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Book Review: ‘The Crow Girl’

August 1, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Crow GirlMy rating: Four of Five Stars

Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro remains a bucket-list challenge, but in the book world, staring down a 784-page Swedish serial-killer novel may make the reader question his or her priorities: Why have I not yet read The Brothers Karamazov or finished Anna Karenina?

With Erik Axl Sund’s perverse murder saga, The Crow Girl, the pseudonymous authors (a handsome pair of black-clad men resembling Scandinavian metal superstars on the back flap), have created a difficult, twisted, irony-free novel with a wildly unreliable narrator.

The book oscillates between good and evil, a scattered female detective, Jeanette Kihlberg, whose imploding family life is a distraction from her cop work. Meanwhile, Kihlberg finds herself increasingly attracted to the highly intelligent therapist, Sofia Zetterlund, who consults on the case when the sexy shrink is not suffering disturbing blackouts.

[Related: Book Review ‘The Ice Child’]

The novel begins with the discovery of the corpse of a young boy, terribly mutilated and mummified. Another child corpse. Another. But then that efficiency ends. The exposition of the first 300 pages is so tangled, the storylines so many, the incidents of child molestation, incest, and torture so repellant, that even a reader who claims The Girl in the Dragon Tattoo as a favorite book may have doubts. They may be tempted to put this novel aside, question the commitment, pick it up again, review earlier pages for missed clues and sigh, looking at all the appealing, shorter books on the nightstand.

And, then, something cracks like ice, the floes begin to move. Generational incidences of fathers molesting daughters and transforming girls into monsters, of grown men behaving badly in actions stemming from their own childhood traumas, and the solution of one mysterious string of seemingly unrelated killings only opening the door to the next, causes the book to break free from its difficult beginnings.

The psychological underpinnings, gradually revealed by the therapist Sofia, who is herself trying to reconstruct her own personality and history of trauma (“Getting to know yourself can be like trying to decipher a cryptogram,” she says toward the book’s conclusion), drives the action forward and the exploration of characters deeper.

[Related: Book Review: ‘The Other Side of Silence’]

Originally published in three volumes, The Crow Girl is a commitment, a doorstop, and a nearly endless psychological puzzle box that creepily crawls from one dysfunctional arena to the next, leaving clues not like breadcrumbs but like bloody bits of ear and entrails. It’s a novel for the committed Scandophile—or those that should be committed.

This review first appeared in the ‘New York Journal of Books.’

Filed Under: Books, Criticism Tagged With: Book Review, New York Journal of Books, Scandinavian mystery, Serial Killers, The Crow Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Book Review: ‘A Hero of France’

July 10, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Knopf

Knopf


Alan Furst is the empathetic king of deeply researched historical fiction set in WWII Europe. His heroes are intelligent men attracted to complex women. Choosing among his best novels resembles choosing a favorite child: The Polish Officer or Dark Star? The Spies of Warsaw or The Spies of the Balkans? His prose is masterful and concise but in no way recalls Chandler or Hammett; he places the reader inside the landscape of the past and carries us back to a darker, more dangerous time in which we know the end—the holocaust, the devastation—but can’t stop it.

And yet this latest novel, A Hero of France, the 1941 exploits of a fortysomething French resistance cell leader under the pseudonym Mathieu struggles to create an urgent narrative arc. Like the cells themselves, the book lacks a cohesive whole. As the cell desperately tries to rescue downed Polish and British airmen and smuggle them out of occupied France, it proceeds in disjointed jumps and episodes, some of them terrifying and tense, many of them less urgent.

[RELATED: My review of Furst’s ‘Midnight in Europe’]

A German policeman moves to Paris to break the line of resistance couriers. A skeezy Balkan inmate tries to infiltrate the cell. A sophisticated Parisienne named Chantal moves far beyond the comfort zone of her proper upbringing to dig through filthy used clothes in a marketplace to dress Mathieu for a mission—and has awkward sexual fantasies about a middle-aged policeman on the opposite side of the desk when she seeks false travel papers.

