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| 0061006629
| 9780061006623
| B001IKTKVQ
| 4.01
| 49,956
| 1992
| Jan 01, 1992
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it was amazing
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A Submariner in Berlin Berlin, 1964. President Kennedy is about to arrive on a state visit. Meanwhile, the city bustles with preparations for the Führe A Submariner in Berlin Berlin, 1964. President Kennedy is about to arrive on a state visit. Meanwhile, the city bustles with preparations for the Führer's 75th birthday. Yes, Hitler. For in Harris's celebrated counterfactual novel, Germany has won the war. I came to this after reading C. J. Sansom's recent Dominion, set in a postwar Britain that has become a satellite state of a victorious Germany, and Sansom acknowledges Harris as his master. But given how much Sansom devotes to the political situation, I was surprised that Harris almost underplays it. The map of the Greater German Reich in the frontispiece shows the country extending far beyond Moscow to the East, but its other borders remain much the same. It is not until well on in the book that we get any clues about what has happened to the countries of Western Europe. For the first half at least, this does not read like a political novel so much as a police procedural. The protagonist is Xavier March, former U-boat captain, now a detective inspector with the Berlin Kripo. Although he holds the honorary rank of SS Sturmbannführer, March is essentially a loner, an "asocial" in Party parlance, a non-joiner who follows lines but does not toe them. He reminds me very much of Arkady Renko in Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith; Harris is absolutely in Smith's league, or John Le Carré's before him. The body of an elderly man turns up in the water near Berlin's most exclusive neighborhood, and March takes the case almost by accident. But soon he finds himself tangling with people very high up in the Gestapo hierarchy, and finds himself fighting for his career and even his life, variously aided by old friends from his U-boat days and a beautiful American journalist. Harris creates a police state that is essentially an extension of its familiar prewar form, now spared the ravages of war. But it is also a state that has been able to maintain a tight control of its secrets; most of the horrors that came to light at Nuremberg and beyond are here still shrouded in darkness. It requires a shift of imagination for the modern reader to conceive a postwar situation where, for instance, Auschwitz is no more than a name on a map. Harris manages to pull it off, partly by his carefully controlled pacing, partly by his meticulous use of real people and events, documenting much that really happened. But this is more than a brilliantly-researched book; it is also a magnificently inventive thriller and rightly the foundation of Harris's considerable reputation. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 09, 2014
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Aug 10, 2014
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Jun 10, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0547738900
| 9780547738901
| 0547738900
| 3.64
| 400
| Jan 01, 2014
| Jul 01, 2014
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it was ok
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Vatican Thrills and Spills My title is admittedly facetious. James Carroll writes a pretty good thriller, in the vein of Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludl Vatican Thrills and Spills My title is admittedly facetious. James Carroll writes a pretty good thriller, in the vein of Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, or Dan Brown. But I question the propriety, or indeed the literary viability, of writing this kind of book around such a subject. The setting, of course, is Rome, beginning with the American liberation in 1944 and continuing a few months after the end of the War. And the underlying subject is the Vatican attitude to the Holocaust, and its later involvement in helping war criminals escape. But let's take one thing at a time. One requirement for a political thriller is to have a protagonist of obvious talents but young enough to have most readers easily identify with him. Carroll has two. David Warburg, the title character, is a young lawyer with the Treasury Department, sent by Secretary Morgenthau to Rome to head his pet project, the War Refugee Board, on the mistaken assumption that he is one of the powerful New York family of Warburgs. This is important, because the purpose of the WRB is to rescue Jews. David, though, is the son of a Vermont butcher and has not even been bar-mitzvahed, but he wins the Secretary's confidence anyway and arrives in Rome just a day after the triumphal entrance of General Mark Clark. The other protagonist is Monsignor Kevin Deane, personal assistant to Archbishop Spellman in New York. Though Kevin is a decade older than David, the two get into an energetic game of one-on-one basketball within days of meeting. But that is nothing to the pissing match David gets into with his roommate, Colonel Peter Mates, on a visit to the Swedish Embassy on his second day. The trope of an apparently insignificant civilian speaking power to rank is of course another staple of such fiction, and Carroll handles it superbly. Other leading characters include a young German priest who is a protégé of Himmler's, an exiled French cleric with a murky past, and the underground leader of the Jewish resistance in Rome. And of course there have to be women. Here there are two: an Oxford PhD in Mathematics who joined a convent to escape a love affair, and Marguerite D'Erasmo, the coordinator of the Red Cross in Rome. So the characters are all in place; what does Carroll do with them? There are, as I say, some terrific scenes, less of action than jockeying for influence or information. Almost all the characters have roles other than those they play on the surface, hidden loyalties or secret demons that they need to expunge. The novel opens with one paradigm shift; with the loss of Rome, many Germans begin to think how they might handle the loss of the War, rather than the winning of it. And the War's end creates two more: Communism is now the larger threat to American interests, while Zionism becomes a dominant concern for certain Jewish groups, who resort to terrorist tactics to achieve access to Palestine. Almost every chapter involves some new realignment; characters never know whom to trust, and eventually the reader gets confused too. Then there are the religious aspects. I don't know why so many authors can't write about priests and nuns without introducing some erotic element that at least threatens their vows of chastity; there is at least one forbidden-sex scene that is bizarre to say the least. Set off against this is the fact that the non-observant David Warburg eventually embraces Judaism as living faith and the Catholic Marguerite D'Erasmo converts—both life-changing decisions that you would think would be treated with a lot more significance than they are here. Purely as a thriller, all the same, I would give this four stars. But then I come up against the propriety issue. Perhaps I have read too many Holocaust books recently; I did not know that this would be another. I think it was Carroll's intent to use the Shoah to authenticate the goodness of his fictional characters who work to alleviate it, but all I saw was the obscenity of treating the slaughter of millions as mere scenery against which to play the cat-and-mouse game of the typical escapist thriller. And it did not even work in plot terms, for while the characters I listed are all fictional, most of the rest are real, as are many of the historical events in the book. So the attempts to mount a rescue here or carry out an assassination there are doomed to failure if history has decreed otherwise. The heroes' only real successes are against straw characters created merely in order to be ultimately defeated. As for the question of Vatican involvement, the provision of escape ratlines is pretty much a matter of historical record, though the Church's ineffectiveness during the Holocaust is much more murky. Carroll questions Vatican neutrality at lower levels, but stays clear of accusing Pope Pius XII outright. All the same, questions of this sort—and the moral implications of postwar Zionism—are too serious matters to be handled in a popular novel. Verdict: a pretty good read for thriller fans, but absolutely not for historians or moralists. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 27, 2014
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Aug 30, 2014
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Jun 10, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1590173813
| 9781590173817
| 1590173813
| 3.61
| 2,466
| 1977
| Apr 26, 2011
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liked it
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Almost Surreal Noir Let's face it, I bought this book for its cover and its slim size. I have seldom been disappointed by NYRB books, and thought this Almost Surreal Noir Let's face it, I bought this book for its cover and its slim size. I have seldom been disappointed by NYRB books, and thought this would make a tart little sorbet between more substantial courses. Besides, I was curious about this "genre-redefining French crime novelist" who died in 1995 at the age of 53, and the inclusion of an afterword by no less than Jean Echenoz, who has done a bit of genre redefining himself, promised at least a pedigree. It is a short work, only 91 pages, and of little substance, but I was not disappointed. It begins with a bang, when a rich hunter in Eastern France is shot at close range by a beautiful woman, who then changes her appearance and boards a luxury night sleeper to the other end of the country, headed for the fictional port city of Bléville. Now calling herself Aimée Joubert, she insinuates herself among the movers and shakers in the place, uncovers the rivalries and shady dealings, and ends with an astonishing high body count for such a short book. Manchette was apparently a practitioner of the néo-polar: that is to say, a crime thriller with a politically radical agenda. And Aimée is decidedly an anti-establishment killer. The name of the city, which translates roughly to Bread Town, indicates that it will be a gathering place for the rich people who are her usual prey. But it carries an almost playful air of satire, utterly different from the social realism of French policiers in the manner of, say, Simenon. Killer though she is, we come to like Aimée, and though the town's oligarchy are mired in corruption and we certainly do not admire many of them, they seem more like caricatures than class oppressors. Indeed, when the first death occurred in this new setting, I almost took it as a piece of surreal absurdity. Perhaps I was influenced by the endorsement from Jean Echenoz, whose Je m'en vais has also its fair share of black absurdity. Also like Echenoz, Manchette revels in precise details of dress, measurements, and accessories, whether describing Aimée descending from the train ("boots in fawn leather with very high heels, a brown tweed skirt, a beige silk blouse, and a fawn suede car coat"), or her orgiastic celebration of her ill-gotten gains on the train the night before: And here in this luxury compartment of this luxury train her nostrils were assailed at once by the luxurious scent of the champagne and the foul odor of the filthy banknotes and the foul odor of the choucroute, which smelt like piss and sperm. [The racy translation is by Donald Nicholson-Smith.]Not your everyday crime novel, by any means, but often surprising, and consistently entertaining. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 07, 2014
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Sep 08, 2014
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Jun 10, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0062060554
| 9780062060556
| 0062060554
| 3.90
| 347,448
| Oct 01, 2011
| Jun 14, 2011
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liked it
