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Catching up on billets before 20 Books of Summer starts.
As often, I read quicker than I write billets. It’s arithmetic. While I love to read after a work day, I can’t stand to open a computer again after the said work day and thus write billets only on weekends. Since there are more working days than weekend days and since I’m sometimes away on weekends, it’s easy to compute that my blogging is always running after the train of my reading.
This month, I’ve decided to cut my losses and write a sum-up post to clean my billet bill and start fresh on June 1st for the 20 Books of Summer challenge.
So, let’s have a tour of the not-reviewed books. It’s not in the order I read them.
First, Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy. (1970) The English translation from the Hungarian is by George Szirtes and the French one entitled Epépé is by Judith and Pierre Karinthy.
I suppose it’s dystopian fiction laced with Queneau and Perec tendencies.
Budai is a well-known linguist who is on his way to a convention in Helsinki. Somewhere along the way he hops on the wrong flight, conks out and arrives in an unknown city. Disoriented, he’s shuffled to a hotel in a country whose language he doesn’t understand. We follow his attempts at finding out where he is, how to communicate with others and find a way to go home. He’s in a metropole that looks like a western city. Very crowded with flows of people going from one place to the other, busy people who never stop to help him.
I’m not sure what Karinthy Junior wanted to say with this book. Denounce the absurd and inhumane life in big metropoles? Tell us something about language? Show us that even the best equipped linguist is at loss if he doesn’t have a Rosetta Stone?
It was fun at the beginning and then I was bored. I finished it thinking “OK, so what?” I’m probably not academic enough to have a coherent analysis of that kind of book. Have you read it? I’d love to discuss it.
The irony here is that Karinthy is Hungarian and speaks a language that is undecipherable for non-speakers. Let’s say you’re French and visit Hungary. If signs are not translated into English or with a pictogram, you wouldn’t be able to find the loo in the airport. That’s how different Hungarian is from French. Maybe Metropole is also a way to point this out.
Among the not-reviewed books are two abandoned books, one from my Kube subscription and the other from my Book Club list. I like to write my thoughts about abandoned books too as it’s good to understand why one couldn’t finish a book.
I received The Fire Starters by Jan Carson (2019) in my Kube subscription. The French title is Les lanceurs de feu and it’s translated by Dominique Goy-Blanquet. To be honest, it’s not a book I would have picked by myself in a bookstore.
The Fire Starters is set in Northern Ireland after the Troubles and features two fathers, Sammy Agnew and Jonathan Murray. The first one sees a bone-deep tendency to violence in his son and wishes he knew what to do. The second one is raising his baby girl on his own and doesn’t want her to look like her mother and hurt other people. The two fathers have something in common, even if they don’t come from the same political sides.
While I was ok with the plot thread involving Sammy Agnew, I couldn’t stand the one with Jonathan Murray and its magic realism elements. I really don’t like books with magic realism, ghosts, sirens and what nots. It put me off the book.
So, we’ll say that the book is good and I’m not the right reader for it. For an interesting and positive review, check out Lisa’s post.
The other book I abandoned was An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. (2018) and according to the blurb, I should have liked this one.
Celestial and Roy are African-American and newlyweds who live in Atlanta. Roy is sentenced to twelve years for a crime he didn’t commit. How do they overcome this?
I probably would have enjoyed it if I hadn’t read If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. It’s disheartening that Tayari Jones can write the same kind of story in contemporary America, that’s for sure. But after reading Baldwin, a book on the same topic pales in comparison and I wasn’t involved in Roy and Celestial’s story the same way I was in Fonny and Tish’s.
A missed opportunity, I suppose but Karen at Booker Talk wasn’t blown away either.
Amidst this reading slump, I turned to a book about book lovers, that’s usually a safe place to go. Well, not this time.
The bookseller of Selinunte by Roberto Vecchioni (2004) French title: Le Libraire de Sélinonte, translated by Gérard-Julien Salvy
Selinunte is an Ancient Greek city in Sicily. It’s a beautiful place to visit as there are ruins of Greek temples in a beautiful place by the sea. So nowadays, it’s a dead city.
In the book, it’s an inhabited town where a strange bookseller wants people to connect with books. He opens his store at night and reads books aloud. He’s rapidly ostracized by the population. The only one who falls into the cauldron of the libraire’s book magic potion is Nicolino. He sneaks out of his bed every night to listen to books, hidden away from the libraire.
Then the libraire is assaulted and all the population of Selinunte loses the ability to speak. Only Nicolino retains the old words and the ability to speak properly.
We’re back to my issue with supernatural elements or magic realism or whatever the name they have. Or perhaps I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to let myself be caught up by the story. It felt stilted and had this I-want-to-deliver-a-message vibe that put a glass wall between the book and me.
To finish on a positive note, two collections of short-stories I really recommend.
Dog Run Moon by Callan Wink. (2016) French title: Courir au clair de lune avec un chien volé. Translated by Michel Lederer.
Dog Run Moon is a collection of ten short stories by writer and fly-fishing guide Callan Wink. Imagine that you live in Montana, take people fly-fishing and one of your clients is Jim Harrison. Lucky you, right?
Dog Run Moon is full of stories set in Montana and Wyoming, where nature has a front seat in people’s lives and with characters who are a bit bruised and battered.
The stories involve various types of characters who reflect on their lives, find themselves in a difficult situation, make life-changing decisions on impulse. There’s always a dark angle in these stories, with people who live a bit on the edges.
There is definitely something of Jim Harrison in Callan Wink’s writing, that’s for sure. Good for us readers who love Jim Harrison but a tall order for Callan Wink.
The other collection of short stories is…
Dry Rain by Pete Fromm (1997) French title: Chinook. Translated by Marc Amfreville.
There’s almost ten years between the publication of Dog Run Moon (2016) and Dry Rain by Pete Fromm. The collections are equally good but Pete Fromm’s characters are more average people than Wink’s. It makes it easier to relate.
Most of the sixteen stories are first person narratives by a white man. All pictures the narrator and their families at a landmark of their lives. It’s not a visible landmark like a wedding or the birth of a child. It’s in an internal landmark, an event that can be an anecdote but left a mark on the narrator’s tree of life.
It’s the remembrance of the fear that a father experienced when he lost his son in a corn maze. It’s a chance meeting with a girl that will push the narrator to think about his past. It’s the moment the narrator must acknowledge that his marriage is sinking. You see the drift. Small and big moments that become either a turning point or rearrange someone’s inner pieces.
Pete Fromm writes about us, small people with our average lives and there’s never any contempt. He has affection for people, their little quirks, their flaws and their hard-working lives. He doesn’t imply that they are losers because they didn’t go to university or never left their hometown. (Cf And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu). This is why I love Fromm’s stories and of course it doesn’t hurt that he’s a skilled writer.
He’s an author I’d love to meet. There aren’t many of them like that but I’m tracking down the Gallmeister newsletters to see if they set up a tour for him in France. He’s probably one of those writers who sell a lot more books in France than in their own country, so we have a chance he’ll come and meet his readers.
Meanwhile, we have his books and I highly recommend these two collections of short stories.
And… Mission accomplished! I’m all caught up with my billets before June starts!
Killers of the Flower Moon. The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. – Made into a film by Martin Scorsese.
Killers of the Flower Moon. The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (2017) French title: La note américaine. Translated by Cyril Gay.
My sister-in-law and I had put on Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann in our list of books for our yearlong readalong. And now that I’ve just read it, it’s all in the media everywhere since Martin Scorsese made it into a film with Leonardo di Caprio and Robert de Niro. After reading the book, I think it is the right director and the right cast for this film.
So, what’s it about? We’re here in an astonishing case of reality defeats fiction. With flying colors.
In the early 1970s, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in the northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties. In the early twentieth century, each person on the tribal roll began receiving a quarterly check. The amount was initially for only a few dollars, but over time, as more oil was tapped, the dividends grew into the hundreds, then the thousands. And virtually, every year the payments increased, like the prairie creeks that join to form the wide, muddy Cimarron, until the tribe members had collectively accumulated millions and millions of dollars. (In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.) The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world.
I’d never heard of the oil boom in the Osage reservation in Oklahoma in the 1920s.
The book opens with Mollie Burkhart’s story. She’s an Osage lady happily married to Ernest Burkhart, a white man. Burkhart is one of William Hale’s nephews and he works for him.
William Hale was a powerful businessman in the Osage county, an advocate for law and order, a friend of the local politicians and many considered him as a great benefactor of the Osage county. The kind who has his fingers in many pies and knows how to make and break politicians’, judges’ and sheriffs’ careers. Since all these people are elected by people who can be influenced, it’s better not to ruffle Hale’s feathers.
Mollie is on the tribe roll, which means that she receives checks from the oil royalties and that she’s rich. In May 21st, 1921, Mollie’s sister Anna disappears and her body is found murdered. Another Osage, Charles Whitehorn, is murdered at the same time. Of course, the authorities aren’t really bothered by the violent death of two Indians.
Mollie has money and she hires private investigators to discover who murdered her sister. As the number of murders increases and the local sheriffs don’t make any progress, the young and ambitious John Edgar Hoover sends his agent Tom White on location. He’s to hire a team and find out who the murdered is.
This investigation is the golden opportunity that Hoover was waiting for to push for the creation of what is now known as the FBI.
Killers of the Flower Moon is an outstanding book. David Grann writes the stunning story of the Osage murders in this county. He writes his book as if it were crime fiction, only this time, everything is true and documented.
