A Secret Kept - Tatiana De Rosnay

I read Tatiana de Rosnay's first book, Sarah's Key a couple of years ago (before I had a blog) and really liked it. This sophomore follow up didn't live up to the first books expectations. A Secret Kept starts with Antoine and Melanie Rey going for a long weekend to the seaside French town they vacationed to as children with their parents. Both are going through a mid-life crisis of sorts. 

Antoine is recently divorced from his wife Astrid and is struggling with part-time parenting of his three children - two of whom are full throttling through puberty. Melanie is coming off a long term relationship with a man who swore he would never get married just to up and impregnate and marry a woman 15 years his junior within weeks of the breakup. They both need some time and space away from Paris.

However, on the drive home Melanie wrecks the car and nearly dies after attempting to tell Antoine some long held family secret. The secret however, is hardly worth the build up and the letters from the past used to hint and then reveal the secret are easily the worst contrived writing in the book. I honestly thought the rest of the prose was well done but the letters were the hardest part to get through. 

So the great family mystery doesn't really seem much of a mystery and all the characters who have a stake in the mystery just up and die or are already dead so there's no real effect of learning the secret. So many people died in the second half of this book I thought maybe George RR Martin was ghostwriting. 

The book probably would have been better if it didn't try to pass itself off as a mystery and instead was a straightforward character examination of a man in a mid-life crisis. Antoine was the most well flushed out character and I actually enjoyed his journey. The characters also make some non-conventional choices which I enjoyed, even if it did leave the ending a bit unfulfilling.

3/5 Stars. 

Food: A Love Story - Jim Gaffigan

I'll just say if you like Jim Gaffigan, you'll like this book. A lot of these jokes come from his most recent tour and of course since the book is about Food, the Hot Pockets jokes are told again. But there's something familiar and comforting about his comedy - like a grilled cheese. He's funny but not edgy funny. No biting sarcasm or deeper humor than self-deprecating jokes about his desire and ability to eat basically everything.

After all, "a cucumber is just a pickle before it started drinking."

Some of the jokes are interesting considering his wife just went through a close call with a brain tumor and I wonder how his comedy will change over the next year. I'm sure some of it will make for good material. A comic's brain likely never stops working that way.

I listened to the audio version of this book so it really was like listening to Jim's standup routines.

A star rating won't make much of a difference on this one but I laughed out loud several times and enjoyed myself so 4/5 Stars? 3/5 Stars?

Ploughshares Summer 2017 Issue - Guest-Edited by Stewart O'Nan

This edition was kind of all over the place in the quality of short stories but the good ones were just SO good. Of course now that I look over the list of those I liked, I realize that really there were only two or three I wasn't thrilled about and so many that were very good. 

The first story, Fair Seed-Time, poor American Richard bikes his way from Calais all the way to Denmark drunk with young love to see Allabella, a beautiful Jewish orphan of France's WWI Resistance movement. Allabella has been put under the custody of Mr. Jens, who sent Allabella abroad to England for school, where she meets Richard at Oxford. After the school term is over, Richard makes this grand plan to take a ship across the channel to Calais and see Allabella. When he arrives, Allabella is in bed, having fallen and hit her head by the sea. It turns out Richard hardly knew her at all and is stuck with his ruined expectations. It's a singular moment that is really illustrative of the entire process of growing up.

Julia and Sunny is the story of a couple who are going through a divorce. Through the lens of their rather shallow friends, we see the beginning and the end of Julia and Sunny's marriage and the hurt feelings of the friends who, having started as Julia's friends, were hoping to get Sunny in the divorce. 

I'm still processing my thoughts on Tandem Ride, which features a young teen, Gneshel, placed with Rabbi Spitz's family by her poor parents. Gneshel has an opportunity to go to school for a reduced rate, where Spitz is the headmaster. However, Spitz has other designs for the "services" Gneshel can provide his family. In the story, we see a grown Gneshel struggle with feelings of guilt over eventually telling someone about her relationship with Rabbi Spitz, leading to his ouster and the destitution of his family, and her feelings of guilt over thinking she wanted to have a relationship with him and bore some of the blame for what happened. This kind of victim guilt is painful to read. 

I loved The Candidate, which tells of a sandwich store worker who makes a late night chicken salad sandwich for presidential candidate Bill Clinton. It clearly has echos to the most recent election and was a smart well put together narrative. 

