WINEMAKER DETECTIVE MYSTERIES PAGE: #8 through #11

MONTMARTRE MYSTERIES (Winemaker Detective Mysteries #8)
JEAN-PIERRE ALAUX & Noël Balen (tr. Sally Pane)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Wine expert Benjamin Cooker travels to the French capital, where his is called to help care for some vineyards in Montmartre, a neighborhood full of memories for him. He stops in on an old friend. Arthur Solacroup left the Foreign Legion to open a wine shop good enough to be in the Cooker Guide.

But an attempted murder brings the past back into the present. But which past? The winemaker detective and his assistant Virgile want to know more, and their investigation leads them from the sands of Djibouti to the vineyards of Côte du Rhône.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Virgile must've been a bad lad indeed in book seven, which I have not read. He comes in for much barbed raillery about his free-lovin' ways, not a thing I'd associate with an impending father-in-law relationship; but he is still here, and still obviously his mentor's pet despite the teasing.

Arthur, an old friend of Benjamin's and a former member of the Foreign Legion, is in need of the winelover's assistance hence the men's travel to Paris. Arthur has an attempted assassination in front, more or less, of them; the past in the Foreign Legion coming home to roost...?

We find out, of course; we also learn why Arthur decided to open a wine shop in Montmartre, and how Benjamin came to be his friend. The past is never that far from any mystery, especially in a series; this entry goes a lot further into Benjamin's past than usual. I enjoyed that, and enjoyed how Arthur came to be where he is (in a coma after the attack on him the men interrupted).

The excuse to get the men to Paris is as flimsy as anything I've ever read: A woman running some convent or hospital or something in Paris has a teensy remnant of a vineyard attached to it and asks Benjamin to come resuscitate it; he agrees, more than anything just to make the trip plausible enough. Virgile is the man of the hour, though. He's more the crimesolver than his boss is.

It's not the best book in the series but it worked fine: Arthur's shop is the occasion for much discussion of many delectable sounding bottles. The main lack is odd: the evocation of Paris feels...postcard level, facile and surface-oriented. I wished it had been more as is usual in this series of quite short reads. We're not going into history-book depths anywhere but more than this, if you please. Still quite readable and kept me engrossed enough to enjoy it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BACKSTABBING IN BEAUJOLAIS (Winemaker Detective Mysteries #9)
JEAN-PIERRE ALAUX & Noël Balen (tr. Anne Trager)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Winemaker Detective goes to Beaujolais, in a French-style cozy mystery for lovers of food and drink, amateur sleuth stories or anything set in France.

A business magnate calls on wine expert Benjamin Cooker to kickstart his new wine business in Beaujolais, sparking bitter rivalries. Can the Winemaker Detective and his assistant keep calculating real estate agents, taciturn winegrowers, dubious wine merchants and suspicious deaths from delaying delivery of the world-famous Beaujolais Nouveau? Another adventure in this made-for-TV mystery series set in France. Both a wine novel and a mystery.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Beaujolais Nouveau was all the rage ten-plus years ago, my memory informs me. I think the wine industry was having us on: “You can drink Beaujolais early on, but the wines frequently open up three to five years after being bottled. They are precocious and aromatic, but round enough to have a lingering taste.”

So there US wine snobs.

As a wealthy philistine wants to acquire a vineyard in Beaujolais to experiment with some new ideas in the making of the stuff, he runs into opposition from local people as well as his own haute Parisienne wife. The latter insists he consult with Benjamin, a renowned expert on wine, to determine how viable his plan to alter the way Beaujolais is drunk. But really, there's quite an amount of inertia in this process: “From time immemorial, {Beaujolais Nouveau} has been celebrated when it’s young, at the start of fermentation. Centuries ago winemakers traded early in the year, and the yeast would complete its job while the barrels were in transit, moving slowly by carriage or boat along the Saône and Rhône rivers or up the Loire.”

Change is hard anywhere. Changing the way the French make and consume wine? If you come for the king, you'd best not miss. That was our millionaire, Guillaume's, error. We're treated to the murder early in the story...but we're not told who's been murdered, so all the characters we meet during the story could be either the victims or the murderers.

It was a nice touch, and I'd've loved to see it on TV because I can't come up with a way to make the idea work. I'll assume it does but man, am I curious as to how. In this installment, Benjamin is the driver of the story because Guillaume has hired him for the legendary expertise he has in the entire world of wine. Of course Guillaume is looking for a certain outcome to the questions he's set Benjamin; he misjudged Benjamin, though, as Benjamin will pursue the truth. It would reflect poorly on his profesional honor to be seen doing Guillaume's bidding. You hire the best, you'd best be ready to believe their report.

Benjamin and Virgile banter and talk and generally behave as always, only now in Lyon and Beaujolais, as they discuss the case, the local wines, literature, how much they loved last night's meal; all the things that keep us coming back to the series.

By the time the murders were solved, I'd sort of accepted there wasn't a solution. There was; and it was dead clever for the authors to hide the victim this time instead of the perpetrator. A very fun entry into the series I'm still enjoying. (Though not really so much thrilled with the lists; they persist.)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

LATE HARVEST HAVOC (The Winemaker Detective Series Book 10)
JEAN-PIERRE ALAUX & Noël Balen (tr. Sally Pane)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Disaster strikes the vineyards in Alsace. Vintners are tense and old grudges surface. The Winemaker Detective's reputation is on the line as he must find the cause before the late harvest starts.

Winter is in the air in Alsace and local customs are sowing trouble, piquing the curiosity of the famous winemaker from Bordeaux, Benjamin Cooker. While the wine expert and his assistant Virgile settle into their hotel in the old city of Colmar, distinguished vineyards are attacked. Is it revenge?

The plot thickens when estates with no apparent connection to one another suffer the same sabotage just days prior to the late harvest. All of Alsace is in turmoil, plunged in the grip of suspicion that traces its roots back to the darkest hours of the German occupation. As he crosses back and forth into Germany from the Alsace he thought he knew so well, Cooker discovers a land of superstition, rivalry, and jealousy. Between tastings of the celebrated wines, he is drawn into the lives and intrigues of the inhabitants.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Benjamin is getting older. As is so often the case, it's something outside himself that sours his usually fairly confident-in-goodness manner. It makes some sense, even, as it comes from nothing so petty as murdering someone you hate for one or another reason.

Someone is attacking the vines of Alsace. Someone is systematically and violently attacking the means of making wine in this ancient part-French, part-German province that Benjamin has known (he thought) most of his career. Some darker mutterings even accuse Benjamin, an outsider from the south, of being connected to the chainsaw attacks on the vines.

We'd get soured by that kind of gross insult to our specialist knowledge and passion, too. Virgile is the one who really shines, and that is always nice to see. He's still a skirt-chasin' houndawg, but he has skills he's honed under Benjamin's tutelage. He uses them to good advantage as he pokes into another viper's nest of Occupation resentments, as we saw in book #4. it felt a little bit weird for the men to wander from Lorraine into Germany and back seemingly at a whim, but it certainly drove home the point that the cultures on either side of the border are subtly different, they're not *dramatically* so; it makes sense to do that in the context of the story's resolution.

I was a bit confronted by the bolder-than-usual sex scene.

I'll say that Alsace, Strasbourg and its cathedral, and gewürztraminer all mean more to me than they ever have. I'm still eager to try, one day, mirabelle plums from nearby Lorraine; since they can't be exported, though, that is a very very unlikely eventuality.

I keep reading these stories, lists and all, because they are short enough to read in a sitting, dense of story enough to satisfy me as I read; and there are enough of them that I can get a solid foothold in their storyverse.

Don't start here, but don't stop before you get here, either.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TAINTED TOKAY (The Winemaker Detective Series #11)
JEAN-PIERRE ALAUX & Noël Balen (tr. Sally Pane)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In between enjoying sumptuous food and wine, the Winemaker Detective grapples with deceit and deception in Old World Europe.

