Another action-packed, fast-moving novel from Shane.
We meet our main character Avery Man. (Every?) He’s recently retired and his wife died a few yearAnother action-packed, fast-moving novel from Shane.
We meet our main character Avery Man. (Every?) He’s recently retired and his wife died a few years ago. He has been building a cottage in the woods in Canada and he wants to leave his urban house behind, looking forward to solitude.
To avoid spoilers, I’ll just list a few threads or themes in the novel.
Avery feels terrible for his grandson that his son is getting divorced and the married couple if filled with hatred for each other. He and his grandson spend time together in the cottage, once in a blinding snowstorm.
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Since his wife died, Avery has had no sex for years. He’s decided to try online dating sites. He’s a bumbler at that. Maybe he should just go to a prostitute. Or maybe his latest contact, a bookstore owner, just might work out.
We learn that Avery used to work for the Sand pharmaceutical company. (Thus the title.) We learn how the company strategized about the cost of developing new drugs versus manufacturing cheap generic drugs. They may have cut too many corners and it looks like a drug they made has been responsible for a large number of deaths. (view spoiler)[ Including his wife. (hide spoiler)]
Another theme is politics. He has a neighbor with good ideas who keeps running for office but losing. He helps the would-be politician by organizing efforts to get people to the polls. His neighbor’s latest opponent is backed by the pharmaceutical company so you start to imagine that there's going to be some dirty tricks played here. The motto of one of the head honchos of the firm is “There are those who rule and the ruled.” Which group do you want to be in?
Avery gets in touch with some recently retired/fired employees of the firm and realizes it’s time to reveal what he what they know about its evil doings. The plot takes a dark turn. He’s being followed and the woman he talked with recently ends up murdered. We learn that a solitary beekeeper, an elderly scientist who worked for the firm and kept meticulous notes about the effect of the drug, appears to be the next victim.
For those of you who have not yet read any of Shane’s writing, here’s a passage that will introduce you to his style:
“Now as he sipped a cup of cocoa in the warmth of the cottage, Avery thought back to happier times. The shape tucked inside the sleeping bag on the fringe of the glow from the fireplace could have been Damian [his son] as a boy, not Paul. And Pat [his deceased wife] would have been around then, putting the dinner things away, preparing the beds, getting the old cottage ready for the night and filling the place with her generosity and warmth. After she died, Avery had tried to get away from it all by selling the old cottage and building this new one, but remnants of the past were difficult to escape: the old couch, a recliner that knew every contour of his body, the books that had followed him throughout his life and shaped his character, the slumbering child in the sleeping bag one generation removed from the previous one. And the ghost of Pat who came back to him every night, fading increasingly with each visit and now locked into set images of times past. That was the problem: there were no new images; Pat was frozen in history. She could not grow old alongside him as he lurched into his uncertain future.”
If you read this book, I encourage you to keep in mind that there are occasional chapters, including the first chapter, related to the elderly scientist beekeeper living in isolation in a cottage in the woods. This is not Avery, the main character. I got confused at first and I assumed, since we learn that Avery is building a cottage in the woods in the second chapter, that the first chapter was a flash-forward to Avery as an old man.
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I really enjoyed the story. As in all of the several of Shane's books I've read, there’s a lot of action and the storyline is always moving forward. I think this is the best book I have read by Shane. Quite an accomplishment.
Disclosure: Shane is a good GR friend and he sent me a copy of the book for review.
Top photo of a cabin in British Columbia from fieldmag.com The author from shanejoseph.com ...more
This is my first Louise Penny. (I think my wife has read all of them.)
Inspector Gamache had semi-retired but he comes back to take over the administraThis is my first Louise Penny. (I think my wife has read all of them.)
Inspector Gamache had semi-retired but he comes back to take over the administration of the Quebec police academy. There are four quirky cadets we follow, all of very different personalities ranging from a timid, introverted young man to a brash, troubled young woman who may have a distant connection to the Inspector.
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We also follow four or five women in the story, all different types. There's a large Black woman artist, a foul-mouthed, curmudgeonly, elderly poet, a bookstore owner and of course the ‘perfect’ Inspector’s wife. There’s also an openly gay male character who runs the restaurant with his partner.
We wonder what Gamache is up to when he allows a corrupt police officer to stay at the academy as an instructor and then brings another corrupt officer in. Then he appoints his son-in-law as second in command. Doesn’t Quebec have rules about nepotism? LOL
And guess what? One of those two corrupt guys becomes the murder victim. Even Inspector Gamache comes under suspicion in this one.
The action takes place in a town outside of Montreal and near to the village of Three Pines where the inspector lives.
The women met regularly as a group and they often deal with insults thrown out by the elderly poet. The author is really excellent at the minute hints people give off in conversation and in their expressions - the little body language signs, the twitches, the raised eyebrow, the eye movements.
The author calls every character alternately by their first or last names which makes it hard to catch on to the characters quickly. For example Gamache’s son-in-law is alternately called Jean Guy and Beauvoir.
There's an old map found inside the wall of an old building that seems to hold clues to the murder mystery. How can that be if it is an ancient map? Maybe the artist has more to do with this than we know? All roads lead to Three Pines town on the map.
One of the corrupt officers (who sat with a gun in his lap when Gamache visited his office because he thought that Gamache was going to fire him) ends up shot. A copy of the map is found in his room. Who gave it to him and why? Who is trailing Gamache and following him to his home?
So there’s plenty going on to keep our interest and move the story along.
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The Canadian author (b. 1958) began her career as a journalist and radio talk-show host before taking up writing. She has published 18 novels in the Inspector Gamache series, the most recent in 2022. The only other book she has written is a political murder mystery, State of Terror (not a Gamache), published in 1921 and co-authored with Hillary Clinton.
