Author: whatmeread

Day 223: 206 Bones

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Cover for 206 BonesPerhaps I am outgrowing Kathy Reichs’ Tempe Brennan series because I don’t pick them up as often as I used to, but I still occasionally enjoy the novels about the forensic anthropologist who shares her work time between Montreal and her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the beginning of 206 Bones, Brennan wakes up buried in a tunnel and most of the book is a flashback.

On a case in Chicago with her on-again, off-again romantic partner Andrew Ryan of the Sûreté du Québec, Brennan is accused of botching the autopsy of a Canadian heiress named Rose Jurmain. Brennan eventually realizes that someone in the Montreal office is sabotaging her career by replacing bones in her lab. Tempe begins to suspect that the heiress’s death is linked to that of three more women on Canada, but she is impeded in her investigations by the drama at her workplace.

I find the Tempe Brennan books that take place in Montreal more interesting than those in Charlotte for some reason, perhaps because they seem more atmospheric. The Tempe Brennan series is the very lightest of mystery reading, but the books are rapidly turning into action novels rather than the interesting explorations in forensics that they started out to be.

Day 222: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

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Cover for The Hare with Amber EyesBest Book of the Week!

In 1994, the world-class ceramics artist Edmund de Waal inherited a collection of 264 netsuke from his great uncle Ignace (Iggie). De Waal decided to trace the history of the netsuke from the time they came into his family, and in doing so, to trace the history of the family itself and the times they lived in. The result is a fascinating combination of memoir, history, art history, and collection of musings on related topics, The Hare with Amber Eyes.

Charles Ephrussi originally purchased the netsuke in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Ephrussis were at that time a wealthy family of bankers, originally from Odessa, who in previous generations had expanded their offices to Vienna and from there to Paris. Charles Ephrussi was not a banker but a noted art collector and critic, friend of Impressionists such as Degas and Manet, and one of the two models Proust used for his character Charles Swann.

De Waal attempts to understand Charles through an examination of his writings and possessions and through events in his time, particularly the effect of the Dreyfuss case on antisemitism in France. Charles’s work in art was an important part of his life, and in this section of the book I was struck by the connection de Waal makes between Japonisme–the interest in and collection of Japanese artifacts, with their focus on nature and everyday life–and the rise of Impressionism, which was considered revolutionary partly because of its focus on nature and everyday life instead of “noble” subject matter such as historical scenes or stories from the Bible or mythology.

In 1899, Charles sent the netsuke to Vienna as a wedding present for his younger cousin Viktor Ephrussi, de Waal’s great grandfather and eventual head of the Ephrussi bank in Vienna. De Waal traced what he could of the life of Viktor and his family, this story culminating shortly after the dual terrors of the Anschluss and Kristalnacht. During this time, everything that this branch of the family owned was confiscated by the Gestapo. In these pages of the book, de Waal does a better job of conveying the fears and anxieties of those times than any of the recent books I have read.

De Waal’s grandmother Elisabeth recovered the netsuke after the war. How they returned to the family is an incredible story that I will not reveal. Shortly after she returned to England with them, where some of the family had made their home, they traveled to post-war Japan with de Waal’s great uncle Iggie.

I have just supplied the barest outline of the fate of the netsuke, which provides a focus for de Waal’s investigations and musings, but the family’s story and the story of their times is fascinating and imaginatively reconstructed. The book is at once a meditation on and enthralling depiction of the life and times of an extraordinary family.

Day 221: The Postmistress

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Cover for The PostmistressIn The Postmistress, Frankie Bard is a radio reporter working with Edward R. Murrow in London at the beginning of World War II. She meets an American doctor during the Blitz who has left his new wife at home to come help in London, inspired by Frankie’s broadcasts. He gives her a letter for his wife right before he is hit by a car and killed.

Instead of mailing the letter, Frankie carries it around Europe for three months while she interviews Jews who are fleeing their countries. All that time, the wife, Emma Trask, doesn’t hear from her husband and is not notified of his death. Frankie also witnesses the murders of innocent people by Nazis and never reports them. She just goes home.

In the doctor’s small Massachusetts home town, the postmistress is Iris James. She doesn’t seem to be that important a character, although the book surrounds her with this great mystique that she is the center of the village because she knows all its secrets. What she actually does is withhold a letter to Emma from Dr. Trask’s landlady saying that he has disappeared, and she does this because Emma is pregnant.