David Grann is a talented journalist who did thorough research. The chapters are gripping and I was is totally caught into the investigation. Violence, corruption, greed, ambition, he shows an Oklahoma rotten to the core. White people would do anything to con the Indians, to put their hands on their lands, their money and deprive them of everything.
The other side of the book is about the birth of the FBI, the beginning of Hoover’s power in Washington. And we know how powerful he became and what he made of his agency.
I won’t tell much about what happened back then because I don’t want to spoil your reading. I knew nothing about this piece of American history and I was hooked from the first chapter.
I was is aware of all the research involved and yet it didn’t feel like an essay. The book includes pictures of the main protagonists and seeing their faces and their families made this awful story even more upsetting. The things we humans are able to do to other humans for money will never ceaze to amaze me.
Grann illustrates perfectly how his country was built on violence, greed and thirst for fame and money and how its institutions were faulty from the start. It also shows the constant actions aimed at destroying the native peoples of the country. It makes me wonder how close we are to the definition of crime against humanity.
I am very impatient to watch Scorsese’s film. Until it is released, I really, really recommend David Grann’s book as it is brilliant, informative, and suspenseful. A fascinating read.
20 Books of Summer 2023 and a joker- My list!
I was happy to see that Cathy from 746 Books hosts her 20 Books Of Summer event again this year. I know I could pick 10 or 15 books instead of 20 but I’m going to challenge myself a bit, even if reading isn’t a competition.
Picking the 20 books is already a lot of fun. This year I chose books from my TBR and according to three categories: books I’ll read as part of already set-up readalongs, books I want to read around my summer trip to Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota and other books from various countries, just for armchair travelling and making a dent in the TBR.
Books from my readalongs:
Ballad of Dogs’ Beach by José Cardoso Pires (1982) – Portugal. French title: Ballade de la plage aux chiens.
We’re in 1960 and a rebellious officer is found dead on a beach. He was killed after evading from prison with his girlfriend after an aborted coup. The novel is about his life and the investigation on his death.
L’Autre by Andrée Chedid (1969) – France. Not available in English
Andrée Chedid is a French poetess. When I browse through the book, I see it’s made of three short stories, that these stories include poems and texts with a weird layout. I’m curious about it.
The Moving Target by Ross McDonald (1949) – USA. French title: Cible mouvante.
I’ll finally read my first Lew Archer investigation! I’ve read only good reviews about this series and in France it is published by Gallmeister in a new translation by the talented Jacques Mailhos.
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) – USA. French title: L’attrape-coeurs.
I’ve read it in French when I was a teenager. This time I’ll read it in English. I wonder how I’ll respond to it now that I’m older.
Letters to wilderness by Wallace Stegner – USA. French title: Lettres pour le monde sauvage.
This is a collection of non-fiction essays by Wallace Stegner. I think these texts were put together by Gallmeister and translated by Anatole Pons-Reumaux. I’m not sure this exact collection exists in English. I’ve read Crossing to Safety and Remember Laughter and I love his prose. I’m looking forward to reading his essays.
Books for my trip to Montana and Wyoming
An Unfinished Life by Mark Spragg (2004) – USA. French title: Une vie inachevée.
I got this as a gift and I’ve seen it has been made into a film with Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez. Here’s a excerpt of the blurb “After escaping the last of a long string of abusive boyfriends, Jean Gilkyson and her ten-year-old daughter Griff have nowhere left to go. Nowhere except Ishawooa, Wyoming, where Jean’s estranged father-in-law, Einar, still blames her for the death of his son.”
Justice by Larry Watson (1995) – USA. French title: Justice.
I’ve already read Montana 1948 and Justice is a prequel to it.
Spirit of Steamboat by Craig Johnson (2013) – USA Not available in French.
A Christmas story with sheriff Longmire. Maybe it’ll be a little strange to read a Christmas story in the summer. I don’t know, I’ll let you know how that feels. 🙂
Fall Back Down When I Die by Joe Wilkins (2019) – USA French title: Ces montagnes à jamais.
A young ranch hand has just lost his mother, owes a lot of money for her medical bills and his son’s cousin comes in his care. It sounds like a great story of a man and a little boy who both need a lot of TLC.
Savage Run by C.J Box (2003) – USA French title: La mort au fond du canyon.
This is the second volume of the Joe Pickett series. It’s a perfect read for the 21 hours of travel from Lyon to Billings.
If Not For This by Pete Fromm (2014) – USA French title: Mon désir le plus ardent.
I’ve read his novel A Job You Mostly Won’t Know to Do and his essay, Indian Creek Chronicles and a collection of short stories, Chinook. All were outstanding. Needless to say I’m looking forward reading another book by him.
Montana. La reconquête de l’Ouest (2018) – Belgium Not available in English.
This is a collection of essays about Montana’s history. It’s only 85 pages long, a short read then.
Armchair travelling and TBR management
Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery (1955) – Egypt. French title: Mendiants et orgueilleux.
Albert Cossery (November 3, 1913 – June 22, 2008) was an Egyptian-born French writer of Greek Orthodox Syrian and Lebanese descent, born in Cairo. Proud Beggards is set in Cairo but written in French.
Children of the Bitter River by Fang Fang (1987) – China. Frencht title: Une vue splendide.
Fang Fang is a Chinese writer from Huhan and I’ve never read her. Here’s the blurb of the book which “narrates a Chinese version of the Horatio Alger myth of a poor boy achieving fame and fortune. In addition to daunting poverty, the hero, Seventh Brother, must overcome the trauma of physical abuse. His story and that of his six brothers traces the history of China from the 1930s to the mid-1980s.
Ping-Pong by Park Min-kyu (2016) – Korea Not available in English
I’ve already read his Pavane for a Dead Princess but Ping-Pong seems a lot more playful. Two adolescents are bullied at school and they discover a field with a ping-pong table. It becomes their safe haven. They meet with Secrétin and strike a bet with him. The book mixes realism and science fiction.
Sputnik Sweethearts by Haruki Murakami (1999) – Japan. French title: Les amants du spoutnik.
I have it in English on the kindle, perfect for travelling. I hope I’ll like it as I’m not always fond of Murakami’s novels. We’ll see.
The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (2015) – Nigeria. French title: Les pêcheurs.
I’m trying to read more African books and I picked this one a couple of years ago. Here’s the blurb: “In a small town in western Nigeria, four young brothers take advantage of their strict father’s absence from home to go fishing at a forbidden local river. They encounter a dangerous local madman who predicts that the oldest boy will be killed by one of his brothers. This prophecy unleashes a tragic chain of events of almost mythic proportions.”
High Rising by Angela Thirkell (1933) – UK. French title: Bienvenue à High Rising.
This is another light read for planes and airports.
Gratitude by Delphine de Vigan (2019) – France. Original French title: Les Gratitudes.
Another book that I have on the kindle. Delphine de Vigan never disappoints and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.
A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee (2016) – UK. French title: L’attaque du Calcutta-Darjeeling.
This is a book I bought at Quais du Polar. It’s the first instalment of the Sam Wyndham series set in colonial India.
The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen (2015) – Mexico. French title: Gabacho
I remember where I bought this novel. It was in an indie bookstore in Barcelonnette, in the South of France. This town has a special relationship with Mexico as a lot of people emigrated to Mexico in the 19thcentury, became successful businessmen there and came back to their hometown and built sumptuous mansions. An incredible story.
So the local bookstore carries Mexican lit and I was drawn to The Gringo Champion, the story of a young Mexican boy who emigrate illegally in the US and tells his story as a clandestine.
That’s my list for the summer. Five books are on the Gallmeister catalogue and we’ll go to Portugal, France, America, especially Montana and Wyoming, Egypt, China, Korea, Japan, Nigeria, UK and Mexico. That’s quite a tour!
Have you read any of these books? Will you be doing the 10 / 15 / 20 Books of Summer too?
Darktown by Thomas Mullen – black police officers in Atlanta in 1948. Highly recommended
Darktown by Thomas Mullen (2016) French title: Darktown. Translated by Anne-Marie Carrière.
As often, I’m late with my billets. April and May are a sort of rat race, all for good reasons but I didn’t have a lot of time for blogging, reading other bloggers’ posts and reading books. I read Darktown by Thomas Mullen in March, before Quais du Polar as I knew that the author would be at the festival. I did have the opportunity to get the sequel of Darktown, Lightning Men, and have it signed.
Darktown is considered at historical crime fiction as it is set in 1948 in Atlanta. That year, under political pressure, the Atlanta Police Department hires their first black police officers.
They are not welcome by their white peers and are second zone policemen. They can’t arrest white suspects. They can’t carry a weapon. They can’t drive a squad car and they can’t enter the police headquarters and have to use the basement of a gym instead.
Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith are part of this new team of eight black policemen managed by a white officer, McInnis. They operate in Darktown, a black neighborhood in Atlanta and share the territory with a team of white officers, Lionel Dunlow and Denny Rakestraw.
When patrolling one night, Boggs and Smith see a black woman taken away in a white’s car. She’s Lily Ellsworth and the driver is Brian Underhill, an ex-cop. Later, Lily’s body is found beaten to death in a dump. No one cares about her murder, except for Boggs and Smith.
They will do their best to find her murderer, even if this investigation crosses some dangerous lines and puts them at risk.
