“A naked man in the freezing cold, with an axe in his hand, opening up a hole in the ice? I suppose, really, that I hope there will be someone out there one of these days, a black shadow against all the white — somebody who sees me and wonders if he’d be able to stop me before it was too late.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUL 31, 2011)

This is a compact sonata of a novel, composed in four “movements.” The title of the last, “Winter Solstice,” might have been a better title for the whole book, set mainly on a small frozen island off the coast of Sweden. It is certainly an appropriate image: the solstice is the darkest part of the year; after it, the days will get longer, but it will still be winter for a long time. This is a book about resurrection, thaw, the slow flowering of the frozen spirit, but it promises few miracles, and even at the end there are setbacks and reversals — a feeling Nordic people must know well in their long wait for Spring.

Fredrik Welin lives alone on his rocky Baltic island, in a decaying house with an anthill slowly engulfing the table in the living room, breaking the ice on the sea each morning for the chilling plunge that is his principal means of assuring himself that he is still alive. He is not a good person, as other characters in the book will tell him; he is too ready to shrug off his responsibilities. As a young man, he abandoned a woman who loved him. Later, at the height of his career as a surgeon, he abandoned medicine after one horrible mistake. Now in his sixties, he has essentially abandoned life. His only contact with the outside world is the irritating mailman; “it’s not easy when your closest friend is somebody you dislike.”

Then one day he sees a figure on the snow outside his door, an old woman with a walker. It is a figure from his past come back to claim him, to demand an accounting for broken promises, implacable as a Fury, yet offering gifts in return: the opportunity once again to care about others, to move beyond his island fastness, to find a family. Rebirth is painful, and the book is full of violence and anger — but also happiness. Twice, the emotions are so strong that Welin flees back to his island. His is by no means a steady progress, more like a game of Chutes and Ladders; there is one especially shocking turnaround just as you think you’re coming into the home stretch. Mankell resolutely avoids easy endings; but the understated ending he does write is quietly moving and absolutely true.

There are several different Henning Mankells. Welin’s imperfections as a family man are an extension of Kurt Wallander of the detective novels, only without the crime. He has used the Baltic archipelago setting before in his WW1 psychodrama Depths, but this novel is modern, and thankfully less psychotic. Less isolated too, but the global politics that have been a concern of several of his later novels, most especially The Man from Beijing, are only a distant aura. But still a perceptible one; two of the women who enter Welin’s life are involved in a world beyond Sweden, mostly combating intolerance and greed. One of the characters has gone on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in search of God, but failed to find Him. “When I closed that church door behind me, there was nothing else left. But I realized that this emptiness was a sort of consolation in itself.” Mankell works with emptiness, turning it from negative space into a positive one, even a sacred space in a secular world. Long before Christianity, the Winter Solstice has always been associated with religious rites, a magic too mysterious for mere words.

And the title Mankell did choose? A small detail merely, a pair of handcrafted Italian Shoes, made over a period of months by an old Italian craftsman living in retirement in the Swedish forest. A sacrament also, they are a small example of the search for perfection, and a reminder of love where other loves have failed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 35 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (October 19, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Henning Mankell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Daniel The Man from Beijing The Troubled Man

Bibliography:

Kurt Wallander Series:

• Faceless Killers (1991;1997 in US)
• The Dogs of Riga (1992; 2001in US)
• The White Lioness (1993; 1998 in US)
• The Man Who Smiled (1994; 2005 in US)
• Sidetracked (1995; 1999 in US)
• The Fifth Woman (1996; 2000 in US)
• One Step Behind (1997; 2002 in US)
• Firewall (1998; 2002 in US)
• The Pyramid: The First Wallander Cases (1999; 2008 in US)
• The Troubled Man (2009; March 2011 in US)

Linda Wallander:

• Before the Frost (2002; 2005 in US)

Stand-alone:

• The Return of the Dancing Master (2000; 2004 in US)
• Depths (2004; April 2009 in US)
• Italian Shoes (2006; October 2010 in US)
• Kennedy’s Brain (2007; 2007 in US)
• The Man from Beijing (2007; February 2010 in US)
• Daniel (November 2010 in US)

Teen Read:

• Shadows in the Twilight (2008; April 2010 in US)

“Looking back on it, theirs is not a house of dramatic battles; it is a house of forced retreats across mountains and down through bitterly cold rivers. Ever retreating, ever glancing over your shoulder for the invisible enemy, who is a ghost. The war long ended; there is no front to fight on. The cause of the unholy conflict – the death of a child, a son, a brother – is unmentionable history.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 26, 2011)

Over 12 years ago, John Burnham Schwartz introduced us to two ordinary families facing an extraordinary crisis – the inadvertent death of a young boy, Josh Lerner, by a hit-and-run driver, a small-town lawyer named Dwight Arno. The book was Reservation Road, a wrenching psychological study about how a single moment in time can shatter an orderly world into tiny little shards.

Now, in a poignantly written sequel, Mr. Schwartz revisits the two families – the Arnos and the Lerners – years later, at the cusp of yet another crisis. But this time, Dwight Arno has served his time, moved from Connecticut to Santa Barbara in an attempt to redefine his life until his estranged son, Sam, shows up. And this time, it is Sam who is in trouble and struggling to come to grips with his anger and his pain.

I’m glad to report that Northwest Corner is every bit as good as Reservation Road, if not better. It sings with love and pain and pathos and the beat of the human heart as it strives for connection. Told in multiple viewpoints from both male and female perspectives – including a first-person rendition by Dwight – this book is as powerful as it is moving.

