books

To begin with, a Christmas present was Bettina Hoffmann's book on the viol - or viola da gamba. I didn't really appreciate it as much as a previous book I had read on the same subject, namely "Die Gambe", by Annette Otterstedt. That earlier book had more technical information about the instrument, and interesting, very personal observations of the author. But the present book was a history of the viol, finding as many historical quotations as possible which boundlessly praise the qualities of the instrument. While this may flatter the ambitions of amateur musicians, it had less substance than Ottersetdt's book. Of course I am extremely interested in this subject since now, in retirement, my main ambition is to learn to play the viol. For this purpose I am practicing for at least three hours most days.

Last year I very much enjoyed reading "Mothering Sunday", by Graham Swift. Therefore I was looking forward to reading more by the same author. "Last Orders" won the Booker Prize in 1996, so I thought it must be good. However, as experience has often shown, the Booker Prize is not a particularly good recommendation. I was only able to wade through the first 50 or so pages before giving up. The book is filled with working class London dialogue, often awkward to read, involving a group of men who have been drinking together at a pub for years. One of the men has died and they are setting off to do something with the ashes. I suppose the professors of literature, sitting on the Booker Prize Panel with their posh, upper class accents, thought that they might redeem themselves by voting for this book. I found it to be boring, seemingly going nowhere, telling a totally uninteresting story.
Then I tried "Waterland" and did read it through to the end. The story takes place in the Fens, which is a lowland region on the eastern coast of England. The author philosophizes about the quality of mud, water, eels, flatness. He seems to associate these things with human depravity, madness. The story of the book is a complicated affair, describing the rise and fall of a brewery family. In the end it all boils down to an unpleasant little business involving the memories of the narrator of his adolescent sexual explorations in the mud, resulting in the pregnancy of his future wife, a horrible abortion and the consequences of the resulting sterility. An unpleasant story.

    Happily, I then realized that there are still a number of books by Ian McEwan which I have not read yet. "The Children Act" is about a very highly placed, established woman judge in the English judicial system at the "Inner Temple", or something, of the "Inns of Court" in London. She has her apartment there which she shares with her husband, a professor at a London university. They have no children. Career has come first, and now it is too late. Frustration about the failure of this basic biological urge to reproduce causes the husband to think of an affair with a younger woman. His wife, the judge, filled with anger, tells him that the consequence will be his banishment from the family. But this isn't really the main story. It is concerned with the Jehovah's Witnesses and a young man who needs a blood transfusion to save his life, yet he is a few weeks short of his 18th birthday, still a minor, and thus, following the recommendation of the hospital, could be forced by the courts to accept a transfusion against his wishes. As with all these books of McEwan, it was hard to put down. There develops a fatal relationship between the young man and his judge.
    I've given pints of blood to the Red Cross at least 30 times over the years. But now I'm too old, and anyway, after all my eye operations a few years ago they think that my blood might have become impure so they no longer want it. Blood seems to me to be something which is hardly worthy of complicated religious pronouncements.
    "Nutshell" was a strange book, telling the story of the murder of a man by his brother and his pregnant wife through the experiences of the unborn baby. It took a while to get used to the idea of an unborn baby philosophizing about all sorts of things, and in particular objecting to the fact that the brother of his father was continuously inserting his member into the birth canal of his mother. But gradually it became an amusing story of human frailties.

Black Dogs, by Ian McEwan

     The review in the New York Times which I've linked to here really tells it all. June and Bernard Tremaine fall in love with one another while working in some sort of secret agency an London during the Second World War. They had both joined the communist party of England during the 1930s, perhaps for the friendship of other young people, all going out together on bicycle trips and what have you. They marry after the war and take a trip to Italy and France with the idea of helping people who had become destitute. After a month or two of this, they escape to a lonely region in the south of France to go hiking in the hot summer sun.
    At one point, June walks ahead, leaving Bernard behind, examining the doings of some caterpillars. Suddenly June sees two huge black dogs along the path. They attack her, but she shields herself with her rucksack and stabs one of them with a pocket knife, thus driving them away. This experience changes their lives. The dogs represent evil. They were trained for evil by the occupying Nazi Gestapo. Returning along the path, June and Bernard meet a tranquil French shepherd who lets them sleep in an old barn. On an impulse June buys the barn, and over the years it becomes the center of her life. She rejects communism and embraces mystical spirituality. Bernard returns to England. His overly rational communism turns him into a successful left-wing politician, often in the news, having an opinion about everything. June and Bernard hate, and yet still distantly love one another, living far apart in different countries. All of this is narrated many years later by their son-in-law who speaks to one and then the other, trying to understand their story.
    I thought it strange that June settled in that isolated, lonely farmhouse near to her experience of evil. But who can understand the mysteries of the spirit? Bernard has rationalized away the failure of communism, yet the middle chapter of the book takes place in the Berlin of 1989 when the Wall fell down. Bernard is excited and rings the narrator in the middle of the night to get him to come with him to enjoy the End of Communism party in Berlin. They hectically arrange a flight from London. In Berlin, Bernard is attacked by a group of skinheads.
    If the book is about good and evil then I suppose Bernard has now also learned that there are forms of evil which are not political. I remember that some Germans here did go to Berlin back then on that night in 1989, finding it to be a great emotional experience. But I thought the situation was potentially very dangerous, and the many Russian soldiers stationed in East Germany could easily have been ordered to go on the rampage, violently suppressing the whole business. Thankfully that didn't happen.

