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.

Existential Bathroom Visits?: Karabashliev’s 18% Gray

Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray, which I read in Angela Rodel’s translation from the original Bulgarian, is a lively and lovely blend of love story, road novel, and self-discovery, all told by a first-person narrator named Zack. Zack  begins his story with “She’s been gone nine mornings.” “She” refers to his wife, Stella, who left him. Stella is an ever-more-successful artist, Zack works in clinical trials under, well, false pretenses, and they emigrated to the U.S. from Bulgaria. Zack doesn’t take Stella’s departure well. He goes to Tijuana, where he ends up in possession of a big bag of pot, then decides to drive to New York City to sell it.

What makes 18% Gray work so well is that Karabashliev asks Zack to alternate stories about his present and his past: in italicized passages, Zack describes how he met Stella, their life in Bulgaria, and the disintegration of their relationship. The two timelines converge at the end of the book. The novel also includes brief dialogues from the past that beautifully combine the mundane and the intimate—many are about Zack’s photography and/or Stella’s painting. These various types of text might sound as if they’d result in a choppy novel, but they have the opposite effect because they integrate memories of Stella into Zack’s present life despite her physical absence on his road trip.

Another reason for18% Gray’s success is that Karabashliev isn’t afraid of any kind of material. Pretty much everything seems to work for him: there’s that rather unlikely bag of pot, there’s a chase scene, there’s the eternal search for espresso on the road (something I relate to all too well), there’s a failed suicide that Zack happens upon on the side of the road, and there are trips into men’s rooms, complete with olfactory and audio effects I hope never to witness in real life. There’s even one scene at a truck stop, where Zack eavesdrops—whilst standing on a toilet seat, for sanitary purposes—on a conversation about relationships. Though I’m not quite sure I’d agree with Zack that that particular conversation is especially “existential,” one of the best aspects of 18% Gray is Karabashliev’s ability to combine, with tremendous sincerity and grace, elements like bathroom humor, an extended parallel of painting and photography, difficulties for immigrants, and lost love. Plus the meaning of it all.

Finally, I should mention how much I enjoyed reading Angela Rodel’s translation: her version of 18% Gray reads smoothly and Rodel has a great sense of humor, something I noticed in her translation of Thrown into Nature, too (previous post). Early in 18% Gray there are two medium-length paragraphs where Zack mentally promises all sorts of things to Stella if she shows up “at the door right now.” Here’s the second paragraph, which I think nicely sums up 18% Gray, Karabashliev’s writing in Rodel’s translation, and Zack’s character. I’m sure you’ll recognize something in here:

I will not correct you when you’re telling jokes, I will not interrupt you when you’re excited about something, I will not sing over your favorite songs, I will not be a smartass when we watch sentimental movies, I will not share my opinion about every single thing, we will not have Josh and Katya over for dinner ever again, we will never ever go to Vegas again, ever, I will not rent Hitchcock films, I will not order Chinese, I will not leave the room when we fight (what am I saying? we won’t ever fight!), you will never see me picking my nose, I will not burp loudly (or strain to fart on purpose), I will never be silent with you for so long, never, I will never watch CNN, I will never promise you the moon—you are a star, Stella.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of 18% Gray from Open Letter, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.

Up Next: Esmahan Aykol’s Baksheesh. Then Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.

More Fiction with Finnish: A Fool’s Paradise and We Sinners

Anita Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise, which I read in A.D. Haun and Owen Witesman’s translation of the Finnish original Hullun taivaassa, and Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners share more than Finnish ancestry: structurally, both books link vignettes or stories into novels, and both books offer straightforward writing and rather bleak, atmospheric pictures of loneliness. 

I read A Fool’s Paradise first, enjoying Konkka’s first-person narrator’s dark humor: her storyteller is an unemployed young woman who’s involved with a married man and enjoys referring to Russian literature and writers. In the first chapter, she has a stone from Pasternak’s grave in her pocket. The woman’s accounts of her life, much of which isn’t particularly interesting in term of activity, read, to me, like a stream of vignettes, often incorporating observations about strangers and descriptions of dreams. “Our life passes in sleeping and waiting,” she says. She also says her only duty in society is to report to the unemployment office.