France’s top wine expert Benjamin Cooker sets off to enjoy the delights of Vienna, a romantic ride down the Danube, a gourmand’s visit to Budapest, and a luxury train through the enchanting Hungarian countryside. All too soon, stolen wallets, disappearing passports, guides who are a bit too obliging, and murder mar the trip. Meanwhile, in Bordeaux, Cooker’s assistant handsome Virgile faces an annoying rival and a mildew crisis in the vineyards just as Cooker’s lab technician is the victim of a mugging.

If you love cozy culinary mysteries, amateur detective stories, international mysteries with French flair, or anything wine-related, this made-for-TV series offers armchair travel at its best with gentle mysteries.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Vienna? Hungary?!

What the actual. I was not expecting this, nor was I bargaining on Benjamin leaving Virgile in Bordeaux to make this lucullan journey. And does Virgile ever get the short end of the stick! All the practical problems are his to figure out and then to solve.

Benjamin, meantime, is spending time with his much-loved Elisabeth as they take in the scenery of the wine world along the Danube. It is genuinely the main pleasure I had in this story, their charming interactions. The authors make it clear these are soul mates, real genuine friends married and very devoted to each other. The tribulations of the murders around them merely make that clearer; they handle the different challenges with the sangfroid of long-established couples.

Back in Bordeaux, the disasters plaguing Benjamin's premises are affecting his every asset. Alexandrine, whose tenure with Benjamin exceeds Virgile's (I think; could be wrong about that), has hitherto kept her distance from Virgile which makes her more interesting, frankly.

Well, that's over.

Too bad, that, she went from mildly interesting in a greyscaled-Moneypenny way to just being another woman on Virgile's cosmic rapsheet. It was here that I determined the series and I were parting company. I'm just not able to gin up much interest in Virgile's exploits in bed, they outnumber the times he's taken the investigative lead, and...well...Vienna? I'm not very interested in the Danubian plains, and it's usually a sign we're going to spend more time outside the wine-world of France when we get time in foreign places back-to-back.

I had an excellent time with Benjamin, Elisabeth, Virgile, and the crew. I'd prefer to leave smiling so that's what I'm doing.

WINEMAKER DETECTIVE MYSTERIES PAGE: TREACHERY IN BORDEAUX, #1; #4 through #6

TREACHERY IN BORDEAUX (Winemaker Detective Mysteries #1)
JEAN-PIERRE ALAUX & Noël Balen (tr. Anne Trager)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: THE PERFECT BLEND OF MYSTERY & GASTRONOMY

Treachery in Bordeaux is the first book in the beloved Winemaker Detective novels, the "addictive" French series featuring master winemaker Benjamin Cooker and his sidekick Virgile. When some barrels turn at the prestigious grand cru Moniales Haut-Brion wine estate, Cooker and Virgile start to investigate. Is it negligence or sabotage? They search the city and wine region for answers, welcoming readers into the underworld of a global luxury industry. Grab a glass of your favorite Bordeaux and delve into a world of money, deceit, inheritance, greed, and fine wine.

Brimming with description, intrigue, and compelling characters, Treachery in Bordeaux kicks off this unbeatable series, which was adapted to television in France.

"I love good mysteries. I love good wine. So imagine my joy at finding a great mystery about wine, and winemaking, and the whole culture of that fascinating world. This is a terrific new series." — William Martin, New York Times bestselling author of Back Bay and The Lincoln Letter

"A fine vintage forged by the pens of two very different varietals. It is best consumed slightly chilled, and never alone. You will be intrigued by its mystery, and surprised by its finish, and it will stay with you for a very long time." —Peter May, international bestselling author

“Intrigue and plenty of good eating and drinking within just a few pages.”—Booklist

“Those who like detective stories that rely on the fine qualities of the investigator will find Cooker an enjoyable lead.”—Publishers Weekly

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read these ages ago; I blew through them in a week, all eight that I possess. They're all short, punchy reads, really an afternoon's enjoyable reading and pondering.

More than anything else, the scratch the same itch as Martin Walker's Bruno series does, the desire to be taken into a place that feels charmingly unfamiliar yet guided around that place by a friendly, experienced polymath who makes us feel less...foreign...than a less cultured native's PoV would. In this story he is training a new assistant, Virgile, in the course of investigating a murder among the élite of historic winemaking center Bordeaux. That makes the emotional investment in the action so much easier; and it provides a reason for some basic questions we'd like answered to be asked.

The book offers us this explanation of the writing duo responsible for the series:

Jean-Pierre Alaux is a magazine, radio and television journalist when he is not writing novels in southwestern France. He is a genuine wine and food lover, and won the Antonin Carême prize for his cookbook La Truffe sur le Soufflé, which he wrote with the chef Alexis Pélissou. He is the grandson of a winemaker and exhibits a real passion for wine and winemaking. Coauthor of the series Noël Balen lives in Paris, where he shares his time between writing, making records, and lecturing on music. He plays bass, is a music critic and has authored a number of books about musicians in addition to his novel and short-story writing.

As is obvious from this potted biography, the duo clearly understand wine, luxury goods, and storytelling; the series was adapted to TV and was available in the US via the MHz Channel. I do not know if they are still available there; I'm disgruntled enough that the books are only available on Amazon.

Anyone wanting to escape the challenging emotional landscape of 2025 would do well to follow Benjamin and Virgile as they navigate the high-stakes world of French cultural treasures like wine, paintings, and that indefinable thing called "milieu." As cozy and escapist as a satisfying (if brief) vacation into the world of those who exist as natives in a beautiful lifestyle in a beautiful setting can be.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

DEADLY TASTING (Winemaker Detective Mysteries #4)
JEAN-PIERRE ALAUX & Noël Balen (tr. Sally Pane)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: When wine tasting turns to murder.

A serial killer is on the loose in Bordeaux. A local chief detective calls wine expert Benjamin Cooker to the crime scene of a brutal murder. The killer has left a strange calling card: twelve wine glasses lined up in a semi-circle with the first one filled with wine.

Cooker is charged with the task of identifying the fabulous grand cru and is astonished by what he learns. A second victim is found, with two glasses filled. Is the killer intentionally leaving clues about his victims and his motives? Memories are jogged about the complicated history of Bordeaux during Nazi occupation. It was a dark time: weinfuhrers ruled the wine trade, while collaborationists and paramilitary organizations spread terror throughout the region.

In present-day wine country, time is running out. Will Cooker and his young assistant Virgile solve the mystery before all twelve glasses are full?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I missed the second and third installments when Le French Book was offering them on EW+, but in a series, that's less fatal than starting your read of it with a later book. I'd read, and really enjoyed, volume one, so I felt I could hop back into Benjamin and Virgile's milieu. Luckily I was correct.

A major subplot in this very short afternoon's amusement is Cooker the wine expert being required by his lady wife, Elisabeth, to give up wine...horror number one...and go on a cabbage diet. Bad enough already, horror number two is it's a liquidized cabbage diet.

The lady's established as a fabulous cook; his life is spent in the wine world of France; and he does not either divorce her or cheat on his diet. For seven days. True love indeed.

The murder that ignites the book is engendered in France's ugly, collaborationist past. The winemakers were, as most others were as well, getting on with their lives as the occupation wore on. Those who stood up to the vile occupiers have never stopped holding grudges. Debts are going to be called in as the time to do so grows ever shorter.

The staginess of the way the murder scenes are set-dressed makes it very clear they're not meant to be under-the-radar killings; no other reason for them to be so very obviously, unmissably, linked up. It does not lead to the immediate solution to the crimes. That was a very interesting touch to me. The collaborationists faded into the background where they could, where they were allowed to; but memories are long for betrayers of those who chose resistance.

