“We buried Vincent on July 30. His paintings hanging on the walls of Ravoux’s café transformed the room. To stand in its center surrounded by such visions was almost blinding. You could tell by the reactions of the handful of men who came for the funeral. […] Some wept, but often they smiled through their tears, for there was joy on the walls. It is easy to forget, especially for those of us who witnessed his last days, that Vincent found delight in what he saw around him, and he brought it to his paintings.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 19, 2011)

Vincent Van Gogh had lived only seventy days in the small community of Auvers-sur-Oise, Northwest of Paris, since arriving in early May. He had been released from an asylum in the South of France and come North to be nearer his brother Theo, who supported him financially. In an astonishing feat of creativity, he dashed off luminous canvases at the rate of one or more per day, until his darkness returned and he went out into a field and shot himself. Carol Wallace’s novel is an account of those seventy days, as told by the person who was the reason for Vincent’s choice of Auvers: Dr. Paul Gachet. The somewhat older doctor, who had trained at the famous asylum of the Salpêtrière in Paris, was an enlightened specialist in mental disorders. More than that, he was an amateur painter himself, a collector, and a friend to many of the Impressionists; Cézanne had stayed in his house and painted it; Camille Pissarro was a neighbor. Surely nobody could better look after the brilliant but troubled Van Gogh?

From my former career as an art historian, I knew Vincent’s letters, and looked up his description of Gachet: “I have seen Dr. Gachet, who gives me the impression of being quite eccentric, though his medical experience must maintain his equilibrium while he struggles with the nervous troubles that he clearly suffers from as badly as I do.” This seemed an intriguing premise for a novel — not so much the blind leading the blind, as Vincent wrote in another letter, but the dazzled helping the dazzled. Might Carol Wallace not do something for painting akin to what Adam Foulds does for poetry in THE QUICKENING MAZE, about the mad poet John Clare and his eccentric guardian? My hopes were raised by an early flashback where Gachet attempts to draw female patients at the Salpêtrière, and feels his clumsy attempts taking him deeper into their madness, but Wallace does not really go this route. She is looking for someone to observe Van Gogh, rather than reflect the brilliant splinters of his mind. So she keeps Gachet as the doctor throughout, sympathetic but always objective. She gives him a slightly stuffy late Victorian voice, as he records a smoothly detailed account of those last days. Her Gachet is perceptive and appreciative, but too much of the middle of the book proceeds as a series of anecdotes about how each of the major pictures came to be painted. Despite the accuracy of the verbal descriptions, you need to Google the actual pictures to bring them fully to life: the portrait of Gachet himself, his daughter Marguerite at the piano, the writhing lines of the Church at Auvers, and that terrible final landscape of the bleak wheatfield with its black crows.

Gachet’s prose cannot hope to match Vincent’s wild poetry, or probe the mystery of madness striking sparks from the flint of genius. Yet there is one passage which comes close, later in the book, when Gachet comes across the artist in a field, a blank canvas on his easel, a charged palette at his side, but totally unable to lift a brush. It is worth quoting at length:

“I wished that Vincent could paint, of course. I wished for more glorious canvases of the world I knew, pictures that helped me understand it and that altered the way I saw everything around me. I wished Vincent would paint the wheat fields under the snow — imagine how lovely they would be! The golden stubble and low gray sky and the patches of snow that, in Vincent’s eyes, would not be white at all but something else, lavender perhaps, or pink.

I could wish that of the artist. But it was also my friend who sat before me, the very image of desolation. If he had painted a self-portrait at that moment, it would have been so full of agony that you could do no more than glance at it. To look longer would have been harrowing. My mind was boiling. I felt as if the very earth were heaving.”

This moment approaches a climax for both of them. For Wallace’s portrayal of the doctor as a man of understated competence will pay an emotional dividend of its own, as he comes to realize that he is not competent at all. For all his experience and savoir-faire, this Gachet is a man tormented by his own helplessness. Lacking modern drugs, he is unable to help many of his patients at the Salpêtrière, and his empathy only intensifies his impotence. He cannot help Vincent, despite his friendship and admiration. He cannot help Theo Van Gogh, who he realizes is dying of syphilis. He could not even help his own wife Blanche, whose agonizing struggles with consumption make a particularly heartrending flashback. But there is one thing that he CAN do, and with the licence of fictional imagination, Carol Wallace finally allows him that option

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carol Wallace
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

Bibliography:

• Leaving van Gogh (April 2011)

“What I like most about the great literature created by Americans of European descent is the Africanist presence within it. I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sane. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it’s most important when it’s negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 3, 2011)

Chris Jaynes has just been fired from his position as the token black professor at a prestigious liberal arts college, and retaliates by visiting the president and snatching off his red bow tie. This none-too-subtle reference to the preferred attire of Leon Botstein, president of Bard College where author Mat Johnson also taught, launches the book as a satire, but gives little hint of the likability of its hero or the fascination of the study of race that will follow. Johnson turns the subject inside out, standing it on its head, looking at race with an outrageous accuracy whose aim falls on black and white alike. Forgive me, therefore, if I set the comedy aside for the moment and concentrate on the book’s intellectual underpinnings.

Much of the debate concerns the nature of blackness itself, beginning with the protagonist’s own racial identity. Jaynes, like the author himself, is a mulatto, “so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety white guy. But I’m not. My father was white, yes. But it doesn’t work that way. My mother was a woman, but that doesn’t make me a woman either.” Jaynes refuses to be confined within the expectations placed upon his race, but insists on defining himself in reference to white society. He boycotts the college Diversity Committee as a meaningless sham. He declines to teach the canonical black texts, looking instead to authors like Poe and Melville to discover “the intellectual source of racial Whiteness,” that “odd and illogical sickness” which he is convinced is the true source of the problem.

