Start a 43T book club

Author: Stieg Larsson

The girl in the title is an investigator. She is woven into the story as one of two main protagonists.

The story takes place in Sweden on the eve of a dramatic stock market collapse, and we are treated to the prelude to that event.

Translated from Swedish, highly readable, not your average mystery/thriller. The women are no less strong, intelligent, capable than the men, and also no less disgusting. Ethics and moral certainty are pushed to the limits.

I give this book a high recommendation. BTW – there are two more books by the same author, forming a trilogy, and the author died of a heart attack. The two books are coming in 2009 and 2010 in English language version.

Very richly observed, cinematic, droll. The author is now the managing director of Conde Nast magazines. The scenes are textured. You have the sense of fully being there.

I was sitting in the hot tub at the beach reading in the afternoon, and it was an interesting juxtaposition, to travel between the English countryside in the winter time to the California coast on a gorgeous summer day, just by turning my eyes one way or another.

That the formula or device behind the story is so transparently one disaster gives way to one just a bit worse than the last is forgiven. The characters are interesting, and as Anthony’s view and tolerance of them change, so does the reader’s.

The renovation of the family castle is ever so much fun to read, from the plans of the flowers and bunnies second wife’s never carried out fantasies, through the elaborate and painfully expensive uber-efforts of the second wife – it is a rare walk through the lives of people unlike any I have ever known or ever would know. And as easy to see as any TV show of lives of the rich and famous. If that makes any sense. It is an intensely visual book.

There is about 1/6 or so left to go.

And you are into the genre of the mystical magical earthiness of South American writers, try Cellophane, by Marie Arana.

It is lyrical, with so much heart.

Like sushi is my favorite cuisine, this sort of South American writing is my favorite genre. It captures the soul of people like no other.

When there is a plague of truth telling on your house, and you live with your brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands and children, and there is the children’s teacher with a really nice butt living there too, plus the exotic people from all over who ride in on the river, it is a story like a movable feast.

He was watching for the teacher, and lifted his hat. 43 yellow butterflies flew into the skies. The village people said Victor lifted his hat and his brains flew out his ears. not a quote, a paraphrase.

My career is currently devoted to the actuality, not the genre. Slowly, inexorably, I am losing fascination with the “good guy” end of it. There are no longer “good” and “bad” guys in the world – just people with different agendas, different anger levels, and certain affinities for conniving, cheating, and mayhem. _{and some are writers}

A couple of books – “A Million Little Pieces” and “My Friend Leonard” by James Frey came out in the last couple of years, in the style of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”. Posing as true crime, they are actually fictionalized fact. Unlike Capote, Frey is not apparently manipulating the life and death of anyone else, although not even that is clear. The books are entertainingly written, drag the reader deep into the writer’s strange world of maleficence, and were passed off initially as biographical. It is an interesting exercise to read the books, then wonder how they would have done in the genre to which they rightfully belong – fiction. The truth of the matter is that Frey was unable to sell the story as fiction. Why should it make a difference? And Frey did it not just once, but twice!

An interesting contrast and compare read is something I picked up in the airport for my journey this week: “The Birthday Party A Memoir of Survival”, by Stanley Alpert.

Alpert was not the survivor of an airline crash, or drug addiction (as is Frey), but of a mugging. Although most people do survive muggings, especially ones where they are not beaten or stabbed or shot, Alpert’s mugging was worth a Penguin True Crime publication. And it has to be because he has a sort of Woody Allen style to his tale. Imagine how Allen would spin the loss of his credit cards to a threatening gun toting gang on the streets of New York City who take him for a ride while they try to figure out how to get at his six figure bank account, and you’ve got the picture.

The more interesting part from my point of view is the police reaction to his tale of woe, once he has gotten through the main part of the survival mentioned in the title.

Alpert assures us that his story is true, only mildly reconstructed, as he must rely on memory for dialogue. It is interesting, again, to compare this with Capote’s style, where he relies on his memory as well, claiming to have 94% recall.

So, if you, like me, have an interest in true crime stories, this set of novels/crime stories make for a provocative reading palette.

Here are two other books I recently read, and would recommend and talk about.

“The Way the Crow Flies” by Ann-Marie MacDonald. She also wrote “Fall on your Knees”. Both are really fine.

“The Way the Crow Flies” is the story of a girl who grows up on a military base during the cold war. Something happens. You learn a little about it right off, then more, and more, almost as sidelights to the story as it wends its way along. What you think may be going on shifts like the light as the sun moves across the sky, through clouds, and into darkness filled with other kinds of light.

“The Dissident” by Nell Freudenberger has an art theme, and as such, takes you into the mind-world of the artists of the book. Another world.