“She just stood there and saw his face merge into the darkness as he lowered his hand and threw the burning match.  The flames burst into life.  It was like an avalanche of fire.  At once everywhere around them was lit up. It was a restless yellow light that made all the shadows tremble.  He staggered backwards a couple of paces while she remained motionless.  The flames were already licking high up the wall.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JAN 29, 2014)

Gaute Heivoll has written both a compelling novel and a historical and fact-driven book that examines a series of fires that occurred during two months in 1978 Norway. It is told from the perspective of the author who was born during the year that the arson occurred, as well as from the perspective of the arsonist who was in his twenties when the author was born.

The character Heivoll has returned to his hometown of Finsland, Norway to research this book and try to become a writer. He interviews those who knew the arsonist and he also gleans information from newspaper clippings and his grandmother’s diaries.

The arsonist, Dag, is the son of the fire chief. He was a most wanted child, an only child and very much loved – good at everything he put effort into. During his early adulthood he goes into the military and returns home after some sort of rejection that is never made clear. He lolls around the house and follows his father on fire calls that, because Dag is setting the fires, become more frequent and horrific. At one point, there are eight fires set over a period of three days.

Between May 6, 1978 through early June, 1978, ten fires are set, mostly to abandoned buildings and out buildings in Finsland. Towards the end of the pyromaniac’s rampage, however, buildings are burned with people or pets in them. They come just a hair’s breadth from losing their lives.

The book goes into the lives of the people who live in Finsland, mostly farmers, who have known each other their whole lives. It is inconceivable to them that one of their own is starting these fires. How could this possibly be? They only know that the arsonist comes at night and they have been driven to ignore sleep and are forced to stand guard all night to protect their homes and belongings from the crazy person who is burning down the village home by home.

Gaute Heivoll remembers clearly a time in school when one of his teachers told him he’d be a writer. He had gone to Oslo to study law but when it came time to take his exams, he turned in empty papers. He is afraid to be a writer yet drawn to a writing life and compelled to write at the same time. He is drawn in completely by the subject matter of this book.

Mr. Heivoll is a child being Christened at the time that the fires start and he imagines what his life as an infant is like when those around him are so frightened and paranoid about the fires. The town is a quiet one and no one would ever suspects Dag, the perfect boy, of doing anything wrong. When his parents figure out it is Dag, the bottom falls out of their world.

The book is poetically written and highly charged. It brings to life Mr. Heivoll’s own development as an author while examining the life of an arsonist who can not stop himself from his heinous actions. This book will appeal to those who like true crime and memoirs, along with literary fiction. I recommend it to anyone who treasures good writing and poetic use of language. (Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (January 7, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gaute Heivoll
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More from Norway: Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen

Bibliography:

• Before I Burn (January 2014)

“There is something I never told you, Laura, a thing about me that makes us more alike than you might imagine. While I have many regrets — in particular about the kind of mother I was to you, and the kind of mother I never managed to be — I have no greater regret than this: that I failed to tell you the darkest truth about me when you were present to hear it, that I failed to show you, when you needed it, how alike we were. This my true confession. To confess is all that I can do for you.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (NOV 30, 2013)

Patrick Flanery’s debut novel is a very interesting example of an overarching story that incorporates another “novel” or “memoir,” a journal and more embedded inside it.  Set in post-apartheid South Africa Absolution is a thought provoking book, and engaging; not necessarily, or least of all, in the sense one would initially expect. Much of the novel could be set in any other country that lived through two opposing government systems. While there are hints of the political realities of South Africa, such as the brief visit to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the central theme of the novel addresses deep moral questions of the human condition that are not time or place specific.

In the most broad sense Absolution is a deep reflection on guilt and seeking foregiveness, on what is truth and why we may not even admit aspects of the truth and our behaviour to ourselves, let alone to others. How many shades of truth are there?

Two central characters – Clare, a grand old dame of literature and Sam, her much younger biographer – enter over the course of the novel into a kind of intellectual and emotional “pas de deux,” whereby each reacts to or dances around the other’s questions and answers. Both reveal slowly and tentatively snippets of themselves and their lives… leaving us as readers to sift through the many shades of truths. As we follow each piece within the emerging puzzle we may at times think we are ahead of the two protagonists, but are we really?

