“He nudged his chair close and studied the warm little hand. He smelled of sweat, peppermint, tobacco, old coffee. Despite his accent he wasn’t hard to understand – he talked so slowly and so carefully. She would have a long life, he said. She would have one child… You have special talents, he told her. People don’t realize.” 

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  DEC 15, 2011)

… stated the “tiny old man,” one of the many transient visitors to the Hardy farm in the small village of Willow Bend while reading eight-year-old Norma Joyce’s palm.

Canadian author, Elizabeth Hay, centers her superb, enchanting and deeply moving novel around Norma Joyce and sister Lucinda, her senior by nine years. Set against the beautifully evoked natural environments of Saskatchewan and Ontario, and spanning over more than thirty years, the author explores in sometimes subtle, sometimes defter, ways the sisters’ dissimilar characters. One is an “ugly duckling,” the other a beauty; one is rebellious and lazy, the other kind, efficient and unassuming… In a way, their characters mirror what are also suggested to be traditional features of inhabitants living with and in these two contrasting landscapes: on the one hand the farmers in Saskatchewan, patient and often fatalistic in their exposure to the vagaries of the weather and the hopes and destructions that those can bring, on the other the Ontarians, assumed to have a much easier life and, to top it off: they grow apples… A rare delicacy for the farmers out west. Hay wonderfully integrates the theme of the apple – the symbol of seduction as well as health!

Hay’s novel is as much an engaging portrait of the quirky Norma Joyce as it is a delicately woven family drama, beginning in the harsh “dustbowl” years of the 1930s. Still, Hay gives us much more than that: her exquisite writing shines when she paints in richly modulated prose, rather than with the brush, a deeply felt love poem to nature: its constantly varying beauty in response to a weather that seem to toy with it as in a never-ending dance.

While Lucinda runs the household on the farm with efficiency and dedication under the admiring eye of their widowed father, Norma Joyce succeeds in daily disappearing acts to avoid taking her place as a dutiful daughter. Into their routine lives enters, one day, and seemingly from nowhere, Maurice Dove, attractive, knowledgeable and entertaining, a student of weather patterns, Prairie grasses and much more… Ontario meets Saskatchewan with unforeseeable consequences…

Norma Joyce has always been a child of nature through and through: “She had her own memory of grasses. Five years old and lying on her back in the long grass behind the barn, the June sun beating down from a cloudless sky until warmth of another kind pulsed through her in waves [...] she remembers every name of every plant.” Now, at eight, she has found in Maurice the ideal teacher and she turns into the “perfect student.” Her small hand reaches out to claim him… He, while enchanted with Lucinda, had been “taken aback by [Norma Joyce's] ugliness, a word he modified to homeliness the next morning [...] then at breakfast he thought her merely strange, and now, interesting.”

Hay is too fine and imaginative a writer to let the story develop predictably. There will be many twists and turns with the family moving to Ottawa and Norma Joyce even further away to New York. At every turn, Hay builds an environment in which human beings interact with the natural surroundings they are placed into. Her description of the Ottawa neighbourhood is intimate and real; New York has its own attractions and disappointments. As Norma Joyce grows up, she feels forced into a difficult journey, that, she later realizes has been an essential phase for her to gain confidence in herself and to discover “her special talents” as the old man had predicted: “Her life would stop, then it would start again…”.

As a reader, I was totally engaged with Hay’s exploration of Norma Joyce’s maturing that teaches her, among many other lessons, to let go while allowing herself to also accept new experiences into her life. Her life-long connection to the prairies sustains her at a deep level, her community in Ottawa helps her to find new avenues to her inner soul. At a different level, Hay plays with references to Thomas Hardy, to established naturalists to underline the importance of landscape and our traditional connection to it. She evokes images that remind us of fairy tales, such as the drop of bright red blood on the white pillow or Norma’s ability to pre-sense events happening many miles away. For me they form part of a richly created background to what is a very authentic and meaningful account of one young woman’s road to herself, an extraordinary achievement for a first novel. A Student of Weather collected several awards and, deservedly, was a finalist for the prestigious Canadian Giller Prize in 2000.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Counterpoint (January 2, 2002)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elizabeth Hay
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Late Nights on Air Garbo Laughs

Bibliography:

• Crossing the Snow Line: Stories (1989)
• Small Change: Stories (1997)
• A Student of Weather (2000; 2001 in the US)
• Garbo Laughs (2003)
• Late Nights on Air (2007; 2008 in the US)
• Alone in the Classroom (2011 in Canada)

Non-Fiction:

• The Only Snow in Havana (1992)
• Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (1993)

“Henri Poincaré was a man who longed to believe, a man who was moved by mystery and beauty but a man for whom belief was impossible. He was too much a scientist, ever the investigator in a world bound up in webs of cause and effect that had served him well in every regard save one: that at the hour between dusk and darkness, when the sky slid from deepest cobalt into night, he suspected something large, momentous even, was out there just beyond his reach….”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (NOV 3, 2011)

In Leonard Rosen’s superb mystery, All Cry Chaos, Henri Poincaré, fifty-seven, is a veteran Interpol agent who believes that it is “better to let one criminal go free than to abuse the law and jeopardize the rights of many.” One of the malefactors that Henri tenaciously and successfully tracked down is Stipo Banovic, a Serb accused of ordering and participating in the mass murder of seventy Muslims in Bosnia. A furious Banovic vows to make Poincaré suffer. In a stunning exchange, during which Henri trades invective with the imprisoned criminal, Banovic screams, “Did you once stop to think why a man becomes a killing machine?” He goes on to say, “I will put you in my shoes before I die.”

