Around 50 pages in, I nearly gave up on Karla's Choice. I found myself rereading the same pages, trying to make sense of the dense paragraphs. I'm usuAround 50 pages in, I nearly gave up on Karla's Choice. I found myself rereading the same pages, trying to make sense of the dense paragraphs. I'm usually quick to set aside novels that don't pull me in right away, but something told me to ride it out. Then a friend encouraged me to stay the course. By the end, I'm so very glad I did.
I've read a handful of Le Carré novels—mostly his one-offs (e.g. The Constant Gardener, The Russia House, The Tailor of Panama), so while I have a passing familiarity with the world of George Smiley, I'm hardly a fan. But positive reviews of this extension of the series—penned with deep attention, affection and skill by Le Carré son, Nick Harkaway—as well as my own desire to read just about anything that pulls me away from modern politics and culture and into the easier-to-digest past led me to give it a go.
While you can plunge cold into Smiley's Cold War at any point, it does help to have a context of both the characters and Le Carré’s writing and intent, so I'm glad to have at least read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which forms part of the so-called Karla series, but confusingly, Karla's Choice is set prior to TTSP, so really, it doesn't matter, but if you're going to start somewhere, I suggest you start with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which precedes the events of this current novel. Wait, what?
Look, just have fun with this. As I mentioned, it was slow going for me at first as it assumes familiarity with past events and characters and doesn't bother to explain itself. But even as I floundered to catch up, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen next and where all this was going. The Cold War spycraft is delicious fun, the characters are rich and nuanced, the Realpolitik chilling even now, knowing as we all do how things would end ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!..."), an ending that has a through line to our relationship with Russia today.
Intelligent intrigue. Mr. Harkaway has done George Smiley, and his own father, very proud....more
I enjoyed the hell out of this. I'm stunned, really, to see the low ratings by my fellow Goodreaders. This was just so dang satisfying and well-writteI enjoyed the hell out of this. I'm stunned, really, to see the low ratings by my fellow Goodreaders. This was just so dang satisfying and well-written. What the actual, friends? In a literary world dominated by the tech-and-technique heavy Tom Clancy knock-offs and the testosterone-dripping Jack Reacher, Anna Pitoniak drops a smart, crackling character-driven thriller. Think John Le Carré meets Kate Atkinson: crispy on the outside, tender within.
Amanda Cole is a career CIA agent chafing at the dull nature of her current station, Rome. When a Russian tourist stumbles into the American embassy claiming that a U.S. senator is about to be assassinated, she believes him and pushes it up the chain of command. There is pushback, but suddenly the senator is dead and Amanda is now Rome's station chief. Complicated enough, for sure, but then Amanda receives information that implicates her father, Charlie, an affable divorcé who is spinning out his final years as a CIA bureaucrat in a boring Langley desk job, his glory years as a spy thirty years distant. And we're off to the races.
Moving back and forth between contemporary Rome, Washington D.C., London, Moscow and early 1990's Helsinki, The Helsinki Affair spins a fascinating tale of international financial mayhem, double agents, the inner political machinations of clandestine services, the collapse of a marriage, and a fractured father-daughter relationship. It's at once deeply soulful and breathlessly suspenseful. For sure, there are plot points that strain credulity but I didn't care. Pitoniak is so confident in her writing and the characters are so rich and well-developed, I was willing to give her a non-stop flight from D.C. to Cairo's worth of latitude to do what she thought the story needed.
The sparkling chemistry between rising star Amanda Cole and veteran agent Kath Frost, a 73-year-old tour de force, is worthy of a series. Bring them back, Anna, and slay those spy genre tropes with your wicked pen. You have a new fan. Bravissima!...more
3.5 stars. A beautifully written, elegant slow burn of noir, but something about it was just off enough, like a fine wine with a faint oxidized whiff.3.5 stars. A beautifully written, elegant slow burn of noir, but something about it was just off enough, like a fine wine with a faint oxidized whiff.
Henri, a French Algerian, abandons his post in the gendarmerie in Oran at the start of the war of independence and flees to his mother's natal Spain. He falls in with gangster relatives in Granada and is sent early one morning to oversee the handoff of a suitcase of cash in the shadows of the storied Alhambra. The handoff is unwittingly intercepted by a young woman who flees with the stash, Henri in pursuit.
The chase that follows consumes the entire narrative, from Granada north through Spain on a bus, by train into France, an interlude in Paris, followed by a long (very long) train ride to Belgrade and on to Istanbul. For reasons that are explored in flashbacks and flash-forwards, Henri deliberately backs away from the many times he could apprehend the tall, delicate and obviously troubled thief. He becomes her shadow and soon the pair are trailed by an ominous third party.