While the “pas de deux,” the discussions between author and biographer, are central to the novel, the backstories of the two protagonists, told in separate sections and in different tones, are as essential. There is Clare’s “letter” to her daughter Laura, which reflects on and responds to her daughter’s notebooks, written while she was on the run from authorities during the “old regime” some twenty years earlier. Clare is also writing a “novel,” Absolution, that reads more like a personal memoir and in another series of chapters we learn more about Sam’s life that was deeply shaken early on in his youth.

Flanery is very effective in pursuing these different narrative streams, interleafing them in a way that, taken together, make for an engaging and comprehensive whole. Your attention is required to keep the different versions of the truth apart. Personally, I couldn’t help comparing Clare with the real-life grand old dame of South African writing, Nadine Gordimer. Be assured, though, there are no parallels between the two, other than maybe the home invasion that both experienced and that weighs heavily on Clare’s mind. I was taken by surprise that, despite the important political undercurrent in the novel, so little was in fact expressed in terms of the complex South African realities then and now. Race or colour was hardly ever mentioned, if at all. On the other hand, I found some sections too detailed and a tightening of those would have increased my reading engagement. Yet, for a debut novel, this book is a great achievement and we can hopefully look forward to more by the author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patrick Flanery
EXTRAS:	Publisher page
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Fallen Land More on guilt & forgiveness: Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward

Bibliography:

• Absolution (2012)
• Fallen Land (August 2013)

“Newcomers are free to condemn their ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 13, 2011)

I was in my late thirties when the poet Arthur Rimbaud first crossed my horizon. It was Jim Harrison, the American writer, who brought him to my attention. In his memoir Off to the Side, Harrison writes, “I think that I was nineteen when Rimbaud’s ‘Everything we are taught is false’ became my modus operandi.” Harrison continues, “…Rimbaud’s defiance of society was vaguely criminal and at nineteen you try to determine what you are by what you are against.” I admire Harrison a great deal. If he liked Rimbaud, if Rimbaud was the man, then I needed to know more. I discovered that the poet had influenced a good bit of the music of the ‘60s and 1970s, that Morrison and Dylan and a host of others had cited his authority. Of this time, Patty Smith writes in her recent memoir, Just Kids: “’When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,” she writes, “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.” His work, she concludes, “became the bible of my life.”

Further, I discovered that the term infant terrible was essentially coined to describe him and that, not only the writing, but the life lived was breathtaking.

I bought Rimbaud and dug in. But try as I might, he was lost on me. There was no fire there. The revolution was dead. I’d come too late to the poet. To Harrison’s point, to Patty’s point, Rimbaud was a young person’s game. To the mature reader, discovering him for the first time, his genius, well, it is obvious, particularly in the context of history; but he does not speak intimately to the older reader, does not influence to the degree of life changing, at least not to this reader. That the right book must find the reader at the right time, was never more true.

Louis Menand has written that a feature of modernity is that “the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence.” Like all ground-breaking endeavors, a visionary must come along and shatter tradition, setting a new standard and creating something that did not exist previously. In the modern tradition, the past is defined against the new, not incorporated into it. In the arts, in particular, the visionary becomes the genius-hero, an immortal. (“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself,” said Beethoven. “There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”) Though he did not touch me in a visceral way, Rimbaud nonetheless did not fail to impress. That the poet visionary-genius Rimbaud was a child prodigy, almost unheard of in literature, makes for good copy. (“He was,” writes Mr. Duffy, “that rarest of rarities and oddest of oddities–a prodigy of letters.”) That after producing his art and while still a young man, he renounced his genius and broke with society, fleeing to the African desert, some say running guns, seems a more likely creation of Hollywood than history. But it is history, and a rich history at that. That is the vein Mr. Duffy so deftly mines.

“I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. I called to all plagues to stifle me with sand and blood.
Disaster was my god.”

Disaster was my God is a fictionalized biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s life. The literature resulting from that early life is here too, not as exegesis, but rather as a compliment, an illuminating accent. In a note to the reader, Mr. Duffy explains his intent: “In a life as enigmatic and contradictory as Rimbaud’s, the more I considered the facts, and the many missing facts–and the more I studied his blazingly prescient writings and poems–the more I found it necessary to bend his life in order to see it, much as a prism bends light to release its hidden colors.” The poet’s life lends itself well to this technique. It is a vivid rainbow. Mr. Duffy’s technique succeeds wonderfully.

