Louis de Bernieres. A
Partisan’s Daughter. © 2008 I read Corelli’s Violin , also by Bernieres, about
six years ago and really liked it. At
that time my notes on what I had read were very brief, but in this case I
didn’t need them because I remember the story so well. I barely got started in this one, before I
packed it in. The Guardian’s review explains why.
October 2014
.
Samuel Clemens. Pudd’nhead
Wilson. © 1894 Wilson got this nickname when he first came
to Dawsons Landing, a town on the Mississippi.
He said something in public that was actually pretty clever, but no one
understood, so they thought he was stupid and called him Pudd’nhead. He was trained as a lawyer but never had a
case. His hobby was collecting
fingerprints on glass slides. Among the
prints he took was that of two infants, Tom the son of a prominent citizen and Chambers,
the son of the Tom’s nanny, a slave woman named Roxy who was only 1/16 Negro. Since Chambers was only 1/32 Negro, Roxy
switched the two boys so that Chambers could have a better life than she could
give him. No one noticed. You can see where this is going. As always with Clemens the journey is fun and
instructive. He seems to have wanted to
make a statement similar to what he told us in Huckleberry Finn, but the
approach is complex and sometimes it feels like he’s on the other side of the
issue. Chambers, who thinks he is the
real Tom until nearly the end, turns out to be a liar, a thief and a murderer,
and Clemen’s message seems mixed because Chambers is technically a Negro. Perhaps he is asking us to think about
whether Chambers is such a loser because he has a miniscule amount of Negro DNA
or because he was raised in a rich white family with no guidance other than
from a Negro nanny who spoiled him while she neglected the boy whom everyone assumed to be
her real child. In a very funny
afterword, Clemens talks about how difficult it is to write a novel. The characters take control and the writer
must do what they say. October 2014
.
Harlan Coben. Fade Away. (Bolitar 3)
© 1996 In this one we learn who
blew out Bolitar’s knee and why. It’s 10
years later, and the owner of a New Jersey NBA team asks Myron to play. Theoretically the knee has been rehabbed and
Myron will be able to hold his own. The
real reason he’s asked to play is so that he can get close to the other players
and perhaps learn enough to find the team’s star guard who has been missing for
several days. As always, it’s pretty
complex. The missing player has a
gambling problem, owes the mob $1.5 million and is being blackmailed by some
hippie terrorists. Wynn is available to
help, but he doesn’t have to kill anyone to get this all sorted out. Myron is really too slow to play and goes
back to his profession as a sports agent as soon as things are sorted out. As in all of Coben’s Bolitar novels, the
dialog is truly funny. October 2014
.
Harlan Coben. Missing You. © 2014
A college kid from Greenwich, Conn. comes to Kat Donovan, an NYPD
detective, to ask for help in finding his mother who has gone missing. It’s the wrong jurisdiction and there is no
real reason to believe the mother is really missing, but Kat listens. Meanwhile her friend Stacy, a P.I., has
bought her a subscription to an online dating site, and in an upstate prison
hospital the thug who murdered her police officer father 18 years earlier is
dying of cancer. These three things come
together to uncover three other things: an online dating scam that is used for
extortion and murder; the truth about her father’s murder; and the whereabouts
of her long lost love who can’t be traced, but whose face shows up on the dating
site. November 2014
.
Harlan Coben. Stay
Close. © 2012 Seventeen years ago, Megan, a suburban soccer
mom, used to be a hostess at an Atlantic City nightclub. Her boyfriend Ray was a well known
photographer. On the night of Mardi
Gras, Megan is supposed to meet Ray in a park.
Instead she finds the bleeding body of the man who had been abusing
her. She assumes he’s dead, flees, meets
a nice man and becomes a mom. Then a
friend from her past drops by and tells her that her abuser may have been seen
in Atlantic City. Megan returns to Atlantic
City to the place where she worked to see what she can find out. Eventually an Atlantic City detective puts
all of the pieces together and discovers that a serial killer has been offing
men in that park every year at Mardi Gras.
The only thing that the victims seemed to have in common was that they
were all serial abusers of women. We
don’t find the murderer until the very end.
I was surprised. Maybe you will
be too. October 2014
.
Harlan Coben. The Woods. Paul Copeland, a New Jersey county
prosecutor, is a widower raising a daughter with the help of a sister and
neighbors. He is still grieving the loss
of his older sister twenty years earlier when he was a councilor at a summer
camp. One night she walked into the
woods and was never seen again. That
same night a boy also disappeared and two campers were found murdered. Copeland was partly at fault because he was
on duty but left his post to make out with his girlfriend. Another Councilor is convicted as a serial
killer for several murders elsewhere and is assumed to be the killer at the
camp, but there was not enough evidence to put him on trial for these murders. Now Copeland is called into the City to view
a body. It’s the boy who
disappeared. With Coben, things are
never simple. It turns out that Copeland’s
old girlfriend’s father is involved and that Copelands own father and mother
had been KGB, and his father had been responsible for his mother’s
disappearance. October 2014
.
James B. Conroy. Our
One Common Country, Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of
1865. © 2014 It’s the last days of the Civil War. The South is pretty much destroyed, and
troops are barefoot and starving.
Jefferson Davis is adamant that the only acceptable outcome is
independence and the continuance of slavery.