I was more intrigued by the history than I was by the actual murders because the motive for them are so little explored; at least in Anglophone translations that make it here to the US. I'm really interested in how memory works on a cultural level. It is becoming a very great deal more relevant here in 2025 all over the world. I'm glad we have a few cultural objects around us to point out the signs of incipient rot.

I'm seeing a prose trend that could, if overused in future entries, cause me acute discomfort: there are a lot of lists (eg: "Elisabeth had cut a large head of cabbage, four slivers of garlic, six large onions, a dozen peeled tomatoes, six carrots, two green peppers, and one stalk of celery and plunged them into three quarts of water with three cubes of fat-free chicken broth. The mixture, seasoned with salt, pepper, curry powder, and parsley, had been boiled for ten minutes and then simmered until all the vegetables were tender.") in this story. A. Lot. It's not *quite* OTT yet, but could easily go there. The characters, major and minor, get reintroduced rather more elaborately than I myownself find helpful or necessary.

As of now these are grunts of annoyance. Watch this space....

ETA: I just learned that the stories in this series are novelizations of the TV show's scripts! Much is now clearer as to the way the writing sometimes does not flow in the reader's experience; try seeing them from a visual PoV and complaints are minimal. I'm so glad to find this out!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

COGNAC CONSPIRACIES (The Winemaker Detective Mysteries #5)
JEAN-PIERRE ALAUX & Noël Balen; Luc Brahe & Éric Corbeyran (tr. Sally Pane)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The heirs to one of the oldest Cognac estates in France face a hostile takeover by foreign investors. Renowned wine expert Benjamin Cooker is called in to audit the books.

In what he thought was a sleepy provincial town, he is stonewalled, crosses paths with his first love, and stands up to high-level state officials keen on controlling the buyout. Meanwhile, irresistible Virgile mingles with the local population until a drowning changes the stakes.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh the horror! the horror! Benjamin's latest edition of his guide to wines is required to go in depth about...can he even think it!...American "wines"!

Snob.

Well, it *is* a very French series and they *are* very protective of their cultural heritage....

Virgile makes more of a splash in this entry into the series. It's odd, too, because while Benjamin drives the revelations, it's Virgile we see most of (and some of the folks of Cognac seem to want to see a lot more still). The series has multiple women as characters though it largely underuses them (slightly disappointingly it's more in the service of men than the plot, if you see what I mean, this time out). Virgile is, I hope, going to come to the fore a bit more.

Cognac, many US readers might learn for the first time, is a real place. It is so charmingly evoked in this short read that it feels more like the main character than any mere human. Benjamin is, as I guess should not shock a savvy reader, a man of Appetites and refined tastes...he reconnects with a long-ago love in this story who really seems to get him very exciteable. So to speak. It's why Virgile takes more attention, I suppose, since otherwise Elisabeth (Mme Cooker) might have problems.

I'm still barely on the good side of the list-use bubble, though sorely tried by: "He took in the scents of pear, apple, kirsch, cherry, strawberry, cranberry, fig, apricot, plum, quince, muscat, lemon, orange, grapefruit, citron, and Mirabelle plums. He wafted fragrances of violent, mint, verbena, fern, moss, anise, fennel, linden, gentian, angelica, tobacco, lavender, and mushroom, along with some spicy aromas, including cinnamon, pepper, clove, ginger, nutmeg, licorice, and saffron."

Family ties, no matter how...um...close they may be are not proof against greed and a desire to punish those you love for not being perfect. As a reason for murder, that's as old as Cain and Abel, as intense as Chinatown, and as uncomfortable as possible. Very much not my favorite read in the series.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MAYHEM IN MARGAUX (The Winemaker Detective Series #6)
JEAN-PIERRE ALAUX & Noël Balen (tr. Sally Pane)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A made-for-TV series. Gourmet sleuthing in French wine country.

Fine wines, dirty secrets. It’s summer in Bordeaux.

There’s a heat wave, the vineyards are suffering, vintners are on edge, and wine expert Benjamin Cooker’s daughter is visiting. A tragic car accident draws the Winemaker Detective and his assistant Virgile into a case where the stakes are very personal, and they uncover the dirty secrets hiding behind some of Bordeaux’s finest grand cru classé wines from Margaux.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh myyyy, as Takei would say, is Papa Benjamin going to go all protective dad because wounded daughter Margaux is Interested in his charming assistant Virgile?

He wouldn't be the first daddy to lose his child to his assistant's charms in all of fiction. It happened to Gamache in the Three Pines books, after all. Is Papa Benjamin only worried because his daughter, visiting from her job in New York City, is wounded in the latest affront to the wonderful world of wines and the celebration of French culture that he must solve? Or is he feeling the writing on the wall as Margaux (named after the wine, of course) shows her increasing adulthood? Either way, the car she was riding in was clearly sabotaged, and the smarmy git driving her around in it is dead.

It's business as usual in the lovely liminal world of Bordeaux's cultured elite. Virgile and Margaux aren't the first two slightly-too-close pair to get Interested in each other. They both love, in their different ways, Benjamin. They share cultural antecedents in the world of wine. Now what are they going to do with these feelings? The threat posed by whoever caused Margaux's accident can't be dismissed out of hand, despite being convenient.

The drought in this story is palpable, the wine consumption way down as a result, and some of the usual scrumptious food descriptions are instead evocations of seasonally appropriate salads that just don't have the same level of mental delight for me as a reader. I did get why the choice was made, and in the decade-plus since I read the story we've seen tragic and unprecedented fires due to drought and extreme heat in this region it's probably all anyone there actually eats anymore.

Then hot-button issues like metal screwcaps replacing traditional corks fix the story in time.It's a debate that will never really cease, but the sheer efficacy and efficiency of screwcaps have become more and more obvious, so that dated the story just a bit.

I'm rootin' for Virgile to get his wooing of Margaux off the ground. I'd like to see more of her.

DAVID FOENKINOS'S PAGE: THE MARTINS, his latest; & SECOND BEST, a very interior story of "missing out"

THE MARTINS
DAVID FOENKINOS (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: ‘Go out into the street and the first person you see will be the subject of your next book.’

This is the challenge a struggling Parisian writer sets himself, imagining his next heroine might be the mysterious young woman who often stands smoking near his apartment...instead it’s octogenarian Madeleine. She’s happy to become the subject of his book—but first she needs to put away her shopping.

Is it really true, the writer wonders, that every life is the stuff of novels, or is his story doomed to be hopelessly banal? As he gets to know Madeleine and her family, he’ll be privy to their secrets: lost loves, marital problems and workplace worries. And he’ll soon realise he is not the impartial bystander he intended to be, but a catalyst for major changes in the lives of his characters.

Told with Foenkinos’s characteristic irony and self-deprecating humour, yet filled with warmth, The Martins is a compelling tale of the family next door which raises questions about what it means to be ‘ordinary’, and about the blurred lines between truth and fiction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't think most Anglophone readers are aware that "Martin" is the most common surname in France. In the US, the equivalent title would be "The Johnsons," our commonest surname. The joke being established, let's look at these bog-standard, government-issue, salt of the earth just folks. (I could probably pack a few more epithets onto that sentence, but I'll resist.)

Does everyone have a novel in them? As a former literary agent who read endless forests of murdered trees invested in the attempted proof of this nostrum, I'd say, "sorta...kinda...it depends...".

In attempting to prove this is a truth not merely a truism, an author sets himself the challenge in the first paragraph of the synopsis. He tricks himself into believing today will be the day he gets to talk to the alluring woman who smokes in front of the travel agency on her breaks.

