“After she disappeared inside the hotel, Pasquale entertained the unwieldy thought that he’d somehow summoned her, that after years of living in this place, after months of grief and loneliness and waiting for Americans, he’d created this woman from old bits of cinema and books, from the lost artifacts and ruins of his dreams, from his epic, enduring solitude.“

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 16, 2014)

After looking up various images of the 1963 movie Cleopatra, the film that critically bombed but was lit up by the scandal of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, I saw a coastline of Italy that looked exactly like the cover of this book. It is a most felicitous cover that captures the mood and time that this novel begins, in 1962. A parochial innkeeper, Pasquali Tursi, lives in a rocky coastline village called Porto Vergogna (Port of Shame), a place the size of a thumb between two mountains, and referred to as “the whore’s crack.”

One day, Pasquali is stunned by the vision of a young, striking, blonde American actress, Dee Moray and baffled as to why she is staying at his inn. He learns that she is sick, and waiting for the famous publicity agent, Michael Deane, to take her to Switzerland for treatment. She stays at the ramshackle inn for a few days. Walter depicts their friendship with exquisite wistfulness and beauty. Her Italian and his English are as rocky as the cliffs surrounding the village, but a meeting of the souls eclipses language. On an outing together, they climb the cliffs high above the Ligurian Sea so that Pasquali can show Dee five frescoes painted on the wall inside a machine-gun pillbox bunker left over from World War II. At this scene, I almost wept. These frescoes become the most poignant visual metaphor of the book.

Alvis Bender, an American writer with writer’s block, traumatized from his experience in the war, stays at the inn annually, and has left his one devastating chapter in the drawer in Dee’s room. It is an astonishing chapter, one of the highlights of the novel. It is a treat to witness the variety of stories that make up Walter’s one larger story.

The novel alternates non-linearly from 1962 to contemporary time in Hollywood, Calfornia, where Claire Silver, a scholar of film archives, works for the now legendary film producer Michael Deane. Claire is on the cusp of quitting her job and leaving her boyfriend, and is suffering from several regrets. She is braced for another insipid film pitch when she receives a surprising visitor.

In this pensive, reflective, aesthetically pleasing, and geographically stunning story, we meet a disparate cast of characters that are ultimately linked. There’s also a washed-up rock musician, a frustrated screenwriter, and a cameo appearance by a certain alcoholic son of a Welsh coal miner–a brief but rollicking insertion of a true-to-life legend that is so spectacular and credible, it almost outshines the rest of the book. But the rest of the novel is exquisite, so that the scenes in repose combine with eye-popping chapters, and give the book a sublime balance.

The story has an undulating, timeless presence. Patience is rewarded, as it ascends toward its peak with a languid pace. The outcome may be a little too neat for some readers, but it is a minor flaw that is incidental to the mature and subtle elegance rendered on every page. As time passes, it continues to echo with its alluring characters, resonating themes, and delicate visual beauty and symmetry.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1,407 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jess Walter
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We Live in Water The Financial Lives of Poets Land of the Blind

Bibliography:

• Over Tumbled Graves (2001)
• Land of the Blind (2003)
• Citizen Vince (2005)
• The Zero (2006)
• The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009)
• Beautiful Ruins (2012)
• We Live in Water: Stories (February 2013)

Other:

• Every Knee Shall Bow: The Truth and Tragedy of Ruby Ridge and the Randy Weaver Family (1995)

“Telling Sandro these things collapsed the layers between me as woman and me as child. Sandro saw both, loved both. He understood they were not the same. It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 1, 2014)

There isn’t much plot in this novel, but it is a hell of story/Bildungsroman of a young woman known as just Reno, an art studies graduate in 1977 who dared to race her Moto Valera motorcycle at high-speed velocities to create land art. Land art was a “traceless art” created from leaving an almost invisible line in the road from surging speeds at over 110 mph. “Racing was drawing in time.” Literally and figuratively.

This era generated a seminal movement in New York where artistic expression in the subversive sect was animate, inflamed, ephemeral, breathing — a mix of temporal and performance art and the avant-garde/punk scene. This was also an age of conceptual art, which grew out of minimalism and stressed the artist’s concept rather than the object itself. Time was the concept of Reno’s art, something to be acted upon.

