ANDREA WULF'S PAGE: THE INVENTION OF NATURE: Alexander von Humboldt's New World; and THE TRAVELER: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris

THE TRAVELER: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris
ANDREA WULF
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Step into the life and times of George Forster, the young naturalist and revolutionary who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and whose radical ideas about humanity and freedom made waves in eighteenth-century Europe—from the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature and Magnificent Rebels.

From an early age, it was clear that George Forster possessed a brilliant mind. A polyglot and gifted scientist, he became an invaluable asset to the ambitions of his domineering father, Reinhold. As a young boy, he travelled with his father from the plains of West Prussia to the wild shores of the Volga to St. Petersburg and London on scientific endeavors, and soon became the breadwinner by publishing translations of hugely popular exploration accounts. When Reinhold Forster was offered the position of naturalist aboard Captain James Cook’s second voyage, he accepted on the condition that his seventeen-year-old son serve as his assistant.

The HMS Resolution set sail in 1772 with orders to find the hypothetical southern continent of Antarctica. On her voyage to the Antarctic Circle and the islands of the South Pacific—including New Zealand, Vanuatu, Tonga, Tahiti, and Easter Island—the Resolution carried the ambitions of the most powerful empire in the world. But George Forster brought an understanding that was centuries ahead of the attitudes of his day—his ideas belonged to the future. A remarkable observer, linguist, artist, and writer whose intelligence surpassed that of his own father, he studied the diverse cultures of the world without prejudice and sought to uncover our common humanity. He was a traveler in body and mind—not bound by place, people or establishment.

Recognized as one of Europe’s brightest minds on his return, Forster held positions across the continent and regaled the world not only with tales from his travels but also radical ideas about human nature. He would write against empire, white supremacy, and slavery. He would become a revolutionary and be declared an outlaw. He would never seek to control others as he had been controlled by his father, and even embraced a liberal idea of marriage, accepting his wife’s affairs and independence Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler recounts an extraordinary life largely forgotten by history, the tale of a man who broke with convention and was unafraid to critique the world around him in dedication to his belief in the human right to dignity, equality, and freedom.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A man as astonishing as Author Wulf's previous science-biography topic, Alexander von Humboldt (see below). Forster has been brought out of obscurity at a time when his delighted curiosity in the world is curdling die to the way we as a species ignored the warnings of imbalance von Humboldt was observing and reporting on. Forster is still known to us today because he wrote of his travels extensively. He was unusual for his attention to the contributions of women and his respect for the contributions of non-whites in many fields around the world. He died before he was fifty; it's a sadness to me personally that he and Alexander von Humboldt never traveled together. As Forster was two decades older than von Humboldt, I can only dream of what the synergy in these men's inclusive, broad views might have gifted us.

A man born in 1754 writing passionately about the flimsiness and dishinesty of white supremacy, and the idiocy of the idea of dominionism deserves a wide audience in the twenty-first century. If we're going to lionize dead white men, let's lionize George Forster the proponent of equality, the supporter of women's rights, the spreader of Enlightenment values. Here's a British man worthy of our respect and deserving of emulation.

Forster's travels broadened his mind and his spirit. He was a person who saw, as his private papers show, the connections among people in a time when colonialism and sexism were drawing ever thicker lines between us. I am saddened that his first-hand observations of the idiocy and evil that Othering (in today's terminology) colonized people was exacting never gained traction. I dream of a Forster who lived to lift up Mary Wollestonecraft, who worked effectively with Revolutionary Parisians to moderate the evils inherent in destroying systems to rebuild them fairly.

Author Wulf has, as is her wont, seen past History's battlefied fog to choose another target of worth and merit to remind us how long the world has been falling from Grace.

And how many before us saw it.

Honoring their legacies by taking action seems appropriate to me. I hope you'll read this dynamically written, thoroughly researched work on an unjustly underknown thinker, and feel inspired to do just that.

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THE INVENTION OF NATURE: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
ANDREA WULF
Vintage Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75*of five

The Publisher Says: Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. In North America, his name still graces four counties, thirteen towns, a river, parks, bays, lakes, and mountains. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether he was climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infected Siberia or translating his research into bestselling publications that changed science and thinking. Among Humboldt’s most revolutionary ideas was a radical vision of nature, that it is a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone.

Now Andrea Wulf brings the man and his achievements back into focus: his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change, his remarkable ability to fashion poetic narrative out of scientific observation, and his relationships with iconic figures such as Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson. Wulf examines how Humboldt’s writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt’s influence that led John Muir to his ideas of natural preservation and that shaped Thoreau’s Walden.

With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written book, Andrea Wulf shows the myriad fundamental ways in which Humboldt created our understanding of the natural world, and she champions a renewed interest in this vital and lost player in environmental history and science.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE.

My Review: Start your journey into Alexander von Humboldt's character and intellect here:

“The effects of the human species’ intervention were already ‘incalculable’, Humboldt insisted, and could become catastrophic if they continued to disturb the world so ‘brutally’. Humboldt would see again and again how humankind unsettled the balance of nature.”

This man, born the year a crucial observation of a Transit of Venus was measured, and died the year of the Carrington Event, was tied to science at both ends.

It's probably down to the fact that he was gay that he's never been lionized in US scientific education the way Lord Kelvin, Sir Humphry Davy, Leibniz, or Pasteur have. Yes, German-language output isn't hugely well-represented in general US scientific awareness to this day; if ever someone deserves an exception, it's the man who has a bay in California, a current running up our Pacific coast, and a species of giant squid found in ever-northening parts of that coast, named for him.

He was a very good writer (seriously...read Cosmos, it was as big a bestseller as On the Origin of Species by his follower Darwin and is an excellent browsing book), which led to his excellent observational science influencing multiple generations of scientists who founded new fields of study by expanding his work. His way of seeing Earth as a system is now the dominant view, expressed thusly by Author Wulf: "He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected, conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still influences the way that we understand the natural world."