Thomas Mullen created a set of characters that works really well. Boggs and Smith are both black but don’t come from the same background. Boggs comes from a poor family and went to France as a soldier during WWI. He knows violence and ingrained racism aimed at him. Smith is the son of a bourgeois black family; his father is a well-known reverent who fights for black people’s rights through the system. Smith is educated and lived a rather sheltered life, until he made the decision to help his community by applying to the Atlanta Police Department. This duo complements each other. Boggs needs Smith’s calm and education to smooth his edges. Smith needs Boggs’s street smartness.
The duo of white cops is another story. Lionel Dunlow is the old school policeman: violent, racist and corrupt. Darktown is his fief and he acts as if he owns everyone’s life and, in a sense, he does. Rakestraw is a newbie who wants to play by the book and recoils from gratuitous violence. He hates his partner but he knows that Dunlow is well-respected in the department. Rake is more progressist, less racist and willing to cross the line and throw a hand to his new black colleagues but he’s prudent.
The investigation progresses and Mullen shows the atmosphere of the town. He describes Smith’s and Boggs’s quotidian and the constant humiliations that they must swallow. It’s like a flock of tiny needles picking at them all the time. You need a tough skin to let them slide and keep your calm and your dignity.
This black team can’t work properly because they are black. Nobody cares about the death of a black young woman. Nobody cares to find the real murderer and the police would rather fabricate a perpetrator to give the illusion of justice. All layers of the white community in Atlanta collaborate, actively or not at keeping black people down and maintaining the status quo.
Were these behaviors a surprise? Of course not. Any reader would expect this kind of atmosphere in 1948 in Atlanta. But Mullen’s talent is such that he makes you feel a bit of what Smith and Boggs experience and I felt so angry on their behalf that I couldn’t read Darktown at night. I was so worked up by what I was reading that it was not sleep inducing.
Darktown and its new police squad is the kind of topic that Colson Whitehead could have written about. Thomas Mullen is white and while he was signing my copy of Lightning Men, I asked him whether people had questioned his writing about black history and with black characters. It shouldn’t be an issue but it could be nowadays. He said that, no, he didn’t have any issues with that, probably because he did his homework before writing and had the facts and the atmosphere right.
Very highly recommended.
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson and Dancing Bear by James Crumley – sons of western Montana
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson (2014) French title: Yaak Valley, Montana. Translated by Nathalie Peronny.
Dancing Bear by James Crumley (1983) French title: La danse de l’ours. Translated by Jacques Mailhos.
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson and Dancing Bear by James Crumley have been written thirty-one years apart but when I read the Crumley, I thought about the Henderson, as if there were a parentage between the two.
The main character of Fourth of July Creek is Pete Snow. He’s in his early thirties, separated from his wife Beth, who just decided to move to Texas, taking their thirteen-year-old daughter with her. Pete is a social worker in the north-west of Montana, near the Yaak River.
His life is a mess, he drinks too much, his daughter hates him and he’s worried about his ex-wife’s lifestyle as she’s a junkie. His brother Luke is hiding from his parole officer and he doesn’t get along with his father. In other words, Pete is something who’d need to benefit from his own social services.
We follow him in his work area as he tries to do his job as best as he can. He’s mostly busy with two families, one where the mother is a drug user and has two children and another more mysterious one, the Pearls. Benjamin Pearl intruded into a school and the principal called Pete. Benjamin lives in the woods with his survivalist father. He’s homeschooled and his father is into conspiracy theories.
Pete wants to help Benjamin and his contacts with the Pearl family will get him into trouble. Meanwhile, his personal life turns to hell…
Milo Milodragovitch, the main character of Dancing Bear is a former PI, current security agent who lives in Merriwether, Montana. He comes from money but his father’s will says he can’t get the family money until he’s 52. He’s now 47 and is doing odd jobs to earn his keep until his age frees his inheritance.
He drinks too much but tries to monitor his drinking and stay in control. Let’s say that he switched from whisky to peppermint schnaps and cocaine. Not sure it’s a better combo. He’s bored with his security job but cares about his employer, Colonel Haliburton who hires veterans to help them adjust to civilian life.
His past life comes into his present when he’s hired by Sarah Weddington, one of his father’s former lovers. She’s an old lady now and she’s spying on her neighbors. She’s seen some weird rendezvous in the park near her house and she wants to know who the people are. She wants Milo to find out and she’s willing to pay well and as it sounds more like indulging an old lady than anything else, Milo agrees to dig into this couple’s life and find their identity.
Wrong move. Milo’s propension to attract troubles is out-of-this world. This easy assignment turns into a dangerous dive into drug and influence trafficking. Lots of cocaine-sniffing, brawls, gunfights, car chasing and housebreaking, that’s Milo for you. Same old Milo as in Wrong Case, the first Milo Milodragovitch book.
The two stories seem very different but the two books have common points. The most obvious one is that they are set in the same area in Montana and at the same time. Indeed, even if it was published in 2014, Fourth of July Creek is set in 1980/1981, after Reagan’s election.
Dancing Bear was published in 1983. Both books describe Montana and America at the turning point of the 1980s, Henderson with hindsight and Crumley with insight. The fun of the 1970s is fading away. Outsourcing public services like garbage collection to private firms has started. Economic liberalism is about to take over everything, cutting State budgets like the ones that finance Pete’s actions. It will deregulate lots of industries and allow more appropriation of natural resources.
Henderson and Crumley set their stories in Montana; they don’t show the ranchers or the farmers but the people in towns. (I don’t understand the French cover of Henderson’s book). The atmosphere in Merriwether is polluted by the paper mill near the city. They depict the poor workers, the people who live on the margins. The hopeless.
Pete and Milo have unfinished business with their fathers, a love-hate relationship that is corrosive to their souls. Pete and Beth got married very young because she was pregnant with Rachel. They were too immature to be parents and not ready to leave the booze and the partying behind. Milo has been married and divorced five times; he has no relationship with his son.
Pete and Milo are flawed and their personal life is a mess but you get attached to them. They have a lot of empathy for people around them. They care. See how Pete sees his job:
There were families you helped because this was you’re your job, and you helped them get into work programs or you set up an action plan and checked in on them or you gave them a ride to the god-damn doctor’s office to have that infection looked at. You just did. Because no one else was going to. And then there were the people who were reasons for you to do your job. Katie. Why. Fuck why.
She just was.
Pete cares about little Katie and isn’t comfortable to let her live with her mother. He goes out of his way to connect to Jeremiah Pearl, Benjamin’s father. Deep down he knows that a child who breaks into a school class is crying for help.
And Milo helps Mrs Weddington for the money, but also in memory of their former acquaintance and because he’s too kind-hearted to refuse. He’ll help a colleague at Haliburton Security. People around them acknowledge that they have good hearts and support them. They need it as they tend to get into a lot of trouble.
Henderson and Crumley have an excellent style with original, flawed but engaging characters. They have a beautiful way to describe the Montana weather and wilderness. I have these two novels in French translation but here’s the opening paragraph of Dancing Bear.
We had been blessed with a long, easy fall for western Montana. The two light snowfalls had melted before noon, and in November we had three weeks of Indian Summer so warm and seductive that even we natives seemed to forget about winter. But in the canyon of Hell Roaring Creel, where I live, when the morning breezes stirred off the stone-cold water and into the golden, dying rustle of the cottonwoods and creek willows, you could smell the sear, frozen heart of winter, February, or, as the Indians sometimes called it, the Moon of the Children Weeping in the Lodges, crying in hunger.
Both writers have an incredible sense of place, an ability to feel the time of their story and build vivid characters. Dancing Bear is crime fiction, a plot-driven genre but in Four of July Creek too, the reader wants to understand what happened to the Pearl family, who Jeremiah really is and if Pete will solve his personal issue involving his daughter Rachel. (Trying to avoid spoilers here.)
I don’t know if James Crumley influenced Smith Henderson but I saw a link between the two, probably because they have main characters who have a moral compass and question the model of the American psyche. Making money. Being sucessful. What does it mean, in the end? Through their actions, Pete and Milo question the system and its values. What’s actual freedom? Do I need to comply to laws I find unfair?
Third crime is the charm #3 – Nice, London and Tokyo
Boccanera by Michèle Pedinielli (2018) Not available in English. (Yet?)
This was our Book Club choice for April.
Ghjulia “Diou” Boccanera, the Boccanera of this crime fiction book by Michèle Pedinielli, is a PI who lives and works in Nice, on the French Riviera.
She’s hired by Mauro Giannini’s boyfriend after Mauro was murdered. The police would like it to be a homophobic crime, Diou thinks that it’s too easy a scenario for it to be accurate.
She starts investigating and takes us around Nice, its old town, its Promenade des Anglais and its gay scene. The story is well-sewn and the pleasure of this book lies in the suspense of the plot (who did it?), the colorful and attaching characters that populate Diou’s life and the author’s love for her native city.
Boccanera wants to be Nice’s Montale but I think that Izzo was a more gifted or more experienced writer. We’ll see how the author’s style and characters develop in the next volumes. It still is an excellent book for entertainment and armchair travelling. Nice is a few fours from Lyon, too, opposite direction of the Vosges mountains and totally different vibe but very tempting too.
Boccanera is a series and I got the second volume, Après les chiens, at Quais du Polar and got it signed by this friendly and enthusiastic writer.
Body Language by A.K. Turner (2020) French title: Body Language.
A.K. Turner is another author who was invited at Quais du Polar, I was reading her book during the festival and I attended a panel where she discussed the setting of her crime fiction series. Body Language is the first volume of her Cassie Raven series.