“You have time. Meaning, don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don’t rush to meet it. Be a conduit…I felt this to be true. Some people might consider this passivity but I did not. I considered it living.”

The novel, narrated by Reno, is all about her observation and experiences as she comes of age in a revolutionary time. She lives in a shabby, run-down hole in the wall in New York–“blank and empty as my new life, with its layers upon layers of white paint like a plaster death mask over the two rooms, giving them an ancient urban feeling.”

As she gets caught up with the underground movement in the East Village, called Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, and later with the Red Brigades of Rome, Reno is herself a conduit for the people she meets and gets involved with, such as her older, rebellious boyfriend, Sandro Valera, son of the Fascist-friendly mogul of Valera motorbikes.

Reno came to New York by way of Nevada, eager to demonstrate her art through photography and motorbikes. She’s “shopping for experience.” Sometime after a particularly moving one-night stand, and attempting to navigate her life and bridge her isolation and loneliness, she meets sculptor Sandro Valera and his friends, a group of radicals and artists who offer her exposure to working-class insurrection in this “mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place.”

Reno was looking for a sense of identity, and she wanted enchantment.

“Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.”

The bridge between life and art, and Reno’s invigorating speed of 148 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats, (where she went with her new friends to make land art), demonstrates the crossover between gestures and reality, and a liberating energy that was “an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed.”

On the one hand, Reno seeks self-sovereignty, but on the other hand, she inhabits a male-dominated and often misogynistic landscape where men exploit women for artistic and political gain. When she visits Sandro’s family in Italy, she is subjected to derision by Sandro’s misanthropic brother and his sneering mother.

In another scene, a male photographer asks women to punch themselves in the face until they are battered, and then pose for him. Reno narrates this with an unemotional but subtle raillery, noting the incongruity of women on a pretense of independence. She acutely observes that “certain acts, even as they are real, are also merely gestures.” And, in Rome, the question of feminine mystique versus male dominance is addressed by a Red Brigade revolutionary radio broadcaster, when he states to women that “Men connect you to the world, but not with your own self.”

Are women “meant to speed past, just a blur” as Reno speculates? And the more I think about that line, the more paradox it evokes.

Artists, dreamers, terrorists, comrades, iconoclasts, all populate this novel, replete with iconic images and fallen debris in a swirl of electrical momentum. New York and Rome aren’t just scenic backdrops; they come alive as provocateurs– firebrand cities with flame-throwing agitators.

Kushner is a heavyweight writer, a dense, volatile and sensuous portraitist of the iconographic and the obscure. Arch and decisive moments throughout the novel heighten the ominous tension that rumbles below the surface, and the reader wholly inhabits the spaces of Reno’s consciousness, and those of the people she meets.

“All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment…And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulder like a stinking vulture…we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom. That is how we’ll take the future and occupy it like an empty warehouse. It’s an act of love, pure love. It isn’t prophecy. It’s hope.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 194 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rachel Kushner
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Interview with Rachel Kushner On writing Flamethrowers
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Hard to find anything similar, but will mention this one anyway: My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru

Bibliography:

• Telex from Cuba (2008)
• The Flamethrowers (2013)

“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Devil’s Highway Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction

Bibliography:

• In Search of Snow (1994)
• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction (2002)
• The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005)
• Mr Mendoza’s Paintbrush (2009)
• Into the Beautiful North (2009)
• Queen of America (December 2011)

The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

• Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993)
• By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996)
• Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998)

More Nonfiction:

• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004)

“He will rub at his eyes, rub away the unsatisfactory aspect of the world. Then he will blink at me. He blinks until I am back in focus… He sits up straighter, moves himself into the edge of the table. He is back to wishing there was more of me, more of me to see.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (SEP 28, 2011)

Who is Ines, the illegal African migrant who embarks on a hazardous sea crossing to Italy and Germany in search of her stolen son? At first, she is a total enigma; we keep wishing there was, indeed, more of her to see. Slowly and painstakingly, her inner identity is revealed in this haunting new book by Lloyd Jones, author of the acclaimed Mister Pip.

When we first meet her, Ines is working as a maid in a tony Tunisian resort, where women routinely supplement their wages with “hotel sex.” In the first few pages, we learn that she is seduced and impregnated by a callous black German guest, Jermayne, who tricks her into signing adoption papers for him and his wife. What Jermayne does not anticipate is that Ines will put herself in the hands of people-traffickers who launch her on a journey to the Sicilian coast, where she is arrives “bitten as a sodden sea cucumber.” From there, she makes her way to Berlin.

