Less

Travelling Heart   

Arthur Less, the protagonist of Andrew Sean Greer’s bestselling novel,Less, that won the Pulitzer Prize and many others, may be a middling writer, but is admirably aware of his shortcomings. When his latest novel is turned down by his publisher, he is disappointed and wonders what he did wrong.  Is his writing too poignant, as his agent alleged, or not gay enough, as another successful writer points out.

Later in the novel, he tells a female travelling companion, “It was about a middle-aged gay man walking around San Francisco. And, you know, his … his sorrows … ” The woman says, “A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows? It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.”

Arthur Less is a gay white middle-aged American man, who seems to dare anyone to feel sorry for him. No matter what travails he goes through, he comes out unscathed somehow, and endears himself even more to the reader. When his younger boyfriend, Freddy, plans to get married to another man, Arthur cannot bear to attend the wedding and feel people’s pitying gaze on him, so he accepts all kinds of junkets offered to writers and embarks on a series of trips out of the country, just to have a valid excuse to escape. He also does not want to be alone on his fiftieth birthday that is coming up soon.

Less is described as “an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books,” but even he has one bestseller to his name, that makes him eligible for speaking and teaching assignments, seminars and awards-- “the crazy quilt of a writer’s life: warm enough, though it never quite covers the toes.”

Greer’s gentle satire makes fun of the literary world and the quirks of authors, while his protagonist is refreshingly free of the slightest nasty streak. The places he visits, the people he meets and the adventures he has make up the very enjoyable novel.

Fortunately or unfortunately for Less, the biggest achievement of his life has been his past relationship with a great poet, Robert Brownburn, and through him, a peripheral involvement with the Russian River School, that is suddenly going through a resurgence.

Mexico, Berlin, Paris, Morocco, Japan and even India figure on Less’s itinerary. In India he is booked into what he believes is a seaside writer’s retreat, but turns out to be Catholic mission in Thiruvananthapuram. While he hopes to rework his novel in peace, he is thrust into the noise (three places of worship blare through the day) and endless bustle of the town.

What could have been a tragedy about mediocrity and heartbreak, turns out to be a comedy about a man who bumbles through life with such charming innocence that a rival actually envies him for having “the best life of anyone I know.”

Less:

By Andrew Sean Greer

Publisher:  Lee Boudreaux Book/Little, Brown

Pages: 263

Unsheltered

No Roof In Sight

When there are promises of making America great again, a family in Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, goes through the kind of financial crisis a middle-class person could suffer, anywhere in the world.

In one of the two interconnected stories, over a century apart, fifty-something Willa Knox, is told that her house is falling down, and it does not make sense to repair it. Willa, a journalist, no longer has a job after her magazine folded up, and she has come with her charming but clueless professor husband Iano Tavoularis, to live in this dilapidated house in Vineland, New Jersey, after the couple upped and moved for years chasing tenure in some university that would offer them stability.

The already precarious condition of the family is further strained, because her husband’s bed-ridden father, Nick, lives with them, his condition is getting worse, and their insurance package is inadequate for his medical needs. Then their daughter, Antigone aka Tig, returns from a stint in Cuba that she refuses to talk about; son Zeke, loses his wife, his job and home and moves back with his newborn son, expecting help and free childcare.

At an age when they should be planning for retirement, Willa and her husband slide down the ladder to a point where it feels like they are starting over from scratch. “It’s like the rules don’t apply anymore,” Willa says. “Or we learned one set, and then somebody switched them out.”

This family unit seems to personify what is wrong with contemporary America—Nick is a rabid right-winger, the opinionated but caring Tig is fiercely anti-capitalism, while Zeke, burdened with a huge debt and start-up dreams, still believes in the American dream.

The chapters of Unsheltered set in the 1870s, tell the story of impoverished school teacher, Thatcher Greenwood, who lived in the house that Willa moved into, and which was crumbling even back then. That was the time when an autocratic entrepreneur, Captain Charles Landis, founded what he hoped would be a Utopian community of Vineland, that he could control. Living across the street is Mary Treat, a self-taught naturalist, who conducts experiments at home and corresponds with Charles Darwin, whose ideas on evolution are causing ripples in the Church and its devout followers. Thatcher admires and befriends Treat (a real-life distinguished female scientist, rare in the 19^th century), that does not go down well with his bigoted employer or his self-absorbed wife.

There is no real connection between the two stories, except the house, but Kingsolver vividly writes about the problems—political, spiritual, intellectual and financial—between the two eras, and how two sets of people fight against seemingly hopeless circumstances. "Without shelter we stand in daylight," Mary Treat says to Thatcher Greenwood. Kingsolver's wonderful book makes the reader aware that everything the thinking person holds dear is in danger of collapsing, and seriously contemplate the need to build a society with ideas that are progressive, humane and inclusive.

