“I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you this.”

I shook my head. I knew why, even then, young as I was and afraid of her. I knew she was telling me because she had to tell me, showing me because she had to show someone. This room was her work as much as it was Alena’s. Alena might have made the room, but Agnes had conserved it—exhaustively, painstakingly—with all the care, patience, attention, exertion at her disposal. It was a task literally without end. Did the room exist if no one saw it? And if it didn’t exist, did Agnes?

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 6, 2014)

Alena is a novel about the art world and the people who inhabit it. It is said to be an homage to du Maurier’s Rebecca. However, not having read Rebecca in no way took anything away from my love of this novel. This novel stands on its own and I loved it.

The novel gets its name from the first curator of The Nauk, a private museum on the Cape in Massachusetts. For fifteen years, Alena held this position and gained a reputation of being bigger than life. She was headstrong, other-worldly, manipulative, dark, flirtatious, and intently involved in conceptual art, especially art that related to the human body. As time progressed her tastes became darker, leaning more and more towards the bloody, death-glorifying, and often gross renderings of the physical. As the novel opens, Alena has disappeared. She has been gone for two years and is presumed dead though her body has never been found. The prevailing belief is that she drowned by taking a swim in the ocean when the currents were too strong for her.

Bernard Augustin, Chair of the Board of the Nauk, goes to the Venice Biennale as he does every year. He is a well-known collector and figure in the art world. In Venice he hobnobs with the top tier art dealers, gallery owners and collectors. It is in Venice that he meets a young female curator from the midwest who is there with her controlling boss on her first visit abroad. (Interestingly, the name of this young curator is never provided in the book.) She meets Bernard by chance and is in awe of him and a bit in love as well despite the fact that he is gay. They hit it off intellectually and emotionally and on an impulse, Bernard offers her the position of curator at The Nauk. She accepts, not actually knowing what she is getting in to.

Once at the museum, the young curator is met with a staff that is still loyal to Alena and resentful of someone taking her place. Alena had promised the next show to a conceptual artist, a Gulf War veteran and multiple amputee who displays scenes of war with body parts and lots of blood. She, however, wants to decide on her own what the next show will be and she offers it to a ceramic artist who makes porcelain butterflies. The Nauk hasn’t had a show in two years and Bernard tells her that the show must be up in two months, by Labor Day. There is a lot of angst between the employees and the curator, and between the curator and the ceramist.

The ambiance of the novel is gothic and eerie. There are a lot of strange characters and happenings that serve to upset and off put the curator each time she attempts to accomplish something. Bernard is not there most of the time to ease the way in for her as he travels to his homes in New York, Colorado and Europe or else he’s attending art-related business far away.

The information about art is comprehensive. The author, Rachel Pastan, knows her conceptual art very well and her knowledge of art history is impressive. This book hooked me right away and I could not put it down. I resented anything that got in the way of my reading it; it was that good. So I present to you this review from a reader who has not read Rebecca but loves this novel as it stands on its own with no history or homage to any other piece of literature but solely to art.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (January 23, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rachel Pastan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and another Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another to try: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Bibliography:

• This Side of Married (2004)
• Lady of the Snakes (2008)
• Alena (January 2014)

“What happens to days that disappear? The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held— a glance, a fight, a taste of bread, a handful of braided hair, thousands of worries and triumphs and regrets— all of it slips between those closing gates, vanishing into a dark and silent room. When Josephine Ashkenazi first invented Genizah, all she wanted to to do was open those gates.

At least, that was how it started.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (FEB 18, 2014)

The idea for writing a modern version of the biblical story of Joseph came apparently from the author’s husband. It is a brilliant one, even more brilliantly executed. First, because she uses it for resonance rather than prediction; you recognize the biblical parallels after they have occurred, but you never know when she is going to depart from the Genesis version, so her novel remains surprising to the end. Second, because the Egyptian setting grounds the book in aspects of Jewish history that are perhaps less well-known, but obviously relevant to the eternal geopolitical situation in the Middle East. And third, because the Torah reference provides the perfect opening to explore many issues in Jewish teaching and philosophy, most notably those concerning divine providence, accident, and free will. The title of her novel, actually, is borrowed from a treatise on these very questions written in Cairo by the twelfth century doctor and philosopher Maimonides. The result, in Horn’s hands, is a richly layered novel that is humane, exciting, informative, and thought-provoking, all at the same time.

Josephine (Josie) Ashkenazi is a software developer and CEO of a company called Genizah, which enables its customers to record, index, cross-reference, and recall even the most trivial aspects of their lives, linking them to everything around them in both historical and geographical dimensions. She is asked to go to Egypt as consultant on a vast new library in Alexandria, and accepts the challenge, leaving behind her Israeli-born husband Itamar, her six-year-old daughter Tali, and her elder sister Judith, who has a subsidiary position with the firm. I must admit that there was something a little science-fictiony about the premise (or magical realist, if you will); although the ideas are all conceivable, it requires some suspension of disbelief to accept the degree to which they had been developed. But two things happen to anchor the book almost immediately. The first is that the action suddenly shifts back to 1896 in Cambridge, England, where two formidable Scottish sisters confront the University Reader in Rabbinics, Solomon Schechter, with a fragment of manuscript they have recently brought back from Cairo. Despite the slightly comic tone of this episode, it is also feels entirely true, and indeed one discovers that Schechter was a real person. And when Josie goes to Egypt, she falls victim to a more contemporary reality: she is kidnapped and held for ransom. The suspension of disbelief quality never goes away completely from Josie’s story, but from now on her role as CEO fades behind those as absent wife, missing mother, and beaten woman.

