“The Interestings,” said Ash. “That works.”

So it was decided. “From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived,” said Ethan, “because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are.” In a ludicrously ceremonial moment they lifted paper cups and joints. “

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 24, 2014)

The greatest gift that any writer can give her readers is providing them with a fictional world they can immerse – and ultimately lose – themselves in.

That’s precisely what Meg Wolitzer achieves in The Interestings, surely the most fully-realized and satisfying book of her career.

This panoramic saga focuses on a group of Baby Boomers from the time they meet at a camp for the creatively gifted as teenagers through middle age. The bond that draws these divergent characters together is powerful and special; they dub themselves “The Interestings.” And the bond, for the most part, is stretched, sustained, and redefined as they age.

There is Jules, the key character, an aspiring comic actress-turned-therapist who attended the camp on scholarship . Her best friend is Ash – she and her twin Goodman have lived a charmed and fortunate life – and eventually marries their mutual friend Ethan. Ethan, the creator of an animated series called Figland, becomes successful beyond their wildest dreams. And then there is Jonah, the son of a Judy Collins type songwriter, who must navigate the boundaries of attachment at the start of the AIDS era.

At the core of this novel, there is an exploration of what it means to be special. As one character ultimately says about the camp that brought them together, “It made you feel special. What do I know – maybe it actually made you special. And specialness – everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do – kill themselves?”

The spotlight is squarely on two couples – Jules and her ultrasound technician husband Dennis and their friends Ash and Ethan – as the lure of money and fame threaten to place them in different stratospheres. The themes center on longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success…and how the definition of what it means to be “interesting” changes as life goes on. Jules says to Dennis,..meeting in childhood can seem like it’s the best thing – everyone’s equal, and you form bonds based only on how much you like each other. But later on, having met in childhood can turn out to have been the worst thing, because you and your friends might have nothing to say to each other anymore…”

The Interestings is cemented in a transformative time, touching on many of the milestones of a unique generation: the rise of feminism, the confusion and terror of being gay at the cusp of the AIDS era, and perhaps most of all, being alive during that tipping point when “portfolios” shifted meaning from art portfolios to financial portfolios. It’s authentic, it’s genuine, and it’s so good I didn’t want it to end.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1003 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade; Reprint edition (March 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Meg Wolitzer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Uncoupling

Bibliography:

• Sleepwalking (1982)
• Hidden Pictures (1986)
• This Is Your Life (1988)
• Friends for Life (1994)
• Surrender, Dorothy (1998)
• The Wife (2003)
• The Position (2005)
• The Ten-Year Nap (2008)
• The Uncoupling (2011)
• The Interestings (April 2013)

Movies from books:

• This is My Life (1992)
• Surrender, Dorothy (2006)

“I had thirteen names. Each name was from a different generation, beginning with Father and going back from him. I was the first one in our village to have thirteen names. Our family was considered blessed to have such a history.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 13, 2014)

Mengestu’s third book—another about the immigrant experience—is his most accomplished and soulful, in my opinion. He returns again to the pain of exile and the quest for identity, as well as the need for a foreigner from a poor and developing country to reinvent himself. In addition, he alternates the landscape of post-colonial Uganda with the racially tense Midwest of the 1970s, and demonstrates that the feeling of exile can also exist in an American living in her own hometown. The cultural contrast of both countries, with a narrative that alternates back and forth, intensifies the sense of tenuous hope mixed with shattered illusions.

“I gave up all the names my parents gave me,” says the young African man, who moves to Kampala in order to be around literary university students. He has left his family in one country to seek his idealism in another. He meets a young revolutionary, an anti-government charismatic young man, who starts a “paper revolution” at the university. Neither is a student; both seek to realize their ideals. They become friends, and eventually, cross the line into danger and confusion.

The alternating chapters concern Helen, a white social worker in Missouri, who has never traveled far, not even to Chicago. One of the young African men, named Isaac on his passport, travels to the US, allegedly as an exchange student. Helen is his caseworker. Isaac’s file is thin, and Helen knows nothing about his history. They embark on a relationship that becomes more intimate, but yet creates an elusive distance. Mengestu explores the hurdles they face, as well as examining how these obstacles relate to Isaac’s past.

The restrained, artless prose penetrates with its somber tone, and the emotional weight of the story and characters surge from the spaces between the words. Mengestu’s talent for nuance was evident when, days after I finished the book, it continued to move me.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (March 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Dinaw Mengestu
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: How to Read the Air

Bibliography:

• The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)
• How to Read The Air (2010)
• All Our Names (March 2014)

“I was a young man. Strong. Tight. White. And ready to love.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  AUG 11, 2011)

Crude and hilarious, Ladies’ Man from American author and screenwriter, Richard Price is a week in the life of Kenny Becker, a thirty-year-old college dropout who works as door-to-door salesman selling crappy cheap gadgets. It’s the 1970s, and Kenny lives in New York with his girlfriend, “bank clerk would-be singer” La Donna, a good-looking, marginally talented girl whose big night revolves around a cheesy talent contest at a hole- in-the-wall club called Fantasia. Kenny has a series of failed relationships in his past, and when the book begins, La Donna’s singing lessons, according to Kenny, appear to be placing a strain on the couple. On one hand, Kenny understands he’s supposed to support La Donna, but he also resents the time she is devoting to her singing lessons. Their sex life isn’t as hot and wild as it used to be and with Kenny’s rampant libido largely unsatisfied, he tends to blame the singing lessons for turning La Donna’s head. He sees her night at Fantasia as a potential disaster, but he feels unable to confront his doubts. For one thing, discussing La Donna’s singing is like handling dynamite, and for another, Kenny knows that keeping the peace is the surest way of getting laid:

“I wasn’t going to say dick. I couldn’t. In the beginning we could say anything to each other, but now it was too dangerous; if we started cracking on each other with truths at this point we would inevitably get to the bottom truth, which was that we had no damn right being together anymore, and I for one was scared to death of the alternatives. So I settled for the bullshit low-key rage of two people going through the motions of a relationship, a life; and I couldn’t let her humiliate herself at Fantasia in the name of not rocking the boat even though the boat was capsizing fast, and I would even have the stones to call it being supportive.”

While Kenny, who’s the glib narrator here, argues that he’s trying to protect La Donna from humiliation and a greedy, lying voice coach (a woman he insists on calling Madame Bossanova), it’s clear to the reader that Kenny’s “protectiveness” is rooted in other things. His own insecurities, fears, and possessiveness all play a role in his begrudging, resentful attempts to support La Donna’s Big Night at Fantasia. Kenny is the classic unreliable narrator; we see his world through his eyes, and Kenny, a self-styled ladies’ man, isn’t quite honest about his relationship problems:

“I must have lived with four La Donnas in the last six years and sometimes I thought I was destined to have twice as many in the next six. I seemed to float from one bad, heavy relationship to another, like a trapeze artist swinging from one suspended bar to the next with no net below.”

As Kenny’s week unfolds, the narrative vacillates back and forth between Kenny’s personal and professional life. His mornings begin in a diner with his fellow Bluecastle House salesmen–men who are older than Kenny–older, heavier, and not as handsome, so it’s easy for Kenny to reassure himself that he’s better than them and that the sales job is temporary–just until something better comes along. But Kenny’s at the age when it is becoming harder and harder to kid himself that he’s going somewhere.

Kenny’s relationship with La Donna inevitably implodes, and when he becomes “Kenny Solo,” his desperation grows as he pursues a series of meaningless sexual encounters–each one more degrading than the one before. With a flagging self image, an obsession about his abs, and with his life spiraling out of control, Kenny seeks meaning in his life through sex. While he stalks the neon bars, greasy, sordid whorehouses, and stroke booths of New York, it becomes obvious that Kenny is terrified of being alone, and that his attempts to fill the holes in his life conversely only serve to expose the hollowness of his existence. Author Richard Price establishes one incredibly-staged scene after another–the humiliation of meeting a high school loser who’s now affluent and happy, a late night talk show that draws frantic, lonely losers, the desperation of a singles bar, and the stroke booth where girls hype men into masturbation.

As an unreliable narrator, Kenny is at times the last person to “get it,” and that also means that we aren’t supposed to take his view of life without some skepticism. Kenny may think he’s special, but he’s just as desperate as the guy in the next stroke booth. Here’s Kenny in a singles bar:

“For the next hour I sat at the bar, drinking rum and pretending to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys. People started piling in. I was having a hard time getting rolling so I continued watching the tube. A lot of guys watched the tube, leaning against the bar or the room divider, their drinks tucked under their armpits like footballs. There was no sound on, but we all watched that fucking game with a burning intensity like we were politicos and the screen was flashing election results. I didn’t even know who the hell were playing. My elation was taking a bath. Around me guys swamped girls like pigeons after croutons, blurting out lines so transparent and tacky that even I was offended. No wonder nobody ever got laid. I watched. I listened. I was an observer. A girl nearby, the brittle remains of an almost-melted ice cube floating on top of her half-hour-old drink, listened politely.”

Ladies’ Man is slated to become an American classic. This is a study of one man’s search for meaning and fulfillment through the neon lights of an emotionally barren landscape, and in Kenny’s case, he arrives at his destination with a new uncomfortable knowledge of his weaknesses and his limitations.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador; First Edition edition (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Price
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Lush Life

Bibliography:

• The Wanderers (1974)
• Bloodbrothers (1976)
• Ladies’ Man (1978; June 2011)
• The Breaks (1983)
• Clockers (1992)
• Freedomland (1998)
• Samaritan (2003)
• Lush Life (March 2008)

Movies from books:

• The Wanderers (1979)
• Clockers (1995)

“There is the need for the interdisciplinary reading of bodies with students, for breaking away from dichotomies, ruptures that are enviable and deforming.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (AUG 3, 2011)

In this artful, cerebral novel spanning four decades and encompassing the tribal conventions and counterculture movements of the 70’s and 80’s, the reader is plunged into a cunning world of philosophy and hedonism that is best described as baroque rawness or stark-naked grandiloquence. If these terms appear to be incompatible pairings, the reader will grasp the seeming polarity as axiomatic soon after feasting on Edie Meidav’s complex narrative style. A carnal vapor infuses every provocative page of this unorthodox psychological crime thriller.

