New (Free !) Acquisitions

I recently received all those cool Bookmooch books and I can’t wait to have a pick on them. Just let me gloat for a minute. Thanks Bookmooch for allowing me to trade disappointing books for fascinating ones!

Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: I thought I knew a lot about Woolf’s private life through her diary, but the upstairs / downstairs view on Woolf’s everyday life attracts me. This one was a “hot mooch”, as it stands on many people’s wish list.

Elizabeth George, Careless in Red: I confess: I’m a fan of Inspector Lynley. I read With No One as Witness, which ends on the most breathtaking cliff-hanger when his wife gets murdered. I was so shocked that I do not remember much else in this book. I didn’t have the heart to read the next thriller, What Came Before He Shot Her. I guess I still held a grudge against George for killing one of my favourite characters (here’s a link to an essay where she explains her decision). So it’s been quite a while (perhaps the time to grieve too!), and I now miss Havers / Lynley conversations!

Kathryn Miller Haines, The War against Miss Winter: this book seems all over the blogs I read, but as I try to remember whose in particular and where the buzz was coming from, I only found Kate’s reference. Anyway, I like the home front theme (see for example contemporary short stories by Molly Panter-Downes), and this one looks like a nice, summer read.

Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet’s Angel: I admit that the name of Vickers isn’t familiar to me at all, but it kept appearing in blogs I love, and when Litlove said that the event she most wanted to attend at a recent literary festival featured this author, I knew I missed something. So here’s my first attempt.

M.C. Beaton, Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet: to prolong my Cotswolds holidays and meet this funny character again after the first episode: The Quiche of Death

In addition, I received a great book by Oneworld Classics, Tolstoy’s Sakhalin Island. It’s an independent British publisher with a great selection of European classics. In most cases, these books are quite hard to find in print and their design is quite nice! I was not really tempted by the French collection (although I can see that they are really serious, ranging from Zola to Robbe-Grillet) but by the Russian one. I knew about Tolstoy’s trip to Sakhalin goals because I heard about it on the French cultural radio, but I didn’t get the details. Excerpt from the back cover: “In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin.” It doesn’t seem to be a light read, but I really want to get to the bottom of this. Doesn’t it sound intriguing?

Barbara Vine, Asta’s Book (1993; US title: Anna’s Book)

Mr. Smithereens was enthralled by this book, and I love both Vine and Rendell’s novels, yet I have mixed feelings about this one. When Ruth Rendell writes as Barbara Vine, she doesn’t write police investigations. Those novels are usually more complex and delve into psychology, like The Blood Doctor (my personal favourite), The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy, or A Fatal Inversion. Crime remains present, but it’s rather a transgression of law or of the common moral code, that will not necessarily be found out and punished in a legal way, but will certainly have a long-term impact.

For all those who love psychological mysteries, this is a great story, one with memorable, deeply believable characters, complex plot and twists that will make you gasp at the end. The story spans over 3 generations, from the grandmother Asta, a Danish woman settling down in London with her family in 1905 to her granddaughter Ann, the narrator, who deals with her legacy.

The third pivotal character is Swanny, Asta’s daughter and Ann’s aunt: she receives an anonymous letter disclosing that she might not be Asta’s daughter, and the latter whimsically doesn’t confirm or refute it. Swanny keeps looking for clues, and in her quest, discovers her mother’s diaries right after her death. Swanny translates, publishes them and they turn out a worldwide bestseller: those originally are “Asta’s Book”. Vine literally writes a book within the book, as chapters of Ann’s narration alternate with large excerpts of Asta’s diaries. When in turns Ann inherits the diaries after Swanny’s death, another plot, more procedural, emerges: in the earliest diary, her grandmother mentioned a crime that happened in the neighbourhood and Ann has to revisit the diaries for clues.

As you see, the plot is thick and has a rich cast of great characters, but it might just be too much. I even thought there might be enough for 2 books, even though the 2 plots are suitably linked. While I was reading it, I kept trying to imagine a different book with the same characters, as if they were cards in my hand that I could shuffle and play in another way. At times, the plot felt forced and there was a bit too much of a coincidence at the end, like a rush to tie all loose ends.

