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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Beyond All Reasonable Doubt (Sophia Weber #2) by Malin Persson Giolito, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles

Paperback, 480 pga, Pub June 4th 2019 by Other Press (NY) (first published January 1st 2012), Orig Title: Bortom varje rimligt tvivel, ISBN13: 9781590519196, Series: Sophia Weber #2

This legal thriller bursts out of the gate from the first pages, easily capturing the attention of anyone who has ever been, or known, a teenaged girl. At the same time it underlines and validates the well-deserved success of Swedish novelist Malin Persson Giolito, who won Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year for her English-language debut Quicksand.

Persson Giolito has not so much captured the crime thriller genre as reinvented it for a sophisticated and cosmopolitan audience. We may never have set foot in Scandinavia but we certainly know their crime writers. Quicksand was optioned and produced as a Netflix Original Series, and debuted worldwide in April 2019.

This story is presented as a case of possible wrongful imprisonment; as each new fact is uncovered, our vision blurs and we are not sure if we have corrupt law enforcement, a scam trial, evil parents, or #MeToo run amok. The victim is fifteen and a model student. A doctor is in jail for her murder. A female lawyer in mid-career is asked to look into the case by her old professor, as a favor. Reluctantly, this lawyer begins to investigate the old case, now fifteen years past, and sees the possibility of retrial or release.

The story has resonance, the subject is personally interesting to everyone, and Persson Giolito’s writing is sharp and insightful. She adds short propulsive chapters of character development to bind us to the characters. We see marriage with the boredom left in, and then later, the exquisite and intimate tenderness. We enjoy the sight of a woman exhausted by the mental and emotional toil of lawyering take a 3-ton sailboat out on a northern ocean by herself in March for a week. We recognize the misplaced pride of the old professor who may have sabotaged his protégé’s case because he wanted the recognition due her.

This novel is just being published in time for summer reading this year and I urge you not to pass this one by when you are developing your summer reading list. It is definitely an immersive rain day read at the beach, but will keep anyone occupied for what it tells us about the psyche of young girls, the legal system in Sweden, and the state of criminal forensics in Europe. Apparently everyone looks to England for “the latest equipment” and to America for discoveries in the field: the TV show CSI makes the actors look authoritative beyond all reason.

The final third of this novel is reason to read through to the end. It is utterly without formula and gripping for that. I don’t think anyone will predict how this legal case might turn out. Americans may have a view of Sweden as famously liberal sexually, but what struck me beyond the fact that fifteen is considered the “age of consent,” is how similar our wealthy classes appear to be in terms of social development. In other words, a teenager is a teenager is a teenager, with all the teenaged angst fairly shared around the world.

Women will feel a bond with Persson Giolito after reading this novel. She is, after all, a professional woman making her way in what used to be called “a man’s world.” Male supremacy has not ended yet, but there are chinks in the wall. Persson Giolito has her main character make casual comment about the backlash that plagues a professional woman making any kind of public statement that could conceivably be the subject of controversy; she describes the now all-too-familiar online and media trolling that is difficult to survive, emotionally, personally, professionally.

The backlash often comes in the form of sexual attack. When I examine my own thinking, I have to admit the most outrageous swear word still taboo is the C word, only recently publicly breached and used in mixed company, but still not normalized. When we get mad, we get sexual. Persson Giolito also makes reference to the court of public opinion: how bad information about a person may be introduced into the public sphere through social media and is almost impossible to combat. This is partly why this book feels so contemporary, and cosmopolitan. Women and men must deal with this new world now.

Persson Giolito is now a full-time writer based in Brussels. In an earlier incarnation she worked as a lawyer for the biggest law firm in Scandinavia and as an official for the European Commission. She is a writer of enormous gifts, and her invention looks like the real deal. Her perceptions are invariably enlightening. Her description of winter sailing made me want to pound my chest Tarzan-style. Women are just getting better and braver and that is a good thing.



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Happiness in This Life by Pope Francis, translated by Oonagh Stransky

Hardcover, 272 pgs, Pub Dec 5th 2017 by Random House Publishing Group, ISBN13: 9780525510970, Edition Language: English

I don’t have anything against popes per se. It seems to me that some men are genuinely holy men, in that they have thought long and hard about life on earth and prefer the alternative: heaven. Pope Francis seems to have absorbed more than a few of the lessons taught in Christianity, and he is a good spokesperson. When he says he makes mistakes, we believe him.

Earlier this month, Pope Francis defended Bishop Juan Barros for being unaware of sexual abuse committed by his mentor, the Reverend Fernando Karadima, who was notorious and hated within Chile. Unfortunately, parishioners in Chile are not satisfied with the investigation that cleared Barros.


Bishop Juan Barros

Pope Francis’ support for Barros could very well be one of those ‘mistakes’ the Pope speaks of. At first the pontiff seems to be sympathetic to the victims of abuse and then backs off, suggesting the Church is being scammed by ‘supposed’ victims. He must be getting information from internal sources.

If I were him, I would have to doubt internal sources at least as much as believers. After all, the Church has failed its believers badly in the past, with abuse of minors, corruption, graft, and lack of humility right at the top of the list of wrongs. It must be hard to be part of such a large and wealthy organization and still preach humility with any degree of sincerity. Pope Francis managed it better than anyone, but he may be struggling now. When he preaches forgiveness, I might find forgiveness in my heart for him, but not so much for the pedos. Let them deal with the law first and then let's talk.

This book is divided into four sections; within those sections are very short statements he has given on different occasions between the years 2013-2016. The pieces are lessons that contain admonishments or suggestions. Those who like to meditate each day on spiritual lessons may find this form very successful for their practice.

Nearly every passage I marked out as insightful, useful, or on a subject discussed for years within the Catholic community came from the summer of 2013 when Pope Francis addressed celibacy:

“Once made, these vows of chastity never end, rather, they endure…when a priest is not a father to his community, when a nun is not a mother to all those with whom she works, he or she becomes sad…This sadness comes from failing to live a truly consecrated life, which, on the contrary, always makes us fruitful, fertile…the beauty of consecration is joy, always joy.”

We can see he means well, but not everyone is cut out to be a priest, let alone a pope, perhaps even less so today.

On another hot-button topic, the role of women in the Church, Pope Francis says this:

“The Church recognizes the indispensable contribution that women make to society, their sensitivity, their intuition, and other distinctive skills that women, more than men, tend to possess. For example, the special attention that women bestow on others, an attention often—but not exclusively—expressed in maternity. I happily acknowledge how many women share pastoral responsibilities with priests, how they guide people, families, and groups and thoughtfully contribute to theological studies.

