“…tipped the contents of  of the pouch into his plan. He caught hold of the gold chain. The gold-filgreed pendant dangled. It bore the image, in vitreous enamel, of a peacock, a perfect gemstone staring from the tip of each painted feather.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (MAR 31, 2014)

Ayelet Waldman’s new book begins in Red Hook, Maine, the setting of her novel Red Hook Road, but the two could hardly be more different. For whereas she had previously confined herself to two families in the same setting over a period of a very few years, she travels in this one to Salzburg, Budapest, and Israel, at various periods over a hundred-year span. By the same token, though, it is a stretch to call Love and Treasure a novel; it is essentially a trilogy of novellas, each with different characters, but linked by a single object and common themes. The object is an enameled Jugendstil pendant in the shape of a peacock. Although only of modest value, it plays an important role in the lives of the people who people who possess it, and provides a focus for the novelist’s enquiry into the lives of Hungarian Jews both before and after the Holocaust.

In the prologue, Jack Wiseman, an old man dying of cancer, entrusts the pendant to his recently-divorced granddaughter Natalie. Immediately, we plunge into the first and by far the best of the novellas, set in Salzburg, Austria, in 1945. Jack, as a young lieutenant in the US Army, is entrusted with the administration of the box-car loads of valuable goods brought out of Hungary on the “Gold Train” — items that he realizes have all been “donated” by Hungarian Jews prior to their exile or extermination. I have no doubt that this is based on truth — not only the train itself, but the horrifying revelation of what happened to its contents, and indeed the exposure of continuing anti-Semitism on both sides even after the War was over. Set in a jurisdiction almost overrun by the sheer numbers of refugees, survivors, and other displaced persons, the story was disturbing, informative and gripping. Even more so as Jack falls passionately in love with one of the survivors, a fiery redhead named Ilona Jakab. It is a surprisingly muscular piece of writing building to a powerful finale. Had I stopped the reading then, I would have given the book five stars.

The other two sections are not quite of this standard. The second novella returns us to the present day when Natalie is in Budapest, keeping her promise to track down the original owner of her grandfather’s pendant. It is less interesting because the laborious process of searching archives is inherently less compelling, but also because it is more difficult to buy into the romance story in this episode. Natalie pairs up with an Israeli art dealer named Amitai Shasho, virile, polished, and wealthy — everything a hero should be — except that he is essentially a Holocaust profiteer, and thus a difficult man for me to trust. He will change towards the end of the novella, but I never really got over my initial disapproval.

The third section is rather more successful, taking us back to Budapest, but now in 1913. It works because Waldman has so perfectly captured the narrative voice of a Freudian psychoanalyst, Imré Zobel, describing his work with a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl named Nina S. It is a perfect parody of Freud’s own literary style, with the added deliciousness of a narrator who, if not actually unreliable, is certainly self-deceiving. But it takes us away from any of the characters whom we have met earlier, and although it fills in some interesting back-story, it is essentially a stand-alone piece.

I mentioned Waldman’s themes. Chief among them is anti-Semitism, seen in an historical context and in some unexpected places; Waldman both makes a strong case for Zionism, and reveals disturbing patterns of discrimination within the Zionist ideal. Almost equally strong is her concern for women’s rights and the historical suffragist movement. And as always, she writes very freely about sex. I was reminded of two other novels in particular. One is The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, which also looks at the twentieth century in Eastern Europe through the history of a single artifact. The other was The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, in its multi-sectional structure and use of psychoanalysis, though Waldman’s book is neither so adventurous in its writing nor so strongly focused on the Holocaust. But you might call it a peri-Holocaust novel, and this I did find interesting. If only it had maintained a stronger focus.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ayelet Waldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Red Hook Road Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

Bibliography:

• Daughter’s Keeper (2003)
• Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006)
• Red Hook Road (2010)
• Love and Treasure (April 2014)

Mommmy-Track Mysteries:

• Nursery Crimes (2000)
• The Big Nap (2001)
• A Playdate with Death (2002)
• Death Gets a Time-Out (2003)
• Murder Plays House (2004)
• The Cradle Robbers (2005)
• Bye-Bye Black Sheep (2006)

Also:

• Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves (2005)
• Bad Mother: A Chronical of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009)

“And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul. Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine—“ You are the absolute love of my life,” he’d written in her last birthday card— and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 15, 2014)

Americanah is a wonderful epic saga of love, hair, blogs, racism in America, and life in Nigeria. It takes place over a period of about 15 years and is primarily about a Nigerian woman named Ifemelu and her first love, Obinze. The meaning of the word Americanah is a person who returns to Nigeria after spending time abroad.