When the college lets him go, Jaynes is immersed in a study of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. It was not a problem that I did not know this book, though I have looked at it since. In the first chapter that really caught fire for me, Jaynes summarizes the novel, making hilarious fun of its weaknesses, but also deconstructing its codes and showing why it is worth further study. Poe’s protagonist enlists on a whaler out of Nantucket. After surviving imprisonment, mutiny, shipwreck, and cannibalism, he reaches the Antarctic Ocean where he is washed up on an incongruously-sited tropical isle inhabited only by stunted natives so dark that even their teeth are black. The sole survivors of a treacherous ambush by the natives, Pym and his friend, a half-caste named Dirk Peters, set sail once more and reach the Antarctic ice-shelf. “But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men.And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” These are Poe’s last sentences, whose enigma, with its strong racial overtones, Jaynes finds more interesting than anything else in the book. By sheer luck (by no means the only authorial license in this splendidly tall tale), Jaynes comes across a crumbling manuscript written in a semi-literate hand that purports to be Dirk Peters’s account of the voyage. Realizing that Poe’s story was based upon true accounts, Jaynes enlists the help of a seafaring cousin called Booker and recruits five other black people to accompany him on an expedition to Antarctica in search of Poe’s race of ultra-white giants, dismissed by Booker as “super ice honkies.”

The rest is a fantasy-adventure in the manner of Rider Haggard or Jules Verne (who also wrote his own sequel to the Poe). Jaynes and his crew do encounter this mysterious race, whom they call the Tekelians, living in ice-tunnels underground. What follows is a re-enactment of racial history — cautious trading, capture, enslavement, and eventual escape. The actual story becomes a little tedious during the long sojourn underground, but Johnson’s observation of the changing dynamics among the black characters never palls; some seek accommodation with their captors, others attempt resistance, and still others record events for later media distribution. In a brilliant twist, Jaynes and his best friend eventually escape this world of literal whiteness only to encounter a metaphorical one, a huge bio-dome built by the painter Thomas Karvel (clearly Kincade), landscaped inside to replicate the perfect sunset world of one of his paintings. Welcome to a space the size of a football field filled with fauna and lavender and color, bushes of every hue, and a waterfall with orange carp swimming at its base. And recorded American talk-shows playing continuously at the four corners: “I got Rush over here by the kitchen because he’s the granddaddy. I got Beck going in the southwest corner. Northwest is O’Reilly, southeast is Hannity, I think. Honey, is southeast Hannity?”

But you do not read this book for the plot or even its fantastic environments, so much as for its intelligent and likable protagonist and for the author’s observations. Some of these are comically absurd, as in this woman bent on denying a heritage that is obvious to everybody else: “Honey, I got lots of Indian in me. I got Irish and I got a little French too. I got some German, or so I’m told. I even got a little Chinese in me, on my mother’s side. Matter of fact, I’m sure I got more bloods in me than I knows. But I do knows this. I ain’t got no kind of Africa in these bones.” Some are little wry asides in the footnotes: “I should say here that, in America, every black man has a conspiracy theory. […] This obsession with conspiracies is most likely due to the fact that our ethnic group is a product of one.” And he even has a few social observations that have nothing to do with race at all: “Americans love that last question, ‘Where are you from?’ They see it as an excuse to go on about their peculiar local identity and tell you everything about themselves as people without really offering anything personal at all.” Ouch!

I label my reading notes with subject tags for easy reference; seldom have I come across a book that touches on so many of them. The books dealing with race are too numerous to mention, but I am thinking especially of the classic I have read most recently, Huckleberry Finn, which Johnson now makes me see as both a statement and a critique of the American Whiteness myth. There are also numerous books with academic settings, those by David Lodge especially, but again I think especially of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, both of which also have ethnic overtones. For other recent satires, I would compare Ian McEwan’s Solar and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question; the latter (which does for English Jews what Pym does for American Blacks) has the more attractive protagonist, but Johnson’s Chris James beats them both on that score. There would also be entries under Adventure, Fantasy, and Survival. I realize, though, that I need to create a new category to address what seems to have become a major recent trend: the use of existing texts as a jumping-off point to address contemporary concerns. In the last year alone, I have read The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Scott, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd, and — older, but the most significant of the lot — Foe by J. M Coetzee, a reworking of Robison Crusoe from the perspectives of gender and racial equality. Crusoe lies behind Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym also, giving Mat Johnson’s reworking a literary heritage that underscores the basic seriousness of his intent. You may read the book for laughs, read it for its shamelessly non-PC shock tactics, read it for social insights, but what will remain in your mind its ability to frame the dialogue on race in a new and important way.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; First Edition edition (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mat Johnson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another wild romp: The Big Machine by Victor LaValle

Bibliography:

• Drop (2000)
• Hunting in Harlem (2003)
• Incongegro SC (2008)
• Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010)
• Pym (March 2011)

Nonfiction Novella:

• The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York (2007)

“Let’s say you had an opportunity to get your work in front of more people than you ever thought you’d reach, a chance to get more money than you thought you could ever get, but you had to compromise everything you thought you believed in. Would you do it?”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (AUG 26, 2010)

Struggling writer and coffee barista, Ian Minot, is frustrated and depressed. For one thing, he just can’t seem to write the kind of stories that will get the publishing world’s attention. After all, Ian knows, his life isn’t as glamorous as his Romanian’s girlfriend’s Anya Petrescu, whose travails under Ceausescu, has landed her an attractive publishing contract. In a snide reference to the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, Ian points out that “Anya had recently been named one of American Review’s ‘31 Most Promising Writers Under 31.’ This year, I was too old to qualify,” he adds.