Such confrontations do Henri no good, especially since he suffers from heart arrhythmia. His wife, Claire, has repeatedly urged her husband to retire to their farm in the Dordogne; she would like him to spend stress-free hours with her, their son, and their beloved grandchildren. Instead, Inspector Poincaré persists in using his experience and uncanny intuition to “anticipate a criminal’s moves as if he were the pursued.”

Poincaré’s next case involves an explosion in an Amsterdam hotel where a thirty-year old mathematician, James Fenster, had been staying prior to delivering a speech to the World Trade Organization. All that is left are the corpse’s charred remains. Who would want to destroy this man of ideas, a gentle and brilliant scholar with no obvious enemies? The search for Fenster’s murderer will lead Henri down many byways, during which he will encounter, among others, a Peruvian activist, a fabulously wealthy mutual fund manager, Fenster’s former fiancée, and a graduate student in mathematics. Most fascinating of all is the possibility that the crime occurred as a result of Fenster’s prodigious mathematical knowledge and wide-ranging imagination.

Nothing is obvious or can be taken for granted in this beautifully constructed and intricate novel. Rosen’s vividly depicted characters have lively discussions that touch on philosophy, economics, psychology, theology, mathematics, and jurisprudence. Passages of deliciously dark humor and vivid descriptive writing enhance All Cry Chaos, a challenging brain-teaser as well as a powerful, literate, and entertaining police procedural. Rosen expresses ideas about family, human rights, morality, and justice that take on added significance in a unsettled world marred by war, financial collapse, political infighting, and lawlessness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 33 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (September 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Leonard Rosen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Bibliography:

Interpol Agent Henri Poincaré series:

• All Cry Chaos (September 2011)

“Mo was tired of the bellicose, lachrymose religion the attack had birthed, was sickened by the fundamentalists who defended it by declaring the day sacred, the place sacred, the victims sacred, the feelings of their survivors sacred – so much sacredness, no limit to the profanity justified to preserve it.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 25, 2011)

Ten years have gone by since the Twin Towers came down on 9/11, and through those years, a wide array of talented fiction writers have attempted to make sense of that pivotal experience: Lynn Sharon Schwartz, John Updike, Jonathan Safran Foer, Claire Messud, to name just a few.

The brilliance of Amy Waldman’s book is that she does not try to apply logic to why 9/11 occurred, nor does she attempt to recreate the complex and traumatic emotions that most Americans felt that day. Instead, she explores something broader: the fallout of a country confused, divided, and sick with fear, clamoring to make sense of the insensible.

The book begins with an ambiguous title: The Submission. On a concrete level, the submission refers to anonymous submissions by architects – in the best democratic tradition – who vie for the right to build an enduring memorial to Ground Zero. But read those words again, and the meaning is far deeper. Is Waldman referring to the submission of Muslims to Qur’an law, forcing them into outsider positions? Or is she writing of the submission of too many Americans to their deepest fears?

A bit of all three interpretations exist, but it becomes increasingly evident that it is the latter that Amy Waldman is most interested in. The skeleton of the story is this: the winner of the submission is an American Muslim, Mohammad Khan, whose true religion is his vaulting ambition. (At a later point, Mo’s lover will say to him, “Now I see that it was about you: your design, your reputation, your place in history.”) Raised in the United States since birth, Mo (as he is universally called) has barely set foot in a mosque his entire life. His design – a garden – is comforting and soothing, particularly to the sole member of the selection jury who is also the widow of a 9/11 victim.

Once Mo’s identity is leaked as the winner, the fervor begins. He is called, among other things, “decadent, abstinent, deviant, violent, insolent, abhorrent, aberrant, and typical.” Amy Waldman, the former bureau chief of the New York Times, knows this territory intimately: the ambitious reporter who will do anything for a scoop (including defecting to the New York Post, which traffics in sensationalism), the equally ambitious governor who strives for reelection while inflaming public sentiment, the radio talk show host who plays into his audience’s prejudices. Before too long, the garden is being depicted as an “Islamic victory garden,” Mo is being called by his full name, and his loyalty to the U.S. is being questioned on all fronts.

Amy Waldman characters are nearly always fully realized: whether she’s writing about Mo, Claire – the wealthy widow and key juror on the selection committee – or a seemingly bit player who is propelled to center stage, the Bangladeshi widow Asma, whose husband, an illegal immigrant, worked as a janitor and was killed in the attack.