Unsheltered

By Barbara Kingsolver

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 480

Long Road To Mercy

Core Of Steel

After the inimitable character of Amos Decker (not to mention Will Robie and John Puller), bestselling author David Baldacci launches a new series with a remarkable female character, Atlee Pine, a fighting-fit FBI special agent with a “core of steel”, who, by choice, lives and works in a remote area near the Grand Canyon, called Shattered Rock. She has a backstory— when she was six years old,  her twin sister, Mercy, was abducted and murdered by a ruthless serial killer. Her parents broke up after that and her father committed suicide. For years, Atlee’s survival instincts wiped out traces of the trauma, but when she reconstructs it with the help of therapy, she becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her sister.

However, this track is introduced and put aside, for the next book perhaps, as she is called upon to investigate the killing of a mule in the Canyon, and the disappearance of the rider, Benjamin Priest. It seems like an open-and-shut case—how far could man go in that wilderness?-- but Atlee soon has the load of officialdom landing on her head. She cannot understand why powerful people in her own bureau, the army and higher-ups in the government are so concerned about a dead mule.

She is warned off pursing the case, but she and her spirited secretary, Carol Blum, a sixty-year-old mother of six, go rogue (“like Thelma and Louise”) in a vintage Mustang, to investigate on their own, and run smack into a global conspiracy, involving the Russians and North Koreans.

The reason for the murderous mayhem unleashed on Pine and anyone else who gets wind of the big secret is absurd enough to be plausible in today’s crazy world, run by deranged leaders.

Long Road To Mercy is not one of Baldacci’s best, it tends to go all over the place, and then spend too much time with Atlee hiking in the Canyon. But still, he is a master of the thriller, and offers the reader a loud enough bang for the buck in the winning climax. The further adventures of Atlee Pine will be keenly awaited.

Long Road To Mercy

By David Baldacci

Publisher: Grand Central

Pages: 404

Past Tense

Follow The Father

Jack Reacher, is a remarkable character created by Lee Child, a former army man who decided, on leaving his job, that he would never settle down. So he keeps on the move, with just the clothes on his back, some money and his toothbrush in his pocket. He has no destination in mind, and goes wherever a bus, or a car giving him a lift takes him. He stays in any motel on the way, and eats wherever he can—the life of a modern-day gypsy. The very tall, well-built Reacher never looks for trouble, and if at all he gets into a fight, it is to protect someone who needs help. He can beat up the best of them, with his honed instincts, impeccable technique, and hands that are described as “big as dinner plates.” 

In Past Tense, the 23^rd book of the bestselling series, Jack Reacher finds himself near Laconia, a small town in New Hampshire, and recalls that his father, Stan Reacher, was born there. He decides to go to Laconia and look for the family home.

Meanwhile, in another track, a young Canadian couple, Shorty Fleck and Patty Sundstrom, drive over in a battered car, hoping to start a new life in the US. Their car breaks down, the place where they find themselves stranded has no cell network and no cars driving by. They find a motel deep in the forest, and get a room there, with the cheerful owner promising to get their car fixed the next day. Between one thing and another, they find themselves unable to leave. Mark and his three cohorts, all smiling and helpful, imprison them for a purpose so sinister, that it would be tough for the reader to guess.

 The two tracks do not actually converge till much later in the book, but Reacher and Patty have a strange spiritual connection; several times in the book, they wake up at one minute past three, with some kind of primeval warning bell ringing in their brains.

Reacher believes his self-assigned errand is simple—go to the country office, find the record for his family,  take a look at the house and leave. But, to his surprise, no Reacher shows up in the search, which just makes him determined to try harder.

He cannot stay out of trouble, however, and fells with one flying fist, in two separate instances, a man harassing a woman, and another beating up an old man.  The families of the wounded men have the kind of connections that would have a mob coming after him. Reacher finds a helper in the old man called Burke, who drives him around, when Laconia’s top cop, Brenda Amos wants him out of town to prevent gang shootouts in her peaceful jurisdiction. But, the way things happen, every time she looks up, there’s Reacher breaking her rule, when all he is trying to do is solve the puzzle of the Reacher clan missing from official records.

It’s a surprisingly humorous and fast-paced book, and when Reacher’s laconic character, who leaves a trail of broken bones wherever he goes, encounters the very smart and spunky Patty, there is a savage, fight-to-the-finish climax. For Lee Child fans, a very satisfying read; those who discover Reacher so late in the day, there are twenty-two books to go, and you can’t stop at one.