Cassie Raven is a mortuary assistant at the morgue in Camden Town, London. Her parents died in a car accident when she was four and she was raised by her grand-mother. She had a rather chaotic adolescence, lived on the margins for a while until her teacher, Geraldine Edwards, mentored and tutored her until she got her diploma.
On the police side, Camden Town has a new detective, Phyllida Flyte. She’s a transfer from the Winchester police and she’s a by-the-book police officer. She needs to adapt to policing in Camden Town while she works through her personal drama.
When Geraldine’s body arrives at the morgue after a death in puzzling circumstances, Cassie starts investigating. The police tends to think it was an accident, Cassie isn’t so sure.
Cassie, with her Goth style and her past as an outsider couldn’t be more different from her. Flyte’s first instinct is to be suspicious of this weird mortuary assistant. As the story progresses, the two will forge a tentative work relationship.
The plot moved forward at an good pace, Cassie and Phyllida have catching backgrounds and life in Camden town is part of the book. A.K. Turner explained that this neighbourhood’s culture sits well with Cassie and asks Phyllida to adjust.
Body Language is an entertaining book, like watching a TV series and I wouldn’t mind spending more time with Cassie but I left London for Paris and then Tokyo with Louise Morvan.
Baka! by Dominique Sylvain (2007) French title: Baka! Not available in English.
Baka! is a Japanese word that means idiot. Dominique Sylvain is a French author who lived a few years in Japan. She first wrote Baka! in 1995 and then rewrote it in 2007. I have the last version, the first one is OOP.
Baka! is the first volume of the Louise Morvan series. She’s a PI who lives in Paris. She inherited her uncle’s PI agency when he died in action. She’s still working through his death and is trying to find her footing at the head of the agency.
She’s hired by Bishop Chevry-Morvan to go and check on his nephew Florent who has moved to Tokyo. Florent has asked his uncle for a substantial loan and the bishop is worried. Or so it seems.
Louise arrives in Tokyo, speaking English but not a word of Japanese, like most of us, I guess. She quickly realizes that things aren’t as straightforward as the bishop said and that she got herself into a dangerous mess.
Tokyo and Japan are an important part of the book: the geography, the customs, the way-of-life. I thought that in this one, Dominique Sylvain tried to embrace too many things at the same time. As we say in French Qui trop embrasse mal étreint, literally meaning that if you try to hug too many things at the same time, you don’t hold onto them very well.
There are too many plot threads in the book, the characters are all connected and have their personal goal or issue in the global picture. I thought it was a bit too much.
However, I really liked Louise Morvan as a character. Unapologetic. Bold. Fearless. In Baka!, we didn’t stay long in Paris before and after the Tokyo trip, but Louise Morvan has the same kind of microcosm as Ghjulia Boccanera in Nice. Familiar faces in a local café and informal relationships with the cops.
Other reviews of books by Dominique Sylvain:
- A standalone also set in Japan: Kabuchiko an excellent one that needs an English translator who speaks French, knows France and Japan. (Wonder who that could be? 😊)
- A standalone set in Paris Les Infidèles
- The second volume of the Louise Morvan series Soeurs de sang,
- Also set in Paris, the first volume of the Lola Jost & Ingrid Diesel : Passage du Désir. This one is available in English and is entitled Dark Angel.
I also started and abandoned 19500 dollars la tonne by Jean-Hugues Oppel. It didn’t work for me.
Upcoming crime fiction billets: the excellent Darktown by Thomas Mullen, the incredible Dancing Bear by James Crumley and the masterpiece Moth by James Sallis.
Malamute by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent – French Nature Writing
Malamute by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent. (2021) Not available in English.
Jean-Paul Didierlaurent is better known for his book The Reader on the 6.27 which I haven’t read. It sounds like a book about books and a rather feel-good novel. Malamute has nothing to do with that brand of literature and veers towards Noir and Nature Writing.
We’re in November, at the beginning of the ski season in La Voljoux, in the Vosges mountains. Germain Grosdemanges is in his eighties, a widower who lives in a remote farm. He’s getting older and his only daughter Françoise worries about him. She lives near Paris and can’t visit him very often. She strikes a deal with Basile, her cousin’s son. Basile is a snow groomer who will work in La Voljoux during the upcoming ski season.
The arrangement is mutually beneficial: Basile can stay rent-free at the farm if he keeps an eye on Germain and does a bit of housework. Peace of mind for Françoise. Savings for a broke seasonal worker. Basile accepts and Germain surrenders to Françoise’s command because it keeps the looming nursing home at bay.
Meanwhile Emmanuelle settles in the farm near Germain’s; she’s also a snow-grooming agent. Her father died a few months ago and she inherited that farm that she’d never heard of. Her parents were Slovak emigrants who came to the village in 1976. Her father Dragan wanted to be a musher and drive tourists around on his sleigh. Their business never took off, partly due to the hostility of the villagers. Her parents left their farm abruptly and never came back to La Voljoux. They were miserable after that and now Emmanuelle wants to know what happened.
She comes to introduce herself to Germain, who recognizes her mother in her. He’s unwilling to tell what happened all those years ago. Something he keeps as a very well-guarded secret. Something he’s ashamed of.
A snowstorm arrives and disrupts the village’s quiet life. Emmanuelle and Basile work in the same snow-grooming team and work very hard on the slopes but also driving snow-plows to clear the roads. Germain and them are forced to get closer. Secrets resurface…
Malamute by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent belongs to Nature Writing. It could be a Gallmeister book.
Germain used to work as a woodcutter and loves the forest and trees in general. He has a collection of woodcuts and he loves imagining what these trees went through. He looks at them as witnesses of times long gone. To him, they are pieces of History. He has this grumpy-old-man vibe that you meet in books by American Nature Writing authors.
The mountains and the woods surrounding La Voljoux are characters in themselves, they are part of the plot. The snowfalls lock Germain, Basile and Emmanuelle in the farm. They can go out because they drive snowplows, otherwise, they’d be totally snowed in. The impact of the heavy snowfalls moves the story forward. La Voljoux is a little village in the mountains, people live there and everyone knows everyone’s business. Its survival depends on the success of the ski season and the weather plays an important role in the villagers’ lives and how the events unfold.
Didierlaurent writes a very atmospheric book that rings true. His characters have names that are typical from the Vosges region. He’s from the area and it seeps through his style, giving the book an authentic flavor and an incredible sense of place. Despite the historical snow storm of the book, it made me want to go hiking in the Vosges mountains. It’s only a few hours away from Lyon, so who knows?…
Malamute has not been translated into English but The Reader on the 6.27 and its sequel The Rest of their Lives have been translated by Ros Schwartz. Malamute was published in 2021, let’s hope that Ros Schwartz is working on it too.
Highly recommended. And that was another very good choice by Camille, my Kube libraire.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan – stunning
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2020) French title: Ce genre de petites choses. Translated by Jacqueline Odin.
I owe Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan to my KUBE libraire. I didn’t like Foster that much when I read it and never tried another book by Claire Keegan after. I would have been missing out.
Small Things Like These is set in New Ross, Ireland, in the weeks before Christmas. It’s a busy time for Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man. He runs his company while his wife Eileen runs the house and takes care of their five children. His days are long as he delivers coal supplies to his clients before the holidays.
Among Bill’s clients is the local Magdalene Asylum. The Magdalen Asylums were convents where “fallen” girls were sent and worked for their keep as laundresses. In Ireland, they lasted from 1765 to 1998 according to Wikipedia and were run by the Catholic Church with the approval of the Irish government. They were workhouses with terrible living conditions.
One day, Bill finds a girl hidden in the convent’s coal shed who asks him about her baby. He’s deeply moved and can’t turn a blind eye to this young woman’s predicament. Indeed, Bill’s mother was a single mum, a perfect candidate for the Magdalene system.
Furlong had come from nothing. Less than nothing, some might say. His mother, at the age of sixteen, had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic for Mrs Wilson, the Protestant widow who lived in the big house a few miles outside of town. When his mother’s trouble became known, and her people made it clear that they’d have no more to do with her, Mrs Wilson, instead of giving his mother her walking papers, told her she should stay on, and keep her work. On the morning Furlong was born, it was Mrs Wilson who had his mother taken into hospital, and had them brought home. It was the first of April, 1946, and some said the boy would turn out to be a fool.
Bill’s and his mother’s life wouldn’t have turned out so well without Mrs Wilson. He knows he could have ended in the system. For Bill, it’s time to give back. For Eileen, it’s better not to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong. The Sisters at the convent are powerful and it’s better not to cross them.
Small Things Like These is a tour de force. In only 117 pages in French (less in English), Claire Forster manages to write a fully-formed story about a family, a man’s childhood and these terrible Magdalena asylums.
In a few pages, her characters, the town and the laundry business come to life. I imagined very well working-class Bill, his wife, their children, their home. They work hard to have a decent life and raise their children. They don’t want to stir trouble or be in the hot topic of the town’s conversations. They have a good life and are successful, in a sense that they improved themselves.
Bill is thankful for Mrs Wilson and as an adult, admires what she did for his mum and for him. He knows that having his mum in her home must have made people talk and yet Mrs Wilson did it anyway. He’s thankful for the small things, the little gestures and her rebellious act of keeping this girl and her son in her home.
Through the scenes at the convent, Eileen’s remarks and people’s reactions, we understand that the convent is a place of power. In helping this girl, Bill takes a risk and he knows it but he must to it. For her, for himself and for Mrs Wilson.