In clear, detailed images, John Burnham Schwartz defines the emotional state of his characters in just a few taut sentences. Take Dwight’s musings, for example: “We think we are solid and durable, only to find that, placed under a cruel and unexpected light, we are the opposite: only our thin, permeable skin holds us intact. Hemophiliacs walking through a forest of thorns.” Is that perfect or what?

Early on in the book, Dwight and Sam come together for the first time in many years, Dwight is working for an ambitious “family man” in a sports shop. Sam is on the run from college after an impulsive deed that threatens to uproot his life. He has been living with his mother, Ruth, who remains in Connecticut, at a crossroads in her own life. And the other family? The Lerners are fragmented, searching, still unable to break away from the emptiness and reach out to each other for healing. The unbearable pain has been replaced by a type of functionality in each of them. But the hole in the center of their lives remain.

The plot is woven slowly and deliberately, with just enough suspense to keep the reader turning pages but make no mistake: this is, at its core, a psychological novel and the “action” is mostly internal. The growth – the so-called “arc” – is an interior one, more than an external one. And therein lies the beauty of Northwest Corner.

Is there a shot at redemption? As Dwight Arno reflects, “Wait too long to speak up and you might just miss your shot. You may do your time, but you will never really get out.” Redemption, the author suggests, is difficult and elusive, but possible with enough effort.

And the title reinforces this fact. These families have traveled beyond the road where an accident cruelly transformed their lives to a wider territory with others. They may not have taken their places in the world quite yet, but they’re moving forward. In the end, this is a story of the emotional journeys that these families – and indeed, most of us — must eventually take to reach a point of self-salvation and completion. It helps to read Reservation Road first, but this book stands proudly on its own.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Burnham Schwartz
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Commoner More “two families”  novels: Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Bibliography:

• Bicycle Days (1989)
• Reservation Road (1998)
• Claire Marvel (2002)
• The Commoner (2008)
• Northwest Corner (July 2011)

Movies from books:

• Reservation Road (2008)

“It’s hard to catch a lizard with your bare hands.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 23, 2011)

Burmese politics, including their political prison system, is harrowing and vicious. Not a lot has changed in the past fifty years or so, other than changing the name to Myanmar. Until very recently, they were under military rule and they are still one of the least developed nations in the world. Karen Connelly has not only written a striking and engaging tour de force about this area, but she has brought a country’s atrocities into focus that needs attention badly, and help from developed nations. However, she hasn’t forgotten the novelist’s rule of thumb to entertain. It doesn’t read like a diatribe or soapbox, it reads like an exquisite, dramatic story of friendship, endurance, compassion, love, and faith in the human condition.

Teza is a young man of (approximately) thirty who is revered by freedom fighters in Burma (Myanmar) for his political songs that expose the corrupt government, and give hope and spiritual fuel to the people. He is in solitary confinement in his seventh year of a twenty-year sentence for this “crime.” The conditions in this prison are something beyond harsh and cruel–absolutely appalling, savage–with lice, scurvy, rickets, bed bugs, and other illnesses invading the prison population. Also, the jailers frequently abuse the prisoners physically.

Teza has become adept at his Buddhist meditation practices and has a strange but beautiful relationship with the lizards, spiders, and ants that share his cell. The most desired item for prisoners, besides food–as he is practically starved by the warden and guards–is pen and paper. If caught with it, it adds another several years to your sentence. Teza is therefore in isolation with nothing but the creatures, a dirty mat, stinking water, inedible food, and his mind. He lives by the power of his heart and mind. Teza knows how to be free in this cage, and his subtle power over the jailers, a different kind of power, is fascinating to comprehend.

Little Brother is a twelve-year-old orphan whose father worked for the prison until he died. This young boy, who doesn’t read or write, knows nothing outside the prison, and has no desire to leave. He is afraid of the outside world. He spends his days running errands for the guards or helping the top-tier prisoners–the ones with lots of pull and power–get extras of food. He is beloved by the few that have half a heart, but generally treated as sewerage by those in power.

The story moves in graceful, gradual, lyrical strokes, bringing the world of the inmates and the jailers to a taut climax. The building relationship between Teza and Little Brother is the most weighty of all. It works brick by brick, like the building of a cell, layer upon layer, surging into an intense, suspenseful, atypical thriller. There are hints of Papillon,(although that story was non-fiction), but this is not a jailbreak thriller. But, like Papillon, it has much to do with the life inside the mind, and the cultivation of formidable inner strength, and the bonds between people who are seemingly so vastly different, and yet connected.

If you only read a handful of books this year, do read this one. Besides its presence as a quietly exciting, non-formulaic suspense thriller, it will invite and heighten interest in this culture and this country. You will thoroughly inhabit these characters and story, page by page; the quintessence of fine literature is actualized in the characters of Teza and Little Brother. Finally, this an unforgettable story that lives in, breaks, and mends the human heart.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (April 8, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Karen Connelly
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin

Bibliography:

• The Lizard Cage (2007) 

Nonfiction:

• Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journa (1994)
• The Dream of a Thousand Lives: A Sojourn in Thailand (2001)
• Grace and Poison (2001)
• Burmese Love Song: A Memoir (May 2010)

“I have the definite feeling if everybody in the world didn’t keep watching to see what everybody else did, we’d all go berserk.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (JUL 21, 2011)

American author, Patricia Highsmith, who died in 1995, left behind a respectable body of work. Highsmith is known primarily for her psychological thrillers, so perhaps it’s not too surprising that a number of her novels have been adapted for the big screen–including The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley’s Game, Ripley Underground, The Cry of the Owl and This Sweet Sickness. Highsmith’s first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock–a man with an uncanny ability to spot new talent. While Strangers on a Train is my all-time favourite Hitchcock film, it veers away from the darkest corners of Highsmith’s tale. I like to think that even Hitchcock wasn’t ready to wrestle with some of Highsmith’s controversial and insidiously buried themes.