"Ha ha ha," says Melpomene, reaching past her laurel wreath for the Mask of Tragedy. Following his self-imposed rule, he must interview an old woman pushing her shopping home. As any seasoned reader knows, here comes the punchline: Mme Madeline Tricot ("Mrs. Cotton") was once in the fashion industry in a small position thus has stories about Lagerfeld et alii being horrible to each other and everyone else.

Score! Or...is it? See, Mme Tricot is sliding into dementia. Her daughter, whom he meets immediately upon going home with Mme Tricot,is naturally very protective of her mother. Thus we're launched into an exploration of modernity, celebrity "culture," and the absurdities of aging...why extend the lives of the old relentlessly and pointlessly if all you're going to do with them is ignore and/or belittle them?...through the lens of The Martins, France's any/every/body family.

Why I enjoyed the read was that Author Foenkinos commits to the bit. He keeps our narrator saying he's reporting alone while, in fact, he's embroiled with the Martins. As a nod to his disingenuous self deletion while in fact performing self insertion, Foenkinos peppers the text with authorial footnotes explaining, justifying, in short intellectualizing, our narrator's many choices. Foenkinos treats us to the narrator's rocky relationships with the people he's trying to make into The Martins, his characters; we read the narrator's account of being termed a con man and an emotional vampire, accusations he, reluctantly, acknowledges carry some truth in their hurtful rejection.

Changing from novel, to non-fiction, to memoir, to metafiction in turns, The Martins is a charming and entertaining exploration of the overlooked, the unconsidered, the devalued, as full and satisfying subjects for our attention. It thus shines a searchlight on the tendency of modern storytelling to ignore simpleness in favor of simplicity. Making their own lives easier by inventing Big!Important!Amazing! people whose lives and doings have only the depth of a narrative purpose, Foenkinos implicitly accuses himself and other authors of avoiding the incredible richness with its immense labor of La Comédie humaine, to cite an ancient example. We're ever less likely to get to know, really know, the people around us, even our own family members as this novel quite clearly demonstrates.

It lends this entertaining read a special poignance, and makes the only slightly veiled warning to our distracted selves sting a good bit more. Multilayered meditation on storytelling, stories, the tragedy and comedy of ordinariness, and the need to attend the moment you're in: A very twenty-first century kind of a read. One I recommend to almost everyone except those in the throes of divorce or breakup, or the recently bereaved.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SECOND BEST
DAVID FOENKINOS (tr. Megan Jones)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A witty, moving international bestseller about a 10-year boy whose life is shaped forever when he loses out on the role of Harry Potter.

It's 1999. Martin Hill is 10 years old, crazy about football and has a minor crush on a girl named Betty. Then he makes it to the final 2 in the casting for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

In the end, the other boy is picked for the role of a lifetime. A devastated Martin tries to move on with his life. But how can he escape his failure, especially when it's the most famous film series in the world? As Martin grows up, he finds every aspect of his life is invaded with a sense of failure and missed opportunity, and he struggles under the weight of the life he isn’t living.

This bittersweet comedy is full of surprising truths and touching moments, as its unforgettable character discovers that sometimes, the lives we wish we’d led might not be all they’re cracked up to be.

An international publishing sensation, Second Best has been adapted for stage and won the hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers.

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My Review: Published in 2022 in its original French and brought out this week by Pushkin Press after their acqusition of Gallic Books, this is a wonderful meditation on the idea of "almost" as it defines us. Our Western culture valorizes "winning," defined as gaining an objective, fulfilling a need to see ourselves in those who exceed or transcend averageness, mediocrity; this is invidious. By definition, there are more who do not "succeed" or "excel" than those who do; the bar moves ever farther from the mass in the middle, and we are subtextually told we're not as good as, as deserving as, as successful as the few that excel.

Capitalism 101 there...create scarcity from abundance, then keep the abundance away from the maximum number of people.

Being on the outside of the circle, then being uprooted from the normalcy of his life before tragedy of s familial sort scars him further, Martin is a kid who's asked to bear social burdens way above his paygrade. Similar circumstances have crushed adults (famously Pete Best, though the comparison is unfair and inexact) into tailspins more intense than Martin's. Adolescence is hard enough...putting this on top...well, it's no wonder Martin begins to fanatically and fearfully avoid the cultural juggernaut that was Pottermania.

Not terribly successful, that. With the expected consequences.

Watching a talented, not exceptional, adolescent fall into psychosis was uncomfortable to read. Martin imagines...carefully note verb choice...people are laughing at him, judging him, thinking of him as second best, because this epic piece of bad luck befell him. This is, to an adult, clearly imaginary; also clearly missing that most painful of adolescent lacks: Perspective. Watching Martin stumble and bumble his way through what could have been a very good career indeed turned into a prison of self-doubt and fantasy...well...it's rough for me as a reader to soldier on, resonating as I do to his terrible, ongoing struggle. Reading the rumination, by definition repetitive, of someone caught in their mind's cruelest trap...what might have been...is, no matter how brief (only 200-ish pages), quite an ask for entertainment.

Author Foenkinos was inspired to write this story by an interview with the film in question's casting director who recounted the process of anointing Daniel Radcliffe as Potter in contrast to another boy who didn't have some quality Radcliffe did. I do not know if that other child was ever named in any other venue. I certainly hope not. Bad enough to lose out; worse to be known as the loser. The story moves at a slow pace because rumination is not susceptible to the plot drivers that keep us flipping pages. It is an interior novel, this, one that says "here we are in this head and here we stay" which isn't quite the same thing as a récit, but really closely related. In both there is a relentless inward gaze. It gets wearing.

That this would make a very interesting French film is undeniable; it's purported to have been adapted to the stage, though I can't find any official source that mentions this. I can barely imagine how Foenkinos is getting away with mentioning Potter at all without The Lawyers℠ being all over him like vultures on a gut-cart for not paying Warner Bros. a cut. (Maybe he is; I kinda doubt it.)

What I found troubling is the way this examination of fame culture was presented in its downside was pointed but never pointed out. I'm not sanguine about the readers attracted to the story getting a sense of resolution from the ending. It's why I'm only offering four stars for a five-star idea.

ONCE UPON A VILLA: Adventures on the French Riviera, a vicarious stroll among the one-percenters

ONCE UPON A VILLA: Adventures on the French Riviera
ANDREW KAPLAN
Smuggler’s Lane Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this wise, warm-hearted, witty, and LOL hilariously funny true account, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Kaplan tells what it’s like when he, his wife, and two-year-old son decided to chuck it all and live the fantasy in a villa by the sea in that extraordinary corner of the world—part international café society, part billionaires’ playground, part provincial France—that is the French Riviera.

Whether it’s matching wits with French bureaucracy, searching for the perfect bouillabaisse, encounters with con men, eccentric ex-pats, and Monaco’s royal family, partying with the international set on Onassis’ yacht, playing chess with a philosophical police chief, or adventures and friendships with the rich and famous and the presumably standoffish French, Once Upon a Villa will transport you to a fascinating and shrewdly-observed world that you will savor like your first-morning bite of pain au chocolate.

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My Review: No idea if it’s just me or what, but I still crave comfort reads.

The world’s gotten way meaner here lately. It takes more and more effort not to simply check out and leave the awfulness to its own devices, perpetuating itself being its best-ever trick. Thus I approached this read with all the fervor I would’ve lavished on the Best-Costume Oscar had I known about the bit John Cena committed to this ceremony. The man’s fifty-five, y’all, give it up for growing old gracefully...and hotly.

Ahem. Focus, Mudge, focus!

So, back to Author Kaplan, and the idea of relocating to the Riviera. Short of money, the author clearly is not...and there’s my sticking point, the reason for my missing stars. The part of the read that was charming, the French and their cultural schizophrenia of warm, generous, welcoming people and cold, maddening bureaucracy, was outweighed in my pleasure-reading by a very arriviste kind of name-dropping and hobnobbing with the Society Set that has long made the South of France its own. So much of the book is about who the author and his shopaholic wife went around and about with that I lost my warm happy glow.

