This Night's Foul Work
Fred Vargas

This is the first of this series featuring a quirky French inspector and his colorful squad of detective that I had come across. I enjoyed it and was willing to suspend my disbelief enough to swallow the preposterous plot.
The squad is headed by the rather morose and dreamy Commissioner Adamsberg who relies on instinct and inspiration rather than the plodding footwork, lengthy interrogations and forensics favored by his illustrious forebear Inspector Maigret. At one crucial point in this story, he sets loose a fat and lazy cat to track down a colleague whom he believes has been abducted and is in mortal danger. The cat travels 38 kilometers across Paris while a police helicopter hovers overhead. Its completely ridiculous -- but fun.
Other characters include a lieutenant who speaks in verse (alexandrines in the style of Racine), a collection of taciturn peasants from Normandy, an archeologist who can tell from digging what kind of spade was used to dig a hole and whether the person digging it was a man or a woman. There's also a priest who has lost his faith and who presides over a 14th century manuscript that contains the secret of eternal life that lies at the center of the plot.
Unlike Maigret, Adamsberg is rather indifferent to Gallic cuisine and fine wine. So one doesn't get the vicarious enjoyment of wonderful meals in a pleasant alcoholic haze.
Instead, one gets an education in ephemera. I learned much from this book including the fact that most mammels have bones in their penises and that some also have bones in their hearts. I learned about the decomposition process and the way hair grows after death. Hair is known as "the quick" because it keeps growing after life has fled, hence the phrase, "the quick and the dead." By the time the book ended, I was caught up in the author's spell, less interested in the identity of the serial killer and how he/she would be caught than in the wealth of minutiae accompanying the story.

The Bible Salesman
Clyde Edgarton

This pleasant book evokes a simpler time in the South, spanning the late 1930s to the early 1950s. In a way, it's a song of praise to the virtues of innocence and ignorance before we were all corrupted by too much knowledge and infected by cynicism.
Henry, a young man who has been brought up by his aunt and two uncles after his father died and mother abandoned him, is trying to make his way in a world he barely understands. His idea is to send away to churches for free Bibles and then sell them to unsuspecting housewives in the Carolinas and Georgia. Henry is not a saint -- but he has an undeniable goodness and sweetness about him and these provide his armor in a world less friendly than he imagines.
Henry falls in with a car thief who tells him he's working for the FBI breaking up criminal gangs. Yes, Henry falls for this incredible story and becomes an accomplice.
The author has effortlessly taken us back to a time which may have only existed in his own imagination, where folks are polite, well-intentioned, God-fearing and charitable. In his version of the South, there's no racial prejudice -- in fact no African Americans at all.
Henry is trying to figure out some of the contradictions in the Bible. Why are there two versions of the creation story in Genesis? What is original sin? Is there really a heaven? He's a sweet and endearing creation himself -- you can't help rooting for him.
Henry meets Marlee, a girl selling fresh produce at a fruit stand, and the two embark on one of the loveliest, most innocent love affairs I've read for years. Truly, they are like Adam and Eve in the Garden.
The various plot strands are eventually rather clumsily resolved -- but this is scarcely the point. We're left with an image of enduring goodness. Truly, ignorance is bliss, the author suggests. Eat from the Tree of Knowledge and misery will result.
So we leave our hero and heroine on their honeymoon, blissfully contemplating the sea, the moon and the stars, asking unaswerable questions about the nature of existence, content they will never know the answers. It's a lovely fantasy -- and a sweet excape from reality.

