I readily admit that I have found Patrick Modiano to be the most fascinating author I have ever experienced, and I have read most, if not all, of his books in print in English. His unique upbringing in post-war France, essentially without parents or real stand-ins for them, his search for his identity through his writing, and his honesty as he approaches life make each book, which he calls a novel here, a unique experience for the reader as much as it must have been for the author. By the time I finished reading, I felt as if I had actually lived through the life of the narrator in a way I have never experienced before – feeling his feelings, recognizing his surprises with him, and puzzling with him when some of the events and characters appear with little to no connection or context. As the novel opens, the main character, Jean Eyben, is twenty years old and he has just received a case file regarding Noelle Lefebvre, a young woman who is missing. Jean is working for the Hutte Detective Agency, and his “case file” consists of “a single sheet in a sky blue folder that has faded with time…turned almost white.” In episodes back and forth over the next thirty years, Eyben searches for this woman and the people who may have known her.
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Rusty Redburn, the narrator who directs the traffic of this exciting and busy book, never expects, when she goes to Hollywood in the early 1940s, that she will end up as a spy for Columbia Pictures. Harry Cohn, President of Columbia, wants to keep tabs on every aspect of the life of “Rita Hayworth” (Margarita Carmen Cansino), his shy and most mistrustful star. As author Jerome Charyn traces the real life of this glamorous film star, he is able to convey the male dominated film business and its demeaning of its female stars. Two of Rita’s five marriages – to Orson Welles (1943 – 1947) and to Prince Aly Khan (1949 – 1953) – are keys to understanding Rita Hayworth, and author Jerome Charyn presents them with sympathy for Rita and a broad knowledge of Hollywood, Rita’s films, the men with whom she starred in films, her lovers, and the film world milieu of the mid-1940s and 1950s. Rita Hayworth had roles in twenty-four films between 1940, when she was twenty-two, and 1958, when she had her fortieth birthday. Her two last appearances were in 1971, on the Carol Burnett Show and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
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In one of the most unusual international novels to be released this year, Korean author Kwon Yeo-sun, reports a murder, its possible motives, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding this death. The facts of the death are far less important to the author and, ultimately, the reader, however, than the inner lives of the main characters themselves, and how and why they view as they do the death of a beautiful girl in her late teens. Three characters narrate the story of Kim Hae-on, the innocent school-age victim of a bloody murder sixteen years ago, a crime that has never brought resolution to the main characters or a conclusion. As a result, this is the story of a murder, but it is not a classic “murder mystery.” Instead, it intensely examines episodes from the lives of the main characters over the sixteen years since Hae-on’s death, leaving the reader to draw conclusions.
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May God Forgive, Alan Parks’s fifth novel in his Tartan noir series featuring Glasgow detective Harry McCoy, has three grisly deaths for McCoy to look into in the first fifty pages, and twenty characters are also involved. McCoy who has just been released from a month’s stay in hospital for a bleeding ulcer, caused by his drinking, smoking, and hard living. As he investigates these and other crimes going forward, the characters increase, the complex involvements of various gangs create issues, and McCoy spends more time investigating on his own than he does as a representative of the police. Making the novel more personal, father-son relationships become an issue, including for McCoy. The action ultimately features a character list of about 40 characters, competing criminal gangs, and some vivid details of violence, torture, mutilation, and maiming, making this novel a stomach-churning experience in which characters driven by their own senses of “justice” have more sway on all levels than the local police.
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Author Alexander MacLeod has won literary prizes for his short stories, and the reaction to this collection, with two shortlisted nominations for the Giller and Commonwealth Book Prizes, suggest more prizes will be coming. His stories feel, at first, as if the characters are ordinary people leading ordinary lives, but the author is so creative and so in control of every aspect of these stories, that he is always able to take them in new directions, full of surprises and irony. His work is filled with unique and heart-breaking insights, presented with empathy, as his characters realize their limitations and recognize a pathway forward, a pathway often unexpected, based on the characters’ decisions and recognitions as shown within these seemingly simple but powerful and often unusual stories.
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