Highsmith is a criminally underrated writer. While her talents are recognized repeatedly by the film industry, she is not as widely read as she deserves to be. During Highsmith’s lifetime she won a number of awards, but those awards are largely granted to mystery novels, and mystery and crime novels aren’t considered on the same playing field as so-called literary fiction. In 2011, Grove Press championed Patricia Highsmith by declaring the re-release of nine of Highsmith’s books, and that brings me to the sinister, moody psychological novel, The Cry of the Owl.

The Cry of the Owl is set in a small Pennsylvania town, and the story begins with quiet, introverted engineer Robert Forrester leaving work one night. Mentally shattered from a recent vicious divorce, feeling lonely, sad and depressed, Forrester has developed a habit of stopping at an isolated country house and watching a pretty young woman as she moves through her mundane, domestic tasks. This isn’t exactly peeping tom stuff as Forrester isn’t interested in catching the girl nude or even watching the girl with her fiancé, Greg. Instead it’s as though watching the girl provides Forrester with some sort of reassurance that decency and normalcy exist somewhere in the world. Forrester thinks this is fairly harmless stuff–although to get a better look he must leave his car, creep up to the house, and watch the girl in the dark. Each time he promises himself that it will be his last, but he always returns, inexplicably drawn to the picture of domestic simplicity and harmony.

Perhaps it’s inevitable. Perhaps Forrester intended it to happen. One night, the girl, bank teller, Jenny Thierolf, spots Forrester in the gloom. We’d expect her to scream, run away and call the police. But she doesn’t. Instead she invites Forrester in:

“He stared at her in an unbelieving way, at her soft hair so close to him now, only six feet away, at her gray eyes—they had flecks of blue in them. Here. So near he could touch them, were the white curtains he had seen her put up, the oven door he had seen her so often bend to open. And something else struck him: his pleasure or satisfaction in seeing her more closely now was no greater than when he looked at her through the window, and he foresaw that getting to know her even slightly would be to diminish her and what she stood for to him—happiness and calmness and the absence of any kind of strain.”

From this point on, a dreadful atmosphere of growing menace lurks over the story as its damaged, emotionally disturbed characters interact and form dangerous, obsessive relationships. Right after the dreamy, moody Jenny enters Forrester’s life, his ex-wife, the toxic, psychotic man-eater Nickie begins pestering him with intrusive phone calls. Tormenting men is a favourite sick game for Nickie, and she’s not about to give up the sport of hounding Forrester–even though she has fresh meat at home in the form of a new pliable, rich husband. Jenny’s boyfriend, Greg, a pharmaceutical salesman with broken relationships in his past doesn’t appreciate Forrester’s presence in his fiancée’s life, and these four characters: Jenny, Greg, Nickie and Forrester find themselves emotionally tangled on a collision course with death. There’s the sense that the events that occur are unique and could only occur in this fatal cocktail, stirred by a death obsession, dependant personalities, and fueled by violent jealousy.

This is a Highsmith tour-de-force–a must read for those who’ve tested Highsmith territory with the Ripley novels. The Cry of The Owl moves with precision skill to its stunning conclusion even as it explores the inherent dangers of crossing the boundary between fantasy and reality, the repressive horror of small town living, and the monstrosity of society’s collective judgment.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press; Reissue edition (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Patricia Highsmith
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Best American Noir of the Century edited by Otto Penzler and James Ellroy The Sinner by Petra Hamesfahr

Bibliography:

• Strangers on the Train (1950; 2001)
• The Price of Salt (1952; 2004)
• The Blunderer (1954; 2001)
• Deep Water (1957; 2003)
• A Game for the Living (1958; 1994)
• The Sweet Sickness (1960; 2002)
• The Cry of the Owl (1962; July 2011)
• The Two Faces of January (1964; 1994)
• The Glass Cell (1964; 2004)
• A Suspension of Mercy (1965; 2001)
• Those Who Walk Away (1967; 1994)
• The Tremor of Forgery (1969; 1994)
• Eleven: Stories (1970; July 2011)
• A Dog’s Ransom (1972; 2002)
• Little Tales of Misogyny : Stories (1974; 2002)
• The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder: Stories (1975; 2002)
• Edith’s Diary (1977; 2002)
• Slowly, Slowly in the Wind: Stories (1979; 2004)
• The Black House : Stories (1981; 2004)
• People Who Knock on the Door (1983; 2001)
• Mermaids on the Golf Course : Stories (1985; 2003)
• Found in the Street (1987; 1994)
• Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes ( (1987; 1994)
• Small g: a Summer Idyll (1995; 2005)
• Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories (2002)
• The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (2005)

Ripley Novels:

• The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955; 2008)
• Ripley Under Ground (1970; 2008)
• Ripley’s Game (1974; 2008)
• Ripley Under Water (1991; 2008)
• The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980; 2008)

Movies from Books:

• Strangers on a Train (1951)
• The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
• Ripley’s Game (2004)
• The Cry of the Owl (2009)

“The life around us had the thin, flimsy quality of a stage set, the walls and furniture and props made of the cheapest, lightest materials. We lived a life whose only certainty was that it would change—just when we’d settled in, just when we’d gotten comfortable, the lights would go down and the scene would be cleared away.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JUL 19, 2011)

The premise—we are shaped by our interactions with others—sounds like something from a school summer writing assignment and is almost too bland to be worked with. But if truly great writing creates marvels from almost nothing, then Christie Hodgen’s Elegies for the Brokenhearted is one such wonder.