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Writing to Recover the Past A young woman wakes up in bed to find a middle-aged man sleeping beside her. So that's what she did last night? She stagger Writing to Recover the Past A young woman wakes up in bed to find a middle-aged man sleeping beside her. So that's what she did last night? She staggers to the bathroom and looks in the mirror. The face that looks back at her is middle-aged too. We've all had mornings like that. But for Christine, the narrator of SJ Watson's psychological thriller, this disoriented waking is a daily occurrence. As a result of some trauma, she is unable to form memories that last more than a day. Every morning she awakes, she has to have it explained to her again that she is at home, being looked after by her husband Ben, a chemistry teacher in a local high school. There are photos of them both around the bathroom mirror, and everywhere there are signs of his devotion. But now something is different. Christine has been contacted by a physician, Dr. Nash, who is interested in researching her case. He has given her a journal to write in every day. Each morning, he calls her, to remind her where she has hidden it, and urging her to write some more. Occasionally, they also meet in person. So now Christine has a way of connecting one day to the next, and to build a store of memories that can actually add up. But what they add up to is not a whole number; something is missing; some things that she knows, or thinks she knows, conflict with others she has been told. And she begins, very faintly, to be able to recapture memories of her own…. Readers are fascinated by the idea of the Unreliable Narrator. Here we have three of them at least. Christine can only write what people tell her, or what she half remembers. Ben, it is clear, is not telling her everything—but is this to protect her, or because there are things to hide? Dr. Nash is young and attractive; he asks that Christine keep their meetings secret from Ben; has he got another agenda? And Christine herself, as she will discover, is a published novelist; are her "memories" true ones or confabulation, the writer's imagination at work? I am the border between four stars and five with this. "You'll stay up late until you know" says one of the reviews quoted on the back cover, and it is right: I did. But at the same time, the ending was not a surprise to me. I felt the climactic scene less involving than it might have been, perhaps because Watson himself had set the bar so high with his descriptions of more ordinary moments. There were also matters of chronology that troubled me—the lapse of time just seemed too long for everyone's actions to be believable; this was partly cleared up at the end, but doubts remained. And above all, knowing how long it takes for even a professional writer to write, I could not believe the basic premise that Christine could write journal entries of twenty pages or more describing the events of the day before she went to sleep. So not quite four stars, but a very high three. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 20, 2014
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Sep 22, 2014
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Jun 10, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1594633118
| 9781594633119
| 1594633118
| 3.45
| 81,617
| Aug 28, 2014
| Sep 16, 2014
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it was amazing
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Tilting the Tables Two or three pages into this, I was already basking in Sarah Waters' magnificent sense of interior life. Although writing entirely i Tilting the Tables Two or three pages into this, I was already basking in Sarah Waters' magnificent sense of interior life. Although writing entirely in the third person, she has the wonderful ability to get inside her protagonist, her feelings, her fears, and her desires. This is a long novel (564 pages), but a concentrated one. Its effective cast is small: four people in a shabby-genteel house in South London. Even when it opens out onto a wider stage at the end, its feeling remains that of chamber drama, closeted and confined, though extraordinarily rich within those secret spaces. It is 1922. Frances Wray lives with her mother in a substantial house in Champion Hill, a well-to-do neighborhood in Camberwell. Her brothers have been killed in the War; her father has died of natural causes, leaving behind a trail of debts that has forced the women to dismiss their servants and take in lodgers, or "paying guests" as they prefer to call them. These are a young couple, Len and Lil Barber; he is an insurance clerk in the City; she spends her time decorating their rooms with colorful gewgaws that show a certain flair, if little taste. For this being a British novel, there is of course a subtext of class. Hard up though they may be, Frances and her mother are gentry; Len and Lil belong to what is several times referred to (without apology) as "the clerk class," lower middle class to their upper. It is only one of a number of factors that tilt the tables in the house, though adding spice to whatever games may be played on them. For it goes without saying that Frances will get involved with her lodgers, young people like herself after all, and that this involvement will bring passion and devastation in its wake. Stop here if you don't want to know the nature of that involvement, though those familiar with the author will know. (view spoiler)[Those who have read Sarah Waters before will know that she is drawn to lesbian subjects, and so not be surprised that Frances will be attracted to Lillian, honoring her by using her full name. I was conscious all along of the extraordinary balancing act that this demands from the author. She is as far as possible from wanting to titillate. Even her descriptions of physical sex are intended to express the overwhelming power of emotional passion—or, in one striking scene towards the end, the barriers to passion. For her, clearly, love between women is a heaven-sent miracle, natural and in every way normal. And yet, to create a story, she has to emphasize its less normal aspects. The love story that occupies the first half of the book would be difficult to write in a heterosexual context without the risk of triteness, but the spice of transgression lends it a freshness that speaks again to all of us, regardless of orientation. At the same time, it creates a sinister foreboding that hangs over everything, a knowledge that if there are secrets in one aspect of their lives, there may well be other secrets lying in wait to ambush them. And when disaster strikes and they find themselves embroiled in a notorious trial, the secrecy of their relationship puts them into an almost insoluble moral quandary. I started the novel leisurely exploring the interior life of its main character; I ended it reading breathlessly for a hundred pages at a stretch, unable to put it down until I could find—or rather, the author could find—some ending that was both ethically acceptable and true to its time. She did, although there may be some who question the ethics; the lives of women in Waters' world seldom have neat endings. (hide spoiler)] Waters is known as a writer of historical fiction. The Victorian setting is very important to her earlier novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith. The Night Watch is set during and after the London Blitz (and surely an influence on Kate Atkinson's Life After Life ). The Little Stranger, her novel before this one, is set in the aftermath of the Second World War. So the choice of 1922 is not a casual one here. I thought I heard deliberate echoes of Mrs Dalloway in a morning walk that Frances takes through London early in the novel, and just as it is in Woolf, the precariousness of the postwar world is a subtle but important theme. There are references to the number of out-of-work ex-servicemen around the streets and the decline in public safety generally supposed to result from it. Men who have not fought tend to be defensive and insecure; there is not a single strong male character in the book. Women have got the vote, and many have taken jobs for the first time, but they are still in an anomalous position, unable to take full control of their own lives. [Feminists might reply that most still can't.] In such a world of faded promise, it is not merely Waters's particular female characters that have the tables tilted against them, but women everywhere. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 13, 2014
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Aug 16, 2014
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Jun 02, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1594632472
| 9781594632471
| 1594632472
| 3.25
| 1,366
| Jan 01, 2014
| Jan 23, 2014
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did not like it
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A Pointless Tribute "Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again." With her first sentence, Rachel Pastan pins her colors to the mast: this novel will be A Pointless Tribute "Last night I dreamed of Nauquasset again." With her first sentence, Rachel Pastan pins her colors to the mast: this novel will be a tribute to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, starting with this echo of her famous opening: "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again." It doesn't quite have the ring, does it? Reading the next four or five pages of lush prose, I began to feel slightly nauseous. I put it down to a sense of déjà vu, the half-remembered echoes of du Maurier's Cornwall clashing with the very different atmosphere of Pastan's Cape Cod. So I broke off in order to read Rebecca again, to get a clearer idea of what Pastan was working with. That was a mistake. Pastan's opening remains faintly nauseating, not merely because it is overwritten, but because it has no organic purpose in the book. Du Maurier opens with a lush dreamscape because she has deliberately chosen a certain genre—the Gothic romance—as a container for the feminist polemic that forms her subtext. Pastan opens in lush romantic style for no better reason than slavish imitation of her model. And the imitation continues for at least three-quarters of the book. If you had the two volumes side by side (they are of similar length), you could almost turn to a page in one, and find the equivalent passage on the same page in the other. Page 15, that must be when she meets him for the first time; 60, this will be where he proposes; 95, she meets his sister; and so on to the big celebration that is the climax of both novels. Rebecca is, among other things, a mystery, and gradually-mounting suspense is an essential part of it. But when the imitation follows its model so closely, most of the suspense has gone for those that know the earlier book. Both novels have a similar trajectory. In Rebecca, the nameless narrator comes as a young bride to the house of a rich older man, but is unable to escape the shadow of her brilliant predecessor, the Rebecca of the title, drowned under mysterious circumstances. The connection between the equally nameless heroine of Alena and her particular rich man, Bernard Augustin, is not the same, but the spirit of the dead Alena is equally present. To be fair, Pastan does take a slightly different direction at the end; the circumstances of Alena's death turn out to be more complex than Rebecca's, but by the same token less elemental, less shocking. And the author does have a cute twist up her sleeve for the final page—except that it gives no reason why the story should wrap around to the scene many years later with which the novel started. There are three major differences between Alena and Rebecca. One is the choice of the Cape Cod setting. Here, when she is not trying too hard to pen purple prose, Pastan is rather successful; the salt-sharp air and occasional fogs come over with satisfying reality. The second is that she makes Bernard gay, so there is no question of a love-interest on his part. Nonetheless, our heroine finds a romantic attachment elsewhere, though this complicates things later on, and there is really no reason why she and Bernard should stay together when the story ends. Thirdly, the link between the two of them is that Bernard runs a private art gallery, and he engages our heroine (on a mere week's acquaintance) to take Alena's former position as curator. The good thing about this is that it gives rise to a number of quite good scenes about art in general and the modern art world in particular, with emphasis on conceptual, performance, and body artists. Pastan knows her stuff, and there was a good novel to be written around it, if only she had not trapped herself in this particular form. For I could not believe the heroine's role in this for one moment. This is a girl who studied art history in a small college, worked as assistant in a minor museum in the Midwest, and who has never been to Europe, or even flown in a plane, until the book begins. Yes, she may have a good eye and be refreshingly free from cant, but the naive qualities that might intrigue a man making an impulsive choice of a wife simply do not cut it in the business of art. Being a curator, engaging artists, dealing with dealers and critics, all this requires a network of contacts that this sheltered young woman could not possibly possess. So even this—the one original thing that the book has going for it—fails totally on the grounds of plausibility. And without that, why bother? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 15, 2014
