10 Oct

‘Four Soldiers’ by Hubert Mingarelli – A Short Lull in the Fighting

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‘Four Soldiers’ by Hubert Mingarelli (2003) – 155 pages        Translated from the French by Sam Taylor

 

‘Four Soldiers’ is another simple but moving war story from Hubert Mingarelli. This time it is set during the Russian Civil War of 1919 rather than World War II which is when the war story in ‘A Meal in Winter’ takes place.

Pavel, Kyabine, Sifra. and our narrator Benia are four soldiers in the Red Army fighting in Romania. They have all recently been involved in heavy fighting with many casualties and the Polish army has taken back the village which they had earlier held. Cold winter is approaching, and at that time in history there is still a break in the wartime fighting for winter. The four come upon a forest and Pavel, who is their informal leader, tells the rest of them that in the forest they could build a hut where they could stay for the winter. So they build the hut.

The four of them spend an idyllic peaceful time that cold winter in their hut. A quiet pond is near by where they can go to contemplate and look at the blue sky and watch the fish jumping.

The other three all like to kid Kyabine who is rather a lovable fool. Pavel calls him “you big Uzbeki idiot”.

“He was incredibly strong and loyal, and he had a voice like thunder. But clever? No.”

All four of them realize that the heavy war fighting will start up again when the snow melts and it is spring. But in the meantime they can enjoy this quiet respite.

“And let me tell you at that moment, I looked at the confident smile on Sifra’s face, because Kyabine was leading the horse at the right pace. And I watched Kyabine’s slow, reassuring gait, and Pavel was there too, walking next to me, and suddenly I was filled with emotion because each one of us was in his place and also because it seemed to me in that instant that each of us was far away from the winter in the forest. And that each of us was also far away from the war that was going to start again because the winter was over.”

When the snow starts to melt , the fighting resumes.

“We were all full of worries and fears, but that morning it was Kyabine – the huge muscular Uzbeki – who was showing it most.”

“It will be alright, Kyabine,” I told him.

“You really think so?” he asked.

Sifra, who seldom talks, answered him:

“Yes it’s true, Kyabine. It’ll be all right, because we’ll always stick together.”

And then the inevitable. Although the last few pages are predictable, they are still heartbreaking.

 

Grade:    A-

 

 

7 Oct

‘Practice’ by Rosalind Brown – An Oxford Student’s Day Spent Trying to Write her Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets

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‘Practice’ by Rosalind Brown       (2024) – 202 pages

 

As often it seems to occur in college, our female Oxford student Annabel has put off her assignment, writing an essay about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, until the Sunday the day before it is due. ‘Practice’ is set in the winter of 2009.

“Four hundred years later, she keeps on reading.”

Annabel enjoys the sonnets, both those written to the young man, the Fair Youth, and those written to the Dark Lady. She likes “spending time with these poems: which are better company than people, they take your shape willingly, but still lightly, like a duvet does”.

She starts the day with good intentions about writing her essay. She reads some of the sonnets at random. She compiles a list of words to describe the Sonnets: plaintive, domineering, splintering, exhilarating, rough, bossy, bitter.

“She lets them work on her mind, entering wholeheartedly into the spirit of them, hardly writing anything down: just reading.”

But there are distractions. Sometimes, while we are reading, we think about everything except about what we are reading.

Even before lunch, she decides that “a walk might invigorate her”. During her walk around the Oxford campus, she considers the man she has been seeing. He is a friend of her mother’s; he is 36, Annabel is 20. She hasn’t told her mother that she has been seeing him yet. Should she drop him or continue going out with him?

By the time she gets back over an hour has passed on her walk, and it is time for lunch.

Later as the day lumbers on and she has yet to begin her essay, Annabel considers grabbing at straws:

“Could she, she flickers a smile, could she provocatively write an essay about her own failure to write an essay. Would the tutorial eyebrows raise.”

She drops that idea, but now it is early evening and she still hasn’t written anything.

This is a novel about a college student, a young woman, spending a day trying to write an essay as an assignment. If you were expecting a detailed analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnets, you would be disappointed. However it does vividly capture this bright young woman’s somewhat humorous yet exasperating struggle to write her essay.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

 

1 Oct

‘Chocky’ by John Wyndham – A Voice from a Distant Planet?

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‘Chocky’ by John Wyndham     (1968) – 149 pages

 

One day, as a father is straightening up his garden shed, he overhears his twelve year-old son Matthew talking to someone he calls Chocky. However there is no one else there. His parents at first assume that Chocky must be Matthew’s imaginary friend.

Chocky seems to Matthew to be of indeterminate sex, and Matthew often calls her “She”. In Matthew’s talks with her/him, Chocky seems to think that things are really primitive down here on Earth.

“Apparently, according to Chocky, we in our civilization, are still suffering from a primitive fixation on the wheel.”

Chocky also complains about our earthly erratic weight, time, and distance measures, pound, yard, week, etc. .

Matthew’s parents become concerned about their son’s obsession with this Chocky and bring in a psychologist to observe Matthew. Afterwards the psychologist comes to this conclusion.

“More than anything I have ever come across it resembles what our unscientific ancestors used to consider a case of “possession”. They would have claimed quite simply that this Chocky is a wandering, if not wanton, spirit that has invaded Matthew.”

Matthew’s mother is not reassured by the opinions of the psychologist.

“I agreed to David asking you to come because I thought you would suggest some course we could take which would rid Matthew of his fantasy without harming him. Instead you seem to have spent the day encouraging him in it and to have become infected with it yourself. I am not able to feel that this is doing much good to Matthew, or to anyone.”