His writing skills were also useful in his later-life career as a diplomat, most enduringly to the Court of King Louis-Phillippe of France. I do not know of any English translations of his diplomatic correspondence, but I wager cash money they make for absorbing reading. His Prussian monarch did not compel von Humboldt to attend hid, perform diplomacy for him, because the guy was boring. He charmed his friends, he charmed the many people his scientific and diplomatic duties brought him into contact with, he charmed several younger men enough that one of them, a Peruvian aristocrat, got jealous enough when he was dumped...that's so unkind, let's say left behind when von Humboldt departed...that he leveled the accusation of our guy visiting a Quito brothel for men who like men. von Humboldt was known to be "like that" but, as always, exceptional talent...and a lack of a widely used "scientific" term for men romantically and sexually interested in other men like "homosexual"...gets judged by other rules. Author Wulf doesn't delve into this aspect of his life, though it's interstitially there; her focus is instead on the immensity, the Forrest-Gumpian breadth of his social circle, and drawing some conclusions about his influence that veer into Great Man Theory territory. I'm not all the way able to get past that discomfiting adulatory tone, despite feeling its pull very strongly. I'd give this read five or even six stars of five with some critical distance baked in; as it is four-and-three-quarters give me wiggle room fo work out my squeam.

It's a long read, it's an impactful resuscitation of a reputation very sadly in need of it among Anglophone readers, and if imperfect is still a very great pleasure to read.

A BOOK I READ FOR MY LONG-AGO BOOK CIRCLE: SNOW COUNTRY by Nobel-winner YASUNARI KAWABATA

SNOW COUNTRY
YASUNARI KAWABATA (tr. Edward G. Seidensticker)
Vintage Books
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: Married, bored (but I repeat myself) aesthete, philanderer, and flâneur Shimamura, an aficionado of Western ballet (although he's never seen one), takes a solo trip into Japan's Snow Country. While there in the wildest of boondocks Japan possesses, he meets Komako, probably the world's worst geisha, but apparently a fascinating contrast to all other women for Shimamura. They meet a total of three times in two years. Another woman, Yoko, hovers purposelessly around the narrative until, for no apparent reason, Komako and Shimamura have a fight over his feelings (?) for Yoko, who for some reason nursed Komako's not-quite-fiance Yukio while he died, despite the fact that Komako indentured herself to the (apparently quite unsuitable) career of geisha to pay for his death expenses.

Then a fire breaks out and Komako runs into the burning building and saves Yoko while Shimamura stands there and looks up at the sky. Fin.

No, seriously.

I spent the entire month I was reading this book, all 175pp of it, alternately claustrophobic and bemused. WTF, I kept thinking, why am I still at this rock-pile, trying to winkle out some small purpose to the narrative; then along would come a gem, eg:

It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void.

p44, 1996 Vintage ed.

Oh wow, I thought, and plowed on. And on. And on. Every damn time Komako exhibits what today we'd call a bipolar break exacerbated by alcohol abuse, I'd find myself thinking, "This damned book is Come Back, Little Sheba directed by Kurosawa." Seriously. Shirley Booth did the same bloody role in that movie, only Burt Lancaster (whose role as her husband bewitched by a younger woman was pretty much exactly like Shimamura) is the one who drank.

I drank a good bit myself, trudging ever onward, marching off to war with the cross of Jesus going on before; okay, I'm a piss-poor Christian soldier, but you get the sense of futility I was experiencing. Then, it happened.

He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely...All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew he could not go on pampering himself forever. pp154-155

So there *is* a point to this hike! And a profound one: The sudden awakening of human feeling in an otherwise dead heart. It was a payoff, and a major one. But did it have to be such a Bataan Death March of a journey to get here? And the stupid-ass last line of the book, which made me so bloody angry that I began raining curses on the lady whose idea it was our book circle read the book...! INFURIATINGLY SOPHOMORICALLY PORTENTOUS, I shrieked. The dog ran away from me. The same dog who, at an earlier moment in my tossing about of the book, expressed her opinion of it by fanging the corner. She calmed down after I did, but really...does one *want* to read this book? I won't do it again. But, on balance and after sleeping on it, I'm glad that I did.

THE PORTABLE VEBLEN, family drama played for laughs & MY NAME IS WILL, Shakespeare as countercultural rebel...twice & THE READER, Guilt! GUILT!

THE PORTABLE VEBLEN
ELIZABETH McKENZIE
The Penguin Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel.

Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul—the product of good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity.

As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: A debut novel that, for its subject, takes on greed, Othering, and intergenerational family toxicity. While Author McKenzie published stories before this book appeared in 2016, the appearance of the novel was warbled delightedly about by Jeff VanderMeer, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Karen Joy Fowler. Reviews from the New York, and Los Angeles, and Seattle Timeses, the Boston Globe, Library Journal and Kirkus and NPR...several programs!...was longlisted for a National Book Award...you get the idea, it was down as The Next Big Deal.

But I forgot it existed. I read it in the dark year, and I came up dry on things to say about it.

In having a clear-out, I found the ARC again. It's such a strange title that I remembered it straight away. How many people in 2022 recall who Thorstein Veblen was? Not a lot more, or fewer honestly, than did in 2016. It's an odd and slightly off-putting thing to first-name your main character. It does efficiently Other her from the get-go. I wasn't sure that I liked that. I remember thinking that it was a darn good thing that she was the sort of person who could, in all seriousness, ask “Do you think wishful thinking is a psychiatric condition?”

So why did I resurrect this long-ago gift from a publisher who clearly never thought to hear from me about it again? Because, in flipping through it, I was caught by some unusually persuasive turns of phrase:

She had once concluded everyone on earth was a servant to the previous generation—born from the body’s factory for entertainment and use. A life could be spent like an apology—to prove you had been worth it.
–and–
Veblen espoused the Veblenian opinion that wanting a big house full of cheaply produced versions of so-called luxury items was the greatest soul-sucking trap of modern civilization, and that these copycat mansions away from the heart and soul of a city had ensnared their overmortgaged owners—yes, trapped and relocated them like pests.
–and–
The sharing of simple meals and discussing the day's events, of waking up together with plans for the future, things that feel practically bacchanalian when you're used to being on your own.