At the outset, it should be made clear that despite its title, this novel is far from depressing. The narrator, Mary Murphy, remembers her coming of age in small-town America in a family full of misfits. Through elegies narrated in the second person to five different people, Mary tells us the story of her life.

“We were a family of bad citizens,” Mary says when remembering her single, womanizing uncle Michael, “Drunk drivers and tax evaders, people who parked in handicapped spaces and failed to return shopping carts to their collection stands.” Despite his many failings, that Michael was one of the few stabilizing forces in Mary’s girlhood, is proof of the neglect she suffered at the hands of her mother. Mother was too busy living in denial that she had two girls (Mary and her sister, Malinda) and spent time watching movies that produced “unreasonable expectations about men, romance, and the tendency for wealth and good fortune to bestow themselves by happenstance on the world’s most beautiful people.” When Mom slowly realizes that good fortune does not automatically bestow itself on Liz Taylor look-alikes, she comes undone and takes the girls through a series of her failed marriages. By the time the last one to a Southern minister rolls around, the girls have long since given up on their mother as a source of emotional comfort.

It is through one of Mom’s many marriages that Mary’s path crosses Walter’s. Walter is a decent and suave black man who encourages Mary to look beyond the confines of the crumbling town in which she grows up. Eventually Mary moves on to college and meets a roommate who also has a profound influence on her.

Despite all the trials she goes through, Mary emerges with some level of stability at the end—a few steps short of triumphant. One hesitates to use the word “redemption” because it is overused so much these days, but this is one story of redemption that is done just beautifully. The daughter of a poet, Christine Hodgen’s prose is also spare and lyrical. There are many instances when the writing just blows you away. Here is one such: “Love—whatever else it might or might not be—was fleeting. Love stormed into your life and occupied it, it took over every corner of your soul, made itself comfortable, made itself wanted, then treasured, then necessary, love did all of this and then it did next the only thing it had left to do, it retreated, it vanished, it left no trace of itself. Love was horrifying.”

Hodgen’s metaphors—“The woman had white meringue-like hair that stood up in peaks”—are equally tremendous. Even if the prose is economical, Hodgen can really set up a sense of place. The chapter set in Maine is a case in point.

One of the many creative aspects of the novel is the way in which it is laid out—not linearly but like a puzzle that slowly clicks into place. Even better, there’s not an ounce of the saccharine rah-rah “you go girl” bravado that could easily have percolated into these pages. Hodgen focuses on bruised lives without a trace of melodrama and in doing so she has created a gem of a novel.

As kids, Mary and Malinda loved watching Tom and Jerry cartoons on television. “In that world, which we loved, characters suffered one fatal blow after another and yet sprang up, every time, unharmed,” Mary recalls. Real life unfortunately is never that simple but Hodgen has mined its complexities to wonderful effect. Elegies for the Brokenhearted makes for absolutely compelling storytelling.

When the final piece in the book fits in just so, we come away with a wonderful portrait of a young woman who is shaped by life’s vicissitudes just like the rest of us. What’s different about Mary Murphy is that she is the person she is, not because of the people around her but in spite of them.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (July 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christie Hodgen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Everything by Kevin Canty Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaws: Stories (2002)
• Hello, I Must Be Going (2006)
• Elegies for the Broken Hearted (July 2010)

” ‘I am Fabrissa.’ ”

That was it, that was all she said. But it was enough. Already her voice was familiar to me, beloved.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (JUL 10, 2011)

Mosse gives her beguiling novel an old fashioned gothic framework that suits this eerie story of ghostly love in an insular mountain village of France a decade after WWI. The story opens in 1933 as Frederick Watson visits an antiquarian bookseller in Toulouse. “He walked like a man recently returned to the world. Every step was careful, deliberate. Every step to be relished.” Well-dressed and confident, Watson knows his appearance contrasts sharply with his last visit to Toulouse in 1928 at age 25. “He had been another man then, a tattered man, worn threadbare by grief.”

He hands the bookseller a parchment document to translate, which, the man tells him, dates from medieval days and is written in the local language of the time. The bookseller asks how Watson came to possess the parchment and Watson tells him the story of his strange visit to the Pyrenees in 1928. This first-person narrative forms the bulk of the novel.

For a decade Watson had been consumed by sorrow for his elder brother, George, killed in the war when the younger boy was in his teens. His parents and his friends have lost patience with him. His father is ashamed of him for his lack of backbone; his mother was never much interested in him in the first place. George had been the center of the family. “It was his presence that had made us a family, the glue. Without him we were three strangers with nothing to say.”

The French motor tour, prescribed by his doctor, has taken him into the foothills of the Pyrenees. One tormented night he steps to the edge of a cliff, then steps back. “Was it courage or cowardice that stopped me? Still I cannot say. Even now, I find it hard to tell those imposters one from the other.” The moment marks the beginning of his recovery. He joins a convivial tavern crowd that evening in toasting the new prosperity of their town and begins to understand the human need to move forward.