The contrast between Bill and the Sisters is striking. They are supposed to be the professional Christians, the experts in generosity and compassion. Yet, they set up a hard, unfair and inhuman system for these poor girls. One can argue that the Irish government and the Catholic Church hierarchy were the actual culprits. Indeed, they are responsible for the material living conditions, for not setting up proper education and for treating these girls as inmates. But each local convent is responsible for its sisters’s behaviour towards these girls. Being nice doesn’t come with a budget or with State allowances. Bill reminds us of the basis of Christianism.
Small Things Like These is an homage to all the quiet people who do the right thing, who help others and don’t make a fuss about it. It’s an ode to the rebels of the quotidian and to daily generosity. People who refuse to look the other way and take action.
Very, very highly recommended.
Thanks, Camille for sending me Small Things Like These in my KUBE package!
Other reviews:
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov – we have to read it
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov (2018) translated by Boris Dralyuk. French title: Les abeilles grises.
Pashka’s garden looked out towards Horlivka, so he was one street closer to Donetsk than Sergeyich. Sergeyich’s garden faced in the other direction, towards Sloviansk; it sloped down to a field, which first dipped then rose up towards Zhdanivka.
I picked this quote in Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov because it struck me that I knew about Donetsk and Sloviansk and that many city names mentioned in the book are now familiar.
And only because these cities are theatres of war. I remember reading in one of Gary’s novels, I don’t remember which one, that in the West, we only learn geography through the news and when we know too much about a country’s geography, it’s not a good sign.
Grey Bees was published in 2018 and it refers to the war in the Donbas between Russian-backed separatists and government forces in eastern Ukraine. Russia had already annexed the Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Sergey Sergeyich and his nemesis Pashka Khmelenko are the two inhabitants left in Little Starhorodivka, a village in the grey zone in Donbass. The grey zone means that they live between the separatists’ positions and the Ukrainian ones. Shells fly over their heads regularly.
First, fathers bundled their wives and children off to safety, wherever they had relatives: Russia, Odessa, Mykolayiv. Then the fathers themselves left, some becoming “separatists”, others refugees. The last to be taken away were the old men and women. They were dragged off weeping and cursing. The noise was awful.
This is how they became the last men living in their village and this short paragraph says all about the drama of war for folks like you and me. One day you live your life and the next, you’re packing what you can and leaving.
Sergey is a retired mine safety inspector and beekeeper extraordinaire. He’s 49, his wife left him a few years ago, taking their only daughter with her to Vinnytsia, in the west of the country.
When the book opens, it’s winter and we follow Sergey’s daily life, a quotidian of survival. They have been without power for three years now, which means heating one or two rooms of the house with the wood stove, using it to cook as well and rely on candlelight. Sergey checks on his bees every day, they are hibernating during the winter, so nothing much happens on that side.
This first part shows a gentle man who likes his village, a pacific soul who cares about his bees, someone who wants to stay out of the conflict. However, contrary to Pashka, he leans towards the Ukrainian forces.
Spring arrives and he realizes there is not enough flowers for his bees to gather nectar and pollen. If he wants them to produce honey and survive, he has to take his hives somewhere else. Therefore he loads them in his Lada, packs his camping gear and his icon of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker and goes on the road to find a suitable place to put his hives and gather honey.
His travels will take him to a village on the east of the Donetsk district and next to occupied Crimea. He will show us how his compatriots see him as a refugee from Donbass and that for them, war doesn’t mean hearing shells over your head but seeing your husband or son join the army and maybe get killed.
When he enters the Crimea region, the Russians have set up a border between the annexed Crimea and Ukraine. Crossing this border is a risky endeavor. Sergey intends to find a fellow beekeeper, a Tatar he met in a beekeeper convention. His stay in occupied Crimea shows the Russian repression towards Tatars and the brainwashing they are doing to the Orthodox population. See here the discussion between Sergey and a Russian inhabitant of Crimea:
“Well, this is their land,” the beekeeper offered timidly. “The hell it is!” the woman said indignantly, but without malice. “This land’s been Russian Orthodox since time immemorial! Russians brought Orthodoxy from Turkey, brought it to Chersonesus, back before there were any Muslims. It was later that the Turks sent in the Tatars, along with their Islam. When Putin was here, he told the whole story – this is sacred Russian land.” “Well, I haven’t looked into the history,” Sergeyich shrugged. “Who knows what happened?” “What happened is what Putin says happened,” she insisted. “Putin doesn’t lie.”
Hmm.
Sergey travels around in these troubled areas, carrying his innocence on his sleeve. Grey Bees reminded me of Candide. His travels don’t seem totally realistic and yet, they are rooted in their time. Sergey navigates in these desolate times with a one-track mind, his bees. His moto is not “We must cultivate our garden” but “We must take care of our bees.” Why grey bees? They come from the grey zone, that’s for sure and there’s an explanation by the end of the book but won’t spoil anyone’s reading.
I liked Sergey and his obstinacy to make honey and keep his bees alive. Kurkov takes a candid character and asks all the difficult questions. He shows the intricacies of the local politics, the mixed Ukrainian-Russian culture of the area, the importance of religion and the power of religious leaders, Orthodox and Muslim. It is all here, in this exchange between a Ukrainian soldier and Sergey:
Petro shook his head. “And what’s your name?” “Me? Sergey Sergeyich – you can call me Sergeyich. So it’s probably Peter, not Petro.” “No, it’s Petro. Says so in my passport.” “Well, my passport says I’m Serhiy Serhiyovych – but I say I’m Sergey Sergeyich. That’s the difference.”
His name is in Ukrainian on his passport and he uses the Russian form. The languages are intertwined in him, probably as they are in the author’s psyche.
I read Grey Bees in February, the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. I don’t want to write the “first anniversary” because that means others are to come but I’m afraid we’re headed that way. The first part was the hardest to read because it delved into the consequences of war for Sergey. Living with a different kind of silence and having fear settling their ugly quarters in his soul.
Fear is an invisible thing, subtle and variable, like a virus or bacterium. It can be inhaled with a breath of air, or accidentally imbibed with a sip of water or vodka, or come in through your ears – and you can certainly catch it with your eyes, so badly that its image will remain in your pupils even after the fear itself has disappeared.
It was very poignant and hard to read sometimes but my discomfort is nothing compared to what the real Sergeys are living.
Grey Bees left me with a question: how could we be so blind and not see this war coming?
_______________________
PS: Boris Dralyuk won Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for his translation of Grey Bees. Congratulations to him for a well-deserved award, his translation is outstanding.
I also read Death and the Penguin and my billet is here. I have The Good Angel of Death on the shelf.
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson – raw sensitivity
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson (2018) Original French title: “Arrête avec tes mensonges” English translation by Molly Ringwald.
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson is an autobiographical novel about his first teenage grand love, Thomas Andrieu, the one that structured his being for the future, whether he wanted it or not. This remained a secret until Philippe meets Lucas, Thomas’s son. Lie With Me tells Philippe and Thomas’s love story, makes it real and alive on paper.
We’re in 1984, in Barbezieux, rural France and Philippe is 17. He’s a senior in high school, in Terminale C., the Maths and Physics major, considered as the elite student track. He has a quiet family life. He knows he’s gay, he’s not open about his sexual orientation but he’s at peace with himself.
Philippe has a major crush on Thomas, who is in Terminale D. They don’t run in the same circles, they don’t talk to each other and Thomas is handsome and always surrounded by girls. In other words, Thomas doesn’t seem to be into boys.
Philippe lives with his unrequited crush until Thomas makes a move.
Their relationship is incandescent, it ignites from nothing and burns high but must remain a secret. Thomas imposes it, Philippe abides by it. They meet in hidden places until they use Philippe’s room when his parents are at work. They don’t talk much at the beginning but open up to each other. Thomas knows from the start that their relationship has an expiry date. Philippe doesn’t.
Thomas is a farmer’s only son. He feels tied up to the land, destined to take over the farm. He’s a good student too but he nixes his rights at a higher education. He feels that he needs to stay and he won’t change his mind. At least, that’s what Philippe perceives. Thomas hasn’t come to terms with his homosexuality. He can’t.
When high school graduation happens and they are separated for the holidays, Thomas knows he will remain in Spain with his mother’s family while Philippe expects him to come home and is crushed by the pain he feels when he understands he won’t see Thomas anymore.
| A la rentrée de septembre, je quitte Barbezieux. Je deviens pensionnaire au lycée Michel-de-Montaigne à Bordeaux. J’intègre une prépa HEC. Je débute une nouvelle vie. Celle qu’on a choisie pour moi, je me plie à l’ambition qu’on nourrit pour moi, j’emprunte la voie qu’on m’a tracée. Je rentre dans le rang. J’efface Thomas Andrieu. | At the beginning of September, I leave Barbezieux. I go to college at the Lycée Michel-de-Montaigne in Bordeaux, working toward a graduate degree in business. I begin a new life, the one that was chosen for me, bowing to the hope and ambition that have been placed in me. I erase Thomas Andrieu. (*) |
Besson describe their doomed love story with a perfect mix of openness and reserve. He looks at his younger self with the lucidity and indulgence of the adult. He writes about young love and raw desire the way Marguerite Duras writes about it in The Lover. Hidden love, impossible love and no feelings put into words. Feelings are told with their bodies. Besson blends immodest lovemaking and modest sensitivity and connects his reader with the pure beauty of his first love and the devastation it left in his soul when it ended.
