Lori Eshleman's Blog, page 6

Review of The Betrayal, by Helen Dunmore

The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Helen’s Dunmore’s moving novel is set in the last years of Stalinist Russia, in 1950’s Leningrad. It is at once a private love story between Andrei, a pediatrician at a Leningrad hospital, and his wife Anna, a nursery school teacher, both survivors of the siege of Leningrad during World War II. The novel illuminates the draconian bureaucracy of Stalinist Russia, and the sense of paranoia and conspiracy theories that can entangle the most irreproachable citizen at a whim. Even the nursery school is mired in bureaucratic statistics, record-keeping, and the expectation that employees will work tirelessly to serve the state. Then Andrei is pulled into the dangerous situation of treating the son of Volkov, a high-ranking officer in the secret police. The boy has a life-threatening cancer, difficult to treat. As Andrei and Anna try to negotiate this risky situation, they are also dealing with their own childlessness, Anna’s moody teenage brother, and jealous neighbors who threaten to report them at the slightest pretext. To complicate matters, they are the keepers of illicit manuscripts belonging to Anna’s father, a black-listed writer who died during the siege. Flashbacks evoke the horror of starving people and frozen corpses in the streets. While conditions in Leningrad have improved, a sense of frugality hangs over the couple, as Anna trades for a jar of honey or preserves, and tends vegetables at her family dacha in the country. Dunmore lovingly describes these economies, as well as the natural beauty and sense of momentary freedom on visits to the dacha. As tension builds between Andrei, Volkov, and the desperately ill boy, the reader is pulled into a crazy, upside down world, where ethical behavior and values are punished rather than rewarded. A world that reminds us of the cost of authoritarian rule, of irrational beliefs, and of falsehoods that are proclaimed to be true. Dunmore is a marvelous writer, whose death last year was a loss to world literature.



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Review of Not a Sound, by Heather Gudenkauf

Not a Sound by Heather Gudenkauf

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The heroine of this mystery is a former nurse who lost her hearing in an accident and is battling back from addiction and depression after the break-up of her marriage. Amelia Winn has begun to regain her confidence by traveling the wooded river near her cabin with the help of her dog Stitch. She turns amateur sleuth after discovering the body of a former friend and fellow-nurse in the shallows of the river. Amelia’s silent world makes navigating her relationship to the detective on the case and to her estranged husband--as well as her first job since the accident--all more complicated. The silence also heightens the lurking sense of threat from the unknown murderer. Suspects abound: from her mysterious neighbor, her doctor husband, and her new employer, to an odd-seeming man obsessed with the dead nurse—no one seems out of suspicion. The story builds to a climax along the very river she loves, after she unwittingly makes herself a target of the killer. And in the end, it turns out the most loyal friends are not always human.



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Review of Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In Go, Went, Gone, author Jenny Erpenbeck confronts the German response to African refugees seeking asylum in Berlin, through the eyes of a classics professor who spent much of his life living in East Berlin. The professor, Richard, is recently retired, widowed, and adjusting to his new, disconnected status in life. Erpenbeck attends to the daily and yearly life rituals to which he is accustomed, rituals that hold less meaning since the death of his wife. Drawn to a group of African refugees who have staged a hunger strike in a Berlin square, Richard becomes aware of how little he knows about these refugees or, indeed, about Africa itself. In professorial manner, he launches a research project to interview the men in the refuge where they are temporarily housed, awaiting decisions on asylum petitions. In the course of his investigation, we, too, come to know these men; their wrenching stories of death, flight, and loss; and their sense of having no place, no right to work, and thus, no identity. Through the medium of his growing friendship with some of these men, Richard reflects on notions of boundaries, belonging, work, and loss that trouble him in his own life as an aging retiree. Erpenbeck meticulously unveils the Kafkaesque statutes and legalistic procedures that at the same time offer--and deny--hope to the refugees. While this is a quiet novel, overall, it is gripping in its immersion in the lives of Richard, his long-time circle of friends, and the African men—set against the backdrop of changes that reshaped Berlin after the fall of the wall, and changes that continue to reshape Europe and Africa today. The novel’s title, Go, Went, Gone, suggests both the verb declensions practiced by the men in their German lessons, and their transitory status caught between places. Like the man who drowned in the lake that borders Richard’s house, these men, too, seem in the process of disappearing.



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Review of The Weight of Night, by Christine Carbo

The Weight of Night by Christine Carbo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Picture a raging fire on the edges of Glacier National Park, skeletal remains turned up by a backhoe in the teeth of the fire, and a missing teenage tourist, and you have the makings of a tense and suspenseful mystery. Combine that with a local CSI, Gretchen Larson, who has her own secrets rooted in her home country of Norway; and a park police officer, Monty Harris, who also harbors a childhood tragedy, and the plot thickens. Narrated in the first person, alternately, by Gretchen and Monty, the book allows access to both private thoughts and public actions as the urgency to find the missing teenager heightens. His story gets entangled with other missing children from the past several decades and a host of suspects living off-the-grid in the wilds of Montana, all equally suspicious of law enforcement and of the FBI agents called in to take charge of the search. I was pulled into this mystery novel by the setting, the characters, and the plot—and by the budding feelings between Gretchen and Monty, feelings that Gretchen, at least, is determined not to let grow. This is a detective duo that will return--and I will be there to read the rest of their story!



