“The children are frozen, too frightened to move closer to one of the women. The sound they heard while still in the house has advanced, roaring its way above them. There is a crash against the storm door, and they all scream, ducking with their arms held over their heads. Ellis drops his candle and, in the weak light left from the candle Mae is still holding, she sees his terrified face. Ruby is crying. Lavinia has Little Homer’s face pressed into the front of her dress as if she can shield him by blocking his sight. Mae reaches out her arms and Ruby and Ellis come to her immediately. She blows out her candle and drops it so she can hold both children tight against her. In the darkness, Lavinia cries, “Dear Lord! Oh, dear Lord!” Then the roaring moves on, like a train careering over their heads. The sound recedes and, eventually, even the wind seems to subside. When there is no longer any sound except rain on the cellar doors, the children hold utterly still, waiting to see what will come next.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 5, 2014)

Falling to Earth is the kind of novel that makes me want to grab the very next person I see and urgently say, ”You MUST read this.” I read this rabidly with increasing awe and respect that Kate Southwood had the chops to create a debut novel with this degree of psychological insight, restrained power, and heartbreaking beauty.

The story centers on a tragedy of unimaginable proportions – a tornado hits the small Illinois town of March in 1925, causing devastation and grievous loss in the homes of every single resident of the town.

Except one.

That one is Paul Graves, a man of dignity and integrity, who lives with his wife Mae, his three young children and his mother, Lavinia. Incredibly, nothing in Paul’s life is touched – not his family, not his home, and not his thriving lumber business…which, in fact, is even more in demand as townsfolk order coffins for the burials of their loved ones.

As the townspeople are forced to bear up under nearly unbearable grief, their envy of Paul’s “unfair” providence reaches a fever pitch and they begin to turn on him – and against him – in droves. Paul, meanwhile, labors under extreme survivor’s guilt as Mae increasingly falls into a dark depression.

Kate Southwood writes,

“A tornado is a ravenous thing, untroubled by the distinction in tearing one man apart and gently setting another down a little distance away. It is resolute and makes its unheeding progress until, bloated and replete, it dissipates. A tornado is a dead thing and cannot acknowledge blame.. If a tornado smashes your house or takes your child, it does no good to blame it…Even after you’ve yanked up another house in the place the old one stood and planted flowers in the dirt where you laid your child, your fury remains as well your desire to lay blame.”

A parable of sorts, this magnificent novel strives to answer questions that have haunted humankind since early times: how do we comprehend the forces of nature and our own fates? How do we manage the extreme hostility and envy that result from nature’s unfairness? How do we break the cycles of revenge, vengeance, retribution and reprisal? These questions transcend this book and can easily be asked of modern tragedies – Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, for example.

The themes are universal: love and loss, family, jealousy and suspicion, guilt and survival. I will not spoil the ending but I will say this – it is masterly and seamlessly brought together all the themes of the book and literally let me gasping.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (March 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Southwood
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another tornado-based story: Sing Them Home By Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• Falling to Earth (March 2013)

“I got into trouble a long time ago. I was a kid. Then the other thing happened and I went to prison. I don’t steal, I don’t hurt people – that other stuff, it’s like someone else’s history.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JAN 4, 2014)

I’ve become an avid fan of Gene Kerrigan’s Irish mysteries. They are literate page-turners that are complex in plot with wonderful characterizations. This is the second one that I’ve read and I plan on reading each of them.

In this novel, Danny Callaghan has gotten out of jail seven months ago after serving an eight year term for manslaughter. He beat a man to death with a golf club when he was 24. He is now 32 and trying to live by the letter of the law, working for his bar-owning friend Novak, doing pick-ups and deliveries of people and materials. While he was in jail, his marriage to Hannah ended in divorce and he is alone with little support except for Novak, who is his confidante. While he was in jail, Novak was basically the only person who visited him there.