This is a writer speaking her truth. I love finding these moments. I think I left the book by the wayside because I couldn't, in the dark year, process the anticapitalist message as anything but the confirmation bias of my brain. In the decades of being steadily more and more radicalized by capitalism's failures of me, my chosen people, and the world my descendants will live in, I've resharpened that mental blade many times. This time I felt Author McKenzie's edge slash closer to me than before.

Author McKenzie reserves her loudest klaxon, her angriest blast of Gabriel's horn, for we-the-consumers. The sneaky message under Veblen's dithering disconnectedness is there. It's not unique, nor even original, but it's heartfelt and it's eloquent...and she's correct:

“I pledge allegiance, to the marketplace,
of the United States of America. TM.
And to the conglomerates, for which we shill,
one nation under Exxon-Mobile/Halliburton/Boeing/Walmart,
nonrefundable,
with litter and junk mail for all!”

Awomen.

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MY NAME IS WILL: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare
JESS WINFIELD
Twelve (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$1.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A tale of two Shakespeares . . .

Struggling UC Santa Cruz grad student Willie Shakespeare Greenberg is trying to write his thesis about the Bard. Kind of . . .

Cut off by his father for laziness, and desperate for dough, Willie agrees to deliver a single giant, psychedelic mushroom to a mysterious collector, making himself an unwitting target in Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs.

Meanwhile, would-be playwright (and oppressed Catholic) William Shakespeare is eighteen years old and stuck teaching Latin in the boondocks of Stratford-upon-Avon. The future Bard’s life is turned upside down when a stranger entrusts him with a sacred relic from Rome . . . This, at a time when adherents of the “Old Faith” are being hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors.

Seemingly separated in time and place, the lives of Willie and William begin to intersect in curious ways, from harrowing encounters with the law (and a few ex-girlfriends) to dubious experiments with mind-altering substances. Their misadventures could be dismissed as youthful folly. But wise or foolish, the bold choices they make will shape not only the “Shakespeare” each is destined to become . . . but the very course of history itself.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tediously moralistic look at how Society tames us by taking hostages.

Heteronormative...shocking, I know...look at Will Shakespeare as horndog, transformed by Time (and parenthood) into...ya know what, if you like this kind of stuff you already know you like it. I don't much. Catholicism is a major vector for evil in this world, there's no denying that to anyone not an apologist; but Catholics ran the risk of horrible deaths in order to enact their fantasy of Religion. On the modern side, academia comes in for a lot of unkind "ribbing" that's meant to make one see that everyone is, at heart, a spoiled brat. These things are crumped together like they're somehow morally equivalent. They are not.

But worst of all, from my personal point of view, is the fact that I had to agree with the author about something:

Shakespeare, in some sense, helped create the modern man, didn't he, his influence is that pervasive. He held the mirror up to nature, but he also created that mirror: so the image he created is the very one we hold ourselves up to.

Stop with the deification already, recognize that there was a man called Shakespeare who wrote a bunch of cool stuff and take the rose-colored glasses off, he did whatever he did in his personal life and we can not speak about it because we don't know. Guessing is misleading, because you're going to think he did what you'd've done. Maybe...maybe not.

I didn't like it; I don't particularly recommend it; but it was not a waste of eyeblinks for that one excellent insight.

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THE READER
BERNHARD SCHLINK (tr. Carol Brown Janeway)
Vintage Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Another read I fastened on as I got my Little Free Library bag ready to go. When I won this from, I think, a website now long gone's giveaway, I was under no obligation to review it. I didn't want to...my ephebeophile mother's long, long, long shadow over my life, her dead hands on my emotional neck still tightening spasmodically should I dare for a moment to forget to be unhappy, gave me a terrible and utter avoidance complex for this story.

Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success...whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood.
–and–
Exploration! Exploring the past! We students in the camps seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship. It was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was just as evident as conviction of this or that camp guard or police enforcer was only the prelude. The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame.

There it is, the unvarnished solipsism of Surviving. The truth is we're all young Berg, we're all fucked-up Hanna. We can't make clean breaks with the past because the past is our inner self, our scaffolding. Young Berg learns this before Hanna puts him under the pressure and painful obligation of loving a broken thing.

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.

And the tectonic pressures are too much for him to bear. They always are, he's not weak or defective. He's just...selfish:

I didn't like the way I looked, the way I dressed and moved, what I achieved and what I felt I was worth. But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I'd be handsome and clever and superior and admired, such anticipation when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? Sometimes I see the same eagerness and belief in the faces of children and teenagers and the sight brings back the same sadness I feel in remembering myself.

One expects this in a boy. But young Berg will only ever be a boy. Hanna did that to him...Hanna enabled that in him.

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?
–and–
At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.

And there, at the end of the book, was my source of discontent made plain to me: This entire louche passage in Berg's life...has not meaning whatever. Neither did the similar passage in my own life. They just...were...and they don't mean much to anyone but me.

So why'd I read this again?

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS, fifty-five years old and going strong

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS
JORGE AMADO (tr. Harriet de Onís)
Vintage Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: It surprises no one that the charming but wayward Vadinho dos Guimaraes–a gambler notorious for never winning—dies during Carnival. His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding she finds herself dreaming about her first husband’s amorous attentions; and one evening Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.

My Review: I've explained on my profile over at LibraryThing that I was in a book circle in RL for many years. I posted our group reading list with my one-line assessments of the books. Most of those books I read long long long before I LT or GoodReads existed, and so I've either never reviewed them or reviewed them for the long-vanished book blog.

Whatthehell, I figured, I should go back and glance over the list of one-liners I put onto them, maybe write some reviews of those oldsters.

So that's what I'm a-gonna do.

BkC1) DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS by Jorge Amado: Adored it! Ghosts get horny, too, and why not?

