THE EYE OF GOLIATH, Argentine Jekyll-and-Hyde take after the Great War

THE EYE OF GOLIATH
DIEGO MUZZIO (tr. Rahul Bery)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dark, propulsive literary gothic novel that puts a modern twist on Stevenson and Poe, from a thrilling new voice in Latin American horror.

“Impossible to stop reading. It has all the fascinating tension of great literature.” — Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

In this deliriously inventive twist on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Argentine powerhouse Diego Muzzio conjures a haunting story of shattering war trauma and the disturbing proximity of sanity and madness in his English-language debut.

In 1920s Edinburgh, war veteran Dr. Edward Pierce develops experimental therapies to treat mentally ill patients whose cases have been rejected by conventional psychiatry. One night, he receives a visitor who asks him to take on an unusual new patient: David Bradley, an engineer who was sent to inspect the conditions of a lighthouse on a remote island in southern Argentina. The sojourn was a disaster, and he returned completely mute, his body overwhelmed by a single compulsion: to swim and swim, in any environment, to the point of total exhaustion.

Bradley’s fragmentary diary reveals how this rational, disciplined man became the deranged individual brought to the sanatorium. Full of bizarre details and echoes of macabre events, it guides Pierce in his studies of his patients, propelling him into scientific terrain that grows increasingly grotesque.

With an ingenious structure that creates doubling and uncertainty at every turn, The Eye of Goliath is a masterfully tense novel that unites classic gothic atmospheres with disturbingly modern psychological horror.

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My Review: A lot like seeing the narrative's events in the sweeping beam of the lighthouse that figures so heavily in poor David Bradley's utter unwinding. Pierce tries to tug the strips of anxiety back into overlapping armor-plate relationship as the are in most of us. Pierce's major problem with that technique has been, until now, the Great War's soulless killing machine dehumanizing men in battle.

David Bradley's issue is not the same though his condition, a mind unraveled by inputs beyond the owner's capacity to process and respond to in any adaptive manner, is the same. Compulsions to repetitive action are present in the men not able to build mental spaces that can contain their horror very often resort to obsessive actions to create rituals of safety. Spurious safety is still preferable to the events that left their minds in wreckage. We're vouchsafed access to the diaries Bradley kept at the lighthouse where...something...destroyed his psychological equilibrium; yet neither we nor Pierce, tasked with reversing this damage, know what the heck it was even *with* the diaries.

It's a very good thing the novel is short because that would be really tough to sustain over an Ann Radcliffe-length novel. We're definitely in gothic horror territory here, particularly given Pierce's own responses to everything, but not so deep into it there are ghosties and ghoulies and other accoutrements of gothicness.

It says here.

Ambiguity is always your friend in writing and reading good gothic fiction; don't pin too terribly much of the story to recognizable territory and the reader will do the work for you, will in fact make your story "better" because you love this trope and the author does not so doesn't explicitly use it so your mind fills it in where ambiguity is left. I wish more horror writers saw the utility of that! If you, o writer, are not as weird and twisted as Clive Barker, do what Author Muzzio did: keep it short, leave room for we-the-reader to people the events to our scare levels, and off you go...and so will your readers.

I'm only down a half-star because I found Pierce's entry into the gothic felt forced, felt incompletely integrated into the way the men he's treating's mindset. I don't think my pleasure in the read would've increased had his own psychotic break been more completely explored. It would've added page count without necessarily improving my eerie experience.

Which was, as said above, eerie and satisfying; it was the flipside of the model story's splitting the personality on purpose. It was a very involving, fast read. Psychological-disturbace avoiders, go to the next book on the shelf! Eerie creepy weirdness fanciers, come sit with me by the fireplace.

Maybe we can light a fire.

COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY, Austrian woman's storyteller reaches Anglophones at last

COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY
TERESA PRÄAUER (tr. Eleanor Updergraff)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An irresistibly witty satire about a dinner party where the foodie guests have a grand amount of taste but no social clue at all.

For the hostess, food has always been about growing up. From the pancakes your grandmother made, dolloped with jam, to the salty glug of your very first oyster. Now, poised at the brink of midlife, the hostess prepares for a dinner party in her new apartment, desperate for the envy of her cultured friends. With a hunger for the finer things in life, she folds linen napkins into neat triangles, arranges wildflowers for the table and puts on a playlist that projects effortless cool.

But her composure begins to falter when her guests arrive drunk and late, downing bottles of her perfectly cooled wine and trailing water over the floor. Here comes the chain-smoking professor who never says the right thing, the husband glued to his smartphone, the wife who makes a secret pass at your boyfriend.

As small talk and social preening give way to sexual tension and lost inhibitions, the hostess struggles to maintain control over an evening far beyond her wildest imaginings. Outrageously funny and keenly observed, this is the first novel by Austrian powerhouse Teresa Präauer to be translated into English, and a delectable feast of social satire for readers of Perfection and The Anthropologists.

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

My Review: Maybe it's just me relating to "the hostess" so deeply and personally...maybe I'm feeling a little wistful for the times when asking people to your home for a home-cooked meal was not weird or unexpected.

That, however, is not remotely what's on Author Präauer's mind. This is a super-sarcastic snarkfest of skewered bourgeois pretensions. She gets after every conceibable subset of our brittlest chit-chat, puts a big ol' flensing knife under the scrotal skin of her (formerly) male characters, spraying narrative mace in their eyes since they weren't using them to see what's in front of their faces anyway.

The women! ZOMG What a collection of prunes, determined to out-smug each other in their certainty of opinions...most especially about food. In its deeply felt rage, it was Babette's Feast for the dining discourse of Ibnstagram meets The Women for the self-conscious class skewering.

It's not clear to me there is not only one dinner party, though it seems the characters aren't the same people...? But believe you me, they're indistinguishable...examining more closely than is comfortable people from the same background so I was left with one idea of what we-the-reader are supposed to think and feel about them. Our narrator occasionally addresses us through the broken fourth wall on the subject of how we perceive food; how food as a cultural touchstone came to exist in our minds.

So you know I was right there. I was fully engaged in every bit of this admittedly slight narrative. I don't think the story being told quite merits the 176-page count...It feels more like a 150pp novella would've done better justice to the exploration of the hostess's purpose in feeding her friends (only her friends) and her new Swiss...fella, let's say. Maybe I didn't really need the oddly angled ending, but rather a simpler one of a door just closing...?

Whatever my cavils, this introduction to Author Präauer, well-known and established in Austria, and her interests and writing style, was a genuine pleasure. I was entertained, amused, and drawn in to this social commentary on Instagrammable foodies, women with axes to grind but no courage to let loose and do it already, and the men who completely misunderstand them.

