#103: Dancing to "Almendra"

Dancing to "Almendra," by Mayra Montero 

(translated by Edith Grossman)

(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007)

Summary:
"Havana, 1957. On the same day that the Mafia capo Umberto Anastasia is assassinated in a barber's chair in New York, a hippopotamus escapes from the Havana zoo and is shot and killed by its pursuers. Assigned to cover the zoo story, Joaquin Porrata, a young Cuban journalist, instead finds himself embroiled in the mysterious connections between the hippo's death and the mobster's when a secretive zookeeper whispers to him that he 'knows too much.' In exchange for a promise to introduce the keeper to his idol, the film star George Raft, now the host of the Capri Casino, Joaquin gets information that ensnares him in an ever-thickening plot of murder, mobsters, and, finally, love.

"The love story is, of course, another mystery. Told by Yolanda, a beautiful ex-circus performer now working for the famed cabaret San Souci, it interleaves through Joaquin's underworld investigations, eventually revealing a family secret deeper even than Havana's brilliantly evoked enigmas.

"In Dancing to 'Almendra,' Mayra Montero has created an ardent and thrilling tale of innocence lost, of Havana's secret world that is 'the basis for the clamor of the city,' and of the end of a violent era of fantastic characters and extravagant crimes."

Opening Line:
"On the same day Umberto Anastasia was killed in New York, a hippopotamus escaped from the zoo in Havana."

My Take:
Awesome as that opening line is, I think this was one of those books I'd hoped to like a lot more than I did. More good writing (how I wish I could produce it instead of just recognizing it, but sadly, whatever facility with words I once had, I don't have two original thoughts to rub together), and certainly Batista-era Havana is as much a character in the novel as anyone else. Noir isn't really my favorite genre, though, so I'm probably not the person who'd get the most from this book.
 

#68: The Piano Teacher

The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y. K. Lee

(New York: Penguin Books, 2009)

 Summary:

"In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, Janice Y.K. Lee's debut novel is a tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong Kong. In 1942, Englishman Will Truesdale falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong to work as a piano teacher and also begins a fateful affair. As the threads of this spellbinding novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge-between love and safety, courage and survival, the present, and above all, the past"

Opening Lines:
"It started as an accident. The small Herend rabbit had fallen into Claire’s purse."

My Take:
This was another of those novels that I expected and really wanted to like more than I did. On paper the plot has promise: What will become of the rarefied world Will and Trudy inhabit (though neither really fully belong) as the war comes ever closer? What's happened to Will between the earlier, 1942-43 story line and the 1953 one featuring Claire that keeps him in Hong Kong, now as the Chens' remarkably underutilized chauffeur?

Trouble is, at least from my vantage point, it doesn't quite deliver. We learn what happens to all these people, of course, and naturally, this being a war story, some of the answers aren't pretty. But it didn't feel like we learned enough about what made the principal characters tick to really picture them in these harrowing settings and make us see the events through their eyes. Claire's pilfering habit (not a spoiler, as you learn about it somewhere around the first chapter) is interesting, but Lee barely scratches the surface of why she starts or what the purloined objects mean to her. We're told that her marriage to husband Martin is safe, conventional, and, well, not very exciting, but we don't see enough of Claire to understand exactly what she wants beyond that. Likewise, Will is a promising character I never really felt like I understood. As a prisoner of war, he shows not quite heroism, but a quiet, understated integrity and strength ... which doesn't quite jibe with how passive he seems in his relationship with Trudy.

Perhaps there's some meta-commentary here, but I found myself feeling like I imagine Lee's two chief European characters felt in Hong Kong: like a fish out of water, with things not quite fitting together as you'd expect. Not awful, and maybe I'm just not getting it, but the book didn't really resonate with me, either.