Six Four, by Hideo Yokoyama

     This is a police novel written by a Japanese. It shares with those Scandinavian police stories and TV programs the idea that we are more interested in the police themselves, their personal lives, loves, ambitions, rather than the criminals, or the victims of all the crimes.
    But if we are to believe the story of this book, then it must be the case that those Japanese policemen are very different from the more familiar Scandinavian ones. The hero is named Mikami. (This made me think of Murakami, the novelist who writes those fascinating Japanese surreal novels.) There are lots of other policemen, women, and other characters whose names start with M, and so I lost track of things every now and then. At the end of the book we realize that all this M..., and in particular Ma... business has a certain reason. Anyway, Mikami used to be a detective, actively hunting criminals, but six or eight months ago he was unhappily transferred from the "Criminal Investigations" side of things into "Administrative Affairs". His job is to deal with the press. Newspapers, TV.
    His office is next to the room of the Press Club, and the big thing is that a pregnant woman has had an accident in her car, killing a pedestrian. The press wants to know her name. Yet Mikami has instructions to protect the woman by withholding the name. This conflict seems to go on for hundreds of pages. The reporters in the Press Club become more and more aggressive. And then everybody else in Administrative Affairs treats Mikami dreadfully as well.
    Do all those Japanese who, as in this story, outwardly pretend to be so nice and polite suddenly become horrible in when they know that they are safely concealed from public censure?
    The GREAT SECRET, which at all costs must remain hidden, but which after countless trials and tribulations Mikami uncovers, is that during a kidnapping 14 years ago, the police tried to record the kidnapper's voice on tape, but for some obscure technical reason, the tape recorder failed to start at the critical moment. The police considered this to be such a great scandal that everyone who knew about the problem was silenced.
    One of the policemen was hounded out of the force, and then another policeman spent the next 14 years spying on the disgraced one. And another was driven to insanity, spending the 14 years locked up in his bedroom.
    This - or perhaps many other things - (or the Japanese mentality in general) led to a total conflict between Administrative Affairs and Criminal Investigations. Rather than investigating crime, they seemed to spend all their time investigating one another. Finally Mikami learns the ULTIMATE SECRET, namely that the central police department in Tokyo is planing to replace the local chief of police with a candidate of their own. This is considered to be a catastrophe of such earth-shaking dimensions that it is almost sufficient to unite Administrative Affairs and Criminal Investigations.
    Well, all of this seems to me to be very strange. How are we to understand all these crazy Japanese? Surely things at the local police station would improve if Tokyo sent somebody to clear up the whole mess. And somehow the Scandinavian version of "The Police" agrees more with what I would imagine to be a sensible state of affairs. But thankfully I have almost never had reason to interact with the police. Nevertheless it seems to me that at least the police here are civilized and can be counted upon to see to it that society functions with as little fuss as possible.

Waiting, by Philip Salom

     An Australian novel. Things take place in Melbourne. It starts off with chapter 1 telling us about a crazy couple: Little and Big. Little is a relatively young woman who is suffering from Lupus, an extremely unpleasant autoimmune disease which particularly affects women and which has left Little a semi-invalid. Big is a fat, older man, a former bush cook who worked for a team of sheep shearers but who now has become a transvestite, exposing his hairy arms and legs by wearing awkward dresses and other female paraphernalia. They seem to have no source of income and so they live in a "hostel" which is also occupied by other outcasts. Australia is a comfortable, prosperous country, and so they must all receive generous payments for their idle, eccentric lives.
    Big and Little are mainly preoccupied with the thought that Little's mother, in Adelaide, is dying, and so Little can expect to inherit her house, which she expects to then sell and so buy some modest home for herself and Big in Melbourne. (I don't know how realistic such a prospect would be these days, considering the mindbogglingly absurd real estate bubble in present-day Australia which has been fueled by all of those Chinese who have struck it rich.)
    But Little's mother has a number of sisters who also want the house. And thus she has a cousin in Melbourne who, in contrast to the rest of the characters, is a sensible person. He is a kind of landscape architect and contractor who constructs his own designs. And then the cousin has a girlfriend who is a university lecturer in some obscure field which nobody is interested in.
    It is a pleasant little story, rambling on and on. We sympathize with all of these characters, these misfits. I enjoyed the book.

Force of Nature, by Jane Harper

     Another Australian novel, but very different from the last one. The characters are again based in Melbourne. Rather than rambling on about nothing, letting one day dissolve into the next, everybody here is filled with action, ambition. We have a corrupt accountancy firm and a pair of policemen: a policeman and a policewomen. The policeman is secretly in love with the policewoman, but she is in love with somebody else - in Sydney - and so she steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any further attachments despite giving her Melbourne police partner a chaste kiss after a dramatic scene at the end of the book.
    But the real emotional tension results when the accountancy firm which they are investigating decides to send five men and five women from the firm into the bush for a character-building trek through the thick, cold, rainy forest of north-east Victoria. The men and the women are sent on different trails. The women get lost. They fight. They end up in a horrible, secret cabin used by a murderer and rapist some 20 years before this time. The fighting and bickering amongst the women continues and increases. It ends in tragedy. And we learn about the broken families of these women. The head of the firm, who is taking part in the men's part of the trek, also has a broken family. His degenerate son was together with the degenerate daughter of the woman making all the problems in the woman's group.
    The problem with these two youthful family members was that they took videos of themselves using their mobile telephones, in exposed, compromising situations. Then, as is typically the case with such things, the videos found their way onto the internet, thus exposing the daughter to unwanted notoriety. I can well imagine that such a situation would be unpleasant. But surely the crimes of the accountancy firm, robbing innocent people of their savings, were more serious.

