Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Tove Jansson – The Summer Book

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While on holiday two weeks ago, I read Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. Not even the unruly multi-family party of Scandinavians sharing our hotel, who slammed doors, ran down hallways at 3am and yelled to each other from their balconies at midnight, could make me unlove this beautiful book (of Finland). I wrote immediately on Twitter how this book fits my idea of a “perfect” piece of writing—plotless but absolutely riveting, graceful and honest—and several weeks after finishing its pages, this still holds true.

The Summer Book is set on a small island in Finland, in a vacation home, and the book catalogues the interactions and adventures of an elderly grandmother and her young granddaughter Sophie. In quite short, disarmingly simple and themed chapters like “Playing Venice,” “The Cave” or “The Robe,” Jansson comments on a variety of powerful subjects. The book is, quite simply, about life and the many difficult questions of existence that humans ponder. And that pondering is presented honestly, through the unique ways that humans consider such things, and by that I mean: off-hand, in absurd conversations, in solitude, in our physical relationship to nature and in our love and hate for other human beings.

One of the things that Jansson does, and does incredibly well, is evoke how human beings find magic in the simplest things. Not real magic, she never goes quite so far, but she knows how to bring the reader (through her characters’ actions and thoughts) to that little feeling of awe that strikes at any given moment and for unexplainable reasons. Jansson really has her finger on this human impulse and this is what most of The Summer Book seems to be about. These moments of awe aren’t always joyful, of course, and both sorrowful awe or angry awe are strong currents in the book as well.

Something I found very curious about the book was the portrayal of the father character. I would have to double check, but I don’t think he ever speaks a line of dialogue, and mostly he is absent—either working or away in his boat. But he is this incredibly affecting presence throughout the book, yet without any real engagement with either the grandmother or Sophie. They talk about him, they disobey his stern rules, they watch him a lot. It’s a technique I haven’t come across before in other books, at least not often or that I can remember. I loved it. Also, the reader learns quite early that Sophie’s mother has died. Jansson gives us this piece of information quickly and without ceremony, and she never goes back to it. But this reality haunts the entire book, and these two people—one truly absent, the other perhaps absent out of grieving or loneliness—are powerful characters.

The Summer Book is a serious book, but it’s filled with some excellent humor. Sophie and her Grandmother are often in conversation about very difficult things, although they don’t often touch these subjects head on. Instead, they talk “around” things or they say silly things which are truly very serious. And they are often prickly with one another, but that prickliness reveals a deep mutual need and love. I do not think I have seen this kind of love expressed so well in many other books. Perhaps, however, this is especially striking because it’s accomplished through the non-traditional pairing of a grandmother and a little girl.

It’s a real pleasure to discover a novel and know immediately that I will reread it often. The Summer Book is the kind of book that doesn’t have to be picked up and gone through from start to finish (although I will do this and am looking forward to doing this again soon), but I could nearly choose a chapter at random and enjoy its atmosphere again whenever I feel like it. It is an example of one of those rare books that become life companions. I do not put many books in this category, and it’s a very special treat to be able to add another volume to this, my most precious of book lists.

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Clarice Lispector – The Hour of the Star

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“One cannot prove the existence of what is most real but the essential thing is to believe. To weep and believe.”
-Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

There has been a lot of talk in bookish circles lately about the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. After my curiosity got the best of me, I picked up a copy of her 1977 (and second to last) novel, The Hour of the Star. There can be nothing more exciting for a committed reader to stumble across than a previously unknown (to me) literary voice and be absolutely blown away. I don’t think I’ve been as excited about a piece of literature since reading my first Nadine Gordimer novel some ten years ago now. I’ll stop the comparison right there, however, because they are very different writers. Still, I now feel the same need to read Lispector from start to finish as I did upon that first encounter with Gordimer.

The Hour of the Star is absolutely unique. Both easily readable and unfathomable at the same time. A straightforward story of life and love and death and yet every page filled with inscrutable and delightful little tangents. Its central concern is an impoverished, ugly, uneducated young woman named Macabéa who has moved from a backwater town to Rio. She’s hopeless and hopelessly unlovable, even though the narrator is desperately obsessed, you could even say, in love with, this woman’s life and, eventually, with her death.

The book has a strange narrator—a man named Rodrigo about whom the reader ultimately learns very little. He is interested in truth/reality and storytelling and how the two affect one another; he often says things like the following:

Forgive me if I add something more about myself since my identity is not very clear, and when I write I am surprised to find that I possess a destiny. Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

That “when I write I am surprised to find that I possess a destiny,” that’s just brilliant. As is the final question in that quote.