One day Matthew announces that Chocky has to leave. His parents are happy about this, but Matthew is sad.

Matthew’s father becomes convinced that there must be some form of telepathy, a communication of minds, between Chocky and their son. In her afterward, Margaret Atwood speculates thus:

“Could it possibly be that Chocky is what Matthew says she is: a being who lives far away, in another universe, but who can join him at will and look through his eyes?”

 

Grade :   B+

 

 

26 Sep

‘Elena Knows’ by Claudia Piniero – Elena’s Affliction

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‘Elena Knows’ by Claudia Piniero   (2007) – 143 pages               Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

“She imagined someone trying to tell her about this illness she now knows better than anyone because it’s inside her. She could describe it better than Dr. Parkinson, she thinks, and she’d call it Elena’s Affliction.”

Elena is trying to cope with both her Parkinson’s disease and her daughter Rita’s sudden death. The police found her daughter’s body hanging from the belfry of Elena’s church on a rainy night. Father Juan at the church and the investigating police quickly come to the conclusion that Rita committed suicide. However Elena knows that Rita would never go inside the church on a stormy night. Elena knows her daughter was murdered.

Elena must investigate herself. But she must also contend with her Parkinson’s.

“Who would have thought that being able to get your arm in a sleeve could be such a big deal, she thinks. Now she knows how important it is.”

Besides her terrible struggle to do even the simplest tasks, another feature which gives this crime novel its authenticity are the conversations between Elena and her daughter Rita which are shown in flashbacks.

“If you’re lucky enough not to shake, Rita had said, why go around telling people? They’ll just pity you. But if no one sees you shaking no one’s going to know you have Parkinson’s, and the longer it takes for them to give it a name the better, Mum.”

As both mother and daughter contend with Elena’s affliction, their conversations turn into severe clashes. These awful fights show the love between mother and daughter better than would have scenes of affection.

“She loved and still loves her daughter even though she never said it, even though they fought and kept their distance, even though their words were like cracks of the whip, and even if she didn’t hug and kiss her daughter, she felt a mother’s love. Is she still a mother now that she doesn’t have a child?”

With her Parkinson’s, Elena can barely ride the bus to this lady Isabel’s house to ask Isabel to help solve the crime of her daughter’s death.

“What’s left of you when your arm can’t even put on a jacket and your leg can’t even take a step and your neck can’t straighten up enough to show your face to the world, what’s left?”

Argentine author Claudia Piniero has been pigeon-holed as a crime writer, but there is much more to ‘Elena Knows’ than a crime story.

 

Grade :    A

 

23 Sep

‘The Horse’ by Willy Vlautin – The Sad Life of a Guitarist-Songwriter Playing on the Casino Circuit

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‘The Horse’ by Willy Vlautin      (2024) – 194 pages

 

Back when live music was still considered something exciting and important, the casinos in the Nevada gambling cities of Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe, and other towns would hire live bands in order to attract crowds. Al Ward, now sixty-four, has spent much of his life playing in these bands and in his spare time writing country-western songs.

Some of the songs he has written: “Halfway Between Her and You”, “The Bottle’s the Only Friend I Got Left”, “Lynette”, “A Girl on the Streets of Tucson”, “A Busted Windshield and a Broken Hand”, “Waiting on a Winnemucca Bus”.

“And no matter what he did or how hard he tried, his songs were good but never great. How many notebooks had he filled with half-good songs, songs that were almost?”

When Al was just nineteen, he played in a band with the singer Mona Maverick who was “curvy and blonde like an aging Playboy bunny”.

“With makeup and in the right light she looked to be in her late twenties, but in the morning with no makeup she was every day of the thirty-eight-year-old bulimic alcoholic she had become.”

Mona came to Al’s room one night. They wound up in a short marriage.

And so it goes.

For a time he plays with two brothers called the Sanchez Brothers who are on the verge of making it big singing Al’s songs with Al playing in their band and the band even moving to Nashville until one of the brothers overdoses.

Later he meets the love of his life, Maxine, but that gets messed up too.

Al is now an old man, a drunk and lazy ex-musician, and has become thoroughly disenchanted with the music scene. He has secluded himself in the Nevada desert fifty miles from the nearest town. He lives by himself on canned soup and instant coffee.

A blind horse wanders on to his property. The coyotes attack the horse, and Al shoots one of them. Al wonders if he should just shoot the blind horse and put it out of its misery, but he can’t do it.

It’s a sad life, but sometimes reading about the hard-luck life of someone else can cheer one up.

 

Grade:    A-

 

 

 

17 Sep

‘The Hypocrite’ by Jo Hamya – A Father Watches his Daughter’s Stage Play

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‘The Hypocrite’ by Jo Hamya     (2024)  –  230 pages

 

In ‘The Hypocrite’, an unnamed successful novelist is in a theater to watch his daughter Sofia’s stage play. He is surprised to find out that the play is about him. The play takes place in a vacation house in Sicily where Sofia stayed with her father for a month ten years earlier when Sofia was then only 17 and had just graduated from high school. The father had been divorced from her mother for a long time.

While his daughter was in Sicily, he had dictated the novel he was writing to her, and she had to write it all down. When they weren’t working on his novel, he persuaded her to spend time with this questionable young guy Anto who was always pushing her head down. Meanwhile the father is going out every night, picking up women, and bringing them back to the house after the daughter had supposedly gone to sleep.

The play is a broad sex comedy with the father bringing several women back to the Sicilian house to have sex with them. The audience is all laughing at this guy’s antics. The father admits that the play is well written but he is offended, because the play is obviously ridiculing him.