#75: Dreams of Joy

Dreams of Joy, by Lisa See (New York: Random House, 2011)

Summary:
"In her beloved New York Times bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, and, most recently, Shanghai Girls, Lisa See has brilliantly illuminated the potent bonds of mother love, romantic love, and love of country. Now, in her most powerful novel yet, she returns to these timeless themes, continuing the story of sisters Pearl and May from Shanghai Girls, and Pearl's strong-willed nineteen-year-old daughter, Joy.

"Reeling from newly-uncovered family secrets and anger at her mother and aunt for keeping them from her, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father -- the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the Communist regime.

"Devastated by Joy's flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joy's and Pearl's separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in China's history threatens their very lives.

"Acclaimed for her richly drawn characters and vivid storytelling, Lisa See once again renders a family challenged by tragedy and time, yet ultimately united by the resilience of love."

Opening Line:
"The wail of a police siren in the distance tears through my body."

My Take:
Now this was exactly what I wanted -- a novel with some substance to it, but with enough action that I didn't keep plodding through chapter after chapter, waiting for something to finally happen. While technically a sequel to Shanghai Girls, it works just as well as a stand-alone novel -- compelling characters who don't require you to have read the earlier book to get and care about, fascinating setting, interesting plot, and so on.

The jacket summary pretty much captures how the book starts: Joy, having overheard a vicious argument between Pearl and May, has just learned that the woman she's known all her life as Auntie May is, in fact, her birth mother; that Pearl, the mother who raised her, is really her aunt; and Sam, the late father whose recent suicide she blames herself for, was no blood relation to her at all. With typical 19-year-old recklessness, she raids Pearl's not-so-secret cash kitty and leaves home, determined to find her birth father and answer Chairman Mao's call for overseas Chinese to return to the motherland and help build a Communist utopia. If college boyfriend Joe refuses to join her, well, she'll just go on her own.

As any student of history can imagine, this doesn't ultimately go so well. Joy does reach China, and fairly quickly locates her birth father, artist Z.G. Li, in Shanghai. Eager to get to know him, she convinces him to take her along on a trip to the countryside, helping him teach the peasants to create new, realistic, Party-approved art. (She only learns much later that this is a punishment rather than an honor for Z.G., and that he chose it only as an alternative to forced factory labor.) Initially, Joy is all too happy to drink the red Kool-Aid; food is simple but plentiful, and the camaraderie is a balm to someone still smarting from the implosion of her family of origin. Her infatuation with Tao, an uneducated but artistically-promising young man in the village, doesn't hurt, either -- though she remains grounded enough to resist his initial proposals of marriage, insisting that they scarcely know one another.

Meanwhile, the newly-widowed Pearl embarks on her own trip back to China, determined to find Joy and bring her home. She finds work as a scrap paper collector, and is able to secure a room in her family's old, much-the-worse-for-wear Shanghai home, where she waits, patiently, for Z.G. and Joy to return. Eventually, they do, but it's not quite the reunion Pearl had hoped for; Joy remains committed to the Great Leap Forward and shows no inclination to forgive her mother/aunt or return to the U.S., and Z.G. is torn between knowing Red China isn't quite the idyll Joy believes and wanting more time to get to know his newly-discovered daughter. After some tense moments, Joy returns to the countryside and accepts Tao's proposal, while Pearl remains in Shanghai to be as close to her daughter as possible.

By the time the reality of marriage sets in, the commune members have begun to feel the first pangs of the Great Chinese Famine ... and Joy is pregnant. Slowly, but surely, she and Pearl begin to realize both how much more difficult it's become for her to leave, and how important it is for her to do so.

I won't spoil much beyond that, but this really combines the best of both an action/ adventure story and a family drama. Definitely worth recommending or even rereading.

#27: The Irresistible Henry House

The Irresistible Henry House, by Lisa Grunwald (New York: Random House, 2010).

Summary:
"It is the middle of the twentieth century, and in a home economics program at a prominent university, real babies are being used to teach mothering skills to young women. For a young man raised in these unlikely circumstances, finding real love and learning to trust will prove to be the work of a lifetime. In this captivating novel, bestselling author Lisa Grunwald gives us the sweeping tale of an irresistible hero and the many women who love him.