The young woman is Louise, an English nobody escaping a nowhere future and a past of sorrow and loss. The money she happens upon at a moment of despair is means to a fresh start, but she has ghosts to confront first, which is how we end up in Paris for a spell. Louise becomes aware of her shadow, but he is a comforting, rather than threatening, presence.
This is billed as a literary thriller-cum-caper, but it is neither thrilling, with the exception of a breathless few pages toward the end, nor does it have the levity of a caper. Like Mangan's other works, it is profound exploration of psyche and motivation, a deeply interior narrative that spends most of its time in its two main characters' heads. I was fully into the novel by the time I realized I was sighing at yet another scene on the train—the scenes move back and forth in time in a bid to break up the rails monotony, but it doesn't quite relieve the draggy middle.
Mangan's descriptions of the many exotic settings are sublime. She deftly exposes the crushing dilemma of French citizens born and raised in Algeria facing the bizarre displacement of colonial peoples who know no other home but the one they occupy. Henri and Louise's magnetic attraction is palpable and this tension, as well as the ever-present threat that trails them, moves the story forward.
The novel is set in 1960 yet it feels decades earlier, as though it could be between the wars or in the immediate aftermath of WWII. The mannered prose renders the cinematic feel in gritty black-and-white rather than the Technicolor of a modern world.
I'm glad to have read this—I remain intrigued by and in awe of Christine Mangan. She writes with admirable confidence and with such intelligence and style. There's really no other contemporary author I can think of who displays her literary influences so transparently and yet creates stories uniquely her own....more
Over a period of 15 years, Stéphane Breitweiser, with the assistance of his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, stole an estimated $2 billion dollaOver a period of 15 years, Stéphane Breitweiser, with the assistance of his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, stole an estimated $2 billion dollars worth of art from regional museums in France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. The thieves carried out their escapades in plain sight of guards and other museum patrons, Breitweiser using nothing more than a Swiss Army multitool to pop display case seals and to remove frame brads. They stashed their loot in backpacks, purses, down pants legs and up shirtsleeves. Favoring work from the Renaissance, they stole paintings, sculptures, tobacco boxes, goblets, a crossbow. Breitweiser even hauled at 150-lb wooden sculpture from a church and stashed it in the back of Anne-Catherine's hatchback.
All of these stolen works of art were displayed for the couple's pleasure in the attic rooms of Breitweiser's mother's home in Mulhouse, France, where he and Anne-Catherine lived, rent-free. An only child of divorced parents who was raised in comfort, Breitweiser is a narcissist, a self-taught aesthete, a preternaturally-skilled kleptomaniac and an emotionally stunted jerk.
Michael Finkel crafts a meticulous reportage of Breitweiser's crimes, building from hours of personal interviews with the thief, as well as investigative reports, psychological tests, and trial transcripts. The book excels with meticulous details of the audacious thefts. Less satisfying is the deep dive into Breitweiser's "why," but this is less a fault of the book and more a factor of Breitweiser's slippery personality and the bizarre nature of his crimes. Finkel does a terrific job of exploring the world of art crime in general, succinctly comparing Breitweiser's escapades to that of other famous thefts. The young Alsatian was unique in his hoarding of his spoils. Stolen art is typically trafficked, not collected for personal pleasure.
It's not a secret that Breitweiser was caught. What's astonishing is that it took so long. He exploited the vulnerability of small, regional museums that have scant security, and then there was the complexity of drawing patterns of thefts across international borders. His boldness was at the heart of his success, but ultimately arrogance was his downfall.
Despite the audacity and the caper-like adventures of Stéphane and Anne-Catherine, theirs is a pathetic and creepy story. Breitweiser is selfish, lazy, manipulative and weird. Anne-Catherine may have had occasional crises of conscience and tried to play off her complicity as some sort of emotional abuse by her boyfriend, but come on. She aided and abetted and ultimately got away scot-free.
A gripping and fast read, which is a relief because you really don't want to spend too much time in Breitweiser's empty world. Highly recommended!...more
I didn't think, not now, not in this moment of incendiary division and desperation, when the world is crumpling under the weight of anger and battle fI didn't think, not now, not in this moment of incendiary division and desperation, when the world is crumpling under the weight of anger and battle fatigue, that I could have the emotional wherewithal to read a novel of war. Certainly not one that mired me in the trenches and barbed wire of the mass homicide that was World War I.
But I wasn't expecting this.
Alice Winn's debut novel, In Memoriam, is astonishing. At once breathtakingly epic and intimate, it explores in graphic, intense detail the horrors of battle and with tender, awkward and sensuous encounters, the delirious joy of physical desire and first love.
In the fall of 1914, the public school boys at Preshute — an elite academy that is a peer of Eton and Harrow — comb the school newspaper's new column, In Memoriam, for the notices of classmates who were killed, injured or are missing in action, newly-made heroes of this new war. In their plummy accents, these boys express their admiration for their fallen comrades and their longing to be at the front fighting for God and Country. But they fear their time may not come, for this war is certain to be settled by Christmas and they will have to settle for stories told by older brothers and graduated classmates.