Very much a "give this one a try" shove to your bookstore from me.

HAPPY LIFE, not a buck-up-bucko book despite the title

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

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A tender and wistfully satirical novel about the desire to change your life by bestselling French author David Foenkinos

"Foenkinos's surreal yet relatable novel…considers life in our age of anxiety, when other people's picture-perfect lives make our own seem drab in comparison." —Washington Post

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wants to be someone else.

Eric Kherson—40, divorced, distracted—is spiraling. He has devoted his life to a successful career as the marketing director of a leading sports brand. But when family disaster rocks him to his core, he finds himself adrift from his family and questioning all his choices.

That is, until an acquaintance from his schooldays offers him a high-powered government position. Desperate for escape, he throws himself into her enigmatic world of high-risk deals and endless networking, doing anything it takes to get a contract signed.

But on a business trip to Seoul, Eric starts feeling worse than ever. Wandering the city's streets, he comes across Happy Life, a store that offers its customers something that could change their lives: a fake funeral. Happy Life will write your eulogy, arrange the flowers, and allow you to lie inside your own coffin. Why? They believe the experience will help you reinvent yourself.

But above all for Eric, Happy Life sparks a business venture of his own that might do just that…

A celebrated French bestseller, Happy Life is a life-affirming story of hope and recovery, perfect for fans of Matt Haig and Nathan Hill.

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

My Review: I am on record as a David Foenkinos fanboy. I have not (yet, anyway) rated any of his books I've read under four stars. I'm pickin' up what he's puttin' down because he's willing to take a classically realist setting and stitch some strangeness onto it. It's never a huge dissonance, it doesn't feel as though some clumsy editor from a different decade bookhorned a bad idea into the story...it's happened to other authors. I'm always *sure* this story of his I'm reading right then will be Foenkinos' breakout hit, and all y'all will see how Right I am about his humor, delicate honesty, and how very deftly Sam Taylor captures it in English!

To date, not so much. I persevere. I'm shocked that y'all read Solvej Balle's riff on Groundhog Day in your tens of thousands and shun a more fun version of the "things fall apart, emotions have entropy, no one gets outta here alive" story. There are over a thousand reviews of this book on Goodreads, average high three stars. Given the quotidian subject matter...there must be more than this...that strikes me as decent.

Happy Life, the business, is a very interesting conceit. Pretend you're dead. Read your obituary. Lie in your future coffin. Now, when you get up, think "is this good enough?" I'll bet most people look at life without depth until confronted with Death, the Reaper, the dirt nap, whatever euphemism tickles your fancy, whose cold grasp is very strongly focusing to everyone who feels it. Eric, our PoV character, is middle-aged, mid-career, peaking in power. He's miserable in the depressed person's way, shrouded in grey fog and honestly unable to see why that's even a problem anymore.

That's the true danger point, when a new challenge (his new job as a trade representative for France in this case) only points up the essential sameness of Life and futility of hope. On a mission to Seoul, Eric discovers Happy Life and its weird conceit of fake-deathing yourself to shed the fog, pull off the shroud of sameness, rise from the coffin renewed and revitalized. It works. And if it worked for Eric, unhappy and unable to think *why* he should be when he's got money, power, and purpose, then it probably will for other wealthy French people.

Can money buy happiness after all?

A mean little stereotype says literary fiction needs to be depressing. A cultural insult says French fiction's full ashtrays and empty lives must end stories in ennui. Both might've been true in the 1970s or 1980s but even then it was books written for the haute bourgeoisie, the people who had too much of everything so did not need anything; that's a soul-killer, that is, any era or country. Look at the billionaires today, they're purposeless and useless so they frivol away their substance on useless stuff while real problems need solving.

Eric brings Happy Life to France in order to jolt people into the same sense of purpose, of wanting something more important and rewarding than "more." Spoiler: Eric is a helluva salesman, as his entire career has shown.

Author Foenkinos is not writing for Literati. He's writing to tell people who like stories a story about a man who faces endings by casting about until he finds a new beginning. I like that story; it's not one we see in upper-echelon-aimed books but it's honestly all the better for it. It doesn't do that American thing of chirping five easy steps at you, just do *this* and you're all set MLM happy-clappy horseshit. It's a story that starts from "sad man doesn't want to be sad" and moves on from there through the steps of doing whatever comes his way to setting out with intention and purpose when one shows up worth his while.

It's not experimental literary or boundary-pushing shenanigans. It's a French guy writing a story he figures will resonate with French people of the 2020s. Is it also critiquing the PTB and their greed? Yeah, that's in there, but it's not what thee and me will see first. It's not yelling at you. It's on the next barstool over talking on the phone to someone who needs the same commonsensical splash of water you need.

I liked it, didn't fall madly in love with it, and think we need more like it from countries all over the world to show us how common this malaise really is. Better than floundering in the dark foggy corners wondering if we're alone in our befuddlement.

SMOKING KILLS, deeply French story made accessible to Anglophone readers

SMOKING KILLS
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Louise Rogers Lalaurie)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, preorder for delivery on 5 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this cozy crime novel with a witty, Parisian black-comedy twist, anti-hero Fabrice can only make smoking pleasurable by committing the ultimate crime

How far would you go to enjoy a cigarette?

When headhunter Fabrice Valantine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to undertake a course of hypnotherapy to rid himself of the habit. At first the treatment works, but his stress levels begin to rise when he is passed over for an important promotion and he finds himself lighting up again—but with none of his previous enjoyment.

Then he discovers something terrible: he accidentally causes a man’s death, and, needing a cigarette to calm his nerves, he enjoys it more than any other previous smoke. What if he now needs to kill someone every time he wants to properly appreciate his next Benson and Hedges?

Unwilling to return to the numbness of a life without pleasurable smoking, Fabrice launches into a life of crime, finding ever more original murder methods—including the use of a poisonous Ecuadorean frog.

A blackly comic story of addiction and transgression, this is also an exploration of the human need for fulfillment, and the lengths we will go to in order to find it. In the end the book provokes us to question the limits we place on ourselves, and the true definition of joy.

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

My Review: Fabrice Valantine is in prison. He is so an unrepentant smoker, as the title implies, that he sees the joy of smoking as superseding others' right to life. Not quite the spin on the title you expected, eh what?

