Liking this series more and more. Can get involved enough that I do not feel I am wasting time. Love the French language everywhere, forcing me to GooLiking this series more and more. Can get involved enough that I do not feel I am wasting time. Love the French language everywhere, forcing me to Google pronunciations and meanings. This is also a complicated story of past terrorism in Europe...one that almost lost me several times. France's relationship to the Basque freedom movement, and the pan-European communist movements are at the forefront. Brutal, secretive, post-individual movements that have no pity.
Bruno once again puts his township at the center of his concerns and enjoys the company of his animals, lovers, hunting and drinking partners. ...more
I skipped around a little. This is Book #13 in the series, published in 2020 and it has so much current events featured that it seemed especially timeI skipped around a little. This is Book #13 in the series, published in 2020 and it has so much current events featured that it seemed especially timely. The main action takes place at Chateau Rock which is owned by an aging British rock star. The musician's son is in love with a wealthy Russian who comes to the chateau to visit with her bodyguard and a friend, who happens to have Ukrainian family history.
One of the parts I liked best was Bruno's 1) involvement with Isabel, who works for French and European intelligence, but also 2) Balzac's mating story, his first encounter with the female of his species. Really quite involving, to one who's never been involved in such doings.
Very fast paced starting midway, but the rest is as wonderful and slow as one would hope a French village market would be... ...more
I just inhaled this--it was so good. Not used to reading novels these past few years, at first I found the chapters just slightly too long. But I soonI just inhaled this--it was so good. Not used to reading novels these past few years, at first I found the chapters just slightly too long. But I soon settled in and I just loved the characterizations, the language, the descriptions of heat, the language, the handcrafts of the main characters, the language, the immediate sense of danger one gets from a father returning home and from having a teenager in the house.
I should have kept her first book in the series because I wanted to go back and reread it, to enjoy it once again. I loved that one, too, and we don't absolutely need the first to understand the second, but one wants to enjoy the full span of it, the American settling in to a small Irish town. It is a little painful. French gets everything right in this, I thought...she pulls us this way and that and the end is a total surprise and unexpected, though we knew it wasn't working out the way the headlights were pointed.
Not done with this and will have to step away for awhile. Will reread when opportunity provides. Deeply interesting and not something to whiz through.Not done with this and will have to step away for awhile. Will reread when opportunity provides. Deeply interesting and not something to whiz through. Stoppping temporarily at page 290. Want to make notes of a couple places. p.282: "How come you never got another cat? I just didnt want to lose anything else."
p. 180: "Do you believe in God, Bobby? I dont know Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you. I dont know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway."
p. 32: "He slept until evening and then got up and showered and dressed and went out." Immediately recognizable.
Merged review:
Not done with this and will have to step away for awhile. Will reread when opportunity provides. Deeply interesting and not something to whiz through. Stoppping temporarily at page 290. Want to make notes of a couple places. p.282: "How come you never got another cat? I just didnt want to lose anything else."
p. 180: "Do you believe in God, Bobby? I dont know Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you. I dont know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway."
p. 32: "He slept until evening and then got up and showered and dressed and went out." Immediately recognizable.
Merged review:
Not done with this and will have to step away for awhile. Will reread when opportunity provides. Deeply interesting and not something to whiz through. Stoppping temporarily at page 290. Want to make notes of a couple places. p.282: "How come you never got another cat? I just didnt want to lose anything else."
p. 180: "Do you believe in God, Bobby? I dont know Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you. I dont know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway."
p. 32: "He slept until evening and then got up and showered and dressed and went out." Immediately recognizable....more
Percival Everett is quite unlike anyone else. Just like the university course in this novel given by a professor named Percival Everett, this book is Percival Everett is quite unlike anyone else. Just like the university course in this novel given by a professor named Percival Everett, this book is nonsense. A black man who looks like Sidney Poitier is named Not Sidney Poitier, which leads to some absurdist conversations. Not Sidney is rich as Croesus, or rather, as rich as Ted Turner of CNN fame, which allows him to do pretty much whatever he wants. But what does he want?
As with all Percival Everett books, this is worth reading just to see where his mind is going...we can all see his mind is going, but if you want to know where, check this out.
