Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, El Salvador, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Psychological study on Jan 8th, 2013
Using different genres for each of his three novels which available in English, Horacio Castellanos Moya creates dramatically different tones, despite their common settings in Central America, and translator Katherine Silver’s own versatility is obvious as she recreates the different moods. Senselessness (2008), Castellanos Moya’s most powerful and most dramatic novel, conveys the horrors of Mayan genocide in an unnamed country which resembles Guatemala. By contrast, Tyrant Memory (2011) often verges on farce in its satirical depiction of the popular rebellion against a pro-Nazi dictator in El Salvador in 1944, an otherwise serious subject. The She-Devil in the Mirror (2009), also set in El Salvador and the least political of the three novels, is a murder mystery, told as a long monologue by Laura Rivera, a privileged, upperclass woman whose best friend has just been murdered. Castellanos Moya’s pacing is flawless as he suggests but does not always confirm the reader’s conclusions about these characters as described by Laura, and the novel’s finale is memorable, perfectly in keeping with tone and character. The details and subject matter are universal, rather than specific to El Salvador, and readers from around the world will be entertained and often amused by Castellanos Moya’s foray into noir fiction.
Read Full Post »
Palace intrigue of the highest order, conducted by courtiers and officials who will do anything to achieve their goals, makes this novel by Swedish author Per Olov Enquist both stimulating and thoroughly engrossing, and few who read it will fail to notice the similarities of the “normal” behavior one sees between these courtiers in their time and place and those “aides” or sycophants who surround other leaders of other countries in other times. The Danish court from 1768 – 1772 pulses with life as powerful personalities collide in their rush to fill the power vacuum resulting from the weakness of King Christian VII, a sensitive, half-mad 17-year-old boy, who married the innocent and unsuspecting Princess Caroline Mathilde, the 15-year-old sister of Britain’s King George III, just two years before the novel opens. When the young king becomes interested in the enlightened ideas of Voltaire and Diderot and is celebrated by these philosophers on a trip around the continent, his nervous and threatened court decides he needs a physician to disabuse him of these “follies.” What they never expect is that the physician they engage, Johann Friedrich Struensee from Germany, will quickly establish a strong and genuinely caring relationship with Christian, share his enlightened ideas, and eventually become the de facto king and lover of the young queen Caroline Mathilde.
Read Full Post »
In The Elephant Keeper’s Children, Hoeg continues his focus on philosophy, this time dealing with the search for faith and meaning through an exploration of life and its parallel search for love and happiness – be it through Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism. He does this, not as the main focus of the novel, but as part of the backstory involving three children who are searching for their mother and father, who have disappeared. Their father is the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark on the island of Fino, where they all live, and their mother, the organist, is a mechanical genius with a gift for invention beyond what anyone in their congregation can imagine. The result is a farcical, picaresque story of chases and escapes in which the fourteen-year-old main character (named, in typical Hoeg fashion, Peter, suggesting issues the character might have in common with those of the author, on some level), along with his sixteen-year-old sister Tilde and terrier dog Basker, sets out to find their parents, sometimes aided by Hans, their older brother who is studying away from home. They know they must find their parents themselves before they are remanded to a children’s home by adults who seem to fear what they might do if left alone.
Read Full Post »
In one of the most stimulating novels I have read in many years, Djibouti author Abdourahman A. Waberi, now living in France, explores issues of crucial contemporary importance while examining the history of religious extremism and how young people are drawn to it. He does this within the context of an intriguing, often poetic, novel which contains mysteries, a spy narrative, secret identities, a writer speaking from the grave, and a mystical, real-time connection between two characters who never meet during the narrative. Though I was glued to the pages of this short novel, I am still thinking of all the mysteries raised here for which, intentionally, the author offers no easy answers as he takes the reader in new directions.
Read Full Post »
Readers who enjoyed Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s first mystery to be translated into English, The Keeper of Lost Causes, which I found “as close to perfect as a mystery can be,” will probably become as captivated by this second novel as they were by the first. The Absent One, however, is somewhat different in its focus from the first novel, spending less time on establishing the character of Detective Carl Morck, who has been assigned to run Department Q of the Copenhagen Police Headquarters. Morck described in the previous novel as “lazy, surly, morose, always bitching, and [constantly] treating his colleagues like crap,” has experienced the trauma of having one partner killed while another, the gentle, six-foot, nine-inch giant Hardy has ended up paralyzed from the neck down in a fight from which Morck himself escaped serious injury. He has always blamed himself for the terrible outcome and has had little interest in doing much of anything at work, as a result. This case concerns a group of friends whose relationship goes back to prep school. With one major exception, all have become immensely successful – and wealthy. The only female of the group disappeared long ago. As Morck, Assad, and Rose investigate, the female, Kimmie, is tracked by the rest of the gang, fearful of what she might reveal.
Read Full Post »