How a professional headhunter (noun Wiktionary serves three senses of the word:
A savage who cuts off the heads of his enemies, and preserves them as trophies.
One who recruits senior personnel for a company.
A pitcher who throws at the batter's head.)
Of these three I think the fairest to apply here is the third; the author intends the second; and implicit in all three is the first) with a genuine love affair with/oral fixation on the dick-shaped tubes of chemicals that, when ignited, provide particulate delivery directly into one's mucous membranes...and those of hundreds of others who happen to be passing by. When absolutely, as a condition of employment, required to stop smoking, Fabrice resorts to hypnotism. It works.

Sort of.

Fabrice loses the pleasure of smoking ("I faced these painful hours with no solace whatsoever, just the dusty taste of my cigarettes and the utter ineffectiveness of the nicotine"), not the need to smoke. Until after an awful, awful accident where someone loses their future to death due to his carelessness, the frisson of smoking returns. So it wasn't permanently removed by hypnosis, only recalibrated to require extreme stimulation to experience it. Being a smoker therefore selfish and self-obsessed, this shows a path forward into pleasure that Fabrice, narrating his story from prison, chooses to follow. But he's careful! He only kills those whose loss won't matter! Isn't he due a reward for, as I often say, cleanin' the gene pool?

A fantastical noir-tinged laugh-out-loud satire of capitalism is one way to see this story. So is a comedy of manners, replete with stock characters (Fabrice as Gordon Gekko leaps to mind). Most of all, though, I want you to read this pinnacle of the translator's art. Louise Rogers Lalaurie has rendered into high-level, delightfully readable English one of the most vibe-dependent reads from the very French pen of Author Laurain. It's not this team's first collaboration...I do not know if the author and the translator worked together to create their magic, but I'm inclined to view the evidence as supporting that interpretation...as the current rush of Pushkin Press's republications attests. I'm a fan because I think Author Laurain chooses his targets well. I'm a fan because the translator understands on a deep level the targets, their cultural position in France, and the sense of the language the author chooses to use and renders it into a different culture recognizably. Her skill is to make this extremely French book humorous in the extremely different cultural valences of English. That is a tremendous skill.

A book to savor like one's last cigarette.

ANTOINE LAURAIN'S PAGE: An Astronomer in Love; Red Is My Heart; The Readers' Room

THE READERS' ROOM
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Jane Aitken & Emily Boyce, Polly Mackintosh)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When the manuscript of a debut crime novel arrives at a Parisian publishing house, everyone in the readers' room is convinced it's something special. And, when it’s eventually published, the committee for France's highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, agrees.

But when the shortlist is announced, there's a problem for glamorous editor Violaine Lepage: she has no idea of the author's identity. As the police begin to investigate a series of murders strangely reminiscent of those recounted in the book, Violaine is not the only one looking for answers. And, suffering memory blanks following an aeroplane accident, she's beginning to wonder what role she might play in the story – as well as how to find the mystery author before the prize is announced.

In the end it will take the combined investigative powers of a detective, a junior editor, and Violaine’s therapist to uncover the truth. They will learn not just about the author of the book, but about the story’s origins, and the novel’s strange power to exact justice for violence done to a young girl decades ago. But when everything comes to light, one question will remain: can Violaine and the other readers of the mystery manuscript put the past to rest, and find happiness in the present?

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

My Review: A fun, middlebrow light mystery about bookish people doing not-bookish things to discover the unexpected connection of writer to subject.

What worked best was the mystery of who the PoV character was before the accident that alters her. I found the brevity of the book (under 200pp) militated against it becoming fully integrated between the editor and the subject of police interest.

It's another entertaining story, albeit with less of Author Laurain's customary whimsical humor (feels odd saying that, given the main character awakes to having a chat with Proust), from France's Fredrik Backman. Laurain's comparative anonymity in the US is bewildering to me. I find his stories are pitched directly at my pleasure-read center, unlike Backman's. This cultural exploration, of a bit more serious tone, is also of a bit more serious topic: the murders, and other crimes, in the editor's manuscript received from a source unknown, coming true after the publication of the book suggests something very sinister took place. Her memory is compromised by the very public plane crash; did she ever know (despite consistently denying it) before her accident the truth of this manuscript?

It's a lot to put in a short space but this keeps the pace snappy. I was, as always, struck by Author Laurain's very unamerican way of keeping the violence and ugliness of the crimes either off the page entirely or minimally dealt with and then only in aftermath not in the commission of the crimes. I found it refreshing in a story that is not a conventional US-style cozy.

It's also not much of a mystery, in its resolution it felt rushed and obvious. So why am I giving it four stars? Because it feels like a dreamland, twilight between reality and not-reality throughout. From awakening into that chat with Proust to discovering she's got big memory-holes, the main character is off balance and so we are too. It's a way not to have our realism addiction denied by flying into the fantasy realm but not having it drag our awareness into the cleaning closet of realism there to be doused with the chlorine bleach of literalism.

I enjoy that liminality; I know others don't but always hope they'll be tempted to try something more...French, ambiguous, unbounded by rules of genre.

Can't hang me for hoping. (Yet.)

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

AN ASTRONOMER IN LOVE
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Louise Rogers Lalaurie & Megan Jones)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, pre-order now for delivery on 3 February 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the best-selling author of The Red Notebook comes the enchanting story of two men, 250 years apart, who find themselves on separate missions to see the transit of Venus across the Sun.

In 1760, astronomer Guillaume le Gentil sets out on a quest through the oceans of India to document the transit of Venus. The weather is turbulent, the seas are rough, but his determination will conquer all.

In 2012, divorced estate agent Xavier Lemercier discovers Guillaume’s telescope in one of his properties. While looking out across the city, the telescope falls upon the window of an intriguing woman with what appears to be a zebra in her apartment.

Then the woman walks through the doors of Xavier’s office a few days later, and his life changes for evermore . . .

Part swashbuckling adventure on the high seas and part modern-day love story set in the heart of Paris, An Astronomer in Love is a time-travelling tale of adventure, destiny and the power of love.

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

My Review: Guillaume le Gentil had to feel there was a bullseye on his back and gawd was always aimimg some kind of malign force at it. Nevertheless he persisted; he accomplished more than most will in a lifetime but failed spectacularly to accomplish the fame-bringing prize of observing the Transit of Venus. He was always trying to get where he needed to be, always thwarted by stuff he could not influence or change or avoid. How to get his Transit of Venus on one of the only two chances that come in any human lifetime?

Xavier Lemercier has a void at the center of his life after his divorce. He needs a woman to fill it. His real-estate career is nothing but a way to earn a living. What he wants is what we all want, someone who really *gets* him and whom he *gets* in the same way; someone with that fit between them that is as firm and solid as a lock receiving its key. How to find this, when he's already experienced failure, when he's always doing the business of life...?

