Lang by Kjell Westö

Lang by Kjell Westö was published in 2005 for English readers and his is first crime/suspend novel. Kjell is a Swedish speaking Finlander author of several novels and books of poetry since 1986. Lang is psychological mystery with its polar opposite being Roseanna which is a Police Procedural story by the husband-and-wife writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. In Lang a crime is committed but the focus is on the why and its consequences rather then on its detection. The story is driven by the question what redemption is possible if your life is driven by fame and success rather then by love.

Lang is the host of Finland’s premier chat show-think Michael Parkinson crossed with Jeremy Paxman and started his rise to the top of the cultural heights by being a successful highbrow novelist. But his second marriage has just failed, and his son from his first is on drugs. He hasn’t written in over ten years and his TV ratings are slipping as viewers switch to new Friday night formats such as Big Brother and How to be a Millionaire. Worse still, he is in is 40’s going grey and fading physically.

A chance encounter with Sarita in a bar starts an obsessive lust affair complicated further which it becomes clear that she is equally locked in an unhealthy relationship with the violent father of her son. Yet it’s like a drug that initially gives the high of a revitalised career but then destroys it as the addicts needs to have more of what he craves leads to murder…but also redemption.

The story is not told by Lang but his best friend who is contacted in the opening scene for a spade to burry the body. Lang browbeats him to get the spade but when arrested keeps his friends involvement secret. The story then unfolds with the friend trying to discuss and write up Lang’s version which we gradually see is more his then Lang’s. We lean more about their friendship and Lang’s abuse of it and how he neglects his mentally ill sister. It also becomes clear that whilst Lang is clearly a charming but nasty piece of work, his friend and Sarita are not merely victims as they are playing their own games. Even Saritia’s violent drug-seller ex husband has more redeeming qualities then first appearances would suggest.

So does it work? Well don’t expect a nice simple bad-guy versus good-guy as nothing is easy or simply resolved and you are left with perhaps more questions then answers. It rings psychologically true and the writing and structure works well with memorable characters that haunt you even when you are not sure if you enjoyed or loved the story. Strongly recommended.

Closely Observed Trains written by Bohumil Hrabal

Closely Observed Trains written by Bohumil Hrabal is considered one of the greatest Czech and European writers of the 20th century. His books are translated into 27 languages. The short novel was the basis of one of the most popular new wave movies made in the 60’s. He died in the late 1990’s possibly by suicide and had to struggle through the long oppression of the communist regime with many of his books having to be smuggled out to be published.

However this is not some worthy political diatribe but an earthy sensual satire that contrasts the bumbling humour of the Czechs and the crudity and repression of the local Nazis as the German front collapse at the end of the war. The opening scene is of a shot down aeroplane wing fluttering into the town and causing panic in the streets. From this we learn about the Hrma family, Great Grandfather who had a war pension from 18 and would drink a bottle of rum and smoke a pack of cigars a day in from of the local workers to show how easy he had it until finally beaten to death in his 80’s, a grandfather who tried to hypnotise the Germans invaders to stop, and a father who had served on the railways for 25 years before he retired to be the village holder of lost and abandoned objects.

And finally we meet Milos Hrma the teenage railway apprentice on the way to work at the local railway station after a 3 month sick leave. He is acutely aware of the town’s view that the whole family are scroungers and wastrels. The sick leave was because he had tried to commit suicide after failing to “rise to the occasion” with his first love as he feared that the eyes of the town were on him.

Milos is one of Hrabal's "wise fools" - simpletons with occasional or inadvertent profound thoughts - who are also given to coarse humour, lewdness, and a determination to survive and enjoy oneself despite harsh circumstances. As he rejoins work he walks into a crisis. It appears that the station dispatcher –a sex mad woman’s man had used the entire official stamps one night to stamp the bum of the female telegraphist. As these were in German, this prompts the investigation of the way that the station was being run much to the frustration of the bumbling pigeon fancier station master ambitions. In the resulting chaos of events Milos gets to achieve sexual maturity and political maturity as he finally makes a moving and heroic stand against the Germans.

The novel is less then 100 pages but each of the characters spring of the page and the underlying politics are hinted rather then laid on with a trowel. For example the horror of this time is mainly conveyed with subtle quiet descriptions of the trains and their passengers passing through the station- a hospital train from the front passing a train with fresh troops on the way to the front or the state of the animals stranded on delayed trains. Its real targets were off course the Communists and the need to take a stand against them which the Czechs did in 68 and in the 90’s to gain their freedom in the velvet revolution. But don’t worry about the politics. Instead enjoy the story and writing that paints pictures in your mind with memorable scenes and humour leaving you desperate to see the film and read more of his books. Highly recommended.