Ten Thousand Knocks was a great story about an enforcer for a shady loan company. Kei's job is to make people pay up when they are behind on their rent. He questions his humanity and whether he can do the things he's being called on to do in the job, all while having a supremely clinical approach to the entire issue. 

Thin Scenery. Okay so this is by Stephen King, so you know this is good. My favorite Stephen King works are all his short fiction. The man is a genius. The Body, Apt Pupil, Rita Heyworth and the Shawshank Redemption - these are all short stories! This man is amazing. I think he likely just has short story material wandering around in his head at any given moment. Anyway, Thin Scenery is a play within a play where one of the characters knows it is a play and is tormented by the fakeness of his life and everything he sees. Some of the characters are also aware of the "4th Wall" while others aren't. The overall effect is extremely creepy and wonderful. All hail Stephen King. 

Jollof Rice and Revolutions was a great story about a group of girls at a boarding school in Nigeria. When they set out to oppose the principal for nefarious deeds, they stage a riot and the result is more devastating than they planned. The interaction between the girls, and the various ways their class and pedigree play into the reaction to the riot is well done. 

Other Mentions:

Also creepy was Spectral Evidence. A story of a medium who feels like a fraud, but is harboring a terrible truth. Midnight Drives is a sad little story about a teen coping with the loss of his brother and its effects on his friends and family shown through the deterioration of the brother's car.

4/5 Stars. 

The Last Days of Night - Graham Moore

I really loved this book! I'm recommending it to everyone because it's so well done. 

The Last Days of Night chronicles the "current war" of the 1880s between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. No, A/C D/C is not just a band, they are the two types of current in which electricity flows. Thomas Edison was a proponent of direct current. George Westinghouse was accused of infringing on Edison's light bulb patent and so Edison sued him for $1B dollars. That's a lot of cheddar. 

In order to get around the bulb issue, Westinghouse adopted Nikola Tesla's alternating current (it didn't work for his lawsuit defense). The two men at times shamelessly worked against each other to promote their own system of electrifying the country, including a smear campaign aimed at alternating current which led to the invention of the electric chair. The first execution was terribly botched and actually proved alternating current was too safe to be used for murdering people. 

This book has it all, an upstart attorney, Paul Cravath (who would go on to develop the system of associate to partner track attorneys that now exists at law firms all over the world) a singing soprano with a past, a wiley inventor who answers to no one, and two industry barons trying to outdo each other. Yes Graham Moore took some liberties with the timeline and dialogue, but overall it's such great history that it's hard to believe it all isn't fiction.

Addition: And OMG this is going to be a movie with Benedict Cumberbatch. Click Here. 

4.5/5 Stars. 

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats - Jan Philipp-Sendker

I can't remember when I first learned of this book, but it's been on my to-read shelf for quite a while. All in all it was fine, but kind of a let down because it could have been much better, and I'm not sure if the disconnect is in the original language or the translation, but I'm willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt. In The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, Julia's father abandons his New York family - Julia, an overly one-dimensional mother, and an almost comically absent brother - to return to "Burma," the country of his birth. (Okay so I know the whole Burma/Myanmar naming thing has been an issue since it happened in 1989, with may adherents to the old name refusing to recognize the new one, but even a passing reference to this would have made the book more realistic, instead it reads more of a westernized fantasy about an exotic locale - one of my first issues with the book).

In order to figure out what has happened to her father, Julia travels to Burma (I'm just going to go with it). While there, she meets Uh Ba (apologies for not knowing how to spell any names, I listened to the audio version). Uh Ba proceeds to tell Julia an elaborate tale about the life of her father, Tin Win, his abandonment at a young age, his early affliction of blindness, his reliance on the kindness of a neighbor, and finally, his falling desperately in love with Mimi - a young crippled girl in the village. The dramatic language attributed to Uh Sa stretched the line of credulity for me. I would have preferred a more streamlined straight-forward rendering of the Tin Win/Mimi backstory. I didn't need the added element of it being told by a third party to Julia. 

I'll say this, the Tin Win/Mimi parts were spectacular. Their relationship, the honesty of their love was very well done. Their disabilities don't impact the love they have for one another, even if others consider it a burden. Julia learns some valuable lessons in the meantime and learns to see her father in a new light. 