But we need to create even more opportunities for women in the Church We need feminine genius in every aspect of society. So women must be guaranteed roles in the workplace and wherever important decisions are made, both within the Church and in social structures.”

Dear Pope Francis sounds like he is trying to make nice but his words are so old-fashioned I am not reassured. I would not be the person interested in reforming this edifice and in cranking open the brain boxes of men who long ago closed their minds to an entire sex. No. But I credit any woman willing to take it on. It is truly a labor of generosity and love.

The question remains, is the Church relevant today, or is it still standing but dead inside?

The audio produced by Penguin Random House and beautifully read by Arthur Morey is a good way to enjoy this title, though if using each little entry for meditation you may prefer the written copy. Translated by Oonagh Stransky. Pope Francis was born in Buenos Aires December 17, 1936, and was christened with the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He became the Bishop of Rome and the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church on March 13, 2013.



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Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated by Roland Glasser

Paperback, 210 pgs, Pub Sept 2015 by Scribe Publications (first pub Aug 21st 2014), ISBN139781925106947, Lit Awards: Internationaler Literaturpreis – Haus der Kulturen der Welt Nominee for Lena Müller (2017), BTBA Best Translated Book Award Nominee for Fiction Longlist (2016), Man Booker International Prize Nominee for Longlist (2016), Etisalat Prize (2015).

If exuberance were key to great literature, this book would rank. This manic deluge takes the Western notion of a novel and puts it on a train out of town. One day it may circle back, or we may catch up with it, but we will all be changed by the journey. This is literature self-consciously desperate to join the club but having no earthly way to reconcile a reality crazier than fiction.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has been sadly underrepresented when it comes to literature, but not because the outside world is not interested. What we see is how complicated it all is, how slim the chances are that anyone would be able to thrash through the thicket that is daily life in the Congo, and manage to capture the moment on paper. Whoever manages it will have a different kind of voice, with a different center of balance.

This is train literature, the protagonist Lucien exclaims,

“locomotive literature….my writing displays similarities with the railroads that depart from the station that is essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks and locomotives that call to mind the railroad built by Stanley….Anyway, I’ve had a weakness for railroads for a while now. I sought man, I found train. (Laughter)”

There is something to the random voices of the bar girls (“Do you have the time?”), the circular nature of daily routine, the powering through despite the distractions…a more unlikely place to find a serious writer of political plays can hardly be found. And yet, Lucien runs into a publisher in the bar who, over time, adds to the general hilarity and nonsense by asking Lucien for short pieces on random subjects unrelated to Lucien’s opus, a political stage-tale with the title: The Africa of Possibility: Lumumba, the Fall of an Angel, or the Pestle-Mortar Years.


“Characters include Che Guevara, Sékou Touré, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Ceaușescu, not forgetting the dissident General.”

But the dissolution is not restricted to the government, as Lucien’s description of Tram 83 includes the panty-less baby-chicks, the single-mamas, the ageless-women, the wild, endless search for the conflict minerals of gold, diamonds, cobalt…”this dung elevated to a raw material,” the search continuing even under the floor of one’s own shack. Lust for the vast, unrivaled mineral wealth of the country affects everyone, but the return on those minerals is nowhere to be seen except in the nighttime exchanges in Tram 83 where everything is for sale. “Do you have the time?” Heart of Darkness, indeed.

The loco-motive nature of the novel at first runs us over. As we grab hold, it drags us behind it. It is only when we are able to climb aboard, for me after the second reading…the second drink, as it were….that the previously unimagined riches of this debut novel begin to reveal themselves. The translator is to be commended for keeping pace and not succumbing to despair or overload. The Democratic Republic of Congo. We’ve heard the stories; we've read the history. Now see the literature.





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Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki, translated by Erico Sugita

Hardcover, 288 pages, Pub April 11th 2017 by W. W. Norton Company (first pub June 12th 2015) Orig Title ぼくたちに、もうモノは必要ない。 断捨離からミニマリストへ ISBN13: 9780393609035

Sasaki’s photographs in the beginning of this book jolt one awake to what he means by minimalism. Some people are so radical that it makes the rest of us look like hoarders. But by the end of this very simply-written and superbly-argued short book, most of the arguments we have for cluttering our space and complicating our lives are defeated.

One must recognize at some point that whatever dreams are mixed up in purchases we have made, the potential of the ideas quickly fade when not acted on immediately, as in when the objects are “saved” for something we vaguely anticipate in the future. In the minimalist outlook, objects should do some kind of worthwhile duty, even if that duty is to make us happy, or please our senses.

When objects become a burden, or chastise us by their silent immobility, collecting dust, literally taking up the space we need to breathe, we can give them away, throw them out, auction them off, or otherwise get them out of our lives so that some potential can grow back into our ideas. That means even books we bought with the intention to read but which make us sad every time we look at them.

But don’t take my word for it. Sasaki really does have an answer for every possible objection you may have. For instance, #37. Discarding memorabilia is not the same as discarding memories. Sasaki quotes Tatsuya Nakazaki: “Even if we were to throw away photos and records that are filled with memorable moments, the past continues to exist in our memories…All the important memories that we have inside us will naturally remain.” I am not convinced this is so at every stage of life, but think there is a natural life to what we need in terms of archival items. If your children don’t want it, you don’t need to keep all of it. Keep the ones that matter only.

Note that Sasaki recommends scanning documents like old letters that are important to you because you can’t go out and buy another if you find you were too radical in your culling. However, even the archival record becomes a burden when it becomes too large unless well-marked with dates, etc. He admits that letting go of those stored memories is a further step in true minimalist living.

The freedom one experiences when one owns fewer things is undeniable. Sasaki expresses the joy he experiences when he visits a hotel or a friend who uses big bath towels. He’d limited himself to a microfiber quick-drying hand towel for all his household needs, and enjoyed the lack of big loads of washing at home and using big thick towels while he was out: a twofer of happiness.

We are encouraged to find our own minimalism. Everyone has their own limits and definition. The author explains that #15. Minimalism is a method and a beginning. The concept is like a prologue and the act of minimizing is a story that each practitioner needs to create individually. We definitely don’t need all we have, and the things we own aren’t who we are. We are still us, underneath all the stuff. Some people will find this reassuring; others may find it disconcerting.