Lincoln is equally adamant that the only result he will accept is union
and abolition. An aging Preston Blair
gets permission to go south with a private initiative to try to get peace talks
started. His proposal was that the Union
and the Confederacy conclude a truce and then jointly attack the French in
Mexico. The idea was that after
cooperating in Mexico and learning to trust and depend on each other in a joint
military venture, it would be easier to settle their differences. It sounds nuts to me and probably did to
everyone at the time, but it did get a dialog started. Everyone you’ve e ever heard of, who was a
alive at the time, had a role in bringing about the Hampton Roads Peace
Conference. All the way through Lincoln
keeps growing taller and taller. October
2014
.
Nelson DeMille. The
Quest. © 2013 This is a rewrite by the author of his 1975
novel set in Ethiopia during the Marxist revolution that deposed Emperor Haile
Selassie. Two reporters and a
photographer set out to find the royalist forces in the general area of
Gondor. When they stop for the night
they find an abandoned resort hotel and spa built by the Italians before WW
II. Hiding there is an old Italian
priest, badly wounded and slowly dying.
The priest tells them that he had been imprisoned for the past 40 years
after he and a squad of Italian soldiers had found a monastery made of obsidian
and containing the Holy Grail and the lance of Longinus – the soldiers had all
been clubbed to death by the monks and he was imprisoned in a fortress about a
day’s walk away so that he could not reveal the location of the Grail. The priest dies and the journalists are
captured by a blood thirsty Marxist general.
Fates worse than death await them but eventually they are released more
or less unharmed and head to Rome. They
research the whole history of the Grail and then return to Ethiopia to try to
find it and bring it back to Rome. The rest is all fairly predictable. They do find the Grail, but they leave it
with the monks. The love triangle, the
photographer is a woman, is resolved.
Exit stage right. Sometimes you
read a novel and hope it will never end, but with this one I kept wishing the
author would get on with it. There’s a
lot of good stuff in the book about Ethiopia and the legend of the Grail and
the story would have been o.k. if it hadn’t been strung out for so long. Maybe the problem was just that the reader
was Scott Brick. He was o.k. for Farenheit 451, but I would have
preferred someone else for this one. October
2014
.
Kazuo Ishiguro. Nocturnes. © 2009
This is a collection of five short stories. My memory of Ishiguro;s Remains of the Day is positive, but I really did’t like these
stories and quit in the middle of the second one which was turning out to be
too similar to the first one. In the
first story, “Crooner," a Polish guitarist, who plays backup in several
different cafes in St.Mark’s Square, is
hired by an aging American singer to accompany him while he serenades his wife
from a gondola. The crooner is someone
who had been adored from afar by the
guitarist’s mother. The guitarist knows
and loves all of his songs and is overjoyed to have a chance to accompany
him. Afterwards the crooner explains
that he and his wife are separating. She
married him because he was famous and he married her because a famous singer
should have an extraordinarily beautiful spouse. Over a couple of decades they grew to love
each other, but now his career was waning, so she had to move on. Neither wanted the separation, but both were
creatures of Hollywood, and they had no choice.
Really. The second story is worse
than the first. October 2014
.
Francis Parkman. The
Oregon Trail. Published
1849 I had always thought this book was
about the trek to Oregon. Parkman went
west with a small party in 1846, and while there were wagon trains headed for
Oregon on the trail he followed along the North Platte to Ft. Laramie, he
stayed on the plains to learn about native
Americans. He spent the bulk of
his time with the Sioux, who at that time were relatively friendly. He developed several friendships with
important Sioux chiefs and learned enough about their culture, so that they
could accept his presence in their villages and allow him to study the customs
and mores of Sioux society in detail. While
many of his observations and insights are familiar to us today, he was
certainly a pioneer in the study of Native Americans of the Great Plains. Among other things, he predicted the
disappearance of their Stone Age culture.
While most of his narrative is about the Sioux, he also has a lot to say
about mountain men and buffalo hunters and the settlers crossing the
plains. His take on the Mormons is
devastating. My favorite anecdote was a
quote from a conversation he had with a Mexican adventurer: “The priests don’t
marry their women, so why should I?” October
2014
.
Gore Vidal. Inventing
A Nation, Washington, Adams, Jefferson.
© 2003 This book is reviewed in
the LA Times by Joseph Ellis, a distinguished
American historian. I recommend his
review.
Vidal ends his book with an account of a conversation with
JFK, who wondered "how a sort of backwoods country like this, with only
three million people, could have produced the three great geniuses of the
eighteenth century -- Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton?" Vidal concludes by saying “…dear Jack, in the
forty years since your murder, I've pondered your question, and this volume is
my hardly definitive answer."
Trained historians might be appalled by the inaccuracies in Vidal’s
book, but, as Ellis says: “Vidal's cavalier style is not designed to move
carefully on the ground through the thick academic underbrush. Asking it to do
so is like asking Louis Armstrong to play just the notes on the sheet. It soars
and dives at its own choosing, and it feels perfectly free to amble off in
tangential riffs designed to express Vidal's imaginative rendering of the
story.” Of the three great men chosen by
Vidal for the years 1787 to1800, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, Adams seems
to come out on top. On the negative side for him were the Alien and Sedition
Acts of 1798, but on the plus side he kept us out of war with France. October 2014
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