It’s Konkka’s use of detail—a bird flying into a room, a gypsy on a ferry, childhood memories of learning about Yuri Gagarin—and tone, as conveyed by Haun and Witesman, that made A Fool’s Paradise so strangely engaging for me. Here’s an example:

A young man is distributing leaflets in front of the K-Market and asks whether I believe in Jesus. No woman has ever asked me that. Perhaps they’ve agreed that men will save women and women save men, since people are more responsive to the allure of the opposite sex.

Repentance and sin are, as promised by the title, a crucial element of We Sinners, a novel-in-stories that chronicles the lives of the Rovaniemis, a family of Finnish descent living in the U.S. that has nine children. The Rovaniemis are Laestadian Lutherans who aren’t allowed to watch movies or TV, go to school dances, use makeup, or drink alcohol. Among other things. Of course they break the rules a lot, and several of the Rovaniemi children leave the church during the course of the book. One of the younger Rovaniemis sums up the church this way, “It’s a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans. End of story.”

All those rules and alleged deprivations (I love life without a TV!), along with the expected transgressions from all manner of sinners, were less interesting for me than Pylväinen’s grace in structuring the book, her debut novel. She tells the family’s story chronologically, economically covering a couple decades in under 200 pages by carrying threads from one story to another. In the first story, children get chicken pox and their father, Warren, may be offered the job of pastor at their church… Pylväinen starts the second story by letting the reader know what happened for Warren.

Pylväinen also creates an interesting illusion with her story-chapters, many of which focus on a key episode in one character’s life with references to other family members. The characters—from father Warren, who grits his teeth from anger until a crown breaks, to Brita, a daughter whose first press of the keys on her new piano is silent—are members of a crowded family living in a crowded house but they often feel tragically alone in their anger, disappointment, and relative poverty. Much of the siblings’ interaction comes through solidarity in leaving or staying with the church.

Two scenes involving the mother, Pirjo, especially stuck with me. In the first, her discovery (at the movies!) that one of her sons is gay seemed especially alienating for everyone involved, “She felt slapped, she felt rejected, she felt like he had looked at the life she had made for him and he had spit on it.” So much for forgiveness. Toward the end of the book, Pirjo tells one of her daughters over the phone, “We’re here to remind you of what is right. We know you know in your hearts what the right thing is, of course we know you know that—” But then her daughter cuts her off, yelling, “Assholes!”

Up Next: Seven Days by Deon Meyer.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of We Sinners from publisher Henry Holt, thank you!

Dreaming Is Free: The Night Circus

First off, an apology: I know it’s unkind to write about books that won’t be available for months. It’s something I don’t usually do, and I hadn’t intended to write about Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel, The Night Circus, until its release date in September… But sometimes fate – in this case, a minor head cold and a stack of books acquired at BookExpo America – takes over.

I picked The Night Circus off my book pile because I thought a novel about a dreamy circus that comes and goes without notice sounded like a perfect companion during my cold. I wasn’t wrong: The Night Circus is a page-turner about magic, love, imagination, desire, and what results when the four combine. The main plot involves Marco and Celia, two magicians whose guardians commit them in the late 1800s to a competition designed to end in death. Of course they fall in love. The mysterious competition, imposed on children by adults, felt absolutely inorganic to me, which is unfortunate since so much of the book’s action springs from it.

The circus, known as Le Cirque des Rêves, is largely a tribute to the relationship that grows out of the competition. The circus felt very much alive: Celia and Marco create attractions for each other, and, fittingly, descriptions of the circus’s wonders are Morgenstern’s greatest achievement. Morgenstern populates The Night Circus with many (dozens of?) characters but her circus details are more memorable: her intricate clocks remind of mortality, her bottles contain stories, and her dresses change color. They feel more real, more lifelike than her people, with one exception: a boy from Massachusetts, Bailey, who first enters the circus on a dare, when it is closed.