Although the author’s point of view is not hard to discern, to her credit, she reveals all sides and that is never clearer than during the scene when the public weighs in about the design. The question becomes: “What history do you want to write with this memorial?” Every side is represented, from the professor of Middle Eastern studies who states, “…Achieving that paradise through martyrdom – murder suicide – has become the obsession of Islamic extremists, the ultimate submission to God: to the author on Islamic gardens who asks, “Since when did we become so afraid of learning from other cultures?”

The pretentious artistic debates… the cynical political showboating… the tactical moves of special-interest groups… the media that fuels rumors rather than reports news – all are depicted here. This well-written, thought-provoking, and nuanced book will appeal to many different kinds of readers. With all the posturing, the truth is often found in just letting go. Or, as Mo eventually discovers, “He had forgotten himself, and this was the truest submission.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August 16, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Amy Waldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Terrorist by John Updike Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

Bibliography:

• The Submission (August 2011)

“And his girl was sleeping beside him, her wonderful blue-and-white flowered nightgown twisted up around her bare, freckled waist. Soft belly rising a little with each breath, her warm damp head resting on Lamb’s outstretched arm, sweat shining at her temples, her mouth open, her little lips open – Christ, she was small – and he was swearing mutely into the space above him that this was good for her. That as long as he was honest and approached this thing from every possible angle, everything would line up and fall into place of its own accord, like atoms helixed and pleated tight within the seeds of cheatgrass needling the hems of her tiny blue jeans: fragile, inevitable, life-giving, and bigger than he.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 12, 2011)

David Lamb has the emotional life of a Rubik’s Cube. All the pieces are there but it seems impossible at times to get his emotional life organized, put together, and working well. He’s like a chess game played by one person, every piece under his dominion, tutelage and control. Only he can checkmate his own self. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

Lamb’s father just died, he is recently divorced and his boss wants him to take a leave of absence because his affair with a co-worker is detrimental to the functional dynamics of the office-place. Lamb is fifty-four years old going on seventeen, graying in the hair, thickening in the middle, and skin loose in places where it once was tight and firm. He lives with adolescent angst in a world of one where his ego is as big as the universe, a narcissist of the first order.

Lamb lives in Chicago and one day is approached by a pubescent eleven year-old girl named Tommie who asks him for a cigarette. Lamb realizes that Tommie is the brunt of her friends’ joke and he decides to get to know her, to make something of her and to teach her about the real world. If this sounds like shades of Pygmalion, it is.

Lamb meets up with Tommie on several occasions and proposes to her that she go on a five-day trip with him to see the true west. He tells her they will go as equals and only if she acquiesces. Tommie agrees and they head out in Lamb’s car to a west that exists only in Lamb’s head; for where they go, there is not much more to see than some domesticated cows, deer, birds, and flora mixed in with strip malls and cheap motels. No matter that Tommie has a mother that will most likely report her missing. Lamb concocts a story that he and Tommie will share so that no one will know the truth about what they are doing together.

Lamb tells Tommie that his name is Gary and he begins to call her Em. Their relationship crosses many distinct and indistinct boundaries with Lamb’s narcissism its guiding light. He believes that Tommie needs him in order to know what possibilities exist in life, to learn what real love is and how it is possible. Is Lamb a pedophile? Is he grooming Tommie in a predatory way? These are questions that arise throughout the novel.

Together, Tommie and Lamb plot out a plan so that Tommie sees herself as a willing accomplice on this trip. She will be gone for only a short time – away from her mother, her friends, her school, her home – and in these few days Lamb will teach her to become worldly and wise, in his eyes positively impacting the path of her future.

Lamb’s hubris knows no bounds. The relationship between him and Tommie, at first restrained and non-physical, becomes more laden with inappropriate intimacies initiated by Lamb. He sees himself as Tommie’s savior. Tommie is at the cusp of adolescence and she is hungry for unconditional love and acceptance.

The author inserts herself into the book in an effort to garner empathy for Lamb and Tommie’s situation. She refers to them as “our Lamb” or “our man” and “our Tommie” or “our girl.” If they are of us, how can they be bad, repulsive, disgusting? At times, these authorial insertions felt manipulative.

Nadzam understands predation and coercion. Lamb, a man who lies, has a grandiosity to the extreme and a pedophilic streak, manages to be rendered by the author as a lost and misguided soul. Tommie’s emptiness needs to be filled and she is the perfect vessel for Lamb.

