It’s a Mystery: Three to Keep Me Guessing

Hmm, three detective novels in a row is something of a record for me: it’s a mystery in and of itself that I pulled the books off the shelves that way. Here’s a post with all three, to get caught up…

I’ve had a soft spot for detective Hank Palace, the narrator of Ben H. Winters’s World of Trouble, ever since I read The Last Policeman (previous post), the first novel in a trilogy that ends with World of Trouble. Palace is a down-to-earth, loyal guy who continues investigating crimes despite the fact that an asteroid is hurtling toward earth and about to destroy everything. In World of Trouble, Palace and his ailing dog, Houdini, have come to Ohio to find Palace’s sister, who’s disappeared. Disappearances aren’t unusual in these fictional end days: people have been going “bucket list” for ages but Palace knows something bigger is amiss. There are lots of plot threads to pull in World of Trouble: an attempted murder, a search for a concrete worker, and, of course, Palace’s relationship with his family, ethics, and impending demise. Winters finds a near-perfect balance of humor, grieving, and realism, and he finishes the book in what I think must be the best possible way. Yes, I laughed and I cried, and [mild spoiler] I love the fact that Palace remains true to himself and the social compact ‘til the end. He doesn’t even yell “Police!” near the end of the book, “because I’m not a policeman anymore, I haven’t been for some time now.”

Commissioner Nicolas Le Floch, the investigator in Jean-François Parot’s The Man with the Lead Stomach, the second book in a series, isn’t quite as endearing or imperiled as Palace but this historical detective novel set in 1761 France made for worthy entertainment. I admit I was more interested in atmosphere than the mystery itself, which involves the rather grisly murder of a courtier’s son. That murder leads to another. Of course. But about that atmosphere: it’s a nice change of pace when there are no fingerprints taken, the investigator travels by horse-drawn carriage, and the detective drinks chocolate for breakfast and lots of wine with his meals, some of which are described in detail, this being a translation from the French. (I opened the book randomly to a page where a cook describes how to cut a rabbit for making pâté…) There are also smells in this early passage describing theatergoers: “There was a disconcerting contrast between their luxurious clothes, and the foul-smelling remnants of wax, earth and horse droppings with which they were soiled.” Michael Glencross’s translation from the French was particularly fun to read because it had some obscure words and terms in common with the book I was working on—this was a perfect way to see them in action in another setting and translated from another language.

Finally, a second book that originated in French: Joël Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, which I read in Sam Taylor’s translation of La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert. The truth about The Truth is that it’s an unholy mess, a blend of a writer coming of age (well, in a sense, two writers coming of age), a satire of the publishing industry, and a murder mystery, with whiffs of Peyton Place and Lolita tossed in. In any case, Marcus (“The Magnificent”) Goldman, a blocked writer who was the toast of New York a year or so ago, comes to the aid of his former writing teacher, Harry Quebert, after Quebert, author of a much-praised novel, is accused of killing a teenage girl, Nola Kellergan, back in 1975; the accusation comes after Kellergan’s body is unearthed in Quebert’s seaside yard nearly twenty years after her disappearance. Quebert lives in Somerset, New Hampshire, so Goldman is dealing with all sorts of small-town relationships, oddballs, and secrets as he interviews townspeople in his quest to free Quebert. Dicker throws in everything from the 1998 ice storm that “paralyzed” lots of New England to the first Obama presidential campaign to lots of seagulls in what feel like attempts to create verisimilitude and capture a time but The Truth is just too filled with extraneous pages, clichéd dialogue, and bits and pieces of disparate genres to come together as a full-fledged novel. Even so, damn it, the book is moderately entertaining and I did read every page. Part of the reason was probably inordinate curiosity after hearing Dicker and his editor from Penguin, John Siciliano, speak at BookExpo America in late May… but I think I’m even more curious to see how writers—not just Dicker but also Winters and Parot—adapt and adjust the detective genre’s typical casts, aesthetics, and plot turns to fit their interests and readers. For a very detailed account of The Truth, check out The Complete Review, here.

