NovelWorld

The Bad Girl has it all – delightful, lovable characters, a skillfully woven, satisfying story, swift, literate writing and the audacity of plot twists that go off like a string of firecrackers.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian literary master (who also ran for President of Peru in 1990, and who slugged Garcia Marquez in the eye for getting way too friendly with Mrs Vargas Llosa) is at the height of his storytelling powers, unraveling a spellbinding love story laced with plenty of comic shocks and unexpected reversals, populated by dozens of colorful supporting characters (the fat cook revolutionary, the adopted Vietnamese boy who won’t speak, the old man who communes with the ocean), and featuring two ferociously mismatched, constantly battling, star-crossed lovers to die for.

From an almost folkloric beginning in Miraflores, Peru, when the narrator at the age of fifteen first falls for the pretty, heartless new Chilean girl with the fascinating (fake) accent, each chapter moves forward in time, shifting location, deepening the characters, revealing more and more as the bad girl goes from one deception and betrayal to another.

Ricardo Somocurcio is a “good boy,” a translator and interpreter for UNESCO, and he’s head-over-heels in love with her. She’s a tricky chameleon who never tells the truth, repeatedly deceives him, cheats him, and nearly destroys him, but she has a weakness for Ricardo’s passionate professions of love, his sentimental talk from the soap operas.

Just like the bad girl herself, the novel is an irresistible seduction, a sexy tease filled with provocative clues and postponed promises. Ambitious in scope, it stretches from Cuba to Japan, with major sequences in France, England, Peru and Spain in a story that spans over thirty years.

Vargas Llosa loves his characters, loves his readers, and delights in yanking the rug out from under them again and again in a crafty plot that never goes quite where you think it will. The casually-revealed surprise that opens the last chapter alone is a head-spinner. And talk about a perfect ending – they don’t get any better! This is why we read, for sheer storytelling joy and an intimate emotional connection to the human comedy.

(and here's Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the black eye given to him by Mario Vargas Llosa)

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

If Joseph Conrad had written a novel with Albert Camus, it would have been something like The Lost Sailors. Yes, it’s that good.

The freighter Aldebaran is stranded in Marseilles and up for sale. The owner has disappeared. Abdul Aziz, the Lebanese captain, and Diamantes, the Greek first mate, realize that for ten years of working together as a perfect team they’ve never really trusted each other enough to reveal their private lives. But when a sailor opens up and confides in someone, he’s lost. These two lost sailors and their troubled attempt at friendship serve as the spine for this superbly-written waterfront noir, which plays out like a classic black-and-white French movie, moody and character-driven, romantic and doomed.

Diamantes is a sailor like his father before him, with a passionate love of maps and sealore, trying to forget the girl he left behind. Abdul Aziz, the tortured captain he serves, desperately needs someone to talk to – his marriage is crumbling, he’s losing the woman he adores, and all he can do is sternly cling to the rules of the ship that will be his last command. One other crew member hasn’t left the grounded ship, Nedim, the Turkish sailor boy looking for love who always stumbles into trouble. Along with trouble he also finds Amina, the beautiful girl with the mysterious scar under her eye, abandoned by a sailor long ago and jealously guarded by Ricardo, kingpin of the Marseilles underworld. Every character is sympathetic, every character has a past and a point of view, as they battle for what they love and what they think is right in a tragic, headlong collision that spans generations and sweeps innocent and guilty alike toward violence.

Jean-Claude Izzo, who passed away half a dozen years ago, is a master in the classic French tradition. With concise, confident prose, filled with silences and understatement, he creates a realistic world of shipyard toughs and bargirls, freighters and sailors that he seems to know intimately. Not only does he effortlessly create the rich, textured feel of a literary crime thriller, Izzo is a philosopher who never misses an opportunity to comment on the stark realities of the plot. “The real questions are the ones you only ask yourself later. When you’ve already screwed up your life.”

Throughout this rich, wonderful novel Marseilles is omnipresent, teeming with life, radiant and complex as a character, the city Izzo passionately loved, the city where he lived and died.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

This little mini-masterpiece would be cause for rejoicing even if Suite Francaise had never been found. Far from being one of those second-rate “lost” manuscripts exploited after an author’s death, Fire in the Blood is a lean, mean little wonder, a treasure just recently pieced together, possibly the last manuscript Nevirovsky was working on in 1942 when she was arrested, imprisoned, and killed at Auschwitz.

Suite Francaise, with its historical setting and grand wartime scope, is Nemirovsky in a Tolstoy-like mood, documenting her time. Fire in the Blood couldn’t be more different. Without a hint of wartime horrors, it’s her timeless Chekhov piece, a tight little drama of country landowners and unfaithful wives in which some humdinger surprises go off like blazing pistols in the second half.