This story is revealed in bits and dabs, through successive narrations of an unscrupulous truck driver, a group of mostly benevolent alpine hunters, a British film researcher, a selfless French poet, and finally, a blind German man whose father may have been complicit in the war horrors. It is only after the first 120 pages that we meet the three key narrators: Ralf (the blind man), Defoe (his other lodger) and finally, Ines herself.

It’s an intriguing way to reveal Ines, a woman who is driven by motherly love and who will do anything and everything to spend time with her stolen son, Daniel, including betraying the trust of those who give her shelter and devotion. Like an old-fashioned detective story – in modern and sparse prose – we discover the contradictions between the narratives, what is real and what isn’t, and who Ines really is, deep down inside.

There is a beautiful symmetry about this book. In the first few pages, Lloyd Jones reveals the stuff that Ines is made of. She buys a parrot, that she quickly tires of, and tries to sell it. When that proves impossible she places the parrot on a skiff as it “rolled its eye up to her, to look as though it possibly understood her decision and had decided it would choose dignity over fear.” Much later on, Ines’s constant harping to see her son is described as parrot-like; she, too, chooses dignity as the best way to go.

The sparseness of the prose – the distance from Ines – places the reader at a bit of a distance. At times the narrative sags under the weight with a sense of inertia. Yet every time it slows down to a snail’s pace, something – some action, some decision, some revelation – creates more forward momentum. As a reader, I felt as if I were on a slow-moving train that suddenly picked up speed and oh, look at the view!

Lloyd Jones reveals a sense of daring and experimentation that shows he has come quite a way since Mister Pip – a book I enjoyed greatly. This subtle book is, in turn, riveting, disquieting, and haunting as we follow Ines’s odyssey to become reunited with her son. It reminded me a little bit of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee in its tautness and ability to summon up emotion. Lloyd Jones is definitely a writer to watch… and it does makes me curious about the many books still unpublished in the U.S. Maybe it is time that they share some of his short story collections.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lloyd Jones
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Nalo Hopkinson

Bibliography:

• Gilmore’s Diary (1985)
• Splinter (1988)
• Swimming to Australia, and Other Stories (1991)
• Biofrafi: An Albanian Quest (1993)
• This House Has Three Walls (1997)
• Choo Woo (1998)
• Book of Fame (2000)
• Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (2002)
• Paint Your Wife (2004)
• Mr. Pip (2006; 2007 in US)
• The Man in the Shed: Stories (2009)
• Hand Me Down World (2010; September 2011 in US)

“How far did I fall? I feel like saying that I fell through time itself, through lives, deaths, and centuries past, but in terms of actual measurement the drop was no more than twenty feet. At least, that is what they say. They also say that, fortunately for me, it was neither rocks nor demons that caught me as I came tumbling into the underworld. It was the ancient river that wakes you from dreams, and which few people have ever been allowed to find.

Her name is Diana.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (JUL 29, 2011)

Hands up anyone who doesn’t know the story of Romeo and Juliet. No-one? Thought not. Chances are you cut your literary teeth on it, and it probably holds some special associations for you. That’s why it’s such a good subject for a modern/historical parallel romance story with sinister overtones.

Julie Jacobs is the quasi-eponymous heroin of the novel. Orphaned as a very young child, she has been brought up by her Great-Aunt Rose along with her twin sister Janice… who is as like to Julie as a marble is to a strawberry. Great-Aunt Rose has brought the sisters up in the States, but when they are in their mid-twenties she ups and dies, leaving Janice the estate and Julie (rather inconveniently) merely a letter and the address of a banker in Sienna. A heartbroken and down-at-heel Julie makes the best of a bad deal and packs her unfashionable bags for Sienna.

Matters get complicated almost immediately with a chance befriending by the glamorous Eva Maria Salimbeni – and that’s before Julie ever even reaches Sienna. The narrative rapidly develops distinct fairy-tale colours, which grow richer by the page. Julie soon discovers that few things really happen by chance in this neck of the woods. What with Julie’s historical trouble with the Italian police (don’t ask) and Eva Maria’s handsome nephew Alessandro being Captain Santini of the Sienna police, a certain amount of intrigue becomes inevitable from the word go.