The outline of his life is nothing short of remarkable. Rimbaud created his ground-breaking art in a five year period, while in his late teens. (Victor Hugo called him “an infant Shakespeare.”) At age sixteen or seventeen, at perhaps the height of his powers, he left his village of Charleville, his middle-class upbringing, his sister and mother, and traveled to Paris, at the invitation of Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. “Come, dear great soul,” wrote Verlaine. “We await you; we desire you.” The older Verlaine, married and a father, fell under the boy’s spell and the two began a torrid and public affair that scandalized Paris. (It is unclear whether Rimbaud was homosexual, or simply a provocateur–likely the latter.) Eventually the two separated, driving Verlaine to wit’s end, shooting Rimbaud. The young poet is slightly wounded and Verlaine consequently spent two years in prison.

Leaving Paris, Rimbaud began a life of adventure, traveling widely, giving up–even renouncing–his writing. He undertook the life of a businessman and explorer, ending up in sub-Saharan Africa. He was 24 when he settled in Harar, Ethiopia, working as a merchant. In 1891 he developed a problem in his leg which would ultimately force him out of the desert. He was carried across the desert on a gurney, his savings strapped to his chest in a special vest, shotgun at his side, surrounded by hired mercenaries. The leg was amputated in Marseille but the cancer soon spread and he died, in the company of his sister Isabelle, in Marseille at age 37.

“I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men.”

Mr. Duffy has rich material here and he makes the most of it. He builds his narrative on the premise that Rimbaud and his mother Vitalie had a love-hate relationship, a dynamic that spurred in Rimbaud both his creative life and his peripatetic life. Indeed, the letters of Rimbaud to his mother include many suggestions that a great tension did exist. For instance, Rimbaud writes to his mother in December 1882 from Aden, Yemen: “I just sent you a list of books to send me here. Please don’t tell me to go to hell! I am about to reembark into the African continent for several years; and without these books, I will be without a heap of essential information. I will be like a blind man…” Subsequent letters find him pleading with his mother for supplies and support. Mr. Duffy’s premise is largely successful–”It was you, Mother,” he has Rimbaud’s sister say, “you who made him a foreigner in his own home.” The mother opens the book and ends it; she is the impetus, even the muse, of genius–though it is lost on her completely, in Mr. Duffy’s iteration.

Early on, Mr. Duffy asks, “…how a poet prodigy of almost unfathomable abilities could willfully forget how to write. How could such a man disable a style and unlearn ageless rhythms–stubbornly resist, as one might food and water, words and their phantom secrets…..in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life–unwrite it? How? To what conceivable end?” It is a question that cannot be answered. The subject is gone, the analyst’s couch can never reveal the answer. This is where the novelist’s art comes in. Drawing on the life, the history, the writing and a good deal of imagination, Mr. Duffy fills in the gaps. He does it with much enthusiasm and verve. One gets the impression that he truly loves his subject, that he wants in a bad way to reveal a profound secret of this genius. But of course the secrets have all gone to the grave. Hence the art.

Late in the novel, Mr. Duffy puts these words into the mouth of Verlaine: “When Rimbaud was a child, or still a young man, he could believe in his dreams, could pretend, could be seduced by his own make believe. And remember, as Rimbaud saw it, and naive as this might sound, he had not been sent to earth merely to write poems but to change the world–quite literally. He actually thought that, he really did, and for while I suppose I did, too.” They say that a society has no culture until the poets show up. Rimbaud showed up and set culture on it’s ear, creating a new culture out of whole cloth. He did, indeed, change the world. He set a generation upon a new path–and does still. That is the job of the immortals.

“I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer; you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet…”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on  Bruce Duffy
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Just Kids by Patti Smith Doc by Mary Doria Russell

Bibliography:

• The World As I Found It (1987)
• Last Comes the Egg (1997)
• Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud (July 2011)

“Later, when it no longer mattered, they learned that the horror that had come from the sky had a name: derecho.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (OCT 2, 2011)

In Northwest Angle, William Kent Krueger’s 11th book in the award winning Cork O’Connor series, Cork and his family vacation in September on a houseboat in Canada, near the Northwest Angle area of Minnesota. Cork had hoped that his family, including his three children, Jenny, Annie and Steve and his sister-in-law Rose and her husband Mel, could finally get some time to relax and enjoy each other. They had all suffered the loss of Cork’s wife two year’s prior and they had not yet found any time to spend together especially since his kids had become older and living on their own.

Unfortunately for Cork and his family, the vacation becomes anything but enjoyable when soon after arrival, Cork and his older daughter Jenny become trapped in a major quick forming and very dangerous derecho storm that shipwrecks them on one of the many islands in the area.