One evening, Danny is sitting in the Blue Parrot, Novak’s bar, when two gunmen come in. Danny isn’t sure if they are coming in to kill him or someone else. It happens that they are trying to kill a small-time punk named Walter Bennett. The gun doesn’t fire properly and Danny ends up saving Walter’s life. This puts Danny in a very precarious position because Walter is wanted by some big-time gang who feels like he’s been snitching on them to the police. Now Danny is in the middle of things. However, Danny is also worried that they were coming for him because when his trial was going on, the cousin of the man he killed told Danny that he would seek retribution: “Blood for blood.”

The two gunmen, Karl Browse and Robby Nugent are young and bad, looking for people to kill. They have been hired by a mob boss named Lar Mackendrich who controls a portion of Dublin’s territory. This is the first assignment he’s given to these two and he’s not happy with the outcome. He wants it rectified, and soon. He wants to see Walter dead and wants to know why Danny got himself in the middle of things.

Danny lives in a small apartment, so small that you can probably touch the walls on each side by standing in the middle and holding your arms out straight. He misses his ex-wife, Hannah, and many nights he drives by her house and parks nearby just staring at it. It’s not that he wants her back but he misses the warmth and love that he once had.

There is a lot of blood and gore in this book and it is not for the faint of heart. It is remediated a bit by some humor but it is hardcore through and through with a noir bent.

The environs of Dublin, where it takes place, is after the real estate bust, and people are clamoring for work. The economy is up the creek and there is no more easy money to be had. This is a sharp contrast to the way things were before Danny went to jail. Prior to being incarcerated, he had a kitchen cabinet business and was happy working with his hands. He no longer wants to be an entrepreneur. Passing the time picking up people and packages with a car is perfect for him at this time in his life.

Kerrigan can really write. He knows how to get deep into a character’s soul and put him out there with all the accoutrements for the reader. That’s what I like most about this author. I have a feel for each and every one of the characters in the book. There are no red herrings and everyone in the book is there for a meaning and the reader gains a depth of feeling for everyone.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (October 1, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Gene Kerrigan
EXTRAS:	Europa page on Dark Times in the City
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Little Criminals The Midnight Choir

Bibliography:

• Little Criminals (2005; 2008 in US)
• The Midnight Choir (2007)
• The Rage (February 2013)
• Dark Times in the City (2009; October 2013 in US)

Nonfiction:

• Hard Cases: True Stories of Irish Crime (1996)
• Another Country: Growing Up in the 50’s Ireland (1998)
• Never Make a Promise That You Can’t Break: How To Succeed in Irish Politics (2002)
• The Big Lie: Who Profits from Ireland’s Austerity? (2012)

“When Rose, voice quivering, told Washington Harold what she’d seen, he said it didn’t do to focus on what might have happened, better to rejoice at a fortunate result. Most deaths, he opined, were accidental, even the vicious ones.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  AUG 31, 2011)

The late Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, is better known in Britain than over here. The winner of the Whitbread Award, and five times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2000, joining AS Byatt and preceding Margaret Drabble. She published sixteen novels over the course of her life, and was working on her seventeenth, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress at the time of her death. Cast in a clear trajectory heading for an unmistakable conclusion, it does not feel unfinished, though the enigmatic compression which I gather is typical of all her books may perhaps be a little more enigmatic than usual.

This is a road trip novel, reflecting a journey across America that Bainbridge herself made in 1968, but this is a nightmare America where nothing comes quite into focus. A young Englishwoman named Rose, a dental receptionist, arrives from London with a few items in a suitcase and an absurdly small amount of money. Her ticket has been paid for by a man she knows as Washington Harold (though he actually lives in Baltimore), who obviously expects a gratifying holiday liaison. But Rose is not as he expected, either in appearance or behavior. She has come to America to reconnect with someone referred to only as Dr. Wheeler, who had somehow been very important to Rose during her adolescence. Harold, it appears, also wants to find Wheeler, though for very different motives which he keeps hidden at first. But Wheeler himself is elusive, both in character and location. At times he seems some kind of preacher or guru; at times a political operative; sometimes even a revolutionary. He never stays in one place for very long. Rose and Harold’s search takes them in a camper from Washington to upstate New York, then across the country to Malibu and finally Los Angeles.