At the end of this small book, Sasaki reminds us the clarity that comes with minimalism. Concentration is easier. Waste is minimized. Social relationships are enhanced. You don’t need forty seconds in a disaster to decide what to take. You live in the now.

The translation of this book is fantastic, by Eriko Sugita. It does not read like a translation, but as an intimate sharing by someone who has been through the hard work of paring down one’s possessions so that his own personality shines through. It is a kind of gift. Even if one doesn’t throw a thing away (I heartily doubt that will be the case) after (or during) the reading of this book, the notions are seeds. Gratitude grows in the absence of things.



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My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston

Hardcover, 272 pages Pub April 18th 2017 by Pantheon Books (first published 2014) Orig Title Kissani Jugoslavia ISBN13: 9781101871829 Literary AwardsHelsingin Sanomien kirjallisuuspalkinto (2014)

Years ago I remember wishing I could experience a bit of what immigrants experience, or that some could communicate their experiences in ways I could understand. They’d started out somewhere I’d never been, and they’d arrived somewhere they’d never imagined. Like Finland. Cold, white, communal, with few racial or religious tensions. I was eager to hear it all, but such stories, if they existed, were rarely published in the U.S. All that has changed now and I couldn't be happier.

This remarkable debut by the 27-year-old Statovci gives us that strangeness, familiarity, differentness, and similarity in a wild ride from Kosovo to Finland, from traditional society to an open society, from cultural acceptance to social ostracism. See how the arrows in that sentence seem to point in opposite directions? Therein lies the tension.

Two seemingly unrelated stories, one featuring a talking cat, twine and twist through the first part of the novel, both stories engrossing: a woman describes the lead-up to her traditional marriage…the clothes, the gold, the mother-to-daughter secrets, the preparations. The other thread features the cat and a snake, neither of which we want to take out eyes off for very long. They are both dangerous.

As readers we don’t object to the fact of the cat, though by rights we should. He is thoroughly obnoxious, insulting his host and then being falsely obsequious. He comes for a tryst and stays for meal, which he then refuses on the grounds such food would never cross his lips. He insists on eating meat in a vegetarian’s house, and he takes long, splashy showers…he is your worst nightmare, the height of self-regard.

The snake—I’d like to hear your take on the snake. A boa constrictor. He’s a wily one, seems to have formed a kind of attachment to his owner, in that he doesn’t threaten him, but he does threaten a guest…Throw a dangerous animal into a story and see if your attention flags. It’s a old trick that works every time. We don’t take our eyes from him whenever he appears from behind the couch.

But it is the story of the wedding that grabs us by the balls, as the expression goes. We are shocked, distressed, angry. We try to imagine how we would handle what comes up, both as a young person, and as an adult. We think over decisions we make so quickly, painlessly in adulthood that are so tortuous and fraught in youth.

All this is overlaid with the portrait of a family of seven living in one room provided by the Finnish government to refugees. The bunk-beds squeak so cannot be used. Mattresses cover the floor. Four or more families share a kitchen, a bathroom. It is nearly intolerable until they remember what they left, native Albanians in a Kosovo run amok. The Bosnian War was brutal beyond all imagining. There is that.

The stories twist and twine through one another like the loops of a snake, another of which, a poisonous viper, makes an appearance later in the book. The viper is only a meter long, and is captured in a plastic bag. It doesn’t provoke as much anxiety as it should. When a plastic bag reappears later in the story, holding not a snake but a book, The White King by György Dragomán, we wonder…can the snake represent his father, the bully whose influence stays around, silently inhabiting the places we live? Deadly, but sometimes ineffective, who might be deflected or exorcised with understanding and effort.

And the cat? There is more than one cat. The first cat talks. The second cat was abandoned, uncared for, unloved in the native country until rescued and restored to health. And finally, there is the black cat in a litter, “just normal, mongrel kittens,” in the author’s words, to distinguish them from the black and white cat who speaks, and the orange cat who doesn’t. The talking cat so full of himself could be the author himself, and the follow-on cats could be those who’d suffered during the war, coming finally to the children, those ‘normal’ integrated ‘mongrels’ who’d adjusted to their new environment in their adopted country and married with locals.

The disturbing shifting sexuality throughout this novel, in a person from a traditional culture with unresolved parent issues, has a touch of intimidation and coercion about it, in the beginning at least. By the end I am much more comfortable that our narrator’s sexual choices are healthy ones, and begin to wonder…is this one of the things that caused the rift between his father and himself?

Statovci succeeds in capturing our attention with this debut, recounting an agonizing childhood and an adulthood filled with sudden emotional traps. His use of a female point of view is extraordinarily effective in making us inhabit her choices. He shows us the distance an émigré may feel from his host country, no matter how conflicted these feelings are with gratefulness and surprise and ordinary, daily joy at being alive. He shows us the pointed, hateful bullying in town—a step up from ordinary schoolyard bullying—that may provoke withdrawal rather than a healthy resistance and reliance on home-grown values.

This is a thrilling debut. Bravo!

Below is a clip from the Penguin Random House audio production:





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Inheritance from Mother by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Hardcover, 448 pages Pub May 2nd 2017 by Other Press (NY) (first published May 1st 2017) ISBN13: 9781590517826

Mother’s Day was celebrated in the United States this past weekend and this novel could be viewed as a kind of delicious dream fantasy for just that kind of woman--mature, thoughtful, caring women who have been around the block a few times. It introduces us to the intimate and internal lives of Japanese wives and mothers, some of whom were thought to suffer in silence as part of their cultural mystique. The main character is not a mother; Mitsuki is a wife, and the daughter who cares for her aging mother. Her sister Natsuki was beautiful, talented, and made a fortuitous marriage to a wealthy man. There had never been any hint Natsuki would take care of the things that needed doing.

Throughout Part One we experience the calculus a family member must make when an aging relative suddenly becomes unable to care for themselves as independent adults. What makes this particularly interesting to those who haven’t gone through it before is the barrage of decisions that blast apart any privacy a person might reasonably expect, even in a family, and how this affects individuals experiencing the trauma and those trying to help out.

If Mitsuki sounds a little resistant to the demands placed on her when talking to herself at times, she is already the poster child for trying to make dying a positive experience for everyone involved, despite the impersonal nature of hospital care and the uncertainties involved in geriatric health. Complicating the picture of her mother’s illness and death is the fact Mitsuki newly discovers her husband has a somewhat serious dalliance with a younger woman. Bad timing for the husband.