Disclaimers: I received review copies of all three books, thank you to the publishers and/or publicists: Eric Smith of Quirk Books for World of Trouble, which will be officially released on July 15; Meryl Zegarek Public Relations for The Man with the Lead Stomach, which was published by Gallic Books; and the nice man at the Penguin booth at BEA, who pointed me to a finished copy of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair masquerading as a galley. Thank you to all!

Up Next: Xu Zechen’s Running through Beijing.

Light Reading That Wishes It Were a Little Heavier: Three Quick Takes

It’s rare that I read—and actually finish—three books in a row that don’t inspire much reflection, thought, or emotion. Either negative or positive. The three books below are a strange bunch: they all passed the treadmill test, meaning I spent miles plodding along a moving belt, enjoying my reading and, thus, even my walks. For better or worse—worse, I’d guess—all three books felt like they wanted to be, in the words of one of my college housemates, heavy, deep, and real. Meaning serious literature. That’s probably “worse” because all three felt a little lighter, shallower, and more artificial than they might or should have. All three felt a little safer than they might have, too, as if their authors didn’t develop them as much as they could have. Although I’m doubly sorry about that because all three books did keep me reading, the good news is that all three books are debuts: perhaps their authors will take more chances next time.

Albena Stambolova’s Everything Happens as It Does, which I read in Olga Nikolova’s translation of the Bulgarian novel Tova e kakto stava, knits together events in the lives of a family or two. There’s no dialogue to speak of and everything—life, love, death—just happens because it does, no real questions asked. Meaning the book seems to be about fatalism, which feels a little hypnotizing. The reader doesn’t know much about why anything happens in this book—why Margarita suddenly has a laptop, why her twin brother Valentin follows her, why Boris with the bees ends up a father—but not knowing why is apparently the point. Everything Happens as It Does is told in a flat narrative voice that contributes to the hypnotizing effect of the book and the feeling of inevitability. It couldn’t have been easy for Nikolova to translate.

The Book of Jonah, by Joshua Max Feldman, combines two plotlines: Jonah, a youngish Manhattan lawyer, is trying to make partner at his law firm and trying to decide which of two girlfriends to make his partner outside work; and Judith, a youngish woman whose life has seemed nearly perfect until tragedy hits, is trying to figure out where she fits in the world. Both are Jewish, and Feldman includes a mystical Jewish thread in the book that inspires Jonah to reassess his life and failings. The Book of Jonah had the most promise early on, when it read most like social satire set in New York City, post-crash, during the time of smart phones… there were some funny scenes and lines, which made this the most enjoyable of the three books, but location changes to Amsterdam and Las Vegas felt artificial.

The car in which Heydrich was wounded

Finally, there’s Laurent Binet’s HHhH, which I read in Sam Taylor’s smooth translation from the original French. This novel about writing a historical novel about Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš and their mission to assassinate Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague takes hemming and hawing about detail to extremes: the narrator fusses over historical detail in ways that might inspire respect (he wants to get things right) or annoyance (does the color of Heydrich’s car really, truly matter when Nazism is the topic?). Despite winning a Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, HHhH doesn’t feel original and shapely enough to be great fiction, and that’s largely because the balances of objectivity-subjectivity and narrator-subject felt askew. That’s not just because Heydrich’s doings—like forming the Einsatzgruppen—were so horrifying and the narrator’s decisions about car color feel so trivial by comparison. All the narrator’s hemming and hawing about familiar thoughts on truth, certainty, and writing fiction ended up padding the book so much that it became a little dull, despite my interest in learning more about Heydrich, Gabčík, and Kubiš. I agree with M.A. Orthofer’s Complete Review assessment that HHhH would make a good young adult novel.

Disclaimers: I received Everything Happens as It Does from Open Letter Books and The Book of Jonah from Henry Holt and Company. Thanks to both!