Genizah, the name of Josie’s firm, is the Hebrew word for the store-room in a synagogue where Torah scrolls and similar documents were placed after they had become unusable, for the name of God could not be erased. The real Schechter unearthed in the Genizah of a Cairo synagogue a chaotic hoard of documents, secular as well as sacred, a discovery which made his name. Among them were letters from Maimonides and a draft of his Guide for the Perplexed. This opens the door to scenes in Cairo of the 12th century, to interweave with those in the 19th and 21st. It also introduces some of the philosophical themes of the book.

Horn is a Jewish writer (and winner of two National Jewish Book Awards), not just because she writes about Jewish characters and subjects, but because she shares the Jewish fascination with philosophical debate. There is a chapter, for instance, in which Maimonides outlines five theories of divine providence, ranging from total predestination to utter chance, and another in which he classifies three different kinds of evil. Other readers might consider these dry diversions, but they fascinated me both as ideas and for how they linked to the moral implications of the story of Josie and her family at home. They formed a serious core to the novel that amply balanced its more fantastic aspects. And indeed balance is all; the more I look, the more I see parallels and linkages that bind this complex novel together. Perhaps some of its characters could be developed a little further, but as a theme-based novel it could hardly be bettered.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 68 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (September 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dara Horn
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Wikipedia page on the biblical Joseph
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Bibliography:

• In the Image (2002)
• The World to Come (2006)
• All Other Nights (2009)
• A Guide for the Perplexed (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Rescuer (DATE)

“In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novels of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely…Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (NOV 16, 2011)

“Reader, I married him.”

What sensitive reader hasn’t thrilled to the last lines of the novel Jane Eyre, when the mousy and unprepossessing girl triumphantly returns to windswept Thornfield as a mature woman, marrying her one-time employer and great love, Mr. Rochester?

That era of these great wrenching love stories is now dead and gone. Or is it? Can these time-honored stories be rewritten for our current age, adapting to the accepted forces of sexual freedom and feminism? That’s the main focus of Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel and the theme shows up early on. He writes about his key character: “Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.”

You’d expect the author of the ground-breaking Virgin Suicides – a beautifully-rendered mythology about the suicides of five secluded sisters as seen through the eyes of neighborhood boys – and Middlesex, the exhilarating Pulitzer Prize winning multi-generational saga focusing on a hermaphrodite – to bring a fresh energy to the topic. And indeed, Mr. Eugenides does.

The” marriage plot” is a term used to categorize a storyline centered on the courtship rituals between a man and a woman and the potential obstacles they face on the way to the nuptial bed. It often involves a triangle – typically, the woman and man who are fated to be together and a strong rival for the woman’s attention.

So it is here. Madeline Hanna – the center of this new marriage plot — is a privileged Brown University student, a young English major whose books range from the complete Modern Library set of Henry James to “a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters.” Her brain is tantalized by her readings of deconstructions like Roland Barthes in her Semiotics 211; her heart, though, is firmly tethered to the literature of a century or two past. The other two sides of the love triangle are composed of Leonard Bankhead, a charismatic, sexually charged, intellectual, and intense college Darwinist, and Mitchell Grammaticus, the spiritually inclined seeker who has been delving into various religious mythologies including Christian mysticism.

But – Eugenides being Eugenides – someone who does not shy from complex characters – he adds a twist. Leonard is not only tall, dark and brooding (he wears a leather jacket, chews tobacco and is uncontrollably moody. Think: David Wallace Foster), he is also bipolar. What follows is one of the most breathtaking descriptions of this mental condition that this reader has ever read:

“As Leonard strode along, thoughts stacked up in his head like air traffic over Logan Airport to the northwest. There were one or two jumbo jets full of Big Ideas, a fleet of 707s laden with the cargo of sensual impressions (the color of the sky, the smell of the sea), as well as Learjets carrying rich solitary impulses that wished to travel incognito. All these planes requested permission to land simultaneously. Leonard radioed the aircraft, telling some to keep circling while ordering others to divert to another location entirely. The stream of traffic was never-ending…”

How do you carry on a relationship with someone who is hostage to his emotions and at the mercy of Lithium, which leaves him dulled and somnambulant, plump and often impotent…yet often magnetic? Indeed, there are times the reader will question exactly what the attraction is and why Madeleine succumbs to it. But wait – in the wings is the man who still carries the torch and who is currently overseas working out the big questions: the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

There are those who will consider the plot to be vaguely misogynistic. After all, Madeleine is the “prize” between two very determined men; she is hardly “I am woman, hear me roar.” Rather, “it turned out that Madeleine had a madwoman in the attic: it was her six-foot-three boyfriend.” Mr. Eugenides is not trying to make politically-correct statements; rather, he is working within the confines of the traditional marriage plot, with wisps and tendrils of everything from Jane Eyre to Anna Karenina. And he does so smartly. He deconstructs not only the deconstruction of the marriage plot, but answers the question about why we still rejoice in this timeworn style. And he does it with page-turning fervor to show how reading about love affects the ways we fall in love.