That was not fatal...the story is a lot of fun to read...it just hits me, the leftist redistributionist, in the wrong way. I do not care about Princess Caroline of Monaco. I do care about the neighbors who were kind.

I am not everyone, and I am quite sure many of y’all will not feel my collywobbles about the snobbery on view. I urge y’all to go to it, go get it, and enjoy its very real writerly pleasures. I felt uneasy about my own trip, but that is no reason you should. This tour of the land of naked privilege should entertain and distract (most) anyone.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ASTRID BRICARD, romantic generational saga *not* a romance

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ASTRID BRICARD
NATASHA LESTER
Forever/Grand Central Publishing
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Three generations. One chance to prove themselves. Can the women of the Bricard fashion dynasty finally rewrite their history?

French countryside, Present Blythe Bricard is the daughter of famous fashion muses but that doesn't mean she wants to be one. She turned her back on that world, and her dreams, years ago. Fate, however, has a different plan, and Blythe will discover there is more to her iconic mother and grandmother than she ever knew. New York, 1970: Designer Astrid Bricard arrives in bohemian Chelsea determined to change the fashion world forever. And she does―cast as muse to her lover, Hawk Jones. And when they're both invited to compete in the fashion event of the century―the Battle of Versailles―Astrid sacrifices everything to showcase her talent. But then, just as her career is about to take off, she mysteriously vanishes, leaving behind only a white silk dress.

Paris, 1917: Parentless sixteen-year-old Mizza Bricard has made a to be remembered on her own terms. Her promise sustains her through turbulent decades and volatile couture houses until, finally, her name is remembered and a legend is born―one that proves impossible for Astrid and Blythe to distance themselves from.

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My Review: The Battle of Versailles, 1973, has long been a subject of great interest for me. Many things shifted as a result of this event, not least the French conception of US fashion designers as lesser lights, or derivative copycats riding the wave of French chicté and eternal design leadership.

At stake was far more than bragging rights...the international luxury-goods market was even then worth billions. As the event progressed, it was clear that the New York contingent was well and truly a creative design force on its own, handing the French designers their first effective challenge for world leadership...and the profits therefrom.

What former L’Oreal executive, and current New York Times bestseller, Natasha Lester did that was truly inspired was to remodel several real peoples’ lives to better present a generational saga of the fashion universe of the twentieth century. The heavily made-up Bricards, from World War One Paris to twenty-first century world citizenship as they arise and create beauty as well as havoc, represent an amalgam of factual individuals and business dynasties.

Driven, high-powered people seldom make good parents. The Bricards, to a woman, were not good parents as they sought to achieve things other people really could not even see. They were, like the real folks their lives were based on, frequently abused emotionally and taken advantage of financially and creatively, as the hunger for glory is the outward-facing surface of money-hunger. What raises this above the run-of-the-mill story of sexist betrayal is that the men perpetrating the thefts are not the men the Bricard women love, but the ones who run the businesses that the women stand as public faces for, and the mass of media types in search of a hook to hang the story they want to tell...not the story of the Bricards, but "The Story of The Bricards"—if you get my drift.

Author Lester is a very well thought of storyteller, and she has a genuinely interesting story to tell here. Her focus on the Bricards and their creative ambitions and abilities led her not to tell a story, even in part, that was of great consequence indeed: the Black models whose performances on the catwalks of this hugely consequential show broke, at last, the color barrier in fashion. True, it was not part of the Bricard story as written, but I felt it could and should have been.

That misfire, and Author Lester’s serviceable, but never more than that, prose, led me to give the book what seems an ungenerous under-four-star rating. I read the book with pleasure, but was always aware that a very big part of the real story it is based upon was just...missing. In today’s world, not telling the whole story involving Black creatives is more troublesome than at any time in the past. It isn’t as though this reality is some specialist knowledge, the kind of knowledge that only a scholar would reasonably be expected to have...after all, *I* know it.

So, while this is a reading pleasure that will involve and entertain readers of what I don’t know what else to call except the cringe-y label "women’s fiction", it comes with some big asterisks for the standard 2024 reader.

THIS CLEAVING AND THIS BURNING, what gay men coped with a century ago & DISORIENTAL, Lammy Award-winning bisexual fiction

DISORIENTAL
NÉGAR DJAVADI (tr. Tina Kover)
Europa Editions
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER OF THE 31st Lambda Literary Award—BEST BISEXUAL FICTION!

The Publisher Says: Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including her formidable great-grandfather Montazemolmolk, with his harem of fifty-two wives, and her parents, Darius and Sara, stalwart opponents of each regime that befalls them.

In this high-spirited, kaleidoscopic story, key moments of Iranian history, politics, and culture punctuate stories of family drama and triumph. Yet it is Kimiâ herself––punk-rock aficionado, storyteller extraordinaire, a Scheherazade of our time, and above all a modern woman divided between family traditions and her own “disorientalization”—who forms the heart of this bestselling and beloved novel.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF AMAZON'S PRIME READING PROGRAM. USE THIS BENEFITS! WE'RE HOW THEY LIVE, SO TAKE ALL ADVANTAGES.

My Review: From the off, this is a very musical, music-like story, told in the form of "Side A" and "Side B." This alerts us "...old enough to remember 45 rpm vinyl records know that the B-side is usually less interesting that the A-side. Side B is the failed side, the weak side", that we should expect the whole read to be inflected by this frame of reference. And lo and behold, it is!

Kimiâ, or "alchemy" as the word has come to us in English, is a magical confabulation of stories and ideas and history. She is in a fertility clinic when we meet her...she is making the future, deliberately and calculatedly, in other words...and she begins with many skips and backtrackings and forward-lurchings to relate to us the recent history of Iran. ("Recent" is relative, of course, since Iran's history dates back to the invention of the idea of civilization so dwarfs silly Western concepts like "history" and the yet-more-modern "prehistory.") Kimiâ's family, the whole huge swath of them...six uncles, a grandfather who had a wife for ever week of the year...are in their different ways shaping the world's as well as their own world's history.

Sara and Darius, her mom and dad, are revolutionaries against the Shah, though very much antithetical to the theocratic horrors of the Islamic state that replaced one cruel oppressor with another. Their exile to France doesn't dim their ardor for and connection to an Iran free and liberated from repression and tyranny. For Kimiâ that includes her sex's oppression and reduction to the role of housewives. She's a bisexual woman and very much anathema to the present regime. They don't acknowlege the existence of gay or bi identities in Iran.

It gives special poignance to the read to realize that Home, when it doesn't want you, isn't home anymore; and France, the land they're living in if not part of, is in the awful, wrenching process of a rightward shift that rejects foreigners like her. It's a miserable truth that Négar Djavadi, the author of the work, is living in that same France, writing in French, and unable to conceptualize a safe return to the land of her birth.

Sleep isn't about resting, it's about letting yourself settle, like the sediment at the bottom of a wine barrel. I'm nowhere near trusting this world that much.

It is, in the end, the birth, "that dark hyphen between the past and the future which, once crossed, closes again and condemns you to wander"...her own, your own, the one Kimiâ is going to endure soon enough...that provides Kimiâ's final reckoning with the subject of exile:

With the passage of time, the flesh of events decomposes, leaving only a skeleton of impressions on which to embroider. Undoubtedly there will come a day when even the impressions will only be a memory. And then there won’t be anything left to tell.