Part Two is in some ways the respite after the storm, and in others a legitimate Part 2 of decision-making and planning for big changes. Mitsuki engages our every sense as she describes her visit, during winter, to a neglected lakeside hotel posing as a fake Swiss villa. She remembers the place from her childhood. Several other people show up at the same time, for an extended ten-day respite before Christmas. When a local psychic, “the sort who bleaches their hair blond and rides a Harley Davidson,” predicts one of the long-stay hotel guests is there to commit suicide in the lake, the attention of hoteliers and guests are riveted.

Mitsuki is there to sort out her options concerning a husband who serially strays, her feelings regarding the difficult time with her mother, and how she can still have a life that is interesting and fulfilling, despite its losses. This part of the novel has many characteristics of the successful mystery novel: a lonely heroine, a villa in decline, an overly solicitous staff, the proximity and possibility of death, a bunch of similarly stranded folks including at least one handsome eligible bachelor. Laced through it all are the experiences, constraints, and history of both westernized easterners and traditional Japanese, endlessly intriguing people with whom we share a bond and yet admire for their exoticism and differentness.

The clarity with which Mitsuki addresses her issues, her deliberate decision-making, her bare honesty to herself about motives and options, her interest in pursuing meaningful engagement is inspiring both to the recently bereaved and to those who have faced these issues, successfully or not. If there is a best-girlfriend reveal to the storyline, it is not unwelcome. While Natsuki sounded wistful and maybe even envious about everything working out for Mitsuki before it actually does, we readers reserve celebration, knowing the odds of the pieces coming together with no errors.

Minae Mizumura studied literature in the United States, at Yale. She wrote this novel in Japanese, and after an earlier novel described in an interview with Bookslut writer Corinna Cliff how the Japanese language became even more beautiful and desirable to her after studying English.

"Nevertheless, now that I have had more experience with both languages, I'm more sensitive to the uniqueness of Japanese. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the language for me is how its writing uses three kinds of signs: Chinese characters -- which mostly function as ideograms -- and two sets of phonograms. The resulting text contains an embarrassment of riches impossible to replicate in other languages. I'll try to explain it. Let's say you are reading a page describing a flower garden. Names of flowers jump out at you. They are rendered in complex Chinese characters that can't help standing out as they are embedded in phonograms much simpler in form. And since flower names in ideograms usually have poetic connotations, looking at the page, it really seems as if you are looking at a garden filled with clusters of fragrant and beautiful flowers."

Mizumura’s experience with English (and French!) culture and language make this a hugely successful crossover novel featuring European, American, and Asian influences in a rich feast. Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary becomes practically an incantation, it receives mention so often. Readers are advised to revisit that work to see how it is used in this case to add an extra layer of depth. J.W. Carpenter's translation is terrifically smooth, so smooth one only rarely pulls back long enough to imagine the work in Japanese.



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Judas by Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange

Hardcover, 320 pages Pub Nov 8th 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (first published August 2014) ISBN13: 9780544464049 Literary Awards – Haus der Kulturen der Welt for Mirjam Pressler (2015), Man Booker Int'l Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2017)

This is the third outstanding work I’ve read by an Israeli in as many weeks, and I find myself falling under a spell of admiration again for a culture that fights back against the worst aspects of itself, interrogates itself relentlessly, and creates humor around the morose recognition of man’s fallibility. Into a novel describing three generations living together in a small Jerusalem house, Amos Oz weaves history, religion, and politics into a meditation on the why and how of Jewishness and the concept of a Jewish state.

Not for a moment do we believe the characters have a life beyond that of describing a conflict. The generous nature of Oz’s characters make us willing to suspend judgment and place our trust in his hands awhile, to hear what he has to say. In our modern world one is rarely willing or able to hear an opposite view, but this seems a safe place to examine ideas. In a review in the New York Times, Oz speaks of this novel as a piece of chamber music. A grouping of voices influence one another, each different than the other, three generations of Jews in Israel.

The time is late 1950s or early 1960s. A student Shmuel has found his thesis, “Jewish Views of Jesus,” not as unique as he’d imagined and less interesting than something he'd bumped up against in research: “Christian Views of Judas.” Shmuel discovers that without the traitor Judas Iscariot, there would be no Christianity. Jesus and his apostles were all Jews. Without the crucifixion, there may not have been a rift in beliefs.

Needing to ponder this theory further, Shmuel has left his thesis unfinished and has taken a job as evening companion to learned old Gershom Wald in exchange for room and board. The old man spends his days arguing vociferously on the telephone with friends and enemies, and is a strong supporter of David ben-Gurion’s Zionism. Wald’s daughter-in-law Aitalia holds an opposite and more radical view that reflects her own father, Shealtiel Abravanel’s opinion that the concept of nation states and ownership of land and resources is a faulty one.

"Aitalia’s father was one of those people who believe that every conflict is merely a misunderstanding: a spot of family counseling, and handful of group therapy, a drop or two of goodwill, and at once we shall all be brothers in heart and soul and the conflict will disappear. He was one of those people convinced that all that is required to resolve a conflict is for both parties to get to know each other, and immediately they will start to like each other…"

The novel is a multi-layered examination of the idea of ‘traitor,’ and whether or not it is, in fact, an enlightened state “which really ought to be seen as a badge of honor:”

"Anyone willing to change," Shmuel said, "will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don't understand it and loathe change…"
……Shmuel added in a hushed voice, as though afraid that strangers might hear: "After all, the kiss of Judas, the most famous kiss in history was surely not a traitor’s kiss…"

But old man Wald reminds us that it is the name Judas which has become a synonym for betrayal, and perhaps also a synonym for Jew.

"Millions of simple Christians think that every single Jew is infected with the virus of treachery…So long as each Christian baby learns with its mother’s milk that God-killers still tread the earth, or the offspring of God-killers, we [Jews] shall know no rest."

In a review for Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir Arab of the Future, I’d expressed some concern that Arab schoolchildren in the Middle East were learning religious hatreds early, never considering that North American Christians were of course learning religious hatreds at the same age.

Oz makes no secret of his own opinions in interviews, but in this work he makes us puzzle it all out. He gives us the old conundrums in new ways, making us want to take them up again for examination. We question everything from the ground up. This work reminds me why I love literature: Oz is able to layer complex motivations onto history and take a stab at trying to explain what man is and what we should expect of him.

The translation of this work into English by Nicholas de Lange from the Hebrew is especially easy to enjoy. The Blackstone audio production is excellent, the work narrated on ten discs (11 hours) by Jonathan Davis. The hardcover published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is useful to return to some ideas. Though the novel is not difficult to read, the ideas challenge readers and may require a second or third look to tie the threads together. This is great stuff. Oz is seventy-seven years old. He should be proud of himself, and we should be grateful.



