For anyone interested in literature, Iran, or another culture

Last fall, I talked about Azar Nafisi's book, The Republic of Imagination. I have finally caught up with her first book, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which was published in 2003. It was deservedly a best seller and deserves to be read fifteen years after it was published.

Azar Nafisi, says her website, "is a Visiting Professor and the executive director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. Azar Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai before her return to the United States in 1997 . . . In 1981, she was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987."

Reading Lolita in Tehran fills out the picture of what happened to her and her family during and after the 1979 revolution, adds stories of her students and colleagues, and connects all this to works by Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jane Austen, and more. She lived through—and describes in painful detail—the rise of the theocracy. (You don't want to live in one, not Muslim, not Christian.) She lived through the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, the one in which the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein. She held private classes in English literature for eight young women in her living room. She tried to open minds under a regime that—my impression—was doing its best to limit them.

For example, one of her senior colleagues in the university did not want her to teach The Great Gatsby. "The novel was immoral. It taught the youth the wrong stuff; it poisoned their minds—surely I could see. I could not. I reminded him that Gatsby was a work of fiction and not a how-to manual. Surely I could see, he insisted, that these novels and their characters became our models in real life? Maybe Mr. Gatsby was all right for the Americans, but not for our revolutionary youth . . ."

With the revolution, came new government regulations punishable by fines, lashings, and jail. Nafisi writes, "Now that I could not call myself a teacher, a writer, now that I could not wear what I would normally wear [new rules ordered women to wear only chador or long robe and scarf in public], walk in the streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all this was illegal, I felt light and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe."

Toward the end of the book, she writes that the dilemmas of the girls she taught "stemmed from the confiscation of their most intimate moments and private aspiration by the regime. This conflict lay at the heart of the paradox created by Islamic rule. Now that the mullahs ruled the land, religion was used as an instrument of power, an ideology. It was this ideological approach to faith that differentiated those in power from millions of ordinary citizens . . ." My opinion is that ideologues make terrible presidents, senators, representatives, judges, and mayors.

My selection of quotations may unfortunately give the impression that the memoir is a screed against the Islamic Republic. Nafisi certainly points out the difficulties of living in a theocracy even if one is a believer. What makes the book far more than war stories of living through a revolution, however, is Nafisi's and her students' thoughts and observations about the books they read. Anyone who is interested in literature, in Iran, in another culture, or in all three should find and read Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Skeleton God is more than a challenging puzzle

I asked to review Skeleton God, the ninth mystery in Eliot Pattison's Inspector Shan Tao Yun series, because I had just read The Skull Mantra, the first in the series.

At the beginning of The Skull Mantra, Shan, who is Chinese, is in a Tibetan prison camp having pursued an investigation too aggressively back in Beijing. When a prison work gang finds a headless corpse on a windy Tibetan mountainside, Colonel Tan, the district commander, springs Shan from the prison with the understanding that Shan will solve the murder before an American tourist delegation arrives and do it in a politically expedient manner, which may require executing an innocent monk—something Shan cannot permit.

As Pattison's website says, Shan is thrown into a maelstrom of political and religious intrigue involving American mining interest, Tibetan sorcerers, corrupt Party officials, a secret illegal monastery, and the Tibetan resistance movement.

I have some quibbles about The Skull Mantra. The maelstrom into which Shan is thrown is complex, and between the Chinese and Tibetan names and Pattison's efforts to convey the recent history of Chinese/Tibetan relations (not to mention Tibetan Buddhist customs and spirituality), it can be heavy sledding to follow the plot's twists. Nevertheless, The Skull Mantra is a superior and fascinating first effort.

Eight books later in Skeleton God, Shan is the constable of a remote Tibetan town. Colonel Tan, while not Shan's friend, recognizes his value and uses him as best he can. Shan's son, Ko, mentioned but not appearing in the first book, is now a prisoner in Shan's former prison. The story begins when Shan investigates a report that nun has been assaulted by ghosts. In an ancient tomb by the old nun, Shan finds the mummified and gilded remains of Buddhist saint buried centuries ago, the remains of a Chinese soldier murdered fifty years before, and an American man (!) murdered only hours earlier (!!). What is going on?

It is to Pattison's credit that what goes on is plausible and engaging. He is able to use historic events—an 1897 earthquake, the predations of the Red Guards, the Chinese looting of Tibetan shrines and monasteries—serve his again complex plot.

