Before I Burn: Gaute Heivoll

Yes, Before I Burn is about a pyromaniac on the loose in remote, rural Norway in the 70s. But it’s also about much more. The fragile child’s drawing on the cover, curled up and ready to burst into flames, speaks to deeper meanings: about adult expectations set during childhood, and the pervasive melancholy that can accompany stifling parent-child relationships. The dark Lake Livannet, painted hauntingly, is a perfect metaphor for the many anxieties the good people of Finsland bottle. As debut author Gaute Heivoll arrestingly shows, release might not always be forthcoming and if it does, is often ugly.

Review: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

  

Excerpt

Imagine the wonders of the kaleidoscope. While it is made up of many fractured, unruly and colorful segments, you can still hold it against the light, turn the wheel, and freeze one gorgeous pattern into place. These are precisely the kind of beautiful snapshots one is treated to while reading the fantastic new book by Francis Spufford, Red Plenty.  

The rest of the review is at Bookbrowse.

Review: By Blood by Ellen Ullman

Excerpt

One of life's many truths is that we're each the sum of our parts. It's not usually only nature or nurture that plays a role; it's both. Yet, what if you don't know one of the essential blocks of your character, you don't know who your parents are? It is this central question of identity that haunts a psychotherapy patient in Ellen Ullman's novel, By Blood.

The rest of my review is at Bookbrowse.

Review: From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarrry

Nearly five years ago, a British man of South Asian origin named Hemant Lakhani was arrested in an FBI sting operation, accused of selling arms that were to support Somali terrorist activities. At the time Lakhani argued that he was framed and his cause was taken up by prominent journalists including Amitava Kumar in his book, “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm, a Tiny Bomb.” Despite an appeal, Lakhani was eventually convicted. Now, years later, a fictional character very similar to Lakhani, makes an appearance in Alex Gilvarray’s debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant.

Ahmed Lakhani is in the import-export business living in New York City--except nobody knows exactly what he imports and exports. What matters is that he has enough money to throw around, a fact that is especially appealing to a young immigrant from the Philippines, Boyet Ruben Hernandez.

Boy is a recent graduate from the Fashion Institute of Makati (FIM) from his native country (the institute, one assumes, is a riff off of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology) and arrives wide-eyed to America’s warm embrace. The young grad knows he has to earn his keep in his adopted country; for now he lives off a meager stipend his doctor parents send him monthly, taking odd jobs for the fashion designer Vivienne Cho while working on a line he hopes can land him a breakthrough at Fashion Week in Bryant Park. “I understood the force I was up against” Boy says, “One needed friends much more than lovers and enemies. This city was cutthroat. This city, crossed with the exclusivity of the fashion industry, was a closed network on new talent. This city wasn’t hard on its newcomers--it was goddamn relentless.”

Boy somehow manages to make a small break through this “closed network”--his name gets mentioned in a fashion magazine as an up-and-coming designer. The two-line blurb is just barely enough to get him noticed but Boy works this to his advantage eventually getting ready to launch his line of women’s fashion, (B)oy.

At precisely the time when Boy is running out of money and when he needs to take his work to the next level, he runs into Ahmed Lakhani, a resident in his apartment building in Brooklyn. Lakhani, a Canadian Muslim, is smitten by Boy’s talent and slowly wheedles his way into Boy’s good graces. It’s uncomfortable--Boy can smell lies when he sees them and Lakhani is no angel, but when Lakhani offers to pump a huge sum of money into his fashion business as an angel investor, well, the temptation proves to be too fierce. Boy accepts, falling into a business relationship with Lakhani. “If, in my desperate state, I had to choose between finding the location of a deadly time bomb and saving my fashion label from complete demise, I would choose my label--my dream, my work, my livelihood,” Boy reasons. As most others would.

Trouble strikes when Lakhani is arrested in a few months on charges of supplying Somali terrorists with bomb-making materials. This is of course the Bush era of hyper-vigilance so the wide net that gets cast after Lakhani’s arrest also traps Boy who gets deported to Guantanamo.

The novel tells Boy’s story through segments set in New York alternating with the present time when he finds himself in “no man’s land.” Brief flashbacks to his childhood in the Philippines also populate these pages. Gilvarray expertly melds truth and facts (there are many footnotes that provide a sort of fact check to parts of the story) and the novel is an interesting experiment in how to tell a gripping story.

Boyet Hernandez comes across as a likeable everyday Joe who just happened to be caught up in a wider web beyond his wildest imagination. Nevertheless the early parts of the book set in New York seem out of place. We know what happened to Boy eventually yet the wry, la-di-da tone of the “fashion terrorist” seems out of pitch for what is to follow. Even as we read the parts set in Guantanamo one is never quite sure what to make of his experience because the light-hearted tone seems a little misplaced.