The early summer of 1968 was a troubled time. The Vietnam War was at its height. Rose arrives in a Baltimore still seething from the race riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King; she will arrive in Los Angeles the day that Robert Kennedy is killed. In between, Rose and Harold will be exposed to several moments of random violence themselves, and news will come through of the attempted shooting of Andy Warhol in New York: “Rose, tone truculent, asked him why Yanks kept shooting each other; was it because they were all allowed to own guns? It was obvious she’d never heard of Warhol.” Indeed, she is neither well educated nor worldly wise. But we do find out a little more about her traumatic past and discover that, despite her flirtations with religion, she is not quite as innocent as she might appear. As Harold drops in on former friends, we find out a little more about his life also, with hints about why he is so determined to track down the mysterious Dr. Wheeler.

The novel comes to a poignant focus at the end, but few of the mysteries are completely cleared up; I suspect they were never meant to be. Despite much detail about driving, diners, campsites, and roadside restrooms (and extended play on the different American and British expectations for personal hygiene), there is a slight layer of unreality to the whole story; this is America as viewed through a B-movie lens. But in some respects America IS a B movie, and 1968 was a nightmare from which the country has never fully woken. I wish I could be sure that this is Bainbridge’s point.

When I look back and see that none of her American characters (Wheeler, Harold, and all his friends) can be placed unambiguously as to socio-economic status, I wish I could be sure that this was deliberate obfuscation rather than ignorance. I admit to having been thrown for a loop early on, when very little of Rose’s journey seemed to fit. How could she work four hours in the dentist’s office before taking the bus to Heathrow for her transatlantic flight? At what airport would she walk through the rain straight from the plane to the arrivals lounge? I live in Baltimore, and know that no sensible route from there to Washington would take three hours and approach the capital from the West. Were these errors, or deliberate choices to knock the reader off balance? Eventually, I gave in to them and spent the rest of the book in the waking dream that Bainbridge presumably intended. But the fact that this is a posthumous novel — perhaps unfinished, perhaps inadequately edited — raises unfortunate doubts in addition to those so magnificently planted by the author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page Beryl Bainbridge
EXTRAS:	Man Booker Bridesmaid
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More stories of America from foreign travelers: Parrot and Oliver in America by Peter Carey Fanny by Edmund White

Bibliography:

• A Weekend with Claud (1967; 1979)
• Another Part of the Wood (1968; 1979)
• Harriet Said… (1972)
• The Dressmaker (1973)
• The Bottle Factory Outing (1974)
• Sweet William (1975)
• A Quiet Life (1976)
• Injury Time (1977) 
• Young Adolf (1978)
• Winter Garden (1980)
• Watson’s Apology (1984)
• An Awfully Big Adventure (1989)
• The Birthday Boys (1991)
• Every Man for Himself (1996) 
• Master Georgie (1998)
• According to Queeney (2001)
• The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (August 2011)

“Calm down. Just calm down. It will all be fixed tomorrow. Change the brake light and touch up the paint, it won’t take all day.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  AUG 31, 2011)

Very early in the morning of August 31 1997, Princess Diana was killed when her car crashed at high speed into a pillar in a road tunnel near the Pont de l’Alma in Paris. Evidence at the crash site suggested that the driver of the car might have lost control after side-swiping a slower-moving car, a white Fiat Uno, near the tunnel entrance. It was not until 2006 that the driver of this car was identified as a young man of Vietnamese origin, but at the time that Laurence Cossé published this novel in 2003, the Fiat still posed a mystery, leaving the author to imagine a story of her own. Clearly wanting to follow the astounding success of Cossé’s A Novel Bookstore, Europa Press has commissioned a translation of this earlier book, produced with Europa’s trademark elegance. But this is a less relaxed, more edgy book that will appeal to quite a different audience.

