“They laughed, both knowing that part of the old ways remained, though they were fragile. At the end of their laughter, words were exchanged, briefly, leaving many things unsaid for another day that continued to be another and yet another…”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (FEB 12, 2014)

Mama Kadie cautiously enters the central path of her village, not sure what to expect, pondering on what has remained and who is still there or has come back like she does now. After the traumas, losses and devastation of the war she experiences profound emotions as she walks barefoot on the local soil, smells the scents of the land and watches and listens for every sound in the bushes. What will life have in store for her? The opening pages of Ishmael Beah’s debut novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, are achingly beautiful; his voice gentle and affecting, his deep emotional connection palpable with what he describes so colourfully. Having experienced international acclaim with his memoir,  A Long Way Gone, which recounts the story of a child soldier in Sierra Leone, with his new book he returns to his homeland, sharing with his readers the demanding and difficult path that the local people have to follow in their recovery from the brutal war and its many losses in life and livelihood.

There is hope – radiance – for a better future but there are also many sacrifices to make: forgiving is not forgetting; rebuilding on ruins, literally, on the bones of loved ones is probably one of the most haunting challenges. Transposing the facts and realities of the aftermath of the Sierra Leonean war into a fictional framework carries its own challenges. At the same time, it gives the author a greater freedom of expression for exploring the tragedies and recoveries. Benefiting from his mother tongue’s rich figurative language, Mende, Beah also conveys to us something of the soul of his home and way of thinking. In his language there is a deep connection between land, nature, cosmos and people that speaks through his wording and that also characterizes his in depth developed protagonists.

The first person Mama Kadie meets as she walks along the central paths of the village is Pa Moiwa, who resting on a log in the village square. Much time will be needed to absorb the enormity of what has happened, evidence of violence and death are visible everywhere. Pa Moiwa slowly turns around on hearing the voice of his old friend: his only question is “how she had brought her spirit into town and which route she had taken.” “… I walked the path, as that is the way in my heart.” There will be many days for them to carefully and gently peel away the layers that have hidden their experiences of the recent past. Every day more people arrive: returning displaced locals and desperate refugees from other parts of the country where survival is even more precarious.

Mama Kadie, Pa Moiwa and, later, Pa Kainesi play a central role in the community, respected by everybody as the “elders.”  Young and old sit together in the village centre after a day’s struggle to repair houses, fetch water and find food to cook; the elders are telling stories of the past with the children listening attentively: “It isn’t about knowing the most stories, child. It is about carrying the ones that are most important and passing them along [from one generation to the next]….” Meanwhile, the younger adults sit apart working on plans how to find work and supplies to care for their families, among them Bockarie and Benjamin, both teachers, who will do everything in their power to ensure a brighter future for their children and others in the community.

Among the returnees are several former child soldiers and lost orphans who prefer to stay at a distance from the villagers but form an important component in the rebuilding of the village as all are coping with the emotional scars of their and the villagers’ recent experiences. They form a small community of their own, led by the enigmatic “Colonel,” a shadowy silent figure, who, nonetheless, finds ways to express his growing allegiance to his protégés and the villagers in unexpected ways.

There is a moment of almost idyllic peace in the community, but as is often the case in real life… it is the calm ahead of the storm. And the storm comes in the form of huge trucks and machinery and shouting people who appear to come from another world… The small mining company that had operated in the area before the war has come back with ambitious new owners and investors, who, with little regard to the needs and traditions of the villages nearby, take over the precious farmland and water resources for an ever expanding open-pit mining operation. The company, endorsed by the provincial politicians, is dividing the community physically and emotionally. Their behaviour provokes not only the elders. They bring the worst of city life into this remote region of the country. On the other hand they become the only employer in the villages around. Conflicts are unavoidable and there can only be few winners.