My Career Goes Bung, by Miles Franklin

     Back in 1983, the Folio Society brought out a very nice edition of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career which I read then (and which I have now reread) and which made a great impression on me. The author was only 17 or 18 years old when she wrote it, living with her family at the Brindabella Station amongst the Brindabella hills just west of Canberra (which didn't exist then) back in 1899. It is a novel, pretending to be an autobiography of rural Australia. The heroine of the novel is Sybylla Melvyn. She describes herself as being an ugly, but lively and sparklingly intelligent young woman. Her family was earlier prosperous, having extensive farmlands more to the west, but now they have a poor dairy farm near the town of Goulburn. The father has become a drunkard, leaving the family almost destitute. The mother, who was earlier an elegant woman, has become embittered, doing everything to make life as miserable as possible for poor Sybylla.
    Things improve when Sybylla is sent to stay with her still prosperous relatives, back out west. She blossoms, enjoys the new sense of belonging, and develops a romantic relationship with Harold Beecham, the tall, handsome owner of a large neighboring property who owns various other farms and extensive properties in Queensland as well. As in all such romantic novels, Adversary strikes. Sybylla is removed from the comfortable home in the west by the tormenting mother and made to work in a degenerate situation. Harold becomes bankrupt, loosing all his holdings. But then, following the pattern of a Jane Austen romance, circumstances change and the hero and the heroine come together. At first misunderstandings prevail. But then, contrary to our expectations and Jane Austen's examples, Sybylla refuses marriage, proposing instead undying women's liberation. The devastated Harold is sent into the wilderness, leaving all of his extensive, regained properties, aimlessly traveling about the world with a broken heart.
    The book was an instant success, both in England and in Australia, when it was first published in 1901.

    And so I thought it would be interesting to read the present book, My Career Goes Bung, which Miles Franklin wrote soon afterwards. What a difference! Sybylla's father is no longer the degenerate rural drunkard. Instead he is a man of great dignity and honor who has been reduced from prosperity to a more simple life due to the fact that he refused to be a part of the general corruption of life back then. Her mother is now a wonderfully loving, caring woman, doing her best to see that things go well with Sybylla. Reading about the life of Miles Franklin, and looking at the photo of her parents reproduced there, I can well imagine that this was what her parents were really like.
    Sybylla tells us about why she wrote My Brilliant Career, and about the shock of learning that it had been published in England. All of the neighbors are scandalized. Her parents dismayed. She travels to Sydney to stay with a wealthy family who are friends of her parents. And although she tells us that she is not beautiful, still, she is feted by all of Sydney society. The most desirable young bachelors all fall madly in love with her. She is the envy of the Australian literary scene. But through all this she writes scathingly cynical portraits of everyone she meets in Sydney. I am sure that for the people of those days, these descriptions would have been easily associated with the real-life people she so easily caricatures. Thus no publisher was willing to touch the book, and it was only first published in 1946.
     I suppose Miles Franklin considered this to be an honest description of the Australia of her day. Too honest. And thus it is a disappointing read after the lighthearted style of her first book.

Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, by Miles Franklin

     Miles Franklin published this one in 1909, when she was still a young woman. She had moved to Chicago to become part of the women's trade union movement. Despite this, the book is again set in Australia. The narrator is a middle-aged woman, an actress who is suffering from a heart condition. And so to recover, she settles in a boarding house in an imaginary town just west of Sydney. She tells us that it is on a river and the trains cross over a bridge on their way up over the Blue Mountains. Therefore it is clear that the river must be the Nepean River, and the town must be Penrith.
    At the boarding house she meets Dawn, a young woman who is beautiful in all ways. The boarding house is run by Dawn's grandmother who tells us everything about her old, Australian country ways, and in particular we learn about her ideas concerning the place of women in a rural, colonial society. Dignity and yet with deference to the menfolk. This is contrasted with the various undignified men who make their appearances in the book. Back in 1902, women in Australia had gained the right to vote, ahead of their contemporaries in most other countries, and so much is made in the book of whom the women were to vote for (all the candidates were men).
    But the main story is how the narrator tries to find a nice man for Dawn to marry, while at the same time encouraging Dawn to take singing lessons in Sydney with the aim of going on the stage. She faces strong opposition from the grandmother who thinks actresses are evil and a woman's place is in marriage.
    After reading the book in fits and starts I simply got bored and gave up halfway through. I need a more modern story with more action.