Up Next: It remains to be seen…

Photo: Creative Commons, from Bundesarchiv.

The Banality of Evil, Once More: Monsieur Le Commandant

Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur Le Commandant: A Wartime Confession, which I read in Jesse Browner’s translation from the original French, is one of the more sordid World War 2 novels I’ve read in some time. Most of Monsieur Le Commandant is in letter form: Paul-Jean Husson writes one long letter, dated 4 September 1942, to Herr Sturmbannführer H. Schöllenhammer, “Le Commandant” of the title. The letter was ostensibly found “by the German documentary film-maker Peter Klemm among family papers abandoned in a Leipzig rubbish dump not far from a group of buildings under demolition.”

Pétain and Hitler, 1940. Photo: Das Bundesarchiv, via Wikipedia

Husson—a World War 1 hero, committed Pétain follower, and snooty anti-Semite—writes to Le Commandant to ask a favor. On behalf of his daughter-in-law, for whom he feels [cue “sordid”] forbidden feelings… Since much of Husson’s story is fairly predictable, I don’t think it spoils much [that’s an alert of sorts!] to say his daughter-in-law, Ilse, is German and Jewish, which makes Husson’s ardor all the more forbidden, thanks to his odious beliefs, which he often illustrates using anti-Semitic clichés. Husson is such a charmer that it came as absolutely no surprise when he said he’d cheated on his wife over the years (I even wrote “what a jerk!” in the margin) with hundreds of women, many of whom he claims were attracted to his stump and prosthesis. He thinks his wife “wisely chose to turn a blind eye and not dig too deeply.”

Though Monsieur Le Commandant has a plot that includes travel through occupied France and Husson’s pursuit of Ilse while his son/her husband is at war, what interested me most was Husson as a character and as a writer. In Husson, Slocombe creates a thoroughly unappealing figure who writes things like, “Against my own will, my family and my life were being ‘Judaised’. Little by little, a surreptitious leprosy was eating away the fabric of a good French Christian family.” It’s hard to even decide if Husson is a reliable or unreliable narrator: he’s so openly anti-Semitic that those feelings felt true but he’s also so melodramatic and over-the-top in his passions and, perhaps even more important, his self-expression that I had to wonder how much of what he claimed to feel was genuine and how much he was inventing himself as the (anti-) hero of his own story, for both himself and Le Commandant.

Monsieur Le Commandant works because Browner’s translation makes all Husson’s melodrama and passion seem so surrealistically and paradoxically real. Browner’s Husson feels appropriately and consistently wordy, pompous, and self-absorbed. It feels odd to say I thoroughly enjoyed Monsieur Le Commandant—the book is, of course, uncomfortable, because of Husson’s moral code—but I couldn’t put it down, thanks to the combination of Slocombe’s storytelling, the voice Browner creates for Husson, and my interest in French collaboration during World War 2.

Disclaimers: I received an advance review copy of Monsieur Le Commandant from Meryl Zegarek Public Relations. Thank you very much! The book’s publication date is listed on the book as February 21, 2014.

Up Next: Pedro Mairal’s The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra.

A Not-So-Jolly Jester: Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man

Andreï Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man, which I read in Geoffrey Strachan’s translation of the original French La vie d’un homme inconnu, is the kind of book that makes me grumpy. The novel details—and I do mean “details”—the emotional and geographical wanderings of a little-known Russian émigré writer living in France who decides to visit the motherland after his much-younger girlfriend dumps him. Shutov, the writer, is a sentimental guy and he wants to visit an old flame.