Old Sylvestre, nicknamed Silvio, impoverished uncle, down-on-his-luck failure in life, has decided to lay bare his soul and the souls of quite a few members of the wealthy farming community of a little village in Burgundy. He’s particularly interested in three fascinating women: his lovely, happily-married cousin Helene, her daughter Colette who is about to be married, and Brigitte Declos, a young woman married to a wealthy old skinflint.

Colette introduces her fiancé to her family. She announces that she hopes for a marriage as stable and enduring as her parents’. That’s how it begins. But no one knows the whole story in this swift little whiplash of a literary experience, as two beautiful young women with “fire in the blood” reach out for the man they love, unleashing the secrets and lies of everyone around them.

Gasping at the audacity of the last sentence, overwhelmed by a new understanding of the plot in retrospect, this reader went right back to the beginning of this cunning little puzzle of deceptions to read it again. Every word counts, every sentence is immaculate, every twist of the storyline is a delightful pleasure, in this wise, ironic look at passionate love and the collateral damage of “fire in the blood.”

As Sylvestre says, “The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable…”

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

This year’s surprise Booker-winner is a surprise in more ways than one. It’s a cocky, sure-of-itself, in-your-face literary experience that’s bracingly honest and frequently roaringly funny on the least funny of subjects: a funeral. It’s not the plot that’s dazzling. The story itself is hardly more than a pretext: Liam Hegarty’s suicide at the age of forty draws his nine surviving brothers and sisters back to the old over-extended family home in Dublin.

Thirty-nine-year-old narrator Veronica Hegarty was always close to Liam, and wants to tell you about her brother’s death, and in particular about something that happened when she was eight and Liam was nine (or, at least, could have happened, or maybe didn’t happen at all), but to do so she has to go all the way back to 1925, and the meeting of Veronica’s grandmother, Ada, age nineteen, with the mysterious, enigmatic Lambert Nugent in the foyer of a Dublin hotel. It’s love at first sight. Does Ada marry Lambert? No. Instead she marries his best friend, Charlie Spillane, who drives up with a flashy car outside. Thus, according to Veronica, her brother’s fate is set in motion. What this has to do with Liam’s death is the mystery.

Don’t expect to find out what really happened in grandmother’s house. Memory in Enright’s hands is even more treacherous and unreliable than in Proust’s. Veronica gives you all kinds of variant possibilities, but that’s all they are, contradictory interpretations of the past, fallible guesswork.

Author Enright has a fine time entertaining you, with a spunky irony to the writing style, an exuberance in the language, a sly wisdom underlying the twists of the narrative. Her tale is pull-no-punches honest about the unfairness and disappointments of life, but playful enough to include a sex scene that didn’t really happen. It’s a thrillingly honest and unsentimental look at the human experience, with plenty of defiant Irish laughter in the face of mortality.

Dotted with deadpan gems, every page seasoned with Enright’s irrepressible spirit, The Gathering is a tribute to the family funerals of life, where grief is “somewhere between diarrhea and sex.”

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

They’re called dillos, these nineteen-year-old deserters from the doomed Argentine army, because they live hidden underground in the tunnels of the Warren.

The Four Kings are in charge, raiding and trading, deciding how much the dillos get to eat and drink each day, deciding who gets to stay below and who are left outside – the sick, the wounded, the unfaithful – to freeze to death in the snow.

Originally titled Los Pichiciegos (small Argentine armadillos, an endangered species) and first published in 1982 as one of the first literary accounts of the Falklands War, the novel has been newly translated as Malvinas Requiem (the Argentines don’t call the islands the Falklands, they call them the Malvinas).

It’s a punchy, startling, thrilling little book. In a spare, elliptical style, as though his lean prose has no time to waste and barely survived the hardships of the war, Rodolpho Fogwill sketches the daily terrors of that deadly June winter, the secret transactions with the Brits, the sheep blown up by landmines, the murderous swarms of helicopters, the spectral nuns haunting the mountainside at night.

Fogwill assumes you know that the Argentine generals were ruthless tyrants, the islands were populated almost exclusively by British shepherds with their flocks, and that these deserters are bartering with the Brits to betray their own Argie army.

Tortured and killed if caught by their own, subject to the whim of British mercy or brutality, Fogwill shows you battered Argentine soldiers with promise-filled leaflets in hand being napalmed as they stand in line to surrender.

Not until halfway through the third-person narrative does a mysterious “I” begin to appear, writing down notes, interrogating one of the dillos. Then a window is mentioned – an odd detail very much out of place in an underground burrow. Slowly out of these clues a narrator surfaces in his hotel room, recording the testimony of one angry survivor.

It’s a dazzling little tour de force that sounds like it was thrown together as fast as it reads, another brilliantly-written, heartbreaking human document of how we slaughter our children.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)