But it’s also a problem of pace: things only picked up at about page 200 (over a total of 400+), when the second mystery steps in. So I had ample time to let my mind wander and nitpick. My major problem is that I didn’t really buy one key element of the plot: that Asta’s diaries were so mesmerizing that it would become a bestseller. They provide a medium to paint the circumstances and hear the “candid” voice of a long-dead character. Besides, Vine needs it to explain how strangers get interested in the family history and how people are willing to open their drawers to find clues long after the protagonists are dead. But would a diary by such a dry writer be a success? We are strongly aware of the missing parts in Asta’s narration, so I didn’t find her diary candid or heartfelt. I don’t find Asta very likable, particularly as a mother, and indeed she’s not supposed to be, but in my opinion that would impede her book’s success.

[Beware SPOILER alert] I was intrigued by the parallel theme of motherhood in 2 novels by Vine that I recently read: Asta’s Book and A Fatal Inversion. In my mind, they echo each other with Zosie and Asta, 2 main characters living motherhood in a traumatic way, so much that they steal a child who isn’t biologically theirs after the disappearance of their own. The fact that the child is the result of a theft is so suppressed that both deny it, fail to see it as a crime, even in keeping a private diary, up to the point of forgetting the truth. The psychoanalytic vision has Swanny suffer from identity loss as a result of her mother’s suppressed subconscious. These aspects of the story make the book quite powerful in spite of my reservations.

Fred Vargas, L’Homme A l’Envers (1999) Seeking Whom He May Devour (2004)

Oops, I nearly forgot to review this book… Not the book altogether, because the plot and the images were engrossing and satisfying, but it added to the now respectable number of Fred Vargas books I enjoyed, so I was tempted to dismiss it as “just one more”.

Fred Vargas likes to use old mythologies into contemporary mysteries. The story I like best from her (to this day), is “Have Mercy on Us All”, about the old fear of the plague, linking the epidemic of “Black death” from Middle-Ages to the modern alerts on new viruses. This mystery recycles the old myth of the werewolf. Vargas is obviously a history buff and refers to the historical incident of the Beast of Gevaudan, when in mid-18th century a remote French countryside was terrorized by some creature that many believed to be a werewolf, or at least a wolf of a gigantic size.

I didn’t approach Fred Vargas’ mysteries in order, but it wasn’t a problem. We find Commissaire Adamsberg once again, the dreamy, quirky police chief inspector whose intuition comes on in leaps and bounds rather than step by step. A nice addition to the plot is his former girlfriend Camille, a musician (composer for movies) who moonlights as a plumber (or maybe the other way round). Apparently there has been a complicated story between them both, but I guess with such a couple, relationships can’t be easy. Long after they separated, she has retired (with a new, Canadian boyfriend) in a remote village of the Mercantour region in the French Alps, a natural park where (a few) Italian wolves still live nowadays.

Jumping from 18C Gevaudan to 21C Mercantour is not so difficult. Every summer, French farmers grumble against wolves who attack their herds (grumbling is a national sport when going on strike isn’t available) and urge the government to stop the reintroduction of wolves as natural species in the French country parks. In Vargas book, the killing of an eccentric sheep breeder by a gigantic wolf unleashes the anger and paranoia of people from Mercantour. Camille, a friend of the victim, sets off to find the killer together with a few other quirky characters, all convinced that a werewolf is involved, what people used to call a man inside-out (as the French title goes), a man who by day wears his wolf skin inside and by night becomes a wolf.

I won’t tell any more of the plot. As always, the resolution is the weakest part in Vargas mysteries, but I had fun all the way. I never visited Mercantour but now I’d like to! And the good news is, this year mountains are our summer destination, crossing from Bourgogne to Austrian Tyrol through Switzerland. I hope we won’t see any (were)wolf though!

Brentano’s Paris Victim of the Recession

A stunning piece of news this morning: The famous old American bookstore in Paris, Brentano’s, opened in 1895 and set on the prestigious Avenue de l’Opéra, closed its doors, a collateral damage linked to the recession. They couldn’t afford the steep increase of their lease and were put into liquidation. Their landlord was BNP Paribas bank. The store was a great place to buy books of course, but also crafts (patchwork) and Christmas ornaments. It was a landmark bookstore for foreigners as well as internationally-minded Parisians, as much as Shakespeare and Co., Galignani’s and WHSmith. I rather patronized the latter because of their huge stock (shame on me), but I will miss this relaxed place where the staff was very friendly.

Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases (2007)

This is one novel I’d hesitate a lot before offering as a present, because it’s so sad. At the same time, it’s so good that you’d want to share it. It’s a strange combination between a traditional Yiddish tale à la Isaac Bashevis Singer and a realist tragedy inspired by historical facts.

At the beginning, upon meeting main character Kaddish Poznan, the Jewish son of a prostitute who makes a living by erasing compromising names in the Jewish low-life cemetery for wealthy descendants eager for respectability, you think of quirky, sweet and sour, down-at-heel characters of the shtetl. Except Poznan lives in 1970s Argentina, when a military coup decided of a massive abduction policy (the ‘Dirty war’) to shut political dissidents up and inspire terror throughout the population. So the tale quickly becomes darker.

Tens of thousands people were “disappeared” by the military, leaving families in the desperate and Kafkaesque situation of not being able to tell if they were alive or dead, or even to prove what had happened. When Kaddish’s son Pato disappears, the Yiddish tale would see it is the result of paternal malediction thrown in a moment of rage, the realist sees it as a random act of terror following a police roundup at a rock concert.

Pato’s family then explodes in grief and undirected anger. The father can’t prove he’s dead even after getting a glimpse (thanks to his seedy connections) of these opponents’ tragic fate. The mother decides to wait for his return and throws all their money at a corrupt priest who can’t even pretend he’s alive. Only in a few elusive lines are we, readers, informed of what really happened to Pato. Even if this surrealistic page (a parenthesis, a brutal change in point of view really) makes us feel better, there is no easy way out of this book. As much as we hope for a happy ending for the traditional tale, the book takes the realistic road of a bottomless descent into despair.

Long after turning the last page I can’t measure the extent of Englander’s project. It’s a very rich book and that makes it all the more satisfying, despite the feeling of sadness. I can’t help but wonder how come a successful young Jewish novelist from New York chooses to revive the scandal of the “desaparecidos” (disappeared), a shameful episode of recent history promptly forgotten in the Western world, but by placing it in the very particular context of the Jewish lower class. I can’t accuse Englander of not knowing Judaism firsthand, but how could he tackle such a loaded issue as living under a dictatorship and the traumatism of losing a child with such a light tone? I’m not saying he shouldn’t have, and it’s always bad to set predefined limits to what literature can or can’t address, yet it’s a risky gamble. I don’t have a hard and fast rule anyway, but in that case Englander pulls it off brilliantly (yet I wouldn’t say effortlessly). He manages to put us readers in the strange position of feeling empathy towards the tragic Poznan family, yet keeping the distance of the clownish farce: ‘this is just a tale you don’t have to take seriously.’

Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse (1961)

In 1961, Agatha Christie was 71. Can you imagine how much her world changed since she wrote her first mystery at the end of WWI? Perhaps I imagine too much, but she might have felt that traditional cosy mysteries, those where a body is found in the library of an isolated countryside manor where all kinds of people with all the right motives to kill happen to be reunited for sherry and cards were not attractive enough anymore. Yes, of course cosy mysteries are formulaic constructions, but they are still fun long after isolated manors have disappeared, and after people don’t spend the evening there with sherry and cards. The appeal of these stories remains because they’re an abstract construction of lies and partial truths, not because we truly care about those characters.

Christie must have felt at odds with her times: I can see no other explanation to her introduction where the hero strangely complains about the aggressive sounds of banal contemporary appliances: “The dish-washers, the refrigerators, the pressure cookers, the whining vacuum cleaners – ‘Be careful’ they all seem to say.’ I am the genie harnessed to your service, but if your control of me fails…’ From an old lady of 71 who witnessed the invention of all those things, it’s completely understandable, but from the youngish hero (a slightly original bachelor, but in the conservative way), it feels strange and fragile.

So the Pale Horse is something of a hybrid: it has some ingredients of the traditional “cozy”, but it adds distracting influences: the Chelsea bar scene, voodoo rituals, accusations of witchcraft rationalized into radio waves influences, organized crime, and even a love sub-plot. The ground idea is very good: an evil organization that offers crime à la carte by black magic, to those who need to get rid of “dear ones”. But all those foreign elements seem quite unnecessary to me and felt odd at best, ridiculous even sometimes (the girls’ catfight in a bar showed only too much that Lady Agatha hadn’t set foot in a bar for quite a while).

