We’re in an eastbound train running across Siberia. The cars are mostly filled with a couple of hundred Russian army conscripts headed for a training We’re in an eastbound train running across Siberia. The cars are mostly filled with a couple of hundred Russian army conscripts headed for a training camp at the end of the line near Vladivostok. We are told that some young Russian men have gotten out of duty by faking medical problems, bribery, or by being married to a woman who is at least six months pregnant.
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We mainly follow Aliocha, one young man who was desperate to get out of the service. He's shy, still a virgin, and has had no luck with women. He can also be violent. He wants to desert and starts planning to get off at one of the stations along the way. At stops, the recruits, although guarded, get to walk around the station and buy snacks and beer.
The author has a good eye for the geography of the steppe, taiga and tundra, which can get pretty boring when watched day after day through a train window. Here’s a sample of the writing:
“Outside, it's still the same chrome-plated night and the train that rolls unerringly, crossing time zones one by one, breaking up time as it changes charges through space; the train that compacts or dilates the hours, concretes the minutes, stretches out the seconds, continues on pegged to the earth and yet out of sync with the earth's clocks: the train like a spaceship.”
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The other main character is Helene, a young French woman who has just left her Russian paramour. He's a big-deal bureaucrat who runs a dam and a power plant on Lake Baikal. He and she communicate in French because she hardly speaks any Russian – they met when he was in Paris.
Helene and Aliocha meet on the outdoor platform between trains where they smoke. They communicate largely by sign language. She figures out what he is trying to do and signals that she will help him.
Now we have a tension-filled atmosphere as the young man draws attention to himself as he initially tries but fails to flee at one of the rail stops. He ends up hiding in the young woman's sleeper compartment. The commander responsible for the recruits orders a train search to find him.
We also learn about the provodnitsas, the women train attendants who live aboard the train and apparently have a mystical standing in Russian culture dating back to communist days when freedoms were limited. Imagine being a woman and having a life where you were in constant travel for thousands of miles when other folks seldom left their village. The provodnitsas know all and see all, so whose side will they be on as Aliocha attempts his escape?
Pretty good writing and a decent story although it didn’t really grab me. I guess a 3.5 rounded up.
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The French author (b. 1967) received a lot of publicity and several awards for her book Birth of a Bridge. But her most popular book on GR is The Heart, a story about a heart transplant. She has written a half-dozen other novels.
Top photo: provodnitsas from wikivoyage.org Trans-Siberian train from rbth.com The author from frenchculture.org...more
Our main character is a young Brazilian man, a doctor with a wife and kid. He is haunted by an incident of cowardice from his youth that resulted in aOur main character is a young Brazilian man, a doctor with a wife and kid. He is haunted by an incident of cowardice from his youth that resulted in a tragedy.
Apparently, to make up for that cowardice, he has become a daredevil. The opening story in the book is about his upcoming attempt to climb an un-climbed face of a mountain in Brazil. He’s still basically an amateur mountain climber but a good friend, an expert climber, has talked him into it.
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There’s a lot of violence in this book. Boys get jumped by bullies and beaten up so badly they are hospitalized. Fights break out among the teen-aged boys at a girl’s birthday party. Hospitals again.
As a kid, he was a daredevil bicyclist. A bunch of guys are out on their bikes on the weekend showing off to the girls their skills at going down a steep hillside and crashing. Our guy is going to go down the steep cement stairs at top speed. Flashing red light again. It’s like he wants to punish himself by getting hurt.
Of all the books I’ve read, this one gives the most detail about the experience of physical exertion upon a body and the intense mental exertion that accompanies that effort. I don’t know how it compares to other books of that genre (if it is a genre) because I don’t read those.
We learn a bit about the life of boys growing up in suburban Brazil at that time. (The book was published in Portuguese in 2006.) There are a lot of references to American movies. The boys spend a lot of time on computer games and use those as a way to interact with each other without talking about anything significant. There’s a lot of local color of suburban Porto Alegre, one of the southernmost big cities in Brazil.
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The author (b. 1979) has written six novels, all translated into English. Not all these translations show on Goodreads. From GR ratings, it looks like Twenty After Midnight is his best-known book to English readers.
Top photo of Pico 31 de Marco in Brazil, about 10,000 feet, on the border with Venezuela. Photo from traveltriangle.com Photo of the author from kirkusreviews.com ...more
When I picked up this book at a library discard sale, I thought I had discovered a French author new to me. After I started writing the review I realiWhen I picked up this book at a library discard sale, I thought I had discovered a French author new to me. After I started writing the review I realized that I had read two other books by him, The Mad and the Bad and Fatale. All three are alike in their action-adventure-crime theme. They are real shoot-em-ups with fights and explosions and car crashes.
About a third of the way through this book it occurred to me that this had been written to be made into a movie. Indeed it has been made into a movie called The Gunman (2015 – starring Sean Penn). Another book has been published with that title based on the film script.
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If you don't mind violence and a bit of gore this book may be for you. We follow a hired killer who grew up in a small French village and did a stint of killing in his French army service in North Africa. He seems to have his act together because he promises his true love back home that he will return in 10 years. Sure enough, in 10 years he quits the hired killer business and returns home expecting his love to be waiting for him. Big surprises are in store for him.
He reluctantly returns to the hired killer business. Should we say ‘he came out of retirement?’ The plot is full of double crossings, not knowing who you can trust, hired killers tracking down other hired killers. He is unfaithful to his women and, no surprise, they are equally unfaithful to him. I was surprised at the very deflated ending to the story. It's as if an exciting action-packed road adventure ended with a flat tire.