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Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

Hardcover, 192 pages Pub January 10th 2017 by Riverhead Books (first published 2014) Orig Title Distancia de rescate ISBN13: 9780399184598 Literary Awards Premio Tigre Juan (2015), Man Booker International Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017)

Dream is the right word for what we think we observe in this novel. Something poisonous is going on involving two mothers, their children, and pollutants that have entered the soil and water in a countryside that should nourish farmers, ranchers, and vacationers. The cycle of life has been profoundly disrupted and neither residents nor visitors can or will speak of the horror in the vacation wonderland. It looks as though some kind of paranormal witchery is being considered a kind of cure.

Americans lived through a history of environmental pollution and subsequent corporate denial for years in the 1950s-1960s until regulations put a halt to the most egregious flaunting of public health. The public became savvy, protesting when agriculture, methane, coal, oil, gas or other byproducts left a mark on their communities. But we rarely saw what happened in other parts of the world where the legal infrastructure was not as developed and the public not as well-educated in the ways profits become manifest.

Schweblin has made an extraordinarily intimate small novel speak for a national catastrophe. She has captured the somewhat insular way a mother observes and protects her child—how intimately she is familiar with every gesture and each learned behavior, connected by some psychic string, or in Schweblin’s words, ‘the rescue distance.’

The story is told in a unique way. The action is all past; a woman, Amanda, is in the hospital. She has a young boy speaking to her in imagination if not in actuality. The young boy encourages her to remember…to remember the sequence of events that led to this moment. Amanda and her child are staying in a vacation home in the country; while waiting for her husband to come on the weekends, they invite an interesting-looking local woman, Clara, and her son over to talk, play, and drink maté.

The strangeness comes from the juxtaposition of the hospital setting with green fields waving in a warm breeze, a cool creek, the hot sun sparkling on an outdoor pool, the languid slap of a screen door, a gold bikini, a young daughter chortling and repeating to herself, “we adore this.” There is unspoken menace in everything recalled by the woman now lying in the hospital, and the young boy she speaks to makes it sound almost as though she still had a choice…a choice she could make to prevent her imminent death.

A review from the Los Angeles Times talks about the introduction of genetically modified soybeans into the farming culture of Argentina. In an interview with Bethanne Patrick in LitHub, Schweblin is more explicit:

"This story could be set anywhere. In fact, the first time I heard about pesticides and their terrible consequences was through a documentary about this subject in France. But, mainly because of corruption, Latin America has the worst agrochemical regulations and agreements. And Argentina, in particular, is one of the biggest importers of soya—one of the products more related with pesticides. We spread this soya all over the world; it is the base of a lot of our food. Soya is in everything: cookies, frozen fish, cereal bars, soups, bread, all kinds of flour, even ice cream!"

The pollution already permeates the soil and water, is what Schweblin is telling us. It’s not like stopping now is going to change anything, but the tension in this novel may indicate there may be a way to forestall an inevitable end.

Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Schweblin apparently now lives and writes from Berlin. Fever Dream is her first novel, originally published in 2015 and winner the Tigre Juan Prize which serves to draw attention to a worthy lesser-known author. She has three story collections besides this book.


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There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Patrushevskaya

Paperback, 181 pages Pub October 28th 2014 by Penguin Books (first published 2002) ISBN13: 9780143121664

Not long ago I reviewed a short memoir published by Petrushevskaya, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, in which I mused about rumors of her talent, never having read any of her poetry, stories, or novelettes. Petrushevskaya has a savage humor borne of long deprivation. Her work bears signs of torture of the spirit; she recognizes how to cannily exploit human weakness to stay alive. But she also has a huge umbrella of compassion which she holds over those she loves. Reading her work is a breathtaking experience.

This collection is comprised of a novelette, "The Time is Night," and two shorter stories. The work altogether expresses every feeling of love, desperation, hope, and bitter despair that a mother can feel about her children in any country in any time. It is an epic, deeply funny, excoriating look at how the deprivations in Russian social, political, and economic life have worked loose the traditional bonds of family. It is compulsive reading. The work was published in Germany before it could be published in Russia, having been banned there.

"It all seems like yesterday. I look back on my life—men are like roadsigns, children mark chronology. Not very attractive, I know, but what is, if you look closely?"

A proud poet finds herself destitute in late middle age. Her son is in prison for theft (and maybe murder) and her daughter keeps showing up pregnant and wanting more than the poet has to spare. The poet takes her daughter’s first child to care for and continues to suffer ungrateful visits from her children whenever they need something. Anna Summers, translator for this series of stories, tells us in the Introduction that

"…her heroines are tired, scared, impoverished women who have been devastated by domestic tragedies and who see little beyond the question, How to raise a child? How to feed it, clothe it, educate it when there is no strength left and no resources?"

When "The Time is Night" was finally published in Russia, it came out at the same time as the third piece, "Among Friends.” "Time…" is a novelette, its length over one hundred pages; "…Friends" is less than thirty pages, outlining a grotesque collection of viperish friends and former spouses, all calculating how and what they can score from knowing someone but paying no attention to the larger world outside their immediate purview. The incestuous theft and jealousy rife within the group is ghetto poverty: no one can break free of the poisonous atmosphere because they need each other. The story is a short quick shard that cleaves the heart, and leaves the reader gasping: it speaks directly to what some feel they must resort to “protect” their children.

The second story, "Chocolates with Liqueur," is the one written the most recently (2002). Summers tells us it was written as a tribute to Edgar Allen Poe. The story itself is broken into five parts; I thought the story was complete after the first part which contains the most horrendous and coruscating engagement scene I have ever encountered, without us knowing it is just a continuation of the theme of how difficult it is to find a place to live. The atmosphere gets thicker, darker, and heavy with motive as befits a Poe tribute, and finishes pointing to "The Cask of Amontillado," thought to be Poe’s best short story. In that story Poe created a family motto suggesting that the family history is filled with acts of revenge: "Nemo me impune lacessit" (No one attacks me with impunity). Find Petrushevskaya's story somewhere and read it. It feels positively ancient, as though this were a story written at the dawn of time.

The twist in the nature of marriage and family comes from the search for a safe place in a society where food, lodging, dignity are in short supply. Petrushevskaya is controlled She has seen it all and still gives us art. I don’t know which of these stories I like the best. She deserves all the awards and all the adulation. She is extraordinary.





