I first started listening to this book on a long car ride, but had to switch to something else because it was putting me to sleep. Granted, I was tired to start with, but it seemed like a lot of talking with this person and that about matters not related to the crime. Later (and more rested) I found myself better able to stick with it, although still vaguely disappointed.

I think I expected more of a sense of place. I mean, Venice after all! Not that I would expect natives to rhapsodise about tourist spots, but I had hoped to understand a bit better what it is like to live there. I like the way Laura Lippman uses Baltimore almost as another character in her books. A mention or two here of the traghetto and a water-taxi didn’t quite do it for me. I was amused that I could still convert lire to dollars almost unconsciously—talk about your useless skills. In a museum in Chiusi a few years ago, I noticed they had a display of different denominations of lire notes and coins. It still seems odd that things from my lifetime are now part of history.

There were some hints of regional discrimination, organised crime and official corruption. But I wanted the feel of daily life in the city of dirt and dreams, not a civics lesson. Unfair, of course, to criticise a book for not being what I expected. I’ve mentioned before that I particularly like mysteries for their puzzle, and the puzzle here was certainly interesting.

When a long-abandoned field is plowed, some human bones are turned up along with a signet ring with the crest of the Lorenzoni family. The patriarch, Count Lorenzoni, runs a huge business with fingers in all kinds of pies. He had started with almost nothing but his fierce ambition to rebuild the family fortunes and restore the family’s honor, deeply tarnished during the war when the Count’s father betrayed the city’s Jews to the Germans.

Almost two years previous to the story, the Count’s only son, Roberto, had been kidnapped. The authorities had frozen the family’s assets, so the Count was unable to pay the ransom, and nothing more was heard of the boy. Could the body in the field be the missing Roberto? If so, who had kidnapped him and why?

Once I let go of my expectations—none of Nevada Barr’s suspenseful chases through national parks here or Ian Rankin’s devastating character development—I began to enjoy this book for what it is: a sober story with much to say about families and what can go on within them.

Songs are stories, too, even when there are no words. Every year I collect the songs I’ve been listening to over and over, and am usually surprised to find a common theme emerging. Switching from cassette tapes to an ipod has meant that my playlists have gotten longer and more dynamic. Here is this year’s list:

An Untold Story – Assaggio No. 1 In G Minor, Casanova soundtrack
Over The Rainbow, Eva Cassidy
Jamaica Say You Will, Tom Rush
Super Duper Love, Joss Stone
Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes, Paul Simon
Adia, Sarah McLachlan
Everything is Free, Gillian Welch
Cowsong, Kate Rusby
The Spotted Cow, Tim Radford
Pony, Tom Waits
House Where Nobody Lives, Tom Waits
A Case Of You, Joni Mitchell
Blue, Joni Mitchell
Largo from “Winter”, The Four Seasons, Yo-Yo Ma et al
Falling In Love Again, Marlene Dietrich
Illusions, Marlene Dietrich
La Route Enchantee, Charles Trenet
Menilmontant, Charles Trenet
La Vie En Rose, Edith Piaf
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, Edith Piaf
In The Still Of The Night, Billy Ekstine
Night And Day, Ella Fitzgerald
I've Got You Under My Skin, Dinah Washington
Moon Dreams (Live), Miles Davis
Vincent (Starry, Starry Night), Josh Groban
Lately, Aengus Finnan
Shenandoah, Keith Jarrett
Gypsy Round, Bare Necessities
Ramsgate Assembly, Bare Necessities
Lord Balgonie's, Susan Conant
Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
Died For Love, John Roberts & Tony Barrand
I Wish, Kate Rusby
Cruel, Kate Rusby
Botany Bay, Kate Rusby
Jamestown, Alistair Brown
A Sailor's Life, Finest Kind
The Female Rambling Sailor, Ian Robb
Clog à Ti-Jules/Bedeau de l'Enfer, Elvie Miller & Naomi Morse
The Discharged Drummer, Nightingale
The Black Isle, Becky Tracy
Theidh mi dhachaigh (Return to Kintail), Alasdair Fraser
The Dark Island, Maggie Carchrie
Cuccuruccu Paloma, Caetano Veloso
Hable Con Ella, Alberto Iglesias
Cinema Paradiso: Looking for You, Yo-Yo Ma/Morricone
Cinema Paradiso (Se), Josh Groban
Cinema Paradiso: Nostalgia, Yo-Yo Ma/Morricone
Moon River, Frank Sinatra

This is the first Kingsolver book I’ve read, in spite of numerous recommendations from friends. I found much to like in it, not least the lovely illustrations of moths and other critters on the end papers, but also much that was problematic.