Top photo taken in the village of Knolton, Quebec where the author lives. Photo by Louise Penny from her Facebook site. The author from cbc.ca ...more
There’s a lot going on in this short story by a female Canadian author of Lebanese descent. It’s only a short story, so I’ll use spoilers to hide someThere’s a lot going on in this short story by a female Canadian author of Lebanese descent. It’s only a short story, so I’ll use spoilers to hide some things.
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A young girl living in London with her mother is terribly stressed by the absence of her father. He sent them out of a war-ravaged country in the Mideast and she will not see him again for three years.
She has unusually black eyes and she comes to believe that she has evil powers. It looks like she is going to start taking it out on herself through self-mutilation. (view spoiler)[ She dreams that her father has died and worries that she has willed his death. (hide spoiler)]
The girl becomes fascinated with a black-eyed owl at a local zoo. The owl’s name is Welsh, Blodeuwedd, which is tied in with Welsh folklore and legends about a ‘flower woman’ turned into an owl. (view spoiler)[ The girl wants to start learning the Welsh language, which aggravates her already-strained relationship with her mother who wants her to learn more about Arabic culture. (hide spoiler)]
She is befriended by a young Black woman who is a caretaker of the owl.
Owls in the GR news: when I recently reviewed The Blind Owl by Iranian/Persian author Sadegh Hedayat, GR friend Bob Newman commented that owls have different symbolism in other countries. In Hindi culture, for example, owls aren’t ‘wise’ – they are stupid and evil.
A good story, worth a ‘5’ as a short. It is posted on the web at the online magazine Strange Horizons. I also read and enjoyed this author’s short story Pockets.
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Top image of Blodeuwedd at etsystatic.com The author from bournemouth.ac.uk ...more
As I said in my review of the author’s book, Milltown: Wow, there is a lot of action and intertwined lives going on in this fast-moving book. I hope SAs I said in my review of the author’s book, Milltown: Wow, there is a lot of action and intertwined lives going on in this fast-moving book. I hope Shane has kept the movie rights because I could see this as an action-adventure thriller on the big screen.
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I don't want to give away plot, so I will describe some of the main characters and some of their issues to give you a feel for the book.
The main character is down on his luck. He's a writer of historical novels and there was a time when his books were selling, his agent was calling, and he was on book tours across Canada. No more. He's looking for what his next shtick will be. So he has to compromise his true writing love for something that's going to make money or he will soon have another ex-wife in his background. Right now he’s stocking shelves in a grocery store.
His new woman friend, an artist, deals with the same issue of what sells. And a swami/guru, whose retreat the author attends, is all about the inner self, but he shows his true colors when he asks everyone to ‘like’ his retreat on Facebook as they leave.
The main character has a son, or maybe not, since paternity is uncertain. The son is looking ahead to an operation that will change his sexuality.
The author in our story has had a tough life, raised in foster homes and subjected to the big three kinds of abuse: physical, psychological, and sexual.
We learn retrospectively of the sad story of his first wife, the mother of the young man who may be his son. To give you an idea of the stresses in her life, let me try to describe her life in one sentence which I will put in a spoiler: (view spoiler)[ She is a bipolar pill popper, a victim of incest as a child, who has attempted suicide several times, and has a gay male roommate suffering from AIDS. (hide spoiler)] The things we don’t know about people before we marry them!
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The author in the story moves on from grocery work to PR work for a Canadian government minister. He drafts press releases and blog posts for social media. In this part of the story we get a lesson on the use and abuse of social media: fake news, pirated Twitter handles, and secret recordings that could turn an election around. [Seriously? In Canada? If they want to stop these unwanted influences flooding in from the south, they should build a wall!]
The third part of the book becomes almost like a spy thriller. It looks like the Russians might be behind some of this fake news trying to throw an election. Our main character is on the run from … well, the police… long story.
And Shane toys with us a bit with names. The flat-faced Eastern European guy, a guy you never want to meet in an alley, is named Igor. We get a bit of graphic sex in the story too, so we are definitely looking at an R rating when the movie comes out. And then we remember our main character’s last name is Smallwood.
To give you a hint of the kind of action you are in for near the conclusion, we have two kidnappings, a body count of three, and two others headed to the hospital, one in critical condition.
A good story that kept my interest through the twists and turns all the way through. Highly recommended for action-adventure fans who like psychological depth in their characters.
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I thank the author, Shane Joseph, for sending me a copy of the book for the purpose of a review. Shane has written seven novels and a collection of short stories, Crossing Limbo, which I have enjoyed reading.
Top photo of Oshawa, Ontario, where some of the action takes place, from oshawacity on twitter.com Toronto from aircanada.com The author from shanejoseph.com...more
This was a much-read book when it came out in 2000. I read it then and took notes and made highlights from which I am writing this review. Gladwell coThis was a much-read book when it came out in 2000. I read it then and took notes and made highlights from which I am writing this review. Gladwell collects interesting stuff and attempts to package them into a theory that isn't always successful, but the collected information is always fascinating on its own.
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In The Tipping Point, the author argues that the spread and adoption of new things follow the principles of an epidemic. (And this in 2000 - pre-COVID!) First a few early innovators get the new product and then its adoption spreads and reaches a point where almost everyone has it - like faxes and cell phones.
He organizes his argument along three 'principles': The law of the few, the stickiness factor, and the context of what is spreading.
The law of the few is similar to the 80/20 rule (which I have done some geography research on). Anyway, 20% of men drink 80% of the beer; 20% of people cause 80% of car accidents; 20% of your carpet gets 80% of the wear, etc., etc. He illustrates this with an epidemic of gonorrhea in Colorado Springs, a city of 100,000 people, where it turns out the epidemic was ‘caused’ by 168 people who hung out in six bars.
He goes on to other examples of spread such as AIDS/HIV, fax machines, and even how a novel, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by a relatively unknown author, Rebecca Wells, became a multi-million seller.
