Martin Scobie, David Hughes, and Fred Privett, all age eighty-five, have just been admitted to the nursing home of St. Christopher and St. Jude following the bizarre crash of their three ambulances at the intersection in front of the facility. Admitted for their recuperation, they must share a small single room in which the light switch can only be reached by leaning across one bed. Some furniture has been removed to accommodate the extra beds, and the wardrobe, blocking a window, is inaccessible because of the third bed. Even if they had a view through that window, however, their accommodations would not be much improved. “Immediately outside the window was a mass of dusty green foliage of the kind which grows outside kitchens and hotel toilets…The leaves, moving in endless trembling toward and away from one another, gave an impression of trying to speak or to listen but always turning away before any tiny message could either be given or heard,” a detail emblematic of all life at this nursing home, which specializes in non-communication, not just between staff and patients, but between staff and each other, and among the patients themselves. As Australian author Elizabeth Jolley develops this relentlessly dark-humored and totally absorbing novel, she also displays enormous talent for developing sensitive character sketches of the elderly patients. Jolley is a world class author, capable of creating serious questions and developing the biggest of the world’s themes within small settings and scenes, and I can hardly wait to read the next book being released, MISS PEABODY’S INHERITANCE. She is a new Favorite!
Read Full Post »
Those who have loved author Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1970 ) will undoubtedly be fascinated also by Angel (1957). Angel, less subtle in its black humor and obvious satire, will strike chords among all writers and lovers of writing who have ever, in their wildest imaginations, fantasized about producing a blockbuster novel, or even a moderately successful one. In 1900, Angel Deverell, fifteen, lives with her mother above the family grocery store in Norley. Emotionally, however, she lives on a completely different plane, imagining a life in which she is elegant, successful, admired by all, and, of course, wealthy beyond her most fervent dreams. Humiliated at school for something she has said, she announces that she will never return again to school. Instead she will finish writing a romantic novel, The Lady Urania, set at “Haven Castle,” a project on which she works almost around the clock, and she is sure it will be a success. Despite her age, it is HUGE, and Angel’s life and the lives of her family are never the same–and obviously, not always in a good way.
Read Full Post »
In the wake of the popularity of Scandinavian mystery writers like Jo Nesbo, Arnaldur Indridason, Henning Mankell, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Stieg Larsson, this mystery by wildly popular Austrian novelist Wolf Haas has just been translated into English, the first of seven novels featuring Simon Brenner to be available in the U.S. Here the novel’s smart-alecky and in-your-face first person narrator, with his appreciation of irony and his uniquely hilarious observations, keeps the reader smiling even as horrific murders are taking place. The narrator himself does not appear to take the characters in his story seriously, and the novel’s resulting style is closer to that of an “entertainment” or farce, in which the narrator becomes the main character directing the show, than it is to the dark and often cynical mysteries clearly identifiable as “noir.” Brenner, a former policeman, is now working as a chauffeur for “The Lion of Construction,” a fifty-year-old man named Kressdorf, who runs a major development company with offices in Munich. Kressdorf’s much younger wife, a physician, works in Vienna, where she operates a clinic offering abortion services. The Kressdorfs’ two-year-old daughter Helena is kidnapped when Brenner stops to fuel up on his way to Munich. There is no dearth of suspects. The novel has some problems with structure and its tone, but it is likely to be wildly popular here, as it is in Europe.
Read Full Post »
Much admired by both Roberto Bolano and by Carlos Fuentes, Mexican author Daniel Sada has now been published in English for the first time by Graywolf Press. Almost Never, “a Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing,” provides a bawdy and mildly satiric look at the whole concept of machismo as it exists in the mid-1940s in Mexico. Sada’s main character, Demetrio Sordo, almost thirty when the novel opens in 1945, grew up in northern Mexico, but he has recently been living near Oaxaca in southern Mexico, working as an agronomist in charge of a large ranch. Bored by the usual nightly “entertainments,” he finally concludes that “Sex was the most obvious option.” Taking a taxi to a local brothel, he meets the beautiful brunette Mireya. His eye-opening relationship with her, graphically described, comes to a temporary stop, however, when he receives a letter from his mother in Parras, asking him to come home at Christmas to accompany her to a wedding in Sacramento, even farther away to the north. There he meet and falls in love with a strictly virginal local girl, Renata. The story with all its complications and bawdy language mocks the pretensions of its characters at the same time that it explains and even, in some cases, tries to justify them in terms of the social context of the period. A new Mexican author of great esteem, now translated into English for the first time.
Read Full Post »
“On Wednesday 23rd March 1983 there appeared in the Guardian the following report: ‘An inquest is to be held on the two elderly women whose bodies were found on Monday in the dilapidated North London house they shared with a man who was the brother of one of them and the brother-in-law of the other. Postmortem examinations yesterday revealed that they had both died from natural causes – but that the older woman had been dead for up to a year.’ ” No one incorporates black ironic humor into novels about earnest, often batty, elderly people better than the British, and Benatar is one of the best of the best. Paying special attention to characters who are dealing with significant emotional stresses, he fills his novels with psychological insights and feelings the reader understands, even as his mordant wit draws the characters to the edge, allowing the reader to watch them cross the line into darker and darker worlds of their own. Focusing primarily on Daisy and the havoc she wreaks, the novel starts at the end and works its way back to the beginning, jumping back and forth among time frames as the backgrounds and the entire histories of each character are laid bare. Brilliant dialogue reveals attitudes and interactions in this ironic and darkly funny novel of dysfunction. If this were a Hitchcock film, Betty Davis would have been perfect as the scheming Daisy.
Read Full Post »