“He wonders what he’s done to have become so abysmally misunderstood by the most important person in his life. He does not know how to fix it.”

While the father is watching the play, Sofia and her mother are in a restaurant near the theater.

Later the father confronts his daughter about her play, and she answers:

“You had me write that shitty book, and then instead of talking to me about it, or spending time with me, you made me listen to you having sex with different women every night – did it ever occur to you to at least try acting like a parent?”

Later Sofia discusses her play with her therapist whose reaction is:

“And in this case, Marlene says carefully, you’ve constructed an arrangement where an audience can laugh with you about your father.”

I thought this scenario, a father watching his daughter’s play, finding out it is about him, and is greatly offended was a great idea for a novel. However I found the execution of it somewhat lacking in precision and sharpness. For one thing, an excellent opportunity was missed with the play he is watching. A few lines from the play are quoted, but none of these lines are connected to a scene in the play or might have offended the father. Instead we find out little about the play beyond that it is a broad physical sex comedy. Instead there could have been many witty lines in the play which the father might have found offensive and might have reacted to, but we readers hear none of them out loud. This was a missed opportunity.

 

Grade :   B

 

 

12 Sep

‘Negative Space’ by Gillian Linden – A Time of Anxiety

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Negative Space’ by Gillian Linden    (2024) – 160 pages

 

Suddenly there seem to be quite a few novels that deal with the Time of Covid.

In ‘Negative Space’, the schools have just re-opened after the covid lock down. Everyone is required to still wear a mask, and some parents have decided not to send their children to school yet. These at-home children are supposed to attend their classes and participate using Zoom technology. There are inevitable connection problems, and the problem might be at the school or at the student’s home. Either way it turns the class into something chaotic.

Our unnamed main protagonist in ‘Negative Space’ is a part-time teacher at this expensive private school. She is also the mother of two small children herself. She has one class of sixth graders and one class of ninth graders.

One day she interrupts a meeting between one of her female ninth-grade students and a male teacher who happens to be our teacher’s advisor. They seem to be inappropriately close together, and she notices their heads touching. Was it a nudge or a nuzzle?

She reports this incident to the woman school administrator like she is supposed to do, but the administrator really doesn’t want to hear about it. Our teacher wonders if her contract for the following year will be renewed.

Along with the scenes in the novel that take place at her school, the reader also gets scattered scenes of this part-time teacher dealing with her children at home. The father seems to be away at his job most of the time, so she usually has to contend with her children by herself. Her daughter is anxious abut her baby teeth which are now coming out. The son often bruises himself falling down stairs, and his mother worries that the bruises might make it appear that someone was hurting her son.

The author Gillian Linden skillfully portrays the generalized anxiety of this teacher and mother and her family during the Time of Covid. However it did not make stimulating reading for me. The minimalist style of writing (no adjectives, short sentences) here makes the scenes seem almost colorless, and it was difficult for me to read more than a few pages at a time. Generally I like the minimalist style, but maybe not for this austere covid time. The covid time was a difficult time for most of us and unfortunately it is not much fun to read about it.

 

Grade :    B-

 

 

9 Sep

‘The Safekeep’ by Yael Van der Wouden – The Loosening of Isabel

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‘The Safekeep’ by Yael Van der Wouden     (2024) – 258 pages

 

This outstanding novel ‘The Safekeep’ is the compelling story of a lonely Netherlands woman. It takes place in 1961.

“Isabel didn’t mind it, the move to the east. She hadn’t any friends in the city, and hadn’t any friends in the country, either.”

Notice that although the woman author is from the Netherlands and has an obviously Dutch name, there is no translator. This novel was written in English.

In some novels, all of the characters are so nice, so thoughtful, that I can’t empathize or identify with them at all. Fortunately ‘The Safekeep’ does not have that problem at all. Not one of the characters here is too nice, least of all Isabel. They can all often be quite mean or nasty. The novel gets high marks for realism.

Nearly 30 years old, Isabel lives alone in her family home. Often she is rude to the point of cruelty. Isabel was “lonely and bitter and took after her mother too much”. About the only people she associates with are her two brothers, the ladies man Louis and Hendrik who lives with his boyfriend. Isabel does have a young maid who comes in nearly every day whom Isabel always suspects of stealing her mother’s heirlooms.

And then Louis asks if his current girlfriend Eva can stay with Isabel at the family home for a month or two while he is on a business trip. Isabel reluctantly agrees to this arrangement, because Louis could kick her out of the family house since it actually is his, him being the oldest child.

With the arrival of Eva, everything changes for Isabel.

“Isabel had spent a lifetime alone. She had spent a whole life without this woman, without her in this house, and now an hour. And now her heart raced at the sound of tires on gravel, the sight of her: first a dot, then a person, then a known shape, coming closer.”

Some graphic love or sex scenes ensue.

‘The Safekeep’ is supremely intense. It kept my mind fully occupied while I was reading it. The story here has the most original plot of any novel I have read this year. I read it very quickly. I won’t give any hints as to the surprise turn the novel takes toward the end.

‘The Safekeep’ is a Must Read. This is one novel you will not forget.

 

Grade:   A

 

 

3 Sep

Quoting Richard Powers

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Author Richard Powers has a new novel, ‘Playground’, coming out on September 24 which I am looking forward to reading. So this would be a good time to share with you some of the quotes from his previous works and interviews which I have found to be enlightening or entertaining.

 

Here goes:

 

“People, Robbie. They’re a questionable species.” – from ‘Bewilderment’

 

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.” – from ‘The Overstory’

 

“The search for truth is a lifelong journey, filled with twists and turns.”