The main part of the story takes place in a hair salon in Trenton, New Jersey. Ifemelu is on a fellowship at Princeton and the nearest place to get weaves is in Trenton. As she is getting her hair done she goes back in time and the reader gets filled in with her life story.

Ifemelu grew up in poverty in Lagos. She managed to go to university there and won a scholarship to Wellson, a college in Philadelphia. She struggles with money and finds it very difficult to get a job. When she does work, she sends money back home to her parents. Ifemulu’s primary job is as a nanny. She describes the dynamics of her employer’s marriage as “she loves him and he loves himself.” She is introduced to her employer’s cousin Curt and Ifemelu and he have a relationship for quite a while. His being white and rich cause some difficulties for them.

Ifemelu cuts off all contact with Obinze despite the fact that they had planned to be together. She had made a choice to do something that left her shamed and abased and she is unable to tell Obinze about it. So, rather than tell him, she severs their contact. He is distraught and does not know what to do. He continues to write to her for months but there is no answer from Ifemelu.

Meanwhile, Obinze goes to London where he lives underground after his six month visa expires. He is working construction and continues to do this until he is deported back to Nigeria.

Ifemelu remains in the United States for 13 years and has a series of relationships with different men. Of significance besides Curt, who is white, is Blaine who is African American and a professor at Yale. Theirs is a long-term relationship that Ifemelu breaks off in order to return to Lagos.

Ifemelu has started a blog called “Raceteenth: Understanding America for the non-American black.” She writes anonymously about varied topics of racism that she encounters in the United States and the differences between being African American and a non-American black person. Her blog is very successful and brings her status and money as people make financial contributions to keep the blog going. She also does speaking engagements about topics she covers in her blog.

The book has many characters in it, each of whom we come to know and connect with. However, it is primarily about Ifemelu and Obinze, their lives and love. I found the book fascinating and very readable. It does not ever let go of the messages that the author seeks to provide the reader. Racism is a constant theme in the book as is life in America for black Americans and non-American blacks. I found the theme of blogging as a way to share knowledge very intriguing. Actual blogs are a part of the book.

Adiche is a wonderful writer. Her short stories, all of which I’ve read, have knocked me out. I plan on reading her other novels. I can see why this brilliant woman has received a MacArthur Genius Award.   Highly recommended

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 511 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Reprint edition (March 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie website
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Thing Around Your Neck: Stories Purple Hibiscus

Bibliography:

• Purple Hibiscus (2003)
• Half a Yellow Sun (2006)
• The Thing Around Your Neck: Stories (2009)
• Americanah (May 2013) 

“I had thirteen names. Each name was from a different generation, beginning with Father and going back from him. I was the first one in our village to have thirteen names. Our family was considered blessed to have such a history.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 13, 2014)

Mengestu’s third book—another about the immigrant experience—is his most accomplished and soulful, in my opinion. He returns again to the pain of exile and the quest for identity, as well as the need for a foreigner from a poor and developing country to reinvent himself. In addition, he alternates the landscape of post-colonial Uganda with the racially tense Midwest of the 1970s, and demonstrates that the feeling of exile can also exist in an American living in her own hometown. The cultural contrast of both countries, with a narrative that alternates back and forth, intensifies the sense of tenuous hope mixed with shattered illusions.

“I gave up all the names my parents gave me,” says the young African man, who moves to Kampala in order to be around literary university students. He has left his family in one country to seek his idealism in another. He meets a young revolutionary, an anti-government charismatic young man, who starts a “paper revolution” at the university. Neither is a student; both seek to realize their ideals. They become friends, and eventually, cross the line into danger and confusion.

The alternating chapters concern Helen, a white social worker in Missouri, who has never traveled far, not even to Chicago. One of the young African men, named Isaac on his passport, travels to the US, allegedly as an exchange student. Helen is his caseworker. Isaac’s file is thin, and Helen knows nothing about his history. They embark on a relationship that becomes more intimate, but yet creates an elusive distance. Mengestu explores the hurdles they face, as well as examining how these obstacles relate to Isaac’s past.