The stickiness factor shows why Gladwell's books are a stretch sometimes. This ‘principle’ is simply a tautology. Things take off because they are ‘sticky.’ But things that are sticky are things that take off. Hush Puppies, fax machines, cell phones, certain novels or television shows, etc. There is really no explanation for it other than, like an epidemic, it takes a while to start spreading. There's no point in being the first person to have a fax machine if there's no one else to send a fax to.
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Mavens help – opinion shapers who know hundreds of people and like to tell others about new things, new ideas, new products. Marketers love these people and give them free stuff, whether they are walking around New York and LA, as was the case when Gladwell wrote in 2000, or now are mainly web influencers. It’s funny how this kind of marketing success inevitably breeds its own failure. Once the web influencer sees his super-cool sneakers he promoted on sale at Walmart, it’s on to something else!
The context part is what we've heard before called the ‘broken windows theory.' If you let a neighborhood go to vandalism and graffiti, criminals and delinquents think they can get away with anything. More graffiti and vandalism occurs and crime skyrockets. The point is the environment matters. It influences, allows, or encourages the anti-social behavior of some individuals. Gladwell goes so far as to say it is the MOST important thing; that is, the context, the environment, is more important than the predispositions of the delinquents and criminals.
Gladwell expands on this point by citing studies that show neighborhoods are even more important than family upbringing. He points out that studies show that a youth a troubled family who lives in a good neighborhood has better life outcomes than a youth from a normal family who lives in a troubled neighborhood. Peers are more important than parents. He writes about how cigarette addition seems unrelated to whether or not your parents smoked and that there are many occasional smokers who never get addicted.
Some of the esoteric stuff he digs up is frightening. Highly publicized suicides (like Marilyn Monroe) drive a week-long spike in other suicides and in traffic 'accident' deaths.
He talks about 'channel capacity' and the theory from anthropologists and sociologists that 150 people seem to be the maximum for a viable social network. That theory has even been applied to factory settings. The Gore-Tex fabric manufacturer in Delaware built three separate factories with about 150 employees each, rather than one big one.
He makes the point that we can develop ‘immunity’ to marketing. That is, we block out or ignore telemarketers on our phones or web browsers.
By the way, have you had your exposure yet today to your 254 commercial messages? LOL
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The Tipping Point is Gladwell’s first and best-selling book. He has written a half-dozen others; best-known are Outliers and Blink. He’s a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. He has a fascinating background. Born in 1963 in England, he was raised in a Mennonite community in Canada, and his mother is Jamaican.
Pictures, from top: nationalpolice.org; mavens101.com; vox-cdn.com
The main character, Anil, a 33-year-old woman, has an unusual occupation. She works for the UN as a forensics expert exhuming and examining bodies of The main character, Anil, a 33-year-old woman, has an unusual occupation. She works for the UN as a forensics expert exhuming and examining bodies of civilian terrorist victims to determine who is responsible – terrorists or governments? She has previously worked in Guatemala and Congo, but now she is in her home country – Sri Lanka.
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It’s the 1980’s and there’s plenty of terrorism going on due to Sri Lanka’s Civil War. The Tamil minority in the north wants to break away from the Sinhalese-dominated government in the south. Meanwhile, Sinhalese insurgents in the south want to overthrow the existing government. There are plenty of mutilated bodies alongside the roads.
Anil is working with a 49-year-old male archaeologist whose wife has died. (view spoiler)[ Supposedly died. She can’t trust him. He has some connections to high-level political figures in the country and half the time she worries if she’s been paired up with him so he can keep an eye on her. (hide spoiler)] It’s likely that the four skeletons they are working on were victims of government terrorism. They affectionately name the skeletons Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. If she crosses some unknown line she could be imprisoned or thrown out of the country.
There are hints of romantic interest between the two but neither one is a prize. Anil is obsessed by her work. She has no life and no friends other than an ex-husband and a long-distance female friend in the US where she went to school. She loves working by herself in the lab until she collapses from exhaustion. The archaeologist is enigmatic and seems to have no social life either.
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It’s an absurd premise for a story, but it’s realistic in its absurdity. Let me explain. The process of identifying a victim through facial reconstruction and all the lab works takes months. Yet everyone already knows the government tortures and kills terrorist suspects. You can see the building downtown where the dirty work is done and at night the mutilated bodies go out the back door in military vehicles to be dumped along deserted roads as a warning to others. Why are we digging up years-old skeletons to show they may have been victims of the government?
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There are other threads to the story. The archaeologist takes Anil to an isolated area to visit a world-famous epigraphist, a specialist in runes and other ancient markings. He has become a monkish hermit who lives among ancient ruins. We learn some about these ancient ruins – real places like Arankale and Ritigala. We learn a bit about the hard life of a former miner who specializes in painting eyes on Buddha statues. And we learn some about forensic analysis. (view spoiler)[ There may be a budding romance between Anil and the archaeologist’s younger brother, a doctor. (hide spoiler)]
I like Ondaatje’s writing and I have read other books of his: Running in the Family and The Cat's Table. Here are a few passages I liked from this book:
“This isn’t Brussels or America. Only the weapons in this country are state-of-the-art.”
“…small talk plunged to its death around him.”
“What are the missing organs in men that made them stroll through life as courteously unfaithful, nonverbal creatures?”
“The boundary between sleep and waking was a cotton thread so faintly colored he often crossed it unawares.”
“He recalled his parents gentle with each other. They were always conversing, sharing everything, and in bed he could hear the continuing hum of it like wool between the house and the world.”
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Ondaatje (b. 1943), best known for his novel, The English Patient (made into a movie), was born in Ceylon, the island off of southern India, now Sri Lanka. His ancestry was a mix of native Sinhalese and Dutch, but the European part predominated since his family was a member of the small minority of upper-class Christians on the island. He now lives in Canada.
