Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

I thought I would continue with last month's experiment of posting a brief well, not review, exactly, but more meandering rumination on the book I'll be discussing with my book group shortly. One of the pitfalls of book groups is that the consensus opinion of something may not shift your point of view, but it may profoundly color your unfiltered reaction.

As for tonight's book, Kidnapped,the two members reactions that I've heard so far make me think this may be a tough sell. One said that she was maybe just not in the right mood for buccaneering--which means she's still pretty early in the story as buccaneering isn't really the focus of the book for long. Actually, I don't know if technically there is any real buccaneering going on, but that's because I realize that I don't really know what a buccaneer is...

Another member said he found it depressing. Depressing? I asked, because frankly that response surprised me. But he said that the number of traps and perils our hero David Balfour falls into are so unrelenting that he didn't understand why David didn't just give up and end it all at some point.

Well, it's a point of view, and frankly, it's the path that I might have considered strongly myself. But in a way, I think that this is because, unlike so many of our action adventure stories today, which probably sport at least the same number of dangers, this book makes the costs seem physically, emotionally and spiritually real.

There are two story structures that have come to mind a few times as I read this book. One is the fairy tale. Not in the sense that this is fantasy, but in following a fairytale motif. In the beginning, David leaves his home and sets out on the road, little knowing where he is going, but eager to see a bit more of the world now that his parents have died. He immediately comes across an old friend of the family, who not only gives him three gifts, a classic fairytale motif, but also a letter that he is to carry somewhere to seek his fortune. He is told that he not the lowly swineherd (figuratively) that he thought he was at all, but in fact a member of a great house.

It's interesting to me, having reached the end of the book (and I promise to give nothing away that's worth saving, unlike Stevenson himself, who apparently gave away several major plot points in the subtitle) it is all really a simple trajectory of a young man seeking his rightful portion and how that all resolves. But there is a sense that the detour that his adventures represent also test his worthiness to be the recipient of that fortune. An inherited right also becomes an earned right, and the ordeals he goes through are again of a sort of mythic nature to reveal the one true king or whatever.

I've also kept thinking that this would make a great computer game. Not like one of those multiplayer games, but something simpler, like Pokemon on Gameboy, which, due to my nephew's childhood is the only one I really know anything about. You would by default be David Balfour and each level would be the next level he has to endure. It might even be good for literacy, as Kidnappedthe book could be a kind of cheat sheet for Kidnapped the game.

Of course these structures leave so much out. You could play the game and even learn to master it quickly and still not have the experience that we have of being with David Balfour as he leaves 'the comfort zone' and sets off on ever widening and ever more difficult adventures.

The thing that you could not hope to replicate in a computer game is his friendship with Alan Breck Stewart. It's interesting that Stevenson chose this historical person to befriend his entirely fictional David. And it is so interesting to watch what begins as relationship of braggadocio on Alan's part and bemusement on David's turn into something much more real and lasting.

I think what my friend got wrong in finding it so depressing,and what I too get wrong in thinking about it as a game, is that we're seeing this as just an endless series of ordeals, to no real purpose. But the ordeals reveal the character of the two men to each other, which binds them to each other in a real and not merely 'code of honor' sort of stylized way. The point of the book is not really the rightful inheritance at all, and because of that it has a curiously anti-climactic ending, which is apt, but not conventional.

Well, headed out now to see what other reactions there were. And will report on them if they're interesting.

Thanks to Adrian McKinty for suggesting this reread. The truth is, I never really care what the others think of the books I recommend us trying. It's just an incentive for me to get around to them myself.

Friends in High Places--a mystery by Donna Leon

Sometimes, in the case of a long running series, it can be intimidating to make a beginning. The Venetian mysteries of Donna Leon, featuring Detective Guido Brunetti, have been recommended to me for years and years, by more people than I care to say. But I could never get into what I think is the first one, A Death at La Fenice, so didn't start them. I was like a horse that balked time and again at the same jump.(Sorry--I was watching National Velvet with my four-year-old friend the other night, and I expect this is going to creep into my metaphors.)