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Review of Transit: A Novel, by Rachel Cusk

Transit by Rachel Cusk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


British writer Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit reads like a nest of short stories, webbed together against the backdrop of a writer and mother’s episodes of encounter and transformation in the wake of her divorce. Along with the writer, we meet various characters as mundane as a contractor who renovates her new house in London, a former lover she meets by chance on the street, two fellow writers at a symposium, and the hair stylist who colors her hair. While seemingly mundane, these episodes include portentous moments that suggest they are more than they seem. Each interaction becomes a lens for viewing elemental life questions about good and evil, will and fate, engagement and ennui. One underlying question is whether the writer can apprehend the reality of life sufficiently to love, to parent, and to write. While the book is highly analytical, moments of pure experience rip through the cerebral, as in this unexpected embrace from a man she has just met: “He put his warm, thick tongue in my mouth; he thrust his hands inside my coat. His lean, hard body was more insistent than forceful” (126).
Cusk’s style, at times simple, is alternately as elevated and portentous as the writing of W.G. Sebald. Describing the drive to a party at her cousin’s house, for example, she writes: “the journey followed a series of narrow, circuitous roads that never seemed to pass through any settlement but wound lengthily through dark countryside shrouded in thick fog….The submerged shapes of trees showed faintly along the roadside like objects imprisoned in ice” (211). The persons gathered at the house party are described with a similar sense of strangeness—and it is no accident that this episode marks the end of the book. By the conclusion of the visit, the writer is convinced that she “felt change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things…” (260). Along with the narrator, the reader, too, is led to moments of insight and transformation in transit through the chapters of this book.




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Review of The Trespasser by Tana French

The Trespasser by Tana French

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Review of The Trespasser, by Tana French. I was first drawn to Tana French’s mysteries by a review in the New Yorker (Oct 3, 2016). Her newest novel in the Dublin Murder Squad series, The Trespasser, did not disappoint. The plot hinges on the beating death of a young woman, Aislinn Murray, in her own home, dressed to the nines, with the table set and dinner for two in the oven. Narrated in the first person by the lead detective on the case, Antoinette Conway, the novel creates the claustrophobic sense of being trapped in her own paranoia toward her fellow detectives—as the only woman and the only minority on the murder squad. Antoinette is never sure who to trust, and who is out to get her. As she and her partner Steve follow one lead after another, we are never certain what is true and what is a red herring. The victim, who at first appears to be boring and Barbie-doll-like, is slowly revealed to be more complex—although never especially sympathetic. The gradual unveiling of suspects and the sense of menace from unknown enemies keep the reader engaged to the end. Like French’s previous novel Broken Harbor, this mystery follows a hard-boiled and disillusioned detective on the verge of abandoning the profession. Perhaps the brightest spot in this psychological portrait of the twists and turns of human interaction is the connection between Antoinette and Steve, two good partners in the making. I think we have not seen the last of this detective duo.



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Review of Barkskins, by Annie Proulx

Barkskins by Annie Proulx

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In her sprawling novel Barkskins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx tells the story of the destruction of the great forests of North America and beyond, from the late 17th century to the present. The novel follows the descendants of two Frenchmen, Charles Duquet and René Sel, who immigrate to Canada to become woodcutters (barkskins) in the 1690’s. Duquet founds a timber company with ties around the world, while Sel marries a Mi’kmaw woman, whose descendants are torn between European and Indian values and life ways. In unforeseen ways, these 2 families intertwine over the years, and both entwine with the fate of the forests, from the eastern seaboard of North America to the kauri forests of New Zealand, and the Amazon jungles. Proulx writes beautifully of the mystery of nature, as in this passage: “The moon was a slice of white radish, the shadows of incomparable blackness. The shapes of trees fell sharply on the snow, of blackness so profound they seemed gashes into the underworld” (23). With a sense of voraciousness, the newcomers hew away at this woodland world, believing it to be limitless; and believing in the civilizing good of clearing the land for farms and settlements. Trees are hacked, sliced, ground, burned and floated, and the clearing moves ever on to new regions and new species. Only much later do some begin to talk about reseeding and replacing what has been lost.

