Reviews and Comments

This time the corpse is disfigured beyond recognition; nothing much happens until a distraught wife files a missing-persons report for her sea-faring husband. Montalbano spends the idle time channeling his inner Umberto Eco to appreciate the murder’s semiotics, although, given the story’s biblical theme, maybe it’s more like the murder’s hermeneutics. Once the story gets going, it quickly gets twisted inside and outside the police station. The ending is one of those where Montablano does all the work and gets none of the credit, but — in one of those twists — Augello can’t get any credit either. As a bonus, the biblical references got me to thinking that Catarella’s annoying “poissonaly in poisson” exclamation may have been inspired by all those “creeping thing that creepeth” in the Old Testament. Overall a story good enough to let you (i.e., me) overlook the habitual irritations in the telling, and it strengthens my opinion that Montalbano works best when Camilleri writes him as a Philip Marlowe type.

As humanity stumbles into the graveyard of climate change, what tune shall we whistle? Andrew Balmford suggests seven possibilities, each based on a successful conservation effort. Balmford traveled the world to examine and report on efforts such as preserving rhinoceroses in Assam, eliminating invasive plants in South Africa, and recovering landscape at Australian mines. The examinations are detailed, covering the problem, the analyses, the resolution, and the consequences. Balmford also spends time with the people involved: the instigators, the participants, the opposition, and often the opposition who became participants.

This review's opening is completely unfair: Wild Hope is about conservation, not climate change (although preserving Ecuadorian fog forests involved a collective action large enough to inspire a little hope, as does, to a lesser extent, the global marine stewardship established to rein in over-fishing). The book also offers jumping off points for philosophical speculation. Preserving a beetle in California’s Central Valley required cages to protect berry bushes from deer and beavers, which made me wonder where conservation ends and cosplay begins. On the other hand, conservationists restoring Dutch wetlands rely only on nature, resulting in some indigenous cattle and horses starving to death during the winter, which agitated animal-rights activists. It could take a century to eliminate invasive plants from South Africa; isn't that a little like dressing now for weather a century from now? If it does make sense, when does conservation turn into nature at that time scale? Balmford doesn’t get too philosophical, but his presentation is clear and even-handed, making these matters apparent, to be picked up by the interested reader.

If you’re reading this before ’21 Oct 1, you can get free copy of Wild Hope as a DRMed e-book from the University of Chicago Press.

Julia Kall’s mother abandons her in a Russian orphanage. Through a clever trick she comes to the attention of higher-ups and parlays that into a release from the orphanage and an eventual computer science degree. On graduating she’s trained by Russian intelligence, after which she’s given stolen American technology and worms her way into in Tangerine, a Facebook-like company in Silicon Valley. She rises to be chief operating officer, then she goes to work. Alice Lu also works for Tangerine, brought in as part of an acquisition made by Julia. One day Alice runs a security audit, and notices unusually high outbound traffic from a server in Dublin. She logs the anomaly, setting the story in motion.

When I finished The American Senator by Anthony Trollope I wanted there to be a Trollope for today. Kathy Wang isn’t that — she’s not as expansive and is much less polite — but she is as sharp an observer and knows how to weave a good story through complicated subtexts. Impostor Syndrome isn’t (or isn’t only) a spy or corporate-espionage thriller, it’s a social (and, at the end, political) story of the kind Tom Wolfe wanted writers to produce. Wang’s satire is keen and exacting, even when her targets are barn-sized in their broadness, and her humor is slightly tilted to reveal the irony, which makes it all the more pointed and wicked, yet still deft.

Montalbano walks out of the house one morning and finds a corpse, this time of a horse. He calls in his colleagues to collect evidence and the municipality to collect the horse, but the horse has disappeared by the time the municipal workers arrive. The horse’s owner seems disproportionally calm over having her horse killed, and doesn’t want to file a report. Montalbano, enraged by the cruelty, runs an informal investigation, discovering stolen horses, including the dead horse, in another jurisdiction, and illegal horse racing. At the same time, he’s menaced by a couple of thugs, who burgle his house, try to burn it down, then burgle it again. Montalbano assumes these are attempts to intimidate him before his appearance as a witness for the prosecution in a trial.