Deadly Secrets, by Robert Byndza

     Apparently this book is part of a linked series of detective stories, describing various cases which the heroine, Erika Foster, a Detective Chief Inspector with the London police, has been involved with. It's the story of a man who hides himself within a World War I style gas mask and then attacks men and women in a depraved manner on lonely, dark London streets. The book starts off with the murder of a young woman. Gradually we learn of many characters who might be suspects, or witnesses. One of them tries to kill himself by having the gas of his gas stove escape into the house, filling the air with natural gas. Erika and one of her sidekicks then come in to rescue the man. And we are told that they also suffer from severe cases of carbon monoxide poisoning. But wait a minute! The gas has not ignited, blowing up the house. It remains in its pristine state, not consumed by fire. And thus the methane and other hydrocarbons in the gas have not yet been converted to water, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide via the addition of atmospheric oxygen.
    We could forgive Robert Byndza this little confusion of the poisons involved in natural gas, but the resolution of the book was unforgivably disappointing.
    It turns out the killer of the young woman was not the large, brutal man behind the gas mask. Instead it was the frail, 97 year old woman around the corner. It turns out that she was a brutal, sadistic Nazi back in the days of World War II. A devilish woman concentration camp criminal. We are reminded of some of the opponents of James Bond, back in the old movie days. And now, 75 years later, the evil inherent in her body was sufficient to enable her to don a gas mask, overpower a young, healthy woman and slash her with powerful strokes of her kitchen knife, cutting deeply through her throat, severing bones and cartilages, and generally producing as much of a bloody mess as the real London gas mask man with all his vigorous, massive youthful strength had been doing. Perhaps the author would have done well to have visited a few geriatric wards while doing his research for this book in order to see what 97 year old women are really capable of.

Dunbar, by Edward St. Aubyn

Macbeth, by Jo Nesbo

Beauty and Sadness, by Yasunari Kawabata

The Izu Dancer and Other Stories , by Yasunari Kawabata and Yasushi Inoue

The Bonfire of the Vanities , by Tom Wolfe

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

On the Trail of the Assassins, by Jim Garrison

Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

Under the Harrow, by Flynn Berry

Anatomy of a Scandal, by Sarah Vaughan

A Double Life, by Flynn Berry

Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith

Give Me Your Hand, by Megan Abbott

The Electricity of Everything Living, by Katherine May

The Whitstable High Tide Swimming Club, by Katie May

Raising Sparks, by Ariel Kahn

The story is concerned with Malka, a teenage girl who has fantastic, dream-like visions and who is able to perform miracles. She is loved by the young Moshe. But her visions lead her to escape secretly from home to find shelter in a strange community which seeks to find meaning in such visions. The leader almost rapes her and she again runs away, this time to a city by the sea, to find peace while swimming in the water, and fulfillment creating wonderful dishes in a restaurant on the beach. Meanwhile Moshe searches for his secret love. He also ends up in the same city, becoming almost destitute. But then they find each other, and the book ends with visions and miracles.

We are reminded of some of the pleasant, surreal fantasies of Haruki Murakami. The hero discovering some strange, impossible things taking place in the real world. And at the end we smile, returning to the normal world, but imagining how it would be if the world were to be so strange. Murakami's stories are far removed from the horrors of established religion where different versions of absurd, impossible ideas lead to deadly conflicts, grinding on for centuries, even millennia, tormenting generation after generation.

The Malka of this story is an Orthodox Jew, living at first in Jerusalem. Her visions are of the Kabbalah, the esoteric myths of Judaism. The city by the sea is Tel Aviv. She tells us of the hatred people have for the Palestinians and of the squalor in which they live, but she finds solace in their friendship. If only the pleasant visions of this book were to be true!

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

Perhaps in a different time and under different circumstances I might have found humor in this book. But as it is, I gave up in disgust about a third of the way in. Somewhere on his website the author tells us something about himself. He was a Wall Street investment banker for 20 years, an American, traveling to various countries, staying in hotels. While doing so he discovered that there are people who live their lives in hotels. That is, they are waited upon day and night, year in, year out, by all the various employees of the hotels: the cleaners, the cooks, the waiters, the management. And so he got the idea to write a book about such a person living in a hotel from about 1920 to 1950. In Moscow of all places. During the upheavals of the communist revolution, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the Great Patriotic War of the 1940s. Is it believable to imagine that a hotel in Moscow throughout this period would continue to grovel to the needs of an absurd, arrogant aristocrat who, after all, represented the horrible abuses which were the basis of the Russian Revolution in the first place?

Perhaps as an excuse, the author tells us that he is ignorant of the Russian language, he didn't study the history of Russia in school, and he has only been to the country a few times. But he did like reading classical Russian literature of the time before the Revolution.

Why does such an American feel a need to write such a book in a time like this? The United States has become preoccupied with provoking wars in one country after another. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have been killed. Millions are displaced, seeking refuge in some safe haven. But of course the United States refuses to accept these people who are suffering from the consequences of its dreadful actions. And the United States, contrary to its undertakings at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union, has closely surrounded Russia with a network of heavily armed military bases, seeking to provoke conflict at every opportunity.

Thus, at least for me, this book is as misplaced as is the nonsense which spews from the current President of that country.

Some Prefer Nettles, by Junichirõ Tanizaki

This is considered to be a classic of Japanese literature. It was first published in 1929. The story is very simple really. A married couple, Kaname and Misako, have grown apart. We have the story from the point of view of the husband, Kaname. He still finds Misako to be very attractive, yet she is not his idea of the "ideal" woman. He is open to the fact that Misako has found another lover, Aso. In fact he encourages her to be with Aso as much as possible and he looks forward to the divorce. She is unhappy with him and he thinks it will be good for everybody to have the situation resolved. The problem is their son Hiroshi. They do not want to tell him about these things, and yet somehow he must eventually be told. And so everything drags on, unresolved. Undoubtedly Hiroshi already understands, but says nothing. A feeling of ennui envelopes everything. The family seems to be quite wealthy, awkwardly being polite to one another with little else to occupy themselves from day to day.