We all know, as we read with dread, that many of these boys will soon lose their lives in a war that would stretch on for another four years. If they survived, many more would suffer grievous injury, physical and mental. Nearly one million British forces died, nearly two million were injured. It's impossible to grasp the devastation these numbers represent, but In Memoriam makes the inhumane achingly real.
The story centers around two Preshute friends: the charismatic and charmed Sidney "Elly" Ellwood and enigmatic, handsome Henry Gaunt. Their close friendship ripples with unrequited love and Winn captures the longing and confusion of these young men, laced with the accepted cruelties of boarding school life, the unavoidable agony of coming of age and the impossibility of "coming out" at a time when homosexuality was punishable by prison sentence. Both men enlist at the age of eighteen and become officers by virtue of their social status. Through these characters, we are taken into the trenches, the battlefields, the prison camps, hospitals, tunnels, the unimaginable horrors of war.
In Memoriam lands in my canon of great war literature, alongside works by Barbara Tuchman, Karl Marlantes, William Styron, Tim O'Brien, Sebastian Barry. It is beautifully written, an extraordinary achievement for the specificity of war history and combat scenes and the intricacies of class, sexuality, and the mapping of the human heart.
One of the year's best. Very best. Highly recommended....more
I placed this dual-biography on my TBR list a few years ago and wondered if I would ever make time to read it. But there is a right time for everythinI placed this dual-biography on my TBR list a few years ago and wondered if I would ever make time to read it. But there is a right time for everything. I bought a paperback edition several months ago and during a lull in the steady stream of library book holds, I fell into this exceptional portrait of two of my favorite artists.
The initial spark for me was curiosity: I didn't know that the Bohemian writer and the French sculptor were friends. In fact, I knew next to nothing of Rilke's life—just his dreamy poetry and his endlessly quotable Letters to a Young Poet. Because of my experiences living in France, I was more familiar with Rodin, the taciturn and difficult man who seemed to exemplify every cliché about famous French artists: a womanizer and a genius, obsessed with his craft and his legacy.
These two men formed an unlikely bond. They were separated by language — Rodin spoke only French; Rilke was a native German speaker; by age — Rodin was Rilke's senior by 35 years; and by temperament. Rodin was a proud Gaul and gruff workaholic who wasted little time on self-reflection and chatter. Rilke was a navel-gazing intellectual who flitted from Germany to France to Italy, chasing a muse and fleeing his domestic responsibilities.
To call them friends, at least initially, is a bit of a stretch. In 1902, Rilke was commissioned to produce a monograph of Rodin. Rilke still was a struggling young writer; Rodin already a lion of French culture. Rilke left the artists' colony in Germany where he and his artist-wife, Clara Westhoff, were raising their infant daughter, and relocated to Paris. Rilke would live off and on in Paris for the rest of his too-short life. The city would draw him back time and again because it was the center of creative energy, the sun around which all stars of the arts revolved.
Rilke eventually became Rodin's secretary, managing an immense volume of correspondence until writing for Rodin consumed all of his time, overriding his own work. Rodin, deeply insular and jealous of attention paid to anyone but him, threw Rilke out after he discovered that Rilke had established separate correspondence with some of Rodin's benefactors. Their fractious relationship finally healed during the war years, not long before Rodin's death in 1917.
You Must Change Your Life is not just a portrait of a complicated relationship between two artists. It is an examination of artistic influence and of an influential city in transition. Not long before Rilke's birth in 1875 Paris was transformed from a medieval labyrinth dotted with Gothic behemoths into an industrial Mecca of wide streets, gas lamps and marauding bands of hooligans. This Paris first broke artistic convention with the wave of Impressionist painters; just a few decades later it shocked the world again as it embraced the fractured styles of Fauvism and Cubism.
It is also the story of an artist in the making: Rainer Maria Rilke, who defied his traditional Austrian family to become a writer. I struggled with my reaction to this portrayal of Rilke. A poet whose work I so revere was in fact a whining, insecure gadabout who abandoned his wife and child to pursue his own interests. He was clingy with lovers, a feckless husband, and dispensed artistic advice he himself scarcely followed. But to his credit, he used his insecurities to push himself to become a better writer and a more empathic human. In the final years of his life, he nurtured the creative efforts of the young son of his final romantic relationship. That young man became the celebrated French-Polish painter Balthus. And Rilke never wavered in his admiration for and support of Rodin; it was his monographs of Rodin that helped elevate a working class sculptor to a venerated symbol of Gallic art.
