Lunchtime read: The Woman Who Waited

Just over half way through and the morale of the story so far seems to be about the dangers of judging someone not only by appearances but also by reputation.

Vera who becomes something of an obsession for the narrator is seen as someone who has wasted her life waiting in a little village for her childhood sweetheart to come home from the war. The narrator starts weaving scenarios around her that he believes happened and apart from clearly a growing love/lust for the woman there is strong sympathy mixed in with frustration she has spent thirty years waiting.

But when he finally sits down to talk to her it emerges that she studied linguistics in Leningrad for six years and has lived much more of a life than he ever imagined. Ironically you feel that her revelation makes it harder for him to maintain his sympathetic love and he will be forced to change his opinion and attitude towards her.

More tomorrow…

Bad sex from Mailer

Maybe it's an odd last word to have on Mailer and Castle in the Forest but the decision by the Literary Review to award the recently deceased writer this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction award for a scene between Hitler’s mother and father is apt. No doubt the problem was not deciding on Mailer but knowing which of the many crude sex scenes from his book to choose from.

The Dogs of Riga - post III

Although this is a great read it differs from the first book that had the feeling of being a police procedural type thriller into something that is more akin to James Bond. The thing that keeps you going is Wallander who despite the increasing implausibility you still belief in as a character.

Wallander having left Riga with the case apparently closed has made a promise to return to help solve the crime of the murdered police captain who came to Sweden to solve the mystery of the two dead drug dealers from all those weeks before.

His return to Riga to help solve the mystery of which police boss ordered the killing of the Latvian police officer who had come to Sweden involves meeting mystery people and heading across borders in the dark. Once back in Latvia he is introduced to a group working with the dead policeman’s widow but before they can become acquainted the police burst in and kill everyone except Wallander.

Without guides and support he has to resort to survival mode and steals a car and then reintroduces himself with a woman selling postcards at the hotel who was a previous point of contact on his visit to Riga. She hooks him up with the widow and they search for the testament of the dead policeman who will expose the corruption in the police force and name the superior officer guilty of crimes and inadvertently his own murder.

The pace steps up a gear and there is a final showdown with Wallander getting it wrong but being saved by the principle that everyone’s enemy has an enemy. Once the details of the case are closed Wallander asks the widow to come back with him to Sweden because he has fallen in love with her. But he travels home alone.

There is an authors note at the end of the book that Markell uses to point out that it is very difficult not only setting a book in an alien environment but also hard to set it against a political background that is changing rapidly. The fact that he tried to bother at all is obviously the result of something that drove him on.

A review will follow soon…

Lunchtime read: The Woman who Waited

It might seem a bit repetitive but the lunchtime read continues to be Makine because they had a lot of his books in the library and they are the sort of stories that are accessible on a dipping in basis over a few days.

This story seems to be autobiographical in feel with a writer just starting to enjoy the thaw of a post Stalinist Russia heading out to the country to find some peasants that might provoke some inspiration.

In the first 50 pages its established that life in the villages is so miserable it is hardly the stuff of satirical comment and that there is not really much there to write about. But there is one woman, Vera, who has spent thirty years waiting for her lover to come back from the fighting in the Second World War.

Vera manages to get under the skin of the narrator and he starts to become obsessed with her and unable to move on from the village.

More tomorrow…

The Dogs of Riga - post II

There is always a danger with mixing politics with a thriller that it will get in the way as it has to be explained to the reader which distracts from the chase to catch the killers. Although it doesn’t get too bogged down in Eastern European post USSR politics it does slow things up. There is also a feeling that because the main character is in unknown surroundings it is also a limited horizon compared to the darting about he does with confidence back in Sweden.

The other problem with going on about a specific point in the history of the disintegration of the former Soviet Union is that it does feel rather dated. Sure the same problems still exist in terms of drugs being smuggled across borders and corruption but if you mention Riga to most people now the image that comes to mind is a location for stag parties rather than a dark, cold and mysterious location that is gripped by subterfuge and political tension.

As the shift from police based thriller to something more akin to a spy novel it leaves Wallander wandering and driving round Riga trying to avoid the people following him and trying to work out why the friends of the dead Latvian policeman he has come to help insist on such secrecy. After some coming and going with the wife of the dead policeman and her friends Wallander decides that the murdered policeman was onto a consipracy that involved one or both of his superiors.