 

“Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.”

 

“Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it’s one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don’t even know that we are infected.” – from ‘Generosity: An Enhancement’

 

“Anyone who gets righteous…doesn’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“How hopelessly fragile and wrong we all are. About everything.”

      • from ‘The Overstory’

“A moment of awe has the power to change the course of a lifetime.”

 

“Evil is the refusal to see one’s self in others.”

 

“Nobody’s perfect, but, man, we all fall short so beautifully.” – Richard Powers, ‘Bewilderment’

 

 

 

That’s all, Folks.

 

 

26 Aug

‘Soldier Sailor’ by Claire Kilroy – A Woman Talks to Her Four Year Old Son

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‘Soldier Sailor’ by Claire Kilroy    (2023) – 232 pages

 

‘Soldier Sailor’ is not a novel about soldiers or sailors but about the many, many traumas and only rare glories of the birthing process and the later excruciating care and feeding of this helpless little creature, a new human being.

I had never even considered how fortunate I, as a male, was to never to have to go through this ordeal of having a baby.

Some people might think this is a book mainly for women, but guys can read it to find out what early human life is really like. In fact this is probably a novel for us novices, because women who have been through this know it all too well already.

This is a powerful harrowing intense personal account of what actual motherhood must be like.

The soldier is the mother, the sailor is her son. The mother is talking to her four year-old son.

“Here’s my ennobling truth, Sailor: women risk death to give life to their babies. They endure excruciating pain, their inner parts torn, then they pick themselves up no matter what state they are in, no matter how much blood they’ve lost, and they tend to their infants.”

Being a male, I never really considered the grueling process that a woman goes through to bring aboard a new human, both before and after birth. The details of that process are all there in ‘Soldier Sailor’.

Her husband and the boy’s father, like most, is of little help. He stays at his office late, claiming he has important work to do. Her husband’s office job was his Get Out of Jail card, his all-purpose excuse not to help her with his son. He criticizes the mother and she answers:

“Look, if the level of care I’m giving our son is unsatisfactory, feel free to step in. Feel free to do a whole ten minutes of parenting. Don’t let me stop you.”

Meanwhile the care and feeding of her son must go on.

“I put the spoon on the plate and my head in my hands. I was so tired. I was so tired and you were so hungry. But you wouldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep. Mother and child.”

The care and feeding of her toddler son is dragging her down.

“All winter I had been sick. A cold, a cough, a virus, another virus. The mother of a toddler cannot take a sick day.”

Later she tells her four year old son:

“You will cast off your maternal shackles, venture forth and fuck up, and that’s part of the game, the glorious game we are here on this blessed Earth to play,…”

 

Grade:    A

 

 

19 Aug

‘Day of the Oprichnik’ by Vladimir Sorokin – The Three R’s – Raucous, Ribald, and Reckless

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‘Day of the Oprichnik’ by Vladimir Sorokin   (2006) – 191 pages   Translated from the Russian by Jamey Grambrell

 

The year is 2028. Modern Russia has now returned to leadership by an all-powerful Czar who is referred to only as “His Majesty”. The modern Russian leader is much like Russian leaders from the past like Genghis Khan and Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible.

“How glorious it is to destroy Russia’s enemies, don’t you know,” he mutters, taking out a pack of unfiltered Rodina. “Genghis Khan used to say that the greatest pleasure on earth was to conquer your enemies, plunder their possessions, ride their horses, and love their wives. What a wise man he was!”

His Majesty has his own imperial police force called the Oprichnina, which was also the name of the black-clad secret police force of Ivan the Terrible. In an early chapter these Oprichniki are sent to punish a Russian noble who His Majesty has determined to be his enemy. After the nobleman is arrested and hanged, his wife is raped by four of the Oprichniki and his children are taken away. After the hanging of the nobleman and the rapes of his wife, the Oprichniki go to the cathedral to pray.

This is just another workday for His Majesty’s imperial police force.

Russia has built the Great Wall of Russia to keep everyone, except for the Chinese, out. China provides Russia with most of its material goods. All the Oprichniki drive Mercedovs, Mercedes Benz rip-offs made in China.

The Oprichniki profess to be the ultra-patriotic defenders of traditional Russian culture, but much of their work consists in burning the classics of Russian literature.

During the evening, in their leader Batya’s bath, all the Oprichniki engage in a group copulation among themselves.

“Well there aren’t any unworthy among us – the Chinese have renewed our genitals, strengthened them, equipped them. We have the wherewithal to delight one another, as well as to punish Russia’s enemies.”

The outrageous ‘Day of the Oprichnik’ is a classic in its wicked humor.

In 2022 the author Vladimir Sorokin left Russia to live in exile in Berlin, probably a wise move. Sorokin has said that he had “underestimated the power of Putin’s madness”. His books are not currently banned in Russia, but they have been withdrawn by many booksellers.

Written in 2006, some readers would claim that ‘Day of the Oprichnik’ is quite prescient.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

15 Aug

‘Brian’ by Jeremy Cooper – For the Love of Movies

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‘Brian’ by Jeremy Cooper   (2023) – 180 pages

 

The novel ‘Brian’ is not for everyone. If you are not a quality movie aficionado, you are probably not going to enjoy this novel. I have a simple test to determine whether or not you will enjoy ‘Brian’. If you have watched and liked two or more Ingmar Bergman movies, you will probably like this novel ‘Brian’. Otherwise you might as well skip it. It is filled with movie arcana about quality movies, the kind of movies shown on the Criterion Channel. I subscribed to the Criterion Channel for several years, so ‘Brian’ was right up my arcane alley.

