Have you ever read a book that so envelops you and feeds your imagination that you feel as if the author somehow knows every aspect of your life, even though the exotic settings and images of his story bear no resemblance at all to your own? I hadn’t. And when it happened in the first novella of this collection of three, “Afterimage,” I could hardly believe that I had lived totally, for the entire length of the novella, in French author Patrick Modiano’s world, a world of mysteries and uncertainty and no answers, and I had reacted to that world as if it had been my own. Instead of feeling let down by a lack of conclusion to the plot elements, as I often do when an author does not sum up and “resolve” the action, I felt energized instead, connected to the author and his alter ego/ protagonist in ways I never expected. I saw parallels with my own life, and most surprisingly, I found myself wondering about people I have not seen in years, curious about what happened to them; pondering mysteries of my own childhood; and wondering if I had misunderstood what was really going on beneath the surface of reality, as young characters do here. (Suspended Sentences is at the top of my Favorites list for the year.)
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Set in Dublin in 2003, during the height of the Celtic Tiger economic boom, Dubliner Rob Doyle’s debut novel focuses on four young men who have just finished secondary school, none of them with any idea of what they want to do with their lives, and even less motivation. Most have been ignoring the academic demands of their school, preferring to float rootlessly within the social atmosphere of their peers, an atmosphere in which drugs and alcohol have been the primary driving force. Main character Matthew Connelly, a punk teenage Everyman, does not know whether he has passed his Leaving Certification, and he does want to think about it. He and three friends grow for the reader in their own chapters here, and the comparisons and contrasts in their lives are vividly depicted. The author’s insightful scenes of teen life, related in unambiguous language, draw the reader into the boys’ inner worlds, however foreign those worlds might be to the reader’s own experiences. Their conversations and behavior, while often bizarre, somehow inspire empathy, since most seem to have some residual sense of what is “right.” As the novel evolves, and the boys’ own issues become increasingly dramatic, however, the novel becomes darker, more frightening, and eventually violent. Few readers who are drawn in by the action and themes of this novel will forget it quickly, and parents of teens may become particularly alarmed at the unambiguous depiction of their teens’ secret lives.
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Book Expo America, held at the Javits Center in New York City for the past few years, opened its last expo there on Wednesday, May 27, 2015 – May 29, 2015. Next year it, and its companion Book Con (which is held on the weekend after Book Expo concludes), will move to Chicago for the Big Event(s). As always, the enthusiasm was high as booksellers, librarians, reviewers, publishers, agents, and other book professionals gathered to see and hear what the publishers have planned for the next six months. Talks, panel discussions, breakfasts with authors, individual meetings with favorite publishers, and autograph sessions in which fans can meet favorite authors and receive signed advance review copies of new books make the lines long, the aisles crowded, and the excitement palpable. Here are some of the international selections getting noticed.
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Antonio Munoz Molina, one of Spain’s premier writers, shows his intense psychological and atmospheric style in this short novel, a perfect introduction to this author for anyone who has not already read A Manuscript of Ashes, or any of Munoz Molina’s other works. In the latter important novel, the author’s scope is that of Spanish Civil War, the people it absorbed, and the subsequent dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The present novel (which some will consider a novella), is of a much more limited scope – the life and love of Mario Lopez, an undistinguished worker in the city of Jaen, halfway between Madrid and the south coast of Spain. Mario, almost anonymous in his profession – a draftsman, rather than the architect he would like to be – is someone his wife Blanca considers a bureaucrat. She has, in the past, accused him of “settling for too little, of lacking the slightest ambition,” to which Mario has replied that “she, Blanca, was his greatest ambition, and that when he was with her he wouldn’t and couldn’t feel the slightest ambition for anything more.” How he and Blanca ended up married is one of the mysteries of the novel that develops as the action proceeds in its roundabout way through time and flashbacks, and as Mario reveals his feelings for Blanca, the only woman who has ever fully captured his heart but one he can no longer recognize as the novel opens
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Kenneth Brill, the main character, is in a military prison in an unidentified location as the novel opens, feigning sleep as Davies, his interrogator from the Air Ministry, arrives to interview him in preparation for his trial for espionage. Brill emphasizes that he has served with honor during the war and has been almost single-handedly responsible for the camouflaging of a British airbase at El Alamein in order to protect it from Nazi bombs. His background as a former art student from the Slade, one of the best art schools in the world, helped him create a “stage set” of a base in the desert, drawing attention away from the real base in Egypt, near Libya, and attracting the attention of Nazi bombers away from the real base. As the novel opens, however, Brill has been caught painting a large number of landscapes of the farm area where he grew up, a few miles outside of London. While a reader might find this a seemingly innocent activity for someone who is been recovering from a gunshot wound for months, Davies quickly disabuses him. The farm area in the Heath, which Brill’s family has farmed for generations, is “shortly to become one of the biggest military air bases in Europe. That land has all been requisitioned by the Air Ministry” for a new aerodrome at “Heathrow.” Evidence from Brill’s past suggests he may be using the paintings to send coded messages to the Nazis.
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