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami is on the surface a gritty hard boiled thriller set in the Kabuki-cho red-light district of Tokyo as the approaching New Year leaves near empty except for the human wreckage of the city. Jimji a young illegal sex tourist guide makes a good but shady living from taking westerners around the girlie bars, peep shows, hookers that allow foreigners.

He meets up with Frank who hires him for three days but from the start Jimji feels something is wrong and he starts to be sucked into an ever deepening nightmare that threatens his and his girl friend existence.

The story is told in the 1^st person from Jimji perspective and is based on clear fluid writing equal if not better then Haruki Murakami, which evokes the place and time so that you have a movie in your head. Not necessarily a good thing given some of things that happen.

Beneath the surface is a very different story which leads to conclusions and beginnings that can be misunderstood if psycho thriller is the readers’ sole expectation. We are instead being lead into mediation through the events affecting two desperate characters on what the Western and Japanese experience of loneliness is. The key passage for me is this one.

I remember the American making this particular confession, and the way his voice caught when he said “accept it”. Americans don’t talk about just grinning and bearing it, which is the Japanese approach to so many things. After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you will get through if you just hang in there. I don’t think I could stand the sort of loneliness Americans feel.

Reflect on what is being said here and you will enjoy a taut psychological thriller whose outcome makes perfect sense. Highly recommended

How German Is It = Wie Deutsch Ist Es by Walter Abish

When should victims and their descents stop being victims and when do the crimes of our ancestors stop being our fault? This is territory of How German Is It = Wie Deutsch Ist Es by Walter Abish published in 1981 but set in the 70’s when the post war generation were having to come to terms with their futures and the pasts it was built on. Abish is an American but whose family had fled Europe during the Hitler years.

The central character is Ulrich a writer who is the son of a former high ranking German military officer executed for his role in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. He and his brother a modernist architect are from the aristocratic elite who supported Hitler’s anti-communist stance as a political necessity. We first meet Ulrich having returned to the new post war town and discover that he had been caught up with a terrorist cell who were imprisoned based on his evidence so he and his wife are free. This has serious consequences as it clear that his wife who leaves him believes in the terrorist cause as may one of his girl friends. His brother, Helmuth is helping to build the new Germany and is in cahoots with the Mayor and has a chaotic sex life causing his marriage to fall about. This again ripples through the novel and helps to shape the climax of the story.

A servant who saved the family in the fall of Nazi Germany lives in the new town and serves in the best restaurant and is known and loved by the two brothers. But it’s clear in the web of relationships that build up that not all is as it seems. As the character’s relationships build up a picture of who Ulrich is and why he must react in the final count in the way he does, we also start to discover that the new town is built on the ruins of a concentration camp and a willingness to try and ignore the past. To the point that we begin to see that the terrorists may well be the moralists except they are as much a failure as the bright new town.

It is a political thriller and more as Abish is an experimentalist writer who uses German stereotypes and a central character, Ulrich, who is initially a cipher to builds up the story by switches in narrator, by the author questioning the action or intention of the character or situation etc. As the story unfolds the interaction with the other characters builds in to real psychological studies. The climax and its consequences for Ulrich seek to answer the question of the novel’s title.The novel is highly recommended and for all it being experimental is not a difficult read. It won the American book award(PEN/Faulkner) in 1981 and deserves a wider readership.

Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

The Kobo Abe novel "Woman in the Dunes is a Japanese novel written in the 1960s and was made into a film in the same period. It traces, in a small book of less then 300 pages, the implications of being alienated and the contradictions of conformity freedom if that conformity has a purpose.

Niki Junpei a teacher trapped in a empty teaching job, a failed relationship and a life mapped up to retirement and death goes a secret 3 day trip- done to wind up his work colleagues. He is an amateur entomologist (bug collector!) which in Japan of the period is an equally conforming hobby. (The imagery of trapping, collecting, recording and pinning is an important an important motif.