In fact, Anya’s future is on such a meteoric track that Ian is sure she will soon be dating celebrity authors like Gary Shteyngart or Malcolm Gladwell—not some wannabe like Ian Minot. Turns out that Anya does indeed leave Ian but she does so for another kind of celebrity author—Blade Markham. Markham’s memoir, Blade—a hard-hitting story about life in a gang and on drugs, has been selling like hotcakes especially after it won the endorsement of a famous talk show host (an Oprah-like celebrity).

Ian of course can’t stand Blade—he knows his success is not well-deserved, he believes Blade is all fake (he turns out to be) and Blade’s success just serves to reinforce the notion that success in publishing is not always related to talent alone. So one day, when a coffee bar regular whom Ian merely refers to as “The Confident Man” shows up with a copy of Blade tucked under his arm, Ian just loses it and kicks the guy out along with his book.

But Confident Man has some plans—and ideas—of his own. Ian’s violent hatred of Blade is just the fuel that Confident Man, aka Jed Roth, is looking for. He presents Ian with a scheme: take a book that Jed has written, make it Ian’s own, get it published (Jed, who has worked in the publishing industry will help with contacts), then reveal it’s a fake. This “twist,” Jed assures Ian, will get the book even more publicity—so much of it that eventually Ian will be able to get his own stories published without much fuss or delay. As crazy as the idea sounds, Ian is roped in. After all, he doesn’t have much to lose. And Jed Roth, who would like nothing better than to rub the publishing industry’s nose in its own filth (for many reasons of his own) has much to gain.

So what follows, is an amazingly tight caper that involves some wild goose chases and a plot that twists and turns to reveal the true color of people and situations as we go along.

Adam Langer’s work has always been clever and on the cutting edge and this one is no exception. For anyone following contemporary literature closely there are plenty of references sure to tickle the funny bone. Langer has even coined a special language centered on these literary references. For example, “Franzens” stand for a particular kind of eyeglasses favored by the author Jonathan Franzen. Author Michael Chabon’s hair is all the rage—anybody who has a wild mane of hair has a “chabon.” References to boxed reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and appearances on Fresh Air with Terry Gross also abound, and all these elements together serve as a delicious lampooning of the publishing industry as a whole.

There are some places when you can get tired of these little bits of cleverness—as in when Langer writes out Anya’s Romanian accent in italics. “She was sure that eff’ryone would hett eet, that refyooers would reep eet to shreds and call her a tellentliss leetle feek.” This is really funny at first but gets annoying towards the end after its novelty wears out.

What really elevates The Thieves of Manhattan is that it is also a novel about kindness and authenticity. It is a wonderfully paced and well-edited novel—a taut page-turner.

“Writing a book can be a profoundly optimistic act; expecting someone to read, buy, and publish it is always a phenomenally presumptuous one. Why would a marketing department put money behind anything you wrote? Why would someone you didn’t know spend twenty-five dollars to read your stories of small people leading small lives?” Jed Roth once asks of Ian. Langer’s new book shows us why. Despite all its clever contrivances, Thieves never loses its focus and in the end is a good dose of vibrant old-fashioned storytelling.

Not only is The Thieves of Manhattan a funny and wild caper, it’s also a touching story about Ian Minot—a small person leading a small life. Until of course, something very big happens to him.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 41  readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (July 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Adam Langer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Ellington Avenue Another writer things about a short cut to money: Dear Money by Martha McPhee and more satire on the publishing business: Grub by Elise Blackwell

Bibliography:

• Crossing California 2004)
• The Washington Story (2005)
• Ellington Boulevard: A Novel in A-Flat (2008)
• My Father’s Bonus March (2009)
• The Thieves of Manhattan (2010)
• The Salinger Contract (September 2013)

“Living in a world with men is like being in the center of a ring with hands spinning you in a circle. It’s like being spun, three-quarters one way, one-half the other, one full time back around. Wherever you land, there’s another set of hands.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (JUN 14, 2010)

The “American girl” in the title of this novel refers to Eveline Auerbach, who, when the book opens, is a junior in high school. The novel is set in the late 70’s in East Hampton, New York.

Evie (as she is often referred to) suffers two big blows right off the bat. A strong maternal figure in her life, Maman, dies from cancer. Incidentally Maman’s daughter, Kate is a close friend of Evie’s. Second, Evie is raped by two high school classmates (for those squeamish about this, there is no graphic description here).

For the most part Evie spends her time hanging around with boyfriend Jack, a musician. Also, orphaned Kate moves in with Evie and her single mom so Kate can finish her senior year before joining her brother and his family in Canada.

Evie herself is an artist and spends time in her studio creating works of art and props for the drama department. It is through this department that in her senior year, she meets Harrison Rourke, an older man (I guessed he is ten years older than her) who is trying to make his way into the professional boxing circuit. Rourke is filling in for the drama coach for a term and he makes a lingering impression on Evie. The two fall in love and spend the entire summer in each other’s company. Both know, however, that the relationship has to come to an end—which it does at the end of the summer. Rourke moves on to whatever he does and Evie is left completely shattered. She finds herself with a new man in her life, Mark Ross, a rich and spoilt brat who is waiting to inherit his father’s fortune all while juggling a high powered executive job in New York City.

Anthropology essentially traces Evie’s story from her teenage years on to her growth into a young woman. Precisely because the story unfolds slowly and over a period of time you can see the many ways in which Evie matures and the beauty of it registers slowly.

Anthropology was self-published by the author a few years ago and it has since garnered a cult following. The reasons for this are not hard to see. The novel’s biggest asset is its writing which is just gorgeous. Evie’s voice too is very compelling. Her teen years are done especially well. “Boys will be boys, that’s what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether,” Evie says. “We are expected to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to express. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves.” There are also many well-made observations about life in high school (even if Evie is hardly caught in the school), which are right on the button.