Lamb is a book to be read in doses. It is as heavy as a pocketful of bricks. Bonnie Nadzam speaks to the universal need and search for love. Lamb has never outgrown his adolescence and Tommie is eager to begin hers. They magnetize towards one another and get sucked deeper and deeper into a plan that goes more and more awry. This is not a gentle book nor is it meant for the faint of heart. It is, however, a thrilling book, a psychological feast and feat. Nadzam manages to make both Lamb and Tommie sympathetic characters at the same time that the reader cringes with disgust.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 29 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bonnie Nadzam
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

Bibliography:

• Lamb (September 2011)

“The sun struck his body at an angle that reduced him to a thin black shadow lined in molton gold and yet when he looked back at me I could make out his smile. It was electric. He motioned for me to follow, but I refused, preferring to sit on a nearby rock, the tide splashing against me as he rushed into the surf. Watching him disappear and reappear in the water, I squinted against the twinkling light that reflected off the water until my sight was infrared. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 3, 2011)

In her debut novel, Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran tells the story of one happy-unhappy family, seen through the eyes of Meena, the youngest of six sisters. Set against the backdrop of suburban British Columbia, Basran paints a richly coloured portrait of a close-knit Punjabi community, caught between the traditions of “home” in India and their Canadian home, where their community is surrounded by a predominantly white, rather laid-back English-speaking society. With an impressively confident approach to a complex subject matter and a lively and engaging writing style, the young Indian-Canadian author explores the emotional turmoil, faced by a girl/young woman like Meena, experiencing the two cultures intimately. Traditional family values are assessed against the young heroine’s need for independence and emotional fulfillment.

From a young age Meena is an astute observer of her surroundings, expressing her thoughts and feelings more easily to her private notebooks than to any one person. Her subdued, hard-working mother, a widow since Meena’s early childhood, appears to be in a state of permanent mourning. The traditional customs and rituals that sustain her physically and mentally, also provide her justification for her strict treatment of her daughters. Speaking little English herself, she insists on Punjabi spoken; she demands of her daughters the traditional obedient behaviour that makes them acceptable as future wives and her constant concern is to find “good” husbands for her daughters, meaning that they are somebody with a good income and, very important, a professional designation, such as a lawyer or a doctor. Love? That may come later, or not.

By the time we share Meena’s intimate musings on her life, all sisters, except one, have or are about to be married according to the traditions. Harj, her favourite sister, was expelled from the family after being falsely accused of misbehaving by one of the many “aunties.”

The aunties, a kind of informal morality police, assume the responsibility of monitoring the young people’s behaviour in public, reporting without delay, when they observe, for example, when a girl alone is talking to a boy. Meena and Harj used to make fun of these aunties, whether related or not, referring to them as the IIA – the Indian Intelligence Agency. With a few evocative sentences, Basran expressively captures the characteristics of different aunties and others in the community: some speak deliberate “Bombay British” (showing off), others are FOBS (Fresh Off the Boat) or DIPs (Dumb Indian Punjabs)… Her sense of humour and irony is conspicuous, revealing an attractive mix of intimate knowledge of and critical distance to such reality. For example, one so-called auntie, claims to visit India every year, “to look for the latest fashion”…”Our styles here,” she explains, “are a year behind.” Nonetheless, while India in her mind is “very progressive,” she prefers to “keep the customs and traditions of Hindustan, of our India” here in Canada. This somewhat twisted logic that may well contribute to undermining any adaptation of Punjabi customs to those of their chosen home country, creates fundamental problems for Meena.

While the young people are not allowed to voice an opinion at extended family gatherings, they realize that they are left with few options as regards balancing the old and the new. Some rebel and are expelled from the comfort and security of the community, others pay half-heartedly lip service and play the “obediency game” at a superficial level, yet, others submit and suffer quietly… Meena, watching her mother’s seemingly unending grief, but also her sisters’ marriages, is increasingly questioning the meaning of love, marriage and family:

“I hated the ritual of belated mourning. We existed between past dreams and present realities, never able to do anything but wait. For what, I didn’t know…”

In her other reality, that of school, university and later in professional life, Meena encounters much ignorance and insensitivity vis-à-vis her and her background. Being reticent herself, she cannot easily explain her life and is usually treated as an outsider. As can be expected, she finds it easier to open up, emotionally and intellectually, to young people, who, for whatever reasons, also feel like outcasts in their respective communities. Liam, one of her classmates, is one person, who can “pull her out of herself.”  Wandering the countryside and beaches around Vancouver, their developing friendship is touching in its innocence, fragility and complexity. Having to resort to secrets and lies at home, she feels pushed into a dual existence. And there is Kal, her gentle childhood friend…

Whether, over time, she can detach herself from the strictures of her traditional upbringing and how she will handle any future decisions for her life, moves the narrative forward in very affecting and, at times, surprising ways. As we accompany Meena’s exploration of a rainbow of emotions – from love, physical intimacy and happiness to loss and pain. Basran’s expressive language takes on additional lyrical qualities when she expresses her heroine’s deep feelings. In the end, what are family values? Can they adapt?

