A Million Drops by Víctor del Árbol

Paperback, 672 pgs, Expected publication: May 15th 2018 by Other Press (NY), ISBN13: 9781590518458

America’s literary scene is so robust and successful that it tends to influence and eclipse exciting work appearing around the world. Other Press of New York has a terrific record of finding and translating for us the best of European fiction and this month we are treated to a historical thriller from Spain, first published in 2014 in Barcelona. The author Víctor del Árbol was a seminarian and historian before embarking on a successful literary career, so his thrillers have recognizable historical underpinnings and a rich and brutal context of war and conflict.

Árbol’s name has begun to show up in lists for literary prizes at home and in Europe. With this second novel to be translated into English, we experience the emotional and historical depths of a Spain struggling with its political past. The richness of the novel stems from Árbol’s contextual complexity and recognized divergence from old societal norms, e.g., the centrality of strong but flawed female characters, acknowledged homosexuality, police misconduct, and in a predominantly Christian country, an important Jewish character who suffered Stalin-era torture at the hands of leftists, leading to lifelong psychological affliction.

Russia and Spain have long been intertwined, and the twentieth century brought enthusiastic support for communist ideals in Spain. Students from all over Europe travelled to offer their services to a Russian government trying to consolidate power under Stalin, but they found “being a non-Soviet Communist is seen as suspicious even in the USSR.” When a purge of dissident elements was undertaken, the Spanish engineering student Elías along with his cohort of fellow Europeans were caught up in the melee and deported to the now-infamous Nazino Island.

Nazino Island was home to a little-known real-life atrocity perpetrated by the Head of the Secret Police Genrikh Yagoda and the Head of Labor Camps Matvei Berman and approved by Stalin in May 1933 in which 6,000 deportees made up of petty criminals and political prisoners were forcibly relocated to a small island in western Siberia. The group was meant to construct a camp designed to bring unproductive land under cultivation during a time of nationwide famine. Few provisions accompanied the prisoners and within thirteen weeks 4,000 had died of starvation, sickness, or at the hands of others. Árbol allows his imagination to construct the camp, describing the depraved behaviors the survivors are thought to have witnessed. Elías’s hope for escape from Nazino looks extremely unlikely, lending a thriller-like air to the telling.

Elías’s 20th-century story is interspersed with the 21st-century stories of his children and the children of people Elías knew from his time in Nazino. His daughter Laura is a journalist-turned-policewoman, and his son Gonzalo is a lawyer with leftist sympathies. In fact, the novel opens with a shockingly brutal incident that leaves us gasping for air, and we are propelled to explain that event by looking for clues in the past.

The structure of the novel is deceptively simple, jumping from one century to the next through chapter headings, but not always immediately addressing the questions we have formulated—another source of tension in the novel. References to important historical moments in Spanish history are intriguing in their own right, generating an enthusiasm in readers to investigate more straightforward accounts that would explain the larger forces at work.

If I had any criticism of the book, it would be that the novel seems indulgent in length. While the situations of Elías and his family are intrinsically interesting and filled with tension, that sense of urgency is difficult to sustain over 600+ pages. Sometimes less really is more, especially in a mystery/thriller. Were the novel shorter, the author wouldn’t need to explain so much, as the reader would be following step-by-step.

The character list takes a toll, and begins to put a strain on our ability to remember an unfamiliar history along with strikingly similar-sounding names, e.g., Gonzalo-Gonzalez, Luis-Luisa, Lola-Laura. And finally, after the complicated relationships carried throughout the novel, the Epilogue seemed too easy, once again usurping the reader’s role to imagine.