That having been said, there are many parts of the book that drag on and which could have used some more editing. Evie’s romance with Rourke for one thing goes on endlessly and while it does a good job of capturing the magical trance of being in love, it occasionally starts to feel too claustrophobic. You want to move beyond the frame, to have the story focus on somebody else for a change.

Evie’s years with Ross are also engaging in a different sort of way but you really begin to wonder why she stays with a guy she despises so much. Her hatred for Ross is blatantly evident: “If being in love is consolation when you are poor, money is consolation when you are not. Life is a trap not because I can’t leave Mark but because there’s no reason to.” Sheesh! After a while, one can even be forgiven for feeling sorry for Mark because he is so thoroughly disliked by the one that he seems to love.

What is unclear in the novel is exactly how the early tragedies that Evie faces, change her perspective about life. Hamann struggles to draw the line between these two moving tragedies and the events that unfold later.

Anthropology is about Evie’s gradual maturing and sexual awakening. So it makes sense that it would be about her romantic entanglements. Still it is discouraging to see Evie so utterly defined by her various lovers. Each part of her life described within these pages seems to be through the lens of a man: “At The Palm we will eat meat, and I will be made to speak.” After a while you want her to stand on her own feet and get a move on already.

This frustration might also stem from the fact that Evie hardly ever speaks—things happen to her and these various incidents form the backbone of the narrative. So Evie ends up being a mostly passive voice in the truest sense. Yet it is quite evident that the range of experiences women can have, or believe in, is on display here. “My mother went on welfare and worked as a waitress to put herself through night school, and my grandmother sent her children away when her husband died so she could work two full shifts a day. They each refused to remarry; they would not allow themselves to live off the beneficence of a man,” Evie says. “There’s a difference, I think, between a woman who would do that and a woman who wouldn’t.” Evie has very obviously seen the various parts of this argument and arrived at the place where she wants to be. Still you can’t help but walk away from Anthropology loving Evie’s voice but wishing it had more spunk.

Interestingly enough, Mark Ross’s mother is a volunteer for the National Organization for Women. She once worked with the stalwarts of the women’s liberation movement. It was one of these leaders, Gloria Steinem, who once said: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” One wishes that Evie imbibes some of that lesson into her own life. Yes, it’s true that everybody loves a lover. But being so needy and malleable just isn’t very sexy.

Editor’s note: Although I did not find Group Discussion Questions for this book,  it seems to me that this would make a good Book Club Choice.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 131 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; Revised edition (May 25, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Hilary Thayer Hamann
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Try this one for contrast: The Vera Wright Trilogy by Elizabeth Jolley

Bibliography:

• Anthropology of an American Girl (May 2010)

“North Koreans learned to swallow their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the pavement to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (MAR 27, 2010)

There is much earthy wisdom in the saying: “One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.” By narrating the life stories of six North Korean defectors and their daily struggles, author Barbara Demick underscores this point beautifully. Her moving book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, lets us look at the human angle behind the news headlines.

We hear about North Korea and its repressive regime in the news but it is through these six stories that you can tell the true impact of the totalitarian state—one that President Bush famously labeled one of the three “axes of evil”—on ordinary people.

The participants are drawn from Chongjin, a town in the Northeast that once was home to thriving industries that are now in a severe state of disrepair. Chongjin is also a better representative of North Korea than the showcase capital city, Pyongyang.

The assortment of interviewees is mixed and represents a good cross-section of North Korean society. There’s Mi-ran a young kindergarten teacher whose father’s roots trace back to South Korea and whose family is therefore stained. “The only mobility in the class system was downward. Family status is hereditary. Stained people are called beulsun—tainted blood or impure,” Bemick writes. Mi-ran narrates the details of her first love and how as a teenager, she and a neighborhood boy, Jun-sang, went for long walks after dinner in the dark. The bright Jun-sang eventually heads for college in Pyongyang to study science and the two continue their romance from afar.

Then there’s Mrs. Song, a party faithful who keeps at her job in a local factory till the very end even when the wages and the work have dried up. Their narratives and the others’ are set in the 1990s—a time when North Korea fell off the map in terms of development and meeting basic human needs. “North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s,” Demick, a correspondent for the LA Times, writes. “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s creakily inefficient economy collapsed.”

Demick’s interviewees detail the slow decline of the country and this is extremely tragic to bear. The confluence of many events lead to severe shortages of supplies and eventually to famine. Demick, through the voices of her interviewees, narrates the heart-wrenching details of how famine affects families. Each one of the interviewees is affected. Mrs. Song loses her husband and her son to famine—in the end when she is forced to choose between food and medicine for her son, it is hard not to get choked up as you read. It is also hard to ignore the fact that when America was in the roaring 90s, millions of people in North Korea were scraping bark and eating sawdust to survive. These images are searing and will remain in my mind forever. “By 1998, an estimated 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine, as much as 10 percent of the population,” Demick writes. “Between 1996 and 2005, North Korea would receive $2.4 billion worth of food aid, much of it from the United States.” But only minimal food reached where it should have gone. Most of it ended up in military stockpiles or sold on the black market.

The famine forced young mothers into prostitution desperate to get food for their children. All they were looking for was a bag of noodles or a few sweet potatoes as payment, Demick writes. Elders skipped food insisting that the young ones be fed first. This lead many older folks to die and thousands of children were orphaned. Kim Hyuck, one of the interviewees, was a “wandering swallow” – one of many homeless orphans left behind by the famine.

Nothing to Envy also gives us details of what ordinary life is like in North Korea. Everything, including shoes and clothes, were provided by the government. Major purchases like watches or record players—had to be approved. There is propaganda everywhere you see—television sets are rigged so only one national channel is streamed. Secret police conduct random checks to make sure this procedure is enforced in houses. Even the math problems are worded as propaganda. “Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in praise of Kim Il-sung. How many children are singing in total?” is one example.