A week or so ago, I happened to open a mystery that had been sitting on my desk at work for longer than I care to say. (If I tell you that I would have no problem admitting that it had been sitting there for a year, you may begin to have some sense of the layers of time we're talking about here.) It was the abovementioned Friends in High Places, and it begins with Detective Brunetti in his study, reading Xenophon as he lounges on the couch while he waits for his wife to come home with soft-shelled crabs for lunch. Apparently this image was all it took to woo me, even though I'm not a man, have never read Xenophon, and if I wait for a wife to come home with lunch fixings, I wait in vain. It doesn't matter--I share a similar enough vision of Edenic bliss for this to work for me.

Of course, being a mystery, this bliss is abruptly shattered by the arrival of a young man from the Ufficio Ustato, a bureaucrat named Rossi who has arrived to inform Brunetti of a slight problem, namely that, ahem, his apartment does not exist.

And that's all I'm going to tell you about the plot. Here's what I think is masterful about the book, though. Within a few pages, and despite Brunetti's astonishment and irritation, we get a feel for the quiet, earnest and yet essentially decent Rossi, which lends a kind of dignity or gravity to all that happens after. The title, too, has many 'levels', which is an unintentional pun on my part. Leon's pun, on the other hand, is relevant to the themes of the book as a whole. She gives, as I expect is her trademark, a penetrating dissection of Venetian society, not wholly favorable by any means. It perhaps is slightly askew from our normal tourist's perception of the city, yet not far off from Rebecca West's analysis of it in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in which, many years ago, she described it as a city of traders and diplomats and dealmakers--beautiful but flawed by corruption.

I am already on to another, A Noble Radiance, and of course, as is the way with all good mystery series, I want to read them all. I'm sure that, given the time, I'll even read the one I couldn't manage to begin.

Holden Caufield, Revisited

For anyone looking to relive their high school or college days, I recommend that they join a book group, if they haven't done so already. It's a surefire cure for nostalgia. Not because I hate book groups--I don't. What I hate, and what I hated in my more academic life, was assigned reading. Yet once a month, I put myself through this required reading stuff. The pressure doesn't come from my group. I live in Santa Cruz, California after all, where any kind of requirement would feel too heavy. But the fact remains that I don't exactly feel right about showing up on a Tuesday night without having finished the book. Which has resulted in a lot of last day swatting up of the text over the years. I haven't quite gotten to the 'all nighter' phase ever. But my back end loading of the book selection makes me quite sure that I am not ready even now to go back to college for enrichment, career advancement, or anything else.

This month's selection is Catcher in the Rye, the famous J.D. Salinger work. I think all of us who are meeting tonight read this book 'back in the day', but in a way, I'm surprised by that, because I did not read this as required high school reading. It seems to be now, though. From my (very) slightly insider point of view as a bookseller, I know that the publisher, Hachette, formerly Warner, banks heavily on some kind of course book adoption of Salinger's books. Frankly, I can't think why. I mean, that I can't understand this book being taught in high schools. Not because it isn't brilliant. It is. But it is so antithetical to the high school experience, so in protest of it really, that I doubt very much that a high school classroom is the proper forum for this work. I don't doubt that teenagers can get quite a bit from it. I just think that discovering it on their own would make it much more resonant than it will be force fed to them.

As for the rereading--one thing that stands out to me is what a New York, specifically Manhattan, book this is. I realized that the first time I read this I had never been to Manhattan, and had no real conception of it, so I glossed over many of the details. I don't know that the details are so important to the message of it, but it stands out all over the place, once it is part of your mental geography.

I had expected that Caufield would appear a lot more strident to me now than he did back then. But he remains a pretty sympathetic, if somewhat deranged narrator. Many of the 'types' he runs across have more resonance to me now than they did on initial reading. I suspect that I didn't have quite enough experience of the human pool to see the accuracy of Salinger's skewering. I don't think most of Holden's expose of phoniness can really be refuted. And yet, he himself refutes total condemnation of anyone many a time.

I'm planning to report back here on what the book group thought of this reread.