Peterhof/Petrodvorets at Saint Petersburg's 300th
Anniversary

Shutov’s surname may be rooted in “shut” (sounds like “shoot”), the Russian word for a clown, fool, or jester, but he doesn’t fit in with St. Petersburg’s carnivalesque atmosphere at the city’s anniversary celebration. He says, “Nothing has changed in thirty years. And everything has changed.” Right. A paragraph later, when Shutov tells himself, “I was wrong to come…,” I wrote “Yes, you were!” in the margin. Reason A: As we all know, you can’t step in the same river twice. Reason B: The trip is a colossally awkward plot device designed to give Shutov a chance to observe changes and fail to have a soulful reunion with Yana, the old flame, who is now a busy businesswoman… but miraculously redeem the journey by meeting Volsky, an old man who inhabits a room in a former communal apartment Yana now owns.

It’s Volsky’s last night in his room before moving to a nursing home, and Shutov watches over him, listening to his life story, which includes the blockade of Leningrad, reaching Berlin for the Soviet Army during World War 2, Stalin-era imprisonment, and a love story involving numerous coincidences. Volsky’s life hits on numerous elements of the mythos of Soviet Russia and Leningrad, combining the miracle of survival and the ability to find a certain happiness amidst chaos, arrests, and death. The problem here isn’t the material, which is important, it’s Makine’s treatment, which makes Volsky feel like a clichéd composite of the Soviet period right down to a tear-jerking final trip to an old site before he moves to the nursing home.

Even worse, Volsky is a tool to inspire Shutov to find perspective on his own dull life. If, that is, the reader can believe this self-centered guy is ready for perspective. This element of the novel felt especially literarily cheap and obvious because Makine summarizes the novel’s action and message at the end, lest the reader missed something. An example: “The violent feeling suddenly overcomes Shutov that he will never be a part of the Russian world that is now being reborn within his native land.” But we knew that many pages ago.

The Life of an Unknown Man reminds me of a Soviet-era package tour to Russia: a schedule stuffed with group meals in hotel dining rooms and ideological excursions, but no contact with Russians other than tour guides and food service personnel. Sure, you see the important sites and many of them are lovely. But you feel manipulated, told what to think. There are lots of Russian novels available in translation that address World War 2 in the Soviet Union and/or the Stalinist repression that I’d recommend over Makine’s The Life, everything from I(rina) Grekova’s Ship of Widows to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Two other Soviet-era books that have become classics: Anatolii Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat and Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate.

To be fair, I should note that lots of readers enjoyed The Life of an Unknown Man far more than I. Among them: Kirkus, which starred it; Amy Henry on The Black Sheep Dances; Mary Whipple on Seeing the World Through Books; Viv Groskop in The Observer, and M.A. Orthofer on The Complete Review, who links to numerous other reviews.

Notes on two other books: I had so much difficulty with G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, a clunky and contrived attempt to mix a Persian Gulf cyberthriller with djinns and The Thousand and One Nights that I stopped reading half-way through. Grumpy again! I also read the first hundred or so pages of WiesławMyśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, in Bill Johnston’s translation. Stone Upon Stone is very good, vignettes of rural Polish life that come close to qualifying as stream-of-consciousness, but it’s the kind of book I’m best reading over time, in chunks, so I don’t lose the nuance. I read wonderful passages about farming, the significance of a new road, and melees at dances. It’s easy to see why Bill Johnston won the Best Translated Book Award for Stone Upon Stone: he creates a memorable English-language voice for Myśliwski’s first-person narrator. It’s a book I’ll study and analyze, too, because its narrative voice feels like a Polish cousin to some of the Russian-language stories I’ve worked on.

Disclaimers: Thanks to Amy Henry who sent me a copy of The Life of an Unknown Man that she received from Graywolf Press, whom I also thank. Amy also facilitated my copy of Stone Upon Stone from Archipelago Books—thanks to both of them! Finally, I picked up a copy of Alif the Unseen from Grove/Atlantic’s booth at BookExpo America; I’ve always enjoyed speaking with Grove/Atlantic about literature in translation.  

Up next: Anita Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise. Then Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners. I think it’s my summer for Finnish-related books… I may have to read Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book next.