The mystery trail of the letter leads from the bank, to a box, to clues, to the Pallio, to museums and clan rivalries, to subterranean passages and clean through to the 14th century. Sienna, it seems, not Verona, is the original location for the historical characters that inspired Shakespeare’s tragedy: a story already two hundred years old and re-told countless times by the time he got to it. To gain the treasure that the historical Romeo and Juliet supposedly left behind, Julie must immerse herself into her own past, which extends far beyond what one would think reasonable in chronological terms.

Fortier displays brilliant craftsmanship in weaving the multi-faceted timelines of her story into a cohesive narrative. She intersperses new mystery, romance and violence at a pace which will leave no reader able to resist the next page. But above all, she really loves her Shakespeare. This work has obviously arisen from a love of the original text. The imagery of warring opposites, fire and ice, danger and beauty that characterize Shakespeare’s work have given birth here to whole neighbourhoods, new characters and impassioned landscapes. This is no half-baked, ill-fadged limping mess that so many supposedly more straightforward “historical” novels fall into. It’s an inspired work of art with a backbone not only of research but of understanding, one could almost say sympathetic resonance. It’s so clever one wishes it were true.

However, not everyone will like it. Readers often divide into camps between the two sisters Julie and Janice: some finding the latter two-dimensional, many considering the former mawkish and generally kickable. The main plot is pretty easy to guess from the start, which is perhaps not ideal for a mystery. I didn’t find this a problem at all, as there were so many details in between A and B that just because one knows the outcome it doesn’t make the journey any less pleasurable.

Possibly its main detraction for many might be that it’s essentially chick lit. Let me qualify this swiftly: I don’t read chick lit and I found Juliet thrilling. It’s the sort of thing you put down with a glow and wonder whom to tell about it first; and then possibly consider that boys might not be so keen on it. I hate to say it, but with 80% of serious readers being female, I still think it’s got a pretty good market. Chick lit it may be, but very good chick lit. As I read it, I was taking notes on structure and tactics, thinking, “if only I could write more like this.” I’m not sure what higher form of admiration one could offer.

If you like your stories well-written, exciting, properly researched, and you have a tendency towards things pre-1400s with a dash of the paranormal and several cask-fulls of romance, don’t delay in reading this especially now that it is available in paperback.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 159 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ballantine Books (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anne Fortier
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Romeo & Juliet tales:  Beautiful Malice by Rebecca James Brazil by John Updike And another Julia on a quest through the past: The Giuliana Legacy by Alexis Masters

Bibliography:

• Juliet (August 2010)

 

“But then Carolina began to see again, in her dreams. At first the glimpses were so slim they might only have been memories: the sun blazing through the new spring leaves, which seemed to be in danger of disintegrating in its rays; a box her mother kept by her bed, red cloth, embroidered with a white parrot; a silver bowl full of lemons.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 29, 2011)

For a book that focuses on a blind contessa, this is an extraordinarily visual novel.  It’s filled with vivid descriptions: afternoon sun streaming through the scarves in windows, stars that flare into full suns or disappear altogether, bright flashes of bird wings, wicks blazing in chandeliers, colorful marzipan fashioned into the shape of lemons, grapes, apples, and roses, glorious dresses in rich hues of blue watered silk with scarlett ribbons.

The beauty of The Blind Contessa’s New Machine is that the young author, Carey Wallace, shows us exactly what is lost when Carolina Fantoni, an eighteen year old Italian contessa, gradually loses her eyesight.

Her sight becomes a metaphor for the narrowing of her world in general.  She becomes pledged to marry the town’s most handsome and wealthy bachelor, Pietro, who is good to her, but merely because of her exquisite beauty, not because of a meeting of the minds. It is her older married friend Pellegrino Turri, an eccentric inventor who enchants and engages her.   Her mother cautions her:  “After you are married…many things may happen.  You will not speak of him. Neither will your husband, if he is a gentleman.  Do you understand?”

As Carolina loses all sight, Turri creates the world’s first typewriter to help her communicate with the outside world and to build deeper intimacy with him;  something that is fraught with anxiety since both are married to other people.  A simple read reveals a love affair between two people whose very souls connect despite overwhelming odds – a lyrical, poignant revelation of love fulfilled despite difficult odds.