While I wouldn’t call this international crime fiction, it has some elements common to that genre. It is closer to historical literary fiction in the way that books about WWII bring that era back to life. This mentions WWII, particularly Stalingrad, but for the Jewish character Elías that horror show just brought back memories of worse. Perhaps not enough was made of Elías’s Jewishness, unless the author meant for that to layer lightly over other elements without being explicit about what it means. In my own country, I’d know what that means. In Spain, I’m not too sure.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel for me was Barcelona living and the mindset of current residents there. Descriptions of tourists blowing in for a week of sun rang as true as the description of a popular Spanish architect living in London coming to introduce his latest commission to the public. I am not entirely sure I got my fill of the authentic experience un-moderated by American TV scenarios (like Miami Vice, mentioned in the final pages) but I very much look forward to more.



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Elephant Company by Vicki Constantine Croke

NPR environmental and animal journalist Vicki Croke’s new book about the British elephant mahout and teak man James “Billy” Williams in Burma in the interregnum between the 20th Century’s World Wars easily began as the best nonfiction I’d read all year. Elephants and Burma--what a combination of mysteries. No matter how many books about elephants that I read, I always learn something new. I love knowing of elephant skills, abilities, capabilities. In her Introduction, Croke tells us:

"Williams had witnessed a life among the elephants that would be hard for those outside to fathom—in fact, he reported behaviors that many would not believe until they were validated decades later by biologists in the field. He had seen these creatures thoughtfully solve problems, use tools, protect one another, express joy and humor, stand up for something more important than their own safety, and even, perhaps, comprehend the concept of death. There was a largeness to them that was about more than their physical size, a quality triggered especially when their sense of decency or outrage was provoked.

Could one really call it decency? Williams thought so. Courage defined them, He had witness their bravery—mothers defending babies, tuskers squaring off against each other, closely bonded females running toward danger, not away, to protect one another.

These were simple lessons from the animals, like how to be content with what he had. And there were more complex ones, too: the realization, for instance that trust requires much more than affection; it depends on mutual confidence—strength, not niceness. Or that sometimes it’s not necessary to know what elephants or people are thinking, as long as one honors what they are feeling."

Croke explains the differences between African and Asian elephants, in size and temperament, and gets into details about living in the plains and mountains of Burma. Details of early teak harvesting are both sad and fascinating. It takes two to three years to harvest a tree, and “it could take anywhere from five to twenty years for a log to become a milled plank." Demand for teak, a hard wood resistant to insects and weather damage increased dramatically in the first part of the 20th century, from "sixty-three thousand tons of teak a year in the late 1800s to more than five hundred thousand tons annually in Williams’s early years." Additionally we learn that "a teak forest 10,000 square miles in extent may be capable of producing only seven or eight thousand trees a year."

Living as a teak forester sounds formidable, and lonely. The hardship of the sheeting rain of the monsoon and the isolation of the jungle life would keep most folks away, but Billy Williams had the consolation of working with the world’s largest land animals. Williams suffered innumerable bouts of malaria and other illnesses that nearly took him out, but he soldiered on without complaint and once recovered, raced back to his post and his elephants.

The only thing that keeps this from being the best book I have ever read is the section on Williams’ involvement in WWII as it played out in Burma. Undoubtedly the Japanese had a strategy for domination that included rustling about in the jungles of Burma, but somehow that did not make any sense to me. No book can answer every question, but if the author makes the reader interested enough to seek out more information as a result of their reading, the book can be considered a success. In this way, Croke's work makes one want to know more. Many of us are more familiar than we’d like to be with the European theatre, but the war in Asia deserved just a few sentences of intent and context.

Once Croke began to talk about the war, the map of Burma given after the Introduction seemed too thinly marked. I could not find the locations she spoke of in terms of troop movements and distances became unclear. Details about the elephants’ involvement in bridge building required more than Williams’ diary would have provided. I understand the difficulties she must have encountered, but I would have preferred, then, not to have the title so focused on the participation of elephants in WWII. It was neither the most interesting nor the most complete section of the narrative.