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Feb 19, 2014
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May 31, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 4.25
| 658,592
| Aug 1938
| Dec 17, 2013
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really liked it
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The Inimitable Original Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.I must have read Rebecca before, but can't be sure. Still, something of the The Inimitable Original Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.I must have read Rebecca before, but can't be sure. Still, something of the writing must have stuck. Reading the opening of the forthcoming book Alena, Rachel Pastan's homage to du Maurier, I felt such a sense of déjà vu in the opening pages as to make me almost dizzy, and knew that I first had to check the original at its source. I am glad I did so—and that I chose this Kindle edition, not least for its wonderful concluding essay by Sally Beauman, who puts the novel into a much more radical feminist perspective than the cloak of gothic romance in which du Maurier chose to drape it. (Beauman also wrote her own prequel to the novel in Rebecca's Tale events at Manderley as narrated by the first Mrs. Maxim de Winter.) Last night I dreamed…My memories had faded into a collage of moods and moments, perhaps from the book itself, perhaps from the several screen versions. Yet one of du Maurier's skills is that, even for first-time readers, the story triggers deep memories. It is both romantic and archetypal. The parallels with Jane Eyre are obvious—the great estate, the humble heroine, the aloof master, the shadow of a former marriage—but Charlotte Bronte was tapping into archetypes also: Cinderella and Bluebeard, to name but two, as the Beauman essay points out. One of my surprises in reading the book again now was to find how much time its nameless narrator spends dreaming or daydreaming. Feeling out of place as the modest new bride in historic Manderley, she imagines the servants or neighbors talking about her in disparaging terms. Even when looking forward to something as vague as her future life as chatelaine or as specific as an upcoming costume ball, she plays through little scenes in her mind, imagining how people will greet her and what she will graciously reply. And with almost every step she takes, she imagines her beautiful predecessor Rebecca, the real Mrs. de Winter, playing that role before her, with far greater charm and elegance than she can hope to muster. …I went to Manderley again."…I went to Manderley again." That "again" is important. For Rebecca is written in unexpected tenses and from an unusual perspective. The entire book takes place in memory; it is a still-young woman looking back at a past when she was dreaming of a future that she now knows she never will have, having been sabotaged by something even further in the past; there is almost no graspable present there at all. It is also a mystery story, but again a highly unusual one. Within a few pages, we already know the essential outcome. The one major denouement comes not at the end, but two-thirds of the way through the book—and it will indeed be a denouement for those who know the story only from the considerably less shocking Hitchcock movie, constrained by the production codes of its time. So far from being the patient elucidation of a crime, the tension in the latter part of the book comes from how and if a known criminal can escape justice. …I dreamed I went…Who, finally, is that "I"? Uniquely, she has no name. She is not merely an anonymous narrator, but a nameless heroine also. It is a daring stroke. Does it permit every reader (or at least every woman reader) to cast herself in her place? Perhaps, but we also look beyond her edges at things that she, as a naive narrator though not an unreliable one, does not see. And do we want to identify with a woman so subservient that all her happiness is bound up in pleasing her husband? Sally Beauman thinks not, and believes that the woman we really take away from these pages is the brilliant but never-seen Rebecca. Personally, I did not find it so. I was as seduced as anyone into wanting this Cinderella story to work out, But Beauman makes a powerful case that this woman—whose only identity, as Mrs. de Winter, is borrowed from her husband—is as much his tragic victim as his bride. For a popular romance, this leaves a lot to think about. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 17, 2014
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Feb 18, 2014
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May 31, 2016
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0307908488
| 9780307908483
| 0307908488
| 3.67
| 2,443
| Jan 28, 2014
| Jan 28, 2014
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really liked it
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Silence and Mystery This may be the strangest novel I have ever read, fascinating, inventive, but almost impossible to review. Visually, it is an airy Silence and Mystery This may be the strangest novel I have ever read, fascinating, inventive, but almost impossible to review. Visually, it is an airy book, with lots of white space and much of the text over at the right of the page like a film script, but it seems awfully weighty when you are done. There are numerous photographs, of houses, fields, even a roller coaster, but they are all of deliberately poor quality and of no apparent relevance, so they obscure the story rather than illuminating it. Although written in English by an American author, the language is curiously stilted and mechanical, as though it were an awkward translation from some foreign tongue. But the odder it got, the more intriguing it became. OK, is there a story? Yes, but a strange one. In the late seventies, an undistinguished Japanese worker named Oda Sotatsu, losing a barroom bet with two friends, signs his name to a document which they then deliver to the police. It turns out to be a confession to the disappearance of eleven old people in the Narito region, and Sotatsu is arrested. But as he refuses to speak during interrogation, at his trial, or to appeal his sentence, he is condemned to death and hanged. Three decades later, an American journalist named Jesse Ball (yes), whose marriage is breaking up owing to his wife's sudden refusal to speak, becomes interested in the case of Sotatsu's silence and goes to Japan to interview the surviving witnesses. What follows, organized with nerdish care, is a series of interviews, tape transcripts, newspaper reports, personal observations, and supporting documents. Over half the book reconstructs Sotatsu's life from the moment of his arrest to his execution, as told by a court reporter, a prison guard, and Sotatsu's father, mother, brother, and sister, most of whom impugn the reliability of any of the others. Ball is meticulous in noting the exact conditions of each interview, but he also gives his own estimates of the reliability of each informant. Curiously enough, once one has got used to the almost mechanistic organization, a lot of human detail begins to emerge, gathering between the lines and shimmering in the white spaces. In the last fifty pages, the texture changes twice more, as Ball locates the two people to whom Sotatsu lost that initial wager. One was a girl named Jito Joo who became his most frequent visitor in prison. Her written statement takes on a lyrical tone that is new to the novel, reading at times more like poetry than fact. With the last contributor, Joo's boyfriend at the time, Sato Kazuko, the tone changes again. He is a former political radical, inspired by the Situationist movement in France. I found his philosophies pretty tough going—but then I saw that the article on the Situationists in Wikipedia has almost identical language, again as if translated from another tongue. Although the novel ends in opaque style, the obvious mysteries do get cleared up, especially concerning the crimes for which Sotatsu was wrongfully hanged. The mystery of Sotatsu's continued silence is not so clear, and if Jesse Ball comes to a better understanding of his ex-wife, he keeps it to himself. Indeed he only elucidates one mystery to expose other ones: the mysteries of identity, of ambiguity, of failures of communication, of how little we know of others around us. For the answers to those, ask the silence… ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 08, 2014
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Feb 10, 2014
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May 31, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0316055433
| 9780316055437
| 0316055433
| 3.95
| 964,362
| Sep 23, 2013
| Oct 22, 2013
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it was ok
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What is it about length? Do writers think that length equals quality? Or is it simply their demand to be taken seriously? A lot of the books acclaimed What is it about length? Do writers think that length equals quality? Or is it simply their demand to be taken seriously? A lot of the books acclaimed this year have been very long ones. Some examples, just among those that I have read, have been The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (830 pages), The Woman Who Lost Her Soul By Bob Shacochis (712 pages), Night Film by Marissa Pessl (592 pages), The Son by Philipp Meyer (572 pages), and Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (527 pages). All of these books had interesting qualities, but my enjoyment in each case (except possibly the Catton) was compromised by sheer length. Both Shacochis and Pessl piled incident on highly colored incident; the last generation in Meyer's multi-generational epic was less interesting than the other two; and the open-ended structure of Atkinson's extraordinary approach to story-telling could have been any length at all. At 771 pages, this latest by Donna Tartt weighs in near the top of the class. But why wait ten years to write a book of this length, rather than publish two or three shorter novels in the same time? The entire story could easily have been a trilogy, and I could have enjoyed any one of the volumes separately, especially given its arresting opening. It first drew me into its orbit on page 22. Theo Decker, the 13-year-old protagonist, enters a New York exhibit of Dutch painting with his mother. Tartt's writing, which had been serviceable up to that time, bursts into bloom with a glorious paragraph that exactly captures the luminous wonder of the Dutch Golden Age. Soon after that, the main plot kicked in, and we were away. The museum is targeted by a terrorist bomb. Theo's mother is killed; he survives. But first comes a dazed encounter with a dying man in the rubble, who gives him a signet ring and an address to take it to, and entrusts him with the small painting by Carel Fabritius called "The Goldfinch" that had featured in the exhibition. Skip the next paragraph if you do not want to know any more about the plot, though the details I give are minor ones. (view spoiler)[I mentioned trilogy since the rest of the novel falls roughly into three phases, each relating to one of the things that Theo lost or gained on that day: his mother, the ring, and the painting. So the next 250 pages have to do with Theo's life as an orphan, virtually adopted by a wealthy family on the Upper East Side. This certainly held my interest, but when Theo's vanished father turns up to cart him off the Las Vegas, my attention began to flag. The middle section overlaps with the other two. It begins when Theo presents the ring at an antique store in Greenwich Village and meets the dead man's partner, a furniture restorer called Hobie, a wonderfully sympathetic character, who brings the story to life whenever he appears. Under his loving tutelage, Theo learns the antiques business, and how to tell the real from the fake. But as we move into the last 300 pages of the book, following a gap of eight years, Theo's life becomes increasingly dominated by his continued possession of the painting which, together with a series of foolish choices of his own, drags him down into a shady underworld without a moral compass. (hide spoiler)] For the huge book to work as a whole, you must have one or more of these things: a prose style that is a joy in itself, or an all-embracing formal structure, or a sequence of events that keeps you fascinated throughout, or character development that is consistent from beginning to end and traces some clear arc, or some major theme or moral payoff that makes the long journey worthwhile. Donna Tartt's style seldom reaches to those heights, but in all fairness few of the writers I mention in the first paragraph are especially noted for their prose. Her roughly chronological organization is at least straightforward, but she does not have the tight control of Catton, and a lot of her material seems arbitrary. She keeps minor events coming without falling into the hyperactivity of Shacochis or Pessl, but moves too slowly in significant ways to maintain the necessary momentum, leaving several thickets of dead wood. I do think she created a very attractive character in the young Theo at first, but either I did not see the organic evolution into the man he becomes, or I simply did not want to stick with him as he falls into foolish, addictive, or criminal behaviors. And as for the overriding moral, consider what he says near the end of the book: "No one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe." If you care to read 771 pages to reach that conclusion, go for it. But be warned: it is a long haul. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 23, 2013