The book’s title comes from a song that all North Korean children are taught—it sings the praise of the government. Propaganda posters in Pyongyang declare: “Long Live Kim Il-sung; Kim Jong-Il, Sun of the 21st Century; Let’s Live Our Own Way; We Will Do as the Party Tells Us; We Have Nothing to Envy in the World.”

Nothing to Envy shows us just how much irony is loaded in that last statement. A country that has been in the dark for so long both literally and figuratively, might not realize just how much it does have to envy—not just in terms of material comforts but in essential human rights. This is a moving and important book—a must-read for anyone who cares about the plight of fellow world citizens in a country that most of us know little about. Demick’s remarkable book reminds us it’s time we sat up and paid attention.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 62 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; 1st Edition edition (December 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AMAZON PAGE:	Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Barbara Demick
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee

Bibliography:

• Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (1996)
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (December 2009)

“Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (MAR 26, 2010)

The Big Machine is a genre-busting romp through the fields of good and evil. Part mystery, part science fiction, part philosophy, and part theology, this book takes us on a heady journey from underneath the earth’s surface to the wonderment of the universe.

Ricky Rice is a janitor for a bus station in Utica, New York when he gets a puzzling envelope delivered to him. It has a note inside that says “You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002. Time to honor it”. He wonders how anyone knew about the promise and how they could have found out? Who are these people? Along with the note is a bus ticket to Burlington, Vermont. Ricky decides to go but says to himself, “What kind of a black man accepts an unsigned invitation to the whitest state there is?”

Upon arriving in Burlington, Ricky is picked up at the bus station and escorted into the deep woods where he finds a small and cozy cottage awaiting him. For a man used to flop houses and shared one-room apartments, this is nirvana. Also on the property is The Washburn Library, a huge and beautiful structure. Ricky gradually finds out that he is a part of a secret society searching for “the Voice,” an unearthly sound that only few humans have been privy to hearing. He is part of a group that he calls “The Unlikely Scholars.”  They are unlikely because all of them have a past. They are made up of ex-cons, drug addicts, prostitutes, the homeless and the disenfranchised. Ricky himself has a history of heroin addiction. He’s been clean for three years but still totes six bags of heroin and a syringe with him – just in case. Additionally, all of the Unlikely Scholars are black, both male and female.

Gradually, Ricky finds out the history of the Washburn library and this society that has made him an honorary member. Judah Washburn, a freed slave, once heard “the Voice” and the Voice led him to an underground tunnel that went from the west coast of the United States to Vermont. Along with hearing the Voice, Judah also found millions of dollars of Spanish bullion. He founded this society to perpetuate his search for the Voice. He wanted to know its origins, what it meant and why it spoke to some people and not others.

Ricky and the other Unlikely Scholars are under the tutelage of “the Dean” who once heard the Voice himself. Each Scholar has their own office and each day newspapers from around the country are delivered to them. Their job is to peruse the newspapers and find articles that can somehow lead to the Voice. How to identify which articles are meaningful and which are not is a real puzzle to Ricky and he spends days scratching his head. He enjoys reading the journals of the past Scholars.

One day the Dean requests that Ricky join another Scholar, Adele Henry, on a super-secret mission to find someone who is a threat to the society. On this trip, Ricky and Adele meet with all types of dangers, both worldly and otherworldly. They find themselves in sewers pursued by the Devil of the Marsh. They meet angels as well. They also have run-ins with human bad guys with plans to destroy all that the Scholars stand for.

An aspect of this novel that I found interesting is that chapters about the Unlikely Scholars are interspersed with chapters about Ricky’s life. He was brought up in a cult called “The Washerwomen.” This cult operated out of an apartment building in the borough of Queens in New York. It billed itself as Christian but it had a different bible and belief system. The cult had an enormous impact on Ricky’s life. We also find out what happened in Cedar Rapids where Ricky made his promise.

LaValle is a wonderful wordsmith and I loved his descriptions. He describes two brothers as having “faces like Boston Terriers, somber eyes that were a little too large, and jowly cheeks that only emphasized their frowns.” His writing is brisk and descriptive. His characters are the dispossessed brought up to a higher rung in the food chain, an aspect of the book I really appreciated. The Unlikely Scholars are a group to be reckoned with and appreciated, pasts and all. Some of the science fiction seemed too over the top for me but the rest of the book was so interesting, I could easily forgive that.

This is a book for readers who love science fiction and mysteries. It is also for readers like myself who may want to wander outside their comfort zone and try another genre. This book is comprised of many genres and is often surreal or “trippy.” It is a mind-bender and a roller coaster ride to the far side.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 33 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (March 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Victor LaValle
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another SciFi book that deals with race:Futureland by Walter Mosley And another that is a SciFi thriller: Improbable by Adam Fawer And another new author: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Bibliography:

• Slap Boxing with Jesus (1999)
• The Estastic (2002)
• Monster (2004)
• The Big Machine (2009)
• The Devil in Silver (August 2012)

“The [gender] divide implied certain things. Young women enjoyed a more fluid job situation; they could join a factory assembly line and move up to be clerks or salespeople. Young men had a harder time entering a factory, and once in they were often stuck. Women, in the factory or out, came into contact with a wider range of people and quickly adopted the clothes, hairstyles, and accents of the city; men tended to stay locked in their outsider worlds. Women integrated more easily into urban life, and they had more incentive to stay.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (MAR 4, 2010)

American journalist Chang, who kept her Chinese heritage at arm’s length for many years, explores her family’s past and the country’s history as she follows the lives of migrant workers in the industrial city of Dongguan, where 70 percent of the population is female.

Most of the factory girls are uneducated, age 18 to 25, flocking in from rural villages. “Most migrants associated the place they came from with poverty and backwardness, and some were even reluctant to say the name of their village.”