This may be the book in which the series jumps the shark. The plot pivots on Montalbano forgetting he had put a horseshoe in his pants pocket. And by “forgetting” I mean he puts it in his pocket in the morning, carries it around all day, then sends the pants to the cleaners so his housekeeper can return the horseshoe, telling him the cleaners found it in his pocket. And I’m skipping how he got the horseshoe, which seems implausible to me, but I’m not a farrier and don’t know anything about horses, so sure, that’s how it happened. But the whole story, which is complicated, is like that, a stream of “ok, yeah, sure, it could happen like that, ok, sure,” which is wearying to read, particularly when coupled with Camilleri’s elliptical, gnomic writing style.

Short stories, some of which are meditations on love and time-shifted assassinations, others of which are about warfare among sentient piles of information, and the remaining ones off by themselves (maybe, some could be about language). The table of contents is cryptically remapped as a directed graph, so it may be that some of the stories are linked, particularly the love and time-shifted assassination ones, and the sentient piles ones, although the chronology is an open question. The story about 22 Sigmund Freuds at a house demolition is certainly stand-alone, as is the one about Bobby Socks; the story about the box ritual could be part of the sentient piles because there’s another story with a box in that sequence. On the other hand, if you find another piece of a blob, you have a slightly larger blob.

Readers of Richard Brautigan or Donald Brathelme should be at home, although these stories are more hard edged and less matter-of-fact. There’s geeky, dadish humor here and there, but not much irony (I took the theorizing straightforwardly). Overall a difficult read, unlikely to repay great effort, so don’t bear down too hard going in and it's likely to be pleasant coming out.

Amory Blaine learns unhelpful and unsustainable social skills from his mother, then goes into the world: to the east coast for prep school, Princeton, and adulthood. Not much happens in prep school until he, as a senior, has a turn at that most useless of social heroes, the star quarterback. Early on he makes an adult friend who could be a guide, but the monsignor seems too subtle by half for a clot like Amory. Princeton is mostly about the friends he makes, although it lets him develop a taste for theatricals (the lead up to his crash and burn is presented as a play script). Women are met along the way, but as the women get older they get better at dealing with men like him, and the damage gets worse on each successive unsuccessful encounter. His adulthood starts at advertising agency, but doesn't survive his crash and burn. World War I happens. The story ends with Amory making a pilgrimage from New York back to Princeton, during which he has an embarrassing undergraduate dorm-room bull session about socialism in the back of a chauffeured limousine, exactly the kind of pilgrimage Amory would expect to have.

This book is credited with founding the Jazz Age, but I'm skeptical. I suspect the Jazz Age got going on the backs of the oppressed, juiced by economic delirium. This book is not that story. This is the story of a spoiled (in many ways) white boy stumbling around places where he doesn't belong, isn't accepted, and is unequipped to find his way in. It's a story that gets told over and over as the American bourgeois gets rolling, and Fitzgerald had the luck to be in on the leading edge.

A space pilot lands a job with a space-cruise company, and assembles a cinematically diverse space crew for a first voyage ferrying around inter-stellar royalty. Concurrently a series of odd, ambiguous and increasingly ominous events occur, culminating in the royalty's ritual murder, raising the potential for inter-stellar war if justice isn't served. Thus arrives a space detective [checks notes] in the form of the 44th clone of a man who fashioned himself after Sherlock Holmes. And, of course, a Dr. Watson. Now there are two conflicts: will justice be served in time to forestall war, and will the pilot or the detective be the server?