Still as his journey into the mountains continues, his mood swings; the landscape grows more alien and menacing, the sky more threatening. His aloneness is tangible and then a voice – singing, whispering – sounds plaintively. Watson goes on, but is soon caught in a sudden violent blizzard. His car goes off the road, narrowly avoiding a mortal plunge into a ravine, and he is left to find his way down the mountain to the nearest village.

Which he does, coming to rest at a charming little inn, where he is invited by the innkeeper to a village fete taking place that very night.

And from here the narration becomes deliciously unreliable as Watson makes his solitary way to the fete through narrow and deserted village streets, getting hopelessly lost in the silent night before torchlight and voices guide him to a hall where he’s swept up in a friendly whirl of villagers dressed in medieval clothing, seated at long tables, eating from trenchers.

His own dinner companion is a girl whose beauty is exceeded only by her instinctive understanding. Watson finds himself falling in love with a woman who seems to know him better than he knows himself. But their evening is not destined for a fairytale ending. Not the happy-ever-after kind anyway.

Mosse’s writing is wonderfully spooky as she explores the emotional resonance of grief, loneliness and an unwillingness to let go and move on (why, for instance, are people impatient with this lingering grief?) meld with the redeeming power of love and the repeating cycles of man’s brutality to man, i.e. war and atrocity.

The novel’s form is comfortingly familiar – did Watson hit his head in the accident or fall prey to a fever as the modern villagers believe, or was his emotional state particularly attuned to the unresolved tragedy that remained hidden in the hills?

Poignant and eerie, and steeped in French country atmosphere, this is a novel that should appeal to fans of literary ghost stories.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Putnam Adult (February 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Mosse
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Trespass by Rose Tremain The Cypress House by Michael Kortya

Bibliography:

• The Winter Ghosts (February 2011)

Languedoc Trilogy:

• Labyrinth (2006)
• Sepulchre (2008)
• Citadel (September 2011 in UK)

“He hanged himself. From a tree. There was some alcohol in his system, I guess, but… I mean, he went out on his own and he drove down by the lake and he hanged himself.”
“Did he leave a note?”
“No note. There usually isn’t.”
“I know, but…”
But nothing I thought. The man was right. Despite everything you see in movies, no matter how somebody kills himself, they almost never leave a note.

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (JUL 3, 2011)

After a wait of 5 years and 2 non-series books, including last year’s Edgar award winning The Lock Artist, Steve Hamilton has brought back Alex McKnight in Misery Bay, the eighth book in this excellent series. While relaxing at the Glasgow Inn in Paradise, Michigan with the owner Jackie Connery and his friend Vinnie “Red Sky” LeBlanc, Alex’s evening is interrupted by a man he didn’t expect to ever see there, Chief Roy Maven, who surprisingly asks for Alex’s help. Chief Maven, the head of the nearby Sault Ste. Marie police force, wants Alex to help his old state trooper partner, Charles “Raz” Razniewski, determine why his son Charlie would hang himself in a remote part of Misery Bay, Lake Superior on the Upper Peninsula part of Michigan.

Alex reluctantly agrees to help by visiting Michigan Tech, the college where Charlie was a senior majoring in forestry, a recent change from the major his father wanted him to study, criminal justice. Alex meets Charlie’s roommates and other friends and really doesn’t find much to help understand the suicide. Although Charlie and his father had some words about the switch in major, Alex doesn’t really find anything significant. However, when Alex returns to Chief Maven’s house to let Raz know about his conversations, he finds Raz on the floor with his throat cut open and dead in his own blood

This leads to the visit to northern Michigan of two FBI agents, the annoying and distrusting Agent Fleury and the somewhat friendlier Agent Janet Long. Neither wants Alex or Chief Maven’s help and encourage them to stay out of their way. Of course, that’s the wrong thing to say to Alex or Chief Maven, who despite their differences, are both passionate in their dedication to find Raz’ killer. Working together and separately, they are more successful than the FBI in finding the clues that may uncover the murderer of Raz and possibly other related murders and possibly a link to the Chief’s past. Hamilton does a very good job in bringing Alex and the Chief together, providing a little more depth into the struggles that both men face with their past and how it influences their current and future relationships with their family and friends.

Overall, this is an excellent book and I can only hope the start of more in this series. Although I’d certainly recommend starting at the beginning of this series, Steve Hamilton does do a good job in providing enough back story about each of the main characters so that this book could be read without having read the prior books. However, really this background serves more as a reminder to the faithful readers and Hamilton does hold back on the much of the details of the major impact on Alex’s life that occurred in A Stolen Season.

I really enjoyed how Hamilton presented the main story of this book and the back story of learning more about Chief Maven and the changing relationship between him and Alex. However, the scenes at the Glasgow Inn and those between Alex and Vinnie were minimal in this book and that was a little disappointing after all this time waiting for the new book in the series. I certainly felt as if Alex (and Steve Hamilton) were just not ready to deal completely with the hardships from the prior book, although you could feel the pain that Alex still has. Although five years has occurred between books, that is not the case between the two books as the events in A Stolen Season appear much more recent.