Chang, former Wall Street Journal Beijing Bureau chief, surveys the scene, interviewing many and getting a sense of their naiveté, hopes and ambitions, before homing in on several stories and following two in particular, Chunming and Min. An engaging storyteller, Chang pulls readers into the girls’ dreams, failures and desires, turning this in-depth social study into a riveting page-turner.

“To me every town looked the same. Construction sites and cheap restaurants. Factories, factories, factories, the metal lattices of their gates drawn shut like nets. Min saw the city through different eyes: Every town was the possibility of a more desirable job than the one she had. Her mental map of Dongguan traced all the bus journeys she had made in search of a better life.”

Chang visits The Talent Market, where young people jockey for jobs, seldom staying put for long, though bosses hold back two months of pay and may try to prevent them from leaving. Mobile phones are lifelines. To lose one is to lose all contact with friends, who have no fixed abode, no relatives to anchor them.

“Women worked as clerks and in human resources and sales, and they held most of the jobs on the assembly line; the bosses felt that young women were more diligent and easy to manage.”

Want ads were often very specific:

“SALESPERSON: FEMALE ONLY, GRADE FOUR ENGLISH
RECEPTIONIST: FEMALE ONLY, CAN SPEAK CANTONESE
SECURITY GUARDS: MALE, UNDER 30, 1.7 METERS OR ABOVE, EX-MILITARY, KNOWS FIREFIGHTING, CAN PLAY BASKETBALL A PLUS

As Chang moves from the general to the personal she calls on diaries, e-mails and visits with Chunming and Min, who are more ambitious and single-minded than most, learning first to use their youth and naivety to land a job, and then to scheme and lie and study hard to jump to better jobs, out of the factory and into the office.

Chunming is lured into a brothel and escapes, losing everything but her life, then claws her way back with a stolen ID card, eventually reaching heady heights in sales, only to have the company collapse and land her back on the assembly line. Not that she stays there for long.

Most girls return home to marry after age 25. Min and Chunming, still ambitious, hope to marry, but their attempts at meeting men mostly fizzle. The man is too short, or not ambitious enough, or maybe too violent and dissolute.

Chang visits Min’s family with her and charts the contrasts between village closeness (and lack of privacy), customs and family hierarchy, to the free-for-all life of the factory town. And, too, the family balance of power is changing. Min, sending back money, making home improvements, has more say and more attitude.

Exploring the lives of these girls, Chang makes side trips into her own family history – her landowner grandfather, village life, the family flight to Taiwan, migration to America. The contrast is as sobering as the pace of life in modern China, where nothing stays the same for long and history is to be honored and then smashed up for re-development.

Chang’s well-organized book is an illuminating portrait of a culture in economic and social upheaval and her empathetic portrayal of individuals is moving and engrossing.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (August 4, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Leslie T. Chang
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read review of her husband’s book: Country Driving by Peter Hessler

Bibliography:

• Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (October 2008)

“ Although I was beginning to question everything I had ever known, even the definition of species, the full implications of transformism still alarmed me. Without belief in order and structure and providence, where would we be? The imagined godlessness of such a world frightened me.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (NOV 01, 2009)

Well before Charles Darwin presented the theory of evolution in 1859, there were scientists who thought along similar lines—who believed that species “were mutable and that Nature was on the move.” Much like scientists who came even earlier and set forth what were considered equally radical ideas, these people too—many of whom were in France—were labeled godless heretics.

When Daniel Connor, a freshly minted medical student, travels to Paris in July 1815, his professor in Edinburgh had already warned him about these “heretics”—also known as transformists. “Paris is riddled with infidels, Professor Jameson had warned me back in Edingburgh. ‘They are poets, those French transformists, not men of science,’” Connor recalls.

Connor is on his way to learn from the giants in science who teach and conduct research at France’s famous Jardin des Plantes—“a garden for the enlightenment of the people.” Specifically, he has recommendations from his professor and some corals and fossil specimens, he hopes will impress Cuvier, a leader in the field of anatomy.

But before he can even get to Paris, a beautiful French woman, Lucienne Bernard, dazzles him and ends up stealing his journals and scientific specimens. As it turns out, Lucienne too has been schooled in the essential principles of transformist theory and has even worked in the fields for a prominent French scientist in the field, Professor Lamarck.

Once in Paris, Connor runs into Lucienne over and over again and slowly falls for her. Lamarck and Cuvier are at odds with each other about their scientific views—Cuvier, for one, does not buy into the principles of evolutionary theory but Lamarck does. “Lamarck’s world of change and flux and progress was revolutionary, a world of horizontals and possibilities, whereas Cuvier’s was a world of fixed and vertical hierarchies. Politically, they were absolutely opposed ways of seeing,” the author, Rebecca Stott, explains. It follows that their followers, Lucienne and Connor, also differ in their views of this science and therefore argue with each other about is finer aspects.

Slowly, even as he begins work in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, as a naturalist’s aide to Professor Cuvier, Lucienne’s transformist theories begin to lodge themselves in Connor and he begins to question his own way of thinking. Even if he “had been taught that questioning the truth of the Bible had eternal consequences.”

“Science isn’t about making things fit with the Bible. Genesis was written two thousand years ago by men who didn’t know what we know. They weren’t trying to explain how the world began, not scientifically. It’s a creation story,” Lucienne explains once.

All well and good. About a third of the way through though, Lucienne suddenly morphs into a plain vanilla thief and for various reasons, has to steal the precious Satar diamond from the Jardin des Plantes (with Connor’s help of course). After this, the book reads like a Parisian version of “Ocean’s 11”—a heist plotted out well and executed smoothly—almost.

