“And if you decide not to read anymore, hey, no problem, because you’re not the one I was waiting for anyway. But if you decide to read on, then guess what? You’re my kind of time being and together we’ll make magic!”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 27, 2014)

How do a century-old modern-thinking Buddhist nun, a WW II kamikaze pilot, a bullied 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl on the verge of suicide, her suicidal father, a struggling memoirist on a remote island of British Columbia, Time, Being, Proust, language, philosophy, global warming, and the 2011 Japanese tsunami connect?

In this brilliantly plotted and absorbing, layered novel, one can find the theme in a quote from Proust, quoted by Ozeki:

“In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self.”

Remember these poignant and piercing words, as it underpins all that this book is about. You can catch on immediately that it is self-referential, at least to some degree. The memoirist’s name is Ruth (like the author)–both Ruths have a husband name Oliver and live on a remote island in British Colombia. And both are writers. The Ruth of the novel suffers from writer’s block. She has been trying to write a book of her mother’s last years living with Alzheimer’s, and to illustrate her own feelings about her experience as daughter and caretaker.

One day, Ruth finds some barnacle-encrusted belongings washed up ashore, possibly from the 2011 Japan tsunami and the tidal drifts that deposited debris in their direction. Inside is a Hello Kitty lunchbox, a wristwatch circa WWII, letters in Japanese, a French composition book, and a diary of a 16-year-old Japanese girl named Nao (pronounced “Now”) written in English. The diary itself is set inside a hacked copy of Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” (In Search of Lost Time). Proust’s novel is removed, leaving the shell as a cover protecting Nao’s secret journal.

In the meantime, a native Japanese crow has inhabited the island where Ruth and Oliver live with their moody cat, eerily haunting the island with its ke ke ke song.

According to the narrative, the ancient Zen master, Sh?b?genz?, stated, “Time itself is being…and all being is time…In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.”

I was hooked by that time, and for the time…being.

I know that, thus far, I have only quoted great historical thinkers and writers, whose words are enfolded in this shimmering tapestry of a book. However, be assured that Ozeki’s contemporary narrative will both exhilarate and touch you.

“I am reaching through time to touch you,” writes Nao with her purple gel pen.

Ruth decides to hunker down with Nao’s diary, a few pages at a time, each night reading to Oliver and herself. She learns early on that Nao is planning on killing herself after she writes down the life story of her great-grandmother Jiko, the Buddhist nun. As the diary unfolds, it is evident that Nao is also recording the story of her own life. Moreover, she shares the events, as she knows it, of her dead great-uncle, the WW II pilot who was also a philosopher and lover of French literature.

The opening of the book is abstract, unformed, and philosophical, but that only lasts for a few pages. Once the chapters begin, the narrative alternates between Ruth and Nao. I admit to an early concern, that the novel may be a YA-adult crossover, due to the chipper tone of Nao and her indelibly teenage style. But, eventually, as the story penetrates and cross-cuts through characters, the storylines become a piercing symphony. I am confident that you will be moved by not just its warmth, but its luminous beauty.

“In the interstices between sleeping and waking, she floated in a dark liminal state that was not quite a dream, but was perpetually on the edge of becoming one. There she hung, submerged and tumbling slowly, like a particle of flotsam just below the crest of a wave that was always just about to break.”

Along the way, you will learn numerous Japanese words, which are footnoted, and Buddhist concepts, which are woven in seamlessly. I have had too many experiences of overweening narratives exerting Buddhist credo that discharge as shallow power point presentations or pedantic coffee table ideas. Ozeki doesn’t disappoint. With a little magic realism (just a little!), a pinch of Murakami, and a lot of heart, she pulls the threads all together into a radiant tapestry. This book is a gift of love.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 279 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin Books (December 31, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ruth Ozeki
EXTRAS:	Guardian Interview
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

Bibliography:

• My Year of Meats (1998)
• All Over Creation (2003)
• A Tale for the Time Being (March 2013)

“Crime is an army. He was a policeman but he wasn’t cynical. He believed in the power of good, and that was why he spoke about evil. It was impenetrable, like observing the enemy through bulletproof glass. Anyone who tried to comprehend it with reason went under. He was starting to realize this, but he still had the urge to get in close to defeat that monster. If you couldn’t use your goodness and intellect to confront evil close up, what were you supposed to use? The thought had flashed through his mind before – a thought that was like a black hole right in the middle of reality, terrifying: that evil could be fought only in kind.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (NOV 27, 2010)

Sweden’s youngest ever chief inspector, at thirty-seven years old, cuts his vacation short when one of his team – a black, Swedish-born woman – has her jaw broken at the annual Gothenburg party, an outdoor late-summer festival at which nativist thugs get drunk and run amok, often in motorcycle gangs.

Gothenburg is sweltering in an August heat wave and Winter shows up for work in cut-offs, a rock band tee shirt and uncut hair – quite a contrast to his usual designer suits and perfect grooming. The attack on his officer has provoked an unaccustomed rage and he unleashes it on his ex-brother-in-law, a criminal with racist ties. “Winter opened his eyes again and looked at his hands. Were they his? It had felt good clenching his fingers around Vennerhag’s jaw.”

It doesn’t take long to round up the attackers, but a murdered woman found in a lakeside ditch effectively ends Winter’s vacation. She has no id or identifying marks; her fingerprints aren’t in any database and no one has reported her missing, though the autopsy shows she’s had a child.

