In his newest novel, Simon Mawer continues the story of Marian Sutro, whose wartime exploits he introduced in Trapeze (2012), and whose difficulties dealing with the complex aftereffects of World War II become the focus of this novel. In Trapeze, Marian was a composite character representing the women who served as members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) between May, 1941, and September, 1944. Though she survived, over a dozen of her fellow SOE members were murdered by the Germans following their capture. All were bilingual in English and French, and all performed under extraordinarily dangerous conditions. In 1943, Marian, after training in England, was dropped by parachute into France to help get a former flame, Clement Pelletier, away from his research lab in France and aboard a small plane to England. In Tightrope, by contrast, Mawer focuses more on the development and detail of Marian’s character, and as he continues the story of Marian, he makes her come very much alive here as an individual recovering in England, rather than as a symbol of the larger group of SOE. The action is complex, with many characters, but the novel is intelligent and thought-provoking, filled with tension and with beautifully drawn and developed settings, both physical and emotional.
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Maurizio de Giovanni just keeps getting better and better. With this seventh novel in his series featuring Baron Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi di Malomonte, Commissario of Public Safety at the Royal Police Headquarters in Naples, he creates a new mystery which takes place during the reign of Benito Mussolini in the early 1930s. At the same time, de Giovanni also continues to develop the stories of the many repeating characters throughout the series to date. It is the new developments in the personal, very human stories of these characters – who represent all aspects of Neapolitan society, from the saintly to the criminal – which make the series so much fun to read. The most highly developed and complex novel of the series to date, The Bottom of My Heart is also one of the liveliest and most satisfying, though de Giovanni does save a number of questions to be answered in the future.
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The film version of this novel won the Academy Award in 2010 for Best Foreign Film. Now the novel itself has been released in English, and it’s proving to be as popular as the film. Main character Benjamin Chapparo, a deputy clerk and chief administrator associated with the investigative courts in Buenos Aires, has just recently retired, and having more time than he knows what to do with, he decides to tell the story of his most compelling case, a murder from 1968 and its aftermath. Alternating between the present and the fraught circumstances of the late 1960s in Argentina, Chaparro lets the reader into his life, a life in which he bemoans his two divorces; his seeming inability to find true love; his commitment to justice at a time in which Argentina was experiencing turmoil from a succession of militaristic dictators; and his thirty-year, unrequited love for a married colleague who seems not to know he adores her. Sacheri’s observations about his characters, their motivations, and the circumstances in which they work or find themselves by accident are particularly astute, giving sociological and psychological explanations for many of the unusual scenes in which they find themselves. The conclusion is full of surprises.
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Posted in 6-2015 Reviews, Chechnya, Historical, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Russia/Soviet Union, Short Stories, Siberia, Social and Political Issues on Nov 3rd, 2015
Set in Russia during the period that begins after the death of Lenin, the earliest stories show the strict Communist Party rule, its control of all aspects of life and thinking, and the country’s economic hardships under Josef Stalin. Later stories make references to Nikita Krushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the fall of Communism in the early 1990s, and the rise of Boris Yeltsin and his successor, Vladimir Putin. Marra is not writing a political history, however. Instead, he concentrates on the ordinary people who live in three different parts of the former Soviet Union during this time period, recreating the atmosphere of everyday life during this period, with all its fears and privations. In the later sections of the book, especially in the story “The Grozny Tourist Bureau, his sense of satire and dark humor rise to the fore, showing the absurdities which the main characters themselves recognize as they are determined to rebrand Chechnya, the most devastated city on earth, as “the Dubai of the Caucasus.” Equally important in this story, however, are the stories of some characters whose future the reader comes to care about. Set in Russia during the period that begins after the death of Lenin, the earliest stories show the strict Communist Party rule, its control of all aspects of life and thinking, and the country’s economic hardships under Josef Stalin. Later stories make references to Nikita Krushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the fall of Communism in the early 1990s, and the rise of Boris Yeltsin and his successor, Vladimir Putin.
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In this marvelous combination of photographic portraits by famed German artist August Sander (1876 – 1964) and modern poems by American poet Adam Kirsch, which accompany them, Kirsch introduces readers to new worlds. Explaining the difference between “snapshots,” which record moments in time and bring back memories for the viewer, portraits like Sander’s, in which the subjects have no names and are identified only by “class, occupation, gender, [and] family role are independent of time and appear to posterity as types. Kirsch’s poems give imagined identities to these subjects, bringing them to life in new ways and connecting them directly with times and places at the same time that they maintain a universality that goes beyond the individual. Forty-six poems, all illustrated, provide a broad look at Germany’s people between 1910 and 1950.
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