Kaname considers himself to be "modern" - adopting "western" values. He thinks Misako is an especially modern, elegant woman. But then Misako's father comes into the picture. He has gone through all of this himself, divorcing his wife, Misako's mother, and now he lives with O-hisa, a young woman of only 22 or so, who is a kind of personal geisha to the father. The father is also interested in the traditional Japanese puppet theater. Kaname is fascinated with his father-in-law and with his puppet obsession. He imagines what it would be like being his father-in-law, together with O-hisa, ordering her about in a traditional Japanese way.

Eventually Kaname and Misako decide to finally tell the father of their decision to divorce. They travel on the train, thinking to just say it and immediately return. But the father-in-law first has a long talk with Kaname, telling him that marriage has nothing to do with the "ideal" woman. Then he convinces his reluctant daughter Misako to go out alone with him to a restaurant for further discussions. In the meantime Kaname is alone in the house with O-hisa who serves him dinner. She rubs him down in the dark bath and then shows him to his room for the night. The father-in-law has bought a traditional puppet for Kaname, and in the dim light of his room, through the mosquito net, he glimpses the puppet... Or is it O-hisa?

And so ends the story, full of symbolism, leaving the rest to our imagination.

Kokoro, by Natsume Soseki

According to the Introduction, this novel is one of the most important works of Japanese literature, "known to every schoolchild and read by anyone serious about the nation's literature". It is a story within a story. The outer story concerns a young student, meeting an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura. The novel was first published in 1914, so I suppose the time is 1910 or so. Japan has experienced dramatic changes during the Meiji period, transforming itself from a feudal society into one of the great powers of the industrialized world. But the story of the book has nothing to do with such things.

The young student calls his older friend "Sensei", which means the respected teacher. But this Sensei tells him that life is meaningless. People are worthless. Eventually we are told Sensei's story. It is a story of love.

Years ago, as a student, he lived in a house with a widow and her daughter. He fell in love with the daughter but was afraid to show his feelings. A good friend of his from his hometown, another student, had little money, and so he invited him to also stay at the house of his lodgings. His friend was a very earnest fellow, dedicated to his studies. He considered the life of the mind, of the spirit, to be above all else. The true scholar lives the life of a monk, apart from the world. But then one day the friend confesses to Sensei that he is secretly in love with the daughter. Sensei is shocked. He had planned to ask the widow for the hand of the daughter himself. What can he do? And so he decides to confront his friend, telling him that by loving the daughter he is betraying his principles as a true scholar. And then he secretly goes to the widow to ask her for the hand of her daughter. This is then joyfully announced to the household. The next day, the friend is found in his room dead. He has committed suicide, stabbing himself with a knife in the neck. The suicide note he leaves does not mention the true cause, only praising the good character of Sensei. And so from then on, Sensei lives a life of secret guilt and remorse, visiting the grave every month. He has married the daughter, and they live on into advanced age in a sterile marriage. A puzzle to his wife.

All of this is related in a long letter to the narrator of the first part of the book. And at the end of the letter, Sensei writes that when he reads it, Sensei himself will be dead, having committed suicide.

What is the moral of the story? What meaning does it have for the Japanese? Surely a modern Japanese student, even one as fanatical as the friend of Sensei, would hardly consider suicide in these circumstances. Thus the story might be of interest in that it contrasts the morality of previous times with that of today.

The Accident on the A35, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

This is one of those books that pretends to be the work of somebody else. It starts off with a Foreword, explaining that a package was sent to Raymond Brunet's former editor containing the present manuscript. (We note the similarity of the name Brunet with Burnet.) Then at the end of the book is an elaborate "Translator's Afterword", describing the "real" life of the fictitious author, together with various theories about whether or not the events described in the novel were actually part of his life.

It really is a simple story, but very nicely told. A man, Bertrand Barthelme, drives his car one night along the A35 motorway in France from Mulhouse to Saint-Louis, driving off the road, crashing into a tree and killing himself. He was a lawyer in Saint-Louis, living in a large house with his young wife, Lucette, and son, Raymond. An unpleasant man. Everybody seemed to hate him. Both his wife and son were, if anything, relieved to be rid of him.

The story is told mainly through the perspective of Inspector Gorski of the local police. A weak man. He reads in the paper of the exciting murder of a prostitute in Strasbourg and gets in touch with the important Chief Inspector of that city. Can there be a connection? The lawyer colleague of Maître Barthelme has suspiciously removed all the papers from his study. But Raymond does find one fragment of paper, containing an obscure address in the city of Mulhouse. And so all these threads are woven together, and we read on to see what happens.

One thing which struck me as being almost absurd is the way Raymond goes on and on about how he thinks that Saint-Louis is a dead-end. A backwater, far removed from anything in the real world. We imagine that French school children may grow up with maps depicting France alone, with white blankness outside the borders. This is similar to the situation in the USA, where the form of the northeastern bit suggests a small peninsula up at Maine, but then, when looking at a more comprehensive map, we are surprised about the fact that the land really continues on in a bulbous manner through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

And so Raymond wanders aimlessly about in Saint-Louis, following a few streets in a northward direction. Feeling confined, far away from everything.

Given that the world only consists of France, and that if you were to step over the border then you would fall into a bottomless vacuum, never to be seen again, then I could understand Raymond's feelings of despair. But in reality, if Raymond had decided to wander for a few minutes in a southward direction he would cross the Swiss border, and in a few more minutes he would be in the center of Basel, a beautiful city which many would rate far above the boring Strasbourg.