Past Tense

By Lee Child

Publisher: Delacorte

Pages: 400

The Death Of Mrs Westaway

Magpies And Mystery

Hal, the small, dark-haired and spunky heroine of Ruth Ware’s suspense novel The Death Of Mrs Westaway, belongs to the new list of young women who are in distress, but do not wait for a  prince to rescue them.

Harriet ‘Hal’ Westaway is in dire straits. Her mother died suddenly in a hit-and-run accident, and the 21-year-old has no money and no prospects. She makes a precarious living as a tarot reader on a touristy pier in Brighton, and when the novel opens on a stormy night, gets a threatening letter from a loan shark. There is also strange missive from a lawyer promising her a legacy from her grandmother’s recent death in Cornwall. Hal is puzzled because her grandparents died years ago.

 A visit from the loan shark’s thug casually wrecking her kiosk and talking of broken bones, makes Hal spend her last bit of cash on a ticket to the village, where she hopes to be able to bluff her way through the inevitable interrogation by the other members of the Westaway family and their lawyer.

 After the funeral, she is taken to the cold, stone mansion, Trepassen House, infested with raucous magpies and without central heating, where a scary housekeeper, Mrs Warren (soul sister of Rebecca’s Mrs Danvers), installs her in a freezing attic room, that looks and feels like a prison cell.

 The Westaway family consists of three brothers, their partners and kids, and a missing sister, Maud, whose daughter Hal is assumed to be, but knows she is not. She hopes that if she is caught out, she will get away pretending it was a case of mistaken identity. She also hopes, she will receive a small bequest that will help her pay off her debts and manage for a few months. But what happens next, throws her completely off balance—first literally, as she faints from cold, damp, hunger and stress, and then gobsmacked when old Mrs Westaway’s will is read out.

She realizes that she has some connection with the family, more so when there is an attempt to kill her. Mrs Warren warns her to get out, and at least one of the Westaway men is not at all happy with the terms of the will.  Ruth Ware expertly builds up layers of suspense; Hal’s story is interspersed with that of a young woman who was locked up in the very attic where Ruth finds herself, and scratched “Help Me” on the glass—everything about the place spooks Hal out, though the Westaway family—particularly an aunt-- is kind and solicitous.

Best-selling author Ruth Ware does not dilute the story with needless romance or other diversions; The Death Of Mrs Westaway is a solid Gothic suspense novel, and the reader discovers the mystery of Hal’s past, as she stumbles on clues.

The Death Of Mrs Westaway

By Ruth Ware

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 384

The Blue Lotus

Collected Wisdom 

Meena Arora Nayak writes in her excellent book The Blue Lotus: Myths And Folktales of India, “This vastness of over three thousand years of storytelling is difficult to fathom, even for an Indian. Most Indians have an idea of the country’s general ethos that derives from the overarching pan-Indian traditions; however, people living in one part of the country have little idea of folkloric traditions in another part.”  Which is so true, and all the more reason why the work the author put into this volume should be highly appreciated. Her selection of stories from a very deep and wide pool, gives the reader a wonderful insight into the diverse narratives of the country. There are the great epics, the Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads tales from the Panchatantra, Jataka Tales, Kathasaritsagar and a treasure trove of stories from the various religious texts and folk tales from the various linguistic groups and tribes of the country. It is impossible to encapsulate them into one volume, but the author has categorized them beautifully, written some evocative notes, and listed such exhaustive references, that this delightful volume could lead the curious reader to many more. The Blue Lotus is for collector to keep and dip into from time to time; and perhaps for parents to read to their children, so that they are introduced to the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of India through stories that are as full of magic and adventure as they are replete with wisdom.

The Blue Lotus Myths And Folktales Of India

By Meena Arora Nayak

Publisher: Aleph

Pages: 584

Elevation

A Lightness Of Being

Stephen King’s slim new novella, Elevation, packs in more heart and soul into its pages than many doorstopper tomes. It is kind of scary too, but not in a ghost-and-ghoulish way.

King fans would remember his 1984 novel, Thinner, in which a man is cursed with endless weight loss. In the new book, healthy and happy-go-lucky 42-year-old Scott Carey, discovers that he is losing weight at an alarming rate, but that makes no difference his 230-pound appearance—he gets lighter but does not lose mass. He has reason to be unhappy—his wife left him; but also to be happy—he got a well-paid work assignment.

Scott goes to see a doctor friend, Bob Ellis, who tells him, “I doubt very much if this is something that can be scientifically investigated.”  Scott does not want be turned into a science guinea pig and media freak, so decides to keep his strange condition to himself, swearing the doctor to secrecy.  It would seem like a dream to some, to be able to eat as much as they want without putting on weight, and having surplus energy to run a marathon, but nothing comes without a tragic price.