I read this dual biography intending to explore the difficult relationship between Rilke and Rodin as a potential path to a new novel. I found that path, but not in following the lives of its principal subjects. Rather, it was the women who played second fiddle to these men who captured my imagination: Clara Westhoff and her best friend Paula Becker in Germany and Camille Claudel in France. These artists defied convention and pushed through societal walls to pursue their art. Claudel paid the highest price: her doomed affair with Rodin overshadowed her own extraordinary work. She died in obscurity in an insane asylum. Westhoff and Becker were friends and artists before they met Rilke, and Westhoff would eventually marry him. It is their unconventional lives that fascinate me. I'm excited to see where this interest, and these women, take me next.
You Must Change Your Life is immersive, deeply researched and illuminating. Highly recommended....more
Stunning travelogue and recipe collection of this most majestic region of Europe. I lived in France's Savoie region, and hiking in Italy's Alto Adige Stunning travelogue and recipe collection of this most majestic region of Europe. I lived in France's Savoie region, and hiking in Italy's Alto Adige has long been in my top-5 travel dreams; I love the wines of these regions. The Alpine cuisine is a generally too heavy and dairy-laden for my system, but in small doses it's omg. But I enjoyed this massive tome less for the recipes and more for the stories of this gasp-worthy mountaintop, storybook part of the world that I so dearly love- Alpine Europe. ...more
This outstanding biography of the most amazing Virginia Hall is more riveting than any well-crafted fictional thriller. Hidden in part because of her This outstanding biography of the most amazing Virginia Hall is more riveting than any well-crafted fictional thriller. Hidden in part because of her clandestine work, but mostly because history is written by men for their own glorification, Virginia's story was largely buried in the annals of military legend and lore. Her extraordinary life and what she accomplished in France during World War II is pieced together in meticulous detail by Sonia Purnell, who balances cold fact with brilliant storytelling, bringing Virginia to three-dimensional, vibrant life.
Hall, always the adventuress, left her native Baltimore for Europe in the mid-1930s. Barely twenty, she fell hard for the liberal lifestyle that awaited her in Paris and after finishing her education, she signed on to work for the State Department. Restricted to secretarial roles in Italy and Turkey, where she lost a leg in a hunting accident, she volunteered to drive an ambulance in France in 1940 just as the Germans began invading en masse.
And then Hall, a woman, an American, a striking, tall, redhead with a loping gait to compensate for her prosthetic leg, became one of the first operatives of the newly-formed British spy agency, Special Operations Executive (SOE). Virginia Hall, hastily trained, barely supported, was sent into occupied France to stir up support for an underground movement against the Germans and their French sycophants, the Vichy government. The groundwork laid by Virginia in Lyon became the heart of the French Resistance.
The moral and physical hardships endured by Virginia — from being undermined by her male colleagues in the field and at HQ in London, to starvation, constant fear of being discovered, crossing the Pyrenées on foot in winter with a damaged prosthetic leg, the near-misses, the dreaded double agents, knowing of the torture and murder of friends, colleagues, and the many who risked, and lost, their lives building the Resistance around her — most agents lasted months before they cracked or were outed and killed. Virginia endured for six long, lonely years.
Despite the massive amount of research detailing operations and its vast list of supporting characters, A Woman of No Importance is nimble and vibrant, just like the woman whose story it illuminates.
I'm delighted to learn this story is being made into a feature film. Virginia Hall is larger than life and her story deserves to be proclaimed from the rooftops. A highly recommended read!...more
As we grow and mature, forced into the rational world by education, employment, family and ambition, most of us lose our wonder with the world. We're As we grow and mature, forced into the rational world by education, employment, family and ambition, most of us lose our wonder with the world. We're distracted and entangled in the day-to-day and our imaginations begin to shrivel from lack of use.
Philip Pullman, in a story both poignant and pertinent, reminds us of the power of imagination and the costs of losing it. The Book of Dust series, a companion to his classic His Dark Materials is far more of the world of adults than the stories that originally brought us Lyra Belacqua, her daemon Pantalaimon, the dreaded Mrs. Coulter and the fierce Iorek Byrnison. His target is organized religion, fractured, fascist governments, and the rational mind which feeds its incurious mind with the souls of the sensitive.
The Secret Commonwealth fast forwards twenty years from where La Belle Sauvage ended. Lyra is a student at Oxford and she has tragically fallen out with Pantalaimon. The story, alternating between a host of characters heroic and sinister, rushes headlong through its 600+ pages, as the Magisterium spreads its claws and grasps even more power. Lyra, disconnected and depressed, has a vague sense that she is being called to respond to the brewing storm, but she can't muster enough curiosity to know what to do. She is surrounded by those who love her and understand her pivotal role, but only Lyra has the power to escape from her own inertia.
Then Pantalaimon witnesses a murder as he is out wandering alone at night. He and Lyra try to come together to explore their suspicions, but in frustration Pantalaimon abandons her, leaving a note that he's going to find the imagination she lost.
