This Poison Will Remain by Fred Vargas, translated by Siân Reynolds

Paperback, 416 pgs, Pub: August 20th 2019 by Penguin Books (first published May 10th 2017) Orig Title: Quand sort la recluse, ISBN13: 9780143133667, Series: Commissaire Adamsberg #11

Vargas doesn’t spare us the grisly details of outrageous crimes committed against defenseless girls and women, but never have I ever wanted to be in a mystery novel before. The characterizations of police officers and villagers are so full of personality, intelligence, and humor that one cannot help but wish these folks were by one’s side—or at least televised.

According to Wikipedia, four of the Vargas mystery series have been serialized for television. I saw one, once, years ago. It was painful, considering the renown of French cinema and the intrigue of the novels. it is definitely time for a new rendition.

Any new film series of the novels must be filmed in France and in French because the charm of the series is the utter French-ness of the interactions, the local dishes like the cabbage soup with onions and ham the officers eat nearly every night of the investigation, and endless bottles of Madiran.

Vargas has given us a convoluted mystery so dense with criminality that we scarcely know which way to turn. Just today I was listening to Vox's Today Explained podcast discussing the many thousands of rape kits in American cities which were never run for DNA: when the kits were finally examined, the entire body of knowledge around rape and serial rape has been turned on its head. It turns out that there were many, many more rapists than one ever thought possible, and one out of every five rapes is caused by a serial rapist.

There has been, as can be seen in the history revealed in this novel and in the untested rape kits languishing on shelves in police stations all over America, a dismissive attitude towards crimes against women. In this mystery, some truly horrifying crimes are described (thankfully in a matter-of-fact, non-inflammatory way) and some male attitudes are examined for bias. At one point Chief Inspector Adamsberg realizes describing his favorite female lieutenant as worth “ten men” would be better changed to “one woman.” Those of us who have worked with colleagues of both sexes are pleased Vargas made a point of chastising Adamsberg for old attitudes.

Vargas is known for the depth of her knowledge about medieval subjects and archeology and gradually she incorporates some of her encyclopedic knowledge in this more modern mystery. There is an archeological dig, and we learn how to find the site and what it takes to manage it. There is a medieval tie-in, but the shocking part is that it sounds medieval when in fact some of the events happened within recent history.

Chief Inspector Jean Baptiste Adamsberg always puts me in mind of Simenon’s Jules Maigret, though the two police chiefs are quite different in many ways. One difference is that Maigret, unless my memory is faulty, wasn't necessarily a masterful team leader. Adamsberg is far from alone. We are intimately familiar with his entire team and grow to rely on them to keep their chief operating in maximum intuition. Adamsberg's “tiny bubbles of gas in [his] brain” jiggle when he walks, stimulating thought. Not so far, then, from Poirot’s “little grey cells.”

This novel, originally published in May of 2017 by Flammarion of France, has been translated by Siân Reynolds, winner of many awards, including a coveted Dagger from Crime Writers’ Association. Reynolds is a professor emerita of French at the University of Stirling, Scotland. In her words,

”… Fred’s books are quirky and often fantastical, sometimes with historical elements, and much appreciated in France. They are about French characters usually in a recognizably French environment, and will necessarily seem a bit foreign to anglophone readers, so the aim is to make them enjoyable on their own terms – but in English.”

This Reynolds does in spades. The novels are a remarkable glimpse of French culture and altogether are a marvelous series. Highly recommended.

More reviews of Vargas works:
The Chalk Circle Man
This Night's Foul Work



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Article 353 by Tanguy Viel, translated by William Rodarmor

Paperback, 160 pgs, Pub March 12th 2019 by Other Press (NY) (first published January 3rd 2017), Orig Title: Article 353 du code pénal, ISBN13: 9781590519332

This mystery novel by prize-winning novelist Tanguy Viel is translated from the French but suffused with French melancholy and spirit. The dark, foggy atmosphere of the northern French coast comes through strongly in the conversation between two men: one asking questions, the other explaining the death of a man everyone thought they knew. Several times we are turned about in our perceptions of what happened.

The whole book would make an excellent play, if the backdrop behind the men in conversation was a large window opening onto the view of the old château on its five acres of maintained lawn sloping down to the sea. The down-on-its-luck coastal town had riches in that view.

We smell the salt air and consider wealth. What is wealth and how do we know when we have it? How does it makes us feel and how much wealth is enough? Everyone in the town worked at a metal fabricators for naval vessels but the factory was closing and severance payments, while large, had to last a lifetime for some of the middle-aged.

Along comes a property developer who wants to build a glittering resort where the château stands. It sounds like a good idea in a town losing its primary industry. Martial Kermeur lives in the château's grounds-man’s cottage for free, though he is responsible for keeping the five acres surrounding the château cut and trimmed. His son, only ten, lives with him after the divorce.

Kermeur’s tale is told after several years; his son is now seventeen. The story is not complicated, “just a run-of-the-mill swindle.” The villain in the piece is in sight the entire time. Here is a classic tale of right and wrong, good and evil; we must consider how far the penal code extends to protecting citizens from wrongdoing.

We don’t often get the opportunity to read current French novels that have captured that nation’s imagination—a nation which supplied some of the greatest philosophers the world has yet known. The tale retains the taste of France. Finishing up at less than one-hundred-and-fifty pages, this novelette makes us look deep inside for how we view right and wrong,



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The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub May 26th 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN13: 9780374184032

One has to ask oneself why we read memoirs of travels. Wouldn’t it be better to just take off on our own, not knowing of other people’s troubles or joys in case we are fearful or disappointed? But Rachel Cusk reminds us why we read other people’s tales: she is observant, and terribly funny. Tales of her trips make ours resonant with laughter, too. How did we first manage when confronted with grocery stores without anything we would consider food in them?

Oh yes, training one’s palate until we recognize what is so special about food, in this case, in Italy. The simplicity of it. We meet the brusque-seeming, loud and insistent butcher, the tennis-playing hotelier who smokes incessantly, and the “four Englishwomen [on the train] their own laps full of purchases from Florence boutiques…returning to their rental villa in the hills….They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists.”

One of the best afternoon’s amusements is listening to Cusk detail the paintings she comes upon in her travels; endless pictures of Madonna and any number of versions of the Child. She gives the backstory of Raphael, his adoration of the work of Michelangelo, and his death at the early age of thirty-seven. The observations she makes about the “congested alleyway toward the Piazza della Signoria, where a riot of of café terraces and horse-drawn tourist carriages and pavement hawkers selling African jewelry is underway.” How much has this scene changed in millennia of Italian history? Or has it always been just like this, where people

“push and shove rudely, trying to get what they want…I have seen a fifteenth-century painting of the Piazza della Signoria, where children play and the burghers of Florence stroll and chat in its spacious spaces, while the monk Savonarola is burned at the stake in the background outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Here and there peasants carry bundles of twigs, to put on the fire.”

So few are the antiquities that people from the world over wait in long, snaking lines, “an overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze in to a slender garment from their youth.” It takes one’s breath away, the clarity with which Cusk writes, reminding us of what we may have once observed but could not convey.

The Catholics have a large presence in Italy, the Basilica di San Francesco lending credence to “the giantism of Catholic architecture…which harmonize unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism…the airport terminal…and the shopping mall.” Cusk takes the stuffing out of adults who use “Christianity as a tool, a moralizing weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious…the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity…judgment lay down there…flowing like a black river.” Do I need to say Catholic school growing up in England was a less than satisfactory experience?

This is the book I would give a friend to explain why I love the work of Cusk so. How can one not appreciate the quiet way she inserts her family into an unfamiliar world and does not spare herself nor anyone else the sharpness of her observations. The family moves over a period of months, down the Italian coast, just south of Naples.

