Summer's Last Gasp

Where did the summer go? Part of me is relieved we're headed back to school, but another part wants one more trip to the lake with family, friends, board games and good books. At the very least, we deserve a few more weeks of reading on the patio before Labor Day, when we settle down for the seriousness of fall and winter.

Emma Healey's Elizabeth Is Missing (Harper, June 2014) is perfect for a season that is winding down. Healey's narrator is Maud Horsham, a mother and grandmother who survived the London Blitz, but is now descending into dementia. She lives alone and copes with the help of daily visits from a carer and her harried, but loving daughter, Helen. Maud also writes endless reminder notes to herself. Many of them involve her best friend, Elizabeth, who is no longer to be found at the house she shared with her disagreeable son. Despite Maud's visits to the police and the concerns she voices to Helen, no one seems to care about the missing Elizabeth.

This reminds Maud of the police reaction to the disappearance of her older sister, Sukey, shortly after World War II, and we follow her increasingly scrambled thoughts to the 1940s, where her memory is clearer. Then, she was 15 and living with her parents and a boarder who worked as a milkman. When the beautiful Sukey disappeared, she was married to Frank, a moving man experienced with the black market. Maud's narration is remarkable in its weaving in and out of its 1940s conciseness and its increasingly helter-skelter present. If Maud had a less loyal family, Elizabeth Is Missing would be heartbreaking reading. As is, it's an unsentimental but tender and insightful look at the disappearance of an aging woman's memory and identity.

John Scalzi also looks at aging, memory and identity in his book of science fiction, Old Man's War (Tor, 2005). The twilight years of John Perry, however, are light years removed from Maud Horsham's. John celebrates his 75th birthday by paying respects to his deceased wife and then enlisting in the army, now called the Colonial Defense Force. The CDF is full of old men and women, because their expertise is valued. They defend the Earth, now considered the sticks, but they also seek to colonize what little is left of unclaimed inhabitable outer space real estate. It almost goes without saying that other planets seek to colonize it too. Wars over colonization have been waged for years.

Upon enlistment, CDF soldiers are given youthful bodies. If they survive two years of service, they are given homestead claims on a colony planet. They are forbidden to return to Earth. Of course, the war they have to survive is unlike anything they expect. Scalzi's writing is witty and offbeat and his unusual elderly heroes are a welcome change as we head for a season of autumn colors and falling leaves.

Memories Are Made of This

I'm sure you've walked into a room, only to discover you've forgotten what you planned to do there. And maybe you've heard the comment, "You'd forget your head if it weren't screwed on." Finding yourself headless would create a world of problems; however, this isn't The Twilight Zone, so we won't explore this topic further. The head sitting so firmly on your shoulders is capable of generating enough Big Headaches for you, like, how do you know what you're perceiving is reality? Can you trust the validity of your memories, the foundation of your self-identity? Is it possible for your memories to be implanted or altered?

These are questions David Ambrose poses in his 2000 book, The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk. The title refers to Luis Buñuel's surrealist film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in which some friends are trying to have dinner together, but their plans are constantly thwarted by disturbing events, odd scenes involving other characters, or their own bizarre dreams. None of these interruptions cause the friends to give up the idea of sharing a meal; they relentlessly continue their efforts, despite the illogical or impossible nature of what's happening around them.

Like a viewer who tries to make sense of that movie, a reader must figure out the actions of Ambrose's characters, who may not be what they seem. Brian Kay is a middle-aged man with brain damage caused by a viral infection. He remembers everything before the virus, but he can't turn experiences since then into permanent memory. Susan Flemyng, Kay's neurologist, conducts research in visual memory in Washington, D.C. When the book opens, she is enjoying close relationships with her father, husband, and young son. Charlie Monk has difficulty remembering events from his youth. He's currently a James Bond figure working for an agency so secret it doesn't have a name; Charlie takes instructions from a man he knows simply as Control. In between his super-heroic feats, Charlie relaxes in Los Angeles with beautiful women and good wine.

As the plot progresses, the characters and the reader relax no more. Dr. Flemyng explains:

"Chuang Tzu was a Chinese sage who lived twenty-five hundred years ago. He told once of how he dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamed he was a man. People have been telling that story ever since, because it represents something that mankind has always known instinctively--that we can never be sure whether the outside world corresponds to the picture of it that we have in our head. We can't even be sure that the outside world is actually there."