I stand by the one-liner. It's a wonderful book, so it deserves a real appreciation. A marriage of opposites whose love just...happens:

The whole street took part in the serenade to Flor, Flor leaning against her high window, all ruffles and lace, drenched in moonlight. Down below Vadinho, her gallant knight, with the red rose in his hand, so red it was almost black, the rose of her love.

Flor and Vadinho are as happy as any two opposites can be in a marriage. Their relationship doesn't make sense to any of Flor's stuffy, social-climbing family (really, whose relationship makes sense to the family?), as Vadinho spends and cheats and generally makes a spectacle of himself in dreary 1940s Bahia (provincial Brazilian city, think Baltimore or Philadelphia). Especially the day he drops dead in a Carnival street dance.

Flor grieves for him, but life goes on, and the aforementioned stuffy family won't tolerate a single woman in her prime to be left in peace. So Flor marries Babbitt. Oh dear, I mean Teodoro (which is Brazilian for Babbitt). He's not a lot of fun, but he's thoughtful, and gentle, and considerate of her feelings, and a BIG FAT BORE especially in bed. Flor settles in for a life of having settled. So many people of both genders and all persuasions can relate to this.

"And why don't I have the right to contribute to buying us a house? Or don't you consider me your helpmate in everything? Am I only good to clean up, look after your clothes, cook your meals, and go to bed with you?" Dona Flor was in a temper. "Just a servant and a strumpet."

Then...then...Vadinho's horny ghost shows up! Moral crisis: Is it cheating on your husband to sleep with your dead husband? Is this a serious question? To Flor it is, and to be frank, I was so bought in at that point that I took it seriously too.

He took her as though she were a toy, a toy or a closed rosebud which he brought into bloom each night of pleasure. [She] began to lose her timidity, giving herself over to that lascivious union, growing in response, turning into a heartsome, spirited lover.

I mean! Could you say no to the returned ghost of a lover who could do that to you?! Written in 1966, this novel felt as fresh as yesterday to me when I read it in the 1990s. It is subtle and grotesque and sly and, in the end, it's the way a real person is: Conflicted. Is the story in Flor's mind, a desperately bored woman's attempt to recapture some small sense of joy in life, or is Vadinho real?

I don't exactly know, even yet. But you know what? Don't matter one little speck. I believe Flor. She woould never lie to me.

All this took place; let him who will believe. It took place in Bahia, where these and other acts of magic occur without startling anybody. If anyone has his doubts, let his ask Cardoso e Sa., and he will tell him whether or not it is the truth. He can be found on the planet Mars or on any poor corner of the city.

Amado was that good. Recommended, ESPECIALLY for married people of all persuasions.

AMATKA, Karin Tidbeck's truly disorienting & disturbing Swedish SF

AMATKA
KARIN TIDBECK (tr. by the author)
Vintage Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Vanja, a government worker, leaves her home city of Essre for the austere, wintry colony of Amatka on a research assignment. It takes some adjusting: people act differently in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion.

Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja finds herself falling in love with her housemate, Nina, and decides to stick around. But when she stumbles on evidence of a growing threat to the colony and a cover-up by its administration, she begins an investigation that puts her at tremendous risk.

In Karin Tidbeck's dystopic imagining, language has the power to shape reality. Unless objects, buildings, and the surrounding landscape are repeatedly named, and named properly, everything will fall apart. Trapped in the repressive colony, Vanja dreams of using language to break free, but her individualism may well threaten the very fabric of reality. Amatka is a beguiling and wholly original novel about freedom, love, and artistic creation by an idiosyncratic new voice.

THIS PURCHASE WAS INSPIRED BY THE WICKED, WICKED SF BOOK-BLOGGER, RACHEL CORDASCO. GO FOLLOW HER...WHY SHOULD I GO BROKE ALONE.

My Review: I was inspired to write this review by the book's selection for a group read in Goodreads's Speculative Fiction in Translation group. The power of group reads is not to be treated lightly, authors...court them!

This is a weird, weird tale. Vanja, a government functionary in a brutally planned-to-a-fare-thee-well society, is sent to an outlying community in her colonial world of, um, psychically manipulable fungi. Sort of. I am floundering a bit for a way to present the world because Author Tidbeck uses the ever-useful in medias res technique to keep your defenses down. I've seen readers unable to decide whether it's all a fable, a magical-realist condemnation of the supposed grey horrors of socialism, or a real secondary world that the colonists have traveled to in some poorly-explained way. I myownself plump for the latter because "colonists" means little on today's quite crowded Earth.

Also it pays for readers to attend to, then recall, that the book mentions the first colonists discovered buildings "not for human standards" which is all but a slamming shut of that case for me. Other readers may find other ways to interpret the story, of course; I don't think it's giving enough credit to a story to say that one and only one interpretation uses The Right Lens.

It was, however, this point that convinced me this was not Earth whether past or future. The sun being missing, or *a* sun being missing, I took to mean that the planet's skies were totally overcast at all times. How else but via a thick atmosphere of some kind could a fungal habitat keep itself from desiccation? And that also went along with the colonists' arrival by non-chemically-propelled means, as their arrival isn't accompanied by any sense of A Journey.

Vanja's life in this peculiar totalitarian society was what kept my interest the most. Her inability and/or unwillingness to be integrated anywhere made her fascinating to me. Nina, her love interest, is another more-or-less misfit. It seems to me their attraction is peculiarly one-sided. How can anyone be attracted to the point of falling in love with Vanja? She's the embodiment of the society she lives in...stop naming her and she will simply slide back into fungal goop.

This presents my basic problem with the book: It stops. It slips back into the primordial goop of story-stuff. I'm sure the ambiguity of the ending is deliberate, is a choice and a declaration of stylistic intent. Looked at from that angle, it "works" inasmuch as I am unable to finish my relationship with this story...I keep needing to name it: "Amatka has ended...Amatka is over..." but note that I need to use "to be" verbs, there isn't even a gerund I can whomp up out of the story-stuff I'm given.