Dearest Anne
Yehudit Katzir

I'm a little conflicted about how to review this book. On one hand, it's well-written and provocative and it does present a beautifully-observed time capsule of Israel in the late 1970s when the country's youth was freeing itself from the strictures of classic Zionism and opening itself to the world of hedonistic sexual liberation.
It's also rich in literary allusions (curiously, one scene refers to Goethe's poem, "The Erlking" which also looms large in my own book The Nazi Hunter: A Novel
On the other hand, there's something very nasty and vile at the center of the book that the author only half-acknowledges -- an affair between a 14-year-old girl and her 28-year-old English teacher.
The fact that this is a lesbian affair didn't bother me. The fact that such blatant child-abuse is presented as something beautiful and precious did.
The book is cast in the form of a diary written by 14-year-old Rivi Shenhav. Inspired by Anne Frank who wrote her diary to an imaginary friend she called "Kitty", Rivi writes her diary to Anne and signs her entries Kitty. Some suggested this device is disrespectful to the Holocaust and the memory of its victims. I don't agree. It's an effective framing device and makes the point that in many ways Rivi gets to live the life Anne was denied by the Nazis. Rivi and Anne share many characteristics, not least a literary talent and poetic sensibility. I can definitely imagine a young Israeli girl identifying with Anne. It may be that Katzir is arguing for a more nuanced way for Israelis to grapple with the Holocaust and memory. Two scenes regarding the way Holocaust Memorial Day is observed in her school in Haifa make that point in interesting ways.
Rivi is bruised by her parents' divorce and her father's inexplicable decision to shun her. Lonely, nerdy and miserable, she hero-worships her literature teacher Mihaela, a married women with flaming hair who seems like the only sympathetic adult in her life. Soon, a love affair develops between them, which persists for almost two years. Rivi presents herself as the sexual aggressor but we gradually learn that she is far from being so.
Mihaela is the pivotal character of the book. She deceives her husband to carry on with this young girl -- but we later learn she is also capable of betraying Rivi. In one revolting scene, she lures Rivi to a tryst with a 50-year-old sculptor; the two of them get the girl drunk and drugged and try to engage in a threesome aimed at relieving Rivi of her "hetrosexual virginity." Perhaps she also wants to sour the young girl from men for ever.
As an adult, Rivi confronts her former teacher and asks, "How could you have done what you did?" Mihaela responds that she did it for love. But the scene is unsatisfactory. Neither Rivi nor the author force Mihaela to give a full moral accounting of her actions.
And yet, it is Mihaela and not Rivi who seems most damaged by the affair, which seems to me another blatant evasion by the author.
The gay and lesbian community in Israel rejected this book -- and one can see why. Lesbianism is presented as a choice (the older Rivi has affairs with men, marries and has two daughters of her own) and it is also conflated with the very touchy issue of pedophilia.
I too found the many mixed messages problematic. Rivi reverts to hetrosexuality and traditional motherhood and is rewarded by "happiness" while Mihaela continues to prey on younger female student, develops cancer and dies in her fifties. What is Katzir trying to say here?
There are many complex strands here, which is what makes the book interesting and worth reading. But the message ultimately seems not just subversive but curiously perverse.

Dale Loves Sophie to Death
Robb Forman Dew

This novel follows a family through a hot summer in Ohio. Nothing tremendously dramatic happens and the characters are all fairly normal Americans going about their lives but by the end of the book we feel we know them inside and out.
This book is beautifully written and Dew subjects her cast of characters to deep analysis -- she is much more penetrating and observant when examining her invented people than most real humans are about themselves. She sees and hears everything but she refuses to judge.
The author remains studiedly neutral even when the husband has a brief and foolish affair and the wife willfully neglects the health of one of her kids. The characters are sometimes appealing and sometimes maddening and always quite real.
That's the strength of the book. The weakness is that by the end one can't help wondering a little why it's been worth the time and investment to get to know these people who are so uniformly ordinary and mediocre.
But I think the author's intentions go beyond that. She's using these people to compose a portrait of a specific time and place -- the place being Smalltown Aywheresville America (the midwestern "heartland" venue being quite deliberately chosen) and the time the end of the 20th century.
So we're left with a very well-composed study of ordinary people living ordinary American lives with their pluses and minuses, their strong and weak points. By the end of the book, the reader reacts almost like one of the characters looking back at one of those golden summers of childhood and wondering what made it so wonderful.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami

Like the author, I am both a novelist and a runner -- but he's far better at both than I will ever be. Murakami has run more than 30 marathons -- me just one. He's written numerous novels -- me just three (and two of those still to be published). So it was with great anticipation that I began this book.
I found it clearly written and engaging but disappointingly slight -- the kind of book an author writes to make a few extra bucks when he's become well-known and successful enough to sell just about anything on the strength of his past record and reputation.
There are a few nice observations about life and running and the connection between them and some mild philosophizing on encroaching old age and how to approach it. But in general, I had the sense that the author was as much hiding his true self as revealing it.
His description of writing his first novel is fairly typical. He's watching a baseball game (he gives the exact date) and it's the top of the second inning and someone gets a hit and at that precise moment, Murakami decides it would be fun to write a novel. A few months later, it's written; a few months after that, it's won a prize. Just like that, easy as pie.
Running is much the same. Occasionally there's some pain but mostly it comes easy, mile after mile after mile. He gives his muscles their marching orders and usually they obey. A couple of times, there are relative failures (in running but not in writing) and the legs seize up. But in general, no challenge is too great that it cannot be overcome.
As the book wore on, my general envy passed. One can't be jealous of Superman. At the end, I found myself regarding Murakami, not as a fellow runner and writer, but more of a phenomenon whose brain and body are constructed of different materials from mine.
And I found myself, while admiring him, also somehow disbelieving him.

