Charlatans

Bad Docs

Robin Cook is to medical thrillers what John Grisham is to the law.  Ever since he hit the bestseller lists in 1977 with the truly chilling Coma, he has churned out 35-odd books set against a medical backdrop, and picking holes in the so-called ‘noble profession.’

The title of his latest, Charlatans, is self-explanatory; the novel opens with the detailed preparation for an operation at the prestigious and state-of-the-art Boston Memorial Hospital. The surgery was supposed to be routine, but the patient dies on the operating table. The arrogant, high-flying surgeon, Dr. William Mason, blames the anesthesiologist, Dr Ava London, and she points fingers at him. But when three such deaths occur, there is cause for suspicion. An ambitious young chief surgery resident, Dr. Noah Rothauser, is caught in the crossfire, when he has to investigate the deaths.

He is attracted to Ava, but also finds that her lifestyle is way more lavish than a doctor could afford, and there are other strange things about her, like her obsession with social media under assumed names. Turns out she works as a lobbyist for the Nutritional Supplement Council, and the plot gets more complex and dangerous.

The novel, like all of Cook’s work, makes valid points about medical malpractice, but the books, too high on procedure and jargon, are getting increasing tough to get through, without some speed-reading.  But, at least they are eye-openers in one way of another. There are good doctors, and then there are the greedy and evil kind.

Charlatans

By Robin Cook

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 448

The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye

The Girl Is Back Again

Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson created in Lisbeth Salander a heroine for our age—a young woman who rose above her horrific past to become virtually indestructible, both physically and mentally.

The first book, The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo became an instant international bestseller, followed by The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. Larsson died tragically young  in 2004, after finishing three books that make up the Millennium Trilogy, but it would be a shame to kill of his characters too, so his estate decided to pick David Lagercratnz to continue the series starring Salander and the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. 

Salander’s hacking and martial arts skills came to Blomkvist’s aid many times in his journalistic career and saved the magazine he works for, Millennium, from shutting down. He is one of the few men she trusts and he feels protective towards her.

The first book by Lagercratnz, The Girl In The Spider’s Web was as intricately plotted and written with the same energy and chutzpah as Larsson’s work. The second, The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye is out now, and happy as fans are to have Salander back, the main grouse is that there isn’t enough of her in the book.

In this novel, Salander is in jail for a flimsy reason, to do with her shenanigans in the last one, in which she had saved the life of an autistic child. Having suffered an abusive childhood, she cannot take injustice or victimization of the weak, which is why she takes on the prison bully Benito (who named herself after Mussollini) and the entire system, because they torture a Bangladeshi prisoner, Faria Kazi.

Faria’s story of oppression by her strictly Islamist family is one of the main plots of The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye; the other has to do with an awful genetic experiment conducted in the past on racial minorities,  in which Lisbeth Salander also suffered.  Her origins story runs somewhat parallel to that of twins Leo and Daniel.

When Salander’s old and ill mentor Holger Palmgren is murdered in his own home, Blomkvist and she try to unravel the mystery that involves evil scientists and a kill-all-witnesses kind of cover-up.

The book is readable alright, but has too many subplots, too many flashbacks (why is Blomkvist’s past love life of interest to the reader?) and Lisbeth Salander not at her Amazonian best, though, of course even in prison, she manages to reach a computer and that makes her nearly invincible. But she does not have a villain worth fighting with, and then, she gets her ribs kicked in twice, instead of causing the other party equal damage.

Let’s hope the next book places her right back in the spotlight where she belongs.

The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye 

By David Lagercrantz

(Translated by George Goulding)

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 362

4321

Unpredictable Lives

Paul Auster’s mind-boggling 880-page tome 4321 is an extraordinary piece of work, that has made it to the Man Booker Award shortlist this year; if it did not, readers would have been surprised.

The novel is about Archibald ‘Archie’ Ferguson,  born to the Jewish Stanley Ferguson and Rose Adler, in 1947 (around the time Auster was born), but it follows four different paths his destiny would take, and how his life would play out with each different turn.  To quote from the synopsis, “Identical but different, meaning four boys with the same parents, the same bodies, and the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house in a different town with his own set of circumstances."

Auster writes about Archie’s growing up, his friendships and passions, but if there is one major event in one of his life it affects the outcome of the story, and Auster weaves in and out of four parallel narratives (actually three and a bit, because in one, Archie dies at thirteen).  And the scope of the sprawling novel/s covers contemporary American social history (notably the Vietnam War, the Cold War,  the race riots, students movements, sports highlights and historical figures like J.F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King) with great astuteness. The book that reportedly took Auster over three years to write is a near masterpiece, never mind the repetition and some confusion (for the reader).

The destinies of the characters in Archie’s life also alter according to his; in one his father’s home appliances business is ruined, in another it thrives, in a third his father is killed, in all of them his uncles turn out to be greedy and manipulative. His mother remains a photographer, but marries either Gilbert or Dan Schneiderman and depending on that his relationship with Dan’s daughter Amy develops; and depending on which man his Aunt Mildred marries, his best friend Noah Marx (the husband’s son from a divorced wife) enters his life or does not meet him.

As the stories progress, readers can only shake their heads in admiration and fascination, as Auster keeps pulling out rabbits out of this marvelous literary hat in this novel of such structural complexity—how did he keep track of the four Archies and give them all clear graphs? 

