Violence – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 THIRTY GIRLS by Susan Minot /2014/thirty-girls-by-susan-minot/ Tue, 11 Feb 2014 13:10:04 +0000 /?p=23633 Book Quote:

“I woke this morning and remembered something I thought forgotten, a time they caught a man on a bicycle and cut off his foot. If you are on a bicycle the rebels think you may be delivering news. The man’s wife came out and they told her to eat that foot.

You don’t forget such things, even if they are not appearing. They are just in the back of your mind, waiting.

Sometimes I want to hit myself with stones.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (FEB 11, 2014)

Thirty Girls by Susan Minot is a powerful novel that is based on a true story. It takes place in Kenya, Uganda and Sudan and is the story of the abduction of over one hundred girls from a convent school in Uganda. A nun by the name of Giulia travels to the site of the abductors, who call themselves the LRA, and negotiates for the release of all but thirty of the girls. Thus, the title of the book.

The novel opens as an American journalist named Jane finds herself in Nairobi. She is there to do a piece on the abduction of Ugandan children by the LRA. So far, about 10,000 children have been abducted over seventeen years and many of them have been killed. Some of the girls have escaped and returned home only to find out that their families no longer want them. Many of them have borne children through rape by LRA members. Others have contracted AIDS. Jane and her friends start on a trek to Uganda to interview the abductees who have escaped and made it home.

Jane is a lost soul. She has written a book previously that many have read. The novel does not mention what the book is about or when it was written. It just appears that many people in Nairobi have read it. She is looking to find herself but does not know where to look. Mostly, she tries being around other people and finds herself in relationships where she enjoys the sex. Currently, she is in a relationship with Harry who is 22 years old. Jane is thirty-seven. Little by little, she is convincing herself that she is in love with Harry though they have known each other for only a very short time, barely three weeks by the end of the novel.

The chapters are interspersed with Jane’s story and that of Esther’s. Esther is one of the girls who was kidnapped by the LRA from her convent school in Uganda. She is pregnant by her LRA “husband” and is not sure how she will feel about her child. While she is in captivity, her mother dies of cancer and her father is incapacitated by an accident. She tries her best to make it through each day but it is a horrific experience and some days she is not sure she can do another day. “Some days were worse that others. You walked past children sleeping on the ground then saw they were not sleeping, they were dead.”

Jane manages to interview Esther and is working on doing an article about the thirty girls. However, she finds herself thinking more of Harry than of her work. “Thoughts of Harry came in the day like reveries, then she would stop the thoughts. How could she be thinking so lightly of love, here in a place where people’s lips were cut off and girls were snatched out of their beds?”

The LRA is like a cult, headed by a man named Kony. Kony has multiple personality disorder, perhaps seizures and runs the LRA through magical thinking. The LRA has no real political purpose. It seeks out weak prey, then kidnaps them. Kony has this idea that by impregnating the girls, he will grow a family. The boys turn into rebels themselves. “Some children believed what they told us. Some of us became rebels. When you were given a gun you started to kill and after a while you would look at yourself and say, I am a rebel now.” The LRA reminded me of the Manson clan, only larger.

The novel is very well written and is the strongest piece of writing that I have read by Susan Minot. It is difficult to read in places because of the violence but it rang very true to life. I highly recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 13 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (February 11, 2014)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Susan Minot
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Movies from books:

]]> PLUGGED by Eoin Colfer /2011/plugged-by-eoin-colfer/ Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:18:38 +0000 /?p=20792 Book Quote:

“There isn’t much call for deep thinking in my current job in Cloisters, New Jersey. We don’t do a lot of chatting about philosophical issues or natural phenomena in the casino. I tried to talk about National Geographic one night, and Jason gave me a look like I was insulting him, so I moved on to a safer subject: which of the girls have implants.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (SEP 9, 2011)

Eoin Colfer? He writes those kid’s books, Artemis Fowl, doesn’t he? What’s someone who writes really popular children’s books doing writing a crime novel? Well according to the dedication, Irish author Eoin Colfer says the book is “For Ken Bruen who made me do it.” So we have Bruen to thank for this first book in what promises to be an entertaining series.

The protagonist and narrator of Plugged is 40-something Irishman Daniel McEvoy, an ex-British army soldier with two horrendous tours in Lebanon under his belt. Plugged finds McEvoy, unable to adjust to civilian life, in Cloisters, New Jersey working nights as a bouncer in a seedy, low-rent strip club called Slotz:

“A formica bar, low lighting that’s more cheap than fashionable. A roulette wheel that bucks with every spin, two worn baize card tables and half a dozen slots. Slotz.”