The writing style suits the topic – short sentences, almost a staccato pace to the writing. There are almost no literary flourishes and no character development. I gave it a ‘3.’
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The French author (1942–1995 - lung cancer) wrote short stories and ten-or-so novella-length crime novels like this one. About half appear to have been translated into English. With hindsight, I much prefer his book Fatale. That’s also his best-known work. I gave all three of his books I read a ‘3’ for the same reasons.
Top photo: a still of Sean Penn from the movie The Gunman from tampabay.com The author from the parisreview.org ...more
A Dan Brown-type thriller. The plot presumes that Pope John Paul I, who served for only 33 days before his death in 1978, was killed because he was goA Dan Brown-type thriller. The plot presumes that Pope John Paul I, who served for only 33 days before his death in 1978, was killed because he was going to clean up vast graft and corruption in the financial arm of the Vatican.
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A Vatican scholar finds incriminating documents in the Library and sends copies to a Portuguese female new reporter. (The book is translated from Portuguese.) She and a smooth, Vatican “CIA-type” operative are now on the run from the bad guys who want the documents.
The plot become a Tom Hanks-type international thriller as they are chased from Lisbon to London to New York. The plot is a bit of a stretch, the characters are stereotypical, and it gets repetitive at times, but it’s a quick read. (Note that there are several books with “Last Pope” in the title.)
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The Portuguese author wrote five books in his Vatican series - this was the first – and three other novels. It appears from GR that three of the Vatican series are the only ones translated into English. The author died from illness at age 39 (1976-2015).
Photo of the Vatican library from visitvatican.info The author from binghamton.eu...more
A re-read for me from many years ago. We all know the basic story. A small river steamship captain, Charles Marlow, commands a ferryboat up the Congo A re-read for me from many years ago. We all know the basic story. A small river steamship captain, Charles Marlow, commands a ferryboat up the Congo River (as did the author). Marlow, like many others in the story, has become fascinated with a guy named Kurtz, a mythologized, legendary trader of ivory who lives in the interior and has ‘gone native,’ as the expression goes.
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There are thousands of reviews out there, so I will just add my two cents to the debate about the meaning and value of the book.
We see the miserable conditions the native peoples live in – they are essentially enslaved - and we read passages that are racist. A well-known critic of the book is the famous Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, author of many books set in Africa, most notably, Things Fall Apart. Achebe basically said the book is a typical work of 19th-century racist colonialism and we should stop considering it a classic and stop assigning it in college courses.
And yet the book is also fundamentally a critique of the colonial system, highlighting the brutality, materialism, greed and inhumanity of the Europeans. In a way, it’s about man’s inhumanity to man and the common flaws of humanity that we all share in. So in that sense, Conrad was relatively ‘woke’ for his time (published in 1899) and the book helped push the needle forward on the scale of enlightenment.
I personally believe that regardless of how ‘woke’ we think we are, we all engage in things, hold beliefs, say and write things that will shock our grandchildren. “How could he think that???”
I’ll let Harold Bloom have the last word. He wrote that Heart of Darkness had been analyzed more than any other work of literature that is studied in universities and colleges, and he attributed this to Conrad's "unique propensity for ambiguity." Learning about ambiguity is a good thing.
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Top photo from warontherocks.com Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) from litariness.org
Have you ever heard the name Hiroo Onoda? This is a fictionalized story based on Onoda’s 29 years of hiding in the mountainous jungle on Lubang IslandHave you ever heard the name Hiroo Onoda? This is a fictionalized story based on Onoda’s 29 years of hiding in the mountainous jungle on Lubang Island in the Philippines, thinking that Japan was still fighting WW II. Onoda and five men were left behind by retreating Japanese forces in 1944.
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Spoilers follow:
Of the five men under Onoda’s command some shortly fled but two remained with him. One surrendered after five years but the second was his comrade for many years until shot in an ambush by Filipino soldiers.
So this short book is really an action-adventure story of how these men, and eventually, Onoda by himself, survived in the jungle for 29 years. It's an amazing feat given that this is a small island (smaller than either Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket). Settlements surround the edge of the island and Filipino soldiers knew they were out there. Many times the Filipino soldiers dropped leaflets or flew over the jungle with loudspeakers announcing an amnesty for the Japanese men. But not only did Onoda refuse to believe that Japan had lost, he also knew that since he and his men had killed villagers over the years during their raids for food, he was skeptical about accepting these offers that ‘all was forgiven.’
Their belief that the war was still on is confirmed by flights of American airplanes for long periods of times over various years – the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
They survived on stolen food from outlying villagers. Often they would fire shots to scare everyone away, and they would go in and steal rice and other staples. They also killed farm animals and smoked the meat to preserve it, but they could only have fires during the rainy season or in dense fog because otherwise the smoke would give away their location.
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The men were constantly on the move, building and abandoning crude huts. Every sign of civilization that blew in - a newspaper, a pornographic magazine, a piece of chocolate bar – was assumed to be a trap. Sometimes they were right, because the last man, his last comrade, was shot in an ambush by Filipino soldiers.
Eventually in 1974 a Japanese student camped out in woods on the island until he lured Onoda out and earned his confidence. The student returned with Onoda’s former commanding officer -now an ancient man - who ordered him to surrender.
This amnesty was granted by the Philippine dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, largely because there was good publicity in it. Many pictures were taken and the surrender of Onoda’s sword was re-enacted with Marcos for the benefit of TV cameras. Marcos said that Onoda should be judged by standards of actions during wartime, so I guess everything he and his men did was okay, even though they at times shot and killed innocent villagers.