The last 100 pages or so are the best parts of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. Here’s where the book turns darker, when the gravity of Boy’s situation hits in full force. In the end, this debut novel is a strong look at the darker side of the war on terror. It shows just how easy it is to get caught in it and just how hard it is to leave. Your heart goes out to Boy when he worries, “Maybe it’s like the Qur’an says: I was placed on this earth to be tried with afflictions.” 

Thanks to the publishers for a galley of the book through Netgalley.

Review: Bloodland by Alan Glynn

Excerpt

Alan Glynn is fast becoming my new favorite crime writer. His cerebral yet fast-paced thrillers are exhibit A in how to spin a great story with a taut pace. In his latest book, Bloodland, the scale of intrigue and corruption is on a grand scale. The story spans three continents--Europe, North America and Africa.

The rest of the review can be found here.

Review copy courtesy of publisher through Netgalley.

REVIEW: The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

Excerpt

This spectacular debut novel by the talented Téa Obreht, is narrated mostly through the voice of young Natalia Stefanovi. Shortly after the novel opens, we learn that Natalia has followed in her grandfather’s footsteps and studied medicine. Just recently done with medical school, she has taken on a volunteer assignment to inoculate children in an orphanage in a small seaside village called Brejevina. The book is set in a war-ravaged country in the Balkans, quite possibly Obreht’s native Croatia. Brejevina, Natalia explains, “is forty kilometers east of the new border.”

The rest of the review is here.

REVIEW: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

Excerpt: The essential premise of the breathtaking new novel by Ben Marcus is this: language is toxic. The very same language device—mere words—can’t do justice to a review of the incredible and heartbreaking The Flame Alphabet.

As the book opens, the narrator Samuel, and his wife Claire, are getting ready to forever leave their home in a small town in upstate New York. They are to leave their teen daughter Esther behind for it is her speech that is slowly killing Sam and Claire. Esther will be taken care of in a special quarantine with other children, they are promised. It is a sign of just how bad things have gotten in the bleak landscape that hundreds upon hundreds of families are split asunder this way, choosing to slink away from their toxic children, trusting that the authorities will know best what to do with their most precious assets.

The rest of the review is here.

Review courtesy of ARC from Knopf.

REVIEW: The Odds by Stewart O'Nan

Many years ago, during happier times, the newly married Art and Marion Fowler had honeymooned in Niagara Falls. At the time, the grandeur of the falls and its associated magic seemed like just the right launching pad for a successful marriage. Now, around 25 years later, the couple is back. This time they’re hoping to revive their failing marriage by banking on the seedier side of American commerce that the falls also represent. Plagued by financial woes and the ghost of marital infidelity, Art and Marion decide to spend one last weekend together at the falls. He vainly hopes to resuscitate the relationship trying to exorcise it of the ghost of his past infidelity, while Marion just hopes “to endure it with some grace and get back home so she could start dealing with the paperwork required to become for the first time in her life, a single-filing taxpayer.”

Equally (if not more) urgent are their financial problems. Both Art and Marion are without work—Art having been laid off more recently. Whatever little nest egg they had was wiped out with the market swings of the great recession. “The crash was too fast, or he was too slow. Like his mother, he prided himself on being a buy-and-hold investor, and expected a rebound, if only the vaunted dead-cat bounce. Their portfolio was conservative and diversified, but by the time he made up his mind to pull their money out, the Dow was below 8,000 and everything had slid.” Credit cards almost all maxed out, Art proposes they bet it all—literally—in one weekend at the area casinos. Art has studied how the casinos operate and is convinced his technique will allow them to win at least some amount of money to tide them over and pay the bills for a while until the horizon looks clearer.

Stewart O’ Nan is a prolific writer and over the years he has developed a special ability to tell stories with a focus not so much on a dramatic narrative arc as on the minutiae of the human interactions that punctuate our everyday lives. His Last Night at the Lobster tracked down the last day unfolding at a closing Red Lobster restaurant and beautifully afforded the reader peeks into the manager’s trying life and his interactions with the restaurant staff. In that book, O’ Nan proved that one needn’t write a doorstopper or a saga spanning large periods of time to craft beautiful stories. A snapshot frozen in time will work just as well. He uses a similar technique in this slim new novel. The Odds follows the 52-year old Art and Marion over the course of a single weekend. And it is their smallest interactions, now worn to a routine over time, that make up for the bulk of the book and give the story its ballast.

