New fiction at the Libraries, June 16
June 16, 2010 – 1:56 PMThe Patience of the Spider by Andrea Camilleri; Translated by Stephen Sartarelli.
PQ4863.A3894 P3913 2008
Camilleri’s agreeable eighth contemporary police procedural featuring the crotchety but insigh
tful Inspector Montalbano finds the Italian detective at home in Marinella enjoying the ministrations of his wife, Livia, after he was shot by a child trafficker in 2006′s Rounding the Mark. But his recuperation is hampered by the demands of a new case: the abduction of Susanna Mistretta, an attractive university student and daughter of a geologist. Unable to trust his colleagues to handle the case properly, Montalbano focuses on subtle anomalies—such as the direction the missing girl’s motorbike was pointed—that suggest the kidnapping is more than the simple extortion attempt it appears to be. The witty writing and acerbic protagonist should appeal to fans of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse.
Ordinary Thunderstorms: A novel by William Boyd
PR6052.O9192 O73 2010
Adam Kindred is in London for a job interview and looking at a bright future. Then he has a chance meeting in a restaurant that results in a series of actions that cost him his family, his money, his very identity. Utterly alone, Adam joins London’s underground society of dispossessed and tries to figure out what happened to his life.
In his surprising new novel (think The Fugitive meets Nobody’s Fool), William Boyd explores how one chance occurrence can evolve rapidly into a life-leveling storm. Boyd manages to breathe new life into the wrong-man tale, weaving together vivid back-stories of intriguing characters, from the hired killer desperate to clean up his mess, to the ruthless executives out for profit, to the hardscrabble individuals Kindred meets while on the run. Ordinary Thunderstorms is anything but ordinary–an ambitious, engaging thriller that also raises questions about identity, religion, and social responsibility.
The Staff Room by Markus Orths; Translated by Mike Mitchell.
PT2675.R78 L4413 2008
Kranich is a newly qualified teacher about to take up his first post. Asmsoon as he arrives at the school he is plunged into a nightmare Kafkaesque world which has all the worst features of a totalitarian state. Very soon he finds himself caught between the Education Authority Police, Secret Security Officers and the CG, the Conspiracy Group, that aims to undermine the school system but only’ verbally, since no one would want to put their own job at risk. The four pillars of the school system, as the headmaster explains on Kranich’s very first day there, are ‘fear, misery, pretence and lies’.
Markus Orths, himself a teacher in his first post, has written a grotesque satire which is both absurd and extremely funny.
First Execution by Domenico Starnone
PQ4879.T345 P7513 2009
When an apparently mild-mannered retired teacher Domenico Stasi learns that a former student of his is being held as a suspected terrorist, he seeks her out to assure himself of her innocence and that his teachings have not created a monster. But she proudly declares her guilt. What’s more, she entrusts him with a task that initially seems a child’s game but soon becomes much more serious. Now someone is watching Stasi. And he has been requested to kill a man. A deadly game has been put into play and nothing can stop its course.
Between Nine and Nine by Leo Perutz; Translated [from the German] by Thomas B. Ahrens and Edward T. Larkin
PT2631.E5 Z4713 2009
In turn-of-the-century Vienna the impoverished, foreign-born Stanislaus Demba, who earns his keep as a tutor of the children of the professional class, must urgently come up with two hundred crowns to take his girlfriend Sonja Hartmann to Italy in order to prevent her from going with the well-off law student Georg Weiner. In a series of highly humorous and intricately-connected vignettes the Czech-born Leo Perutz, himself an immigrant to Vienna, sends the enigmatic and generally unsympathetic Demba cascading through the city in his quest to obtain the needed money even as he strives to conceal his shameful secret. Besides offering a satire of contemporary life in his characterization of the petty bourgeoisie and the upper class, university professors and intellectuals, gallants and flirts, and gamblers and high-class thieves, Between Nine and Nine (1918) also sheds light on the forces that conditioned identity in fin de siècle Vienna: industrialization, misogyny, anti-Semitism, classism, and xenophobia. Through the modern, indeterminate narrative stance, the novel, originally entitled Freedom in its serialized version, ultimately depicts the contingency of self-determination and identity in a complex social milieu. On display in Between Nine and Nine are the author’s skills as storyteller and caricaturist, his subtle and satiric humor, his highly refined aesthetic sensibilities, and his insightful social commentary. Readers unfamiliar with Perutz will find him delightfully provocative.
Night Work by Thomas Glavinic; Translated from the German by John Brownjohn.
PT2667.L53 A8713 2008
Thirty-six-year-old Jonas, a resident of Vienna, Thomas Glavinic’s everyman-type protagonist, wakes up one day and finds that everybody but himself has disappeared: gone without a trace. It’s not clear whether other forms of life are also gone, but he hears no birds nor does he see any stray dogs. No flies buzz and no mosquitoes bite. He does see trees, and the electricity and the hot water (somehow) work.
This is a familiar science fiction premise, but Glavinic’s treatment is pure Kafka. He doesn’t attempt in any way to account for the disappearance (much as Kafka did not attempt to explain how Gregor Samsa became “a monstrous verminous bug”); instead he shows us how Jonas copes with this stupendously extraordinary event.