With devastating wit and a nod to intellectual and academic influences, Jeffrey Eugenides creates a fresh new way to approach the predictable marriage plot, revealing its relevance in today’s world. It is an achievement.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 392 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 11, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jeffrey Eugenides
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Middlesex

Bibliography:

• The Virgin Suicides (1993)
• Middlesex (2002) 
• The Marriage Plot (2011)

Movies from books:

• The Virgin Suicides (2000)

“In 1962, Walter Cousins made the biggest mistake of his life: he slept with the au pair for a month. She was an English exchange student named Diane Burroughs, and he was an actuary from Piersall-Crane, Inc., whose wife, that summer, had suffered a nervous breakdown.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (NOV 13, 2011)

Ed King had me mesmerized from the first page and did not let up throughout the book. It is a contemporary retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex set in the American northwest. The protagonist’s name, Ed King, means Oedipus Rex. Ed is short for Oedipus and Rex means “king” in Greek. Ed’s middle name is Aaron and one could read into this, “Ed, A King.” There is no real subtlety to the retelling. The characters change but the story remains the same. Ed kills his father and marries his mother. It is a Greek tragedy of great proportions and strength, hubris and loss.

The story opens with Walter Cousins, an actuary, temporarily left without childcare while his wife is hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. The time is the 1960’s. Ed hires a fifteen year-old British au pair, Diane, and begins the biggest mistake of his life – sleeping with her. She becomes pregnant and they agree to have the baby put up for adoption. Instead, she leaves the infant on a front porch in a prosperous neighborhood. The child is eventually adopted by an upper middle class Jewish family and raised with much love.

Diane blackmails Walter for $500 per month in perpetuity, telling him that she kept the child and needs the money for childcare. The character of Diane is well wrought. She is interesting, beguiling, and sly to the max. Over and over she rises to the top only to be brought down by her own hubris.

Ed goes to Stanford where he is a math whiz. After graduation, with some start-up money from his family, he begins a company that is called Pythia and it is reminiscent of Microsoft, as is his character similar to Bill Gates. Ed also is similar to Steve Jobs in that he was adopted and has started up one of the most successful businesses on the planet.

Pythia becomes the largest data search company in the world and Ed is one of the richest men in the world. He has a thing for older women and, wouldn’t you know, somehow he finds and ends up with Diane, sixteen years his senior but still very attractive. His family is a bit troubled by the age difference but learn to accept the marriage.

During his teen years, Ed is a bit of a renegade. He likes to drive fast cars, has little use for adult wisdom and goes his own way. One day he is driving with his girlfriend and a man in a BMW gives him the finger. Ed is incensed and is determined to get the best of this stranger. Ed ends up driving him off the road and this man is killed. His name is Walter Cousins. This episode is an existential moment in Ed’s development. He does not know who Walter is, but the thought of having killed someone else makes him feel psychically ill. He ruminates on it and can not get it off his mind. He gets rid of his car and tries to move on with his life. His girlfriend can’t understand why all of this bothers Ed. No one saw the accident happen and, as far as the law is concerned, Ed is off – free and clear. However, he is punished by himself.

The character of Ed does not have the same depth as Diane. Aside from the existential dilemma posed by killing Walter, Ed has it easy. He’s brilliant and arrogant, filled with hubris. Diane is not only interesting and filled with adventure, but each chapter about her brings on new information that just whets the appetite for more. Ed is much more bland. His story is told from his birth to his death with adequacy but lacks the component of thrill that accompanies Diane’s life.

Guterson is a masterful writer. He knows how to rein the reader in and just hold him captive. There was not one page in this book that bored me. I kept reading with interest and delight as the novel progressed. I highly admire Guterson’s way of redoing a classic in contemporary time and still retaining all the aspects of the original that made it such a classic tragedy in the first place. This is one of my top ten books read this year, without a doubt.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 83 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (October 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Guterson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our short review of: Snow Falling on Cedars Based on a Greek Comedy: Beginner’s Greek by James Collins

Bibliography:

• The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (1989)
• Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) 
• East of the Mountains (1999)
• Our Lady of the Forest (2003)
• The Other (2008)
• Ed King (October 2011)
• Problems with People: Stories (June 2014)

Nonfiction:

• Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

Movies from books:

• Snow Falling on Cedars (1999)

“I’m afraid, Doctor, that while Mr. Fields knows what people read, he shall never quite understand why.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (JUN 30, 2011)

You could classify The Dante Club loosely as historical fiction. Or perhaps, try historical-fantasy-fiction-literary-murder-mystery. It’s definitely a work to be enjoyed by “literary types,” but also by thrill-seekers, detective buffs, psychological and social analysts and in fact anyone who enjoys a good read.

The setting is Boston in 1865, the main protagonists include the real-life characters of a group of poets. At the time of the action they are unified by the project of translating into English (for the first time in America) Inferno by Dante. They include Oliver Wendell Holmes (poet, author and medical doctor), J.T. Fields (notable publisher), James Russell Lowell (poet, professor and editor), George Washington Green (historian and minister), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poet). When a series of spectacularly grisly murders hit the sleepy crime scene in Boston, they start to become aware that the crimes are copy-cat renderings of some of the punishments meted out to sinners in the very Inferno they are working on. As only a handful of people have any knowledge of the work in question, the list of suspects is effectively pared down to members of the club, and a few others. Rumbling in the background are the after-shocks and repercussions of the recent Civil War.

Already, some readers have probably been put off by the list of heavy-duty literary characters. They shouldn’t be. You don’t need to know anything about the protagonists further than what is given to you on the page, and their personalities are not only lively but jumping out of the book with individuality. As a murder mystery the piece is perfectly balanced. The focus of possibility of guilt moves continually, silently – the reader is never left idle for speculation. The action is vivid, the murders horrific and bizarre. There are no spurious red-herrings thrown in for the sake of it. The denouement is thoroughly satisfying in every way.

