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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Twenty-five years ago Jimmy Rabbitte and his mates in the working class Barrytown section of Dublin, decided that the best way to change their economic situation for the better was to form a rock band. In the first novel of the Barrytown Trilogy (1988), named The Commitments for the rock group they formed, Jimmy and his hopeful friends tried for big-time success, and in the trilogy’s subsequent novels (The Snapper and The Van), they continued their earnest and energetic, though unsophisticated, plans to improve their lives. Now, after twenty-five years and four children, Jimmy has achieved modest success in the music business, though not as a performer, and in his new novel, The Guts, he revisits many aspects of his life, his family, and his friendships as he evaluates where he is in the Grand Scheme of his own grand schemes over the years. The Guts is hilariously funny and filled with humor that ranges from the dark to the most boisterous and profane, but it also shows an older, more thoughtful Jimmy whose life has taken a sudden turn in a new direction: Jimmy has just learned that he has cancer. Despite the fact that the subject of cancer dominates the novel, Doyle keeps the action flying, and at no time does the mood ever flag or descend to the maudlin.
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Following another of Nesbo’s most exciting novels, Police (the sequel to Phantom) comes the English language release of Cockroaches, a very early novel originally published in Norway in 1998, the second in the Harry Hole series. This novel has won no prizes, and those who read it, as I did, in the hope of seeing the continuing development of an author who made a quantum leap from his fairly simple first two novels (The Bat, and Cockroaches, both OK) to the complex and superbly developed novel The Redbreast (outstanding), his third novel, may be disappointed by this novel’s consistent lack of clear focus. In Cockroaches, Detective Harry Hole is chosen by the Norwegian Foreign Office to go to Thailand to investigate the murder of Norway’s ambassador to Thailand, who has been found in a brothel with an elaborate old knife in his back. . Readers who have enjoyed the later novels may be surprised by this one, which shows little about Harry himself and even less about the secondary characters, but those who have read all the other Harry Hole novels will probably also read this one, for the sake of “completion,” if nothing else. Those new to the series may want to begin with The Redbreast, certainly one of the best of the series, and then read the others in the series in the order in which they were published.
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An action-packed debut novel in which reality and virtual reality overlap, Game reflects the game of life with an alarming twist, one that raises serious questions about how much control over our own lives any of us readers might be willing to give up in exchange for the excitement and ego-stroking of an on-going virtual reality game. Here, Henrik “HP” Pettersson, a young Swede in his thirties, with too little to do and no sense of responsibility, finds a cell phone on the commuter train to Stockholm. Not surprisingly, he decides to keep it. When he opens it, he discovers a message: “Wanna play a game?” He ignores it, wanting only to figure out how to use it as a phone. When the message changes to “Wanna play a game, Henrik Petterson?” he is stunned. And when the phone will not take no for an answer, HP concludes that some of his friends are playing a trick on him. He decides that the only way to get back at them is to play the game and beat them at it. He soon finds himself playing a “game” in which his very life and the lives of everyone he knows are at stake.
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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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