This review expresses the disappointment of an Alan Furst aficionado who for a time has felt like he has wearied of his own books and their subject matter. The research remains. The story returns to the Brasserie Heininger with its “gold-framed mirrors above dark red banquettes, where waiters appear with fin de siècle whiskers” that appears in all his novels like Alfred Hitchcock’s cameos. Sometimes the setting plays a central character but here just an epilogue, a reminder that the good life in Paris has always been heightened by a little danger, a bullet hole in a mirror left unfixed above the “favored table 14.”

Meanwhile, the sex, however generous Furst is to include the pleasure of the woman as well as the man, seems worn. Must we write another sex scene, Mathieu? Must we invent a soapy episode when the occupation has made us so desperately tired that all we want to do is roll over until awakened by Allied bombing raids? Certainly, Mathieu’s relationship with the younger Joelle leaves little to the imagination—except who is this phantom woman that lives in the same hotel? Where is the necessary complexity of her character to make us care about their stolen kisses?

[RELATED: My review of Furst’s ‘The Other Side of Silence‘]

And so it is with deep regret that the reader must resist the many charms of the elegant Furst this time around. The subject of the small actions with big impact that defined the French resistance—the risks average individuals took to be true to themselves and their conception of what it meant to be a Parisian—is an excellent topic for an historical espionage thriller. This is not that passionate novel, only a shadow of it. In Furst’s weakest books his heroes appear like ill-fitting suits made for Humphrey Bogart’s wardrobe. Sadly, A Hero of France is one of them.

This review originally appeared in the New York Journal of books

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Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Alan Furst, Book Review, French Resistance, Gestapo, historical fiction, historical spy novel, Nazis, WWII

Book Review: “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

March 26, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Max Perkins: Editor of GeniusMax Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the first day I met my agent, Victoria Sanders, she recommended two books. One was about Max Perkins. Since then I’ve written and sold a book The Last Woman Standing: A Novel of Mrs. Wyatt Earp and started the next proposal. Even though I am not a biography reader (my bad), I sat down to read A. Scott Berg’s massive biography of the Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, the man behind writers as famous yet as diverse as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. It is not a spoiler to say that they are all dead. While there are many valuable lessons in this book, one of the keys for a fiction writer is the many ways that Perkins tended to his flock of needy, brilliant, sporadically blocked writers. He tended to their literary woes but often their financial and emotional woes as well. Fitzgerald, whose The Great Gatsby has been forced on generations of high school students, lived above his means and was constantly interrupting his novel writing to borrow money, go to Hollywood, and write short stories suited to the glossies of his time. Perkins lent him money, both in the form of advances against work that may never arrive and out of his own pocket, during their long relationship. Wolfe arrived, young and blustery and in a tangled relationship with a must older woman and benefactor, with a massive box of manuscript pages that Perkins helped him shape (sometimes the equivalent of wielding a machete of a red pen) into Look Homeward, Angel. In an era where fancy Manhattan publishers often acquire books and don’t have that deep emotional investment in their writers, it was a great reminder that an editor, like my beloved editorial coach, can be a branch for the writer to hold onto during the storm that is the writing of a novel. Also, reading this book, I realize that each writer has their own challenges — drink, blocks, a love of physical danger if your Hemingway, romantic entanglements, doubts about talent and legacy — and that a good editor cannot protect the writer but can help them deliver a manuscript that sings. Reading the book allowed me to get a birds’ eye view on multiple writers and their varying needs — plotting, overwriting, difficulty finding the meat of the story, starting too early or too late in the story, relying on false endings. But there is also a great sadness to the book — Fitzgerald dithered and was finally writing a genius book when he died suddenly of a heart attack, the work, The Love of the Last Tycoon unfinished. Wolfe is a hurricane of a Southerner, whose first book burned many of his bridges in his native Asheville, North Carolina, with his first book but became an international literary star. Having had Perkins help him create that book out of a mass of manuscript pages, he later turned on the editor he looked upon as friend and father figure. And then dropped dead, suddenly, at 38, at the height of his powers. In some ways, it is the very beginning of the end, as Perkins works harder — a truly brilliant editor — and ultimately drinks more. There are many mysteries that remain about the man — does his being in a loveless (or so the author says) or mismatched marriage account for his sadness. Does the betrayal of authors? The senseless death of Fitzgerald, who frittered away so much talent and was on the verge of being considered simply a chronicler of the Jazz Age and not much more. The depression and mental illness that plagues so many of the authors close to Perkins and his own Yankee stoicism that kept him chained to his desk. Reading the book from a female perspective, I do recognized how closed this world really was. The editors are men. The agents often women. Perkins had a number of female authors but it was the men — Wolfe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald — that owned most of the real estate of his heart. And, yet, gender bias aside, I agree with my agent, this book is a must for novelists both to understand how publishing works and how many roads there are (and roadblocks) to getting a novel finished (an achievement in itself) and transformed into the best that it can be. RIP Maxwell Perkins. Long live the editors who, in the current often hostile climate, continue to nurture novelists whose needs aren’t just on the page.