[Edited for typos 10/31/2021; spoilers hidden 2/18/24]
Top photo of the Arankale Forest Monastery from lanka-excursions-holidays.com Victims of the Civil War from nytimes.com The author from theguardian.com...more
One of four books in the author’s Lieutenant Boruvka series. The story is set in Prague around the tiThe End of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skvorecky
One of four books in the author’s Lieutenant Boruvka series. The story is set in Prague around the time of the uprising and Soviet invasion, so say late 1960’s.
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The Lieutenant (police detective) has his quirks. There’s humor in the fact that he is quite overweight but used to be a physical ed instructor. He plays the saxophone. He’ll decline your offer of a cigarette but pull out a cigar. He has a good relationship with his daughter but we wonder about his wife – for example, when his daughter becomes pregnant she tells him who the father is, but her mother doesn’t know.
He doesn’t feel he’s a good cop. He has had to back off cases because of involvement from Communist party officials. On another case years ago, a young woman missing, he learns when her body turns up that he closed it too early. When a young woman was missing it was so easy to write ‘case closed’ meaning she probably illegally fled the country.
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His latest case involves another young woman. It could be murder or suicide or maybe just an accident. There are indications of leaking gas and drugs. He reads her cache of love letters looking for clues.
The byzantine bureaucratic rules and politics constantly interfere in his investigations. He sees that maze personally as his daughter wants to marry an American man and leave the country. So much complexity in that request!
I give the author credit for a fairly original plot. He shows us how an archaeological dig that unearthed a skull from the Middle Ages leads to a clue that solves his present case.
A pretty good read. I’ve read one other book by this author, not part of the Boruvka series, Two Murders in My Double Life.
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Wikipedia tells us that the author (1924-2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher. He spent half of his life in Canada, publishing and supporting banned Czech literature during the communist era. Škvorecký and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. He published about a dozen novels, half translated into English (he wrote in Czech), and is probably best-know for The Cowards.
Top photo of Prague from fineartamerica.com 1968 Soviet invasion from theatlantic.com Statue of the author in the Czech town of Nachod from Wikipedia.commons
Fourteen short stories that are a mix of realism and fantasy set in rural Portugal. The writing is good and although the author, an editor and a transFourteen short stories that are a mix of realism and fantasy set in rural Portugal. The writing is good and although the author, an editor and a translator in Canada, has not written a lot, just about everything he has written - collections of short stories, a novel and some poetry - has won awards, including this collection. (And this book is highly rated on GR - 4.4.)
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In Roses for the Dead, the cruel, rich local landowner dies. At his funeral the priest says all the right things and then…
In Garden of Dreams, a mother and her little girl arrive at an isolated cottage to try to convert an old lady to their religion. But the old lady makes her own miracles.
In the title story, a young girl has an uncanny ability to detect when someone is lying and she’s not shy about confronting everyone about their lies. How will the village deal with her?
A young man has a dilemma in Forever Promises: should he marry the girl he loves or the one his dictatorial father insists he marry?
The Visible Horizon is a re-telling from the boy’s point of view of the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima. (Mary appeared to two girls and a boy.)
Several stories involve Portugal’s wars in Africa:
Chestnut Tree tells the story of a man returning after years of imprisonment in Africa. Everyone, including his wife and child, thought he was dead, so everything has changed.
In A Millstone, Always A Millstone a mother has seen so many boys go off and die in war that she hides the sex of her latest child and raises him as a girl.
In Sardines and Acorns a man is so lazy and considered so useless that everyone wants him to go off to war to bring some money in. “At least if you returned wounded we’d gain the respect of our neighbors. War injuries are an honorable reason to sit idle.”
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Some samples of the writing:
“Amelia had never sat in a classroom. Her sweat had begun watering the fields while her cloth doll, clinging to her waist, still longed to play.”
“Prudencio Casmurro was no ordinary man. He had buried his parents, seven wives and the last of his twenty-two children, and showed no readiness to depart the mortal world.”
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The author was born in Angola, raised in Portugal, and is now a Canadian citizen. Under the fascist dictator Salazar, Portugal drafted men to fight to hold its colonies against independence movements in Angola and Mozambique from 1971 to 1974. That undoubtedly explains why several of these stories are about Portuguese men going off to war.
Top photo, Piodao, central Portugal, from vortexmag.net Portuguese farmers from alamy.com The author from canadianwritersabroad.wordpress.com
As you might guess from the title, this is a story of a young boy discovering his homosexuality. The setting is Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) during theAs you might guess from the title, this is a story of a young boy discovering his homosexuality. The setting is Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) during the 1980s or so, so the second major theme is politics: the horrible violence between two ethnic groups: the Tamils and the Sinhalese.
The young boy’s family is Tamil and they are in the minority. We don’t get any real overview of the nation’s geography and history in the book (it’s semi-autobiographical fiction), but as a former geography professor I can’t resist giving a brief ‘in a nutshell’ overview at the end of this review for those who are interested.
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The semi-autobiographical story: on the weekends all the relatives gather at the grandparents' house where the young boy shuns (and is shunned by) the other boys playing cricket. He plays ‘bride-bride’ dress-up with his girl cousins. His favorite books are Nancy Drew and Little Women. Eventually his father sends him to a school that will ‘make a man of him.’ It’s an abusive place where the boys suffer punishments akin to torture. We watch the boy as he comes of age and has his first gay experiences.
The byzantine intricacies of being Tamil in a Sinhalese-dominated country are the backdrop to almost everything that happens in the story. The schools separate Tamils and Sinhalese students by class but exceptional students may be allowed into the other ethnic group’s classes. Potential violence and actual violence are always on the horizon. The next anti-Tamil pogrom may happen at any time. (view spoiler)[ And does happen to them; houses are burned and relatives killed, after which they start planning to emigrate ... (hide spoiler)]
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The boy’s family is well-off with cars and servants. His father is a banker who also owns a resort hotel with Sinhalese staff. As a Tamil, he can’t correct Sinhalese people, so he has to run the hotel through a Sinhalese manager. There is an extended sub-plot involving the boy’s mother and a male friend of hers who is a journalist writing stories that upset the government. (view spoiler)[ The journalist is killed and the young man and his mother begin an investigation, getting in over their heads. (hide spoiler)] There’s another extended subplot involving a Tamil aunt visiting from the US who starts to fall in love with a local Sinhalese man.