The title refers to the awesome fertility of a humid southern summer, when honeysuckle can overrun a wall in a single season. The story takes place on fictional Zebulon Mountain and the small farms of the nearby town of Egg Fork, clearly in the remote Appalachians. Although the state is not named, it appears to be Virginia or West Virginia. The setting is perhaps the best part of the book. Kingsolver captures the sweet, almost dreamy, explosion of life in the southern woods, lovingly describing mushrooms, softly rotted trees, mouse-eating snakes, and moths of all kinds. She brings to life the sounds of an old farmhouse and the wavy, antique glass of its windows.

Nestled in among the other fauna are three sets of people, whose stories intertwine. Deanna is a wildlife biologist living alone on the mountain, maintaining trails, expelling out-of-season hunters and—unofficially—searching for signs of coyotes moving into the area. She meets a mysterious stranger on the trail, a man whom she finds disturbing in more ways than one. Down the mountain, where civilization starts, Lusa struggles to adapt to the farm life she has married into and the extended family that comes with it. Closer to town, two elderly neighbors feud over pesticides and the way the world has changed in their lifetime.

I enjoyed these characters and their stories. Kingsolver switches gracefully from one story to another, delineating the change with chapter breaks. However, she is less graceful at drawing analogies between the lives and passions of her human characters and those of her critters. She pounds home the comparison, not just in one chapter but over and over.

The other area where I would have appreciated a little more subtlety was the proselytizing about ecology. Yes, I’m sympathetic to the cause, concerned about disturbed habitats and threatened (and actual) extinctions. But I don’t want to read lecture after lecture about it in a novel. I’m starting to think that there is just no way to talk about any creed or dogma in fiction. So many of my stories have ended up in the shredder because they turned into rants. For a writer, having strong opinions can be a real drawback! I struggle to figure out how to set up a path without bullying the reader down it, to suggest an alternative way to frame an issue without forcing it on the reader as this book forced its issues on me.

Still, despite its weaknesses, this was the right book to read, here in the middle of my own southern summer, with the sparrows, hummingbirds, cardinals, robins, and even a bright goldfinch today swarming over the feeders; tree frogs and crickets going crazy; vines crawling over the trees by the run; and the dank sweet smell of the run itself after a week of rain.

I loved this book. It’s quite short, a series of vignettes about a young girl named Sophia and her grandmother, drawn from summers spent on an island in the Gulf of Finland. Sophia’s father appears in some of the stories, but he is a peripheral presence, busy working at his desk or taking the boat out to get supplies. They are the only people on the island.

What is remarkable about these little stories is how tough they are. Jansson enters fully into the child’s world of magic forests, special bathrobes, and visiting friends. She manages to write about that world without a trace of sentimentality and so truthfully that I found myself stumbling over long-buried memories of my own childhood foraging in summer woods, clambering over rocks and peering at insects.

Even more refreshing is the grandmother’s resilient candor. The stories are most often from her point of view, and I loved the way she treats the child, directly, as an intelligent being who could be expected to hold up her end of things. The old woman doesn’t cater to Sophia or fawn over her, not even when the girl is shouting with anger or trying to hide her fear when swimming in deep water, not even when the subject of Sophia’s dead mother comes up. Yet the grandmother—whose aches and pains are relayed without self-pity, who crawls under bushes to hide the fact that she’s smoking a cigarette, who is not above using a swear word to distract the child—will work behind Sophia’s back to carve animals out of wood or create a Doge’s palace for a pretend Venice.

I find it incredibly hard to write about children. In many stories they are either syrupy sweet or too prescient, miniature adults. The child as lonely outsider has been done to death, and the bratty, know-it-all children who populate sitcoms are just plain annoying. But this book is a perfect model for how to write about a child in a way that is new and honest.

I wrote about Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum back in April, a first novel I enjoyed so much that I snatched up this, more recent book when I spotted it in the bookstore. Case Histories fits into the mystery genre, having a series of crimes and a detective. However, it is unlike any other mystery I’ve read and, although they haven’t often shown up on this blog, I’ve read a lot of mysteries.