Not wanting to give any spoilers, suffice to say that I was captivated by Meenas’ voice in conveying her reality, her life between two worlds, the growth beyond victimhood. One could quibble over small details, such as lacking clarification of some Punjabi terms and, possibly, the brevity with an element of stereotyping when describing the non-Punjabi environment. Yet, these are not serious flaws. Basran, is without doubt a new author to watch. With Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran was a semi-finalist in Amazon’s 2008 Breakthrough Novel Award and the winner of the 2010 Search for the Great BC Novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mother Tongue Publishing (October 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gurjinder Basran
EXTRAS:	Interview on YouTube
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Namesake by Jumpa Lahiri

Bibliography:

• Everything Was Goodbye (October 2010)

“Just go sit in a café and read the play,” he told us. “Have a coffee. Take a pen.”

He said these things as if they were obvious, as if they were what any normal person would do.

But they weren’t obvious things to most of us. Even if I explored Paris on my own, even if I sat by myself from time to time on the banks of the river, when he suggested them they were different, as if we’d be crazy not to listen. And so those many of us who loved him, we did what he asked. And we felt important, we felt wild, we felt like poets and artists, we felt like adults living in the world with books in our hands, with pens, with passions. And when we returned to school, how many of us prayed he’d ask what we’d done over the weekend? Not only if we’d read but where.

And that’s something.

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (SEP 26, 2011)

Part school story, part existentialism primer, You Deserve Nothing, is a deftly told and absorbing debut. Ostensibly, the story of a troubled teacher who goes too far, You Deserve Nothing is also a thoughtful examination of moral education, of the ways in which we learn to navigate the minefield between duty and freedom, courage and cowardice, the self and the persona. The story, predominately concerned with a scandal that is as shocking as it is mundane, is told from three perspectives some five or so years later: Will Silver’s, a young and charismatic English teacher; Marie de Cléry’s, the beautiful, but insecure daughter of a cruelly elegant mother and a workaholic father; Gilad Fischer’s, an intelligent but lonely boy, the son of an American diplomat and Israeli mother, who idolizes Will.

International School of France is an expensive private school in Paris, and while the majority of students at ISF are “kids who’d been plucked from an Air Force base in Virginia and deposited in Paris, who resented the move, refused to adapt,” the informal style of Will Silver’s Senior Seminar resonates with the privileged offspring of upper-echelon executives and foreign diplomats, kids “who were fluent in several languages and cultures, who were so relaxed, so natural in exquisite apartments at elaborate parties, who moved from country to country, from adult to adolescent with a professional ease.” A dynamic and charismatic teacher, Will pushes his students to think through ideas of duty and freedom, courage and responsibility as they appear in the Bible and the works of Sartre, Camus, Shakespeare, and Faulkner. Although a true believer in the power and importance of literature, Will can’t help but wonder if much of the pleasure of teaching “lies exclusively in the performing, in being adored.” Will enjoys celebrity among the student body, and undoubtedly, his exhortation to pursue your dreams “in spite of fear . . . No matter what. Because you have to. Because you know it’s right. Because you believe in it. Because by not doing it you’re betraying yourself” will remind many of Robin Williams’ character (carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary) in Dead Poet’s Society, and as I read the classroom scenes, I half-expected everyone to jump up on chairs and quote Walt Whitman (O Captain! My Captain).

An obvious association, I know, but I couldn’t help but feel at times that that’s the point, that Will is aping that role – the role of risk-taking, life-changing teacher. This is a book about courage and responsibility, about the ways in which we shirk our freedom and opt out of creating ourselves; moving half-way across the world for a job you love might seem like a brave choice, but for Will it’s an act of cowardice, an abrupt flight from a wife he loves when the pain of his parents’ deaths becomes too much.

Numbing himself with a sort of Sartrean bad faith, Will’s dazzling persona protects him from having to emotionally engage with the world. Even when he flouts conventional morality and starts a sexual relationship with Marie, both a minor and a student at ISF, it is less a principled embrace of desire than a retreat from his despair, having witnessed a murder, and his shame at having done nothing to apprehend the murderer. Even the young and inexperienced Marie starts “to have the impression that [she] was making love to a ghost or something.” However, there are no easy villains here, and Alexander Maksik wisely avoids moralizing their relationship. Although Marie, masking her inexperience and insecurity, plays at being the seductress, Maksik allows her a honest sexuality, and Will, unable to doff his role as the instructor, gently teaches her how to enjoy her sexual nature. This is not to excuse Will, of course. Mickey Gold, ISF’s bumbling biology teacher, hits it on the head when he advises Will that trading in the complicated (and reciprocated) love of a real woman for the empty pleasure of “those adoring eyes” is “a coward’s game.”