The dual timelines aren't separated by chapters, or sections, or other structural tricks. They're separated by your attention. The maguffin here is Le Gentil's telescope that comes into Lemercier's possession via a real-estate transaction. Each man hopes to see his life change through its eyepiece. And both do. Just not ever quite as expected....

Will you resonate to these men's struggles to get to their hearts' desires? I'm guessing so; you'll need to be ready to invest a lot of energy into the under-300pp of fully intertwined life stories. There's a lot going on, yet a curious lack of direct action. This is a character-driven story of accepting limitations and finding a path through them, one that enriches your Self, despite (or because of) never being direct or going the easy route.

It was a satisfying read though lighter on Laurain's whimsical humor than I myownself prefer. It felt as though I was speaking to someone I had not heard from in a while, listening as he caught me up on the unusually packed time he'd been having. It's not perfect...I mentioned it's a bit po-faced for my preference, and a wee bit more action would not come amiss...but it was a rich, mellow mug of chocolate to warm my needing innards exactly when I needed it.

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

RED IS MY HEART
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Jane Aitken), illus. Le Sonneur
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A moving, evocative exploration of heartbreak and healing in Paris, told through words and images in this stunning collaboration with French street artist Le Sonneur

How can you mend a broken heart? Do you write a letter to the woman who left you—and post it to an imaginary address? Buy a new watch, to reset your life? Or get rid of the jacket you wore every time you argued, because it was in some way responsible?

Combining the wry musings of a rejected lover with playful drawings in just three colours—red, black and white—one of France’s best-selling authors has collaborated with renowned street artist Le Sonneur to create a striking addition to the literature of unrequited love, and a moving, evocative exploration of heartbreak in one of the world’s great cities.

In this playful, poignant series of musings, a nameless narrator remembers a love affair just gone, watches the flight they were due to take to New York depart, sends flowers to a woman who died a century ago, smokes ostentatiously in front of No Smoking signs, and takes solace from the endless distractions and beauty of the city he calls home, Paris. If he walks these streets long enough—the streets of the City of Light, City of Love—he may find himself ready to love again.

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

My Review: This is as close as I (voluntarily) come to poetry. Reminiscent of the concrete poetry that was popular in the 1960s, this illustrated trip into the psyche of a man processing his grief at loving and losing is evocative, emotionally resonant:

I hasten to say the text isn't arranged in flowers or birds flying, more just that the illustrations are copious in number and the text flows in response to them, reminiscent to me of old-timey concrete poetry. The prose is, of necessity, spare; it is making the points the many illustrations are expanding on and evoking responses from.

I'm not the obvious reader for a melancholic, perhaps under-reflective man's internal monologue. I wanted him to have a name so I could shout it at him to get him to see what was in front of him not merely look at it. Acts of adolescent defiance like the highlighted smoking in front of a "No Smoking" sign don't seem cute to me, just...adolescent.

I'm not making a great case for you to pick it up, am I? It's down to my absence of sympathy with things poetical. If you're not so inclined either, not a read to pursue. If, on the other hand, you're amenable to blank verse with integrated illustrations that are, in my opinion, very attractive indeed, you are exactly who the book is made for.

And consider this: I really dislike poetry, and still read this book, still liked this book...Author Laurain is clearly A Talent.It's very unusual for me to do more than look at poetry and slam the book shut, chuck it into the donation pile, and forget it exists.

On that grading curve, my 3.75* looks almost like a full five.

THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS, who knew from "beguines"?

THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS
ALINE KINER (tr. Susan Emanuel)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A captivating story of love, jealousy and faith, set amid a community of independent women in medieval Paris — the perfect summer read for fans of historical fiction

This thrilling, sensual evocation of medieval Paris sold over 100,000 copies in France and offers a fascinating insight into the world of the beguines — communities of women who lived independently of men and successfully managed their own affairs all the way back in the Middle Ages.

A heretical text, a vengeful husband, a forbidden love...

It's 1310 and Paris is alive with talk of the trial of the Templars. Religious repression is on the rise, and the smoke of execution pyres blackens the sky above the city. But sheltered behind the walls of Paris's great beguinage, a community of women are still free to work, study and live their lives away from the domination of men.

When a wild, red-haired child clothed in rags arrives at the beguinage gate one morning, with a sinister Franciscan monk on her tail, she sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter the peace of this little world-plunging it into grave danger...

This rich historical drama makes a great summer read for fans of Hamnet, The Lost Apothecary, The Wolf Den, and The Yellow Bird Sings.

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

My Review: I read "beguine" in the book's description and immediately began humming. This is not, obviously, the beguine meant by the late Author Aline. I had not heard of this particular religious movement prior to encountering the story told here. I strongly wish these people had left descendants of the soul in the larger religious landscape. The world would be a better place had they done so.

Be that as it may, the setting and the background are of such interest to me largely because the characters were...out of focus...to me. I got more of an atmosphere, an ethos, than the sense of getting to know real people. At first this felt slightly distancing, removing me from the immediacy of the unfolding conflict with The Church℠ that monolithic squasher of all liberty.

Then it hit me...of course! That's part of the point! A beguine, in this sense, is a community united in serving a purpose, answering a calling, that transcends monadism. By taking the unstated risk of diffusing the emotional connection readers make to individuals, Author Aline pointed up the real purpose of a beguine, to think and act as a member of a collective. It also sets a background whose textures are suggestive of a reality we in this century can only grasp at never fully grasp...the world is so very different now.

It also works to make the terrible central conflict with the Franciscan over the wild little redhead the more stark. In a sense it's the technique of Steven Spielberg's use of the one girl in a vivid red coat as the one colorful image in Schindler's List. It carries so much more impact, freighted with all the meaning you, the viewer, can conjure and thus heap on it.

I can't quite offer a full five stars. For all I found a key to comprehending Author Aline's purpose in making the collective the focus, it still made my reading experience...less intense, more of a read than a ride when it could have been both. I think anyone who liked Hamnet would like this story as well. The women in this beguine reminded me a bit of Agnes's world in that read, the not-quite-complete depersonalization.

A fascinating introduction to a world I'd never encountered. Recommended reading.

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.

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

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.