A good story that was a bit slow getting started. The bride-bride stuff and the visiting aunt’s doings at the beginning of the book seemed dragged out to me, but after that the book moved along well and kept my interest.
The author (b. 1965) has written four novels and many short stories. Funny Boy was made into a film in 2020. The author’s mother was Sinhalese and his father was Tamil. The family emigrated to Canada when the author was 19 years old.
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Here’s my nutshell description that is not given in the book: Sri Lanka, unfortunately, has the perfect conditions for ethnic violence: groups with different geographical distributions, different languages, different religions and skin tones. The population is about 22 million, so Sri Lanka has double the population of Ohio in an area half the size of Ohio.
The country has three major ethnic groups (often erroneously referred to as ‘races’). The Sinhalese group dominates with 75% of the people. Sinhalese and English are the two official languages. The Sinhalese are generally Buddhists. The Tamils, who speak Tamil, make up about 15% of the population and they are generally Hindus. Both groups think the other group is ‘darker skinned’ but the reality is that skin tones in both groups vary from light brown to dark brown and that varies for both groups by region of the country.
Both groups have lighter-skinned minorities called ‘burghers,’ who have some European ancestry, mostly Dutch, Portuguese or British. They tend to be Christian. (LOL a common name in this group includes apparent relatives of mine called ‘Fonseka.’) A third ethnic group, 9% or so, is Muslim, still commonly called ‘Moors,’ a name given to them by the Portuguese, even though they were unrelated to the Moors of the Iberian peninsula. They generally speak Tamil but still use Arabic for religious purposes. They predominate in some of the eastern coastal sections of the county.
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Although Tamils are a minority, in the northern third or so of the nation they are the majority of the population. Sri Lanka became independent from Britain in 1948. Anti-Tamil pogroms occurred in 1956, 1958, 1977 and 1981. Some were state-sponsored terrorism. (In the novel, these events mark the calendar: people say ‘right after the 1977 riots,’ etc.) Another pogrom in 1983 essentially started a civil war that raged until 2009. The Tamil Tigers fought to break their section of the country away from Sinhalese domination. As many as 100,000 people on both sides were killed. Many escaped the violence by emigrating to other countries, especially Canada and Australia. The author and his family fled to Canada, as did author Michael Ondaatje, and the folks in the novel Milltown, a great book by my GR friend and GR author Shane Joseph.
The capital and largest city, Colombo, is near the middle of the west coast of the nation. Its metropolitan area has more than 5 million people, about a quarter of the nation’s population. The ethnic mix in the capital is about one-third of each of the three major groups. History will tell us if that combination allows the city to show the rest of the nation “why can’t we all just get along?” or if it becomes a powder keg for future violence.
Top photo: a peaceful Sri Lanka landscape from vervemagazine.in A neighborhood burned in the violence from opiniojuris.org The author from theglobeandmail.com Map from mapsontheweb.com...more
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy from Colombo, Sri Lanka (Ceylon back then) boards a ship bound for EnglThe Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy from Colombo, Sri Lanka (Ceylon back then) boards a ship bound for England. He has been living with an aunt and uncle but is going to live with his mother who has been gone for four years. At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table" - as far from the Captain's Table as can be - with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys of his age. [I’m paraphrasing from some of the blurbs.]
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The boy is an only child. “When my parents abandoned their marriage, it was never really admitted, or explained, but it was also not hidden. If anything it was presented as a mis-step, not a car crash.”
As the ship makes its way on its 21-day journey across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another. But there are other diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world of literature. Another never speaks, but it turns out that’s a sham. The narrator's elusive, beautiful older cousin becomes his confidante.
Every night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, headed for trial in England, his crime and his fate a mystery that they uncover little by little. A botanist aboard takes them to his below-ships garden of rare plants. A musician instills a fascination of music in him. He gets conned into working with a ship-board thief.
Meanwhile the boys have the run of the ship, hiding out in the lifeboats, eating the supply of emergency chocolate, splashing guests with “cannonballs’ into the pool, eavesdropping on conversations, smuggling a dog aboard that they bought in a port. There’s a terrible storm.
Some of the themes include lifelong friendship, and on-and-off again friendship, and how chance childhood friendships can help shape your life. For example, he ends up marrying a sister of one of the boys. There’s the theme of how a dramatic early life event at that age, such as the sea voyage, can help shape you for life. For example, decades later the boy goes to an art exhibit by one of the other boys he traveled with and discovers all the paintings are scenes from the ports they went through at night – almost hallucinogenic in style.
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There are a lot of mysterious goings-on aboard ship. An elderly wealthy man on his way for medical treatment in England dies and the boys feel they had something to do with it. There’s a murder – was his cousin involved? There’s an attempted escape by the prisoner and people die – or did they?
Almost everyone is protecting someone else, the way his cousin protects him.
The sea story is interspersed with chapters about much later events in the young man’s life. Some of these mysteries are solved decades later by letters and by chance encounters.
I enjoyed the story – a bit implausible but that’s ok, it’s fiction.
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Ondaatje, best known for his novel, The English Patient, was born in Sri Lanka. His ancestry was a mix of native Sinhalese and Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese-Portuguese origin, but the European part predominated since they were a member of the small minority of Christians on the island and certainly upper class. He left the island in 1954, when he was eleven, to move to England with his mother. He went to college in Canada and became a Canadian citizen. He has written about a dozen other books which, beside The English Patient, include Warlight and Anil’s Ghost.