The restrained, artless prose penetrates with its somber tone, and the emotional weight of the story and characters surge from the spaces between the words. Mengestu’s talent for nuance was evident when, days after I finished the book, it continued to move me.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (March 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Dinaw Mengestu
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: How to Read the Air

Bibliography:

• The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)
• How to Read The Air (2010)
• All Our Names (March 2014)

“You can’t stand against a flood, Annie Clyde.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (FEB 25, 2014)

“You can’t stand against a flood, Annie Clyde.” Oh, yes she can. Or at least die trying. A descendant of the native Cherokees, Annie Clyde Dodson has deep-rooted connections to the land of Yuneetah, Tennessee. Long Man, the river that courses through, is tempestuous and moody but the farmers here have learned to corral its powers to make their living off the land. The Tennessee Valley Authority though, has other plans. A dam has been built upstream and in a matter of a few days, Yuneetah will be under water. Annie Clyde is one of the last holdouts. She just can’t up and leave the land which she wanted her daughter, Gracie, to know and love. And as much as her husband has plans to find factory work up north in Michigan, Annie can’t stomach the thought of a stark existence away from the natural surroundings she loves.

As Long Man opens with a setting in the immediate post-Depression era, the town is just a couple of days away from being flooded by the dam’s waters. To make things worse, a steady, heavy rain has been falling and the water levels everywhere rise slowly. Along with Annie and her daughter, Gracie, there’s Annie’s aunt, Silver Ledford, who makes her meager home on top of a high cliff overlooking the valley. Tensions are running high enough as it is; practically everyone has left town with a relocation package but Annie has just managed to show yet another TVA man, Sam Washburn, the door. She does not want to move. To make matters worse — much worse — Gracie, Annie’s daughter, disappears. Could it be the town’s bad boy, Amos, who has taken her? Or is it the equally menacing flood waters that are to blame?

Using the child’s disappearance as a driver for the story, Amy Greene movingly explores the complicated relationships between the town’s various players and also their deep and abiding respect for the land. The hardscrabble countryside comes gloriously alive in her telling and it is the most arresting aspect of Long Man.

The story itself is slow to unwind and lurches forward precariously, often coming to almost a complete halt as Greene outlines relationships and events through a series of flashbacks. While these back-and-forth movements can feel jerky and disorienting, the pace picks up eventually — it is interesting to note that the tension builds slowly along with the rising floodwaters. It’s almost as if Greene were working consciously to have the book’s tempo increase gradually with the drama of the plotline.

While farming itself can be a challenge (one which Greene points out well), Long Man occasionally lapses into too much starry-eyed worship of the vocation’s faithfuls. The romantic visions that Annie Clyde has seem overwrought at times: “She didn’t understand the power company’s reasoning. She didn’t need electric lights when she could see by the sun and moon. She had the spring and the earth to keep her food from spoiling…if a person didn’t come to depend on material things, it wouldn’t hurt to lose them.”

Where Long Man does succeed, is in showing how even the fiercest of people have weak spots that can be chipped away at and weathered over time. The ties that bind can take various shapes and forms and lend themselves to fluidity. Not many can hold their ground when it comes to a rising and powerful flood — whether that change takes the form of raging waters or technical progress. As Greene writes: “The dam would stand in memory, but not of their individual lives. Only of a moment in history.” Even that, you soon realize, is more than what most of us can hope for.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 12 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Amy Greene
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Bloodroot Another dam story: The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels

Bibliography:

• Bloodroot (2010)
• Long Man (February 2014)

“How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 20, 2014)

The eponymous title of this penetrating and artful novel refers to third-grade schoolteacher and unfulfilled artist Nora Eldridge, who has lived in the Boston area her whole life. It is also the book’s principal motif, surfacing periodically to describe Nora’s various attributes as an uncharacteristically plain woman, a woman who doesn’t rock any boats or shine like a supernova– one who is always nice, mannerly, and unthreatening to others. Essentially, anonymous and invisible. Nora has previously accepted this about herself, living up to the part with emblematic virtuosity.

Unfortunately, this Woman Upstairs quality also tends to create a two-dimensional figure to others, a woman easily dismissed and placed in a mold, or a bin–conventionally boring, predictable, and reliably bland. But, now, at 37, she is haunted by that Marianne Faithful song about Lucy Jordan, “At the age of 37 she realized she would never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair... ” (Remember that song from Thelma and Louise? It does make me think of someone on the brink)

Now is “The time at which you have to acknowledge that your life has a horizon… that you will never be president, or a millionaire, and if you’re a childless woman, you will quite possibly remain that way.”

