The land of Mesopotamia, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, once boasted the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, among the Seven Wonders of the World. Highly developed ancient civilizations competed for power there, leaving behind sites of immense archaeological importance as they defeated each other and formed new civilizations. In the modern era, Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq, fell under a succession of foreign rulers, and by 1914, when this novel opens, it was ruled from Constantinople by the weakened Ottoman Empire. Virtually every country in Europe is on site, vying for oil. The Germans are building a railroad from Basra through Baghdad, an American from Standard Oil is there, the French are trying to gain a foothold so that the railroad will not take shipping business from them, and the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian Empire may help finance the railroad in exchange for a piece of the action. Trying to ignore most of this turmoil is John Somerville, a thirty-five-year-old archaeologist who has been working an ancient site near Baghdad. In the nonstop action, no one can trust anyone else. Unsworth creates a vibrant picture of a tumultuous time and place, endowing what might have been an exotic tale of archaeological discovery with a broader thematic scope.
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Jerome Battle, who describes himself as an “average American guido,” has managed to live most of his sixty years “above it all,” never quite engaging with those around him or becoming truly intimate. On weekends he is aloft in his small plane, his “private box seat in the world and completely outside of it, too,” flying alone around Long Island. Unfortunately, Jerry also lives his personal life the way he flies his plane, as if he’s seeing it from a great distance. Slowly, inexorably, the author develops the family’s crises until they finally force themselves onto Jerry’s personal radar screen. A couple of emergencies, he finally realizes, “are new instructions from above (or below or beyond), telling me in no uncertain terms that I cannot stay at altitude much longer, even though I have fuel to burn, that I cannot keep marking this middle distance.”
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Just beside the cash registers of a large mall bookstore this week was an entire table of books, arranged attractively for Mother’s Day—all were “Jane Austen books.” Of the fifteen or so books, however, only one of these was actually a book written by Jane Austen. The others, all presumably “books Mother would love,” included: Jane Austen Ruined My Life by Beth Pattillo, What Would Jane Austen Do? by Laurie Brown, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, and the unforgettable Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by “Jane Austen” and Seth Grahame-Smith. Five or six other books focused on Mr. Darcy in various new adventures. Author Claire Harman tells how Jane achieved such fame.
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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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