A Manuscript of Ashes:
Antonio Munoz Molina

There's something hypnotic about the long, languid sentences that make up this book and that force the reader to pay attention to every nuance and every metaphor because within the serpentine alleys of the writer's prose lurk all kinds of mysteries and clues, which may or may not be true.

The book is set in Franco-era Spain and tells the story of a young university student, Minaya, who retreats to his uncle Manuel's mansion in an ancient city called Magina to write the biography of Jacinto Solana, a neglected poet the old man once knew. He quickly finds himself delving into a curious love triangle, while falling under the spell of a mysterious serving girl who works in the mansion.

The book darts back and forth in time from the years before the war to the the war itself to its bitter aftermath, sometimes changing time within the same paragraph. The effect is to produce a dreamlike narrative where nothing is quite what is seems and nobody can be trusted.

The cast of characters also includes a pro-fascist sculptor who mass produces saints, the bitter old Dona of the household, a gay artist, Solana's stern father, a proud peasant farmer, his Communist lover and other assorted types. I wish I knew more about the Civil War because I take this book partly as an allegory about the fate of Spain during those tragic years. Clearly the author has no sympathies with the fascists but he is equally stern about the Republicans. In one scene, a suspected Falangist spy is lynched in the town's main square. The message seems to be that whereas the right was bathed in butchery, the left also suffered a grievous moral failing.

Minaya uncovers a startling secret and the story becomes a weird mystery story. How exactly did the beautiful, yet elusive Mariana die on her wedding night?

The answer is surprising -- and yet the plot and its resolution is secondary. Days after I finished this book, its peculiar beauty stayed with me, a little like Spain itself -- fascinating, languid and with a dark edge of violence.

McMafia by Misha Glenny
This is an eye-opening and shocking look at the burgeoning business of international crime. Glenny is an expert travel guide to some of the murkiest and most sinister corners of the world and he fills his account with colorful episodes and anecdotes. Even more valuable, he does a masterful job of explaining the political background and errors that enabled these international criminals to flourish.
Glenny is strongest when discussing the Balkans (his area of expertise) and the former Soviet Union and its satellites. He explains how the United States turned its back on Russia after the end of the Cold War. As central authority fell apart, shadowy mafias formed alliances with former KGB officers ready to smuggle arms, prostitutes and drugs to a hungry European market.
Glenny looks at the rebel Russian enclave known as the "Independent Republic of Transnistria" between Ukraine and Moldova which became a virtual mafia fiefdom. Under President Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine made crime and criminals part of government and the port of Odessa became a key transhipment point.
We also look at the Russian mafia in Israel and the sordid and tragic business of forced prostitution of naive young girls from the former Soviet Union.
Next it's on to Nigeria, which Glenny calls a "Potemkin State" where corruption rules everything and where the computer scammers who trap greedy and ignorant westerners are hailed as national heroes.
We take side trips to South Africa, Dubai, China and Japan. Wherever you turn, enterprising and ruthless criminals are carving out empires, playing on the greed and stupidity of westerners and their perverse desires for illicit sex and drugs.
We in the West are the ultimate fools in this scenario -- because we are the customers.
The chapter explaining the nexus between Colombian cartels and the United States was the only part of the book I felt had been overtaken by events. President Uribe has managed to largely break the cartels and the FARC guerrillas -- only to have their role usurped by even more bloodthirsty Mexican gangs spreading murder and mayhem all the way to the U.S. border and occasionally beyond.
Here is a key lesson: as soon as one mafia is broken, another arises to take its place.
This is an important book. It explains how crime has gone global. These gangs may differ in the commodities they sell or the things they steal but they are alike in their utter ruthlessness and disregard for human life. They operate with incredible cruelty.
Glenny's theory is that global crime has been spurred by technology, the disappearance of trade and other barriers and of course the huge disparity between the world's rich and poor.
It's an upsetting book in many ways. Police and law enforcement agencies struggle with inadequate resources to combat the scourge. They occasionally score some successes -- but the problem only grows.