Shan is an interesting character. He speaks Tibetan and English as well his native Chinese. Because official China has been doing its best to eliminate Tibetan customs and culture for the last fifty years, the local people regard Shan warily when not actively hostile. Because Shan's beloved son is a prisoner and could be shipped to a much harsher prison (although the 404th Construction Brigade is hardly a Boy Scout camp), Shan has to be careful on whose toes he treads. Because the careful reader can figure out who the bad guy is about halfway through the book, we still want to know (I still wanted to know) exactly what he did and why he did it. It all makes for interesting tension.

Either because I had just read The Skull Mantra and was thereby familiar with the names and language or because after writing eight Inspector Shan mysteries Pattison made Skeleton God easier to follow. A friend felt that the first book should come with a Cast of Characters and a Glossary of Buddhist Terms. I disagree.

Part of the novels' pleasure is learning from context about Tibetan culture and its recent history. The mystery is interesting, but both The Skull Mantra and Skeleton God offer much more than challenging puzzle. Pattison tells me something about a world I know nothing about, and I trust his word.

How Ove is saved in spite of himself

Ove is not an easy character to like or to sympathize with. Okay, he's fifty-nine years old, his wife has died recently (the only person who could have stood him), he has no children, he's out of work, and his world has changed in ways he neither understands nor wants to understand.

In Chapter 1 of Fredrik Backman's best-selling A Man Called Ove, Ove shops for a computer. He's both ignorant and impatient; he does not trust the store clerk, assuming the worst. For example, if a laptop does not come with a keyboard—and Ove knows computers need keyboards—it's "Because you have to buy it as an 'extra,' don't you?" he sputters (Ove has a very short fuse). The sale does not go well.

In Chapter 2 we watch Ove go through his inflexible morning routine: make coffee, inspect his housing development's garages, make sure as always (with three tugs) his garage door is properly locked, confirm that no cars in the guest parking area have been parked more than 24 hours (he jots down license numbers), separates a glass jar from its lid, dropping the former into the glass recycling bin, the latter into the metal recycling bin (muttering "incompetents"), and, back home, prepares to hang himself in his living room. The chapter ends when he's interrupted by "a long scraping sound. Not at all unlike the type of sound created by a big oaf backing up a Japanese car hooked up to a trailer and scraping it against the exterior wall of Ove's house."

Well, guess what. It is a big oaf backing up a Japanese car hooked up to a trailer and scraping it against the exterior wall of Ove's house. It's his new next door neighbors, a Swede like Ove, his very pregnant Iranian wife, and two small children. Here's how Backman describes the husband: "He's wearing a knitted cardigan and his posture seems to indicate a very obvious calcium deficiency. He must be close to six and a half feet tall. Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can't quite make it all the way up to the brain."

A couple examples of Backman's method of showing the reader Ove's views of—attitude toward?—the world: "He's wearing his navy suit . . . Ove's wife likes that suit. She always says he looks to handsome in it. Like any sensible person, Ove is obviously of the opinion that only posers wear their best suits on weekdays. But this morning he decided to make an exception. He even put on his black going-out shoes and polished them with a responsible amount of boot shine." Not too much polish, a responsible amount.

One more example: "Ove didn't dislike this cat in particular. It's just that he didn't much like cats in general. He'd always perceived them as untrustworthy. Especially, as in the case of Earnest [a cat Ove's wife loved], they were as big as mopeds. It was actually quite difficult to determine whether he was just an unusually large cat or an outstandingly small lion. And you should never befriend something if there's a possibility it may take a fancy to eating you in your sleep." Throughout the book, Backman (or his translator) employs interesting metaphors and adjectives.

Few readers, however, read a book for its metaphors and adjectives (or, for that matter, it adverbs). I thought A Man Called Ove is an interesting exercise in working out how a man could become a curmudgeon, so depressed he wants to join his wife in death (and is certain he will join her, although he'll be a suicide), and, through the goodness of other people and his inherent decency, is returned to life. With an uplifting message like that, a book deserves to be a best seller.

John Rebus retired is still solving crime

You don't have to have read all of Ian Rankin's John Rebus mysteries (I haven't) to enjoy the latest, Rather Be the Devil, but it would help. For one thing, you would know something about Detective Inspector (Ret.) John Rebus, DI Siobban Clarke, DI Malcolm Fox, and Edinburgh crime boss (and Rebus nemesis) Big Ger Cafferty. Fortunately, while it may increase your pleasure in the book knowing all the past cases involving these characters, Rather Be the Devil stands on its own.

