To Be Read...

Hotel Iris, by Yoko Ogawa

The lies came to me much more easily than I would have imagined, and I felt no guilt at all.

I bought Hotel Iris on impulse, having read a Reading Matters review, and wanting a palate cleanser in between several Swedish novels. I went from a country I know quite well to a country about which I know little. I went from a country that, if you believe the cliches, is calm and civilised, but harbours a dark heart, to a country which, well, appears calm and civilised but harbours a dark heart...

Hotel Iris has all the delicacy and precision I expected; it is drawn ink and watercolours rather than vibrant oils, but the two, perhaps three, relationships that shape the narrative are abusive and deeply disquietening.

Mari is 17 and works in the family hotel. It is by the sea, and all the others nearby have names that reflect their location.

"The R in IRIS on the sign on the roof had come loose and was tilted to a bit to the right. It looked a little silly, but also slightly sinister. In any event, no one ever thought to fix it."

Her grandfather explained that an iris is a beautiful flower, and the name of the rainbow goddess. It was, he said, 'pretty stylish.'

"Still, there were no irises blooming in the courtyard, no roses or pansies or daffodils either. Just an overgrown dogwood, a zelkova tree, and some weeds."

It is hard not to think about the terrible events that might have befallen a sea front hotel recently.

One day Mari sees a man being evicted from the hotel after a noisy row with a prostitute.

"Shut up, whore." The voice seemed to pass through us, silencing the whole hotel. It was powerful and deep, but with no trace of anger. Instead, it was almost serene, like a hypnotic note from a cello or horn.

I turned to find the man standing on the landing. He was past middle age, on the verge of being old...

It occured to me that I had never heard such a beautiful voice giving an order. It was calm and imposing, with no hint of indecision. Even the word 'whore' was somehow appealing."

Inexplicably, Mari follows the man. He seems to be gentle and considerate...

"I'm a translator - from Russian."

"Translator..." I repeated slowly to myself.

"Does that seem odd?"

"No, it's just that I have never met a translator before.

"It's a simple sort of job, really. You sit at a desk all day long, looking up words in a dictionary.

But he is also controlling, violent and sadistic. Perhaps Mari falls under his poisonous influence because  of her relationship with a strict, money-obsessed and unkind mother.

If mother is so intent on paying me compliments, it might be because she doesn't really love me very much

Whatever the reason, to be given an insight into such a dreadful relationship through such simple and elegant writing is a profoundly unsettling experience. 

• Hotel Iris, by trans Stephen Snyder, (2010, Kindle Edition).

The Dead of Summer, by Mari Jungstedt

Construction form boss Peter Bovide is holidaying with his family on the Swedish island of Fårö. As always he goes for an early morning run. Hours later his body is found Sudersand beach, shot once in the head, then many more times in the stomach.

It soon becomes clear that Bovide's firm employs illegal workers, there a financial worries and late payments, and the gun is Russian...

The Dead of Summer is the fifth of Mari Jungstedt's crime novels set in Gotland; if you have read the earlier ones you will know what to expect, if you haven't it is probably not the best starting point!

Jungstedt has created an engaging (if undemanding), cast of characters, and paints a picture of Gotland that makes you want to visit, explore... and meet friends (video). She is a journalist, and probably tells a lets a little too much of her professional experience seep into her portayal of reporter Johan Berg.

And she writes like a journalist, good for readability, but light on literary insight.

Here, police chief Anders Knutas has cut short his holiday to interfere with his deputy Karin Jacobssen's investigation.

Karin got up and went to stand at the window. He looked out at the idyllic summer scene, or at least as much of it as was visible on either side of the big customer car park at Östercentrum outside the Co-op forum.

Later a few pages later, Kihlgård comes over to talk to Knutas.

"What on earth is going on? This so-called summer paradise is turning out to be another Sicily."

Jungstedt is good at rooting her narrative in the ordinary - anyone who has visited Sweden knows the Co-op scene - but does anyone really speak like Kihlgård does here?

As before, The Dead of Summer ends with a question that ensures I will be reading the sixth instalment Den mörka ängeln (The Dark Angel?) as soon as it is translated into English (hopefully by Tiina Nunnally who does a typically good job here).

 

VIDEO: Amberville, by Tim Davys

Homage to homage

I was thrilled to discover that Åsa Larsson named Rebecka Martinsson after Martin Beck, though a bit disappointed she didn't begin The Savage Altar with these two words, a neatly reversal of the splendid homage that is the final word in the final Martin Beck novel, a quite brilliant homage!

Now, The Hypnotist has just downoaded on to my Kindle and I read that Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril chose the pseudonym Lars Kepler in part from Stieg Larsson.

Sadly, we must presume Stieg Larsson did not chose his name in homage to Stig of the Dump... (he just added the 'e' to differentiate himself from his friend, also called Stig Larsson).

Splinter, by Sebastian Fritzek

Have you experienced a severe trauma, and would you like to erase it from your memory? If so, email us.

Marc Lucas is a social worker in Berlin. We meet him as he is talking to a damaged teenager, who is threatening to kill herself by jumping from a diving board into an empty pool. Then he walks away, never turning back to see her fate.

Six weeks earlier he killed his actress wife Sandra and their unborn child in a car crash for which he was to blame. He has read an advert in a newspaper for the Bleibtru institute which offers to erase painful memories by erasing all memories

"Our problem is not that we learn too little. On the contrary, our problem is forgetting," explains Bleibtru.

"Up to now... psychoanalysis has tended to unearth supressed memories. Our research proceeds in the diametrically opposite direction."

Did he go to the clinic? Did he take the treatment? Marc is now in a nightmare world where his credit cards don't work, the numbers have disappear from his mobile, his ID has gone, a building vanishes, his dead wife appears, his troubled brother is a contract killer for a gangster who wants a journalist dead.