Contrary to the suggestive cover, title, and product description, this will not appeal to fans of chick lit or genre suspense thrillers. This is more in tune with Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, with a peppering of TC Boyle and Dan Chaon. Muscular, sweat-producing, and erudite, the satisfaction of reading these pages rests on the reader’s consent to capitulate control of predetermined ideas and conceptions and enter into a contract with the author, giving Meidav permission and authority to rule the aesthetic jurisdiction, and to accede to the flow, command, and demand of its prose.

The eponymous title refers to Lana Mahler and her best friend, Rose, who meet as teenagers and form a bond that graduates from symbiotic to alpha/supplicant (Lana as alpha). They call themselves Lola One and Lola Two. Lana’s parents are both esteemed academics; her father, Vic, is a neuroscientist cum philosopher of the counterculture variety, and has his own willing supplicants known as “shaggies.”

Lana’s mother is an ethnologist/feminist who has garnered popular fame. As noted, the novel takes place primarily in California, with an emphasis on the analysis of California lifestyles and attitudes, particularly the free-thinking Berkeley. Lana and Rose parted ways many years ago, but the psychodynamics of their early relationship continues to haunt both of them.

The book opens in 2008 in the Alcatraz penitentiary. Vic Mahler is on death row, with an execution date less than two weeks away. The author takes us into Mahler’s mind, which gravitates from hearty to hallucinogenic. We learn that he hasn’t seen his daughter in twenty years, but that Rose has been writing him letters and offering her assistance as an attorney. Juxtaposed with the prison opening, the story takes us to Lana, who is on her way to a desert spa with her latest boyfriend and her twin boys, a place right out of Boyle‘s The Road to Wellville. Rosa is on the verge of tracing Lana down after a twenty-year separation.

The disclosure of Vic’s crime and fate, as well as the unveiling of the Mahler family and Rose, is gradually revealed by positioning each character in alternating chapters. They examine their lives, past and present, and dissect each other, so that the reader is shown each character through various lenses that eventually coalesce into a prism of overlapping and juxtaposed realities.

Like Chaon’s Await Your Reply, the narrative unfolds with an intricate opacity toward transparency. Meidav has a knack for shocking the reader at intervals, like the best thrillers do. Just as the Lolas once worked as strip-tease dancers together, the author unveils surprises in increments like a strip-tease act for the reader.

Lana and Rose are the locus of the novel, and the narrative forms a mosaic or tapestry of several dialogues and narratives between them and their relationship with the external world, much like Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children is a tapestry of texts and collage of languages that form a unity of what is virtual and what is real. There is a constant flux between the Lolas, and a tension between what is true and what is illusive, what is implied and what is extant.

It took me about one hundred pages to relax into Meidav’s style, the wrap-around sentences and esoterica of neuroscience and philosophy, the limbic arousal and dourness of Martin Amis.

“…people’s faces work to hold up new veils by the minute: the all-time favorite is dignity, as is the visage of sex-transcending enlightenment, a new kind of spiritual chastity armature.”

Meidav’s bare-bones plot–a crime, a perpetrator, and a fate–are less important than the characters that inhabit this dystopia of false and renegade idols. Nature, the pliable state of consciousness, and the desire to reclaim the credo of youth and supple confidence, is the plaintive hope and recursive doctrine. We are all disciples of the mind; we are prisoners of our bodies.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Edie Meidav
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon No One Tells Everything by Rae Meadows The Legacy by Kirstin Tranter

Bibliography:

• The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (2001)
• Crawl Space (2005)
• Lola, California (July 2011)

“He wanted to work when other people worked, go out to dinner at restaurants that proclaimed their names in fancy gold script above the entrance and used starched white tablecloths and heavy silverware; he wanted to go to the theater and he wanted to ride in cabs as a passenger.   Most of all he wanted to go to bed when it was actually dark outside, and make love to a beautiful woman, more than one even, who wouldn’t put up with a man that arrived at seven in the morning and slept until one.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 14, 2011)

Family sagas have long been a staple among American best-sellers; the examples are wide and vast. The very predictability of the family saga genre promises an absorbing yet familiar reading experience: the once-poor yet highly attractive and charismatic main character who overcomes all kinds of adversities, goes through heartbreak and scandal, and then emerges older, wiser, and in most cases, wealthier than before (or at the very least, with enough knowledge to become wealthier).

Sharon Pomerantz mines this territory once more with Rich Boy, a novel infused with a heavy dose of melodrama combined with the realism of growing up American and Jewish in the pivotal years of the 60s through the 80s.

Robert Vishniak is a character on the rise. We meet him when he is a pre-teen, pickpocketing his rich relative’s wallet so that his father will not have to experience the shame of losing at a card game. The stage is set: we know he is resourceful and will do whatever it takes to succeed.

In the years ahead, Robert will show his resourcefulness in many ways: with his well-heeled college roommate who harbors a “shameful” (in some eyes) secret, with his unprecedented rise in his chosen law firm, with his choice of stunning women (all of whom are inevitably drop-dead gorgeous, sexually aggressive, and somewhat manipulative). He will also experience adversity with his first true love – Gwendolyn, an extremely fragile, socially conscious, vulnerable, and yes, gorgeous and doomed young woman.