It's not like this is a fatal flaw. It is, however, a self-inflicted wound on what might have been a hugely more popular seller...and I get the impression, reading about a rigid settler society that never appears to question WHY this fungal paradise of infinite, if ephemeral, possibility even exists or what happens to those who...vanish, that this is entirely okay with the author. If not the reason she wrote the story in the first place.

I found myself chuckling at the knee-jerk responses to this story to the world of socialist economic austerity. In fact, it seems to me a bitterly outraged condemnation of the eternal horror of capitalism's consume-or-die ethos, its ephemeral products designed to fail to ensure they need to be replaced, the supposed inexhaustibility of the planet's resources tied to an endless need to rename...recycle, reform, reuse...the very substance of reality. Because it's gray and hopeless, it must be about Them, not us...well folks, your privilege is showing. The view from the bottom is very much in line with Author Tidbeck's retelling of it.

What I want is for hundreds of thousands of you to be overwhelmed by a sudden desire to make your inner world richer with a flattened, attenuated emotional landscape. By contrast, even the new plague-fighting restrictions impinging on our daily lives must seem positively vibrant with possibility.

All in all, a wonderful story to read, and then re-read, for its layered and beautifully textured use of, and celebration f the uses of, language. I have seldom read a self-translated work that was this exacting in its craft, so fully and unsparingly rendered as its own self. Many are the echoes of Solaris, for example, in the protean fungal goop; but never by word or deed do the characters echo the positions or words of Lem's ancestral work.

Bravo, Author Tidbeck. Well crafted on all counts, in all metrics.

BLACK LIGHT: STORIES, raw gobbets of the debut author's psychic flesh

BLACK LIGHT: Stories
KIMBERLY KING PARSONS
Vintage Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now


Rating: 6* of five

The Publisher Says: With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.

Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, acerbic, and wise.

THIS BOOK WAS CHECKED OUT FROM THE NEW RELEASES COLLECTION IN MY LOCAL LIBRARY. THANKS, Y'ALL!

My Review: Don't start this read if you're not ready to go there. You know the "there" I mean, that there that Gertrude Stein railed against not being there in Oakland, California, circa 1920. Or today, for all I know or care. The there you're going with Author Parsons is the there that we try hard to deal with each in our separate ways, the there that we hate but need. You're not going alone. You might, in fact, prefer solitude on the trip, but by definition, reading is an accompanied silence. Like a playlist of stuff you can't remember liking when you were twenty but comes up when you enter the year you turned twenty into YouTube's maw.

As is my wont, I will use the time-honored and very efficient Bryce Method to view the stories as they come.

Guts is the reminiscences of a plus-size substance abuser about her handsome doctor lover (or is he, is their glancing connection, a product of her unfilled, bottomless needs?). It's sad, it's poignant, it's a window into the heart of someone who quite simply will not accept any positive event in her life—she looks for the lightning bolt in every cloud but ignores the gleaming of the silver lining. I want to box her ears for her. I recognize my fellow impostor-syndrome sufferer. She is an annoying twidgee. She needs the calm, practical doctor to open her mind, her body, and her psyche with invasive maneuvers she cannot evade. 3.5 stars

In Our Circle asks if PTSD is fixable: "When they let me out, I was just as mad as when I went in, only fatter and too lazy to exercise my wrath. Plus, I'd shaved off my eyebrows for no real reason, and what grew back was fine and blond and seemed to endear the world to me. I'd done the work and passed their tests, but my mind was still snarled." I'm guessing not. 4 stars

Glow Hunter is a coming(!)-of-age tale set in the Texas I did not want to grow up in, a part that was poor and trapped and ugly inside and out. These girls are just on the brink of making their biggest discoveries about life, these two little lives just exactly like every other little life are about to get a whole new dimension from their first psychedelic experience:

(p39)
Bo is always dangling new universes, places she says are hidden in plain sight. I already feel high when she's around—giddy, tingles on my scalp. Once, I let her drag me to a trailer park psychic. A woman in a leotard told me my aura was dingy, that I could pay her extra to hose it off with her mind. I've told Bo I don't want to turn into a fractal elf or watch my hands pool into liquid rainbows. She tells me not to worry, that with mushrooms we'll be us, only better. She calls this my Summer of Yes. "Imagine everything slightly dazzling," she says, "real life with a glow."
***
(p46)
Bo and I weren't exactly friends in school—we were polite. It was Jeff who shoved us together. Bo, this strange girl who made abysmal grades and covered her arms in highlighter filigree. She'd wait in the library while Jeff and I did homework, cutting holes in her clothes or vandalizing desks with her bizarre poems. Sometimes the two of them would take a break and go out to her car to get high. I'd study spitefully, prepare to kick Jeff's ass on whatever test. They'd come back stoned and giddy, sticky heat radiating. I'd never smelled sex before. I could have stormed off, but I didn't—I'd sit there wallowing in the hot tang of them, not used to being in such proximity to what I wanted.
***
(p59)
Jeff kissed me once, when we were thirteen. I'd just beaten him at some video game—obliterated his high score—and I thought he was mad until he lunged, openmouthed, and hugged me with his whole body. I memorized the shape of that moment, and then I pulled away. I laughed and laughed. He showed me what I was, without meaning to. He was all fat tongue and dumb want, his dick like a dog in the room, begging for attention.
***
(pp64-65)
I'm working Bo with my hands. This goes on in such a way that I can leave and come back to it. I take breaks, visit my childhood bedroom in my mind, sit in a comfy chair in my dead grandmother's knocked-down house. Helping Bo is a noble and difficult task, like trying to jerk off a beam of light.

She's due for a heartbreak, our narrator; Bo couldn't be less of a lesbian if she practiced all night. But the curves of these moments will always be the forms she beats her life's shapes to mirror. Bo, Jeff...shadows whose blackness will define her light places always. 5 stars

The Animal Part talks about the awful way boys away from home make their friendships work. One night's ghost story at camp becomes a bid for freedom from the hard stuff kids must think about, like survival in the pack, like finding an identity. For such a short tale, no more than five hundred words, this brings home our essential difference from females. It doesn't surprise me that Author Parsons has sons. 3.5 stars

"What's worth happening happens in deep woods. Or so my daughter tells me." That's how Foxes starts. This is an amazing story. The story behind its creation, via Publishers Weekly, is one you should know: it's here, someone tell me if there's a paywall please.