The future as described is a-kilter: humans merge consciousness with machines and jump through time and space via worm holes, but in space everybody drinks, which provides several plot points, and smokes. Maybe in the future disease is but a memory and alcohol as been re-engineered to be psycho-active but not poisonous, or maybe it's an homage to Woody Allen's Sleeper. Retrograde (to the medieval) sexual politics also provide several plot points, including at the story's resolution, literally at the climax. The author is considered thoughtful, so most humans are genetically engineered to specialize them in their careers, bringing in philosophizing about what it means to be human (and don't forget the clones). The pilot rescues an assassin-geisha who falls in love with him (more genetic engineering), but he only has eyes for his space ship (ditto), and the reader thoughtfully ruminates over the conflict between love and duty. I'm making the story sound stupid, and it is, but I'm way over-simplifying, leaving out a lot that makes the story weird and funny, specially if you're willing to cut huge swaths of slack, or are irony poisoned.

A dying king seeks to marry off his daughter, establishing the quest. A stranger shows up telling of a neighboring kingdom destroyed by an evil queen that looks like the princess. Now the quest is either to marry the princess, or kill her. A irascible hero acquires an irritating side-kick and a wizardly antagonist. Diversions occur on the way to the palace, and the hero accrues a rag-tag entourage. The palace gained, the fight joined, the surprise revealed, and everything ends more or less according to plan.

This is a terrible book: poorly written, although the first line is good, promising way more than the rest of the book delivers; poorly plotted, veering among fantasy, adventure, horror, whatever's handy; with characters that are boring, or ridiculous, or offensive; and jokes that are at best dad-level (a character named Herrow appears, and soon after the Abbot and Costello bit unfurls to no good affect).

Soon after the identical twins Laurel and Daphne Wolfe are born they develop a private language they’ll use into adulthood. As they grow up they besot themselves with words and language, and unsettle everyone around them. As adults they continue to be word driven - as copy editors, columnists, teachers and poets - but individuation sets in, starting with a nose job and growing to encompass their essence: prescriptivist vs descriptivist. If you read The Corrections and didn’t like the parts with Erin and Sinéad, you should skip this; otherwise read it, particularly if you're looking for a follow-up to Happy All the Time, although there's more children and death in this book than there is in Colwin’s.

As a special treat for writers, page 210 has a good example of how it goes wrong when you tell instead of show; it’s specially egregious because everywhere else Schine’s prose is graceful and subtle.

A man moves from bohemian youth to bourgeois middle-age. In Paris he loses his first love, desultorily picks up another before temporarily reconnecting with his first, develops interests at school, makes a stab at a career, then pitches everything and goes back home. In Puerto Rico he fumbles around, then fades from the story as he becomes a university professor, married, and a father. In his place he describes a dying (and eventually dead) colleague and a former student with a talent for bad poetry and squandering advantages. The end.

The story moves along, but in no particular direction. He claims art, but in incidentals and asides; a diarrhea attack at the start of a vacation gets more detail than his artistic life. His side of romance is banal and self-centered, and her side doesn't appear, not even speculatively. His behavior doesn't change much from his complicated first love to his more straightforward Parisian lover, and his wife is mentioned only as an object in his life, like his car. His studies give him drive and purpose, which evaporates at the first sign of tedium. This is definitely the story of a guy going through stuff, but after that I don't know, which is maybe the point.

A quasi-factual family history of an eccentric, polio-stricken grandmother who's a writer and a mild, Jewish grandfather who's a gastroenterolgist. The story's organized around a room-by-room description of the couple's home in a Parisian mansion, and non-linearly jumps around the century from the 1870s to the 1970s. The plot is twisty, covering both the Boltanski family history and how the history was gathered. The story hinges on the early 1940s, and once the name "Anne Frank" drifts by in an early chapter, expectations in that direction are set. The grandmother motivates the story. She's both a black hole and a tent pole for her family, usurping them to compensate for polio, which she otherwise refuses to acknowledge, and directing their dealings with the outside world (she recognizes that her husband's latest summons to the police station is likely to be disastrous, and sets off his disappearance).

Adding temporal and spatial shenanigans the usual immigrant-story vagaries (forgetfulness, mendacity both fearful and face-saving, indifferent record keeping) produces a complex story, one that most likely requires at least two readings to appreciate fully. Fortunately the story is short (around 200 generously spaced pages) and the writing in translation is pleasure to read.