Archive for February, 2024

26 Feb

‘Vengeance is Mine’ by Marie NDiaye – A Mother’s Terrible Act

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

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‘Vengeance is Mine’ by Marie NDiaye (2021) – 226 pages                 Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

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There are two plot lines to the French novel ‘Vengeance is Mine’.

One plot line is the aftermath of a horrendous act: a mother, Marlyne Principaux, admits that she has murdered her three little children, Jason, John, and Julia. Jason is 6 years old, John is 4 years old, and Julia is 6 months old. The mother drowned them in the bathtub. The mother’s husband Gilles is very supportive of his wife when the police come to question them. He hires the female lawyer M. Susane, who is at the center of this novel, to defend his wife.

“Principaux would be judged excessively loyal to Marlyne, so much so that he would be accused of duplicity, of supporting his wife for his own ends.

“It was simply that Principaux didn’t seem “emotional” enough.”

The second plot line concerns the lawyer M. Susane’s housekeeper Sharon. Sharon who is from the Indian Ocean island country of Mauritius and is undocumented. If the authorities found out that she is undocumented, they could send her back to Mauritius at any time. The lawyer M. Susane wants to help her get the necessary marriage certificate documents from Sharon’s sister, but Sharon resists. M. Susane tries to be helpful to Sharon in every way, but Sharon seems to reject her at every turn.

“The mere thought of offending Sharon horrified her.”

Both of these plot lines are quite straightforward, and the first half of the novel is easy to follow and understand, perhaps too easy.

However the novel takes a turn in the second half that is hard to follow. M. Susane has what amounts to a nervous breakdown and is plagued with self-doubt about her entire circumstances.

“Her memory of the few weeks Rudy and Sharon had spent caring for her was hazy, but she recalled with almost infuriating precision her desperate return home after leaving her office, locking the door, and telling herself she would never go back, that she had none of the qualities of a respectable lawyer, that even her parents, the only people on earth who loved her unconditionally, were now passing the cruelest but surely the most accurate judgment on her; she’d failed in every way.

There was no one she hadn’t let down.”

I don’t believe that Marie NDiaye adequately prepared her readers for this radical change to the plot. It’s like Ndiaye realized her original plots were not deep enough, so she tried something else.

I was disappointed with the ending, because it didn’t seem to answer any of the questions that the two earlier main plot streams naturally raised. To me, the ending did not fit what had happened before. The ending is unclear, murky. Neither plot line is given a satisfying conclusion. Instead we seem to be dealing with a main character who is falling apart.

I much preferred Marie NDiaye’s earlier work, ‘Three Strong Women’, to ‘Vengeance is Mine’. The plots of the three novellas in ‘Three Strong Women’, if not as dramatic, are much more relatable.

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Grade:    B

20 Feb

‘Martyr!’ by Kaveh Akbar – An American-Iranian Novel

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Martyr!’ by Kaveh Akbar    (2024) – 323 pages

 

First note that there is no “translated by” reference on the title page of this novel. ‘Martyrs’ is written in good old English, lively American English. A love of English infuses ‘Martyr!’

“You’re the most American kid I know. You taught Shane how to play Madden, how to torrent Marvel movies. You buy fucking vinyl records. We’re having this conversation in Indiana, not Tehran.”

The above is a description of Cyrus, the main character in ‘Martyr!’. Cyrus is a young man who was born in Iran, but came to the United States when he was very little. His mother Roya was killed when Cyrus was still a baby when the USS Vincennes warship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger airliner, an Airbus, on July 3, 1988. All 290 people on the plane were killed. The United States never did fully apologize for the incident, but did recompense the families of the victims in 1995. Cyrus’s father Ali moved himself and the baby to Indiana in the United States soon after the accident to work on an industrial chicken farm.

As a young man, Cyrus considers his mother Roya as well as the other 289 people who were killed on the plane as martyrs. He becomes fascinated by other martyrs such as Joan of Arc, Bobby Sands, the man who stood up to the tank in Tiananmen Square, and others. He decides to write his own book of martyrs.

By this time Cyrus’s father Ali has died.

“A wife’s sudden and meaningless death, immigration to a hostile nation, nearly two decades of six-days-a-week manual labor. Ali had earned the right to rest, even in Cyrus’s dreams.”

Cyrus becomes fascinated with this woman artist in New York City, Orkideh, who is dying of cancer and spending her final days in a museum speaking to visitors for an exhibition known as “Death-Speak.” Cyrus views Orkideh as a martyr also, and decides to go to New York City to talk to her.

“What about you though, Cyrus Shams? Orkideh asked. “If you become a martyr, won’t you be hurting the people who love you?”

Cyrus nodded. “Of course,” he said, then after a beat, “but it’s hard to figure out if that hurt would be worse than the hurt of my being here.”

Orkideh shook her head.

“It will be worse,” she said. “I promise. If you let yourself get a little older, you’ll understand that.”

Near the end of ‘Martyr!’ there is this inconceivable, unbelievable, far-fetched story twist in his family story that changes everything. But Cyrus has been so upfront about the rest of his crazy life, his addictions and his sex life, that we almost believe this insane incredible twist, almost. But even if we can’t accept this twist it still makes for a good resolution.

There are a lot of funny scenes in ‘Martyr!’. Kaveh Akbar is a poet also, and there is a lyrical energy to even his prose writing. As a shining example, consider this sentence:

“Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.”