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Dec 27, 2013
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May 31, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0316074314
| 9780316074315
| 0316074314
| 3.75
| 82,577
| Aug 24, 2013
| Oct 15, 2013
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it was amazing
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The Elephant in the Tent What is this book? I think of the story of the elephant in the tent, too large to be comprehended as a whole (and this is 800 The Elephant in the Tent What is this book? I think of the story of the elephant in the tent, too large to be comprehended as a whole (and this is 800 pages), and where everyone looking through their particular slit in the canvas gets only their particular part of it. But there are clues the moment one opens the book, even on the dust-jacket, with a series of pictures of a woman's face waxing or waning like the phases of the moon. Open the cover, and the first thing you see is a Note to the Reader, beginning thus: The stellar and planetary positions in this book have been determined astronomically. That is to say we acknowledge the celestial phenomenon known as 'precession,' by which motion the vernal equinox, the astrological equivalent of the Greenwich meridian, has come to shift.All of which means absolutely nothing to me, as I have little knowledge of astrology and still less belief, but it is obviously important to the author. She follows the note with a list of twelve principal characters, assigning each a house and, in the astrological charts which open each section, a particular sign. Almost all the chapter headings also have astrological significance; to me, they are often evocative but not meaningful. Yet I need not have worried. If Catton wants to use such devices to organize and reshuffle her complex material, all strength to her. Readers with an interest in such arcana may get even more out of the novel, but there was more than enough there for me to realize that this was a very special kind of book indeed. Special first of all in its resonant adoption of the nineteenth-century writing style. Catton does not merely write of events taking place during the New Zealand gold rush in 1865 and 1866, she inhabits the period totally (marred only by the curious editorial decision in the American edition to spell the colour, which is the miners’ term for gold, as color, even though the same readers will not balk at, say, gaol for jail). Without ever descending to purple passages or flashy description, Catton writes with such breadth and mastery that one keeps reading, even slowly over a period of many days, for the sheer pleasure of her language, even when one is bewildered as to what is actually happening. And also for the slow unfolding of her characters, each of whom has more petals than a rose, and tendrils that reach out and entwine with one another in an almost impenetrable thicket. For if you were to grasp at only one label for this elephant in the tent, I suppose you would have to call it a Mystery. At the beginning, a young English lawyer named Walter Moody lands at the goldrush town of Hokitika on New Zealand's West coast and checks in at an hotel. There, he accidentally gatecrashes a meeting of twelve citizens of various nationalities and stations in life, who have convened to discuss various recent happenings that may or may not be criminal in nature: a hermit found dead with a large stash of gold in his possession, a whore lying unconscious in the road and accused of attempted suicide, a rich prospector nowhere to be found, and a valuable trunk purloined or mislaid. But most mystery stories proceed by certain rules: there is a clear crime, one or more detectives, a cloud of witnesses, and a dwindling number of suspects. Here, however, the characters are reporters, detectives, witnesses, and suspects all at the same time. Almost every conversation uncovers new wrongdoing, adds new information, and shifts suspicion, giving us a deeper understanding of the characters involved at every turn. I suspect that Catton sees the constant realignment of characters as parallel to the equally constant realignment of the stars and planets in the astrological system. It is certainly fascinating, but also bewildering—maybe intentionally so. Among the clues you get from opening the book, there is also one of the most extraordinary tables of contents I have ever seen. The novel is divided into twelve parts, but look at the page-numbers! The first is almost half the entire book (360 pages), the second is half that (180), the third is half that again, and so on, with the last few parts being only a page or two each. I have no idea of the mathematical reason for this, but it gives a special quality to the experience of reading. The first 360 pages are slow going, as character succeeds character and revelations multiply. If not by the end of this first part then certainly by the middle of the second, the sheer number of clues and connections (for most of these people knew each other on the East coast before coming West) multiply to the point where it would be impossible for the normal reader to keep track of them all, unless he were drawing up charts or keeping notes. I began to suspect that Catton, in her sheer profusion, was much less interested in the normal patterns of a mystery story than in the sheer complexity of interaction that results from all these interconnections, both random and determinate at the same time. Yet she does play fair. As the sections get shorter towards the end, two things happen: we get a clearer sense of the facts, and a deeper empathy with the people. There is a highly satisfying court scene towards the end, with Walter Moody appearing magnificently for the defense. But, unlike traditional mystery novels, there are still over 100 pages to go, and Catton uses these to go back in time to events in Dunedin on the East coast. In nineteenth-century style, she had always prefaced her chapters with short summaries, as a tongue-in-cheek teaser for the detail that would follow. But now the summaries get longer and longer and often sneak in factual information which is not in the actual text at all. Meanwhile, the shrinking texts get more and more personal: dialogues and brief encounters, telling us more about the characters as human beings. For whatever her interest in astrology and character types and planetary influences, whatever role is played by chaos theory, these people act ultimately as individuals, with real hopes, fears, and passions. We come to care for them, in some cases quite deeply. In the last resort, that is what matters—and that, I believe, is why Eleanor Catton deserved to win the Booker, and all the other prizes that seem to have followed. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 19, 2013
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Oct 25, 2013
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May 29, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 2070373584
| 9782070373581
| 2070373584
| 3.63
| 9,509
| Sep 05, 1978
| Mar 04, 1982
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it was amazing
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I am Nothing "Je ne suis rien" (I am nothing)—the opening phrase of this 1978 novel which won the Prix Goncourt for Patrick Modiano, now the most recen I am Nothing "Je ne suis rien" (I am nothing)—the opening phrase of this 1978 novel which won the Prix Goncourt for Patrick Modiano, now the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize. The protagonist is a private detective named Guy Roland. Only this is merely the name given to him by Hutte, his former employer at the detective agency when he rescued him from total amnesia a dozen years before, and gave him a job. Now Hutte is retiring to Nice, leaving Guy with only one case to investigate: his own. Yes, it is a totally implausible concept, but Modiano is less interested in the mechanism of Guy's search for self than in what that search will reveal. The detective will follow a number of clues, each time finding somebody who will give him a tiny part of his story, but not the whole of it. The story is implausible too in that Guy gets almost none of the "Why bother me?" kinds of reaction that one might expect. Almost all his informants seem glad to talk with him; they invite him to their homes and give him boxes of souvenirs to go away with. This, even as Guy himself is having to pose as someone else to gain their confidence, trying on one possible role after another, as he gradually works out who he must be. And, as he does so, he begins to have flashes of memory of his own. Artificial though the mechanism may be, there is none of the surrealism that one associates with many mid-century French writers. Modiano copies the "policier" style perfectly; his noir settings and vivid dialogue could come from the pen of Simenon or any of his followers. "The lights in the bar dimmed, as they do in some dance-halls at the beginning of a slow fox."* There is a fascination with his journeys into various quarters of Paris to meet new informants: a cocktail pianist, a jockey, various Russian expatriates, others of mixed or uncertain nationality. Although the original French title, "Rue des Boutiques Obscures" ("Street of Shady Shops" perhaps?) turns out to have little to do with Paris, but to refer to the headquarters of the Communist Party in Rome, the roman-noir idea of secrets hiding behind closed doors is a powerful and compelling one. This is an easy book to read, and I soon found myself swept up in its momentum. Here is a longer example that captures both theme and atmosphere well: In the lobbies of apartment buildings, I believe that you can still hear echoes of the footsteps of those who once crossed them but have now disappeared. Something continues to vibrate after their passing, sound waves getting weaker and weaker, but which you can still catch if you try. When it comes down to it, it may be that I never was this Pedro McEvoy, I never was anything; but the waves that passed by me, sometimes distant and sometimes closer, and all those echoes that hung in the air crystallized and that was me.