Ishmael Beah’s novel is beautifully written, absorbing and engaging at many levels. His central characters stay in your mind long after you closed the book. He succeeds in telling a story that balances humanity and grace on the one hand with the harsh reality of life in a country that has come out of a brutal civil war and is faced with a devastated economy. Traditional ways of life are challenged and as readers we can only hope that the wisdom of the elders can continue in the mind of the younger generations and that they will learn from the many stories their culture and communities have to offer.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	Sarah Crichton Books; First Edition edition (January 7, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ishmael Beah
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

Bibliography:

• Radiance of Tomorrow (January 2014)

Nonfiction:

• A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007)

“I can scarcely believe we had sex in the Houses of Parliament. I can scarcely believe that we ever had sex at all. That acute feeling, the giddiness of it, as if I had plunged my face into a bouquet of lilies, their scent so blissful it would make me feel faint – that was what it was like. Was it happiness? Was that all it was? Or was it a kind of addiction, to the story, to the drama of what we were doing? If it was a film, we were the stars.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JAN 14, 2014)

Yvonne Carmichael, 52 years old, is a respected geneticist, married for many years with two grown children. She works for an esteemed institute called The Beaufort and is also an external examiner for graduate students. Her life is rich in many ways. Thus, it comes as a surprise to her that when she is scheduled to give a report at the House of Parliaments she notices a man who is giving her a come hither look and she begins to follow him. This begins an extraordinary affair. She doesn’t even know his name or what he does, though after some time she surmises that he is a spy of some type. This first time they have sex, he leads her to the Crypt Chapel on the House of Parliaments grounds and in the rank basement they make love. Yvonne thinks “From my empirical knowledge of you I know one thing and one thing only. Sex with you is like being eaten by a wolf.”

The affair begins suddenly and is all-consuming for Yvonne. Her lover gives her a pre-pay phone with his number programmed in and she is to call him only on that. She fantasizes about him continually and her life is one long effort to be with him in every free moment.

“It is worrying me, how easy you found it to have sex with me. I could have said, how easy you found it to seduce me…but seduction suggests a process of persuasion over the passage of time. You just went right ahead and I went right along with it – there wasn’t any persuading necessary. I need you to know this was not normal for me.”

Yvonne is caught up in the high of her sexual power, her ability to court a man who desires her so fully. The mystery of the affair is also a pull for her. It is so different from her daily life. “I am fifty-two. I have status and gravitas – when I don’t have my tights around my ankles in a secluded chapel beneath the Houses of Parliament, that is.”

We learn in the prologue that there is a court case, that something is happening to the two of them that is very serious and earth-shattering. Yvonne realizes in court as the novel opens, “That is the moment when it all comes crashing down . . . We both know we are about to lose everything – our marriages are over our careers are finished, I have lost my son’s and daughter’s good regard, and more than that, our freedom is at stake. Everything we have tried to protect – it is all about to tumble.” Their affair leads them to an act that finds them in court, fighting for their freedom with every ounce of their strength.

This is a bountiful novel, filled to the brim with wonderful writing, psychological suspense, an erotically charged relationship and a harrowing courtroom battle. Told from the first person, with Yvonne as the narrator, we travel with her from her first glance at her lover to the denouement which is riveting. Louise Doughty has written a truly compelling novel, one that has me wanting to read her other works, and soon.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Sarah Crichton Books (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Louise Doughty
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Interview
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Narcissist’s Daughter by Craig Holden

Bibliography:

• Crazy Paving (1995)
• Dance With Me (1996)
• An English Murder (aka Honey Dew in UK)(1998; 2000 in US)
• Fires in the Dark (2003)
• Stone Cradle (2006)
• Whatever You Love (2010)
• Apple Tree Yard (January 2014)

Nonfiction:

• A Novel in a Year: From First Page to Last in 52 Weeks (2007)

“And until you have possessed
dying and rebirth,
you are but a sullen guest
on the gloomy earth.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 22, 2011)

Bolaño cites this quotation from Goethe (also given in German) towards the end of this early but posthumously discovered novel. It is as good a key as any to what the book may be about. The protagonist, Udo Berger, a German in his mid-twenties, is literally a guest — in a hotel. He is taking a late summer vacation with his girlfriend Ingeborg in a beach hotel on the Costa Brava where he used to come with his family as a child. Together with another German couple, Hanna and Charly, they engage in the usual occupations: swimming, sunbathing, eating, drinking (a lot), and making love. But shadows hang over this idyll. They become involved with a group of slightly sinister local men, called The Wolf, The Lamb, and El Quemado (the burnt one), a hideously-burned South American immigrant who hires out pedal boats on the beach. Their contentment is marred by small acts of offstage violence, and by an unexpected death that touches them more directly. Udo will stay on until the hotel is about to close for the season, a change in atmosphere that is summed up by Bolaño in itchily discordant images:

“The regular muted sound of the elevator has been replaced by scratching and races behind the plaster of the walls. The wind that every night shakes the window frame and hinges is more powerful. The faucets of the sink squeak and shudder before releasing water. Even the smell of the hallways, perfumed with artificial lavender, breaks down more quickly and turns into a pestilent stink that causes terrible coughing fits late at night.”