Besson perfectly gives back the early 1980s in France. The Jean-Jacques Goldman posters on the walls in Philippe’s room. The clothes. The atmosphere at the high school and at home. His father is a primary school teacher, which gives Philippe the status of the teacher’s son and academic success is important at home. School is a social ladder.
Although I’m several years younger than Besson, we still have some things in common. A shared love for Veiller tard by Jean-Jacques Goldman. Same school track in high school and after. Same kind of family background. I bet he knows the scent of the spirit duplicator that all teachers used at home at that time. Ask about it to any teacher’s child born in the 1960s-1970s and they’ll know.
These years are the end of innocence, before AIDS. When I was Philippe’s age in the book, the AIDS epidemic was a major topic. The only good thing about AIDS is that it put homosexuality in the open. In the early 1990s, it gave us Philadelphia and showed a couple of gay men living normal lives and not Cages aux Folles lives. In France, we were reading To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Hervé Guibert and watching Les Nuits fauves by Cyril Collard. 10/18 published The San Francisco Chronicles by Armistead Maupin. Philippe Djian had gay characters in Maudit Manège. Both were huge successes.
But before AIDS became a hot topic, during Philippe and Thomas’s years, no one talked about homosexuality. After reading this book, I wonder who were the Philippe and Thomas in my school. Statistically, they exist and I’m sorry that they had to hide.
The English title of Besson’s novella has a double meaning: “tell lies with me” and “lie with me in bed” and both meanings are relevant. The French title is Arrête avec tes mensonges, which means Stop with your lies. Besson’s mother used to tell him that when he was inventing stories about the people around him. But it’s also addressed to Thomas who wouldn’t stop lying to others and to himself.
Thomas didn’t have the tools to become his authentic self. It’s a personal thing and a class thing. In the paragraph quoted before, the little sentence J’intègre une prépa HEC packs a lot for a French reader or at least for me. It emphasizes the difference between Philippe and Thomas. Philippe will leave home to go to prep school, then will move out of the region to go to a business school and move up the social ladder. Thomas feels that he needs to take over his parents’ farm, not out of love for farming but out of duty. There’s nothing more tying-to one-place than farming.
Lie With Me is a heart-wrenching story of doomed young love and of two men who suffered all their lives about it. One never recovered of being abandoned and not knowing whether he was loved, the other never overcoming his fear of people’s reactions to his sexual orientation.
To me, this novella goes with The Lover by Marguerite Duras and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
The Lover was published in 1984, the very same year Philippe and Thomas relationship happened. Like Lie With Me, it’s an autobiographical novella about a hidden love between teenage Marguerite Duras and a rich Chinese man. It’s about raw desire, the inexplicable force of attraction that draws to each other two people from very different backgrounds and who brave social conventions to be together.
The Lover has a detached narrator/author, a girl who puts up mental barriers and doesn’t want to voice her love for this Chinese man because it’s taboo, because it’s doomed and because the idea of its ending hurts too much.
In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer condemns himself to live someone else’s life because he knows his limits. He won’t change and he’s not strong enough to live through the social and family disgrace that will come with marrying Ellen Olenska. Thomas reminded me of Newland: he knows his limits too and he’s the one who makes the difficult decision.
It is a truly beautiful novella, made into an excellent film by Olivier Peyon even if the storytelling varies from the book. Besson worked on the screenplay, so, he approves of the changes. Guillaume De Tonquédec plays an incredible Philippe Besson. He looks like him it’s confusing.
I read the book and watched the film the day after. Even if the film is good, nothing compares to literature when it comes to conveying subtle details about people’s souls.
Many thanks to Kim who took the time to find the English translation of the paragraph quoted before. I wondered how the translator had fared with the “prépa HEC” phrase. She remembered to look for it when she was at the library and you’ve got to love the international book community for having an Australian in Perth checking out a paragraph for another reader in France. Book lovers rock! Kim’s review is here , have a look at it.
Jacqui also reviewed it here.
Other billets about books by Philippe Besson:
Third crime is the charm #2 : French crime fiction for #ReadIndies and French February
This month is #ReadIndies, where we read books published by independent publishers. It’s hosted by Karen and Lizzy. Marina Sofia decided to do a #FrenchFebruary for herself and I decided to join her and combine the two events.
So here we are with three French crime fiction books published by independent publishers (Les Arènes, Les éditions du Rouergue and Zulma)
Let’s start with…
Mamie Luger by Benoît Philippon. (2018) Not available in English. Publisher: Les Arènes, collection Equinox.
I came upon this book at Quais du Polar and its English title could be Nana Luger.
Berthe Gavignol, born in 1914 in a village in Cantal, France is the Mamie Luger of the book. Mamie, because she’s 102 when she greets the French police with her rifle and Luger because she owns a Luger gun acquired during the German occupation in WWII.
She’s taken to detention for shooting her neighbor and the police inspector André Ventura is in for a ride when she starts telling her life story.
Mamie Luger is a serial killer, out of circumstances. Her bad choice in men makes her a victim of domestic violence and she solves the problem with her Luger and her inhouse graveyard in her basement.
The author tells this incredible story on a tone laced with humor as a relationship builds between a bewildered Ventura and his new prison ward. It’s fun but a bit too long sometimes, less husbands wouldn’t have hurt.
Still, it’s a picture of what too many women have to endure and a take on rural life in France.
To read for fun and Marina Sofia’s thoughts on this one are here. Then, my February crime fiction journey led me to…
Par les rafales by Valentine Imhof (2018) Not available in English. Publisher: Rouergue noir.
It came as a blind book date as I asked the libraire of Un Petit Noir to pick books for me. This deadly road-movie took me from Lorraine, to Belgium, Louisiana and Canada. How?
Alex is a free-lance music journalist. When the book opens, she’s in a hotel room in Nancy after a music festival. She’s with a man, for a one-night-stand when their hookup spooks her and she kills her companion. Savagely.
Then she’s back to Metz, where she has her base camp and her lover, Anton. Alex is haunted, her skin is tattooed with excerpts from various works of literature. Her tattoo artist is Bernd, in Ghent, Belgium. He suggested to hide under ink all the marks of torture that covered her body. And they we learn how Alex got them and why she feels tracked like wildlife during a hunting party.
Each chapter of the book starts with an unreadable text, an excerpt of Alex’s tattoos. Par les rafales is Alex’s highspeed run race against the police, her imaginary hunters and her very real internal demons born with the assault she was victim of.
The book could have been written by Virginie Despentes, the one from Apocalypse Baby. Feminist. Full of literary and rock and blues references. (The playlist is at the end of the book and I’ll put in on Spotify when I have time). Crude with a strong female protagonist.
An unusual book, well-written, violent and haunting. It needs a translator.
After all the cold and rain of Par les rafales, I went to the French countryside, in the Drôme department, between Lyon and Provence for a wonderful book by Pascal Garnier.
Low Heights by Pascal Garnier (2003) Original French title: Les Hauts du Bas. Publisher: Zulma
Another book with a fiery old person. Edouard Lavenant is an old curmudgeon, forced to retire to a family property in Drôme Provençale, near Rémuzat after he had a bad stroke. He has a nurse and housekeeper, Thérèse, that he likes to torture. He’s as gracious a character by Thomas Bernhard. You see the drift.
He’s like a petulant child who’s sulking because he had to change his life and at the beginning of the book, we see how Thérèse manages to get him out of his shell with her unwavering kindness. It sounds all bucolic and the descriptions of the Drôme natural landscapes are gorgeous. It seems to go into the fluffy direction of the old man mollified by his housekeeper and learning to enjoy life again and make peace with his past.
Only it’s not a book by Elizabeth Gilbert, it’s a book by Pascal Garnier. Edouard doesn’t get out of his shell; he gets out of his personal Pandora box and all hell breaks loose, from Rémuzat, to Lyon and to Switzerland.
This is perfect noir literature, in less than 200 pages. Extraordinary sense of place with vibrant descriptions of the region that will make you travel to the Drôme Provençale area. A sense of humor that made me chuckle time and again. A storyline built like a well-oiled machine, like Hot Spot by Charles Williams or a roman dur by Simenon. There’s also a scene with snails that reminded me of the short-story The Snail-Watcher by Patricia Highsmith. The crime fiction gods are all approving of Low Heights.
Both Garnier and Tavernier are dead now but I could see them team up and make Low Heights into a magnificent film. We still have Jacques Audiard and it’s right up his alley. So, fingers crossed, eh?
Lucky you, out of the three French books I read for French February and Read Indies, this is the only one available in English, thanks to the indie publisher, Gallic Books and Melanie Florence who translated it. See also Marina Sofia’s take on it for Crime Fiction Lover and rush for it.
Born Content in Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut
Born content in Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut (2017) Original French title: Née contente à Oraibi. Not available in English.
Have you ever read a book and find yourself unable to know what to think about it? That’s how I felt about Née contente à Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut when I finished it.
Cournut is a French editor and writer born in 1979. That’s all I know about her, except that she wrote several books and spent some time among the Hopis.
Oraibi is a Hopi village in Navajo County, Arizona. There’s no precise timeline but I’m thinking we’re at the turning of the 20th century. At least, if I consider the photos included at the end of the book.
It’s a coming-of-age novel, a first-person narrative with Tayatitaawa’s voice. She’s “the one who salutes the Sun with a grin”, or in other words, the one who was born content in Oraibi. Tayatitaawa tells her childhood and her adolescence, describes her house, her family and her quotidian. She was close to her father and lost him at a young age. He wasn’t a usual Hopi man but he was well-respected in their community. His death carved a hole in her soul, one she had trouble healing to feel whole again. It’s a lovely book, written in a poetic tone and with a strong sense of place.
This book has the soothing quality of a folk tale. It’s full of Hopi customs and cosmology but they don’t come as a statement. They are in the book, described but not too much. They belong to the narrative because they belong to Tayatitaawa’s life and education. The lack of in-depth explanations about rites gives weigh and life to Tayatitaawa’s voice. If she’s a Hopi telling her life to other Hopis, she won’t explain things that are obvious to them. She will tell important facts that belong to oral transmission like the family bonds between clans, clans’ names and roles in the village.
I don’t know if what Bérengère Cournut writes about Hopi customs is accurate. I don’t care. She doesn’t pretend to write a scientific book. Née contente à Oraibi feels like the child of a writer who made a meaningful trip and absorbed her surroundings. She connected with other human beings from another culture and recognized them as other human beings. Nothing else. No awe for their culture. No judgment. No comparison. Her book is her way to share what she captured of Oraibi. She could have written a reportage. She wrote a novel to pass on what she felt about the place, its wilderness and its inhabitants.
We could debate upon the rightfulness of a French author writing a coming-of-age novel with a Hopi character in such a traditional setting. I’m a firm believer that authors may write whatever they want. Even if that means more clichéd books about Provence and mythical French lovers in postcard Paris. It’ll be the role of critics and readers to cull the best ones and point out flagrant inconsistencies or biased tones of the others. To me, there is no alternative. Discussion and debates are the only options. Otherwise, it’s like setting up a book police aka censorship.
If we say that Bérengère Cournut can’t write about Hopis because she’s French and not Hopi, where does it stop? An American historian cannot write about the French Revolution because he’s not French even if he has studied the period a lot more than any average Frenchman?
We’re already on an ice-covered slippery slope as examples keep piling up. A white poetess cannot translate a black poetess because she’s not black. Agatha Christie now wrote And Then They Were None instead of Ten Little Niggers. I call it laziness: it’s easier to change the book title than to take time to educate people and help them see this title as a symbol of its time and talk about slavery and colonization. Let’s erase it, it’s easier and we’ll all forget that people thought it was normal to use the N word.
And I heard that a new cleaned-up version of Roald Dahl’s book is on the way, that Anthony Horowitz was asked to delete the word scalpel from his book to spare Native Americans’ sensitivity as the word is close to scalp. What’s next? LGBT associations asking to rename Pride and Prejudice into a neutral Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam because the words pride and prejudice mean something specific to them?
We are living in an asinine world where there is no space left for nuance and discussion. Marketing gurus target individuals and tailor goods and services to their customers’ liking, leading them to expect that everything has to bend and accommodate to their tastes and way of life. Add the built-in bias of social networks: the contents they push to their users is based on what they liked before and keep them in their community, not exposing them to other ways of thinking and the ability to block content you don’t want to see seals the deal. All this keeps people in their own mental juice and doesn’t leave a lot opportunities to accidentally broaden one’s point of view.
These people who push to rewrite Roald Dahl want everyone’s specificities and sensitivities taken into account. It’s not possible to have a one fits all for everything. Or everything becomes bland because the middle ground on which everyone agrees upon is tasteless. Yes, I understand that Under the Volcano may not be a good book to a recovering alcoholic. The solution is not to change tequila into water in Lowry’s book. It is for readers to use their brain and make an educated decision about the books they read.
What does all this have to do with Née contente à Oraibi? Everything. I closed the book, puzzled because I fleetingly questioned her right to write it. This way of thinking has wormed its way into my brain in spite of me and I don’t like it one bit. Writing about Née contente à Oraibi helped me put things into perspective.
Bérengère Cournut wrote a beautiful book set in a place, time and culture totally foreign to her upbringing. She learnt enough about Hopi customs to write a plausible book and she extracted the essence of her trip. She captured the universal: after all, Tayatitaawa is just a girl who is growing up, who misses her father terribly after his untimely death, who tries to bond with her brother, who wants to understand where she comes from and what she’ll do with her life. No need to be French or Hopi for that. Only to be human.
PS: This book is published by Le Tripode, an independent French publisher. Its editorial line is to consider any book of any genre as long as its good literature. The books are beautiful too. The cover of Née Contente à Oraibi is a creation by Juliette Maroni and it’s a perfect fit for the book. I received it through my Kube subscription and the libraire who chose it for me did well.
This is one of my contributions to Karen’s and Lizzy’s official #ReadIndies and to Marina Sofia’s unofficial French February.
The Waltz of Trees and Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia – Van Gogh’s days in Auvers-sur-Oise
The Waltz of Trees and Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia. (2016) Original French title: La valse des arbres et du ciel.
The Waltz of Trees and Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia was our Book Club choice for January. I’m writing this billet about a year after I got this book during a splendid afternoon of visiting bookstores, indulging in book buying and settling in a beautiful historical café in downtown Lyon.
The Waltz of Trees and Sky is a historical novel in which Marguerite Gachet relates the last months of Van Gogh’s life. She was 21 when Van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise, to meet his new physician and lover of the arts, Dr Gachet. He spent his last months there from May to July 29th, the day he died and painted around 70 pictures in three months.
Marguerite was the doctor’s daughter. She was 21 at the time, an amateur painter and in his historical fiction, Guenassia imagines that, now that she’s eighty-years old, she’ll write about her love story with Van Gogh and explain that he didn’t commit suicide.
In his afterword, Guenassia lists his sources and thanks Benoît Landais, a renowned Van Gogh specialist for his help. He also explains that there are doubts about Van Gogh’s death but there is no proof that it wasn’t a suicide. Several rumors report a relationship between Marguerite and Vincent but she didn’t say anything before she died and there is no actual proof.
Now that this in the open, what did I think about Guenassia’s book? First of all, I read it easily, it was really pleasurable.
The descriptions of Auvers-sur-Oise, the beautiful weather of that late spring and summer are true-to-life. I felt I was leaving my cold January behind and that I was walking around in the fields with Van Gogh, his canvas, paint tubes and easel. It’s breathtaking, like entering into a Van Gogh’s painting and seeing the countryside with his eyes.
The picture of Dr Gachet is terrible. I saw him as a patron of the arts and a let’s say, a good man. According to Guenassia, he sounds like a selfish brute, ready to manipulate his children through money and power play. He saw helping his painter friends as an investment.
Guenassia portrays Marguerite as a strong-willed and intelligent young lady. She doesn’t want to conform. She passed her baccalauréat – something new for a woman – and wanted to push further her studies but her father didn’t want her to. She wanted to be an artist and was working hard on her painting. She saw the beauty, the novelty and the vibrancy of Van Gogh’s paintings when her contemporaries didn’t. Van Gogh painted her at least once, at the piano.
However, my more analytical mind detected flaws in the novel.
I wasn’t quite on board with his Marguerite Gachet. She seemed like a die-hard feminist, imprisoned by social proprieties and trying to beak free. A sort of Camille Claudel. I’m not sure in real life, she had all the freedom to walk around on her own that she has in the book. Bourgeois conventions and all that. I thoughts that chaperones were inevitable.
I also thought that the tone of the book wasn’t consistent from the beginning to the end.
Marguerite sounded more like a young woman writing her diary than an old woman reminiscing about a happy, tragic and life-changing moment of her existence. It lacked the hindsight and reflective thoughts that come with remembrance. Her language was also too modern, not consistent with an 1890 young woman or a 1949 old lady. I expected more of a Céleste Albaret manner of speech than what Guenassia wrote.
The book is peppered with vignettes about France and Paris at the time. I didn’t understand their purpose. They broke the flow of my reading and weren’t always relevant with what Marguerite was saying. If it was to make the reader feel the atmosphere of the time, then they could have been at the head of each chapter and not in the middle of the text.
And then, there’s the romance vibe; not quite to my liking even if I’m usually a good sport for that kind of development.
But in the end, these flaws weren’t important enough to spoil the pleasure I had reading about Van Gogh’s painting, about his hot, dry and productive summer in Auvers. The book immersed me in the painting, in the double vision of the canvas and the scenery he was watching.
The idea of his death being an accident instead of a suicide made me sad because of all the paintings he still had in him. He was only 37. And then I noticed that his brother Theo who supported him financially and emotionally died of syphilis 6 months after Vincent. Would he have fared well and survived without his brother? In the end, maybe things are better this way and, in any case, he left us with gorgeous paintings that go straight to your soul.
Now, I want to go to Auvers in the summer and do the Van Gogh trail. And hop on a train to Amsterdam to visit the upcoming exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum “Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months” and see the Vermeer exhibition that is opening soon.
La valse des arbres et du ciel isn’t available in English but according to Goodreads, you can read it in French, Greek, Italian, Czech, Arabic and Russian.
Third crime is the charm : England in the Middle Ages, high tech in Virginia and a haunting past in Finland.
Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin (2007) French title: La confidente des morts. Translated by Vincent Hugon.
This is the first instalment of a series by Ariana Franklin featuring the female doctor, Adelia Aguila. We’re in Cambridge, in 1171, during the reign of King Henry II of England. Adelia came from Sicily with Simon of Naples and Mansur.
They were sent by their king upon Henry II’s request. Children have been murdered in Cambridge and the local population accuses the Jews of the crime. They have been staying in a castle for months now and as valuable tax payers, Henry II wants them back to their occupations.