Hardly a stellar career move, but then McEvoy isn’t so much into appearances–except when it comes to his bald head. When the book begins McEvoy is getting hair plugs from an unlicensed doctor named Zeb who operates a fly-by-night office, and it’s this relationship combined with the murder of a Slotz hostess that takes McEvoy out of his role of neighbourhood bouncer to amateur investigator. McEvoy soon finds himself partnered-up with a prickly female detective, and on the unfriendly end of the local crime boss.

The book’s narrative has an almost chatty, humorous, and casual approach which belies the violence that frequently and suddenly explodes on the page. McEvoy confides in his reader and enhances the narrative with flashes of Lebanese hell and memories of therapy sessions with his permanently hungover, trendy therapist Simon Moriarty–a man who in his absence has assumed the role of mentor and advisor. McEvoy is a likeable character whose seemingly-loser role in life covers independence and a well-honed philosophy:

“The great Stephen King once wrote don’t sweat the small stuff, which I mulled over for long enough to realize that I don’t entirely agree with it. I get what he means: we all have enough major sorrow in our lives without freaking out over the day-to-day hangnails and such, but sometimes sweating the small stuff helps you make it through the big stuff. Take me, for example; I have had enough earth-shattering events happen to me, beside me and underneath me to have most people dribbling in a psych ward, but what I do is try not to think about it. Let it fester inside, that’s my philosophy. It’s gotta be healthy, right? Focus on the everyday non-lethal bullshit to take your mind off the landmark psychological blows that are standing in line to grind you down.”

If you like that quote, then chances are you’re the sort of reader who will enjoy Plugged. It’s a light, fresh crime novel with an engaging protagonist whose lively sense of humour and unflinching eye deliver an entertaining read. Some of the humour gravitates around McEvoy’s Irishness and still more erupts from the well-drawn characters who range from McEvoy’s nutty neighbour–Mrs Delano: a woman who’s “beautiful-ish in a psycho kind of way” to the bitchy retired stripper, Brandi who’s “been angry at the world for about a year, since she had to hang up her stripper’s g-string and downgrade to a hostess job” at age 30.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 7 readers
PUBLISHER: Overlook Hardcover (September 1, 2011)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Eoin Colfer
EXTRAS: Audio Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

  • The Max by Ken Bruen and Jason Star

Partial Bibliography:

Artemis Fowl series:

Not a kid’s book:

]]> THE HYPNOTIST by Lars Keplar /2011/the-hypnotist-by-lars-keplar/ Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:28:05 +0000 /?p=19950 Book Quote:

“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:

Bibliography:

]]> THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME by Donald Ray Pollock /2011/the-devil-all-the-time-by-donald-ray-pollock2/ Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:05:22 +0000 /?p=18639 Book Quote:

“” ‘Did you know…that the Romans used to gut donkeys and sew Christians up alive inside the carcasses and leave them out in the sun to rot?’ The priest had been full of such stories. ‘Just think about it. You’re trussed up like a turkey in a pan with just your head sticking out a dead donkey’s ass; and then the maggots eating away at you until you see the glory.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 12, 2011)

Out of the funk and foul methane mist comes this almost mythical tale of legendary proportions, a lugubrious story ripe and ribald with gallows humor and the kind of tragedy that is crawling with comic perversity. This amoral cast of hillbilly trash will make your eyes twitch and your forehead darken as you turn the pages with unabashed glee and lick your foaming lips with depraved delight. These are people who are devoted to the Lord with fire and brimstone dedication, a demonic depravity that fills them with Jesus juice and strychnine.

There’s an Old Testament fervor that possess these twisted, sick sub-archetype folks from in and around Knockemstiff, Ohio, a place of 900 or so almost penniless undesirables and beer-slugging, Bible-toting, gun-slinging zealots. The paper mill towers over the town like an effigy, pouring out its sulphuric fumes, and the pig-packing plant reeks and oozes its blood and bone like an animus.

This is a bit reminiscent of Natural Born Killers meets Deliverance, but with a style and trademark unique to the author’s imagination. The prose is sleek, tight, and tidy with the spills of human degeneracy and base desires. But there is a taut and tense plot, too, a story that will have you biting your nails to the quick while you gasp with mortified pleasure at every single page.