But a deeper read reflects that at its heart, The Blind Contessa’s New Machine true theme is the power of imagination:   the invention of the typewriter (in historical fact, Turri did create this machine in 1808)…the ways our dreams compensate for what is lost in real life…and how our true vision is in our mind’s eye.

Carey Wallace writes, “As the summer wore on, Turri had developed the habit of asking her where they were each time they met. At the question, a vision always sprang up…hidden waterfalls, new gardens, unknown shores. Perhaps lured by these imaginings, her dreams had begun to return as well.”  Interestingly, as Carolina loses her sight, she begins to see whole new and fascinating worlds – those of her own creation.  Her unseeing eyes may be useless, but her mind is stunningly alive and able to create a smorgasbord of mind-pictures.

The author demonstrates a sure hand in her historical descriptions and a knowledge of the cost of encroaching blindness.  Some characters need a little more back story, but all in all, this is a whimsical recreation of a forgotten time in history.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 40 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (June 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carey Wallace
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer Leaving Van Gogh by Carol Wallace

Bibliography:

• The Blind Contessa’s New Machine (July 2010)

“Never mind about Cagliari, about the dark, narrow streets of Castello that unexpectedly opened to a sea of light, never mind about the flowers she had planted that would flood the terrace of Via Manno with color, never mind about the laundry hanging out in the mistral. Never mind about the beach at the Poetto, a long desert of white dunes beside clear water that, no matter how far you walked, never got deep, while schools of fish swam between your legs. Never mind about summers in the blue-and-white striped bathing hut, the plates of malloreddus with tomato sauce and sausage after swimming. Never mind about her village, with the odor of hearth fires, of pork and lamb and the incense in church when they went to her sisters’ for holidays.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (MAR 14, 2011)

These memories of her home island of Sardinia run like a litany through the mind of a love-sick woman on a visit to Milan in 1963. She is considering remaining on the mainland for ever, but the contrast between that sea of light and the fog-bound Northern city tells at least the reader why she cannot. It is actually one of relatively few physical descriptions of the island in this charming little novella by Milena Agus, which reads almost like a family memoir. But the book is filled with the spirit of Sardinian life, which seems to have preserved the old ways well beyond the end of the war, a combination of circumspection and joy. The book preserves the language too, quoting it liberally –although this would have been more effective in the Italian edition, where the differences between the two languages would have been more apparent. These sudden switches between the Sardinian expressions and their English versions are the only breaks in an otherwise flowing translation by Ann Goldstein.

The nameless narrator tells the story of her Grandmother, growing up in Sardinia between the wars, and managing to put off all her suitors until her family despair of her as an old maid. This changes in 1943 when she marries a man whose family have all been killed in an air raid. Their sexual life is peculiar, to say the least: husband and wife sleep at opposite edges of the wide bed except when . . . but that would be telling! Certainly it cannot be called a romantic marriage. Romance enters her life in 1950, when she is sent to a mainland spa for her kidney stones. There, she meets a man known only as the Veteran, and the weeks that follow will change her life. “Longing is sad,” the narrator remarks, “but there’s a trace of happiness in it too.”

We also hear about the narrator’s parents: her father, a world-class pianist, and her flutist mother, both surprising products of their environment. Art, indeed, is the subtext of the entire novel. Where did these talents come from? The grandmother works as a maid so that her son might have piano lessons, yet she runs out of the only concert of his that she ever attends. The flutist’s mother appears to have no time for art whatsoever, and yet her life also has its secrets that are revealed only after her death. Does inspiration find root in the glorious jangle of the island itself, where “if you look down you can see the roofs, the geranium-dotted terraces and the drying laundry, and the agave plants on the cliffs and the life of the people, which seems to you truly small and fleeting, yet also joyful?” Or is it some more intimate disorder, just a step away from madness?