The agony of their separation finally pushes Lyra out the door, into action. She has the vague destination of a land far to the east, where a mysterious and highly valued rose is grown, a flower that seems to be at the center of the Magisterium's power grab.
This is magnificent. As ever and always, Pullman offers up a rich, profound fantasy world that shimmers just beyond the reach of our own with characters that endear, seduce, infuriate and frighten. I treasure how he never patronizes his younger readers — although his work may confound pre-teens with heavy themes and graphic violence — but adults will be just as satisfied and enchanted.
I cannot wait for the next. It's of particular comfort now to know this fantasy world is out there, running just parallel to our own. ...more
To know me is to know that I am fascinated by the history of Europe in the Middle Ages, I love long-distance walking, I have written a novel about theTo know me is to know that I am fascinated by the history of Europe in the Middle Ages, I love long-distance walking, I have written a novel about the Catholic Church's crusade to rid France of the Cathars, and my bucket list is full of pilgrimages, even though I'm not, nor will ever be, Catholic.
So I couldn't wait to curl up with Timothy Egan's A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, not only because of its setting and subject matter, but the author himself. A personal hero, one my Pacific Northwest compatriots, whose narrative nonfiction ranks among my favorites.
The author takes on the 1,200 mile Via Francigena, a medieval route between Canterbury and Rome, to contemplate the Catholic faith, search for meaning in its history, and come to terms with his own ambivalence. Egan was raised in a large Irish Catholic family in Spokane, home to the Jesuit university, Gonzaga. His mother was a vibrant, selfless, would-be artist who traded her own ambitions to raise a family and be a wife-mother to a taciturn salesman. He is a self-professed skeptic and abandoned his faith in the face of the Catholic church's and God's many failings, “You can see why people shun a supposedly benevolent creator who presided over the slaughter of the Wars of Religion, the African slave trade, the butchery of the Great War, Stalin’s mass executions, genocide in Germany and Uganda and Cambodia.” But Egan is hoping to reconnect with some manner of spirituality. His sister-in-law is dying of cancer, and he's getting to the age when one's mortality begs the question of an afterlife.
A Pilgrimage to Eternity is a humane, funny, gentle and engaging travelogue, a glimpse into the fraught and fascinating history of Catholicism and Christianity which is in many ways the history of Western Europe. Egan pulls no punches when detailing the broken promises and travesties of the Church, either historical or contemporary, including a harrowing episode of a predatory priest in Spokane, but he remains unabashedly admiring of Pope Francis and eagerly hopes for an audience with the pontiff at the end of his journey, using his connections as a journalist to reach out to the Vatican.
It's not clear what inner demons he calmed during his long walk to the seat of the Catholic Church; this books is less about Egan's spiritual journey than his physical and cultural one. It made me long to lace up my boots and strap on my pack, recalling the mind-emptying meditative bliss of my own long foot journeys through Ireland, and the peace I found in walking. I now add the Via Francigena to the long list of pilgrimages throughout Europe I will take in the years to come. Glad to learn the trick about taping heels (and toes- oh, that was so painful to read!).
A lovely travel narrative by one of my favorite non-fiction writers and journalists....more
In postwar Europe, the hunger for justice is keen. The Nuremberg Trials only scratch the surface; hundreds, thousands, of Nazi criminals remain at larIn postwar Europe, the hunger for justice is keen. The Nuremberg Trials only scratch the surface; hundreds, thousands, of Nazi criminals remain at large, scattered around the world as they slipped away in the chaotic aftermath.
A former British war correspondent sets about to bring as many of these shadowed monsters to light. He teams up with a rangy, wise-cracking American G.I. and a Russian bomber pilot, who turns out to be his wife. At the top of their most wanted list is The Huntress, a Nazi who trapped and murdered Polish refugees. Even her true identity is a mystery, so trying to find her in the displaced and desperate mass of humanity during those first frantic years after Germany's defeat is a Sisyphean task indeed.
Meanwhile, a young woman comes of age in the Boston suburbs with her father, a widowed owner of an antiques store. When he brings home a beautiful German woman, the first serious relationship he's had since his wife died several years before, Jordan, his teenaged daughter, fights her feelings of jealousy to embrace her father's newfound happiness. But there is something a little off about the perfectly poised Annaliese, a little something Jordan captures one day with her Leica. The camera reveals a cold, vicious expression, caught in a moment of candid surprise. Who is Annaliese, really?
Kate Quinn's premise is fascinating and her research impeccable. The characters are engaging, and the writing is excellent. There is much to love in this multi-layered work of historical fiction. Too much, really. It's overlong and begs great suspension of disbelief from the reader. The coincidences needed to steer the plot in the right direction were frustrating, and I found myself skimming through thick layers of backstory to return to the central narrative. Quinn's great writing and storytelling pushed me to the end, but I wish she and her editors had had some hard conversations....more
This rich, lovely novel offers a breathtaking tour of fin-de-siècle Scotland, France and Russia seen through the myopic eyes of Brodie Moncur, a renowThis rich, lovely novel offers a breathtaking tour of fin-de-siècle Scotland, France and Russia seen through the myopic eyes of Brodie Moncur, a renowned Scottish piano tuner. His severe short-sightedness serves as a metaphorical reminder that we should hold his perspective at arm's length. Brodie's adventures abroad often become misadventures due to his poor reading of reality.