The biggest shadow of all is that cast by the title, The Third Reich. We learn early on that it is the name of a war game played with counters on a stylized map. The war that the game replays is a purely military operation of armies, deployments, and supply lines; the text has no hint of Nazi ideology or the Holocaust. Yet those associations are inevitably in the mind of the reader, who waits for some at least symbolic equivalent to surface, for the dream holiday to become a nightmare. And Bolaño, who is a master at generating angst from a meticulous compilation of detail, makes a fine start to building the tension here. Udo is the German national champion of war-gaming. Like one of those solipsistic characters out of Ishiguro, he is obsessed in his hermetic world, working out variants of the games, publishing them in obscure magazines, corresponding with gamers in other countries. Alone of the German quartet, he remains pale while the others develop suntans, since he prefers working in his room to lounging on the beach. There is a danger in him, a potential for mental instability, at least as great as any threat posed by the low-life characters with whom the four associate.

This is a beautifully produced book with an evocatively surreal cover and a fluid translation by Natasha Wimmer. I leaped into it the moment it arrived and truly wanted to like it. But I have to say that, for all the fascinating hints of ideas he would develop in The Savage Detectives and especially in 2666, this is not vintage Bolaño. It seemed to be all wind-up and no punch. As so often with Bolaño, there is a surreal element competing with the meticulous realism, but here I felt they canceled each other out rather than reinforcing. Udo, of course, lives much of his time in a totally irreal world, “essentially ghosts of a ghostly General Staff, forever performing military exercises on game boards.” Ingeborg, his girlfriend, is forever reading a mystery featuring the detective Florian Linden, but although reportedly near the end she never reaches it. A vacation involving so great a consumption of alcohol is in itself somewhat unreal, and Udo’s imagination verges increasingly on paranoia. Yet while nightmares, in the sense of actual dreams, play a larger and larger part in the story, the nightmare fails to materialize in reality; the book ends in distinct anticlimax.

All the same, I do see the point of the Goethe quotation. “Dying and rebirth” are certainly among the ideas in play, and Udo is a different person at the end. The novel makes a fascinating addendum for existing fans of Bolaño’s work. But though it is an easy read, even lighthearted at times, I would not recommend it as an introduction for those who do not know the author. For them, and especially for those leery of tackling the vast scale of his major works, I would suggest the novella By Night in Chile, whose compact power is merely hinted at here.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 22, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Roberto Bolano
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: 2666

Bibliography (translations only):

• The Third Reich (1989; 2011 in US)
• Distant Star (1996; 2004 in US)
• Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996: 2009 in US)
• The Savage Detectives (1998; 2007 in US)
• Monsieur Pain (1999; 2010 in US)
• By Night in Chile (2000; 2003 in US)
• Assassin Whores (2001; 2010 in US)
• 2666 (2004; 2008 in US)
• Amulet (2006; 2007)
• Last Evenings on Earth: Stories (2007)
• The Skating Rink (2009)
• Antwerp (April 2010)
• The Insufferable Gaucho (2010)
• Between Parentheses (2011)
• The Secret of Evil (2011; April 2012 in US)
• Woes of the True Policeman (November 2012 in US)

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

Book Review:

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

“Reader, I married him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

Movies from books:

• The Virgin Suicides (2000)

“Mo was tired of the bellicose, lachrymose religion the attack had birthed, was sickened by the fundamentalists who defended it by declaring the day sacred, the place sacred, the victims sacred, the feelings of their survivors sacred – so much sacredness, no limit to the profanity justified to preserve it.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 25, 2011)

Ten years have gone by since the Twin Towers came down on 9/11, and through those years, a wide array of talented fiction writers have attempted to make sense of that pivotal experience: Lynn Sharon Schwartz, John Updike, Jonathan Safran Foer, Claire Messud, to name just a few.

The brilliance of Amy Waldman’s book is that she does not try to apply logic to why 9/11 occurred, nor does she attempt to recreate the complex and traumatic emotions that most Americans felt that day. Instead, she explores something broader: the fallout of a country confused, divided, and sick with fear, clamoring to make sense of the insensible.