What’s most interesting about The Night Circus is the underlying power of circus attractions to draw people by playing on imagination, dreams, and illusion. Morgenstern incorporates themes about magic and circuses that I’ve run across in several Russian novels, emphasizing the role of the observer, who must be open to illusion. I’m open as a reader, too, and I had little trouble believing in the circus’s ever-burning cauldron, never-melting ice, mysterious train, and acrobatic kittens. But I wasn’t sure what to make of the rêveurs who follow the circus – and their own dreams – around the world, wearing identifying red scarves. Maybe it’s because the rêveurs felt more earthly than the circus but, with the exception of the original rêveur, they felt a bit cultish. (Or maybe it’s because “rêveur” sounds like “raver”?) Like many of the characters and motifs (e.g. public faces and masks) in The Night Circus, they felt a little underdrawn, as if they could have contributed more to the novel but lost out to description of scenery.

I came away from The Night Circus feeling ambivalent. Morgenstern’s stylized language conjures up vivid places, smells, and atmospheres that make for wonderful entertainment even if you’re not a big fan of circuses, and the book reads almost like a lucid dream. But The Night Circus lacked power for a reader like me who enjoys characters that develop through the course of a novel: here, the people and their stories seem schematic and secondary to the attractions they create, and the novel’s messages about imagination and love didn’t feel especially original despite much loveliness. The Night Circus hit on many of my other negative biases, too, but I have to say that the novel’s circus still drew me in… though its effects are fading quickly, like the ephemeral, image-laden dreams and nightmares of what passes for real life.

Disclaimer: I received an advance review copy of The Night Circus from Doubleday/Random House at BookExpo America, thank you! I also took a bag of caramel corn that went with it and should probably disclose my gratitude to Doubleday/Random House for the snack since I was very, very hungry at the time. Not that The Night Circus needs much help from the likes of me: my impression is that The Night Circus was one of the most visible books at this year’s BEA.

Up Next: Hans Keilson’s The Death of the Adversary.

Location, Location, Location: The Oracle of Stamboul

Michael David Lukas’s The Oracle of Stamboul is a costume drama of a book, a fairytale-like story about one Eleanora Cohen, a fictional girl born in 1877, to the accompaniment of omens, including the presence of a flock of hoopoes. Eleanora’s mother dies in childbirth, and her rug merchant father marries her mother’s sister, who prefers that Eleanora learn housework instead of reading. But Eleanora reads, and she follows advice about following one’s heart that she gleans in her favorite book: Eleanora stows away on her father’s voyage to Stamboul, where she becomes a polyglot child prodigy and is invited to advise the sultan on important matters.

Publisher HarperCollins calls The Oracle of Stamboul “evocative,” which it is. Lukas describes settings, food, and clothing in intimate detail, making me crave Turkish coffee, pomegranate juice, and fresh flatbread. And his accounts of Eleanora’s love for reading are rather sweet: the girl’s favorite book is The Hourglass, a novel that is, as far I can tell, purely fictional.

Though Lukas generally writes consistently in a genial, sometimes old-fashioned style and fully convinced me he’d done his research, I can’t say he convinced me of Eleanora’s role in the history within this historical novel. The book’s plot turns felt predictable – most of them are obvious from the publisher’s description anyway – and character development suffers at the expense of all the vivid settings. Readers who enjoy rich descriptions with a magical flock of birds thrown in will love The Oracle of Stamboul.

For my part, I read The Oracle of Stamboul as a book about reading and knowledge rather than a book about history or a talented little girl. I held on to a small detail simply because it’s Russian: early in the book, Eleanora’s father holds up a copy of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to prevent Russian soldiers from pillaging his house. The book, a classic Russian poem-as-novel, functions like a protective icon. Later in the book Eleanora finds solace and advice in books. Her beloved Hourglass is the true oracle of the book, inspiring Eleanora to continue a reading career that progresses to ancient classics, recognize life’s paths and plans, and make decisions.