Brodie is plucked from a dull piano showroom in Edinburgh to lend support at the company's troubled Paris flagship. There he comes up with a scheme to increase sales, and falls into the sphere of a once-celebrated and now slightly demodé Irish pianist, John Kilbarron, and his sinister brother and manager, Malachi. Brodie falls hopelessly in love with Kilbarron's Russian mistress, Lika Blum, an aspiring opera soprano, and becomes a man obsessed.
Lika and Brodie undertake a 'hidden in plain sight' love affair in Paris that blooms into a dangerous liaison when the small entourage moves to St Petersburg. After an old school duel goes tragically wrong (apparently, gentlemen aren't really supposed to fire those pistols), the lovers are forced to flee and go undercover. They are pursued in a cat-and-mouse chase across Europe, and eventually to India, that leaves the reader anxiously turning the pages, hoping the unlikely hero makes it out alive. Add to this Brodie's worsening tuberculosis, and love doesn't only seem blind, it seems doomed.
Love Is Blind is ripe with gorgeous period detail and Boyd makes piano tuning a fascinating avocation, particularly when Brodie uses it for nefarious purposes. He cuts through the melodrama with well-placed moments of humor. The novel is deliciously, compulsively readable-what a treat to relax into the words of a skilled storyteller.
I withhold a star for some of the most horrendously-written sex scenes I've ever read. I can't believe Boyd wasn't even nominated for the 2018 bad sex in fiction award (which gives me some idea of how REALLY bad the others were). And for the ending, which left so many dangling threads, and this reader bereft....more
Oh for heaven's sake. This was SO much fun. 100 percent delicious escape. Made me late for work. More, please!Oh for heaven's sake. This was SO much fun. 100 percent delicious escape. Made me late for work. More, please!...more
...beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body
Ali Smith upends the
...beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body
Ali Smith upends the standard binary worldview in this gorgeous, complex, postmodern creation. It's a rare book that leaves me weeping at the end, but this is a rare read, indeed. At once playful and melancholic, absurd and achingly real, How To Be Both transcends boundaries of past and present, life and death, perception and reality—not to mention plot and character—to become something greater than the sum of its two distinct, but intertwined, parts.
One part (I cannot say Part One because half the books were printed with one section leading off, half with, well, the other section) brings us the story of George, a teenager living in present-day Cambridge, England. George, named after the iconic 60s pop song Georgy Girl by The Seekers that reduced a young woman to little more than a pretty bauble, is searingly smart and self-aware, yet so vulnerable. She is navigating the murky waters of grief over the sudden loss of her mother, enigmatic and impulsive Carol. Seeking clues into Carol's psyche in a poignant attempt to connect with her mother, to know her and hold her in a way she could not before her mother's death—because we all take the living for granted, don't we?—George tumbles down the rabbit hole of Ali Smith's imagination.
George stumbles upon her mother's obsessions, including Carol's certainty that she was being monitored (or minotaured, in a delightful turn of phrase and twist of plot) by the government, and a work of art by a little-known Renaissance painter, Francescho del Cossa. Along the way, George develops obsessions of her own, including an internet porn video, which she forces herself to watch every day as a way to honor the young girl victimized by the pornography; and a friendship that grows into puppy love with a classmate, Helene Fisker, known as "H". She also gently leads her dumbstruck father and lonely younger brother through their own labyrinth of grief, while waiting for her house to literally fall down around her.
Although George's story is more immediately engaging, because it is told more or less conventionally, with a touching and tender perspective, it is del Cossa's madcap, meandering, stream-of-consciousness life story that anchors the book to its themes: the subversive power of art, the mutability of gender and sexuality, the way existence spills beyond the frames in which we try to contain it, all the madness and joy that is life, particularly life lived within art.
I like very much a foot,” she says, “or a hand, coming over the edge and over the frame into the world beyond the picture, cause a picture is a real thing in the world and this shift is a marker of this reality: and I like a figure to shift into that realm between the picture and the world just like I like a body really to be present under painted clothes where something, a breast, a chest, an elbow, a knee, presses up from beneath and brings life to a fabric.
I have this little notion, delicious to me, that George and H created del Cossa's narrative, or perhaps she, theirs, as she watches from a remove of 500 years. Or that somehow there was this beautiful melding of minds that melted the time and distance between these two stories, a melding that found purchase in a vibrant, revolutionary work of art.