Why did the real-life author, who is a Scott, not French, depict Saint-Louis in this way?

His Bloody Project, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Again we have a story which is supposed to be based on newly found documents relating to some historical incident. And then the book is a collection of those documents, written by the the fictitious protagonist. In this case, the main part of the story was supposed to have been written by Roderick Macrae in 1869 in a jail cell in Inverness in Scotland. We note the fact that "Macrae" is, at least apparently, the middle name of the real-life author.

Instead of inventing imaginary places for his story, the author gives us a very real geographical setting. Namely Culdie, a collection of houses along a lonely road on the west coast of Scotland, just south of the little town, or settlement, of Applecross. Out of curiosity I clicked into Google Street View, and I found that they did run one of their camera cars along the Culdie road. The Macrae house in the book is the one at the northern end. Here is the link to the Street View site, where you can look around at the house which is standing there now. It's a small house, but perhaps not uncomfortable. Traveling along the Culdie road via Street View we find some quite nice houses, but at the south end we come to the house which in the book belongs to Lachlan Mackenzie. It seems to be obscured by bushes, and there are a couple of cars and an old trailer parked about the place.

The scene in 1869, if we are to believe the book, is much less pleasant. Dirt floors. Pigs, cattle, hens living in the houses alongside the people, and those "houses" are built of mud, the roofs are reeds. They are dark, stinking, filthy. Such, apparently, was the life of the "crofters" of those days. Working the small parcels of land between their houses and the sea, producing a few potatoes or whatever, and continuously paying rent to the "Laird" who owned the land.

In the story, the person responsible for the Laird's estate was the "Factor". But he considered himself far too important to have anything to do with the primitive, sub-human crofters. Instead they elected a "Constable", one of the crofters, who then reported to the Factor.

In the story, Lachlan Mackenzie was elected Constable, an evil man who enjoyed tormenting the Macrae family, particularly Roderick. He rapes the sister with impunity. The father is humiliated and the basis of the existence of his family is ruined.

It must be dreadful to be in a situation like this with no recourse to any degree of natural justice. Perhaps there are many people today in the world who are similarly suffering. For Roderick, the only course of action was to kill the Constable.

And then we have the imaginary records of various officials in the community. The village priest writes that the whole degenerate Macrae family are ungodly heathens. But the school teacher writes that Roderick was the best pupil he had ever had. And then we have the arrogant, opinionated James Bruce Thompson, who was a real life "scientist" in those days, telling us about the degeneracy of the lower classes, their genetic inferiority, and particularly his own superiority above all. Here the author paraphrases the actual writings of that creature.

It was a sobering read. But at least we see that in the 150 years between the time of the story and now, judging from the houses to be seen at Culdie, life seems to have improved. And I wonder what the people who live in those houses today would think about this book.

Midwinter Break, by Burnard MacLaverty

Gerry and Stella are a married couple, perhaps 70 years old. Gerry is happy enough, but for Stella, life is not so good. Gerry is an alcoholic. It is tiresome to read how he continuously hides his drinking from Stella. When she sleeps he has a glass of whiskey, then another, and another. When they are together he has a beer, saying ah!, he hasn't had anything to drink for ages, then he quickly downs another whiskey. In restaurants he orders a bottle of wine; Stella takes a small glass, then Gerry drinks the rest and orders a quick whiskey on the side before ordering another bottle. He imagines that he is doing a good job of hiding all of this from Stella. But of course she knows everything.

On the other hand, in various places in the story Gerry tells us how much he loves Stella. She is still beautiful. He admires all of her virtues. How sensible, competent she is. How he would be unable to live without her.

Gerry was an architect before he retired, and Stella was a teacher. They live in Scotland and have a son who lives in Canada with his wife and small son, the grandchild of Gerry and Stella.

In the book they travel to Amsterdam for a long weekend in the middle of winter. It was Stella's idea, and her secret. She would like to leave Gerry and live alone in a community of women, living in peace, devoted to prayer, meditation. Away from Gerry's deceptions, lies, drunkenness.

She would like to become a member of the Begijnhof. This is an ancient order of Catholic women, living freely, but within the world, not as nuns sanctioned by the Church but rather as independent women. While she investigates the possibilities, Gerry uses the time away from her to down as many whiskeys as possible in an Irish pub somewhere around the corner in Amsterdam.

Stella meets Katherine, an Irish woman who is a beguine, a member of the order, and she has a long talk with her in her peaceful, austere rooms. And she tells Katherine her story. But she learns that the few openings for new members are only available for women between the ages of 30 and 60. Later she has a short interview with the more formal woman who is the head of the order, and she learns that there would be no possibility for Stella to become a member. She is devastated. It is the end of her dreams.

We learn about what happened to Stella long ago when she was newly married, living in Belfast. Both Gerry and Stella were Irish, of Catholic backgrounds. And while Stella often prays, adheres to the teachings of the church, Garry laughs, telling her that it is nonsense, pure fantasy. And dangerous, brutal nonsense, leading to all the horrors of the "troubles" in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s.

One lazy, hot summer day in Belfast, Stella, who was pregnant with their son, while crossing a street was suddenly shot. The bullet passing through her abdomen, but missing the baby. She nearly died, but in a delirium she promised God that if her baby were to be spared then she would devote herself to the divine. Now, in old age, she feels guilt about her failure to fulfill this promise.

