First time novelist Clay stakes out an ambitious purpose: retelling TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in contemporary fashion set in a small British town. And amazingly he just about pulls it off fashioning a much darker more brutal look at how one family can have such a negative impact on their neighbors how a gawky awkward teenage boy falling in love with the wrong girl turns his life upside down in monstrous ways and how idealism and optimism gets quashed over and over again but is never quite completely diminished. Skunk Cunningham isn't Scout Finch but she's got a fantastic narrative voice all on her own and after reading BROKEN. I am glad I don't have to revisit what it's like to be at the mercy of feral schoolage females.
I will say up front that I'm going to have to read this about three more times before I understand Durrenmatt's intentions clearly. But even on a first read it's easy to recognize the brilliance of its conceit using twenty-four chapters of a single sentence each to convey the natural and frightening extension of relying too heavily on images moving and otherwise. The quality here is deliberately hallucinatory as the reader seems to fall into the narrative clause by clause comma by comma so no wonder the effect is both confusing and revelatory. Durrenmatt died a decade and a half before YouTube and long before today's on-demand world but he would have had a field day with current technological developments - and their ills - had he lived.
One of my all-time favorite series of books wraps up in worthy fashion bringing to a close Walton's alternate history of what might have transpired had Britain and Nazi Germany agreed to "peace in our time." Once again. I marvel at how Walton is a student of history without teaching it to the reader in didactic fashion how she contrasts the innocence of her chosen 18 year old budding debutante heroine with the world-weary nature of her guardian the Chief of the Watch designed to implement Britain's neo-fascist rulings and how she comes up with a shocker of a twist to bring about the trilogy's close wrapping up some major threads but never quite tying them up as neatly as we might hope. It's a scary world that was once avoided - but the line is so thin that we're not so far off from something like this happening again and openly.
Heart soul kids who speak in voices far beyond their years road trips messed up expats gas stations and a bizarre unrequited love for Deborah Solomon of NYT Magazine fame - yeah. I'd say THE FLYING TROUTMANS has it all. The comparisons to LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE are too easy what with the surface similarities in plot but Toews has a great deal more to say about running away from and returning to face responsibility looking for redemption in the most far-flung places and how fractious sibling relationships remain an influence years thereafter. And yes there's so much heart and soul in this book that it wraps you up tight and keeps you there weeks after that final page is turned.
Finally I come to this year's Dublin IMPAC Prize winner and it's well deserved. Hage a Lebanese-born. Montreal-dwelling novelist adopts a minimalist style to tell the story of Bassam and George two lifelong friends separated and brought together after a bomb rips through Lebanon. Even as Bassam leaves his native country behind he can never quite escape it - or the truth of what he sought to bury. Hage does not shy away from brutality or from the hard choices people make even concerning those they treasure most. And now I really can't wait to read his next novel COCKROACH and what comes thereafter.
I just read Stasio's review of BOOK OF THE DEAD again. It doesn't offer much criticism but the bulk of it comes in the last line of the review:
"In trying to reassert Scarpetta’s supremacy. Cornwell hasn’t exactly purged the series of tired formulas and worn-out cast members. But she has shaken things up a bit and produced one terrific new character a bodyguard named Bull who’s helping Scarpetta tend her neglected garden. It will be interesting to see what grows there."
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://www.sarahweinman.com/confessions/2007/11/if-youre-a-best.html
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|
