Archive for August, 2010

OUTSIDE THE ORDINARY WORLD by Dori Ostermiller

At first I thought this book was not for me as a male reviewer, for its focus is so much upon its central female character and her roles as daughter, wife, and mother. But I soon found Dori Ostermiller gripping me with her writing, and her uncanny ability to plot the emotional seismograph of a woman on the brink of an affair. “I want to ask if she ever felt she was falling through her life, pulled down through dream and memory by a force larger than gravity. I want to know if she felt the splintering pain of it — a terrible, fruitful pain like birth, a pain you can’t stop because you have to know what’s on the other side.”

August 19, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Family Matters, NE & New York, Reading Guide

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE by Julie Orringer

The publisher of THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE, this blockbuster book, speaks of its “Tolstoyesque juxtaposition of the fate of the individual with the motions of time and history.” The implied comparison to War and Peace is not unreasonable, in that Julie Orringer also describes the events of a terrible period (the decade beginning in 1937), concentrating on a number of sympathetic characters, mingling bloodshed with romance, and giving herself generous space in which to do so. But this is Tolstoy rewritten in book-of-the-movie style, Tolstoy lite.

August 19, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Facing History

AUNTS AREN’T GENTLEMEN by P.G. Wodehouse

For me, P. G. Wodehouse and eighth grade totally belong together. I spent all of eighth grade reading whatever Wodehouse I could get my hands on and totally inhabited the lives of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves and Blandings Castle. I still remember my friends and I writing letters to each other in the Wodehouse style: “How are you? Hope you’re in the pink of h.” That sort of stuff.

That instantly recognizable style of writing is also here in AUNTS AREN’T GENTLEMEN—one of the many Wodehouse novels re-released by Overlook Press on the 25th anniversary of his death. This is a Jeeves caper, which means the stoic butler is again rescuing his employer, Bertie Wooster, from comically sticky situations.

August 18, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Classic, Humorous, United Kingdom

I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE by Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman knows how to write about terror, both the subtle, covert, shadow type and the more acute, stomach-wrenching, in-your-face type. This is a book about acts of terror, specifically kidnapping and rape. It is primarily about the kidnapping and rape of 13 year-old Elizabeth Lerner in 1985 and the 39 days she spent at the hands of her kidnapper and rapist, William Bowman, a serial killer.

August 17, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Horror, Mystery/Suspense, US Mid-Atlantic, y Award Winning Author

BREATHING WATER by Timothy Hallinan

Hallinan sets a breakneck pace in his third to feature American ex-pat and longtime Bangkok resident, Poke Rafferty. Married to Rose, a tall, confident Thai beauty, and adoptive father of Miaow, a precocious former street child, Rafferty gets involved in a poker sting while working on a book about crooks called “Living Wrong.” But in addition to the marks, an extra player shows up, big, drunk and dangerous. Khun Pan, rich and ruthless, loses and takes it badly. Pan is the sort of man who grinds an expensive cigar out on a rare carpet just to flaunt his vulgar origins. To diffuse a violent outcome to the evening, Rafferty sets up one last bet and wins the right to write Pan’s biography, a heretofore forbidden project.

August 17, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  · Posted in: Sleuths Series, Thailand-Bangkok

THE CHANGELING by Kenzaburo Oe

Fractal designs, such as used to be popular twenty years ago, have the property that any part of them replicates the whole in miniature. If you zoom in on even the tiniest detail, you can reach an understanding of the entire shape. This analogy occurs to me after reading THE CHANGELING by Kenzaburo Oe, a late work by the Japanese Nobel Laureate, and so far the only thing by him that I have read. Where most novels have a linear narrative behind them, this one reads as a series of one-sided conversations, thoughts about literature and other arts, buried memories, and some bizarre incidents — all generally minor in themselves, but each seemingly endowed with immense hidden significance, each a clue to some overall design that only gradually emerges as the various details replicate and mirror one another.

August 16, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  · Posted in: Japan, Nobel Prize for Literature, Translated, Unique Narrative, World Lit, y Award Winning Author