Art has reserved the honeymoon suite in a nice hotel and bought Marion a special ring—yet the generosity seems lost on her. Marion, for her part, is trying her best to be nice and gracious to her husband, but has already written the marriage off as a lost cause. Over the course of the weekend, as vacation gives them the perspective they need, Art and Marion come to realize that they need each other’s routines and company more than either of them had imagined. “The real answer, the real reason the question tortured him, was that without Marion he wouldn’t know what to do or even who he was,” O’ Nan writes about Art, “He could send his laundry out, but he would belong to that legion of aging, unloved men buying frozen dinners and six-packs at the grocery store, or worse, working there, bagging their sad purchases and wishing them a good evening.” If nothing else, sheer force of habit in companionship is hard to break. It remains to be seen whether this force alone is strong enough to have them stay together.

O’ Nan uses the backdrop of the Niagara Falls—its cheap and tawdry commercialization, yet its irresistible place in the American psyche, to good effect in the book. Just like the casinos surrounding the natural wonder that ring hollow despite their attractive facades, Art and Marion too wonder if marriage has lived up to all its promised riches. “What had she done with her life?” Marion reflects, “For a moment she couldn’t think of anything. Become a wife and a mother. A lover, briefly, badly. Made a home, worked, saved, traveled. All with him.” Yet both Art and Marion accept that the life that exudes the falls, “even if it was all just a show,” is better than going home to “dark, empty apartments”

There is a reason that the couple’s favorite song is the 70’s ballad, Crazy on You. The song’s opening refrain “We may still have time, we might still get by,” just might apply.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing an electronic galley of this book. The full review will also be published on curledup.com. 

Review: The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

Excerpt

Coming more than twenty years after her critically acclaimed Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard's latest, The Great Fire, is in most basic essence, a classic old-fashioned romance. The novel traces of the path of the protagonist, Maj. Aldred Leith and his love, seventeen year-old Helen, as they try to live out lives anew in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The rest of the review, originally published on November 3, 2003, can be found here.

Review: The Movies of My Life by Alberto Fuguet

Excerpt

The incredibly creative plot device that steers Alberto Fuguet's novel The Movies of My Life centers around a list-a list of 50 movies that forms a brilliant vehicle to explore a lonely childhood. 

The rest of the review, originally published on November 28, 2003, can be found here.

Review: Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy

Excerpt

History has shown us that the instruments of revolution can be as varied as the causes they support; the Changó’s beads and two-tone shoes in William Kennedy’s new novel are precisely that—they’re stand-ins for the vehicles of change.

The rest of the review is here.

REVIEW: Shadow Without a Name by Igancio Padilla

Excerpt

"My father used to say his name was Viktor Kretzschmar. He was a pointsman on the Munich-Salzburg line and not the type to decide, on the spur of the moment, to commit a crime." 

So begins the brilliant Shadow Without a Name, a book that doubtless deserves the award for best opening lines in a novel in recent memory. The narrator here is Franz Kretzschmar, a young recruit in the Third Reich, haunted by questions of identity--both of his own and his father's. As he recounts, on an old dilapidated train long ago, Viktor Kretzschmar met Thadeus Dreyer. Both expert chess players, a deal was struck: "if my father won, the other man would take his place on the eastern front and hand over his job as pointsman in hut nine on the Munich-Salzburg line. If, on the other hand, my father lost, he would shoot himself before the train reached its destination." As a result of that wager, a Viktor Kretzschmar spends the rest of his days as a frustrated pointsman and Lieutenant Colonel Thadeus Dreyer is decorated with the Iron Cross for his actions on the front.

The rest of the review, originally published on June 18, 2003, is here.

REVIEW: White Mughals by William Dalrymple

Excerpt

William Dalrymple shot into fame as a travel writer with his In Xanadu, a travel account he wrote when just twenty. A self-confessed Indophile, many of his subsequent works (City of Djinns, Age of Kali) were set in India. His latest book, White Mughals, revisits India, and among other things, is a detailed history of Deccan politics during the late eighteenth century.

The rest of the review, originally published on June 18, 2003, is here.

Review: Monkey Hunting by Cristina Garcia

Large portions of the book are set in Havana's Chinatown pictured above. This picture is from planetware.com

Excerpt:

Chen Pan is a young 20 year-old in China who signs a contract to make his fortune in Cuba. He is promised that the tropical island is full of riches, that "even the river fish jumped, unbidden, into frying pans." Chen Pan figures he would work in Cuba for a few years, and return to China a rich, content, man. So it is that he signs his life into slavery on a sugarcane plantation in Cuba. The ship journey over to the island is an indication of what lies ahead. After long, hard labor, Chen Pan finally escapes the plantation and makes his life in Havana. Pan's escape from slavery in Cuba and his survival in the country's harsh jungle eventually becomes the stuff of legend.

The rest of this review is here.