One question I have, which of course must remain unanswered. What would have happened to Holden Caulfield? I wish Salinger would write a novel about the grown up Holden. And I would hope that he would not take the too easy route of making Caufield "a phony".

The Private Patient by P.D. James

There are some books that leap to the top of the pile when they arrive at my door. They aren't necessarily the best books. But there is something so compulsive about reading them that the usual quandaries I have about what should take precedence, and how I'm ever going to get around to such and such evaporate around certain titles, and I find that somehow there is time, ample time for me to read them whenever they appear.

The work of P.D. James is a case in point. I have just read her latest and, limited by honor not to give away too much of the plot, I find myself wondering why and how I have managed to read almost all her books over the years, and watched the PBS/BBC dramatizations too.

It isn't that I think that she is the greatest mystery writer qua mystery writer of all time. In fact, I don't usually care all that much about the mystery aspect of her books, although of course I find the way it drives the story along entertaining. But I tend to find the actual resolutions of her stories a tad disappointing. At least, I don't find them thrilling or 'fiendishly clever' or any of the usual descriptive things that usually pump up sales.

In fact, as I peel away at the onion, it becomes less certain what it is I do like about the books. The characters, i.e., the suspects, but sometimes the crime solvers too, are rendered in a cold and definitely unflattering light. They are almost always either unlikable people, or likable people who are for all intents and purposes idiots.

You might think it's the great detective himself, then, our Adam Dalgleish, who is so riveting. Perhaps once. But now I find him slightly tedious--his strains, his age, and especially his love life. A long time ago James wrote An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and it was clear to her fan base that Cordelia Grey was the right woman for the great detective. Dame James thought not. The dilemma of love, marriage, and all the attendant responsibilities that Dalgleish preoccupies himself with over his new love Emma in the more recent books is tedious and at times downright boring. I may be wrong--perhaps there is some contingent of Dalgleish worshippers who have just been pining for him to find the right woman and settle down. It seems unlikely.

So why the hell do I read these books, you ask? Okay, I ask. And I think the answer is, because of the beauty with which they unfold. Her books are aesthetically satisfying, even if emotionally, well, maybe not so much.

This book, and it's taken me a long time to even get to an aside about its details, has to do with the murder of an investigative reporter who has gone to a country facility to have an old scar removed. You will no that she's the victim early on, yet even she is given an inner life and compulsion. What James is so good at is in investing us all with the sense that this place, Cheverall Manor, has a life. As time after time she has done with similar settings in the past, she builds it up from the ground, first the physical architecture, but then the daily structure, the routine of such a place as well. You sense that she is meticulous in plotting all this--you are not going to catch her out on the floorplan--physical, emotional, spiritual of any of her books. It seems that if you could somehow walk into the world that James has invented, you would not come to an edge where there were gray bits, where the reality of it suddenly stopped.

And yet, for all that, there remain mysteries.On the way to her first visit to Cheverell Manor, Rhoda Gradwyn, designated murder victim, gets overwhelmed by a storm, and has to stop, sitting in her car till the rain subsides. The sequence that follows is about her past, her inner life, her reasons for having an old scar removed. None of that has much to do with her life as an investigative reporter-- which is the part of her life that may have something to do with her death.

Early on, she tells the surgeon who will do the necessary cosmetic work that she is having the scar removed now, because she no longer has need of it. What this means exactly, I, at least, never figured out. But it does remind you rather poignantly that this character did not in fact go to a country clinic to be a convenient plot device in a murder investigation. She went as someone involved in her own story, who wanted only to be healed.

Dead It Should Not Be

Sometimes we come to things in funny ways--the wrong way, so to speak, but it turns out to be the right way after all. I thought I didn't know how exactly I had come upon Adrian McKinty's work in the first place, because ordinarily, I am not someone lured in by blurbs like "Tough guy fiction at its gory, heart-stopping best." (The Miami Herald), or "peppered with enough violence to make Martin Scorsese wince" (Rocky Mountain News)

Such are the phrases on my paperback copy of The Bloomsday Dead, but of course now we come to the title and you have the answer to the mystery. Because of course a book that uses Bloomsday in the title means to have some traffic with James Joyce, and Ulysses, and having slogged my way through that fat tome, I feel entitled to all the Joycean reference perks I can get my hands on.

