Mesmerized, by Gayle Lynds

High-powered attorney Beth Convey gets a heart transplant, becomes enmeshed in a dastardly plot to assassinate the new Russian President, Vladimir Putin (the novel was published in 2001) -- right in the White House Rose Garden -- and finds herself endowed with a whole new set of skills and abilities as she fights to prevent the plot from succeeding.

Her adventures quickly team her up with Washington Post investigative reporter, undercover FBI operative, and undeniable hunk, Jeffrey Hammond. Together they battle US-embedded rogue KGB agents, anti-government American militia members, a mole in the FBI working for the Russians, and the various National Security agencies of the United States, who, as usual in these thrillers, get it all wrong.

If nothing else, Lynds manages a lively pace, but for what is basically a romance novel, there is only one sexual encounter between Beth and Jeff and it is painful to read. "He pressed his lips into her belly and tasted her, savory as buttermilk." Could be a yeast infection.

I'd been looking forward to the scene for most of the novel, because Beth's heart donor turned out to be a male Russian agent skilled in karate and general hand-to-hand combat, firearms, and high-speed driving, among other things, and Beth had "inherited" (I'll spare you the pseudo-science) his skills, his thought processes, many of his memories (which she relived through dreams), and apparently, something of his sensitivities. How would this manifest itself when, "panting," she kicked off her "thong" and opened her legs to Hammond?

First, she's wearing a thong through all this action?! Second, why aren't the two fighting for the top position? Third... well, I don't want to go there.

I admit I skimmed a lot of the book. I just wasn't that mesmerized.

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann

Read this wonderful, amazing, lyrical, sad, funny, fateful book. 

Let The Great World Spin – An Excerpt, © Colum McCann 2009
(Random House, 2009)

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty.  Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. 

Others figured it might be the perfect city joke—stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring
upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker.

Or a jumper.

Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

He could only be seen at certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework, gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from one tower to the other. Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.  It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn’t want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn’t want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched.

Around the watchers, the city still made its everyday noises. Car horns. Garbage trucks. Ferry whistles. The thrum of the subway. The M22 bus pulled in against the sidewalk, braked, sighed down into a pothole.  A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways.  Sneakers found their sweetspots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clinked against the pavement.  Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street.  But the watchers could have taken all the sounds and smashed them down into a single noise and still they wouldn’t have heard much at all: even when they cursed, it was done quietly, reverently.

They found themselves in small groups together beside the traffic lights on the corner of Church and Dey; gathered under the awning of Sam’s barbershop; in the doorway of Charlie’s Audio; a tight little theater of men and women against the railings of St. Paul’s Chapel; elbowing for space at the windows of the Woolworth Building. Lawyers. Elevator operators.  Doctors. Cleaners. Prep chefs. Diamond merchants. Fish sellers. Sad- jeaned whores. All of them reassured by the presence of one another.

Stenographers. Traders. Deliveryboys. Sandwichboard men. Cardsharks.  Con Ed. Ma Bell. Wall Street. A locksmith in his van on the corner of Dey and Broadway. A bike messenger lounging against a lamppost on West.  A red- faced rummy out looking for an early- morning pour.  From the Staten Island Ferry they glimpsed him. From the meatpacking warehouses on the West Side. From the new high- rises in Battery Park. From the breakfast carts down on Broadway.

From the plaza below. From the towers themselves.

Sure, there were some who ignored the fuss, who didn’t want to be bothered. It was seven forty- seven in the morning and they were too jacked up for anything but a desk, a pen, a telephone. Up they came from the subway stations, from limousines, off city buses, crossing the street at a clip, refusing the prospect of a gawk. Another day, another dolor. But as they passed the little clumps of commotion they began to slow down.

Some stopped altogether, shrugged, turned nonchalantly, walked to the corner, bumped up against the watchers, went to the tips of their toes, gazed over the crowd, and then introduced themselves with a Wow or a Gee- whiz or a Jesus H. Christ.

The man above remained rigid, and yet his mystery was mobile. He stood beyond the railing of the observation deck of the south tower—at any moment he might just take off. Below him, a single pigeon swooped down from the top floor of the Federal Office Building, as if anticipating the fall. The movement caught the eyes of some watchers and they followed the gray flap against the small of the standing man. The bird shot from one eave to another, and it was then the watchers noticed that they had been joined by others at the windows of offices, where blinds were being lifted and a few glass panes labored upward. All that could be seen was a pair of elbows or the end of a shirtsleeve, or an arm garter, but then it was joined by a head, or an odd- looking pair of hands above it, lifting the frame even higher. In the windows of nearby skyscrapers, figures came to look out—men in shirtsleeves and women in bright blouses, wavering in the glass like funhouse apparitions.

Higher still, a weather helicopter executed a dipping turn over the Hudson—a curtsy to the fact that the summer day was going to be cloudy and cool anyway—and the rotors beat a rhythm over the warehouses of the West Side. At first the helicopter looked lopsided in its advance, and a small side window was slid open as if the machine were looking for air. A lens appeared in the open window. It caught a brief flash of light. After a moment the helicopter corrected beautifully and spun across the expanse.  Some cops on the West Side Highway switched on their misery lights, swerved fast off the exit ramps, making the morning all the more magnetic.

A charge entered the air all around the watchers and—now that the day had been made official by sirens—there was a chatter among them, their balance set on edge, their calm fading, and they turned to one another and began to speculate, would he jump, would he fall, would he tiptoe along the ledge, did he work there, was he solitary, was he a decoy, was he wearing a uniform, did anyone have binoculars?

Perfect strangers touched one another on the elbows. Swearwords went between them, and whispers that there’d been a botched robbery, that he was some sort of cat burglar, that he’d taken hostages, he was an Arab, a Jew, a Cypriot, an IRA man, that he was really just a publicity stunt, a corporate scam, Drink more Coca- Cola, Eat more Fritos, Smoke more Parliaments, Spray more Lysol, Love more Jesus.

Or that he was a protester and he was going to hang a slogan, he would slide it from the tower ledge, leave it there to flutter in the breeze, like some giant piece of sky laundry—nixon out now!  remember ’nam, sam! independence for indochina!—and then someone said that maybe he was a hang glider or a parachutist, and all the others laughed, but they were perplexed by the cable at his feet, and the rumors began again, a collision of curse and whisper, augmented by an increase in sirens, which got their hearts pumping even more, and the helicopter found a purchase near the west side of the towers, while down in the foyer of the World Trade Center the cops were sprinting across the marble floor, and the undercovers were whipping out badges from beneath their shirts, and the fire trucks were pulling into the plaza, and the redblue dazzled the glass, and a flatbed truck arrived with a cherry picker, its fat wheels bouncing over the curb, and someone laughed as the picker kiltered sideways, the driver looking up, as if the basket might reach all that sad huge way, and the security guards were shouting into their walkie- talkies, and the whole August morning was blown wide open, and the watchers stood rooted, there was no going anywhere for a while, the voices rose to a crescendo, all sorts of accents, a babel, until a small redheaded man in the Home Title Guarantee Company on Church Street lifted the sash of his office window, placed his elbows on the sill, took a deep breath, leaned out, and roared into the distance: Do it, asshole!

There was a dip before the laughter, a second before it sank in among the watchers, a reverence for the man’s irreverence, because secretly that’s what so many of them felt—Do it, for chrissake! Do it!—and then a torrent of chatter was released, a call- and- response, and it seemed to ripple all the way from the windowsill down to the sidewalk and along the cracked pavement to the corner of Fulton, down the block along Broadway, where it zigzagged down John, hooked around to Nassau, and went on, a domino of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, flail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage, while the others—those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther—felt viable now with disgust for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself, step backward into the arms of the cops instead of the sky.  They were jazzed now.
Pumped.
The lines were drawn.
Do it, asshole!
Don’t do it!

Way above there was a movement. In the dark clothing his every twitch counted. He folded over, a half- thing, bent, as if examining his shoes, like a pencil mark, most of which had been erased. The posture of a diver. And then they saw it. The watchers stood, silent. Even those who had wanted the man to jump felt the air knocked out. They drew back and moaned.

A body was sailing out into the middle of the air.  He was gone. He’d done it. Some blessed themselves. Closed their eyes. Waited for the thump. The body twirled and caught and flipped, thrown around by the wind.

Then a shout sounded across the watchers, a woman’s voice: God, oh God, it’s a shirt, it’s just a shirt.

It was falling, falling, falling, yes, a sweatshirt, fluttering, and then their eyes left the clothing in midair, because high above the man had unfolded upward from his crouch, and a new hush settled over the cops above and the watchers below, a rush of emotion rippling among them, because the man had arisen from the bend holding a long thin bar in his hands, jiggling it, testing its weight, bobbing it up and down in the air, a long black bar, so pliable that the ends swayed, and his gaze was fixed on the far tower, still wrapped in scaffolding, like a wounded thing waiting to be reached, and now the cable at his feet made sense to everyone, and whatever else it was there would be no chance they could pull away now, no morning coffee, no conference room cigarette, no nonchalant carpet shuffle; the waiting had been made magical, and they watched as he lifted one dark- slippered foot, like a man about to enter warm gray water.  The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.

Out he went.

Colum McCann

About Grace

by Andrew Doerr

Review in the NY Times Sunday Book Review Section

by NEEL MUKHERJEENOV. 7, 2004

In his first novel, "About Grace," Anthony Doerr drags his protagonist, David Winkler, over a fair few hot coals: 25 years of exile as a dogsbody in a new hotel in St. Vincent in the Caribbean, a near-drowning experience, malnutrition, a clinically debilitating journey in a clapped-out Datsun across the vastness of America, an Alaskan winter in an unheated shed, gradual loss of eyesight, an alienated daughter he abandoned when she was a few months old. The comparisons with Lear are flickering and fugitive but inevitable. As Winkler himself thinks: "I have already been reduced. Leave me be." Why does Doerr inflict so much on this quiet, retreating hydrologist, a man obsessed with water and snow?

Winkler is no ordinary man. He sometimes dreams of things that, in his waking life, come true. As a boy, he dreams of a man coming out of a shop with a hatbox who will shortly be run over by a bus. In a few days, it happens. This life of prolepsis, with frequent illuminations of déjà vu, of "the vertigo of future aligning with the present," becomes his unraveling. He dreams of the woman with whom he is going to fall in love and the exactness of the circumstances as well. Before long, he is locked in an intense relationship with Sandy Sheeler, married to Herman Sheeler for more than 15 years. Sandy gets pregnant, leaves her husband and Anchorage with Winkler and sets up a new life with him in Cleveland. A few months after their daughter, Grace, is born, Winkler dreams of an imminent flood in which she will drown while he is trying to save her from the rising waters.

To avoid this fate, he escapes to St. Vincent, where he is rescued by a Chilean cook, Felix, and his wife, Soma, both exiles themselves from Chile's political violence and repression. For 25 years, which Doerr oddly manages to telescope so that it feels like a tenth of that time, Winkler lives on the island in a dilapidated shed, working as general factotum in an offshore restaurant. It is his friendship with Felix and Soma's little girl, Naaliyah, to whom he is friend, father figure, mentor (even academic referee when she decides to go to graduate school in the United States), that holds out the hope of salvation for him. In an act of redemption that allows Winkler to reorder the patterns of a past he has been expiating, he is released from the paralytic torpor afflicting his life. He returns to the United States to search for the wife and daughter he had abandoned.

Doerr traverses again the territory he had marked out in the stories of his lucent first book, the short-story collection "The Shell Collector" (2002): a rapture with nature expressed in prose that sings off the page; an infinitely subtle algebra of resonance and sympathy between minds, lives, objects, light, senses, weather; the majestic indifference of nature; the proper measure of man against natural forces. Doerr has a compulsion for observation and a passion for nature that borders on the religious.

But in "About Grace," this very strength snakes in on itself and becomes its perilous opposite; what was pitched so perfectly in the circumscribed space of a short story can appear overwrought, extended now over 400 pages -- a hothouse product, at times so swooningly in love with itself that it cannot resist yet another perfectly turned sentence (or four) on the miracle of the hexagonal structure of snow when more important action is pressing. Doerr's interest in nature is so obsessive that the whole equation of man in nature becomes heavily skewed in favor of the latter, producing fiction of rapturous beauty but of an oddly cold, uninvolving nature, as if it were embalmed in its own lustrous style.

A passage about Winkler seems to hold the key both to Doerr's philosophy and to the central weakness of the book. "All day . . . a sensitivity had been building within him: the slightest shift in light or air touched the backs of his eyes, reached membranes inside his nose. It was as if, like a human divining rod, he had been attuning to vapor as it gathered in the atmosphere, sensing it -- water rising in the xylem of trees, leaching out of stones, even the last unfrozen volumes, gargling deep beneath the forest in tangled, rocky aquifers -- all these waters rising through the air, accumulating in the clouds, stretching and binding, condensing and precipitating -- falling." This encapsulates the whole problem of a style that can sometimes stray into the self-consciously hypersensitive and precious as well as the problem of balance, the way the human is compulsively stunted in favor of the natural.

The human action and human interests, characterization, dialogue, all appear oddly attenuated when set within the frame of this overdeveloped poetic realism. Faced with the occasionally thin credibility of the characters, the exquisite avenues of light and cloud formations and ice crystals down which Doerr leads us prove disappointingly to be cul-de-sacs when we reach the inevitable destination.

Doerr reaches heroically toward the humanization of his novel with Winkler's return to the United States and his attempts to reinscribe himself into the notion and experience of family by tracing his daughter, Grace, now a young woman with a child of 6, Christopher.
Just as his relationship with Naaliyah, a proxy daughter, set him on the path to finding his real one, this time, too, Winkler is given hope, absolution and grace by Herman Sheeler and Christopher, in two relationships combining atonement and a rewriting of the past, a relearning of responsibility.

These are definitely the most moving sections of the book, but too much brightness dazzles and distracts, and the wall of luminous prose almost fences off the reader's heart, something Doerr clearly wants to sway. A writer as dizzyingly talented and as generous as Doerr should be confident enough to do away with some of the more blinding fireworks.

Pretty Baby: A Novel, by May Kubica

Review by Bethanne Patrick

Mary Kubica's second novel, Pretty Baby, plays both with the timeline and with the notion of who is most harmed. Heidi Wood, a social worker, lives in downtown Chicago with her husband, Chris, and their bright but newly sullen 12-year-old daughter, Zoe. While commuting, Heidi notices a disheveled teenage girl toting a filthy, miserable baby. After seeing the pair more than once, Heidi approaches the girl — who gives her name as Willow Greer — and invites her to a local diner for a meal, ostensibly to discover whether the girl needs to go to a shelter.

We learn a lot about Heidi, Chris and Zoe in the first half of Pretty Baby, especially after Heidi invites Willow and baby Ruby to move in to their apartment. Chris travels a lot on business, but although a colleague is eager to get him into bed, he adores his wife and daughter — even when the latter tests her parents' nerves by shutting her mother and father out of her thoughts and room.

It's the perfect setup: Willow, seedy, suspicious and even scary (is that blood on her undershirt?), is going to worm her way into this family and destroy them. Will she steal all their valuables? Have an affair with Chris, who struggles to reconnect with Heidi after a serious health scare? Ruin Zoe's life and reputation? Heidi is so preoccupied with getting the sick baby well (it takes awhile for a doctor to diagnose a urinary tract infection, brought on by Ruby's dirty diaper) that she fails to consider most of the possible complications.

Kubica patiently constructs a tableau offering glimpses of Willow's before and after stories: She landed in a foster home with a dangerously abusive father figure — and, at some point, wound up in juvenile detention being questioned about murders (yes, plural). When and where did Willow give birth to Ruby? Who is Ruby's father? What does Willow want from the Wood family? When and how did she get taken to detention?

Most readers will get caught up in these questions as they watch Heidi try to take over all responsibility for Ruby's care. And when Chris engages a private detective to find out more about Willow, the story teeters on the edge of a climax in which one family's kindness is repaid with evil.
But Kubica has delicately misdirected our attention. I normally dislike endings that unspool quickly, seeing them as the result of fatigue or even laziness on the author's part, yet for Pretty Baby, the stage has been set while we were looking up toward the balcony. The fast-paced final chapters show us how easily we all ignore hidden infections in favor of surface wounds, and why "the ones you never hear about" may carry the deepest secrets.
___________________________________
My rating 3.5 / 5

Willaim Ryan's Recurring Character, Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev

The Darkening Field (released January 3, 2012) is author William Ryan’s second book featuring MVD Detective Alexei Korolev, whom we first met in The Holy Thief.

Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev as a complex character, who’s “suffered greatly during the First World War and the Civil War and has done his best to forget the traumatic experiences, although they keep bubbling to the surface – and in addition he finds his slightly naive hopes for the ultimate success of the revolution to be completely at odds with his personal belief in God.”

Ryan sees Korolev's religious belief as “a very instinctive one, the kind that comes from being brought up in pre-Revolutionary Russia when the Orthodox faith would have been something that permeated every aspect of life.” Although Ryan doesn’t necessarily see Korolev as very religious as such, his surviving the First World War and the Civil War “seem to have persuaded him that having God on your side in a tight spot is no bad thing.”

Ryan says that Korolev “knows the difference between right and wrong and believes that evil should be punished and that's probably what drives him as a detective. Of course, the dilemma for him is that being moral in 1930s Russia is not necessarily sensible for a man who values his safety and that of his friends and family, so he has to be pragmatic more often than he might like.”
Ryan feels that the interesting thing about Korolev is that, “he also believes, or wants to believe, in the ultimate aims of the Revolution.

Ryan says “It took a while to put [Korolev’s] character together but the more research I did into the period the more I wanted to try and show the psychological pressures and damage that the savage wars, famines and repression that had ravaged Russia in the years after 1914 inflicted on individual Russians and how they managed to cope. And the fact that Korolev has managed to retain his optimism and morality through all of this is what makes him, I hope, an attractive character.”

From Russian Life interview with William Ryan, January 10, 2012 (http://www.russianlife.com/blog/interview-william-ryan/)

Sweetland, by Michael Crummey

The steel mill was a city unto itself. Massive coke ovens, storage tanks and elevators, engine rooms, stock houses the size of city churches, miles of train tracks and gas lines and elevated piping that criss-crossed the blackened acres. Cooling stations, smoke and creosote and slag, the molten glow of the pour-offs at the open hearths like some evangelical's vision of hell. Everything was in motion, cranes and railcars, conveyor belts shifting ore pellets to the blast furnaces, coal cars shuttling from the battery to the ovens, sheets of heated strip steel rolling through rotating cylinders. All of it seemed to be moving at cross purposes and the unremitting noise of the place was a physical thing, hammering against them. The air heated and condensed, packed with dust and steam and a nauseating chemical sweat. Men darting among the machinery like rats, their faces grimed with soot.

This is Michael Crummey's vivid description of the mill that his protagonist, Moses Sweetland, works in with his friend, Duke Fewer, when the two young men go to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, to find work. In Crummey's novel, 'Sweetland,' Moses and his friend can barely eke out a subsistence existence where they live on the island by the same name, Sweetland, in Newfoundland. Every other inhabitant (90 in all) of the small town is in the same boat (no pun intended), as a result of the moratorium on cod fishing imposed by the Canadian government in 1992. The moratorium was forced by over fishing and the resulting collapse of the once-plentiful fish stock.

Crummey's writing has been described in glowing terms, but as "spare lyricism" (the St John's Telegram). I guess I don't know what spare means in this sense. I see his descriptions of place, as in the steel mill above, as rich, fulsome (in the best sense), and evocative. Crummey is an award-winning poet, and his prose employs a variety of poetic devices, such as the parataxis demonstrated in the steel mill paragraph. He's able to do this without getting caught at it. One simply stops reading and exclaims, 'What a wonderful description,' or 'How well put,' or just says nothing and simply sits back and imagines being there, under a threatening sky, "a scudding wind kicking a lop on the water high enough to spit over the gunwale...soaked with ocean spray...face rimed with salt."

Crummey's story is about the disappearance of a way of life and it reflects, as any good story does, reality for Newfoundland's tiny coastal communities of fishermen and their kin. It revolves around the resettlement program implemented by the government of Canada. Families were offered a considerable amount of money to resettle to designated "growth areas." The sticking point in Crummey's novel was that all families had to agree (in actuality, the stipulation was that 80 to 90 percent of families had to agree). The government made it clear that once resettlement was completed, services would be cut off. In 'Sweetland,' we find the one hold out, Moses Sweetland, stranded in Chance Cove after he agrees to leave, then disappears as the government ferry is loaded.

Why does Moses Sweetland stubbornly refuse to leave the hardscrabble existence that he and others in the community endure? Perhaps it's because of the experience he had working in the steel mill, an experience that scarred him for life, physically and emotionally. Perhaps it's because who is, who he sees himself as being, is so tightly wound up with the concept of place that leaving is simply inconceivable. He is as much rooted to the land as the gnarled and tangled stands of stunted spruce and balsam fir -- the tuckamore -- anchored to the rock, weathered into swept-back, sculptural shapes by harsh coastal growing conditions.

Sweetland will not leave the island, but the island will leave him. Crummey doesn't lecture about climate change. He simply tells his story, and in his story, dead, emaciated birds wash up on shore. "Dozens of bullbirds dead in the water, the corpses like tiny bouys off their moorings and drifting past the breakwater...hundreds more of them on the surface beyond the breakwater, floating dead. The birds so delicately calibrated they'd starved within hours of each other, the organs shutting down one at a time." Sweetland realizes that these birds, these fish, these places are, "relics of another time and on their way out."

At some primal level, Sweetland understands that he too, is a relic. That, "There was a new world being built around him." Listening to the Fisheries Broadcast, he heard about, "apocalyptic weather, rising sea levels, alterations in the seasons, in ocean temperatures. Fish migrating north in search of colder water and the dovekies lost in the landscape they were made for. The generations of instinct they'd relied on to survive here suddenly useless."

In the end, I was left sad by the story. Sad for the plight of the people. Sad for the suffering. Their diminishment. Sad to realize that for many, perhaps most, their resettlement will not bring happiness, but simply another sort of suffering by virtue of an alienation that an indoor toilet can't assuage. Sad for the loss of a way of life. But I realize, as well, that I feel as if I've come to know these people, and I will miss them.

The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins said in an interview, "Nobody expects this, do they?" about the phenomenal success of her thriller, The Girl on the Train. I wouldn't have. Don't get me wrong. It's a good read. Something to take with you on your vacation to that B&B on the Oregon Coast. But the prose is prosaic, and the first-person point of view of the three women narrators has one wondering how one of the women, who ends up dead, manages to tell her tale. I mean, this isn't The Lovely Bones.

The main character -- our protagonist -- is Rachel, and she is a drunk, and as such, her narration of the story is unreliable. She has memory lapses (to say the least), she mis-remembers things, and she believes things that her husband (now ex-husband) told her that may or not be true. In addition, she lies like a rug. All this serves to keep the reader guessing -- it did me -- but it also becomes a bit tedious. In fact, at one point I was hoping that Rachel would become another victim and once in the afterlife, be more or less compelled to tell the truth -- I mean, who lies in the afterlife?

The other women who relate the story are Anna and Megan. They are both flawed women, as is Rachel. In fact, halfway through the book one has to ask, 'why do we care about these women?' The answer is, we don't. We just want to get to the end and find out 'who done it.' Because The Girl on the Train is, after all is said and done, a thriller.

The Martian: A Novel

by Andy Weir

In his novel, The Martian, Andy Weir, reimagines Robinson Crusoe stranded on Mars, instead of some much more hospitable island in Earth's seas (and atmosphere). His protagonist's survival is unlikely, but Nick Watney is determined and resourceful. His struggles just to last the first few days after the storm that left him in this circumstance exemplify his courage and single-minded struggle to live, even though in the back of his mind he may think his long-term chances are hopeless.

The Martian is the first published novel by Weir. It was originally self-published in 2011 after which Crown Publishing purchased the rights and re-released it in 2014.

According to Wikipedia, having been rebuffed by literary agents when trying to get prior books published, Weir decided to put the book online in serial format one chapter at a time for free at his website. At the request of fans he made an Amazon Kindle version available through Amazon.com at 99 cents (the minimum he could set the price). The Kindle edition rose to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling science-fiction titles, where it sold 35,000 copies in three months, more than had previously downloaded it for free. This garnered the attention of publishers: Podium Publishing, an audiobook publisher, signed for the audiobook rights in January 2013. Weir sold the print rights to Crown in March 2013 for six figures.

The Ridley Scott directed film is scheduled to be released on November 25, 2015 in 3D, and stars Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain, with Michael Peña, Kristen Wiig and Jeff Daniels in supporting roles.

In other words, the dream scenario for all you self-published authors out there.

My opinion is that the story will make a better film than a novel, unless, like Andy Weir, you're "a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of subjects like relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight." This is not say I didn't enjoy the novel -- I did. But it is replete with technical detail on how to survive in Mar's harsh environment, and, at times, all this 'geeky stuff" became tedious. A picture is worth a thousand words, and that's what we'll see in the film.

Wadi Rum, Jordan, location for the filming of The Martian

Chinaberry

by James Stll
Edited by Silas House
From a review by Tom Eblen

Chinaberry is about the epic journey of an unnamed boy of 13, who often seems much younger. He leaves Alabama with family friends for a summer of picking cotton in Texas. During the next three months, his life is transformed.

"I think it's a love story on so many levels," House said. "It's a love story between the author and childhood, between a person and a place. I think there's a palpable love for Texas in the book, and for a way of life that's gone forever."

At the heart of the story is the relationship that develops between the boy and the Chinaberry ranch's owner, Anson Winters, and his second wife, Lurie. Anson virtually adopts the boy, treating him as a replacement for the young, handicapped son whose death he still grieves.

"What's so brilliant about the book is that (Still) doesn't make any judgments; it's a psychological thriller in a way," said House, who found some scenes almost creepy.

Plum and Jaggers

by Susan Richards Shreve

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW

Four young children are orphaned in 1974, when a terrorist bomb explodes on the Milan-Rome express train, in this touching novel about how families cope with violence and loss. The explosion occurs just after the elder McWilliamses leave their kids briefly to get lunch in the cafe car, which is the part of the train that's blown to bits. Dazed and frightened, Charlotte, Oliver and infant Julia cling to Sam, who, at age seven, is the oldest of the siblings. An Italian family cares for them until they're picked up by their kind but conservative grandfather, who--with their agoraphobic grandmother--raises them in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Though they love their new charges, the grandparents are distraught by the children's compulsive, secretive behavior, especially that of Sam, who, obsessed by his perceived responsibility to protect his family, becomes a loner with a bad reputation. After Sam is mistakenly blamed for the beating of a younger, handicapped boy, the family moves to Washington, D.C., where Sam shoplifts items to build a bomb shelter and is placed in a juvenile detention center. There, he conceives the idea for Plum & Jaggers, a comedy troupe eventually composed of his brother and sisters, whose bizarre scenarios transform with dark humor the tragedies of random violence and the ironies of modern life.

An accomplished author of adult (The Visiting Physician) and children's (The Formerly Great Alexander Family) fiction, Shreve reveals the orphans' creativity and self-destructiveness with balanced honesty, evoking her familiar themes of distrust and haunting memories. Best at sketches detailing individual quirks of the McWilliamses as they grow up, Shreve focuses more intensely throughout on the most disturbed, unstable and unusual character of Sam and leaves the other three siblings a bit sketchier. But through Sam's dark ebullience, Shreve traces the complexity of the family, including the spirits of the dead parents, offering a compassionate portrait of a courageous, troubled and resilient foursome.

Fram, by Steve Himmer

Oscar is a minor bureaucrat in the Bureau of Ice Prognostication, a secret government agency created during the heyday of the Cold War and still operating in the present without the public’s knowledge. Tasked with inventing discoveries and settlements in the Arctic, then creating the paperwork and digital records to “prove” their existence-preventing the inconvenience and expense of actual exploration-the job is the closest Oscar has come to his boyhood dream of being a polar explorer.

Fantasy becomes all too real when Oscar and his partner Alexi are sent on a secret mission to the actual Arctic, which brings them into a mysterious tangle of rival espionage that grows more dangerous the farther north they travel.

The trip also allows Oscar to reconnect with his wife, Julia, from whom he’s grown alienated by years of lying about what he does for a living (a distance compounded by Julia’s own secret government job), leading both of them to discover what can be lost if we let one part of ourselves—or one part of a story—distract us from everything else the world offers.

Anglemaker, by Nick Harkaway

Joe Spork is a quiet, unassuming clock-repairer and the protagonist of Nick Harkaway's novel Anglemaker. When we meet him, Joe is a creature of distinctly untested mettle. This changes dramatically when he meets the dreaded Opium Khan, aka Shem Shem Tsien, a possibly immortal, definitely voluble, downright Bondian super-villain given to boastful self-mythologizing.

“Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was a boy born in the nation of Addeh Sikkim, in the royal palace, who wanted nothing more than to lead his people into a new world of prosperity and hope. He was suited to the task: clever and able and well-favored.” The Opium Khan looked nostalgic.

“I locked him in a steel box and burned him alive.”

Joe is an unwitting, mostly unwilling, certainly confused hero and like the rest of us, remains in the dark about just what the hell is going on for the bulk of Angelmaker’s nearly 500 pages. Joe is the only son of London’s most notorious gangster (Harkaway is John le Carre’s son). An identity he rejects in favor of a quiet, honest life among his flywheels and jewelers’ loupes. But like one of Shakspear’s fated characters, Joe is inevitably pulled into a battle of good against evil; a battle for the very existence of mankind.

Harkaway splits the novel's first half between Joe’s present day and the Cold War era, in which a young female superspy faces off against the aforementioned Shem Shem Tsien. When sinister officials grind Joe up in the gears of the State, and when he finally gets pushed far enough to fight back, we find ourselves thinking ‘finally!’

Harkaway’s book, in its disregard of verisimilitude and generic constraint is utterly immune to precis. It isn’t steampunk. It isn’t fantasy or science fiction. It isn’t speculative. Some have called it "existential."

From its frantic oscillation between plausibility and fantasy emerges an odd, unique composite that seems to deserve its own genre. The plot is a jigsaw of pulpish tropes: there are enigmatic hooded monks; female superspies; devilish machines; London gangsters; an underground (both figuratively and geographically) criminal society operating with its own morality; and the small matter of a doomsday device involving lots and lots of tiny mechanical bees, and which Joe's tinkering unwittingly sets into motion.

When all is said and done, it is an enjoyable read, but truth to tell, there are times during Harkaway’s highly encumbered plot and prose when tedium edges up on the reader, and there is temptation to just scan what seems extraneous circumlocution and get on with it.

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This review borrows liberally from reviews by others, among them: James Purdon, Glen Weldon, and David Barnett.

Spook Country, by William Gibson

From the review by Dave Itzkoff, in the New York Times

“Spook Country,” Gibson’s first novel since “Pattern Recognition,” moves farther from science-fiction speculation and immerses itself fully in modernist realism. More than a post-9/11 novel, it is arguably the first example of the post-post-9/11 novel, whose characters are tired of being pushed around by forces larger than they are — bureaucracy, history and, always, technology — and are at long last ready to start pushing back

Structurally, “Spook Country” rotates among the perspectives of three characters. The first is Hollis Henry, a member of a defunct rock band that enjoyed modest cult success. Now a writer for a magazine no one seems to have heard of, she’s investigating a high-tech art subculture for an enigmatic employer whose interests in the movement may transcend objective journalism

The second is Tito, a Cuban-Chinese immigrant who’s recruited into a series of espionage missions by an old man who Tito hopes can shed light on his father, who died under mysterious circumstances

Finally, there is Milgrim, an amphetamine addict and an expert of sorts in obscure details of communication and cryptography. He’s in thrall to a government stooge named Brown, who forces Milgrim to accompany him on his own surreptitious spying assignments by threatening to cut off his drug supply, and whom Milgrim occasionally suspects might not really be a government agent at all, and might just be a jerk with a gun. (Only he doesn’t use a word as nice as “jerk.”)

What initially unites these seemingly unrelated narratives is a theme familiar to Gibson’s work: the novice initiated into an alternative reality he or she never knew existed. But in each of these strands, Gibson is also playing on the word “spook,” not just in the slang sense of a spy, but also in the more traditional sense of a ghost — of figures who pass through the world unnoticed and unrecognized, and who are about to find out how empowering anonymity can be

At first, Hollis, the musician-turned-journalist, emerges as the novel’s most intriguing character. (Surely Gibson didn’t need the experience of interviewing U2 for Wired magazine to learn how it feels to be a rock star.) Her investigations introduce her to a form of expression called locative art, in which “spatially tagged hypermedia” and a sophisticated visor allow an observer to view images in the real world that are otherwise invisible to passersby: don the glasses in front of the Viper Room in West Hollywood and see an artist’s virtual recreation of the moment when River Phoenix died; stand in the world music section of the Virgin Megastore while wearing them and see F. Scott Fitzgerald suffer a heart attack

It’s a setup that lets Gibson riff on the immortality of celebrity, and reveal a side of himself that, though it may not be optimistic about the future, is at least willing to concede that the past is still up for grabs. (“The past isn’t dead,” Hollis muses aloud, in a nod to Faulkner. “It’s not even past.”) More important, locative art becomes a potent metaphor for a disjointed world where anyone can experience reality as he chooses to see it, and no two people’s observations of the same place or event need coincide in any way. If locative art went mainstream, one character predicts, “The world we walk around in would be channels.

But in later chapters, I found myself more fascinated with Milgrim, who sees his relationship to Brown as a twisted, 21st-century upgrade of Tom and Huck, and who wonders just how involuntary his servitude really is. And when Milgrim glances at a beat-up copy of a book on Europe’s history of revolutionary messianism that he just happens to keep in his coat pocket, he provides Gibson with another laboratory to synthesize his limitless curiosity about technology with his deep misgivings about the modern world

Under the dominance of Catholicism, Milgrim thinks, medieval Europe was a “one-channel universe ... broadcasting from Rome,” a province with “a hierarchy in place and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

Of course, Gibson doesn’t have to reach as far back as medieval Europe to find a realm plagued by a unitary broadcast in dire need of being drowned out, and it is not only Milgrim who lives his life alternately in obedience and resistance to his autocratic masters. And as “Spook Country” refers to the spectacle of George W. Bush’s jet-fighter landing aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, examines the true function of terrorism (“to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law”) and explains how torture fundamentally undermines the process of intelligence gathering, it is not only the novel’s central characters who are left to wonder what has become of, as one character puts it, “the country he hoped was still America.

When the three narrative strands of “Spook Country” at last converge, almost 300 pages into the novel and just in the nick of time, they culminate in a climactic prank meant to deliver an accountability moment to some shadowy off-screen figures who have so far avoided blame for the world’s ills. And you may wonder, as I did, briefly, if this slick, “Seinfeld”-ian resolution was really worth all the events that preceded it

But I don’t think that’s the lesson of “Spook Country.” The point is that its protagonists are ultimately able to channel their feelings of detachment and insignificance into something meaningful and pleasantly destructive — and it is precisely because of their apparent insignificance that they are able to do so. When they breathe a sigh of relief for the invitingly uncertain world that awaits them, Gibson can, too: the future is a clean slate for all of them, and whether his characters realize it or not, the author surely understands that this is a symbol of ultimate freedom.
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Dave Itzkoff writes the Across the Universe column for the Book Review.

The Ploughmen, by Kim Zupan

Storm on Montana Wheat (Giovanni Gervasi)

Valentine Millimaki, a sheriff's deputy in central Montana, is the officer who's called upon whenever someone goes missing. In the past, he has found people either safe or clinging to life, if barely. But for over a year, he's only found corpses, dead of exposure or suicide or murder. "Valentine Millimaki did not bring back angels," writes novelist Kim Zupan in The Ploughmen.

Millimaki's is assigned to a new detail: the night shift at the jail, where a hardened killer named John Gload is being held awaiting trial. Now the job is coming close to costing him his sanity and his marriage. Millimaki and the murderer forge an uneasy relationship.

Reviewers compare Zupan's prose favorably to Cormack McCarthy, and there is a similarity in the flow and imagery. The writing is self-assured and beautiful, but it lacks the depth and profundity of McCarthy.

Zupan's novel begins with a scene from Millimaki's childhood. He sees a note in his family's kitchen, written by his mother and intended for his father. "Darling — Come alone to the shed," it reads. The young boy takes an apple from the table, walks to the shed, and finds his mother hanging from a noose. Later, Gload will confide in the deputy that he also lost his father at a young age; he was caught in a snowstorm, frozen to death before he could find help.

Both men suffer from insomnia, both have troubled relationships. But there aren't many other similarities between the two. While Millimaki dedicates his life to saving the living, or, when he can't, recovering their bodies, Gload has dedicated his to murder — killing people and selling their belongings. When Gload starts engaging Millimaki in long conversations at night, the killer in his cell and the deputy outside, Millimaki is too enervated to resist.

The Ploughmen is a remarkable novel, beautifully executed and dark as pitch. It's almost hard to believe that it's a debut — Zupan is a carpentry teacher who has previously worked as a fisherman and rodeo rider. He grew up in central Montana, and it's clear he knows the landscape well. His descriptions of the country are stunning: "It was dark among the trees ... the snow lay deep and untrammeled, lit softly blue from the quarter moon and the stars swarming in the cloudless vault above the peaks."

He's equally gifted at considering the uneasy relationship that lies at the novel's core. There's no logical reason that a young straight-laced sheriff's deputy and an elderly killer would confide in each other, develop something approaching a friendship. Unless there is: In a sparse, barely populated part of the country, maybe there aren't many other options. "It's hard to be alone," thinks Millimaki at one point. "In this country, it's just hard to be alone."

The Ploughmen is an intensely Western novel, and it's absolutely beautiful, from its tragic opening scene to its tough, necessary end. Zupan is an unsparing writer, but also a generous, deeply compassionate one, and the relationship between Millimaki and Gload is one of the most troubling in recent American fiction.

From a review by Michael Schaub, for NPR

Tigerman: A Novel, by Nick Harkaway

"On the steps of the old mission house, the sergeant sat with the boy who called himself Robin, and watched a pigeon being swallowed by a pelican." So begins the novel, Tigerman, by Nick Harkaway that pretty much defies categorization. io9 calls it "existential pulp," comparing it to comic book fiction, but with serious questions about "existence and personhood." The Independent calls the novel, "post-pulp." Harkaway himself says of his novels, "My books are hard to categorise: they have elements of the fantastical, so they often do end up on the science fiction shelves, which is like parking a skidoo among motorbikes: sort of makes sense, but not a perfect fit."

As Jason Sheehan writes for NPR, Tigerman is the story of Sergeant Lester Ferris — a British soldier who has "seen too many wars in too many places," and is now approaching an uneventful retirement babysitting the brevet-consul position of the doomed island of Mancreu. The island, like so much of Harkaway's book, is imaginary.

Due to past ecological insults visited on the island by greedy corporations, unnamed but familiar, Mancreu now occasionally belches clouds of toxic waste, and is thus due to be cleansed any day now by fire and high explosives, courtesy of a panicked international community, fearful that the rest of the world will be somehow 'infected' by the island's inflected disease. One is reminded of global warming, except the world doesn't seem to be paying attention.

As the story unfolds, Mancreu exists in a sort of legal limbo. No one wants it, so no one rules it, and anarchy prevails. Mancreu has become home to the sorts of characters who seek out lawless places. The 'Bay of the Cupped Hands' has filled up with the Black Fleet — a dangerous if motley collection of intelligence posts, gun boats, illicit hospital ships, drug labs, torture centers and money laundries — and the bars with journalists and spies. Lester, because as the sole remaining representative of the U.K. government's former colonial apparatus, he has been ordered very clearly to not care about any of it, turn a blind eye, mark time, and for God's sake, don't give any interviews to the Press.

But the Sergeant isn't the sort of man to watch as dogs are kidnapped, fish are stolen, drugs are stockpiled, and most of all, a street kid is in danger of being orphaned, if he's not already, and thrown to the mercies of the global refugee debacle.

This boy, who Lester sees as possibly the son he never had, sees himself as Robin to Lester's Batman, or any superhero will do. And the boy, who gauges everything by levels of awesome, ultimately convinces Lester, at a certain point, to become a superhero called Tigerman, and to right wrongs, large and small. Lester goes along with it because he loves the boy, although he will not use that word, worries over the boy, indeed, saves the boy as mysterious evil-doers viciously gun down their friend, a barkeep, with his fingers possibly in nefarious doings.

Mancreu is, of course, a microcosm of all man's petty lusts and foibles. Harkaway's prose are especially telling when he writes along these lines. When describing an initial conversation the sergeant has with the former British Consul to Mancreu, for example, the man warns Lester not to answer the phone. "By the time it rings, the situation is fucked up beyond all retrieval anyway." He then compares Mancreu to Iraq, saying, "Should have had a better bloody plan in the first place. Should have said what we said we were doing in Afghanistan and left Iraq alone." Harkaway then has him say, "Conduct oneself with a bit of dignity and don't let the local staff get murdered. Avoid the sexual torture of prisoners, that's always a good one." Yes, indeed that's a good one.

As Sheehan writes, "for all the strangeness that lives in Tigerman, Harkaway never loses his grip." What is strange is necessary and just right and altogether enchanting and awful. The sergeant is always a soldier and too old to play superhero even when he is Tigerman. And you are, of course, pulling for the boy and the sergeant and the sergeant's dream of saving the boy and having a son and when the story ends you can not be disappointed, because it ends as it has to.

Just Published: The Reunification of Joseph K

Joseph Kimmelmann, a graduate of the Jackson School of International Relations, Korean Studies Program, is greeted at the Pyongyang Airport by two North Korean ‘minders,’ who accompany him virtually everywhere he goes during his visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the so-called, ‘Hermit Kingdom.’

Joseph represents Castle, a venture capital firm that wrings profits out of distressed properties, and Pyongyang’s Ryugyong Hotel, under construction for twenty-six years, is as distressed as they come. But Castle Ventures has no intention of helping the DPRK finance the hotel. Instead, Joseph is in Pyongyang to spy on potential competitors. But Joseph has another mission in North Korea, a ‘small favor’ he agreed to do for the CIA.

It only takes Joseph a few days to learn that flaunting the prohibitions placed on foreign visitors by North Korea is an extremely dangerous game. It takes him a little longer to realize just how foolish he’s been in coming to North Korea, let alone in associating himself with the ‘American imperialistic’ CIA.

“The Reunification of Joseph K” is the story of a flawed young man’s introduction to a culture he thought he knew. A culture he studied in great detail, becoming fluent in its language and, he thought, in its customs. But despite his advanced degree, Joseph’s appreciation for the ‘cult of Kim,’ is sadly deficient and he is ill-prepared for the elaborate scheme the People’s Republic has hatched to thumb its nose at America, a scheme in which he, Joseph Kimmelmann, is the pawn.

In many respects, The Reunification of Joseph K is reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” Like his namesake, Josef K, Joseph Kimmelmann is conspired against and prosecuted by inaccessible authorities, but unlike Kafka’s unfortunate protagonist, Joseph Kimmelmann knows why he’s being punished, and he’s willing to try anything to escape his fate.

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Available in the Amazon.com Kindle Store on November 5, 2013

The Reunification of Joseph K

by Richard Badalamente

Joseph Kimmelmann, a graduate of the Jackson School of International Relations, Korean Studies Program, is greeted at the Pyongyang Airport by two ‘minders,’ who will accompany him virtually everywhere he goes during his visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the so-called, ‘Hermit Kingdom.’

Joseph represents Castle, a venture capital firm that wrings profits out of distressed properties, and Pyongyang’s Ryugyong Hotel, under construction for twenty-six years, is as distressed as they come. But Castle Ventures has no intention of helping the DPRK finance the hotel. Instead, Joseph is in Pyongyang to spy on potential competitors. But Joseph has another mission in North Korea, a ‘small favor’ he agreed to do for the CIA.

It only takes Joseph a few days to learn that flaunting the prohibitions placed on foreign visitors by North Korea is an extremely dangerous game. It takes him a little longer to realize just how foolish he’s been in coming to North Korea, let alone in associating himself with the ‘American imperialistic’ CIA.

“The Reunification of Joseph K” is the story of a flawed young man’s introduction to a culture he thought he knew. A culture he studied in great detail, becoming fluent in its language and, he thought, in its customs. But despite his advanced degree, Joseph’s appreciation for the ‘cult of Kim,’ is sadly deficient and he is ill-prepared for the elaborate scheme the People’s Republic has hatched to thumb its nose at America, a scheme in which he, Joseph Kimmelmann, is the pawn.
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The Reunification of Joseph K is scheduled to be published in November 2013

Woman in the Ruins

A story by Michael Peck
From Zouch Magazine (by permission)

The prostitute was not surprised by Berke’s request. Nor when he unscrewed a fold-out easel in the bathroom. Organized his tubes of paint on the sink.

Berke’s city, 1944, bombed into its own shadow. The gathering of photographers excited by all this photogenic death. Orphans prowled the alleyways of his dead city. The orphans wanted to be photographed. The photographers didn’t want to photograph the orphans. The orphans stole the photographers’ equipment. The photographers became incensed and chased the orphans. The orphans hid in closets and cupboards.

  “I want you to shower,” Berke said.

     “I’m clean.”

     She covered her breasts with her hands and stepped into the shower. Awkward in the adolescent purity of the old man’s longing.

     “The water should be cold. Turn away from me and wash yourself as though I’m not here.”

     He outlined a background of disintegrating gray-stone and brick. The white of the parched sky.

The woman in the ruins.

Her short brown hair.

White tight fingers clutching soap.

“Do you like this?” the girl asked.

“Continue to wash yourself,” Berke said.

Of it all, Berke remembered; the sinkhole of a house once belonging to a violin manufacturer, and the naked woman bathing contentedly in the spray of a geysering water main. Scrubbing her shoulders, dark silt drifting down her legs.

It wasn’t her face that he recalled, but the soap. As it slipped through her fingers. As it cascaded along the dusty street. As it descended into the gutter. As the woman turned to him.

The woman in the sinkhole began to cry. She looked pleadingly at Berke. He felt real shame, then. Shame at eavesdropping on her sadness.

He was twelve.

“Look at me,” the woman said to him.

“Look at me,” Berke said to the girl.

He hated the painting as soon as it was finished.

The girl wrapped herself in a towel. When she came up to Berke he slapped her hard on the face with the back of his hand. She was stunned with instinctive tears.

“I’m trying to find something,” he said.

“Did you find it?” she asked.

“No.”

At the door he gave the girl an extra fifty dollars.

Afterwards he walked away to other ruins, wondering who else’s dream the woman would inhabit.

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Zouch Magazine

publishes an eclectic compendium of material from a broad and diverse range of sources and genres, including: poetry; original fiction; nonfiction including interviews, reviews, essays; and commentary on style and design, art, music, cartoons, and other forms of media.