The rounded sub-plots are almost all instrumental to the dual purpose of further fleshing out the characters and in revolving the possible finger or guilt. Holmes’s fear of loss of literary fame and his lack of empathy with his son, Longfellow’s grief for the loss of his wife, Lowell’s embattlement with the Harvard authorities over the validity of teaching Dante (and modern language works in general), as well as his suicidal tendencies. Patrolman Rey (Boston’s first Black police officer) and his difficulties as a figure of authority in a racially divided society, and Augustus Manning’s maniacal obsession of bringing the University and press under his control. They are all brought together in an extremely solid framework where the reader will step firmly, even if the territory is unfamiliar.

But what relevance, I hear a myriad silent voices quizzing, are either Boston in the 1860s or the works of a 14th century poet? The core thread to both the Boston story and Pearl’s central theme lies in the work of the Inferno itself.

It is an undisputable fact that everyone who has the slightest knowledge of Inferno finds it at the very least memorable – probably on a level they don’t even realise. And Inferno is exceedingly well known. My own most vivid recollections of other works derivative of Dante’s Hell are the 1995 film “Se7en” and the 2005 TV drama “Messiah: the Harrowing,” but the briefest search on Wiki for “Dante and his Divine Comedy in Popular Culture” throws up page after page of references. Dante has made his way into the TV series “Angel” and into “Futurama.” He’s in video games, art and sculpture, music – and of course, literature. In this sense, The Dante Club is not in the least an esoteric book.

Why are we so fond of Dante? Certainly, the punishments in Inferno are grim, and there is no age throughout history in which we have not derived a macabre thrill from pure and bloody spectacle. This is not the cause of its popularity. If it were, we would all be reading torture accounts from the Spanish Inquisition instead. The appeal is in the precise reason it was written: a yearning for justice. Any class or race of human has an inbuilt auto-response system to the myriad of inevitable injustices, great or small, to themselves or to others. “That’s not fair!” is often chased fast by the thought “This is how it should be.” It is the meting out of punishments in an appropriate way (Dante’s contrapasso) that is irresistible to the human psyche. And it is precisely this that is Pearl’s theme. The series of murders are for a long period incomprehensible, but through the key of Dante they are shown to be composed from an almost autistically accurate logic. It is perhaps no coincidence that after graduating from Harvard in English and American Literature, Pearl went straight on to take a Law degree at Yale Law School.

There are some disconcerting aspects to the book. These mainly stem from the dichotomy between extremely well-researched, knowledgeable, fact-based fiction on the one hand and the occasional (but crucial) forgery here and there. It throws the reader off balance a little. Pearl knows his literary characters very well, and their behaviour rings true to what one would expect. The scene is Boston is extremely convincing and is no doubt based on intimate knowledge of the place and its history. However, the notion of the characters in question being involved in this type of criminal investigation is nothing short of preposterous, and the concepts of applied psychology and forensic logic which are brought to play are completely anachronistic. We are left teetering a little at the realisation that the writer is assuming we don’t need to be told what’s fact and what’s fiction: we’re grown-ups and understand that we’re listening to a story that simply uses these vehicles.

So far, we’ve established that it’s a good story, relevant to today, and accessible to a non-literary audience. Now for the caveat. You will enjoy this book ten times more if you are familiar with Inferno on some reasonably detailed textual level. The greatest strength of The Dante Club is the incredible interweaving of the plot on both the levels of the Boston scene and Dante’s exiled imaginings. Quite a number of reviews state that the book “starts off slowly” – this despite the first murder being mentioned on page 1, the first maggoty corpse discovered on page 8, and the first suicide leaping to a gory death on page 28. What they mean is, you don’t understand what’s going on for a good while. This is true, on a plot level. On a metatextual level, the plot is progressing at breakneck speed. The skill and accuracy of quotations and resonances between the two works, within the framework of immaculate modern prose, is the true delight of this novel.

This facet of Pearl’s craft reaches a jaw-dropping peak in a passage late on in the work. The poet-investigators chase after one of the “printer’s devils” in the dead of winter, across a frozen lake. The scene of Lowell grabbing the nearly-submerged “devil” by his curly red locks and demanding explanation brings the 9th circle of hell possibly more vividly to life than Dante did himself, as it is a palimpsest of not only several related scenes in Inferno but the Boston scene as well. The union of all the references and implications in the context of the narrative left me frankly queasy with admiration. Pearl has tried to disambiguate by introducing this particular point in Dante’s narrative just before the incident (there is, literally, a lecture on it), and it is followed up shortly after by another, even plainer rendering on the same theme. Hopefully non-Danteans will pick up on the superficial reference, but I fear a great deal of the force of the words will melt unless aided by a little more knowledge. Pearl himself is a kind of opposite to Patrolman Rey, who hears a piece of Dante quoted to him but cannot understand it, only endure the apprehension of knowing its grave importance. “He remembered the whisperer’s grip stretch across his skull. He could hear the words form so distinctly, but was without the power to repeat any of them.” Pearl by contrast cannot help but repeat them, through the medium of his story.

This extreme marriage between the two texts, or rather the bond between Pearl himself and the text of the Comedia (for his work on which he won the 1998 Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America) is perhaps more apparent than even the author realises. Pearl’s prose is without exception polished, educated and perfectly presented. However it is always in the scenes that refer (in whatever way) back to Dante that are extraordinary in their skill. If you don’t know your Dante, it’s a very accurate way of guessing which parts are alluding to Inferno. If you read a sentence and think “wow that’s vivid” or “what a strange way to put things” – it’s probably echoing Dante. This is not in any way to belittle Pearl’s own words or to suggest excessive reliance on another work. It is merely very evident that the true inspiration for the work are the words of Dante, and it is these that ignite Pearl’s own words as if suddenly doused in petrol when they hit the page with the force of his empathy.