Sharon Pomerantz is at her best when she delves into an exploration of Jewish-American life in the 1960s-1980s: the one-time outsiders assimilating and taking their deserved place within the social hierarchy. The clash between the impoverished and frugal world that Robert shares with his birth family and the opportunities that are opening themselves for him is crisply done. Here is Robert, reflecting on the privileged life he shares with his moneyed wife and their young daughter:

“Why now, when his daughter never needed to step inside a subway, and every major possession they owned came with insurance and an alarm, why now did he feel so nervous, as if he had woken up in the wrong life – a life lived from car windows and behind locked doors?”

The paranoia of the Nixon and Vietnam years, the real estate and commodities boom and bust, the drug culture and over-the-top parties of the affluent, the wheeling-dealing of law firms – all this is handled with aplomb. Less successfully done is the focus on his Robert’s many relationships. The women are mostly caricatures: the self-destructive and forever-remembered first love, the cold and moneyed wife, the young-and-genuine actress on the cusp of discovery…as readers, we’ve met these women before.

Still, this is a particularly American story – a Jewish-American story – of the class divides between rich and poor, rich and obscenely rich. It’s a story of  “a family built for the 1970s.” Those who like straightforward, old-fashioned, rags-to-riches sagas will likely enjoy Rich Boy a great deal.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Twelve (July 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sharon Pomerantz
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

Bibliography:

• Rich Boy (August 2010)

“Sometimes, as I remember, my voice is that of the ten-year-old boy I was then; sometimes the voice of the seventy-year-old man I am yet to be; sometimes it is my voice, at the age I am now… or the age I think I am. Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JUL 11, 2011)

He calls himself “Harry” now, after his new hero, the famous escape artist, Harry Houdini, hoping that one day he, too, will be a successful escape artist. Discovering a book about Houdini, hidden in the room that will now serve as his bedroom, the ten-year-old boy finds a new source of inspiration. Only the day before, and without warning, his family had to leave their comfortable house in Buenos Aires with nothing but the bare essentials. An abandoned country house has to serve as their temporary shelter. Harry already misses school, his friends and his board game Risk. With his routines disrupted, his sense of dislocation is further heightened when papá tells him and his little brother that they all have to take on new names and forget their former ones: it is too dangerous. Set in 1976, against the backdrop of what has become known as Argentina’s “Dirty War,” that left thousands of people as desaparecidos – disappeared without a trace -, Marcelo Figueras takes us on a moving and intricate journey, through hope, devotion and betrayal, through human frailty and strength, through loss and perseverance.

By concentrating on the life of one family, in hiding and on the run, Figueras opens a narrow, intimate window into this traumatic reality. Young Harry, the primary voice in the novel, while trying to cope with the day-to-day challenges the family faces, is also living in a colourfully imagined world full of heroes and battles, and preparing for his own, Houdini-like, “escapes” from the dangers he senses around him. His depiction of his surroundings, descriptions of his encounters with the toads in the pool… are lively and endearing. These and others feel immediate and richly drawn; the voice of the child is totally convincing as it fluctuates between innocently funny to wisely inquisitive.

The novel opens with a decisive moment in time, before it rolls back to the beginning, prior to the events unfolding that led up to this point: Harry and his grandpa say goodbye to his beloved parents: “The last thing papá said to me, the last word from his lips, was ‘Kamchatka.'” Harry will never forget his father’s last word. In his mind, it is like a code word between father and son, a promise, a sign of eventual victory. Kamchatka, for him is a safe place, from where a temporary retreat changes into fighting back, moving forward to winning. Kamchatka is one of the “remotest territories waiting to be conquered” on the Risk board, the game he loves to play with his papá. He is a curious child, fascinated not only by Superman and famous battles and their historical heroes. His interests in the ancient philosophers, in biology, astronomy, and geography are just as strong. For as long as he can remember, he knows, for example, that the board game Kamchatka resembles – in its remoteness and its physical profile – the actual one in the north eastern tip of what was then the Soviet Union: “a frozen peninsula, which is also the most active volcanic region on Earth. A horizon ringed by towering inaccessible peaks shrouded in sulphurous vapors.” In his imagination the fictional and the real Kamchatka merge into one, a safe and beautiful place where he will travel to when the time comes…

The adult Harry is a constant companion voice to that of the ten-year-old, recalling vivid memories, filling in what his younger self didn’t know or couldn’t conceive and trying to make some sort sense of his life by reflecting on the games played by memory and time. “Time is weird,” he muses. ” That much is obvious. Sometimes I think everything happens at once, which is anything but obvious and even weirder.” Between the two voices the novel contains much more than the story of a young boy who desperately tries to maintain his playful childhood, his study, and his new-found friendship with the mysterious Lucas, while at the same time hoping to support his parents by “playing his role” in the family. He observes, more than he understands, and yet senses why the “uncles” have disappeared one after the other, why his adored and adoring mamá does no longer behave like the “rock” of the family, why the psychological stresses show on his parents’ faces. With great apprehension he watches them in their constant challenge to demonstrate the emotional strength needed to keep the family together as long as possible and to provide for Harry and his young brother the sense of safety and normalcy in a dangerous period of history. Yet, he does not dare to ask…

Beyond the child’s story, Kamchatka is also the adult’s multifaceted meditation on history, on learning about life and the universe, on time and memory. Figueras, in fact, structures his novel along the lines of school periods: Biology, Geography, Astronomy, Language and History.  In each section, young Harry learns at a child’s level and through observations and practical experiences what the older Harry then places into the respective context. The two voices are so intricately intertwined that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which voice is speaking to the reader and affording young Harry maturity he cannot have had. As Harry later describes himself: “Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other.” For me, some of these “scientific excursions,” while interesting and valuable in their own right, can take the reader too far away from the essence of the story. They tend to turn, at times, the political and personal story more into a subtext than may be warranted given the overall direction of the narrative.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat; (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederikie Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Marcelo Figueras
EXTRAS:	Publisher page
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

