September | 2024 | Tony's Book World

Archive for September, 2024

26 Sep

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

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: Claudia Piniero. 2 comments

‘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

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: Willy Vlautin. 2 comments

‘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

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: Jo Hamya. 2 comments

‘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

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: Gillian Linden. 13 comments

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

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: Yael Van der Wouden. 6 comments

‘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

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: Richard Powers. 2 comments

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.”