So all was forgiven and Onoda became a Japanese celebrity, eventually marrying and moving to Brazil where his brother owned a farm. Onoda, 22 years old when he began his jungle sojourn, was 51 when he surrendered. He was 92 when he died in 2014.
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As an action-adventure story I would give this book a ‘4.’ It’s a survivalist story with all the fascination of Robinson Crusoe. However the beginning and ending of the book seemed hastily thrown together and the story never really touches on Onoda's feelings about all this in any depth.
The strongest impression that comes across is the sense of a time warp – what is past, present or future in 29 years in the jungle constantly on the alert and hiding out? Just one example of how these feelings are lacking is shown in a single sentence related to the villagers that were killed. All that Herzog has to say about that is: “But the matter of those he had killed among the population never quite went away.” We learn nothing about what the real or even the fictional Onoda thinks of the matter. So, I rounded my rating down to a ‘3.’
The author of this book, Werner Herzog (b. 1942), is a German film maker. This may be his first novel. All his other books seem to be autobiographical stories related to his filmmaking. The author befriended Onoda on a trip to Japan and interviewed him about his time in the jungle, although again, he states that this book is a fictionalized story based in reality.
Top photo of Onoda from historydaily.org Map of Lubang Island from moken.ca Onoda in his later years from miro.medium.com ...more
Iris Murdoch is one of my favorite authors. This is the 6th book of hers that I have read and I never thought I would rate one of them a ‘3’ but here Iris Murdoch is one of my favorite authors. This is the 6th book of hers that I have read and I never thought I would rate one of them a ‘3’ but here it is. I'll explain below. It's still a good story.
We have a hapless antihero, Jake, probably 30ish, bumming around London. He considers himself an intellectual but also recognizes that he’s basically a ‘literary hack.’ He gets some money by translating crappy books from French. But Jake is a guy who has never held down a full-time job. (view spoiler)[ Eventually he gets a job as a hospital orderly and enjoys it, but of course, loses it. (hide spoiler)]
Jake survives by house-sitting and crashing in friends’ houses and attics of old girlfriends. He's a good guy and women generally like him. He has a sidekick named Finn, a Sancho Panza who is the stereotypical hard-drinking Irishman. Finn provides the muscle and gopher work for Jake’s various adventures.
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Jake always makes the wrong decision. It must be a genetic thing with him. Even when he works through all the pros and cons in his mind, and the cons vastly outweigh the pros, he ends up talking himself into doing the wrong thing. “If one has good reasons for an action one should not be deterred from doing it because one may also have bad reasons.” That's a good part his escapades that make up most of the story -- that and a complicated love triangle – a love rectangle actually. I will make up names so I don't give anything away. Bob loves Lois who loves Tony who loves Diane who loves Bob. So the plot thickens.
Jake interacts with some wealthy people. There are two sisters, one a famous actress, and three wealthy men who are entrepreneurs. (view spoiler)[ One is a bookie and one is in filmmaking. Despite going through life with hardly a pound in his pocket, Jake has a knack for turning down money and ends up relying on hot tips on horses from the bookie for much of his money. (hide spoiler)]
Jake thinks a valuable manuscript he wrote has been stolen from him and he gets Finn to help him kidnap a valuable show dog as ransom to get the manuscript back. (view spoiler)[ True to his hapless lifestyle, the manuscript was not stolen - he could have simply asked for it back. The dog turns out to have been put out to pasture. No one wants him and he has no financial value. (hide spoiler)]
The author’s day job was as a professor at Oxford so all her novels have concepts from philosophy or philosophy of life themes worked into them. Two are evident in this story. One is political, based around a socialist political activist appropriately named ‘Lefty.’ He corners Jake in a bar. They are both socialists but Jake doesn’t give a rap about politics, so Lefty engages him in a Socratic dialog to run him through the paces: Is it that you don’t care or is it that you feel it’s hopeless to try to do anything? Well, Jake tells him, it’s a bit of both and they’re interconnected aren’t they?
A second, bigger theme, developed in several discussions with another character, is ‘do you need a general theory or philosophy of life to get by?’ Or can you be a pragmatist and make your decisions by the seat of your pants. Obviously Jake has opted for the latter, and we even get to read excerpts from a book Jake is writing about all this.
And one more bit of heavy-duty philosophy. Remember the love rectangle? “Some situations can’t be unraveled.” lol
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Some examples of the humor that I liked:
“I have often asked Finn why he shakes his head when he has a hangover, and he tells me that it's to make the spots move away from in front of his eyes.”
“He [Finn] loves trouble, his own or other people’s without discrimination…”
“After all, she had no father, and I felt in loco parentis. It was about the only locus I had left.”
“I needed to think, and I can never think in a taxi for looking at the cash meter.”
“He was dressed in tweeds and had the look of an outdoor man who had lived too much by electric light.”
“By now I had enough alcohol inside me to feel despair at the prospect of having to stop drinking.”
Are there is other good writing:
“Arriving in Paris always causes me pain, even when I have been away for only a short while. It is a city which I never fail to approach with expectation and leave with disappointment. There is a question which only I can ask and which only Paris can answer; but this question is something which I have never yet been able to formulate. Certain things indeed I have learnt here: for instance, that my happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away.”
“What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all of the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air? We both felt its presence.”
Still it's a good story and I enjoyed the humor in the writing. So why rate it a ‘3’? It turns out, and I did not know this while I was reading the book, that this was the first novel that Murdoch published, 1954. Obviously her skills improved over time.
I didn't enjoy the slapstick Three Stooges, overly-long escapade about kidnapping the dog and escaping with it through London. I also thought there were several other overly-long passages of 5 or more pages that didn't go anywhere. For example, Jake wandering through Paris in pursuit of a woman through streets and parks, or another slapstick episode where a movie stage set of Rome collapses, and a breaking and entering scene to get to see someone in a hospital.