One day, Nora meets Reza Shahid, a student of mixed heritage. His Parisian artist mother, Sirena, is of Italian descent and his Lebanese father, Skandar, is an intellectual and Ethics Historian. They recently moved to the Boston area from Paris. Nora is immediately drawn into their world and attracted to them, as a family and as individuals. Nora is single and childless, and thinks of Reza as she would a son. He is shy and also quite stunning.

So, Nora has finally met the contrast to her ordinariness, a worldly, charismatic family of three, which, enigmatically, turns Nora’s quiet desperation to a barely controlled, boiling rage. We don’t know where all this rage is coming from, at first. That is part and parcel of the immaculate pacing and architecture of this novel, a narrative so deftly chilling that I think my head stood up on my hairs!

Throughout the book, Nora attempts to elucidate to the reader her deep love for all members of the Shahid family, and feels inadequate to do so without worrying that she falls into a clichéd description. She is often on the brink of expressing her profound feelings to Sirena and Skandar, which creates a marvelous reader tension as we bide our time, anticipating what Nora will convey, and how she will convey it. But the reader is constantly privy to her feelings:

“Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us…[W]ho sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is it that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone catch it?”

Nora and Sirena rent a warehouse together as a space for working on their art. Sirena does installation art, with the names right out of fairy tales and myths. Her current project is Wonderland. To describe Sirena’s art–well, you could write a book about it, it is so florid, philosophical, and full of gimmicks and tricks. For example, she would create a world that appeared to be of lush gardens with visions of paradise, a fantasy for us to interpret. But, up close, you would see it is made of garbage and mottled by filth. Her installations limn the line between fantasy and reality, and are vast, expansive. Sirena is on the precipice of artistic success.

Nora’s art, on the other hand, is miniature, and exacting, and insular. She uses historical facts and pictures to piece together dioramas representing the rooms of famous people like Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, choosing ripe moments and themes from their lives–such as Woolf’s rocks to commit suicide, and Dickinson’s obsession with death. Only Edie Sedgwick’s room would be designed out of the imagination, the only piece of her art that had a parallel to Sirena’s imaginative art–exemplifying that line between fantasy and reality.

There are numerous other motifs that resonate, such as Nora depicting life like a Fun House–at once zany and terrifying. Not really fun at all. We read excerpts of Nora revisiting her childhood, which will explain some of her covetousness, and reticence. At this time in her life, she hasn’t had a real passion, not for anything or anyone. All was sacrificed or quashed, in favor of becoming…The Woman Upstairs.

The prose is potent, humid, and allusional. And Messud makes it both provocative and claustrophobic, writing with an inflammatory formality that personifies Nora’s rage burning within her meager existence. There’s very little plot, but you will be on the edge of your seat, compelled. I turned the pages feverishly, as I couldn’t wait to know what went down with The Woman Upstairs.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 486 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (February 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Claire Messud
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Emperor’s Children

Bibliography:

• When the World Was Steady (1995)
• The Last Life (1999)
• The Hunters (2001)
• The Emperor’s Children (2006)
• The Woman Upstairs (2013)

“I woke this morning and remembered something I thought forgotten, a time they caught a man on a bicycle and cut off his foot. If you are on a bicycle the rebels think you may be delivering news. The man’s wife came out and they told her to eat that foot.

You don’t forget such things, even if they are not appearing. They are just in the back of your mind, waiting.

Sometimes I want to hit myself with stones.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (FEB 11, 2014)

Thirty Girls by Susan Minot is a powerful novel that is based on a true story. It takes place in Kenya, Uganda and Sudan and is the story of the abduction of over one hundred girls from a convent school in Uganda. A nun by the name of Giulia travels to the site of the abductors, who call themselves the LRA, and negotiates for the release of all but thirty of the girls. Thus, the title of the book.

The novel opens as an American journalist named Jane finds herself in Nairobi. She is there to do a piece on the abduction of Ugandan children by the LRA. So far, about 10,000 children have been abducted over seventeen years and many of them have been killed. Some of the girls have escaped and returned home only to find out that their families no longer want them. Many of them have borne children through rape by LRA members. Others have contracted AIDS. Jane and her friends start on a trek to Uganda to interview the abductees who have escaped and made it home.

Jane is a lost soul. She has written a book previously that many have read. The novel does not mention what the book is about or when it was written. It just appears that many people in Nairobi have read it. She is looking to find herself but does not know where to look. Mostly, she tries being around other people and finds herself in relationships where she enjoys the sex. Currently, she is in a relationship with Harry who is 22 years old. Jane is thirty-seven. Little by little, she is convincing herself that she is in love with Harry though they have known each other for only a very short time, barely three weeks by the end of the novel.