Rodrigo could easily be Lispector and the blurring between these two writerly identities is a wonderful and fascinating part of the book. Rodrigo doesn’t really influence the story, not as a character would, but only as the person selected to tell Macabéa’s story. There is some notion of the two having met at some point, but it isn’t important and Lispector could have easily taken an authoritative omniscient and told the story herself. And yet Rodrigo’s voice adds something really unique to the narrative—an ordinary human obsessed with the pathetic story of another ordinary human. There is this sense that Rodrigo as a writer has created Macabéa, turned her from fiction into flesh and in that transformation he’s given a part of himself, so whatever happens to Macabéa happens to him as well.

To be frank, I am holding her destiny in my hands and yet I am powerless to invent with any freedom: I follow a secret, fatal line. I am forced to seek a truth that transcends me. Why should I write about a young girl whose poverty is so evident? Perhaps because within her is seclusion.

And what does happen to Macabéa? Not much really. She lives in a slum, works as a typist. Has small entertainments on the weekends. She has a friend named Gloria who seems to know more about the world. She has a crush on a young man who pays her some attention. But Macabéa is heading toward a moment of fame, a sad and horrible kind of fame, but fame nonetheless. And Rodrigo must tell the reader all about it.

I haven’t even scratched the surface of all I could say about this tiny little novel. As it’s one of her later ones, I plan to come back to it once I’ve had a chance to read her earlier works. She has nine novels and nine collections of short fiction, so I’ll have my hands full with this for awhile.

If I’ve piqued your curiosity about Lispector, take a look at the New Directions page for her. They’ve just come out with several of her books in new translations and there are links on this page to many, if not all, the critical reviews that have been floating around about her work.

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Derek Hayes – The Maladjusted

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Today at Necessary Fiction, I review a short story collection by Canadian writer Derek Hayes – The Maladjusted.

As a collection, these stories ask the reader to consider a person’s awkward ways and unacceptable behaviors—from the aging immigrant working as an aide in a public school classroom to an otherwise “normal” young man obsessed with his girlfriend’s facial hair. Obsession is a key word for the cadre of voices and personalities in The Maladjusted, obsession and self-esteem, as each of these people overthink and worry themselves about both small and big issues of daily life. There is definitely charm in this fixation, a revelation of the quirks that make us human. At the same time, Hayes makes it clear, in “Maybe You Should Get Back Here,” or “A Wonderful Holiday,” that his characters suffer for their anxieties, and that people often turn away from their graceless behaviors to judge or pity them.

You can read the entire review here.

Dana Johnson – Elsewhere, California

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Today at Necessary Fiction, I review Dana Johnson’s début novel, Elsewhere, California. Here is just a bit of what I had to say:

Avery understands the way that language works as a door between cultures because she’s been paying keen attention to speech patterns and the importance of words since she was a child. And Avery is a tester, interested in trying out words and phrases from other people—from Brenna’s poor, white and overly permissive family; from Joan, a kind and elderly white neighbor; from the young women of different cultures she meets in college; and even from her own family, those in California and those in Tennessee. To Avery, language is intricately bound with identity and so as Avery learns to speak several “languages,” her identity begins to crack and splinter.

This identity crisis begins young, and Johnson does a great job of showing the multitude of awareness moments in young Avery’s life, and the miniscule alignment choices that she makes, both with positive and negative repercussions, as she moves forward from child to adult and her world changes and shifts. There’s a complex negotiation going on here—who does Avery want to be? What are the boundaries to her identity and who or what has put those boundaries in place? Johnson doesn’t shy away from the more delicate questions of race and prejudice, and although the novel has what I would call a gentle narrative, it doesn’t pull its punches either.

My review says as much, but I really enjoyed this novel–its focus on language as well as the clarity and emotional complexity of Johnson’s writing.

Click here to read the entire review.

Elsewhere, California was an interesting book to read relatively close to Martha Southgate’s most recent book, The Taste of Salt, as well as one to consider against all my Gordimer reading, especially her latest, No Time Like the Present. In terms of The Taste of Salt and Elsewhere, California, both books deal with identity issues for African American women who have in some way left their working class or impoverished backgrounds behind, and both books deal with the protagonist’s relationship with a male relative who hasn’t been so lucky, a person the protagonist cares about but who also embarrasses and even frightens them. The main characters of these two novels are quite different, but the books share these general themes and it was interesting to compare how the authors handled similar ideas.