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But I’ll back-pedal a bit more. I note that Under the Net has a similar overall ranking on GR as her other novels. Of all her novels, Under the Net was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. (I think it should have been her Booker prize winner, The Sea, the Sea.)
Top photo, London in the 1950s from alamy.com London from gettyimages.com The author from irismurdochsociety.org.uk
[Edited for typos, pictures added 1/26/22, edited for spoilers 9/19/23/] ...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
Breath is the story of two barely teenaged Australian boys over a couple of years, so we follow them from about age 14 to 16. They are daredevils and Breath is the story of two barely teenaged Australian boys over a couple of years, so we follow them from about age 14 to 16. They are daredevils and they challenge each other to dangerous escapades. One boy, the companion of our narrator, is crazy fearless and it’s amazing he has lived to be even as old as he is.
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They live by the beach in a small town in western Australia. One of their favorite stunts is to hold their breath underwater for amazing lengths of time and they scare tourists by diving, holding on to branches underwater, and waiting for the tourists to go into a panic when they believe the boys must have drowned.
This is Big Wave country, so they get into surfing. Their daredevil stunts attract the attention of a world-famous local surfer, a 36-year-old odd duck. They idolize him and he takes them under his wing. This man is married but he shuns the company of other surfers and that feeling is mutual. Now we may ask why a 36-year-old man hangs out only with young boys, but the story doesn’t go in that direction. (view spoiler)[ Instead, we should have asked what his 25-year-old wife sees in them. (hide spoiler)]
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The two boys get into rivalry for his attention, which endangers their friendship. Three’s a crowd. This world-class surfer takes these novices out to surf in areas that he has never attempted and that the other surfers won’t attempt. He literally endangers their lives as they risk drowning and being smashed against rocks. And, indeed they do almost drown and get torn up by the rocks several times.
There are many other things going on in the book, of course. It’s infrequently mentioned, so it’s easy to lose track of the book's structure, but the story is told retrospectively by a psychologically damaged older man, a divorced EMT, who was the less-daring boy. At the end of the book he tells us he is ashamed of his actions during these years but it’s interesting to ask: Why? He was just a kid.
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We also learn of the boys’ puppy loves and their lives with their parents. The fearless boy has no mother and an abusive father. The narrator has very old parents; not only clueless, but they just don’t want to admit or deal with what he is up to when he ‘goes to the beach.’ He says of his relationship with his mother later in life: “I tried to show I loved her but our relationship was a polite, undeclared failure - there was tenderness but no intimacy – and in this regard it could have been a rehearsal for marriage.” We also get a glimpse into the dysfunctional marriage of the surfer guy.
Back to the book’s title: Breath. To be honest, the theme becomes a bit overdone. We see the holding of breath underwater, the almost-drowning while surfing; one of the boy’s fathers has some kind of sleep apnea where he stops breathing during the night, and we get into some kinky sex with semi-suffocation.
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A lot of this book is literally about the adventure of surfing. It occurs to me while reading it that surfing as a sport is a bit like fishing. “There were several major swells that year…but we spent more time waiting for them, discussing them, imagining them, than riding them.” LOL
I selected this book to read because I enjoyed the author’s novel The Shepherd’s Hut. Had I known it contained so much about surfing I probably wouldn’t have picked it. But I think it says something about the strength of the author’s writing that I stuck with it and I was glad I did.
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The author (b. 1960) has been twice short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His best-known book is Cloudstreet. That book, The Shepherd’s Hut, and The Turning are his highest rated books on GR, all around 4.0.
Edited for typos 12/17/21
Top photo: surfing in western Australia from nextmedia.com.au Road map of Western Australia from wikipedia Perth from Wikipedia.com Castle Bay, Dunsborough from travelmag.com The author from penguin.com.au...more
Mountain bandits! A love story! Poverty and despair in the lives of the inhabitants of an impoverished mountain village kept in virtual slavery by theMountain bandits! A love story! Poverty and despair in the lives of the inhabitants of an impoverished mountain village kept in virtual slavery by the local landlord. This book has an amazingly high rating on GR of almost 4.5 – that’s up there with the Harry Potters.
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Memed, a kindhearted boy, tries to flee but is caught, beaten and almost killed. Like many others around him, he eventually takes to the mountains as a brigand. He is different from the others though; he’s a bit like a Robin Hood, only robbing rich people. He becomes the nemesis of the landlord who sets the police and the army out after him. Meanwhile his love waits for him in prison – falsely accused of crimes by the landlord. Can Memed retain his good qualities or will he turn into a killer like so many other bandits?
The setting is the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey, close to the Mediterranean, but these folks have never traveled to the sea. It’s around the 1920’s. There is good writing with vivid geographical descriptions of the terrain and the vegetation. We get some history of the gradual take-over of other tribes in the area by the Ottoman Turks.
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I liked the occasional idioms: On gossip: “The mouth of the people is not like a purse that you can draw tight.” And “What he has done has been like putting a watermelon rind in the mind of a donkey.”
A good story and a worthwhile read.
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The author (1923-2015) was a Kurd who grew up picking cotton in a poor village in Turkey. His was the only Kurdish family in town. His writings and his advocacy for Kurdish rights got him in trouble with the government. He was convicted but the sentence was suspended. This was the first of four books the author wrote in the Memed series.
