Archive for September, 2023

28 Sep

‘On the Edge of Reason’ by Miroslav Krleža – The Dangers of Speaking the Truth

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘On the Edge of Reason’ by Miroslav Krleža (1938) – 188 pages                Translated from the Croatian by Zora Depolo

 

The Doctor and his wife are invited to a dinner party in the vineyard on the veranda of the summer house of the great industrialist and benefactor, the Director-General. The Doctor and his wife were frequent guests of the Director-General as they were well-respected members of the community.

That night the Director-General is expansive, and regales his guests with stories from his past. He tells about how in the early days of his wine-making operation, some of the men who worked for him wanted to start a union. Then he brags about how four of them trespassed on to his property, and he shot them like dogs.

The other guests sat there not saying anything, but the Doctor says absent-mindedly, almost but not quite under his breath, that “It was all a crime, a bloody thing, moral insanity.”

The Director-General overhears the Doctor and is hugely offended. He even claims a little while later that the Doctor himself should be shot like a dog too.

The Doctor’s life collapses in the following days. No one else dares to offend the Director-General. The townspeople rush to castigate this Doctor who had the nerve to criticize their town’s great industrialist and benefactor. The doctor finds out his wife has been unhappy with him for a long time and she asks him for a divorce. He finds out that she has been carrying on with her baritone music teacher for years. However the Doctor agrees to take the blame legally for the divorce. Soon there is a newspaper article about the Doctor:

“It stated that I was a promiscuous person, a slanderer, a paramour, divorced through my own fault, according to witnesses a confirmed adulterer, a problematic man, a morally sick case.”

The police start harassing him, and soon the Doctor is dismissed from his job and put on trial on trumped up charges.

Do you say what you really think, or are you like most people who keep their mouths shut and keep their opinions to themselves, especially concerning prominent people in your community?

In ‘On the Edge of Reason’, the Doctor accidentally reveals what he really thinks, and the results are disastrous for him.

“Truly, you have set all the high-placed consciences of our elite against you for having dared to call attention to a common bandit and to tell him in public he is what he is: a bandit.”

 

Grade :    B+

 

 

 

26 Sep

‘In the Act’ by Rachel Ingalls – Her Husband Builds a Sex Robot Named Dolly

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘In the Act’ by Rachel Ingalls   (1987) – 64 pages

 

The publisher New Directions has created a new series called “Storybook ND” in which they republish certain novellas, so far nine, in a hard cover readable format. Their slogan is : “The pleasure of reading a great book from cover to cover in an afternoon”. One of the novellas they chose was ‘In the Act’ by Rachel Ingalls.

I am very familiar with the work of Rachel Ingalls having read several of her novels and stories, and I have been on the lookout for more of her work for a long time. Ingalls died in 2019. She left behind a number of novellas which were hard to market in her time. Her specialty was the long story.

In ‘In the Act’, Helen and Edgar get along fairly well as husband and wife, but they do have their problems.

“You’re being unreasonable.”

“Of course I am. I’m a woman,” she said. “You’ve already explained that to me.”

Husband Edgar does have his good points.

“He wasn’t too bad as a father. He actually wasn’t too bad anyway, except that sometimes he irritated her to distraction.”

Helen has taken many adult education classes which fill her days. When her classes end, Helen tells Edgar she’s going to stay home for awhile, and Edgar gets really angry. He tells Helen that his work requires that he have the house to himself. Why? Helen gets suspicious. Helen sneaks into his office and uncovers something that sort of looks like a woman. At that point Helen assumes it must be some kind of work project. A few days later she sneaks in again, and now it looks like a fully developed woman. She looks under her dress and then she gets angry herself. Dolly is beautiful and docile, every man’s dream. Helen stuffs Dolly into a suitcase and stashes the suitcase in a train locker near their house, unbeknownst to Edgar.

Later a professional thief named Ron steals Dolly out of the train locker and soon discovers her enticements. It’s “like having a wife, except that not being human, of course, she was nicer”.

Meanwhile Edgar finds out that Helen has taken his sex doll, and she tells him she won’t give it back until he builds her a male sex doll of her own.

That’s enough. ‘In the Act’ is a fun little novella and a fine reminder of Rachel Ingalls’ work.

 

Grade:   A

 

 

 

19 Sep

The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray – The Final Review : A Family’s Skeletons in its Closet and Out of the Closet

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray   (2023) – 643 pages

 

Have you ever wondered about what kind of lives your parents lived before you were born? In their younger days, did your parents have the same kind of problems you have had, or were their problems completely different? How did your parents meet and later decide to get married? It is easy to forget that your parents were young once too.

Dickie Barnes owns a prosperous car dealership he inherited from his father. Dickie and his wife Imelda have two children, Cassandra and PJ. They live in a nice house in small-town Ireland. Everything is seemingly fine until the post-2008 Irish economic downturn. During the recession, the Barnes car dealership faced severe problems like many other businesses.

“A fall as dizzying as the Barneses’ couldn’t come from simple economics. There had to be a moral element.”