Then go back and read "Foxes" again.

The marriage that produced the daughter was between the youthful narrator and an older fool, one with a little bit of money and a lot of crass. They're both people with whom I share nothing but the right to trial by a jury of one's peers. They come from the trailer park, and they're only out of it physically.

(p73)
Whether it's nature or nurture, for people like the fool and me there is a long beat between learning something and knowing it. For us, answers come later, when we're far away from the question, if they come at all.

The narrator's drinking problem didn't stop the fool from leaving, far be it from him to stay and help or, who knows, maybe even fix the problem; and such is his self-absorption that leaving his daughter to our drunken narrator's tender mercies doesn't turn a gray hair on his scalp. The teachers and the shrinks all agree that the child's darkness is to be accepted if not encouraged, as she tries to make sense of her new world.

(p81)
In the deepest, darkest woods, the knight cuts out a man's liver and tosses it to a fox. He cuts off two ears. Fox. Fox. He rips out a larnix as a snack for a wolf. Two larnixes!

"I believe it's pronounced larynx," I say gently, refilling my glass.

But in the end, what's the poor kid to do? Her daddy's somewhere else and not coming back and mama's not what you'd call all there either.

(p89)
Very soon, he'll be dead in a painful, mundane way–a ruptured this, a burst that–and even more funds will arrive. How noble of him to provide such a hefty inheritance! I'm still working out that last part–right now it's more wish than plausible ending.

There's really not much sign of a life raft here; no wonder it took twelve years for the author to write it. She says, in the PW article linked above, of her process in writing "Foxes":

Finding my way into voice is always the part that takes me the longest, but usually once I’m there, the story comes in a steady reveal. “Foxes” was different–it stayed murky at every turn.

Plumbing that murk is at the heart of the stories Author Parsons looks to tell, or for sure the ones she looks to tell us here. It is a damnably tough job to reach that far inside and pull out anything that someone else wants to see. 5 stars

The Soft No does a lot to humanize Lubbock! Not. It's as bleak as any other wide-open space is, at least to those whose souls don't belong there; like Donna, the soft-no mom of the title. She's lost. She's actually home-bound by her sadness and her depression. It's not in the least bit a startling or new story. But it's very prettily told by a child just realizing that she must escape, she can not survive if she lets this "home" make her life into this miserable slog of thing that's destroyed her mother:

This dumb town is known for two things only: the Buddy Holly statue by the strip mall and the big, big sky. I hate that stupid statue—just seeing it sticks the whiniest songs in your head, makes you think of creepy, old-timey ghosts...The sky is all right, streaked pink and orange, but it's more like a lid than a promise. We're nowhere. If you wanted to leave you'd be driving forever, not toward anything, just away.

Don't kid yourself. Ten pages is enough to know how deep the water of life can recede yet leave bodies in their millions making nothing of their space in time. 5 stars

We Don't Come Natural to It is the saddest story yet: the longing of the left-out for belonging, being present in a way that matters to someone. The desperate denial of the body's needs, the equally desperate sensual overload of too much yes where it's hurtful and too much hurt where it's tender. The brisket-eating scene will break your heart. There isn't enough space in the Big City for all the nothing that the narrator, super-fat-shamer extraordinaire, needs:

Where I'm from, falling asleep is easy. You can hear your eyelashes swipe the pillow. There's so much nothing pouring in, you drift off listening to your choice.

The less there is of her self-starved body, the more she needs to have room, to carve space out of whatever is near and use the hole as proof she exists. 4 stars

The Light Will Pour In tells us a low-rent Lolita story, a happier ending with misery for all but no redemptive rescue for anyone. I can't help but feel that this narrator is the fool from "Foxes." He sounds like I imagine the fool would, he talks about settling in Matador, Texas, on the ass end of the Red River's dividing line between the Llano Estacado and the Great Plains; I'm goin' with my gut here, same guy.

Trish liked to pick at me with questions. She posed them in a kind of singsong innocence meant to cut. Like how had I lived such a long, long life without knowing the One True Way to pack a suitcase? And how much torrential rain had to fall before I'd hold up a newspaper or my jacket or something, anything, as a kind of gentlemanly shield over her? ... There is no excuse, when traveling by bus, for not knowing where the bus station is. But we'd show up somewhere in the dark and go one way for a burger and another for a place to sleep...I hated the thumpy road and the noisy brakes, the awful bodies shifting and coughing, all the unbearable people who weren't her.

Sounds like hell...but the ending is what makes it clear you're not just hearing the echoes of hell, you are spang in the middle of it. 3.5 stars

Into the Fold is an ugly, ugly story about adolescent girls at a posh boarding school. It made me very glad I'm no longer an adolescent. I was not a fan back then, now I'll cross the street to avoid adolescents. Horrible cliquish creatures without compassion or remorse.

The gist of the story is one girl's misery on the death of her favorite horse being transmuted into the hell on Earth that is being the one left out. Not just left out: being labeled as Weird. Social death; often enough actual death, this being the moment when people have adult-strength emotions without any compensatory perspective to allow reality to intervene between the pain of being Othered and realizing how little one actually cares. I really don't. 2.5 stars.

Black Light is the agony of First Love finishing before you're ready for it to. Especially bad for the burgeoning dyke in Nowhereland whose girl leaves her for Jesus. The. Absolute. Worst. And then your dirtbag older brother bugging you to share the inevitable Polaroid beaver shot with him...well, I ask you! Staying in bed for a good, long cry sounds good.