Conspiracy theories aside, the driver of the Fiat was clearly not directly to blame for the crash, so the big stumbling block is to find a convincing reason for his or her not going immediately to the police. The driver in the real situation might have had many reasons: momentary panic, fear of involvement, then fear of being blamed for not coming forward earlier; the details do not really matter so long as the driver is just a name in a newspaper. But once we get to know the driver as a real person, once we get into her heart and her head as the protagonist of a novel, the reasons had better be good ones. Cossé uses her feminine empathy (yes, Laurence is a female name in France) to imagine a young woman, Lou Origan, a 25-year-old cook at a Paris restaurant, returning home to the suburbs. Her initial reactions are entirely credible; the huge black Mercedes bearing down on her at more than double her speed, knocking into her not once but twice, then bursting into flames; no wonder she drives home in shock.

It is only when Lou wakes up and listens to the radio that Cossé really runs into problems. No doubt wanting to plunge into the story at breakneck speed, she has not had time to establish Lou as a fully-dimensioned character; her relationships with her live-in boyfriend Yvon (an aficionado of fast motorbikes and sleek sailboats) and her co-workers at the restaurant are sketched in only later. So all we have of Lou is her panic. Cossé’s empathy produces only the kind of girly helplessness that I thought had more or less vanished from serious fiction. Lou’s attempts to take control of the situation are generally negated by fecklessness in carrying them through. Before long, she feels herself hunted and in fear of her life, running around in circles despite her determination to make a clean break. But to a large extent, these problems are inherent in Cossé’s choice of subject. A Novel Bookstore contained elements of suspense and detection also, but it was held together by the author’s deep love of books and appreciation for the people who write, read, and sell them. This, by contrast, is a book about a woman falling apart.

The novel does pick up half-way through when another character enters the story, a man who knows Lou’s secret. Now Lou has another person to contend with, a situation which brings out reserves of courage, endurance, and (in the one climactic scene) inspiration that she had not the opportunity to show before. But despite this one addition to the cast, we are still basically trapped inside Lou’s mind, and the feeling of going around in circles continues. Unfortunately, too, the climax comes too early, so the last section of the novel just runs out of steam — though Cossé springs a nice ironic twist as a final flourish.

Readers who enjoy the woman-in-peril genre may find themselves biting a few nails in delicious anguish, and there is always the interest of the Di-and-Dodi crash (since Cossé stays very close to the facts). But these are unlikely to be the same readers who so enjoyed A Novel Bookstore.  (Translated by Alison Anderson.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Laurence Cossé
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Novel Bookstore

Partial Bibliography (translated books only):

• A Corner of the Veil (1996)
• A Novel Bookstore (2010 in US)
• An Accident in August (2011 in US)
• Bitter Almonds (April 2013 in US)

“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)

“Guests would arrive in armoured 4x4s or mud spattered jeeps, tanned men with bellies and moustaches, who chatted by the pool all weekend gripping beers and caipirinhas; stunning wives on sunloungers with tinted hair and manicured nails and cosmetically enhanced bodies, rotating in the heat like rotisserie chickens.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (NOV 12, 2010)

The main character in James Scudamore’s novel Heliópolis is twenty-seven-year-old Ludo. Born in terrible poverty in a Sao Paulo Favela (shantytown), Ludo and his mother had the good fortune to come to the attention of Rebecca, the British, charity-minded wife of one of the city’s richest businessmen, Zeno (Zé) Generoso. Zé and Rebecca, who have one daughter, Melissa, formally adopted Ludo, and he has a privileged upbringing which comes with a price; he’s constantly reminded of his humble beginnings, his good fortune and how much he owes to his benefactors. Separated from his mother who remains as the cook at Zé’s country estate, Ludo has no self-identity. His life is shaped by the desires of the Generoso family, and while he may be the adopted son, he’s little more than a trained house-serf.

The novel explores the vast disparities between the rich and the poor, and just how the characters adapt to their respective roles in this overwhelmingly non-static society. To Zé, it’s simple: “there is no such thing as a middle class, and no such thing as a non-criminal underclass.” It’s “us” (Zé and his fellow plutocrats) vs. the rest of Brazil. Zé and his family live into a fortified compound within the exclusive Angel Park community. Life in Angel Park has a surreal quality, but at the same time the wealthy who sprawl inside these impregnable walls live with incredible paranoia when it comes to the issue of security. Here’s Zé’s mansion:

“The house he flies home to every weeknight is a fortified compound, buffered by terraced ponds and beds of hostile spike shrubs. His self-watering lawns are patrolled by two pure-bred fighting mastiffs, which roll over on demand for Zé and his family, but would take the leg off an uninvited guest. His palm trees contain motion-sensitive cameras connected to the hub of technology in the guardhouse; if you disturbed so much as a blade of his grass, Zé would know about it. And that’s just the beginning. Before you even get to the house you have to enter the compound itself, which is defended by bundles of oiled razor wire and a tooled up crew that resembles a private army rather than a team of security guards. It would take a thief with Special Forces training to get past the outer walls, let alone breach Zé’s last line of defence, and even if you did, you wouldn’t find him—he’d be sealed in his tungsten panic room long before you got in.”

Heliópolis is actually the name of the largest favela in Sao Paulo, but for this novel the term could refer to the lives of the extremely wealthy set–people who never travel at street level, but who instead move from building to building via helicopter:

“Melissa’s father, Zé Fischer Carnicelli, hasn’t been down to street level in the city for over fifteen years. He lives in a gated community of 30,000 inhabitants, way out of town, and is flown there to his downtown office every morning in a helicopter that has the word Predator painted graffiti-style over its nose, along with gnashing teeth and a pair of evil yellow eyes. He’s approaching retirement, but he still keeps regular office hours. A chauffeur drives him between his house and the helicopter, then back again in the evening. During the day, he might hop to another high-rise to meet someone for lunch, or to attend an afternoon meeting, but he never touches the pavement. It’s not just a question of safety; if he went by car he could get snared in a traffic jam lasting hours. Nobody who’s anybody gets driven to work in the city these days.”

When the novel begins, Ludo works in a nebulous “communications” company in Sao Paolo. His repulsive boss, Oscar, a lifelong friend of Zé’s, vacillates when it comes to his attitude to Ludo. On one hand, Ludo seems to enjoy “special treatment” as an employee who is hired through strings pulled, and yet there are moments when Oscar zones in on Ludo and humiliates him in front of a room full of business associates. Ludo typically arrives late to work, and spends large amounts of time snoozing curled around the base of the toilet.

The novel begins with Ludo sleeping with his adoptive sister and sometime mistress, Melissa. She’s now married to Ernesto, the plump well-meaning son of another wealthy Brazilian family. Apart from the money connection, it’s an odd match. Ernesto, who works interminably on an ever-elusive PhD, is obsessed with the plight of Brazil’s underclass, and while he interviews people for his Sisyphean project, his wife Melissa lives like a princess in a tower and spends lavishly at the most exclusive shops.

The novel is divided between the past and the present. A large portion of the book details scenes of Ludo’s childhood as he and his mother jump into action for the Generoso family every weekend. Ludo and his mother live at Zé’s country estate which is a sort of exclusive Disneyland for Zé, his friends and the business associates he invites for the weekend. No expense is spared for these mind-boggling weekends of endless gluttony and pleasure. Ludo’s present focuses on a new advertising campaign geared towards the inhabitants of the favelas. Advertising executives vie to provide the slogan for the new supermarket chain geared for the poorest of Brazil’s inhabitants. These scenes underscore just how out of touch Brazil’s upper echelons are with the rest of the country.

Heliópolis offers fascinating insights into Brazilian life and the vast chasms between the rich and the poor, and Ludo is a bridge figure who straddles both worlds. He’s useful to his masters and yet he doesn’t fit in either world–not the skyscrapers and the country estates or the fetid squalor of the favelas. Ludo fails to connect with anyone on any meaningful level. He even unintentionally manages to patronize the office cleaner, and it’s through this relationship that it becomes clear that Ludo has no place in society.