There is no room for boredom in this book. And there are souls you will root for, with their pathos emanating from the alluvial carnage. Pollack’s tale is fresh and sparkly, too. Yes, it shines and rubs you down to the roots. Even amidst all this violence, you never feel it is gratuitous or exploitative. Pollack is an artist who commands his subject matter with such ease and empathy that you can’t help but spend all those rapturous hours in the refuse and scum of that decayed pig chute of prairie America.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 42 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Donald Ray Pollock
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read another review of: 

The Devil All The Time

Bibliography:

 

]]> VIENNA TWILIGHT by Frank Tallis /2011/vienna-twilight-by-frank-tallis/ Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:10:48 +0000 /?p=17407 Book Quote:

” ‘Psychiatrists,’ said Rheinhardt, shaking his head, ‘At what point do you balk at the study of perversity and madness? Do you never think that some things are so dreadful, so appalling, that they should simply be left alone?’

‘It is always better to understand than not.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (APR 17, 2011)

Vienna Twilight, the fifth installment in Frank Tallis’s superb mystery series, focuses on a serial killer obsessed with death; a degenerate artist, Herr Ludo Rainmayr, who paints emaciated young girls in the nude; and an agitated mental patient named Norbert Erstweiler. Dr. Max Liebermann is a psychiatrist and disciple of Sigmund Freud. He also unofficially assists his close friend, Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt. Max and Oskar attend concerts, chat over meals, make music (Max plays the piano and Oskar sings in a rich baritone), drink brandy, smoke cigars, and track down felons. Max’s knowledge of abnormal psychology helps him understand the subconscious forces that drive people to commit unspeakable acts.

Liebermann is currently treating Herr Erstweiler, a gentleman in his early thirties whose symptoms include insomnia, anxiety, loss of appetite, and a belief that he is being stalked by his doppelgänger. In addition, with the help of medical student and blood expert Amelia Lydgate, Oskar and Max try to find a serial killer who dispatches his victims in an unusual manner.

Tallis places us in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a city of high culture and architectural grandeur, with its many theaters, art galleries, concert halls, and opera houses. Furthermore, it was a place where provocative new ideas were challenging tradition in such areas as medicine, aesthetics, and gender roles. Some couturiers dispensed with restrictive corsets and designed “loose-fitting reform dresses” for ladies; this symbolized a movement to liberate women from the constraints that held them back. This great metropolis had a dark side, as well. Although the upper classes enjoyed lives of leisure, the less fortunate barely subsisted from day to day. In decadent Vienna (where syphilis was a “national disease”), moral boundaries were routinely pushed to their limits.

The characterizations, dialogue, and forensic details are all first rate and, along with his serious themes, Tallis includes welcome passages of wit and humor. Max, as usual, is cerebral, detached, and insightful; Oskar is efficient, principled, and overly fond of rich pastries; and Amelia talks her way into the autopsy suite, where she bonds with the eccentric pathologist, Professor Mathias. Tallis creates a troubling picture of a sick society whose members are “preoccupied with sex and death.” As Liebermann says, foreshadowing Austria’s bleak future, “What was wrong with the German soul? Why were love and death so intermingled in the German imagination?” Vienna Twilight has graphically erotic and violent scenes, and is one of Tallis’s most explicit novels to date. At the same time, it is a cleverly plotted, elegantly written, suspenseful, literate, and thoroughly absorbing.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 20 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House Trade Paperbacks (April 12, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Frank Tallis
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

The Liebermann Papers:

Writing as F. R. Tallis

Nonfiction:

]]> THE COLOR OF NIGHT by Madison Smartt Bell /2011/the-color-of-night-by-madison-smartt-bell/ Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:06:19 +0000 /?p=17220 Book Quote:

“Above the dry hills the air turned white — that shimmering electric pallor that pretended to promise rain in the desert, and the hard wind swirling up grit from the ground, while Ned climbed trees to nail up speakers behind D—‘s speaking stone, and Crunchy and Creamy stirred up batches of gangster acid, cut with speed, with Tab or Mountain Dew in plastic garbage cans, so that it rained snakes instead of water, and I — I tore my robe to bare one breast and caught such a snake, its diamond back writhing over my hand, meaning to bind it around my brow as a living coronet, wedge head erect and spitting venom while I danced outside the borders of any mortal consciousness, whirling my thyrsus in one hand and a wildcat’s spotted cub in another.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 06, 2011)