One of the themes of the book is reliance on free will versus predictions of fate. Tin Win is abandoned by his mother based on the predictions of an astrologer. As a young adult, his life is shattered by a self-interested Uncle who acts according to the predictions of an astrologer. Only Suu Kyi, his adopted mother, Tin Win and Mimi (and Mimi's mother) live outside the bounds of astrology and in the realm of free will. And their lives are richer for it.

3/5 Stars.

The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Sunil Malhotra again beautifully narrates a tale of brothers living separate but irrevocably entwined lives in Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Lowland. (Malhotra also narrated Cutting for Stone - you can read that review here). 

Raised in Calcutta (Kolkata), Subhash and Udayan are inquisitive about the place in which they live and the social hierarchies endemic both of the Indian culture, and the British imperialist relic. It is Udayan who becomes critical of the disparity in wealth and stature which the nearby Tally Club represents, an exclusive golf club for members only. 

Udayan's passion leads him to communist thinkers such as Che, Mao, Marx, Castro. He looks at the world and is impatient with his inability to make a difference, to rise to the level of notoriety achieved by other communist leaders. He becomes more active in the communist party in India, and for it, he pays the ultimate price.

Udayan's misplaced idealism has a chain reaction of negative consequences - his parent's withdrawal and overwhelming sorrow, Subhash's assimilation of the life Udayan was living including marrying Goudi, Udayan's pregnant widow and taking her to Rhode Island where he plans to continue his studies, Goudi's inability to find contentment and love with Subhash and her daughter Bela, Goudi's eventual abandonment of them both to pursue her own academic interests. 

All of the above is told in Lahiri's beautifully woven prose. While some of the characters fail to fully emerge from the page, even as they become the narrators of their story, overall The Lowland delivers a story of one person's destructive effect on generations up and down the familial tree and how those individuals work or not, to overcome the pain and destruction caused.

4/5 Stars. 

X - Sue Grafton

This was a slightly different take for Kinsey. X is the combination of three separate mysteries. First, a woman asks Kinsey to track down a son she put up for adoption who has just been released from jail. Second, Pete Wolinsky, who died in the last novel as part of a bribery scheme, has left a coded message of names of women. Third, two elderly neighbors with suspect motives have moved in next door to Henry. 

The three mysteries are completely unrelated, but all happening simultaneously. The mixture of issues helps to move the book's plot along, especially where it might have petered out in singularity. None of the three mysteries is quite enough to make a novel-length story of its own. It's nice to see Kinsey not quite so hard up for money, but it's equally disturbing seeing her throw around money on hotel rooms all the while knowing she's not getting paid. Her one paid gig in the entire book is over and done with in the first couple chapters. Otherwise she seems to be on the verge of unemployed. 

I received X a while ago on NetGalley in exchange for a review. I fully intended to make it through the earlier novels faster, but it just wasn't to be. Surprisingly though, after so many books following once character, Grafton continues to put out consistently readable and entertaining material. Perhaps she never expected to make it this far. X isn't for anything in this one. It just simply is. 

3.5/5 Stars. 

March Violets - Philip Kerr

Bernie Gunther is a private detective in the volatile world of Berlin in 1936. With the backdrop of the Olympic summer games, Bernie is asked by steel magnate, Herman Six (sorry for the spelling errors, I listened to this one), to find out what happened to a diamond necklace stolen from a safe the night his daughter was shot and killed while in bed with her husband - before their home was set aflame. In the mix are the March Violets, newcomers to the Nazi party with something to prove and status to gain. 

Bernie unravels more than he bargained for as he tries to navigate the changing landscape of power in the Third Reich. Goring, Himmler and Goebbels all make brief appearances to help cement the reader in time. 

As far as noir goes, this novel is spot on. A devastatingly beautiful film actress, secret motives, guns for hire, etc etc, this book has it all. I was able to figure out a very important piece of the story before Bernie, but the plot went in such wild directions afterwards that I was pleasantly surprised by later developments. There is a bit of melancholy which the period evokes that can never be done away with. But Bernie's dogged determination and cynical viewpoint help to move the story along.

It's a bit incongruous to have the book read by John Lee, who is British, and the story occur in Berlin. Lee is a great narrator, but at times it was jarring to hear a cockney accent on a German thug. Written by the British Kerr, the book is one stepped removed from the realism or authenticity a German author may have given to the story - as the jokes are more heavily in the British style of humor than German. 

4/5 Stars.