The book begins with an ambiguous title: The Submission. On a concrete level, the submission refers to anonymous submissions by architects – in the best democratic tradition – who vie for the right to build an enduring memorial to Ground Zero. But read those words again, and the meaning is far deeper. Is Waldman referring to the submission of Muslims to Qur’an law, forcing them into outsider positions? Or is she writing of the submission of too many Americans to their deepest fears?

A bit of all three interpretations exist, but it becomes increasingly evident that it is the latter that Amy Waldman is most interested in. The skeleton of the story is this: the winner of the submission is an American Muslim, Mohammad Khan, whose true religion is his vaulting ambition. (At a later point, Mo’s lover will say to him, “Now I see that it was about you: your design, your reputation, your place in history.”) Raised in the United States since birth, Mo (as he is universally called) has barely set foot in a mosque his entire life. His design – a garden – is comforting and soothing, particularly to the sole member of the selection jury who is also the widow of a 9/11 victim.

Once Mo’s identity is leaked as the winner, the fervor begins. He is called, among other things, “decadent, abstinent, deviant, violent, insolent, abhorrent, aberrant, and typical.” Amy Waldman, the former bureau chief of the New York Times, knows this territory intimately: the ambitious reporter who will do anything for a scoop (including defecting to the New York Post, which traffics in sensationalism), the equally ambitious governor who strives for reelection while inflaming public sentiment, the radio talk show host who plays into his audience’s prejudices. Before too long, the garden is being depicted as an “Islamic victory garden,” Mo is being called by his full name, and his loyalty to the U.S. is being questioned on all fronts.

Amy Waldman characters are nearly always fully realized: whether she’s writing about Mo, Claire – the wealthy widow and key juror on the selection committee – or a seemingly bit player who is propelled to center stage, the Bangladeshi widow Asma, whose husband, an illegal immigrant, worked as a janitor and was killed in the attack.

Although the author’s point of view is not hard to discern, to her credit, she reveals all sides and that is never clearer than during the scene when the public weighs in about the design. The question becomes: “What history do you want to write with this memorial?” Every side is represented, from the professor of Middle Eastern studies who states, “…Achieving that paradise through martyrdom – murder suicide – has become the obsession of Islamic extremists, the ultimate submission to God: to the author on Islamic gardens who asks, “Since when did we become so afraid of learning from other cultures?”

The pretentious artistic debates… the cynical political showboating… the tactical moves of special-interest groups… the media that fuels rumors rather than reports news – all are depicted here. This well-written, thought-provoking, and nuanced book will appeal to many different kinds of readers. With all the posturing, the truth is often found in just letting go. Or, as Mo eventually discovers, “He had forgotten himself, and this was the truest submission.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 197 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August 16, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Amy Waldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Terrorist by John Updike Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

Bibliography:

• The Submission (August 2011)

“There were too many people here now, a crush of bodies on the sidewalks and too many cars on the highways, people crowded into houses and apartment buildings in Santa Ana, in Anaheim, cities that used to be good places to live. The landmarks of Scott’s youth, the burger stands and the diners, were now covered with the grimy stains of time and something else, an alien presence.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (OCT 17, 2011)

From the looks of it you could never tell that the beautiful Torres-Thompson home in fancy Laguna Rancho Estates, is on the cusp of unraveling. But look closely and you can see the edges of the tropical garden coming undone, the lawn not done just right; and these are merely the symptoms of greater troubles. For the couple Scott Torres and Maureen Thompson the country’s financial crisis has come knocking, even in their ritzy Los Angeles neighborhood.

Scott Torres once spearheaded a booming software company that went broke in the software bust. As the book opens, he is reduced to doing mundane work for a new software firm. The family is beset with enough financial insecurities that Scott and Maureen let go of two staff members in their hired help team—the gardener, Pepe, and the babysitter, Lupe. 

The one maid left standing, Araceli Ramirez, once only held cooking and cleaning responsibilities but now finds herself, much to her annoyance, occasionally watching the boys, Brandon and Keenan and the baby, Samantha.

As Araceli cleans and cooks, she silently watches the dynamics of the family unfold. One day, Maureen, tired of cutting corners from the lavish lifestyle she once knew, decides she will splurge on a new desert garden—one that will replace the decaying tropical one that gardener Pepe once so lovingly tended. The astronomical sum she spends on the landscaping is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Scott and Maureen have a heated altercation, witnessed by Araceli. The next morning, Araceli wakes up to find both her jefe and jefa (there’s a little Spanish left untranslated in the book, some of which can’t be made out just by context) gone with the baby. The boys are home alone with her. As it happens, Maureen and Scott leave independently each one assuming, through a set of coincidences, that the other spouse will be around to take care of the boys. Neither is; the boys are left completely alone for three whole days.