She is compelled "to let myself be guided by the flow of images and free associations, the natural fits and starts, the hollows and bumps carved into my memories by time." She is the witness, the one whose between-state of emigrant/immigrant is definitional; her responsibility equally to the parents and family whose worlds are so different from hers, and the life she's making whose exostence will continue a line of existences that partake in many beautiful, braided strands of the bread we eat with our every act, that we call History.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THIS CLEAVING AND THIS BURNING
J.A. WAINWRIGHT
Guernica Editions
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Two unrelated, aspiring writers, born on the same day in the same year to parents with the same first names, grow up together and eventually gain national prominence as authors. As the years pass, the complex sexual identities of Miller Sark and Hal Pierce undermine their intense private relationship, inflicting damage that cannot be undone by the distinction of their fiction and poetry. Inspired by the lives and works of American literary giants Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane, This Cleaving and This Burning reveals the passion and purpose behind masks of public reputation and creative expression.

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My Review: The bones of this story are based on Hemingway and Hart Crane, a sadly now-forgotten poet popular in the 1920s for his exaggeratedly obscurantist poetry. He was much on the model of T.S. Eliot, though far more, um, impressionistic in his vocabulary and stylistic affectations. For all that, he had a spark of some beautiful thing, a light that shone from his lines (as oddly heard as they were:

The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.

These lines are from "Repose of Rivers" which is from his seminal collection White Buildings. Modern Queer Theory proponents like the late Thomas E. Yingling and Tim Dean have pushed back against heteronormative readings of Crane's poetry, arguing that his gayness was central to his sense of himself, and his sense of being a social pariah for his queerness was central to his poet's identity.

Any road, the friendship between Hemingway (a hugely overpraised writer in my never-remotely humble opinion) and Crane is not factual; it's factual that, had it happened, this is the way it would've ended given Hemingway's homophobia.

The thing that drew me ever deeper into this read was the beautiful creative world these two inhabited, the joyous freedom of childhood and adolescence spent with light supervision allowing them to muse and think and just *be*. The way the words knit and tat and crochet the strands of character and story together was magical. There's really very little said, apart from a seriously climactic scene, about their natural world...and even that scene is far more about Hal's thoughts and feelings. The characters, based on real men, are themselves and not merely mouthpieces for a plot full of contrivances. It hews as closely to the known life-events of the men as it's possible to do within the confines of writing one's own story.

While the ending was a saddening thing to read, it was factual in its results and outlines. What I'd recommend to readers is that they come to this tale of the valences of long-term friendships, especially same-gender ones, with a spirit of discovery. The novel is about the transformative nature of Love in its many, many, bizarre and unhappy and joyful forms. The love between men-friends is one of the toughest to show in fiction unless one resorts to sports as a central metaphor. In the case of Miller and Hal, the center of their long and loving friendship is Miller's appreciation of the adornments of Hal's poetical imagination and Hal's appreciation of Miller's grounded, practical masculinity. The tragedy of an ending is always there in the rapture of a beginning, isn't it.

It's actually a bit of a surprise to me how much I ended up enjoying this read. I don't generally like tragic endings to queer stories but this one's both factual and handled with a real sensitivity to the story that's led up to it. The characters, always forefronted in Author Wainwright's hands, are very clearly heading into inevitability. Their hidden selves and their public presentations of self collide and fragment on the rocks of Love. It has happened forever; it will happen myriad times again. It's a testament to that reality's careful construction in This Cleaving and This Burning that it failed for once to trigger my knee-jerk hostility to this kind of ending.

I'll say this for Author Wainwright. Decades of writing, both poetry and novels, has led him into a beautiful green pasture of story that only he could inhabit with the lightness and rightness of touch to sell my resistant soul on such a painful, sad to read, finale for two fascinating characters.

ARCADIA, rare intersex representation & THE WASTELAND, London life of gay poet/literary ikon T.S. Eliot

THE WASTELAND
HARPER JAMESON
Level 4 Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The extraordinary career and devastating life of T.S. Eliot.

T.S. Eliot is a hollow man trapped in a dreary world. He works at a bank, a slave to the clock, the same routine, day after day. While London’s elite enjoy a Great Gatsby lifestyle and poets like Robert Frost are rock stars, attracting thousands of fans to each reading, Mr. Eliot walks past life, peering at it through cracks or around corners. Only in his imagination does the world drip with color.

Then one day he comes across Jack, an out and proud gay man being badly beaten, and something compels him to intervene. Life will never be the same.

Jack introduces Mr. Eliot to the gay underground of early twentieth-century London and to feelings Mr. Eliot had crammed down and locked away. And with freedom comes poetry. Extraordinary poetry that takes London by storm. But as Mr. Eliot’s fame increases, pressure for conformity does as well. Religious intolerance, fascism’s increasingly popular message of traditional values, and the allure of untold success present him with a decision that could have devastating consequences.

The Wasteland is the untold story of T.S. Eliot, his secret struggle with being gay, the people left in the wake of his meteoric career trajectory, and the madness that helped produce his greatest work.

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My Review: Sadness. Grey, enveloping sadness. That's the take-away I had from this technically adept reinvention of poet T.S Eliot's early-1920s life in London.

Even if there were no light on the bank, Mr. Eliot would still know it was there. It's always there, waiting to welcome him with open arms, more than willing to take more tocks from his clock.

–and–

"We return you now to our regular broadcast," the announcer drones.

"Clair de Lune." Claude Debussy. Relaxation. Baloney.

Baloney indeed, and more than just that in a penitential dry sandwich consumed in a lonely penitentiary. With the aplomb of a dab hand at this fantastical-reimaging stuff, Eliot's life is peopled with the souls embodied and conjured on a magical-realist visit with the great poet. We even see him conjuring Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock (whose peaches are uneaten and coffee spoons resolutely empty) on the day he learns his new crush, Jack, is no longer with the bank. But Mr. Eliot is in for a major surprise in this case....

...as are the readers of this historical fantasia on themes of gay men's circumscribed lives. Mr. Eliot, for I cannot bear to call him Tom, is a creative and passionate soul in the body of a Puritan. He is deformed and damaged by a world he despises as he obeys it. Mr. Eliot will get his revenge. He blares forth a trumpet of poetic passion that has stood its ground atop English-language poetry. Its creator is given, here, by Author Jameson, a life that commingles reality and fantasy as only a poet could merit, warrant, summon forth from beyond the grave's creative silence.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ARCADIA
EMMANUELLE BAYAMACK-TAM (tr. Ruth Diver)
Seven Stories Press
$13.96 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

25% OFF DIRECT PURCHASES OF #WITMONTH TITLES HERE: https://sevenstories.com/blogs/385-celebrate-women-in-translation-month-2025

The Publisher Says: An English-language debut that reveals and subverts contemporary conceptions of normative sexuality, capitalist culture, and environmental degradation.

Winner, Prix du Livre Inter, 2019

Farah moves into Liberty House–an arcadia, a community in harmony with nature–at the tender age of six, with her family. The commune’s spiritual leader, Arcady, preaches equality, non-violence, anti-speciesism, free love, and uninhibited desire for all, regardless of gender, age, looks, or ability. On her fifteenth birthday, Farah learns she is intersex, and begins to question the confines of gender, and the hypocritical principles those within and outside the confraternity live by. What, Farah asks, is a man or a woman? What is it to be part of a community? What is the endgame for a utopia that exists alongside refugees seeking shelter by the millions and in a society moving ever farther away from nature and its protections. As Liberty House devolves into a dystopia amidst charges of sexual abuse, it starts to look a lot like the larger world, confused in its fears and selfish hedonism.

Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam delivers a magisterial novel, a scathing critique of innocence in the contemporary world.

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My Review: Really, really squicked out by what I see as a borderline-coercive sexual relationship between a fifteen-year-old who's just discovered they're intersex and the much-older leader of the cult that they and their family now belong to. I took a long break from the read because I was not sure I wanted to finish this entire story. It brought up my mother's sexually abusive power-plays against me. That was not comfortable at all.