For anyone unfamiliar with Inferno, here are some brief pointers (much more is explained within the book). Dante is journeying through Hell on a sort of tourist visa, and passes through the ante-hell and nine circles of it, which are arranged according to the punishments awarded various types of sinners. The outer circles are for lesser sins, the ninth circle is reserved for traitors and Satan himself, along with Judas Iscariot. In The Dante Club, by a certain arbitrary process only some of the circles are dealt with. Unfortunately, detailing the sins and their punishments here would only spoil (both) books for the reader. It will have to suffice to compare yet another Dante-related work: Milton’s Paradise Lost. If Milton tries to “justify the ways of God to Man,” and Dante might be said on some level to justify the ways of Man to God, Pearl is perhaps trying to justify the ways of Man to Man. The question: what can turn decent people into unspeakable torturers, is one that is as pertinent to this day as it was in the 14th century, and will continue to be so long after we are gone.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 362 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (June 27, 2006)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Matthew Pearl
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Hell is Empty by Craig Johnson The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

Bibliography:

• The Dante Club (2003)
• The Poe Shadow (2006)
• The Last Dickens (2009)
• The Technologists (February 2012)

Related:

• Inferno: The Longfellow Translation by Dante (2003)

“So, without precise coordinates, deprived of places and dates, I began to exist. The imprecision extended to my name; and to keep from boring the reader again with the narrative cliché of identity problems, the facile what’s-in-a-name, I’ll simply say that I was baptized — yes, with a splash of holy water and everything: my mother might be a convinced iconoclast, but she didn’t want her only son ending up in limbo on her account — as José Beckman, son of the crazy Gringo who killed himself out of homesickness before the arrival of his descendant.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 18, 2011)

When Joseph Conrad was working on Nostromo in the early 1900s, and setting it in the fictional Latin American country of Costaguana, he found that his first-hand knowledge of the region, based on a couple of brief shore visits a quarter-century earlier, was insufficient. He therefore consulted friends who had spent greater time in northern South America and constructed a setting that is entirely believable, not only in its composite geography but also in its way of life and political turmoil. Now Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez imagines that Conrad might have had one further contact, José Altamirano, born in Colombia but recently arrived in London as an exile from Panama, following the province’s secession from Colombia in the revolution of 1903. Writing now in 1924, the year of Conrad’s death, Altamirano believes that the novelist has stolen his life story and that of his country to make a fiction of his own, utterly obliterating him in the process.

Altamirano writes in a voice that is immediately attractive. Witty, knowing, speaking directly to his readers, and making hay with narrative and historical conventions, he is an engaging travel companion and tour guide to the past century of Colombian history. Kudos to the translator Anne McLean for maintaining especially the humor of this voice, as when General Rafael Uribe Uribe dies “with an ax embedded in his skull and the weight of several civil wars on his shoulders,” or a group of envious conspirators break in on Simón Bolívar in bed with his mistress, “determined that this coitus shall be interruptus.” Altamirano’s story begins with the birth of his father in 1820, a Renaissance man who is simultaneously a lawyer, a doctor, and a writer, until exiled from the capital as a liberal and unbeliever. José himself is born in 1855, and remains in ignorance of his father until his late teens, when he goes off to Panama — at this time still a Colombian province — to find him. Coincidentally, a young seaman named Józef Konrad Korzeniowski makes his one visit to Panama at about the same time, gun-running with a French ship. The two do not meet.

It is probably going to be difficult for a foreign reader to keep up with the changing political situation in Colombia itself, but it would be worth Googling the history of Panama, especially the difficult building of the railway across the isthmus, the failed French plan to cut a sea-level canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the horrendous loss of life to yellow fever and loss of capital to fraudulent speculation, and the American involvement in securing a sovereign zone in a newly-independent country where the canal would ultimately be built. All these form the background to Altamirano’s personal story, which has more than its share of danger, love, and loss. Vásquez loses none of his narrative virtuosity, but halfway through his book begins to pall, partly because the mixture of personal and political no longer seems to gel, and partly because he also begins to tell the parallel story of Conrad in Europe and Africa. Though interesting enough in itself, the parallels seem forced and both stories get diluted. For that matter, the similarities between Altamirano’s story and Nostromo are not really that close at all, and good though Vásquez’ sense of place may be, Conrad’s is even better. The moral climax of the book depends entirely upon which side one backs in the Panamanian revolution, and while Altamirano clearly feels deeply, it is difficult for a Gringo to have any horse in that race at all, making it hard to sympathize with the author’s crippling guilt.