For the suitors who visited Grandmother on successive Wednesdays, then made excuses not to return, were convinced that she was mad. She would scribble vast arabesques on the walls of her room. She would sew intricate embroideries that she would then tear apart. And she would write passionate letters, filled with snatches of poetry or suggestions thought improper from an unmarried girl. Had she not found a husband, her parents would have committed her to a pleasant asylum by the sea. Her life is an always-surprising alternation of repression with passionate outbursts of invention. I now realize that Milena Agus’ novel, which seemed rather insubstantial at first reading, is a time-release capsule filled with tiny granules of passion, and itself the record of the Grandmother’s remarkable invention.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (December 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Milena Agus
EXTRAS:	Mary Whipple’s  review of From the Land of the Moon
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More from Europa Editons: God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi

Bibliography:

• From the Land of the Moon (December 2010)

“Yevgeny passed the violin back to me. I held the instrument up and studied it carefully from all sides. My fingers were trembling slightly, my heart fluttering. Il Cannone had been Paganini’s violin for nearly forty years. It was with him throughout his entire mature career, through all the triumphs as he set Italy, and then Europe, ablaze with his dazzling virtuosity. There was history in this violin. What tales it could tell, I thought, if it had a human voice, instead of just a musical one.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose  (JAN 05, 2011)

Cremona, Italy. On the eve of an important performance, local luthier Gianni Castiglione is called on to examine Il Cannone, the violin once played by Niccolò Paganini, which would be played that night by competition winner Yevgeny Ivanov. A minor adjustment is made and at the recital both violin and musician perform flawlessly. The next day, however, a concert attendee, a French art dealer, is found dead in his Cremona hotel. Two items are noted among his possessions: a locked golden box and a torn corner of a music score from the night’s previous performance. Gianni’s police detective friend, Antonio Guastafeste, enlists his help and the two soon find themselves on an international chase, on the trail of not just a murderer but of a priceless historical treasure, one worth killing for.

Gianni, appearing in author Paul Adam’s well-received The Rainaldi Quartet (2007), is a warmly sympathetic character and a compelling, often philosophical narrator. All the characters are well developed, giving the story a depth and sense of humanity not always found in mysteries and thrillers. Classical music lore and historical detail spring to life, as do descriptions of Paris, London and the Italian countryside. A side plot in which Gianni befriends Yevgeny Ivanov is charming and effective and deepens the mystery—might Yevgeny or his overbearing stage mother be involved in the nefarious goings-on? The story offers the reader insight into the life of a young career musician, the grind of it, the competitions, the grueling performance schedule. As well, a romantic angle to the story helps flesh it out—Gianni’s developing relationship with Margherita Severini, his musings over his first wife who died several years earlier, both of which are presented with a warm, realistic touch.

Paganini’s Ghost is sure to appeal to the music history reader who normally doesn’t “do” mysteries, as well as providing a palatable dose of history to readers who tend to gloss over “those boring details” to get to the action. Adam has a great eye for detail, is economical with his words, uses humor sparingly, which makes it all the more entertaining and delightful when it does appear. Some passages are worth reading and rereading for their subtle artistry, such as the following, which I found myself reading aloud to anyone who would listen:

“He was a short, goatlike man with crooked, slightly buck teeth, a shock of untidy grey hair, and a covering of pale fluff on his chin that was too insubstantial to warrant the term beard. He gave the impression of good-natured affability, until you looked into his eyes. His eyes were cold and cloudy, like chips of frosted glass.”

No, this is not searing, literary fiction that will forever haunt you. It is not high stakes, high-octane thriller writing. It’s better: an engrossing, intelligent, satisfying page-turner I’d recommend to almost anyone, and a “you’ve got to read this” to music history or classical music fans. A great follow-up to The Rainaldi Quartet. This is book two in the series; here’s hoping we will see much more of Gianni and Guastafeste.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Felony & Mayhem (December 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Adam
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:The Rainaldi Quartet

Bibliography:

• An Exceptional Corpse (1993)
• A Nasty Dose of Death (1994)
• Toxin (1995)
• Unholy Trinity (1999)
• Shadow Chasers (2000)
• Genesis II (2001)
• Flash Point (2003: March 2004 in US)
• Enemy Within (2005)
• Oracle Lake (July 2007)

Gianni Castiglione and Antonio Guastafeste series:

• The Rainaldi Quartet (2004;February 2006 in US) (Called Sleeper in the U.K.)
• Paganini’s Ghost (January 2010)

Max Cassidy Series:

• Escape from Shadow Island (February 2010)