Gordimer is a different kind of writer than either Johnson or Southgate because she’s so often moving from the political to the emotional, and not the other way around. She’s also white, so that’s something else altogether. Regardless, both Southgate and Johnson take a more intimate approach, focusing their narrative on the interior life of a single character. No Time Like the Present is looking at similar issues really, especially the idea of a mixed culture marriage and the documentation of moments of prejudice in a society that is meant to be striving for equality between cultures.

 

 

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Janet Frame – Owls Do Cry

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Today is the second session of the newly minted Dead Writer’s Book Group (#ddwritersbkgp)  – this time we’ll be talking about New Zealand author Janet Frame’s first novel, Owls Do Cry. Here are some quickly-written thoughts (as bullet points this time) on the book, something that helps me prep for our Twitter discussion. The discussion is open to anyone, so please join in if you have the chance/inclination.

• The cover of my edition of Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry is from 1967 (the book was first published in 1957) and shows the silhouette of a feminine head, although bald, with puzzle pieces laid across the forehead and stretching up onto the top of the head. The head and the blank space behind it are done in a light blue; and the outlines of the head in a slightly darker blue. The puzzle pieces are done in vibrant colors with a floral motif. It’s a striking image and ties in perfectly with the last few chapters of the book. It also confirms (to me, at least) that while the book spends an equal amount of time on each of its characters, the person the reader is supposed to become the most attached to is Daphne. Because this disembodied head on the cover, with its downturned eyes and missing puzzle pieces, is most certainly Daphne Withers.

• Owls Do Cry tells the story of the Withers family – parents Bob and Amy, and children Francie, Daphne, Toby and Chicks. The first half of the book covers their childhood while the second half begins twenty years later with the adult lives of these four children. Actually, three of them, because one dies before becoming an adult. Although all four remain equally present in Part Two. That is just one of the curiosities of this completely unique book. In Owls Do Cry, childhood and adulthood are fixedly connected, and any attempt to separate the two causes pain and even madness.

• Despite the overall linear progression of the narrative, the book isn’t really all that interested in timeline. The stories of each of the children criss-cross somewhat, doubling back on each other as Frame gives us portraits of them as adults. The book plays a lot with the fluidity of time, and gives the reader a sense that the past and the present (and even the future) share the exact same emotional space. I found this extremely interesting, mostly because it strikes me that negotiating the emotional responses to past, current and future events is a particular task of the rational brain. Frame seems to be making a comment, or at the very least, exploring the rational brain and what we—readers, humans, sane individuals—expect of it.

• Although the book does tell a “story”—in that it looks at four individuals as children and then reveals their lives to the reader as adults, and then even goes beyond that in what is probably the most successful and fascinating epilogue I’ve ever read—it’s hard to consider Owls Do Cry as interested in “story” in the traditional sense. Frame puts together a series of portraits and arranges them somewhat linearly, and although there is this sense of showing what has happened to these children as adults, the overall effect is loosely conjunctive instead of flowing and coherent.

• Daphne seemed to be a focus of the novel, at least this is the impression I had while reading of her life as a child. And the second half of the book is extremely concerned with her, even while she is mostly missing from it. And yet, I found myself curious about Frame’s deliberate exclusion of any transition. We meet her as an intact child and then as a broken adult. I was nearly sad not to see the movement from one to the other, at the very least as a way to try and understand what had happened to her.

• Even a quick read of Frame’s autobiography shows that she dealt constantly with issues of mental illness; that preoccupation is certainly evident in Owls Do Cry. I’m curious if her later fiction (she has twelve novels total) continued to engage with this theme.

• Just a word on the style—Frame weaves a lot of poetry into her narrative, and her syntax is often a little dissonant. I think the dissonance works beautifully to make the reader aware that this is uncommon storytelling, that the book is more interested in the emotional truth of the images brought forward, instead of their logical truth. At the same time, it wasn’t an easy book to read and it felt at times that Frame wasn’t always in control of her imagery and language. I’ll be very curious to see how she developed her style in later works.

This is crossposted at Dead Writer’s Book Group.

Mary Costello – The China Factory

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I review a début short story collection from the Irish writer, Mary Costello. I had the pleasure of first reading Costello in an issue of The Stinging Fly, an Irish literary journal, and have now come to really admire her work after reading this entire collection. The book is called The China Factory.