During the storm, Jenny at first becomes separated from her father when he is tossed off their small boat before she is able to steer the boat to a nearby island. She seeks shelter at a small cabin in what appears to be the only building on the small island. She uncovers a baby that has been placed in safety from the storm and shortly thereafter finds the apparent mother of the baby dead. Although at first she thinks the woman was killed by the storm, she soon realizes that the woman was actually murdered and, given how hungry the baby is, she realizes the baby was more likely hidden from the murderer than from the storm. Fortunately, soon thereafter, she finds her father but they both become concerned when they see a man with a gun that they fear may be the killer of the baby’s mother.

Cork and Jenny manage to avoid the man with the gun and eventually reunite with the rest of their family and go to Northwest Angle to report the murder of the woman in the cabin. There they meet with people eager to help especially against who they believe is the murderer Noah Smalldog, the brother of the murdered girl, Lily Smalldog. However, the longer Cork and the others stay in the area, the more confused they become about who is really helping and what is really going on.

As usual for a William Kent Krueger book, I really enjoyed this book that starts and ends as a thriller and is more of a traditional mystery in the middle. He does a great job in presenting believable and likeable main characters while providing an interesting and realistic story. To me, the mix of the thriller and mystery was interesting but led to some dragging in the middle of the book, especially after such a quick reading beginning during the storm and finding of the baby. Nonetheless, this is a very enjoyable and well recommended book that adds to an already great series.

Although it would be helpful to have read prior books in the series to understand all of the back story and relationships among the various characters it is not necessary. Krueger does a good job in the beginning in providing the key back story without boring his faithful readers (some of which are like me and appreciate the reminders anyway).

I was not very familiar with William Kent Krueger until I went to Bouchercon in 2008 where I found he had a significant presence and following. He was also a very interesting and entertaining speaker so I picked up a copy of his Anthony-nominated Thunder Bay while there and later picked up a couple of his prior books so as to start at the beginning of the series. I finally started reading the series in January, 2010 starting with Iron Lake, the first book in the series, which became one of my favorites in 2010. I’ve now read the first six and last two and I’m looking forward to going to back to read the three I’ve missed.

As soon as I started reading these books, they reminded me of the Alex McKnight series by Steve Hamilton. Both books take place in the United States just below the Canadian border, with Hamilton’s books based in Michigan and Krueger’s books in Minnesota. Both have a strong American Indian influence to their stories with significant Indian characters and reservations key to the story. Both of the main characters were policeman in major cities prior to moving to their current more remote locations, with Cork having spent a short time in Chicago and Alex in Detroit. Of course, several key differences exist, the most significant of which is the key part of family that is important to Cork as he is married with children in most of the books while Alex has no immediate family. Nonetheless, if you’ve enjoyed only one of these writes, I know you’ll like the other.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 92 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atria Books; First Edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	William Kent Krueger
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Misery Bay by Steve Hamilton

Bibliography:

Cork O’Connor Series:

• Iron Lake (1998)  / 
• Boundary Waters (1999)
• Purgatory Ridge (2001)
• The Devil’s Bed (DATE)
• Blood Hollow (2004) 
• Mercy Falls (2005)  
• Copper River (2006)
• Thunder Bay (2007)
• Red Knife (2008)
• Heaven’s Keep (2009)
• Vermilion Drift (2010)
• Northwest Angle (2011)
• Trickster’s Point (2012)
• Ordinary Grace (March 2013)
• Tamarack County (August 2013)

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

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

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

And that’s something.

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (SEP 26, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

“I am imprinting this upon my memory,” she said. “The southern exposure of a winter morning light, the sounds of thaw, water dripping off the eaves, the squirrels…Sometimes I seem to know, in the split of a second of a moment, that it will be a moment I’ll want to keep.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (SEP 12, 2011)

This is a beautiful book. If you want to read something that has the same effect as gazing at a vast and perfect ink-wash painting, calming and yet utterly absorbing, reach for this. Like the tiniest haze of seeping ink will be skillful enough to convey a distant village nestling in the hills, or the flight of a crane; there is not a word misplaced in this small and lovely work. Its theme is poetry, and indeed the exquisite style does full justice to the subject.

The plot follows the lives of a handful of graduate poetry students and their teacher. The initial focus is on their interactions and early relationships during university years, but as the story progresses the camera lens zooms with painful precision on subsequent pinpoints of time.