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The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei translated by Canaan Morse

This wonderful short novel, Ge Fei’s first translated to English, has just been published by NYRB as a Classics Original. The cover copy calls it a “comic novel” and it is...in the sense of the straight man in a comic duo undergoing relationship trouble, family trouble, and job trouble in a fast modernizing Beijing. Our hero—we only ever learn his surname, Cui (pronounced Ts-wei)—plays the straight man role to the end, never quite losing his nerve, though he comes close, while we watch helplessly.

Cui is not completely destitute, except in terms of money, love, and friendship. He has skills. He can put together hi-fi sound systems that audiofiles want to buy. When forced to move from his sister’s unused apartment one winter, Cui develops a sound system that should qualify as “the best in the world,” for any discriminating buyer in China, in hopes that the profit will give him enough to buy a small courtyard for himself to live in.

What elevates this novel is the ordinary man quality, the sense we have of a human fleck bobbing on a wind-tossed sea over which he has no control. The bad things that happen are outside of his control, and though he makes plans and efforts to extricate himself, there is a certain inexorable flow to his outcomes.

This novel is not especially dark, though it has delicious elements of horror and mystery. We become genuinely terrified when a mysterious wealthy stranger offers to buy the "best sound system in the world," but who exudes a hard inflexibility and sense of ferocity when challenged...or when asked to pay. There is some evidence that he has done damage to those that oppose him.

Who wears the invisibility cloak in this novel? Cui tells us that

"In the 1990s, Mou Qishan, the celebrity tycoon, was a household name in Beijing. He liked calligraphy, climbing mountains, and hanging out with female movie stars—all an open secret. Other rumors, however, told of his eccentric and often unpredictable behavior. The wildest story I heard was that he could show up at any event unseen because he wore an invisibility cloak…"

When Mou died, Cui bought a pair of hexagonal Autograph speakers from Mou’s estate. He used them to construct the “best sound system in the world.” It could be the invisibility cloak passed from person to person with ownership of the speakers.

When Cui’s childhood friend Jiang Songping played a joke on Horsewhip Xu, an old man in his neighborhood, Cui had a personal revelation:

"...the best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface, which is where, in fact, all of us live out our lives. Everyone has an inner life, but it’s best if we leave it alone. For as soon as you poke a hole through that paper window, most of what’s inside simply won’t hold up to scrutiny."

What do we take from this? If you are wearing the invisibility cloak, you not only cannot be seen, there isn’t much worth seeing? It does seems as though once ownership of the Autograph speakers changed hands, the “freed man,” as it were, becomes once again visible, and able to express himself “on the surface,” without us having to look through “the hole in the paper window” to their inner thoughts.

One of the more intriguing things Ge does in this novel is debunk the integrity of Jiang Songping, Cui’s best and only friend, and he does it using a pomegranate. Jiang Songping was a clever boy, but Cui’s mother could see right away he was going to be the kind of person who owned people. Jiang had a way of sounding authoritative, even when he spoke rubbish. All of us come under his spell to some degree when he states categorically that all pomegranates, no matter how big or how long they've grown, contain the exact same number of seeds, 365 to be exact. Our eyes pop a bit with this news, for who has ever actually counted pomegranate seeds, and who could dispute this entrancing fact? Later, we learn with the chagrin we share with Cui’s sister that, in fact, Jiang lied on this occasion, and perhaps on many others.

One of the more poignant moments in the book was when Cui returned to the neighborhood where he grew up and discovered it much changed:

"Human memory really is unreliable. I could clearly remember this alley being long, wide, submerged in green shade or sprinkled with white locust flowers, and nowhere near as cramped and seedy as it looked that day…As I sat on the stoop and surveyed the cluttered street under the setting sun, I felt vaguely alienated from everything."

Not all change is good...but memory is unreliable.

This is a delightful addition to the canon coming out of China today, having none of the syrupy schmaltz that earlier, more severely censored works demonstrated. Terrific translation by Canaan Morse, and many thanks to NYRB for picking this one out to share with us. Kudos to all on this one.



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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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Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

This work is all kinds of novel. Chilean novelist Zambra really puts us through our paces by making us actually participate in the process of his fiction. He gives us choices on how to finish his sentences. He starts easily enough, asking us to decide which word has no relation to the words given. The structure of the book copies the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, required of all applicants to university in Chile. Our minds race with the possibilities he’s given us, and we can be as cynical and hard-eyed or hilarious and droll as any teenager in marking the answers and thinking of our own.

Next comes “Sentence Order,” and the test-maker is acting like a disaffected teenager himself, his sentences starting out short and perhaps only a little sarcastic, progressing to longer sentences that sound bitter and angry, to his last question featuring a page of sentences we are meant to order, including words like “pain,” and “tumor” and “going from the general to the specific,” and mentioning General Pinochet for the first time.

The section marked “Sentence Completion” is pretty easy because the test-maker does not give us as many choices as he might have. He seems almost to be steering us. We can’t just think up answers…he is strong-arming us to conclusions as a result of his sentences. We chafe a little under his direction.

In the penultimate section, “Sentence Elimination,” we start getting the feel of the potentiality in this form. Zambia here reminds me of a famous Chekhov monologue called “The Evils of Tobacco.” In that monologue, a distinguished educator who has been asked to give a speech on tobacco veers off topic into the state of his marriage and how he despairs of his wife. Our test-maker in “Sentence Elimination” starts with short sentences, though they are already evocative, and gradually starts talking about family, a hated father, government eliminations, and other soul-baring terrors. We forget which sentence to eliminate.

The final section, “Reading Comprehension,” evokes Saramago. Remember in All the Names Saramago created a government functionary who was supposed to do a boring job filing the names of all the folks who died? That bureaucrat started getting creative, investigating the deaths instead of just filing them away. Well, here our test-maker quite loses the detachment of a test-maker and begins a long confession on how he learned to cheat on tests and how it brought his cheating classmates together…only to further disclose how his classmates lived, loved, played…You get the picture. In the final questions to test comprehension, we see that he has lost all objectivity and is telling us instead what he has learned.

Bravo, Zambra. The form fulfills its potential. Translated, by Megan McDowell.


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Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich

I was eleven or perhaps twelve years old when I learned that ignorance is no excuse for anything.

That revelation completely changed the way I viewed the world. I ran to my parents, separately, I remember, my eyes wide. I said to each of them, “Ignorance is no excuse!” It won’t save anyone from the repercussions of whatever they are ignorant of. You can die as a result of ignorance or you can participate in something evil as a result of ignorance.