So I'm unusually alert to sexual undertones in relationships between kids and adults. I felt Arcady, the cult/commune leader, was less grooming Farah than responding to Farah's burgeoning sense of themself as a sexual, intersex person. While that doesn't lessen my personal discomfort with Arcady's power imbalance with Farah, it does show that Author Bayamack-Tam possesses a clear sense of the need to keep the power dynamic in balance. Add to that Farah's rare and possibly genetically-heritable anatomical anomaly resulting in an indeterminate sex and gender presentation.

Prime candidate for a charismatic cult leader's sexual manipulation. Which, it must be said, is present; but the clear and repeated caveat from older Arcady is that they reach maturity before he will sexually engage with them. Farah, quite understandably, is not willing to wait some indeterminate amount of time for someone not her to decide they're capable of offering informed consent and, mirabile dictu, pushes the schedule to meet their burgeoning sexual desires.

Totally understand that. But great-grandfather does not think with a teen's hormones, and holds Arcady to a higher standard. But anyway, this was not anything Farah regrets or has doubts about; and again, the stage was set for this to be as unrevolting as possible because we know what Farah is thinking and feeling.

I've gone on about the subject and left out the nudist free-spirit grandmother, the cypher parents who really are affectless, the communards whose existence is merely suggested not explored in even the slightest depth...in general, this is a decent novel by a hippie-wannabe, a French-lady Brautigan, with an agenda and an axe being ground noisily in the background. Also a fun story to read.

THE VANISHED COLLECTION, a family's heritage raped away by Nazis

THE VANISHED COLLECTION
PAULINE BAER de PERIGNON (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press
$12.95 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five, for the message if not the messenger

The Publisher Says: It all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss: Renoir, Monet, Degas, Tiepolo and more. Pauline Baer de Perignon knew little to nothing about Strauss, or about his vanished, precious art collection. But the list drove her on a frenzied trail of research in the archives of the Louvre and the Dresden museums, through Gestapo records, and to consult with Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano.

What happened in 1942? And what became of the collection after Nazis seized her great-grandparents’ elegant Parisian apartment? The quest takes Pauline Baer de Perignon from the Occupation of France to the present day as she breaks the silence around the wrenching experiences her family never fully transmitted, and asks what art itself is capable of conveying over time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well, this review went through some changes. A lot like me as I read this book. I think the world needs to attend to the huge, stinking pile of denial in the center of Culture Inc. What happened to the art collected by Jews? It was stolen by the Nazis. Those bad Nazis!

...and then what happened? *blank stare*

In Author Baer de Perignon's tale of family, legacies, and fairness denied, you will learn that the reality is...nothing happened. Museums bear extraordinary responsibility for the nothing that happened. They don't want to give their ill-got gains back to the families whose rightful property it is. The whole raison d'etre of "the Museum" (in its broadest cultural-institution sense) is thus opened to serious question.

This isn't a small issue. The 2003-2011 Iraq war resulted in *appalling* levels of art and antiquities being looted or damaged, often destroyed. There is some tut-tutting over this. Not a lot, given the scale and value of it. Why? Because that leads to lots of awkward questions about how "the Museum" got the stuff in the first place. "Provenance" and "spoliation" in other words. Then that opens lots of graves "the Museum" wants to leave closed.

This isn't the first time that this issue has been raised, or wrestled with. Read a book called Goldberg's Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade (it's excellent, BTW, highly recommend it to you). The topic simmers along, looted antiquities are topics of concern on slow news days around the world. For a minute. They don't rate high on most folks' outrage meters. But the Impressionists and Academicians and Old as well as other Masters aren't talked about in media or entertainment almost at all (pace George Clooney's lukewarm The Monuments Men, which did poorly at the box office). Because people love them, come to see them in their hallowèd homes, are inclined to buy tat with the (profitably licensed) images on them (from "the Museum"'s store). The fact that many were looted from Jews by the Nazis is bad. But whatcha gonna do.

Nothing, for as long as possible, until the heirs of the murdered millions forget (I was *astonished* at the number of people Author Baer de Perignon met who just knew nothing about what had been looted, spoliated, from their ancestors!) or give up. "The Museum" will still be there, after all, taking in cash from ill-got gains they should've given back most of a century ago.

It is a scandal but no one wants to bring up the solution: restore spoliated property to its proper owners, or otherwise their descendants. As I read this book, I realized the case for this is unassailable. But I realized also why I had such trouble writing this review: I dislike the author.

She's quite sarcastic, very judgemental, has a serious oh-poor-me attitude. She snarks, in the text, about people she fawns over in the Acknowledgments. One assumes she thinks these people won't read the actual book.... Her scattered, disorganized research method draws criticism she fobs off as passing...but I promise you that her "mentors" did the real heavy lifting. I read this between the lines, I recalled many author Acknowledgments from when I was an agent that left out lots of realities not to the Author's Taste. And I realized that I support the message of repatriation, restitution, and acknowledging the harm done to generations of people simply because they were Other...but I dislike this messenger.

It's a shallow, personal response, and it shouldn't prevent anyone from picking up this book for its message of ma'at, fairness, justice, and the value of saying "I'm sorry."

Postscript: Sotheby's has auctioned the painting the author worked so hard to reclaim. Watch her conversation with the auction house's staff. In the end, it brought $1.23 million hammer price.

TWO FRENCH THRILLERS IN GRAND OLD STYLE, The Sleeping Car Murders & Rider on the Rain

RIDER ON THE RAIN
SÉBASTIEN JAPRISOT (tr. Linda Coverdale)
Gallic Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When a young woman takes justice into her own hands after a horrific attack on the French Riviera, she thinks she has got away with it. But a mysterious stranger at a wedding has other ideas...

The bus never stops in Le Cap-des-Pins. Not in autumn, when the small Riviera resort is deserted. Except today, when a man with a red bag and a disconcerting stare steps out into the rain.

His arrival will throw the life of young housewife Mellie Mau into disarray. After surviving a horrific attack, she has a dark secret to hide. But a stranger at a wedding, the enigmatic American Harry Dobbs, is determined to get the truth out of her, leading her into a game of cat and mouse with dangerous consequences...

A cool, stylish and twisty thriller from cult French noir writer Sébastien Japrisot.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: CONTENT WARNING FOR SEXUAL VIOLENCE—STIGMATIZING MENTAL ILLNESS

This is a more or less unusual project...it's a novelization of a film script that Author Japrisot wrote for a wildly successful French film. The DNA of the script is still here, in the copious dialogue tags; quite a few stage directions have survived the trip to novella-ization, too. What also shows is the very, very dated sexual politics of the day...far more horrifying than in the older Japrisot novel reviewed below.

Consider that Charles Bronson plays the male lead in the film. That the film was made in 1969, and came out in 1970. I don't think I need to get too deeply into the, um, action.

So with that warning in place, to the plot. Again its film-script DNA is on display. It is taut; it is not in the least bit deep. Its surfaces are glossy and its politics aren't particularly liberal. It has a lovely woman being abused by damned near everyone who spends even a few seconds onscreen. Americans are violent, nasty brutes; Italians are shouty abusive men; French people are supine and ineffectual.

Author Japrisot wasn't any kind of a patriot....

What's on offer here is a deeply angry story of revenge and of the toll an abusive world can extract. It's never going to be easy to read something written over fifty years ago by a bitter, outraged man without coming away from the experience a little less sure that the world's a good place filled with kind people. But in this story, the woman who exacts a condign revenge on that world is allowed a degree of freedom that would've been unthinkable even a decade earlier. Look at Janet Leigh's character in Psycho....