I felt this book was entirely frustrating, because I found the characters’ actions inexplicable. What kind of person carries a letter for someone else around in her pocket for three months without mailing it? What kind of reporter witnesses the deaths of innocent people and doesn’t tell anyone about them? A postmistress who withholds a letter from its recipient is disobeying federal law, and I suggest that the upright, responsible Iris wouldn’t think of doing that, let alone reading the letter in the first place. And who would decide it is better for a wife to be left in limbo for years? Trask has already deserted her for the war with very little explanation, which is traumatic enough.

Everything pivotal in this novel seems like a contrivance to me. In addition, the novel that is supposed to be about the postmistress gets hijacked by the reporter, whose actions throughout are irrational. I also feel as though too little attention is paid to the details of life during the war. Frankie’s journey to the continent during the height of German occupation seems to be completed with very little difficulty, and in record time. One reader on Amazon points out that Frankie and her London roommate Harriet have a refrigerator in the room, even though they were uncommon in England in the 1940’s. In other respects, the characters seem oddly untouched by the war. Although Sarah Blake wrote another novel that I enjoyed very much, Grange House, I cannot recommend The Postmistress.

Day 220: The Water’s Edge

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Cover for The Water's EdgeOut on a hike in a park, Reinhardt and Kristine Ris find a child’s body shortly after they pass a nervous man in the parking lot. We know all along that this man murdered the boy, but even after the witnesses see him at the grocery store and notify the police of who he is, lazy police work makes them rule him out. In the meantime, another boy disappears.

As Inspectors Sejer and Skarre investigate, they are fairly sure of the identity of the perpetrator but have limited evidence to go on. They also find that the abuser has himself a history of abuse.

In contrast to Karin Fossum’s excellent The Indian Bride, I feel that The Water’s Edge is a fairly pedestrian effort. It is more about exploring the psychology of pedophilia than about solving the crime, than actually about developing the plot at all. I also don’t feel like I get to know the characters very well, even the police. However, I have not had the luxury of reading Fossum’s books in order, which might make a difference in my feelings about the characterizations. A side plot about the witnesses’ marriage promises to be more interesting than it actually turns out to be.

Karin Fossum is considered the Queen of Norwegian crime fiction. If you haven’t read any of her books, I suggest that The Indian Bride is a more interesting place to start.

Day 219: Joy in the Morning

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Cover for Joy in the MorningI loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but unfortunately, Betty Smith’s Joy in the Morning isn’t anywhere near that calibre. Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Although Annie is only 18, she travels from Brooklyn to a midwestern university where Carl is attending law school. They are married, and the novel is about their first difficult year.

The couple are far away from friends and they have very little money. They go through the expected adjustments and she becomes pregnant. Annie wants to be a writer. Unfortunately, the reader is subjected to samples from diaries, short stories, and plays that are uniformly dreadful. I have to wonder at the couple of professors in the novel who think she might be gifted. (The irony is, of course, that Smith was gifted, and if these samples were really her own from that period of her life, then the professors saw something in them that I cannot.)

The novel often explores trite situations and has a very uniform plot line, without much of an arc. The dialog is extremely unsophisticated. When I read this novel, I hypothesized that perhaps it was Smith’s first. However, it was actually published last, in 1963. As with other Smith books, I suspect that the novel is at least partially autobiographical, although she apparently never admitted that of any of her books.

Day 218: Sea of Poppies

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Cover for Sea of PoppiesSea of Poppies is an absolutely enthralling historical novel, the first of a trilogy. Set in India in the 1830’s, it is centered around the opium trade, which the British East India Company forced upon both India and China. The novel is an ensemble piece, following the fates of several characters who all find themselves by the end of the book on the Ibis, an old slave ship bound for Mauritius.

The novel begins with Deeti. Like the other Indian farmers in her area of eastern India north of Calcutta, she has been forced to replace her food crops with poppies, destined for the Ghazipur Opium Factory. Now she can barely grow enough to feed her family, while the price for poppies sinks. As a girl, she was tricked by her husband’s family into marrying a hopeless opium addict. Soon fate will cause her to leave her home and flee down the Ganges.

Zachary Reid is a mulatto sailor who ships out from Baltimore on the Ibis as an ordinary seaman. A series of misfortunes onboard leave him without officers to sail the ship to Calcutta from Africa with only the help of Serang Ali and his fellow lascars. Once in Calcutta, his employer Benjamin Burnham hires him to help refit the ship and take the third mate position for the voyage to Mauritius.