As I remember it, my parents did not say anything. There is much I would think as a result of my eleven-year-old coming to me with such a revelation, and I am not sure I would know what to respond, either. But it was a big moment, and it came from reading a novel.

Now I wonder which novel gave me such an insight, but I cannot remember. I was an ordinary schoolgirl, with no special access to literature. I read too much, my sisters said, and most of them were bodice-rippers…

This book reminds me of that moment of realization. The insights into what man is and how he responds to national, political, and personal trauma come fast and hard in this work. Alexievich begins by recording voices from the Gorbachev years: “Those were wonderful, naïve years…” Both for and against Gorbachev, the voices record people’s naiveté. They had an excuse, the lack of reliable, comprehensive news coverage being one of them, but it would not save them from their future nor their past.

There is simply nothing to compare with this fabulous reconstruction of the lives of people under communism and after. Alexievich records the stories of people under the dictatorship of the people, and there is so much nuance, so much pain, fear, crazy love, faith, and delusion tied in with people’s understanding of those years that it becomes as clear a record of what humanity is that we have.

“Changing the nature of man” was on the table. From the sounds of some voices, it succeeded on every measure. But if nature can be changed, we question again that "nature." Naomi Klein tells us man is not hopelessly greedy but it is hard to see that when greed is rewarded and protected. The Soviet Union, Russia, has gone through enormous social upheaval in the last one hundred years, and Alexievich manages to give us a window through which we can begin to see what happened to people. It is breathtaking.

Among the voices are ordinary folk, high Kremlin officials, members of the brigades who spent their days shooting “enemies of the people.” We see what they were thinking at the time and what they are thinking now. Because governance the world over has many similarities, constraints, and imperatives, everyone who can read should see how governance actually plays out, no matter what we believe.

Alexievich has taken memory and made literature. For me, it will be one of the most meaningful books I have ever come across. I listened to the Penguin Random House Audio version of this, narrated by a full cast. It was beautifully done, and I highly recommend this method of consumption.

An interesting piece written by Sophie Pinkham in the New Republic magazine gives us some insight into how Alexievich may have gone about constructing her work. I disagree with Pinkham's conclusions, but her dogged research into the creation of the work itself reveals how this work has become Art.


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A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte Collins

It is always interesting to see what books inflame the European imagination. This novel by the Austrian writer Robert Seethaler took Germany by storm, and was released in translation last year in the United States and Canada. It really is the story of Andreas Egger’s whole life, though it runs less than one hundred and fifty pages.

The orphan Andreas Egger was given to a mean old relative, Hubert Kranzstocker, who crippled him in youth. Egger hardly ever spoke, but when he was eighteen he refused to be beaten by the old man, “If you hit me, I’ll kill you,” he said in the time-honored way of abused youth everywhere.

There is more, much more, but Andreas died in that village where he grew up. One February night the Cold Lady came for him. He did not resist. She looked like his wife, who was killed years before in an avalanche that also destroyed his house, his future child, and his dreams.

Perhaps the metronome quality of the writing is what draws readers to this work. It is patient, unheroic, daily. Moments of grief and joy are told with the same tone of ordinariness that describe winning a job, losing a job, working a job. The step-by-step inevitability of the end calms us. Egger still had plans—greatly diminished plans—when the Cold Lady came for him:

“…buy a couple of candles, seal the draughty crack in the window frame, dig a ditch in front of the hut, knee-deep and at least thirty centimeters wide, to divert meltwater…He was overcome by a feeling of warmth at the thought of his leg, that piece of rotten wood that had carried him through the world for so long.”

He did not suffer.

A life does not have to be loud to be meaningful. Egger was a strong and useful member of his society, and though he lived alone, he was not particularly lonely. “He had all he needed, and that was enough.” He talked to himself when he wanted to share a thought, and it gave him pleasure. Sometimes he laughed to himself…laughed until his eyes filled with tears.

This novel has a very European feel to it, so unlike the kind of large and spectacular and verbose novels we have tended to lionize in America. And the language is so European, capitalizing at least partially on the setting: "Sometimes he would pass his old plot of land. Over the years scree had accumulated on the spot where once his house had stood, forming a sort of embankment. In summer white poppies glowed between the lumps of stone, and in winter the children jumped over it on their skis."

I’ve looked everywhere I can think of to find interviews with Seethaler, and found one in German on youTube, which didn’t help me much. Picador promises us one on their website, but I couldn't find one. Seethaler is fifty years old, has written four previous novels, and occasionally works as an actor. The translation by Charlotte Collins seems particularly excellent to me.


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The Yellow Wind by David Grossman

David Grossman was a novelist when he was commissioned in 1987 to write a series of articles describing his perceptions of conditions in the occupied West Bank at the time of the twentieth anniversary of Israel’s Six Day War. What he wrote became a sensation in Israel. A book of the articles was published. Portions of that book were published in The New Yorker, and translations offered access throughout the world.

My initial reaction upon reading this thirty years since it was written was that it seemed dated. Those of us since who have been willing to grapple with the scene there have encountered stories like these before. The point, I guess, is that the problem has never been resolved and instead has festered, infected, and inflamed an entire region.

Grossman was remarkably naive in his writing—by that I mean he registered his reactions without much apparent editing. When he was horrified and distressed recognizing that Arab children were being taught to hate and kill Jews, he said so. When he discovered he lacked remorse when an Arab’s family home was torn down and the family banished because the son had committed murder, he said so. “They had raised the son and were therefore responsible” was his logic.

Towards the end of the book, however, his insights came hard and fast and terribly prescient. What strikes me now is how none of his insights were acted upon. All the markers I have in this book are in the last 75 pages. The paragraphs are too long to quote, so you will just have to go to the source. If you have been following the Israel Palestine saga, skim the beginning, and start reading at Chapter 12, “Sumud.” Or just read the last chapter, “The First Twenty Years.”

"The occupation is a continuing and stubborn test for both sides trapped in it…demanding that we…take a stand and make a decision. Or at least relate…Years passed…[and] I found myself developing the same voluntary suspension of questions about ethics and occupation…I have a bad feeling: I am afraid that the current situation will continue exactly as it is for another ten or twenty years. There is one excellent guarantee of that—human idiocy and the desire not to see the approaching danger. But I am sure that the moment will come when we will be forced to do something and it may well be that our position then will be much less favorable than it is now."