Adelia is an oddity for 12th century England: she’s a woman, a doctor and “mistress of the art of death”, in other word, the ancestor of medical examiners.
The book is a criminal investigation, a cool description of life in Cambridge at the time. I’m not sure that everything is totally accurate or that the characters are historically plausible but I didn’t care. I’m no historian, the main details were correct and I had a great time following this ad hoc team of investigators while they looked for the perpetrator of these gory murders.
Recommended to spend a good afternoon on the couch, with a blanket during a cold winter Sunday or lying on a towel on the beach during a hot summer day.
Livid by Patricia Cornwell (2022) Not available in French. Yet.
My daughter raised to the challenge of getting me a book for Christmas and the poor child sweated bullets and spent a lot of time in a bookstore wondering what to buy to her bookworm of a mother.
I hadn’t read anything by Cornwell in 25 years, I think. I used to read her, Mary Higgins Clark and Elizabeth George in my teens and twenties. Then I got tired of them, even if Elizabeth George is the best writer of the three. What Came Before He Shot Her is truly remarkable. But back to Cornwell.
Kay Scarpetta is back in Alexandria, Virginia, as the chief of medical examiners and let’s say that CSI techniques have progressed since Adelia’s time in Cambridge.
The book opens with an excellent trial scene where Scarpetta is testifying and put under unfair pressure by the Commonweath’s Attorney while the judge doesn’t intervene. The said judge is Annie Chilton, her college friend and by the end of the day, Scarpetta learns that the judge’s sister Rachael has been murdered and that there was an attempted terrorist attack against the president of the USA.
Scarpetta goes on the crime scene and the CIA and FBI have already invested the place as the victim worked for the CIA. Scarpetta quickly understands that Rachael was killed by a microwave gun, a very rare and specific weapon. Later, another body is discovered in the neighborhood.
Follows a family investigation since Scarpetta does the autopsy, her niece is on the case as an FBI agent and so is her husband Benton, as a secret services agent. What a family, eh?
It’s good entertainment even if the pace of the book is a bit weird at times. The description of Scarpetta’s work at the morgue seemed to drag on while the denouement was rushed and not detailed enough. The characters sounded a bit formulaic and I wasn’t too interested in the office politics and antagonism.
It was published in October 2022 and I couldn’t help noticing that the war in Ukraine was already mentioned in the book. Eight months after it started it’s already in a published book. There was no time wasted in editing and polishing this book before its publication, it seems.
Anyway, this is another Beach & Public Transport book, one you read as you watch a CSI episode on TV.
The Oath by Arttu Tuominen (2018). Not available in English. French title: Le serment. Translated by Anne Colin du Terrail.
The Oath is truly the best book of the three. We’re in Pori, Finland in 2018. Jari Paloviita is the interim head of the local police and Rami Nieminen is murdered by Antti Mielonen during a party in a cabin in the woods. The victim was stabbed in the back and Antti ran out of the cabin and was found in the woods with his sweatshirt full of the victim’s blood. There is no doubt he did it.
Inspector Henrik Oksman and his partner Linda Toivonen know it. All they have to do is follow procedures to the letter to ensure there is no room for doubt about Antti’s guilt when the trial comes.
But Jari Paloviita used to go to school with Rami and Antti. Antti was his best friend while Rami bullied him relentlessly. He and Antti share a heavy baggage as the story unfolds and we discover what happened to them during the summer 1991. They were 13 at the time and dramatic events pushed them out of childhood.
To what length is Jari prepared to go to in the name of an old friendship?
I’d say you’ll have to read the book to find out but sadly, it’s not available in English. It baffles me since Nordic crime is such a hit in the English-speaking world. It’s a real pity because the plot is tight, the back and forth between 2018 and 1991 is gripping and full of grey areas. The characters’ personal life is troubled and I can see the beginning of a great series.
This is also my contribution to Annabel’s event Nordic FINDS.
It strikes me that I didn’t choose the three books I just wrote about. I got the Ariana Franklin with my Quais du Polar entry ticket, my daughter gave me the Cornwell for Christmas and the Tuominen came with my Kube subscription. The Tuominen is probably the only one I would have bought myself, so kudos for the Kube libraire who blind-picked it for me.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga – the dark sides of real-estate in Mumbai and of human behaviour.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (2011) French title: Le dernier homme de la tour. Translated by Annick Le Goya.
Bombay, like a practitioner of yoga, was folding in on itself, as its centre moved from the south, where there was no room to grow, to this swamp land near the airport.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga is set in Mumbai, in the Vakola district near the airport, in a two towers apartment complex built in the 1970s.
Tower B, known as “Vishram Society” is like a vertical village of lower middle-class people. It’s also known as ‘cosmopolitan’ (i.e. ethnically and religiously mixed.) The various families have been living together in this building for years, they’ve raised children, grown old and have to share their private lives due to paper thin walls and building practicalities. Like in small town life, everybody knows everything about everyone and keeping a secret is illusory.
The Secretary [the concierge], not for the first time during his tenure, cursed the early – morning cat. This cat prowled the waste bins that the residents left out in the morning for Mary [The cleaning lady] to collect, in the process spilling beans, bones, and whisky bottles alike. So the residents of the building knew from the rubbish who was a vegetarian and who merely claimed to be one; who was a rum – man and who a gin – man; and who had bought a pornographic magazine when on holiday in Singapore.
What was I saying about secrets?
Now, in the ever growing and changing Mumbai, a property developer, Mr Shah, has set his eyes on two towers built in the 1970s. He wants to buy out all the current owners, demolish the towers and rebuild expensive condos on the land.
Mr Shah is ready to pay a hefty sum to all the owners based on the square meters of their apartment to encourage them to move out.
A useful note at the beginning of the book explains that Mr Shah’s offer is equivalent to $330,000 per family, in a country where the average per capita annual income in 2008 was around $800. So, if people accept Mr Shah’s offer, they become very rich and have enough money to relocate somewhere else.
Last important thing to know: Vishram Society is a Registered Co – operative Society. Not a jungle. If even one person says no that means that the Society cannot be demolished.
The novel shows the dirty methods used by property developers in Mumbai to put their hands on prime land, to throw working classes out of some neighbourhood to gentrify the area. In Mumbai, slums, older building and modern towers are near each other and this passage about a beach sums it up:
Here, in this beach in this posh northern suburb of Mumbai, half the sand was reserved for the rich, who defecated in their towers, the other half for slum dwellers, who did so near the waves. Residents of the slum that had encroached upon the beach were squatting by the water, defecating. An invisible line went down the middle of the beach like an electrified fence; beyond this line, the bankers, models, and film producers of Versova were engaged in tai – chi, yoga, or spot – jogging.
Builders have no qualms about bullying people into agreeing and they have special people to do it.
Every builder has one special man in his company. This man has no business card to hand out, no title, he is not even on the company payroll. But he is the builder’s left hand. He does what the builder’s right hand does not want to know about. If there is trouble, he contacts the police or the mafia. If there is money to be paid to a politician, he carries the bag. If someone’s knuckles have to be broken, he breaks them.
People in Vishram Society have heard stories about builders’ methods and swindles. They are cautious, they wonder where things could go and how they can be sure to get the money after they’ve signed the papers to sell their apartment.
Rather quickly, all the inhabitants agree to sell and the only one who doesn’t want to is Masterji, an old widower who refuses to leave the memories of his late wife and daughter behind. At least, that’s what he thinks his motives are.
This opportunity to get rich for the owners and to get richer for the promoter is like a bomb in a carefully built life balance between the inhabitants of the Vishram Society.
Last Man in Tower relates how Mr Shah manoeuvres to get what he wants. It also depicts how this tower-village copes with the one inhabitant who blocks their way to wealth.
Adiga’s book is cleverly done because it is not Manichean, the bad developer on one side and the poor old man on the other side. The greedy people and the virtuous one. Mr Shah intends to pay the money he promised, in the builder category, he’s not the worst one. But still. He counts on the neighbours to pressure Masterji into selling.
Masterji’s neighbours want the money, and most of them for good reasons: to provide for their son with Down’s syndrome after they die, to raise their children in a better neighbourhood, to help their grownup children to settle in life, to live a little and stop counting every penny.
And Masterji’s refusal is not just sentimental. There’s something else at stake here, someone who wants to stand up for himself when he wasn’t able to do it in this life, someone who sticks to his principle for the sake of them only.
Last Man in Tower is a dark tale, a book that shows how quickly people turn on each other when money is involved and circumstances push them to pick a side. We know that dark side of humans, we’ve witnessed it in wars and it’s the same mechanism at work here.
Adiga’s novel exposes the workings of the real estate market in Mumbai and digs into the dark corners of the human soul but it is also a vibrant picture of Mumbai and life in this sprawling city. The slums, the markets, the temples, the overcrowded public transports, the heat, the monsoon and the incredible pollution.
South Mumbai has the Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Building, but the suburbs, built later, have their own Gothic style: for every evening, by six, pillars of hydro – benzene and sulphur dioxide rise high up from the roads, flying buttresses of nitrous dioxide join each other, swirls of unburnt kerosene, mixed illegally into the diesel, cackle like gargoyles, and a great roof of carbon monoxide closes over the structure. And this Cathedral of particulate matter rises over every red light, every bridge and every tunnel during rush hour.
When I was reading, I thought it was a bit too long but now that I write about it I realize that the pace of the narration suits what the author had to show and say.
The book was published in 2011, wonder how the real-estate market is in Mumbai now.
Book Around the Corner 