Peter Hoeg’s first novel in ten years takes the reader on a trip through an almost psychedelic world of circus clowns, children with mystical abilities, powerful nuns, evil financiers, mysterious security agencies, and bizarre foundations. Kaspar Krone, a circus clown, has discovered that “SheAlmighty has tuned each person into a musical key,” and he is able to hear the music that SheAlmighty creates for each person. By tapping into the music of people’s psyches, he can understand their moods and thoughts. Often the music he hears emanating from those around him is that of Bach, the ebb and flow of a person’s inner spirit paralleling the changing moods of specific Bach masterpieces. Complex and sometimes mystifying, The Quiet Girl builds its non-linear “story” through impressionistic scenes, presented seemingly at random from the past, present, future, and even the imagination. It is up to the reader to create a narrative from the scenes presented as the characters overlap and as additional information is revealed.
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In prose which is dense, dramatic, and saturated with images of violence of all kinds, Vargas Llosa reconstructs the final, tumultuous years of Rafael Trujillo’s despotism in the Dominican Republic.
Using three points of view to give breadth to the portrait of the country in 1961, the author cycles the chapters through three distinct viewpoints: that of Urania Cabral, a contemporary 49-year-old woman who has returned to the Dominican Republic for the first time in 35 years, and who shares her reminiscences of her life there in 1961, when her father was President of the Senate; that of Trujillo himself as he reflects on his declining health, his 31 years in power, and his relationships with subordinates, the church, and the U.S.; and that of four conspirators waiting to ambush and assassinate “The Goat,” as they individually recall the events which have driven them to take this final step.
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Set in Sweden in 1990, Henning Mankell’s first Kurt Wallander mystery begins with a dramatic, Raymond Chandler-esque scene. An elderly farmer from Lannarp, an “insignificant farming village” in southern Sweden, awakens at 4:45 a.m. with a sense of unease: “Something is different. Something has changed.” As the farmer gazes at the farm next door, he begins to notice a series of homely, seemingly insignificant details, and he and the reader slowly conclude that he is not overreacting in his growing alarm. Kurt Wallander, substituting for the absent police chief of Ystad, some distance away, answers the farmer’s panicked call for help and investigates the “methodical violence” of a bloody crime scene. The press quickly concludes that the crime may have been committed by foreigners. Public threats are made against the foreigners by extremists, and Wallander knows that “The [threats] had to be taken seriously. It is in the examination of these attitudes that this novel is different from the typical whodunit.
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Posted in 9c-2009 Reviews, Argentina, Austria, Experimental, Germany, Literary, Mexico, Mystery, Thriller, Noir on Jan 16th, 2011
Mexican author Ignacio Padilla creates characters who move like pawns, as if they were pieces in the chess games which are at the heart of the action here–they are often being overtaken by events and supplanted by other men as part of the grand, overall “game” of life. Padilla raises thought-provoking questions about the nature of selfhood here, as men appropriate each other’s names, accept or reject the past which is connected with those names, and hope, ultimately, to change their destinies by living someone else’s life. The reader must constantly question whether each character is who he says he is, and whether he really is who we think he is. The tight story line maintains its tension, and the author’s ingenuity in manipulating characters and historical events provides constant surprises. The novel is very much an intellectual chess match between author and reader, and in this case, both turn out to be winners.
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Eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison, the daughter of a Nigerian mother and a British father, has a particularly difficult time deciding who she is, and she seems to fit in nowhere. Significant emotional problems leave her unable to deal with the outside world, and she can spend five or more hours hiding in the family’s linen closet, attempting to find some sort of “fragile peace” in the tumult which she sees as her life. Given to uncontrollable screaming fits, both at home and at school, she also falls ill, sometimes with high fevers, has panic attacks, and often talks to herself. A psychological horror story, the novel provides plenty of intense scenes, somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and the battle for Jess’s soul is dramatic and action-packed. The conclusion feels somewhat artificial, since it relies on accident and is not the inevitable outgrowth of the actions of a rounded character, but Oyeyemi has created a page-turner that dares to be different.
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