Thursday, October 17, 2024

Jessa Maxwell, I Need You to Read This


I Need You to Read This, Jessa Maxwell's new novel,  combines several threads of plot, swirling around an advice column in a fictional New York newspaper. One thread concerns a woman who has applied for the job of advice columnist upon the murder of the long-standing incumbent in the job. She has relied on the column in her own life's tumultuous course, but that is her primary qualification, , and is surprised when she is hired for the job. This thread follows her insecurity and imposter symdrome about doing the job, as well as her contacts with a possible suitor and her relationship with a couple of sort-of friends. Another thread follows that tumultuous past, as she becomes involved in an abusive relationship. Another thread follows her own investigation of her predecessors murder, a pursuit that will bring all th thread together in a violent resolution. But there is one more thread, as we follow her in her choice of letters to answer in her column, as well as her heartfelt advice to this correspondents (in the shadow, of course, of her predecessor, her own personal hero).

     The result of all these themes is involving and propulsive, with several major twists that move the whole story forward and keep the reader involved.

Thursday, August 29, 2024

Flowers over the Inferno TV series plus Daughter of Ashes (A Teresa Battaglia Novel) by Ilaria Tuti Ekin Oklap (Translator)

 Daughter of Ashes is the third volume of a trilogy by Italian crime \writer Ilaria Tuti, featuring detective Teresa Battaglia, who is suffering from bokth diabetes and the early stages of age-related dementia. The novels are set in and arouond Udine in the far north of Italy, frequently in mountainous areas, and her young and devoted assistant is a prominent feature, along with her other detectives, also devoted to herm and an increasingly hostile boss (I won't go into any details about the boss,m since their back \story is a big part of the novels' development. All the Battaglia books are concerned with both murder and with history, culture, and even folklore of the region. This last in the trilogy is also concerned with some extensive dips into the past of both Battaglia and the Roman history of the area.


The books are compelling and distictive, and the first of them, Flowers over the Inferno, has been made into a TV series by RAI, the Italian national network and it's available with English subtitles (so far onlly on the Australian SBS streaming network, accessible outside Australia with a VPN). The series is very effective in translating the human interactions, especially among the schoolchildren who are a big part of the first novel, and betweenn Battaglia and her young and very attractive assistant Marini (a young Sicilian whose adjustment to the snowy north is a source of some comedy, especially at the beginning).


The crime plots of all three novels are original in concept and in resolution, with the intelligence and wit of Battaglia and the growing confidence of Marini.
It's difficult to describe either version of the series without giving too much away, but I can say that the stories are compellingly told in both media, the novel and the series, and offer an unusual, distinctive experience to both reader and viewer.

Tuesday, July 09, 2024

John McFetridge, Every City is Every Other City


 John McFetridge is  a Canadian crime fiction writer who published a couple of excellent series set in Toronto (more noir) and Montreal (more police procedural) a few years ago. Quite by accident I recently discovered that since then he has published a stand-alone (maybe?)novel, Every City is Every Other City, set in contemporary Toronto. The title comes from the main character's everyday profession as a scout for locations for movies and TV shows filmed in Toronto (in which the Canadian city and surroundings serves as whatever city or town that the given project is supposed to take place in. His part-tine job though, is private detective, licensed but not too serious about it, usually just taking freelance jobs handed out by the more serious detective agencies around town. But when a colleague asks him to find her missing uncle, he steps into a dangerous morass involving both the missing uncle and a Weinstei-like important man being accused of multiple sexual assaults. 

    The story flips back and forth between the two jobs, offering interesting views inside the film world's not-so-glamorous realities and the gritty real world of police corruption, the power of money, the  lives of ordinary people and one who hopes to rise above the ordinary, a bit-part actress who hopes for the big time but also teaches improv classes at the famous Second City.

    McFetridge's characters talk like real people, and a lot of the story unfolds in dialogue plus the also very natural inner monologue of the main character. Every City is Every Other City is the most enjoyable novel I've read in a long time and I can only hope that the author revisits these characters or introduces us to new ones in the near future.