"From his earliest days as a 'practice baby' through his adult adventures in 1960s New York City, Disney's Burbank studios, and the delirious world of the Beatles' London, Henry remains handsome, charming, universally adored -- and never entirely accessible to the many women he conquers but can never entirely trust.

"Filled with unforgettable characters, settings, and action, The Irresistible Henry House portrays the cultural tumult of the mid-twentieth century even as it explores the inner tumult of a young many trying to transcend a damaged childhood. For it is not until Henry House comes face-to-face with the truths of his past that he finds a chance for real love."

Opening Line:
"By the time Henry House was four months old, a copy of his picture was being carried in the pocketbooks of seven different women, each of whom called him her son."

My Take:
Now THAT's more like it!

#58 - Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange

Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange, by Amanda Smyth (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009)

Jacket Summary: "'Men will want you like they want a glass of rum. ... One man will love you. But you won't love him. You will destroy his life. The one you love will break your heart in two.'

"So says the soothsayer, when predicting young Celia's future. Raised in the tropics of Tobago by an aunt she loves and an uncle she fears, Celia has never felt that she belonged. When her uncle -- a man the neighbors call Allah because he thinks himself higher than God -- does something unforgivable, Celia escapes to the bustling capital city.

"There she quickly embraces her burgeoning independence, but her search for a place to call home is soon complicated by an affectionate friendship with William, a thoughtful gardener, and a strong sexual tension with her employer. All too quickly, Celia finds herself fulfilling the soothsayer's predictions and living a life of tangled desperation -- trapped between the man who offers her passion and the one who offers his heart."

Opening line: "I knew about my parents from the things I was told."

My take: An entertaining, if mostly lightweight, debut novel, saved from pure, beach reading, chick-lit-dom by an interesting setting (Trinidad and Tobago) and a likable if misguided heroine.

Then again, "lightweight" and "entertaining" don't quite tell the full story. We know from the first sentence that Celia has never known her parents; her mother, Trini native Grace, died when she was born, and her white British father decamped to Southampton before she was born. Even so, Aunt Tassi's home in a small Tobagan village would be a safe, loving one were it not for Tassi's second husband, the lecherous Roman. Tassi, herself a single mother of twin daughters, seems to think any husband is better than none, and turns a blind eye to Roman's brutality and philanderings. Celia is barely sixteen when Roman rapes her, and makes it clear that Tassi will never believe her over him. Convinced that he is right, Celia flees to Port of Spain with the clothes on her back and what little money she finds in the house.

Two chance happenings on the inter-island ferry shape her destiny. First, she meets William, a homely but kind gardener who works for a wealthy doctor and his British wife in Port of Spain. Second, she falls ill on the crossing, getting steadily sicker and weaker with fever until, once they reach Trinidad, William takes her home to his mother's and eventually summons his employer, Dr. Rodriguez, for help.

Having read the book jacket, I wasn't surprised when my initial suspicions were confirmed: William is indeed the man who comes to love Celia in vain, and it's Dr. Rodriguez who breaks Celia's heart. Unfortunately, this love triangle is probably the weakest part of the book. While Celia's friendship with the gentle William, and his mother's wary mistrust, is believable, the Celia-Rodriguez pairing is far less so. To me, it just seemed too coercive. I could easily understand how the young, isolated Celia could end up becoming lovers with her wealthy, powerful employer, but Smyth doesn't do a sufficiently convincing job explaining what makes Celia fall in love with him. Likewise, I'd have liked more insight into Celia's burgeoning relationship with her Aunt Sula, her mother and Tassi's other sister, who lives in semi-retirement on the country estate estate outside Port of Spain where she worked for decades.

Glad I read this one once, but don't know if it's something I'll come back to.

#27 - Shanghai Girls

Lisa See's Shanghai Girls (New York: Random House, 2009) was another pleasant surprise. I'd read Peony in Love, by the same author, and was pretty underwhelmed; maybe it's that I just can't get excited about a story where the main character is a ghost.

