Gordon Lish Praises Care Giver!

The novel I've just recently reviewed and praised now has the maestro, Gordon Lish himself, in its corner!

"I'm sold. I'm so sold I read this book four times before--trembling, trembling--sitting myself down to write this comment. You want to know what the business of the mind is going to be as the body declines into its notorious bankruptcy? Like this, like Care Giver, like the stuff in the braided sentences that constitute the telling of Blanchard's true story. Oh, and the person in the pic on page six?--that's the object of desire for you, perfect and, of course, lost, yet never the least lost."

We're not kidding, folks. This is some kind of wonderful. Please...go pre-order before release on 20 May!

Yuck ick bleurgh

Medical misery tour. Most of today lost to medicine's side effects. Yuck! There have never been any unmixed blessings in my world, so I shouldn't be surprised....

TAUVERNIER STREET, a collection of short portraits of a place and time

TAUVERNIER STREET: Stories
JAY ATKINSON
Livingston Press
$9.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Jay Atkinson's riveting new story collection, TAUVERNIER STREET, the writer that Men's Health magazine called "the bard of New England toughness" uses a variety of narrative voices, characters and styles to express a single, central truth: you are where you came from. In these stories, some written in "Technicolor" and others in "black and white," a young boy learns to cherish the solid, unremarkable presence of his own father when he gets to know the charismatic dad next door; an ex-Marine finds the strength to deal with his wayward young bride in the pages of an ancient book; and a young gangbanger with a keen sense of history seeks protection from a tough hombre named Jesus.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY OF THIS COLLECTION FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: The collection by a writer who says: "...I realized that my old haunts were the starting point for nearly all my characters. It was a neighborhood of steep hills, rickety houses, and long lazy afternoons spent waiting for my father to pull into the driveway," had better deliver on the Sense of Place in every single story. Author Atkinson almost does. I'll go into details as we come to each story, à la the Bryce Method.

The Art of War

Dancing the Presidents

The God of This World

The Tigers in Argentina

God's Work

The Landscapes of Dr. Aboud

The Tex Cameron Show

Sages

Two Mississippi's

Latin Kings

Fear of Earnshaw

The Philosophy Shop

The Messenger

Radio Call

Pinholes

Jailbird

The Thorndikes of Tauvernier Street

A day without a new posted review!

Sad, but true. I was working on a review of a book that I found myself floundering around trying to explain my reaction to, and realized that meant I didn't understand it. So I'll have to look it over again and see what I failed to see the first time. Failing that, I'll have a better shot at explaining my response being so wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey. (Whovians will get it.)

A CARRION DEATH, first in a new Africa-set mystery series

A CARRION DEATH (Detective Kubu #1)
Michael Stanley
HarperPerennial
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Smashed skull, snapped ribs, and a cloying smell of carrion. Leave the body for the hyenas to devour-no body, no case.

But when Kalahari game rangers stumble on a human corpse midmeal, it turns out the murder wasn't perfect after all. Enough evidence is left to suggest foul play. Detective David "Kubu" Bengu of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department is assigned to the case.

The detective's personality and physique match his moniker. The nickname "Kubu" is Setswana for "hippopotamus"-a seemingly docile creature, but one of the deadliest on the continent. Beneath Kubu's pleasant surface lies the same unwavering resolve that makes the hippopotamus so deceptively dangerous. Both will trample everything in their path to reach an objective.

From the sun-baked riverbeds of the Kalahari to the highest offices of an international conglomerate, Kubu follows a blood-soaked trail in search of answers.

Beneath a mountain of lies and superstitions, he uncovers a chain of crimes leading to the most powerful figures in the country-influential enemies who will kill anyone in their way.

A memorable detective makes his debut in this gritty, mesmerizing thriller. Set amid the beauty and darkness of contemporary Africa, A Carrion Death is the first entry in an evocative new series cutting to the heart of today's Botswana-a modern democracy threatened by unstable neighbors, poachers, and diamond smugglers. Those trying to expose the corrupt ringleaders will find themselves fighting for their lives...


My Review: I want to smack the copywriter who created the promo copy above, and on the dust jacket of my library's hardcover. “Detective” Kubu is “Assistant Superintendent” Kubu. And there's something very uncomfortable to me about the “darkness” of modern Africa cited above. Just tin-eared phrasing, I'm sure. No one in publishing could be unconsciously playing with stereotypes. No no.