Thursday, July 04, 2024

Elizabeth Heider, May the Wolf Die

 In Italy, if you want to wish someone luck before an exam or other stressful event, you might use a phrase that translates literally as "in the mouth of the wolf." The appropriate response translates literally as "may the wolf die." In Elizabeth Heider's new crime novel May the Wolf Die, she makes no reference to this common use of the phrase. Instead, she portrays a number of more literal, but human, wolves: predators who attack women, ordinary citizens, and anyone who gets in their way. The novel is set in contamporary Naples, so some (but not all) of the wolves are associated with the Camorra (the Neapolitan Mafia) or the crime families that are attempting to take its place. But the main line of the narrative pursues wolves in the  upper ranks of the U.S. Navy, who prey on young naval officers. Heider's two main characters are Nikki and Valerio, who are not a romantic couple bt share the ownership of a sailboat. Valerio is a detective in the Neapolitan police and Nikki is employed in a special office tasked with mediating between U.S. military personnel stationed in Naples and the police or any other government offices with which they might come into contact. Heider was herself employed in such a role in Naples at one time.

    The novel centers on two corpses, both discovered by Nikki in the first chapters. Both turn out to have links to the U.S. Navy, so the local police collaborate with both an NCIS agentm representing the Nav, and Nikki, as a go-between overseeing the interests of everyone concerned. Ths line of the story is very interestingm reflecting the conflicting interests. of all the parties involved in a straightforward police procedural ultimately involving Valerio and otehr cops. But there are several side plots having to do with various \wolves that impact the pribatye lives of Nikki and Valerio. For these side plots to make sense, Heider spends considerable time on the back stories and current lives of these two characters, but mostly o Nikki and her lovers and family members.For me these storylines were distracting, at least up to the end when everything converges in a propulsive and involving manner.

    Nikki is an interesting character, determined to be self-reliant and not dependent on male protectors, a character trait that is much tested, right up to the ending. Along the way, there is a lot of action: more murders, intimidation, violence against women, poisonous office politics, arrogant Naval officers, ruthless gangsters, and multiple views of Naples and surroundings, not to mention an overlay of references to Dante's Inferno. By the end, my frustration with some of the subplots was forgotten in the rapidly mounting threats and violence. xzx

Sunday, June 30, 2024

Someone's in the Attic, by Andrea Mara

 Andrea Mara works in the eerie space between the ordinary and the creepy. In Someone's in the Attic, these two realms intertwine, sometimes in alternation sometimes all at once. The ordinary life of a family recently returned to Dublin after abandoning a life in California,  is fraught with reestablishing old friendships (a frequently funny, sometimes suspenseful part of the narrative) plus a series of TikTok videos showing their house being invaded through an attic hatch by a stranger dressed like a ninja. We the reader know more about the threat this figure poses than the characters do, but they are pretty freaked out themselves. At some points, as a reader I wanted the creepy part of the story to progress a little faster, but the ordinary life of the family is also entertaining: So I would highly recommend this not-quite-a-horror story and social comedy.

Arms & Legs, byy Chloe Lane

 Chloe Lane's narrator, Georgie, tells a dark and frequently funny story that progresses in a spiral rather than a straight line. Her language, in Lane's novel Arms & Legs, gathers together a corpse in the Florida forest, exploding eggs, cops and creepy neighbors, controlled burns, and love and desire (not. necessarily at the same time), difficult relationships, and most of all the voice of Georgie, brutally honest with herself and yet open to hose strange creatures, other people.  Georgie is an instructor in a north-central Florida university that sounds a lot like the University of Florida, but this is not a college novel, and though sometimes satirical it is not cerebral: Georgie's language is very physical as well as metaphorical: her own body and its relation to her husband and. her lover is specific and concrete. Lane's novel is dark enokugh to be thought of as "noir," and includes a disturbing, grisly (to use Georgie's word) corpse, a police investigation (th0okugh conducted in the shadows of the narrative. So not a conventional crime novel, but a lyrical, honest portrayal of Georgie's mental, physical, and emotional struggles: as well as being highly entertaining, since Georgie's voice is always elliptical as well as entertaining.