The chapters are interspersed with Jane’s story and that of Esther’s. Esther is one of the girls who was kidnapped by the LRA from her convent school in Uganda. She is pregnant by her LRA “husband” and is not sure how she will feel about her child. While she is in captivity, her mother dies of cancer and her father is incapacitated by an accident. She tries her best to make it through each day but it is a horrific experience and some days she is not sure she can do another day. “Some days were worse that others. You walked past children sleeping on the ground then saw they were not sleeping, they were dead.”

Jane manages to interview Esther and is working on doing an article about the thirty girls. However, she finds herself thinking more of Harry than of her work. “Thoughts of Harry came in the day like reveries, then she would stop the thoughts. How could she be thinking so lightly of love, here in a place where people’s lips were cut off and girls were snatched out of their beds?”

The LRA is like a cult, headed by a man named Kony. Kony has multiple personality disorder, perhaps seizures and runs the LRA through magical thinking. The LRA has no real political purpose. It seeks out weak prey, then kidnaps them. Kony has this idea that by impregnating the girls, he will grow a family. The boys turn into rebels themselves. “Some children believed what they told us. Some of us became rebels. When you were given a gun you started to kill and after a while you would look at yourself and say, I am a rebel now.” The LRA reminded me of the Manson clan, only larger.

The novel is very well written and is the strongest piece of writing that I have read by Susan Minot. It is difficult to read in places because of the violence but it rang very true to life. I highly recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 11, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Susan Minot
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Past Ahead by Gilbert Gatore

Bibliography:

• Monkeys. (1986)
• Lust and Other Stories (1989)
• Folly (1993)
• Evening (1998)
• Rapture (2002)
• Thirty Girls (February 2014)

Movies from books:

• Evening

“You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man to ascend in a fire balloon, also planned to be the first to fly the Channel from France to England. To this end he constructed a new kind of aerostat, with a hydrogen balloon on top, to give greater lift, and a fire balloon beneath, to give better control. He put these two things together, and on the 15th of June 1785, when the winds seemed favourable, he made his ascent from the Pas-de-Calais. The brave new contraption rose swiftly, but before it had even reached the coastline, flame appeared at the top of the hydrogen balloon, and the whole, hopeful aerostat, now looking to one observer like a heavenly gas lamp, fell to earth, killing both pilot and co-pilot.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  FEB 10, 2014)

Julian Barnes’ memoir of grief for the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh in 2008 after a thirty-year relationship, must be one of the most moving tributes ever paid to a loved one, but also the most oblique. So let’s start with something simple, a photograph. Look up the title in the Daily Mail of London, partly for the marvelously-titled review “Lifted by Love, Grounded by Grief” by Craig Brown, but mostly for the photograph that accompanies it. Julian is seated. Pat stands behind him, her arms around his shoulders, her chin resting on the crown of his head. Her love is obvious, she whom Barnes refers to as “The heart of my life; the life of my heart.” But equally striking is the unusual vertical composition. Pat, who on the ground was a small woman beside the gangling Barnes, here appears above him, like a guardian angel reaching down.

Which is relevant, because Barnes’ book is about verticality, about love and loss, and incidentally about photography. The first of its three sections, “The Sin of Height,” is essentially an essay. It begins with three ascents by balloon: the English adventurer Colonel Fred Burnaby in 1882, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1876, and a French entrepreneur named Félix Tournachon in 1863. Tournachon was to become one of the most famous early photographers under the name Nadar; it was he who took the iconic photographs of Bernhardt, and it was in his studio in 1874 that the first Impressionist exhibition was held. Barnes’ second section, “On the Level,” is typical of many of his short stories (and also longer works such as Flaubert’s Parrot and Arthur & George), starting off from fact and developing it in the imagination. In this case, his subject is the passionate affair between Fred Burnaby and Sarah Bernhardt in the mid-1870’s, the remarkable openness of the actress with the soldier (on the level, indeed), and its inevitable end. All the way through these sixty-plus pages, you can see the author conjuring examples of daring and discovery, love and loss, and creating a language of metaphor with which to describe it.