In the airport at Schiphol, waiting for the return flight, everything is delayed by a winter storm. Gerry, realizing he will be unable to take all his stores of whiskey onto the plane becomes totally drunk. Stella moves away from him to another area and sleeps there. In the morning a hungover Gerry promises - once again - to stop drinking. Will he now really stop, knowing that Stella wants to leave him? And could it be that the shock of that bullet all those years ago was the thing which drove Gerry to alcohol in the first place? It was a sad, but nicely told story.

Educated, by Tara Westover

The story here is similar to that of Jeanette Walls, as she described it in her book The Glass Castle. Both are true stories. Jeanette Walls grew up living on the edge of society in a state of indigent, makeshift squalor with irresponsible, degenerate parents, the mother being weak, listless, the father an alcoholic. Against all odds she was able to escape into a better life and write a book about it.

In the present book, Tara Westover's father was also drunk: on religion.

Which is worse: to be intoxicated by alcohol or by religion?

At first one might think that alcohol is worse. For example when she was a young teenage girl, Jeanette Walls' father took her to a bar where he was drinking, and he suggested that she could accompany some other man upstairs, presumably to offer herself to him so that her father might receive another shot of whiskey. She refused, and later her father apologized.

The alcoholic knows that his actions are evil, destructive, and so there is room for improvement. But the religious fanatic knows that he is always right.

In the Westover family there was no question about suspicious moral behavior. On the contrary, Tara Westover describes her early childhood as being free to roam Buck's Peak, in Idaho, the mountain next to their property, riding horses, being out in the open all day long. For the father, school was a source of evil. The enemy. The "feds". The "illuminati". Therefore none of the children went to school. It would have been a sin to do so. The mother taught them how to read, but if the father saw them reading a book - which was not the Bible - then he would tell them to stop wasting their time. They should do some useful chores instead.

The father had a junkyard, dismembering old cars, sorting the metal as scrap. Tara had to help. She describes incredibly dangerous scenes. For the father, safety was of no importance. An accident was the will of God. She is half crushed by a front-end loader driven by the father. She balances on the forks of a fork lifter high in the air. Her brother falls off the fork lifter after balancing on a pallet, falling head first onto steel rebar ends sticking out of concrete, barely surviving with horrible head injuries. They have 3 or 4 bad car crashes with terrible injuries. There is no insurance. One son is badly burned when taking an acetylene torch to a car in the junkyard without having drained the fuel from the tank. Then later the father is also badly burned doing exactly the same thing. Everything is the will of God. But at least Tara tries to avoid some of this reckless behavior.

And then of course medicine is also evil, the doings of Satan. All of these injuries are to be endured as a message, a gift from God, showing the path to salvation. The mother concocts healing oils using various plants she finds growing on Buck's Peak. It is astonishing to read how the injured members of the family survive on the basis of prayer and oils.

As she enters puberty, one of her brothers - she names him Shawn, although that is not his real name; all the other characters in the book are correctly named - begins tormenting her for her womanhood. He calls he a whore. He forces her head into the toilet bowl, saying she is impure. He is big and powerful and twists her hand behind her back to the point of breaking her wrist with excruciating pain. She is a work of the Devil.

But Tara Westover was able to escape from this hell. Despite having no formal schooling, she graduated from Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City and then went to Cambridge (the real Cambridge in England) where she eventually received a Ph.D. in history. And yet even during these university days she still tried returning to her family, only to be accused by the parents of being a lost sinner. This led her to have a mental breakdown. She tells us that she does have contact with one or two of her siblings who also escaped into a better, educated life, and also with some of her more distant relatives who, although being Mormons, are more sensible people.

Writing this book for all the world to read must be a real provocation for her family. And looking at Tara Westover's internet site, I see that she travels back and forth between England and the US, constantly giving talks describing her childhood. Wouldn't it be a better idea to simply go on to new things in life, leaving her strangely warped childhood as nothing more than a bad memory?

The Suspect, by Michael Robotham

Joe is a psychologist. His father is a distinguished medical surgeon who was expecting his son to follow in is footsteps; he is disappointed with Joe. And so Joe tries to tell us how interesting and important psychology is.

He has an ideal family, a flourishing consultancy in London, also making considerable sums of money, although not as much as the father. And he has an interesting and enigmatic patient, Bobby. Bobby seems intelligent enough, but he is often silent or says things which don't make sense. And he often misses his appointments, or comes late.

Michael Robotham's genre is crime novels, so there is a mysterious and seemingly horrible murder which is discovered at the beginning of the book. I just wanted to read something light after all the heavy stuff which Tara Westover told us about in the previous book. Gradually more murders are discovered. They seem to fit into a pattern. Joe begins to suspect Bobby. But things become twisted around and soon the police suspect Joe. Joe is running from the police, trying to find out about Bobby's past and the relevance it has to all the murders. All of this was very interesting and I read on and on, wanting to find out what happens.

But, as with all too many of these action-packed movies, things accelerated, becoming hectic, contrived at the end. A disappointment. A shame since I was thinking it might be pleasant to read a few more of Robotham's books. Perhaps I might get in the mood again, particularly considering that he tells us that when writing these books he lives on the North Shore of Sydney, on the coast. I wish I was there now. In one of those wonderful houses at Avalon, or Palm Beach.

Believe Me, by JP Delaney

Googling for a few seconds, I find that the author's real name is not JP Delaney, but instead it is Anthony Strong. He seems to write everything under various pseudonyms despite - or perhaps because of the fact that he had a distinguished education in England.