The technique of the writing is such that it leaves one with an impression of overlapping layers rather than a well-woven tapestry, the latter of which is the more usual impression in a well-plotted novel. Life depicted here is more a palimpsest than a continuous narrative. There’s an almost fatalistic crystallisation of the view of the past seeping into the present (or the ongoing) that’s highly peculiar, and entirely seductive.

It’s even more astonishing to find such alluring excellence in a book that is essentially about writing. Generally, tomes ranting away about the torment of literary endeavours and the social inadequacies of their perpetrators are best put out of their misery immediately by means of a swift bonfire. But rather than wallow first-hand in the self-absorption and uncertainty as so many of these efforts tend to, Chang depicts a view onto these same themes that’s as unnervingly detached as a high-resolution spy satellite picture: taken from space, but accurate enough to read the print on a newspaper. The style is formal, bordering on the stilted, the tone even and quiet.

Two of the central characters are the poetry student friends Roman and Bernard. Roman is driven, moderately gifted, insistently handsome and, eventually, inordinately successful. Bernard is his counterpart, with caricature-like introversion, religious torment and more than a hint of obsessive compulsive disorder born out in poverty, and the novel makes no bones about his role in the narrative as the “traditional” poet.

These extreme stereotypes should be flat shadows by rights. Instead they’re almost luminous, depicted by refraction, like a painter using the space that is not to denote the presence of an object. These two characters vie with each other, in their peculiar way, for the attentions of their teacher Miranda Sturgis, the acclaimed and established poet. Their differing approaches, viewpoints and degree of success in gaining her approval and attention are at the core of the novel.

Along with the much-debated question of “why write poetry,” the novel explores facets of the role of the teacher (or mentor), the relationship of the mentor with the recipient, and the progression of the student in turn becoming mentor. The development here is linked structurally and thematically to the ageing process, which gives the novel as a whole a feeling of natural evolution; something organic and inevitable. Perhaps this is why I can’t remember reading anything with so little a sense of contrivance. Despite, or perhaps because of, the meticulous precision with which it’s put together.

The character reveal is also atypical. It’s not so much a reader discovering an already-formed entity but the entity and the reader making the discovery together. Again, the sense of extreme detachment fused with extreme intimacy is slightly dizzying.

If you read action thrillers exclusively, then I suppose this book is not for you. Apart from that I’d recommend it to anybody. You don’t need to know about writing or poetry, just be ready to think about why art is necessary for life. And read a jolly good story in the meantime, complete with romance, betrayal, suspense and verve. It’s quiet, but it’s a page-turner.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (September 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lan Samantha Change
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book on poetry: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Bibliography:

• Hunger: A Novella (1998)
• Inheritance (2004)
• All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (September 2010)

“It’s taken me years to understand that dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of another’s lives until not death, but distance, does us part – time and space and the heart’s weariness are the blander executions of the human connection.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  AUG 24, 2011)

Let’s Take The Long Way Home is, at its core, a love story. It’s a story of how a close connection with a friend can ground us and provide us with a life worth living. And it’s a story that any woman who has ever had a friend who is like a sister – I count myself among those fortunate women – will understand in a heartbeat.

Gail Caldwell, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, met Caroline Knapp, also a writer, over their mutual love of their dogs. Ms. Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.”

Both women – about a decade apart in age – are passionate about writing and their dogs and have successfully dealt with alcohol addiction that knocked them to their knees. “We had a lot of dreams, some of them silly, all part of the private code shared by people who plan to be around for the luxuries of time,” Ms. Caldwell shares.

Quickly, Gail and Caroline and their two dogs become a “pack of four.” They are both self-described moody introverts who prefer the company of dogs. Yet, “…we gave each other wide berth – it was far easier, we learned over the years, to be kind to the other than to ourselves.” As they grow closer, Gail and Caroline learn that nurturance and strength “were each the lesser without the other.”

It is almost inconceivable that this close friendship would ever end, but Caroline is a smoker and at 42, she learns she has stage 4 lung cancer. Her death comes quickly, in a matter of weeks. Gail Caldwell reflects, “Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage form what you thought you couldn’t stand to lose.” And later: “Caroline’s death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight.” Eventually, she comes to realize “…we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”

This memoir is poignant, authentic, unflinching, and genuine – never manipulative or sudsy. In addition to the profound look at an extraordinary friendship, it also focuses on “inter-species” love – between two fiercely private and self-reliant woman and their incredible dogs. The rich and moving portrayal of Gail Caldwell’s Samoyed, Clementine, will be entirely familiar to those of us who have shared our lives with four-legged “fur babies;” love in any guise is still love.