*It is writing of this caliber that raises Modiano above the level of the normal detective novelist. But also the question of where the protagonist's inquiries will take him. I do not want to say too much, but it becomes clear that his story will come to a head during the period of German occupation. Modiano has said that many of his novels use memory to explore the experience of his father, who was Jewish but survived the occupation. That does not appear to be the specific theme here, although references to "those years of night" crop up increasingly among the protagonist's informants. Although the novel builds to a climax that manages to be exciting and desolate at the same time, there have been other authors since who have pulled the net tighter and painted in darker tones. In short, I see this as an approachable and meaningful introduction to the work of this latest Nobelist, though I suspect that the reason for his winning the Prize has more to do with the totality of his oeuvre than the quality of any one book. ====== The review above, originally for Amazon, gives my somewhat bewildered reaction to reading my first Modiano; his Nobel Prize had just been announced, and I wanted to get a sense of him. At the time, I gave it only four stars, but I also sensed that reading him might easily become addictive. And indeed, that has proved to be the case. My second attempt, the trilogy of novellas translated as Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, turned me into an addict. They also confirmed something that I did not know at the time of reading: that Modiano is concerned with unlocking the past, especially as it relates to the Occupation when his father, though a Jew and a petty criminal himself, was believed to have worked as a Gestapo collaborator. At the time of writing, however, I was still working things out. In the comments, I added the following footnote:: Most of the characters in the novel appear to be fictional, but there is one who is not. This is a Russian expatriate named Gay Orlow (Galina Orlova), who became a dancer in New York and began an affair with Lucky Luciano before returning to France. Although she is never a foreground character in Modiano's book, she is very important indeed to the background. But I can see no reason whatever why he chose a real figure rather than inventing his characters as he did the others.And a fellow reader known as "bibliophile" replied with this: Another character mentioned in the book who is not fictional is Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican diplomat, and later famous playboy, who, during the 1930s, made money from selling visas to Jews trying to escape Europe. In Modiano's book he provides Dominican passports to some of the characters.I have since realized that the combination of real and fictional is a hallmark of Modiano's writing, from his very first novel, La Place de l’étoile to and beyond his masterpiece, Dora Bruder, which is so real it might almost be non-fiction. ====== * Since I read this in French, this translation is mine, although there is an English version available under the title Missing Person. The original French text of my first quote is: La lumière du bar baissa, comme dans certains dancings aux premières mesures d'un slow…and that of the longer excerpt is as follows: Je crois qu'on entend encore dans les entrées d'immeubles l'écho des pas de ceux qui avaient l'habitude de les traverser et qui, depuis, ont disparu. Quelque chose continue de vibrer après leur passage, des ondes de plus en plus faibles, mais que l'on capte si l'on est attentif. Au fond, je n'avais peut-être jamais été ce Pedro McEvoy, je n'étais rien, mais des ondes me traversaient, tantôt lointaines, tantôt plus fortes et tous ces échos épars qui flottaient dans l'air se critallisaient et c'était moi....more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 14, 2014
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Oct 16, 2014
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May 29, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0062428519
| 9780062428516
| 0062428519
| 3.92
| 5,284
| May 03, 2016
| May 03, 2016
|
really liked it
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A Good Novel Slightly Marred by Excess There were so many positive surprises about this novel about a cantata manuscript by J. S. Bach that resurfaces A Good Novel Slightly Marred by Excess There were so many positive surprises about this novel about a cantata manuscript by J. S. Bach that resurfaces among the effects of a GI who found it in Germany in 1945. I am generally cautious with books about music, because the authors so frequently get it wrong, but Belfer writes impeccably on the technical and historical levels and as a listener. Although no musicologist myself, I was fascinated by her detailed description of the deciphering and authentication of the work. Every so often, she inserts historical chapters tracing the ownership of the manuscript from the late 18th century on, starting as a gift from Bach's son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach to his star pupil Sara Itzig, daughter of a prominent Jewish Berlin banker. These too are meticulously observed, but I suspected overkill: does the family have to know every writer and musician of the time, such as Schiller, Beethoven, Meyerbeer, and the young Mendelssohn? But then I looked them up: the family was real and yes, they did; Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn were Sara's great-nephew and -niece. The lost cantata fits exactly into one of the sequences of weekly observances that Bach wrote for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. But what makes it special is that it is a setting, in part, of a text by Martin Luther condemning Jews. This was one of the things that made me leery of reading the novel, but so precise is Belfer's research in other respects that I am prepared to believe that this text is genuinely by Luther. Indeed, the implied Antisemitism of some of Bach's texts has been a point of dissention before, most notably in the treatment of the Jews in his St. John Passion. And Belfer uses her recurring time-capsule chapters from the 18th and 19th centuries to show the growth of Antisemitic sentiment even among the Prussian aristocrats and artists that attended her salons. This has obvious relevance to German conduct in the 20th Century too, of course, and the shadow of the Holocaust is always present, but Belfer handles that too with sensitivity. As she does the troubled question of whether a manuscript taken from a house that was itself stolen from its murdered Jewish owners can ever be the object of legal possession. But she is good with the moral issues too, having Susanna Kessler, the niece of the GI who found it, engage in painstaking searches to find any heirs of the rightful owners. What I liked even more, though, was that she made these issues personal. Both Susanna and Daniel Erhardt, the first expert she shows the manuscript to, undergo crises of faith during the course of the novel: she as a kind of spiritual curiosity stirring within her lifelong secularism, he as an onset of doubt about his long-unquestioned Christian beliefs. And I was even more impressed that Belfer was able to treat the spiritual search of both characters so even-handedly, giving equal value to Christianity, Judaism, and indeed humanism. So what's not to like? A few implausible coincidences, but I am prepared to indulge them. I am more concerned with authorial overkill, as though Belfer wanted to make a blockbuster rather than trusting the historical, legal, moral, and religious aspects of the situation to work in their own terms. Does Susanna have to be the administrator of a charitable trust fund, distributing sweetness and light around the public schools of New York? Do we need to see the parties hosted by her billionaire boss, with whom she feuds with discreet determination over ethical issues? Does she need to be a rape victim? When she finds herself a new apartment in high-rent Manhattan, does it have to be in the secluded cloister garden of an episcopalian seminary? Is it not enough to have one musicologist assisting her, but do there have to be two, a Protestant and a Jew, each attracted to her romantically as well—with yet a third horning in for his own nefarious purposes? Normally, such problems would make me reduce my rating to three stars or even two. But it is a tribute to the much more important things that Belfer does get right that I am sticking with four. I got a free copy through the Amazon Vine program. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 31, 2016
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Jun 02, 2016
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May 28, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 2253004219
| 9782253004219
| 2253004219
| 3.68
| 4,796
| Dec 01, 1927
| Nov 28, 1972
|
really liked it
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Crime and…? In 1906, in Mauriac's home town of Bordeaux, a young woman named Blanche Canaby was put on trial for attempting to poison her husband, but Crime and…? In 1906, in Mauriac's home town of Bordeaux, a young woman named Blanche Canaby was put on trial for attempting to poison her husband, but found guilty only of a lesser charge. Two decades later, Mauriac used the case as inspiration for his most famous novel, Thérèse Desqueyroux. Not only that, he would return to the character in four later novels. Why this fascination with an obscure criminal? Why this most unusual crime story, steeped in noir atmosphere (a night journey to the isolated pine forests on the SW French coast), but beginning where most crime novels leave off: with the release of the accused from jail? Mauriac was a devout Catholic, and there is evidence that he provisionally entitled this Conscience, the Divine Instinct, making the entire book a confession to a priest. If so, he would have been pursuing the particular Catholic paradox whereby even the most terrible sinners can be brought in the end to God's grace, much as Graham Greene was to do in such books as Brighton Rock. But no; Thérèse remains essentially agnostic, and our one glimpse of the local priest shows him virtually useless in his pastoral role. Yet traces of the original design remain. The author, who addresses his protagonist directly in the prologue and on and off throughout the book, talks of his hope that she will one day be brought to God. And Thérèse herself, in her long journey from the jail back into the care of her husband, rehearses the confession she will make to him, in much the same manner and with the same hope of absolution as if she were performing the sacrament in church. The imagined confession admirably serves the novelist's need for exposition. Beginning as it does with the proclamation of "non-lieu" (insufficient grounds), the withdrawal of the case because of the husband's refusal to pursue it, the reader has a lot of back-story to catch up, and indeed we are two-thirds of the way through the book before Thérèse returns home to Bernard Desqueyroux and the action can move forward. We hear of her growing up motherless in the great pine forest that she will one day inherit, her close friendship with her younger neighbor Anne de la Trave, and the virtual inevitability of her marriage to Anne's half-brother Bernard, owner of the adjacent property, a marriage largely to give her a settled status. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Mauriac's treatment is his refusal to load the dice. Bernard is a man of little imagination, interested only in business and hunting, but no monster. He can be thoughtless in bed and certainly cold, but he is not brutal. Mauriac was conscious of the example of Flaubert before him, but Thérèse is no Emma Bovary. Although she is jealous when Anne de la Trave falls into passionate love with a young man who has recently come into the district, she does not seek other lovers. Indeed, as with several other Mauriac books, I picked up hints of homosexual attraction, and wondered whether she could be satisfied in marriage at all. Although Thérèse is referred to once or twice as a monster, she is not portrayed as one either. But nor is she entirely sympathetic. She is a chain-smoker, self-centered, and an indifferent mother. But yes, she is trapped in a marriage that takes away her freedom without giving her anything in return, a situation that will become blindingly obvious when she returns to Bernard. There is almost a unique trajectory to this novel. Thérèse's mental confession does indeed have the effect of making her crime seem less heinous, but there is no absolution. Bernard's deposition at the beginning of the book may have released his wife from jail, but it was made for the sake of the family only, it is not forgiveness. This is Crime and… what? Punishment, but of what kind? Redemption? Hardly. Whatever Mauriac's original intention, his characters take their own course into a cold purgatory of their own making. No wonder he felt the need to return to Thérèse again and again. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 23, 2013
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Jun 25, 2013
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May 28, 2016
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0812979788
| 9780812979787
| 0812979788
| 3.78
| 92,873
| Jul 16, 2013
| Jul 01, 2014
|
liked it
