Good Reads meta-data is 333 pages, rated 3/39 by 246 litizens.
DNA: Colombia.
Genre: Novel.
Verdict: Meh.
Tagline: Everyone did it.
In 1990 Gabriel remembers with a lifelong family friend, Sara, a Jewish refugee, the death of his father Gabriel Senior In flashbacks we learn something of her flight from Germany in 1935 as a tweenager, and then Gabriel Senior’s troubled life during La Violencia of the 1950s in which 180,000 died when zealots on both sides thought murdering children was the best longterm strategy to defeat their opponents.
In the late 1930s there were resident Germans in Colombia, among them many enthusiastic Nazis, then came a small influx of refugees, mostly German Jews, and after the war a few more Germans, including fervent Nazis. During World War II many of the Germans, both residents and recent immigrants, were sequestered together – Jews, Nazis, and neither, usually in hotels or resorts and they lost many of their assets. Colombia had been quicker than many Latin American countries to join the Allies. (Some of the resident Germans ran or flew in local airlines and were perceived to be a threat to shipping in the Caribbean Sea and the Panama Canal, either a directly or as a source of intelligence, though that is not mentioned in this novel.) Colombia was also quick to join the United Nations in the Korean War.
Forced together this mix of Germans was volatile, but the novel makes little use of that obvious fact. But it does emphasise the mutual denunciations by informers. Instead the villains are the blacklists that were used to identify enemy aliens. The logic is convoluted to this reader
Yet somehow Gabriel Senior survived La Violencia, though maimed, and rose to eminence as a jurist and spawned a son, Junior, though there was little affection between them. The aforementioned Junior, a journalist, convinced Sara to allow him to write her biography. When it was published it all but disappeared until Senior, that very distinguished jurist, published a poisonous review of it. That made it an object of curiosity and sales increased. That also meant they no longer spoke to each other.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez
The puzzle for Junior is why his father, who only read classics from the Ancient World, bothered to weigh in on his little book. But that emerges with persistence and patience, not my best qualities. There are occasional references to events in Colombia’s recent history that mean nothing to me, but would to a Colombian no doubt.
The style is vague, elliptic, dense, and asynchronous. The author is unfamiliar with the concept of a topic sentence. Paragraphs run on and on combining description, dialogue, several points of view, many subjects, and then end, and another starts. The sort of obscure prose that appeals to jaded literary awards panelists. I found it hard to follow and even harder to care about this array of narcissists.
Last Stop, the Twilight Zone: The Biography of Rod Serling (2014) by Joel Engel.
Good Reads meta-data is 322 pages, rated 3.81 by 59 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: The one and only.
Tagline: Next stop.
Version 1.0.0
Born (1924-1975) the second son to a comfortable, well-off family in Binghamton New York, which was a small company town based on a shoe factory whose owners practiced Quaker philanthropy with its work force. Idllic images of towns and villages were born from that experience to return in scripts years later.
Even as a five-year-old he craved the limelight and was forever thereafter trying to be the centre of attention. A school teacher guided that incessant demand into plays and debate, and later into journalism. He edited his high school newspaper and was class president, having campaigned hard for the honour. At 5’ 4” both the high school football and basketball coaches rejected him as too small. That put a chip on his shoulder.
The day he graduated from high school in 1943 he enlisted in the US Army and volunteered for the most rigorous training as a paratrooper. Only 1 in 8 of volunteers succeeded, and he was one of them. He made 37 jumps, including two in combat conditions in the Philippines with the 511th PIR where 400 men of this unit were killed or wounded. There are some remarkable scenes in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead of such combat. The fragility of life was another recurrent theme in Twilight Zone born of this experience. He also took part in the house-to-house fighting to liberate Manila from the suicidal Japanese defence. He had two wounds, one a knee that forever gave him pain and which occasionally even as he recorded the prologue to the Twilight Zone would seep. In addition to the two Purple Hearts, he had earned a Bronze Star.
He went to Antioch College on the G.I Bill and set himself to write for radio, starting with the campus radio. Again guided there by a teacher. At the time cheapskate sponsors came up with the idea of having listeners submit scripts to anthology programs, and Serling did so, winning more than once a cash prize, and more important, the glory of having his words broadcast into the ether. He loved both the money and the glory. There was no looking back from that. The anthology format went into Twilight Zone.
While at college he met and married Carolyn Kramer, she a Christian and he a Jew. They compromised on religion and became Unitarians (who have no religion, people used to say). She brought a summer home on a lake to the union, but while in college to generate the income of a married man, Serling took a job test jumping parachutes at a nearby army base and then ejector seats. He succeeded 3 others, all of whom had been killed in tests.