I have chosen this rather longer quotation to show how Madison Smartt Bell can turn on a dime between a realistic description of a California druggie cult in the late sixties to an evocation of the revels of Dionysian maenads from the earliest age of Greek mythology. The link here is an acid trip, but Bell does not need chemicals to effect his alchemy. In 2001, when the book opens, the narrator Mae is a middle-aged croupier in a Las Vegas area casino. Bell’s description is realistic and immediate: “Only the whirl of lights and the electronic burbling of machines, rattle of dice in the craps table cups, and almost inaudible whisper of cards, the friction-free hum of roulette wheels turning.” But two sentences later, he has already made the shift: “It was a sort of fifth-rate hell, and I a minor demon posted to it. A succubus too indifferent to suck.” Writing of the harsh life of the trailer park behind a chain-link fence in the desert, with the tracks of ATVs crossing the serpentine marks of sidewinders in the sand — Cormac McCarthy country — Bell can match the master, image for image. But he is also liable to launch into a passage of Classical Greek (and, what’s more, leave it untranslated)! There are scenes of drugs, sex, mutilation, and murder in this book that would normally turn my stomach, but Bell’s ability to juggle the violence of the American underbelly with the Bacchic celebration of unbridled passion, and to keep both balls scintillating in the air at the same time, made for such an exhilarating experience that I was fascinated throughout. It was even worth the nightmares when I went to bed.

Perhaps it worked for me because I have had a classical education, and have worked with myth all my professional life. I think the intensity of the writing will still come through to those who do not catch the references, but it might still be worth checking the Wikipedia article on Orpheus before starting. Not just his trip to the underworld to reclaim Eurydice, but also the less familiar legends about his death, torn apart by maenads in the throes of a Dionysian orgy. Two important figures in the novel are referred to by their initials only — rather coyly, since the allusion is pretty obvious: O— (Orpheus) is a rock star, living in a beach house in Malibu; D— (Dionysus) is the charismatic leader of a drug cult known as The People. Although this may sound impossibly fantastic, so was a lot else that was going on in the late sixties, not least the murderous Manson Family. Madison Smartt Bell’s miracle is his ability to be simultaneously mythic and utterly realistic.

The novel, broken into 74 very short chapters, begins in 2001. Mae’s reaction to the World Trade Center attack is different from that of most Americans. She compiles the news footage into a two-hour tape that she watches again and again, reveling in it: “The planes bit chunks from the sides of the towers and the gorgeous sheets of orange flame roared up and the mortals flung away from the glittering windows like soap flakes swirling in a snow globe and the tower shuddered, buckled, blossomed and came showering down.” It is clear she has a fascination with violence, and in alternating chapters we discover why. Traumatized by incestuous abuse (worse in that she seems to have embraced rather than resisted it), she leaves home as a teenager and travels to California, “balling for bread” as she puts it. There, she is picked up by D— and recruited into The People, living in their commune outside San Francisco, taking part in activities which become more and more anarchic. When the police raid the compound, Mae manages to escape with her lover Laurel, but the two later separate to go into hiding under false identities. Now, over 30 years later, the memories come flooding back, triggered by a news shot of Laurel fleeing from Ground Zero: “So I saw Laurel for the first time again, Laurel kneeling on the sidewalk, her head thrown back, her hands stretched out with the fingers crooked, as weapons or in praise. Blood was running from the corners of her mouth, like in the old days, though not for the same reason.”

These closing words of the opening chapter, which itself is only a page and a half long, deliver a mule kick into a roller-coaster of a ride. It is horrible yet thrilling, sickening yet exhilarating, with a tense pace that never lets up. Other than McCarthy, it makes me think of Robert Stone, who writes an appreciation on the cover, of the violence of Roberto Bolaño, and most recently of Carlos Fuentes, whose Destiny and Desire makes a similar play between myth and reality. But The Color of Night is leaner and meaner than any of these, and more brilliant in its darkness. Undoubtedly one of my best books of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 8 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Madison Smartt Bell
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:Devil’s Dream

Bibliography:

Haitian series:

Nonfiction:

]]> THE MEMORY OF LOVE by Aminatta Forna /2011/the-memory-of-love-by-aminatta-forna/ Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:02:31 +0000 /?p=16085 Book Quote:

“And when he wakes from dreaming of her, is it not the same for him? The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against every morning…Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 14, 2011)

Incalculable grief cleaves to profound love in this elaborate, helical tapestry of a besieged people in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. Interlacing two primary periods of violent upheaval, author Aminatta Forna renders a scarred nation of people with astonishing grace and poise–an unforgettable portrait of open wounds and closed mouths, of broken hearts and fractured spirits, woven into a stunning evocation of recurrence and redemption, loss and tender reconciliation. Forna mines a filament of hope from resigned fatalism, from the devastation of a civil war that claimed 50,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Those that survived felt hollowed out, living with an uneasy peace.

