Archive for June, 2021
A detective mystery, a love story, and a novella with cats
Casanova and the Faceless Woman
by Olivier Barde-Cabuçon
Paris, 1759. The monarchy is disintegrating, the king is a pedophile, the king’s mistress wields her influence, the clergy schemes, many conspiracies are afoot, and a woman is found murdered…and with no face. The witness: the infamous seducer Casanova, who’s fled Venice and insinuated himself into Parisian society. The detective: Volnay, the Investigator of Strange and Unexplained Deaths. The threats: powerful interests who do not hesitate to kill when threatened. The complication: a beautiful Italian woman who puts her faith in science. Casanova and the Faceless Woman is the first in an award-winning historical detective series to be translated into English. Rich in atmosphere and historical detail, pulsating with danger, it exists somewhere between Alexandre Dumas and Patrick Susskind (Perfume).
New Passengers
by Tine Høeg
The idea of an entire book written as a series of short text messages would be irritating, but the Danish author Tine Høeg imbues each line with a dry wit, insight, and feeling. The form is a perfect match for this story of a young woman just out of school, starting a teaching job, and embarking on an affair with a man she meets on the train.
Family and Borghesia
by Natalia Ginzburg
Thanks to the good people at NYRB Classics I have discovered great writers who have fallen into undeserved near-obscurity. I have the greatest affection for Natalia Ginzburg, the mid-20th century Italian author and her unaffected, unsentimental novellas of ordinary life. Family follows an extended group of friends and relations over many years, through seemingly uneventful periods and jolting change, and in its 60-odd pages manages to convey entire lives lived. In Borghesia, a woman adopts a series of Siamese cats to ward off loneliness, but the cats have ideas of their own, and life will come at you no matter how you plan for it.
Novels about the Palestine issue by Colum McCann and Adania Shibli
The renewal of hostilities in Gaza prompted me to pick up Apeirogon, which has been in the tsundoku for months. In this protracted pandemic year I have been partial to fiction that gives me comfort, and the little I know of the Palestine issue tells me there is no comfort to be found there. As I was finishing Apeirogon, with its beautiful passages reminiscent of McCann’s wondrous Let The Great World Spin, a package of books arrived from my friend in Copenhagen whom I’ve never met in person. One of them was Minor Detail by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. It is brief and impassive, its matter-of-fact tone and aspergetic detail triggering anxiety.
An apeirogon is a shape with countably infinite sides—if you spend your life counting them you might get an answer. That is the approach taken by McCann’s book, an epic nonfiction compendium of stories and information centered on two men, a Palestinian and an Israeli who have both lost young children in the conflict and become friends. It is the feelgood version, if you will, in which one side grasps how the other has been humiliated, and the other grasps how the legacy of trauma up to the Holocaust has shaped their antagonist. The subject is complicated, but empathy might yet save the world.
Minor Detail is pitiless and unsentimental. It opens with an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers after the triumphant Israeli War of Independence/catastrophic displacement of 700,000 Palestinians who have lived there for many generations. A Palestinian woman becomes obsessed with this event, which is deemed so insignificant that the victim’s name is not even known. She sets out to do research, a fairly simple task that entails painstaking planning, permissions, subterfuges and humiliations, because she is living in the occupation. How can you reconstruct memory while you yourself are being erased?
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
