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.
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 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.
Anni Ultimi (2011) by Allan Scribner and Douglas Marshall, eds.
Good Reads meta-data is 181 pages, rated 3.89 by 18 litizens.
The book consists of the two editors’ introduction and commentary on Seneca (4BCE – 65AD) the Roman Stoic thinker, imperial advisor, speech writer, exile, essayist, satirist, together with a selection of Seneca’s letters concerning old age, retirement, and death. Born from Seneca the Elder in Cordoba Spain where I once saw a statue of him, he lived most of his adult life in Rome.
Seneca knew how to talk a good game: the letters selected are replete with insights, pearls of wisdom, and sound reasoning. Seneca sees nothing to fear in death since it extinguishes consciousness just as we were before birth. We knew no pain, suffering, or fear before we were born, so there will be none in death.
Old age has its infirmities, and if we dwell on them, they are magnified. Ergo, best to soldier on as though on campaign. (Truly the voice of a man who was never a soldier.)
Retirement signals a state of equilibrium. One is no longer striving for things. Ergo, now one wants nothing. (Was his retirement funded by a defined benefits superannuation scheme as mine is?) Each day of life is a celebration of the senses. In retirement keep learning, observe the world around, appreciate the skills of others, and put things in perspective.
This is the same Seneca who was complicit is several of Nero’s murders, like that of his mother Agrippinna, nor did Seneca scruple to amass enormous wealth during Nero’s reign.
If anyone wonders about the connection between this person and the Great Hill People of Western New York, there is none. The Dutch called then Sinnekars and when the English arrived that became Seneca. So says Wikipedia.
Scribner has published a series of krimis set in the Rome of Marcus Aurelisius and I have read at least one with satisfaction.
Good Reads meta-data is 272 pages rated 3.56 by 124 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Czech (via exile in Canada)
Verdict: A puzzler, indeed.
Tagline line: Who dunnit? How d’ya know?
Accomplished Czech crime writer Škvorecký offers ten short mystery stories after a foreword about Ronald Knox’s decalogue. In anticipation of this volume, there is an earlier post setting forth Knox’s ten commandments. That is the homework.
Each of these stories illustrates the contravention of one of these ten commandments. That is, each story shows the importance of each commandment by its absence, so that when it is violated the story is less than satisfactory.
About 80% through each story there is a pause to allow the reader to infer who did it and how and ponder on which commandment has been compromised.
The stories are amusing, though contrived for didactic purposes, and, sorry to say, they become repetitive because the recurrent character is described every time in some detail: her alluring scent, her plunging décolletage, her blonde hair, her hourglass figure, her shapely legs revealed by a maximum mini skirt, and so on, again and again. Likewise, her repeated and successful efforts at repelling boarders from the barflies that are drawn to her as per the previous description.
Some readers may be interested to know that one story offers a mathematical proof to identify the murderer. Sort of.
The sequence is not in numerical order of the decalogue, nor otherwise ordered by difficulty, or length. This reader discerned no order at all.
Josef Škvorecký
Only one of the stories is set in Czechoslovakia as it was then. Some are in Sweden and most in the USA as our heroine is a traveling artiste singing in nightclubs. Škvorecký’s Lieutenant Boruvka does make an appearance in the last story along with the songbird whose feminine attributes are once again detailed.
IMDb meta-data is 16 episodes of 1h each, rated 7.8 by 119,000 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: USA
Verdict: All trip, but what a trip.
Tagline: The Living Dead.
She went out to get a bottle of milk, and disappeared for seven years. Not quite, but something like that. Then she came back.
But is it she? The returnee is different yet undeniably her. Where had she been? What did she do in those years? Why is she different?
That is the kick off and flashbacks unravel her story.
There are things to like about it. The pace is slow and the telling is convoluted. Some of that is a gimmick to keep the viewer coming back episode by episode and not necessary to the plot or character. Still it is in no hurry unlike to many breathless presentations that go nowhere fast. I also like the gathering a multi-generation group. Because several of them are young, we also see the mental and moral growth of a couple of them as they participate in the quest for meaning. After all, what does ‘OA’ mean? I think I got it but….
I was less enamoured of the mad scientist and his elaborate set up. The actor is great at it but why is he there at all.
My track record with television series is poor. I usually give up after three episodes of so when the attenuated trivia and clichés become too great, e.g. For All Mankind, Mars, Beacon23, War of the Worlds, Infiniti, and others now forgotten down the memory hole are instances of this viewer’s fatigue.
I chose this one because I have seen other films from this duo, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, starting with Another Earth (2011) and The Sound of My Voice (2012). Two of the most original and arresting films I have seen. Their kinship to The OA is palpable but the connective tissue is stretched very thin.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 2 hours and 39 minutes, rated 7.8 by 20,000 human comedians.
Genre: BioPic.
Verdict: Indigestion.
The spectacles just kept on coming without rhyme or reason until this viewer lost interest, about an hour before it ended. Since no Hollywood movie can be made without Tom Hanks, he is there under a ton of make-up, attenuating everything well beyond the breaking point.
When Elvis sings, that is the best part, but even that wore thin by repetition. While the black roots of his music are emphasised it is external not internal. It goes from the outside in, and does not emerge from the inside out with the gospel songs. There exist live recordings of Elvis singing in black churches before an audience that are spectacular for the energy and emotion that are discharged. There is no need for kaleidoscopic camera spins and other confusions. Despite the no-expense spared staging in this film that electricity fizzles.