Over 99% of people suffered from unrelieved post-traumatic stress disorder, and those that survived often hid shameful secrets of forced betrayal. Here you have children, now adults, trying to cope after their brutal coercion with rebel soldiers. They are living with the aftermath of “nothing left to lose.” If you can imagine an unspeakable atrocity, it was likely executed. Blood on the hands of the people who remain seep into the pores of the newly arrived.

Three principal characters form the locus of this story–a psychologist, a surgeon, and an academic. The story goes through seamless temporal shifts–from 1969, a period of unrest following a military coup–to 2001, following ten years of civil war begun in 1991.

Adrian Lockheart is a British psychologist on sabbatical from his failing marriage to accept a (second) post in Freetown. He is compassionate and dogged in his pursuit to treat the population of mentally disturbed and traumatized citizens, to help them find hope and resolve, yet he feels emotionally dislocated from his own family at home.

“The truth is that since arriving here his life has seemed more charged with meaning than it ever had in London. Here the boundaries are limitless, no horizon, no sky. He can feel his emotions, solid and weighty, like stones in the palm of his hands.”

Adrian treats tortured men and women in the fallout of war, finding a particularly poignant interest in Agnes, a woman who is suffering from a fugue disorder. He contends that the endless miles she compulsively roams on foot (and subsequently forgets) indicate a search for something meaningful from the ruins of war. He believes she is going toward somewhere, a place he determines to find out.

Adrian’s most prominent patient is the unreliable narrator, Elias Cole, an elderly, retired history professor dying of pulmonary disease. In this city of silence, Elias is compelled to tell his story, his confession, to Adrian. It begins in 1969, when Elias first laid eyes on Saffia Kamara, a charming and comely botanist married to the gregarious, fearless Julius, an academic at the university.

“People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss.”

Julius, Elias, and Saffia embark on a friendship that inextricably points to the destiny of the next generation. The military coups of the late 60’s followed Sierra Leon’s hard-won independence from the British colonial rule. Political unrest led to widespread paranoia, which in turn led to wobbly allegiances. Elias’s confession to Adrian is the rallying point, which heightens all the other narratives. Adrian’s probing of Elias reaches to encounters outside of the hospital, and will alter the course of his life, and too of the story.

Lastly, there is Kai Manseray, a talented, young orthopedic surgeon, a tireless and tormented man plagued by chronic insomnia and a suppressed and devastating history. Kai chose to stay and help the damaged and impoverished, rather than abscond two years ago with his best friend, Tejani. He is torn between his loyalties in Sierra Leone and his desire for a more elite station in the States. The woman he loved has gone, the city ravaged, the people embattled, but his little cousin, Abass, and the patients who need him keep him anchored. He has secrets that he won’t share with anyone, that threaten to undo him in the operating theater.

As the story highlights the contrast of their professions, Kai and Adrian form a tenuous bond of friendship. Kai’s achievements are measurable–stitching, sewing, patching, cutting, and saving lives. Adrian, however, can’t measure his patients’ success with an X-ray or point to approximated edges of a wound. Psychotherapy is a process of encounters, wending your way through the dark channels of a person’s interior and facilitating change through conversation. Kai and Adrian’s bond is ultimately the most hypnotic, with consequences encroaching on the dark side of hope.

Aminatta-FornaForna constructs a mesmerizing collision of forces and people that slowly propel the reader toward a towering climax. This story is for the committed reader, the patient literature lover who will undertake many hours of dedication for the inevitable reward. Think of a blank canvas, and every sentence as a mindful brushstroke, a bloom on the page. It takes a while for the picture to materialize. The writing is carefully crafted, and yet imperceptibly so, not in the least self-conscious. She is steadily augmenting, fuller and deeper, contrasting the light and the darkness, capturing nature and sound. Even her secondary and tertiary characters are wrought with polish and care.The story’s leisurely pace builds its emotional cathedral one stone at a time; at about the halfway point, it becomes riveting and impossible to turn away.

This is a personal and natal undertaking for Forna, whose father, Dr. Mohamed Forna, was a dissident in Sierra Leona and was killed on trumped up charges when she was only eleven-years-old. Her non-fiction book, The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest, is the story of her search for the truth of that harrowing time. She continues her exploration of healing and recovery in this deeply researched and ambitious novel.