Going alongside Scott’s affliction, is the hostility faced by his new neighbours, a married lesbian couple, that has moved to the town of Castle Rock to run a vegetarian Mexican restaurant called Holy Frijole, which is on the verge of closing down for lack of patronage. Scott’s starts on the wrong foot with the more aggressive of the two, Deedee (the other partner is the mild-mannered Missy, a chef), by politely telling them that their dog is crapping on his lawn. He soon realizes that the women have more serious issues to deal with. When he gets into a scrap with a bully to defend his neighbours, Deedee gets inexplicably angry. His civility is so rudely rebuffed that he can only say, “All I want, is for us to be good neighbours.”

The conservative town does not want the Deedee and Missy flaunting their ‘otherness’. A character comments to Scott, “The county went for Trump three-to-one in ’16 and they think our stonebrain governor walks on water. If those women had kept it on the down-low they would have been fine, but they didn’t. Now there are people who think they’re trying to make some kind of statement.”  And just like that, King, gently slides in politics, intolerance and rigid social attitudes.

The book is simple, heartwarming (in spite of the cliché of a white male savior of women in distress) and stands for simple kindness over strident political correctness. It can be read in one quick sitting, but its impact on the mind will stay longer.

Elevation

By Stephen King

Publisher: Scribner

Pages: 160

Holy Ghost

Something About Mary

In John Sandford’s eleventh Virgil Flowers novel, Holy Ghost, the investigator is faced with an elusive sniper in a newly prosperous town.

Wardell Holland, the mayor of the beleaguerd town on Wheatfield, who had lost a foot in Afghanistan, spends his time literally shooting flies, till precocious teenager John Jacob Skinner comes up with a fraudulent but harmless scheme to alter the town’s fortunes. When the Virgin Mary appears in the town’s church, the devout flock to Wheatfield. The direct beneficiaries are Holland and Skinner, whose new store is right opposite the church.

Then two people are shot in apparently random attacks, and Wheatfield is in danger of going losing all its recent gains.. Flowers of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, is summoned to help solve the case. He reluctantly leaves his pregnant girlfriend Frankie (quite a character, but she has little to do in this book) and drive to Wheatfield.

When the gun used in the killing is identified, its owner, Glen Andorra, turns up dead, shot in his home, with one of his own guns—of which has plenty, since he runs Wheatfield’s shooting rage. That makes one thing clear, the killer is from the town, and knew Andorra. Virgil believes that if he can find the motive, he will be able to catch the killer. The smartalecky Skinner is sure that the motive is money, but whose money, and who gains in a cash-strapped town? Holland is, of course, worried about the financial implications if the religious tourists are scared way by the sniper.

Sandford populates the novel with a cast of amusing characters—the top being Holland’s mother, who runs a café with such inedible food that Flowers and the other cops who land up for another case, have to survive on packaged junk from Holland and Skinner’s store, which also ends up being the cops’ headquarters. The dialogue is witty, the wisecracks fly thick and fast; the only small problem is that track that leads to the killer is not quite linked to the humorous set-up, but that does not take away from the enjoyment of the novel. John Sandford is, as Stephen King is quoted saying, “one of the great novelists of all time!' High praise indeed from the master of horror and suspense.

Holy Ghost

By John Sandford

Publisher: Putnam

Pages: 400

The Labyrinth Of The Spirits

Out Of The Maze

When Spanish writer Carlos Luis Zafon wrote The Shadow of the Wind in 2001 he created a book lovers’ paradise, in the form of a cemetery of forgotten books, a secret mansion made of endless walls, corridors and columns of books, preserved for posterity. Only a few are allowed into the maze, and if they are initiated, they are allowed to take one book which they have to protect for life.

The huge success of the first book (translated by Lucia Graves), led to three more,  The Angel’s Game, The Prisoner of Heaven and the last in the series, The Labyrinth Of The Spirits—a magnificent, sprawling epic of a novel (800 plus pages), an absolutely riveting saga of Spain under General Franco, a country seething with unrest, intrigue and politically-motivated atrocities.

Alicia Gris is introduced in this book, a young woman, who, as a child, lost her family during the Spanish Civil War when the Nacionales (fascists) mercilessly bombed Barcelona in 1938. She was rescued by a young Fermin Romero de Torres (from the earlier books), who stowed away in a ship to Barcelona, escaping the sadistic Inspector Fumero, to carry a message for Alicia’s mother. While they were separated in the melee, Alicia found herself in the huge, mysterious library, where her life was saved, but she was left with a burn injury that causes her unbearable agony, and also painful memories that refuse to fade.