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Sorry, you lost me back there! I must say, as I begin writing this, that I am not sure of my eventual rating. Five stars for the way the book grabbed m Sorry, you lost me back there! I must say, as I begin writing this, that I am not sure of my eventual rating. Five stars for the way the book grabbed me at the beginning? Two stars for the unnumbered sixty-page chapter interpolated between chapters 93 and 94 that made me want to chuck the book in the trash? Four for the way she almost pulls it all together at the end? Back down to three for her inability to leave well enough alone even then? Those who have read Special Topics in Calamity Physics will know that Marisha Pessl has a beguiling way with words. They will also know that she takes her novels in directions you do not expect. That one started as a teenage search for personal identity (rather good at that, actually), morphed into a murder mystery, and morphed again into espionage, conspiracy theories, and goodness knows what. Her new one has more mutations than you can pin down, starting as a noir mystery and veering into cults, more conspiracies, and a heavy dose of the occult. Or apparently so; with Pessl, you can never know. It is like a roller-coaster enclosed in a haunted house; if you can accept novels as fairground rides, you will love this! Stanislas Cordova is, or was, a notorious American director of horror films—so horrible that the studios refused to release them half-way into his career, and the last half-dozen were screened only in clandestine showings in places like the Paris Catacombs. Near the beginning of the book, Cordova's 24-year-old daughter Ashley, a former musical genius, is found dead in a deserted New York warehouse, apparently from suicide. Investigative reporter Scott McGrath, who has already been slapped with a lawsuit by the Cordova family, decides to look deeper. Before long, he is joined by a 19-year-old waif and a part-time drug dealer; this is quite implausible, but if you are looking for plausibility, you had better stop now. For the next 400 pages, the three of them chase clues all over New York State. I was strongly reminded of a video game—not the especially violent ones, but the puzzle-solving kind in which mastery of one environment gains admittance to the next. For one thing, convoluted though the search might become, it is essentially linear; one thing always leads to the next, with no dead ends. People who start by yelling at the trio to get out will be talking more or less reasonably half a page later. Even when our investigators are shown the door, there is always someone coming out of the woodwork to tell them where to go next. Then Pessl has a fondness for wormholes: a discreet doorway in a luxury hotel leading to an even more exclusive one, neglected storefronts in dingy streets opening to treasure chambers beyond, old movie soundstages preserved in every detail, underground passages leading from one corner of an estate to the other like the diagonals in Clue. And, also in video-game style, there is the increasing strangeness of the environments themselves, Pessl's signature genre-morphing that I mentioned earlier. Only she did it once or twice too often for me. I am prepared to suspend disbelief if I am having fun, but I do require some slight hold on reality. I can follow as the various species of sinister move from psychological to criminal and conspiratorial, but when we get to black magic and bargains with the Devil, I lose it. It all came to a head in that unnumbered chapter, inserted between jet black pages, a narrative black hole of sheer nightmare. Totally disorienting, but I found I simply didn't care. True, Pessl will pull herself out of the black hole with some skill, though her shift back toward rationality seemed almost anticlimactic. She has other skills too: a seamless inclusion of web-pages, photos, and other artifacts, and the sense to avoid opportunities for easy sex or sentimental resolutions. But you have to stick with her to appreciate these, and she lost me 200 pages back. I note that the book, even before publication, is already in pre-production as a movie, absolutely the right medium for it. Movie, video game, carnival ride—take your pick and enjoy. But it's not my idea of a novel. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 30, 2013
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Jun 03, 2013
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May 27, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 2070408485
| 9782070408481
| 2070408485
| 3.57
| 8,076
| Apr 02, 1997
| May 28, 2018
|
it was amazing
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The Known and the Unknown I really wanted to quote the final paragraph of Modiano's novel, which is infinitely more moving in its simplicity than anyth The Known and the Unknown I really wanted to quote the final paragraph of Modiano's novel, which is infinitely more moving in its simplicity than anything that comes before. But I will desist, and leave it for the reader to discover—not because it gives away secrets, but because it does the opposite, preserving a secret for all time. It is the one gift he can offer to the tragic subject of his writing, a teenage Jewish girl living in Paris at the time of the German Occupation. So failing that, let me come upon it obliquely, as Modiano himself does. Near the beginning of his book, the author recalls visiting the hospital of the Salpêtrière in search of his ailing father, whom he had not seen for many years: I remember having wandered for hours through the immensity of this vast hospital, looking for him. I went into ancient buildings, passed through wards lined with beds, and questioned nurses who gave me contradictory information. I ended almost doubting my father's very existence as I walked back and forth in front of that majestic church and those unreal buildings, unchanged since the 18th century. They made me think of Manon Lescaut and the time when they served as a prison for prostitutes, under the sinister name of General Hospital, before they were deported to Louisiana. I must have pounded those paved courtyards until dusk. I never saw my father again. [translation mine]This paragraph has nothing to do with Modiano's main subject, which is to trace the last months of this girl before her eventual capture. And yet it has everything to do with his motivation and method. It could be said that his entire oeuvre has to do with the search for his father and his failure to find him—or at least to understand how he could have survived the Occupation as a Jew, unless as a black-marketeer and collaborator with the Germans. His method of inserting himself into the settings of his story, his precise accumulation of detail, his command of the parallels with history and literature, make him into an archaeologist of shame, very much in the manner of W. G. Sebald, though with documents in place of photographs. The one exception is the winter scene on the cover of this Gallimard edition, which sums up the desolate atmosphere of the book in a single shot.* Like his Prix Goncourt novel, Rue des boutiques obscures, but unlike his recently translated trilogy Suspended Sentences, I read this in French, and feel it was absolutely essential to do so. Not for Modiano's style, which is direct rather than literary in tone, but the number of original documents he uncovers, whose untranslatable bureaucratic language treats the management of horror as a day's normal business. Modiano's trigger is a mention in a 1941 newspaper that a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Dora Bruder has disappeared. The author knows the area in which her family lived, and revisits the once-familiar streets to soak in the atmosphere. I read with Google Maps zoomed in to various areas of Paris, walking vicariously through the unfamiliar quartiers, imagining how they must have felt in 1941. What intrigues him is that Dora's disappearance does not coincide with the round-ups of French Jews, which did not begin until later the following year. So why did she vanish? Indefatigably, he looks through records, searching for information. And remarkably, he finds a lot. Unlike the other four Modiano books I have read, which work obliquely by mystery and suggestion, this one is almost full-frontal; it is Modiano's simplest book, and arguably his greatest. There is no question what ultimately happened to Dora Bruder, and the details make painful reading. Fact after fact after fact, not revealed in order, but squeezing Dora's life between them as in a slowly closing trap. Soon, there are no secrets left. Except one—and that is the stroke of poetry that turns this painstaking history into a work of art. With so much fact, is this a novel at all? Yes; the story is in the search, the searcher, and his ultimate failure. You can see Modiano looking at this material, feeling there must be a novel here, if only he can research the facts and then apply his imagination to the rest. Well, the facts he has, and empathy aplenty. But he doesn't write that novel; he will not use his imagination to fictionalize her. To rob her of the secrets of those missing months would be the greatest obscenity of all. ====== It is pure chance, but this novel chimes in interesting ways with a several other European books that I have been reading, in some cases within the last few days: The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, who follows a Jewish character very much like Dora's parents. She was born in Galicia at around the same time, then fled to Vienna, then fled again, although Erpenbeck then takes her East rather than West. If, as seems likely, Erpenbeck's book is about a real person, it is another instance of an author using an idiosyncratic technique to reflect a real life in significant vignettes. Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck. In some ways, Erpenbeck's earlier novel is even closer, in that it focuses as Modiano's does on the history of buildings—in this case, a single house by a lake in Brandenburg—leading to the capture of a young Jewish girl, an actual victim and the one named character in her whole novel. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. This is the classic example of the use of cultural archaeology to examine a Holocaust-related subject. Sebald uses old prints and photographs to assemble apparently irrelevant scraps of architectural and military history that eventually all converge on the story of one Jewish boy sent away from Germany on a Kindertransport. Sebald also parallels Modiano's technique of walking the ground himself to imbibe its atmosphere. HHhH by Laurent Binet. Binet's novel about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and architect of the Final Solution, follows Modiano's approach of marshaling an overwhelming set of true historical facts (at least, I assume that Modiano's are true). In both cases, the "novel" is the story of the author uncovering these facts, rather than the history they tell. Compared to Binet, though, Modiano is cooler and far less flamboyant, even though his personal connection to these events (through his curiosity about his father's past) is that much more personal. The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas. Unlike the other books, this is relatively trivial and has nothing to do with the Holocaust. But its unusual approach got me thinking. It is not a novel itself, but an interview between the author and a literary critic about some novel that he is supposed to have written. It was thinking of Haas as writing what you might call an AfterNovel that made me see Modiano as writing a PreNovel. All the time assembling his facts and querying his own recollections, as though saying, "There is a novel in here somewhere, if only I can bring my imagination and empathy to bear." Well, there are facts and empathy aplenty, but the novel as such never gets written. And that is the entire point. ====== * The cover photograph of the Folio edition, a shot by René Jacques from about the same period, is almost identical to one described in the book: I thought I remembered it from two or three photos, taken in winter: a sort of esplanade with a bus going by. A truck that had stopped, as though for ever. A snowy field, on the edge of which waits a cart with a black horse. And, away in the background, the mist-shrouded bulk of apartment buildings.With passages like these, although there are only a few, who needs photographs? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 15, 2014
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Nov 17, 2014
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May 23, 2016
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 067002578X
| 9780670025787
| 067002578X
| 3.92
| 6,290
| 2010
| Aug 16, 2012
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liked it
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Viral Paranoia Not my normal thing, but it made a nice break from all that literary stuff. Imagine Night Film written by Michael Crichton with a to Viral Paranoia Not my normal thing, but it made a nice break from all that literary stuff. Imagine Night Film written by Michael Crichton with a touch of Stieg Larsson. And with a French flavor. For this thriller, a blockbuster success in Europe, comes to us in a racy translation by Mark Polizzotti (who is himself taking a break from literary assignments, apparently; I last encountered him as the translator of Nobel prizewinner Patrick Modiano's Suspended Sentences ). A Northern French flavor, actually, which is a little unusual. The novel opens in Lille and immediately crosses the border into Liège, Belgium, where a film collector goes to browse through a collection of old films being offered for sale. Among them is a mysterious 16mm silent. He takes it home, watches it, and goes blind. Speed-dialling at random, he calls a former girlfriend, a Lille detective named Lucie Henebelle, who gets him to hospital. So far, her only concern is as a friend, but when a number of murders follow, she becomes involved professionally. At about the same time, a group of five buried bodies comes to light near Rouen, and the local police call in a Paris profiler named Franck Sharko. All have been grossly mutilated. Evidence crops up that suggests that the two cases may be linked, and soon Lucie finds herself working with Franck, two lonely people running from sorrows in their past lives. In the course of the subsequent investigation, which takes Franck to Cairo and Lucie to Montreal, the two uncover the secrets of the deadly movie, and face the possibility that these latest murders may be part of a long series, going back decades. And, true to the genre, the two discover a growing tenderness for one another that actually becomes quite moving. That is, if you can accept a schizophrenic cop who plays with toy trains and talks to an invisible companion; Lucie, a single mother of twin girls, is a lot more believable. Indeed, the book requires a lot of suspended disbelief. The chain is a tangled one, but the links drop into place rather too easily. There is a lot—a lot—of collateral bloodshed and some moments of danger for the protagonists, but also some "with one bound he was free" escapes. The film itself may not contain the virus that the blurb suggests, but the story certainly proliferates virally to become a paranoiac's dream, linking fifty years of violence over three continents to secrets kept by some of the most powerful forces in their respective countries. Including some sinister experiments in mind control that turn out to be largely true. All the time I was reading, I was hesitating between four stars and three. If I end up with three, it is not because of these narrative excesses, which are after all normal for this kind of book. It is because, even in its own terms, it ends not with a bang but a whimper, making the solution of the mystery a limp anticlimax after so much excitement. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 16, 2014
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Nov 18, 2014
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May 22, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0747591296
| 9780747591290
| 0747591296
| 3.67
| 255
| Feb 04, 2008
| Feb 04, 2008
|
it was amazing
| A Belfast Novel that Gets It Right I was born in Northern Ireland, and kept coming back there all through the Troubles of the Seventies and Eighties. A Belfast Novel that Gets It Right I was born in Northern Ireland, and kept coming back there all through the Troubles of the Seventies and Eighties. I was caught in the center of Belfast during the Bloody Friday bombings of 1972, staggering back to my train through streets littered with rubble and broken glass. I have returned only a couple of times since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, pleased to see the removal of the sandbags and barricades and the new building that has followed. But the sectarian murals and graffiti still remain in places, and the long legacy of suspicion and resentment is not so easily put to rest. There have been a few novelists who have understood the roots of the conflict, though inevitably with a bias towards one side or the other; Seamus Deane's quasi-autobiographical Reading in the Dark is a fine example. But few have tackled its aftermath. Stuart Neville is one, in The Ghosts of Belfast, in which he explores what becomes of a former IRA hit man in a country now theoretically at peace. But being a thriller writer, his subject is still the legacy of violence, and he relies on violence once again to propel his climaxes. Hence my great pleasure at reading the Northern Ireland sections of Colum McCann's TransAtlantic and the author's warm portrayal of Senator George Mitchell, the architect of the 1998 agreement. And hence my admiration for this 2008 novel by David Park, who addresses the problems of peace with a native's understanding but without a trace of sectarian bias. Whether viewed as a political novel, an ethical exploration, a human character study, or simply as a gradually unfolding mystery, it is a superb book. Park imagines that one approach taken in Northern Ireland might have been to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on South African lines, in which people from all sides admit to their wrongdoing and are granted amnesty. His title character, a former judge named Henry Stanfield, is the son of a Catholic mother and Protestant father and so presumably free of bias. Although the hearings take their toll, he can also reflect on those miraculous occasions when they achieve their purpose: However, it's also true that there are days when something else happens and someone's story rises up like a sad aria that, for all its artlessness, its lack of structure and simple language, sings out and fills the chamber. Some stories—and he can never predict them or see them coming—take on the mysterious power to reach beyond the external world and touch the quick of everyone who hears them.Park begins with a brief prelude in which an unnamed teenager is abducted by IRA operatives, taken to a remote farmhouse, and interrogated about being an informer for the British. By the time the main part of the book starts, the boy, Connor Walshe, has been missing for years. His case is number 107 on Stanfield's docket. But Park takes time to set up the four main characters in the drama, establishing them with remarkable sympathy as warm but flawed human beings leading their untidy lives as best they can. Stanfield is clearly an able and principled man, but he has been shattered by a messy divorce and has an alienated daughter living near Belfast. Although former IRA leader Francis Gilroy is now Minister for Children and Culture in the new coalition government, he must still go around with bodyguards, even as he makes preparations for his daughter's wedding. James Fenton, the former intelligence officer who recruited Connor, feels like an exile from a police force that has now no use for him, and divides his time between walking in the Mourne Mountains and supporting an orphanage in Romania. Another IRA man, Danny, has fled illegally to America where he works on the grounds crew at a campus near Orlando; he is trying to start a new life with a new girlfriend, but his past catches up with him. These four introductions are expansive but remarkable, making almost cinematic use of telling set pieces. Although I obviously feel closer in background to some of these men more than others, I cannot say which I ended up by liking or respecting more as human beings. And what of the truth? As these four come together and the date of the hearing approaches, we begin to understand that each is fatally compromised. There are forces behind each of them that want to see the proceedings end in a certain way. And no matter what each desires in his heart, it is likely that any truth they utter will be partial or distorted. I have noticed before in his books (The Poets' Wives, The Light of Amsterdam), David Park does not craft neatly tied-up endings; I salute him for it. But some truths will out; cynicism need not always prevail. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 24, 2014
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Nov 26, 2014
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May 22, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0060806559
| 9780060806552
| 0060806559
| 3.76
| 500
| 1963
| Jan 01, 1983
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really liked it
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Survival at Sea his reissue of a novel from 1963 caught me entirely by surprise. It was an impulse buy; I picked it up mistaking it for a mystery, as i Survival at Sea his reissue of a novel from 1963 caught me entirely by surprise. It was an impulse buy; I picked it up mistaking it for a mystery, as it says on the cover. But no, it is a genre I normally avoid: a psychological thriller. More than that, it is set entirely upon a small yacht—two yachts, actually—in the middle of the Pacific. If I tell you how much I hate the small-boat world after suffering under the captaincy of the tyrant who I once thought would be my father-in-law, it says a lot for the book that I stayed up into the small hours reading to the end. I literally could not put it down. John Ingram and his wife Rae, both mature and previously married, are on their lazy way to Tahiti for their honeymoon, sailing the small ketch Saracen, when they spy a slightly larger boat in the distance. But as they are heading towards it, its owner, a young man named Hughie Warriner, rows out in a dinghy. He is in an hysterical panic and at the end of his tether. His wife and the other couple on board, he tells them, have died of botulism, and his ship, the Orpheus, is taking water faster than he can pump it out. He thanks them for saving his life, but refuses their offer to help remove his valuables from the boat. But Ingram rows over anyway. And discovers that not all of Warriner's story was true. At this point, three chapters in, Warriner overpowers Rae and sails the Saracen away, leaving Ingram on the Orpheus. The ship is indeed sinking, and neither of the two people he finds on board is competent to sail her. From this point on, the story alternates between the two boats, often in the middle of a chapter with no visual break between paragraphs, a shift that gives a thrilling jolt each time. Although I am generally turned off by boat talk, it is a real pleasure to find a writer, Charles Williams—and a character, John Ingram—who are so much masters of their world that one is drawn in by their sheer competence. But I was more impressed yet by the fact that their ultimate survival does not depend solely upon seamanship, still less on physical violence, but upon John and Rae's ability to figure out the psychology of the three other people involved. We will eventually learn how the two couples on the Orpheus came to be together, and what happened to drive them apart. But the real mystery is the interplay of personalities under extreme conditions, and that kept me reading to the very end. Probably only a three-star book, if I am honest, but it really did grab me by what's left of my hair and not let go. [There is also a 1989 movie of the same title, with Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman, but from what I see in the synopsis, they changed the story extensively.] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 11, 2014
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Dec 12, 2014
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May 17, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0312275420
| 9780312275426
| 0312275420
| 3.72
| 5,252
| Jan 01, 1999
| 1999
|
it was amazing
|