Image credit: Saint Petersburg’s 300th Anniversary, from www.Kremlin.ru

Bad Intentions Squared: Fatale and The Death of the Adversary

I’ve fallen behind on posting so this week I’ll write, briefly!, about two books: J.P. Manchette’s Fatale, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith, and Hans Keilson’s The Death of the Adversary, translated from the German original Der Tod des Widersachers by Ivo Jarosy.

Fatale is an evil sliver of Euronoir that brings a killer antiheroine who calls herself Aimée to the French seaside town of Bléville. Manchette sets the tone for violence on the first page: hunters are cranky because they’ve been out for hours and haven’t killed anything. But Fatale’s first death, on the second page, involves a human, setting us up for a high-stakes account of survival of the fittest. The killer, of course, is Aimée, who boards a train in the next chapter: she dyes her hair and feasts on choucroute, with “great chomps” in her luxury compartment. I wrote “very prole” in the margin: Aimée has a case full of cash but is surrounded by the nasty aromas of her money and food, which is said to smell like bodily fluids that I won’t name, lest I spoil the fun for anyone.

Fatale is a supremely class-conscious novel. Beyond the food, Aimée is a scam artist looking for powerful, well-heeled marks in Bléville. The novella ends with a spate of deaths that feels campy, and Aimée’s bad end is accompanied by an address from Manchette to his female readers. Fatale is filled with weird moments. My favorite is probably when Aimée is at a gathering, sitting on a settee in a hallway of what sounds like a swanky house, when, all of a sudden, a man comes out of the bathroom and begins urinating against the wall. I’ll leave things at that and just say that I thought Fatale was an oddly enjoyable book.

I thought The Death of the Adversary, though, was odd without being particularly enjoyable, despite some occasional comic relief: a first-person narrator discusses his hatred for a figure named B. B. strongly resembles Hitler, and the narrator seems be describing life in Nazi Germany. Part of my difficulty with The Death of the Adversary is that some of the book’s passages depend heavily on an interiority that felt repetitive and cramped; it must be difficult to carry so much hatred. For my taste, a scene in which a young man describes desecration of a cemetery is one of the strongest in the book: the narrator’s tension is palpable, in trembling and sweat, when he is faced with a real adversary, in a real-life conversation. Seeing B. at a parade, though, leaves the narrator “tired and depressed. I felt like lying down on a nearby park bench and going to sleep.”

Though The Death of the Adversary felt a little uneven to me as a novel, it felt important as a portrait of hatred and the role of enemies in our lives because Keilson’s characters and their actions and reactions felt so authentic. Keilson’s use of abstraction weakens the book in one sense – the shadow of Hitler always looms and I think it’s natural to want to identify him definitively – but it also strengthens the novel by opening the possibility for universality.

Keilson died recently, and his obituary in The New York Times, written by William Grimes, notes Kielson’s background and the circumstances of writing The Death of the Adversary. Grimes also calls the translation “stilted.” I don’t know if the translation reflects Keilson’s German-language style or not but I agree with Grimes’s thought: the language of the English translation sometimes felt cumbersome to me, too. Though the awkwardness made the novel a touch more difficult to read, intentional or not, it felt almost organic to the story of a man trying to figure out his place in life when faced with adversarial conditions.

Up Next: Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog.

Disclosures: I received a review copy of Fatale from New York Review Books at BookExpo America. I always enjoy speaking with NYRB about translations. I received my copy of The Death of the Adversary from fellow blogger Amy Henry, who wrote about the book here; Amy got the novel from publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thanks to all for the books!