‘The Bee Sting’ is the examination of a family tragedy from the long perspective of past family history going back thirty years. It is told from the viewpoints of each of these four family members. Daughter Cassandra is worried that she won’t be able to get into college with her best friend Elaine. Father Dickie is trying to keep the car business going. His wife Imelda doubts that Dickie has what it takes to run the business.

“she and he The rich boy and the girl from the back arse of nowhere It should have been impossible It was so easy.”

Son PJ sees his family disintegrating.

From the reviews I’ve read, I get the impression that Murray’s previous novel ‘Skippy Dies’ is quite humorous, However ‘The Bee Sting’ is a heart-stopping dramatic realistic portrayal of a family in crisis. There are scenes in ‘The Bee Sting’ of terrible menace that will leave you on edge.

Despite its length. ‘The Bee Sting’ is a relatively quick read. The reader gets so immersed in this family’s situation that the pages fly by. ‘The Bee Sting’ has the depth that you would expect from a long novel. By depth I mean that the characters are more complicated and ambiguous than usual. Each of the main characters has their strengths and weaknesses, their good and not-so-good points.

“We’re all different, but we all think everybody else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel the world would be a much happier place.”

Author Paul Murray does take liberties with punctuation. When capturing a character’s thoughts or memories, he does not use commas or periods. I had no problems reading or comprehending this method. When our minds are in reverie mode, we do not have full stops or pauses, but keep rolling from subject to subject to subject.

“You’ve had enough past frankly to last you a lifetime.”

The scenes from the past of father Dickie and of mother Imelda determine to a large extent the present predicament of the family. In the suspenseful conclusion, all of the family members, some of them armed, converge in a dark woods at night in a heavy torrential rain.

 

Grade :    A

 

 

14 Sep

‘Batlava Lake’ by Adam Mars-Jones – A Time in Kosovo

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‘Batlava Lake’ by Adam Mars-Jones    (2021) – 97 pages

 

Adam Mars-Jones just recently published the third installment of his “semi-infinite novel”, ‘Caret’. I did want to read Adam Mars-Jones but I certainly wasn’t ready to commit to reading 752 pages which is the length of ‘Caret’. So instead I searched around among his previous works and came up with ‘Batlava Lake’, published in 2021 and only 97 pages.

‘Batlava Lake’ was rather a fun read. Englishman Barry Ashton is deployed to Pristina, Kosovo as a civil engineer attached to the Royal Engineers corps in the British Army. He is a civilian attached to a NATO peace-keeping mission to rebuild Kosovo in 1999 after it was destroyed by the Serbs.

The tone of this novella is light and conversational as Barry tells us about himself and his time in Kosovo. Batlava Lake is in Pristina; the English called it “Baklava Lake”. Barry is a regular English bloke, in no way enlightened. He calls the soldiers he works with “saps” He calls the Kosovo Muslims, “chogies”.

But Barry makes fun of himself too. He is getting divorced. He makes excuses for himself.

“No good at playing games, no good at lying, rubbish husband material altogether.”

Recalling his time in England with his wife, Barry says stuff like :

“Rather rebuild a broken country any day than face a bridesmaid who didn’t fancy the color of her dress, thinks the color doesn’t suit her complexion!”

Later there is a race across Batlava Lake between the civil engineer corps guys and the British army regulars in makeshift boats that each side built by themselves.

Reading ‘Batlava Lake’, I could imagine Adam Mars-Jones had fun writing in the voice of this wrong-headed but quite typical Englishman.

Batlava Lake

The tone is altogether lighthearted until they discover that the waters of Batlava Lake contain a terrible secret.

‘Batlava Lake’ is entertaining fare that held my interest throughout.

 

Grade:    A-

 

 

12 Sep

‘A Love Affair’ by Dino Buzzati – A Love Both Foolish and Hopeless

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‘A Love Affair’ by Dino Buzzati    (1963) – 288 pages                    Translated from the Italian by Joseph Green

 

Women of today might not take kindly to the opening of this novel. Antonio Dorigo is a quite prosperous nearly fifty year-old stage set designer and architect in Milan, Italy. He has never been married. When Antonio wants to have sex, he calls Signora Ermelina who provides him with young women. It is a discreet operation. At the beginning of ‘A Love Affair’ Signora Ermelina sets him up with Laide who is only 19, underage. Antonio is satisfied.

“What a wonderful thing, thought Dorigo, prostitution is!”

After a few times with Laide, Antonio becomes obsessed with her. Meanwhile Laide is totally indifferent to him.

“Not that sex with Antonio gave her much pleasure, on the contrary, it clearly meant nothing to her at all.”

But the more she ignores him, the more obsessed with her Antonio becomes. Antonio offers to pay for her apartment and provide her with adequate spending money in the futile hope that she will like him just a little more. However Laide is always doing stuff behind his back and making lame excuses like visiting a sick mother. Antonio doubts her stories and constantly tries to catch her in a lie. There’s this guy Marcello who hangs around her apartment when Antonio is not there. Laide claims he’s a cousin, and that they do not have sex. Antonio becomes extremely jealous.

