My faithful readers, both of you, realize I have not blogged since June 24 and here it is July 24. I am drafting a new novel and when my writing goes well, this blog drops in priority, behind family visits. the writing, translating and memorizing Japanese vocabulary (I want to read Japanese one day, not translate, which means struggle through—sentence by sentence), and the ordinary daily, weekly obligations.
I do, however, continue to read in the evening and this is a summary of what I've read in the past month.
Nightshade, a mystery by Michael Connelly. Another smoothly written, carefully crafted story featuring a new Connelly character, LA County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been “exiled” to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a mainland homicide desk. A body is found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor—a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. Who is she? What happened to her? Who did it? Another impeccable Connelly police procedure set in a small community.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, the 2011 Booker Prize winner, which is why I picked it up. It is not very long, but what it lacks in pages more than makes up for in depth. The narrator, Tony Webster, tells the story of his life in two parts, his youth and romance and college (Cambridge) years, and his sixties when he is divorced, comfortably retired, and remembering. His tranquility is shaken when he receives an unexpected legacy from an old girlfriend''s mother. Why would the woman do such a thing? Tony attempts to learn, the reader along with him. My only hesitation about the novel came late. Tony goes to such lengths to convince the reader that what he recalls is accurate I began to wonder just how reliable a narrator he is. Nevertheless, I'm glad I read it and recommend it.
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, (1931– 2016) was an Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was born in Australia and also held U.S. citizenship. Her 1970 novel The Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010, and her 2003 novel The Great Fire won the National Book Award. I've known of her for years but had never read her so I checked out another of her notable novels, The Transit of Venus. Reportedly it took her seven years to write, but I am afraid it took me less than a week to decide that the writing is so rich, so thick that finishing it would require more effort than I was willing to give.
The Feeling of Iron by Giaime Alonge, translated from Italian by Clarissa Bots. Alonge is an author, screenwriter, and associate professor of Film History at the University of Turin and this thick novel shares many characteristics with a film: short, vivid scenes, many characters, and much action which occurs on two timelines, Prussia and Poland during WWII and Central America in the 1980s. I will not attempt to summarize the story. It includes patriotic Germans, Nazis, Polish and Czech Jews, CIA agents, Sandinistas, and more and more. Alonge blends real people and true events so skillfully with his fiction it is impossible (for me) to know for sure where history stops and story begins. By the end of the book, all 416 pages, I felt almost as if I had lives through the collapse of the Third Reich and the Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua, a accomplishment of both the author and his translator.