Mm. That's as may be. I found Kubu and his Botswana to be a welcome new angle on territory once owned, in the US market and mind, by McCall Smith's rather more twee Mma Ramotswe series. Kubu, the dangerous hippo of a detective in the series, is a Mozart-singing grocery hound, a kind of African Nero Wolfe-cum-Inspector Morse with a very nasty boss, a very appealing wife, and a large country to help police.

It's a nice debut novel about an interesting character with a lot of promise. The writing team, one Afrikaner and one Minnesotan, do a lot with their man's appetites for food, truth, justice, and facts. They're a bit less facile with the villains, using a lot of shortcuts...wealth equals evil...and failing to avail themselves of opportunities to work in some believable offsets to the faults.

The Superstitious Natives Who Are Right trope isn't one I like much, either, but I'll let that go for this book. If it happens again, there will be discussion of it then.

On balance, the series deserves another shot, and the sleuth a chance to grow and shine. Until next year, then.

Okay, I lied. Review of COOKING WITH FERNET BRANCA

COOKING WITH FERNET BRANCA
JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON
Europa Editions
$18.00 trade paper, $10.99 ebook platforms, reissue available now

COOKING WITH FERNET BRANCA also appears in Literary Fiction & Story Collections

I was reminded of this review of a 2019 reissue by a stray comment, and I loved the book so much I decided to tart up the review and post it here. I so so wish someone would go get John Barrowman by the sleeve and gently but firmly make him understand that a movie of this book starring his beautiful self would be dynamite!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany, where he wiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions-including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur of the book's title. Gerald's idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former Soviet republic. A series of hilarious misunderstandings brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity.

James Hamilton-Paterson's first novel, Gerontius, won the Whitbread Award. He is an acclaimed author of nonfiction books, including Seven-Tenths, Three Miles Down, and Playing with Water, He currently lives in Italy.

My Review: Cooking With Fernet Branca is part of oddball publisher Europa Editions's sinister plot to make Murrikins like me aware of the strange and sinister world of lit'rachoor published beyond our shores. Muriel Barbery owes her Murrikin presence to them, too. We all know how *that* turned out....

Well, before moving any farther along in this review process, let me send out the call: Does anyone know how to get hold of (wicked double entendre optional) actor John Barrowman? You know, Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood fame? He is literally missing the key to Murrikin stardom by not reading, optioning, and making this book into a Netflix movie. It suits every single national prejudice we have: Eastern Europeans as sinister lawbreaking peasants who eat strangely shaped, colored, and named things and call them foods (like Twinkies, Cheetos, and Mountain Dew are *normal*); Englishmen as dudis (you'll have to read the book for that translation) who do eccentric off-the-wall things with food that are repulsively named and gruesomely concocted (spotted dick? bubble-and-squeak?); and Italians as supercilious effete cognoscenti of world culture, who possess the strangest *need* for vulgarity.

The characters in this hilarious romp are the most dysfunctional group of misfits and ignoramuses and stereotypes ever deployed by an English-language author. They do predictable things, yet Hamilton-Paterson's deftly ironic, cruelly flensing eye and word processor cause readerly glee instead of readerly ennui to ensue. The whole bizarre crew...the lumpenproletariat ex-Soviet composer, the Italian superdirector long past his prime, the English snob who refers to Tuscany's glory as "Chiantishire" and "Tuscminster"...gyrates and shudders and clumps towards a completely foreseeable climactic explosion (heeheehee). And all the time, snarking and judging and learning to depend on each other. In the end, the end is nigh for all the established relationships and the dim, Fernet Branca-hangover-hazed outlines of the new configurations are, well, the English say it best...dire.

Read it. Really, do. And I dare you not to laugh at these idiots! Don't be put off by the sheer hideousness of the American edition's cover, in all its shades-of-purple garish grisliness. The charm of reading the book is that one needn't look at that...that...illustration...on the cover, but inflict it on those not yet In The Know enough to be reading it themselves.

And seriously...John Barrowman needs to know about this. Pass it on!

No Review Posted 24 April 2013

The book I planned to review was so horrible that I don't even want to mention it, and the one I had as a back-up was pretty dire, too. So disappointing. I always WANT to love the books I pick up, and each one starts out with five shiny, hopeful stars. Bitter, rank disappointment was my lot today.