The seductive allure of Paris is on full display here and it is as much a central character in the story as any. Rebecca Stott, who wrote the beautifully atmospheric, Ghostwalk, does a good job of painting the smallest historic details of Paris of the early 1800s. Her recounting the fate of Napoleon—who has just been defeated at Waterloo—in very short chapters, especially helps create the atmosphere. These chapters are intermingled with the main story.

Stott seems to have found her calling—in bringing the elements of science to literature. In The Coral Thief, however, it seems as if science sits on the bleachers much too often—allowing other elements of the story line: a romance, a heist, to take over the plot.

Stott tries to create a “beautiful savant” in Lucienne—a strong, mysterious woman. To some extent she succeeds. But the attempts at creating a woman who is haunting and mysterious actually backfires because Lucienne is a character who is never fully realized. In trying to create a woman of mystery devoted to science, neither science nor the woman ends up emerging strong.

“Today I am Dufour the locksmith. Tomorrow I am a linen dealer or a botanical illustrator or a printer’s assistant. In Paris I am many people,” Lucienne says. Therein lies the problem. All those avatars don’t make for an alluring heroine, just a frustrating one.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (September 15, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Stott
EXTRAS:	Interview
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Ghostwalk More science in fiction: Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins Quicksilver by Neal Stephensen Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers

Bibliography:

• Ghostwalk (2007)
• The Coral Thief (2009)

Nonfiction:

• Tennyson (1996)
• Darwin and the Barnacle (2003)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2003)
• Theatres of Glass: The Woman Who Brought the Sea to the City (2003)
• Oyster (2004)
• Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution (June 2012)

“This is the philosophy of the prostitute; I am who I am only at this moment in time; my past does not hang from my shoulders and my future is indefinable and so cannot be a concern. I am nothing else and there is nothing else. As I look at myself in the mirror, it dawns on me that the tree was correct – all is created for me alone. I close my eyes tight and hear the tree laughing.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Jana L. Perskie (JUL 7, 2009)

The Blue Notebook is a beautify written novel about the grimmest of subjects – child prostitution. Were it not for author James A. Levine’s exquisite prose and his remarkable protagonist, nine year-old Batuk Ramasdeen, a poem of a girl, this story might be too sad to read. However, Batuk, a precocious, ever optimistic little girl, wins the reader’s heart from page one and makes The Blue Notebook very hard to put down. At 210 pages, I read it in two sittings.

Batuk lives in a small village near Bhopal, India. During a bout of tuberculosis, at age seven, Batuk is interned in the missionary medical center, and it is here that she learns to read and write in Hindi. The nurses, observing her intelligence and acute curiosity, are happy to teach her, but not as thrilled as Batuk is to learn. She begins to write in a journal, the blue notebook, from that time forward.

When she recovers enough to return home, she is surprised to learn that she is going on a trip to Mumbai with her beloved father. She has never been on a bus before and is extremely excited. Batuk is not told that her family has fallen on hard times, and that she, at nine years-old, is going to be sold into prostitution. Batuk is an exceptionally lovely looking girl, so her father will receive a good deal of money for her – at least by his standards. On arrival in Mumbai, Master Ghil, takes charge of the child. Her father takes his money and leaves for home, without bidding his daughter farewell. Bewildered, Batuk allows herself to be bathed, perfumed and painted – with kohl darkening her eyes, and lipstick and rouge brightening her face and accentuating her features. I can only imagine that she looked like she was decked-out for Halloween. A doctor examines her, inside and out, to make sure she is a virgin and carries no disease – an altogether humiliating procedure. Batuk is then dressed in a beautiful sari and taken to a room filled with wealthy men. She is auctioned off to the highest bidder – beautiful virgins bring in much money.

Although seriously traumatized, stunned and disoriented, she survives her rough “initiation,” and is sent to a special “Orphanage,” where she is taught, with brutality, her new “trade.” This orphanage is policed by “Yazaks,” men and women who “have divested themselves of humanity.” Yazaks “view their charges solely in terms of the income they provide.” Punishment for disobeying their orders is savagely met out. It is at the Orphanage that Batuk meets her best friend, Puneet, an eight year old boy whose beauty is flawless. Boys are especially prized as prostitutes, and are trained to be girl-boys. Just before they reach adolescence, they are castrated so they are able to continue their profession as boys. Adolescent males do not make a good deal of money for their owners.

Eventually, Batuk and Puneet are given to Mamaki Briila, whom the children call “Hippopotamus” behind her back, because of her obesity. In Mamaki’s “house,” on the Common Street, each child is given a cell-like concrete room, called “nests.” There Batuk is expected to turn at least 10 tricks per day, a process she euphemistically calls “baking sweet cakes.” She is a survivor and is able to “will her soul away from her body” in order to maintain her sanity. “Her soul jumps onto the spinning upper air that covers the top of the earth and there is unconfined.” Sometimes, while her soul is out of her body, she believes that her nest is a “womb of gold,” where she is illuminated in white light. “From my face emanate rivers of brilliance that seek out all the specks of darkness, and that is how I light my nest. My nest is glowing in my light, for there is no other light.”

In her light, which glows so brilliantly, she makes up fantastic tales about a silver-eyed leopard and a poor boy who fells a giant with a single gold coin.

Her journal and daily writing allow her to create poems, document her life and her surroundings, and provide her with some happiness. Her pencil and journal are her most prized and only possessions. Fearful that Mamaki, or one of her “johns,” will discover the journal, she is careful to keep it hidden.

Although Batuk comes to realize that she is public property, she still remains a child in many ways. She loves to color with crayons, and to chatter away with Puneet and the other 4 girls who make-up Mamaki’s crew – but only when Mamaki is not around to listen, or the children will be punished for talking.

She strives to excel at “baking sweet cakes,” so she will receive praise from her oppressors, and maybe a bit more to eat. She is beaten often, for no reason except for the needs of some clients to dominate. All of her earnings go to pay off her purchase price; she gets nothing. Her experiences are devastating, but her spirit remains unconquered. Her acceptance of her world is nothing short of remarkable.