First as an unpaid intern and then as a staff writer he worked for radio stations writing everything from advertising jingles, to reports of garden parties, the weather, drama, news bulletins, commercials, and comedy. Then came television with an even more voracious demand from words, and he supplied them. He now submitted scripts to television programs, amassing a volume of rejections, but enough acceptances to eke out a living.
He wrote 71 scripts for Kraft Television Theatre, and then came the 72nd, called Patterns (1955), a kind of Caine Mutiny set in the corporate world. It was triumph in the pages of the New York Times and he was a made-man. There followed another triumph with Requiem for a Heavy Weight (1956). His name now sold and he sold off 50 or more of his earlier rejected scripts as fast as possible to capitalise on his newfound fame. Many of these were mediocre at best and reduced his market value. This desire to spread his seed, despite devaluing it, is a recurrent tide in his life.
He wrote scripts about negro lynchings, hated of Jews, corporate corruption, government incompetence, quick-thinking women, incompetent bullies, and the like but found commercial sponsors insisted on watering the themes down to nearly nothing. To skirt this barrier he adopted the fantasy, science fiction cloak, encouraged by Desilu Productions, and produced the pilot of Twilight Zone in 1959. It lasted five seasons when a season was 39 episodes. By the end he was dried up, and accepted the termination, though he did not write them all he did read and edit those written by others whom he hired and directed, but he wrote the bulk. During its run in proved to be both a commercial and critical success.
Twilight Zone made him famous and wealthy. It is unlikely that any other writer ever has been so well known around the world. That celebrity also carried expectations, none of which he could fulfil in later years, and he knew it, but could not change his ways. The sirens’ song had done its worst to him.
Those successes enabled him to convince the producers to record the episodes to be screened again, the rerun. This was not the common practice at the time when one live airing was the norm. When taping started it allowed better productions, but once aired the programs were taped over for the next episode. Serling, and others, argued that saving taped programs for summer reruns recouped the cost of taping and, he argued, and also allowed the broadcast rights to be sold, which they were and syndicated to local stations.
Leaving aside the many details, what emerges is a man who was driven by an insatiable craving for external validation, and, in fact, could not live without it. Was this entrenched need a result of his height (he wore elevator shoes from high school on) or being a lifelong younger brother, or what?
When Twilight Zone ended he sold himself to the highest bidder, not because he wanted or needed the money, he was rich beyond Croesus, but for the affirmation. He did TV commercials, became a regular on daytime television game shows, hit on every woman that crossed his path from stewardesses to college students asking for an autograph to waitresses to secretaries and more, instructed his agent to say yes to every commercial offer, composed and tried to sell film scripts, teleplays, theatrical dramas, short stories, novels, and mostly failed.
He prostituted himself in every imaginable way to find approval, affirmation, and adulation, becoming just the kind of hollow man he had decried in his Kraft Theatre dramas years ago. What is worse is that he knew it but the compulsion was too strong. He was an unhappy man. An example of human bondage.
Even those projects that were completed and credited (and paid) to him succeeded, despite, not because his contribution, e.g., Seven Days in May. His name is there but he contributed little to it.
It is another example of a poor little rich boy’s search for happiness, and the failure of that quest. It is hard to sympathises with his emptiness, the more so, because it was all so repetitive. He learned nothing, and forgot almost everything.
What killed him in the end was one of the products that he advertised, cigarettes. He smoked 60-80 a day himself. That might almost be a Twilight Zone episode, killed by the golden goose.
Good Reads meta-data is 245 pages, rated 3.56 by 75 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Brazil.
Verdict: dégustation.
Tagline: Varied in 14 stories, some 3 pages, others 30.
An ageing beauty convinces a gigolo to murder her husband. He does, turns out the victim is not her husband, but the man who tortured and killed her husband thirty years ago when the generals ruled. Oops. Now professional honour requires that the deceased’s body guards have to settle the score.
By chance a small time business man takes shelter from the rain in the foyer of a dilapidated office building where he sees a notice for a tarot reader. To pass the time during the storm he decides to do it. He does…. and finds out more than he wanted to know, because the mystic is…. All very Twilight Zone.
Then there is a Hannibal Lector, a teenage drug lord in the City of God on the hillside, and more. Some of the stories are distasteful to my taste but they live up to the cover blurb’s promise of the dark side of the white sands, Sugar Loaf, and beachside high rises. In some stories there is much to’ing and fro’ing and there is a rudimentary map to indicate the geography of this sprawling metropolis wedged between mountains and the sea.