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Grade :    A-

 

13 Feb

‘Children of Paradise’ by Camilla Grudova – A Job at the Paradise Movie Theater

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Children of Paradise’ by Camilla Grudova     (2022)  –  196 pages

 

The Paradise is an old movie theater built around the time of the outbreak of the First World War. The young woman Holly is new to this unnamed town, and when she sees a sign at the Paradise on its big dusty doors saying “We’re Hiring” she decides to apply for the job. She has to clean up the spilled popcorn and all the other even more disgusting stuff found on the floors of the theater as well as clean the toilets.

“I guess people found an animalistic pleasure in eating and drinking in the dark, in making a mess, leaving bags, boxes and cans behind.”

There are a lot of gross-out lines in ‘Children of Paradise’ of the toilets getting majorly clogged by movie patrons or disgusting stuff showing up on the theater seats or inside the popcorn machine. These kind of incidents probably happen in a lot of movie theaters but especially at the Paradise.

When Holly meets some of the other employees and regular customers of the Paradise, she finds that they are about as decrepit and spiky as the old theater itself. At first these other characters, the projectionist, the ticket sellers, the ushers avoid her. They are a clique.

However, in time they accept Holly and invite her to home screenings of their favorite movies. All of the offbeat weird employees share one thing in common, a love of the movies.

“They were a necessary evil, customers, so that we, the true devotees, could have access to the screen, our giant godlike monument.”

In time Holly becomes one of them, these strange lovers of movies. “I became a part of the Paradise.”

However, when the Paradise is bought out by the movie theater conglomerate chain CinemaTown, ‘Children of Paradise’ becomes a horror story. First the projectionist is fired, because movie theaters don’t need projectionists anymore. Instead of the older esteemed movies which the Paradise had shown, a steady diet of Marvel Universe superhero movies is brought in, which the former employees of the Paradise cannot tolerate. Things at the theater further deteriorate from there.

I was quite impressed with the author of ‘Children of Paradise’, Camilla Grudova, for setting up the gruesome scenes and characters of this ultimate horror story so vividly. This is her first novel. I will be reading her previous collection of stories ‘The Doll’s Alphabet’ soon.

 

Grade :   A

 

 

8 Feb

‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan – Stories of Women and Men

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan   (2023)  –  118 pages

 

Note that the subtitle of this collection of three stories is “Stories of Women and Men”, not “Stories of Men and Women”. In each of these stories, the woman is the main protagonist and the man plays a peripheral though critical part. “Critical” is the operative word here.

“That was the problem with women falling out of love; the veil of romance fell away from their eyes, and they looked in and could read you.

But this one didn’t stop there.”

The man can only react to the woman’s lessened opinion of him.

“He had looked at her then and again saw something ugly about himself reflected back at him, in her gaze.”

The second story has a nice twist to it, a female writer retaliating. She is staying at the Boll House, the former home of the famous German author Heinrich Boll on Achill Island, to work on her new story. Heinrich Boll’s family left this house as a working residence for writers.

A German literary professor visits her at the house and she hopes he won’t interfere with her writing progress, However it turns out that he has been spying on her and is highly critical of her.

“You come to this house of Heinrich Boll and make cakes and go swimming with no clothes on.”

Our woman writer retaliates the best way she knows how. She puts him in her story and gives him “the long and painful death” in the story, which is the story title.

The first lines of the last story, “Antarctica”, are :

“Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. That weekend she was determined to find out.”

I doubt there are very many readers who could stop reading after those opening sentences

It’s proving very difficult to criticize anything Claire Keegan writes, and I am not going to do it. These three stories are all fine. This is a very quick lively read.

 

Grade:   A

 

 

5 Feb

‘This Plague of Souls’ by Mike McCormack – Terror in Ireland

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘This Plague of Souls’ by Mike McCormack     (2023) – 177 pages

 

Can one fault a writer for the key information he intentionally leaves out?

In ‘This Plague of Souls’ paints a picture of a man who has just been released from prison who returns to his small farm in western Ireland to find that his wife and son are not there. He cannot reach them by cell phone either, so he takes up living on the farm as he did before he met his wife.

This man, Nealon, gets these mysterious sporadic phone calls from a guy who seems to know all about him. This strange unknown guy wants to meet up with him, but Nealon hesitates at first. Who is he? What does he want?

In the meantime, I should mention something about the writing style of Mike McCormack. His descriptions are over the top, but so deadly acute and accurate. It’s as if every single word in this novel matters.

“The morning sky is swollen with clouds and driving rain through the gray light, in a steady fall, this day is down for good. Some people are already abroad, a harassed breed with their eyes fixed to the ground, dispirited before the day has drawn breath. They have about them the resentful look of men and women who wish they are elsewhere, anywhere.”

This unique inimitable description of the rain and the people of this city that Nealon is approaching could only be made by McCormack.

Meanwhile a major terrorist incident is occurring in Ireland, and the television anchors are filled with impending doom except when they continue to cover sports events.

Finally Nealon agrees to meet with this mysterious stranger who knows too much about him.

At this point, I was quite satisfied with ‘This Plague of Souls’ even though there were many unanswered questions. What were the crimes that Nealon had been in prison for? How did they relate to this new major terrorist threat? How did this mysterious stranger find out so much about Nealon? Surely they would all be answered in the denouement.

No, none of these questions was specifically answered. Instead we get a lot of dire talk from this mysterious stranger that seems to imply that Nealon was somehow directly involved in this new terrorist threat, but we get no new details about Nealon’s involvement. Instead we get hints like “ripping off insurance companies”.

I’m quite sure that Mike McCormack left out these details on purpose to create a modern ominous atmosphere of menacing terrorist doom, but this reader was left hanging with too many unanswered questions and critical facts left out.

 

Grade :    B