Posted in 7-2014 Reviews, Australia, Book Club Suggestions, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Psychological study, Social and Political Issues, Switzerland on Jan 4th, 2014
Winner of the prestigious Patrick White Award in her native Australia, Christina Stead (1902 – 1983), acclaimed in England and Australia, still remains unknown to most readers in the United States, and that’s a shame. Her 1973 novel The Little Hotel, given to me by a friend from England, reveals her deliciously twisted sense of humor, her pointed social satire, and her vividly depicted but often very sad characters, and I am now poring through Amazon’s Marketplace listings to find as many of her other sadly neglected novels as I can. In this novel, set in a small hotel on Lake Geneva in the immediate aftermath of World War I, Stead introduces an assortment of bizarre characters who live at the small Hotel Swiss-Touring for various lengths of time, some of them for a season, and a few as residents. Most of them are there because they cannot afford the more elegant accommodations to which they have been accustomed, though the twenty-six-year-old hotelkeeper, Selda Bonnard, and her slightly older husband Roger do their best to meet their guests’ needs. Touring artists associated with a local nightclub, and the road companies that play the casino, also occupy the hotel, residing on another floor above the guests. All of Stead’s characters are flawed, and as all are shown in intimate scenes in which they reveal themselves, at least to the reader, they inspire a kind of empathy within the reader – and even a kind of pervading sadness – which does not often happen within social satire, which is usually characterized by sterotypes.
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This week I read A Long Way from Verona, newly released by Europa Editions, having previously read and loved seven other Jane Gardam novels, and I was puzzled as I read this one because it seemed unusual, and while not out of character, a lot less sophisticated in terms of structure than her usual. Though I knew from its description that it was a “coming of age” novel, it was not until I finished both the book and my review that I discovered, to my great surprise, that A Long Way from Verona was also Jane Gardam’s first novel, originally published in 1971. Here, the as-yet-unpublished author examines the growth of a writer from her days as a thirteen-year-old schoolchild in a small British village during World War II to the publication of her first poem, providing insights into the “mania” of writing, what impels it, and the frequent agonies which accompany it, especially when the writer is an enthusiastic adolescent. Like many other debut novels, it is sparkling and insightful, though not perfect, and though it will not completely satisfy every reader, especially those who are fans of her later, more mature and successful novels, it becomes especially significant because one recognizes just how much of the realistic adolescent angst of this novel must be autobiographical. Jessica Vye, the richly described main character, tells her own story, however, filled with the confusions of a thirteen-year-old who is trying to figure out who she is. Throughout the novel, Jane Gardam shows her now well known-wit and her ability to choose exactly the right words and images to covey Jessica’s feelings and her seemingly psychic insights into the people around her. In the later part of the novel, Gardam also creates strong feelings in the reader, many of these feelings related to insights she gives into the creative process.
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Lisbon, 1940, provides a temporary safe haven and hope for emigrating citizens from every country in Europe as they try to secure visas for passage by ship – any ship – out of Europe and away from the Nazis. For Americans with valid passports, life is more secure. The U.S. government has commandeered the S. S. Manhattan to transport stranded Americans in Lisbon back to New York. For these people, the biggest challenge is to pass the time till the ship sails, and many of them do it in extravagant fashion. A few, however, including characters here, have more difficulty leaving Europe, physically and emotionally, than one might expect. As one character notes, in retrospect, “Now it seems churlish to speak of our plight, which was nothing compared with that of real refugees – the Europeans, the Jews, the European Jews. Yet at the time, we were too worried about what we were losing to care about those who were losing more.” Author David Leavitt, in describing life in Lisbon in these crucial weeks before war engulfs all of Europe, examines four characters – Americans awaiting the S. S. Manhattan – as they reveal their attitudes toward Europe, toward the United States, and ultimately toward each other. All in all, Leavitt creates an unusual treatment of a tension-filled time and place with characters whom he manipulates effectively to illustrate his themes. Ultimately, “there are occasions when none of the choices are good. You simply have to calculate which is the least bad.”
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Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903 – 1989), a prolific author, published two hundred novels and over one hundred fifty novellas during his long career, most of them involving mysteries of some sort. Though he is the author of the Inspector Maigret series, hugely successful in the film versions and TV series in addition to the novels, he was particularly proud of his much more serious novels, his “roman durs,” psychological novels in which he reveals his interest in how ordinary people deal with the many shocks and betrayals of their personal lives. Act of Passion, published in 1947, is one of these romans durs, a novel about which critic Roger Ebert has asked, “Why is there no sense at the end [of the novel] that justice has been done, or any faith that it can be done?…There are questions for which there are no answers. Act of Passion is essentially a question posing as an answer.” Ebert is not being coy. The main character here, a physician named Charles Alavoine, admits from the outset that he is guilty of premeditated murder, but he has had a good relationship with this magistrate, who investigated his story and interviewed the crime’s witnesses over the course of six weeks, and he feels that this magistrate, who is assigned only to investigate the case and not to try it, will understand him if he can only know about his life. If he can understand him, then Alavoine believes he will understand why he committed murder. A NYReviewClassic from 1947.
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He’s done it again! With over twenty million copies sold, and over a dozen Nordic prizes and nominations for crime writing under his belt, Norwegian author Jo Nesbo is certainly at the top of his game, and this novel, which fans will almost certainly agree is the best one yet, is sure to win him even greater recognition and even more readers. The dramatic and terrifying teasers at the end of this novel also guarantee that devoted readers will be waiting in line for the next novel in this Oslo based series, which centers on the troubled and alcoholic Inspector Harry Hole and those he has worked with in the Oslo Police Department. In Phantom, the preceding novel, Harry Hole suffers grievous injuries, and this novel begins where that one left off. Both Kripos and the Crime Squad are collaborating here on a series of cases in which a serial killer is murdering policemen who are have been unsuccessful in solving a sensational murder case at some time in the past. Each policeman or investigator is murdered on the anniversary of that unsolved murder, and usually in the same location as that murder. The first policeman dies a grisly death at a ski slope at night, and the similarities between this death and one that has remained unsolved from the past is immediately obvious to the investigators. Subsequent murders of police involve “sex, sadism, and the use of knives,” and frequently violence to the face with a blunt object. Author Nesbo plays a cat-and-mouse game with the reader in this one.
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