On a deeper level, ‘Brian’ is about saving your life by finding something outside yourself that you can get totally involved with.

Brian is a character who has somehow survived a traumatic childhood. He lives alone and keeps to himself. He works at his desk job every day, but there is something missing. One night he goes to a movie showing at the British Film Institute, and Brian’s life is totally changed. There is a group of mostly men there who are movie fanatics. They watch the movies of Werner Herzog, Mike Leigh, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Ingmar Bergman, Clint Eastwood, etc. After watching the movie, they discuss it. Soon Brian is going there every night, sometimes even watching two movies.

“The sense of security experienced on noting the titles and times of a whole month’s movie bookings in his diary was immeasurable. It had never occurred to Brian that he would one day find such contentment.”

Brian develops a specialty in watching Japanese movies, partly to avoid having to interact much with the other movie buffs.

Much of ‘Brian’ consists of the discussions about these movies that Brian watches, and if you are not that interested in these types of movies, you probably will be bored. However I wasn’t, as Brian’s insights are quite engaging.

We follow Brian and his movie-going for many years, up to his retirement and beyond.

Only occasionally we are given insights into Brian’s life and traumatic childhood.

“Although Brian believed he was never going to have sex, with anyone, ever, he was prepared privately to admit that, if he did, it could as easily be with a man as a woman. It would never happen, the idea of being alone naked in a room with somebody else too appalling to contemplate, of any gender.

To be without his clothes with another person.

Inconceivable.”

Brian visits the grave of his mother who was “the least inadequate of his parents”. She was a Northern Ireland dissident who sheltered violent paramilitaries. Brian was born in prison and soon after was put in an orphanage. Neither Brian’s father or older brother visited him in the orphanage.

However the novel is centered on movie going. If you like discussions of quality movies, you probably will like ‘Brian’. Otherwise don’t bother.

Being a movie aficionado isn’t all that different from being a fiction aficionado.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

12 Aug

‘Held’ by Anne Michaels – Of Beauty, Love, Death, and Marie Curie

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‘Held’ by Anne Michaels     (2023) – 220 pages

 

There are some breathtaking lines in the 2024 Booker long-listed novel ‘Held’ which create lovely images like the following:

“Mara and Alan walked home through the winter streets. Past midnight, hardly any lights in the windows, the night sky deepened by the clarity of the cold. The snowfall began so gently it could only be seen under the streetlamps. Silent, lambent emanation.”

There are also scenes of deep feeling.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Where were you happiest? What was your favorite food when you were a child? What was the first book that made you cry? I want to hear everything, don’t leave out a thing.”

“That will take forever,” she said.

“I hope so,”

However the novel skips around erratically from place to place, from time to time, from situation to situation, and from person to person. This skipping around left this reader almost entirely confused, except for those beautiful images that are presented. Neither the times nor the places nor the characters are well-grounded in significant detail so that the occasional lovely or profound image that is presented seems to be unearned.

There are so many characters, and we skip around from time to time and from place to place so we never really get to know these people who are having such profound lovely thoughts. We can appreciate the beauty of what they are seeing or saying, but we cannot really empathize with these under-developed people.

Sometimes the prose gets too abstract, too diffuse, not tied to anything real or concrete.

“Loneliness is not emptiness but negation, with all its agonizing precision, its absoluteness; exact, active; in every depth of detail, it is the inverse of love, the dark replica of love.”

What exactly does that mean?

There are many fleeting fictional characters in ‘Held’, and towards the end the real person Marie Curie makes an appearance. Madame Marie Curie, discoverer with her husband Pierre, of the radioactive element radium and the only winner of two Nobel Prizes in both the fields of Chemistry and Physics. Soon after she won her first Nobel Prize in 1911, it was revealed that Marie Curie was involved in a year-long affair with another male physicist not her husband, which was a major scandal at the time.

“Do we really need our own misery to teach us to be kind?” asked Marie.

“I think perhaps we might,” said Hertha.

“That’s a dark thought,” said Marie. She hesitated. “I won’t believe it.”

For me, ‘Held’ was just too diffuse and abstract and not grounded sufficiently in everyday reality for me to give it a high grade. However I will end with another of the special lines from the novel.

He was fully awake now.

“Sometimes I think I see her too,” Peter said, “out of the corner of my eye. If you can see a feeling.”

“Yes, I think you can.”

 

 

Grade:    B-

 

 

6 Aug

‘Cold Victory’ by Karl Marlantes – Cold War in Finland After World War II

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‘Cold Victory’ by Karl Marlantes     (2024) – 345 pages

 

Sometimes I want a big fiction, one that deals with a subject unfamiliar to me which I can totally immerse myself in. The novel ‘Cold Victory’ served that purpose well for me.

Arnie Koski from the United States and Mikhail Bobrov from the Soviet Union had both been officers in their respective armies during World War II. Their armies had been allies, defeating their common enemy Germany during the war. Arnie and Mikhail had become friends after a fashion. After the war, it was natural that Arnie, with his Finnish background, would become a diplomat to Finland. Mikhail became a Russian intelligence officer stationed in Finland. Arnie is accompanied by his wife Louise, and Mikhail is accompanied by his wife Natalya. Natalya and Louise become good friends despite their language differences, and much of ‘Cold Victory’ is told from the point of view of Louise. Natalya has two little children, and Louise is trying to start her own family and in the meantime is working at the local daycare center.