The last day of their southern journey, the ‘bottom’ of their vacation, they are denied a trip to Capri by boatman strike. Instead they boat to Positano where father, mother, and two children paid fifteen Euros each to lie on the beach. Beside them were young American newlyweds in white bathers, ‘groomed as gods” but timid and self-conscious. Cusk wishes she had a Raphael to paint them for her, and I do, too.

Cusk has a warmth in her writing for the magnificent, the ‘theatrical and sincere,’ the elaborate, the splendid Italians, and she tells us her children will always remember Italy as a place they want to live. Her husband gets no notice, and if we did not know she travelled in a family of four, we would not know he was there at all. This book was published in 2009, and three short years later her marriage lay in ruins. We see the beginning of that split here, methinks.

One feels quite as though one had done this journey, too, traveling along with sunburnt girls in the back of a car with the windows wide. The final week in a faded blue tent strike us as real as real can be—even with the call from the publisher saying the rights to publish her last book in South Korea allowed them the possibility of a glorious, comfortable night in a seaside resort with gold bathroom fixtures but an unused swimming pool and a beautifully-appointed restaurant in which no one ate.

‘Rewarding’ hardly seems adequate praise. I savor her work like Peruginas. Her writing is for me like one of those moments she describes whose effects will last forever…visually stunning, thought-provoking, delicious to remember. The summer feels lived.

Below please find reviews of Cusk's other works, in order:
Saving Agnes, 1993
The Temporary, 1995 (not reviewed yet)
The Country Life, 1997
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2002
The Lucky Ones, 2003
In the Fold, 2005
Arlington Park, 2006
The Bradshaw Variations, 2009
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, 2009
Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation, 2012
Outline, 2014
Medea, 2015
Transit, 2016
Kudos, 2018
Coventry: Essays, 2019






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So Much Blue by Percival Everett

Paperback, 236 pgs, Pub June 13th 2017 by Graywolf Press, ISBN13: 9781555977825

Percival Everett blows the doors off with this beautifully constructed novel that holds secrets and mysteries in each of its three stories centered about Kevin, an oil painter living in Rhode Island with his wife and two children. I do wonder about Everett, who so gradually has become one of America’s most reliably exciting and unique novelists that his anonymity lasted long enough for him to enjoy some walking-around time without celebrity recognition. That’s probably well over now, if this enormously assured work of fiction garners the attention it deserves.

The work is studded with recognizable truths in the way of great literature but the writing is plain enough that we spot these easily, following his trail eagerly. Describing the way his children looked at him when he was drinking regularly and too much:

“No, I never flew into rages or stumbled late and noisily into dance recitals or yelled a little too loud and made inappropriate comments at soccer games, but I became acutely aware that I wore a sickly-sweet late evening cologne and I noticed how my children looked at my eyes, holding them for too long and looking away too quickly.”

There is a paragraph less than fifty pages in which describes what happens in Paris when Kevin is visiting a museum on a day his wife is traveling. He happens upon a young woman, a watercolorist, who recognizes him and invites him somewhere they can talk comfortably.

“Very close of course was Victoire’s flat. She was, after all, a watercolorist and her apartment was full of them. Thankfully they were not portraits of cows, but there was a preponderance of empty parks and stark river scenes. There was a large window that overlooked a garden. In the middle of the garden was a broken birdbath and I felt a little guilty when I realized I was paying more attention to it than to the many works of art. I turned my attention to her work and found them well done, but ordinary.”

This paragraph with all its conflicted feelings describes a true thing; I know this because it happened to me. I can’t remember now if I was the young woman or the older man. Perhaps I was the younger woman with the eyes of an older man.

Everett does this to us regularly: holds up our experience, or maybe his own, for us to acknowledge. He is always surprising and exact yet comfortable and intimate with us. Sometimes his sentences remind me of the clipped noir of Raymond Chandler or the deeply funny seriocomic social commentary of Joe Lansdale. But Everett is unique. Not only that; each novel is unique.

Almost every novel by Everett is different than the one preceding it, making it seem as though he were reveling in the breadth of the form, trying out methods, working a style. One has the sense of an oeuvre not unlike a fiction chapbook which showcases many forms of popular fiction but which is infused with a self-conscious humor, even parody, always within the realm of literature. It is American literature at core, worthy of study for the pieces Everett chooses to highlight. That standing outside the form is almost missing in this novel, but Everett is sly.

The novel's three strands, each thread in a different country, are widely spaced in time yet carefully braided into one narrative so that no one strand seems dominant nor gets lost as the other stories unfold. The interleaving is so well done it is a model for writers. The only overlap in all the stories is the main character, Kevin Pace; married, living in New England, two children, a painter.

Blue, the color blue, cerulean, cobalt, “the color of trust, loyalty,” ultramarine, blue leaning to green, Guillet green, emerald green. Kevin saw one painting done by the young French watercolorist which was outside her usual style, all done in blues and green running into blue, with a splash of blood red in one corner. It made him cry. It should have been done in oils. Blue was a color he could not control, and it reminded him of something, a secret.

This novel is about secrets, and upheaval, and finding a safe place, and the how paint can reveal truths we cannot speak. Everett is a painter besides being an author, and in 2010 he collaborated with the novelist Chris Abani to produce a journal of Abani’s poetry and Everett’s paintings.

This novel, coming after thirty or more earlier works, seems to bring all that earlier experimentation to glorious fruition. It’s a beautiful novel, full of energy, movement, truth, and color. So much blue.



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My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul

Hardcover, 256 pages Pub May 2nd 2017 by Henry Holt and Co. ISBN13: 9781627796316

Coming out at this time of year, Pamela Paul’s memoir is reminiscent of a commencement speech, albeit book-length and one just as interesting for the parents as for the graduates. It is a blast to listen to an obsessive reader share her thoughts on books, her travels and travails. Bob is her lifelong companion and record, her Book of Books, the place she can note what she has read. It gives date of completion, and, because Paul tried to read books about the countries or cities she visits or lives, we deduce a sense of location. It is her book of memories then, a record of where she has been.

Paul was the single daughter born into a family of seven sons. Despite the expected in-house torture and rough-housing, her psyche remained remarkably intact, though her parent’s divorce may have had more effect than discussed here. She did emerge as a reader, an introvert, and from a young age wanted to write. In this book she has boldly decided to write about what she’s read in the context of her life, and astonishingly, it is interesting. We enjoy retracing her faltering steps as a burgeoning adult, in which she recalls with uncommon accuracy the embarrassed and confused feelings of a teen.

France plays a large role in Paul’s life. Although her American Field Service (AFS) experience in a small town in suburban France was not as she imagined, it set the table for her next visit and the one after that. Eventually she found a family in France that became a second home, a family that subsequently attended her weddings and met her children. This kind of close long-term relationship defines Paul, I think. We all have trajectories, but not all of us cultivate the path as we go so that it becomes personal, the impact felt on both sides.

Paul’s decision after college to go directly to Thailand without the usual scramble for underpaid work at home was prescient but daring. She’d not get another chance to see that part of the world with any depth, though the China portion of the trip gave me the screaming heebies. It sounded perfectly horrendous, completely uncomfortable, filled with sickness and incomprehension. The China trip was her father’s idea, and it never became hers. The unmitigated disaster of that trip reminds us that we have to own our journey, start to finish, for us to manage it with any kind of finesse.

There was a marriage that lasted a year. The utter heartbreak Paul experienced does not lacerate us: from the moment she begins to speak of her first husband we are suspicious. She is much too happy much too soon. Love is one thing. Blindness is another. In my mind I modify Thoreau to read: beware all enterprises that require giving up a large, rent-controlled flat in New York City...