This is delivered at a blistering pace, each short chapter ending with a twist that propels the narrative in a new direction. The writing is taught, too clean and functional too engage the enmotions, and the plot deliberately disorientating. I read this as a literary device, others have seen it as a weakness endemic to such thrillers.

Reading Splinter is like watching a firework display; you are dazzled by pyrotechnics, then you walk away. Some parts are so bright you see them when you blink...

Splinter, by trans from German by John Brownjohn (2009, Kindle ed)

In The Country Of Men, by Hisham Matar

It is 1979, and through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, Suleiman, Tripoli sounds so beautiful. It is a city of fragrances and light, Roman ruins and sunshine, but also one where the prudent display their allegiance to  the Benefactor, the Father of the Nation, the Guide of the Libyan Popular Revolution.

"Stopping at the next traffic light, (Mama) whispered a prayer to herself. A car stopped so close beside us I could have touched the driver's cheek. Four men dressed in dark safari suits sat looking at us.  At first I didn't recognise them, then I remembered. I remembered so suddenly I felt my heart jump. They were the same Revolutionary Committee men who had come a week before and taken (university professor) Ustath Rashid.

But the boy has faith: "The imam... of our local mosque, had told me, have no cause to fear; only the guilty live in fear."

Anyway, he is with his mother and their relationship is close. They are, she says, "Two halves of the same soul, two open pages of the same book..."

But many of the Pages aren't open to Soolma and there is much about her life , and her mysterious illness, that he doesn't understand. Even her own mother's favourite and much-repeated story was not what is seemed: "Scheherazade was a coward who accepted slavery over death."

Her life is shaped by an arranged marriage at 14 to an ancient man fully nine years older than her and of whom she had not been allowed even to see a photograph; she would be taunted by a maid who said the future groom was a ugly, with a big nose. 

Fearful that the wedding night would not go as planned, her father had buried a pistol in his pocket: "Blood is going to be spilled either way."

Faraj is a Bedouin who has left the desert behind to become a business man, importing trees from Sweden, and less, successfully, cows from Scotland: "Where they are from the sun has no heat and barely any light."

"So you want to convince us you've been to Scotland?"

"No, I saw it in a film. I felt a chill just watching it."

Tripoli is a city of secrets - "Don't tell Moosa, nothing every stays in that man's mouth" - but Suleiman is not good with secrets, and the naivety of youth makes him an unreliable narrator

He sees life vividly, but life is not always what it seems.

Like her two sons, Um Masoud was fat. Her buttocks were the size of watermelons. Although I never tried it, of course, I was certain I could balance a glass of water on one of them."

For Um Masoud's husband Ustath Jafer, was "an Antenna, a man of the Mokhabarat, able to put people behind the sun," and as Soolma will come to realise "informing on your fellow citzens is Libya's national sport." 

The regime is brutal, and dissent is dangerous. A few students speak our and are hung; "The foolish dreamers!" says Mama.

"Here it's either silence or exile, walk by the wall or leave. Go be a hero elsewhere."

This a country where the defenders of the revoution gather crowds into the National Basketball Stadium, where a noose hangs from the backboard of a net, and a death sentence is carried out on live televison.

"In a time of blood and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing for relief, I was the ridiculous child craving concern..."

This a book about growing up, about dawning realisations of the adult world, about the distance between father and son. "How much of him is there in me? Can you become a man without becoming your father?"

It is also a book about betrayal, and the languid beauty of its vivid and warm imagery and language makes the intrusion of brutality all the more shocking.

Highy recommended. I won't be disappointed of In the Country of Men turns out to be the best novel I read in 2011.

• In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar (2006) read on Kindle.

 

Bestsellers at Malmö station

 
Not a "next Stieg Larsson" sticker in sight!

April, the Ban, and In Praise of Challenges

I have to say I was a little bit sceptical about Reading Challenges. Something didn't feel quite right.

Then again, I set myself challenges in other things, and I do like to have structure to reading, so why not?

It has turned out to be a very good decision indeed. Shortly I will try and deliver on my commitment to the Eastern Europe Challenge (this won't be too hard as I regularly read novels by Eastern Europeans) and the Argentina Challenge (I am going ot go there eventually).

I have been concentrating on Dorte's 2011 'Seven Continents' Global Challenge, three books from each of seven continents, with a couple of extra rules of my own just to spice it up. I am going on author's nationality rather than setting and I am only allowing writers I am reading for the first time. (The nationality criteria wasn't well thought through - I had also decided that science fiction might be the springboard for the seventh continent section so I am nominally committed to read three books written by extra-terrestrials....).

The Global Challenge was worth doing if only for the enjoyment of hunting down possible titles; I must have spent hours combing reviews, following Amazon "Customers who bought..." and checking Wikipedia entries for country of birth etc.

And I have read some splendid books. Thanks Dorte!

The best book I read in April was In the Country of Men, Hisham Matar's insightful and moving story of a boy growing up in post revolutionary Libya. Review to follow, five stars and already a strong contender for my favourite read of 2011.

I was also much impressed by Red April, by Santiago Roncagliolo - not everyone's cup of tea, apparently, but strongly recommended, and a book purchased, rather perversely, by a negative mention on Petrona, Splinter by Sebastian Fitzek (four star review to follow, Maxine!).

I also read Stratton's War, by Laura Wilson (and would probably read more by her if I wasn't so strongly drawn to John Lawton), and Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet, which is a guilty pleasure partly driven by my PR in Fiction project...

I suppose I could include Asa Larsson's Savage Altar in a challenge, but including Sweden would be like including England...