The Oracle of Stamboul stimulates the senses of sight, smell, and taste more than the intellect, and I think the retro language and Eleanora’s flock of birds feel too mannered... but sometimes there’s something to be said for an easy-reading, escapist book that offers the warmth of Stamboul, along with that thick Turkish coffee, in the middle of a cold, snowy Maine winter.

Disclosure: I received an advance review copy of The Oracle of Stamboul from publisher HarperCollins. Thank you!

Up next: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day.

Photo credit: Hoopoe in Israel, portrait from MathKnight and Zachi Evenor, via Wikipedia.

Neither Hot Nor Cold: Russian Winter

Daphne Kalotay rolls lots of recognizably Russian motifs into her debut novel, Russian Winter: ballet (the Bolshoi, no less), amber jewelry, poetry and poets, secrets, and wariness among friends. Russian Winter’s main character, Nina Revskaya, connects them all.

In the novel’s historical track, set in Stalin-era Moscow, Nina is a Bolshoi Ballet ballerina whose poet husband gives her jewelry. Wariness comes in through arrests and informants. In the novel’s contemporary track, Nina has retired in Boston and donated her jewels for an auction to raise money for the Boston Ballet. Through the auction, Nina meets Drew, a divorced auction house employee, and re-encounters Grigori, a widower and Russian émigré who was adopted at birth and never knew the identity of his birth parents. Grigori, a professor, also translated Nina’s husband’s poetry.

I didn’t love Russian Winter – much of the characterization and plot felt as predictably worn and creaky to me as Nina’s aged joints – but I did find the book fairly absorbing. It lived up to the “page-turner” description on the front flap of the book that HarperCollins sent to me, though I was disappointed that Russian Winter felt more plotted than organic, as if Kalotay carefully meted out details to keep the reader interested in learning her characters’ secrets.

Thanks to my interest in Russia, I found the chapters in Moscow more compelling than the chapters in Boston, though some material felt more like it came from Kalotay’s research than her characters. (Notes at the end of the book confirmed my suspicions.) I thought some of the lowest-key Russian scenes – like night swimming at the dacha – were the best in the book. In Boston, I had no interest in jewelry auction details and I tired of Nina’s crankiness. That’s not to say it felt unnatural: Nina is essentially housebound, and her curmudgeonliness almost made her seem like a native New Englander.

Russian Winter is filled with romantic, professional, familial, adversarial, and Platonic relationships, and I think Kalotay is at her best focusing on characters’ loyalties and trust during the Stalin era, demonstrating how doubt poisoned friendships and lives. She also shows plenty of beauty and kindnesses, as with certain telegrams that Nina’s mother sends. Perhaps best of all, Kalotay presents a sincere and sensitive portrayal of episodes, both light and heavy, in the lives of Nina and the people around her.

For more:

• An excerpt from Russian Winter.
• An interview with Daphne Kalotay here.
• Library Journal loved Russian Winter: Review
• Publisher Harper Collins organized a blog tour for Russian Winter. The previous post, a review, is on She Is Too Fond of Books here. Tomorrow’s post will an interview with the author on Bookin’ with Bingo. BTW, I noticed Bookin’ with Bingo has a review of Babushka’s Beauty Secrets: reading the review brought back memories of similar advice I heard when I lived in Russia.
• My Russian literature blog, Lizok’s Bookshelf, has posts about books on related topics: Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers (very readable nonfiction about the Stalin era), my top 10 greatest hits of post-1917 Russian fiction, and Irina Grekova’s Ship of Widows (difficulties of communal apartment living). I wrote about Sofi Oksanen’s Purge, a much different kind of book about mistrust, on this blog, here.

Disclosure: Thank you very much to Harper Collins for providing me with an advance review copy of Russian Winter at my request. (I’d hoped to get an ARC signed at Book Expo America but arrived too late after getting stuck in traffic somewhere in sweltering Massachusetts!)

Up next: Dalia Sofer’s Septembers in Shiraz, which I found disappointing.

Photo of the interior of the Bolshoi Theater from AndreasPraefcke, via Wikipedia.

Why Everything Matters!