Life Cycle This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read, vying with D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel for poetic originality, though qu Life Cycle This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read, vying with D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel for poetic originality, though quite different in manner. And one of the most extraordinary things about it is that it makes no claim to concern itself with world events at all, but something utterly ordinary: the death of a middle-aged couple near a small seaside town. Which brings me to the first of the four points I offer as demonstration.… 1. The Story. Joseph and Celice are zoologists in their later fifties. As the novel opens, they die together shortly after making love in a hollow in the dunes of Baritone Beach, the setting of their very first tryst three decades before. The book is well titled: their death is simply a fact. There is a crime, but no mystery; nobody has much hope of solving it. Instead, what Crace concentrates on is simply death itself, and what happens to the bodies in the six days between being killed and carried away. He does this in clinical detail which at first seems disgusting, but soon develops its own kind of poetry; this is death as it might be described by a scientist such as Joseph and Celice are themselves. But death is not Crace's only subject.… 2. The Handling of Time. The novel juggles three time-frames simultaneously. One, hour by hour, day by day, is the post-mortem narrative that I mentioned above. Against this, Crace sets a second sequence, describing how the couple arrived at the beach, and moving backwards an hour at a time to Joseph waking Celice at daybreak to tell her that the day promises to be too good to waste indoors. For this is also a portrait of a marriage, a marriage held together by love and parenthood, though no longer by passion. A third timeline goes back thirty years to their first meeting, as graduate students on field study, and the unpredictable twists that led them into each other's arms. There are surprises in this story which will affect their later lives, including their last excursion. All in all, this is as much a book about love and companionship as about death. You could even argue that Crace's objective description of dying is the mechanism that allows him to paint an entirely clear-eyed portrait of marriage, totally free from sentiment, and to have it emerge as something both ordinary and beautiful. 3. The Setting. Crace is a superb writer, and brilliantly evokes the duneland setting of Baritone Bay (so called for the occasional phenomenon of its singing sands) and its flora and fauna. But it has the quality of somewhere you almost know but can't quite place. I wondered about East Anglia, since Crace is English, but that doesn't quite fit. I thought the American Northeast, but no fit there either. I am not the first to note this; I came upon at least one blog entry raising the same questions. This story about biologists, for instance, is filled with plants of all kinds, from the manac shells that surface the paths to the lissom grass on which the couple bed down; look them up, though, and you will find they don't exist. The people in the town, too, seem part of the familiar Anglo world, but the drinks they consume, the drugs they take, the customs of their lives, all are slightly unfamiliar: cousinly, not fraternal. It is a superb balancing act, doubly so in that you are hardly aware of it at all. I suppose it is a kind of science fiction: the everyday world re-imagined through the mind of a scientist. 4. The Language. Crace invents a linguistic world in order to be master of it, to hold it to the light, turn it on its head, hold it up to the scrutiny of eternity. That reversal of time, for instance. At the start of the book, he describes an old custom (I think invented) of "quivering," a kind of wake whose purpose is to shake the body and turn time backward: Their memories, exposed to the backward-running time of quiverings in which regrets became prospects, resentments became love, experience became hope, would up-end the hourglass of Celice and Joseph's life together and let their sands reverse.I am reminded of Martin Amis turning time backwards in Time's Arrow, although Crace has far greater subtlety. His object is not illuminate some particular event but to make a statement about life in the universe—an atheist's philosophy perhaps, but as consoling as anything offered by religion. So let me end with the passage when Joseph and Celice's bodies are finally separated: Joseph's body rolled towards the west. His wife went east. They came off the grass and on to cotton, then into wood-effect, then on to the flat bed of the sand jeep, along the beach and through the suburbs to the icy, sliding drawers of the city morgue, the coroner's far room, amongst the suicides. Their bodies had been swept away, at last, by wind, by time, by chance. The continents could start to drift again and there was space in heaven for the shooting stars....more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 12, 2011
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Dec 14, 2011
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May 17, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0062220551
| 9780062220554
| 0062220551
| 3.90
| 21,139
| Mar 15, 2015
| Mar 17, 2015
|
did not like it
|
Maisie Moves Forward, But Keeps Looking Back I read the first three novels in the Maisie Dobbs series, and one of the later ones, but then stopped, Maisie Moves Forward, But Keeps Looking Back I read the first three novels in the Maisie Dobbs series, and one of the later ones, but then stopped, largely because of the author's habit of taking two steps backward for three forward. The Cinderella story of the housemaid who gets sent by her titled employers to Cambridge, puts that on hold to volunteer as a nurse in WW1, and subsequently becomes a self-styled "psychologist and private detective," had a certain charm, but a substantial portion of each subsequent novel was spent in rehashing the story so far. Besides which, I got tired of Winspear's attempts to wring further variations on the legacy of the Great War, even a decade later. But the books do provide a certain nostalgia for a vanished age—and besides, I am a sucker for those covers. So when I heard the latest one would show Maisie in Gibraltar in 1937, I thought that maybe she had moved forward at last, and was eager to see her viewpoint on an entirely different place and period. Maisie, it appears, has been away from England for some years, and is on her way home from India when she decides to break her journey in Gibraltar. Near the beginning of the book, there are a series of letters explaining this hiatus in her life. I don't know how much is new to close followers of the series, but at least the retrospective is quickly over. No sooner in Gibraltar, than Maisie stumbles on the body of a local photographer, a member of the Sephardic community, and decides to investigate. Meanwhile, various other people are keeping an eye on her, for various reasons, both political and personal. Across the border in Spain, of course, Civil War is raging, and the British colony is flooded with refugees who make convenient scapegoats for any unsolved crime, and equally convenient spies for their respective factions. The book has all the makings of a pleasant historical thriller. Except that retrospection turns out to be more than the author's means of linking the novel to its predecessors; it is Maisie's principal modus operandi. Maisie goes around talking to people, it is true, but seemingly every chapter she pauses to go over her actions and conclusions in her mind. Though sound practice for a detective, her constant second-guessing of herself soon becomes tiresome in a novel, since everything gets told three times over. At several points, she imagines what someone from her earlier life might say to her—one of her former mentors, a girlfriend, or the Cockney barrow-boy she employed as her assistant—none of whom we actually meet in the book. One wonders what readers Winspear is serving: those new to the series would find this incomprehensible; old fans will know it already. Or perhaps it is the confirmation, the simple acknowledgement of shared experiences, that binds her faithful readers to her side? Nonetheless, after about 200 pages, things get moving. Maisie grows tired of waiting in Gibraltar—the colony that one of the characters, working for the British Secret Service, calls the entrance hall to the Spanish Civil War—and crosses the frontier to see for herself. She even finds a brief use for her old skills as a battlefield nurse. I can't say that the greater clarity of action leads to a similar clarity in Maisie's investigation; the case of the murdered photographer remains frustratingly vague, as does the identity and fate of too many of the shady characters that cross Maisie's path in the course of the novel. And I am not sure that I can trust anything she says about the Civil War either. Maisie sees a squadron of German and Italian bombers crossing the coast heading north—on their way, as she later realizes, to bomb Guernica. In fact, the Guernica bombers were stationed in north central Spain, but even as a stroke of poetic license, this makes no sense. To fly the entire length of the country, a distance of over 1,000 kilometers, coming from where? Does Winspear imagine her readers so ignorant of geography? ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 23, 2015
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Jan 25, 2015
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May 14, 2016
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.01
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it was amazing
|
Aug 10, 2014
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Jun 10, 2016
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| 3.64
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it was ok
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Aug 30, 2014
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Jun 10, 2016
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| 3.61
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liked it
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Sep 08, 2014
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Jun 10, 2016
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Sep 22, 2014
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Jun 10, 2016
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| 3.45
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it was amazing
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Aug 16, 2014
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Jun 02, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.25
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did not like it
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Feb 19, 2014
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May 31, 2016
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| 4.25
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really liked it
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Feb 18, 2014
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May 31, 2016
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| 3.67
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really liked it
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Feb 10, 2014
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May 31, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.95
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it was ok
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Dec 27, 2013
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May 31, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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Oct 25, 2013
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May 29, 2016
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| 3.63
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it was amazing
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Oct 16, 2014
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May 29, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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Jun 02, 2016
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May 28, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.68
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really liked it
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Jun 25, 2013
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May 28, 2016
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| 3.78
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liked it
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Jun 03, 2013
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May 27, 2016
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| 3.57
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it was amazing
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Nov 17, 2014
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May 23, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.92
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liked it
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Nov 18, 2014
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May 22, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.67
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it was amazing
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Nov 26, 2014
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May 22, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.76
|
really liked it
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Dec 12, 2014
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May 17, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.72
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it was amazing
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Dec 14, 2011
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May 17, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.90
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did not like it
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Jan 25, 2015
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May 14, 2016
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