And please. Go see the film American Fiction. It is the film version of Erasure. I am looking forward to seeing it next week....more
This short shots series is really a great idea. It is basically a book-length short story or a short story with the heft of a novel. It is easy to seeThis short shots series is really a great idea. It is basically a book-length short story or a short story with the heft of a novel. It is easy to see Jassy Mackenzie's influence and it is because of her great thriller-writing skill that I picked this one up. I'd like to ask her why she didn't write another, and if I were to guess...but I shouldn't speculate. I have been wrong before.
This shows South Africa's crime scene, and it is terrifying to contemplate. Parts of major cities that are completely lawless, and one cannot even drive through, or stop one's car for fear of hijacking. But this also looks at the illegal gold mining that takes place and the dangers of mines that are officially closed but still being used by unscrupulous bosses with trafficked workers from elsewhere.
I've never read any Patterson, so the muscular feel may be his influence, but there is a strong female character that saves it from being a vehicle for the tall dark green-eyed body guard....more
What a masterful police procedural this is. Rendell wrote this in the 1980s, shortly after China opened to the West. She beautifully captures the oddiWhat a masterful police procedural this is. Rendell wrote this in the 1980s, shortly after China opened to the West. She beautifully captures the oddities of train travel and life under Communist Party rule, the humid heat of Guangzhou and the strange beauty of the southern mountains in the city of Guilin.
Shortly after the return of famed police Chief Inspector Wexford to England, deaths among those he’d met while traveling in China ties their lives together once again. Rendell was in her fifties and at the height of her powers when she wrote this book and it shows in every sentence. She somehow makes star-crossed love stories believable and the chintz-upholstered, heavily-draped world of the wealthy in England accessible.
Rendell died in 2015 but she remains one of Britain’s mystery greats....more
Jassy Mackenzie has an adrenaline-fueled writing style that makes portions of her novels difficult to put down and this is a perfect example. There isJassy Mackenzie has an adrenaline-fueled writing style that makes portions of her novels difficult to put down and this is a perfect example. There is often a sexy thread, too, that weaves through the piece…will she or won’t she? But while this title and a couple of Mackenzie’s other novels focus on environmental crimes, this novel feints and gives us a national security and industrial crime: nuclear waste that can be used for weapons.
The central mystery telegraphed to me early, so I read mostly to see how Mackenzie drew it out and for the pleasure of reading her on South Africa again. It is really all local action since the national security aspect takes a second seat, serving only to bump the case to a high enough level to involve de Jong’s love interest, David Patel.
But we are thrown a curve ball with several people seeming to be good choices as bad guys…only to have them turn up dead. We are thoroughly confused as to who is handling the local plant sabotage and who is handling the international transport of the really dangerous nuclear byproduct. A much different book could have come from all this, but I was just as happy to stay in South Africa.
Mackenzie introduced us earlier to a tangential character that she fills in with affectionate strokes in this novel, Warrant Officer Mweli. When Mweli is threatened late in the action, I found myself praying she’ll get through it. I’d love to see her developed further in future books, but this may be the end of the road for Mackenzie, as it was published in 2017 and is the last so far in the series. (I hope not.)
Mackenzie does have another series, apparently, not all available in the U.S. In 2020 Mackenzie published an erotic novella called Switch, but there are others: Soaring (2016), Drowning (2016) and Folly (2013). So, she's still working. Good news for us.
By the way, Mackenzie also had an influence on my interest in handguns. I find myself seeking pictures of different makes to get an idea of size, weight and accuracy. Maybe I’ll have tried a few at the range by the time Jade de Jong is back online....more
Percival Everett is a Black man. And he does something very special in this book—his 1000th, I think, or something like that. He imagines what would hPercival Everett is a Black man. And he does something very special in this book—his 1000th, I think, or something like that. He imagines what would happen when time come for retribution. And it ain’t gonna look like Donald Trump imagines it. (view spoiler)[ The thing is, he’s so funny when he’s telling us what could happen. We’re snickering and really, it is pretty gruesome. But he’s got the whole security pyramid working on the case before they realize exactly what is happening, the FBI, the state police, the local cops…everybody is trying to figure out who is doing these killings.
The thing is, it isn’t just killings. It is mutilations, and inventive ways of killing that are each a little different across the country. To remind folks about Emmett Till, and to take their pound of flesh for what happened to him. But my goodness, to make that funny, one has to be some kind of writer. And Everett is that. (hide spoiler)]...more
Everett does what he has done so often in the past: stares at a thing so long it is burned on the retina. Then he writes about it in a way that is heaEverett does what he has done so often in the past: stares at a thing so long it is burned on the retina. Then he writes about it in a way that is heartbreaking, funny, painful and very human. We move through his fictional world seeing more ironic reality than fiction. But there is a way his fiction is unlike other people’s fiction, and each new fiction is unlike his previous fictions.
There is a distinct sense of Everett literally making it all up as he goes along. Not for him the grand sagas where “it is written…” There is an untidiness and crazy ridiculousness that I love, wondering how his characters, beaten and bruised, are going to get out of this. I mean, at one point in this tale, Ol’ Jim gets shot up by his onetime owner, floats downstream on a log, manages to climb onto a paddle boat plying the Mississippi, gets blown up on said paddle boat and finds Huck Finn, from whom he’d been separated when they started their journey south.
The book ends in a way I wasn’t expecting. Most of what happens in the novel is something I wasn’t expecting. It is a series of painful truths that we should have heard long ago, but should be grateful to be hearing now. In the end, the white people in this book are more afraid of language spoken properly than they are of a gun. They are more afraid of Black folks finding their freedoms than of anything else. After all, gun owners “are not after me” they may imagine. How much of today is explained and revealed by this humorous tale of Huck Finn and Ol’ Jim?...more
We go to the eastern coast north of Durban in this novel, to Richards Bay. Jade is meant to meet her lover David Patel there by the golden sands and iWe go to the eastern coast north of Durban in this novel, to Richards Bay. Jade is meant to meet her lover David Patel there by the golden sands and in preparation Jade takes scuba diving lessons. I found myself unnecessarily jealous of this fictional setup.
Shortly, as is usual for Ms. de Jong, people start dying. And not just dying, but being horribly slain and everyone is looking around for a culprit. In this particular novel, far-flung characters are somehow connected, though just how this is so does not become apparent until the very end.
{spoiler alert} (view spoiler)[ The third in the Jade de Jong series is my least favorite of this series. Mackenzie was stretched in this one, and just barely made it all come together at the end. Also, sorry to say, she told us early in the novel that animals and plants were not her forte, similarly to her father. She knew every brand and type of shooting instrument, but the natural world was not her area of expertise.
So Jade’s understanding of the destruction of the natural world in this novel about crimes to the environment might be perceived as ‘thin.’ We forgive her because she is perfectly willing to admit she knows nothing. Her real horror is reserved for the possibility that the golden sands might no longer be available to hard working cops and business owners rather than for the sea creatures including, ahem, reptiles like leatherback turtles. (hide spoiler)]
It is hard to retain any sense of superiority when Mackenzie writes a smackdown like this stunning description:
"Most of the cars had GP number plates and were also heading west, holiday over, back to Gauteng. Grim-faced at the prospect of returning to world, with their tank tops and shorts revealing deep sun tans and post-holiday flab. Arms as bloated and brown as cooked sausages, feet slapping along in flip-flop sandals. Kids trailing behind them, bored, restless and yelling."
Don’t know about you, but I feel like I am there.
I got a bit lost in the description of the central crime, and I kept losing track of who the bad guys were. But heck, I hope Mackenzie had fun researching this one because Richards Bay sounds gorgeous....more
This tour de force by a celebrated veteran of Swedish police dramas in the van Veeteren series drips along so slowly��like an icicle melting in freezinThis tour de force by a celebrated veteran of Swedish police dramas in the van Veeteren series drips along so slowly…like an icicle melting in freezing temps…that one might be forgiven for thinking the police were doing nothing at all to catch the mysterious killer of a young boy.
And really, they weren’t. Another two murders started to put the wind up and made them look back…but look how easy it would have been to overlook all the clues that would have led them to the killer of the boy. If one of the murdered wasn’t former Chief Inspector Van Veeteren’s son, I think we can safely say an opportunistic mass murderer would have gone free.
The involvement of the now-retired Van Veeteren added to the misty hard-to-get a clear angle on the case, and yet everyone in the station was on their best behavior to solve this case “for the chief.” The chief was, at best, ambivalent about the death of his son, who was recovered from a history of addiction. The scourge of drug addiction broke relationships and a life that barely had gotten started.
So, we are aware of the killer’s motives, actions, plans but we have no way to signal the same to the police. We grow increasingly anxious as the killer seems to have one solution to people finding out about his crime: kill them. Bodies keep accumulating and finally, finally, a clue is found that links the victims. It is the terrible tension that keeps us involved…how long can this go on and what on earth will be the thing to unravel the whole?
The writing and translation are stellar. There is one piece I must recount here:
“On Wednesday, December 9, it was 50 or so degrees, and the sky was high and bright. The sun seemed to be surprised, almost embarrassed at having to display itself in all its somewhat faded nudity.”
Hour of the Wolf ends with a scene in New York, and Nesser captures the cold December feel and the vastness that is New York. Chief Inspector Reinhart of Maardam stayed on the 24th floor of Trump Tower (!) with a view to the north and east of Manhattan. He describes how inhospitable it seemed in the chilly fall weather when the sun set early. (This was long before Trump ran for office, so Nesser had his finger on the pulse.)
First published in 1999, this can already be considered an old one, one of the last of the Van Veeteren series which were still being written, translated and published into the 2000s. Håkan Nesser won the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award three times and prestigious the Glass Key Award once. Around 2006, Nesser moved to Greenwich Village in New York for a couple of years where a new series featuring a Swedish police inspector with Italian roots, Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti, was published.
Nesser’s oeuvre is Scandi classic. Read them all....more
The second of Jassy Mackenzie’s Jade de Jong series is a big book: she opens her narrative to several countries and many seemingly unrelated cases. ThThe second of Jassy Mackenzie’s Jade de Jong series is a big book: she opens her narrative to several countries and many seemingly unrelated cases. The focus is trafficking of women across borders and the story is a desperate one for many unfortunate characters.
Mackenzie manages to capture the work style of every one we meet, from the school principal to the small time bureaucrat and seller of false documents. Even the nicely-dressed and -spoken man who delivers ultimatums about getting fake documents on time is believable, partly because he backs up his threats with action.
There is a particularly memorable scene that shares the experience of minibus taxi-riding in South Africa:
"The taxi driver was busy peeling a banana with his knee propped against the wheel. While he ate the fruit, he conducted an animated conversation with the man in the passenger seat. Lots of unbroken eye contact, reminding Jade of the way David liked to drive.
When he had finished, the taxi driver flung the banana skin out of the window and, still steering with his knee, began to peel an orange.
The vehicle felt wallowy on the road, its uneven progress a testimony to ancient shocks, balding tires, brakes worn down to the rim."
This novel exhibits horrific violence against those who are thought to threaten the system but again, as in previous Mackenzie novels, the pace is blistering. We can’t stop reading even if we want to. This novel particularly had great impetus that led us to a shocking conclusion.
This novel raised my opinion of Mackenzie’s skills even higher and I am thoroughly hooked now and must finish the series. I have already checked to see if there are any more novels in her oeuvre and I am surprised and disheartened to see she may have gone back to her day job. Her character development and braided story lines are far more accomplished than most and I certainly hope she is well compensated for giving up novel writing, if indeed she has.
What she really needs is a film contract for a limited TV series. Her characters and themes rock out loud and are way suitable for a diverse audience....more
I read this fourth of the books in the series so far and while I enjoyed it, I did think the later books are stronger. But, one simply must read them I read this fourth of the books in the series so far and while I enjoyed it, I did think the later books are stronger. But, one simply must read them all because McCall Smith is a treasure and such great company in the worst of times.
The dog...the dog is a character and it is absolutely imperative we know what goes on in his life. And he does get into some trouble...trouble I would never have guessed. But Marten is one that everyone feels comfortable expressing love for, so go with it and enjoy the crimes committed that are investigate by the Department of Stupendous Sensitive Crimes....more
The second of this series that I read inhaled and enjoyed so much. It is totally unnecessary to read the books in order and in fact I did not. The chaThe second of this series that I read inhaled and enjoyed so much. It is totally unnecessary to read the books in order and in fact I did not. The characters are so well-introduced that we are comfortable with them knowing they had a past.
In this, Varg gives away something he dearly loves in order to achieve a goal his lover makes him feel he must want...though in fact, he doesn't. This is a good one for people who can be talked into something ... who isn't one of those people? But when the stakes are high, this can be a very tricky and unsatisfying experience.
McCall Smith shows and tells why it is not always necessary to go the entire way to satisfying someone else's goals. Things turn out fine for him in the end, but his instincts at the start were fine. He probably should have heeded his doubts.
All to say, the philosopher is what we go to McCall Smith to hear. The mystery is secondary....more
A new novel by Paul Murray is always cause for celebration. Despite having promised us long ago that he was going to go short on the next one, this opA new novel by Paul Murray is always cause for celebration. Despite having promised us long ago that he was going to go short on the next one, this opus clocks in at 643 pages and it is not too long. In fact, he could have done with a few more pages because he forgot to tell us what happens. Don’t want to be Debbie Downer, but he leaves us high and dry after the flood.
But, as with all things Murray, that turns out to be a good thing. We may not have been able to take, psychologically, what he was dishing out and we could therefore finish the tale in any way that keeps us carrying on carrying on. As in previous novels, he goes down hard for “climate change.” Just sayin’…if you think we have it bad now, just do nothing and see how that turns out.
The most endearing, funny and tragic (all at once) thing about Murray’s stories is that his characters are such vulnerable blunderers, like most of us. We can probably all recite those sore spots in our lives when we made just the worst possible decision because it looked pretty good at the time. At the same time Murray makes us laugh, really laugh at the confusion of a middle school student trying to break through his older sister’s airy dismissals as he tries to get her to concentrate on family issues that are plaguing him. “Butterflies drink crocodile tears!”
Meanwhile, the older sister, a high school student trying to reconcile the bitter spew her beautiful literature teacher has published as poetry, completely misconstrues her father’s distress at his own plight vis à vis his marriage to his dead brother’s financée. Her father continues to dig a hole from which he cannot extricate himself, never explaining nor coming to terms with himself, his family, his needs, his own life…the only thing he has that is truly his.
The central conceit, the bee sting, I think can be interpreted in many ways; one way is to recognize that bees are critical to life on earth and yet have a nasty way of making their presence felt when humans do not pay sufficient attention to their surroundings. A central lesson of the book was that it is difficult to overstate how profoundly the universe does not care about your issues. So, best to put yourself in the best position to pay attention and stop thinking so constantly about how you will be perceived for doing something that feels right.
Best phrase: "His brother's life often reminded him of a soap opera written in crayon."
Brilliant. For the laughs, read it. For the lessons on how to conduct yourself in a f—ked-up world, read it. Rejoice, there is a poet amongst us....more
A Kate Atkinson novel is something to celebrate. Britain comes roaring through, “olden” culture perhaps more strongly than that of recent days. This nA Kate Atkinson novel is something to celebrate. Britain comes roaring through, “olden” culture perhaps more strongly than that of recent days. This novel is set in the 1920s, a time of great change after the Great War, and a time of gathering wealth…for a few.
The ‘culture’ I speak of that (it seems to me) is unique to England is the strength, sophistication and dare I say, deceptiveness of British women. I can assure you that while America has had strong female leaders, the only women approaching the personalities of everyday housewives Atkinson liberally sprinkles throughout her novels are pioneer women wielding long guns.
Atkinson does her time warp manner of writing again: she trained us all well in her earlier novels (e.g., Life After Life, A God in Ruins) to work through the confusion. All the time she is telling the tale, we are thinking she is misdirecting, forcing us to make connections, to solve a mystery we didn’t even know was a mystery. If occurred to me she must be happy she trained us so well.
It must be exquisitely difficult to write a novel expressing the viewpoints of so many characters and still write it all in a straightforward timeline. It can’t really be done, when you think about it. At some point the reader is going to have to retread some ground. In Shrines, the author doesn’t bother with your confusion: the reader is practically suffering the same confusion as one of the characters.
But what characters! So many, and so recognizable! The gruff nightclub owner Nellie and her passel of disappointing and dissolute children, the righteous police inspector, the criminal policeman looking for the last best chance, the savvy schoolgirl, the bright, capable and attractive spy. It is such a delicious stew that we don’t care how often she turns the tables on our understanding by introducing another piece of the jigsaw.