While The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk isn't a ghost story, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw comes to mind. Ambrose cleverly and energetically twists his futuristic thriller's plot, and the reader will need to interpret what has happened. This is one of those books that provoke thinking about the nature of evil.

After choosing his identity and memories, this shopper
should choose a good memory-foam mattress.

Carsten Stroud's Niceville, published in June 2012 by Knopf, is another. Sylvia Teague has often thought Niceville, founded in 1764 by four families who've now been feuding for a century, would be "one of the loveliest places in the Deep South if it had not been built, God only knew why, in the looming shadow of Tallulah's Wall." On top of this limestone cliff sits an ancient forest that whispers and creaks around a large sinkhole, full of cold black water, called Crater Sink. Cherokees considered it a place of evil; all the present-day citizens know is that nothing goes into Crater Sink and comes back out. In addition to this unsettling place, Niceville claims a bothersome statistic: people disappear at a much higher rate than the national average.

The latest such disappearance is Rainey Teague, Sylvia's 10-year-old son, last seen looking into the window of Uncle Moochie's pawnshop. A few days later, the kid is found. Oh, man, you'd never guess where. This is the point in the book when I visited the likker cabinet for a glass of bourbon and settled deep down in a comfy chair to savor Stroud's vivid writing, oddball characters, black humor, and crazily complex noir plot.

What else? Two men rob the First Third Bank, and a third coolly shoots not only the cops pursuing the first two, but also the people covering the chase in the news helicopter. Then the shooter puts on his Ray-Bans and lights a cigarette, "consoled by the warmth and the lovely light" of what promises to be a pretty evening. Do I need to tell you these three outlaws have watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? I must also mention a dentist who poses and then photographs his unconscious female patients in erotic tableaus, and a civic leader who installed a video camera in the bathroom his teenage daughters use.

Obviously, those characters make a mockery of the name of the town, but lawyer Kate Kavanaugh tries to be nice. Her client just won a divorce custody case against her husband, the extremely nasty Mr. Christian Antony Bock, who should, but doesn't, ooze down into a dank cellar and stay there. Although Kate's husband Nick is troubled (he served in Iraq with the Army Special Forces), he's now a more-than-competent lawman with the Cullen County Criminal Investigation Division, and he adores his wife. Kate's dad is a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, and her sister is married to a hot-tempered jerk who runs a private security company. Sorry, I was talking about good guys, and the bad guys keep intruding. There are only so many nice people in Niceville.

There are more disappearances, macabre deaths, and mysterious events that can only be explained in supernatural terms. Like Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280, Niceville puts a comedic edge on crime. And like The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk, it will give you a chance to contemplate how memories can entrap their creator and others, and identity can be manipulated for evil purposes.

This gothic thriller isn't for everyone. It's not a soothes-you-to-sleep read. If you appreciate dark humor, lyrical writing, and a plot that's spooky as hell, master storyteller Carsten Stroud wrote it for you. Let's hope very hard we'll see a sequel.

Note: I received a free review copy of Niceville.

Is Fiction Stranger than Fact?

My sons often behave in ways that make me want to tear out my hair, but they also perform many acts of random kindness. One of them this morning was to present me with these "facts" they found online: "Ants stretch before they wake up. They also appear to yawn in a very human manner before taking up the tasks of the day." I like thinking that these busy little critters are like us in these ways, although visualizing them with human faces makes me feel guilty about how I greeted them when they last crashed our backyard picnic. I wish I knew whether these "facts" about ants are true or false.

What are the differences between fact and fiction? Truth and falsehood? Beginnings and endings? These are questions Miguel Syjuco poses in Ilustrado, which won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize while still an unpublished manuscript.

The book begins on a winter morning in 2002 when a fisherman hooks a battered body floating in the Hudson River. The corpse is Crispin Salvador, an exiled Filipino writer, who had been living and teaching in New York City. He was working on a book called The Bridges Ablaze. It is still in manuscript form, "a glacial accretion of research and writing––unknotting and unraveling the generations-long ties of the Filipino elite to cronyism, illegal logging, gambling, kidnapping, corruption, along with their related component sins." The police are unable to find any evidence of foul play, but rumors about whether Salvador was murdered or committed suicide swirl through the Philippines.