I'm not going to talk about The Bloomsday Dead, though. At least not right now. Or at least more than to say that after I started it, I realized that I was three books into a trilogy, which obviously isn't the best place to start, and yet I was already so sucked in that I decided to take my chances.

Well, you shouldn't follow my lead because you are going to get some major spoilers about the troubled saga of Michael Forsythe, immigrant/exile/fugitive from Northern Ireland if you do. So begin, as is usually wise, at the beginning. Find yourself a copy of Dead I Well May Be and hunker down with it.

That is if you can find it. I think you can, because there are used copies and library copies to be had, and it looks like you might be able to download it on Kindle, should you be so fortunate as to own one.But in print? No. Despite being the crucial first volume in a crime trilogy, the publishers have seen fit to take it out of print, which means you can't just walk into your local bookstore and pick up a copy, or even order it all that easily. I won't rant about that too much here, I'll only say persist. Find the book. It's worth the effort.

Despite warning you against this, I actually had a lot of enjoyment out of reading this book out of sequence. There is something to be said for reading the past while knowing what lies ahead. It allows you to be a bit more leisurely. You are not quite so swept along by the plot. (Though there are still plenty of surprises here even for one who, Cassandra-like, knows the future.)

Let's just say briefly, without giving anything away, that there is a kind of doom around young Michael Forsythe. Whether it's a Northern Irish doom, or a more personal one is hard to say. When, early on in the story, you get a glimpse of a real ruthlessness in him, and realize that this guy is not exactly like you and me (or at least he's not like me), you do actually have to find a way of reconciling that within yourself, because you've already identified with him and his situation. Still, there is some, what?--emptiness?--at the core of him that is never really explained, perhaps not really explainable, but which feels real, not cartoonlike. You see that he's been hardened, and yet you also see the cost.

There are many and various pleasures in this book. The action/adventure buff will certainly not go away disappointed. For me, though, two types of things stand out. There are the literary references, alluded to with a light and deft hand, which won't matter if you miss them, but will add to your pleasure if you spot them. And, more importantly, there is McKinty's power of observation in every setting, whether Belfast or New York or wherever, but especially of the nuances between different types of people and cultures. Let us just say he has not passed through the places on this earth that he's lived and visited with a veil drawn over his eyes.

So go track down a copy of this. You can probably find the copy I lost in Santa Cruz somewhere, for instance. Meantime, check out his always entertaining if highly opinionated blog. And then get yourself on some sort of waiting list for Fifty Grand, his forthcoming novel. It's a stand-alone, or at least the first in a series, and those in the know (which wouldn't be me, by the way) say it's his best yet.

Also, if you're interested in a slightly less meandering, more on point discussion of Michael Forsythe, check Brian O'Rourke's blog for his take on all this. And you can check out one of Peter Rozovsky's McKinty posts at the always scintillating Detectives Without Borders here, which will in turn lead you on to an interview with McKinty himself.

Bad Blood?

I don't think of myself as much of a one for memoir, but I read Lorna Sage's Bad Blood for my book group and by and large enjoyed it. Her account of growing up in a northern Welsh vicarage, largely raised by her eccentric and embattled grandparents is probably the most striking part of the book. Her own early identification and preference for the man she sometimes refers to as 'The Old Devil' appears to be the issue she is still trying to illuminate for herself.
As a professor of English who taught in both England and the U.S., it perhaps goes without saying that she writes well and interestingly. But as sometimes happens with memoir, the reader may find her or himself arrested by parts of Sage's life that don't seem to strike her in the same way. 'Bad Blood', for instance, would seem to rate a much darker, more defective past than is really in evidence here. In fact, as the members of the group sought out this book, we learned that there were quite a few current books with the same title--a murder mystery, a romance novel(no doubt having something to do with fangs), a true crime account, and so on. The Sage family drama was by far the tamest of the lot.