(p142)
"Take it out" was what she said when I first got my hand in her. "Take it out so you can put it right back in." She was a flood, sopping. A girl like that can't last. A fleeting gleam. I don't know if there's a word for the ache of missing something when you still have it. I'd kiss her and taste my doom.
***
(p152)
I don't have to look far to see the kind of woman she'll become—this town is bloated with them. Women who met their soul mate in youth group and got married young. Mission trips and the missionary position and grace before every meal. It's a life of pew PDA with the hubby, clapping on the downbeat, hating the sin, not the sinner. Hair spray, pot lucks, half a dozen kids. A big, fat scrapbooking habit.

Like that, but with basketball.

Her girl's a six-footer, a terrible player, but basketball led to Jesus, so it has to be excoriated. It can't be her, it surely can't be you; so basketball. And Jesus. All the things that are wrong with our fucked-up world. 4.5 stars

Fiddlebacks brings up That Memory...finding your parent(s) doing something mysterious, wrong...weird...and making talk-like sounds that don't mean a single thing to your kid-self. The peculiar noises, the off-putting sounds...and the sheer living, breathing energy of it...all put it into your memory forever. Bury it, deny it, whatever you need to do, but it's there. Set in another Panhandle/Llano Estacado town with nothing whatsoever going for it (except arachnids galore, like the venomous ones of the title), these three kids are coming of age this one dark and stormy night. Poor Mother, and by gawd poor old Stubbs! Ugly and dumb and unloved by his sweetie's spawn, he's never, ever gonna live this down. 4 stars

Starlite reveals the ugly truth about marriage: You got no idea what Kneecap, your husband, or Eyelash, your wife, get themselves up to when you're not around.

One shop sold only home theater equipment, another specialized in bespoke chinos—luxuries not meant for the guests who usually stayed here. Even the word "guests" felt wrong to Jill. Customers, maybe. Frequenters. This place was rock bottom for anybody, a good spot for bad decisions.

(The proverbial hot-sheets hotel, the no-tell motel. Wonder what Jill and Rick's gettin' theyselves up to.) Might be you're happier that way. Could also be they got no notion of what it is you're up to...the messiness of being alive, the passionlessness of the quotidian, purple cabbage Thai dishes jumble against red beards, hairy armpits, no one wins. 4.5 stars

There it is. This is what's kept Author Parsons busy the past twelve or so years. It's been a good, solid busy, as you can see. It's hard to imagine her finding the room inside herself to birth two kids! All this life, all these people, you end up feeling like your entire brain is swelling from their bad breath and farts.

I say go. You say...?

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW: one of the most poignant novella titles I've ever read

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW
WILLIAM MAXWELL
Vintage International
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.

Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who had the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

My Review: What a beautiful but sad book.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

So speaks out narrator as he sets out to recreate the end of his childhood. The last gasping breath of an unhappy lad's, I think innocence is too light-hearted a term for it, ignorance of the full measure of unhappiness that others can bear in addition to himself, even if he waits a half-century to get to the meat of the pain:

Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.

His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.

Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

"Cletus" brought to life as an Einsteinian thought experiment, a boy whose remembered existence is defined by a murder committed or a suicide perpetrated or both. Or neither?

But let me say this. My confusion about this issue is paralleled by the narrator's confusion about his own place, his very existence in the world of this little prairie farming town. His father isn't much for feelings, and he's a "sissy" and an artistic child...except for music, the art form his father loves and he knowingly resists learning as his only somewhat outward act of rebellion.

As he turned away I had the feeling he had washed his hands of me. Was I not the kind of little boy he wanted to have?

What strikes me as hilarious, in a not-funny-at-all way, is:

We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists anymore. Fathers have grown sensitive and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

Well now, this novella having a publication date of 1980, all I can think is that Maxwell intended this as sly humor. Or else he was deaf and blind.

Sly humor it is.

And it's of a piece with the Maxwellian phrases that abound in this book. It's always so tempting to rush to the Goodreads quotes page and add...almost every line he writes. Retyping the entire book being, then, a real temptation, I add no quotes to the ones already found there. I rely on the mathematical certainty that all of us together are smarter than any one of us individually. Let the hive mind decide which of these sentences are crucial, which best illuminate Maxwell's writerly chops as well as his storyteller's acumen.

But the title of this review gives me away. I want to add something to the quotes page. I can't, though, because even I the "oh-so-what-about-spoilers" King-Emperor feel the last two pages of the story can't be excerpted without making the point of reading the book evaporate.

It is damned near heartbreaking, what those pages say and what it means. I was perfectly glad to read this book, and rate it close to four stars. Then the ending hit me with Negan's baseball bat.

Maxwell wrote a good little story and a perfect ending. That deserves recognition. Read it, please, it won't take long and it will give you something beautiful in return.

THE IBIS TAPESTRY by Mike Nicol, a not-very-thrilling thriller that's still a good read

THE IBIS TAPESTRY
MIKE NICOL
Vintage Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: An audacious departure for the internationally acclaimed South African novelist--a thriller with all the searing immediacy of today's headlines.

Who was Christo Mercer, and why was he brutally stabbed to death in a remote Saharan town? For Robert Poley, an unhappy writer of political thrillers, the welcome distraction posed by this question has become an obsession. With the mysterious delivery of a laptop computer and a cryptic email message, he finds himself slowly entwined in the vagaries that constituted Mercer's life and death. An illegal-arms trader haunted by his nightmares, his past, and his clandestine involvement with a ruthless rebel-- and with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great --Mercer lived on the grand stage of history, yet remained obscured by shadows until his seemingly fated demise. Now, piece by piece, in a complex web of social, political, personal, and fictional disclosures, the intricacies of Mercer's troubled psyche begin to reveal a pattern as corrupt as South Africa's in the aftermath of apartheid--years of judicial inquiry, the Truth Commission, and continued social unrest.

With alchemical bravura, Mike Nicol turns history into fiction and fiction into history, bringing to allegorical life the haunting story of a murder emblematic of South Africa's recent past.