So other than an entertaining and swashbuckling yarn, what is the novel about? Any light it casts on Conrad and his Nostromo is relatively trivial; this does not even have the relevance that, say, Jean Rhys’ High Wind in Jamaica has to Jane Eyre. But in a less specific sense, it is a fascinating exploration of history and fiction. When Altamirano complains to Conrad “It’s not the story of my country,” the novelist replies: “Of course not. It’s the story of MY country. It’s the story of Costaguana.” Fact has become fiction. But the whole book is about the reshaping of fact. As each regime takes over from the other, it’s justifies its aims in the reframing of history and the writing of bad but patriotic poetry. The senior Altamirano practices a form of “refractive journalism” in Panama, bending the truth, and is paid by the Canal Company to write copy that will keep investors coming up with the money. His son uses every narrative trick at his disposal to present or conceal facts as he sees fit. And even the author plays the game by including among his solemn list of works cited an entirely fictitious history written by a fictitious character invented by Conrad for his Nostromo!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (June 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Guardian article on Juan Gabriel Vásquez
EXTRAS:	Wikipedia page on Nostromo
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Bibliography:

• Los Amantes de Todos Los Santos (2001)
• The Informers (2004)
• The Secret History of Costaguana (2007; 2011 in US)
• The Sound of Things Falling (August 2013)

“What I like most about the great literature created by Americans of European descent is the Africanist presence within it. I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sane. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it’s most important when it’s negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 3, 2011)

Chris Jaynes has just been fired from his position as the token black professor at a prestigious liberal arts college, and retaliates by visiting the president and snatching off his red bow tie. This none-too-subtle reference to the preferred attire of Leon Botstein, president of Bard College where author Mat Johnson also taught, launches the book as a satire, but gives little hint of the likability of its hero or the fascination of the study of race that will follow. Johnson turns the subject inside out, standing it on its head, looking at race with an outrageous accuracy whose aim falls on black and white alike. Forgive me, therefore, if I set the comedy aside for the moment and concentrate on the book’s intellectual underpinnings.

Much of the debate concerns the nature of blackness itself, beginning with the protagonist’s own racial identity. Jaynes, like the author himself, is a mulatto, “so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety white guy. But I’m not. My father was white, yes. But it doesn’t work that way. My mother was a woman, but that doesn’t make me a woman either.” Jaynes refuses to be confined within the expectations placed upon his race, but insists on defining himself in reference to white society. He boycotts the college Diversity Committee as a meaningless sham. He declines to teach the canonical black texts, looking instead to authors like Poe and Melville to discover “the intellectual source of racial Whiteness,” that “odd and illogical sickness” which he is convinced is the true source of the problem.

When the college lets him go, Jaynes is immersed in a study of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. It was not a problem that I did not know this book, though I have looked at it since. In the first chapter that really caught fire for me, Jaynes summarizes the novel, making hilarious fun of its weaknesses, but also deconstructing its codes and showing why it is worth further study. Poe’s protagonist enlists on a whaler out of Nantucket. After surviving imprisonment, mutiny, shipwreck, and cannibalism, he reaches the Antarctic Ocean where he is washed up on an incongruously-sited tropical isle inhabited only by stunted natives so dark that even their teeth are black. The sole survivors of a treacherous ambush by the natives, Pym and his friend, a half-caste named Dirk Peters, set sail once more and reach the Antarctic ice-shelf. “But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men.And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” These are Poe’s last sentences, whose enigma, with its strong racial overtones, Jaynes finds more interesting than anything else in the book. By sheer luck (by no means the only authorial license in this splendidly tall tale), Jaynes comes across a crumbling manuscript written in a semi-literate hand that purports to be Dirk Peters’s account of the voyage. Realizing that Poe’s story was based upon true accounts, Jaynes enlists the help of a seafaring cousin called Booker and recruits five other black people to accompany him on an expedition to Antarctica in search of Poe’s race of ultra-white giants, dismissed by Booker as “super ice honkies.”

The rest is a fantasy-adventure in the manner of Rider Haggard or Jules Verne (who also wrote his own sequel to the Poe). Jaynes and his crew do encounter this mysterious race, whom they call the Tekelians, living in ice-tunnels underground. What follows is a re-enactment of racial history — cautious trading, capture, enslavement, and eventual escape. The actual story becomes a little tedious during the long sojourn underground, but Johnson’s observation of the changing dynamics among the black characters never palls; some seek accommodation with their captors, others attempt resistance, and still others record events for later media distribution. In a brilliant twist, Jaynes and his best friend eventually escape this world of literal whiteness only to encounter a metaphorical one, a huge bio-dome built by the painter Thomas Karvel (clearly Kincade), landscaped inside to replicate the perfect sunset world of one of his paintings. Welcome to a space the size of a football field filled with fauna and lavender and color, bushes of every hue, and a waterfall with orange carp swimming at its base. And recorded American talk-shows playing continuously at the four corners: “I got Rush over here by the kitchen because he’s the granddaddy. I got Beck going in the southwest corner. Northwest is O’Reilly, southeast is Hannity, I think. Honey, is southeast Hannity?”

But you do not read this book for the plot or even its fantastic environments, so much as for its intelligent and likable protagonist and for the author’s observations. Some of these are comically absurd, as in this woman bent on denying a heritage that is obvious to everybody else: “Honey, I got lots of Indian in me. I got Irish and I got a little French too. I got some German, or so I’m told. I even got a little Chinese in me, on my mother’s side. Matter of fact, I’m sure I got more bloods in me than I knows. But I do knows this. I ain’t got no kind of Africa in these bones.” Some are little wry asides in the footnotes: “I should say here that, in America, every black man has a conspiracy theory. […] This obsession with conspiracies is most likely due to the fact that our ethnic group is a product of one.” And he even has a few social observations that have nothing to do with race at all: “Americans love that last question, ‘Where are you from?’ They see it as an excuse to go on about their peculiar local identity and tell you everything about themselves as people without really offering anything personal at all.” Ouch!