Which isn't to say it's boring. I think the word I would use is 'inscrutable'. It is in some ways still hard to account for this family, even after all her description. I won't give too much away, as there is a certain level of suspense that comes into it all. I will say that I haven't heard her dismissal of the nuclear family described in quite the same way.

"The fact that I somehow belonged to them [her parents], and with them, had been obscured to me in my grandparents' divided dominion. For a husband and wife to get on together,to gang up with each other, seemed strange and unfair.(Perhaps this is why people dream back with nostalgia to the extended family? Not because you get more parenting, but because you get less? Who knows, perhaps we secretly long to avoid being eggs in just one basket, which is what you get if your parents build a nest on just one branch of the family tree.)"

Well, this doesn't seem to be a particularly secret longing on Lorna Sage's part.

The book isn't new. It fell out of print (I think) and has recently been reissued, but probably to the interest of a fairly small audience, at least here in the U.S. So it was with some surprise that I found myself approached in the laundromat by a young woman who asked me eagerly where I had gotten it. She and her mother formed a somewhat odd, not to say dysfunctional pair, and I was absolutely sure that she was really after the horror novel or whatever of the same name, which I ventured to her. "This one is about a girl growing up in Wales? In a vicarage?" To which she replied, "Yeah, yeah--I read the sequel. Well, not sequel it was more of an article in a collection."

Well, I am still not sure whether we were talking about the same book, or whether this 'sequel' exists, though it would make a certain sense, with Bad Blood ending where it does. (And a small failing of the book is that the ending does feel somewhat rushed and unexplored in comparison to the beginning--I'd say as a whole that Sage finds her own story less intriguing than that of her ancestors, even though the reader may not.) But I did learn that readers shouldn't be judged by their covers anymore than books should. In the book biz, you can get pretty jaded--thinking you can judge in advance what people are going to like--but every once in a while you're completely wrong.

This, by the way, is a good thing.

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio

Okay, this is either the third or fourth time I've tried to write about this novel by Algerian-born Italian resident Amara Lakhous. The book, put out in English translation by Europa Editions, first came to my attention in one of the threads over at Adrian McKinty's blog The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in a comment from Marco, who I am also indebted to for showing all of us how to make a link.

Marco started the ball rolling by saying:

We have mentioned big/plural/diverse cities,immigration,progressiveness vs insularity -one of my favorite novels of recent years,Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator on Piazza Vittorio deals with all these things,and has just been translated into English.

As an American, and maybe even more particularly as a Californian, my view of the vastness of Rome has to do with both its physical scale and its reach back into various layers of historic time. So I was not really prepared to encounter a European story of immigrants and exiles, which feels much more familiar here than the story of Romulus and Remus. Also, I think we tend to see Italy as far more 'unified' than it really is. The people in this book who figure as 'foreign' may be no further away than Naples. I want to say that Southern Californians would not prove so exotic to us in Santa Cruz, but in fact, much of the life of the Central Valley would seem very strange indeed.

This story revolves around a murder and a suspect. It spoils nothing to say that the suspect is one Amadeo, and that all the cast of characters have their own different take on him, often completely at odds with the others. A quote fairly far into the book, but again giving nothing away says: "Amadeo maintained that Italian-style comedy represents the highest level of Italian creativity because it emphasizes paradoxes, combines tragedy and comedy, humor and serious criticism." This is in fact the style of this book, and if that description sounds intriguing to you than you should enjoy this.

A personal note: Not too long after reading this novel I found myself shouting up the stairs at my fellow tenant, through the barrier/mediation of the property manager, a man covered in tattoos but also carrying a little lapdog. Our dilemmas and differences were as trivial as those of the characters in this book, and yet our lack of communication as profound. A little dog figures prominently in Clash of Civilizations as well. Perhaps there is always a little dog somewhere, emblematic of we know not what.

Don't know if anyone will even see this, but if so, let's state that spoilers are okay in the comments, so be forewarned.

I'm updating this to add a link from Peter Rosovsky's highly informative international crime blog, Detectives Without Borders, where he is also talking about this book, doubtless in a much more intelligent way.