What I like about mysteries, beyond the fact that some of the best writing today can be found in them (just take a look at books by people like P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Iain Pears, and Arturo Perez-Reverte), is the puzzle. Yes, I’m one of those people. I like to do crossword puzzles, though not quite so much as I did in the days when my sons were still at home and we worked them round-robin on lazy Sunday mornings in front of the fire. My sons are now trying to convert me to cryptic crosswords, but I haven’t yet done enough to recognise the patterns and cues; finding a single answer is cause for major rejoicing, and I still remember the astonished pride with which I unraveled my first clue. (“Trainee pilots tie shoes”: L+aces=laces. Okay, I never said it was a hard one.)

Atkinson’s book is not so much about the puzzle, though there are questions to be answered and deaths to be understood, as it is about the emotions. She breaks what I never before realised was a cardinal rule of mystery-writing: don’t linger too long on the grief; get busy building the resolution. No, the losses here are wrenching, and continue to distort lives decades later.

In Case No. 1, a family goes to sleep in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood and wakes up to a disappearance that changes each of their lives forever. Case No. 3 takes us inside the life of a young woman trapped by a too-quick marriage, rural isolation, and a demanding baby (whom she refers to as “the bug”), all of which combine to create the kind of desperation that leads a fox to gnaw off its own leg. Case No. 4 concerns the detective himself, and his family’s past. But it was Case No. 2 that sent me reeling: a widowed lawyer whose love for his daughter permeates his life, whose fear for her safety evokes practical defenses, such as cautioning her against blind spots, and magical thinking, such as believing a train accident had filled the day’s quota of tragedy.

One of Atkinson’s gifts as a writer is the way she brings her characters to life—I could swear I knew Ruby Lennox from Museum personally, and in my dotage I’m sure I’ll get her mixed up with my real childhood friends—but participating so fully in their emotions means feeling their confusion and anger and desolation. In each of these cases, hurt, mourning with those left to carry on, I was reminded of Julian Green’s “a chasm coming between me and my life”, the way a single event can put a full stop on what came before and thrust you irrevocably into a new and alien reality, where your only hope is to reach a separate peace. Solutions are achieved here, peace even, but it is the grief that stays with me.

Memoirs have made up a good part of my reading list over the last few years while I struggled to shape my own story. The quality has varied widely, but even the duds raise questions that interest me, such as why the author selected these scenes and ordered them in this way. Sometimes even the poorly constructed ones have a few scenes that bring a particular time and place to life, scenes that stay with me. For example, I recently read M.F.K. Fischer’s Among Friends which I found tedious for the most part. Rather than a sustained narrative, it appeared to be a random collection of anecdotes such as those intended for the sake of children or grandchildren, i.e., people who care more about the writer than the story. However, there were several lovely and memorable scenes, such as one from a childhood summer at the shore where she swims out to a rock to collect mussels for dinner.

I picked up this memoir about Patchett’s friendship with Lucy Grealy, having read nothing by either woman, but intrerested by the inside flap’s promise that “Patchett shines light on the little explored (sic) world of women’s friendships”. However, the scene describing the start of their friendship left me uneasy and skeptical. Although the two had attended Sarah Lawrence at the same time, Lucy didn’t know Ann while Ann knew Lucy only as a campus “celebrity”. Yet Lucy’s first action when they meet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is to throw herself on Ann, wrapping her arms around Ann’s neck and her legs around Ann’s waist, weeping copiously with joy that Ann has arrived.

There is a lot more weeping throughout the book as Lucy—who is also presented as outgoing and popular, with hordes of friends—continues to cling to Ann, demanding that Ann constantly acknowledge that she loves Lucy best, better than any other girlfriend, better than any boyfriend or husband. On one occasion, when the two are lunching with Ann’s new friend Elizabeth, Lucy pulls this stunt, sitting on Ann’s lap, demanding to be told Ann loves her best, eating off of Ann’s plate. Ann writes, “I was a little embarrassed, but only because I was afraid that Elizabeth might not understand Lucy, or understand me for letting her get away with it.” At that point, a third of the way through the book, I did not understand either.

I found this book deeply disturbing and not in any way representative of women’s friendships as I know them. True, the writing is beautiful and powerful. True, Lucy faced severe and uncommon trials. But, if this account is accurate (a disclaimer that must always be made about a memoir), the “friendship” between these two women was a classic addict/enabler relationship. Lucy was addicted not just to the heroin that eventually killed her but to being the center of attention always, attention that Ann and Lucy’s other friends lavished on her, along with money, food, clothes, apartments, etc. “She liked to be carried,” Ann writes.