But art and love are a matter of mouths open in cinnabar, of blackness and redness turned to velvet by assiduous grinding, of understanding the colours that benefit from being rubbed softly one into the other : beyond which there's originality itself, which is what practice is really about in the end and already I had a name for originality, undeniable, and to this name I had a responsibility beyond the answering of the needs of any friend.
Wait, what? you say. That makes no sense. Oh, dear reader. Let go of expectations, convention, allow yourself to be dazzled to the point of bafflement. The double helix of this narrative twists endlessly, spinning in possibility and wonder.
hello all the new bones hello all the old hello all the everything to be made and unmade both ...more
I closed the back cover of Tightrope, set the book on the table beside me, and switched on the radio. NPR was just beginning a segment on Russia's quiI closed the back cover of Tightrope, set the book on the table beside me, and switched on the radio. NPR was just beginning a segment on Russia's quiet but steady build up of a missile defense system, and its not so quiet military intervention in Syria, its aggression in Crimea. An interview with General Frank Gorenc, commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe and Africa, revealed the extent to which the United States is wringing its hands over Russia's beefing up of its military. "De-conflicting" is the term the General used. Is that an actual word?
De-confliction (see what I did there?) is what some Cold War spies had in mind when they became double agents, trading secrets on a moral high ground. They reasoned that if enemy countries had equal access to the most terrible things science and engineering could manufacture, a balance of power would be achieved, a peace wrung out of duplicity.
It's fine not to have read Trapeze the prequel to Tightrope, but really, you should. For it is there we first meet Marian Sutro, a young—very young—French-English girl recruited as an English spy during WWII. She parachutes into France at the height of the war and, well, read the novel. It's excellent.
In Tightrope, we meet Marian two years after that moonlit drop into a war zone. She is still quite young in years, but in spirit she is weary, nearly broken by torture and captivity. Tightrope moves at a ponderous pace, mirroring Marian's burden of grief, guilt, and the surreal return to the land of the living. Threading flashbacks and flash-forwards into the narrative, Mawer does a masterful job of adding dimensions of tension to the plot and emotional depth to his characters. There is awkwardness in the perspective interruption of a childhood admirer of Marian's, who steps in to provide background and exposition in odd and cloying segments. I'd rather have been left alone with Marian. But it does not detract significantly from the powerful, tender, graceful and aching character study of Marian Sutro.
The initial turgidity also reflects the dullness of England after the war—the excitement and urgency of the battle is over, replaced by the belt-tightening of life on rations, the chin down, bear-up of cleaning and restoring battered and bombed city streets.
Now that Marian has returned, desperately seeking anonymity, avoiding any claim of heroism, she is bereft of purpose, at times sustained, at times nearly crushed under the weight of wartime memories. She takes an innocuous job at a library, marries a solid former pilot-now-tire-salesman, and fails at settling into a normal life. Haunted by her tortures and deeds, she casts about for a reason to keep on, to look forward instead of behind.
In steps MI6 to fill the void. Marian is re-recruited as a spy. This time the enemy is behind the Iron Curtain and the crisis is one of proportions hard to grasp: total nuclear annihilation.
The cat-and-mouse plot moves forward like a slow-moving river with deadly currents hidden beneath murky waters, but what is most fascinating is the cat-and-mouse game Marian plays with her own soul. In Trapeze she was an ingénue. In Tightrope she is a cool seductress, at ease with slipping in and out of character, down side streets, into the night.
It is fascinating to read historical fiction about the infancy of the Cold War some thirty years after its limping, anti-climactic conclusion, knowing that here we are, still looking askance at Russia with Syria and the Crimea caught between the rocks and hard places of rattling sabers, Putin slapping his bare chest, and the machinations of diplomacy.
Simon Mawer reminds us that behind the engine of intrigue are human beings, motivated by and acting on entirely human impulses. ...more
So recently set adrift by two novels with multiple points-of-view, each chapter taking me through my paces with a new voice, each novel leaving me parSo recently set adrift by two novels with multiple points-of-view, each chapter taking me through my paces with a new voice, each novel leaving me parched for emotional resonance as though I were desperate sailor drinking sea water, I thought, 'No, not again," when I embarked upon this voyage with Naomi J. Williams and her debut Landfalls.
Okay, I'll stop with the silly seafaring metaphors.
But I won't stop raving about this unputdownable tour de force, crashingly good, tsunami of a novel.
Williams offers a kaleidoscopic view of the ill-fated Lapérouse expedition of 1785-89, which saw two frigates filled with over two hundred men attempt a circumnavigation of the globe for the glory of science, human endurance, and the maritime prowess of France. With each chapter the kaleidoscope shifts, offering a different perspective—from seaman to scientist, Tlingit child to French castaway. Several of the chapters were published as short stories and in many ways this novel is a collection of individual works, as Williams leaps nimbly from voice, perspective, and style. Yet with each landfall, the threads of characters' lives are woven through the narrative, connecting each part to all those which precede it and the underlying tension of a well-paced thriller holds you fast. The author frames a daring, complicated structure and shores it up, page after page, with a gripping, marvelously inventive, and historically solid story.