This eloquent book ends up being a celebration of life in all its complexities – including love, friendship, devotion, and grief. As Gail Caldwell writes, “The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 87 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Interview with Gail Caldwell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Mentor by Tom Grimes

Bibliography:

By Gail Caldwell:

• A Strong West Wind : A Memoir (2006)
• Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship (August 2010)

By her friend Caroline Knapp:

• Drinking : A Love Story (1996)
• Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs (1998)
• Appetites: Why Women Want (2003)
• The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays (2003)

“In a movie there might have been more warning. I might have heard a tiny mechanical click, the sound of him releasing the safety. But in reality that single impatient breath was the only warning I got. Then the muzzle brushed my side and he pulled the trigger.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (AUG 7, 2011)

David Loogan lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his girlfriend, Detective Elizabeth Waishkey and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Sarah. Loogan edits a mystery magazine, and he has made the mental leap from writing and critiquing stories about crime to tracking down villains in real life. In Harry Dolan’s latest novel, Very Bad Men, David tells us a story that will explain “the motives people have for killing one another.” As we will see, the reasons for taking someone’s life can vary from a matter of convenience to a thirst for revenge. Loogan, who is a witty first person narrator, gets embroiled in his latest adventure when someone drops an unsolicited manuscript at his office, in which the anonymous writer confesses to committing murder and even provides the name of his next victim.

An emotionally disturbed individual has targeted particular men whom he believes must die; if he has to dispatch others who are not on the list, so be it. When Elizabeth and David become familiar with the case, they discover that it is far more complex than it at first appears. Very Bad Men involves a seventeen-year-old bank robbery, corrupt public officials, an aspiring senatorial candidate, and an ambitious young newspaper reporter who stirs things up.

Harry Dolan has created a large cast of characters, each of whom plays a role in what will turn out to be a Greek tragedy, Michigan style. The author is good with details: how to kill someone who is locked up in prison; what it is like to live with excruciating migraine headaches; a fine description of the landscape and inhabitants of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; and the tricks that tenacious journalists use to get their stories. Although the plot is ridiculously convoluted and not particularly believable, Very Bad Men is entertaining enough to hold our interest. As bodies pile up and events occur that shed new light on what is happening, David and Elizabeth decide to dig deeper into the past. They suspect that the slaughter will not stop until secrets that have been hidden for many years are finally revealed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (July 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Harry Dolan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We All Fall Down by Michael Harvey Misery Bay by Steve Hamilton

Bibliography:

• Bad Things Happen (2009)
• Very Bad Men (July 2011)

“What I mean is that a lot of stuff that I thought were weaknesses of mine turned out to be strengths. And one of them is that I am not, I’m not a particularly exceptional person. I think I’m a really good reader, and I’ve got a good ear. And I’m willing to work really really hard. But I’m more or less a regular person. – David Foster Wallace”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUL 20, 2011)

There is that question we asked one another in college: Who in history, if you could meet and talk to whomever you wished, would you select? Depending on orientation and background the answers are all over the place: Jesus is a regular; Buddha, and other spiritual luminaries frequently show up. Second tier options, Nietzsche, Thoreau (personal favorite), St. Francis. No surprises there. Aside from a small collection of history’s heavyweights, answers are typically–and sophomorically–idiosyncratic. (More recently, at a dinner party that included a bunch young adults, one answer was, oddly, Jeff Buckley.) I wouldn’t easily toss aside posterity’s world-making worthies, but if I were so inclined, I’d turn to the great creative artists. Shakespeare certainly would be a contender. Homer too. Rimbaud would be fun over a couple of beers. Joyce was a good singer, I understand. I’m sure he’d light up a room. Reading Lipsky’s book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, reads like a contemporary answer to the “who would you choose” hypothesis. Wallace is gone now, but what if you could just spend a few days with him, even a few hours? What was the man like, really? By his work, he will be remembered. But what of the man?

In March 1996 David Lipsky was assigned to interview David Foster Wallace by Rolling Stone Magazine. Wallace was coming off a book tour, promoting his ground-breaking–and best-selling– tome, Infinite Jest. Wallace, uncharacteristically, agrees to the interview. It will span several days, with Lipsky riding along with Wallace to book readings, NPR interviews, coffee-shop breaks, pit-stops and dog walks. Lipsky writes of Wallace in the introduction, “David had a caffeine social gift: He was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake–he acted on other people like a slug of coffee–so they’re the five most sleepless days I ever spent with anyone.” The book reads accordingly. Wallace is a brilliant raconteur, breathlessly intelligent, informed, thoughtful and entertaining in that way we once thought we’d be, after we got out of college.