Summary: "In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, full of great wealth and glamour, home to millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister May are having the time of their lives, thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business. Though both wave off authority and traditions, they couldn’t be more different. Pearl is a Dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true Sheep, adorable and placid. Both are beautiful, modern, and living the carefree life ... until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth, and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from Los Angeles to find Chinese brides.

As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the villages of south China, in and out of the clutch of brutal soldiers, and across the Pacific to the foreign shores of America. In Los Angeles, they begin a fresh chapter, trying to find love with their stranger husbands, brushing against the seduction of Hollywood, and striving to embrace American life, even as they fight against discrimination, brave Communist witch hunts, and find themselves hemmed in by Chinatown’s old ways and rules.

At its heart, Shanghai Girls is a story of sisters: Pearl and May are inseparable best friends, who share hopes, dreams, and a deep connection. But like sisters everywhere, they also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries. They love each other but they also know exactly where to drive the knife to hurt the other sister the most. Along the way there are terrible sacrifices, impossible choices and one devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel by Lisa See hold fast to who they are – Shanghai girls."

Opening line: "'Our daughter looks like a South China peasant with those red cheeks,' my father complains, pointedly ignoring the soup before him."

My take: Yes, Shanghai Girls is both a sweeping family story and an immigrant's tale ... but these descriptions alone don't do it justice. The characters are complex and believable; the plot compelling with just the right amount of surprise (neither predictable nor preposterous). As the above summary suggests, the story opens in 1937 Shanghai, where narrator Pearl and her less clever, more charming younger sister May are livin' la vida loca, garnering just the right amount of fame and fortune by modeling for the "beautiful girls" calendars that are ubiquitous to Shanghai advertising.

No sooner, however, have we gotten a taste of the girls' world than it starts to crumble, and ultimately shatters. Initially, Pearl and May defy their father's order to settle his debts by marrying the sons of a wealthy businessman, but then the full story emerges: Baba's creditor is a notoriously brutal gangster, and until he is paid, no one in the family is safe. The sisters have no other choice but to go through with the wedding, spending but a single night with their new husbands before the brothers depart for L.A. To their grave embarrassment, their new father-in-law publicly inspects their bedding in the morning, revealing that while Pearl and Sam have consummated their marriage, May and the childlike Vern have not.

As Sam, Vern, and their parents depart, Pearl and May promise to sail for America in 2 weeks to join them, but have no real plans to do so. That is, until the Japanese army invades Shanghai. Unable to find Baba, the girls and their mother try to trade in their tickets and flee to Hong Kong, but by now, they are but three among countless refugees. They end up hiring a wheelbarrow puller to carry their foot-bound mother as far as he can, stopping at the odd farmhouse along the way for food and rest, until ultimately, the soldiers catch up with them. Mama's attempt to protect her daughters, and later, Pearl's effort to save both Mama and May, have grave, life-altering consequences for all three of them.

All in all, an outstanding story, with a not-too-tidy ending (a plus, in my book). Highly recommended.

#93 - The Cheese Monkeys

I'm a sucker for college novels. Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters (Scribner, 2001) is not typical, nor is it perfect, but it is pretty darned funny in places. The anonymous narrator is, as the book begins, en route to an unnamed State U. to major in art, although he's none too enthusiastic about either one:

Majoring in Art at the state university appealed to me because I have always hated Art, and I had a hunch if any school would treat the subject with the proper disdain, it would be one that was run by the government.

While his first-term art teacher, the is-she-senile-or-just-plain-ditzy Dottie Spang, doesn't do much to dispel his ennui, we can't say the same for classmate Himillsy Dodd, creator of the emperor-has-no-clothes inspired title sculpture. Sure, she drinks too much and too early in the day, has so much artistic talent that she can't bear her peers' sophomoric efforts (and consequently sneaks into the studio and modifies them after hours), and frankly, seems a bit full of herself ... but at least she's interesting and unusual, and the narrator becomes more than a little enthralled with her. While he's quietly frustrated at her romantic unavailability (Himillsy, of course, has a steady boyfriend, the incredibly pompous architect Garnett), an odd friendship develops.