From this account, I could see where Lucy’s incandescent personality (when she wasn’t crying) could be fun to be around. For a few minutes. However, it wouldn’t be long before I would be running like crazy in the other direction. There are some people who can never get enough attention; their neediness is like a bottomless pit inside them (as a friend of mine described it). Expecting someone to devote themselves to the Sisyphean task of trying to fill that pit goes beyond the bounds of friendship, in my opinion.

If I can get over the creepiness of the story, I will go back and try to analyze the writing itself to understand how Patchett achieves such remarkable power in her prose. And I will keep looking for a good memoir about women’s friendship.

Moving a little further north, from South Africa to Morocco, this small novel also deals with friendship and the way its currents shift and change over time. Here, though, it is not a question of power but of betrayal.

We get the story first from Ali’s viewpoint and then from Mamed’s, with a coda from the viewpoint of a mutual friend. Ali and Mamed both describe their childhood with playground bullies and teachers, their adolescence with girlfriends and prostitutes, and their later life with wives and children. A youthful brush with politics gets them arrested, and their brutal eighteen-month incarceration cements their friendship, which survives into adulthood as they move into different careers (medicine and teaching) and even different countries (Mamed moves to Sweden while Ali stays in Morocco). However, there is a subtle tension between them, a sense of things askew, which causes their friendship to fluctuate.

If all this sounds straightforward, it is. I had hoped for insight into Moroccan history and culture but got very little of that from this book. I did, however, gain insight into friendship and how it can play out over a lifetime. More importantly, the book gave me a new perspective on narrative itself.

Ben Jelloun’s style here is to tell the story rather than recreate it. Most western writers try to get the reader to experience the story along with the characters, using sensory details, absorbing characters and suspenseful plotting to engage the reader’s full participation. None of that here.

Yet, the seeming flatness of the story made me pay more attention to how it was being told. Nuances in the way the two friends related the same events suddenly took on great importance. A single adjective here, the description of an article of clothing there gave completely different meanings to a single happening. The extremely short chapters—500 words or so—also made me pay attention. The small frame, and all that was not said, highlighted what was actually on the page.

Usually I have to read a book again if I want to analyze what the writer is doing. However, here I found myself aware of the craft even as I enjoyed the art. Some people would call that a failure on the writer’s part, but I would not go so far. It’s just a different reading experience. Ben Jelloun has found an unusual way to relate two lives, a way that engaged my intellect as well as my interest.

I was quite taken by the cover of this book, a muted picture of a the corner of a shadowed room with a faintly glowing window in the darkest wall. It’s not the first time I’ve chosen a book simply because of the cover, just as I sometimes use my friend’s method of selecting wine based on whether I like the picture on the label; the uncertainty creates space for discovery.

This novel takes place in the “new” South Africa of the 1990’s where people of all races are trying to work out where they stand in the new social climate even as they struggle with resentment and reconciliation. It follows an Afrikaner woman named Marion who owns a travel agency where she has just hired Brenda, her first employee of color. Marion owns an apartment by the sea, appropriate for someone whose father has always called her his “meermin” or mermaid. Although her parents came from a “dirt-poor” background, they prospered in Cape Town, and Marion herself leads a carefully ordered and affluent life, running her business and visiting her aging father, until dreams and chaotic memories begin to disrupt her equilibrium.

I enjoyed the writing. Wicomb’s syntax is unassuming but subtly spellbinding. Many dialect words and expressions are inserted, but their meaning is clear and they are not intrusive. I found the descriptions of the interactions on the street, in the break room at the travel agency, the father’s run-down cottage, and the home of Brenda’s family powerful. However, I simply could not warm to Marion. Several times I almost abandoned the book, not so much because Marion was such a cold, solitary person, but because I could find no common point where I could engage with her.

When there is a main character I don’t like or am not interested in, there must be some compensating factor to keep me reading: a fascinating story or enthralling writing. The writing here is good, but the reason I didn’t abandon this book was the metastory, the larger issue of who holds the power in social relationships and what they do with it.

Power isn’t supposed to be a factor in a friendship, but it is. Sometimes friendships coalesce where one is the leader and the other the follower. Or friends can be experts in different fields, e.g., one knows all about music while the other is a visual artist. But the relationship doesn’t stay there. The follower matures and becomes powerful enough to challenge the leader. The artist learns more about music while the musician doesn’t look up from her score. The balance of power between two friends fluctuates, particularly in an environment such as South Africa where the power relationships between the larger societal groups are also changing.