THE MYSTERY OF HENRI PICK, clever and fun, entertaining and sly

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

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The delightful first title in a new collaboration with Channel 4's Walter Presents: a fast-paced comic mystery enriched by a deep love of books

In the small town of Crozon in Brittany, a library houses manuscripts that were rejected for publication: the faded dreams of aspiring writers. Visiting while on holiday, young editor Delphine Despero is thrilled to discover a novel so powerful that she feels compelled to bring it back to Paris to publish it. The book is a sensation, prompting fevered interest in the identity of its author—apparently one Henri Pick, a now-deceased pizza chef from Crozon. Sceptics cry that the whole thing is a hoax: how could this man have written such a masterpiece? An obstinate journalist, Jean-Michel Rouche, heads to Brittany to investigate.

By turns farcical and moving, The Mystery of Henri Pick is a fast-paced comic mystery enriched by a deep love of books—and of the authors who write them.

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

My Review: I'm guessin' a majority of y'all don't know about Walter Presents (link above). It's presented on PBS in the US, which means it's hidden from most people most of the time. Hard to create a breakout hit in the media landscape we have; harder still to do it with subtitles.

Damn shame, that. I haven't seen the film of this story...ain't paying for Prime Video when they shove ads at me (now it's the US streamer as of 2025)...but as a very French story that isn't overtly snobby or très precieuse in its roots and branches, I'd like to see it have success commensurate with its quality.

Plus it's set in Brittany, one of the more anti-Parisian-hegemony parts of France. Imagine Oregon versus California, or upstate New York versus NYC. That kind of underdog struggle ethos suffuses this entire story.

It's really a fascinating story about books that only exist as created by their authors...much in the spirit of The Brautigan Library, follow the link for their introduction and mission statement...and housed in a special collection located as far from the cultural hegemon that is Publishing in France. That alone would've made my ears prick up. Author Foenkinos has a couple books coming out at the end of October 2025 which I've written happy reviews for; this book has, I'm sad to say, languished unread and unreviewed because Reasons. Not good ones, but Reasons.

Fixing it now has been a real pleasure. Author Foenkinos via translator Sam Taylor has built a good take-down machine, skewering our need to see behind the scenes and dig up the dirt on every single damn thing in the world...no sense of "happy to have {thing}" survives the compulsion to find out what's wrong with it. When nothing's wrong with it, something wrong with that. Being pathologically in the know is not entirely new but has hit the gas hard this decade. As our journalist character Jean-Michel Rouche exemplifies, we want the stones turned and the tea spilled, and we want it NOW.

Using all of literary culture as his sources, Author Foenkinos has probably made a lot of us more aware than ever that the world of publishing, the world of literature, and the world of us readers who lap it all up aren't the same, but are all chock-a-block with the best, the most fun, the most amusing stories, and they're all served up on demand...what a glorious time to be alive! That is the light side to the darker one enumerated above. One necessitates the other at this moment in technological societal development.

The knowing nudges and the sly side-eye moments are all well thought out. I appreciated The author's explicit acknowledgment of midcentury monadnock Brautigan, whose work has maybe not aged that well; thinking of In Watermelon Sugar in particular. Nothing ages faster than Utopia...though it would've been nicer than the world we got. (Nineteen sixty-four, the one in that book, never felt as far away as it does now.) Reminders of the very French attitude of affection and respect for literature in A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé abounded for me. It's the same playfully exaggerated attitude of piss-taking that unites them.

Plot developments aren't going to surprise anyone. You're reading this story to savor the soufflé not fill up on the steak. Everyone, Delphine the editor, Frédéric the novelist manqué, Jean-Michel mentioned above...all raise their piece of the froth high for you to delight in. It's light on suspense and filled with thousands of bubbles effervescing from the sense of fun underlying the project.

You know your own humor best. read a sample; if it doesn't hit, don't commit. It hit me just right, and right when I could use it most.

RILKE IN PARIS, pretty object, interesting tale, but about someone I did not like knowing more about

RILKE IN PARIS
MAURICE BETZ (tr. Will Stone)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Rainer Maria Rilke offers a compelling portrait of Parisian life, art, and culture at the beginning of the 20th century

In 1902, the young German poet Rainer Maria Rilke travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city’s high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century.

Much of this work, despite its perennial popularity in French, German, and Italian, has never before been translated into English. This book brings together Rilke’s sublime poetic meditations on existence Notes on the Melody of Things and the first English translation of Rilke’s experiences in Paris as observed by his French translator Maurice Betz.

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

My Review: I've read as little poetry as I've been able to over course of the past sixty-plus years. I've stated why (I don't enjoy it), I've explained why (it's pretentious and condescending), and yet here I am reviewing with praise a book about a poet, by his French translator, published after his sad, early death from leukemia.

Praise?

Praise: The essay on why Rilke wrote poetry is beautiful, deeply moving, and really makes me wish I didn't hate the experience of reading the...stuff. Song lyrics are poetry, so why do I listen to music voluntarily if I hate the stuff in a song? It's in the essay. The melody of the world is not audible to all of us in the same way. I "hear" prose; Rilke "heard" poetry, and made some beautiful poems in the world's opinion. I'm not arguing they're not; based on the essay in here I will bet there are gorgeous poems to his name.

For those who like poetry. I am still not one of you.

Maurice Betz observed Rilke being in the Paris of his time with an intensity I reserve for my lovers. I would guess Rilke was a little bit aware of the depth of Betz's attention. Rilke was under the influence of Rodin and swayed by the older man's frankly nonsensical contention that artists, true artists regardless of métier, must forego personal life and the pursuit of family and sex and friendship. Hogwash! But Rilke did somewhat wake to the foolishness of that, though never completely; he was a rootless wanderer despite being married and fathering a child; not to mention an impressive sexual CV of important artists and creatives, as well as that aforementioned wife.

He was, in other words, the bog-standard thing of beauty and a boy forever; Peter-Panning his way through life and taking nothing but himself seriously. I read this between Betz's besotted lines. What a selfish, rotten way to live one's life. Yes, he wrote right nice. I'll agree to give him that. It does not, in my 2025 eyes, redeem his narcissistic personality that used and discarded multiple people.

But lawsy me, does Maurice Betz love him! It was warming to feel how much he resonated to the Rilke shy-boy charisma. The way he wrote about Rilke is so apt, so fully aware of him: "Paris both fundamentally oppressed Rilke, compelling him to depart elsewhere, and summoned him back with a kind of nostalgic urgency, which he was unable to resist. ... In fact, it is evident that, along with Italy in a supporting role, France and French culture are the dominant guiding forces of Rilke's adult life, exemplified perhaps by the fact that he celebrated this relationship by writing some four hundred poems in French, translated a clutch of French poets, chose to settle in a French-speaking region and became, in his later years, more deeply absorbed in the work of the French poet Paul Valéry than in that of any other poet."