No one country has the corner on stupidity and reluctance to see danger. America, Europe, China...every country...has been reluctant to acknowledge climate change when it would have been so much easier to address it than now. None of us can claim to be better. There will always be those among us whose moral anguish or need to respond exceeds that of others. But I begin to think the situation in Israel/Palestine has crushed the souls of most people living there until now there is precious little left to save. Please prove to me is isn't so. Make me proud to know you.

The last paragraph of the book quotes Albert Camus. The passage from speech to moral action has a name: “To become human.”

I was led to this reading by a GR friend whose review made me want to see.


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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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Angela Merkel: The Authorized Biography by Stefan Kornelius

I like authorized biographies. We get spin and opinion from journalists all the time when analyzing a leader’s record, and often those journalists are judging from the outside what a leader is thinking. Here we have a writer who has a bit of access and can ask straightforward questions and get reasons for why a leader would choose one path over another. There may be some self-serving spin on the leader’s part, but many times the outcomes of decisions are not immediately known—it takes some time for them to play out in the European theatre—so we are looking at decision-making and rationale. Those are useful in judging the record of a leader.

Kornelius knew Merkel since she got her first political job as spokesperson for the East German Democratic Awakening Party in 1989, before it was eventually absorbed into the West German Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He reports on foreign policy for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. This authorized biography felt constrained and thin to this outsider at the start when we are unsure whether or not to trust the author’s perceptions. After Merkel’s election as Chancellor in 2005, however, Kornelius uses his experience watching events in Europe to sketch dynamic relationships as they unfolded, adding government rationale and commentary on public reactions. Many of the relationships and people discussed in this 2013 book are still in office, making it absolutely relevant.

It is commonly held opinion that years of crisis are good years for chancellors.

Merkel’s first term saw the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers the year before the general election, and from then on her main preoccupation would be the economy, the stability of the banks, the survival of a single currency, and a whole range of political issues that went with the euro crisis. Merkel’s approach to saving the banking system (tighten money supply) appeared to be opposite to what the Americans wanted to do (loosen money supply), and in fact there was a moment when Obama’s financial policy team led by then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner almost derailed Merkel’s attempt to orchestrate a response to the Greek debt crisis.

Merkel believes in American exceptionalism, and firmly believes in the necessity for the U.S. to involve itself redressing imbalances in the world power structure: she finds the notion of Russian or Chinese overreach troubling because their autocratic systems are not as free. However, she did not go along with the intervention in Libya (Germany abstained from the U.N. vote) because she “viewed the rebel movement in Libya and the rest of the Arab world with skepticism…She thought the political currents in these countries gave no clear indication of their likely future character as states.” Kornelius calls this decision one of the worst foreign policy blunders in her career. I wonder what he would say now, when in America the decision to intervene in Libya, urged by Hillary Clinton, is now considered one of the most ill-considered decisions of Obama’s two terms.

Israel has a special place in Merkel’s list of countries important to Germany. She has felt their tied histories deeply, acknowledges a historical responsibility to the state of Israel and its “Jewish character,” and recognizes Israel’s place as a religious center for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. She has been a strong supporter of a two-state solution and when such an idea collapsed under Netanyahu’s decision to continue building new settlements on disputed land, she has distanced herself from that administration. “Relations cooled.”

A discussion of Merkel’s relationship with Putin reveals a refusal to be bullied, each by the other. It is a relationship of uneasy balance, and wary distrust. Merkel had hopes for a Medvedev government, only to have her hopes collapse at the handover back to Putin. Merkel opposed Ukraine and Georgia being a part of NATO early in her chancellorship, despite heavy lobbying by the George W. Bush administration. She could see weakness in the governments there, unresolved conflict, and a fiscally-tied closeness to the Russian regime that spelled future trouble. The decision to refuse NATO status to Georgia under Saakachvili turned out to be a good one since three months later Saakachvili was testing Russian mettle and being soundly beaten for it.

At the top of Merkel’s scale of values is freedom… “Freedom is the joy of achievement, the flourishing of the individual, the celebration of difference, the rejection of mediocrity, personal responsibility.” …Now, after over seven years as Chancellor, freedom is more than ever the leitmotiv if her foreign policy.

The debt crisis in Europe tested not only the financial structures but the political ones as well. It called into question the nature of the European union. One possibility was for the EU to become, in essence, a United States of Europe, or a European superstate where power is transferred to Brussels. Another possibility was a union that worked in parallel with the EU, where states keep existing treaties and conclude new ones with each other and solve problems (labor laws, tax laws, budgets, social security) though intergovernmental solutions. Merkel believed it better for individual states to retain their sovereignty and coordinate with others. The social models and national sensitivities in member states were too different to allow for a single solution in these areas.

But Merkel still firmly believes that globalization will sweep away individual states unless there is a new European economic order that allows Europe is to get “big” enough as a bloc to be able to compete with other huge economies. Her suggestion that there be more unity and control within the EU involved a new system of economic supervision, a Council, which would be a chamber to advise on and structure a program of individual state economic reform with heads of government. It is an ambitious suggestion that perhaps only someone like Merkel would make, with her step-by-step solution to problems.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TIIP) with the United States currently under scrutiny once again is another thing Merkel has been keen to finalize, despite hot debate in Germany. “Globalization” is a concept that was begun in the 1990’s and its efficacies have been called into question during the 2016 election in the United States. Merkel's solutions for addressing weaknesses in Europe's position vis-à-vis a program of globalization may be enough to keep the system from being swept away wholesale, but it is clear she needs the stabilization of powerful economies like Britain to keep the system stable, to say nothing of her firm belief that cooperation will be more beneficial than each country trying to stand alone.

Merkel’s low key style does not highlight the important place Germany has assumed in the years since she became Chancellor. The turmoil surrounding the Syrian migrant crisis was not addressed in this book but is sure to be part of Merkel’s legacy. Merkel has said that she does not want another term, though there are no term limits on chancellorships and her predecessors often stayed for up to 16 years. It is always hard to imagine who could follow a figure who has assumed such stature.

Kornelius did a good job covering a lot of ground. His book is just one of many needed to get a grip on the wide range of topics covered in this book. A lot happens in ten years and Kornelius wisely limited his scope to the crises in Europe which were in the forefront. I expect we will have many more detailed portraits of Merkel's time in office to come. Translated by Anthea Bell and Christopher Moncrieff under aegis of the Goethe Institute, this work was originally published in German by Hoffman and Campe Verlag in 2013. This translation, based on a revised German text including the additional chapter "The British Problem," was first published by Alma Books Limited in 2013. The book is also available as an eBook.


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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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