The suave and sinister Leandro Montalvo pulled her out of the streets and inducted the beautiful and enigmatic woman into the secret police in Madrid, a job she excelled at and hated. Leandro promises to release her, if she does one last job—tracing the missing Minister of Culture, Mauricio Valls.

She is paired with a reluctant partner, an older policeman, Juan Manuel Vargas, and they make their way to Barcelona, where the key to the mystery lies, and somehow the Sempere family of booksellers is involved.  Alicia discovers a possible clue—a rare book by the author Victor Mataix in Valls’s office in his forbidding Madrid mansion. Valls used to be the director of the dreaded Montjuic Prison in Barcelona during World War II, where several writers were imprisoned, tortured and possibly killed, including Mataix.

As Alicia and Vargas start investigating, they almost uncover a dark secret that imperils their own lives. Nobody seems to be what they claim to be, and nobody can be trusted; there is danger, deceit and a trail of crimes committed by the corrupt and powerful men in Franco’s tyrannical regime. They have left behind a system that has thrown up ruthless men like Valls and a frighteningly vicious cop called Hendaya.

In the first book, just before the Spanish civil war Daniel Sempere, the son of a bookseller who was one of the cemetery’s curators, selected a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by an obscure author, Julián Carax, and that is linked to the chain of the fourth book. The two middle books added writer David Martín, and in the last, is Victor Mataix, creator of a series of children’s books, called The Labyrinth of the Spirits; whose life and work hold the solution to the problems in which Gris and Vargas are caught up.

There are passionate romances, complicated subplots, references to classic literature, and stories within stories—the whole effect is that of a jigsaw, which readers can get lost trying to solve, till Zafon decides it’s time for them to fit all pieces of the puzzle and emerge into the light.

While he tells his stories, Zafón also comments on the political and religious censoring of what are considered ‘unsuitable’ books, and also conjures to vivid word pictures of Barcelona and Madrid. He is truly a magician of words and Lucia Graves translation captures his imagination and occasionally florid style, especially when Fermin speaks, “like a book,” a young character complains.

Readers who have read the earlier three books, would enjoy this one much more, but it works quite well as a standalone novel too.

The Labyrinth of the Spirits,

By Carlos Luis Zafon (Translated by Lucia Graves)

Publisher: Orion

Pages: 882

Flights

Wandering Heights

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, won the Man Booker International Prize earlier this year, for translated fiction. It is not strictly a novel, but an intertwined bunch of pieces and stories about travel.  Most of the book is set in airports, railway stations, hotels, cars on the road, and gives a dizzying feel of dislocation.

The book begins with a narrator who likes the idea constantly being on the move. She says, “Clearly, I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots. . . My energy derives from movement — from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.”  

Interspersing the voice of this restless modern-day gypsy, are digressions like random observations about travelling, and stories of other travellers, the most disturbing being the one about a man whose wife and child go missing when they are on vacation. Tokarczuk whips up tension and suspense and then abandons this track for a bit, to look at other people and their experiences, none of which give the reader a sense of an ending.  These fragments of stories and observations range from the banal (sanitary pads!) to the macabre, and could be like things that happen to everybody when they travel, but don’t always come to a neat conclusion, because it is time to move on to a new place. Still, the narrator who does not like the idea of naming or describing experiences, says, “Do not leave any unexplained, unnarrated situations, any closed doors; kick them down with a curse, even the ones that lead to embarrassing and shameful hallways you would prefer to forget. Don’t be ashamed of any fall, of any sin. The narrated sin will be forgiven. The narrated life, saved.”

It may not be a book to be read at a go, but dipped into from time to time, to get a dose of humour, wisdom, curiosity and introspection.

Flights

By Olga Tokarczuk

Translated by Jennifer Croft

Publisher: Riverhead

Pages: 416

Alternate Side

Parking Woes

At the centre of Anna Quindlen’s Alternate Side is an ordinary incident of a parking quarrel that could occur in any teeming city with more cars than space to park them. The unexpected burst of violence goes on to become a study of urban angst, fractured relationships, class and racial differences and the sheer cussedness that stress brings about in the most civilized of people.

Set in a posh Manhattan neighborhood, where people live in designer homes, throw catered parties, have their kids raised by Jamaican nannies and their toilets unclogged by Hispanic handymen, it is seen from the point of view of Nora Nolan, who has an enviable job as the director of a Museum of Jewellery in New York; she is so good at her work, that is constantly being pursued by others to head their non-profit initiatives. While her husband Charlie’s career as an investment banker, is on the decline, even his boss tries to woo Nora which causes some friction in their already fraying marriage.