The premise is simple: Ride around with Wallace for five days, tape recorder running and ask him questions. This is the raw stuff of Lipsky’s journalism, though it a properly massaged transcription. For example, on smoking pot: “I stopped smoking pot–I think I stopped smoking pot right about the time I got out of grad school. You know, it wasn’t any kind of big decision. I just, it wasn’t shutting the system down anymore. It was just making the system, it was just making the system more unpleasant to be part of. My own system.” On watching T.V.: “I also, there’s the–like the thing that’s killed it recently for me, is the channel-surfing thing. Is because, I always have this terrible fear that there’s something even better on, somewhere else. And so I will spend all this time kind of skating up and down the channel system. And not be able to get all that immersed in any one thing.” The book is raw in that stream-of-consciousness way.

The project was shelved and Lipsky never wrote the article. Now, fast-forward a dozen years to the height of the David Foster Wallace posthumous creative industrial complex and someone thinks: Hey, what about those Lipsky’s tapes with Wallace? Surely there is a buck or two to be made there! That is the cynical dark-side opinion one might suspiciously hold of this endeavor. That is, here lies yet another exploitive American money-making scheme, cashing out on a brilliant dead writer’s extemporaneous ramblings. But there are two sides to this coin. The good news, setting aside this reader’s apprehension to slink through the graveyard, is that the rambling is brilliant, insightful, funny and, most of all, human. Magnificently human, that is, if one might be capable of being human on the scale of the magnificent. And as if the writer’s works themselves where not sufficient evidence, we now have Lipsky’s record. Let there be little doubt, David Foster Wallace had the capacity to be magnificently human. That is, I think, at the core of what draws so many legions of readers. His brilliance was tempered through the filter of his humanity. Here in Lipsky’s ride-along, we enjoy the genius–and the man.

For example, here Wallace, sipping on a Diet Pepsi, lays out his simple belief on art: “I have this–here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like a five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic….And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

Or cultural survival: “At some point, at some point I think, this generation’s gonna reach a level of pain, or a level of exhaustion with the standard, you know….There’s the drug therapy, there’s the sex therapy, there’s the success therapy. You know, if I could just achieve X by age X, then something magically…Y’know? That we’re gonna find out, as all generations do, that it’s not like that.”

There is a terribly sad and poignant scene Lipsky shares in the afterword. Wallace’s condition has deteriorated. His depression medication has lost its punch and he is reeling. He calls his parents and they come to visit. The story, as a family member shared it with Lipsky, is that “one afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor beside him. ‘I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor.’” It sounds blithely naive, but reading this book gave me a feeling of being honored as well, a sense that the man had carved out a bit of time for me. By the end of the book my cynicism had evaporated and I was grateful for this record and the insights it contains.

On a practical note, Becoming Yourself is a good David Foster Wallace reader companion. The copy I read was loaned to me by a friend who has never read his fiction, though she aspires to. Her copy was underlined and dog-eared. It will serve her well once she dives into the works. She will have a foundation of understanding the currents that carry his narrative. Conversely, I’ve read his fiction and coming to the book after that experience, I found it illuminating. It underscored what I found in the readings and nicely dove-tailed into the universes he had so carefully constructed. For the stand-alone experience, that is, the reader who has not read Wallace and has no intention of doing so, the book provides a worthwhile and insightful peek into the world of a modern creative genius.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Broadway; 1 edition (April 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Lipsky
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Bibliography:

• Three Thousand Dollars : Stories (1989)
• Art Fair (1996)
• The Pallbearer (1996)

Nonfiction:

• Late Bloomers: Coming of Age in Today’s America: The Right Place at the Wrong Time (1994)
• Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point (2003)
• Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (April 2010)

“The leaves of the Bodhi are a wondrous shape. The round broadleaf describes an almost perfect circle, with the midrib extending way down into a long thin lobe forming a tail like a stingray. The leaves, I was told, are suggestive of the Buddha’s ears.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (APR 20, 2011)

