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.

What Price Discipline?: Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline

I seem to have a habit of calling books “atmospheric” when I damn them with faint praise: “atmospheric” feels like a code word for books with lots of detail and texture but very little story. But Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, an account of boarding school translated by Tim Parks from the Italian I beati anni del castigo, is different. At only 101 pages with lots of white space, Sweet Days of Discipline is just short enough, just long enough, and just elegant enough to feel complete as – here, I’ll say it – an atmospheric portrait of a young woman and her surroundings.

Our first-person narrator is a teenage girl sent to school in post-war Switzerland. She has a German roommate because her mother requested it; the narrator disdains the roommate and imagines her meeting dates in her sleep. Sweet Days of Discipline contains all sorts of early warnings that this isn’t a heart-warming tale of high school camaraderie: we learn in the first paragraph that writer Robert Walser walked nearby and died in the snow. On page two, the narrator tells us she remembers only Baudelaire from her study of French literature. I wrote “uh-oh” in the margin.

Flowers of evil, indeed: our narrator has girl crushes (or maybe something deeper?) on beautiful, perfect new girls, first Frédérique, later Micheline. What hides behind the perfection? Life at school, the narrator tells us, involves establishing “a façade, a kind of double life” – she even emulates Frédérique’s handwriting. Sweet Days of Discipline contains lots of other creepy little details, like the comparison of boarding school with a harem and reading “a few lines of Novalis about suicide and perfection.” Frédérique is described as a nihilist, and we confirm toward the end of the book that not all is right in her world.

Then there’s all that discipline and obedience. The narrator speaks of the pleasure of disappointment and sadness in her life, and wonders if the discipline of religious school, where she was a boarder at the tender age of eight, might have been the best years of her life. She also finds pleasure in obedience… This is a short book, so I’ll leave things at that, though I would love to tell you about the book’s very last sentence.

I probably wouldn’t recommend Sweet Days of Discipline to readers who prefer fiction with strong stories and plots, but I think those who enjoy eerie character sketches will love it. Enigmatic somehow works for me here, and Sweet Days of Discipline succeeded where Maile Chapman’s Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto (previous post) did not. Though both books concern females – not all of them stable – living and interacting in restrictive, closed places, in Parks’s translation, Jaeggy’s writing is spare, wonderfully restrained and, yes, disciplined, giving this novella a poetic beauty as it describes life’s dark corners.

And now I’m curious about Robert Walser…

Disclaimer: I have discussed literature in translation with New Directions, the publisher, but received Sweet Days of Discipline from a friend in a book trade. Thank you, Daisy, and enjoy the baking!

Up Next: Michael David Lukas’s Oracle of Stamboul.