In the book we follow the adventures of Claire, a young English woman trying to break into the theater business in New York. She is studying in one of the acting schools of the city. But she doesn't have a green card, and thus cannot accept employment as an actress. She supports herself by working occasionally with a private detective who is employed by wives who suspect that their husbands sleep with prostitutes. For this, she hangs about in bars, getting into contact with the unsuspecting husband, luring him into agreeing to a rendezvous, filming everything secretly, then delivering the evidence to the wife. She thinks of this as a kind of practical exercise in acting. But suddenly, on one such assignment, the wife is murdered. Who did it? Was it Claire, or was it Patrick, the husband who, in this instance, refused to be lured?

There follows a long, involved story with many twists and turns, where at first we believe that some people from the FBI have gotten Claire to pretend to fall in love with Patrick in order to entrap him into a confession. But maybe this whole entrapment business, as an exercise in acting, was actually designed to entrap Claire into confessing. The ending is a ridiculously contrived scene in the catacombs of Paris, where the FBI is always present. I had thought that France was a sovereign country, but perhaps its current President, Macron (one thinks of Macarons, which are everywhere in Paris), is keen to alter this, changing France into a subservient entity of the bureaucrats in Brussels or Washington.

Paradise City, by Elizabeth Day

The story takes place in London, but it is not really the Paradise City of the title. Instead "Paradise" has to do with a chain of clothing stores owned by one of the characters. There are four of these characters, and the titles of the chapters alternate amongst them: Howard, Esme, Carol, and Beatrice.

The first chapter, entitled Howard, who is the wealthy owner of Paradise City, introduces himself. We are told that he is the son of a Jewish couple who fled the Nazis in the 1930s, settling in London as poor tailors. The family name in Germany was Fink, which in the German language denotes a finch - a small bird - yet in the English language, fink has a less appealing meaning. Therefore the name was changed to Pink. As a boy, Howard Pink helped out, selling clothes on the streets. And now he is a rich man. He had a daughter who grew up uncomfortable with all these riches. She suffered from bulimia, perhaps various drugs, a sensitive girl. She went off to university, and then she just disappeared. Had she been murdered? Or was she living somewhere in secret? Italy, India,..? It is now 10 or 15 years later. Things are still unresolved. This has led to the divorce of Howard from his first wife, and he lives with his second wife, a fashionable social climber, in his spacious London mansion.

In this first chapter we meet Howard entering a luxurious hotel. We are told this is his monthly ritual. He is given his usual suite; he takes off his clothes, has a shower, puts on the hotel bathrobe, and a maid knocks on the door. She comes in to get things ready for the night. This is Beatrice. She is African. While she is arranging the bed, Howard approaches her from behind, slips his hand inside her blouse to fondle her breast and masturbates, trying to avoid having his ejaculate soiling her clothes. Beatrice says nothing and leaves the room. And so the story develops.

We learn all about Beatrice. She comes from Uganda and is lesbian. The crime of lesbianism is dealt with brutally and horribly in Uganda, and so she has obtained refugee status in England. She is living on a pittance as a hotel maid despite the fact that she is well qualified for higher professions. Howard's fumblings were not that bad. But they represented a further indignity which she is determined to challenge.

And then Esme is a newspaper reporter, and Carol is an older woman living in a suburb of London. Esme is sent to interview Howard, and the subject of his daughter comes up. Through most of the book it was unclear what Carol has to do with anything, but then, at the end, she does play an important role.

Despite the sordid beginning, everyone turns out to be very nice, and in the end everybody lives happily ever after except for Howard, who learns of the fate of his daughter. But still, it is nice to have that question resolved too. This sugary, feel-good story is made politically correct by the emphasis on the Jewishness of Howard, and so we are happy to forgive his initial treatment of Beatrice in this otherwise cruel, cynical world.

The Party, by Elizabeth Day

This book was much more interesting than the previous one. It's no longer the case that everything turns out wonderfully and everybody lives on happily ever after. The story is much too complicated to summarize in a nutshell. More interesting are the characters and how they feel about one another.

First of all we have Martin. A very complex character. Towards the end of the book we are told that he looks rather like the character in the British children's amusement of Where's Wally. He is very intelligent, if rather awkward. His father died of an absurd accident and so he was brought up, poorly, by his mother, who hated him. But he obtained a scholarship to an exclusive private boarding school (which in England is, absurdly, called a "public school") where he met Ben.

Ben is everybody's favorite. An aristocratic, titled family. A very likable character, ready to help everyone and to enjoy being the center of everything. And so Martin tries to become like a brother to Ben, to become part of his so much superior family.

The years pass. Martin is constantly with Ben, visiting the family mansion, treating the parents almost like his mother and father. He obtains a first class degree at Oxford. Ben takes a more modest, aristocratic degree. It is now ten or fifteen years beyond university. Martin reviews art for the newspapers. He has written a best seller; a book on art with a rude title. Ben has become even richer, a hedge fund manager, now dabbling in politics. And Martin is always thinking about Ben. He is married to Lucy, but still, all his thoughts are centered on Ben. Is it love? He refuses to see it that way, but we see that he really loves Ben far more than Lucy.

The Party is at a huge, extravagant country estate which Ben and his wife and children have acquired. What does Ben think about Martin always trying to hang on to him, a love which is hardly desired? Why does he keep putting up with Martin for all these years? Is there some secret which binds them together? All of this leads, finally, to a cathartic explosion.

A Few Books from the Beginning of the Year: