When three middle-aged losers independently and simultaneously show up to look at an old farmhouse for sale in the countryside of Campania, outside of Naples, each sees it for its potential as a Bed and Breakfast retreat. For each of these men, creating such a retreat would represent a whole new way of life, one far more satisfying than anything he has known to date. None of them can afford this dream, however. Though they do not know each other, they are (barely) smart enough to realize that the only way any of them can afford to participate in the B & B project, is to pool their resources and buy it together. Within a month, this disparate group has signed the papers together and received the keys to a farm that someone else once tried to restore but has abandoned. The novel is clever and well developed, great fun for those who are looking for a different kind of novel, a wonderful break from the bleak and often depressing noir novels which have also been coming from Italy recently. If this were summer, I might say that this is the perfect “beach read,” full of fun, very funny, and very exciting, but as it is not, I will say only that readers here and now will be wise to pay particular attention to the titles of the last three chapters, each of which is from the point of view of a different main character. The cumulative effect of these chapters provides the real conclusion which will delight readers, even in the short, dark days of winter.
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 »
As a boy in Trujillo, Peru, Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua has his fortune told one Sunday, in the plaza just outside the local basilica. A fortune-teller, with a miniature cathedral on his cart, has trained a monkey to draw fortunes from small drawers in the façade of the little cathedral. When Victor and his aunt receive his fortune, they see no ironies in the fact that Don Victor had just gone to Mass and confession and that this fortune is drawn by a monkey from a toy cathedral. Both believe in the inscribed destiny: “Beware! There are those who think you a dreamer. Pay them no mind. They are small-minded people… who would have you doubt your goals.” Victor eventually goes to engineering school, doing his apprenticeship with a papermaker, and eventually building a factory in the Peruvian jungle, where his employees make cellophane. This discovery leads to the fulfillment of the dire predictions of the second half of his childhood fortune—and to the action of this novel, which is divided into three “plagues.” A “plague of truth” follows the discovery of cellophane, as each character, including the priest, confesses his/her romantic indiscretions. A “plague of hearts” follows, with each person pursuing new love or rekindling old love. Ultimately, a “plague of revolution” comes to Floralinda, as government soldiers invade Floralinda, and local workers blame Don Victor and his cellophane for these troubles. Ironies abound. Expansive in scope and theme but magnificently controlled in its execution, Cellophane is thoroughly entertaining, filled with humor and irony and many hilarious scenes. Reminiscent of the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Read Full Post »
It is difficult to think of Alice Thomas Ellis, the pen name of Anna Haycraft, without also thinking of some of her equally talented contemporaries – Beryl Bainbridge, whom she mentored, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark, Jane Gardam, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Penelope Fitzgerald, and others – all of whom also wrote brilliant, often satiric, darkly humorous, and psychologically astute novels about women and families, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s. Ellis’s first novel, THE SIN EATER (1977), pays homage to the Welsh tradition of the sin eater, someone who would come to the household of a recently deceased person, and enact a short ritual in which s/he would “eat” the sins of the deceased so that s/he could then safely pass on to a happy afterlife. In this novel, the Anglo-Welsh patriarch of an old family is dying in Llanelys, and his children and their spouses gather at the estate to await the end. Stunning imagery, delicious turns of phrase, and lively dialogue make the narrative sparkle. In PILLARS OF GOLD Ellis writes some of the wittiest dialogue ever, crafting a hilarious tale in which one of the neighbors is missing and the neighborhood does not want to report her absence to the police for fear of being wrong. Then a body matching the description of the missing woman is discovered in a nearby canal. More satire of contemporary life.
Read Full Post »
Seventy-year-old Harry Chapman has been ill at home, and has just been admitted to a hospital for diagnosis and treatment. Confined to bed for the next two weeks, Harry, a writer, cannot help sharing his thoughts and “suppositions” with the reader and sometimes the hospital staff, recreating conversations and bringing family members, friends, and literary characters to life. But Harry does not stop there. Books, poems, plays, and paintings are also a vivid part of his on-going reality, and some of Harry’s favorite literary characters and his most admired fellow writers cross the borders of reality and fiction to work their way into his memories of real people and real events. His attention constantly jumps around, but it is through these seemingly random memories, stories, favorite poems, and observations about life that author Paul Bailey succeeds in bringing Harry to life and creating a “real” person for the reader. Ultimately, author Paul Bailey creates a novel in which Harry becomes an everyman on an odyssey, one in which he seeks answers to life’s most basic questions of what life means and whether the journey has been worthwhile.
Read Full Post »