I label my reading notes with subject tags for easy reference; seldom have I come across a book that touches on so many of them. The books dealing with race are too numerous to mention, but I am thinking especially of the classic I have read most recently, Huckleberry Finn, which Johnson now makes me see as both a statement and a critique of the American Whiteness myth. There are also numerous books with academic settings, those by David Lodge especially, but again I think especially of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, both of which also have ethnic overtones. For other recent satires, I would compare Ian McEwan’s Solar and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question; the latter (which does for English Jews what Pym does for American Blacks) has the more attractive protagonist, but Johnson’s Chris James beats them both on that score. There would also be entries under Adventure, Fantasy, and Survival. I realize, though, that I need to create a new category to address what seems to have become a major recent trend: the use of existing texts as a jumping-off point to address contemporary concerns. In the last year alone, I have read The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Scott, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd, and — older, but the most significant of the lot — Foe by J. M Coetzee, a reworking of Robison Crusoe from the perspectives of gender and racial equality. Crusoe lies behind Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym also, giving Mat Johnson’s reworking a literary heritage that underscores the basic seriousness of his intent. You may read the book for laughs, read it for its shamelessly non-PC shock tactics, read it for social insights, but what will remain in your mind its ability to frame the dialogue on race in a new and important way.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; First Edition edition (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mat Johnson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another wild romp: The Big Machine by Victor LaValle

Bibliography:

• Drop (2000)
• Hunting in Harlem (2003)
• Incongegro SC (2008)
• Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010)
• Pym (March 2011)

Nonfiction Novella:

• The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York (2007)

“Arthur [Conan Doyle] killed Sherlock Holmes by the light of a single lamp…. At this, the middle point of his career, Arthur was unquestionably England’s great composer of the mystery story…. There was a trick to mystery stories, of course, and Arthur wasn’t embarrassed to admit that he knew it. It was the same trick practiced by a thousand amateur parlor magicians and face-painted circus jugglers: misdirection.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (FEB 06, 2011)

The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore, is required reading for fans of Doyle’s master of ratiocination, Sherlock Holmes. Moore has a fine time going back and forth between his two protagonists. One is Doyle himself who, in 1893, was growing heartily sick of Holmes. The sleuth in the deerstalker hat had become a celebrity in his own right and had overshadowed his thirty-three year old creator. Why should Doyle despise a fictional character that brought him so much fame and fortune? One problem was that many of Holmes’s admirers believed that Holmes was real, and they were driving Doyle crazy with their letters and requests for help in solving petty crimes. Most outrageous of all, says Doyle, “My greater work is ignored.”

Protagonist number two is twenty-nine year old Harold White, a freelance literary researcher whose life is predictable and mundane. He receives a big boost when, on January 5, 2010, he becomes the latest inductee into the Baker Street irregulars. Harold is elated to at last be part of “the world’s preeminent organization devoted to the study of Sherlock Holmes.” White is a bit of a loner and socially awkward. He even attends the annual Irregulars’ dinner wearing his own deerstalker hat which “was by far his favorite possession.” This Princeton graduate is a Holmes prodigy, who knows the Canon so well that he can quote many passages verbatim. He is a speed-reader, as well, with a vast knowledge of literature.

What connection is there between Doyle and White? Both become involved in complicated quests. Seven years following Holmes’s “death,” someone makes an attempt on Arthur Conan Doyle’s life. Assisted by his close friend, Bram Stoker, Doyle follows a series of clues leading to a vicious serial killer. (Naturally, the inept members of New Scotland Yard are of little use.) White has a conundrum of his own. One of the foremost Sherlockians is found dead in his hotel room, and a much sought-after diary, purported to have been written by Doyle in 1900, has gone missing. White decides that he is best qualified to find both the killer and the diary, and he conducts his inquiries in the company of a persistent reporter named Sarah.

This novel is loads of fun, and some parts of it are historically accurate (be sure to see the Author’s Note at the end). Be aware, though, that since a number of plot points are rather implausible, you will need to suspend your disbelief quite a bit. Moore has a grand time mocking Doyle’s pomposity, priggishness, and male chauvinism, but he also showcases Doyle’s loyalty, sense of honor, and astute mind. Bram Stoker is an engaging and pretty sharp detective in his own right. The author entertainingly satirizes obsessive individuals who feel compelled to find answers to questions that torment them, even if they endanger lives in the process.

The constant switching from Doyle’s adventures to White’s is dizzying, and an attempt to give Harold a romantic interest never catches fire. White is smart and spunky but bland; it is hard to get too worked up about his fate. However, the narrative is filled with so many intriguing curve balls, including a subplot about fiercely dedicated British suffragists and their antagonists, that fans of cerebral puzzles will enjoy matching wits with Doyle and White to figure out whodunit and why. There is an eloquent passage towards the conlcusion about the changeover from gas lamps in London’s fog shrouded streets to the harsh glare of electric lights, symbolizing the transition from an era of romance and mystery to one of modernity. Moore implies that something indefinable may have been lost in the process.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 74 readers
PUBLISHER:	Twelve; First Edition edition (December 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Graham Moore
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Sherlockian Fiction: A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullen The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King

Bibliography:

• The Sherlockian (December 2010)

Some Free Sherlock Holmes for the Kindle:

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
• The Sign of the Four
• A Study in Scarlet
• The Hound of the Baskervilles

And a fun movie:

• Sherlock Holmes (2009)

“FUNCTIONING ROBOTS are all alike; every malfunctioning robot malfunctions in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with the French girl who had been amécanicienne in their family, charged with the mainte- nance of the household’s Class I and II robots. Stunned and horri?ed by such a discovery, the wife had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the robots in the household were terribly affected by it. The Class IIIs were keenly aware of their respective masters’ discomfort…”

Book Review:

Review by Ann Wilkes  (SEP 30, 2010)

Android Karenina is one of those everything but the kitchen sink science fiction tales (robots, telepathy, strange creatures, threats from outer space and time travel) with the added benefit of being a literary mash-up. Ben H. Winters has transplanted the characters from Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina into a culture dependent upon technology to serve their every need.