Heliópolis was longlisted for the 2009 Booker prize. Not that I care–the books I like never win. I liked Heliópolis but it wasn’t perfect. Ultimately there’s something unsatisfying with the tale. Richly evocative when it comes to locations and atmosphere, many of the characters fail to connect as living, breathing human beings, and its denouement feels somewhat contrived.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (October 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	James Scudamore
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Also set in Brazil: Buried Strangers by Leighton Gage

Bibliography:

• The Amnesia Clinic (2006; January 2007 in US)
• Heliopolis (2009; October 2010 in US)

“How droll. I’ve always had a soft spot for dissertation topics, I find them very entertaining. Those sweet students who, to imitate a great man, write idiotic things with hyper-sophisticated titles, when the contents are the very height of banality—like a pretentious restaurant embellishing scrambled eggs with a grandiose description.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (NOV 04, 2010)

Belgian author Amélie Nothomb came to my attention a few years ago through a French film. The film, Fear and Trembling (which is excellent, by the way) is based on Nothomb’s biographical experiences–specifically when she worked for a Japanese company in Tokyo. Hygiene and the Assassin is Nothomb’s first novel, originally published in 1992.

The novel’s plot is straightforward. 83-year-old Nobel Laureate Prétextat Tach is dying. This notoriously reclusive and cantankerous author only has a few months to live, and journalists flock to his home hoping to land a rare interview. Prétextat’s faithful secretary selects five names from the horde of applicants. The “fortunate” five journalists then, one after another, enter the lair of the famous author–all of them certain that they will land the interview coup of a lifetime. Prétextat’s work is obscure and defies interpretation, and the fact that he hasn’t written a word in twenty-four years fuels the competition for the interview.

Four of the five journalists are doomed to disappointment. They all expect some sort of brilliant, if difficult recluse, but they discover that Prétextat is a repulsive, grossly obese misogynist with a self-proclaimed “PhD in masturbation.” The interviews between the journalists and Prétextat dissolve into spitefully witty verbal duels with the author entertaining himself at the journalists’ expense until he can discover some point of outrage to exploit. One journalist, for example, is so revolted by Prétextat’s eating habits, he exits and promptly vomits.

The fifth journalist, Nina, is a woman–surely destined to become Prétextat’s final victim. Just what secrets Nina uncovers are the gist of this tale.

The first part of Hygiene and the Assassin has a playfulness and humour which is in direct, sometimes grating contrast to the cruel disgustingness of Prétextat–a man whose blubber and toxicity is comparable to Jabba the Hutt. The encounters with the first four journalists are entertaining and emphasize Prétextat’s eccentricities. The interviews begin in polite, hopeful reverence and end in various humiliations–all very amusing if one is willing to laugh at the expense of the journalists who are constrained by politeness and who are painfully desperate to land a good interview. The book is at its strongest when Prétextat waxes on about the literati, and the section about authors “who write in order to be invited to people’s drawing rooms,” is a particularly acidic interpretation of the adulation some authors inspire amongst pseudo-intellectuals. The story, however, shifts and loses its humour once Nina takes control, and she begins to peel away Prétextat’s lies through an intricate analysis of his books. At this point, the novel loses its bite and its rarity while it dissolves into the banality of cheap resolution. Ultimately Prétextat’s ugly story–part crime, part loony rant forms a modern-day fable of misogyny unleashed and revenged. (Translated by Alison Anderson.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; Reissue edition (October 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Amélie Nothomb
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Tokyo Fiancée

Bibliography:

• Hygiene and the Assassin ( 1992; 2010 in US)
• Loving Sabotage (1993; 2000 in US) *
• The Stranger Next Door (1995; 1998 in US)
• Péplum (1996)
• Attentat (1997)
• Mercure (1998)
• Fear and Trembling (1999; 2001 in US) *
• The Character of Rain (2000; 2002 in US) *
• Cosmétique de L’ennemi (2001)
• The Book of Proper Names (2002; 2005 in UK)
• Antichrista (2003; 2005 in UK)
• The Life of Hunger (2004; 2007 in UK)
• Sulphuric Acid (2005; 2008 in UK)
• Tokyo Fiancée (2007; 2009 in US ) *
• Le fait du prince (2008)
• Life Form (February 2013 in US)

*fictionalized autobiography

Movies from Books:

• Fear and Trembling (2005)

“Because the baby had come, special attention had to be given to Margaret, who was eight. On Wednesdays therefore she was to go out with Lydia the maid for the whole afternoon. […] Maybe to Eastkirk — and a nice walk about on the Front and down the woodland.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (OCT 27, 2010)