Arnie and Mikhail make a friendly bet, a ski race across the frozen terrain above the Arctic Circle in northern Finland, since they are both excellent cross country skiers.

The daycare where Louise works is short of funds. Louise has what she hopes is a wonderful idea for raising money for the daycare. Why not sponsor a raffle where people could guess who wins this ski race between their husbands and by how much?

“Still, it was that damned impetuous go-get-’em attitude of hers. Of course, she’d come up with some scheme to bring in money for the cause.”

What could possibly go wrong?

“This was about Mikhail. Of course the Kremlin would be reading about this race, who knows how high up. Stalin and Beria were not the kind of men who laughed at embarrassment. They were the kind of men who would kill you if you embarrassed them.”

Louise’s friend Natalya is grilled by an intimidating Soviet bureaucrat:

“Do you really believe that “Louise Koski”, again the quotation marks, is as naive as she lets on?”

Yes, Louise Koski is that naive.

“Now she knew a grim truth: naivete was not an excuse; it was a flaw. And it was a flaw that hurt people.”

Along the way, we learn much of the history of Finland before and during World War II. In the late 1930s, Finland and the Soviet Union fought each other in what is called the Winter War, and Finland had to cede some of its land to the Soviet Union. During World War II, Finland sided with Germany to get their land back. Then the Soviet Union, the victors, imposed harsh conditions on the Finns.

In ‘Cold Victory’, there is intense suspense for both the women and the men. At the beginning I was a little put off by the author’s careful workmanlike construction of this fairly complicated plot situation and its protagonists, but by the end of the novel I was won over. Karl Marlantes has crafted this story to achieve a larger story goal. And there is a breathtaking surprise at the very end. ‘Cold Victory’ is a poignant historical novel.

 

Grade :    A

 

 

 

31 Jul

‘The Cursed Friend’ by Beatrice Salvioni – Fascist Times in Northern Italy

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘The Cursed Friend’ by Beatrice Salvioni  (2023) – 218 pages         Translated from the Italian by Elena Pala

 

‘The Cursed Friend” is a novel about a young girl Francesca Strada coming of age in the city of Monza in northern Italy during Italian fascist times around 1935. At the age of 12, she develops this friendship with another girl her age, Maddalena Merlini, who is reviled by nearly everyone in town and is often referred to as the Cursed One. Instead of behaving like most of the girls in town do, Maddalena hangs out on the River Lambro with a couple of guys her age. She is caught stealing fruit from the corner grocery store. Maddalena also is not afraid to confront the ruling fascists in town. I suppose Francesca is attracted to her by the wayward freedom of her life.

“If she hasn’t done anything wicked yet, she will soon enough.”

Francesca’s parents are mostly not political, but they do have to please the powerful local fascists in town in order for her father’s hat business to prosper. They are not at all happy when their daughter becomes friends with the Cursed One.

Mom. by contrast, would always doll up, caught in the solemn atmosphere around town. She’d teach me how to hold my fingers and elbow straight for the Fascist salute. “We are part of something bigger,” she explains and must look our best.”

We do get some of the local color of the town of Monza as it hosts a Grand Prix auto race in the novel.

For me, the novel ‘The Cursed Friend’ lacked depth and there was no room for ambiguity. It is too obvious in its plotting and there is no subtlety. The fascists are depicted as fascist pigs as you would expect. Everything that happens in the novel is just a little too predictable.

The author makes up for this lack of nuance by increasing the level of the violence and the outrages on the characters. I found this novel way over the top in its plotting.

Of course later, on April 28, 1945, the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini and his mistress were shot by his own people, and their bodies were hung upside down from the roof of an Esso service station.

 

Grade :   B-

 

 

23 Jul

‘Not a River’ by Selva Almada – Two Men and a Boy in an Argentine Fishing Boat

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Not a River’ by Selva Almada   (2020) – 87 pages                Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott

 

Despite the shortness of this novella, ‘Not a River’ is not an easy read. I would call it an uneasy read dealing as it does with the carelessness of guys, both with the fish they catch and with the women they pursue and sometimes catch.

Three men are out on a boat fishing in northern Argentina. They are two fifty year old men, Enero and El Negro, and their dead friend’s son Tilo. While they are fishing they catch a giant ray which is a fish that sort of looks like a giant pancake. Before they haul it into the boat, one of the guys shoots it.

“Christ, she’s ugly!

Says Enero slapping his thigh and laughing. The others laugh as well.

Fought us pretty hard.

Says El Negro.”

This “Says” is a poetic device that the author Selva Almada uses throughout ‘Not a River’. It is a device that emphasizes the person who is talking.

They hang the ray up on shore so the local townspeople can admire it, but the guys really don’t have any idea about what they can ultimately do with it. After a few days, the dead fish starts rotting and they throw it back in the water. This carelessness makes the locals very angry at them.

“They chucked it in the river.

Says Aguirre.

Motherfuckers!

Says Cesar.

We need to teach them a lesson.

Says Aguirre.

What kind of a lesson.

Says Cesar.

Just as in Aguirre’s mind, “it wasn’t a ray” that Enero and El Negro killed, “it was that ray. A beautiful creature stretched out in the mud at the bottom, she’d have shone white like a bride in the lightless depths. … Pulled from the river to be thrown back in later. Dead.”

Unlike ”The Wind that Lays Waste’, another novella written by Selva Almada that I have read recently, ‘Not a River’ is not at all a straightforward story. It jumps around from these men and the boy fishing in a boat to a local woman Siomara and her two daughters, Mariela and Lucy. We get a view of the music and nightlife in the local town bars which the girls are excited to go to, but where the men, fueled with alcohol, don’t treat the girls any better than they treat their fish. This is a story about toxic masculinity. Although not as easy to follow as the other novella, ‘Not a River’ achieves an even greater depth.