At the end of the third day, at her wit’s end, Araceli decides she will bring the boys to Los Angeles where she is sure their Mexican grandfather (Scott’s Dad) lives. The three set off on an adventure to find grandpa. Predictably they never do.

In the meantime, Maureen and Scott have returned home only to find the boys and the housekeeper missing. They immediately jump to the conclusion that the boys have been kidnapped. The police are called in and all hell breaks loose.

The fact that Araceli is an illegal immigrant complicates the situation tenfold and soon the case makes national headlines. After a series of adventures, the boys are reunited with their parents. But the case has by now developed a life of its own. Scott and Maureen for their part become the stand-in for rich, privileged folks who get constantly shown up as the poster children for bad parenting.

Then there’s Araceli. On the one hand she is worshipped by fellow Mexicans as the exploited, underprivileged Mexicana—someone who represents all the collective immigrant angst in the United States. On the other hand, there’s the flag-waving crowd—members of whom insist that Araceli needs to be deported if not permanently jailed for her crimes. As the book makes its way through to the end, Araceli decides to take some of these matters in her own hands.

The Barbarian Nurseries starts out with a good premise but at every stage it moves so predictably that one can see the ending coming way before it actually arrives. The author, Hector Tobar, won a Pulitzer as part of a team at L.A. times covering the L.A. riots. Unfortunately his journalistic brio doesn’t translate well to fiction. The Barbarian Nurseries has one coincidence too many woven into the story until it totally strains credulity. For example, when Maureen leaves home with Samantha and goes to a spa, the delays that hold her there for three whole days are really difficult to swallow.

Tobar does have keen insight into the various segments of the California narrative—the ultra-rich millionaires, the hired help, the immigrant psyche—but he falls short of weaving these narratives into a compelling story. One would have loved to learn more about Araceli’s past in Mexico, or even about Maureen’s Midwestern roots for example. But too often Araceli and her owners fall into clichéd stereotypes, for what people like them should say and do. Even the media circus that attends the “kidnapping” case drags on way too long.

To his credit, Tobar successfully raises some essential questions: about the act of parenting in these intensely wired times and about the place of immigrants in our larger social fabric.

The Barbarian Nurseries has been billed as the great contemporary California novel and it certainly has all the elements for one. Unfortunately its somewhat predictable story has the book degenerating into precisely the thing it derides the most — a sound bite.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Héctor Tobar
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: My Hollywood by Mona Simpson

Bibliography:

• The Tattooed Soldier (2000)
• The Barbarian Nurseries (September 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States (2006)

“He was standing on a cliff…into a kind of arena enclosing…Spruce Lake…and now he looked down on it hundreds of feet below him, its flat surface as still and black as obsidian, engulfed in the shadow of surrounding cliffs, ringed with a double ring of evergreens and reflected evergreens.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  AUG 30, 2011)

Denis Johnson won an O. Henry prize for this novella of the old American West in 2003. It originally appeared in the Paris Review but is now reissued and bound in hardback with an apt cover art—a painting by Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton called “The Race.” If you contemplate the painting for a while, you may feel the ghost of the book’s protagonist, Robert Grainier, as he, too, felt the ghosts and spirits of the dead.

Robert Grainier is a man without a known beginning —- at least, he didn’t know his parents, and neither did he know where he was from originally. Some cousin suspected Canada, and said that he spoke only French when he was left off in Fry, Idaho, circa 1893, arriving there on the Great Northern Railroad as a young lad. His aunt and uncle were his parents, and he grew up in the panhandle by the Kootenai River with the loggers, the Indians, the Chinese, and the trains.

As the book opens in the summer of 1917, Grainier is helping his railroad crew of the Spokane International Railway (in the Idaho panhandle) hold a struggling Chinese laborer accused of stealing. They meant to throw him from the trestle, sixty feet above the rapids at the gorge, but the man, cursing and speaking in tongues, broke free and went hand-over-hand from beam to beam, until he disappeared.

“The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully…and any bad thing might come of it.”

And that was the signal incident that curses, spirits, and demons would inhabit the landscape of Grainier’s dreams. Often, in the background, is heard the melancholic whistle of the trains.