Top photo: an ocean liner lounge from the 1950's from insider.com Middle: Colombo in the 1950's from lankapura.com The author from lithub.com ...more
This book is hard to categorize as it is part family memoir, part travelogue and part autobiography. There’s even a section of poetry. Ondaatje, best This book is hard to categorize as it is part family memoir, part travelogue and part autobiography. There’s even a section of poetry. Ondaatje, best known for his novel, The English Patient, was born in Ceylon, the island off southern India, now Sri Lanka. His ancestry was a mix of native Sinhalese and Dutch, but the European part predominated since they were a member of the small minority of Christians on the island and certainly upper class.
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Sri Lanka is about the size of West Virginia, so his travels took him to every corner of the island. I appreciate the map included that showed most of the places mentioned in the story. We hear some about famous authors who lived there for a while such as D. H Lawrence and Pablo Neruda. And we get a bit about the country’s history such as the revolt of young people in 1971 when as many as 4,000 were killed.
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To show how upper crust the extended family was, they all had servants and nannies. They left Colombo seasonally in a caravan of cars to avoid the heat and go to the hill towns where they created a resort atmosphere, racing horses and swimming, playing golf, tennis and croquet. English and other Europeans were disliked as colonial masters unless they married locals in which case they were fully accepted into the local society.
In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to the island for several months to have his family meet his relatives and to catch up on his own family history. His mother had separated from his father when the author was as an infant. He left the island in 1954, when he was eleven, to move to England with his mother. So to some extent the author is writing about events he never really witnessed. And what a wild family it was.
Two people stand out for their crazy antics: his father and an aunt, a sister of his mother. Let’s just look at his father: a kind man that they loved, but he was at times a raging alcoholic. Technically he suffered from dipsomania, a condition where he could go for a few months without any alcohol but then go on a binge and drink multiple bottles of gin in a day for weeks at a time. He had been a director of tea plantation and later a major in the Ceylon army. In one of his bouts of blind alcoholism he took his army issue gun and commandeered a train, going about naked. His influential friends helped cover things up. Family memoir spills over into family legends, and some of his antics and those of an aunt seem a stretch to believe.
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Another major theme of the book, I’ll call homage to the tropics. Perhaps because the author was visiting his homeland from Canada, he is re-enamored of the heat, rain on metal roofs, bats and peacocks coming into houses, the riot of flowers and plant tendrils reaching into the windows. This lush tropical exoticism makes think of another book I reviewed, Tale of a Certain Orient by Milton Hatoum, set in Brazil.
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And there’s humor. “So how did your grandmother die?” “Natural causes.” “What?” “Floods.” “My father continued with his technique of trying to solve one problem by creating another.” “He was my father’s and Noel’s closest friend and the best man at several weddings he tried to spoil.”
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After England Ondaatje went to college in Canada and eventually became a Canadian citizen. He has written about a dozen other books which, beside The English Patient, include The Cat’s Table, Warlight and Anil’s Ghost.
Top photo: Sri Lanka landscape from ak8.picdn.net/shutterstock Pettah Market in Colombo from shutterstock Colombo skyline from cdn2./media/1075/colombo-sri-lanka Map of Sri Lanka from ezilon.com/maps The author from irishtimes.com...more
A Canadian historical novel, translated from the French, based on a real murder in Quebec in 1840.
We have a love triangle. A woman has several childreA Canadian historical novel, translated from the French, based on a real murder in Quebec in 1840.
We have a love triangle. A woman has several children by her physically and verbally abusive husband. He’s a heavy drinker and is constantly threatening to kill himself and his wife, saying things like “I’m making a noose for two.”
She falls in love with her American doctor and they decide the husband needs to go. Early on in the story we know the husband gets murdered so the mystery that keeps the story going is who did it and how? All through the book we get excerpts from her trial and what happened at the trial. At times is seems like the wife is the murderer. But maybe it was the doctor? Or her maid?
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Much of the story is told retrospectively, a long time afterward, and the woman has remarried a much older man who is dying from illness and old age. (view spoiler)[ He refuses to take even tea from his wife, relying on the maid so he won’t be poisoned. (hide spoiler)] She worries about the looming death of a second husband and the scrutiny it will bring to her.
And how’s this for advice coming from her mother-in-law: “My son is a good boy. But he will go off on his little flings once in a while…I’m not going to say you should try to get used to it…Simply ignore it. …Don’t forget that, and you’re sure to be happy. No matter how my son mistreats you.” Maybe she should do that quote in cross-stitch for her daughter-in-law and ask her to hang it in her kitchen.
The entire story is told in good, clear writing in very short sentences. An example:
“Yes, no doubt I am. That’s what it means to out of your mind. To let yourself be carried away by a dream. To give it room, let it grow wild and thick, until it overruns you. To invent a ghastly fear about some wagon wandering through the town. To imagine the driver ringing your doorbell in the middle of the night. To go on dreaming at the risk of life and limb, as if you were acting out your own death. Just to see if you can. Well, don’t delude yourself. Someday reality and its imagined double are going to be one and the same. No difference at all between them. Every premonition, true. Every alibi, gone flat. Every escape blocked off. Doom will lie clinging to my bones. They’ll find me guilty, guilty before the world.”
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The woman is the main character, so some of the story is told as her re-living testimony from the trial. Some of the story she dreams; some is present-day, and at times it is hard to know exactly what is what. But all in all a very good story that held my attention all the way through. All the sleigh rides will remind you of Dr. Zhivago!
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The author (1916-2000) won Canada’s top literary prize, the Governor General's Award, three times, twice for fiction and once for poetry.
Top photo, book cover art, Laurentian Homestead by French Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon (1881-1942) Leaving Church by Clarence Gagnon from RoyalCanvas.ca Canadian postage stamp honoring the author from postagestampguide.com
Wow there is a lot of action and intertwined lives going on in this fast-moving book by Shane Joseph.
The setting is a small town near Toronto where a Wow there is a lot of action and intertwined lives going on in this fast-moving book by Shane Joseph.