"…the minute a subject veered from the fictional world, the private world, the secluded, just-us-on-top-of-the-mountain world, into the greater, grittier territory below, the nonfictional world, my husband and I had serious differences…Even when we each happily read those same books about the perfidy of man, we read them in opposite ways…this kind of book contested my essentially optimistic view of the world rather than overturned it…whereas for him, the world really was that bleak, and the books proved it."

Here you have, folks, a political difference so profound it can break nations in two. Ayn Rand’s work became Paul’s personal standard for judging viewpoints. Paul admits--she who practically worships books--that she threw one of Ayn Rand’s books in the trash after reading it, so that no one else would be polluted by its ideas. I laughed. I did the same thing, though I contemplated burning it before I did. In my tiny garage-turned-apartment in New Mexico, I wrestled with Rand’s horrifying vision of a society of go-getters and decided that to burn her book would invest it with too much significance.

I loved reading about Paul’s poor dating experiences after that. She was inoculated against irrational exuberance after her divorce, but she still wanted intimacy. She manages to share with us chortle-inducing instances of “okay, I’ve had enough of that” with some of the men she met later. My favorite might be the time a boyfriend convinces her that he’d been to the Grand Canyon before and so can show her “the best way to see it.” Har-dee-har-har. This memoir is a great example of smart and funny, gifting us many moments of remembering our own worst histories and reinforcing for younger women coming along that our judgment may be the only thing separating us from a much worse time of it.

Pamela Paul is now books editor of The New York Times and no longer has to struggle to find the coin to buy a new book. She is the best kind of editor for all of us because she is has read widely and acknowledges the draw of genre fiction while communicating her admiration for the range of new nonfiction that helps us cope with our history and our future. She is also an interested and informed consumer of Children’s lit and Young Adult titles, which aids me immeasurably since these are not my specialty and therefore necessitate me seeking assistance from a trusted source.

Access to all there is out there comes with its own set of stresses, but Paul has extended her reach by asking some of the best writers in the country to read and review titles in the NYT Book Review, and to talk about their selections on the Book Review Podcast, available each week from iTunes as an automatic download. Her guests and her own considered opinions help to narrow the field for us.

This is a great vacation read, not at all strenuous, yet it is involving. Imagine the unlikeliness of the concept: an introverted reader and editor writes a book about her life…reading…and it is interesting! Totes amazeballs. It occurs to me that Goodreads is one big Bob. I’m so glad Paul put the effort in to share with us: big mistakes don’t have to be the end of the world. It depends what happens after that. See what I mean about commencement?



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The Arab of the Future, Part 2 by Riad Sattouf, translated by Sam Taylor

Volume II is a continuation of the adventures of Riad as a young French-Arab in Homs in the mid-1980s. Riad is still a child, blond-haired and six years old. He is ready to go to school for the first time, and is terrified. With good reason, it turns out.

Sattouf positively outdoes himself drawing scenes from the classroom. The headscarf-wearing teacher has a skirt so short and legs so large that our eyes widen in fear. Riad takes a frame to zero in on the impossible narrowness of her high heels, her calves looming dense and heavy above, like a boulder snagged over a walkway. She looks dangerous. That is to say nothing of the smile she holds a second before she strikes the boys on the palms with a wooden rod. Nothing so thin as a ruler, her tool is a rod that looks very solid and hard in her hand.

"Ha, ha, [Riad’s father chortles that evening] you’re funny. You’re just like me at your age. Scared of everything…Don’t worry, nothing will happen."

More false words were never spoken. Lots happens, and much of it is life-threatening. But perhaps most importantly we see the utter cruelty with which people treat one another. If there was ever a time to be grateful for political correctness in our daily interactions, after reading this you will breathe a sigh of relief for those tedious niceties. You will remember the menace of schoolyard bullies, and realize Arab society, in Syria at least, is taught this is normal human behavior: to be admired if you win, killed if you do not.

Sattouf takes his time with this installment of the story of young Riad. We spend a couple of days sampling the coursework in first grade: patriotic songs, basic characters for writing, reading skills without comprehension, and inventive slurs and punishments. We meet the neighbors: a police-chief-cousin whose stash of gold jewelry could finance a bank, and whose home is a huge unfinished concrete pile cratered with moisture-seeping cracks. We go on a day trip to Palmyra with a general while Riad’s father spends his time trying to wrangle the general into “putting in a word” for his advancement at the university where he works. Palmyra is littered with ancient-looking pottery shards which Riad’s father disdains.

"In the third century after Jesus Christ [Riad’s father says dully, lighting a cigarette] Zenobia turned the nomad’s city of Palmyra into an influential artistic center."

Riad returns to France and enjoys it at the same time he begins to realize he is changing…has changed. He is a desert child now, confused with the plenty that surrounds him in France. It is a poignant section we all recognize for its dislocation. He does not read or speak French particularly well. The French language is difficult, and complicated. Where does Riad fit in? Where does he belong? Where will he be accepted?

The scenes of RIad with the men in his community when he returns to Homs are memorable. Very little is said; the drawings do the work here. I did not understand all that was implied, but someone will. Perhaps the punchline will be revealed in another installation of the life of Riad in Syria. Riad’s father is becoming more and more unbearable as a husband, as a father, as a man. He is hopelessly out of his league wherever he is, and always aspirational, never in control. His wife is losing patience, and he himself is recognizing a few hard truths that have him sitting by himself in some frames, smoking and silent.

Sattouf leaves us feeling unsettled and unsure. Do we want Riad in this place with these people? I think his mother is feeling similarly unsure. The father…one gets the sense that however much the father thinks he is the man, there is precious little he does control.

This installment just cements my sense that this kind of graphic novel may be the easiest, most immediate, most fun way to learn about a culture. When it is done well, a boatload of information can be transmitted in a couple of frames. Sattouf appears to be completely frank about life in Homs as he sees it, and it is remarkable for its insights as well as its humor.

I love this series and will insist upon reading everything about Riad growing up. The Tintin series was the first set of books Riad had access to, the series being only one of two books his academic father had in his personal library. The other book was the Quran. Will look to see if I can see the influences from Tintin in Sattouf’s marvelous story of growing up Arab before his third book hits the stands.

The terrific translation of this work is done by Sam Taylor, and the U.S. publisher is Metropolitan Books, a division of Henry Holt.

Paperback, 160 pages. Published September 20th 2016 by Metropolitan Books (first published June 11th 2015) Original TitleL'Arabe du futur 2 : Une jeunesse au Moyen-Orient (1984-1985) ISBN 1627793518 (ISBN13: 9781627793513)




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WTF? What the French by Olivier Magny

How impoverished would the world be without the French? Olivier Magny, whose qualification to expound upon the French way of life is without qualification (he was born in France, grew up in France, and runs a business in France), pokes some fun (love of Nutella, love of rap music, inability to dance) but mixes in surprisingly astute social and political commentary on the nature and attitudes of the French for those of us who do not travel there frequently. Arising from the success of Magny’s blog and an earlier book called Stuff Parisians Like, this book carries his cultural introductions further and deeper.

Magny shares some of what he considers the most beautiful places in France, pointing out the wide variety of regions and styles: “Whether you’re drawn to beautiful beaches, mountains, hills, plains, lakes, river, cold water or warm water, dry weather or wet weather, arid vegetation or lush forests, chances are France has it somewhere.” Which makes us especially curious when he tells us that Anglo-Saxons, comprising Great Britain and America, and often New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, are lumped into one category of human that the French have no need, nor any desire, to examine in detail. Les Anglo-Saxons are to blame for most of the drinking and warmongering in the world, but also have admirable business practices, good universities, and research. By analogy, perhaps, we shouldn’t be lumping “the French” in anything like a monolithic category.