Bibliography (translated only):

• Kamchatka (2003; September 2010 in US)

“Rootless, I float between two continents, both of which spurn me. I’m searching for an empty space in which I might drop anchor and which could, for example, be the long mountain range of your body, some recess or hollow in your body where I could lay my shamefaced hope.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (MAY 23, 2011)

In 1971, Lobo Antunes, recently qualified as a doctor, was drafted into the Portuguese army and sent for two years to Angola, mired already for a decade in a bloody war of independence. Six years after his return, he used this experience for his second novel; it now appears in a magnificent translation by Margaret Jull Costa, whom readers will know from her work with José Saramago. The original title of the book, OS CUS DE JUDAS, refers to a bodily orifice that should probably not be named here, but it is apt, referring both to the battle zone at the eastern edge of the country and the conditions that obtained there; the images of excrement are strong and pervasive. In her helpful introduction, Jull Costa quotes another writer describing the war in Angola as “a form of colonial sodomy — the Portuguese state simultaneously violating the rebellious colony and its own reluctant, traumatized troops.” Point made.

The book, a masterpiece in its way, is not a novel in the normal sense; there are few named characters and hardly a story. Its short chapters, labeled with the letters of the alphabet but in only the vaguest chronological order, consist of a running monologue that the unnamed narrator addresses to some woman in a bar or among the sweaty sheets in his bedroom; it is clear that she is but one of a series of weary listeners buttonholed by this prematurely Ancient Mariner (Jull Costa’s term) whom he himself describes as a “disoriented Lazarus,” returned from the dead yet dead still in his soul. The tragedy here is not so much the horrors of the battlefield (though these are bad enough), but the degradation it inflicts on its soldiers, many of whom become drunkards, deserters, suicides, and in some cases rapists, torturers, and worse. The narrator avoids the worst of these fates but, like that of the author himself, his marriage ends in divorce, despite the love of his young wife and the birth of his two daughters. Lobo Antunes, who has practiced psychiatry alongside his writing, is clearly as interested in PTSD as in anatomizing the trauma itself, and this post-traumatic stress is as sad as they come.

So why read a book that is about death, degradation, and depression? Do we not have enough Vietnam memoirs in our own literature? What Lobo Antunes has to offer is the brilliant inventiveness of his images, no matter what his subject. Here he is on the first page, describing a visit to the Lisbon zoo with his father:

“The zoo had a whiff about it like the open-air passageways in the Coliseu concert hall, a place full of strange invented birds in cages, ostriches that looked just like spinster gym teachers, waddling penguins like messenger boys with bunions, and cockatoos with their heads on one side like connoisseurs of paintings; the hippopotamus pool exuded the languid sloth of the obese, cobras lay coiled in soft dungy spirals, and the crocodiles seemed reconciled to their Tertiary-age fate as mere lizards on death row.”

These can be amusing images, even when grotesquely nasty, as the grossly fat woman running a cafe on the Zambian border “who resembled a vast ambulant gluteus maximus and whose very face had something anal about it and whose nose was like a painfully swollen hemorrhoid.” They can be sad, like the postcoital description of “the exhausted silence afterward of marionettes deserted by the fingers that worked them.” His complaints about the sons of the privileged who are exempt from service take him into Joycean wordplay: “But if you don’t mind my asking why is it that the sons of your ministers and your eunuchs, of your eunuch ministers and your minister eunuchs, your minieuchs and your eunisters, aren’t stuck here in the sand with us?” And sometimes he is reduced to the bare recitation of facts: “Show us some visible results said the colonel and all we had to show were amputated legs coffins malaria corpses vehicles transformed into wrecked harmoniums.”

But colorful writing can also be a disadvantage. As the book went on, I found myself reading less for what he was describing than for the language in which he describes it. The horror, in other words, did not hit home, only the aftermath of horror. Just occasionally, though, among this nightmare of death, degradation, and debauchery, there are some things that are so understated that they catch you entirely unawares. “I happened to walk into the sergeants’ bathroom, into the eternally flooded, stinking pigsty known as the sergeants’ bathroom, and saw the officer clutching the prisoner to him in a kind of epileptic frenzy, the shy, silent girl was leaning against the tiled wall, her eyes blank, and above their heads, through the window, the plain opened out in a majestic fan of subtle shades of green, where one could make out the slow, zigzagging, almost metallic sheen of the river and the great peace of Angola at five in the afternoon, refracted through successive, contradictory layers of mist.” That surprising word “peace” — how incredibly powerful! How poignant to be reminded that beauty can still exist!