But with one of the friends of the murder victim fitted up for the crime the time of Wallander's official visit comes to an end and he promises to return as a tourist and help them solve the mystery.

At this point credibility is being stretched to breaking point but it should be fun seeing just how Wallander blows the lid on the conspiracy.

More tomorrow...

Could Amazon rekindle the electronic platform?

Forgot to post the link to an interesting piece in the Telegraph yesterday by A.N.Wilson in response to the launch of Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle, which I have also neglected to post about is Amazon’s ebook reader. Apparently it can do the same for reading that the iPod has done for music. Hold on though isn’t that exactly the line that Sony spun when it launched its eReader product earlier this year?

Wilson is right about one thing which is that the book is such a good design it is hard to top it with an electronic version:

“The book, in codex shape, really was a brilliant invention. And after the century of Gutenberg and Caxton there really was no looking back.”

It is a point that has been made before and one no doubt that will be raised in the future when the next ebook reader is launched…

Lunchtime read: A LIfe's Music

The second half of the book is more gripping than the first because the climax of the story is coming as the pianist on the train talks about his life and what became of his thwarted ambition to play the piano.

He tells of how the war saved him because he was able to steal the identity of a dead solider who had been killed in one of the first battles with the Germans. Having stolen the identity he goes on to fight through the war until chance puts him in the right place to become a general’s driver. He keeps driving for the general after the war and is finally introduced to his daughter. They flirt on the edge of an affair before she realises it is a crush and there is too much of a difference between their worlds.

But before the ties are cut she involves him in her engagement party where he is meant to perform a couple of piano songs that she is to be credited with teaching him. He stumbles through the first but then plays the second with a level of professionalism that shocks and brings the curtain down on that relationship.

The train arrives at Moscow and the pianist tells his fellow traveller that the general’s daughter married but then died of cancer and he has been quietly supporting her son with money he made while working in the far north in the camps.

By now the pianist knows that his parents were killed in the camps and that he is marked for life by his duplicity of keeping his connection with them hidden as well as taking the identity of a dead solider.

He invites his fellow traveller to a concert and you assume that the son of the general’s daughter steps out onto the stage just as the pianist disappears.

A book that is great because just as there is a life story here there are also questions for you to take away and mull over.

A review will follow soonish…

The Dogs of Riga - post I

A few of the questions that you are left with at the end of the first book are answered reasonably quickly with Wallander’s colleague dying of cancer and his personal life bedding down into a position of phoning his father on a daily basis and wondering if his daughter is happy.

Back at work a phone call that tips off the police that a life raft with two dead bodies inside is going to wash up on a local beach is all that disturbs Wallander on a night the snow comes in.

The boat has been discovered by fishermen and towed near to the shore before they cut it adrift not wanting to get involved with the police. The two men are embracing each other wearing expensive suits and when they do wash up on the beach the police are called in. Wallander keeps wondering what his old colleague Rydberg would have done but without his friend, who died of cancer in between books one and two, he has to try and struggle on alone.

The case does not seem to be easy and when it emerges that the victims are from Eastern Europe the hope is that the Swedish police can wash their hands of the whole thing. That wish seems to come true after the Foreign Office gets involved and it is established that the men originated from Riga and are known criminals to the Latvian Police.

A Latvian police officer is sent over to help with the investigation and he manages to explain that his country is dominated by drugs and gangs and these men were involved with both. He heads back to Riga with the coffins and documents from the Swedish police handing the responsibility back to the Latvian police.

But the policeman turns up dead hours later and Wallander is sent over to throw any light on the last investigation he was involved with.

This is a slow burner and a clever approach because you get a sense that Wallander and his men do not want the case and as a result their emotional involvement is not as great as it might have been. But with the case coming back to haunt Wallander and a trip to unknown and unfamiliar Riga in store the thriller changes gear.

More tomorrow...

Lunchtime read: A Life's Music

Russia is one of those countries that provides a wealth of material for writers. On one level there is the landscape, which in this case is only extensive but cold and covered in snow; there is the political environment that means you can never drop your guard and tragedy could be just round the corner; and there is also the history with the war and the extent of the sacrifice and destruction of the Second World War over shadowing the present as long as those with memories share them.