It doesn’t make for fast reading, I would say, but it does rather emphasize the pleasures of re-reading. Sometimes books are so good one would rather just wallow there for a week or so, being thrilled again and again with the club-owner’s strong-minded and (one imagines) strong-bodied son of a certain age: not so young as to be green but not so old as to be past falling hard in love.
It did occur to me that readers of Ms Atkinson’s novel must surely be mostly women. Mostly because the variety of unique women in this novel would overwhelm any man who this way wanders. Women, of course, are completely aware of the range of skills and talents of others of their sex, but those who still think of women as ‘the fairer sex’ may find themselves out of their depth.
This is definitely a mystery, but isn’t all of life? It begins with a mystery and ends with a different one. There are big questions and big surprises: we needed to be reminded, perhaps, that strong drugs were available since the 1800s for those who hungered for them. And those drugs wreaked havoc on societies before ours, in much a similar manner. Abortion was available, but not as safely as we have enjoyed in the past fifty years.
The novel is a triumph. It is a novel for adults—not in the sexual sense—but in the sense of reminding us of aftermath of world war, the horrors of the 1920s for those who had nothing but their passion, and the grotesqueries of those who had too much of everything except passion. And then there were the supposed ‘protectors’ who exploited and abused…these cannot be forgotten. Sometimes it roiled my stomach so, I had to put it aside…when reading of the young girl who wanted to go ‘on stage.’ So hopeful. God help us all....more
This novel doesn’t read now the way it did to me as a younger reader. Deeply explicatory of the ways people arrange their brains to suit the facts thaThis novel doesn’t read now the way it did to me as a younger reader. Deeply explicatory of the ways people arrange their brains to suit the facts that show them in the best light, it is a cynical book but not a cruel one. This is the way people act, moral or not, so we’d best take that feature into account when facing criminal charges.
First published on a fortnightly basis as a 27-part serialization in Rolling Stone magazine in 1984, this first novel of Tom Wolfe was later published, with revisions, by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1987. With the book publication, Mr. Wolfe became a cause célèbre. He’d been disappointed with the reaction of the public to the magazine serialization and that earlier effort seems to have been almost lost to history:
It felt all the more ironic given the book’s title. The first vanities bonfire happened in Florence, Italy in 1497 when supporters of friar Girolamo Savonarola publicly burned what they considered vain objects – books, art, music, anything deemed immoral. It’s easy to see Wolfe playing the part of Savonarola, eradicating all evidence of his early attempts at fiction.
Considering Bonfire was Wolfe’s first novel, it was a marvel of description, capturing the technicolor of the Wall Street bond market, the holding pen in the Bronx Criminal Courts Building, as well as the well-padded offices of Reverend Bacon, the profitable nonprofit savant.
The language is the thing to enjoy here. Plot is not this book’s strong suit. I read with real admiration Wolfe’s description of a crime victim, shot dead in the back of a Cadillac: “The victim was a fat man with his hands on his legs, just above his knees, as if he were about to hitch up his pants to keep them from being stretched by his kneecaps.”
Somehow that description blew me away. The next sentence, how the rear window of the Cadillac looked like someone had thrown a pizza against it, confirmed that the victim himself had, in fact, been blown away.
Wolfe claimed in a couple places that there was truth in the saying that “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.” That’s his own ‘saying’ and the first time I read it I laughed. When I read it again, I wondered…I don’t think that is true anymore, fifty years later.
So, I am still scratching my head over the title. I am inclined to agree with another reader who has pointed out this is probably less of a bonfire of the vanities than a celebration of them, but perhaps the title refers to the main character, Sherman (Shuhmun) McCoy.
Sherman McCoy, whose name recalls the ‘real thing,’ is in fact, ‘the real McCoy’ insofar as he is a man untouched by human drama to this point in his life. Raised in wealth and working in bonds, he has hardly had occasion to consider what a ‘bump in the road’ might mean to the ordinary man on the street.