Together with a third classmate, excruciatingly earnest fish-out-of-water Maybelle Lee, the pair find only one art class still open when spring registration rolls around: the newly-renamed Introduction to Graphic Design, taught by Winter Sorbeck. This, my friends, is where the novel really picks up steam. As the Complete Review's review notes, the plot itself is only so-so, partly because Himillsy's character is so annoyingly self-righteous. (Perhaps it's just that I've been out of college long enough to have forgotten somethings, and on a campus long enough that I know its cliches. Alternately, perhaps the iconoclast really was a rarity in the '50s and early '60s, which would explain why (usually) she shows up and holds such fascination for other characters in novels set on college campuses during that period; Indignation and The Secret History come to mind, and that's just off the top of my head. But I digress.)

But the graphic design assignments and critiques are both biting and hilarious. Sorbeck is merciless, and more than a little crazy. The first class assignment has the students driven out into the middle of nowhere (yes, the same landscape does surround every college town) and expected to find rides home, armed only with a large sheet of posterboard and a permanent marker; later, a faculty art exhibition sees and smells Sorbeck exhibiting a load of crap -- literally. And the hapless Maybelle and kindred spirit Mike -- a non-traditional student with excellent technical skills, but next to no soul -- are positively shredded. Kidd himself is a designer, and apparently a well-known one (I believe this was one of his book covers ), and he clearly knows that of which he speaks. I'm usually a stickler for plot and character, but the art school/ design principles bits here were enough to overcome my usual preferences. Probably won't make my top 10 list for the year, but still an enjoyable read.

#76 - The Outcast

Yet another book set (mostly) during the 1950s; I'll have to shake things up with my next read. The Outcast, by Sadie Jones (Harper, 2008), was excellent: gripping, painful, and heartbreakingly sad. It opens in a small village outside London in 1957, where Lewis Aldridge is returning home to his father's and stepmother's home after a 2-year stint in prison. He doesn't know quite how to behave with his neighbors or even his family, nor do they with him ... but for now, that's all we learn.

Almost immediately, we rewind 10 years to another homecoming: that of Lewis' father, Gilbert, who has just been demobilized after World War II. Both Lewis and his mother, Elizabeth, have grown accustomed to more closeness and less formality than life with Gilbert seems to demands, and continue to quietly enjoy some of their own rituals, like picnics by the river, while Gilbert's away at work.

Their otherwise-ordinary suburban routine, however, is shattered after one riverside picnic, when Elizabeth drowns. Both father and son withdraw into their own private grief, seemingly unaware of or unable to comfort one another. Within a few months, Gilbert finds comfort elsewhere, remarrying the young, naive, and malleable Alice. Lewis, however, has fewer reserves to draw upon, and in his silence, becomes a local curiosity of sorts. His nearest neighbors, the Carmichael girls, continue to seek him out; Tamsin, slightly older, from a combination of pity and craving admiration; Kit, 5 years younger, because she's learned from her own family's dark secrets that people aren't always what they seem, and she has faith that beneath Lewis' numb exterior lies someone kind and good.

Sadly for Lewis, others don't share Kit's conviction, and treat him only with a distant tolerance. This, coupled with his tense relationships with Gilbert and Alice at home, lead him to cut his arms in order to feel something, and ultimately to commit the crime for which he is imprisoned. After his release, he tries desparately to fit in at last, but is thwarted by a complicated relationship with his stepmother, and by the lingering resentment and suspicion of Dicky Carmichael, Gilbert's boss and Tamsin and Kit's father. Ultimately, his efforts to find love and human connectedness expose long-buried skeletons in both the Carmichael and Albright closets.

The story is gripping, and all the characters (with the possible exception of Dicky) are admirably human; Lewis in particular seems an unlikely hero, and he's really not one ... but the book works. Read it.

#75 - Indignation

I'll have you know I broke a personal vow for this one. While I loved American Pastoral and, um, had tremendous respect and appreciation for Sabbath's Theater (translation: the main character was disgusting, but the book so compelling and alive that I couldn't help turning page after page and finding it brilliant), the last few of Philip Roth's books I've read -- The Human Stain, Exit Ghost, The Dying Animal -- have seemed so repetitious, and I'm not a fan of the hackneyed old older-man-rediscovers-passion-with-beautiful-young-thing story line to begin with, that I promised myself I was done with Roth for a while.

Well, then came Indignation (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). The narrator's in his early 20s, so I knew from that alone that Roth would have had to find a new subject to write about. He did, and while Indignation is no American Pastoral, I was favorably impressed. The protagonist, Marcus Messner, is the 19 year old son of a Kosher butcher in Newark in the early 1950s. After learning the business inside-out from his father, and graduating at the top of his high school class, he enrolls at the tiny local Robert Treat College, and is utterly in his element, among working-class strivers of all ethnic stripes, and studying under fiery, radical professors from across the river in NYC. Unfortunately, his father becomes increasingly obsessed with the possibility that some grevious harm will come to Marcus, and that a single false step or careless choice will be his downfall. Nathan's need to monitor and question Marcus' every move leads the latter to transfer to the conservative, ultra-traditional Winesburg College in Ohio ... where his determination to maintain straight As and avoid being drafted and sent to Korea buts up against roommates from hell, a maddening chapel requirement, an overly solicitous Jewish fraternity leader and BMOC, and a beautiful, insatiable young rich girl with a dark secret of her own.

The book's deceptively short, but a good read nonetheless, alternately funny and excruciating. The ending packs a wallop along the lines of Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind; honestly, I gasped when I read it. A fascinating if sobering coming-of-age novel, which drives home the notion that simple, seemingly inconsequential decisions can have grave repercussions.

#74 - Telex from Cuba

This book is one of the reasons I've gotten so behind in my blogging. It took me over a week to slog through Rachel Kushner's Telex from Cuba (Scribner, 2008), and once I finished, I cranked through two others in rapid succession. Granted, part of the delay was due to my having discovered and then overdosed on playing Bejeweled 2 to the exclusion of everything else for a few days ... but part of it was that Telex just didn't really draw me in enough to make me want to read more than a chapter or 2 at a time. The book was fairly well-reviewed in the New York Times, but frankly, a little disappointing.

Don't get me wrong; Kushner's writing is superb. Her descriptions make you feel like you're right there in pre-Castro 1950s Cuba, with all your senses; the book gives you a phenomenal sense of a time and place that few others (at least in the English language) touch upon. The only trouble is that nothing much seems to happen there. The story, if one can call it that, focuses on the American expats who work for the United Fruit company and their families, living lives of privilege amidst servants and tropical flora. It's told primarily from the vantage points of two children: K.C. Stites, rich and privileged even among the American elite, whose white-jacketed, uber-formal Southern father manages United Fruit's Cuban operation; and Everly Lederer, a bookish, upper-middle-class outsider who develops a crush on Haitian houseboy Willy Blousse rather than returning the affections of the far more suitable K.C. Ultimately, the Stiteses, Lederers, and all their neighbors flee to the continental U.S. by way of Guantanamo (no surprise here; we all know which way the Castro revolution ended up at this point).

Until then, though, the book is little but a sketch of the American enclaves in the Cuba of the day. There are a handful of side storylines that I found interesting: Charmaine Mackey's affair with a wealthy Cuban Lothario; Del Stites' typical adolescent rejection of the family he grew up in, and less-than-typical reaction (running away to join Raul Castro's band of rebels in the mountains). Neither of these are sufficiently well-developed to stand as primary plots, though, nor are any of the characters depicted with near as much depth and nuance as the setting. There's also a side storyline about an opportunistic World War II vet and a nightclub dancer that didn't quite seem to fit with the rest of the story, and which I found distracting. All in all, the book probably has some literary merit, and may well be a fitting tribute to the author's family (according to the blurb on the dust jacket, Kushner's mother grew up in one of the American enclaves in Cuba in the 1950s). And I didn't find it awful; the setting was novel and vivid enough to hold my interest, at least enough to make me finish the book. Not one I'll reread or recommend, though.

#72 - The Secret Speech

Today, I finished The Secret Speech, by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central Publishing, 2009). This book is a sequel to Child 44, which I read earlier this year, and it does indeed meet my first sequel test: it stands perfectly well on its own, TYVM, whether or not you've read the earlier one.

The story is set about 4 years after Child 44 ends, though like its predecessor, it opens with a 1949 prologue that sets the stage for the action to come (though here, the relationship between this prologue and the main story is much clearer from the get-go). Lazar, a pragmatic priest who's more or less cooperated with the Stalinist regime, is standing in the crowd, waiting to watch the destruction of his Moscow church. When the demolition is botched, he rushes to save the handful of documents and icons that remain hidden in the building, aided by his wife Anisya and young seminarian Maxim. Alas, he is caught by the authorities -- and shocked to learn that his protege, Maxim, is none other than secret police officer Leo Demidyev. Both Lazar and Anisya are hauled off, presumably to the gulag, as the curtain falls.

Fast forward seven years. After his success tracking down the serial killer in Child 44, Leo's now working in the legitimate (if not well-publicized) homicide division of the Moscow police department. This entails none of the secret arrests and coerced confessions of his old job, and in the intervening years, he and his wife Raisa have, belatedly and tentatively, built an honest, even loving relationship. However, at 14, Zoya, the elder of the two daughters they adopted at the end of Child 44, still hasn't forgiven Leo for his role in her parents' murder. As the story begins, Leo receives a middle-of-the-night phone call from a distraught former colleague. Thinking him merely drunk, Leo advises the man to go back to sleep, and promises they'll talk in the morning.

And then all hell breaks loose. Rising party leader Krushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin's purges and cult of personality has just been made public, with tremendous consequences. Leo's panicked colleague, terrified that his wife and children will learn of his role in Stalin's brutalities, murders them in their sleep before killing himself. Zoya is inspired to stand up in school and denounce Stalin herself; not surprisingly, she and Raisa (a teacher) are soon looking for a new school. She then offers Raisa a startling ultimatum: if Raisa wants Zoya to live with her and behave as her daughter, she must leave Leo. (Did I mention that, in all the confusion, Leo puts two and two together and realizes that someone in the doorway the night of the phonecall + a mysterious knife on his floor = Zoya plotting to kill him in his sleep?)

However, before Zoya can make good on her threat, she is kidnapped. The culprit, not surprisingly, is a specter from Leo's past: Anisya, now d/b/a Fraera and leading a cell of an increasingly powerful underground gang, the vory. Fraera has an ultimatum of her own for Leo: either he must free Lazar from the gulag where he's spent the last seven years, or Zoya will be executed. While restrictions have loosened in the wake of Krushchev's speech, there are still limits ... and in order to save Zoya, Leo must pose as a prisoner himself, and come face to face with the fate to which he consigned so many others. Moreover, even when he completes his mission, he learns that Fraera has only begun to extract her revenge.

The Secret Speech takes us from Moscow to the wasteland of the Gulags to the doomed Budapest uprising of 1956, and has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as did Child 44. Great literature this isn't; none of the characters are especially well-developed, and (yes, I know this is a frequent complaint of mine with novels of a certain style) many of the scenes have a slightly-implausible, Hollywood action movie feel to them. Nonetheless, it is exciting (mostly; the pacing was a little off in places), and it raises some intriguing questions about how cruelty affects the perpetrators, and what's left when a brutal, repressive system is suddenly discredited. If you like spy novels and/or James Bond-style action, you'll probably enjoy this one.

Book 32, Child 44

What an interesting premise for a book. I finished Child 44, Tom Rob Smith's debut novel, last night, and only just now learned that it's loosely based on the true criminal exploits of Andrei Chikatilo in the Stalinist-era USSR. Perhaps that's proof that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction.