The plot is complex involving a 35-year-old cold case, international money laundering, a significant murder, competition between Edinburgh and Glasgow criminal gangs, and more. Adding to the mix is the fact that Rebus is no longer a DI and cannot flash a warrant card in suspect's face. He is also trying to give up cigarettes and has been diagnosed with a shadow on his lung.

I guess you could read the book for the puzzle, and Rankin is a master of inventing plausible criminal puzzles. Edinburgh is large enough to have a substantial criminal underworld, small enough that a player in that would could reasonably have played a very minor part in the unsolved 1978 murder. Teasing apart all the threads along with Rebus, Clarke, and Fox is one of the book's pleasures.

Another pleasure comes from being in the hands of a crackerjack writer. Here are the book's first four sentences:

Rebus placed his knife and fork on the empty plate, then leaned back in his chair, studying the other diners in the restaurant.
"Somebody was murdered here, you know," he announced.
"And they say romance is dead." Deborah Quant paused over her steak.

One more example. Malcolm Fox has been left in the station house where he's been reading a book that may be relevant to the case. Rebus asks where the rest of the team working the case has gone. Fox says,

"They're also going through Chatham's house, seeing if there's anything on his computer or tucked away in a drawer somewhere . . ."
"While you're left her to read a library book?" said Rebus.
"Playing to one of my many strengths."
"What? Basic literacy?"

How many mysteries make you laugh out loud? 

Yet another pleasure, which may be based on an illusion, is seeing the way the Scottish police work, the bureaucracy, the mechanics of how the system works. I say it may be an illusion because I have no idea whether what Rankin describes is accurate or not. Suffice it to say, the procedures, the infighting, the limitations, and the eventual results sound spot on. I still sure to what Rather Be the Devil refers; that, however, did not diminish my pleasure at all.

What would happen if you couldn't recognize faces?

I had never heard of Bone Gap, Laura Ruby's 2015 novel until a young friend pressed it on me as one of the best books she'd read all year. Shame on me because the book was a National Book Award Finalist, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and wan a number of other Best Book of the Year awards.

Bone Gap is the name of a small Illinois farm town. Eighteen-year-old Finn lives with his EMT older brother Sean on the remains of the family farm. Their father is dead; their mother ran off to Oregon with an orthodontist. Some time before the story begins, a lovely young Polish woman named Roza had shown up in the corn field, fleeing something. She lived (chastely) with Finn and Sean long enough to demonstrate almost supernatural skill at growing vegetables, for Sean to fall in love with her, and because of her beauty and personality to become popular with the townspeople. She's been kidnapped. Finn saw the kidnapper, but he cannot for the life of him describe the man's face to the local cop. That he can not does not endure him to Sean, the cop, or the townspeople.

After a first chapter to introduce Finn and the situation in Bone Gap, Ruby shifts point of view. We are now with Roza in what could be another universe. One without another person with whom she can connect. The only other person is her kidnapper who asks repeatedly:"Are you in love with me yet?" Roza has become Rapunzel locked away in a tower (although at first it seems a suburban American house, but that's only at first).

Part One chapters alternate between Finn's and Roza's point of view as we learn about them and their situations. Finn grows attracted to Priscilla, a beekeeper about his age, who because of her looks has never attracted male attention. In Part Two, Ruby adds chapters from Sean's and Priscilla's point of views to those of Finn and Roza. Part Three resolves the questions the book has provoked.

So Bone Gap is an interesting amalgam of verisimilitude and fantasy, or realism and fairy tale. Ordinarily, I don't care for such a mixture; I like my realism to be realistic, my fantasy to be fantastic. Bone Gap is the exception, perhaps because Ruby has created such interesting characters. The story held my interest and there was not a point where I was jolted out of my willing suspension of my disbelief.

In addition, Ruby writes so well. Here's the first description of Roza's kidnapper: "But he would smile that bland, pleasant smile—the smile of an uncle, a teacher, a clerk, all those men with all those teeth—a smile that made him all the more terrifying." And here's a crowd watching Priscilla retrieve an escaped bee swarm: "Their voices washed over Finn the way they always did. Like a strange sort of choir music, one voice blending into the next, the refrains so familiar that he could have mouthed the words along with them." I also recommend studying her dialogue, which reveals character and advances the story.

For readers who have young friends, I suggest you introduce them to Bone Gap. But you might want to read it yourself first.