With photos I can't show you, this text is very much more suited to someone who loves poetry, has more than a Wikipedia-level familiarity with his work; my main connection, and a pleasant one, is to Rilke's Francophilia, to his off-kilter sense of himself as other than how his friends saw him.

I'm glad I red the book. I'm glad I didn't know him, or he'd've got an earful about his using others. No loving Maurice Betz, me.

ANTOINE LAURAIN'S PAGE: THE PORTRAIT, firstborn fiction by the author; & FRENCH RHAPSODY, meditation on Les Jadis and how much today is the same

FRENCH RHAPSODY
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Middle-aged doctor Alain Massoulier has received a life-changing letter—thirty-three years too late.

Lost in the Paris postal system for decades, the letter from Polydor, dated 1983, offers a recording contract to The Holograms, in which Alain played lead guitar. Back then The Holograms had believed in their cutting-edge sound. However, the music industry remained indifferent, and eventually the band split up, each going their own way.

Alain is overcome by nostalgia, and is tempted to track down the members of the group. But in a world where everything and everyone has changed . . . where will his quest take him?

Antoine Laurain's new novel combines his trademark charm with a satirical take on modern France.

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

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

In this rather odd tale, we go down the rabbit hole of missed chances. Every person this accident of fate changed came under Author Laurain's scrutiny in separate chapters, with life stories and so on. It made for nice reading...but what was I supposed to get from these stories? I know them but possess no framework to see what I'm to make of the fates of the post-The Holograms members. Maybe I'm insufficiently au fait with modern French society to get the full import of the meaning.

That said, I really resonated to the right-wing politician's trajectory, he who was the bassist. I've forgotten his name because I despise his politics (and his screed-spouting lectures) and, like Endora from Bewitched, I forget the names of those I dislike. Nonetheless, I thought it was very interesting to read about whatsisname's trajectory. How he got into it, what he does...all very timely. Especially for a book first published in 2015....

The others stuck with me less but were absorbing enough that I kept picking the book up to read more every time I put something else down. A clutter of wacky neighbors and hero's-journey cicerones detract from the central story's momentum, none of whom end up making a real difference. I found the ending...pat.

So I'm rating it only a tad under four stars. I got chuckles, I got angry mutterings, but I never got bored. That, my olds, is worth a lot in a literary month cram-jam full of heaps of nothing interesting.

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

THE PORTRAIT
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A Parisian antiques collector finds himself in a case of mistaken identity after buying a portrait which curiously resembles him

While wandering through a Paris auction house, avid collector Pierre-François Chaumont is stunned to discover the eighteenth-century portrait of an unknown man who looks just like him. Much to his delight, Chaumont's bid for the work is successful, but back at home his jaded wife and circle of friends are unable to see the resemblance. Chaumont remains convinced of it, and as he researches into the painting's history, he is presented with the opportunity to abandon his tedious existence and walk into a brand new life.

Chaumont needs a fresh start—he and his wife fell out of love long ago, and the only thing that holds meaning for him anymore is his search for perfect objects. But this portrait is more than just a painting. The first night he owns it, Pierre-François dreams of another life, lived as the Comte de Mandragore, in a rural chateau, with a beautiful young wife. Awaking from the dream he’s determined to find this place—but it will take all his collector’s avidity, ingenuity, and unscrupulousness to make it his own. And when he finally has the chance to do so, will he be willing to pay the price to make it last?

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

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

This is the novella that started it all. Told in first-person, it's as immediate as a récit but takes place outside the narrator's skull, so it's not one. It's a sweetly-smiling stab at modern greed, the lust for Stuff that fills the gaping emotional holes in many modern people.

There's a sharp edge here, a flensing eye that spares no one...the unloved, unloving wife, their circle of "friends", the man himself...no one looks all that good under the pithy judgment of Author Laurain:

Modern eyes? They have no soul; they no longer look up to heaven. Even the most pure are only concerned with the immediate. Vulgar lust, petty self-interest, greed, vanity, prejudice, cowardly appetites and envy. Those are the abominable emotions swarming in today’s eyes. We have the souls of notaries and cooks. That’s why the eyes on the portraits in museums are so spectacular; they reflect prayers and tortures, regrets and remorse.

What a pompous peroration! What a quiet proof that simply being misunderstood and softly maligned does not equal being Right.

It's an afternoon's read. It will keep you involved if, like me, you think Stuff is an addiction that speaks more loudly about what it is...about greedily stuffing yourself...than what it isn't...a fulfilling and worthwhile use of you one wild and precious life (that endlessly apt and beautiful phrase from Mary Oliver).

I think it's evident it's a first work, the sheer improbability of the plot is up there with Thorne Smith that whole school of magical objects that open portals from modern to ancient (ot just other) times. The characters are, as is almost inevitable in novellas, not developed beyond the necessity of moving the plot forward.

It's a pleasant and worthwile read. Maybe don't hunt for it everywhere, but if you have the budget and the device, download it of a dull Sunday afternoon to enjoy its real pleasures.

LAND OF SNOW AND ASHES, historical novel of Nazi war crimes...in LAPLAND?!

LAND OF SNOW AND ASHES
PETRA RAUTIAINEN (tr. David Hackston)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The haunting, gripping story of Lapland's buried history of Nazi crimes during World War II, perfect for fans of Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius

Finnish Lapland, 1944: a young soldier is called to work as an interpreter at a Nazi prison camp. Surrounded by cruelty and death, he struggles to hold onto his humanity. When peace comes, the crimes are buried beneath the snow and ice.

A few years later, journalist Inkeri is assigned to investigate the rapid development of remote Western Lapland. Her real motivation is more personal: she is following a lead on her husband, who disappeared during the war. Finding a small community riven with tension and suspicious of outsiders, Inkeri slowly begins to uncover traces of disturbing facts that were never supposed to come to light.

From this starkly beautiful polar landscape emerges a story of silenced histories and ongoing oppression, of human brutality and survival.

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

My Review: The Nazis are truly the gift that keeps on giving in horror terms. I had no idea there were Sámi extermination camps. I'm not remotely surprised there were oongoing attempts to "integrate" the Sámi into Finnish overculture, as Westerners seems constitutionally unable to just let people alone.

Sámi victims of extermination are part of a war effort that began in 1944, one of our timelines; the waning days of the conflict as I was taught about the war. It's very instructive that, as defeat was inevitable and impending, these hate-filled nutjobs didn't change their minds but instead doubled down on their appalling cruelty. (Young half-Sámi Bigga-Marja is our witness; her trauma is a major part of the story from that point on.)