All of those ingredients are woven into the first half of this novella with Makine using a train journey from the Urals to Moscow as the opportunity to tell one man’s life story. The man in question is introduced playing the piano and weeping and as he starts to tell a tale about a piano concert that was never given because his parents were arrested and a society that shunned him as a result it is already lining up to be a tragic tale.

Add to that the decision the pianist makes to head to a relative in the Ukraine just before the Germans invade and it seems that everything that could go wrong is going wrong.

Quite how it works out has just guessing enough to want to read on to the end of the journey.

More tomorrow…

book review - Castle in the Forest

There have been hundreds of books about Adolf Hitler all not only detailing how he came to power and what he did once he got there but also trying to get to the bottom of the dictator. Because of his anti-Semitic views, the holocaust and his wilful destruction of millions of lives he rates pretty highly on the evil index. So it is a brave author who decides to put Hitler as one of the main characters in a novel. Norman Mailer does take that on and then to make it even more uncomfortable hurls a fair amount of abuse at the reader.

On the positive side Mailer not only gets you to think about where Hitler's evilness came from but also makes you ask some questions about the nature and nurture debate as well as provoking thoughts about good and evil in the form of the devil and god. You are forced to dwell on the dark side and conclude that if someone is exposed to brutality in the form of parental abuse and sibling rivalry along with a helping hand from a demon then they might well go onto become an evil dictator. The problem is that Mailer overdoes the darkness and you find yourself being put off by old men who like young boys, mothers obsessed by the faeces and the arseholes of their children and fathers who sleep with their daughters.

The problem is that everyone bar Hitler's stepsister Angela and his brother Edward all come across as susceptible to the grotesque and Hitler almost gets lost in the line-up. There is also an odd tangent where Mailer's narrator demon heads of to the coronation of Nicholas the last Tsar. The point seems to be that the devil was busy looking at the bigger picture sowing the seeds of destruction that would lead to the Second World War. The fact he was making it difficult for the Tsar and thereby preparing the way for Stalin implies that he was backing both evil dictators.

This might not be that difficult to read in terms of clearly signposted chapters and a reasonable argument for why the focus is Hitler's family. The downside is that the book backs off just as Hitler starts to get interesting and close to the man he was to become. It also keeps suggesting that all of the seeds of hatred were planted early on - the bees being gassed by sulphur, the swastika over the monastery school entrance - but a great deal of Hitler's political thought was shaped by his experiences and response to the German defeat in the First World War.

This book got quite a few plaudits from the book reviewers when it came out and Mailer worked the circuit and most I heard or read applauded the bravery of choosing such a potentially challenging subject. But there is not that much of a story here other than the straight forward one that details the incestuous background of Hitler and exposing how demons work and what they do for their clients.

In fact that is the only real leap of the imagination. The rest could almost be a historical novel expect for the occasions relapses into perverted territory. If you buy into the idea that Hitler was shaped by the devil and a demon could have the possibility of writing a memoir about it then this is a solid go at describing what that world might look like. But that asks the reader to exercise the same sort of suspension of disbelief that you are expected to exercise when you go to the cinema. Because of the nature of reading, that tends to happen over several days, it is hard to maintain the illusion that this is a devil's memoir and the more that process takes the more the cracks start to show.

This was a tough book to read and one that was certainly not one that was enjoyable but maybe it wasn't meant to be and that's why Mailer can be so frustrating.

bookmark of the week

Not exactly sure where this leather bookmark was purchased but I have a feeling it might be the Barnes Wetland Centre is South West London. If it is then this is a few years old and reminds me of a Sunday afternoon spent there with just a hint of rain on the wind and most of the birds being far away and looking gloomy in the grey water and against the grey sky. Still the shop was good enough to sell bookmarks.

Faceless Killers - post III

The plan was to do a review of Norman Mailer’s Castle in the Forest but the room where the computer lives has lost its heating and it is about three degrees so the idea of sitting here tapping away is not appealing.

But it seemed like a good idea to try and match the pace of Mankell and wrap up my thoughts on reading Faceless Killers. He manages to move things forward at a much quicker pace in the last section of the book. After progress being so slow that the case looks as if it night never be solved the months roll by and things seem to be going nowhere. You keep one eye on the page numbers and wonder how things are going to get resolved in the last thirty pages.