What a writer's writer says about writing

James Salter got tagged a "writer's writer," i.e., a writer whose use of language, insights into the human condition, ability to create art but whose books don't become best sellers. Richard Ford, in an introduction to Salter's reissued novel Light Years, wrote: "It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today." Salter had been a combat fighter pilot in WWII and in the Korean War, and resigned from the Air Force after eleven years to write full time. He wrote screenplays, short stories, and novels and six months before he died at ninety in 2015 he gave three lectures at the University of Virginia, now published as The Art of Fiction with an introduction by John Casey. The lectures are titled, "The Art of Fiction," "Writing Novels," and "Life into Art."

Salter asks, Why write? For money? Recognition? A sense of importance? As the jacket writer notes, "Confronting a blank sheet that always offers too many choices, practicing a vocation that often demands one write instead of live, the answer for Salter was creating a style that captured experiences, in a world where anything not written down fades away."

Because Salter is so interesting—far more interesting than a review about him—let me simply quote from the lectures rather than attempt a precis of their contents:

"Over the years I've never found myself truly intimate or comfortable for a long period with people who don't read or have never read. For me, it's an essential. Something is missing in them otherwise, breadth of reference, sense of history, a common chord. Film is too simple . . . "

"I don't know where the urge to write comes from. I don't believe it's inborn, but it comes early. I had no daemon in me, as Faulkner said he had, nor D.H. Lawrence, but there are writers who have no daemon . . . In any case, genius is unto itself . . ."

"Actually, I don't think anyone can teach you how to write a novel, or if they can, not in an hour. It's difficult to write novels. You have to have the idea and the characters, although additional characters may appear to you as you go. You need the story. You need, if I can put it this way, the form . . . "

"I try to write regularly. I have difficulty beginning each day. If I can leave myself a line or a few words to help me take it up again, it goes much better. The day sometimes goes well. More often it doesn't. I'm reconciled to the certainty that I'll be disappointed in what I've written. I write when I don't feel like it, but not when it revulses me . . ."

You can read The Art of Fiction in an hour or so, but it is the distillation of a writer's life experiences. It is a book every writer of fiction should read, think about, look up the writers Salter admires, read them, reread Salter, and think about one's writing. And then reread Salter once again.

A perfectly adquate puzzle box

I've just read A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch, his first mystery published in 2007, a perfectly adequate puzzle box that many people enjoyed and sold well enough that Finch has been able to publish ten more mysteries in the series.

It is set in London in the winter 1865 and is told from the point of view of Charles Lenox, "a man of perhaps forty," a wealthy, aristocratic bachelor who has, we learn, assisted the newly-established Metropolitan Police in their inquiries in the past. That Lenox has solved their cases has not endured him to the Yard's Sergeant Exeter.

The blue death is that of Prudence Smith, an apparent suicide. She had been a maid in the household of  Lady Jane Grey, "a childless widow of just past thirty," Lenox's Mayfair neighbor, and good friend. Lady Jane asks Lenox to look into the death which had occurred in the home George Bernard, the director of the Royal Mint. Lenox and his friend Thomas McConnell, a doctor and amateur scientist, go to Bernard's London mansion and establish almost immediately that Prudence was murdered by drinking a rare, and expensive poison. The game's afoot.

By the time Lenox has untangled all the clues and followed all the threads, a story so complex that the author has to explain it twice, justice has been done. In the course of it, Lenox enlists his butler Graham in quiet investigation below the stairs in Bernard's house, tries unsuccessfully to keep Lady Jane out of it, works McConnell and with his older brother Edmund an MP and around Exeter (shades of Watson, Mycroft Holmes, and Lestrade).

Because the book has been so popular (it's still in print), I have been thinking about why I found it so unsatisfactory. First, I think, because as I intimated above, it is Sherlock Holmes lite. Second, because the 1865 London setting sounds as if it's based on a carefully study of "Upstairs Downstairs" rather than on lived experience. Third, because the author did not convince me that the murderer's motivation was convincing, let alone the elaborate plot behind the murder.

I have also been considering why so many readers find it satisfactory. Perhaps they like for the reasons I'm dissatisfied: Lenox is a more engaging character than Sherlock Holmes; they are persuaded by the historic setting; and they enjoy a puzzle's tangles. If you are a reader who enjoys historical mysteries and is not troubled by anachronisms, A Beautiful Blue Death may be for you.

Can the old man stay hidden?

Thomas Perry has written a wonderful series of thrillers featuring Jane Whitefield, a woman who helps people who need to disappear disappear. In Perry's new stand-alone thriller, The Old Man, Dan Chase made himself disappear thirty years before the story begins. He's sixty years old, a widower, father of an adult daughter, living a quiet life in a Vermont town on the New Hampshire border.