Or so this novel tells us.

The Nazis were allied with Finland at this time, 1941 through 1944. Both hated and feared the USSR, and cooperated in warring against them. German troops were stationed on Finnish territory on a friendly basis; though as war ended, they really did sabotage all Lapland's infrastructure they possibly could. There is no documentation supporting any claim to historicity of these specific genocidal events, at least not perpetrated by Nazis. There was, earlier in the 20th century, a joint Swedish/Finnish genocide against the Sámi, with some lackadaisical Soviet cooperation. If there was ever a movement or intention to create a "Greater Finland" I can't find anything about it. (In English; outside the translator's note at the end.)

This is not being marketed as History, so please don't read it as such. Think of it as alternate history-lite, which is how I got my pleasure in the read. The translator's note provides a decent potted history of how Finland experienced the war; understandably it didn't really resemble the way the US or the French did.

Read it because it has lines like this: "{Her eyes} were like freshly blossomed heath violets or fat bilberries glistening in the morning dew. Not quite blue, but something altogether different...A hue reflecting the piercing Arctic light and the universe." That is beautiful, and it utterly unsettled me. There is a lot of imagery like this throughut the story. It is different enough from my own more stodgy fare that I found it both refreshing and off-kilter enough to keep me on my readerly toes. A great deal of untranslated Sámi dialogue appears after Inkeri, our PoV character in the novel's present (1947), arrives...it's a language not readily understood by the wide majority of Finns, either, so the point of leaving it untraslated is maintained: these are not your people, there's no need to wonder about it. Inkeri learns all the awfulness (mostly fictional and not rooted in the facts as presented, remember!) that's been committed in eastern Lapland, and she's still so enchanted by the place and the Sámi themselves that she ups stakes from her Finnish life in the south and relocates there.

Spoiler alert.

Also it's well worth bearing in mind as October slithers ever closer, stinkbugs flying out of her hair and scorpion stingers instead of nipples, demanding you sacrifice your nightly rest with horror reads. There is horror indeed in Bigga-Marja's experiences, there is horror in the way the Sámi were treated by their neighbors, there is horror in all "race" related prejudice.

THE SAMURAI OF THE RED CARNATION, fascinating historical period, less successful novel

THE SAMURAI OF THE RED CARNATION
DENIS THÉRIAULT (tr. Louise Rogers Lalaurie)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Matsuo is born to be a samurai, but as he is being trained in the art of war he realises he was meant for a different art altogether.

Turning his back on his future as a warrior of the sword, he decides instead to do battle with words, as a poet. Thus begins a story of romance and adventure, love and betrayal, that takes Matsuo across medieval Japan, through bloody battlefields and burning cities, culminating in his ultimate test at the uta awase—where Japan's greatest poets engage in fierce verbal combat for the honour of victory.

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

My Review: Warrior turns poet, author tells his story complete with the poetry he writes.

Not my thing. At. All. I was expecting more warrior...the first third was focused on that...and lots less on-the-page poetry, and I got the reverse. I'm reviewing it because it was a solid work of historical evocation that gave me a more intense experience of medieval Japan's ethos than I've had since Sanō Ichiro of the 17th century. Like Sanō, Matsuo, who lives in Heian Japan in the 12th century, has battle experiences that mark him for life. They lead Matsuo to the very Japanese world pf poetry as a high art.

It should tell you all you need to know about this book's writing that I did not abandon it forthwith after the first poem. Translator Lalaurie did as well as anyone could in presenting poems not written in English to their best advantage. Of course they were not originally written in Japanese, so there is that. I understand Japanese poetry feels different from Western stuff but I could not tell you why or how to save my life.

While Author Thériault is French, he did assume a very Japanese manner of not using dialogue to tell his story. It is almost all narration. That will not sit well with some, so be aware of it. I found myself wondering if the Japanese of the Heian were mute and communicated solely in glances, gestures, and writing. It's not my favorite way to tell a story, TBH.

In the end I wanted to bring a full review to it because it is a remarkable feat of writing to convince my poemphobic self to sit through a whole novel of poetry, thinking about poetry, valorizing poets, etc etc, without causing me to hurl either my cookies or my Kindle across the room.

Bravo to author and translator. Those enamored of poetry...hi y'all, how the heck did you find me?...should not hesitate a moment to pick this story right up and savor its pleasures.

THE RED NOTEBOOK, what Queen Camilla calls “Parisian perfection”

THE RED NOTEBOOK
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Jane Aitken & Emily Boyce)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this bestselling novel, a bookseller pursues a mystery woman—known only through the jottings in her red notebook—through the streets of Paris

Bookseller Laurent Letellier comes across an abandoned handbag on a Parisian street, and feels compelled to return it to its owner. Quickly ruling out the police station, which is always best avoided, he turns the contents out onto his kitchen table to see if they hold a clue. The bag contains no money, phone or contact information. But it does yield a small red notebook, full of handwritten thoughts and jottings that reveal someone Laurent would very much like to meet. From the lists of likes and dislikes, things noticed and things felt, emerges the portrait of a woman who might just be his soulmate.

But without even a name to go on, and only a few of her possessions to help him, how is he to find one woman in a city of millions? He’ll have to turn to his daughter, who helps him decode the possessions and sends him on a madcap journey around the French capital.

Meanwhile, in an anonymous hospital room, fragmentary thoughts float through the mind of a woman in a coma. She thinks she’s called Laure, and she has some strong opinions and painful memories – but will she ever wake up and get a fresh chance at life?

Soaked in Parisian atmosphere, this lovely, clever, funny novel is the perfect French holiday read!

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My Review: Author Antoine Laurain (Vintage 1954) is a major bestseller in the UK. Given how much y'all like those Japanese weird-bookshop-soulmate-finding books, why haven't you gone all-in for this guy?

The absolute perfect one-sitting read, a novella about a bookseller in Paris turning detective in the wake of a violent crime he knows nothing about. His motive is to find the owner of a red notebook full of her jottings but noticeably devoid of a name or an address.

What happens to Laurent the bookseller as he reads the notebook is the magical sense that the writer is his soulmate, long lost other half, all those romantic notions that plague us harder in warm weather. He uses the list, with his daughter's help, to scour the city to "reunite" with this dream woman he's never met.

This gives Author Laurain a chance to rhapsodize about his native Paris. This he does with a facility I can but admire from a distance; he evokes Paris as a living city not a tourist theme park in just over 150pp! It gives the reader as lovely an experience as going there does without the hassle of plane travel.