Johnson’s story is a portrait of early 20th-century America as witnessed through the itinerant Grainier, a scrupulous, dignified man whose wife and infant daughter were consumed in a fire in their cabin while he was miles away working on the railroad or in the forest as a logger. Grainier’s long life is seen through snapshots juxtaposed in a deliberately disjointed style, submerging our thoughts deep into the great Northwest, as forests are cleared and the trains tracks are laid that connect one land to the next.

Grainier came back and rebuilt on the burnt lot, the grief of his loss now a thing in his soul, a muted or massive thing, depending on his memories or his dreams. The dead spirit of his daughter appears in abstract or animal form to haunt him, and the wolves enter his soul.

“…when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth…It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart…”

Love, loss, death, and lust are wound into this short but powerful story, a story of a time that is receding from the collective American memories. Denis Johnson’s ode is an evocative and sublime remembrance of things past—of railroads built, of people buried, and of souls lost and wandering. Johnson awakens them, and puts them to rest.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Denis Johnson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nobody Move Tree of Smoke

Bibliography:

• Angels (1983)
• Fiskadoro (1985)
• The Stars at Noon (1986)
• Rescitation of a Hanged Man (1991)
• Jesus’s Son: Stories (1992)
• Already Dead: A California Gothic (1997)
• The Name of the World (2000)
• Tree of Smoke (2007)
• Nobody Move (2009)
• Train Dreams (August 2011)

Other:

• The Icongnito Lounge: Poems (1992)
• The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems (1995)
• Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond (nonfiction) (2001)
• Shoppers: Two Plays (2002)

Movies from Books:

• Jesus’ Son (2003)

“Oh, my God! He cried out. “They’ve been slaughtered . . . Children have been slaughtered . . . I don’t know what to do. I’m all alone, and they’re all dead.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  AUG 10, 2011)

The Hypnotist, written by Lars Kepler (a pseudonym for a husband and wife team writing together in Sweden), was tauted by Janet Maslin of The New York Times as “The summer’s likeliest new Nordic hit.” The writing is compared to that of Steig Larsson and Henning Mankell. Other than the novel taking place in Sweden, I observed little or no similarities to either of these two writers.

The novel opens up with a bloody, horrific murder scene. An entire family has been hacked up with an axe, knives and scissors. Body parts are strewn everywhere. Arms and entrails are mixed in with the blood. Only the fifteen year old boy, Josef, survives. As he lies in a hospital bed, a detective, Joona Linna, is called in and takes the case. There are two things that Joona detests. “One is having to give up on a case, walking away from unidentified bodies, unsolved rapes, robberies, cases of abuse and murder. And the other thing he loathes, although in a completely different way, is when these unsolved cases are finally solved, because when the old questions are answered, it is seldom in the way one would wish.” Joona is a detective well-respected by his peers and someone with an instinctual sense for the underlying truth of things. He is also known for never giving up on a case.

Despite Josef being on extremely strong pain killers and having been stabbed all over, Joona wants him to be hypnotized. He calls in Erik Maria Bark, a hypnotist and trauma specialist who has sworn ten years ago never to practice hypnosis again. Despite this promise, Joona talks him into hypnotizing Josef. During the course of hypnosis, it turns out that Josef himself is the murderer. The wounds he has are all self-inflicted

The novel deals with Josef’s escape from the hospital, serial murders and kidnappings. All is told in full graphic detail. Not one drop of blood is left to the reader’s imagination. This is not a book for the weak of heart or squeamish.

The novel also deals with the troubled marital relationship of Erik and his wife, Simone, as they struggle to hold their floundering marriage together. Erik is addicted to several medications that he keeps in a special “parrot and native” box. He uses multiple sleeping pills, pain killers, uppers and downers in order to numb himself from the world.

Unlike the works of Steig Larsson, Arne Dahl and Henning Mankell, this book is mainly about external actions rather than existential and internal reflections. The book is written in short chapters and follows several cases of murder and mayhem. The middle section of the book is about Erik’s history as a hypnotist and the reasons that he decided to give up the practice of hypnosis.

The book falters in many ways. Characters are not fully realized, the ending is too pat, and though the beginning of the book alludes to secrets in Joona’s past, these are never fully revealed. Perhaps this is because a sequel is in the works. The reader is also left without knowing what happens to some of the characters, especially Evelyn, Josef’s sister.