“Mafiosi are mistrustful by nature. When they wake up every morning, the first thing they think about is how to go out and screw their neighbor, taking special care to sniff out the slightest risk to themselves of falling into the same trap; if they get ripped off, it can lead to a dangerous and uncontrollable drop in their popularity within the shark-infested social network of their crime family.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (SEP 29, 2010)

If you’re a fan of Italian crime fiction, then reading Massimo Carlotto is a necessity. This author dubbed the “king of Mediterranean Noir” creates bleak worlds in which his Nietzschean anti-heroes struggle to survive. I “discovered” Carlotto in 2007 through Death’s Dark Abyss and The Goodbye Kiss. These excellent crime tales remain some of the darkest Italian noir I’ve ever stumbled across. The Fugitive, a brilliant true account of the author’s life on the run came next, and then last year Poisonville, a novel which addressed the connection between Italy’s toxic waste crisis and the Mafia.

Bandit Love has the feel of a buddy novel, but the relationship of those buddies is entrenched in past lives of crime. The buddies in the novel are ex-con turned unlicensed PI Marco Burrati (aka the Alligator), gangster Beniamino Rossini, and Max la Memoria (Max the Memory). Burrati and Max, now trying to go straight, are co-owners of a bar named La Cuccia, and here Max the Memory (also known as the Fat Man) endlessly cooks his favourite recipes. For their camaraderie and implicit faith in one another, these three characters could easily have strolled out of the Jean-Pierre Melville film Le Cercle Rouge. The action in Bandit Love, however, mostly takes place in Italy, and while it does include a heist, the story centres on the disappearance of Rossini’s belly dancer lover, Sylvie.

The mystery of Sylvie’s disappearance takes place early in the novel, and it’s an event that pulls together the three friends, former partners in crime as they pool resources to hunt for Sylvie. Sylvie’s disappearance takes place in 2006, but as Burrati digs around for clues, he realizes that Sylvie’s disappearance is not a random act, and instead it’s part of a complex chain of events that began in 2004. While Sylvie’s disappearance seems to be a component of an elaborate revenge, Burrati, who’s the main character here, concedes that they’re in a quagmire involving the Serbian organized crime, the Kosovar Mafia and the burglary of a stash of drugs from a laboratory storeroom.

Burrati, who’s in his 40s, drifting along, largely unwilling to commit to anything particularly serious in life, and attracted to dangerous women, is a great character. Here’s Burrati’s PI ethic when it comes to cheating spouses he’s been paid to catch:

“The client was sacred, but then one day it dawned on me that the universe of suspicious spouses deserves only to have its wallets emptied and that, all things considered, cheating on your husband or wife is just one of the many ways of making it through the day, or night. What really pounded the concept into my head was a blonde from Mestre, just outside Venice, who caught me following her one day. She used highly persuasive arguments and tones. “At work, my boss busts my chops, my daughter’s going to have to wear her braces for another two years, and my husband is a regular guy, but I might have been a little overhasty when I decided he was the man of my dreams,” she said practically without a pause. “So I step out on him occasionally; nothing serious, just a bout of pure sex, and then I feel better. Can you understand that?” I nodded and then shared a couple of tricks with her to keep the man to whom she’d sworn eternal fidelity from getting too suspicious.”

Burrati’s world is full of edgy, violent criminals, ambitious Mafiosi, crooked cops, and greedy lowlifes, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that one of the other great characters is a professional snitch-cum-prostitute, the seductive Morena, a woman Burrati can’t quite resist even though he should know better:

“She had tried working in a number of legal venues, but nothing worked out. She was very attractive, she knew how to dress, and she started frequenting the best places in town. After a succession of failed relationships with the sons of wealthy businessmen, she started sniffing cocaine and turning the occasional discreet trick. Occasional, carefully considered, and well paid. Nonetheless, she found herself in trouble with the law. Luckily for her, a compassionate cop with nice manners pointed out an alternative, explaining that she knew lots of things, valuable information that could be worth cold hard cash on the right market.”