"Since the inception of Vatican II, France went from being…the first child of the Catholic Church to being one of the least religious countries on earth. Among the general public, the Church went from being viewed as a profoundly respected and heeded institution to being an inaudible and questionable organization…the tremendous surge of Islam is a response to the collapse of the Catholic Church…While official reports continue to claim that Catholicism is still the number one religion in France—which happens to be impossible to prove since the French state is prohibited from keeping such statistics—there is no doubt that if it is still the case (which is unlikely), it won’t be for long."

In another section, Magny tries to explain the rise of the far-right nationalist party in France. Many Western countries are experiencing the same phenomenon, and the phrases Magny uses to describe “the switch over to the extreme right” has many parallels in the U.S. We are not alone, then, in our population's severe disaffection with politicians in government, and the media’s horrorstricken and ineffectual analyses. Magny's discussion deepens our understanding of how flattening the wealth pyramid has worked out in France.

This book is meaty, considering the essays max out at three or four pages for each topic, and is unfailingly interesting. After a few more serious topics including immigration, police, and three(!) sections on taxes, Magny returns to a lighter note, discussing the haircuts of older women, pessimism, divorce, TV debates, how speaking English is now cool, and the comment thread in online communication. Absolutely surprising was the low rate (to me) of daily wine consumption in France and the fact that younger French are being influenced by America’s fascination with wine to drink it in greater amounts. And the omnipresence of yogurt in every refrigerator.

Most of us remember a hunger for French panache and elegance in design and style, but Magny tells us that has changed in France these days. “Aiming high has become suspicious,” and therefore folks are looking more for value and convenience. It is an absolute change in focus, quality, and lifestyle that changes the meaning of France for many of us. “France is the worst country to make money in, but is the best one to spend it in.” This statement opens the door to another discussion of taxes and how “very few people are sitting on a very large stack of cash. Savings and generational wealth are almost unheard-of in France.”

This extraordinary collection of essays is completely engrossing to someone tangentially acquainted with France and its systems. Magny must have some critics. The more we know the more we'd be able to critique this work. Can all France's problems be laid at the feet of a leftist mentality in education and government? The best thing this book does is make us look, really look at France with a questioning eye. We aren't tourists anymore.

Magny takes a stab at examining the real roots of cultural change. Many essays include suggestions for further online research into French taxes, governance, music, film, and TV celebrities, suggestions given with the equivalent of a Gallic shrug: “If you don’t believe me, check it out for yourselves and make up your own mind.” Thought-provoking and much deeper in tone than I was expecting from a book of this type, the book should spur some discussion and counter theories by others who have some experience living and working in France.

Intriguing, easy to read, and worth seeking out. Makes great conversation starters if one is planning to visit France.


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The New Threat: The Past, Present, & Future of Islamic Militancy by Jason Burke

If I had one book to give someone interested in understanding ISIS and the threats we now face from Islamic militancy, it would be this one. Published in August 2015, this book includes material through the summer of that year, but also digests and explains some of the earlier reports coming out of Syria, the Middle East, and South Asia. Burke also addresses the threat of home-grown terrorism that is most real to Western communities and governments.

Burke began reporting on events relating to the change in the Islamic character of the Middle East and South Asia as a journalist in the 1990s and he has refined his understanding of the changes in those regions ever since. His grasp is both deep and wide—he wishes he could have included more about the movement in South and Southeast Asia because, in his conclusions at the end, he believes that could be the next area to source individuals committed to jihad.

Burke reiterates over the course of his narrative that terrorism is meant to force leaders to act quickly, make mistakes, and take action they ordinarily would not do, destabilizing their governments. Terror is meant to make individuals disrupt their daily routines, causing follow-on economic repercussions. And terror is meant to cause the populace to polarize: people to question their relationships, fear their neighbors, challenge their government, and consider violence. One might argue terror has already caused irremediable changes in the fabric of world society. Burke replies that we must become resilient, savvy, and knowledgeable. Terrorism in the Middle East may have already run its course, but the seeds are everywhere.

The book is not long, and those of you already well-schooled in the history of ISIS may not feel you need to reread the beginning, though I found Burke’s finesse added a depth to my own understanding of the region, besides being the tightest, clearest history I’ve yet seen. Burke adds to the work done previously by making cogent comment on others’ conclusions. For years I’d been wondering about the families of suicide bombers, their apparent acquiescence causing me to question my own understanding of family ties. Burke addresses this directly:

"Suicide bombing is neither a cheap weapon, as often said, nor the spontaneous, organic expression of the inchoate rage of a people. It is a tactic, adopted for specific strategic reasons by terrorists, and which involves the commitment of significant resources if it is going to be successful. The extremist organizations that pioneered the use of the tactic—such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers—rapidly learned that few communities naturally accept the voluntary death of their teenagers. The individual who becomes a human bomb may cost an organization less than a missile but any militant hoping to reply suicide attackers needs to invest heavily and systematically in propaganda designed to build and then maintain a ‘cult of the martyr’ if they are avoid a backlash from relatives, friends and their wider circle. It is not natural for a mother or a father to celebrate the death of a child, and the idea that young men, or increasingly women, should kill themselves in order to kill others, often civilians, has to be normalized…in practical terms, meanwhile, the families of ‘martyrs’ need to be looked after; funerals organized and paid for, valedictory films produced and broadcast; a dedicated infrastructure to find, isolate and condition ‘martyrs’ set up and run. This effort must be constant and places a considerable strain on a groups’ resources. Many Islamic extremist organizations, including IS, make disproportionate use of foreign volunteers as suicide attackers. One reason may well be to make a powerful statement about the extent of their support around the globe. But another may simply be that foreigners are cheaper."

Burke briefly traces the history and methods of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, their differences and similarities, and their current state of play, including their affiliates around the world. He then discusses the threat to the West, drawing on the most important conclusions of Western analysts regarding what has been called home-grown terror or “lone wolves.” He first focuses on terror incidents in Britain and Europe, which I found particularly enlightening. With regards to America, Burke focuses most intensely on the Marathon Bombers in Boston.

He takes issue with the notion of ‘lone wolf,’ arguing that the similarities of the public statements of those with wearing this label use many of the same words and concepts, implying an underlying global community that extends far beyond their individual actions. “These men were formed, conditioned and prepared for their ultimate acts over years, if not decades, by an entire culture of extremist activism.”

An interesting outcome of the Arab Spring, Burke notes, is that several relatively Westernized pro-democracy activists turned to Islamic militancy when they were disillusioned during the fifty months from 2011 to 2015 when regimes collapsed, governments failed, and the international community did little to stave off deprivation for citizens facing war or displacement. He speaks of the gangland ethos among converts to Islamic militancy, the ‘jihadi cool,’ and 'jihad meets The Sweeney meets the gangsta.’ There is exploitable weakness there, for both the converts and for the main terror group.

In the final chapter on the future of terror, Burke discusses several completely fascinating long-term surveys or polls done in huge swathes of Islamic territory. The U.S.-based Pew Center published one in 2013 which revealed that support for suicide bombing remains limited, concerns about extremism are high, and levels of support for Al Qaeda remain low, but that perceptions of Western society are are increasingly negative, including views of Christians and Jews. On the Western side, we don't need to go further than our newspapers and TV reports to know that perceptions of Muslims are tanking.

Burke’s final chapter is one readers will not want to miss. In it Burke describes the outcomes of this history of terror—the divisions we see in our societies, the retrenchments in rights, the fear, the polarity—despite the relative lack of physical impact of terror on Western communities. “The real impact of Islamic militancy…is in the Islamic world where the monthly death toll frequently exceeds the total in the West over the past decade.” But the West has had costs: by focusing on terror we did not focus on climate change, the relationships between the West and Arab or Islamic populations have become poisonous, and our own communities have divisions that are destroying us from within. How we deal with the threats we face will define us long into the future.

This book has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2016.