***
There is certainly irony, as indicated above, but I am not sure the word ‘noir’ applies to any of the stories. Many end without a resolution, and none comply with the Knox Decalogue.
Of the fifteen authors, two are women. One of each gender are expatriates. The majority are journalists associated with O Globo, the newspaper of record, it says of itself, in Rio de Janeiro. Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is included and I have read with interest three of his Inspector Espinosa series. Despite the puff I have neither knowledge of or interest in the editor. Aside: to my untrained eye the same translator for all the stories rendered them uniform: Word choice, idiom translations were the same for all the characters, it seemed.
Part of a series that includes scores of such other titles as Haiti Noir, Hong Kong Noir. Stories stand alone but can be used to identify authors to check out for more if so inclined.
What Time the Sexton’s Spade doth Rust (2024) by Alan Bradley.
Good Reads meta-data is 298 pages, rated 4.14 by 4,212 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Little England.
Verdict: Go girl!
Tagline: She’s back!
Tweenage Flavia de Luce is irrepressible and her even younger cousin Undine is worse in 1952. When a longtime but secretive resident of the local village is found dead, it’s murder!
It gets worse. The harmless part-time cook, Mrs Mullet, of Buckshaw, Flavia’s home, is blamed for the death! The only question for plod is whether it was intentional or accidental. Yes, mushrooms.
Alan Bradley
That double whammy propels Flavia on to Gladys, her bicycle, to put things to rights! Again. Good. Hooray! She is aided and abetted by the ever so correct butler cum handyman, Dogger, when he is not suffering a recurrent bout of survivor guilt because of his three years on the Burma railroad.
This is number eleven in the series after a five year hiatus. Any reader is advised to read them in sequence. An unexpected and most welcome return. But no, I cannot explain the title, and I wonder if the author can.
Moonlight Downs (2008) by Adrian Hyland. Diamond Dove.
Good Reads meta-data is 304 pages, rated 3.79 by 742 litizens
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Strine, Abo.
Verdict: Bony revivicus!
Tagline: Whew! Deep, dank, and dark.
The prodigal daughter return to her tribal roots in the Red Centre of Australia populated by aboriginals, miners, graziers, and public servants. They have one thing in common, water. They all need it.
Daughter of miscegenation, a word seldom used these days, she has a Napoleon ‘Bony’ Bonaparte foot in both the black and the white worlds. Most of the miners are thugs for whom the meaning of life is a beer can. The graziers aren’t much different. The civil servants are a sorry lot consigned to this purgatory.
A tribal elder who was widely respected for his common sense and ability to navigate and negotiate land rights with the miners, graziers, and civil servants, is murdered. Who dunnit and why?
Daughter sets out to find out, while plod is not much interested in what seems like a black on black murder. Though, credit to the writer, plod is not cardboard.
There is a long overture and then many details of aborigine life in the interior, and some insight into the grazier who is a stereotype until…. There is a great deal of trip and the arrival was a little off centre I thought. I wondered if it complied with the Decalogue in substance.
This is the first of a sequence, though I expect it will be hard to top.
Adrian Hyland
Hmm, I should also have said above that I found the constant accumulation of metaphors to describe the outback and its denizens got to be annoying. A case of trying too hard to be different. It got to be distracting, too, making it hard to distinguish the important from the background colour.
It was originally published by Text in Australia as Diamond Dove. But when SoHo reprinted it for the international (read American) market, the title was changed for reasons that are not apparent to this reader.
Good Reads meta-data is 242 pages rated 3.65 by 426 litizens.
Genre: Novel.
DNA: Brit
Verdict: Who cares.
Tagline: Who dunnit?
A story within a story, as Hamlet has a play within a play. It is 1990 and a middling middle aged civil servant is directed to look into the accidental death of a middling middle aged civil servant in 1974 who had fallen to his death on a Sunday from an upper level of Admiralty House.
Since Victim had no business being in Admiralty House at any time, let alone Sunday, the coroner’s court had recorded an open verdict. Accordingly, an air of mystery surrounded this death, and periodically a lazy journalist in search of a scandal rakes it up. To anticipate the next iteration of that chestnut, Middling is to prepare a briefing. In the best fictional detective tradition he tries to retrace Victim’s steps in his last months when he was seconded to a new unit, established by an incoming government, on the ‘quality of life’ when that phrase was ubiquitous, meaning everything and nothing to any and everyone.
A philosopher was appointed chair the Quality of Life Committee and she and Victim start to prepare the terms of reference…, and never get beyond that. She turns the occasion into a tutorial in which she quizzes Victim on the quality of his, Victim’s, life. This is revealed to Middling in a cache of cassette recordings, which Middling then uses to eavesdrop on their many and extensive conversations. Since neither is adept at using the recorder they record just about everything, and then just about nothing.