Ron Currie, Jr.’s, Everything Matters! is the first old-fashioned “you’ll-laugh-you’ll-cry” book I’ve read in a long time. What could be more laughable or more cryable than a novel about the absurdity of the human condition, tricked out to fit Junior Thibodeau? Junior is born hearing a God-like voice that lets him in on all sorts of secrets, like the ultimate demise of Earth as we know it, by comet, about 36 years after his birth. Oh, heavy burden.

The wonder of Everything Matters! is that Currie makes the story, which includes mini-apocalypses, both fun and believable by letting his characters – including the slightly officious nearly omnipotent voice that informs Junior of everyone’s destruction – narrate the novel. The book’s polyphony shows how well Currie hears voices, too. Junior speaks about coping (or not) with his knowledge. Junior’s girlfriend, Amy, talks about Junior. My favorite narrator is Junior’s older brother, a superlative baseball player whose childhood cocaine addiction causes brain damage; the transcripts of his answers to his badgering therapist’s questions demonstrate his loyalty to his brother. Junior’s father, a laconic Mainer, talks about Vietnam, his family, and working in a bakery.

Currie uses plot details to connect their narrations, giving the novel a sense of continuity. Even more impressive, Currie infuses the title message with surprising freshness and emotion by showing how much Junior and his family care about each other, despite (or because of?) their difficulties. Though the book’s message sounds simplistic, Currie piles up moments, memories, and actions to create Junior’s personal microcosm of the “everything” in the title, without letting the novel feel too magpie-ish or cute. He even gives cameo appearances to real people, notably Ted Willams and Maine senator Olympia Snowe.

I think Everything Matters! works because the book feels so sincere and even traditional. Currie shows fantastic patience and balance: there’s plenty of alienation but he accentuates the positive sides of relationships instead of estrangement, and a twist toward the end says loads about the choices we make and our perceptions of the lives we live. The novel also has an authenticity I appreciate. Currie, a native Mainer, works in details of Maine life that show grittiness and dignity without letting the Thibodeau family’s problems descend into depressing naturalism or annoying quirkiness. Despite the prophesy, alcoholism, cocaine, and lack of money.

Currie’s work in progress, from which he read a few weeks ago at Longfellow Books in Portland, also seems to demonstrate an ability to balance interesting form with an emotional, very human story. I can’t wait to read it. (But please! Take your time, Ron!) I probably have a couple years to check out Currie’s debut book, God Is Dead, a collection of stories that won the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library. Everything Matters! won a 2010 Alex Award from the American Library Association and is being translated into many languages.

I’ve limited details in this post not because of a grand quest for blandness but because I was glad I didn’t know too much about Everything Matters! before I read it. If you want to read a very positive review and don’t mind knowing more, here’s Janet Maslin’s review from The New York Times. I think it qualifies as a rave.

Up next: Akira Yoshimura’s spare Shipwrecks and Daphne Kalotay’s Russian Winter.

Most intriguing review of the week: Murray Bail’s The Pages, here, in The New York Times Book Review. I enjoyed Bail’s Eucalyptus years ago and am interested in this take on Australia and philosophy.

Three Debuts: A Walk in Broken Glass Park, a Scratchy Gramophone, and Needy People in Suvanto

I seem to be on quite a debut novel streak this summer: this post discusses three, I just finished a fourth, and I’m now reading a fifth. I’ve always had an affection for debut novels because I think (or imagine?) there’s a unique energy in first novels, as if the writer is finally having a say about something important. I love seeing how new novelists handle all that papery space.

Though I don’t think any of the three novels in this post quite achieved what they might have, all three held my interest more than enough to want to finish them. (I am quick to dump anything I don’t like!) Even better, I would happily consider reading each author’s next novel.

Characterization, setting, and an energetic voice are Alina Bronsky’s tremendous strengths in Broken Glass Park, translated from the German by Tim Mohr. Seventeen-year-old Sascha tells why she wants to kill her former stepfather, who killed her mother. Sascha, her family and neighbors, and her run-down German apartment building felt so believable I thought I was with them, but the book’s strong positives had the unfortunate effect of emphasizing the novel’s slight weakness – a lack of forward narrative momentum.