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Villa Triste by Patrick Modiano

Modiano has a melancholic bent whose sentences vibrate (“like a spider’s web”) with a kind of menace. We are never really sure who deserves the most scrutiny amongst his characters, but everyone in this novel seems to be hiding some dark past or grim present. Even the dog, a Great Dane, was “congenitally afflicted with sadness and the ennui of life.” In Modiano's lavish description of the locale, a fashionable small French resort across a lake from Switzerland, even the trees are a mystery:

"The vegetation here is thoroughly mixed, it’s hard to tell if you’re in the Alps, on the shores of the Mediterranean, or somewhere in the tropics. Umbrella pines. Mimosas. Fir trees. Palms. If you take the boulevard up the hillside, you discover the panorama: the entire lake, the Aravis mountains, and across the water, the elusive country known as Switzerland."

Why “elusive”? We never learn why. “I didn’t yet know that Switzerland doesn’t exist.” Perhaps it is the notion of safety that doesn’t exist. A nineteen-year-old is not expected to know that, not then, not now. Modiano liberally salts his work with phrases that fill us with an unnameable dread. Count Victor is no more Count than you or I, but somehow we’d rather believe that than whatever it is he is running from. He is the son of Russian Jews, and the Second World War is over at least fifteen years. He is wealthy beyond imagining, but he has fear: he’s “scared to death” he tells us early on as he recounts the time he met Yvonne and Meinthe.

”When I think of her today, that’s the image that comes back to me most often. Her smile and her red hair. The black-and-white dog beside her. The beige Dodge. And Menthe, barely visible behind the windshield. And the switched-on headlights. And the rays of the sun.”

Modiano writes like a painter paints. He weaves sound and scent along with color and emotion, light and dark.

”We returned through a part of the garden I wasn’t familiar with. The gravel paths were rectilinear, the lawns symmetrical and laid out in picturesque English style. Around each of them were flamboyant beds of begonias or geraniums. And here as well, there was the soft, reassuring whisper of the sprinklers. I thought about the Tuileries of my childhood. Meinthe proposed that we have a drink…

In the end, the three of them, The Count, Yvonne, and Meinthe make quite a hit in that town at that time. Photographs show them glamorous and solemn, walking arm-in-arm beside the dog, Meinthe taking up the rear. Meinthe and Yvonne win the coveted Houligant Cup for that year and are sought-after companions for their edgy stylishness. Gradually Menthe and Yvonne share pieces of their shadowy background with Victor, and the glamour, he realizes, is all rhinestones and rust.

“The rooms in 'palaces' fool you at first, but pretty soon their dreary walls and furniture begin to exude the same sadness as the accommodations in shady hotels. Insipid luxury; sickly sweet smell in the corridors, which I can’t identify but must be the very odor of anxiety, of instability, of exile, of phoniness.”

When “France suddenly seemed to [Victor] too narrow a territory,” he proposed they ditch the local act and take to the road, somewhere where they could show their true capabilities…America.

Later, when it is all over, we think that perhaps Victor’s fear is his youth, his aloneness, his uncertainty. He grew up that summer by the lake, and saw most of what there was to see. Later, when he ambles under the arcades on the Rue de Castiglione reading a newspaper, his education comes full circle, and the mystery begins again.

Promotional copy for Villa Triste, due out today in a new translation by John Cullen and published by Other Press, calls it Modiano’s most accessible novel. It may well be, but all Modiano’s great themes are present. This fine translation does justice to the underlying greatness of the work. A fine piece of literature that can keep you mulling events over in your head for a long time to come.



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Lacombe Lucien by Louis Malle and Patrick Modiano

Louis Malle and Patrick Modiano collaborated on a screenplay about the lives of a few individuals in 1944 during the German occupation in France. What is so remarkable about this small book is how so few words or body movements depict the devastating complexity of lives torn by war.

The screenplay opens with a seventeen-year-old boy, Lucien, diligently and thoroughly doing menial labor cleaning in a charitable nursing home. Our judgment of the boy changes much in the process of the play but this impression will be one we will be reluctant to divest.

Lucien comes from a small town in southeastern France that is a hotbed of resistance against the occupation. One day, standing on a limestone plateau with a flock of sheep, Lucien sees the wider world stretch out below him. He is just at the age when he realizes he can turn his bicycle in a different direction from the town where he works to seek out a different experience.

The world is full of danger, and one must be constantly vigilant not to fall into a trap, even though ultimately we cannot escape. The ease with which Lucien kills a small bird with his slingshot and leaves it lying in the courtyard is how, at the end, we view this work by Malle and Modiano. Filled with banality, tragedy, and senseless death, we recognize the underlying truth of war and the human condition.

This classic work of literature packs so much humanity into a glance, a phrase, a movement of the arm that it becomes the essential reading experience. It is only 100 pages, short enough to be read in an afternoon or evening, and yet its effects last forever. This is the way to describe people in extremis. It happened just like this.

Re-published by Other Press and due out this week, this is a book you must read to get a glimpse of how great literature manifests.


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Mon amie américaine by Michèle Hudsveldt, translated by Bruce Benderson

Paperback, 176 pages Published Spring 2016 by Other Press

Two film producers and critics, Molly and Michèle, have more in common than their professions. They are friends, deep-bonded in a way that comes rarely in a lifetime. Michèle writes that Molly is just another iteration of herself, one who had made different choices but was essentially the same. Each woman could see how their life might have turned out had they made the choices of the other, one with children and one without. That one was French and one American made no difference, at least to them.

This gorgeously-written and -translated novel leaves us pondering our responsibility to the world, to ourselves, and to each other. The truths it contains are recognizable dilemmas any of us might face: we can imagine having to make these choices.

Halberstadt defines the friendship between the two women distinctly. The two meet several times a year on different continents, attending festivals where they watch the current crop of films, compile their critiques, and plan their free time together. Laughter and shared intimacies leave each feeling unrestricted and free to be themselves, reflected and treasured by the other. When the sudden nagging migraines of forty-year-old Molly turn out to be a brain aneurysm, Michèle blames herself.

In the explanation to her small children about why she cries, Michèle describes Molly’s coma as the deep sleep of a princess. “Waiting for Prince Charming to come and give her a kiss!” the children crow, closer to the truth than they know. When Molly finally wakes after three months, she is partially paralyzed, and her persistent short-term memory loss leaves her feeling angry, cheated of life. While she seems to retain some of her personality, her drive and verve is gone. Molly’s reaction to her condition is more a tragedy than the actual fact of her disability. She loses her defenses.

What is so involving about this novel is the immediate form, written, in the beginning, as a letter from Michèle to Molly as Molly lay unmoving, unhearing. Michèle counts the ways she loves her friend: her sappy romanticism, her trick of whistling like a boy with two fingers, her frozen-food gourmandism. How she misses her. Michèle’s own life with her husband and her children has stresses and strains that she longs to share, to get relief and perspective. But as Molly languishes, Michèle feels there is no way to tell her friend that her husband has begun an affair--wearing aftershave, getting haircuts and new clothes, carrying his phone like a talisman—and that her children now turn to the nanny for comfort. Things are slipping away and Michèle appears to be losing almost as much as Molly: her best friend, her husband, and her children.

There almost seems something unfinished in this novel, but I believe whatever it is that is missing is what we are meant to supply. Both women react similarly to crises in their lives at first, true to the nature of the shared core they recognize and celebrate in friendship. They do nothing. Molly refuses to take up the challenge of carrying on her profession, or any profession, by carrying her disability there.

”You don’t understand. I’m about to turn forty-one. Who am I supposed to be fighting for? For the guy I don’t have? For the children I’ll never have? I’m tired… I don’t even have the nerve to end it all.”

Michèle, when faced with her husband’s infidelity, doesn’t have the courage to call him on it.