View all my reviews

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Biograpy, Book Review, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Look Homeward Angel, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Maxwell Perkins, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, the last woman standing, Thomas Wolfe, victoria sanders, Writers

Book Review: David Downing’s ‘Jack of Spies’

June 7, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Jack of SpiesJack of Spies by David Downing
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Sometimes I worry that all my reviews are positive and that will seem phony. The truth of the matter is that I’m very picky about what I read, and tend not to write about those things that I do not like. But two things drew me to Downing’s latest novel: that Soho Press published it, and that the Washington Post said of his work: “In the elite company of literary spy masters Alan Furst and Philip Kerr.”

The problem with that review is overpraise. Furst is absolutely one of my favorite authors, not only because he teaches me, through his own extensive research, about the activities in the shadows during WWII, but also because his characters are so psychologically rich. He truly carries on the tradition of Eric Ambler and “A Coffin for Dimitrios.” If anything, Furst can sometimes be a little too romantic. And his female characters are complex and complicated.

But it’s not fair to spend this space over-talking about Furst (and I could go on about Kerr, too). Downing’s book — set before WW1 and hooked to a Scottish-born British spy — is well-researched but unmoving. There are times when the dialog is just an information infusion — these are not people talking but exposition donkeys.

The central romantic relationship between the ambiguous hero, Jack McColl, and an insufferably modern Irish-American journalist suffragette, left me cold. They had sex, and sex again, in hotels and on board trains and ships, but never seem to use protection — and talk the most nonsense politics.

Furst and Kerr drew me to try this author, with a nod from the Washington Post, but the comparison only reinforces how much more brilliant those authors are, weaving historical details into rich, psychologically complex and ultimately satisfying fiction. (Furst even more than Kerr.) I am always looking for authors of their caliber — and often, I must go back in time to Ambler and those still undiscovered writers, rather than contemporary authors like the tepid Downing.

View all my reviews

Filed Under: Books, Criticism Tagged With: Alan Furst, Book Review, David Downing, Eric Ambler, Espionage Thriller, Jack of Spies, Philip Kerr, Soho Press

Book Review: ‘The Black Path’ by Asa Larsson

October 26, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Black Path (Rebecka Martinsson, #3) The Black Path, the third in the Rebecka Martinsson novels, breaks convention. Unlike some mystery series that navigate toward a formula, Larsson’s Swedish mystery twists and turns, moving back and forward in time, in and out of multiple characters’ heads and even, which I love, into the parapsychological. The female characters are varied and rich — mothers, daughters, pregnant women, single adventurers, broken and fixed. Compared to Karin Fassum and Henning Mankell, the books couldn’t be farther from police procedurals even if they begin with a corpse.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Asa Larsson, Book Review, favorite books, Female Protagonists, Swedish mysteries, The Black Path

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