The people of this alternate history even turn to their “beloved” servants for comfort and strength to face life’s trials. Their servants follow their every order and tell them what they want to hear. These androids, like those in Asimov’s Robot series, are subject to a set of laws that prevent them from harming their masters and require them to protect their own existence – in that order.

Interwoven in the drama of Anna’s love affair with Count Vronsky are a number of odd developments. Anna’s husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, is testing a prototype for a new kind of android which seeks to control him and ultimately all of Russia through Alexei’s position on the ministry.

The ministry is also behind an upgrade campaign in which everyone’s robots are confiscated for improvements. Meanwhile giant worm-like mechanical creatures are attacking the citizenry, which has already been assailed by such things as bug-like, mechanical koschei, Godmouths and emotion mines.

As in the classic, Anna alternately throws herself with abandon at Vronsky and beats herself up over her infidelity. Unlike the classic, Anna has another internal struggle – one that Tolstoy never could have imagined.

I zipped through this novel, drawn in by the brewing mysteries and unique world-building. It was an enjoyable read. One word of caution – don’t read through the book looking for the scene depicted on its cover. The artist took considerable liberties.

The ending left me disappointed (it lacked a certain punch and felt like a choose-your-own-adventure), but Android Karenina was still well worth the journey.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 49 readers
PUBLISHER:	Quirk Books (June 8, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ben H. Winters
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another mash up: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steven Hockensmith

Bibliography:

• Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009)
• Android Karenina (2010)
• The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (2010)
• Bedbugs (2011)
• The Last Policeman (July 2012)

“Ohhhhhhhhhh!” she cried, rolling her head and grabbing Mary with one hand, Kitty with the other. “My last hope, gone! Instead of throwing my eldest in the path of eligible bachelors, they’re to be thrown to the unmentionables! And so go the rest of us, girls—to a potter’s field or down a dreadful’s gullet, one or the other! And all because your father started taking orders from some ponytailed stripling who doesn’t even have the sense to cook his fish!”

Lydia and Kitty joined in with weeping of their own, and even Mary’s eyes took to watering behind her spectacles (though Elizabeth suspected this had more to do with the way her mother was crushing her hand).

When Elizabeth glanced at Hawksworth to gauge his reaction to the spectacle, she was surprised to find him intently gauging hers.

Book Review:

Review by Ann Wilkes (MAY 13, 2010)

In Dawn of the Dreadfuls, Steve Hockensmith takes Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and adds a generous helping of dry humor and zombies. What’s not to love? Here are the first two lines, which promise much more fun to come:

“Walking in the middle of a funeral would be, of course, bad form. So attempting to walk out on one’s own was beyond the pale.”

And Hockensmith doesn’t disappoint in this prequel to the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

At the ill-fated funeral, Mr. Bennett clears the church except for the vicar and his girls. His four daughters learn their father is more than just a long-suffering, hen-pecked man with a saving sense of humor. He’s expert at killing zombies. In fact, it’s a skill the secret order expected him to pass down to his children.

Mr. Bennett knows that a zombie incursion begins with just one zombie. Ignoring the shrieking protests of Mrs. Bennett, he throws all his wife’s flowers out of his dojo-turned-potting-shed to begin training his children in the deadly arts.

Soon, a handsome young warrior, trained in the East and sent by their father’s secret order of zombie hunters takes over their training. Lizzy makes up for her lack of skill with more than her fair share of determination. Under Master Hawksworth’s tutelage, Lizzy becomes a formidable foe to the many zombies who dare cross her path.

Unlike most Victorians Lizzy encounters, Dr. Bertram Keckilpenny is untroubled by her training outfit, straightforward manner, hunting skills and lack of squeamishness. When Lizzy meets him, he is made up to look like a zombie to test his theory that they are no danger to each other and to people they mistake for their kind.

Lizzy’s life is complicated by these two men and keeping her sister, Jane, safe from the philandering Lord Lumpley. The Lord makes a pretense of courting her naïve sister. Elizabeth Bennett manages all this while saving England from zombies.

I enjoyed seeing Mr. Bennett get his day, having a vital purpose rather than just hiding away in his library. Dawn of the Dreadfuls kept me amused for days. I didn’t want it to end.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 78 readers
PUBLISHER:	Quirk Books; Original edition (March 23, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Steve Hockensmith
EXTRAS:	Trailer for the book Quirk Classics web page for more mash-ups Ann Wilkes interview with Steve Hockensmith
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Jane Austen fan reads: Beginner’s Greek by James Collins The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Fowler More Zombie fiction: Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child Not sure if there is a Zombie in this one, but check it out anyway: The Devil You Know by Mike Carey

Bibliography:

Holmes on the Range series:

• Holmes on the Range (2006)
• On the Wrong Track (2007)
• The Black Dove (2008)
• The Crack in the Lens (July 2009)
• The World’s Greatest Sleuth (January 2011)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies series:

• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (October 2009)
• Dawn of the Dreadfuls (March 2010)

More Quirk Classic Mash-ups:

• Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters (September 2009)
• Android Karenina by Leo Tolstory and Ben H. Winters(June 2010)