Junpei is interested in sand bugs so goes to area of sand dunes. When he misses the last bus back, a group of locals suggest he stays the night in their village. They send him down a rope-ladder to a house at the bottom of a sandpit, where a young widow lives alone. She has been tasked along with a handful of other households by the village with preventing the sands from destroying the house (if their houses succumbs to the dunes then the other houses in the village will be threatened).

When Junpei tries to leave the next morning he finds the ladder removed. The villagers inform him that he must help the widow in her endless task of digging sand. Junpei initially tries to escape, upon failing he takes the widow captive, but is forced to release her when the house almost collapses after several days of sand build up outside. At one point he does escape only to be captured and gradually

Junpei eventually becomes the widow's lover but still continues to plot his escape. Through his persistent effort on trapping a crow for messenger, he discovers a way to draw water from the damp sand at night. He thus is able to choose his when he can escape.

At the end of the book Junpei gets his chance to escape, as he discovers what the sand is being used for and that assumption of who bad-good guys are is less clear. He refuses to take it as he now has the power to leave when he chooses and a purposeful if bleak life with a community that depends on him. We at the end of the novel know what the meaning of his official declaration of death that is reported at the beginning of the novel.

The book raised powerful questions on what is our purpose and what we sacrifice if that life is to have any meaning. Its central “character “is the ever changing sand dunes described and struggled with in writing that is evocative, mythical and deeply psychological… the silences, gestures and actions all revealing more in the spaces between. But, and this is important it also suspenseful! Highly recommended.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Maurakami

Do you like your love stories happy, sad and bitter-true? Read on. If you like them sentimental and Mills and Boon is your genre of choice then best to leave now.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Maurakami opens with a Proust like moment as the Beatles tune is played in a German plane in 1987. We are taken back to the emotional triangle of his best friend (Kizuki) and his friends’ girl-friend (Kaoko) The first of many emotional triangles that Watanbe finds himself as the calm centre over the next five years.

He goes to a 2nd rate Tokyo private university in the student driven political riots and campus takeovers of the late 60’s where he makes friends with Nagasawa a secret reader of western classics and a serious womaniser. Or with his roommate, the storm trooper. Both teach him ways of living before disappearing from his life but perhaps not for ever. As the events of his friendship unfolds he meets and falls in love with a free speaking fellow student but this is not his only love so he gradually falls apart as the story moves to its bitter-truth ending

This at one level is the most accessible of Haruki Maurakami novels and the one that sold in millions in Japan making him a superstar. He fled for five years before going back. However it’s no Japanese Love Story which was a sentimental, romantic tearjerker film based upon Erich Segal's best-selling short novel of the same name.The mood is darker but lightened with humour and tenderness so you come to admire and love Watanbe honesty and painful path to adulthood. You also feel part of the ordinary life of 60’s Japan that lies beyond the stereotypes.

The prose has the poetry of the best Japanese writing but with the flow of the best western writing. I got to be a fan of his writing with the very different Dance Dance Dance which blurs genres, and writing conventions but I strongly recommend Norwegian Wood for anyone who like good writing for as Nagasawa says

if you only read the books that every one else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Don't you find that books are like lovers? Some you can’t bear to be parted from, wanting to spend every spare moment in each others arms, share intimate secrets as the relationship deepens so you are changed but heartbroken when the relationship has to end and you both go your separate ways. Yet with others, after the initial excitement of the first date and the promise of the pages to come, it fades, you find excuses not to read, when you do its for less and less time, you get distracted by other books and even start to two-time by skimming them, trying to convince yourself its only a fun no strings fling.

Sadly this is happening with The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. It had all the signs of the great read; political satire, Gothic appearances and interventions by the Devil, suppressed by the Soviets, but... but I have faded starting dalliances with other books such as The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson.Why the fading relationship? Well the usual thing is to say its me not you, I am not ready for commitment, let’s be friends rather then face the pain of saying you are not lovable by me. The killer, as in all relationships, is the minor fault that reveals deeper flaws. For me this is the idiom and speech patterns feeling false. I find it difficult to suspend believe and become part of the world so it remains intellectually satisfying but an emotional famine.

