Ray Celestin: The Mobster’s Lament, Pan Macmillian, 9781509838967, paperback

Ray Celestin’s third book in the City Blues Quartet series has been my savior during the start of the Corona crisis. “The Mobster’s Lament” took my mind far away when real world Corona events became so surreal and crazy,  I could not have imagined them in my night mares.  

This perfect escape came in the form of an electrifying historical crime novel set in the mobster world of 1947 New York, starring Ida Young, private investigator from New Orleans via Chicago,  now widowed, coming to the aid of retired investigator Michael Talbot whose son Tom finds himself imprisoned in Rikers Island accused of having brutally murdered 4 people in a Harlem hotel.  As soon as Ida starts looking into the police records and the actual murder site there is no doubt that Tom was set up and sacrificed for death row with the real killer still at large.  Enter the Mobster world of the Luciano Family with Frank Castello as acting boss and Gabriel Leveson, Castello’s fixer who runs the famous Copa club who has his own reasons to leave the city.  When Castello gives him the job of finding 2 million dollars who have disappeared, Gabriel‘s plan to flee New York in 10 days is in serious jeopardy.  Louis Armstrong, as a friend of Ida’s from her New Orleans days, has a minor role in this third sequel.  Celestin is a master at stringing along multiple intricate plots with fabulously  well drawn out characters. He never fails to amaze me how tidily he brings the strings all together in the end. I have never been able to figure out how it could all possibly connect in the end, chapeau! 

If you want 550 pages of brilliant historical crime fiction at its highest level, this is your book. Not surprised it has been listed for several awards already, I am just sad I am finished now and have to wait a while for book number four which will be set in Los Angeles.

Lennie Goodings:  A Bite of the Apple - A Life with Books, Writers and Virago, 

9780198828754, Oxford University Press, hardback, also available as E-Book

Lennie Goodings is one of the pioneers in feminist publishing, arriving first as publicists and later becoming publisher/editor at Virago Press whose fate she helped shape to this day.  

Coming  originally from Canada and joining then tiny Virago Press in 1978 with their larger than life publisher Carmen Cahill,  Lennie started her career at one of most important feminist publishing houses dedicated to publishing  female authors and topics solely,  a revolutionary concept then. 

“A Bite of the Apple” is a fascinating recollection, of great interest to anyone interested in UK publishing, feminism and literature.  Part memoir, part history of Virago with all its politics, successes and economic struggles, I was particularly captured by Lennie’s own thoughts about editing and her stories and commitment to her authors.  I know Lennie from my days at Penguin and had the great pleasure to help sell Virago books into Germany when Virago was sold to Little Brown, now Hachette.  Consequently reading her book felt like a déjà vu to me, I savored her spilling the beans about office and publishing politics, so many names and people were familiar. I vividly remember her enthusiastic presentations of her books at sales conferences followed by wild dancing and partying in the evening!  “A Bite of the Apple” is a  frank, intimate and passionate memoir, exquisitely written as one might expect of someone like Lennie who introduced such great authors as Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Waters, Linda Grant, Natasha Walter, Naomi Wolf and Maya Angelou among many others into UK and European market. 

Deepa Anappara: Djinn Patrol on the purple line,

Chatto & Windus, UK, 9781784743093, C format paperback

 

The quirky title of “Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line” led me to pick up this unusual debut novel by former journalist Deepa Anappara.  She has worked as a reporter in India before moving to England and in that capacity was confronted by facts of hundreds of children disappearing every day without any investigation by the Indian police every being launched.  Wondering what might have become of these children who mostly came from very poor backgrounds, she decided to write a novel telling their story through the eyes of endearing nine year old Jai whose voice gives this novel a special feeling.  

Her narration made me feel like reading a YA novel at 

times, particularly during the first few chapters but this feeling disappeared towards the middle of the book when the novel becomes more serious and darker. Jai and his friends Pari, a very smart girl, and Faiz, a Muslim boy live with their families in dirt poor circumstance in an Indian slum/basti. When two of their school friends disappear and not one missing report filed by their parents leads to a search by the police,  Jai, whose life dream is to become a detective, convinces his friends to start their own investigation. Very soon they find themselves in dangerous, dark circumstances before Jai's life in particular is affected dramatically. 

Deepa Anappara’s  decision of choosing a format by letting a nine year old boy narrate the story, her vivid description of the harsh life in an Indian slum and blending in the voices of those who are about to go missing,  makes this such a stand out, captivating debut novel. The last third of the book in particularly had me glued to my chair. Spoiler alarm: there is no Bollywood happy ending.

Liz Moore: Long Bright River, 9781786331632, trade paperback, Hutchinson UK/Penguin Random House, available now,

German edition: Long Bright River, CH Beck, hardback,

 

Liz Moore’s “Long Bright River” is set in Kensington, a part of Philadelphia heavily populated by addicts in search of heroin or other substances, once a respectable neighborhood. The author has done neighborhood work there and her familiarity with the people living in this part of town makes this novel and the characters in it so very authentic.

“Long Bright River" is at times dark and heart wrenching, part crime fiction but mostly a story of two siblings, Kacey and Mickey Fitzpatrick, who grew up in rough circumstance with little love apart from the intimacy and bond they had between each other.  To toughen them up for the unfairness of life was the prime goal of their grandmother Gee, leaving little room for affection in her household where they grew up after their mother died, their father disappeared and where money was always tight.  The two sisters could not be more different in character: Mickey, shy, introverted, very smart , responsible, always protecting Kacey, eventually choosing a career as a police officer and raising a child as a single mother; Kacey a dare devil, outspoken, with a track record of bad man ending up on skid row as a heroin addict and prostitute.  The sisters haven’t spoken to each other for years but Mickey keeps track of her whereabouts on her patrol. When Kacey disappears after the murder of a heroin addicted young prostitute and someone Mickey knows from their childhood is also found murdered, she goes in frantic search of her sister as the killer clearly has it in for addicted prostitutes.  I will not be a spoil sport, but the solving of the murder actually plays a minor part in the novel, the history of the Fitzpatrick family and the unravelling of family secrets makes this such an intense and often almost painful, realistic read.  I like Liz Moore’s clean, clear cut prose which fits with the plot.