Here is a short except from my review:

Again and again Costello creates stories in which the human connections are both delicate and tender. Stretched thin and raw. Connections that contain an ache. Most of her characters are endowed with an almost painful empathy—attuned to the mysteries of their loved ones and bound to the intricate emotional structures of their own inner landscapes. In “The Patio Man,” a gardener is witness to his boss’s miscarriage and the event, clearly life changing for the woman, is as deeply afflicting for this quiet and watchful man. He is shaken to the core. While never neglecting the woman in the story, Costello actually explores the effects of this man’s empathy to a far greater degree.

I make it very clear in my review how much I enjoyed these stories but I can add a bit of personal anecdote here in this less formal reviewing place. I finished reading The China Factory in a local café, just across the street from my daughter’s daycare. My childcare schedule is somewhat inconvenient and so most Tuesdays and Thursdays, when she goes only for a few hours in the afternoon, I drop her off and head directly across the street to work, so as not to lose any time. In any case, I’m usually reading or writing or translating and I’ve gotten quite good at working in public (which is, I believe, an acquired skill).

Now, I am a seasoned reader. I read all kinds of beautiful and/or difficult literature and although I do engage with it deeply, I usually have no trouble reading anything in public. This was not the case with The China Factory. I re-read “Insomniac,” the second to last story and then blithely read on into “The Sewing Room.” By the time I realized what this quiet story was about, it was too late. I was sobbing. I put the book down, got myself under control and picked it up again. I told myself I could get through it. I took a quick peek around the café, which was about one-third full, and decided to go for it. Before I had turned that last page, the café owner had come over, put a kindly hand on my shoulder and asked me what on earth I was reading. She was visibly disappointed when she saw I was reading in English and wouldn’t get a chance to see for herself, but she quickly re-filled my teapot and hovered until it was clear that I wasn’t going to fall apart.

This all makes for a good story now, but the point I’m trying to make is that it is difficult to do this kind of poignancy nowadays. I admit that my being a relatively new mother made that last story particularly devastating for me—and the fact that it’s only through the support of my husband and family that I can continue working and be a Mom, something that wasn’t, or isn’t, available to many women around the world and so there were/are other, sometimes horrible, choices to be made—but Costello is so restrained in her depiction of these characters and their lives. There is no melodrama. She says it all in the simple handover of an apple from an 18-month-old child to its mother, and how that mother looks at this piece of fruit two days later, and my heart literally broke for these fictional people.

That particular story touched me quite personally and so remains my strongest memory of the collection. But the other stories were all as simple and profound. I cannot recommend this book more highly. Read the entire review here.

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Carson McCullers – Reflections in a Golden Eye

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Tomorrow starts the very first discussion of the newly established Dead Writer’s Book Club—a discussion I’m very much looking forward to—and so I thought I would write out some of my thoughts on this first book, Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, as a way to organize my thoughts before the lovely chaos of a Twitter and Facebook and blog discussion.

What strikes me first and foremost about Reflections in a Golden Eye is how contemporary it feels, especially in terms of language and style. Without some of the older dialogue formulations, I would have had to continually remind myself it was written 70 years ago, and not last week. Even the subject—a bizarre love triangle (actually a love hexagon or heptagon, depending whether you count the horse) set on an army base and leading to a murder is as classic as it is contemporary. There is obviously a reason that McCullers has continued to speak to contemporary writers and readers. She engages with timeless elements of human nature.

And yet there is something wonderfully particular about her writing. For me this comes from her fascination with loneliness and how it brings out the unusual, even the freakishly bizarre, in a person. McCullers makes loneliness as destructive and devastating as any kind of real disease. Her first novel, and probably her most famous, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, features five such desperately lonely people. I’ll never forget how McCullers renders each of those five characters, especially the young girl Mick Kelly and all that music floating around in her head and making her nearly crazy. Or Jake Blount who loses himself completely in an enraged attempt to communicate his understanding of the world to anyone who will listen. Of course no one does. This kind of loneliness portrait is done more quietly in Reflections in a Golden Eye, but it’s extremely sinister. Just look at these lines from early in the book, after Private Williams sees Leonora Penderton walk naked through her house before a dinner party:

The four people at the table had not been alone. In the autumn darkness outside the window there stood a man who watched them in silence. The night was cold and the clean scent of pine trees sharpened the air. A wind sang in the forest near-by. The sky glittered with icy stars. The man who watched them stood so close to the window that this breath showed on the cold glass pane.