The book was written over the 20's and 30's at the height of the worse excesses of Stalin and would have cost the writer his life had it been found at the time. It’s a period of history I have had a great deal of interest in so it’s even more disappointing that the book feels flat. Its very urban based and concerned with the cultural politics of the intelligentsia but the great disasters of the period, the destruction of the rural classes, wiping out of the party, the show trails, mass imprisonments are barely touched on Perhaps the problem is past relations with other Russians such as Solzhenitsyn who deal with similar themes but with greater distinction. Perhaps because I looking for something that the novel does not have, I am missing what it does offer. Friends of the novel say

Ultimately, the novel deals with the interplay of good and evil, innocence and guilt, courage and cowardice, exploring such issues as the responsibility towards truth when authority would deny it, and the freedom of the spirit in an unfree world. Love and sensuality are also dominant themes in the novel. The novel is a riot of sensual impressions, but the emptiness of sensual gratification without love is emphatically illustrated in the satirical passages

For now, I have decided to not spend more time with my family and stop at Book 2. So am I on a break or is this the end for us? Only time will tell but always more books in the library that I can cherish and love... And dear reader, my spurned lover could be the passion of your life so make a date and enjoy the bitch about the failures of ex’s if the relationship works out.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

You are a decent sort of person, respect the neighbours, keep on the right side of the law. But if you could die in the next few days as you flee your home, possessions and community what then? Could you keep decent, fair minded and above board? These are questions that Irene Nemirovsky explores.

In the first section, Storm in June she explores the impact of the fall of Paris in June 1940 falls and like a pebble falling into a pool we follow how this affects the life of various families and individuals. The Pericand's are an upper middle class family who flee and in the course of the flight the two sons, Hubert and Phillipe discover to fateful costs the depth of their political or religious pretensions. In Gabriel Corte the emptiness and selfishness of many intellectuals is explored and exposed. Or with other characters how the ordinary working class people were mistreated and trampled over.

This is not a history book but a moving story where we dip in and out of peoples lives as they deal with extraordinary events. In the second section, Dolce she explores how French and German lives interweave with each other in a small village two years after the invasion. Some of these characters and events have been touched on in the first section of the book but both sides have virtues and flaws. The writing and tone is superb and runs in the French naturalism tradition(think Zola).

Given the humanity of the writing and the story, its deepens the tragedy that she had escaped the death camps of the Russian Revolution only to die in Auschwitz. These fragments of a planned 5 part novel survived as her young children grabbed the diary as a memento of their mother whilst fleeing and hiding amongst relatives and friends. Their father also being snatched and dying in Auschwitz, a few months after their mother. The daughters found it too painful to read and so didn't discover until the 90's that the small bearable print was in fact the two sections of this novel.

Weep for what may have been and enjoy what we have. Highly recommended even for the fellows.

Review of 253 by Geoff Ryman

I was reading the other day that novels can be divided into two types. One is driven by character and the other is driven by the quality of the writing rather then interest in the characters. 253 by Geoff Ryman is a fine example of how wrong this distinction is. The story at one level describes the journey of 7 ½ minutes on the London Underground from Embankment station, to the Elephant and Castle where it crashes and passengers die. It does this by dipping into the lives of 253 people. Why 253? There are seven carriages on a Bakerloo Line train, each with 36 seats. A train in which every passenger has a seat will carry 252 people. With the driver, that makes 253! It takes place on the 11th January 1995, which is the day the author learned his best friend was dying of AIDS.

Each passenger’s life and thoughts is explore in actually 253 words over three sections as described below.

Outward appearance : does this seem to be someone you would like to read about?

Inside information : sadly, people are not always what they seem.

What they are doing or thinking : many passengers are doing or thinking interesting things.

We work through the characters one by one in each of the seven carriages. As we do we gain a sense of the time moving as people leave and arrive the carriages. In each carriage an incident happens from a shout, to performance art that ripples through the characters thoughts and behaviour.

As you read, you discover connections between passengers, the different reactions of characters to each other and the events. Some story lines are resolved others leave you curious to know more. Several characters make key decisions as they sit and think and some you find out the consequences and some you don’t. All the time as you read you know they are moving to destruction and yet the complexity of their lives continue to unravel. The final carriage and reasons for the behaviour of one of the characters are genuinely moving. In the final sections the crash and who dies is described so ending at random the lives of some the characters and so their stories end but you know the consequences some happy, some tragic some bitter-sweet.

In between the carriage sections are mock adverts and many of the stories have footnotes explaining some fact or the basis of the author’s decisions. These may be true, lies or misleading. It is different and if you want to see and read it an interactive version click on to http://www.ryman-novel.com/.

I highly recommend if for nothing else because of the sheer inventiveness of sketching believable characters in 253 words within a structure that gives pace and emotional depth.