In any case, the elephants were involved in at least two long distance treks carrying refugees across vast distances and through difficult terrain, forgoing their usual regime of being river-washed and set free each night to forage and rest. Despite all the hardships of teak work and war, they made the best of their situation and came through when called upon for help. Williams himself earned commendation for his war effort which included mustering and handling the elephants behind enemy lines and we know from his own writings how much credit he gave the animals in his care, especially one exceptional bull called Bandoola, whom he loved.

The resurrection of this riveting account of elephant teak and war work in Burma is due entirely to the research and attention of Vicki Croke, whose fluency makes the narrative absorbing. She has a sensitivity regarding animal and human behaviors that seems exceptionally perceptive. Despite my quibbles about the final third of the book, the story is packed with detail and photos of early teak work in Burma and is definitely one of the best books of my year. This extraordinary nonfiction title is well worth the time/money investment to locate and read a copy and would be a great book to gift someone for the upcoming holiday season.


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In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin

The first time I sunk into one of Mark Helprin’s huge, atmospheric novels I wondered how it was this man was not better known. But he is well known as a maker of epics, I just didn’t know it then. That first brush with Helprin was A Soldier of the Great War which so enraptured me I thought I’d never read another that was as good. Later, a professor friend of mine told me he “couldn’t get through it.” Older now, I wonder if it isn’t the fantastical quality of the romance, or the steel thread of Ayn Rand-like self-reliance that runs through his work that put my friend off.

Helprin, having attended Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford, has had access to the lives of the moneyed classes and unashamedly uses that access to create lavish sets for his novels. His insights into this exotic world waltz us off into dreaming how it would be if…which might actually be more fun than actually living in that constrained and rule-bound world. To be reassuringly safe from the vicissitudes of having enough to eat or clothes to wear, this is the stuff of romance. I am less susceptible to those fictions now, but I can see its attraction for many.

This unabashedly romantic tale centers on a great love between a New York Brahmin and a New York Jew. We are treated to the lush scenery of a minutely-observed post-War New York City, and to the problems encountered by small businessmen trying to keep their businesses viable while paying out protection monies on a weekly basis. The outlines of Helprin’s characters are carefully and completely drawn, and are then filled in with great swathes of color and fabric and angled light—that sunshine and shadow comes at us from every direction.

What I noticed and celebrate again is Helprin’s unequaled ability to observe and then relate the way the water in the wake of a ship, for instance, curls and moves and vaporizes, indicating current, direction, wind speed, tide levels…so much is caught in his web of words we can taste the salt spray. It leaves me gasping.

Helprin takes his time over this novel, moving back and forth in time, as expansive on the state of play in the garment district of New York as on the honeyed beaches of Long Island. There is a brilliant set-piece in which the aspirant for the hand of the heiress meets her parents for the first time. They eat dinner at the beach house on Long Island and the conversation is so elliptical and constantly shifting that one feels the danger in the meanings behind the words like hidden shoals upon which one might be wrecked.

The cast of characters is large, but completely manageable in Helprin’s hands. We get Manhattan: the theatre district, the garment and financial districts, the shops, the bustle, the 1950’s coffee shops with menus and waitresses. It is a brilliant reconstruction that must tempt more than one filmmaker to try it on. But it is too large a thing for a film; others have already tried to make films of Helprin’s novels (Winter’s Tale), and they must realize it is too…hopelessly romantic for our hard-bitten and seen-it-all audiences today.

I listened to the audio of this novel, and it went on for days while I worked on endless tasks. The inflectionless voice of the narrator, Sean Runnette, was not appealing at first, but this is a long story, and perhaps his style is what was needed. It was a little like being read to by one’s parent at bedtime instead of by a professional reader. Not what one would have chosen, but it becomes familiar. Helprin is still writing epics and he has a unique viewpoint that gives us romance like no one else.

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All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr's highly praised second novel was published in May 2014, just months before the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy. The book is a useful link for today's youth to understand events and conditions in Europe during the Second World War, and the lives of individuals on each side of the conflict. A young French girl flees occupied Paris to stay with her father's brother on the French coast, and a young German orphan boy with exceptional aptitude for radios is drafted into the German army. The fact of the D-Day battle becomes their point of overlap.