But beauty and love are the worst tortures of all. One of the few oases of joy in the book comes towards the end, in a chapter addressed in memory to an African girl called Sofia with whom the narrator seems to have had a relationship characterized by tenderness and compassion. But Lobo Antunes uses it only to demonstrate what a monster his character has become: “That’s what they have made of me, Sofia, a cynical, prematurely old creature laughing at himself and at others with the bitter, cruel, envious laughter of the dead, the silent, sadistic, laughter of the dead, the repulsive, oily laughter of the dead, and all the while I’m rotting away inside, by the light of the whisky I’ve drunk, just as the photos in albums rot, regretfully, dissolving very slowly into a blur of mustaches.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (May 23, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on António Lobo Antunes
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Book of Chameleon by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Bibliography:

• Elephant’s Memory (1979)
• The Land at the End of the World (1979; May 2011)
• Knowledge of Hell (1980; 2008 in US)
• An Explanation of Birds (1981; 1995 in US)
• Fado Alexandrino (1983; 1995 in US)
• Act of the Damned (1985; 1995 in US)
• The Return of the Caravels (1988; 2003 in US)
• Treatise of the Soul’s Passions (1990)
• The Natural Order of Things (1992; 2000 in US)
• The Death of Carlos Gardel (1994)
• The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996; 2004 in US)
• The Splendor of Portugal (1997; September 2011 in US)
• Exhortation to the Crocodiles (1999)
• Don’t Go Through That Dark Night So Fast (2000)
• What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? (2001; 2008 in US)
• Good Evening to the Things From Here Below (2003)
• I Shall Love a Stone (2004)
• Didn’t See You In Babylon Yesterday (2006)
• My Name Is Legion (2007)
• Archipelago of Insomnia (2008)
• What Are Those Horses That Shade In The Sea? (2009)
• Sôbolos Rios Que Vão (2010)

Nonfiction:

• The Fat Man and Infinity: An Other Writings (2009)

“After they put the room into some semblance of order, Samuil reluctantly followed Emma up the steps to see Karl and the grandchildren. In their former life, Alec had never seen his father do anything reluctantly. He did what he wanted or he did nothing at all.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (MAY 13, 2011)

Bezmozgis, born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973, centers this darkly humorous novel on the close-knit, irascible Krasnansky family as they emigrate from Soviet Latvia in 1978, joining the flood of Russian Jews seeking a better life elsewhere. Their way-station on this way to peace and plenty in Canada, America, Australia, Israel – somewhere – is Rome.

There are six adult Krasnanskys and two children. Battle-scarred Samuil, revolutionary and staunch communist, is the literal founder of the Krasnansky dynasty, having shed the family name – Eisner – and taken Krasnansky for “its evocation of the Communist color.”

But the patriarch’s power has dimmed with age. “There had been a point – once it became obvious that his sons would leave Riga, that no manner of threats or appeals would deter them, and that his family and his reputation would be destroyed – when Samuil had, for the first time in his life, contemplated suicide.” But suicide seems like capitulation: “after a lifetime spent eluding death, the habit of survival was deeply ingrained.”

Samuil, cantankerous, bitter, bullying, is the book’s most complex character, because of his age and experience, and is as sympathetic as he is exasperating. The battles and terrible losses he’s suffered – his father and grandfather murdered before his 5-year-old eyes by anti-communists, his brother killed in WWII, his cousin vanished into the maw of Soviet triumph – have hammered him into the principled communist he’s proud to be.

But his two sons have no respect for his legacy. Alec, a bright, charming womanizer in his mid-20s, seems to chart the easiest course through life, while Karl, a couple years older, possesses Samuil’s autocratic character but wields it in unswerving pursuit of money and material security for his family.

While Bezmozgis paints vivid portraits of each family member – even the little boys are occasional vivid blurs of color as they race across the page – he concentrates point of view on three people: Samuil, Alec, and Alec’s non-Jewish wife Polina, with Samuil’s meek wife Emma stepping into the foreground as Samuil fades into the past.

Alec and Polina’s characters are still being formed. Even their marriage — only a year old — is a tenuous thing. Polina has drifted along in life, carried on a river of others’ making. She had never loved her stolid, conventional first husband and married him only because he loved her and it seemed the logical next step, as did falling into an affair with Alec.

Alec, though loyal to her as a wife, feels it’s his prerogative to take after his father in this one thing and indulge his roving eye.

But Polina is beginning to exert herself in her own life and Alec, though it’s a lesson he will have to learn repeatedly has “discovered, much as he’d suspected, that once life caught up with you, you could never quite shake it again. It endeavored to hobble you with greater and greater frequency. How you managed to remain upright became your style, who you were.”

Alec and Polina provide the story’s forward momentum as they work, navigate the city, and make temporary lives semi-independent of family and each other. At the center of this makeshift life is the émigré community, which includes a large proportion of unscrupulous, even violent characters, newly freed from Soviet jails during this window of time in which the USSR was pleased to get rid of its Jews.

But in this temporary stopover in an alien land (none of them speaks Italian), the future is an undefined goal, while the past is real.

As the younger generation hustles to prepare for a new life, Samuil (whose infirmities are blocking their acceptance to Canada) takes refuge in the past. He decides to write his memoirs, which will have “corrective and instructive value.”

“For hours each day he settled conspicuously at a card table in the sitting room and demanded not to be disturbed. Nevertheless, his grandsons scampered through the room with impunity and his wife and daughter-in-law often interrupted him with their comings and goings between the bedroom and the kitchen.

“To his wife’s inquiry about what he was doing, he said, I’m doing what I’m doing.”