In the beginning, McCoy is fearful and respectful, still, of law enforcement and legal matters in general though gradually one can perceive his discernment increasing as time—and his opportunities for incarceration—go on. Perhaps the title is not meant as anything other than the notion that the innocence of man, in the larger and smaller senses, is set alight every day in urban America, were we only aware....more
Horse, the story of a great racing stallion from Kentucky named Lexington, encompasses an arc of American history that cuts still today. Australian auHorse, the story of a great racing stallion from Kentucky named Lexington, encompasses an arc of American history that cuts still today. Australian author Geraldine Brooks puts her finger on the sensitive places in America’s living history which we as a society have not yet resolved: our relationship with America’s early racial legacy, slavery.
The colonial powers of the 18th- and 19th centuries all have complicated histories with race, but America stands apart as a country built explicitly on the notion of equality for all men. The founders just didn’t ‘cotton’ the connection properly between Blackness, economic prosperity, rights and freedom. The Civil War was meant to set them straight, but it didn’t actually do that. Nothing civil about it…then or now.
The horse Lexington, described on two continents as the “greatest racing stallion in American turf history,” and slavery have a shared history, both in reality and in this fiction. There are pre-Civil War written and painted records of Lexington’s groom and trainer, both Black men in Kentucky, a state which would hover in-between the Union and Confederate armies and be bled by both.
We hear the story of a White Union soldier who initially finds himself seeking out prisoners “to better understand their minds.” Gradually, he realizes those men “were lost to a narrative untethered to anything he recognized as true.” Author Brooks connects our history with America today.
In a Brooks novel, readers enjoy the author’s passions…for history, science, horses, art…and for her native land, Australia. Brooks doesn’t give her own country a pass in the race relations area, giving voice to a critic of Canberra’s policies. She successfully details examples of microaggressions, some that go out into the world and are recognized for such, just as they land, by all witnesses.
The embarrassment of recognizing one’s own prejudices spills onto the reader, making us cautious but willing to learn more about how these impulses buried deep inside suddenly materialize and how they impact those around us. One of the more interesting characters who brings out the reader’s prejudices remains only sketched lightly in the background: a gruff woman of diminished means who throws out on the sidewalk an old and dirty painting of a horse and to whom we impute a nasty attitude totally dissimilar to our own good intentions.
Horse is a wonderful read, filled with surprising discoveries and twists we do not see coming. In the Afterword, Brooks reminds us that her husband, Tony Horwitz, was a Civil War historian who approved of her turn towards this history in her novel before his untimely and sudden death in 2019. What a wonder that this terrific book was birthed in midst of such great sorrow and loss....more
Charlotte Carter. We are lucky to be alive in this time when publishers are doing the right thing for themselves AND for us by republishing terrific, Charlotte Carter. We are lucky to be alive in this time when publishers are doing the right thing for themselves AND for us by republishing terrific, under-read authors. Charlotte Carter is new to me but she is one of the best writers for a kind of hard-boiled mystery reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and the kind of glamour and won’t-look-away savvy of Nina Simone and James Baldwin.
Nanette Hayes is the series. Described as “a Grace Jones lookalike in terms of coloring and body type (she has the better waist, I win for tits)”, Nan is, when we meet her, busking on NYC streets with a saxophone, supplementing part-time work as a translator, French to English.
As far as I can tell, the series is only three novels long, but Carter has such a delicious and particular voice, you’re going to want to read all of this in a rush of indulgence. The first book in the series, Rhode Island Red, comes out July 27, just in time for long hot days in the hammock. August and September bring the last two, Coq Au Vin and Drumsticks. It’s like eating bonbons—very hard to resist.
First published in 1997, Rhode Island Red is written from a Black woman’s perspective and set in New York City just after stop-and-frisk was added to our lexicon. Cops were hated then, maybe even more than now? Even the title is a mystery; we don’t even know what the title means until close to the end but if you were to guess…
Nanette longs for France but grew up in the States as a child prodigy in maths, languages and spelling, of all things. One day another sax street player—a White man a little older than she—shows up needing a place to stay…and who ends up dead within hours.
It’s a complicated story, as it always must be when a stranger gets killed inside one’s own apartment. Nan calls the cops, only to have them question her motivation in bringing him home to her apartment. It’s a good question, one that Nanette will spend the rest of the story asking herself.
Carter wasn’t ahead of her time. She was playing old tunes in the 90s, but they were the anthem of the century. In a sense, she was closing the joint. We as a country are just catching up with her now. Radical. Real. Rhode Island Red....more
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