Doerr’s work has been lauded right from his debut story collection, The Shell Collector: Stories, published in 2002 when he was recognized as a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick. Since that time he has been awarded the Roma Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards. Doerr has published several collections of short stories, and his first novel was called About Grace, published in 2005. This latest offering should probably be classified as a Young Adult or teen title (age 10 and up) and is garnering top marks and much praise.

Doerr has a graceful style and his careful craft in setting the scenes will entrance a younger reader. There is much sympathy generated for both the French girl, Marie Laure, who is blind, and the German boy, Werner. Werner looks on his army service as a chance to get out of the workhouse and an employment future that includes mining. His military training and his officers are presented with a jaundiced eye and ambiguity, while his cohort in the ranks have sympathies that resonate with our own.

I note that many adults often like to read fiction that can be labelled Young Adult (e.g., The Hunger Games, and the Twilight series) and it is becoming common to mesh adult and teen titles in marketing. This is a charming story, if such a thing can be said about war. However, I did not feel it added depth to my understanding of the conflict in Europe. Doerr brought the history of the two protagonists to the present day, which might also help younger readers to place the event in time, and find some grounds with which to relate to the material.

Simon & Schuster was kind to send me an audiobook in exchange for an honest review. Regarding the audio production, Zach Appleman has a pleasant American accent and he did a good job pacing the narration. His pronunciation of French and German words and accents were not authentic though, oddly enough, his pronunciation might make the words more recognizable to younger readers.

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The Secret of Raven Point by Jennifer Vanderbes

A novel by Vanderbes is always cause for celebration. She has only written three to date, each very different in subject matter. The first, Easter Island, introduced two generations of scientists, and was named “Best Book of 2003” by The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor. The second, Strangers at the Feast, is set in a single day, Thanksgiving, when a family gets together again at some cost.

There is always something shifting and ambiguous about the characters Vanderbes serves up to us, something which requires our full attention and our judgment reserved. We are forced to rethink our opinions of her characters as we move through the stories because they surprise us, but not in a fundamental way. Fundamentally there is always something true at the center.

Which bring me to what I like best about Vanderbes’ fiction: she does not skirt the truth. She nails the truth. It may not be what we would have wanted, or would have chosen for ourselves, but life is like that.

This is a book about war: World War II, in fact. So many novels have been written about WWII that readers are wily, knowledgeable, heard it all, seen it all. But war concentrates the mind wonderfully. And in this conflict, perhaps we haven’t quite seen it all. Vanderbes makes it new, placing the action in Italy away from news of troop movements and victories, and layering the work with untold, or underreported stories that stun us with recognition. The cruel and casual violence shows us the futility and destruction of war, even here, in the “good” war.

A young woman, Juliet, after receiving a letter from her brother who is reported to be missing-in-action, manages to get herself posted to Italy as a nurse in hopes that she might run into his regiment and learn news of him. The short section (Part I) introduces Juliet and her brother in South Carolina. I wish the novel could have begun with Part II somehow, lacing in the fore-story as it progressed. The explosive machine of war combined with Vanderbes extraordinary characterizations and insinuated truths make her story completely compelling.

Is it even possible to write a war story that isn’t about loss? Would we want to read it if it were? Well, this story is about loss but it is also about how we reconcile loss, how we go on living with that loss. We are given the arc of a woman’s life from teen to grandmother. Now she has seen it all: “…[she was] part of the collective walk, the unending march of history. Along the way things were dropped, others picked up…That was the arc of life, it seemed; the slow and grateful recognition of those who were, by chance or fate, simply with you.” It may not be what we would have wanted, or would have chosen for ourselves, but life is like that.

“I’m not sure if you made me believe in God, but you sure made me believe in people.”

He smiled. “Same thing.”

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Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

“There is a fine line between living and dying,” a character observes in Kate Atkinson’s new novel. And it does certainly seem to be the case here, in the midst of two world wars, during the Great Influenza, at the beginning of the twentieth century in Britain. Characters come close to death, and some do not escape it: alternate histories are woven together until we are not really sure what is true. And this is the message. “History is all about ‘what ifs’” a character says late in the novel. More to the point here, perhaps, is that fiction, and this fiction in particular, is all about ‘what ifs’.

This is my first experience with what I would call a literary mash-up. Mash-up is a relatively new concept in literature that was borrowed from music where two or more songs are combined, usually by laying the vocal track of one song over the instrumental track of another. Wikipedia defines a literary mash up as taking a pre-existing work of fiction, often a classic, and combining perhaps thirty or forty percent of it with a vampire, werewolf, or horror genre. Atkinson has taken “classic history,” which is the Führer’s horror story, and overlaid many possible stories (love stories, family histories, employment possibilities) so that outcomes in some cases are different for individuals, but not, that we can see, in the larger history.

Stories cascade upon one another, all centered around a single family, indeed, a single person, Ursula, who we meet in the first chapter and who succeeds, we think at first, in killing the Führer.

“Don’t you wonder sometimes, “ Ursula said. “If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in—I don’t know, say a Quaker household—surely things would be different.”

The juxtaposition of the chapters makes one remember those times when we stare into the unknowingness of the future and wonder what it will hold for us…and once there, looking back at the innocence of the early years, when we proceeded with our lives as though we had any control at all. Which brings me to a larger observation in this novel and in Atkinson’s fiction in general: oftentimes Atkinson’s characters are not agents of change, but reagents, possibly causing a chain reaction when they are introduced, possibly having no discernible impact at all.

“Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance. The Führer was different, he was consciously making history for the future.”

Sometimes there are exceptional people, but even they cannot escape that possibility that “one thing” could change everything. Therein lie our power, and the power of the fiction writer.

The title, Life After Life, points to those lives impacted by another’s life, or a close escape from death, or lives that continue after another has died, or simply the alternate histories we all might have if “one thing had been different.”

When the book and the stories were drawing to a close, I admit I didn’t want to get to the end. I didn’t want another person to die unexpectedly. I didn’t want Ursula to grow older. I didn’t want to know which story was true. So, you see, I was caught, too.


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Restoration by Olaf Olafsson

Now this is a great summer read. Not only is it beautiful to hold (Ecco imprint, thick deckled pages, only 336 pages in a 5-5/15 x 8 inch format), but the words just made me want to slow down and savor. The characters in this book were making their dreams come alive: a wealthy woman uses her ample funds to get creative restoring an old villa on a wind-swept mountain in Tuscany, and a penniless, parentless artist finds her calling restoring the paintings of old masters in Rome.

Cochineal, indigo, white lead, cinnabar, umber, ocher, kermes and weld: the words bring their own smell, their own color. Add Rome, Tuscany, love, passion, wealth and youthful beauty in the pre-war years and the combination is irresistible. That the dreams of both women are blasted apart by World War II and their relationships with men adds depth to the drama, and it continues very near to present day, when the artist looks back and has us question again the nature of great art. Provenance in terms of art, it turns out, is almost all its value.

According to David Leavitt, writing a review for the New York Times earlier this year, the provenance of Olafsson’s story is deeply rooted in the real-life adventures of Iris Origo, about which she wrote in a nonfiction memoir called War in Val d’Orcia. Leavitt sounds a little incensed in his review that Olafsson did not emphasize this “borrowing” and writes

In 1993, I was sued by the poet Stephen Spender after I wrote a novel, “While England Sleeps,” based on an episode from his memoir “World Within World.” If I learned anything from that unhappy experience, it was that it’s essential for writers to acknowledge their sources fully and without hedging.