There is a lot of paralyzed surveillance in the novel. Private Williams goes every night to the Pendertons, Captain Penderton follows Private Williams around during the day, Alison Langdon stares out of her window every night instead of sleeping. For different reasons and with varying levels of self-awareness, these three individuals are almost completely cut-off from all normal human interaction and McCullers reveals how painfully they suffer.

The different reasons for their isolation are fascinating to me. Captain Penderton and Alison Langdon seem to share a similar heartbreak; they both love and want something from life that they cannot have. Private Williams is infinitely more mysterious. Indeed, if I’m not mistaken, McCullers does not let her narrator go into his mind. She details his often peculiar actions—like riding a horse naked in a hidden meadow or sneaking into Leonora Penderton’s room to watch her sleeping—but doesn’t give the reader the satisfaction of an understandable motivation. It’s almost as if he has suffered an enchantment and the sensual has taken over the rational.

Thinking about the book in terms of McCullers’s thematic development as a writer is interesting as well. It was her second novel and she followed it with The Member of the Wedding. However, she stopped in the middle of that third novel to write her novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café. Thematically, there is a lot to connect these four works: the loneliness as physical and psychological destructor, the troupe of social misfits with unfulfillable wants, the idea of jealousy and vengeance, and finally, the problem of gender and sexual orientation.

For its publication date, Reflections in a Golden Eye is extremely forthcoming about sexual orientation. The word homosexual doesn’t appear once in the book, but McCullers asks some very direct questions about the painful nature of loving someone that society tells you it is wrong to love. Captain Penderton feels only disgust for his wife’s body and a passionate but painful longing for the other men in the book, especially Private Williams. Looking at this relationship with a view to the ending shows where the real tragedy lies.

I haven’t read her autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, or what appears to be an excellent biography of McCullers, The Lonely Hunter by Virginia Spencer Carr, but from what I’ve gathered online and in articles about McCullers, she knew first-hand what she writing about. Reflections in a Golden Eye is actually dedicated to Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer and photographer, who was openly gay. (N.B. I would highly recommend The Cruel Way by Ella Maillart—a famous Swiss adventurer and travel writer—it’s about her trip through the Middle East with Schwarzenbach and it details Schwarzenbach’s struggle with drug addiction as the two women traveled alone from Geneva to Kabul in 1939. It is a fantastic book.) McCullers and Schwarzenbach must have met sometime in 1940 and McCullers apparently fell in love, but Schwarzenbach didn’t. This is all I know and I’m curious what her autobiography and any biographies of her have to say further.

So without further ado, I’ll stop here knowing that tomorrow’s discussion of Reflections in a Golden Eye will bring me back in a few days with more thoughts.

Cross-posted at: Dead Writer’s Book Group

 

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Tove Jansson – The True Deceiver

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A few months back, the lovely Helen of Gallimaufry sent me a copy of Tove Jansson’s The True Deciever. She suspected I would like it and was she ever right! Discovering Jansson’s fiction is one of the highlights of my reading year. I loved the book. Loved it.

The True Deceiver is strange and dark and interested in human nature and animal nature and how the two get confused with each other or confront each other. The book is about Katri and her brother Mats and their relationship with Anna Aemelin, a wealthy woman who lives alone in a big house at the edge of the forest.

When the novel opens, Katri and Mats, who have a ten-year age difference, are living above the local shop. Katri is definitely a guardian figure for her brother and both Katri and Mats are outsiders, although for very different reasons. Katri is feared by the villagers because she doesn’t want their friendship, because she trusts no one, because she wields an uncanny authority over a giant but nameless German Shepherd. She is also a math genius. Mats, on the other hand, is considered simple-minded. He loves reading adventure stories. He loves working on boats and members of a family of local boat builders give him odd jobs from time to time.

For her part, Anna is a strange character indeed. A famous children’s book illustrator, she lives alone in the big house her parents left her when they died. She draws eerily intricate paintings of the forest floor which are then superimposed with bizarre, almost cartoon rabbits. Anna lives very much outside the local community, and so in their shared outsider status it is quite fitting that Anna, Katri and Mats are finally connected.