Raja Neel Rattan Halder, the zemindar of Rashkali, is deeply in debt because of poorly timed investments in the opium trade. Although Neel is careful of the welfare of his hundreds of dependents, he is careless of business and expects to go on in his pleasure-loving ways. But the self-righteous Burnham wants the Raja’s estates for himself.

Paulette Lambert, the daughter of an eccentric French naturalist, has been left destitute by his death. Burnham has taken her into his family out of charity, but she is having a hard time adapting to his household. She is expected to behave like a proper young English lady, but she was primarily raised by an Indian woman, treats her son Jodu like a brother, and prefers to dress in a sari. Jodu has recently returned to Calcutta after his mother’s death and wants to be taken on as a hand on a sailing ship.

The fates of all these characters, and others, converge aboard the Ibis, which is scheduled to journey across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius with a load of indentured workers and then to sail to China to participate in the impending Opium Wars.

The novel is filled with entertaining characters and the colors, smells, and languages of India. It is beautifully written and crammed full of unusual words–Bengali words, sailor and lascar jargon, ornate oriental English, and various patois. The book has a glossary, but it is ironically intended. Comic, cruel, vivid, and deeply engrossing, the novel is rich and teeming with life. Amitav Ghosh’s novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is wonderful.

Day 217: In the Time of the Butterflies

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Cover for In the Time of the ButterfliesIn the last days of the Trujillo dictatorship of the Dominican Republic in the 1960’s, a jeep containing the bodies of three sisters known as “las mariposas,” or “the butterflies,” was found at the bottom of a steep cliff. The three sisters were revolutionaries who were committed to the overthrow of Trujillo, and they were murdered by the regime. In the Time of the Butterflies tells the story of the lives of the three sisters, and their surviving sister Dede.

The novel begins with the young girlhood of Patria, Minerva, Maria Terese (Mate), and Dede Mirabal, narrated by each girl in turn. As life under the regime becomes more difficult and the sisters grow older, one by one they become radicalized until they and their husbands are actively taking part in an underground movement working toward a revolution. The novel depicts their lives in prison and the final days when their husbands are moved to a new prison precisely so the sisters will be forced to drive up that fateful road to visit them.

The novel certainly is interesting and kept my attention, but it was vague in a way that is difficult to describe. I think it assumes a larger knowledge than I have of the state of affairs in the Dominican Republic at that time. Ironically, I also feel as if it downplays the acts of the regime. In my investigations after reading the novel, I learned that the Trujillo regime was responsible for the murders of many people, but the book was not effective in conveying that or the other atrocities committed by the government. Reviews of the book remark that it captures the terror of the time under the regime, but that is exactly what I feel is lacking.

Day 216: Bangkok 8

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Cover for Bangkok 8Previously, I gave a bemused review to Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett. I wish I had started the series with Bangkok 8, the book I am reviewing today, because it provides a lot of context. In this book, we are introduced to Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a half-caste Bangkok cop. He and his partner Pichai are lifelong friends and arhat, devout Buddhists and uncorrupted police officers in a city where corruption is rife.

Sonchai and Pichai have been ordered to follow William Bradley, a retired marine. He picks up a beautiful woman before they lose him in traffic. Later, they find him in his car, where the doors have been jammed shut and a python is attempting to eat his head. After they open the door, they discover too late that his car has been filled with cobras. Pichai is bitten in the eye and dies. Sonchai then vows to find and kill the person responsible.

He is soon requested to meet with the FBI, who are investigating a powerful American associate of Bradley’s–a jeweler named Sylvester Warren who supplies magnificent gems and artifacts to the wealthy of the world. The FBI agents believe that Warren hired Bradley to import jade and commission replicas of ancient sculptures so that Warren can sell them as authentic. However, Warren’s connections make him too powerful to touch either in the US or in Thailand.

The woman who was on the motorcycle proves difficult to locate or identify, even though she is strikingly tall and has unusual multi-colored hair. As Sonchai investigates further, he finds a tangle of secrets and dark deeds.

This novel provides a lot of background about Sonchai and is full of rich descriptions of the city and its occupants. It is also darkly funny. Burdett does an excellent job of conveying the flavor of the city. The mystery is dark and complex, involving the sex industry, drug smuggling, and connections to the Russian mafia and Cambodian thugs, but it is also entertaining. Sonchai’s insights into, for example, the other characters’ past lives, lend additional spice to the mix. This series is not a traditional one but offers something fresh.