These church recordings are, well, unrestrained and exultant quite unlike the studio versions of the same songs. They have an immediacy and intensity that is palpable.
When I visited Graceland, the overwhelming impression I had was the ever presence of music in every room, in every nook and cranny there were record players, instruments, sheet music, 45s, radios set to music stations. The music was oxygen for The King, and he had to have it, had to make it, to live. The house communicates that need far better than does this film.
Moreover, the movie missed the obvious fact that celebrity killed Elvis as he was consumed by his fans. Eaten alive in the constant demand for performances and in turn he became addicted to the audiences. Colonel Tom was a catalyst not a cause.
At times the film seems to use Elvis as a prism to observe US society, and that loses its biographical focus.
Are we there yet? Where are we going? And why? Alain Resnais once said if a story cannot be told in 90 minutes, it is not (yet) a story. Put differently, if you know what you want to communicate it can be done in 90 minutes, if you don’t know then it takes 2 hours and 39 minutes or more.
Those who want something of Elvis the man might try (1) Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) for a cackle and half, or (2) one of Daniel Klein’s krimis in which Elvis investigates, e.g., Blue Suede Clues (2002).
GoodReads metadata is pages 288 rated 4.23 by 48 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: Deft.
A very disagreeable housekeeper trips over a whiskey bottle and dies. Good riddance and all that. The tabloid press goes even more bonkers than usual. In distant Sydney the sanctimonious tones of the ABC are sounded since this housekeeper once talked to a Strine. It’s world news because the house the victim kept was Buckingham Palace and her employer is one Mrs Elizabeth Mountbatten née Windsor, Queen of all the Englands, and more.
All those Buck House officials lift the carpet to sweep the housekeeper (deceased) under it on the way to their knighthoods. Trouble is someone is standing on the carpet. Indeed, it is Her Self the Majesty who would like to know just how one trips over a whiskey bottle in a place where one has no business and one is not a drinker of spirits, and one is roundly disliked by so many. What really did happen? Of course, this one cannot be so direct. Circumspection is thy name, Queenie.
And while she is about it, HM would also like to know how a painting given to her personally many years ago by an obscure Tasmania artist went from her bedroom wall to a Royal Navy wardroom. Drinking tea there after cutting yet another ribbon (must 50 this year already!) when she noticed it. Too polite too inquire then and there, she went back home to check. Sure enough, not where it used to be. So hard to keep track of one’s 7,000+ paintings.
Do these two mysteries intertwine, the errant painting and the corpsed keeper? All those prim and proper (blinkered) officials in Buck House will never notice. Still something is not quite right about either the wandering painting or terminated housekeeper. No, this is a job for someone who cannot say ‘no,’ the junior Assistant Private Secretary (APS), late of the Royal Horse Artillery, gets the assignment. The instruction are ‘Find the route that painting took from the royal bedroom to the naval wardroom, and find out who put the whiskey bottle there to fall over (if that is what happened). And do so with such deft discretion that no one knows you have done it. Should keep you busy a day on two on top of all your other duties.’
QEII cannot do anything herself since she is scheduled twenty-four hours a day and under scrutiny from staff every one of those hours. Any deviation would be an earthquake. The portrayals of royal life are many and fascinating in these pages. The gravities on Her Britannic Majesty exceed those borne by most astronauts. The pecking order among the Buckingham Palace staff is positively Byzantine with invisible lines of demarcation guarded day-and-night by fanatics. The buck-passing and blame-shifting are constant. Is this is the incubus of McKinsey management.
The Palace officials (all stiff upper-lipped chaps) seem relieved that the obnoxious housekeeper is no more, and are happy to move on with no further unpleasantness. That is in the great tradition of McKinsey Management, blame the victim. Absent fuel, the tabloids find something else to lie about. Check Pox News or the Moloch Press for the latest in fiction. The chaps have even less interest in an odd painting of no market value that does not belong to the nation but to Elizabeth Mountbatten. No, to achieve satisfaction, HM will have to see to it herself, but – of course – she cannot be seen to be seeing to it. Good thing she has had years of practice of not being seen to be seeing to things, and getting them done. They call it reigning rather than ruling.
That there seems to be a systematic and extensive campaign of stalking and harassing women employed in Buck House soon becomes apparent to everyone except those stiff-lipped chaps who run the place. Even the none-too-perceptive police officer who had a look at the house keeper’s cadaver grasps that and says so, but the chaps don’t hear what they do not want to know. What happens under the carpet, stays under the carpet, that seems to be their mantra. Once under the carpet, everything is under control.
S J Bennett
This is the second in this series I have read and lapped up. Though I admit there is far too much padding with descriptions of clothes, furnishings, and food. When that description is in Buck House it is part of the atmosphere but it carries on as the APS goes out and about and it does go on. And on. Every where she goes, we get the full-IKEA, full-Elle, and full-Gourmet accounts. Treacle.
While whingeing I add that I found the plot tangled beyond my comprehension. Still I enjoyed the ride and the insight into the life of Buckingham Palace. HM’s affection for the valueless painting is explained in a charming aside. The title, by the way, refers to the appropriate number of dogs to take on a walk if one wants to think through a problem. Fewer than three and they expect to be entertained by ball throwing; more than three and one spends the whole time minding them. Three is just right: Enough to entertain themselves but not so many as to distract one from cogitation. This is just one of the many charming nostrums to be found in the book.