The resolution isn't mysterious; or the point, really. It's a story about how a decent guy can act stalkery, but get away with it by knowing he's treading a really fine line, adjusting his expectations, and still managing to find who he's looking for. He does nothing to indicate he thinks he's got a right to his mystery love's returned affection. He is honest throughout with himself and all around him about his intentions but never claims he is entitled to anything from the woman he doesn't know just because he's fallen for her.

Honestly impressive feat on Author Laurain's part. Still it *will* trigger some, so be advised it's in the story. I was a bit less impressed with the way the PoV shifts between Laure, the woman, and Laurent were handled. It takes little enough to put a break in the text; nothing literary was gained by not having one. I dinged a half-star for positive mention of c-a-ts. *shudder*

A lovely summer vacation in Paris with little fuss. What's not to love about that?

BIRD COTTAGE, perfect holiday read for #WITMonth

BIRD COTTAGE
EVA MEIJER (tr. Antoinette Fawcett)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Amazon link
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: I want to find out how they behave when they’re free.

Len Howard was forty years old when she decided to leave her London life and loves behind, retire to the English countryside and devote the rest of her days to her one true passion: birds.

Moving to a small cottage in Sussex, she wrote two bestselling books, astonishing the world with her observations on the tits, robins, sparrows and other birds that lived nearby, flew freely in and out of her windows, and would even perch on her shoulder as she typed.

This moving novel imagines the story of a remarkable woman’s decision to defy society’s expectations, and the joy she drew from her extraordinary relationship with British garden birds.

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

My Review: A non-fiction novel, a fictionalized (more than usual) biography, it's a read that solves the need I feel to derive some kind of new-to-me knowledge from my entertainment. Len Howard was a real woman, and the facts of her life are as presented here.

I don't think that's necessary to know to appreciate this celebratory telling of one woman's remarkable life. It's interesting, and raises the question: Why not go into a full biography of this powerful, if quiet, personality? She would stand out in any era but in her lifetime (1894 to 1973) she was a unicorn! So, from the start, I was inclined to stand a bit apart from the story. When I'm told it's based on a real person's life, but is fiction, I'll never settle in to a naturally flowing response now. The "which is this thing, fact or fiction?" will arise at every turn.

No fifth star for you, book.

That said, the story told...quiet, meditative, filled with Howard's own sense of wonder and awe at the beautiful world...is an enfolding, enriching experience. I'm not deeply interested in les burdies, unlike so many. Howard's decision to stop creating music to pursue a close and deep connection to them was surprising to me, as it was to those very few she was close to. Her desire to see what unthreatened birds would do differently from the ones she saw being "studied" in harrassing ways, as was the norm at the time, made me think she was trying to find a space free of threats, free of unnatural demands, for herself. What she does in this beautiful idyll is make careful observations, meticulously recorded and thoroughly analyzed. This led to two published books, in 1952 and 1957, now seemigly out of print in English, though not in Dutch...for obvious reasons. Author Meijer's deft hand at work, I suppose, though she did not translate the book.

It is the story of a restricted life, told beautifully, and fully. It reveals that even a woman of restrained temperament...nothing in Len's life before or after her assuming residence at the eponymous Bird Cottage suggests she was a repressed soul, just a quiet one...can feel pinched and coerced into a mold not to her liking. Often the quiet souls, uncomplaining and undramatic in their manners and manner, are mimstakenly supposed to be happy or at least contented. Len Howard was neither. She disliked most human interaction. When, at forty-five, she left the social demands of the world behind to be fully in the natural world, she began to achieve things, to see things, that simply would not be seen in the regimes of study then fashionable. She began, I think, to live her life for herself, as herself.

The strength of my own lurid energies makes me think "that can not be a happy life" but the evidence of her writing suggests it was. I'm appalled, fascinated, and very slightly amazed that someone could choose, at any age younger than I am now, a life without sex. Without companionship. Without others. She wasn't the first, or the last, but "really?" is my one thought.

So there's the missing star explained away; the other four represent my glad-hearted, deeply gruntled feelings as I immerse myself into a calm pool of beautifully clear word-water, telling me a satisfying story of a life lived on the terms its subject most wanted. That she was ucky enough to do this for almost half her years on this planet makes her one of the most fortunate and privileged of people.

This beautifully translated novel of an extraordinary woman's life is an excellent seasonal read. It's one that, during a vacation, will allow the reader to submerge into a truly different way of life. Even though I myownself wouldn't want to live Len Howard's life, I'm glad Author Meijer and Translator Fawcett shared it with me.

COMPLETELY KAFKA: A Comic Biography, centenary of his death honored in fun-to-read format

COMPLETELY KAFKA: A Comic Biography
NICOLAS MAHLER (tr. Alexander Booth)
Pushkin Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A delightfully witty and original graphic biography of Kafka, published to coincide with the centenary of the author’s death

This bold and sharply funny new look at Kafka is told through Nicolas Mahler's distinctive graphic novel style and minimalist illustrations. Full of fascinating details and witty, absurdist illustrations, it’s a delightful tribute to one of the world’s great writers.

Franz Kafka not only wrote prose, he was also passionate about drawing: at one time, he even said it satisfied him more than anything else. In this graphic biography, acclaimed artist Nicolas Mahler echoes Kafka’s own minimalist drawing style in a unique and surprising approach to the great writer’s life and work.

Drawing extensively on Kafka’s fiction, letters, and diaries, Completely Kafka illustrates the major and minor details that formed his life, from struggles with self-doubt and writer’s block to a failed plan for a series of cheap travel guides.

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

My Review: When people want to say "this stinks and I don't know what the hell is going on" in one word, they reach for "Kafkaesque" to do the job. This is, as all eponymizations must of necessity be, a gross oversimplification and misrepresentation of an extremely complex and, in my never-remotely humble opinion, beautiful body of work. Nicolas Mahler's selections from Kafka's fiction and his letters are very cannily chosen to be effectively illustrated in his minimalist style:

The lines, the volumes they define, the handmade feel of the brushstrokes, all echo the effect of Kafka's prose in my reader's ear. They are bold, they delineate spaces and fill them with interesting images; they are clear, unambiguous in themselves and still make the gestalt ambiguous; they do not use vivid colors but rely on contrasts, shapes, edges to convey their sense.

Offered as a corrective to the sloppily used eponym and an expansion of real understanding of Kafka and his intentions in a short, unpretentious, enioyable package on the centenary of his death.

Very highly recommended for those whose idea of Kafka pretty much ends at using "Kafkaesque" when at the DMV or the county tax office.