Selva Almada gives the reader a good picture about what town life is like in this river region of northern Argentina.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

15 Jul

Some of my Favorite Fiction of the 21st Century

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews.

 

The New York Times currently has a feature where they asked famous people to list the fictions or poetry which they think are the best of the 21st century. I decided that I couldn’t resist and that this was something I’d want to try, but I wouldn’t go so far as saying “Best”, since there are so many books that I have missed. Who hasn’t missed reading some great novels? Instead here are some of my favorites of the 21st century so far.

Some of these novels I read before I started my site in 2009. If I do have a review on my site, you can reach it by clicking on the cover image or the title.

 

‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson (2004) – Who would have expected a deeply religious novel to have such an impact in the 21st century? But here it is.

 

 

 

 

 

‘The Known World’ by Edward P. Jones (2003) – By focusing on a black slave owner, Edward P. Jones avoids turning this re-creation of the days of slavery into a morality play of good and evil. There is no one preaching in this novel. The matter-of-fact tone of this narrative only intensifies the reader’s reaction to the events in the story. I’m still waiting for Jones’ next, since he hasn’t published a fiction since 2006.

 

‘Fates and Furies’ by Lauren Groff (2015) – Here is a writer who manages to put Greek myth and Shakespeare into a modern marriage story. There is a manic energy and an inventiveness here that puts this novel above most.

 

 

 

‘The Sympathizer’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015) – Here is a poignant yet witty novel that observes the Vietnam War from the viewpoint of the Vietnamese, a perspective most of us people from the United States have not encountered before. ‘The Sympathizer’ is like a fine Graham Greene novel which is told from the perspective of a Vietnamese rather than that of a white colonialist.

 

‘The Long Take’ by Robin Robertson (2018) – This atmospheric and expressive poem of a novel that captures the crazed free spirit of Los Angeles just after World War II when the movie makers were filming the classic crime noir movies.

 

 

 

‘My Brilliant Friend’ by Elena Ferrante (2012) – Ferrante brings to life almost every member of the seven families who live in this tight little neighborhood in Naples, Italy in the 1950s.  The writing in this novel is colorful, moving, and a joy to read. After you read ‘My Brilliant Friend’, you will probably want to read all four of her Naples Quartet series.

 

‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ by Michael Chabon (2000) – An often humorous, always fascinating, novel, about the Golden Age of Comic Books.

 

 

 

 

‘The Old Romantic’ by Louise Dean (2010) – For those who like their comedy dark. This novel is a wicked joy with the meanest and sharpest dialogue around. I’ve been waiting 14 years for Dean to write another novel.

 

 

 

‘The Burning’ by Megha Majumdar (2020)– ‘A Burning’ is a vivid powerful novel which focuses on one of the major crises in our world today, racial hatred. Here is a world-changing novel about the Muslim/Hindu situation in India today.

 

 

 

‘Trust’ by Hernan Diaz (2022) – A rich person can buy the past he or she wants even if it is counter to the facts, if we let them. One of the features which make ‘Trust’ an outstanding novel is the smooth and effective way that Hernan Diaz handles four different sources so that we readers wind up with a full picture.

 

 

‘The Past’ by Tessa Hadley (2015) – Here is a superior family reunion novel that takes place in their old childhood home in the English countryside. The story in ‘The Past’ flows smoothly along just like the stream that flows past their old house. However at one distant point the stream goes over a rocky cliff and becomes a waterfall. The people in the novel too have their turbulences. The reader gets the strong impression that the characters here are just as subject to the laws of nature as everything else.

 

‘All for Nothing’ by Walter Kempowski (2006) – This is a powerful work of art that captures, in authentic detail and with compassion, the evacuation nightmare for the German people of the last days of World War II. There is a musical quality to the individual sentences which makes them a pleasure to read, in spite of or because of the frightfulness of the events which are occurring.

 

 

 

Happy Reading!

 

9 Jul

‘Beautiful Days’ by Zach Williams – “Too Scary” Explaining the Inexplicable

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Beautiful Days’, stories, by Zach Williams    (2024) – 219 pages

 

Zach Williams is being promoted as “the Next Big Thing” in fiction. ‘Beautiful Days’ by Zach Williams is an ambitious writer’s first collection of fiction. Williams has already had two stories, “Neighbors” and “Wood Sorrel House”, published in the New Yorker to much acclaim. His story “Trial Run” won the Paris Review Award for Fiction. These three stories are included in the ‘Beautiful Days’ collection along with seven other stories.

It is indeed refreshing but sometimes unnerving to have a writer who will push against the limits of what a story can do. These stories go at least one or two steps beyond this reader’s expectations. That is a good thing, usually.

In “Neighbors”, Tom and his wife Anna, who was having an affair that she wanted to escape from, move to a house in San Francisco four blocks from the Pacific ocean. An old woman named Bing lives next door. One day Tom does not hear anything coming from that woman’s house. Her son calls him and asks him to check up on her. Her son had previously given him the key to the house. Tom enters the house and finds her dead body but also a man sitting across from her. The man says nothing but moves across the room.

Like “Neighbors”, several of these stories have an eerie setting. They purposely make the reader uncomfortable, but then pull back from the precipice. We are sort of in Steven King territory here, but here the stories are not so obviously horror stories. Williams’ stories have a deeper subtext. These stories affect the reader at the visceral level rather than at the intellectual level.