For a first novel, this is an extraordinary tome at 503 pages. Some of it works and some of it just didn’t keep me entranced. I must admit that at times I found it to be an effort to pick up the book and keep reading despite the action sequences which I usually enjoy a lot. The book tries hard to belong to the Swedish genre of existential angst and lost souls but doesn’t quite find its way. I think it would make a fine book for the airplane or beach but unlike some of Mankell’s work, it won’t stay in my mind for a long period of time. The book would have been better served if tauter as an action-packed mystery with graphic descriptions of mayhem, severed body parts and bloody corpses throughout.  (Translated by Ann Long.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 262 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lars Keplar
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson The Man from Beijing by Daniel Mankell

Bibliography:

• The Hypnotist (2011)
• The Nightmare (2012)
• The Fire Witness (July 2013)

“Years ago, she’d taught herself never to forget that everyone in her late-night world wanted something from her: a drink or two, a name and a number, a subtle stroke or an obvious grope, forgiveness for spilling or spewing or stepping out of line, a hit of blow or a blow job in the back-seat. They wanted to be seen and heard through the lights and above the noise any way… Everyone in her life, Maureen knew, was a buyer or a seller, usually both, all the time. That fact was the cornerstone on which she’d built her survival. Hers was not a world where a girl could let her guard down. For anyone. Ever.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUN 11, 2011)

Physically, 29 year-old Maureen Coughlin is a wisp of a woman, 5’ 4” tall and 100 pounds. Emotionally, she’s a powerhouse, a person with acumen, tenacity, and a wild streak just this side of the Serengeti. She works as a waitress, the same job for the last 10 years and she’s just sick of it. It’s a nowhere job and she’s going nowhere. She lives and works on Staten Island in a faux chic bar with the emphasis on “faux.” She’s started college and dropped out more than once but she knows that waitressing is not where she wants to find herself down the pike. She lives alone and has no one special in her life except her mother who gives her more trouble than solace.

She’s not averse to starting her shifts with a drink and a bit of cocaine to get her going. For a while she had a pretty bad cocaine problem but she’s kicked that. Now, her use is just recreational. Her alcohol consumption, however, is pretty heavy. As The Devil She Knows opens, Maureen is just coming off her shift. It’s near morning and she’s strung out and in a black-out, not even realizing where she is. She finds herself in Dennis’s, her boss’s, office. As she leaves the office she sees Dennis on his knees giving a blow job to Frank Sebastian, candidate for State Senate. She pretends she’s seen nothing and leaves hoping that will be the end of it. Maureen is discreet and knows when to keep a secret. However, the next morning Dennis is found dead, ostensibly a suicide on the railroad tracks. Maureen believes it’s not a suicide because just before she was leaving the bar, Dennis told her he wanted to talk to her. Also, she knows Dennis is not the type to take his life. Now she’s in a real quandary.

She approaches John, her ex-boss at the bar she used to work at. He encourages her to call the cops and gives her the name of one that he trusts as honest and good. It just so happens though that Waters, the cop, has a history with Sebastian. They used to work together in Brooklyn. Something happened that caused Sebastian to retire as a hero and Waters to be transferred to Staten Island. Waters is old and tired. Maureen thinks of him as a lumbering great bear. Maureen confides in him and tells him what happened between Dennis and Sebastian. Waters promises to work on it. He takes her allegations and suspicions very seriously.

What Maureen hadn’t anticipated, however, is just how bad a guy Sebastian is. He is really bad, no shades of gray here. He has killed before and he has killed many people. Maureen finds her apartment broken into, her television smashed, and warning cards laid carefully under her mattress. Sebastian is not a light-weight and Maureen knows she’s in deep trouble. Waters advises her to lay low and stay at her mother’s house. Maureen doesn’t like taking advice or orders. She likes to take things into her own hands and her brain is telling her to find Sebastian and face off.

The book’s plot is pretty basic in its David and Goliath theme – little woman against big and powerful man. However, it’s well-written, has great quips and kept up my interest throughout. Maureen is a wonderful character. The reader feels like they really know her, along with the others who surround her. The author, Bill Loehfelm, is great with building a character from scratch. We get a real sense of everyone in the book and the characters are all there for a purpose – no loose ends and no rabbit trails.