There are coincidences in The Memory of Love that nevertheless do not disturb the beauty or the impact of the story. In lesser hands, this may have come across as artifice. However, Forna’s characters and themes are ultimately grounded, and the patterns that emerge from the disparate stories–the unguarded moments, the link of love that ties all the characters together–transcend her intention. The potency of storytelling and the refrain of love in the aftermath of tragedy is evident and sublime in her fluent prose.

“There exists, somewhere, a scale for love invented by one of his [Adrian’s] profession…And there are others still who say love is but a beautiful form of madness.”

The injured voices of her characters mesh into a voice of hope and holding on, to a startling story of redemption. At various intervals, the lyrics of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” drift onto the page. It sang, I sang.

“Well, they tell me there’s a pie up in the sky…The harder they come, the harder they fall.”

Love endures. One and all.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 27 readers
PUBLISHER: Atlantic Monthly Press (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Aminatta Forna
EXTRAS: Diane Rehm show interview with Aminatta Forma
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]]> POINT OMEGA by Don DeLillo /2010/point-omega-by-don-delillo/ Sat, 20 Feb 2010 03:07:06 +0000 /?p=7888 Book Quote:

“Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can’t be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and become three-dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Daniel Luft (FEB 19, 2010)

Don DeLillo’s Point Omega is a slim and subtle novel. It is so slim that very little happens and so subtle that the reader will be left to question exactly what happened here and what any of it means.

The book begins and ends with with the viewing of a film exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit is called 24 Hour Psycho and it screens Hitchcock’s famous movie in slow motion, without sound, for a full twenty-four hours.

In between these brief, stark, descriptive, passages is the story of the narrator Jim Finley who has installed himself in the isolated, desert home of Richard Elster who, until recently, had been an advisor to President Bush. Elster came from academia and his presence in the administration was to add credibility and depth to the decisions made by the government. His exact job in the administration was to place the war into some kind of context, to give it meaning, find a metaphor that the administration could use. To Finley, he refers to his job as “bulk and swagger” which is closer to cloak and dagger than to “shock and awe.”

Finley is a novice filmmaker who wants to make a documentary of Elster speaking to the camera and telling the story of his role in the administration, his thoughts on the war, politics, everything. But Elster has fallen silent even before he consents to do the film. The two men spend a lot of time together, alone in the house, drinking on Elston’s deck, watching the sun set.

After a week of this near silence, Elster’s daughter, Jessie, comes for a visit, which only reminds Finley of his own loneliness and urges. He continues to pursue Elston professionally while he fantasizes about the daughter.

This routine ends a couple days later when Jessie very suddenly disappears and the story takes an abrupt shift into the realm of personal mysteries and loss.

This shift must be a cue from Psycho where the lead character was killed off early in the story. Psycho began as a heist film, turned into a private detective story and then morphed again into something quite unsettling. With its impersonal violence it raised questions about the genre of crime fiction and how quaint its methods were next to random violence.

Point Omega seems to raise the question of how anyone can find meaning in violence and loss. The book also toys with the idea of stories and their meanings. It begins like a reversal of Darkness at Noon with the meek artist trying to goad answers from the powerful party official. Then, with the arrival of Elster’s daughter, the story meanders into a retelling of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, where young Nathan Zuckerman gets to meet his idol but is eventually sidetracked by lust for the old man’s daughter.

But then Point Omega changes once more with Finley and Elster, alone together again, searching for some kind of expressible meaning in the disappearance of a single woman. Next to this emptiness how could anyone explain the overwhelming violence and unfairness of an entire war?

Most of DeLillo’s major writing has been event-oriented like the toxic plume in White Noise or the windup pitch of Underworld. Vivid characters have never been his strength. For this short book with only one real plot point occurring, more characterization would have helped. Elster himself points to the book’s flaw when he tells Finley what a bad idea their film would be: “But isn’t there a real movie you’d rather do? Because how many people will want to spend all that time looking at something so zombielike?”

DeLillo is a major American writer but he still has yet to create a character that captures the collective heart of his readership. No Garp, no Zuckerman, no Sam Spade. With all the premature deaths in Psycho, the audience still got to hold on to Norman Bates.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 43 readers
PUBLISHER: Scribner; First Edition (February 2, 2010)
REVIEWER: Daniel Luft
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo’s America
EXTRAS: Excerpt

Complete Review on Point Omega
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our short review of:

White Noise

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