”I still haven’t spoken to Vincent. As long as the words aren’t spoken, the things they conceal have no reality…three words on a cell phone have turned me into this tense, nervous, unhappy woman I scarcely recognize.”

But Michèle does eventually act (“Molly, you would be proud of me”) and that is why she will survive when Molly cannot.

At its finest, this novel is a meditation on the need for courage in the face of challenge. Sometimes it takes more than we think we have. But without courage, life can lose its meaning. Layered into the meditation are the uncertainties that come with friendships and married relationships. What do we owe one another? How we deal with our relationships, and with our challenges, will define us.


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Angela Merkel: A Chancellorship Forged in Crisis by Alan Crawford and Tony Czuczka

Hardcover, 205 pages Published August 5th 2013 by Bloomberg Press (first published January 1st 2013)

Before Angela Merkel was named Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2015, Merkel had long been recognized as a leader among leaders, one whose opinion was not just sought, but absolutely couldn’t be ignored. Could she be the kind of leader we ought to emulate? It wasn’t just her manner of soothing her own electorate that Germany could, in fact, take hundreds of thousands of migrants, changing the face of their community and revitalizing it at the same time. It was the fact that she’d led the European Community through a difficult debt crisis and managed to get a contentious Europe to hew to her insistence upon debt ceilings as a percentage of GNP.

"We have to be a bit strict with each other at the moment so that in the end we are all successful together."

Merkel’s record as Chancellor in Germany has few book-length analyses, but this one, written by two Berlin-based journalists for Bloomberg News, is extremely useful for understanding the basis of her style and success as a leader, while pointing out areas other European leaders do not agree with Merkel’s direction and methods. If Merkel lived in the U.S., we’d already have several books out on her rise to the top leadership post. This book, published in 2013 after the EU was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012, is specific to how Merkel steered the EU through the debt crisis amid much political maneuvering.

Several longish pieces on Merkel have appeared in The New Yorker, i.e., Cassidy, Sept 2013; Packer, Dec 2014), and may show American intellectuals the the long line of folks who have underestimated Angela Merkel. George Packer, taking the line proposed by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, suggests that Merkel’s leadership through the euro crisis has been “less than inspiring” and the euro zone was saved only by the emergency intervention of the European Central Bank led by Italian economist Mario Draghi, who had been extensively lobbied by the Americans. The authors of this book, however, point out that Merkel approached the crisis with a different set of attitudes toward what caused the crisis and what was necessary to fix it.

Czuczka and Crawford give a tantalizing account of Merkel turning to the work of Polish-born mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, then teaching at Yale, to understand the workings of the financial markets. Mandelbrot wrote a piece in Scientific American (1999) entitled “A Multifractal Walk down Wall Street,” later expanded into The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward (2004), co-authored with Richard L. Hudson, a former managing editor of Wall Street Journal’s European edition. “Chapters have subtitles including “How the operations of mere chance can be used to study a financial market” and “Orthodox financial theory is riddled with false assumptions and wrong results.”” One can imagine how this bolstered Merkel’s insistence upon commonsense regulation of banking and financial instruments.

Merkel’s personal style of 80% listening and 20% speaking, as well as her slow (some call it “delaying”), step-by-step trial-and-error “scientific” approach to decision-making has meant she has been able to change her mind when necessary, and adopt a policy she had not previously supported, all without being personally attacked as flip-flopping. She has been able to carry her electorate along with “root” changes in government administration, tax policy, and economic and societal direction. In addition, her reliance on a few close-mouthed advisors, closed-door negotiations, and restrained personal style have not given opponents much of a target. Vituperative postings on YouTube that give voice to those who oppose her migrant policies appear to play to a minority as she enjoys record high approval ratings in Germany and in Europe generally, particularly among the eastern Bloc countries.

"The supreme illustration of Merkel’s ability to pull off a reversal without incurring political damage was her overnight decision to ditch a planned extension of the lifespan of German’s nuclear power stations…Merkel the scientist said she had been convinced by the weight of evidence provided by the worse nuclear disaster since Chernobyl."

Crawford and Czuczka point out innumerable instances when Merkel managed to emerge from a political scuffle victorious, from her defeat of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, to allowing David Cameron to wander off on his own while she consolidated her leadership of the EU, shifting the center of gravity from Franco-German to Germany after the addition to the EU of several eastern European countries.

The Eastern Europeans “are acutely aware that systems can collapse” and have experienced collapse in their lifetimes, which may be why they appreciate Merkel’s “commonsense” approach to rebuilding “from the root” systems that are failing. Merkel seems to be creating an entirely new coalition of formerly weak European states that may emerge as a bloc of enormous vitality in comparison to the formerly wealthy colonists of western Europe who still seem intent upon protecting their wealth rather than creating new wealth. (America take note!) Merkel is focused on staying relevant and prosperous in a future that includes the rise of China and India and other emerging economies which are experiencing growth rates that may sideline the centrality of Europe in decision making.

“I have a very clear vision of what Europe should undertake, and must undertake, so the people in Europe can continue to live in prosperity.”

Merkel has a small portrait of Catherine the Great on her office desk in the chancellery. Catherine “was courageous and accomplished many things under difficult circumstances,” Merkel said when asked. Catherine also ruled Russia alone for 34 years. Merkel has told close associates that she will not run again for chancellor and may even leave before her term is finished in 2017. “Mutti” Merkel has changed the face of politics in Europe during her term and enjoys unprecedented popularity despite the static of vociferous opponents. It is difficult to imagine any other person we know governing with the quiet authority Merkel radiates.

This book is a very useful, insightful, and readable introduction to Merkel’s thinking, style, and political deal-making in her early terms as German chancellor, and gives us some idea of what was happening in Europe during that time. It includes biographical snippets and telling photographs of key moments in Merkel’s accession to and consolidation of power. For Americans, it may be an indispensable guide to understanding how Merkel is perceived by member EU countries. American–centric reporting misses a great deal of her appeal. Two journalists immersed in Berlin politics, and whose home countries (U.K. and U.S.) do not support Merkel’s policies, come away admiring of what she has been able to accomplish. Is Merkel the great politician of our time?


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So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patick Modiano

This novella is Modiano’s first publication since he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014. Translated into twenty-five languages, it allows readers to become familiar with the haunting style that I predict is Modiano’s signature. In 2016 I plan to read the novel Villa Trieste, and the screenplay Modiano collaborated on with the filmmaker Louis Malle, called Lacombe Lucien.

This is a novel of remembrance, forgetting, and foreboding, aligning the present with the past and the future. Modiano illuminates how the shadows of memory keep us from knowing who we are.

I cannot provide the reality of events,
I can only convey their shadow.
--STENDHAL, Modiano’s epigraph

Monsieur Jean Daragane was dozing in his study on a hot summer day in Paris when the insistent ring of his telephone shatters his isolation.

"Almost nothing. Like an insect bite that initially strikes you as very slight. At least that is what you tell yourself in a low voice so as to reassure yourself."

The caller is unknown to him, but has a “dreary and threatening voice.” Monsieur Daragne has lost his address book, and the caller has his name, address, and phone number. He wants to come over and question Mr. Daragne about a name he discovered in the book—a name possibly associated with a murder.

It was all so long ago. Monsieur Daragne is old now, and he no longer cares about the address book, nor the lives represented within it. The numbers he remembers by heart will ring in places where no one will answer any more. The person the caller asks Daragne about he claims not to remember, though the caller points out that Daragne’s first novel references a man by that name. The caller’s insistence starts a landslide of memories, once long hidden, uncovering a past Daragne had buried.

This is a book short enough to be read in an evening, and when I was browsing in a bookstore on a day before Christmas, I was so struck by the menace in the opening lines that I knew this would be my introduction to the work of Modiano. Cheers!