In “Trial Run”, an unknown entity called TruthFlex is sending out disturbing messages about their manager, Lisa.

“Lisa Horowitz is a CULTURAL MARXIST – !WHITE GENOCIDE!”

On one snowy winter day, our unnamed narrator decides to go to work anyhow. Besides the security guard Manny, the only other person in the building is Shel. Our narrator is hesitant to talk to Shel but finally he must. After his disturbing conversation with Shel, he considers the following which captures the rightfully ominous paranoid spirit of our times:

“I’d have to report Shel. There was no question about that. He was unstable, possibly delusional, an abuser evidently, and he lacked the basic judgment not to reveal those things to a colleague. Anyway he might well be TruthFlex. Who else, if not him? Shel needed help, that was clear, and I hope he’d get it. But what if there were guns in that gym bag?. I’d tell Lisa.”

All of these stories go beyond what we normally expect from a story which can make the story difficult to follow for an unsuspecting reader. I did not get fully into the spirit of these stories until my fifth one, until I read “Golf Cart” which is my favorite.

Zach Williams is attempting more than most writers attempt. We wish him luck.

 

Grade:     A-

 

 

2 Jul

‘Godwin’ by Joseph O’Neill – United States Office Politics and European Football

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

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‘Godwin’ by Joseph O’Neill       (2024) – 277 pages

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Despite getting some rave reviews elsewhere, the novel ‘Godwin’ never quite worked for me. Neither of the two main strands of the plot – the search for the young African soccer player Godwin and a United States office politics situation – fully captured my interest. The only character holding these two strands together is the main character Mark Wolfe and he does not come alive in either part. Even after reading the entire ‘Godwin’, I hardly understood anything about and had little insight into its main character, Mark Wolfe. When the main character of the novel is not fully developed, the novel is going to have problems holding one’s interest.

The sections that take place in a technical writing consortium of which Mark Wolfe is a member are especially lacking in interest. These sections seem intentionally convoluted to reflect the sorry United States office politics.

Those sections that take place overseas involving the locating of the young African soccer player Godwin do have one fully developed character named Lefebvre who is a long-time French soccer scout and agent. He always refers to soccer as football as Europeans do. He has a video of the young African Godwin playing a full game of soccer, and he is mightily impressed. When Lefebvre speaks, he often spouts cliches about the sport.

“What is this fact? It is this: football is its own religion. It has its own gods and priests, its own traditions and doctrines and churches. It has its own reality.”

Lefebvre has spent much of his adult life searching for African soccer talent, and he now bad mouths nearly everything African except these young soccer phenoms.

“Italy is a paradise. Benin is a hell.”

At one point, Lefebvre makes the following comment:

“Terrorists, jihadists, criminal gangs – in short backward types from the world over – would disfigure the gentle streets of Germany.”

I guess after World War I and World War II, I would never speak of “the gentle streets of Germany”.

I did read with interest Lefebvre’s detailed account of the absolute horrors of the Slave Trade in the historical Kingdom of Dahomey (which was part of the modern day country of Benin). The English, the Dutch, and the French colonialists in Africa all participated in this Slave Trade. Humans from the interior of Africa were hunted down, captured and put in chains, then auctioned off. In chains, they were then marched to the sea and put on ships headed for North or South America where they would be forced to work as slaves. At one point, Lefebvre compares this Slave Trade to the Holocaust.

However overall I did not find the situations in the novel ‘Godwin’ compelling or convincing. It might have helped if Godwin were actually a character in the novel instead of only described by others.

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Grade:   C

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27 Jun

‘The Daughter of Time’ by Josephine Tey – Investigating a Murder Charge from Over 500 Years Ago

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘The Daughter of Time’ by Josephine Tey     (1951) – 206 pages

 

Here is a detective book like no other. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard hurt his back and leg, is laid up in the hospital, and is thoroughly bored. He needs something to occupy his mind. His friend brings some pictures of historical figures to perhaps get him interested in English history.

Inspector Grant becomes intrigued with Richard III who was King of England from 1483 to 1485 and who is considered one of the most monstrous villains of English history. Richard III was said to be a venomous hunchback who had his two child nephews locked up in the Tower of London and murdered so that he could become King himself. Even William Shakespeare mentions the child “Princes in the Tower” murder charge against Richard III in his play ‘Richard III’. Inspector Grant decides to look into this child homicide case using the detective techniques he uses on Scotland Yard cases.

“Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn’t lie in someone’s account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. Advertisements in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.”

First Inspector Grant reads the available literature regarding the murders, most notably “History of Richard the Third” by Thomas More which Shakespeare used as his source for his plays. The Inspector quickly becomes disenchanted with More’s writing considering that More was only five years old when the murders supposedly took place and that Thomas More was an apologist for Henry VII, the first Tudor King, who took the English throne away from Richard III after Richard III was killed in battle.

“As far as he was concerned there was nothing so uncritical or so damn silly as your Great Mind. As far as he, Alan Grant, was concerned, Thomas More was washed out, cancelled, deleted; and he, Alan Grant was beginning from scratch again tomorrow morning.”

Inspector Grant brings in a young assistant who has full access to the British Museum to help him with the case.

“P.S., it’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale, they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset.”

Richard III

This is a sharp, fun story written with exuberance. ‘The Daughter of Time’ is mercifully free of anti-Semitic remarks which are known to appear in some of Josephine Tey’s crime novels written in the 1930s.

I was impressed with this combination of a detective novel and an historical novel. It is a quite unique approach to somewhat ancient history.

 

Grade:   A

 

 

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