To photo of the Taurus Mountains from earthmagazine.org Turkish peasants in the 1920's from shopify.com The author from oggito.com ...more
Three novellas of adventure by a Colombian author (1923 – 2013) who fled the dictatorship in his home country and lived most of his life in Mexico CitThree novellas of adventure by a Colombian author (1923 – 2013) who fled the dictatorship in his home country and lived most of his life in Mexico City. He wrote many works, but his Maqroll series consists of seven novellas that are combined in different ways in various editions. The edition I am reviewing has three novellas. They are action/adventure stories with good writing and a strong literary flair.
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The main character is Maqroll the Gaviero. As far as I can figure out, Gaviero means something like a sailor on a sailing ship but in context, more like “wingman.” Wikipedia I think gives a good opening summary so the next paragraph is copied from that source:
Mutis' works are most widely read in Latin America and Europe. Mutis is not well known in the anglophone world, probably because he is not easy to categorize. His literary work is not part of what is commonly understood in the American academy as "Latin American Literature". Maqroll, his most well-known character, is of indeterminate origin, nationality, age and physiognomy. He is not evidently from Latin America and does not represent anything particularly Latin American in character. Maqroll is a solitary traveler who brings a stranger's detachment to his encounters and his lovers; he searches for meaning in a time of violence and inhumanity.
In the novella Snow of the Admiral, Maqroll is making a 3-month long trip up an imaginary Amazon River tributary to supervise a sawmill operation. He knows nothing about his destination or about sawmills, but that’s what Maqroll spends his whole life doing. (view spoiler)[ When he reaches his destination after all that time, what he finds is so forlorn and unexpected that he stays one day, turns around and goes back downriver. (hide spoiler)]
As he does in all the novellas, in the three-month journey he thinks back on previous escapes, nick-of-time escapes, lost loves, brushes with the law and with death. We hear about his escapes running a mine, fencing stolen art, etc.
He visits a prostitute. When he leaves he notices a picture of his father on her wall. He asks, in effect, “Is that your best customer?” She replies, “No that’s my father.” Nobody has adventures like Maqroll!
Maqroll has incurable wanderlust. For relaxation he reads books about Medieval times and lives of the saints, as if his soul belonged to that era. But, of course, he’s irreligious and a fatalist.
In “Ilona Comes With the Rain” (which was made into a Spanish movie in 1996), he’s been cast up in Panama City. He get so drunk every night that he ends up in the morning with a woman in his bed he has no recollection of – until he catches on that they were let in by the hotel clerk so they can charge him money for imaginary services.
He’s found an old flame and perhaps they have a short time of true love. But they are stranded there with no money. Ilona comes up with a money-making scheme to run a brothel featuring women attired as airline stewardesses. It’s a big success but like almost everything else Maqroll gets involved in, ends in tragedy. One of the prostitutes is pursued by ghosts.
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Un Bel Morir, I think, is the last of the seven novellas. Maqroll is getting old and has lost his energy. In a small, unnamed Latin American country. he has been hired to haul loads of engineering equipment by mule train up a mountain. But he has been duped. The crates really contain arms and explosives for a revolutionary group, so of course he’s ends up in big trouble with the law.
We also get extra treats with his recounting of his bizarre dreams. In one, he is having sex with a woman in her a hospital bed when the curtains are suddenly flung open by a group of altar boys and a priest who are there to administer last rites to him.
Some passages that illustrate good writing:
“A Coleman lamp burns at night, and a parade of large insects smash into it, their colors and shapes so varied I occasionally have the impression that the order of their appearance has been arranged for some mysterious educational purpose.”
He goes to places where things are “Just what you’ve seen, no more, no less. Intelligence is blunted here and time is confused, laws are forgotten, joy is unknown, and sadness has no place.”
A blind woman says: “It’s not so bad being blind, you know. I don’t believe there’s all that much to see. What do you think?”
“You’re immortal, Gaviero. It doesn’t matter that you’ll die one day like the rest of us. That doesn’t change anything. You’re immortal for as long as you live. I think I’ve been dead a long time.”
“To learn, above all, to distrust memory. What we believe we remember is completely alien to, completely different from what really happened. So many moments of irritating, wearisome disgust are returned to us years later as splendidly happy episodes. Nostalgia is the lie that speeds our approach to death. To live without remembering may be the secret of the gods.”
“She looked into her interlocutor’s eyes but not at the person. I mean that more than merely looking, she seemed to be searching, with secret, patient astuteness, for the other being that is always with us and comes to the surface only when we are alone, to deliver certain messages, dissolve certain fragile truths, abandon us to unspeakable perplexity.”
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Good literary writing wrapped in intriguing adventure stories, served up with philosophical nuggets, so I gave it a 5.
Top photo, a clip from the movie "Ilona llega con la illuvia" from cinelatinoamericano.org Photo of a ship going up the Amazon from .gonomad.com The author from Wikipedia
There is much good descriptive writing and use of metaphor in in Lars’ latest book: I’ll start with some examples:
“The freezing wind tempestuously torThere is much good descriptive writing and use of metaphor in in Lars’ latest book: I’ll start with some examples:
“The freezing wind tempestuously tore into the room searching for a place to warm itself….”
“The whale broke his reverie like a knock on a church door during vespers.”
“The man, whose clothes were in poor repair, mostly resembled a dressed up ferret. His facial features were grossly elongated and his inward pointing teeth, small and nicotine stained, sat behind a pair of thin cracked lips. His eyelids flickered over his small dark eyes and he moved with a jerkiness like a badly functioning windup toy.”
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“Surrounded by veritable fence of satiny ivory colored shafts, the body of a white doe floated like a lone iceberg on the immobile surface of the gray unvarying ocean. The feathery fletching at the ends of two arrows protruding like territorial markers from the center of the body, slowly moving up and down in moribund consonance with the animal’s rib cage, upon which an irregular crimson mark slowly spread its mercurial boundaries across the immaculate surface.”