The crisis that shatters the peace of the neighbourhood is caused by a Jack Fisk, an unpleasant lawyer hitting the colony’s handyman Ricky Ramos with a golf club and breaking his leg, because his van was blocking the entry to the precious, much-coveted parking lot. If the lawyer is not to be sued for all he’s got, he has to prove in court that it was an accident. Charlie and the men of the close-knit community decide to back the lawyer, and Nora is appalled. She has always been the type to do good, help the housekeeper and handyman with things her family no longer uses, or give money to the homeless man outside her workplace, but her smugness is dented by Ricky’s furious wife, Nita.

Alternate Side has focused on a very small and privileged section of New York, but the briskly-paced novel with a dash of dark humour, is an incisive look at emptiness of urban lives and tensions simmering under seemingly happy homes.

Alternate Side

By Anna Quindlen

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 304

Calypso

Families Are Made Of This

David Sedaris writes in a funny way about everyday things that most people won’t notice—like shops at the airport trying to sell you stuff you don’t need, but he can expertly blend humour with empathy and pathos when he writes about subjects like aging, depression, suicide. His family and long-time partner Hugh appear in many of the essays in Calpyso—pieces that are part fictional, and always engaging. 

His regular readers know about his large brood—there was his loving but alcoholic mother who died years ago, his old and tetchy father, who lives alone in a messy house, but won’t move out or accept help; there is a bunch of siblings, their spouses, a supersmart niece, and enduring memories of sister Tiffany, who committed suicide. (At some point on the book Sedaris confesses that he slammed the door on the troubled and troublesome Tiffany and never saw her again.)

Calypso, Sedaris’s tenth collection of story-essays has a lot more of his family in it; the joyous times spent in the amusingly named beach cottage, Sea Section, on the North Carolina coast, where the clan gathers regularly for holidays—the house that that Sedaris and Hugh purchased to fulfill the wish that,  “one day I would buy a beach house and it would be everyone’s, as long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me for it”. There are anecdotes around the house—like the time his sister Lisa and he went for a walk on the beach and could not figure which of the near-identical sea front cottages was theirs.

Sedaris writes about getting obsessed with his fitness device and spending hours walking (“Before, once we’d eaten dinner, I was in for the evening. Now, though, as soon as I’m finished with the dishes, I walk to the pub and back, a distance of 3,895 steps”), and cleaning up trash on the way while he is out and about, so that a garbage truck is named after him. In another hilarious episode, a reader, who claims to be a doctor, removes a tumour under Sedaris’s skin, which he then collects to feed to a turtle.

If he writes with humour about his family's belief in ghosts, his sister's encounter with a psychic of his father's admiration of Trump, he can turn the smiles to tears when he writes about the shame of incontinence. There is a fine balance of light and darkness in Calypso to make it amusing as well as deeply poignant.

Calypso

By David Sedaris

Publisher: Little, Brown

Pages: 288

Killing Commendatore

Murakami In Wonderland

The English translation of Haruki Murakami's book was eagerly awaited, even though reviews of the Japanese original were not exactly raving

Still, Murakami could never write a bad book; even if he did, it would be a great read. Murakami with his surreal style, may be an acquired taste but his books are addictive. About time he was awarded that elusive Nobel (and also the Bad Sex prize given out annually).

Killing Commendatore, translated by Phillip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, follows the strange adventures of the unnamed protagonist, a popular painter of portraits, whose life comes apart when Yuzu, his wife of six years announces that she wants to leave him for another man.

He gets out of home, drives around aimlessly for a while till his friend Masahiko Amada offers him the use of a remote mountain cottage, where his father, the great artist Tomohiko Amada used to live and paint. He suffers from dementia and was moved to a care home.

The narrator wants to be a 'real' artist and no longer wishes to paint portraits but inspiration does not strike even amidst peaceful, picturesque surroundings. To pad his dwindling bank balance, he teaches at a nearby art school. He also starts casual affairs with two married women, one of whom stays around for a while, bringing him news from her "jungle grapevine."

Then, three things happen, he gets offered a huge amount of money to paint a portrait of the mysterious Menshiki, who lives on a hilltop mansion nearby. Menshiki has been inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, except for the lavish parties. He also lives in splendid isolation and has a peculiar obsession for a young woman. (Later, homage is  also paid to  Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland.)

Menshiki claims to have retired rich from the sale of his tech business, but there is no trace of him online. His most remarkable feature is his snow white hair. He drives expensive cars, wears stylish clothes and has a hidden agenda for seeking out the artist.