Isabel Allende: A Long Petal of the Sea, Ballentine Books/Penguin Random House USA, 9780593158425, Trade Paperback,

German Edition: Dieser weite Weg,  Suhrkamp Verlag, Hardcover

Isabel Allende is one of my favorite Latin American storytellers ever since I read her famous „The House of Spirits“.  A few years ago her novels no longer held me captured as they used to and I read her more infrequently. She now has my full attention again; her latest novel “A long Petal of the Sea” was an absolute pleasure to read, written in the best tradition of Latin American storytelling.   Allende spins a captivating yarn combining historical facts of the Spanish Civil war in the 1930ties weaving them into  a love and family saga which ends in Latin America. The subject at the heart of the novel, the importance of home for wellbeing, is a very timely one, with hundred thousand fleeing their countries currently for a multitude of reasons, reminiscent of the masses that fled Europe during the 1930/40ties because of their Jewish heritage or political convictions.

Victor Dalmau comes from a family fighting Franco’s Fascists, he treating the wounded as an army doctor in the field. Among the thousands fleeing Spain over the treacherous mountains into France is Roser, a gifted pianist and the lover of his brother Gillem, pregnant with their child. In order to survive, Victor and Roser decide to enter into a marriage of convenience after it becomes clear that Gillem is dead and the only way they could gain passage on the SS Winnipeg to start a new life in Chile is as a married couple particularly since Roser is heavily pregnant.  I was completely unaware of the fact that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda had actually chartered such a ship in 1939, the SS Winnipeg, gathering a total of two thousand refugees transporting them to a safe new life in Chile.  Allende uses these two richly drawn protagonists to describe the atrocities of the Spanish Civil war period, the ensuing hard years in Chile and Venezuela with all their political upheaval and the effect on the destiny of the Dalmau family.  Her vivid imagination and her own life experiences created a fascinating tale of love, family, and the power of belief, endurance and hope.

I loved this uplifting, compassionate saga, Roser and Victor felt like family, I was sad when their story ended after 314 pages – Allende at her best!

Irvin D. Yalom: When Nietzsche wept, 9780062009302, Harper Perennial Modern Classics,

German Edition: Und Nietzsche weinte, btb Taschenbuch

In my opinion, Irvin Yalom is one of the wisest thinkers and friend to mankind, a psychotherapist one hopes to encounter when in troubled waters. His work as an author spans from reflections on his long time experience as a therapist to novels. One of my favorite pieces of his work is a film called “Yalow’s cure” (Anleitung zum Glücklichsein in German). He has a unique gift of passing on invaluable philosophical knowledge and advice about life’s perils and how to become closer to happiness based on his own life experience and that of his patients. The film is superior to anything I have seen available on the subject matter. 

I have read several of his books and am currently reading "Staring at the sun"  but “When Nietzsche wept” has been on my “Want to read list” for quite some time. I finally bought a second hand copy in Austin/Texas and read it over months alongside other novels. 

It is a fascinating imagined account of an encounter in 1882 by two great men that actually never happened but nearly did: Friedrich Nietzsche, the tormented philosopher and Dr. Josef Breuer,a famous Viennese physician who today is regarded as the originator of the talking cure, eventually introduced by his friend Sigmund Freud, then a young doctor he had regular intellectual exchanges with. When Dr. Breuer agrees to treat Friedrich Nietzsche, who had been plagued by terrible, debilitating migraine headaches almost his entire life using his “talking cure”, both men have no idea that the exchange between doctor and patient will eventually be reversed over the months they regularly meet. Breuer himself is plagued by inner demons and marriage problems and finds great comfort in their philosophical, often painful yet healing exchanges. Yalom blends fiction with acknowledged facts creating a powerful novel prompting the reader to reflect on one’s own life experiences. 

If you are interested in philosophy or psychology, this is a wonderful, thought provoking novel I loved reading.  

Alex Michaelides: The Silent Patient, Orion Publishing, 9781409181620, paperback
German Edition: Alex Michaelides:  Die stumme Patientin, paperback, Droemer Knaur

“The Silent Patient” by Alex Michaelides was a record selling thriller in 2019, a New York and Sunday Times bestseller  with  rights sold into 39 countries world- wide as well as film rights. This means I started reading my first book of 2020 with very high expectations indeed.

The story of this psychological mystery sounded very promising and compelling: a successful painter, Alicia Berenson, is convicted of having shot her beloved husband five times and has refused to speak ever since concealing what led to her actions.  All efforts by psychologists at the clinic where she is kept have been in vain; she remains silent and even became violent at times. Enter Theo Faber, a psychotherapist who has become obsessed with the case, convinced he can treat Alicia and bring her back to the real world. He is even prepared to give up a promising position in another clinic just to be able to treat her as his patient.  Being a happily married man himself he is totally puzzled why Alicia should have killed the man that had given her all the love and stability she had graved for….. 

This is where I will stop talking about the plot which is a very engaging,a slowly building one with a clever twist towards the end. But despite staying interested and wanting  this book to grab me, it never really did for whatever reason, be it that I have read zillion thrillers and mysteries over the years working in publishing which is perhaps why I am a little demanding or that the development felt  a bit too constructed towards the end for my taste.  It is a very clever plot now doubt and I can see why the story appealed  to so many readers as it clearly did; I was just not one of them. ….