To me, Steve Hamilton is one of the best authors at developing characters especially in the use of dialog in developing his characters, especially with the occasional humor. He also does a really great job in making the reader see and feel the Upper Peninsula part of Michigan where most people have not visited. I If I ever went to Paradise, Michigan, I would expect it to be cold (and snowy even in April) and that Jackie would be behind the bar at the Glasgow Inn. I’d ask him for one of his special supply of Canadian Moulson (which he probably wouldn’t give me). If Alex wasn’t there, I’d try to find the five cabins his father made. Also, although many readers I’m sure have grown up near American Indians, many of us have not, and reading about them in this series is also educational as I trust Hamilton has presented these people and their relationships correctly. The primary first person presentation from the mind and voice of Alex McKnight also helps better understand him and his relationships with his friends and enemies. Overall,  Steve Hamilton is one of the best people writing today and I wish he he’d decide to quick his day job at IBM to write full time.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books; First Edition edition (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Steve Hamiltion
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Night Work And another set in Northern Michigan: Dead of Winter by P.J. Parrish

Bibliography:

Alex McNight series:

• A Cold Day in Paradise (1998) / 
• Winter fo the Wolf Moon (2000)
• The Hunting Wind (2001)
• North of Nowhere (2002)
• Blood is the Sky (2003)
• Ice Run (2005)
• A Stolen Season (2006)
• Misery Bay (June 2011)

Stand-alone:

• Night Work (September 2007)
• The Lock Artist (January 2010) 

“No subject is more touched on than love, in the human life stories as well as in the literary corpus they have left us; . . .no subject, either, is as discussed, as controversial, especially during the final period of human history, when the cyclothymic fluctuations concerning the belief in love became constant and dizzying. In conclusion, no subject seems to have preoccupied man as much; even money, even the satisfaction derived from combat and glory, loses by comparison, its dramatic power in human life stories. Love seems to have been, for humans of the final period, the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated. The life story of Daniel1, turbulent, painful, as often unreservedly sentimental as frankly cynical, and contradictory from all points of view, is in this regard characteristic.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (JUL 2, 2011)

It’s often said that a critic has no place christening contemporary works as literature; it’s for future generations to decide which books will live on and which will fall the way of obscurity. According to this line of thinking, 19th- century Russians were just as incapable of heralding their literary giants as the ancient Greeks were of immortalizing Homer or the Elizabethans, Shakespeare. But there’s something in this argument I’ve always found hard to believe: great literature lives on not because it’s incidentally suited to future tastes or historically informative; it lives on because it captures some of that elusive essence of what it is to be human, and while that universal quality all literature possesses is hard to pin down, to paraphrase Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it. Tolstoy’s contemporaries knew what they held in their hands with War and Peace just as I knew what I held in mine the first time I picked up a book by Jose Saramago. So let me be clear: Michel Houellebecq is such a writer and The Possibility of an Island is a book that will be read for generations to come.

The book, published in English in 2006, tells of a French comedian’s affairs of the heart. Far from politically correct, Daniel is a raunchy comedian, a social satirist, a “cutting observer of contemporary reality”, profiting from the absurdity of modern life with skits as controversially titled as Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine! and We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts!. Fame comes easily to Daniel, and with it follows money, so when Daniel falls in love with Isabelle, the beautiful editor of a pre-teen fashion magazine called Lolita, nothing stops them from retiring to a mansion on the Spanish Riviera.

But living together for the first time, Daniel discovers that while “[his]animal side, [his] limitless surrender to pleasure and ecstasy, was what [he] liked best in [himself]”, Isabelle, more coldly rational, dislikes sex, and because of this, they will never be true lovers. Moreover, as her body ages, she begins to despise it, letting herself go physically so that before long, they are no longer intimate, and as “the disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism”, they are condemned to an existence of “depthless irritation [that] fills the passing days.” Unable to bear her encroaching decrepitude, and correctly convinced that Daniel is no longer attracted to her, Isabelle leaves Spain for Biarritz, alone.

Isabelle isn’t the only one aging, and although he is rich, it’s getting increasingly difficult to attract the young women he desires– the young avoid anything that even hints at aging – until he meets Esther. Esther, a young, sexually adventurous actress makes Daniel’s life worth living again. However, she’s of a generation for whom love is passé and life is about pleasure-seeking and hooking up. While Daniel can’t live without his living-breathing fountain of youth, Esther does not love him, and soon, his pursuit of Esther devolves from warmly pathetic to mildly disturbing.

However, Daniel just wants true love and communion, and while his marriage to Isabelle was a meeting of the minds, it’s through his love for Esther, that “little animal, who was innocent, amoral, neither good nor evil, who was simply in search of her ration of excitement and pleasure”, that he realizes Esther’s generation is right, that “love had never been anything but a fiction invented by the weak to make the strong feel guilty, to introduce limits to their natural freedom and ferocity” and that he is nothing more than “a prehistoric monster with [his]romantic silliness, [his] attachments, [his] chains.”

The decline of Daniel’s sexual life begins just as he is introduced to the Church of Elohim, a cult that promises its members immortality through technology. Members submit their DNA for storage, hoping to be cloned as the technology becomes available in the future. When canny high-level members of the church turn the murder of their prophet into a publicity stunt – staging his resurrection in the form of the prophet’s living son – the church becomes increasingly popular. With the fall of Christianity and Islam in the West (Houellebecq eerily anticipates the Arab Spring), Elohimism, as a church “imposing no moral restraints, reducing human existence to the categories of interest and of pleasure …not [hesitating], for all that, to make its own the fundamental promise at the core of all monotheistic religions: victory over death” is perfectly positioned to become the religion of a post-religious world.