Then, the narrator discovers a painting titled Killing Commendatore by Amada hidden in the attic, which bewitches him. The genesis of the painting inspired by the opera Don Giovanni, lies in the time Amada spent studying art Vienna.

The third strange occurrence is a the sound of a bell that wakes up the narrator at night, till he and Menshiki trace it to a pit in the forest nearby. Disturbing the stones on the pit unleash a creature who plays a big part in what happens next.

It would be a spoiler to reveal any more, but the book has to be read at leisure, savouring Murakami's descriptions of food, clothes, music, books and art.

Very few writers can throw logic to the winds, forget about connecting dots and tantalise the reader regardless. The one annoying thing about this book, is the writer's breast fetish-- his conversations about breasts, particularly with a thirteen-year-old girl, are creepy. Ignore that and the novel will please a Murakami fan.

Killing Commendatore

By Haruki Murakami

Translated by Phillip Gabriel, Ted Goossen

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 674

Transcription

Cloak And Dagger

There was admittedly some reluctance in picking up yet another World War II novel, but Kate Atkinson’s deliciously twisty Life After Life and its sequel (or companion piece as she called it) A God In Ruins, were such favourites that one could not resist a new book by her. And Transcription it turned out to be fast-paced, suspenseful and very readable.

The protagonist is 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong, who is newly orphaned, and hoping for a better life. She gets the excitement she wants, but not in the way she expected. She is suddenly summoned to the offices of MI5, Britain’s security services, to be recruited, along with several young women, including the aristocratic Clarissa. For reasons she cannot fathom, she is picked by the enigmatic and handsome Peregrine ‘Perry’ Gibbons to move in next door to a flat where fifth columnists (British Nazi sympathizers) have their secret meetings. They do not know that their handler, Godfrey Toby, is not the Gestapo agent that he claims to be, but an MI5 spy.

The walls of the flat have been fitted with recording equipment—even then the techie was a clever teen-- and Juliet’s job is to transcribe the tapes. It would have been terribly dull work, were it not for her infatuation with Perry, and her involvement with the more dangerous job of taking on the fake identity of the posh Iris Carter-Jenkins and infiltrating the circle of the traitorous Mrs Scaife.

Juliet discovers that not only does she have the imagination to fill in the blanks in the conversations next door, but also the courage to survive the lies, deceit, the cloak-and-dagger of the spy business. 

After the end of the War, when she is working on a children’s radio programme with the BBC, she suddenly runs into Toby, who refuses to recognize her. Characters from the past, that she thought she was done with when she ceased to be spy, tumble out, and she starts getting threatening letters (“you will pay for what you did”) and people following her. It turns out that the warning about the work of the secret service never getting over, was right.

Juliet tries to find out just what is going on, and gets embroiled in events beyond her control. It is impossible to tell if people are who they claim to be (is the pesky assistant a spy?); whether a double agent is actually a triple agent, and why she is being targeted for her actions during the War, which were, after all not of her own choosing, and were meant to be for the benefit of her country.

Transcription is a wonderful book, based on some true characters and events, about how multiple identities, crime, punishment, the conscience and, of course, the political choices people make, trace the course of their lives. It reads like a spy thriller, but sprinkled with wry British humour and ruminations on what constitutes patriotism. Poor Juliet’s love for Perry brings the pages some of its funniest scenes and lines; like when he takes her on what she believes is a date, but turns out to be a hilariously unromantic outing.

Juliet Armstrong, caught though she is in the web of history, is a girl for all times— intelligent, intrepid, and calm in a crisis. This novel is begging to be turned into a movie.

Transcription

By Kate Atkinson

Publisher: Doubleday

Pages: 352

Two By Nora Roberts

Psycho Alert

Two of Nora Roberts books have psychopathic villains—the kind with dangerously devious minds and the means to wreak havoc.

The gun control debate in the US comes up every time there is a mass shooting. In Nora Roberts’s Shelter in Place, three young men enter a mall in Portland, and start firing randomly. Many people are killed, and some in moments of heroism that automatically emerge when there’s a crisis, manage to save lives.

Simone Knox, who just happened to go out of the movie theatre to the washroom when the attacks took place, manages to call the emergency number 911, for which she is hailed as a heroine—without her presence of mind, more lives would have been lost.  Knox loses one of her best friends, and suffers from survivor’s guilt, leading her to go live on Tranquility Island, with her bohemian grandmother, CiCi, who is an artist, and seek solace in clay art herself.

