Simon Howe, editor of the weekly newspaper in rural Maine, has just hired a new employee, previously an employee of a Portland newspaper and a former farm team player for the Red Sox, now an ex-con who served six years for assault on a woman. Amy, Simon’s wife, takes the side of the woman victim, wondering aloud if the victim, too, has a new job, and if she’s gotten over the trauma of being sexually assaulted. The new employee has told Simon that there are two sides for everything, but Amy feels such crimes are too damaging to women to be forgiven and she does not want to meet him. Soon after, Simon receives the first of what will eventually number six postcards from around the country, none of them signed, gradually hinting at some terrible deed that Simon unknowingly committed in the past. As the cards are mailed from closer and closer destinations, first from the Great Salt Lake, and then from Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Portland, Simon and Amy become more stressed and more impatient with each other. The final card is hand-delivered to the family’s mailbox, and the message demands that Simon meet with the sender during his 25th reunion celebration. Author George Harrar ratchets up the tension to the breaking point, and few readers will be able to resist seeing this book as a classic Alfred Hitchcock film. Ironies abound here in this tension-filled study of universal themes as seen through the seemingly simple life of a respected man in Red Paint Bay.
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A fast-paced plot, a setting that is both horrific and familiar, a mixture of fantasy with traditional religion, and unusual characters dealing with pressing political, economic, and moral issues capture one’s attention from the opening pages, as author Michele Roberts keeps the reader moving swiftly through the French countryside from 1931 – 1945. In many ways the two girls who are the protagonists of this novel represent the dichotomies of their times. Jeanne will do whatever is necessary to survive, including stealing food from the convent, and later taking jobs which demean her. Marie-Angele and her family, for all their religiosity, consider themselves superior because they are wealthier, and these hypocritical attitudes are also reflected, ironically, in the attitudes Jeanne experiences with the nuns in the convent. Though Jeanne is the primary narrator, Marie-Angele also serves as a narrator, expressing her own versions of events and her own attitudes toward life, and the two reflect very different realities which also reflect the realities of France during this period. Because time is not linear in this novel, the author is able to paint a picture of life from several different vantage points, not just in point of view but also in time. Sure to become an immense popular success not just for its story but for its style, this novel will surely appeal to a wide audience. Recommended for book clubs.
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Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Catalonia, Experimental, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Short Stories, Spain on Jan 21st, 2013
Catalan author Quim Monzo’s new collection of short stories captures the reader’s attention with its surprises, tickles with its humor, bewilders with its disturbed, often absurd characters, and ultimately arouses deep sadness with some of its portraits of the elderly and those close to them. Included are seven full-length stories in Part I, and twelve, very clever one- or two-page mini-stories in Part II, each of these stories playing with reality, especially the reality of love, as Monzo’s characters and his readers understand it. These characters often experience and react to a very different reality from that of the reader, and, therein lies the stories’ tension as the characters make unexpected or bizarre decisions and move in unique directions. These sudden twists lead to innumerable surprises even for the most jaded reader, and no one can dismiss these stories as “too weird” (even if one were ungracious enough to want to do so) simply because the characters and their stories share so many details with our own everyday realities. As absurd as the characters and their lives may be, we can see that there are always strong and familiar truths embedded within even the strangest realities here, and we are always able to empathize with some aspect of the characters’ lives. Filled with wonderful stories which are full of surprises, A Thousand Morons reflects life’s absurdities at the same time that it also reflects the realities of life and love, an intriguing collection of stories told with wit and great panache.
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Deola Bello, a thirty-nine-year-old Nigerian expatriate who has been living in London since the 1980s, is now working for LINK, a non-profit charity which funds projects in Third World countries. She is about to travel “home” to Lagos on business for a week to report on two projects in Lagos, and her brief return will coincide with the fifth anniversary of her father’s death. The family memorial service will draw large numbers of family and friends. With the focus on the small, the specific, and the individual, as these details relate to the general state of middle-class life in Lagos, the author shows how these characters compare and contrast with those Deola sees in London, who are also described in the same kind of detail as they try to communicate with each other and the outside world. In paying such close attention to “Who are we, really?” this book feels quite different from other books set in Nigeria. Atta is far less interested in using a story to illustrate universal themes or endemic problems than she is in looking at her characters’ lives through a magnifying glass, describing what she sees (without editing all the plebeian details) and allowing the reader to share the point of view of Deola, the character who is making the observations.
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Set in Naples in 1931, during the early years of Mussolini’s rule, this novel is a study of character, especially that of Ricciardi, the Commissario of the police, who has the occult ability to hear the final thoughts of murder victims. Here he investigates the death of the world’s greatest tenor, just before his performance of Pagliacci. Consummately romantic at heart, with exaggerated but likable characters and heart-breaking situations more akin to opera than to real life, Maurizio De Giovanni’s surprising mystery is both dramatic and compassionate, filled with a kind of charm rare among dark mysteries. Lovers of opera, and I am one, will be intrigued with all the references to love, vengeance, murder, sorrow, pride, envy, and jealousy which seem to motivate most operas, and, Ricciardi would have us believe, most murders. As is also the case with opera, the characters are sometimes stereotyped, their actions pre-ordained by the traditions of operatic plot. Having established Ricciardi’s occult talents in the opening pages, the reader understands that a significant amount of “willing suspension of disbelief” is necessary here, and as Ricciardi’s own life, like those of the other main characters, is also its own romantic opera, there is no pretense of realism.
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