The setting is a small town near Toronto where a Sri Lankan immigrant family has left the ethnic violence of their homeland behind in Colombo, Sri Lanka and moved to Canada to start a restaurant. I like that the immigrant family is not portrayed as stereotypical hard-working in-love-with Canada types.
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Instead, the teenage daughter, unknown to her parents, is promiscuous – sneaking out for an hour on restaurant breaks. Eventually she becomes pregnant by a lower middle-class Canadian boy. What to do with the baby? “Why have you not progressed?” [She asks him.] “With all that this country has to offer, you should have been well-off by now—at least, that is what my father says.”
On the other hand, the teenage son, with his mother’s urging, is learning about his old culture and Buddhist religion, while his father wants him to study Canadian history.
The immigrant family gets the sharp stick from both ends: the Canadian real estate firm that holds the restaurant lease is trying to force the restaurant to move from a good location to a side street. Meanwhile thugs from his own homeland regularly appear wanting 10% of his take and threatening his family.
There is a greedy, evil type – a factory owner who exports to the USA a pesticide illegal for sale in Canada. It’s a tricky business requiring sleazy lawyers and accountants. Fortunately female ones can be found so the factory owner can bed them down as well.
Just how sleazy is this guy? He’s more or less responsible for his wife’s suicide, and his childhood neglect of his son is probably behind his son being in jail for murdering his girlfriend. The son escapes prison during a transfer. He kills four more people (count ‘em) and takes the pregnant Tamil woman and her boyfriend hostage.
Here’s a passage I picked out to illustrate the writing style:
“He was waiting for her past midnight when she hurried up the hill after her shift to his darkened house, which was illuminated only by a dim light in the living room, throwing his shadow picking at his guitar upon the drawn curtains. The dogs barked in the back yard somewhere as she pushed through the creaking, rusty gate.
The porch light went on, and he stood in the doorway, the black shirt further unbuttoned; the hair on his lower body was darker. He made no excuse to cover his semi nakedness but waved her in unselfconsciously.
She entered the musty house; books in piles lined the corridor leading into the living room. Faded blue curtains shrouded the windows and newspapers and magazines were strewn over the scratched hardwood floor. She moved a pile of papers and sat down on the worn leather sofa, its springs complaining under her.”
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Dirty politics and corporate sleaze abound. A good fast-paced read.
I thank the author, Shane Joseph, for sending me a copy of the book to review.
Top photo: Merrickville, Ontario from shawglobalnews.wordpress.com Bottom photo: Old Colombo, Sri Lanka, from tripsavvy.com...more
Good short stories on wide-ranging topics in varied settings that show a lot of imagination.
An old man and a young woman, both contemplating suicide Good short stories on wide-ranging topics in varied settings that show a lot of imagination.
An old man and a young woman, both contemplating suicide by train, meet at night on the railroad tracks.
Two old men reminisce in a nursing home and try to remember who each other is when they talk – one is a Jew tortured by the Nazis and the other is a former Nazi camp guard.
A dog tells one of the stories about a boy whose dad died and now lives with his troubled mom. The dog solves a crime and becomes judge, jury and executioner.
One story is a macabre dystopia in the Arab world. A ruler has too many daughters and not enough sons so he kills new daughters and the wives that bore them.
Beware of hooking up with people you meet in chat rooms. There are killers out there. What happens when a male killer meets up with a female killer? Is that a match made in heaven?
Also beware Caribbean resorts specializing in spouse swapping. That probably won’t end well either.
A 50-ish woman is on a mission (or maybe it’s her hobby) to take on young newly divorced guys, get them to quit drinking and teach them tantric sex.
One of the stories I liked best is about Caribbean immigrants in Toronto. The father is the hard worker; the son looks for the easy way out like robbery. The father comes around to the son’s way of thinking. As their lives end in ruin, the older man thinks of his granddaughter, now back in the islands: “A little girl was running free on that beach, free of preying parents, righteous Benedictines, desperate immigrants, bastard bosses, and unhappy rich people. It was a vision to sustain him through the days ahead.”
These are good stories but not pretty ones: the book is subtitled “Deep Moments, Shallow Lives,” and the blurbs tells us these stories are about “Greed, desire, ambition, loss, illness, death, and the driving quest to find purpose in a meaningless world…”
A James Mitchner-like romp that crosses generations and continents. There are two main characters and one ofThe Invention of the World by Jack Hodgins
A James Mitchner-like romp that crosses generations and continents. There are two main characters and one of them is dead when the book begins.
Maggie, the living main character, is a stereotypical strong, independent woman living on the fringe of modern civilization on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. This is lumber-jack timber country and the prototypical male here is Paul Bunyan. Maggie has married some of these guys and had kids by others. She’s on her own now living in an old historic house she bought that shelters a gang of social misfits, men and women, young and old. The house was the home and headquarters of a utopian-type settlement, the “Revelations Colony of Truth” built by a now-deceased leader Donal Kenealy.
Deceased Donal is our other main character. He was an evil religious huckster born in a forsaken dirt-poor Irish village. When young he had migrated to Canada to work. He went back to Ireland, stole money to pay for everyone’s passage and to buy land, and persuaded the whole village to follow him back to Canada. He killed his own mother when she objected to his scheme. He had learned some magic tricks as a kid so he fooled and semi-terrorized these uneducated starving peasants into following him back to the Canadian wilderness where he set himself up as a Jim Jones type leader.
Unlike a chronological Mitchner story, the modern and the historical are blended in chapters throughout the book, aided by reflections of the misfits, and articles and interviews of the original inhabitants collected by the town historian. Another misfit is the former wife of the religious leader who provides details like “right by that kitchen door is where he strangled the dog.” Another crazy character is Madmother Thomas who drives a backhoe around town and lives in it.