The story: Our main character is a man in his 30’s working for an insurance company. It’s horse and buggy days. We get the impression he’s a kind of dull, introverted guy. He’s a loner who as a kid wasn’t bullied or disliked, he just “wasn’t noticed.” Suddenly he’s kidnapped, blindfolded and taken to an island where he has an endless supply of canned food and all the necessities. He has no idea who did this to him or why. He lives a Robinson Crusoe type existence. His only companion is a raven that he names Poe, and eventually, a cat.
The island has a pond filled with some type of water-like liquid that gives him a sensuous feeling and strange dream-like experiences. People appear during these times and talk philosophy with the raven, although Poe never talks directly to the man. Most often the person who appears by the lake is a beautiful young woman. The person who appears tells a fable to the raven and they discuss philosophy. The man also has dreams of discussions with a whale.
After each event the man writes down the fable, the details of the event, and the details of his situation stranded on the island and puts the note in a bottle. He tosses the bottle into the sea in the hope of rescue. The stories are fables or sometimes fairy tales. They are often violent and there’s never a happy ending. The reader is tempted to ask, as Poe the raven does: “Why does every story I hear on this godforsaken lump have to be a horrible combination of cataclysmic misadventure?”
And, as we are told elsewhere, maybe “…the essence of the story was not the story itself, but merely to bring a spark to energize the indomitable mind of the reader?”
But we don’t read this book for its plot or its fables. It’s really a work of philosophy. The discussions around the magical pool between the raven and the visitor of the week, as well as the dreams of discussions with the whale, are vehicles for philosophical discourse about everything from art to physics. Some examples and nuggets:
“… I believe it’s fair to say that life, at some point after you have gotten a bit more than two thirds through, becomes a continuous exercise in loss…. One after another, like a majestic tree slowly losing its dried out decaying leaves to the cold, you can be assured that all that you once held dear will slip away from you like grains of sand between your fingers.”
“I readily confess that I do not believe in the concept of time, as it is neither an event nor a thing that can be properly measured.”
“Compassion is a short-lived and as useful as blowing into a hurricane. The possibility of disaster is inherently the glue that keeps humanity together. It is there from the beginning to the end, and it doesn’t occur only at the end as a single violent act, but is fueled by our inability to stave it off. Tragedy is fundamental no matter whether we’re talking about the greatest love story or the deadliest conflict.”
“If you were to put an entirely unknown object into an empty space, which set of values would you utilize to analyze it? Would you use the priest’s, the historian’s, the mathematician’s, the scientist’s, the naturalist’s, or the philosopher’s?” (At one point a cat suddenly appears to keep the man and the raven company. The man names him Saul, but we know it’s Schrodinger’s cat. lol)
A good book with a surprise ending when we find out how and why the man ended up on this island.
And, as for philosophy, we all know it ends up like this: [The man asks the whale:]
“What is this place? And who are you?”
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I thank the author for sending me a copy of his book for review. Other books by Lars that I have enjoyed and reviewed are The Somnambulist's Dream and When All the Days Have Gone.
Photo of a private island off of Ireland from vladi-private-islands.de The author from iad.nec.edu
I’ve read a half-dozen novels by this Japanese author. All have been dark, focused on planning secret rebellions, a planned murder, ritual suicide, deI’ve read a half-dozen novels by this Japanese author. All have been dark, focused on planning secret rebellions, a planned murder, ritual suicide, death and reincarnation. The author himself headed up a ritualistic right-wing group and ended up committing ritual suicide. So imagine my surprise to find I’m reading a book about first love with a happy ending! (We know this from the blurbs on the cover, so I’m not really giving away plot.)
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It’s a coming-of-age story of a young man on a small Japanese island. Most of the men are fishermen going out daily in small 2-3-man boats. The island women are famous for their endurance diving to collect buckets of abalones, hopefully with an occasional pearl inside.
Social class is a theme. The main character’s father died in WW II, so his work as a fisherman is the main support of his mother and young brother, although his mother is a diver. He falls in love with the newly arrived beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man on the island who owns a large freighter. Of course it’s understood that the daughter will marry one of the few other upper-class boys on the island. The father prohibits her from seeing the lower-class boy. They interact by secret notes. The boy graduates from the small fishing boat to work on a freighter where he proves himself by an act of valor while at sea where he risks his life in a storm.
The plot is elaborated with ‘rivals,’ a young man and young woman who are interested in each of the two main characters; a scene between the boy’s mother and the wealthy man, and village gossipers who seem to do all they can to complicate the path of true love.
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In the end, love finds a way through hard work, courage, honestly and doing the right thing. It could be a YA novel if the three pages describing women’s breasts were omitted, (lol, the women dive wearing only loin cloths).
The novel, published in 1954, is rich in local color and in descriptive detail of a way of life - housing, cooking, dress - that is now gone. Even the women divers are only there for tourists now. (Like the Greek sponge divers in Tarpon Springs, Florida) The story has been made into a movie in Japan several times.
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While writing this review I happened to come across this article about Japanese Nobel Prize winners (Yasunari Kawabata 1968; Kenzaburo Oe 1968) and how Mishima basically ‘campaigned’ for the prize and the hope of fans that Haruki Murakami might eventually win one.
A story of the confusing and senseless violence during the breakup of the former nation of Yugoslavia, 1989 to 1992. A young Serbian man, Luka, is theA story of the confusing and senseless violence during the breakup of the former nation of Yugoslavia, 1989 to 1992. A young Serbian man, Luka, is the main character. He has a Croatian girlfriend. The cover blurb summarizes the book’s theme in a short sentence (my emphasis added): “But soon the young men must take sides and slowly EACH ONE IS DRAWN BACK TO A HERITAGE THAT NEVER USED TO MATTER MUCH TO THEM.”