When the confrontation comes, and we know it will come, we’re all rooting for Maureen. Bill Loefelm started his career as the first Amazon Breakthrough writer, winning their award for his novel Fresh Kills. It appears that The Devil She Knows is the first in a series starring Maureen. I look forward to the subsequent books.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 24, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bill Loehfelm
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Missing Persons by Claire O’Donohue

Bibliography:

• Fresh Kills (2008)
• Bloodroot (2009)

Maureen Coughlin series:

• The Devil She Knows (May 2011)

“Bai, in Guyana it have pandit and it have bandit and sometimes it hard to tell the two apart.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (MAY 22, 2011)

First, a quick background about Indian (specifically Bengali) cinema: The great Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, was from the state of West Bengal and is one of Bengal’s most revered sons and cultural icons. It stands to reason that years after Ray’s death, the incredibly talented Rahul Bhattacharya (a fellow Bengali) would use Ray’s famous bildungsroman, Pather Panchali, as the inspiration for his debut novel.

At its most basic essence, Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People Who Care is also a bildungsroman—it traces the growth and coming of age of its protagonist in a country far away from home, Guyana. The protagonist in the novel seems to be modeled after Bhattacharya himself. Like Bhattacharya, the protagonist is a cricket reporter who decides to take an extended yearlong vacation in Guyana. Gooroo, as the protagonist is referred to by others, has “a one year visa—to reinvent one’s living, to escape the deadness of the life one was accustomed to…to be hungry for the world one saw.”

While in Guyana, the protagonist travels to many places and tries his hand at many jobs. One of these exotic jobs is that of a porknocker, prospecting for diamonds with a local bandit called Baby. Gooroo soon tires of this and moves on. He watches Pather Panchali at a local cultural center and remembers what one of the characters in the movie says: “If you stay too long in a place, you become petty. It has happened to me.”

Towards the end of the book, the protagonist is mesmerized by a woman he meets, Jan (short for the Indian Jankee). He is so taken by her that he invites her to travel with him to destinations unknown—they eventually end up in Venezuela. This portion of the book, the interaction between Gooroo and Jan, is easily one of the most nuanced descriptions of a romantic relationship I have read in a long time. The slow tempo with which the relationship rises and eventually falls is just superb and in a sense, mirrors the languid surroundings that always haunt the book.

Gooroo eventually knows he has to stop wandering and find some ballast to his life: “One escapes one’s life seeking adventure, and with enough dheel and some luck, that happens. But the thread is anchored. You can only go so far. The impulse must change. Instead of adventure one seeks understanding,” Bhattacharya writes.

The author incorporates a lot of Guyanese history into the novel and this serves to explain just how and why such an ethnically diverse set of people are described within the pages of Sly. Guyana was once a Dutch colony and waves of indentured laborers, including Africans, Indians and even Chinese, helped settle this South American country. The title for the novel comes from a book Gooroo spots at a small local library. It was a book about the Dutch West India Company and someone had written a single word on one page, possibly in an attempt to describe the colonial power: Sly. In the margin, a sentence had been started: “They think like they care.”

If there’s a problem with this novel, it is that Bhattacharya’s spectator view of Guyana is too rosy, too often—a tourist’s adoring gaze, if you will. The book is also less of a novel and more of a travelogue, even if the overall arc of the story—that of the protagonist rediscovering himself—becomes clearer at the end.

Yet these are extremely minor drawbacks in a debut fiction work that will be long remembered for its voice and for its superb sense of place. Bhattacharya has said that voice is one of the most important elements in fiction and that he devoted a lot of care in making sure that the voice in Sly really came to life. This attention has paid off beautifully in his debut novel. Sly teems with rich voices everywhere and they together create a beautiful tapestry.

The country of Guyana comes alive in these pages (“Our days passed slow and voluptuous”). It wouldn’t be too much of an overstatement to say that you can almost feel the humid air and the mosquitoes swarming around, when you read this book. Between the voice and the passages describing the gorgeous countryside, the reader is completely transported. And isn’t that after all, the central thesis of fiction?

To think that the immensely talented Bhattacharya is only 31! Still plenty of time for the New Yorker to sit up and pay attention. It wouldn’t be too much of a wild call to predict that this immensely talented author will soon make the magazine’s prestigious “20 Under 40” list.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Guardian article on Rahul Bhattacharya
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More fiction about travel: In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut Away by Amy Bloom

Bibliography:

• The Sly Company of People Who Care (April 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Pundits from Pakistan (2004)