Bandit Love’s weakness is that it squashes so much into a fairly slim novel. With a large number of characters–some of whom share a sordid past–it’s hard to keep the story (which is spread over 5 years) straight. At the same time, characters who never appear are mentioned, and for this reason, Bandit Love had the feel of a series novel. First-in-the-series novels are generally weaker as they serve as portals to other worlds. Carlotto’s website details all the books, and reveals that there are five so far–including two others translated into English: The Master of Knots and The Columbian Mule.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 reader2
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Massimo Carlotto
EXTRAS:	Publisher page on Bandit Love
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Death’s Dark Abyss The Goodbye Kiss Poisonville The Fugitive

Bibliography:

The Alligator Series:

• The Colombian Mule (2001; 2005 in US)
• The Master of Knots (2002; January 2014)
• Bandit Love (2009; 2010 in US)

Stand-alone Mystery:

• The Goodbye Kiss (2003; 2005 in US)
• Death’s Dark Abyss (2004; 2006 in US)
• Poisonville (2009) (written with Marco Videtta)
• At the End of a Dull Day (May 2013 in US)

Autobiography:

• The Fugitive (1995; 2007 in US)

“I had a vague idea, just as I was vaguely aware that I was about to cross a threshold that night. Or maybe I’d already crossed it.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (AUG 14, 2010)

The Past is a Foreign Country from former anti-Mafia prosecutor, Gianrico Carofiglio is primarily a psychological tale. While the novel contains a crime story, the main focus, and perhaps even arguably the main crime, is the complete and utter corruption of one human being by another.

Giorgio is a serious young man, a law student dedicated to his studies and committed to his long term girlfriend, but his life changes radically when he’s befriended by the charismatic, good-looking Francesco. They meet at a party when Giorgio intervenes in what threatens to develop into a full-blown beating, and then gradually the two young men form a dangerous relationship. Francesco is a cardsharp, and he introduces Giorgio to his criminal lifestyle. Soon Giorgio partners with his “mentor” Francesco to spend endless nights bilking suckers in the seedy back rooms of bars and clubs. Giorgio’s moral code is systematically stripped away as he finds himself eased into an exciting life of gambling, booze, drugs and casual sex with bored women.

Giorgio’s corruption is an insidious process, and at first Giorgio isn’t even aware that’s it’s happening. When he does realize it, the recognition is punctuated with denial. He’s distanced from everyone who loves him and just like any addiction, he’s in too deep to be able to get out….

While Francesco begins as Giorgio’s mentor, it’s clear that Francesco’s designs on Giorgio are motivated by power and control. Giorgio is seen as a hollow human being who’s swayed by Francesco’s Ubermensch-inspired bizarre moral arguments. Here’s Francesco arguing why cheating at cards isn’t immoral:

“People manipulate and are manipulated, cheat and are cheated constantly, without realizing it. They hurt other people and are hurt themselves without realizing it. They refuse to realize it because they wouldn’t be able to bear it. A magic trick is an honest thing because we know in advance that the reality of it is different from the appearance. And in a way, on a universal level, cheating at cards is honest too. I mean, we’ve taken control of the situation away from pure chance and put it in our own hands. I know you understand. That’s why I chose you. I wouldn’t say these things to anyone else. We’re challenging the mindless cruelty of chance and defeating it. Do you understand? You and I are violating commonplace rules and choosing our own destiny.”

If you’ve ever wondered how the demonic partnerships of people like Leopold and Loeb or Ian Brady and Myra Hindley got started, then you’ll be interested in The Past is a Foreign Country. Ultimately this is a novel that examines the issue of identity and its relationship to morality. The process of maturing includes discovering exactly what one is and isn’t capable of, and in this story, Giorgio’s sense of self is gradually eroded by the much stronger-willed, Francesco. Under Francesco’s tutelage, weak-willed Giorgio becomes his “mentor’s” doppelganger and his willing pupil. While the reader may experience some frustration at Giorgio’s inherently weak nature, the story is riveting. The tale gathers momentum with shades of foreboding and the irresistible fascination of watching an imminent train-wreck. Carofiglio pulls the various threads together for an explosive collusion course in this elegant Italian crime novel. (Translated by Howard Curtis.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books; 1 edition (July 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gianrico Carofiglio (in Italian) Wikipedia page on Gianrico Carofiglio
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Reasonable Doubts

Bibliography:

• Involuntary Witness (2002; 2005 in US)
• A Walk in the Dark (2003; 2006 in US)
• Reasonable Doubt (2003; 2007 in US)

Stand-alone fiction:

• The Past is a Foreign Country (2004; August 2010 in US)