Luka, his older brother, just released from the Yugoslav national army, and a couple of other buddies hang out as ethnic conflict begins. The first part of the story is set in Osijek, a real town in what is now Croatia, near the border with modern Serbia. These buddies had a band at one point but no one seems to work now. We’re not told where their money comes from. Mostly they hang out in bars and sit in parking lots drinking themselves silly until they vomit. This heavy drinking is a long-running theme through the whole novel as even on-duty police and soldiers are often drunk. Sometimes they go to the zoo or a dance or on a picnic with their girlfriends. One time the go fishing and the boy’s army brother lobs a grenade into the pond so they can scoop up the stunned fish.
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The buddies talk politics a bit but most of the political talk is left to others. Ethnic conflict is beginning. There are impromptu political speakers on street corners. Stores blare patriotic music on loudspeakers. There are parades. Every ordinary street or church festival has suddenly become a political rally. Men who haven’t been in church for years start attending these religious festivities, now politicized, and they even wear rosaries around their necks as a political symbol. Youths throw rocks at tanks.
It seems the only thing that the different ethnic groups can agree on is their common hatred of dictator Tito and of the Yugoslav Republic. Ex-soldiers who have army tattoos do everything they can to remove, hide or change them. Because Luka is a Serb in a mostly Croatian area, he starts to wear the Croatian patriotic “chess symbol” on a wrist band just to avoid trouble. Other friends of his are suspect because they have fathers who are Muslim or Russian.
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In the distance they can hear battle sounds on a daily basis – bombs falling and tanks firing. The fighting is initially in rural areas. The cities start to fill up with homeless and frightened rural refugees. Then the air bombing of the city starts. Everyone – Serbs and Croats - goes into basement shelters where they listen to Croatian television propaganda. Now the Serbian boys know it’s time to leave. One goes to Germany to work. One goes to the big city, Zagreb. Luka’s girlfriend is sent by her parents to work in Germany to avoid the fighting.
Luka decides to join the Serbian Home Defense Force in a rural area. The second half of the book focuses on these military actions. It’s a rag-tag army of ex-soldiers and volunteers. And just like that, Luka picks up a gun and starts killing people. He lobs a grenade into a house that might contain a sniper. Prisoners are shot even after a negotiated white-flag surrender. One of their own planes makes a bombing run killing a dozen of their guys playing soccer in ‘friendly fire.’ They drink plum brandy constantly and an argument over dinner leads to one soldier killing another. Luka lobs a grenade that, in an incredible coincidence, has tragic consequences for himself.
There is some good writing:
“Mrs. Bakaric stood there opening and closing her ill-fitting dentures, spitting saliva and squeaking as if she had a scrap-metal machine in her head…She hated everything that moved within a radius of ten kilometers.”
[an old man] “…spent days walking around the estate wheezing and sputtering in a pair of old jogging bottoms with his socks falling down; his wife treated him like some old pet she hadn’t had the heart to take to the vet to be put down.”
“They were all overweight and wore their shirts open to the waist with their bellies pulled in by innumerable belts, making them look more like sausages than fighting men.”
“Everything had gone, even the rage, as if someone had broken into his soul and ransacked it.”
“The general appeared from his Campanola jeep looking like a large intestine that had not been emptied for a month.”
“The plane disappeared, as if they hadn’t been invented yet…”
“Duke finished cutting the bullets and packed them away gently, like the seeds of some rare plant that would one day bear a precious fruit.”
In summary, it’s a decent novel with fairly good writing. But the first half tried my patience. It was almost a DNF as I thought “how long can all this hanging out, drinking and vomiting go on before the story moves along?” The second half of the novel, the military half, moved along more quickly. I think the value of this book is in its first-hand look at how the start of ethnic conflict in these countries can turn neighbors today into enemies tomorrow.
Photo of Osijek from cloudfront.net Croatian national symbol from wikimedia.org ...more
This story is set in Brazil in the late 1960’s when that country was building superhighways crisscrossing the Amazon region. The maiCONTAINS SPOILERS
This story is set in Brazil in the late 1960’s when that country was building superhighways crisscrossing the Amazon region. The main character is a 30-ish guy who loves his job and his boss, who is a high-powered Master of the Brazilian Universe type. The main character’s specialty is maintaining a fleet of trucks. First dump trucks that were used in Amazon highway construction and then a fleet of cement mixers. He always delivers on time for his boss and he’s basically his boss’s right-hand man, even charged with visiting his wife to make up a story about why his boss will be out of town for a few nights. Of course he can’t tell her about the blonde.
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Now his latest task in getting a fleet of eight huge company-owned cargo trucks to deliver loads of corn on time for the grand opening of a distillery. It’s a trip of several hundreds of miles and they have eight days, but the area of Brazil they are traveling through has had its worst flooding in years and the rain is still coming. Sections of the super-highways have washed out and the army is blocking entrances to the road. The trucks have no choice but to use the parallel old-fashioned highway in place before the superhighway was built. It’s narrow and winding with wooden bridges.
Just before the trip, the main character has a big fight with his woman friend. Just getting to where the loaded trucks are parked is an ordeal by bus. Now the humor kicks in after the bus has a minor crash and he goes with the police making up a story about how he hurt his leg. Much of it is genuinely funny.