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Stuart Neville, Blood Like Mine

Stuart Neville's writing career began with a sort of political ghost story, Te Ghosts of Belfast, and since then his work has gone from crime fiction to horror, sometimes emphasizing one genre's conventions and sometimes another. In his new Blood Like Mine, he lures a reader in with a character-driven crime story, a mother and daughter on the run, and then shifts suddenly into a high energy horror story still character driven, making the conventions of (spoiler alert) the vampire and zombie tale toward something new. His monster is an original take on the monster as icon, increasing in intensity as the story goes along. From the point where the horror tale bursts into full bloom, the book is relentless, striking, and impossible to put down. Highly recommended, even if you don't usually go for any of the horror genres that Neville touches upon (and stretches to his own ends) here.

Friday, September 22, 2023

Ayesha Manazir iddiqi: The Centre


Ayesha Manazir iddiqi: The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books)

 

Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre is a thriller, a horror story, and a satire, but above all else an investigation of the relationahip of selfhood and language. The horror element comes not from an alien or supernatural source, but from the depths of human nature, with a reference not to technology but to anthropology and human history, myth, and ritual. Siddiqi’s novel occupies the fraught line between fascination and disgust, between the satiric and the gruesome. Siddiqi, like some other writers working in or adjacent to the horror genre, tends to hold the terrifying elements at arm’s length for a large part of the novel, to shift abruptly away from thrilling or shocking possibilities, withholding them  until a climactic moment later in the story. This deferral of horror has the effect of highlighting, alongside the shocking elements of the story, the ordinary conflicts, struggles, and terrors of everyday lie.

The novel is strictly from Anisa’s point of view (and at one point there is a sly hint of association between the narrator and the author); that narrative choice emphasizes the core of the novel, the insistence that subjective experience is impossible to communicate transparently—all communication involves a translation that is distorted by the point of view and experience of each party to the conversation. This incommunicability is most obvious in Anisa’s relationships with two friends and a lover. At the heart of the novel, though, is a mysterious process that seeks to break down this barrier to understanding by providing a process of acquiring languages and adopting other people’s experience. The institution that sponsors this process is The Centre of the book’s title.

The story  follows three primary arcs. The first is Anisa’s relationship with her friend Naima, who makes a living from tarot readings, tantra, and ayahuasca workshops for women of color. Anisa met Naima when she first moved to London at 18 to attend college, and they are now in their 30s. This part of the story is the most conventional, two friends struggling for love and for a place in the world, a storyline that ends with a wedding (though not the most reassuring of literary weddings). Naima is not only Anisa’s anchor, her best friend and confidant, but their relationship is also, despite Naima’s unconventional way of making a living, the “normal” against which Anisa’s stranger experiences can be measured. The second narrative arc deals with Adam, a man whom she meets at a seminar on literary translation: Adam is the person who introduces her to the Centre, a cult-like language school that claims to achieve for its adherents total fluency in a language in 10 days. The third narrative deals with the Centre itself and with  Anisa’s relationship with Shiba, a staff member at the Centre who becomes her guide (her Virgil, even) through the the Centre’s mysteries, possibilities, and even horrors.

            Anisa, dissatisfied with settling for a life that falls below her personal and literary ambitions, begins her journey, though, with a tarot reading that Naima does for her (with a comic touch: Naima consults the instruction booklet that came with the pack of cards for her interpreatation): according to Naima (and the instructions that came with the cards) Anisa is ”searching for the reasons for her discontent outside yourself, when the discontent itself is the reason for the discontent.” Thinking about her discontent leads Anisa to consider translation as a profession and an art form, meditating on the difficulties of finding an emotional equivalent for even the most basic elements of language. As evidence she references Harold Bloom’s discussion of the difficulty of adequately translating the famous first line of Camus’s L’Etranger.