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Backstabbing in Beaujolais by Jean-Pierre Alaux & Noël Balen translated by Anne Trager

“Beaujolais is a lighthearted wine that makes people happy.”

We simply cannot ever have too many novels from France here in the U.S. and the publisher Le French Book is trying to bring those novels, translated, to market. Especially popular among the “cozy” mystery set is this series of novels set in the wine regions of France by Jean-Pierre Alaux and Noël Balen. We learn a great deal about wine production in each one, and the stories revolve around the great passions that wine evokes in producers and buyers…

This episode in the long-running mystery series manages to end before the body count exceeds two, and at the end everyone still alive is moving towards a fulfilling career or marriage. It is meant to be as lighthearted and refreshing as the wine it describes, and, for those with an interest in viticulture, it succeeds admirably.

“…moderate consumption [of red wine]—one glass a day for women and two for men—can be good for the health: reducing your risk of depression as well as your risk of developing colon cancer… Wine has anti-aging properties. While consumption of other alcoholic drinks can increase a woman’s chances of developing breast cancer, red wine in moderate amounts can actually lower that risk. One study has even found that a chemical found in wine can improve your sensitivity to insulin. That means you’re not as vulnerable to diabetes…”

While I am not convinced by the one study that suggests red wine might make one less vulnerable to diabetes, I believe the other claims have more solid scientific backing. But I was surprised, I admit, to learn

”You can drink Beaujolais early on, but the wines frequently open up three to five years after being bottled. They are precocious and aromatic, but round enough to have a lingering taste.

The story had the requisite homegrown local who harbored resentments against everyone, the millionaire businessman who wanted to bottle wine but knew nothing of the process, the gorgeously-dressed, slim, blond marketing wizard…you get the picture. One intriguing character, Benjamin, was a French wine expert who I could have sworn was British.

Beaujolais wines have a unique winemaking process call ‘whole-berry fermentation.’ The technique preserves the fruity quality without extracting tannins from the skins. The vintners in this novel considered “drawing out the vatting time and submerging the cap of grape skins during the maceration to enhance flavor and intensity, thinking it would preserve the fruity aromas and flavors while enhancing color and tannins. Who knows if it would have worked? They never got to try it, sadly.

“From time immemorial, [Beaujolais Nouveau] has been celebrated when it’s young, at the start of fermentation. Centuries ago winemakers traded early in the year, and the yeast would complete its job while the barrels were in transit, moving slowly by carriage or boat along the Saône and Rhône rivers or up the Loire.”

Beaujolais Nouveau commonly goes on sale in November and is meant to be enjoyed before May the following year. That goes for this novel, too. Enjoy!


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The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray

When the ship goes down, I want to be in Murray’s skiff. At least there will be laughter, love, generosity, poetry, and with any luck, a gulp of whiskey among us. If you thought the financial meltdown and its aftermath was too complicated to understand, read Murray. His account is a little like that fabled whiskey, warming and clear. At the inevitable end, we wonder where our head was, to think we could carry on like that and not have a hangover.

"[The restaurant called] Life is so loud, it takes a few moments to realize it is almost empty."

Murray gives his reading audience almost everything we want in a modern novel: a little mystery, a little romance, a little grand larceny. He does not neglect important, relevant subjects like the isolation of lives wrapped in technological bubblewrap or the failure of the banking system to protect and build a middle class. His bright gaze reveals the cracks in individual and institutional facades. But it is all done with a lightness of touch that makes it clear we can understand this, that we must, in fact, understand this, if we are going to save ourselves.

"If it’s a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them."

A successful French banker, Claude Martingale, takes a job in Dublin to escape snorts of derision from his father over his choice of career. A blacksmith and former radical, his father was unreasonably proud when his son graduated college with a degree in philosophy. “Philosophy was France’s greatest export,” he would boast to neighbors. How then could his son side with the thieves and quants who knew only how to cut experience into saleable lots, “using the underlying only for what can be derived from it,” rather than understanding the real value of life, of experience itself?

"Technology allows unprecedented quantities of reality to be turned into story. Reality becomes secondary…life becomes raw material for our own narratives."

Claude’s investment bank in Dublin creates financial instruments that fictionalize reality. What better place to set a novel? The problem of trying to make interesting the life of a banker was the central struggle of this work, and the central lesson we are meant to take away. Claude’s life in the bank was soulless, but not without moments of excruciating drama. And there was money…lots and lots of money…for some.

"'What is the most reliable area of growth in the twenty-first century?'
’Inequality,’ I say.
‘Bingo.’ "

Even financial disasters wholly created by the banks could be capitalized upon for their benefit. Murray gives us the example of a small island, Kokomoko, experiencing climate-related tide incursions, transformed to a golf course by a hedge fund. “I’m talking about monetizing failure”:

“Don’t you see the bottom line here? Even when it all goes tits up, you still get paid! Profit is finally liberated from circumstance! It’s the Holy Grail! It’s the singularity!...Seizures in the electricity grid, degradation of ecosystems, the spread of epidemics, the disintegration of the financial system—they’re all part of the same phenomenon. Civilization has become a bubble.”

Murray warns us that members of society have a responsibility to call out the farce and refuse to play...or get them to pay. They need us, after all.

But this insistence that we think comes to us with many examples of the fun part of thinking: madcap imaginings of a literary dinner, complete with a novelist camping up his meeting with his editor who, in his quest to sign the “next big thing,” appears strangely blinkered to the outrageous behaviors and opinions in his stable of authors. The reviewer who panned him (“I’m a little surprised she has flesh. I always pictured her as a sort of floating skull”) appears oblivious to the careers she has skewered. A slip of an editorial assistant captures everyone’s attention with her tremulous defense of art.

Murray invites us to look at the lives of writers: the crazy cash-flow between a novel’s conception and publication, the procrastination, the wacky attempts to jump start the creative process, the whoring (literally, in this case) of life partners, the desperation and despair. And then the reviews: “TL, DR” (Too Long, Didn’t Read), or the cavalier online dismissal of the years of effort because “Wombat Willy” received the book late and got a papercut getting the book out of the box.

Why bother with art at all? Because it reminds us who and what we are, Murray responds. The painting central to the novel could be seen as a type of graffiti whose price has risen, parallel to banks’ mystical valuations, to unheard-of heights. Threaded throughout the novel are constant references to Joyce and then suddenly, there it is, Ullysses II, the Irish folk in all their beautiful blemish:

”And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, beaky, exophthalmic; the Irish, with their demon priests, their cellulite, their bus queues and beer bellies, their foreign football teams, betting slips, smart-phones and online deals, their dyed hair, white jeans, colossal mortgages, miraculous medals, ill-fitting suits, enormous televisions, stoical laughter, wavering camaraderie, their flinty austerity and seeping corruption, their narrow minds and broad hearts, their drunken speeches, drunken fights, drunken weddings, drunken sex, their books, saints, tickets to Australia, their building-site countryside, their radioactive sea, their crisps, bars, Lucozade, their tattoos, their overpriced wine and mediocre restaurants, their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their punchbag history, their bankrupt state and their inveterate indifference. Every face is a compendium of singularities, unadulterated by the smoothing toxins of wealth and privilege; to walk among them is to be plunged into a sea of stories, a human comedy so rich it seems on the point of writing itself…”

This is the first book I have read of Paul Murray’s since Skippy Dies, his magnificent second novel about the horrors of Irish Catholic public schools and just about everything else, including quantum physics, climate change, history, and music. I found myself relaxing into this new novel, enjoying the ride while harboring a nagging feeling that this is not Murray’s finest work. His talent, understanding, and deep sense of the absurd are undeniable. If I wish for more discipline, focus, and seriousness, will I have to give up the sheer joy in the unwieldy construction? Writers are who they are and do what they will do and thank goodness for it. I note, however, that Murray was hoping to write a short novel this time, which would imply his interest in a greater adherence to those other qualities of style. Perhaps we will get it one day. Murray has the goods, and lord knows I wouldn’t trade one of his laughs for its reverse, not in this world. Joy.