That’s fine with me. For writers, painters, innovators, anybody who borrows from another: Acknowledge the source and keep the provenance clear, but…art historians and wordsmiths don’t kill me…I believe great art can be created borrowing techniques, styles, and yes, the stories, of others and it doesn’t diminish the work in any way. And that is really the central question of the book—you’ll see when you read it.

So yes, this is a fine book when you don’t want a massive tome and just want beautiful words arranged artfully on the page.


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Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon

A man, filled with good intentions, is caught in the jaws of the competing and intersecting interests of global powers in Istanbul after World War II. Istanbul is the bridge between north and south in Europe, and between West and East. It has always been a place of great intrigue and mystery, filled with industrialists and spies. By setting his mystery here after the war, Kanon capitalizes on the reader’s sense of dislocation. We are familiar with the war, but we know little about what happened shortly after, when hundreds of thousands of Jews needed resettlement from Reich-controlled countries and war-time spies were tying up loose ends, chasing double agents and moles.

Istanbul was a port through which some of the refugees streamed, bought from their oppressors by well-meaning Jewish citizens with the intention of giving them passage to some other country where they could set up a new life. Palestine was one of these destinations, by no means the obvious choice.

This is the first novel of Kanon’s I’ve read, but I have taken note of his books and know that his particular interest has been the war years in Europe. He flawlessly captures that insular American consulate feeling, the wide-eyed naiveté gradually devolving into a slight disdain fueled by lack of understanding. The intrigue of a city of spies comes through clearly as well, the confusion and the calculation as one undercover spy after another is picked off, leaving the innocent (and the reader) to figure out what happened and who is responsible and what can be done.

Kanon’s style is telegraphic, abrupt, pointillist when describing a man’s thoughts…rather like the way we talk in our own heads when walking down the street. We don’t think in complete sentences when we are noticing street action. Only words and phrases come to us: red hat, sidling walk, cold, sun. Together these can add up to a larger understanding that we must explain in sentences to another. And there was my difficulty. Not only was Kanon noticing and attaching value to things differently than I might have, he didn’t always give me a complete sentence in which to process his progress. I got the gist, and I got used to it, but it certainly added to the mystery of the piece that I couldn’t completely trust the judgment of the main character and I suspected everyone. The mystery his language produced was akin to that fog of incomprehension his characters were laboring under—who knew what and when, and who held the cards? After my initial reserve I entered fully into Kanon’s vision, and he managed to crank the stress level quite high enough to impel this reader through to the end.

Istanbul comes through clearly: colorful, exotic, dangerous. The sly knowingness in the Turkish character makes the people attractive and descriptions of the city and the Bosporus are irresistible. Makes you want to book passage. Now.



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The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

Europe between the wars is heady in its mix of optimism and foreboding, and both impel the reader’s involvement in this story of the unlikely meeting between a Czech Jewish capitalist and his wife in Venice to a brash and forward-looking minimalist Austrian architect. The result is the Landauer House of the story with its famed der Glasraum. The author adds a note that ”raum” in German means much more than “room”: it also encompasses “space,” “volume,” and “zone” in its expansive meanings. And this is literally what the architect of the novel intended: that outside is in and inside is out and the space and light he captured are the art he intended to achieve.

The novel mirrors the architecture: magnificent and sprawling, yet contained, the expansive room with glass sides reveals all. The motivations of the characters are not hidden; flaws and beauty are apparent. If this book were a piece of music, it might be a piano sonata in several movements, for music rings throughout the house and this book. Special note is made of a young composer, Vitezslava Kaprálová, who died at 25 years of age the day France fell to the Germans in the world-encompassing European conflict of the 20th century.

But the book is more than the house, or the glass room. It is the intimate history of several intersecting lives of that period, and later, when they meet again. It is compulsive reading, for its revelations were shocking then, and even to us now. The european-ness of the novel is strong, like a flavor, a color, or a sound. We become reacquainted with the Czech word lίtost, the unbearable sadness of being, and are reminded of the deep and now ghostly scars of war.