A lot of the story gives us somewhat technical details about their numerous problems along the way, which I actually enjoyed reading about. And the main character reminisces about past journeys and problems. So we learn how to use cables to right a tipped-over dump tuck; how to do a makeshift repair on a leaking brake line. Sometimes they have to send a truck cab back to the most recent town to get an axle repaired or to weld a leaking radiator. There is humor again when one of the trucks has some of its tires stolen.
Since the old highway has wooden bridges which are flooded over, several times they chop trees to brace up the bridges and in one case where the bridge is too weak, they create a ford by lining trees along the two banks of the river.
While they wait for water to recede in one location, the main character visits an old friend who is now married with kids and he gets to see what a settled life could be like. He also reminisces about a time when he hit and killed a drunk truck driver standing in the road – he just kept on driving. And he remembers a few nights he and his men spent at “Madam Olga’s.”
All in all I thought it was a pretty good story. It was fast-paced and I enjoyed the humor. The ending has a surprise twist.
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I also read and enjoyed this author’s Beneath the Waters, which is a collection of short stories and journalistic vignettes about families that were displaced by flooding from the construction of a dam in Amazonia. The Long Haul was made into a movie in Brazil in 1988.
Photo of trucks crossing one of the Amazon highways from businesstimes.com Photo of the author (1936-1989) who died in a car crash from cartografosdavertigemurbana.files.wordpress.com ...more
A bouncing romp through the Amazon rubber boom. An adventure story, part historical novel and part farce, set in (Edited and pictures added 9/20/2021)
A bouncing romp through the Amazon rubber boom. An adventure story, part historical novel and part farce, set in the rubber boom world of the Amazon basin in the very late 1800s. Our main character is quite a ladies’ man. He prefers married women, especially young ones married to elderly wealthy gentlemen, but in a pinch, the mayor’s wife, a stage actress, or a wayward nun will do. So there’s a lot of farcical episodes of sneaking out of bedroom windows and being on the run from the police and angry husbands.
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The main character gets involved in intrigue over the disposition of the rubber-rich Amazon province of Acre – will it go to Brazil or to Bolivia and how and why is the United States flexing its muscles in this matter? Our main character ends up as ‘King for a Day’ of this territory, well, for a few months anyway, until this house of intrigue collapses around him. This is the historical part of the novel, in part based on real-life events known as the Acre Revolution of 1899 when the Brazilian rubber growers in Acre revolted against Bolivian control.
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The book is a humorous romp and a quick read written in a lively style and in very short segments or mini-chapters, usually one to several paragraphs with descriptive section titles reminiscent of old British works such as “An Uneasy Bolivian,” “To the Dining Room,” “Curtain Call,” and so on.
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This book was written in 1977 and translated from (Brazilian) Portuguese. The author, a Brazilian journalist born in Manaus, on the Amazon River in 1946, has made his writing career on a dozen or so novels, like this one, a work of fiction based in part on historical events in the Amazon River basin. This book and Mad Maria, are his two best-known works in English. From what I can tell on GR, it looks like only four or so of his books are available in English.
Top photo of the Amazon from news.climate.columbia.edu Historic photo of Brazilian rubber workers from america.aljazeera.com The author from pwf.cz/archivy/ ...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
In the old days, Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard would be called a swashbuckler. Ben Tyler, our hero, is a cowboy gone South; in this case, as far south In the old days, Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard would be called a swashbuckler. Ben Tyler, our hero, is a cowboy gone South; in this case, as far south as Cuba. He also has a history of justifiable bank robbery, if there is such a thing.
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So, in a way, this novel is a ‘western.’ Ben finds himself shipping horses to Cuba. But unknown to him, under the deck is more than straw and horse droppings. This is an operation smuggling guns to Cuban rebels who have been fighting an endless guerrilla war against the Spanish Don.
This is 1895, the year the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. The Americans blamed the Spanish colonizers for the explosion and Teddy Roosevelt came in to charge up San Juan Hill.
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In Cuba Ben meets and falls in love with the lovely Amelia, daughter of a well-to-do New Orleans family. So this is a romance novel too. Amelia's search for adventure has led her to Cuba where she has become the mistress of a wealthy American sugar plantation baron. (Shocking in the 1890s!)
The dirt-poor Cuban plantation workers are fighting the barons. Whose side is the American planter on, since the Spanish protect the planters' interests? (view spoiler)[ Amelia becomes a spy for the rebels. She hooks up with Ben to stage her own kidnapping to get money for the rebel cause. (hide spoiler)]
Against all this adventure as backdrop, Elmore has given us a well-researched historical novel. We get rich details about the sinking of the Maine, the 'yellow journalists' who populate Havana's bars sniffing out stories of corruption and cruelty among the Spanish colonizers, and battle details of this particular 'Splendid Little War.'
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Leonard Elmore (1925-2013) was an amazingly prolific writer, publishing almost 40 novels as well as short stories and screenplays. His earliest novels, published in the 1950s, were Westerns, but he went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers. His most-read book on GR is Get Shorty. And this is even more amazing: Get Shorty and more than two dozen of his works were made into major movies.
The list of stars in movies made from his works reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood. What an incredible debt the film industry and movie-goers (as well as readers!) owe to this author.
Here’s a partial list of stars in films made from his works: Paul Newman, Charles Bronson, Robert De Niro, Burt Lancaster, Ann Margaret, Alan Alda, Tom Selleck, Rock Hudson, George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Peter Falk, John Travolta, Morgan Freeman, Mickey Rourke, Danny Devito, Jennifer Anniston, Peter Fonda, Uma Thurman.
[Revised and typos corrected 4/12/23]
Top image of the charge of the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill from nps.gov The wreckage of the Maine from cfr.org The author from loa.org...more
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