My assumption was that in the third and longest part, “The Loss of Depth,” he would apply these things directly to his wife, giving us a portrait of her more intimate and revealing even than those Nadar took of “the divine Sarah.” But no, he does almost exactly the opposite; in photographic language again, what he gives us is the negative, leaving it for us to develop. Almost immediately, he plunges into a description of grief, the constant reminders of things no longer shared, the intolerable intrusion of friends with euphemistic circumlocutions or bracing suggestions, or worse still avoidance of the subject altogether. Pat (whom he never names except in the dedication) is present only in the spaces she has left in his heart; one of the things that turns him away from thoughts of suicide is the knowledge that he retains the mould of her memory; without him, that too would be lost. He comes back, to a degree, through art: through the discovery of opera, through reading, and above all through writing. As you read on, you see him using links to the earlier sections, a phrase here, an idea there, and you think: “Ah, now he is going to pull it all together, and himself too.” But it is never as easy as that. Barnes has great skill, but also the daring to leave doors open and loose ends untied; I am sure that “closure” is one of those words he hates. And that is fine, because this strange asymmetrical hybrid is Barnes’ tribute to a love that will never end, and probably the best book he has ever written.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 82 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 24, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Julian Barnes
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pulse The Lemon Table And: A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Bibliography:

• Metroland (1980)
• Before She Met Me (1982)
• Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
• Staring at the Sun (1986)
• A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters (1989)
• Talking It Over (1991)
• The Porcupine (1992)
• Cross Channel: Stories (1996)
• England, England (1998)
• Love, etc (2000) (prequel to Talking it Over)
• The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003)
• The Lemon Table: Stories (2004)
• Arthur & George (2005)
• Nothing to be Frightened of (2008)
• Pulse: Stories (2011)
• The Sense of an Ending (2011; 2012 in US) 

Essays:

• Letters from London (1995)
• Something to Declare (2002)
• Levels of Life (2011; September 2013 in US)

“He was asleep there behind the door.

The guarded hospital room smelt of medicine and paint. The monitor beside him registered his heartbeats.

Isabelle Skoyen, the Councillor for Social Affairs at Oslo City Hall, and Mikael Bellman, the newly appointed Chief of Police, hoped they would never see him again.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (FEB 7, 2014)

Suspects abound and deceit, lies and corruption are the order of the day from everyone – criminals and cops – in Police, an enthralling follow-up to Jo Nesbo’s previous Harry Hole novel, Phantom.  Police  actually takes up where Phantom leaves off. And my question, for over a year, while waiting in angst for this book to be published is…”Is Harry Hole still alive?” Obviously he is…or this book would not have been written. But still…there was some doubt.

I must say that Jo Nesbo has become a familiar name on my favorite author list and I cannot quite pigeon-hole his work into the “mystery,” “police procedural or “crime” genres.” His books, with their well developed characters, exceptional and unusual plots defy, for me, any one single genre. Perhaps, “body of literature” would fit the bill… and I consider his work, his prose, to be literature.

Nesbo is a master of very complex plots, an expert at exploring human motivations, the choices people make and their consequences. He has a talent for taking the usual crime thriller trope and twisting it into deranged scenarios. Harry Hole defies authority. He is a self-made outcast within his own organization and is best left alone to do his job. He is more of an anti-hero than a hero. His romantic life is nil – he usually lives alone and likes it that way, and his definition of “justice” may differ from what is defined as the “LAW.” For me, Detective Hole embodies the classic character from American hard-boiled fiction…but more hardboiled. His attitude is conveyed through his detective’s self-dialogue describing to the reader what he is doing and feeling. He witnesses, on a daily basis, the violence of organized and non-organized crime that flourishes, while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, this detective of hardboiled fiction is a classic antihero….that would be Harry on steroids.

If possible, I believe one gets the most from Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series by reading the books in order. This way one can observe how Harry and other characters develop or grow, and sometimes die. I would say especially that I would most definitely read Phantom before picking up Police. These two novels should be read in order. However, if sequential reading is not possible, do not be discouraged. Once one has completed the first few pages of any of his other novels, it is difficult to put the book down…no matter where it falls in the sequence.

As Police begins we find Harry in relatively good shape as compared to how we left him in Phantom. He’s off active duty in the police department where the stress and danger almost killed him. He is teaching at the police academy and much healthier and happier, if this is possible. He is back , for the moment, with Rakel, his longtime, sometime love, and her son, Oleg, whom he considers his own.