In fact, the novel is narrated by a succession of clones, each one appending the story of their life to the stories left by their predecessors. As the future Daniels meditate over their ancestor’s life, their existence – as bio-engineered neo-humans – reveals itself to be one of isolation in reinforced compounds in a post-apocalyptic world. While the neo-humans live a rational life, free of human desires, they, like humans, are “formatted by death” and shape their existence by the dictates of a prophet, the Supreme Sister, who prophesies the transcendence of the neo-human state and the arrival of the Future Ones. Neo-humans are exhorted to study and assimilate the longings of their human ancestor to further expand their consciousness and facilitate transcendence and the final evolution. However, at the end of their lives, rather than detached understanding, neo-humans often end up demonstrating human traits, creating art and verse, experiencing a shadowy longing , a desire for desire, prompting some to defect to join the human savages that scrounge around the barriers of the compounds.

After Daniel25’s cyber companion, Marie23, defects to seek out a human colony, Daniel25 is left wondering if perhaps there is more to life than this. Setting out from his compound with his dog, a clone of the original Daniel’s Fox, he opts to keep his dealing with the savages minimal. Although his nutritional needs are little more than mineral salts, sun and water, he travels far enough into the dried sea that he begins to feel physical discomfort akin to hunger and thirst. And as he watches Fox frolic in the woods, or the stars shine overhead, or waves lap against the beach, he understands “how the idea of the infinite had been able to germinate in the brain of these primates; the idea of an infinity that was accessible through slow transitions that had their origins in the finite; . . . and how the first theory of love had been able to form in the brain of Plato.” He also comes to realize that neo-humans, limited to the carbon-based existence of their human ancestors, will always be limited, unable to participate in the transcendence they’ve been working towards, however, doubly condemned, unable to experience the ecstasies or terrors of humans.

Houellebecq is a polarizing writer, and while I have no doubt that some readers will put this book down in (misguided) disgust, I’m equally sure others will finish it impressed by Houellebecq’s courageous intelligence. While most won’t agree with everything Houellebecq writes here, it’s hard not to admire his unflinching exploration of his theme –humans, like other animals, find true meaning in the unfettered satisfaction of bodily drives, especially the drive to reproduce. And if he’s to be believed and, for better or worse, we’re unable to escape our biology; perhaps our lofty myths of mated souls and true love have done human society more harm than good. Of course, I can’t really believe that; but I also can’t dismiss such an important book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 29 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; Trade edition (May 23, 2006)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia on Michel Houellebecq
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and another (short) Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Public Enemies

Bibliography (translated only):

• Whatever (1994; 1998 in US)
• The Elementary Particles (1998; 2000 in US)
• Platform (2001; 2002 in US)
• The Possibility of an Island (2005; 2006 in US)
• Map and Territory (2011; January 2012 in US)

With Bernard-Henri Levy:

• Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and The World (2008; January 2011 in US)

“She knows that she does not believe – not really – the stories she tells of Frederick. She knows she does not believe – not really – the opinions of Frederick’s psychiatrists, her relatives, her own family. She knows that she still does not believe that it is as simple as others tell her it ought to be, as she tells herself it ought to be: that she was sane, while Frederick was mad; that she performed the heroic necessary work of saving her family, while, in his mental hospital, Frederick ‘indulged in the escapist writing behavior’ (his psychiatrist’s words) that is now in Katharine’s hands. Sane mad, heroic, dissolute, earnest, deluded: she knows she does not believe – not really – in those simple divisions into which she has spent the last twenty years organizing her past.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUL 1, 2011)

Stefan Merrill Block has written a novel so irrepressibly beautiful and poetic that it left me stunned. The Storm at the Door is based on the life of his grandparents, Frederick and Katharine. Partly imagined and partly based on fact, this is the story of a troubled family dealing with mental illness, secrets, and denial. It is also about the horror and the power of a psychiatric hospital, along with the myriad patients who have enacted their trust in this institution.

Frederick and Katharine met on the cusp of World War II and were married six months later. Theirs was a love affair based mostly on correspondence and the desperation of wartime. For some unknown reason, Frederick does not finish out his service and is placed in a naval hospital. When he is released he looks like a victim of starvation. The reasons for these events are never truly clear to Katharine.

Frederick is charismatic and the life of the party. He is also rowdy and loves his bourbon. He begins to be unfaithful to Katharine early on in their marriage. He disappears for days at a time and comes home promising to change and be a better man and husband. He has lots of plans and aspirations, none of which seem to come to fruition. He cannot hold down a job for long although he has an MBA from Harvard. When he drinks, which he seems to do to self-medicate, he is inappropriate but he is usually able to steer clear of getting into all-out trouble. Katharine’s goal in life is to please others and she constantly and consistently forgives Frederick his transgressions.

One auspicious evening in 1962, Frederick drinks at least five bourbons and leaves the party they are at, borrowing a friend’s raincoat. He is naked underneath. He walks up to the nearest road and flashes either his rump or his genitals to oncoming traffic. Most of the cars just peer and go on. However, two old ladies call the police and Frederick is handcuffed and taken to jail. He has the option of prison or entering a psychiatric hospital. Katharine, with the help of her friends and relatives, decides to commit him to Mayflower Hospital , a fictional hospital based on the actual McClean Hospital in Massachusetts. McClean has been a temporary shelter for the poet Robert Lowell, singer James Taylor, and mathematician John Nash. It is supposedly the best psychiatric hospital in the country. What Katharine and Frederick don’t realize, however, is that Frederick’s hospitalization is not strictly voluntary. He is to remain at Mayflower until the chief psychiatrist sees fit to release him.