“He’s never before found himself in a mess like this. He’s never found himself naked on a bed, eyes wide, watching a girl thirty years younger than himself, a cocky little whore without the least semblance of affection for him. He’s never found himself head over heels in love with a girl who doesn’t give a damn about him, who doesn’t even need him inasmuch as she could find a dozen just like him, who goes with him only because for the moment it seems convenient for her.”

With all Laide’s excuses, one assumes she is also carrying on with her prostitution sideline.

The title ‘A Love Affair’ must be ironic. The novel was published in 1963, and may be Buzzati’s answer to Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’.

For me, this overwrought affair goes on for much too long, for at least 150 pages, with Laide telling Antonio stories to cover up what she’s doing and Antonio trying to believe but doubting the stories. It felt like years and years were going by, but it all takes place within a year.

This somewhat repugnant lengthy realistic novel is much different from Dino Buzzati’s other works. I would recommend that a reader at least first read ‘The Tartar Steppes’ (which was recently republished by NYBR as ‘The Stronghold’) to get a much more positive view of Buzzati’s writing.

 

Grade:   B-

 

7 Sep

‘The Fawn’ by Magda Szabo – An Actress’s Life-Long Hatred of Angela

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘The Fawn’ by Magda Szabo       (1959) – 285 pages        Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

 

In ‘The Fawn’, our narrator Eszter descends from an aristocratic Hungarian family. However due to her sickly lawyer father’s frequent illnesses, he stays at home and does not practice law. Thus the family lives in reduced circumstances with Eszter’s mother making a little money by giving piano lessons to children in the neighborhood. Eszter as a child has to do the housework that her mother would ordinarily do, but the family remains poor.

One of the neighbor girls who takes piano lessons from Eszter’s mother is Angela. Angela’s family is well-to-do, and she is a beautiful child. Eszter hates her instantly.

“I have loathed and hated Angéla from the moment I first saw her. Even when I am dead, if there is any life after death, I shall hate her still.”

The story in ‘The Fawn’ takes place in those turbulent years during and after World War II when first Germany invaded Hungary, and then the Russians attacked and defeated the Germans, and then the Russians remained in Hungary, and Hungary became a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

As ‘The Fawn’ progresses, our narrator Eszter grows up and becomes a famous Hungarian actress in Budapest.

One tool which is very helpful in ‘The Fawn’ and that I wish more novels today would do is a list of the main characters at the beginning with a short description of their place in the novel.

Despite Eszter’s success as an actress, she retains her childhood hatred of Angela. When Eszter finds out that Angela is living in Budapest with a husband and that Angela’s husband is translating a Shakespeare play into Hungarian, you might imagine what happens next.

One of the aspects of ‘The Fawn’ that stood out for me is that the narrator of the novel, Eszter, is not a good person. It seems to me that in our more recent novels, the narrator, especially a female narrator, is assumed to be and usually is a very fine person. I found it refreshing having to deal with a narrator who is morally ambiguous at best.

That is the mark of a talented writer to me, that they don’t just try to get by with the good natures of their characters. The New York Review of Books must think the same way, since ‘The Fawn’ is the fourth Magda Szabo novel they have made available to us.

 

Grade :   A-

 

 

5 Sep

‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray – Part I: So I Don’t have to Kick Myself for Not Reading It

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray      (2023) – 643 pages

 

In 2010, Paul Murray published the novel ‘Skippy Dies’. All of the reviews that I read at that time were very positive, and it went on to win numerous awards. The novel was said to be both comic and tragic at the same time, in other words right up my alley.

Ordinarily I would have been quick to get a copy of ‘Skippy Dies’ and read it. However there was one problem. ‘Skippy Dies’ was 672 pages long. How in the world was I going to read a 672-page novel and keep my book blog site active at the same time?

I kept postponing and postponing reading ‘Skippy Dies’. And at the same time, the reputation of ‘Skippy Dies’ seemed to grow as the years went by.

I kept kicking myself for not having read ‘Skippy Dies’.

In the meantime Paul Murray published another novel, ‘The Mark and the Void’, which did not create quite as much of a stir as ‘Skippy Dies’.

Now in 2023 Paul Murray has published another novel, ‘The Bee Sting’, and again this time the reviews are uniformly superlative. It’s been longlisted for the Booker Prize and so on.

But ‘The Bee Sting’ is again over 600 pages. However this time I’m not going to make the same mistake as I did with ‘Skippy Dies’. I began reading ‘The Bee Sting’ four days ago, and I am already to page 260 which means I’m already over 40% done with the novel.

This time Paul Murray has written an Irish family drama and not in a humorous vein. There are scenes of terrible menace in this novel. The opening quote is quite acute in capturing the mood of ‘The Bee Sting’:

“Those are my best days, when I shake with fear.” – John Donne

‘The Bee Sting’ is working out to be a quite immersive read for this reader who is fully engaged in the lives of these four family members.

Stay tuned for Part II of ‘The Bee Sting’, my final review of the novel, which will appear after I complete the novel. In the meantime I will be publishing a couple of reviews of other novels I’ve recently read.