There is a new series of executions in Oslo. The killer seems to be duplicating murder cases previously solved by Harry; the victims are all police officers. There are no loose ends, no tracks, no evidence – only revenge with a capital “R.” The police officers are not just shot in the commission of a crime, but lured to the scene of former murders and killed in an imitation of the previous crime. The killer is promptly dubbed “The Police Killer” by the press. Again, these are crimes, murders, previously solved by Harry. And, can it be possible… Oslo’s Crime Squad actually misses their top crime solver? But Harry is not around. Therefore, Krimteknisk and Crime Squad must now team up to solve the murders of their own. So…what we have is a conglomeration of four of the best detectives on the Oslo police department, all of whom have been introduced as Harry Hole’s well trained partners and colleagues over the last few novels. Among them are forensics specialists Beate Lønn and Bjørn Holm, brilliant researcher Katrine Bratt, psychologist Ståle Aune – but not Harry Hole, the one detective in Oslo who has solved virtually every case that’s crossed his path. The new group of crime stoppers…or solvers…constantly wonder “what would Harry do here?” “What was it Harry used to say? Intuition is only the sum of many small but specific things the brain hasn’t managed to put a name to yet.” The only thing predictable about this book is its unpredictability. It’s almost as scary as it is surprising.

And, deep down Harry and the reader know that he misses his old job – the department and active investigations. When one is good at something, like solving horrific crimes, one doesn’t let go easily…or at least Harry doesn’t. As the murders start striking closer and closer to him and targeting his former colleagues, Harry is pulled back into the investigation. I mean, he solved the crimes the first time around…so why not the second? Because, Harry is an alcoholic. He has a taste for drugs. His girl friend’s son, Oleg, while on drugs, shot and nearly killed Harry. And Harry has promised Rakel, that he will not go back to the police force. BUT…he does have his own unique and effective way of investigating murders. Ways not always condoned by the police manual. Harry is in a bind. He can come back to the police and risk losing his girl friend and her son or stand by while police are systematically being murdered. With corruption running rampant at City Hall, a vicious rapist escaped from prison, and the shifty Chief of Police, Mikael Bellman, exercising control over the force, the team will do what it takes to draw Harry back and unravel the mystery before another officer becomes a target.

This is the tenth Harry Hole mystery, and, as usual, the reader turns the last page eager and impatient for the next novel. Police reads differently from other Oslo Sequence books. It is longer and more nuanced. As ever, Nesbo is a master of giving us a difficult puzzle to solve and a flawed but likeable main character to take us there.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 522 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (October 15, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jo Nesbo
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Snowman The Devil’s Star Nemesis

Bibliography:

• The Bat (1997; 2013)
• The Cockroaches (1998; 2014)
• The Redbreast (2000; 2006 in UK; 2007 in US)
• Nemesis (2002; 2008 in UK; January 2009 in US)
• The Devil’s Star (2003; 2010 in US)
• The Redeemer (2005; 2009 in UK; not in US)
• The Snowman (2007; 2011 in US)
• The Leopard (2011)
• Phantom (2012)
• Police (October 2013)

Stand-alone Novels:

• Headhunters (2008)
• The Son (May 2014)

“The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome: it lies along corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into the floor, against the side of the table.

Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 16, 2014)

Almost as though in reference to the title of her best novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006), Maggie O’Farrell’s new one begins with a disappearance. One morning in 1976, in the midst of a heatwave, retired bank manager Robert Riordan, after laying breakfast for his wife Gretta, leaves their North London house, draws some money from his bank, and does not return. Within a day, their three grown children have all returned home to help their mother handle the crisis: Michael Francis from his house a few miles away, where he lives with his wife and two young children; Monica from a farm in Gloucestershire, where she lives with her second husband and, at weekends, his two children; and Aoife**, the youngest, from New York, where she is single with a boyfriend. Thus O’Farrell lays the groundwork for a book about family dynamics, not only Gretta, the absent Robert, and their grown children, but also the individual situations of the offspring, who will each confront and largely resolve their own personal crises over the four-day span of the novel. At this level, it is an extraordinarily well-constructed and heart-warming read.

Michael Francis is a bored high-school history teacher, who has had to give up his dreams of getting a PhD and becoming a professor, a circumstance that has cast a shadow over his marriage to his wife, Claire. Monica has gone from a failed first marriage to wed an antique dealer in the country, but has never felt at home in his deliberately unmodernized farmhouse or with his two girls. Aoife, by far my favorite of the three, is a free spirit, brilliant but severely dyslexic, a disability that she manages to hide from the photographer for whom she works in New York, her boyfriend, and even her family. I did wonder why O’Farrell chose to set the novel in 1976, apart from the fact that there was a severe heatwave in that year. I now see that it marks a particular point in the timeline of sexual liberation, which one gathers happened later in devout Catholic families than elsewhere. The stories of all three children are punctuated by something to do with sex or pregnancy, and what one might call the old morality will become an important factor in understanding the lives of Gretta and Robert.