When Frederick first enters the hospital, it is very laid back and the patients have privileges and room to move – physically and psychically. There are cows in the pasture and the setting is idyllic, designed by the great architect Frederick Law Olmsted on 65 beautiful acres. Frederick has been diagnosed with manic depression and the diagnosis appears to be quite accurate.

The stories of different patients are shared with the reader. There is Robert Lowell. the poet, who suffers from manic depression. There is Professor Shultz, the Harvard linguist who hears sounds in the words he reads, whose life of loss and tragedy most likely contributed to his first psychotic break as well as his subsequent ones. There is Marvin, the most famous patient at Mayflower, a man of 15 distinct personalities ranging from a French poet to Carmen Miranda. There is James Marshall, a war veteran with only one limb (and not all his limbs were lost in the war) who can fold the U.S. flag with his one remaining arm, raise it on the flag pole daily and take it down lovingly every night to refold.

Unfortunately, the administration of the hospital changes and a psychiatrist with little empathy and a desire for complete control takes the helm. During group therapy, he delights in bringing up painful aspects of each patient’s illness and they cringe in the mandated group therapy with him. He betrays each and every one of them in some great way.

The novel is told in alternating viewpoints; one chapter from Katharine’s and the other from Frederick’s. The structure works well. We understand what Frederick is going through in the desperate situation of his hospitalization, which goes on for months. He struggles with multiple solitary confinements and ECT (electric shock) treatments. We also see how hard it is for Katharine to sustain her family as a single parent and to maintain the strength she knows that she needs to have in order to find herself. She is gaining insight on codependency and sees that her desire to please helps everyone but herself.

All of the characters are given great depth. The patients, and the extent of their illnesses, is poetically described. Block gets mental illness, both the beauty and despair that go along with it. His poetic imagery and narrative never falter and the beauty of the book is sustained until the end. This is by far one of the best books I have read in the last ten years. It is a phenomenal feat of love and writing.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stefan Merrill Block
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Lowboy by John Wray

Bibliography:

• The Story of Forgetting (2009)
• The Storm at the Door (June 2011)

“If you think it’s him, it sounds like him,” Arthur says to his sister; “if you think it’s not, it doesn’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 24, 2011)

The very first thing I did after finishing The Tragedy of Author – Arthur Phillips’s ingenious faux-memoir – was to Google to see what was true and what wasn’t…only to find that much of Phillips’s traceable past has been erased.

Did he really have a gay twin sister named Dana, a scam artist father who spent his adult life in prison, a Czech wife and twin sons of his own? Methinks not. What I do know is that Arthur Phillips shares his birthday with the Bard himself, that he was born in Minnesota, and that he is indeed a writer to be watched very carefully. Because what he’s accomplished in this novel – er, memoir – is sheer genius.

Arthur Phillips – the character – is an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, and points it out in various excerpts. Right from the start when he says, “I have never much liked Shakespeare,” we feel a little off-center. The book is, after all about the ultimate Shakespeare scam: his neer-do-well father, at the end of his life, shares with Arthur a previously unknown play by Shakespeare titled The Tragedy of Arthur and entices him to use his Random House connections to get the play published.

To say his connection with his father is complicated is an understatement. Arthur Phillips, memoirist, reflects, “His life was now beyond my comprehension and much of my sympathy – even if I had been a devoted visitor, a loving son, a concerned participant in his life. I was none of those.” Now he wonders: did his father perform the ultimate con? If so, how did he pull it off? And how do the two Arthurs – Arthur the ancient king portrayed in the “lost” play and Arthur the memoirist – intertwine their fates?

It’s a tricky project and Arthur Phillips – the novelist – is obviously having great fun with it. At one point, he urges readers to, “Go Google the van Meergeen Vermeers…Read James Frey’s memoir now…We blink and look around, rubbing the fairy dust from our eyes, wonder whether we might have dreamt it all. Once you know it isn’t Shakespeare, none of it sounds like Shakespeare. How could it.” But somehow, it does.

The play is reproduced in its entirety in the second part and indeed, it reads like Shakespeare (I read all of his major plays in grad school and have seen many of them performed). It’s absolutely brazen that Arthur Phillips could have mimicked Shakespeare so successfully and with seeming authenticity.

So in the end, the theme comes down to identity. As Phillips the memoirist writes, “So much of Shakespeare is about being at a loss for identity being lost somewhere without the self-defining security of home and security, lost in a shipwreck, confused with a long-lost twin, stripped of familiar power, taken for a thief, taken for the opposite gender, taken for a pauper, believing oneself an orphan.”

And, as Phillips the novelist knows, it’s also a trick for perspective. The play, the novel, the memoir, the scam can equally be said to be “about a man born in Stratford in 1565 – maybe on April 22 or 24, by the way — or about an apocryphal boy king in Dark Ages England or about my father or his idea of me or my grandfather or Dana in armor or or or.” Just as Shakespeare may or may not have written his plays – according to some anti-Bards – so might this new one be a fakery, written by Arthur’s fictional father. There is layer steeped upon layer steeped upon layer in this book. It’s audacious and it’s brilliant. Arthur Phillips convincingly shows us just how easy it is to reinvent a play, a history, or ourselves with just a few sweeps of a pen.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 43 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House; First Edition edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Arthur Phillips
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Song is You Another book had us fooled: Incident at Twenty-Mile by Trevanian

Bibliography:

• Prague (2002)
• The Egyptologist (2004)
• Angelica (2007)
• The Song is You (April 2009)
• The Tragedy of Arthur (April 2011)