And so begins the delightful 1978 novel by Jane Gardam, with an exquisitely described trip on a local train that “went slowly, see-sawing from side to side in the dusty coach with blinds with buttoned ends and a stiff leather strap arched like a tongue on the carriage door,” a pitch-perfect evocation of Britain between the Wars. What begins for Margaret Marsh is nothing less than the gradual opening of her eyes to the complexity of the adult world. For until the new baby provided a distraction, she had been protected from worldly things by her bank-manager father, a puritanical believer. “He and his wife were members of the Primal Saints and most of their free time was spent in the local Primal Hall down Turner Street — a very nasty street of plum and sandstone and silence.” Yet Margaret loves her father and has applied her considerable intelligence to acquiring a prodigious knowledge of Bible verses, all referred to by name and number, as in: “Her feet were on the earth and her life yielding fruit Genesis one eleven.” Or: “She wondered two Corinthians five one whether she had seen a home not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

I admit that I may not be the most objective reviewer, since much of my enjoyment comes from the fact that this is MY world she is describing — a small seaside resort in Northern Britain, such as the one where I grew up. Instead of the dying sputters of the candle that fitfully illuminated the postwar austerity of my own childhood, Gardam moves her action back half a generation to the mid-thirties when there was ALWAYS a band in the bandstand, ices on the promenade, and pierrots on the pier. And preachers on the beach, with tambourines and trombones, tracts and hymn-singing — uplifting entertainments that flourished in the recession to form part of my childhood also.

Given the Saints’ prohibition on frivolity of all kinds, Margaret’s seaside excursions are like an entry into a different world. Accompanied by Lydia — a decidedly secular and sexual woman, although nominally also a Saint — her eyes are opened to more than mere seaside attractions. She stumbles upon a great house converted into a sanatorium for shell-shock victims, and then finds Lydia flirting rather physically with the gardener. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the book is watching the author gradually adjust the language from the child’s-eye view of the opening descriptions to a more adult perspective, as Margaret learns, albeit from a distance, the lineaments of denial and desire, dimly perceives the consequences of divisions in class, and discovers that her idols have feet of clay. The author’s focus gradually changes also to the older generations, exploring the frustrations of Margaret’s mother, the ripples caused by the return of some old childhood friends, and the machinations of a rich old lady dying in the big house.

In observing adult behavior through the eyes of a child, Gardam writes within an established tradition, as exemplified by Henry James’ What Maisie Knew or L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. But she has her own special flavor, whose simple storytelling hides considerable emotional complexity. Readers of her later books such as Old Filth and The Man with the Wooden Hat will know the mixture of pathos, humanity, sadness, and warm humor that she can create, and will not be surprised when everything connects up in somewhat hopeful fashion at the end — although I did feel that the postlude here was a little too obviously tacked on. All the same, this beautifully produced Europa reprint makes a fascinating piece of time-travel well worth taking, even for those who did not grow up in the atmosphere it describes.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 56 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (October 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jane Gardam
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews for: The Man with the Wooden Hat Queen of the Tambourine Old Filth The People of Privilege Hill

Bibliography:

• Black Faces, White Faces: Stories (1975)
• Bilgewater (1977)
• God on the Rocks (1978; October 2010)
• The Sidmouth Letters (1978; May 2001)
• Bridget and William (1981)
• Horse (1982)
• The Pangs of Love and Other Stories (1983)
• Crusoe’s Daughter (1985)
• Swan (1986)
• Through the Doll’s House Door (1987)
• Showing the Flag (1989) 
• The Queen of the Tambourine (1991; September 2007)
• Going into a Dark House (1994)
• Faith Fox (1996; January 2005)
• Missing the Midnight: Hauntings & Grotesques (1997)
• The Green Man (1998)
• Ink Monkey (1999)
• The Flight of the Maidens (2000)
• The People on Privilege Hill: Stories (2008)
• A Long Way from Verona (1971; November 2013)

Old Filth Trilogy

• Old Filth (2004)
• The Man in the Wooden Hat (2008)
• Last Friends (April 2013)