Bezmozgis, author of the story collection Natasha and Other Stories, has an incisive, dryly humorous prose style, which nurtures affection for his flawed, disputatious characters, even when they are behaving badly, and captures family dynamics in all its sniping and essential loyalty.

He joins a very specific time and place, ethnic culture and political climate with the stark, commonplace irony of history’s extremely fleeting lessons. Samuil’s sons not only disregard his past and his political battle scars, they cannot even share their father’s most precious possession, his dead brother’s letters, for they are unable to read the language.

Delightful, sad, wise and wry, this well-told tale should appeal to readers of such greats as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Bezmozgis
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of other books from this publisher: The Nude Walker by Bathsheba Monk Ghost Light by Joseph Connor

Bibliography:

• Natasha and Other Stories (June 2009)
• The Free World (March 2011)

“If it did happen again, if his and Lise’s baby died, too, would they survive? Would their marriage? The thing is, there’s no telling. From where he sits, less than a month away from fatherhood, he sees that what they’ve done together acknowledges the possibility of its own undoing: that what there is to gain is exactly equal to what there is to lose.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 9, 2011)

Ann Packer’s newest book, Swim Back to Me, is comprised of a novella and five short stories. They are all “emotionally searing stories” dealing with issues of intimacy, misunderstandings that cause distancing, betrayals, and the problems that people have with understanding and knowing one another. Each story is strong and brilliant.

“Walk for Mankind,” the novella in this collection, just sings. It is a coming of age story but to just describe it as that would be like saying it’s a beautiful day and to leave out what makes it beautiful: the smell of the greenery, the feel of a breeze, the sensation of the the sun on your skin and the overall feeling of beauty and abundance inspired by being part of this world.

The novella takes place in 1972 Palo Alto, California close to the Stanford campus. It is told from fifty-year old Richard’s memories of his fourteenth summer. Sasha and Richard are both fourteen years old and are friends, the kind of friends who play scrabble, go to the beach, ride bikes together and play truth and dare. They have fun. Sasha is the more dominant one in the relationship and she has a real independent and wild streak to her that Richard lacks. Sasha decides that she and Richard should do a 20-mile Walk for Mankind and raise so much money that they are “heroes” of a sort. Just before the walk, Sasha meets Cal and begins a sexual relationship with him. Since Cal is a drug dealer, pot also enters the picture. Sasha starts smoking a lot of weed and Richard soon embraces it as well. Pot becomes a big deal for Richard as he “laughs the ocean-wave laughter of the stoned, up and down and down and up, and it was incredibly intense and at the same time locked away from the real world, safe behind a wall of glass.”

Richard loves to go to Sasha’s house where her free-wheeling parents are fun and exuberant. Richard lives with his stodgy father, a history professor, and a housekeeper. His mother left them ten months ago to “find herself” and Richard sees her once a month for a weekend. Richard’s relationship with his father is distant and he loves Sasha’s family as much as being with Sasha. There comes a time in their relationship, however, when sexuality enters and they begin to distance, not understanding one another and their new roles.

The underlying theme of this beautiful novella is the distance and pursuit of two adolescents who do not know themselves or each other and are trying to navigate the world of intimacy. This quickly turns into perceived betrayals which distance the two friends, leaving them in a place of anomie. They learn to perceive the treacheries, dreams and misfortunes that comprise life, songs in a dissonant key.

In “Things Said and Done” Sasha’s family is revisited during the festivities of her brother’s marriage to a woman much younger than him. Her parents are long divorced and Sasha has come to realize that her father is a narcissist. She is his emotional caretaker. She has left her wildness behind her and lives a staid life as an academic.

In “Molten” a mother grieves the death of her teen-aged son. “Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.” She has lost her grasp on life and tries to relive her son’s days by listening to his rock music non-stop and finding meaning in the music and instrumentation he once listened to. She has moved away from her family and at a bereavement group “she felt molten. She didn’t want friends, compassionate or otherwise. She wanted to scream in a padded room, scratch her arms till they bled.”

“Jump” is a story about a shift supervisor at a copy store who has a urinary tract infection. Her car won’t start and a co-worker drives her home. On the drive she finds out he is not who she thought he was and that they are both trying to escape from certain parts of their lives without success.

In “Dwell Time,” a newly married woman has to deal with her husband’s habit of just disappearing for days at a time, something he did in his first marriage but she did not know about. Should she leave him or can she find a way to make this marriage work? Interestingly, the term dwell time “is how long soldiers have between deployments.” Could her husband think of their marriage as a war zone, and these disappearances be his way to find peace?

“The Firstborn” is a poignant story of a woman whose firstborn son died at five months from crib death. This destroyed her marriage. She is remarried now, pregnant and about to give birth to a child. The couple’s fears and hopes are examined, along with her memories of her firstborn.

I am a lover of short stories to begin with, but I gather light when I read something as engaging and brilliant as this collection. Ann Packer has matured so much in her writing since The Dive From Clausen’s Pier. She is well on her way to becoming a master.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ann Packer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Songs Without Words The Dive From Clausen’s Pier

Bibliography:

• Mendocino and Other Stories (1994)
• The Dive from Clausen’s Pier (April 2002)
• Songs Without Words (August 2007)
• Swim Back to Me: Stories (April 2011)

“Hope McMaster had pulled a thread and everything she had believed about the fabric of her life had started to unravel.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (MAR 21, 2011)

Kate Atkinson has written a number of novels that feature ex-cop turned PI Jackson Brodie: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There be Good News?, and now the fourth novel, Started Early, Took My Dog. I had read a total of ZERO novels in the series when I picked up Atkinson’s latest. This is a novel that can be read as a stand-alone, and although there were threads to the other stories, Atkinson’s novel is so very well-written, it’s not essential to begin with the first novel in the series.