As Middling listens he grows to identify with Victim as his professional veneer falls away in the tutorial and he reveals more and more of his self to Chair, and she reciprocates. This illicit affair is consummated in the attic office they are using, and his death is a result of (hard to believe) circumstances that occur there, thanks to a number of coinciding plot devices.
The title is a metaphor for the unusual and exhilarating experience the two have of their sexual liaison.
In the vicarious experience Middling has of their flight he reflected on his own laboured existence which continues. By the way, I never did quite figure out what become of the Chair. Maybe I nodded off on that pages.
It is a nice parody of an Ordinary Language philosophy tutorial. Note to the uninitiated ‘Ordinary Language’ philosophy was ‘ordinary’ to the same degree that ‘Reality television’ is ‘reality.’ It was the dominant mode of English philosophy for two generations after World War II. In it ‘ordinary’ language use was subjected to a pitiless analysis of infinite regress. It dominated my own graduate education.
The Chair is feckless and more than a little naive, and Middling’s reaction to her is very civil service, trying to curb her enthusiasms and manoeuvre her into the safe and sane channels, but, well, the self-analysis she elicits from him crumbles that prim and proper facade.
Michael Frayn haș published many books to much acclaim.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 46m, rated 6.5 by 610 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: Amusing.
Tagline: Yes, Virginia.
A television program concerns the paranormal…real or fake! Each week someone claiming paranormal abilities is the guest who demonstrates that ability. Bring on the spoons! Two regulars offer comments, the believer and the skeptic who always prevails.
It sounds as loopy as some of the (un)reality television I have seen here (from the bicycle seat at the gym).
As much fun as it is for the audience to ridicule failed contestants, the ratings are falling and the director is desperate for a boost. Ergo he decides they need to do better than those who volunteer for the show. No, they have to go find some paranormal talent. To that end he dispatches his feckless assistant to get some real abnormals, as he says.
Where to start such a quest? A trip to Wellington (NZ) Paranormal is too expensive so, she settles for reading the National Inquirer, News of the World, Sydney Telegraph, and other credulous tabloids with stories of two-headed cows, UFOs among the garden gnomes in the Imperial Gardens, psychic cooks, miracle cures for stupidity, and the like.
From this research she identifies places where the ley lines must be crossed, and sets out on the train with her roll-abroad kit.
Among the viewers of this terrible television program is a group of genuine but secret paranormals who meet every Monday at showtime in an otherwise closed cafe run by one of their number to watch the latest debunking. Each is sworn to secrecy about their powers and each other. One has X-Ray vision. Another has telekinetic powers. A third can read minds. A fourth, despite appearances, has super strength … There are six of them.
Then by a mischance a seventh appears…and confusion follows, just as the television journalist stumbles into the cafe, exhausted and frustrated from her own recent encounters with individuals who claim such powers but don’t have them. She would be happy for a cup of tea and snack, and she is hard to resist, so the cafe owner obliges.
While the paranormals try not reveal themselves to her for what they are, they would also like to — you know — get closer to her. Hint, hint. That is complicated by the seventh interloper. The original six are so used to concealing their true selves from other people, they just don’t know how to talk to anyone, let alone a good looking young woman with media connections.
There follows a comedy of errors which is good humoured but stretched thin, and it has a denouement that was from a shelved Disney movie. Did I mention it was Christmas eve?
Good Reads meta-data is 455 pages, rated 4.04 by 276 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
DNA: Vermont.
Verdict: Hardscrabble.
Tagline: Odysseus had it easy.
Around 1900 many French Canadians immigrated to New England for work, especially in the woods and lakes, logging, trapping, quarrying, mining, and fishing. One precocious youngster in the migration was Marie. She is smart and spirited but uneducated and naive. Disease, work accidents, a miscarriage, rape, the accidental death of a loving husband on thin ice, the war death of another, beatings by not so loving mates, all of these woes beset her and yet she keeps going: quiet but purposeful at times in -40F temperatures.
There are compensations, while they lasted she was happy with each of those two husbands; she had a sense of purpose in working in the sanatorium after her own recovery; her spirit rose in the north woods on an autumnal day or viewing the stars in the sky on a winter’s eve.
The telling is leavened with the back stories of those, good and bad, she meets on her travels, other wanderers and also residents. But she has no Ithaca. Her recurrent nemesis I found hard to believe but so be it.