The storyline alternates in time from the period when Batuk is seven to nine years-old. She writes of the riverbank back in her village, “with Granpa, the feasts, the feuds with Mother, and the fights with my brother Avijit.” And she documents her life in Mumbai – from ages nine to fifteen. Batuk writes in the first person, about her experiences with clarity and detail. However, she rarely expresses her emotions.

At the age of fifteen, she is taken from Mamaki’s establishment and brought to a posh hotel in Mumbai. Here she is expected to serve as a party girl for a most demanding client. This event will change Batuk’s life forever.

Of course, I found The Blue Notebook difficult to read at times. However, James A. Levine’s prose is so, lyrical, and Batuk’s spirit is so alive – even in the most dire of circumstances she is determined to find some beauty – some happiness. Her imagination is her salvation.

I am looking forward to the author’s next book. It is obvious that he is an extraordinarily talented writer. James Levine is also a doctor and professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, and is a world renowned scientist and researcher. He is donating all the U.S. royalties to the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 117 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (July 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	James Levine, M.D.
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and publisher word on this book
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	This movie comes to mind: Slumdog Millionaire And this book: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and this one, because it too has an unusual voice: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Bibliography:

• The Blue Notebook (2009)
• Bingo’s Run (January 2014)

“Money,” he said wearily, looking out of window as though he was seeing a golden age go by.  “All the world is now convertible to money.  Power, influence, peace and war.  It used to be that the sole determinant was the number of men you could march out to meet your enemies.  Now more depends on the convertibility of your currency, its reputation among the bankers.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Eleanor Bukowsky (MAY 18, 2009)

Iain Pears’s Stone’s Fall opens in France in 1953 with the burial of Madame Robillard, who passed away in her eighties.  The first part of the book is narrated by Matthew Braddock who had met Robillard (then known as Elizabeth, Lady Ravenscliff) when she was in her forties.  The year was 1909, and twenty-five year old Matthew was a crime reporter for a London newspaper.  Elizabeth summons Matthew a fortnight after the death of her husband, John Stone, Lord Ravenscliff, who died after he fell or was pushed out of an open window in his study.  She offers Matthew a great deal of money to look into her husband’s professional and personal affairs.  There are a number of questions that she wants answered:  Was Stone’s death accidental or a result of foul play?  Why did he leave a huge bequest to a child, whom, he states in his will, “I have never previously acknowledged?”  

Why did Stone grant a legacy to Mrs. Esther Vincotti of Italy?   After examining her husband’s papers carefully, Elizabeth finds nothing to shed light on these matters.  She tells Matthew that, even after twenty years of marriage, she and her husband were very much in love and that he had not been in the habit of keeping secrets from her.  That is why she is willing to pay Matthew handsomely to dig deeper and give her the information that she craves for her peace of mind.

Thus begins a lengthy narrative that moves backwards in time.  Pears takes us to London in 1909, Paris in 1890, and finally, to Venice in 1867.  Part Two is narrated by Henry Cort, a shadowy figure who crossed paths with John Stone and Elizabeth and knows a great many of their secrets.  Part Three is narrated by Stone himself.  The first part is not that compelling and some will be tempted to put the book down after the first hundred pages.  Initially, it is difficult to care about the deceased and his wife, about whom we know little, or about Matthew, who barely makes a living as a journalist.  Matthew eagerly accepts Elizabeth’s generous stipend, hoping to improve his lowly financial position.  However, when he starts investigating and finds anomalies in Stone’s business dealings, his curiosity gets the better of him.   What he learns shocks and alarms him, and his continued involvement in the Stone case will put him in grave danger.

Pears takes a huge gamble, expecting the reader to keep track of dozens of characters, some of whom are not what they seem to be, and an incredibly convoluted plot.  The author assumes that we will be willing to stick with a narrative that moves in many different directions, and that hinges, to a large extent, on arcane details of banking and politics; not everyone will finds this subject matter particularly compelling or comprehensible.  Does Pears’s gamble pay off?  Yes and no. Until part three, Stone’s Fall is a tough slog.  There is a great deal going on but, for quite some time, the point of it all is elusive.  It is only in the third section of the book that the tale at last comes to brilliant life.  We get to know Stone intimately, discover how he becomes a captain of industry, and watch him commit grievous errors for which he will pay dearly.  At last, this cipher becomes human and the final pages are riveting.  Many hitherto undisclosed facts are revealed, finally enabling us to make sense of what has occurred in the previous sections.  The ending of Stone’s Fall, although not completely believable, is deeply poignant.  Pears explores a number of themes:  Men who are familiar with the intricacies of making money and the inner workings of government wield enormous power (a timely topic in our troubled times).  Without love, wealth and social status provide scant satisfaction.  A person is revered after his death not for his power and influence, but for his good works, compassion, and personal honor.  Although determined readers will diligently plow through this dense novel, Stone’s Fall will, alas, bring less hardy souls to their knees long before they reach the final page.  Still, the magnificent part three almost makes the whole task worthwhile.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AMAZON PAGE:	Stone’s Fall
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Iain Pears
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Review of The Portrait Another review of Stone’s Fall

Bibliography:

Jonathan Argyll, Art History Mystery Series:

• The Raphael Affair (1990; 1992 in US)
• The Titian Committee (1991; 1993 in US)
• The Bernini Bust (1992; 1994 in US)
• The Last Judgement (1993; 1995 in US)
• Giotto’s Hand (1994; 1997 in US)
• Death and Restoration (1996; 1998 in US)
• The Immaculate Deception (2000)

Other:

• The Instance of the Fingerpost (1997)
• The Dream of Scipio (June 2002)
• The Portrait (April 2005)
• Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears (May 2009)