There is a scene in the movie, The Social Network, where the Zuckerberg character sits down at his dorm room computer and plaintively declares, “I need an idea.” It is a sensation I suspect many can relate to: that building up of energy, the antsiness and the creative urge which begs to somehow be addressed. In the movie, of course, the idea is big, world-changing big. Facebook is born. Most of the time, surety is lacking and the energy petters out, the idea half-baked and forgotten. There is a sense of that in this book, the feeling of an author in search of an idea. And even the author doesn’t seem sure of its worth. Horan writes, early on: “My cockamamie scheme, to restate it loosely, was this: I would go around the country collecting tree seeds at the homes of famous peoples I admired, grow them into saplings, then buy a cheap parcel of land and plant them there.” He continues, “If all went well, in a few years I would start giving the trees to my book-, nature-, and history-loving friends.” The thing is, unless the idea is crushingly brilliant, the holder of the idea is too often unsure of its value. That usually shows in the execution. Sometimes it turns out to be “cockamamie.” Sometimes not.

Perhaps this idea, collecting seeds from the trees who shaded the great, is indeed lame. The book is tentative that way with a feeling of the random about it. For instance, on page eleven the author shows up in Oxford, Mississippi, at, where else?, Faulkner’s home, Rowen Oak. But, he discovers a sign, “Closed for Repairs.” At Flannery O’Connor’s home he finds a no trespassing sign. Helen Keller’s place is closed, as is Rachel Carson’s. (“My only disappointment about the house being closed was the fact that I couldn’t ask questions specific to the vegetation on the grounds.”) Would a more researched, less random, adventure come to such dead-ends? Is it half-baked? In his defense, Horan’s is not the journey of the tourist. Indeed, he seems ill-at-ease when he does gain entry to a writer’s home; and he disdains the overblown tourist trap. Taking the tour of Emerson’s house in Concord he writes: “The docent wore a frozen smile as she delivered her monologue, and I began to kick myself for having decided to take the tour. I should have been outside on the front lawn, where swollen acorns and pregnant pine cones beckoned to me to pluck them up.”

Those comments aside, this is a fun book. It does not take itself too seriously, and leans to the light and breezy. The author’s voice is compelling. He seems like a good companion for a road trip, even if it’s an armchair adventure. But he is not to be underestimated. His goal is nothing less than to establish a connection to the creatively and historically profound. And when that connection works, it is lovely. It is obvious who Horan’s heros are. The fashion in which he writes about them, thrown in among those who elicit less passion, stands out and calls attention to itself. Of Jack Kerouac, for example, he writes: “Somewhere down the road, with the sun sinking low on the horizon, casting biblical shadows across the rolling continent from end to bittersweet end, when I know where I am going at long last, I’ll think of Jack Kerouac, young Jack Kerouac, with a football under his arm, a rucksack on his back, and the holy glow of a saint…the brother I never had….” Or upon visiting Walden: “Walden Pond is as sacred a place as there is on this planet, and its most famous inhabitant, Henry David Thoreau, is as saintly a prophet as has ever walked the earth.”

It is generally accepted that the better the reviewer, the less you will find of him or her in the review. Like a journalist, the good reviewer should refrain from pontification, self revelation and opinion. But wait, we read books for as many reasons as there are readers and one of those reasons is to experience a connection to others through the shared story. On this level, it doesn’t matter, fiction or fact, the reading experience of which I refer is deeply personal. One can’t help but respond on a personal level when one reads in this fashion. Even the circumspect reviewer steps up.

I make this editorial aside by way of saying, I want to ride along with Horan. I too have sought out my literary heros. I’ve snuck into the room in remote India where Chatwin wrote The Songlines; peered into the window of Virginia Woolf’s London flat (now an office full of busy people turning the wheels of commerce); visited Gertrude and Alice’s apartment in Paris where Hemingway stood in the lobby and eavesdropped, to name just three pilgrimages. I share this as a way of saying, I understand–and enjoy–the premise at work here. Hogan and I are brothers in the same tribe. I only wish he had carved out the time to better explore those places and people about which he was truly devoted and excised the rest. His enthusiasm is compelling when he focuses on that which is most personally meaningful.

There is a nice–and surprising–end note that sums up his effort. It is not a surprise, but I don’t think elaboration is fair. Suffice it to say, his efforts, the substantial collection of “legacy” trees and seeds he has collected finds a home that is both meaningful and profound beyond his personal effort. In that fashion, he succeeds far beyond the intentions for his “cockamamie scheme.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Richard Horan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Written Lives by Javier Mairas

Bibliography:

Fiction:

• Life in the Rainbow (1996)
• Goose Music (2001)

Nonfiction:

• Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton (April 2011)