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The Arab of the Future: A Graphic Memoir by Riad Sattouf

This memoir in the form of a graphic novel by Riad Sattouf is positively terrifying. It only takes an evening to read, and I can guarantee you will not want to put it down.

A cartoonist and former contributor to Charlie Hebdo, Sattouf now has a weekly column in France’s L’Obs. This graphic memoir is translated from the French by Sam Taylor and published in 2015 by Metropolitan Books, and tells of Sattouf’s early childhood in France, Libya, and Syria.

The memoir is terrifying for what it tells us of the consciousness of a Sunni Arab man and his extended family, as well as the conditions in the late 1970s-early 80's in the cities of Tripoli and Homs. Sattouf engages our sympathies immediately by starting out his descriptions from the eyes of a blond two-year-old, who we might expect to be perplexed wherever he was, being new to the world. But this turns out to be the perfect vehicle for presenting the things he sees, hears, smells, and experiences with a disingenuous honesty, though, I must admit, the consciousness of a child. It is as disarming as it is damning. We laugh and cringe at the same time.

Sattouf is choosing what to tell us about his upbringing with the consciousness of an adult. He shows the peculiarities of early education in France, and Syria. Both have failures, as a system. It’s a wonder we survive at all, but less surprising that we exhibit the flaws we do. He has a finely honed skill for cutting away the extraneous, and revealing the kernel of his experience. He makes it laughable, but at heart, it is also terrifying.

Riad’s Syrian father, Abdul-Razak, is the first of his family to read and is (therefore?) considered a great scholar in Syria. He is sent to study history at the Sorbonne and manages to wed an unworldly French student, Clementine, who is studying in Paris. Clementine is from a small village in Brittany and when they both graduate, Abdul-Razak accepts a position teaching in Tripoli, Libya. You have got to read this to enjoy it. I don’t want to spoil your fun. It sounds just about what you might expect with Qaddafi in charge, only even worse than you could imagine.

The family returns briefly to France, and then pack themselves off to Abdul-Razak’s home village outside of Homs, Syria. By this time Riad has a new dark-haired brother, but his own hair is still blond. He is teased (and beaten up) mercilessly in Homs, where the children harass him with expletives while calling him “Jew.” Conditions of everyday life in late 70's Syria sound positively crushing in this period Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father, was in charge. Riad’s family was Sunni; Assad was Alawhite. Segregation by religion, by sect shouldn’t surprise me, but the extent and result of it is stomach-roiling. Riad’s dear father, Abdul-Razak doesn’t sound more enlightened, for all his education.

I am reminded of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in which he writes that early childhood inculcation into any religion is one of the most damaging things that can happen to the impressionable mind. One cannot help but agree when one sees what it has done in cultures all over the world. In this part of the world hatreds last for millennia, perhaps due largely to childhood inculcation of religious ideology. Riad’s father buys him a plastic revolver as a toy. “All boys like weapons,” he says. Does it follow, I wonder, that all who like weapons are still boys?

What Riad captures in this work is the deeply ingrained and insufficiently informed nature of the racism and sectarianism in each of the countries in which he has lived. He also captures realistically grim pictures of living conditions in each country, as well as the good bits: in France, we see an education system that seems to work well for enrollees; in Libya, we see ancient ruins by the sea that evoke history better than many other ruins; in Syria, we see the memories of a school-aged Abdul-Razak bring him back to a simple life. But each is a comfortable deception that people feel comfortable telling themselves. Family ties were more important than whether your relatives were good people or not, and obligation takes the place of generosity.

Riad’s drawing skill is such that one can envision the environment quite clearly. It is better than a photograph since Riad can add the elements he wishes to emphasize. In the New York Times review of this title, as well as The New Yorker 10/19/15 review, called "Drawing Blood, we learn that Riad has a few more installments planned for this series, and I look forward eagerly to other adventures as he grows older. He has a viewpoint that is not all sarcasm. He so far has spared his mother, who comes across as a bewildered alien in a hostile environment.

Riad’s work has the sting of criticism, but since he presents it through the eyes of a child, adult readers are meant to add their own gloss, knowing what we do about the perceptions of a child. Let’s see what he comes up with next, enjoying this and making up our minds later about whether he oversteps the mark.


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Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson

This novel has the spine-tingling atmosphere of an episode of Netflix’s original series Sense8. Chance, coincidence, gambles, even miracles figure into the actions of a young woman seeking to make sense of her life and her mother’s death. The distinct sense of foreboding that pervades the pages comes partly from us: we are involved, judging the character’s choices against our own. The main character cannot be sure how this will play out, either. "I feel new. I’m a blank slate. A gamble…" This is a teenaged alienation story that does not run to drugs, alcohol, nor sexual perversion.

Katherine (Kit) Carlyle was an IVF baby who had been kept as a frozen embryo for eight years before she was implanted in her mother’s uterus with two other embryos. She was the one who survived, and from her years waiting in limbo, we know her conception and birth was a kind of gamble. Kit is nineteen and living in Rome when we meet her. Somehow Kit claims a kind of DNA memory of that pre-time of frozen suspension, and finds herself going in search of those origins when she feels abandoned by her parents--her mother to death, and her father to a peripatetic career.

Kit is a woman who doesn’t always have the motivations we associate with a woman of her wealth, beauty, and intellect. She is young but her naïveté is paired with a world consciousness that few people over thirty can claim. She also has waist-length hair. When I pointed out to friends that this seemed a male fantasy, one man said “not so fast: women with very long hair tend to obsess over it.” It turns out that hair is like a talisman in this novel, a touchstone upon which feelings, actions, and behaviors turn.

Author Rupert Thomson has published nine other novels, one described by critic Jonathan Miles writing for Salon.com as "disquieting" for the horrific scenes of sexual abuse depicted. Thomson, now sixty years old, has been praised for his sentence craft and is often in the running for major literary prizes. One suspects it is his unusual sense of story rather than his writing talent that advances other authors over him to win prizes. In this novel, for instance, the palpable sense of doom and danger does not often play out: we readers are bloodied but whole. There is a rape scene late in the novel, but it is not graphic and is only implied.

More disturbing are the dreams and fantasies of the young woman, who likes to imagine her father searching for her, trying to find her. She writes letters to him, and despite accusing him of not loving her enough, she dreams that he will feel anxious moments trying to locate her with the few clues she has left behind. The author adds to our sense of unease by italicizing a sentence that could only be said by an older person to a younger one: "Even negative experiences contribute to the sum of who you are." There is a sense of inevitability about pain and exposure, though Thomson does not do his worst, to Kit nor to us, in this novel.

Thomson’s work may simply be too uncomfortable to win the prizes, but this novel stands as an entry in the new literature being written that gives us a sense of being untethered in time and space. Thomson’s characters appear to acknowledge and accept the many mysteries that come with interactions with new people. It remains an open question whether his reading public wants that, too.

**Rupert will be participating in a series of events in the US this fall. Please see below for a list of readings and interviews for the novel KATHERINE CARLYLE.**

EVENTS

ST PAUL, MN
Twin Cities Literary Festival – 10/17

NEW YORK, NY
Bookcourt – Talk, Q&A, Signing – 10/19/15
Greenlight Bookstore in conversation with Rebecca Mead – Talk, Q&A, Signing – 10/20/15
Center for Fiction in conversation with w/ Rebecca Carol – Talk, Q&A, Signing –10/22/15

BOSTON, MA
Boston Book Festival – 10/24/15

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