Just as Marie’s disappointment with Will is inevitable, Gilad’s hero-worship can only mature through disillusionment. Gilad, in the way of the young, conflates the thrilling ideas being taught with the character of his teacher and when, after a heartbreaking scene with his parents, he sits in a café, reading Camus, it pleases him to think that Will would approve of him “there alone, so early in the morning, paying such attention to simple, beautiful things” and when Gilad admits that his infatuation was so complete he “wanted to go to war for him,”,I was reminded of one of the best instances of hero-worship and disillusionment in literature: Nicholas Rostov’s infatuation with Tsar Alexander in War and Peace (in case there’s any doubt: I mean this as a compliment). In fact, it’s partly  Maksik’s astute understanding of adolescent psychology and mannerism that makes this book so good and his characters so real, as captured here in this bantering dialogue between Will and a former student, Mazin:

“ . . . I miss our talks.”
“But we’re having one now.”
“Yeah, on my free period. Lame.”
“I’m flattered you’d waste your free period with me, Maz.”
“Yeah, well don’t get too excited. Anyway Silver, school’s a waste of my time.”
“Carrot?”
“No man, I don’t want a carrot, I want to know why I shouldn’t just move to LA and start a band.”
“Who says you shouldn’t?”
“Please. Everyone.”
“You realize, right, that this is a tired conversation? You know everything I’m going to tell you. It’s the height of boring.”
“No, I don’t. You’re the height of boring. What are you going to tell me?”

However difficult Marie and Gilad’s loss of innocence is, narrated from a place of relative wisdom many years later, that past pain is softened. In comparison, Will is frustratingly opaque, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the place he was narrating from: had he found the courage to dismantle his armor or was he “teaching the needy in some unspecified African nation” or “living cheap in Thailand,” still a ghost?

You Deserve Nothing is an auspicious debut, both for Alexander Maksik who shows himself here to be an unfairly talented writer and for the new Europa Editions’ imprint, edited by Alice Sebold (of The Lovely Bones fame), Tonga Books. I look forward to seeing more from both.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 73 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alexander Maksik
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and Interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah

Bibliography:

• You Deserve Nothing (August 2011)
• A Marker to Measure Drift (July 2013)

“If you take any event and isolate it, blow it up huge so you can study its slightest grain, there’d be a million tiny impossibilities worming every which way across the landscape, all the unlikely variables, all of the unaccounted-for seconds, all of the chance collisions falling too perfectly into place. That’s what life is.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 19, 2011)

Lightning People is an electrifying book, a high voltage tightrope of five 30-something characters that are walking the edge in the post 9/11 New York City. It’s a book about true connections, missed connections and downright parasitic connections. Its energy strikes and surges randomly, briefly illuminating, sometimes plunging back into the darkness. And by the end, it leaves the reader rubbing eyes as he or she emerges back into a transformed light.

In crucial ways, its theme is similar to the Oscar-winning movie Crash. One of the key characters in that movie said: “In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”

Move the setting from L.A. to New York. An ensemble of rootless characters crash into each other as they struggle to find meaningful interactions. There is the actor Joseph Giteau, who left his Ohio home and his reclusive and conspiracy-obsessed mother, newly married to Del Kousavos, a snake expert at a city zoo who is on a work visa from Greece. In the aftermath of 9/11, he finds himself at thriving prisonerofearth conspiracy meetings, trying to take stock and make sense of his life.

Joseph and Del are surrounded by others: Raj, Del’s exotic and not-yet-forgotten former lover and his sister Madi, Del’s best friend, an executive at a company outsourcing jobs to India. And lastly, there is William Asternathy, whose career is on permanent hiatus, on “fast live-wire current circulating through the city.”

All of these characters try to remake their fate and their destiny in that shining yet alienated city of re-creation, New York. Del considers: ”The whole city was pulsating with electricity. It had been all of the light that had first attracted her to New York, had brought all of the fresh arrivals beating around the same shine. But what happens when her eyes finally adjusted to the light?” And William thinks, “No one in New York has parents. Or families for that matter. We’re all pretty much immigrants taking shelter here.”

As the action pulsates forward, secrets emerge or remain hidden, and it’s very important for each reader to experience the arc of these secrets individually. Among the questions raised are, “Will a generational health secret derail Joseph and Del’s marriage and end Joseph’s life prematurely? How will William’s dark self-destructive streak affect those around him and what damage will it do? And are the conspiracy theories – deriving from the Latin phrase “breathe together” – a shared paranoia or are they self-fulfilling prophecies?”

As these characters brush against each other – sometimes willingly, sometimes inadvertently – sparks are set off. “Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice until it does,” muses Joe. Coincidences are packed into coincidences, but that is the fabric of the novel; how our lives all intersect and how one shocking personal tragedy can alter our paths, individually and collectively.

This is an intricate novel, beautifully plotted, brimming with high-stakes paranoia and calamity and angst, narrated with vigor and flashes of insight. It is difficult to believe this is a debut novel and it certainly goes on my Top Ten list for 2011.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soft Skull Press; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christopher Bollen
EXTRAS:	Interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Handbook of Lightning Survivors by Michele Young-Stone The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

Bibliography:

• Lightning People (August 2011)

“I’m afraid I’ve made more than a few mistakes along the way”

“Well, then, unmake them. That’s what life is about—making and unmaking mistakes, getting back on the track and moving on. The problem with mistakes is that they have the habit of growing into such big, fat, lovely excuses.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (SEP 17, 2011)

Thirty-one year old William Dysart should be on top of the world. He is a successful attorney, lives in a beautiful home, and is married to Arabella, a stunner who turns heads wherever she goes. Gregory Murphy looks beneath the veneer of the Dysarts’ seemingly enviable life in Incognito.