She is inspired to attend a seminar on literary translation, where she first encounters Adam, who is also in the audience. She is impressed by his seeming fluency in several languages, and after striking up a conversation with him. When she asks how he has managed to learn so many languages, he offers the stale line that he could tell her but then he’d have to kill her, a line that serves as both a joke and a premonition. Their relationship is tentative at first: he is shy and cautious, particularly about sex, and he is also reticent regarding his skill in learning languages. As she ultimately says, there’s something “off” about Adam, and otherness that provides a lot of the tension in the first half of the story, and is finally explicated in an angry confrontation between what is at that point the former couple, toward the end.

            For the first quarter of the novel, the story is a frequently funny rom-com and coming-of-age late story about thirty-somethings in London finding their way through sexual, cultural, friendship, and family stresses—except for the occasional mention of “the horror that was to come.” Anisa navigates her ambitions, her sometimes fractious relationship with Naima, ad her slowly, hesitantly developing relationship with Adam, up to an including the adoption of a cat together (a big step, after all, toward shared domesticity). The break in the narrative occurs when a Anisa and Adam travel to introduce him to her family in Pakistan. Cultural and sexual tensions arise, from multiple misunderstandings based in incommensurable personal experience of a man and a woman from opposite ends of the colonial history of t heir countries. The biggest shock to their relationship comes when Adam reveals that he has learned Urdu, as a sort of gift to Anisa, but her reaction is not what he expects (not the least of which is that he now speaks the language better than she does, a fact that her family remarks upon). This insistence on the linguistic and translational aspects of disconnections between individuals with differing bodily experience of life prepares for both the couple’s breakup and the more startling aspects of the tale in the chapters to come.

After Adam provides Anisa with a referral to The Centre (something that p[articipants are only eligible to do once in a lifetime), almost as a parting gift upon their breakup, she undergoes an odd interview and an even stranger physical exam, and then journeys to the remote facility. The building is half 18th-century mansion and half modern glass and steel, the two sections surrounding a central courtyard and garden. The two halves of the building suggest the two tendencies of the story: toward gothic mystery and speculative fiction (both, though, grounded more in anthropology than in the supernatural or the technological).

The central garden: It seems perpetually lush and green, regardless of the season, but more pointedly, there is in the center of the garden a fenced-off section of poisonous plants. Their role in the Centre’s activity is never specified, so they function as a menacing presence and, by the end, a suggestion that there is more going on than the narrator is revealing. The poisonous presence are also a first hint of Anisa’s growing suspicions abut what is going on in the facility.

            At first, though, the program of The Centre is almost monastic. The regimen involves, first, the confiscation of all communication devices, then a strict schedule of meditation, meals, silence (except for occasional contact with staff), and long hours of sitting in a booth listening to a “Storyteller” drone on and on in a language that the learner does not (yet) understand. Anisa’s first crises are, on the one hand, boredom (despite the excellence of the meals prepared by the on-site chefs), and the forced withdrawal from Whatsapp and social media. At one point, she breaks down in her cell-like room and is comforted by an elderly cleaner (with whom she is not supposed to interact) who convinces her to go back to her language booth. Her other, sanctioned, interactions are only with Shiba, who encourages her but also echoes her life experience as a South Asian émigré. Their bond grows to fill ghe gap left by Anisa’s growing distance from Naima (who has become engaged to a man that Anisa does not approve of) and by Shiba’s  isolation as the chief of staff (she is not only in charge but is the daughter of one of the founders).

            Their friendship softens the cult-like atmosphere and the, suddently, Anisa begins to understand Peter, Her German Storyteller, as he drones on and on in her headphones, telling his life story in intimate detail. Her new facility in Germanm though, also has a darker side: she realizes that her recent, disturbing nightmares seem to be based on Peter’s story, even though she was having the nightmares before she could understand him.

