“The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  SEP 02, 2011)

Three Pines is a village near Montréal that is so small it does not appear on any map. For its size, this town has had an inordinate number of murders; solving them is the job of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté de Quebec and his team of detectives. This time, the victim is a woman, Lillian Dyson, whose art criticism years ago was so caustic that she was responsible for putting an end to budding careers. Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light is all about artists—their insecurities, craving for recognition, pettiness, resentment, and jealousy.

Two artists, Clara Morrow and her husband, Peter, live in Three Pines, and Peter has been moderately successful. However, it is Clara who is having a private solo exhibition, a vernissage, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal. For years she toiled in relative obscurity, receiving nothing but “silence from a baffled and even bemused art world.” Now that Clara has come into her own, Peter has mixed feelings about his wife’s long overdue fame.

This novel deals with relationships and emotions. Gamache is still barely on speaking terms with Olivier Brulé, who bears a grudge against him. Moreover, Gamache still has nightmares about a bloody raid he conducted that went terribly wrong, nearly taking his life and that of his second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvior. Jean Guy is a wreck, who relies on pain pills to get through the day and is planning to end his miserable marriage (“all the petty sordid squabbles, the tiny slights, the scarring and scabbing”).

Louise Penny understands what makes people tick. She knows that they often show one face to their family, friends, and neighbors, while they bury their true feelings under a façade of amiability. A Trick of the Light exposes the soul-destroying anger, the disappointments, and the bitter rancor that can eat a person up from within. She specifically examines the mind-set of alcoholics, who are capable of doing extensive damage before they are ready to admit that they desperately need help.

As a murder mystery, this is a fairly routine effort. There is little suspense (the list of people who had motive, means, and opportunity to kill Lillian is not particularly large) and most readers will not be shocked when Gamache unmasks the culprit. Penny is a stand-out for other reasons: her eloquent use of language, analysis of people’s psychological foibles, and her beautiful and sometimes humorous description of life in a place so tiny that everyone is intimately acquainted with everyone else. Ruth, an old drunk who insults people with wild abandon, Olivier and his beloved partner, Gabri, and Armand’s lovely wife, Reine-Marie, are all on hand, along with an assortment of art dealers, gallery owners, associates of the homicide victim, and the detectives who are under Gamache’s command. Penny explores what makes art memorable and also what it is like to struggle creatively. This alone makes A Trick of the Light both fascinating and, at times, poetic.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 287 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Louise Penny
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Missing Persons by Claire O’Donohue

Bibliography:

Chief Inspector Gamache novels:

• Still Life (2006)  /  
• Fatal Grace (2007) 
• The Cruelest Month (2008) 
• A Rule Against Murder (2009)
• The Brutal Telling (2009) 
• Bury Your Dead (2010)
• A Trick of the Light (2011) 
• The Beautiful Mystery (2012)
• How the Light Gets In (August 2013)

“How can I describe to you what it feels like to have nothing left inside? To become hollow? For months, I could not live, would not die. Not here, nor there. The same man I told you about was with me. I was all alone, except for him. One day when I was too weak to dress, to eat, even to speak, he said to me: ‘Jana, now you fear life as you once feared death. You are more afraid of life than of death.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 3, 2010)

Filling in the gaps. Ami Sands Brodoff opens with an epigraph from Rabbi Avi Weiss: “The Torah is written ‘black fire on white fire’ . . . black fire refers to the letters of the Torah . . . the white refers to the spaces between the letters . . . they are the story, the song, the silence.” Exploring the story, singing the song, reflecting on the silence, these are the promises of this intimate yet ambitious novel, and they are both moving and beautiful. To say that Brodoff does not quite realize them is not to diminish the value of her search. The book is a sincere and obviously personal attempt to illuminate mysteries that may ultimately remain unknowable.

Jane Ives is a retired New Jersey kindergarten teacher. Now over 80, she was born Jana Ivanova in Prague and enjoyed a happy childhood before being caught up in the Holocaust and transported to Terezin and then Auschwitz. There, because of her good German, she became a “Secret Keeper,” typing out false death certificates, including for members of her own family, randomly selecting one of 34 approved “illnesses,” although the cause of death was always the same. Somehow, she survives and comes to Montréal, living there for two separate periods before she settles in New Jersey, pregnant with her only child, a daughter named Willow.

Jane raises Willow on the “memory books” she has kept of her childhood and life in Montréal. But there are gaps in the collection of photographs and in the stories that Jane is willing to share: the entire Holocaust period for obvious reasons and, more mysteriously, any details about Willow’s father. Perhaps in order to structure her own stories, Willow becomes a puppeteer, finding it easier to relate to her wood and plaster creations than to real people. When, at the age of 40, she is invited to a theatre collective in Montréal as artist in residence, she accepts. Coincidentally, Jane is also invited to Montréal by an organization called the Witness Foundation, to record her memories of the Holocaust. There, in this Northern city that Brodoff obviously loves, as the long winter finally turns to summer, mother and daughter begin their process of rediscovery, emerging from the spiritual hiding that had held them frozen for so long.

The post-Holocaust theme of emerging from a private world of suffering into a life led in public is undoubtedly an important one. It was treated very effectively, for example, by fellow Canadian author Anne Michaels in her Fugitive Pieces. But it requires a difficult balance between the inner life and the outside one that I don’t think Brodoff quite manages. There are too many inconsistencies and outright coincidences. The memory- book sequences of dialogue between mother and daughter work more like prose poems than the record of a real relationship; it is difficult to see Willow as the product of an ordinary American high-school and college. Curiously enough, as she pursues her career as a puppeteer, readers can feel enriched by admission to the arcana of her technical world; it is always fascinating to read about professionals engaged in the minutiae of their craft. But when the same sense of privilege extends to ordinary life, the result is merely distancing and hermetic.

Brodoff’s Montréal is presented virtually as a Jewish enclave, with hardly a gentile in sight. Yiddish expressions pepper the dialogue, sometimes obvious from the context, but not always. This is a subject that interests me considerably, and I really wanted to share Brodoff’s experience as a fellow human being. But I felt I was being continually pushed away, as though I didn’t belong, whether as a gentile reading a book about Jews, a man reading a book about women, or an adult reading a book intended perhaps for teenagers (as some other imprints from Second Story Press tend to be). Conversely, I responded positively to Willow’s work, as a theatrical artist myself. The best books transcend such coincidental identifications on the part of their readers; this one, I’m afraid, did not.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Second Story Press (October 1, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ami Sands Brodoff
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another take on a Holocaust novel: The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Bibliography:

• Can You See Me? (1999)
• Bloodknots: Stories (2005)
• White Space Between (2008)