Young Readers:

• Kit (1984)
• Kit in Boots (1985)
• A Few Fair Days : Stories (1971)
• The Summer After the Funeral (1973)
• The Hollow Land (1981) 
• Tufty Bear (1996)

Nonfiction:

• The Iron Coast (1994)

“She’s there inside me somewhere, but I don’t want her there. I want her here, so badly I can taste it, the acid tang of need sickeningly fresh and surprising every time. The face in the mirror is blurring before me and suddenly it doesn’t look like either of us. It doesn’t look like anyone I know. I blink the tears away. I whisper my own name to myself, wanting to hear it as she used to say it. Louise. It’s not the same, never the same.

I step back from the mirror, addressing myself in my head. You thought that this would be enough – to see him, to satisfy your curiosity. You were wrong. Nothing you can do will bring her back, but you have the right to know. This man murdered your mother. You need to understand why.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 01, 2010)

Rebecca Connell has written a finely fraught literary thriller and romance in her debut novel, The Art of Losing. It examines the legacy of loss and betrayal and the extent to which a person will go to seek out the truth.

Louise was ten years old when her mother died in a horrible automobile accident. She believes that Nicholas, her mother’s lover, is responsible for her death. Louise decides to infiltrate Nicholas’ life in order to find out the truth. When she is in her twenties, she changes her name to Lydia, her mother’s name, and heads off to Cambridge to find Nicholas who is a lecturer in a college there. Her first plan is to sit in on one of his lectures in order to get a feel for who he is. Serendipitously, at the lecture she meets his son, Adam, and he takes a liking to her. They begin to see each other and party together. She also goes to a cafe that she knows Nicholas frequents. She meets him for a brief moment and ends up crying.

Adam is a college student but “Lydia” is not. She is wholly involved in finding Nicholas and learning about her mother’s death and their relationship. When the college term ends, Adam invites “Lydia” to stay with his family during the break. How much more convenient a setting can that be for her! She notices, when introduced to Adam’s parents, that they cringe when they hear her name. They comment that it’s an unusual name but their reactions are like it’s a frightening and sorrowful memory from the past. “Lydia” keeps a straight face, not divulging any emotions. She and Adam share a room and she proceeds to infiltrate the family.

The novel is told in alternating chapters from the viewpoints of Nicholas and Louise. The chapters are also from different times in the relationship between Nicholas and Lydia. The reader finds out that Lydia was married to Martin when she met Nicholas but that they began their affair anyway. Their affair was passionate and on-going for several months. Nicholas wants Lydia to leave her husband, Martin, and be with him. She, however, decides to stay with Martin. Lydia and Martin move away and it is several years before Nicholas and Lydia cross paths again. Meanwhile, Lydia has a child, Louise, and she and Martin settle in Cambridge where Martin teaches. Nicholas also marries but he can’t let go of Lydia’s memory. He and his wife Naomi have a son, Adam. Ironically, they also live in Cambridge where Nicholas lectures.

On a casual walk in Cambridge, Nicolas runs into Adam and the two couples meet for dinner. The affair recommences with disastrous impact for the two families. Nicholas and Lydia respond to to one another like moths to a flame. Martin and Naomi are two innocents caught up in their partners’ frenzy.

As the novel takes up with “Lydia” in Nicholas’ home, Nicholas chooses to tell her the whole story of the affair, not realizing that she is Lydia’s daughter. He feels comfortable opening up to a perceived stranger. The story takes all kinds of twists and turns, making it eerie and unsettling. It has a gothic feel to it.

The book is a real page-turner and an excellent read. It is hard to put down because the thrill of what’s next beckons with each page. Connell has the knack for holding the reader’s interest and it’s hard to believe this is a debut novel. I look forward to more of her work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; Reprint edition (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Connell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt An interview with Rebecca Connell His Futile Preoccupations review of The Art of Losing
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More psychological thrillers: Matala by Craig Holden The Point of Fracture by Frank Turner Hollon The Dead Lie Down by Sophie Hannah

Bibliography:

• The Art of Losing (2009; September 2010 in US)

“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)