When it came to keeping things almost painfully slow then a breathless climax Mal Sjowall and Per Wahloo did it better in Roseanna and the reason is that this seems to go almost too quickly. The balance of the book is off kilter and the pace should have been upped a bit earlier.

It is enjoyable reading through the final pages watching Wallander solve the crime but things are going by a bit too fast and you finish the book with a load of questions about where Wallander is going in his personal life, whether or not his loyal colleague dies of cancer and what becomes of his relationship with the prosecutor.

No doubt that is all deliberately done to get you to do exactly what I will be from tomorrow – picking up the next book in the series The Dogs of Riga.

A review will follow after Castle in the Forest and A Hero’s Daughter…

Faceless Killers - post II

Although there are plenty of character flaws with the main character Kurt Wallander you stick with it because you want to see how he solves the crime. As a person he is losing on almost every front on his personal life but as a policeman he retains a gift of insight that is capable of solving crimes others are scrambling in the dark over.

Although the double murder of the old couple in the farm remains unsolved attention switches to a racist attack that leaves a Somalian dead after he is shot in the face. A former policeman reports that it was his car that might have been used for the crime because it is missing but Wallander tumbles that he is in fact the murderer. He risks his life to prove it and they do manage to wrap up the case before any of the other refugees are killed.

Meanwhile Wallander has a terrible meeting with his wife, his father is going senile and he gets too carried away and tries to get physical with the chief prosecutor in a way that borders not far off assault. He is also caught drink driving by some colleagues who allow it to go unreported.

Morale in the police is low with the double farm murder remaining unsolved and Wallander is constantly looking for a breakthrough and starts to focus on tracking down the mistress of the murdered farmer without any luck.

The weather starts to play an increasing role with Wallander trying to fight off a cold and wishing the snow would stay away. You sense the cold, the loneliness of being newly separated and the desperation of wanting to close the case. In the meantime those who depend on him outside of the police station get forgotten and suffer from a lack of attention.

You might not be a total fan of Wallander but you want him to succeed and it hard to put down the book when the remaining pages hold the key to the story.

Final chunk tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: A Life's Music

It is easy to get stuck in a grove but if you are enjoying it then a little bit more of what you like should do no harm. For that reason it was without a great deal of hesitation that the lunchtime read choice went straight from one Andrei Makine to another.

I only managed to start the very first few pages of this novella but already the scene is set with a bitterly cold train station in Russia the location. A bunch of travellers are left huddled in the waiting room while they wait for a train, which is going to be delayed by six hours. That gives the narrator, who you have no idea of anything about them even the sex, time to wander round the waiting room and out onto the platform almost like a camera panning the opening scene setting sequence for a film.

More tomorrow…

Faceless Killers - post II

The similarity between Mankell and Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo is the commitment to detail police procedure down to a level that sometimes seems unnecessary but as a result it makes the story so much more believable.

It is also clearly set in a period of flux. In some respects Wallander is in the same position as Sheriff Bell in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Both characters are starting to question their ability to fight off drug related crime and cope in a world where the respect for the law is almost non existent.

“Rydberg gave him a sceptical look. Then he stood up to go. He paused at the door.
‘The daughter that I talked to, the one from Canada, had her husband with her. The Mountie. He wondered why we don’t carry guns. ‘
‘In a few years we probably will,’ said Wallander.”

The problems for the detective in a case without almost any clues is that the last words the dying woman says who becomes the second murder victim is that those responsible were foreigners.

That puts the spotlight on the nearby refugee asylum and various nutters come out of the woodwork threatening to stir up race hatred. The book is set in 1990 but the themes resonate 17 years later because ultimately the breakdown of the law is not something that happens overnight.

The case begins to unravel with the brother of the murdered woman revealing that the landowner was indeed rich and had made money out of collaborating with the Nazi's and kept his fortune, along with a mistress and a son, hidden from his wife. A bank search reveals that the story appears to be true but there is no sign of the mistress.

Meanwhile on the relationship front Wallander finally gets in touch with his wife but is hostile, forgets to visit his father and has no idea what his daughter is up to.