William is growing tired of doing the bidding of Phil Havering, the managing partner at his law firm. In addition, he has become disenchanted with his wife who, in spite of her great beauty, is insecure and demanding. After six years of marriage, the couple is childless, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that Arabella is a social-climbing, vain, and shallow individual who is more interested in material possessions and status than she is in her relationship with William. “It was rare now that their conversations did not end in a quarrel.”

This is Edith Wharton country —- New York society in 1911 -— and, for the most part, Murphy mines this fertile territory effectively. The premise is intriguing: William is dispatched by his boss to Long Island to convince the lovely Sybil Curtis that it would be in her best interest to sell her five-acre property to Lydia Billings, a fabulously wealthy widow who wants to augment her two-thousand acre estate. William is surprised to learn that Sybil is a self-possessed and independent young woman who is not interested in selling her home, even for the princely sum of ten thousand dollars. Dysart senses that there is ill-will between Lydia and Sybil that goes far deeper than the matter at hand. As the weeks pass, the attorney finds himself sympathizing with Sybil, while Havering is furious that William cannot convince Sybil to accept Lydia’s offer.

Incognito effectively unmasks the hypocrisy of affluent, prominent, and degenerate people who carefully hide their vices behind a veneer of respectability. William and Arabella spend a great deal of time attending charity functions, dinner parties, and other lavish events, and although Arabella is in her element, William is becoming bored with the strain of keeping up appearances. It is painful to observe his deteriorating marriage, and in flashback, we eventually learn why William settled for this loveless union instead of seeking a partner with more depth and character. This is a touching study of men and women at cross purposes. Although William is anxious to bring about a rapprochement between Sybil and Lydia, until he finds out why there is bad blood between them, he is powerless to accomplish his mission.

Murphy stumbles, however, when he makes some labored points about the pettiness, prejudice, and selfishness of those who occupied the highest strata of New York society. They socialize compulsively, spend money lavishly, and care little about such issues as the rights of women and the oppressed. Sybil is a mysterious and provocative character who is less than candid about her tragic past. William is at heart a good man who knows that he will never be content unless he makes some fundamental changes in his life. The book’s main flaw is that, as it progresses, the narrative becomes heavy-handed and melodramatic, with too many revelations, ugly confrontations, and a conclusion that is a bit too pat. Although most of us would agree that the keys to happiness are fulfilling relationships, meaningful work, and peace of mind, Murphy might have conveyed this message with a bit more subtlety. As it stands, Incognito has some powerful scenes, an appealing protagonist in William Dysart and, for the most part, a story that keeps us turning pages, wanting to know what will happen next.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Berkley Trade; 1 edition (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gregory Murphy
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Bibliography:

• Incognito (July 2011)
• Maisie Villiers

“Who’d chook a boy just to get his Chicken Joe’s?”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 14, 2011)

Around ten years ago, a young Nigerian immigrant, 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, was beaten by boys barely older than him in Peckham, a district in South London. Damilola later bled to death. The incident sparked outrage in the United Kingdom and was subsequently pointed to as proof that the country’s youth had gone terribly astray.

The same incident seems to have also inspired a debut novel, Pigeon English, with 11-year-old Harri Opoku filling in for the voice of Damilola Taylor. As the book opens, Harri has recently emigrated from Ghana to London with his older sister and his mother. Dad and younger sister and the rest of the family are still in the native country and Harri is often brought back to his home country through extended phone calls exchanged between the two sides.

Like most children, Harri is not privy to the intricate goings-on in the lives around him. It’s a fact made worse by the displacement brought about by immigration. Harri must not just figure out the ways of the world, he must do so in a new place where the rules of the game are entirely unfamiliar. Even if life in the ghetto is painful and lived in extreme poverty, Harri finds plenty to keep him in good spirits. For one thing, he wants to try every kind of Haribo (candy) in the store close to him.

Even better he has struck a tentative friendship with a local boy, Dean. With Dean’s help, Harri is determined to solve a recent crime—one where a kid like himself is found brutally murdered in a struggle over a fast food meal. The devastating tragedy affects Harri deeply and he is determined (in a typical naïve and childish way) to find the killers. Unfortunately he gets too close to the real killers—people who might not appreciate interference from a bright-eyed curious kid.

Pigeon English is narrated through Harri’s voice so the English is broken and mixed in with special words whose meanings become apparent only after a few readings. “Bo-styles” for example, means very good while “Asweh” is the more readily understandable, “I swear.”