That connection is engineered by Katri for purely financial means. She wants to find a way to give Mats something he desperately wants. It begins with Katri working as a kind of assistant to Anna, and following a break-in (faked by Katri) the two move into the big house. Katri approaches the relationship on purely economical terms – what can be gained? what must be given up? Despite her constant mental calculations, she can’t factor in the other person’s personality quirks. And Anna is unable to think in such mercenary terms. If Katri’s modus operandi is hostile honesty, than Anna’s is overly gracious pretence. The two are worthy opponents and their “battle” will work profound changes on each side.

Just as fascinating as this uncommon story is the way in which Jansson tells it. She wavers between the 3rd person and the 1st person, switching at will and using the 1st to give us snippets of Katri’s thoughts and less often, Anna’s. The 3rd person narrator has a “knowing” tone as well, further complicating the mix of voices and opinions.

The book is set in the deepest darkest winter, when the villagers practically tunnel through the streets to get around town. The weather continues to reflect certain of the book’s events, although this isn’t a heavy handed technique in any way. As the story ramps up and Anna and Katri discover previously unknown parts of their personalities, Jansson’s winter descriptions shift to mirror their inner and outer struggle. It’s wonderfully done.

The True Deceiver was my first experience with Tove Jansson’s fiction for adults, but it certainly won’t be my last. Let me just finish up here with a bit of the writing, taken from a sample in Katri’s 1st person voice:

Every night I hear the snow against the window, the soft whisper of the snow blown in from the sea, and it’s good, I wish the whole village cold be covered and erased and finally be clean… Nothing can be as peaceful and endless as a long winter darkness, going on and on, like living in a tunnel where he dark sometimes deepens into night and sometimes eases to twilight, you’re screened from everything, protected, even more alone than usual. You wait and hide like a tree.

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Jürgen Fauth – Kino

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Atticus Books is a fairly new publisher doing some wonderful things. First off, they published The Bee-Loud Glade, a book by a very good friend of mine, Steve Himmer, and which I’ve talked about several times already (here, for starters). They’ve also put out an e-novella by Himmer called The Second Most Dangerous Job in America, which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read yet. I plan to correct this mistake very soon.

There are several titles in their catalogue that I’d like to read, namely John Minichillo’s The Snow Whale and Nazareth, North Dakota by Tommy Zurhellen.

However, I had the pleasure of reviewing one of their latest titles for Necessary Fiction recently. Kino, by Jürgen Fauth, is somewhat hard to describe succinctly. The book is about a young woman out to uncover a few family secrets, it’s about the German film industry of the 1930s, it’s also a little bit about contemporary politics and media, and it’s also a little bit about love and marriage.

Here is a little bit of what I had to say in my review:

Much of the joy in reading this kind of novel comes from an admiration of the author’s research and skill in putting that research together into a coherent story. Kino is filled with real historical characters and events—people like German filmmaker Fritz Lang, actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge and many others, and of course Goebbels and several events pertaining to the Third Reich’s negotiation of German art and culture during the 1930s and 40s—but the novel cleverly inserts itself as a fictional footnote to this period of film history, even going so far as to suggest that the discovery of Klaus “Kino” Koblitz’s films will necessitate a re-evaluation of the merit of certain film makers previously credited with the development of revolutionary techniques. Suddenly, deliriously, the “real” and the “possible” begin to merge. Fauth becomes Kino—or is it the other way around?

You can read the entire review here.

Emily St. John Mandel – The Lola Quartet

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Last week over at Necessary Fiction I wrote about Emily St. John Mandel’s most recent novel, The Lola Quartet (Unbridled Books, 2012). This is a carefully scripted story with a large cast and some very interesting commentary on how youthful mistakes can haunt a person’s life. Mandel has a simple but elegant style that suited the novel’s sometimes difficult subject matter. I’ve never read Mandel before and really enjoyed discovering her writing. I’m also curious now if she always writes as she did in The Lola Quartet, or if some of her style came about as a reflection of the way she incorporated elements of literary noir into the novel. On to read her first two novels as soon as I get a chance.

Here is a small excerpt from my review:

Like any good homage to literary noir, The Lola Quartet deals in suspense. From the opening chapter with Anna waiting for help on a playground while that dangerous wad of cash hangs heavy and toxic from the bottom of her infant baby’s stroller, to the final “handoff” with its complicated moral implications, The Lola Quartet cultivates the reader’s sense of dread. These characters, mostly vulnerable to us for their relative youth and precarious lifestyles, move through different levels of danger. They are all at-risk from the dangers of the self as well as from various perpetrators of exterior menace.

Read the full review here.

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