The scope of Williams's research is breathtaking yet, like modern masters of the form Mary Doria Russell, Hilary Mantel, David Mitchell, you are drawn naturally, unresistingly into a distant era by flesh-and-blood characters. Heartstrings are pulled in the opening pages and are never released, until the gasping end. There is humor and irony, violence and tragedy, longing and despair. I greedily devoured the pages of a dreamlike obsession with a child bride at a Chilean outpost, gasped at the crystalline and savage beauty of Alaska, burned with anger over sadistic priests on the California coast, mourned love found and lost during the heartbreaking Siberian journey of a translator and his devoted bodyguard. The scope of history and setting, of character and voice and emotion, is nothing short of astonishing.
This is simply the best of what historical fiction can be: a voyage of discovery that speaks to the imagination and the heart, swallowing the reader whole like a literary whale.
For my residency at Anam Cara on Ireland's Beara Peninsula last June, I was assigned the "Novel" room. Painted blue, with blue linens, carpet, curtainFor my residency at Anam Cara on Ireland's Beara Peninsula last June, I was assigned the "Novel" room. Painted blue, with blue linens, carpet, curtains, the room was like the inside of a raindrop. A large window above the desk faced west, over looking the bay, and at that time of year, the sun drifted away on clouds of coral sometime after 11:00, headed toward Iceland.
I found Seal Woman on the shelves that lined the Novel room, shelves that groaned under the hundreds of works of fiction, classic and fluffy, familiar and, well, novel. The cover looked just like the view from my window—black rocks reaching from the water and behind them, a velvet-smooth sea stretching toward a setting sun. The story—set in WWII Germany and post-war Iceland—sounded intense and soulful and achingly beautiful, like the scenery around me. I ran out of time before I could read Seal Woman, but returning to the States, I searched until I found a copy, serendipitously signed by the author.
Solveig Eggerz researched the lives of a small group of Germans who traveled to Iceland in the late 1940s as contract laborers for Icelandic farmers. Of the group of 314 men and women, roughly half stayed past their year of service, married and settled into their new communities. Seal Woman is the author's imagining of one of those lives, Charlotte Bernstein, who left Berlin broken by grief over the loss of her husband and only child.
As the story opens, we see a woman looking into the near distance at her middle-age, a silent husband beside her, two boys growing past the boundaries of their farm. The yearning, a voiceless keening, in Charlotte is palpable from the beginning. The story's quiet tension is built on her conflicting feelings of love and despair for her present and her past. There is grace and comfort to be found in the harsh, exhausting landscape where she lives, this lonely corner of a lonely island, yet we wonder how long she will last.
Much of the novel is rendered in flashback to Berlin before and during the war. Of scant means, working as a waitress and attending art school, Charlotte falls in love with Max, a fellow artist and department store heir, and, incidentally to Charlotte, a Jew. They marry, even as brownshirts and stormtroopers goose step like automatons through Berlin and relationships—business, familial, romantic—between Aryans and Jews are declared illegal and punishable by death. Charlotte begs to leave Berlin, their situation made even more precarious with the birth of their daughter, Lena, but Max joins a resistance movement and refuses. They remain, malnourished, terrified, but defiant. The nearly fifteen-year span between Charlotte and Max's courtship and the end of the war tripped me up a bit—years passing in a sentence seemed to diminish the sense of urgency and danger—but Eggerz shows the gradual, then precipitous, descent of Berlin as Hitler gained momentum and the Third Reich rose, smashing its way to power.
By war's end, Charlotte is alone, certain her husband and daughter are dead. But with no bodies to bury, no official notice, there is no closure, only a heavy cloak of grief and guilt, and a dreadful sliver of hope that haunts her dreams. Unable to bear the rubble of her heart that is so like the rubble of a bombed-out city, she leaves for the isolation and supposed peace of a farm in Iceland.
Seal Woman is a work of extraordinary rawness and depth. Eggerz portrays Charlotte's complex psyche with solemn grace, giving us time to develop profound empathy for her as she struggles to knit her past with her present. This is not only a finely rendered work of historical fiction, it is a rich character study, and a portrait of place. Iceland works its way into Charlotte's soul, the land and sea dueling for possession of her—one bracing her like the solid comfort of her new family, the other offering the sweet release of nothingness.
I have something to tell you... Charlotte's mother-in-law encourages Charlotte to release her story, the one she has kept locked inside for nearly twenty years—how she lost her husband and daughter—before she loses herself. In a land of legends, where storytelling is a way to explain a violent and beautiful world, Charlotte at last finds her voice.
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