Over so many pages, it may not be possible to remember which Archie lost his fingers in an accident, which one spent months in Paris, which one had a gay affair, which one took up with his former teacher, and so on, but the stories are so absorbing that it does not matter. Whichever life Archie leads, it is fulfilling for him in its own way; he is lucky to get love, loyalty, good looks and talent, along with the usual amount of grief, loss, angst and disappointment.  But in all his lives, he is fond of sports, movies, music, reading and writing.

Auster does not give Archie wildly different destinies, so it is an act of writerly dexterity to juggle four lives and make them all interesting while keeping within a particular suburban socio-economic circle, with the sophistications of New York and Paris tantalizing within reach. And, much to the delight of fans, Laurel & Hardy play an important part in Archie’s life.

4321

By Paul Auster

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Pages: 880

Killing Orders

Tough Gumshoe

Sara Paretsky is an acclaimed and multiple award-winning author of crime fiction. Her creation, the smart and tough Chicago detective, V.I. Warshawski (she prefers to use her initials over her full name Victoria Iphigenia), daughter of a Jewish Italian mother and Polish father, a kind and loving man, has been topping charts for years.

Killing Orders, that first came out in 1985 and was #3 in the series, has been reissued in paperback. Those who did not get to read Paretsky can get an introduction with one of the finest, in which Warshawski takes the might of the Catholic Church and the Chicago Mafia, while she helps on-off British lover Roger Ferant to save a company from a sneaky takeover.

When Warshawski is summoned by her Rosa for help, she goes to the mean-spirited woman’s house, because she had promised her dying mother Gabriella, that she would always help her sister, even after Rosa had thrown her out on the house.

Rosa works as a treasurer at the St Albert’s Priory, and when some valuable shares kept in the safe are found to be fake, she is under suspicion. However, no sooner does Warshawski start investigating, her aunt wants her to drop it.

Warshawski is not the kind to give up so she continues and starts getting threatening calls. Then she is attacked with acid and her apartment burnt down. Anyone else would have been scared off, but with Ferrant as a her support, she digs deeper till she exposes a major scandal.

In the fast-paced adventure, a lot keeps happening, as Warshawski struggles to solve the crime, as well as trace the man who threatened her and then tried to maim and kill her.   Her friend Agnes, a stock broker gets shot in her office, her friend Lotty’s uncle gets stabbed and Warshawski, cup of woes just overflows—with a baffled by sympathetic Ferrant by her side, trying to make sense of what is going on.

It’s a proper page turner, and you can’t put it down till it’s finished. Because it is set in the pre tech boom era, there are no cell phones or computers, and there is this quaint institution called the answering service, that gave messages from callers whose calls the subscriber may have missed… far more efficient that a cell phone.  Warshawski never seems to be at a disadvantage because she is not at home to pick up the phone.

Killing Orders

By Sara Paretsky

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 355

Men Without Women

Mood For Melancholy

Three year’s after his novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Haruki Murakami’s has whetted the appetite of his devoted readers, by bridging the gap till his latest novel Killing Commendatore comes out in an English translation, with a collection of short stories, titled Men Without Women.

The seven melancholic stories are about lonely men, written in Murakami’s signature ruminative open-ended style. The men go through bizarre experiences that involve women in their lives.

In the first story, titled Drive My Car, an actor, Kafuku, unable to get over the death of his wife, happens to hire a female driver, when an incident of drunk driving gets him banned from driving. Over a period of time, he and the dour young woman driving his old yellow Saab convertible, get comfortable enough with each other to have a conversation. Her questions make Kafuku remember how he had endured his actress wife’s constant infidelity. He even befriends one of her lovers just be able to talk about her and read his expressions when he speaks of her. It is his strange way of keeping her memory alive in his mind and also, perhaps, to scratch at his own torment like the scab of a wound.

In Yesterday, Kitaru, who keeps failing his exams while his smart childhood sweetheart, Erika surges ahead, wants her to date his friend, the story’s narrator, because, as he puts it, ““I figure, if she’s gonna go out with other guys, it’s better if it’s you. ’Cause I know you. And you can gimme, like, updates and stuff.”  There is something perverse and self-flagellating about his need to give her up, yet control her. The tone of the story is wry, and it is one of the few of Murakami’s stories that actually has some kind of closure.

Scheherazade is a weird tale about a woman who works as the housekeeper, and volunteers to be the lover, of a reclusive middle-aged man; like the character from the Arabian Nights, she tells him stories. One of them is about herself as a young schoolgirl so obsessed with a boy in her class that she breaks into his house to get to know him in an odd intimacy, since he pays no attention to her. The way she narrates that tragic-comic slice of her past, the reader has heart-in-mouth for fear that she will get caught and ruin her life.

If Scheherazade is about a teen’s obsession, An Independent Organ is about what happens to a cosmetic surgeon and confirmed bachelor always playing the field, when he falls deeply in love and cannot discard the woman like he did others in the past.

And so it goes, Murakami creating this dream-like universe of memories, of loves lost and pain hidden, in which he teases, tantalizes the reader with allusions to other writers, his pop-jazz references and his dissections of several hearts to reach the darkness within. The book can be read in one stretch, after which the fan would be tempted to go back and start reading again to savour it better. Murakami’s books demand this kind of attention and admiration.

Men Without Women

By Haruki Murakami

(Translated by Phillip Gabriel & Ted Goossen)

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Pages: 228