This is a lovely story with moments of real beauty in its final pages. But it shows instances of carelessness that I don’t normally associate with O’Farrell. Some of these are verbal, such as the odd use of “both” in the quotation below, or confused similes such as a surprise that “rears up in front of you, like a cliff-edge you weren’t aware of.” Some are matters of transparent narrative convenience, like a priest who hears the name Riordan (surely not uncommon in Ireland) and just happens to reveal an important part of the back-story. And my empathy with Aoife was undermined by glossed-over details like how she could have obtained an American visa at the drop of a hat without the ability to handle any of the relevant paperwork. The publisher calls this “a perfect summer read.” Sure it is — but Maggie O’Farrell is capable of a whole lot more and although you will likely enjoy this novel, first-time readers may want to start with Maggie O’Farrell’s backlist to see her at her more nuanced and innovative best.

**”Her mother is the only one who can properly pronounce her name. Her accent — still unmistakably Galway, after all these years — strikes the first syllable with a sound that is halfway between e and a, and the second with a mysterious blend of v and f. She drives the name precisely between both ‘Ava’ and ‘Eva’ and ‘Eve,’ passing all three but never colliding with them.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 120 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 18, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Maggie O’Farrell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Bibliography:

• After You’d Gone (2000)
• My Lover’s Lover (2002)
• The Distance Between Us (2004)
• The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006)
• The Hand That First Held Mine (2010)
• Instructions for a Heat Wave (June 2013)

“The call came late on May 2, the first day of what should have been the last ten days of Jason’s fifth tour. First, last, fourth, fifth: everything in military life involved numbers — or letters.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 11, 2014)

In a blog that she wrote for the Huffington Post, Lea Carpenter notes that eleven days was the period of truce negotiated between King Priam and Achilles in the Iliad after the death of Hector — an encounter movingly narrated by David Malouf in his novel Ransom. It is an appropriate reference for many reasons, not least the almost classical values that Carpenter both celebrates and espouses in her storytelling; this gripping debut novel is immediate in content, ample in moral perspective, rich and thoughtful in its human values.

Yet its modernity makes Carpenter’s work quite different from Homer or Malouf. Jason, her male protagonist (yes, the reference to the Argonauts is deliberate), is a Naval SEAL officer on his fifth deployment overseas — pretty clearly somewhere in the Middle East. His mother Sara, a young single mother living at Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania, is told that he has been missing for two days. The rest of the book follows her for the remainder of the eleven-day period until he is located. It also follows Jason in flashback over some eleven years, as he swaps the idea of Harvard for Annapolis after 9/11, graduates, and undergoes the extraordinarily demanding SEAL training in Coronado, California.

It is significant that this is a war novel written by a woman. You might expect authenticity in the portrait of a mother waiting at home for news of her only son, but her ability to provide empathy without a trace of sentiment is quite remarkable. Even more remarkable is her portrayal of Jason’s life, with enough military detail to rival Tom Clancy, and yet always focusing on his inner life; to call it spiritual would not be far from the mark.

In the same Huffington Post blog, Carpenter says that one inspiration for her novel was an old photograph of her father, who was some sort of special forces agent in Vietnam. Another was the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, just as she was beginning to write. It is an impressive attempt to imagine what her father must have gone through then and what those young men in the Middle East were going through now. Something of the lost father figure comes through in the novel in the person of Jason’s father, David — an older man probably connected with the CIA, who loved Sara and continued to support her from a distance until his death in the 1990s. Jason’s attempt to live up to his idealized image of his father is a large part of his motivation; we eventually come to realize that he has greatly exceeded it. Carpenter cannot really fill David out, though, and she is wise not to try. Her main focus is on these two younger people, mother and son, and her empathy with both is extraordinary.

As a pacifist, with little patience for the jingoistic flag-waving of the past decade, I am amazed by how much I liked this book. Yet Carpenter’s achievement is to make politics vanish in the light of simple humanity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 48 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 18, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lea Carpenter
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Soldier’s Wife by Margaret Leroy

Bibliography:

• Eleven Days (June 2013)