Zoning in and out with Énard’s Zone

So I finally finished Mathias Énard’s Zone last week and since it is a one-sentence wonder, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, I thought I’d do something different, that is write about the book in kind of, sort of the style in which the book is written, which is to say one big, long sentence that wanders but has a definite destination because the main character is this guy, Francis Mirkovic, who is French but Croatian (I think you can see that in his name) and a former soldier and an intelligence gatherer, and anyway, he’s on a train because he missed his plane, so that means he has a lot of time to look around and think about his family and his life and all the things he’s done and people he’s met, and lots of that isn’t very pleasant, really, it’s about war and violence and truly horrible, awful things people do to each other and the Zone refers to places where many violent conflicts happen, the Mediterranean basin, as the back of the book says (I couldn’t say it better myself), and while he’s on that train he reads a book about Lebanon, but he also refers very often to mythology and ancient history and World War 2 and World War 1 (I almost forgot) and his own participation in the strife in what used to be Yugoslavia, which is awful and very vivid, some of the most interesting stuff, and, well, a lot of this is interesting, particularly when it’s about him and what he did himself but some of you probably already know that I don’t really like reading much nonfiction (which I always hate to admit) which means that some of the more historical asides got a little not-interesting for me, and Francis also talks about his girlfriends, who I kind of felt sorry for because he’s no gift as they say in Russian, not the nicest guy, not that that matters, no, I can read fiction about nice and not-nice people, but some of the things he does aren’t very pleasant, and also you can tell there’s war in his DNA because his father was in Algeria so there’s this feeling that war is just part of who people are, and what else can I say about this book, well, there are also many threads about literature like Don Quixote and Under the Volcano and I can’t forget The Iliad, you really can’t miss them, they’re pretty obvious, plus there are carnivalesque themes with lots of drinking (what better way to forget, right?, particularly when you’re a guy who collects memories about awful things that we shouldn’t forget) not to mention dancing, and in Beirut there’s a mention of a dance that “instead of a dance of memory it’s that dance of oblivion that only state-controlled memory allows,” so Francis thinks about all this as he takes the train, because he missed the plane, and he’s going to Rome where he’s going to turn in a briefcase full of information about all these terrible things and then he’s going to disappear and no longer be Francis Mirkovic but be someone else, using the identity of a guy he knew who’s now in a psych ward and that guy too was involved in conflict though not of the same type as a declared war, the book is really a lot about war so if you like reading about war and what it means, you’ll probably like Zone, especially because it’s really about how war and violence and conflict go on through the ages, on and on and on, kind of like that train clicks along until, maybe, the tracks or the journey or the world ends, which is also referred to in Zone, and the book is about memories, heavy stuff, and even I think male bonding, and about a sort of person like Francis who is, oh, I don’t know, maybe pan-European, and I think the book is pretty-not-bad for what it is, though I think that 516.2 pages of mostly all one sentence (with the exception of that book Francis reads on the train) is really quite a lot, too much, probably, for a reader like me so sometimes I felt I read a lot like I ride on a train, meaning sometimes I felt fully alert and engaged, watching what’s out the window, but other times I kind of zoned out (sorry I like puns), mesmerized by everything, with blurred vision so I probably missed things, but in the end, I felt like it all made sense, that it had a point, as I hope this post does, too, that you can get something out of it, like I got out of Zone, and here’s the disclaimer, I thank Chad Post of Open Letter for sending me a copy of the book to review, and of course I also want you to know that you can read more about Zone in lots of other places, like Scott Esposito’s very informative interview on Conversational Reading with Charlotte Mandell who translated Zone from the French, and Oh wow, she didn’t read it all before she translated it, I can’t imagine doing that because I always like to know what’s coming, I really do, but I can understand it might be fun to have suspense even as you translate, plus there’s also a review in last week’s New York Times Book Review (here) and on Words Without Borders (here) and if you read all of them you’ll learn lots more about the book because there are so many threads in it that one blog post like this can hardly catch and write about them all, so I think that’s all I want to say about Zone, which I do recommend, I’m glad I read it though it is one of the harder books I’ve read in a long time and oh, one more thing, I think it would be a fun book to read and research simultaneously, very enlightening, because Énard mentions so much history and literature, eons of it, really, I could probably spend months reading it and all the subtexts, now that would be a great project, so that’s all for now, bye, next week I will probably tell you about Copenhagen Noir, which sure is easy to read after Zone, even if there are some pretty disturbing things there, too.