            After “graduating” from The Centre, Anisa seeks to fulfill her professional ambitions, selecting a German literary novel (which is an allegory about language and translation) and publishes a successful English version of the text. Her feeling of success is mixed with her sense of inadequacy, which she identifies as the imposter syndrome, and sheh reaches out to Shiba. They meet and bond further, and then Anisa decides to go back to The Centre to learn Ruissian. On her second visit, the institution’s linguistic labyrinth darkens. She learns that her new Storyteller is in fact the elderly cleaner kthat she encountered on her first visit, but she is told that she will not be able to meet her this time, since the old woman is ill and in hospital. A further crisis comes when Shiba invites Anisa to visit her in the private quatters that are forbidden to leaners, and in a moment when Shiba is occupied and her laptop is open, Anisa further violates the ru les by checking her email. Whe follows is a thriller-like sequence of panic ,fear, and flight, ending abruptly when she attempts to enter another forbidden area: whereupon the narrator and the hnarrative go black. The secret behind the door will not be revealed until much later (following the pattern of the novel’s thriller and horror elements: at each stage, the narrative pulls back, postponing the full effect as the normal (though still ominous) life at The Centre and beyond resumes.

            The resto fthe story follows Anisa’s success as a translator, and a second trip to South Asia, this time in the company of Shiba, to visit with Shiba’s father and the other founders, who are coming together, from their various institutions around the world, to conduct The Centre’s essential business and the plans for its future. The visit is initially amicable, but rapidly falls apart in two ways: The final revelation of The Centre’s secrets in their full horror become clear, but Anisa’s final break with Shiba, her father, and the intstitution stem from a more banal, but in a way even more horrifying and disgusting, incident.

Anisa’s flight from India and from Shiba’s famiy does not quite resolve her relation to The Centre and its horrors. A further revelation, in a conversation with Shiba during the novel’s final weddiing scenes, both turns the screw further andn threatens to inveigle Anisa again in the web of The Centre, despite her awareness of its dark heart.

As horror fiction, The Centre has much in common with other historical and contemporary horror novels that are grounded in cults and human history (rather than supernatural or alien forces). I kept thinking of Charlotte Jay’s Beat Not the Bones, whose horror derives from essential and powerful cultural misunderstandings and colonial domination of one culture over another. The Centre is full of the same criticism of colonial domination, but usually in a lighter and more satirical tone, but like Jay’s famous novel, its horror is rooted in anthropology and history. Among more recent novels, Siddiqi’s book has in common with Elisabeth Thomas’s Catherine House a focus on cult-like enclaves and on female experience of the world. The Centre also has themes in common with Alma Katsu’s The Hunger, though without that story’s supernatural and historical elements. And John Darnielle’s invocation of the disruption of ordinary means of communication and the eruption of terrifying possibilities into ordinary (if unsatisfying) lives in his Universal Harvester has parallels in Siddiqi’s contrast between the ordinary conflicts and the awful potentialities of human nature.

What distinguishes The Centre from these books is partly tone: there is a lightness in Siddiqi’s evocation of the social lives of thirty-something Londoners of varying backgrounds that both contrasts and hightlights the anger and misunderstanding, both cultural and personal, among her characters. Much of the narrative’s tension is based not on exceptional circumstances but on ordinary life, not on the horror underneath but on the banality on the surface of the characters’ lives. In Anisa’s heated arguments with Adam, Naima, and Shiba, what is revealed is the incommensurability of individual experience: our inner lives, and basic points of view, and. Untranslatable across the gap between us. Anisa and the founders of The Centre are, each in their own way and each with their own moral dilemmas and lapses, trying to overcome that barrier. The question is whether total understanding across the barrier between us, a kind of telepathic communication, would result in horror and conflict or peace and understanding. Would sharing another person’s consciousness lead to empathy or nightmares. Rather than the style of horror that mines anxiety and shock as emotional forces,