At any rate, Child 44 is part murder mystery, part spy thriller, and if you'll pardon the pun, the combination makes for quite a novel read. After a brief but harrowing opening vignette in the famine-ravaged Ukraine of the 1930s, in which two brothers go into the woods on a desparate hunt for meat, but only one returns, the story jumps forward to 1950s Moscow. Here, we meet our protagonist, Leo Demidov, a war hero-cum-secret police officer who appears to be at the top of his game. Possible methamphetamine addiction aside, Leo's unwavering Party loyalty and ruthlessness have served him well; he's risen rapidly through the MGB ranks; has a beautiful wife, Raisa; and has been rewarded with a comfortable apartment of his own and cushy jobs for his aging parents. Moreover, Leo is not just a good politician or an expert spy; he's a true believer in the aims of the State, and in whatever brutal means are necessary to achieve them. When a fellow officer insists that his young son Arkady was murdered, this makes Leo an excellent choice to set the grieving family straight: Arkady's death was a tragic accident, to be sure, but as Stalin's USSR is a worker's paradise, crime -- even murder -- simply doesn't exist.

The limits of Leo's loyalty are tested when, after butting heads with long-time rival Vasili during the capture and torture of a "spy" who turns out to be just an ordinary veterinarian, he finds Raisa's name inserted into a coerced confession. Despite his suspicions, he refuses to save his parents and himself by denouncing her. Given the many interrogations and punishments he himself has administered on the State's behalf, he's not surprised by the 4 a.m. arrest that follows, but he is deeply stricken to learn that Raisa never loved him in the first place, and married him only for the sake of fear and survival. The pair are shipped off to a meager apartment in a remote Ural outpost, where Leo is assigned to a low-level militia job under the command of General Nesterov. Here, he gets involved in investigating the killing of a teenaged prostitute. While the locals are content to pin the blame on a mentally disabled man, Leo recognizes the graphic details as being identical to those reported in Arkady's murder. With Nesterov's grudging support, he sets out to find a pattern and stop the killer ... never mind that no crime records are kept, so there's not much to go on, and if he's discovered, he and his parents will be sent to the gulag or worse.

According to one review, Smith initially envisioned Child 44 as a movie, and it has the feel of one. In many places, he effectively conveys a mood with just a few pointed details. There's one particular escape-and-chase scene I could almost picture watching on the big screen as I read it, and the opening description of a region so beseiged by famine that people boil their shoes and eat bark to stave off starvation is positively haunting.. The only colorful or bright thing about the story is its stark red and white covers; in between, the reader really feels the grey, suffocating nature of the omnipresent Stalinist regime.

Unfortunately, the characters were also a bit monochromatic; by the end of the novel, we've learned a fair amount about Raisa's past and motivations, but little about any of the other principals'. In Leo's case, this may be deliberate -- he believes so completely in the rightness of the State that he really has subsumed his own individual memories -- but it's not clear how he got that way or why the story's events precipitate a change. It's also been suggested that Vasili's intense loathing of Leo needs further explaining, though I'm not sure I agree. As I see it, both Leo and Vasili are just trying to survive, politically and personally -- a situation that's made enemies in far less cut-throat professions than this one.

I do, however, think the ending seems to wrap things up a bit too tidily, given the grim nature of most of the story. The professional side of the resolution was amusing (yes, I'm deliberately being vague so as not to spoil it), but the rest just felt a little too happily-ever-after to ring true. Nonetheless, I found the book up until these last few chapters exciting and intriguing -- enough that I've added Gorky Park and The Gulag Archipelago to my "must read" list, in keeping with the theme. If you enjoy a good spy novel with a decent amount of meat to it, I'd recommend this one.

Next up: Political intrigue enters the 21st century, with Our Lady of Greenwich Village, and then it's on to Marriage, A History ... which is bound to raise some eyebrows during a visit with the in-laws!