I thought this book remarkable for taking on such an unusual and fascinating subject. For the most part, Wicomb handled it deftly. The ending was a bit of a clunker, just the last few pages—disappointing after so much lovely prose and so many nuanced insights into these characters and their relationships.

I couldn’t leave Turkey without checking into these great epics, published as Memed, My Hawk and They Burn the Thistles in English translation. They take place in the Taurus mountains, just after the first World War, when the Ottomans have been banished and all the boundaries redrawn. Mustafa Kemal has driven out the French and abolished the feudal system. However, like the carpetbaggers that swarm in after any war, a few newly rich men have started acquiring land and power, setting themselves up as aghas or lords. When the villagers could no longer be tricked out of their land, the aghas beat and tortured the holdouts or brought in brigands to burn the villagers’ homes and steal their horses.

We first meet Ince Memed, Slim Memed, as a young boy running away from home. After his father died, the local agha beat the boy and his mother and took their land, condemning them to be serfs on his land. When the agha finds Memed, he subjects him and his mother to an even greater punishment: instead of taking two-thirds of their laboriously scythed and hand-threshed wheat, the agha takes three-quarters and threatens the other villagers not to give them a single grain. Although some of their neighbors disobey the injunction, the two are left to starve until they finally surrender and give their single cow and its calf to the agha. Later, when Memed has grown, the agha takes even the youth’s fiance to be his own nephew’s bride.

Memed’s struggle against this cruel despotism leads him to the mountains to become a brigand, first joining a band that is not in the pay of an agha and then leading his own small band. Eventually he becomes a great hero to the people of all the villages, a Robin Hood who cannot be shot and who inspires some of them to fight back. Memed finds his fame a burden and, in the second novel, is plagued by a sense of futility when the agha he kills is replaced by another who is even worse. “‘Why struggle?'” he asks old Suleyman, the man who had taken him in and adopted him back when Memed had first run away. “‘It is right to struggle,'” Suleyman replies.

These novels, separately and together are great reads. In them, the elements of a novel are equally strong: the enthralling plot carried me forward like a river in spate; the complex emotions and motivations of the characters are explored in ways that are integral to the story; and the settings—the plains, the mountains, the streets of the town—are described in vivid detail: the feel of the mud sucking at your boots, the color of the thistle fields at sunset, the cold of a mountain cave in winter, the bees and butterflies and green snakes.

And behind it all the eternal theme: good versus evil, the risk and damage done to the hero who stands up, the gradual rise of an oppressed people against men whom greed has turned into tyrants. Memed compares the people to a thousand-headed dragon: “Cut off the thousand heads and a whole forest of heads emerged.”

People of Paper is not like any book I have ever seen. Clearly experimental, the text alone shows that the author wanted to play with form and meaning. I thought it would be hard to read for this reason, but in fact the story engaged my interest immediately and—for the most part—kept it as the plot unrolled. I was afraid that the gimmicks were intended to hide poor writing, but in fact the writing was quite good.

I liked the first part of the book best. It's rare to find an author who handles magical realism as well as Plascencia does, and his formal innovations only added to the fun. The story begins with an origami surgeon, a man who creates organs for transplant and then goes on to create entire people out of nothing but folded paper. All the characters were strange, yet I couldn’t help entering into their interests and cheering for them as they picked flowers and engaged in a war against Saturn. Why? Because he was looking at them.

Mid-way through, I was disappointed at finding out Saturn’s identity; the whole story suddenly seemed rather mundane and just too cute. For example, I had really liked the idea of origami surgery and didn't want it to be a simplistic metaphor. Books that leave room for my own imagination have a stronger impact on me. I also wasn’t much interested in hearing about the author’s personal issues and problems writing the book.

However, Plascencia managed to hold it together enough for me to finish the book. I liked the characters in the town best: Froggy who endured the gang initiation and became its heart, Federico who needed to sit under the shell of a mechanical tortoise in order to think, Baby Nostradamus who could hide his thoughts. I would have liked the book better if Plascencia had stuck with them instead of spelling out his metastory (and metaphors), but perhaps others will enjoy the extra layers.

Ultimately, the book is a cautionary tale about the power of stories. We can all create narratives (whether books or news articles or simply gossip), and we can also be the unwilling subjects of them. The book made me think about the power of the narrator over the subject, his/her power to intrude on other people’s privacy or inflict damage on their lives. Words can mean what we want them to, as Humpty Dumpty told Alice; all that matters is who is to be Master.