My Review: Well...that piece of publisher puffery isn't, in my opinon, supported by this highly literary and relatively suspenseless, badly miscategorized "thriller." There is nothing thrilling about the narrator's life. The thrilling subject of the narrator's research project is all flashback and invention, barnacled with notes, digressions, irrelevant faux-research-paper citations...it gets tedious.

But what makes this read a good one for me is the thing that I suspect would turn off the mass of American readers: Untranslated Afrikaans words, unexplained geography, facets of South Africa's rich and complex culture that will be unfamiliar. I am a little better versed in these things, as I dated a South African for a good while; but I would hope that avid readers would find it an interesting chance to learn about this amazing place.

Mike Nicol has a considerable reputation as a thriller writer. A novel of his, HORSEMAN, was hugely and internationally acclaimed. As THE IBIS TAPESTRY is the first of his works I've read, I think I'll try it before reaching a conclusion about Mr. Nicol's readerly chemistry with me. Based on this book alone, I don't think I'd be a fan. But there's a lot to be interested in here.

The arms trade is a scourge on the world. South Africa, after an arms-sale embargo was put in place by the UN in 1963, developed a gigantic and sophisticated war-machinery manufacturing sector. Industries require sales and sales require customers and customers are thick on the ground among the hate-fueled warriors infesting Africa. So it's only logical that a well-connected "Englishman" with a serious psychological problem...what we'd call in the here and now PTSD...that fixates him on the world of power players and influence peddlers in his native South Africa. The Marlowe play he obsessively reads, analyzes, revises in his own words is the epitome of England's 16th-century expansionist, imperialist self-image building. It's not too much of a leap to see this man's fascination for our narrator, a writer of thrillers in the airport-book mode. His own life and family have blown up in his face and he badly needs a complex puzzle to work out.

The complexity of the puzzle is a big part of the book's appeal for me. As our narrator moves through the steps of solving his subject's murder, he takes steps that lead him into contact with the underside of South Africa's arms trade, supplying warlords with destructive capacity and to hell with the consequences. The South African arms trade is global, but by focusing on Africa and its warring factions, Nicol manages the tough trick of illuminating the horrors and consequences of war with the minimum of gore. It is the gift of the talented storyteller to make a subtext of violence. I see the gift in Nicol's story of THE IBIS TAPESTRY. But it takes a love of puzzles to get the most from this book's complicated world.

BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE, a series-starting delight

BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE (Bruno, Chief of Police #1)
MARTIN WALKER
Vintage Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The first installment in a wonderful new series that follows the exploits of Benoît Courrèges, a policeman in a small French village where the rituals of the café still rule. Bruno—as he is affectionately nicknamed—may be the town’s only municipal policeman, but in the hearts and minds of its denizens, he is chief of police.

Bruno is a former soldier who has embraced the pleasures and slow rhythms of country life–living in his restored shepherd’s cottage; patronizing the weekly market; sparring with, and basically ignoring, the European Union bureaucrats from Brussels. He has a gun but never wears it; he has the power to arrest but never uses it. But then the murder of an elderly North African who fought in the French army changes everything and galvanizes Bruno’s attention: the man was found with a swastika carved into his chest.

Because of the case’s potential political ramifications, a young policewoman is sent from Paris to aid Bruno with his investigation. The two immediately suspect militants from the anti-immigrant National Front, but when a visiting scholar helps to untangle the dead man’s past, Bruno’s suspicions turn toward a more complex motive. His investigation draws him into one of the darkest chapters of French history—World War II, a time of terror and betrayal that set brother against brother. Bruno soon discovers that even his seemingly perfect corner of la belle France is not exempt from that period’s sinister legacy.

Bruno, Chief of Police is deftly dark, mesmerizing, and totally engaging.

My Review: First in a series! Words to gladden a satisfied mystery reader’s heart. First in a cozy series set in a French village. First in a series featuring a male lead who loves kids, works his land and his job, has lovers (women, boringly enough), and commands the respect of his entire territory by being unflashily committed to justice, even when the law is in conflict with it.

Bruno is a very good man, one who did everything he could to save the life of the woman he loved in the Bosnian war, and still failed; he’s a damaged man, and he would be the first to say so; but he never once puts a foot wrong in dealing with the souls in his care. We meet him, in fact, helping the local farmers evade the stifling EU bureaucrats bent on enforcing health codes that simply don’t apply to the ancient market town of St-Denis. Any wonder everyone loves him?

So a murder occurs, one that Bruno can’t hope to handle solo: An elderly Algerian immigrant, veteran of the French Army and holder of the Croix de Guerre, appears to be the victim of a far-right racist hate crime. Things don’t look good for the town’s small Algerian community’s peace of mind, but the trail of evidence developed by Bruno with his colleagues from the various and confusingly similar French policing agencies lead them to an unexpected resolution to the crime. What makes that so satisfying isn’t that it was a surprise, which it was not about halfway into the book, but that it was handled with the tact, grace, and dedication to justice that make cozy mysteries satisfying.

There is food, there is wine, there is a dog, there are no cats...it is as if Walker went over my personal checklist and gave me all but one thing on it (Bruno’s straight). I’m okay with that. But most of all, Walker gave Bruno wonderful people to work with, people whose deep and dense roots are charmingly intertwined and wonderfully deftly worked into the narrative. Infodumps are rarely this good. It is a major plus for the series, always assuming it continues.

I can’t quite get to four stars for the book, though, because it’s atmospheric and delightful, but not quite suspenseful enough. The author tips his hand more than forty pages before the end of the book. Okay, yes, it’s a first mystery, but I think a little more care could have gone into the Big Reveal. It’s only a quarter star knockdown because the Big Reveal is a very very surprising facet of French history I hadn’t so much as heard tell of before, and that’s worth a lot of pleasure points. The red herring wasn’t quite all I’d hoped for either, leading nowhere a lot sooner than I would have expected. Again it was interesting, and it cast a bit of light on my idea of the EU’s cultural landscape from a new angle. But it was just this side of perfunctory in its use.

All the cavils aside, the book is a pleasure to read, and the series will be one I follow for at least a few more outings, possibly much longer.