While it isn't an easy read, due to subject matter, it is formally interesting for its far-from-usual direct lifting of script elements in novelizing the work. It has all of Author Japrisot's strengths, the terse and pointed language and the stunningly easy to visualize settings. Because it's not a simple story, in the sense of having great resonance with dark and ugly parts of human psyches, I don't think it'll appeal to all audiences. Because it's novella length, I don't think it'll necessarily fit well into today's crime-fiction universe...the crime trend is towards bloat as much as the rest of literature is. But it's a bracing, bitter draft of revenge fantasy and devictimized womanhood.

Only not in a salubrious way.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE SLEEPING CAR MURDERS
SÉBASTIEN JAPRISOT (tr. Francis Price)
Gallic Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A beautiful young woman lies sprawled on her berth in the sleeping car of the night train from Marseilles to Paris. She is not in the embrace of sleep, or even in the arms of one of her many lovers. She is dead. And the unpleasant task of finding her killer is handed to an overworked, crime-weary police detective named Pierre Emile Grazziano, nicknamed Grazzi, who would rather play hide-and-seek with his little son than cat and mouse with a diabolically cunning, savage murderer.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is the first published crime novel from the late monadnock of French thriller writers, seeing the light of day in 1962...sixty years ago! I'd expected to be eye-rollingly impatient with the sexual politics...I was...and to find the motive for the title crime absurd...I sort-of did...and generally to find the read a pleasant time capsule but not one I could recommend.

Wrong on that score.

What Author Japrisot, ably served by Translator Price, achieved was a smartly paced and charmingly observed crime novel. I want to be clear, though, that the attitude towards women and their sexuality isn't within 21st-century best practices. I don't have a positive thing to say about that, and no, I don't want to shrug it off by saying "it's of its time." I think the way to frame the attitudes that makes me least irritably impatient is to think of this as a cautionary tale...a dead, or at least dying, set of stupid and wrong-headed ways of seeing people that has very directly contributed to terrible crimes.

What sticks with me the most is the sheer, idiotic nihilism of the crimes committed, and for such idiotic reasons. There are no excuses, of course, but the reason someone deprives another person of life...the one and only thing that can't be made good or replaced when it's taken...should always at least make some twisted kind of sense. Here, though, there is nothing, not a grain of a comprehensible motive. Like those thrill-killing boys, Leopold and Loeb.

I was utterly unable to put this debut crime novel, first published in 1962, down. It's not like a modern crime novel. There's no bloat; there's very little dialogue. The whole story's narrated, in a kind of distancing tactic, a lot like the voiceover narration of Double Indemnity, albeit it isn't the same narrator. Just the strategy, the way of telling that makes it feel like showing. And, in the end, the framing device works very, very well for the final summation of the crime.

Japrisot wasn't a hugely productive writer, having written a dozen fiction works of different lengths between 1950 and 1999. He translated works by Salinger, among others, into French; he worked in the advertising industry; he was, in short, a jobbing writer with a gift for economical storytelling. His strength lay in constructing the angle of repose for his story; he knew the slightest shift in perspective would destroy the equilibrium that a work of fiction relies on. When the shift inevitably occurs, the entire story flows out of its resting state and becomes something entirely other, a new resting state that doesn't resemble the constructed story but is all the same colors and most of the same shapes.

It is a pure pleasure to read this level of craftsmanship. By all means procure it and enjoy it for all its afternoon-filling worth.

MY LIFE IN FRANCE, culinary goddess Julia Child tells enough to keep the pages turning...but not all

MY LIFE IN FRNACE
JULIA CHILD (with Alex Prud'homme)
Anchor Books
$16 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Julia Child single handedly awakened America to the pleasures of good cooking with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she didn't know the first thing about cooking when she landed in France. Indeed, when she first arrived in 1948 with her husband, Paul, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever. Julia's unforgettable story unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a cook and teacher and writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years.

My Review: Truth in advertising had no greater champion than Julia Child. Her book is called exactly and precisely what it is: The narrative of her life in France. She begins her book on November 3, 1948, with the Child family landing at Le Havre, getting into their gigantic Buick station wagon, and motoring off across northern France towards Paris. They stop at thirty-six-year-old native Californian Mrs. Child's first French restaurant, La Couronne, where her husband Paul (already fluent in French from his first stint living there more than 20 years before) consults with M. Dorin, the maitre d', and decides the young marrieds (relatively speaking, as he's 46 by then) will have a sole meuniere with a glass of wine! I mean! A nice Republican-raised gal from Pasadena, California, drinking wine with lunch! Who heard of this?! Mais certainement not Mme. Child, nee McWilliams!

It was the beginning of a life-long love affair between Julia Child and la belle France, and Julia Child and la cuisine Francaise. It led to several books, several TV series, and a long, happy life spent teaching, teaching, teaching. Mme. Child had found her metier, at close to forty, in a day and time where living past sixty-five was ** considered to be ancient. In the process, the person she became changed the American, and possibly the world as a result, culture surrounding food. Yet Julia Child wrote this book with her husband's great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, who tells us in his brief Foreword that getting his garrulous old relative to open up about the feelings and secrets that make up the majority of any human life. His degree of success was formidable, given the generational and gender-induced reticence he fought against to extract the juicy bits from her.

Bravo, M. Prud'homme, et merci bien par tout le faire.

Julia Child was a fixture around our house when I was young. I got the TV-watching habits I carry with me to this good day at a tender age, and part of the formative process was The French Chef. My mother didn't like Mrs. Child much. She was a fan of M.F.K. Fisher's food work, which wasn't in sympathy with Mrs. Child's careful and precise measuring and nice and accurate timing. Mama was a feast-maker, not a dinner-preparer, and that's why she watched Julia Child programs.

I learned about enthusiastic appreciation of food from my mother and Mrs. Child. I was never a picky eater, and only rejected a few foods. (I still hate corn on the cob.) It always seemed like the ladies were having so much fun making these weird dishes! It made sense to me that it would be fun to eat them, and so it proved to be.

In reading this memoir, I immersed myself in the flow of Child's later-life awakening to the joy of food and the sheer exhilaration of preparing special and delicious and carefully thought-out meals for one's loved ones. While I understand the co-author's challenge in balancing the need to afford the famous personality privacy against the buying public's desire to know the dirt, I can only lament that Prud'homme either didn't or couldn't press Child on the topic of her childlessness. I suspect burying herself in research and in obsessive experimentation was a means of assuaging her sadness at not being a mother. She was, or at least she is painted in this book as being, a very nurturing person, and given the prevailing attitudes of the era, it is unlikely that this absence did not cause her pangs of regret. I would have liked to see some exploration of that, mostly because I think glittering surfaces (which this book limns in loving detail) are even more beautiful when seen with shadows. It's like sterling silver flatware: When dipped into a cleaning bath as opposed to hand-polished, it's true that all the tarnish comes off, but all the character does too, and the pattern is flat and blah for lack of a bit of dark contrast that is left by the more labor-intensive hand polishing method.

The delight of the book was in Child's almost orgasmic recollections of the foods and wines she and her dearly beloved husband Paul Child ate and drank across the years. In the course of learning to cook the haute bourgeoise cuisine that she made famous in her native land, Child came alive to the joys and thrills of sight, smell, and taste in a way that only truly delicious food can cause a person to become. It was the positive counterpoint to her manifold frustrations in collaborative cook-bookery. The travails of preparing the Magnum Opus that is Mastering the Art of French Cooking simply don't do enough to make the author come off the page and join me in my reading chair. I rate books based on this type of measure, this degree of ability to enfold and immerse me in the narrative and the emotional reality of the tale being told. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but I wasn't swept into it and away to France circa 1950, and that was what I came to the read expecting to happen. In fact, when I saw the film partially based on this book, Julie & Julia, I was completely swept away and eager to read the source material.

In the end, I got more out of watching Meryl Streep enact Julia Child than I did reading Julia Child reporting herself. I was disappointed.

And hungry.