My conclusion may sound a bit harsh but she should have stuck to her guns (and to what she did well) and not made those concessions to the times. It reminds me of the 1970 mystery by Ngaio Marsh that I read last year, where the rules of the classic mystery were bent out of shape to accommodate drugs, thugs and even a shoot-out in the streets of Rome, regardless of the proper, tidier killing that must happen, as you all know, in a library of an isolated British manor, behind closed doors.

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I’ve typed the notebook version of this post and enriched it at the same time, but in case you want to have a taste of pencasting (my first ever attempt), here it is:

Yew, it looks really worse than I thought (there is some tape on the pages as Baby Smithereens tried several times to understand what’s so interesting in Mom’s notebook). Maybe I’ll stick to the typing then…

A Review (at last) and a Question

I fell behind in my reviews once again, but it’s all the more annoying as it’s “only” due to a technical (or organisational) problem: I do find time to write reviews (prospective blog posts) longhand in my notebook during my commute, BUT I never find time to type those up once I’ve arrived home or in the office. So these reviews are lingering in my old-fashioned notebook and my blog is staying hopelessly inactive. What a shame!

One solution I’ll try in a moment is pencasting, the solution found and advocated by Mandarine. But I’m not sure you’ll be able to read as I wrote in my personal notebook for no other reader than myself in mind, so I didn’t make any special effort.

So I take my courage in both hands and copy for you this long-overdue review on Frederic Bobin, Voyage au centre de la Chine (Travel to China’s heart). Bobin was the press correspondent for French major newspaper Le Monde in Beijing for 4 years. This book can be seen, if you take a low ambition point of view, as a travel account of all the trips and encounters he made there, or, if you think there is a larger plan behind it all, as an attempt to portray a country in its diversity and contradictions. What it’s definitely not, is an essay on China’s astounding growth, or a personal take on what might happen in this beautiful and complex country. You get, back to back, numerous individual stories of villagers, city dwellers, poor, rich, corrupted, party members, dissidents, materialistic, or intellectual people put together. The only link is that of the journeys, so you could say that there’s a regional approach, but I’m not so sure anymore.

I can testify that all he says is very very true, as I was there during the same period (and happened to come across him a few times), but I found the book a bit dry. The journalistic approach means that Bobin remains factual and objective, which is good to discover these places and people, but I wanted more. I wanted more psychology, more time to explore a few of these extraordinary characters in depth, something that maybe only fiction can do. Or if he chose to remain on the outside, then I would rather have himself more into the picture, felt what it meant to him to meet all these people. I couldn’t help but regret that this book weren’t something else. Now I guess I really need to find a good Chinese novel to make up for it. I might re-read Ma Jian’s Red Dust, a book that blew me away years ago.

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I must confess that copying this review didn’t take me nearly as long as I’d thought. But I’d rather find a solution that allows me to type texts in during my commute, later to be transferred to my computer. Now, dear readers, I’m quite clueless and technology-adverse and I need some advice to find my way in the technological jungle out there. Mini-computers, or whatever they’re called, seem still too big and heavy for my handbag (it’s not a backpack, you see, it’s something feminine with a strap you carry on your shoulder, so I wouldn’t risk dislocating the said shoulder). Is it something a Blackberry would do? Or another type of electronic agenda? Or even a phone?? I’m not interested in the least by the interactive side of these devices, only just by its connectivity to transfer data to my computer in preferably Microsoft-compatible format. I want to preserve my commute as a quiet down time to write, something I’m not sure salespeople from the techno-shops will ever understand. Will someone be nice enough to point me to the right direction?

Reading Notes – And A Bookmark to Go with it!

I never play lottery, because I never win. If I bet on a number at a lucky draw, you can be sure this one will never be picked. But obviously this rule also has an exception, as I was the lucky recipient of a nice Pomegranate Bookmark, courtesy of Danielle!

I received it today, super fast. Don’t you find it classy? From the information I get on the reverse, it’s from John George Brown, a British painter emigrated to the US in the 1850s. The original is in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The woman on the seashore is actually holidaying at Grand Manan, a popular resort island in the Canadian province of New Brunswick (now, I understand better why she isn’t wearing any kind of swimsuit …)

Now, the hardest question is: in what book will I use it right away? I have several ones currently being read:

- Barbara Vine, Asta’s Book: things are picking up at around page 200. I must confess that where it not for Mr. Smithereens’ enthusiasm, I would have been strongly tempted to lay it on the side.

- Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition: I was attracted to this book at WHSmith purely because I love the cover. I was slightly ashamed to buy a book for its cover, so instead of buying it, I got it through Bookmooch (doesn’t it feel better not to spend money for a book you’re not sure to like?). It’s a family drama set in Penzance, with a mother as the pivotal, most dramatic character. It’s not really a theme I’m used to, but so far I like it.

- Ruth Rendell, An Unkindness of Ravens. This one is the “bedtime story” for Baby Smithereens. It works quite well  (it’s not that the story lacks suspense, most probably my voice is simply droning him to sleep, in which case I may need to work on my reading aloud skills…) I don’t quite get the meaning of the title just yet. Native English readers, is there a double entendre here?

- François Caradec, Le doigt coupé de la rue Bison. A true Parisian humor mystery, not at all in the Vargas vein, but rather playing with the clichés of the 1950s black-and-white gangsters and cops movies set in the Paris seedy underworld. The writer is a member of Oulipo, a post-Surrealist group interested in playing with words (up to the point that the mystery itself rather gets the backseat). Interesting but rather hard to follow! 

Even though the bookmark is in the grey shades, I don’t find it suited for a contemporary police investigation.  I guess it will work better with Barbara Vine’s historical and psychological mystery. I normally take the first flat little thing I come across to mark my page: a metro ticket, a payment slip, one of those commercial loyalty cards from shops I never visit twice, a tiny perfume sample like those you get in magazines. But it’s nice to replace my shameful little piece of torn newspaper with some proper, arty bookmark!

M.C. Beaton, Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (2002)

Be warned, Agatha Raisin is my personal new fad. So I’m tempted to be all-forgiving about this book, the first of a series of light (you could say lowbrow) mysteries set in the Cotswolds. Agatha Raisin’s mystery is strongly inspired by another Agatha, and Miss Marple’s shadow comes immediately in the picture, but there is no real comparison.

Agatha Raisin is a feisty P.R. businesswoman of 53 who, at the top of her professional success in Mayfair, realizes her lifelong dream of buying a cottage in the Cotswolds and retiring to a (supposedly) idyllic country life. Very soon, she is brought down to earth, lonely and unsettled by her gruff neighbors, and doesn’t know how to keep busy far from the hectic city life. In order to socialize (and with the ulterior motive to impress those country bompkins), she enrolls in a local quiche competition, undisturbed by the fact that she doesn’t know the first thing about cooking, and without a pang of guilt, buys the quiche from a favorite London caterer. But not only doesn’t she win (someone had the local judge in her pocket already), but on top of ego bruising, there are murder accusations! The judge is found dead the next day, poisoned by Agatha’s quiche. This double whammy (public humiliation of being recognized a cheat, and public suspicion of being a murderer) sets her on the killer’s tracks.

As you can see, Agatha Raisin is no Miss Marple, but all the traditional ingredients of the cozy British mystery (the vicar’s wife, the gossip, the quiet hatred simmered by years of local grudge, even the cardboard characters) are present. She lacks Marple’s discretion and experience of decades of village secrets, but she makes up for that with city cynism and daring. I doubt it’s a portrait of real life in the Cotswolds (I didn’t meet anyone like that there and there was no poisoned quiche either), but the setting is enchanting enough and the characters suitably endearing. This is pure escapism, and I won’t promise it is all very plausible, but it was a lot of fun. And I got the next two ones in the series from Bookmooch, so Agatha is coming back soon!

Note to interested readers: I’m not sure whether the mysteries are supposed to be standalones, but I guess it’s better to follow the order with that series, as there are strong recurrent storylines and characters.

We Interrupt This Program For Some Pictures

As requested…

On your left, Cotswolds villages: charming honey-stoned cottages, footpaths across the soft hills, 15th Century churches with gorgoiles and Gothic churchyards (not to mention clotted cream teas…)

On your right, Bath and dignified Georgian townhouses, Jane Austen and spa water from the Pump room (not to forget Sally Lunn buns…)

What would you vote for?