After his wife died, Chase's daughter suggested he get a dog and he found two at the pound. When his daughter next visits, she says, "Oh, Jesus. That's not the kind of dog I meant. Look at their feet. They're going to grow up big."

"I like big dogs," he said. "They're calmer and quieter. It's scared dogs that bite."

"I don't know," she said. "You really want to have two animals that could kill you? You're—"

"An old man. A stiff breeze could kill me."

"You know what I mean."

"I do," he said. "It's just another reason to make sure they never want to."

This exchange on page 3 is the first dialogue in the book and it accomplishes a lot: Introduces the dogs, says something about Chase, about his daughter, and about their relationship, and introduces the thought that something (someone?) might kill him.

By the end of Chapter 1, two hired assassins have tried to kill him and it's clear he will have to disappear again.

What makes Perry such a satisfying writer is that every major character has a very clear 'I want'. Chase wants to survive. The people chasing him want to kill him. The character he has to kidnap midway through the book has a solid reason not to escape from Chase when given the chance.

The other satisfying element is the information Perry provides. We learn the mechanics of dumping a hot car, of creating an alternate identity (it'll take time if you want to try it), of blending in, of destroying your trail, of where to hide out.

Chase's challenge to stay alive is complicated by the fact that an element of the US Government (the CIA? NSA? the Defense Intelligence Agency?) are cooperating with a middle-Eastern political figure who has good reasons for wanting Chase dead. The spooks are helping because they believe Chase as an agent stole $20 million thirty years earlier. So another one of the questions Perry answers is: How do you hide $20 million in cash without drawing attention to yourself? (Good to know.)

I hope the snippet of dialogue I quoted above suggests Perry's craft. Indeed, I believe that anyone who aspires to write a thriller could profitably study The Old Man to take it apart scene by scene to see how Perry reveals character, builds tension, paces developments. For everyone else, the craft—in the description, action, dialogue, plot, and exposition—is on the page to enjoy.

Inspector Montalbano between Scylla and Charybdis

Andrea Camilleri's A Voice in the Night is, by my count, the twentieth Inspector Montalbano mystery. Because the translation is copyrighted 2016, I believe it is the most recent. I have not read every one of the first nineteen in the series, and a reader who starts with this one may wonder about the relationship between Montalbano and Livia, his main squeeze, who appears in this book only on the telephone, and his relations with other reappearing characters.

Montalbano in this book is 58-years-old. He's an experienced Sicilian homicide detective who has to—you will excuse the reference—thread his way between the Scylla of the local mafia and the Charybdis of a corrupt political system. Montalbano may be able to solve the crime, but there's no guarantee that justice will be done.

This tension, between a (relatively) honest police detective and forces well beyond any individual's control is one of the things that makes the Montalbano mysteries interesting. They are also interesting puzzles, and Camilleri does not, for the most part, cheat the reader. (He will, as we're coming down to the denouement, not reveal exactly what Montalbano has planned, only that he has plans.) And the books are, for me at least, convincing pictures of what a certain slice of contemporary Sicilian life is like.

Montalbano has to solve two crimes in A Voice in the Night: A routine supermarket burglary turns unroutine when the store manager is found hanging in his office—and forensic evidence suggests he was murdered. Almost simultaneously a lovely young woman is found brutally slaughtered in the apartment of one Giovanni Stranglo. Stranglo has a solid alibi, but, as it happens, his father is the president of the province. Traveling with Montalbano as he works with his staff to solve the two cases (we never leave the inspector's point of view; my preference in a mystery), we watch him uncover clues and red herrings and—surprise!—solve the crimes.

The book is not perfect. In an attempt, I suspect, to suggest the Sicilian dialect, the translator has one of the thankfully minor characters talk like this: "My virry best wishes wit' all my 'eart for a rilly, rilly long life an' alla 'appiness an' 'ealthiness inna world, Chief!" I find a little of this goes a long, long way. Also Camilleri wrote the book when Silvio Berlusconi was Italy's prime minister, so there are a few topical references that are outdated.

Nevertheless, for readers who have been following Inspector Montalbano's career, A Voice in the Night is a creditable entry in the series. And for mystery lovers who do not know the detective, it's time to make his acquaintance.

How to write and publish a mystery

I will be presenting a program on How to Write and Publish a Mystery at the Silas Bronson Library in Waterbury, CT, on Saturday, January 21, at 2:00. Hope to see friends and new faces there.