Harri’s musings and experiences can be funny at one moment and heartbreaking the next. Author Stephen Kelman has done a terrific job in capturing the boy’s voice. The problem with Pigeon English is that the same voice eventually becomes a distraction. It never becomes seamless enough so the reader can concentrate on what the boy is saying—you’re forever hung up on how he’s saying it. And of course there are times when he says too much: “I can make a fart like a woodpecker. Asweh, it’s true. The first time it happened was an accident. I was just walking along and I did one fart, but then it turned into lots of little farts all chasing it.” Did we really need to know that?

It was entirely a coincidence that I read this novel right around the time that the London riots made headline news around the world. As was reported by the New York Times and other news outlets, it was the youth who were the primary looters and criminals in these riots—an effect brought about by a “combination of economic despair, racial tension and thuggery.” The riots, the paper reported, “reflect the alienation and resentment of many young people in Britain.” Read at this particular moment in history, Pigeon English then seems much more than a fairly good read—it also comes across as an important one. One can’t help but wonder how much the timely relevance of its subject matter lead Pigeon English to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year.

“I made the choice, nobody forced me,” says Harri’s mother about the decision to move her kids to London from Ghana. “I did it for me, for these children. As long as I pay my debt they’re safe and sound. They grow up to reach further than I could ever carry them.” Pigeon English is a moving novel not just because it is a stark story about London’s ghettos, but because it reminds us that for many in the developing world, a move to this kind of a hell is actually a move up.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stephen Kelman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

Bibliography:

• Pigeon English (July 2011)

“The circus arrives without warning.

No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers.  It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 13, 2011)

Illusion and reality intersect and overlap to reveal a luminous, mesmerizing character– Le Cirque des Rêves (The Circus of Dreams). As the sun is the center of the solar system, the Circus of Dreams is the central character of this enchanting tale. Like a magnetic field, Le Cirque des Rêves pulls in other characters like orbiting satellites around a bright star. This isn’t your childhood circus–rather, this is more in tune with Lewis Carroll or M.C. Escher–a surreal and hypnotic place of the imagination and spirit.

Le Cirque des Rêves is a dazzling venue of magical intensity and Tarot images, a story of dreams and desires. It is an invention that reflects the Jungian collective unconscious and personifies the archetypes of polarity–night/day, good/evil, life/death, safety/danger, among other symbols and experiences that have repeated themselves since ancient times. The manipulations of these images and forces speak to the core of the story.

At the end of the nineteenth century in London, two self-regarding necromancers arrange a duel, part of an ongoing contest reaching back through their long history. Prospero the Magician and “the man in the grey suit” agree to provide a worthy opponent each for this contest of illusion, a competition that is only partly visible to the reader’s eye. Prospero trains his daughter, Celia; the grey-suited man selects a fitting boy, Marco, from an orphanage. Sealed with a ring in a familiar ritual, the turf war proceeds.

When Marco and Celia become adults, the duel commences within the venue of the atmospheric, aromatic circus, which is open only at night, in colors black and white (and shades of silver). The duel and its setting is showcased in its artistry of conception, the beauty of its containment, and the mystery of its migration. Le Cirque des Rêves travels silently, invisibly, from country to country, unannounced. There’s a tent of stars, a room of sculpted ice, a pool of tears. The fireplace burns eternally with a white-hot blaze. The landscape of the duel’s setting is a phantasmagorical tour de force.

The cast is inseparable from Le Cirque des Rêves. Among others, they include the tattooed contortionist, Tsukiko, the twins, Poppet and Widget, (born on the dawn of the circus’ opening night), and the Tarot reader, Isobel. Marco is a chameleon-like magician and Celia is the Isis of alchemy. They mirror the archetypes of Jung’s collective unconscious–the shadow; the animus/anima; the hero; the mother; sacrifice/rebirth; the Self, and the wise old man.

The tarot readings, like the story’s progression, are dynamic components of character transformation, digging down to the layers of repressed memories and sublime intuition. ??Within this process of transformation, the individual characters of this story must journey through uncharted terrain like portals in the soul, proceeding toward a cosmic relationship with humanity. How to separate reality from illusion and arrive at the totality of the Self? What obstacles and pathologies must be overcome to achieve a kindred consciousness? Likewise, the duelists become lovers, complicating the stakes of the game–if you win, you lose.

A magnificent, spectral clock is commissioned from a renowned German clockmaker, a clock that is mystical and harlequin, dreamlike and figurative. It stands like an emissary at the gates of the circus, a timepiece of magical stratification, an emblem of temporal shifts. No patrons can enter until dusk, and all must be gone by dawn.

In Erin Morganstern’s enchanting first novel, illusion and reality are two sides of the same coin. Inspiration and imagination become tangible territory, a dream circus of the wakened mind, a magical mystery tour of the unconscious. This is a Fool’s (Hero’s) journey, an adventure for the immortal child and enduring lovers, to a star-filled tunnel and a silver sky. Step from bare grass to painted ground, eye the towering tents of black and white stripes. Enter.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1085 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Erin Morganstern
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers

Bibliography:

• The Night Circus (September 2011)