Just as the trees are cut, so the human characters are cut down by an amazing array of accidents, illnesses, and catastrophes. And faster than the trees, they regenerate and give birth to the next generation. While it can be challenging to keep up with the many generations and relatives in the two families, a number of characters stand out: Charles Duquet himself (who changes his name to Duke), an ambitious and not very likeable man who is successful nevertheless. His descendant Lavinia Duke, a pioneering woman in the lumber industry, who meets her soul mate in Dieter Breitsprecher, an early proponent of reseeding and replanting. Outger Duke, a scientific enthusiast who abandons his half-Indian daughter, Beatrix, to return to Europe. Beatrix, wanting to understand her Native American roots, weds one of the Mi’kmaw Sels, and while at first they seem happy, neither finds in the other the wholeness they are looking for. A counterpoint of greed and generosity, dissatisfaction and hope runs through the novel, as many characters seem broken by their own histories and their struggles with nature. The novel ends with a new generation hoping to turn the tide of global warming. Sapatisia Sel, a descendant of both families, is aware of the coming dangers that we all face. “’A great crisis is just ahead,’ said one scientist”--in reference to the melting of the Greenland ice. “Sapatisia Sel thought he meant that they had been looking at human extinction. She wanted to cry out, ‘The forests, the trees, they can change everything!’ but her voice froze in her throat” (712).




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Review of The Eloquence of the Dead, by Conor Brady

The Eloquence of the Dead by Conor Brady

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This historical mystery set in 1880’s Dublin interweaves the politics of Irish land reform with the crime-fighting G Division of Dublin plainclothes detectives. Armed with a Colt revolver, Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow searches for a killer in the streets, pawnshops, pubs, and hotels of Dublin. He indulges his cultural side by attending weekly painting classes, where a charming antiques dealer named Katherine alerts him to ancient Greek coins mysteriously appearing in local antique shops. Swallow is an interesting main character--a blunt and determined man, struggling with a sense of personal failure and drawn to two very different women. Dublin landmarks, Irish beer and food, the rise of Irish nationalism, and an appearance by poet and mystic William B. Yeats give the novel an appealing sense of place and time. The culture of the Dublin police force and the British administration at Dublin Castle seems believable, with its mix of corruption, ineptitude, authoritarianism and greed. And Brady creates a sense of suspense and urgency that keeps the reader guessing to the end. Altogether, a satisfying historical mystery.



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Arab Jazz, by Karim Miské

Arab Jazz by Karim Miské

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Review of Arab Jazz, by Karim Miské. This thriller plunges the reader into the multi-cultural stew of the 19th arrondissement in Paris, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians rub shoulders. A particularly brutish murder of a cast-out Jehovah’s Witness sets the stage for an unlikely encounter between Ahmed, a reclusive young man of Mauritanian descent, and Rachel, a beautiful Jewish detective. Ahmed, the downstairs neighbor of the murder victim, spends his time reading pulp thrillers which he buys by the pound from a local Armenian book dealer. His neighbor’s murder brings him out of isolation and plunges him back into the kaleidoscopic neighborhood where he lives, as he tries to find the murderer and at the same time prove his own innocence. Meanwhile, Rachel and her partner Jean track down leads that run the gambit from corrupt French police to a Salafist Imam to a Jehovah’s Witness center in Brooklyn.

Arab Jazz is vibrantly and densely written, much like the urban environment where it is set. There are moments of dreamlike introspection alternating with rough brutality and glimpses of pure evil that give it a kind of claustrophobic punch. Of the many characters in the book, a substantial portion are criminals, killers, or wannabes who fantasize about violence. By the novel’s close, the boundaries between guilt and innocence have blurred, and there is little hope that justice will be done. As the chief of police states, “As for the rest, we have done what we can…But there’s no such thing as absolute victory. There is no end to this fight. It has been going on since time immemorial, and it will continue to go on forever” (239). Entangling themes of violence, greed, desire, and religious discord, this novel’s ultimate focus is the human condition.





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Review of I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh

I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After hearing a review on NPR of I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh, I was eager to read this British thriller/detective novel. Revolving around the hit-and-run killing of a child, the novel is both suspenseful and wrenching. The Bristol detective duo Ray and Kate make an interesting team, immersed in a growing friendship and attraction, as Ray struggles with a difficult teenage son and a disaffected wife at home; and Kate, much younger, tries to establish her career. The strongest voice in the novel is Jenna Gray, an artist who flees Bristol for a remote cottage on the Welsh coast. Jenna, who is obviously damaged and griefstricken, finds a new form of action-art by drawing and photographing names and phrases in the sand on the beach. This art is continually washed away by the sea, much as Jenna’s life and sense of self have been washed away by waves of tragedy. A rescued dog and a ruggedly attractive veterinarian give new hope to Jenna’s life. But the cottage by the sea devolves from a place of refuge to a place of threat that reaches a climax at the end of the book.

Mackintosh writes in a mixed voice, alternating first and third person narratives. Her choice of the first person for the most dangerous character brings the reader uncomfortably close to the mind of an entitled and manipulative predator. And the author’s manipulation of viewpoint brings a shock that left me with a sense of confusion and broke the flow of the book. That said, I Let You Go is a riveting thriller which is hard to put down.




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