We are treated to occasional very good writing such as: “The long island which protected the harbor from the rougher movements of the strait looked like a floating tray of firs, a jagged-topped green platter that you wouldn’t be surprised to see glide closer, or warp and roll if something should disturb the water.”
The book is quite fascinating; a blend of history, humor, noir and magical realism. There’s a story-book romantic ending – a wedding with a Keystone cops finish that seems out of place with the rest of the novel. But it’s still a good read that kept my interest all the way through. ...more
When I first wrote this review I was amazed that I was only the second reader to review this work. (Now there are 8(Edited and pictures added 6/15/20)
When I first wrote this review I was amazed that I was only the second reader to review this work. (Now there are 8.)
This is a wonderful, powerful women’s story that deserves a wide readership. It’s a book about women and their personal and family issues: love, raising a family, births, deaths, abortion, adultery and affairs. Men, as the narrator tells us anyone can see from family photos, are largely absent. They are mentioned, especially in a chapter called “Rage” but the world of women largely revolves without them, not around them.
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The writing is at times intense, at times ironic, but always lively with many notable turns of phrase.
This is also a book about Portuguese culture, or transplanted Portuguese culture, and in that sense it is a kindred work to a growing body of truly excellent writing by Portuguese Americans and Portuguese Canadians (as is this author). Its personal intensity from a woman’s perspective reminds me of Saudade by Katherine Vaz; It’s homage to Portuguese ancestors reminds me of The Undiscovered Island by Darrell Kastin, and its matriarchic focus reminds me of Sue Fagalde Lick’s Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California.
The Portuguese flavor shows through directly in stories of the mythical Portuguese figures of Queens Isabella and Inez, and indirectly in many ways ranging from the irreligiosity of the women (Portugal has one of the lowest church-going rates in Europe) to wanting multi-colored lights on Christmas trees. (My non-Portuguese wife insists on monochrome too.)
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I thought it was a good read but I note that it has a fairly low rating on GR (3.1) but only 45 ratings.
A store in Toronto's Little Portugal from flickr.com The author from besthomesto.com ...more
For years I noticed this book on display, particularly its cartoonish paperback cover. Was it a children'[Revised, pictures and shelves added 2/28/23]
For years I noticed this book on display, particularly its cartoonish paperback cover. Was it a children's book? This Pi stuff -- was it something about math? (Was it plagiarized? See story at end.)
It's a castaway story and like all castaway and shipwreck stories it's about human endurance, indomitable spirit and man vs. nature. The things that distinguish this story from Robinson Crusoe or Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away, is that the main character (Pi, short for Piscine) is trapped in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
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Pi is Indian and he's multi-religious - a true believer in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. He comes from a family of zookeepers who were transporting their animals by freighter. This is how he wound up with a tiger in his lifeboat.
It's an inspiring book, but drags in spots -- more than 200 days at sea is a lot of fish and storm stories. I kept waiting for the multi-religious theme to play a real role in the story but it did so only peripherally, so the plot seems a bit disconnected from that theme.
In the end, we are offered two stories: one of murder and cannibalism and one of a journey in the lifeboat with animals. A key line comes at the end of the book as a throwaway: 'Which story do you prefer? So it is with God.' It's a decent read and an interesting plot but as I revise this review, with hindsight, I'm downgrading my rating from 4 to 3.
Life of Pi won the 2002 Booker prize and was a huge seller worldwide – 12 million copies and 1.5 million ratings on GR. But here’s a story I came across when I reviewed another book, The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes, by Brazilian Jewish author Moacyr Scliar. Here’s the (paraphrased) story from the NY Times obituary for Scliar in 2011 and from Wikipedia:
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Scliar wrote a novel, Max and the Cats, about a Jewish youth who flees Nazi Germany on a ship carrying wild animals to a Brazilian zoo. After a shipwreck the boy ends up sharing a lifeboat with a jaguar. The book achieved fame twice over. Critically praised on its publication in 1981, it touched off a literary storm in 2002 when the Canadian writer Yann Martel (b. 1963) won the Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi, about an Indian youth trapped on a boat with a tiger. Mr. Martel’s admission that he borrowed the idea led to an impassioned debate among writers and critics on the nature of literary invention and the ownership of words and images. Martel admitted he got the idea by reading a review of Scliar’s book but said he never read the book itself. “In a certain way I feel flattered that another writer considered my idea to be so good, but on the other hand, he used that idea without consulting me or even informing me,” Mr. Scliar told The NY Times. “An idea is intellectual property.”
Top image is a still from the movie on npr.org The author from theguardian.co.uk ...more
This is a low-key academic murder mystery featuring an older Canadian college English professor. I say “low-key” bRevised and pictures added 5/21/2020
This is a low-key academic murder mystery featuring an older Canadian college English professor. I say “low-key” because the professor never really sets out to solve the murder of a colleague’s husband; he simply happens to notice conflicting stories told by the characters. There are no trench coats with pistols in the pocket. It helps that he has quite an ear for hallway and academic party gossip. And it happens that the detective investigating the case is in his class, writing about the crime for one of her course papers.
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A second plot going on is that the professor and his wife immigrated to Canada from Czechoslovakia. She has been erroneously slandered as an informer on her former colleagues during their previous life under Communism. The immigrant Czechoslovakian press in Canada has picked up on this story from the presses back in the homeland.
The book is also about academic life in general. We learn that our main character is, let’s face it, a crotchety old man who enjoys calling the young women “girls” when the political correctness police let their guard down. He also times the lengths of visits of female students to offices of his male colleagues. It’s an interesting read but not a dynamic thriller.
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Wikipedia tells us that the author (1924-2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher. He spent half of his life in Canada, publishing and supporting banned Czech literature during the communist era. Škvorecký was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1980. He and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz. He published about a dozen novels, half translated into English, and is probably best-know for The Cowards.
Photo of Prague uprising against communism in 1989 from theculturetrip.org The author from theparisreview.org
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