Started Early, Took My Dog is ostensibly a crime novel, but to try and slot this excellent tale into such a neat and ultimately limiting definition is a mistake. While crimes take place, the emphasis is on the crimes that slip silently into simple everyday living: cruelty, casual violence, lying and possibly most importantly–failing to take a moral stand.

The book begins in 1975 with a horrendous murder. Two police constables are first on the scene to investigate a fetid smell emanating from a flat on the fifteenth floor of a rundown building. WPC Tracy Waterhouse “a big graceless girl only just off of probation, and PC Ken Arkwright, a stout white Yorkshireman” make a horrifying discovery that is not easily forgotten. As the novel plays out, Tracy Waterhouse never forgets the unsettling case in spite of the fact that her more-than-thirty-year career spans the killing sprees of some of Britain’s most notorious serial killers:

“They would both see the beginning of the Ripper’s killing spree but Arkwright would be retired long before the end of it. Donald Neilson, the Black Panther from Bradford, hadn’t been captured yet and Harold Shipman had probably already started killing patients unlucky enough to be under his care in Pontefract General Infirmary. West Yorkshire in 1975, awash with serial killers.”

The novel goes back and forth between 1975 and the present. Tracy Waterhouse is now retired from the police department and working as the head of security at a shopping centre. Tracy’s tale is intertwined with Jackson Brodie’s latest case–he’s been hired to track down the birth parents of an eternally optimistic New Zealander, Hope McMaster. Hope’s adoptive parents are dead, and curiosity leads Hope to hire Brodie. Armed with some bare bones information about Hope’s birth parents, Brodie discovers that nothing pans out, and while he heads into a dead end, he also slams into a long buried crime that involves West Yorkshire Police’s retired Detective Superintendent, the “butch old battleaxe” Tracy Waterhouse. Tracy’s years with the West Yorkshire Police have left her permanently scarred:

“Tracy had seen the worst and then some. She felt soiled by everything she had witnessed. Filth, pure and simple. Massage parlors and lap-dancing clubs at the soft end and at the other end the hardcore DVDs of people doing repugnant things to each other. The unclassified stuff that scrambled your synapses with its depravity. The young girls trading their souls along with their bodies, the bargain-basement brothels and saunas, sleaziness beyond belief, girls on crack who would do anything for a tenner, anything. Arresting girls for soliciting and seeing them go straight back on the streets; foreign girls who thought they were coming to work as waitresses and nannies and found themselves locked in sordid rooms, servicing one man after another all day; students working in “gentlemen’s clubs” (ha!) to pay their fees. Free speech, liberal do-gooders, the rights of the individual—as long as it’s not harming anyone else. Blah, blah, blah. This was where it got you. Rome under Nero.”

Tracy Waterhouse is a marvelous creation, and when the novel moves back between the present and 1975, we enter a time warp of attitudes–some of which do not significantly change with the passage of time. Tough female coppers are still either dykes or “lezzies” and prostitutes are still unsympathetic murder victims–women who “ask for it.” When Tracy joined the police force, she was there essentially to hold hands with women victims and pass the box of tissues, and while female detectives are no longer seen as fluff, neither are they seen in any sort of flattering light; they simply fall into a different, unpleasant stereotype:

“When Tracy was on the force her fellow officers—male and female—all assumed she was a dyke. She was over fifty now and way back when she’d joined the West Yorkshire Police as a raw cadet you had to be one of the boys to get along. Unfortunately, once you’d established yourself as a hard-nosed bitch it was difficult to admit to the soft and fluffy woman you were hiding inside. And why would you want to admit that anyway.”

I read a fair number of crime novels, and Started Early, Took My Dog is superior for its characterizations and the depth of the issues involved. This is not a simple PI procedural, or even a mystery that needs to be unraveled. Instead this is the story of several characters who are forever shaped by the decisions they made in a split-second moment. On one tier, there’s Tracy Waterhouse who’s haunted by an image of a starving child, and Jackson Brodie who’s haunted by the murder of his only sister, but there are many second tier characters who’ve either stood by and allowed terrible acts to occur or who’ve made poor judgments that have haunted them for decades. Atkinson takes a generous approach to all of her flawed characters, and in some cases at least, the characters have opportunities for redemption.

As a series character, Jackson Brodie possesses the requisite interest for a return visit. This novel shows him maturing and coming to some realizations about both his past and his present. Threads are left open for the fifth novel in the series, but until that one sees the light of day, I have some catching up to do with the other Jackson Brodie novels.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 263 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books (March 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Atkinson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: When Will There Be Good News? One Good Turn Case Histories

Bibliography:

• Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
• Human Croquet (1997)
• Emotionally Weird (2000)
• Not the End of the World (2002)
• Life After Life (April 2013)

Detective Jackson Brodie series:

• Case Histories (2004)
• One Good Turn (2006)
• When Will There Be Good News? (2008)
• Started Early, Took My Dog (2011)