Another survivor, Reed Quartermaine, befriends a young cop, Essie McVee, who had shot one of the killers, and becomes a cop too. All of them try to cope with the nightmarish memories, when suddenly, someone starts to target the survivors and kills them in horrible ways. The murderer, an expert with disguises and fake ids, stays several steps ahead of the cops; only Reed sees the connection, between the mall massacre in the past, and the current spate of killings. The novel is part thriller, part romance and very readable.

Shelter In Place

By Nora Roberts

Publisher: St. Martin's

Pages: 448

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Come Sundown by Nora Roberts takes a germ of an idea from Emma Donoghue terrifying Room, in which a man abducts a young woman and imprisons her in a basement.

Alice Bodine, a rebellious young woman, on her way home, is kidnapped by a religious psychopath, who shackles her in a room, beats and rapes her and takes away the children she gives birth to. He forces Alice to call him “Sir” and believes a woman’s place is to serve men and give him sons. Alice is so brutalized that she loses her sanity.

The discomfiting horror of Alice’s plight, is juxtaposed with the life of ambitious Bodine Longbow, who runs her family’s Montana resort and has made a success of it. Her father and brothers run a ranch and they all live happily in a close-knit family, with grandmother and great grandmother around.  Bodine is even happier when her childhood crush Callen Skinner, returns to town and starts working with the family enterprise.

Then, two women are found murdered on ranch property and a vengeful cop tries to pin the blame on Callen. But that is the least of the family’s problems—a mentally traumatized and severely battered Alice is found on the road, and getting her back to normal is a challenge.

Callen and his beloved horse Sundown are shot at, and suddenly the Longbows have more problems than they are used to dealing with.

Roberts successful thriller-romance formula seems to work quite well here too, even though many readers could be put off by the violence inflicted on Alice. There is also some kind of judgment here, unintended though it may be-- women who don’t stay within the protective ring of their families, are risking Alice’s fate.

Come Sundown

By Nora Roberts

Publisher: St Martin’s

Pages: 480

Red War

Dead Man Walking

Vince Flynn wrote popular political thrillers (American Assassin being the best known, turned into a movie) with Mitch Rapp, a CIA counter-terrorist operative, as his protagonist ; after his death in 2013, Kyle Mills continued to write them, under the current publishing trend of keeping characters alive ever their creators have passed way to continue a profitable franchise.

Mills, a bestselling writer himself, has done a fine job with Mitch Rapp, his Russian frenemy Grisha Azarov and CIA boss Irene Kennedy appearing in great form, along with some other regulars like Scott Coleman, Mitch’s partner Claudia Gould and her daughter Anna (his girlfriend died in an earlier book).

Red War, the seventeenth Mitch Rapp novel, has as the villain, a Vladimir Putin-like Russian autocrat Maxim Krupin. When he finds that he has brain cancer and will probably not live too long, he is quite willing to start World War III to keep up his image as a strongman in the eyes of the people.  Facing protests in the streets for the poor conditions in the country and unable to trust anyone in his inner circle, he springs out of retirement, the psychopathic General Andrei Sokolov, who will stop at nothing to bring back the glory of Mother Russia.

Krupin and Sokolov plan to destroy NATO, attack Baltic countries and engage the west in a war that would benefit nobody but himself—and as a man with nothing lose, he is a tough adversary.

He is the kind of tyrant, who would mess with the power grid of Costa Rica to have his former hitman Grisha Azarov killed. Azarov has quit the madness periodically unleashed by power-hungry leaders, and is living peacefully with his girlfriend Cara, when the Russians attack. Rapp and Coleman happen to arrive in the nick of time to pull him out of his burning house, but Cara is badly wounded. Azarov is furious enough to consider mounting a hit on Krupin.

Meanwhile, Krupin hides out in the back of beyond, where medical personnel he has kidnapped conduct ghastly experiments on innocent civilians who have the same symptoms as Krupin, in the hope of finding a cure.  The CIA wonders why Krupin is behaving so erratically, and correctly conclude that he is terminally ill.

As the threat of nuclear war looms, it is up to Rapp and his new ally Azarov (who had tried to kill him in the past and had badly wounded Coleman) to find a way to stop the two Russian madmen.

Mills gets his politics right and the reader gets a worrisome look at the precarious state the world is in—for a change, the enemies are not middle-Eastern terrorists, but Russians with a death wish. The book is action-packed, pulse-pounding and scary for how realistic it is, even within the incredible two-man-army scenario.  Even if Mitch Rapp’s perfectly-timed appearances, hair-trigger escapes and way of getting out of every violent encounter unscathed seem exaggerated, and the CIA’s protector-of-the-world stance ridiculous, Red War is a hugely enjoyable read.

Red War

By Kyle Mills for Vince Flynn

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 400