Winter, who finds himself musing on the nature of evil and the urge to fight violence with violence, sets his team in motion, chasing down every lead they can think of, no matter how thin:

“An investigation is a great big vacuum cleaner that sucks in everything: witness statements and forensic evidence, sound ideas and crazy hunches, most of it completely irrelevant to the case. Eventually you find things that fit together. Then you can formulate a hypothesis.”

It takes almost half the book to trace the woman’s identity. Meanwhile the narrative breaks for interludes with a child held captive and missing her mother and a lonely old lady growing anxious about her missing neighbors.

A police procedural with a strong psychological bent, Edwardson’s series stays primarily on Winter, while branching out to include details of his team’s private lives and aspirations. Winter himself is on the brink of a life choice, spurred by his girlfriend Angela’s ultimatum.

The prose is Scandinavian spare with a vivid sense of place only occasionally confusing to an American audience. Fans of Scandinavian crime fiction will love Edwardson. (Translated by Per Carlsson)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Åke Edwardson (in Swedish) Wikipedia page on Ake Edwardson
EXTRAS:	An Interview with Ake Edwardson
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other Swedish novels: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson Mind’s Eye by Hakan Nesser The Devil’s Star by Jo Nesbo

Partial Bibliography:

Chief Inspector Erik Winter Novels:

• Death Angels (1997; 2009 in English)
• The Shadow Woman (1998; September 2010)
• Sun and Shadow (1999; 2005 in English)
• Never End (2000; 2006 in English)
• Frozen Tracks (2001; 2008 in English)
• Room No. 10 (2013)

“I saw a therapist for years. I stopped when I realized there was no fixing the broken bits…. When your world falls apart and everything’s ruined, you lose part of yourself. Not all, inconveniently. One half, the best half, dies. The other half lives.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (JUN 4, 2010)

Sophie Hannah’s The Dead Lie Down is a multi-faceted psychological thriller about guilt, revenge, self-destruction, and redemption. All of the major characters have something to hide and they reveal their secrets reluctantly. Aiden Seed, who frames pictures for a living, has decided that he and the woman he loves, Ruth Bussey, should be open with one another before they become intimate. Ruth hesitantly admits that she did something shameful and was punished excessively for her actions. Aiden is sympathetic, saying, “The worst things stow away in the hold, follow you wherever you go.” It is then his turn to confess: “Years ago, I killed someone.” “Her name was Mary. Mary Trelease.”

When Aiden makes his startling admission, Ruth is appalled. She cannot say to Aiden that it doesn’t matter. Instead, she confides in someone she admires, Sergeant Charlotte Zailer, who is part of the community policing team for the town of Spilling. The catch is that the woman Aiden claims to have killed is not dead. Mary Trelease lives at 15 Megson Crescent on the Winstanley Estate, a rough neighborhood whose residents are steeped in squalor and hopelessness. Trelease is a painter who jealously guards her work from prying eyes. Aiden shows no obvious signs of mental illness, so why is he confessing to a murder that he did not commit?

Sophie Hannah goes back and forth in time, and shifts point of view frequently. In addition, the author teases us with bits of information that, by themselves, mean very little. Eventually, the puzzle pieces come together to form a ghastly and unutterably depressing whole.

Sophie Hannah is a fine descriptive writer with a strong eye for detail. Her depiction of a party during which Charlie and her fiancé, DC Simon Waterhouse, celebrate their engagement at “a dingy room in a pub,” along with family and friends, is excruciating, embarrassing, funny, yet also unutterably sad. Simon and Charlie are a wounded pair and people say cruel things about them behind their backs. What should have been a festive occasion turns into a cringe-worthy fiasco. Simon’s boss, DI Proust, known as the Snowman, is creepy, cold-blooded, sarcastic, and completely unreasonable. He and Simon loathe one another, and their interactions are painful to observe.

The problem with this book is not the characterizations, which are heartbreakingly authentic, but the plot, which is byzantine and as far over the top as one can get. If an author requires more than one or two pages of exposition to explain everything that has gone before, this is a clue that something may be amiss. The Dead Lie Down concludes with such a lengthy explanation, intended to clarify the muddy narrative, that a scorecard would have been welcome to keep track of who did what to whom. How much more satisfying this novel would have been had the story been less dense and more grounded in reality.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 39 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sophie Hannah
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Orphan Choir Other unusual mysteries: Death of a Writer by Michael Collins Something Might Happen by Jule Myerson Yes, My Darling Daughter by Margaret Leroy

Bibliography:

• Gripless (1999)
• Cordial and Corrosive: an unfairy tale (2000)
• The Superpower of Love (2002)
• The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets : Stories (2008)
• The Orphan Choir (January 2014)

Zailer & Waterhouse Mysteries:

• Little Face (2006)
• The Wrong Mother (2008 UK; 2009 US) ( Published as The Point of Rescue) in the UK
• The Dead Lie Down (2009 UK; 2010 US) (Published as The Other Half Livesin the UK)
• The Truth Teller’s Lie (2010 UK; 2010 US) (Published as Hurting Distance in the UK)
• The Cradle in the Grave (2011) (Published as A Room Swept White in the UK)
• The Other Woman’s House (2012)  (Published as Lasting Damage in the UK)
• Kind of Cruel (2012 UK; 2013)
• The Carrier (2014 in UK)

Note: Sophie Hannah is also an accomplished poet, see her website for more information on her poetry books.