A bravo performance by Mawer, whose other works I shall follow with avidity.


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Summer Reads from Three Bloggers

Porter Square Books

-- a BOTNS Boston event --

When: June 3, 2011
Where: Cambridge, MA
Porter Square Books

[Courtesy of http://portersquarebooks.com/]

Three bloggers shared their best recommendations for summer reads with us:

• Melanie Yarbrough of The Things They Read
• Marie Cloutier of BostonBibliophile
• Ann Kingman of Books on the Nightstand

Melanie writes, but also blogs. Though she usually reads and writes fiction, Melanie recommended two nonfiction memoirs for summer reads:

1. A Widow's Story: A Memoir by Joyce Carol Oates
   
   
   
   
   
2. 
   Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason by Anne Roiphe

Marie buys books at bookstores like rest of us, scanning shelves and tables for something to catch her eye. Summer Reads for her are big, enveloping books that bring you somewhere new. Melanie recommended three books and you can see what she says about her choices here:

1. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Heliopolis by James Scudamore

Ann Kingman has found her calling as a podcaster. When she starts telling of her summer reads, her voice becomes slow and honeyed. One settles back for storytime, and when she says, "I just couldn't put it down," we know we must see these books:

1. Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. The Snowman by Jo Nesbø
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
   
   
   
   
   

Finally, some listeners at the gathering wanted to make their recommendations for summer reads:

• Anything by Bill Bryson on audio;
• Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell
• Three Seconds by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström, translated by Kari Dickson. I reviewed this book last month.
• Tibet Underground 1939(?) by Jinzo Nomoto, or maybe it was Japanese Agent in Tibet by Hisao Kimura. He wasn't sure, but it sounded great!
• My recommendation is a brand-new (comes out August 1, 2011) genre-smashing, wildly good stand-alone Reginald Hill called The Woodcutter. Put it on your lists so you don't forget--you'll love it!

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A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear

Jacqueline Winspear has emphatically mastered the art of a mystery series with this latest addition to her list. Not only does her main character have a wealth of personality traits that are admirable, laudable, even enviable, she is attractive, wealthy (this is critical), and clever. She is as busy as we are, so we don’t feel as though time is passing slowly, or that we are wasting time reading of her adventures. Meetings, letters, investigations, reading, meditation all take time, and she schedules herself very closely. She is the woman we would strive to be. It is interesting to see how she responds to queries, doubts, challenges, though I have to admit it is frustrating to see her push those lovely suitors away one by one, again and again.

But not only do we have Maisie Dobbs herself to consider, we have her constellation of family and friends, who by this time in the series have become our own friends: employees, mentors, her father, her fiancé all have lives and backstories we revel in following. This time I am struck by the success of the formula: with many threads and much driving about, the pace leaves readers breathless. But the comforting commonsense calm of reason brings Alexander McCall Smith to mind, despite the difference in the subject matters of the series produced by each author. It is the tone that is reminiscent, one of the other. And that is high praise indeed.

This latest in the series introduces Maisie to the Secret Service in the years before WWII. She takes on an assignment which requires the utmost secrecy, and I amused to read how many times she told friends and colleagues what she was doing was “hush-hush” for the government. How hush-hush is that? I guess they didn’t really mean it.



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Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

The book is a huge bestseller , so whatever I think will have to be taken in that context. It is immediately accessible, and has two enticing threads: one of a blond Jewish child from Paris during the German occupation of France, and the other of a forty-something American journalist married to a Frenchman and living in Paris. We can empathize with the one while envying the other. I was not suprised to learn the author is French, as the voice is clearly 'other' than American, and very interesting for that. But not even halfway through the story begins to show cracks: a 10-year-old girl proposes to bribe a train conductor with cash, and the journalist shows a naïveté and an insensitivity that makes us less interested in her search. I only skimmed the last half of the book, having lost faith with the narrator. It is possible the book could have been a very tight and taut short story, but it felt much too long for a novel.