The overall effect is melodrama. Each episode (spanning 3 – 7 chapters) starts out wth Marie doing well at something somewhere, and we all know the balloon will burst in the next couple of chapters. She marries and is happy. Her husband dies. She likes nursing, and the sanatorium closes. She loves an old horse, and it dies. And so on and on: Lurching from crisis to catastrophe. The result is a soap opera.
Howard Mosher
All told in Mosher’s precise, deadpan prose. As Willa Cather is the novelist of the Great Plains (Nebraska), so Mosher is the novelist of the North Woods (Vermont). That is a comparison which I hope does them both credit.
It is quite a contrast to Delia Falconer, Service of the Clouds which seems trivial and laboured in comparison.
Historical note: The Vermont Republic (1777-1791) abolished slavery, endowed women with the right to own property, and granted universal male suffrage. Some of that spirit lives on in Bernie Sanders it would seem.
Good Reads meta-data is 322 pages, rated 3.49 by 240 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: Bloodless.
Tagline: In the mists.
Spoiler: For ten years she waited for him to…do something. Then he did; he married someone else.
It starts about 1907 when the Hydro Majestic Hotel was being built and ends around 1926, detailing aspects of life in the Blue Mountains, particularly Katoomba, in that period. He is a photographer who seeks the face of God in the clouds and hopes that through the aperture of the camera lens he will have a divine experience. She is of a more practical turn on mind, but she aids and abets him for years, and every time their hands touch or one jostles another in setting up or moving a camera she has a mental organism, or so it seems with the profusion of metaphors that follow.
Years (and pages) later, after he marries another, she turns her attention to an older tubercular man and sex rears its head, sort of. Sometimes it is hard to tell what is going on because the prose is slathered so heavily on that the cake disappears under the icing. It is lyrical and poetic, and the effort shows.
The result is elliptical and vague; just the sort of prose favoured by the jaded panelists of literary awards, not by readers who get lost in the undergrowth, darkened by a heavy canopy of words, who lose sight of the main point(s), if there are any. With all of the forced imagery and unusual vocabulary, most readers will never quite connect with the protagonists: Form over content, thy name is post modernity.
Delia Falconer
The intense and relentless imagery is out of proportion to the unrequited love story. Reminded this cynic of some of the multimillion dollars productions from Hollywood like Valerian… (2017). Enormous show, and zero go.
It is resonant with Anne Michaels’s elegiac Fugitive Pieces (1996) but lacks that novel’s moral core.
Got it at the Megalong Bookshop while in Katoomba a time ago. I chose it because it seemed to be centred on Mark Foy’s hotel, the Hydro Majestic where we have stayed several times. My mistake.
Good Reads meta-data is 288 pages, rated 4.11 by 409 cinematizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction; Species: Mountain magic.
DNA: Vermont.
Verdict: More, please.
Tagline: ‘Very little that people do is in any way understandable!’
Adopted orphan boy Frank Bennett grows up in Kingdom Country (Vermont) along the unmarked Canadian border in the household of an acerbic Catholic priest (who does not sexually abuse him despite his dog collar). Father George is the recognised but unofficial historian of the locale and the designated peacemaker among the many ley lines of conflict that riven the village.
Frank’s coming of age is told in episodes in which he participates, often as little more than an observer of the absurdity of life and its satisfactions. The telling is timeless but perhaps the early 1950s.
While the bulk of the small population is steadfastly safe and sane, shopping at the Vermont Country Store and voting for Bernie Sanders, within their ranks are eccentrics like young Molly Murphy and her desperate and eventually successful effort to run away and join the circus where her nerveless dare devilry can thrive. More troublesome is Foster Boy Dufresne, an idiot savant if ever there was one, who seems jinxed starting with that name ‘Foster Boy.’ Then there is the wannabe gypsy fortune teller Louvia de Banville who has a bad word to say for and about everyone and yet is always there to help when help is needed in fire, flood, accident, or worse.
Aside from the Irish and the Canucks, the village is also home to Abel Feinstein, a tailor, who will not take one step back and Sam E. Rong who took the Statue of Liberty’s motto literally.
Frank long wanted to follow Father George into the priesthood, but, well, there is that girl with bluest, dancing eyes who teases him mercilessly and then disappears back to Quebec for months at a time.
Howard Frank Moshere
It is not Lower Rising, Staggerford, Lake Woebegon, or Yoknapatawpha county, and certainly not Mayberry, but it is its very own God’s little acre. Mosher published ten novels set in this cleft between the Green and White Mountains where on some nights the bright lights of Montreal can be seen reflected in low clouds; where the endless forests are dark and primeval; the lakes crystalline; and weather as taxing as the people.