I didn’t think Sascha’s anger and ideas about revenge were quite enough to sustain a novel. Plenty of things happen – a cousin comes to care for Sascha and her siblings, Sascha has sex, Sascha exacts a small revenge, and Sascha learns fear (or admits she learns fear) and has an epiphany about a neighbor – but the many episodes and the anticlimactic ending added up to a book that felt more like a portrait than a story with a narrative arc. Of course this isn’t inherently a bad thing, particularly in Broken Glass Park, which presents a compelling and vivid portrait of not just a person but of cultural and class differences, loyalties, and violence.

Bronsky said in an interview with Marie of Boston Bibliophile that she did no “special research” for Broken Glass Park: “The novel is based on my own experiences and observations.” This felt absolutely obvious to me because Bronsky didn’t cram the book with gratuitous or incongruous details that made me feel she wanted to get in all her research.

Then there is Saša Stanišić’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, translated from the German by Anthea Bell. Many of Stanišić’s descriptions of childhood in Bosnia – such as a party to celebrate the opening of an indoor bathroom – combine humor, cultural specifics, and a sense of impending doom. Reminiscences of grandfathers are very strong, and scenes from the war are terrifying. Form and content are absolutely inseparable here: the narrative itself is as fractured as young Aleksandar’s life. I admire Stanišić’s eye for detail and the absurd, and recommend the book for that and its portrayal of the consequences of war, which Stanišić experienced. Though I liked the book, I thought its shattered structure often detracted from the story more than it reflected or supported it.

Maile Chapman’s Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto feels like a lite mashup: an early 20th-century Nurse Ratched at the Hotel Overlook with the scent of cardamom rolls. I don’t mean to sound flippant: Suvanto is a novel about Sunny, an American nurse and control freak working at a remote Finnish hospital for women. Sunny works on a floor housing emotionally needy “up-patients,” essentially expat wives escaping their lives. Some, like Julia, a former ballroom dance instructor suffering from various female problems, have real physical “issues,” too.

Beyond that, Suvanto is, well, atmospheric; I usually think of “atmospheric” as shorthand for books with lots of weather, seasons, and (maybe) food but little plot. Such is Suvanto: there are mentions of Finnish character (quiet), Finnish cold and ice (Finns know when it’s safe), and Chapman includes some Finnish vocabulary, but I didn’t think the book felt inextricably tethered to Finland. I’m simplifying but, absent a few details, the setting might have been another northern place with ice and quiet people, say, northern Norway or Alaska. (Even my own Maine, where ice, Finnish heritage, the term “people from away,” and the desire for privacy are common, might fit.)

Chapman uses a mannered first-person plural narration and focuses on building up the arrival of Something Evil. The book culminates with several deaths, some mysterious, but little is resolved, and the identity of “we” isn’t revealed. My vote is that a patient is speaking for the group: reviewer Mary Whipple reminded me that Chapman mentions Euripides’s “The Bacchae.” I’ll leave that topic to Whipple’s post, particularly since she includes photos of the sanatorium Chapman visited and used as a model for the place in her book.

Other (re)views:

• Boston Bibliophile wrote about Broken Glass Park here.
• Complete Review on Broken Glass Park here.
• Europa Editions has a PDF sample chapter of Broken Glass Park here.
• The Black Sheep Dances posted a favorable review of Suvanto here.
• The New York Times Book Review on Suvanto here.
• An excerpt of Suvanto is here.

All three books came to me from their publishers: Europa Editions gave me a signed copy of Broken Glass Park at Book Expo America. Grove Press sent me a copy of How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Graywolf Press gave me a copy of Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto at Book Expo America. Thank you to all! (Disclosure: I’ve met all these publishers at BEA and asked them about their interest in translated fiction.)

Up next: Yes, it’s more debut novels: Daphne Kalotay’s Russian Winter then Ron Currie, Jr.’s Everything Matters!.