Salvador's sister asks his student Miguel, who lives in New York, to sort through Salvador's apartment. The manuscript is gone. Miguel finds himself unable to sleep and begins a biography of his teacher with the idea that examining Salvador's life could help him with his own. He cannot believe that Salvador committed suicide:

"To end his own life, Salvador was neither courageous nor cowardly enough. The only explanation is that the Panther of Philippine Letters was murdered in midpounce. But no bloody candelabrum has been found. Only ambiguous hints in what remains of his manuscript. Among the two pages of notes, these names: the industrialist Dingdong Changco, Jr.; the literary critic Marcel Avellaneda; the first Muslim leader of the opposition, Nuredin Bansamoro; the charismatic preacher Reverend Martin; and a certain Dulcinea."

Miguel decides to hop a plane for Manila.

At this point, the book––I don't know how else to describe it––goes rogue. It becomes not only a story of Salvador, but his entire colorful family in the Philippines over the course of 150 years, through colonization or occupation by the Spanish, the Americans and the Japanese, and independence. It also picks up the story of Miguel Syjuco's own family and his coming of age as he moves from the Philippines to Canada, back to the Philippines and then on his own to the United States and now back to the Philippines.

All this history appears not in a straightforward fashion but in a patchwork series of excerpts from Salvador's interviews, memoirs, novels and a running joke told in story form; Miguel's biography of Salvador, in progress; Marcel Avellaneda's blog posts and comments to his blog; Miguel's narration of the past and present; and an omniscient narrator's narrative. These excerpts are presented as if different flavored Pez candies have been loaded in one Pez dispenser. Every excerpt is separated by an asterisk. Some of the excerpts faithfully appear in a different typeface. The source of others is given in parentheses but this sourcing happens less often as the story progresses. Familiarity with the excerpts' content makes it clear whether, for example, Miguel is narrating about the present or whether the entry is one of Salvador's fictional "Manila Noir" stories. It makes an exuberant kaleidoscope.

Needless to say, this is NOT an easy read. It is, however, a very rewarding one. The inventive form of the story (a series of excerpts from many sources) provides a jigsaw puzzle for the reader. The disappearance of the excerpts' sources as the book continues is something for the reader to ponder. In the mystery genre, Ilustrado might be classified as historical fiction. The dead body that opens the book provides a good excuse to examine that corpse's life. Miguel and Salvador explore the nature of fiction, truth, identity, honesty, perception and memories, using the history of the Philippines and two families. There are wonderful characters, straightforward storytelling and allegorical writing. The resulting book is witty, moving and surprisingly funny and raunchy at times. The author takes satirical jabs at Filipino politicians, big business and the ruling class. I wish I knew more about the Philippines and I'm glad this author is young, so we can expect more imaginative books from him. Salvador tells his student Miguel, "Just write, and write justly. Ezra Pound be dammed. Poets lie, though beautifully. Don't make things new, make them whole." In this book, Miguel Syjuco does.

A Mystery Appears in Your Future

Fate is my friend. She likes to help when I have trouble making a decision. Go out with Joe or stay home and work on my taxes? I toss a coin. If it's heads (Joe), and I'm chagrined it's not tails (taxes), I stay home and work on my taxes. If I'm thrilled it's heads, I go out with Joe. See, fate is my friend!

Fate also helps with my reading, but this time she doesn't appear in the guise of a coin. She appears as a fortune cookie fortune. I save my fortunes in a zip-lock bag and keep the bag in a drawer of my desk. This makes it very handy for those times when I'm restless with the desire, no, the need to read, but unable to settle on a particular book. Out comes the bag. I close my eyes and pick a fortune at random. Indecision evaporates; I'm ruled by fate. The book must match my fortune.

I'd like to tell you about some books fate found for me.

Fortune: "You could prosper in the field of wacky inventions"

I saw "wacky," and my mind was all over Florida. Tim Dorsey. Carl Hiaasen. Craig Rice wrote a fantastic screwball series with John J. Malone, the "little lawyer," set in Chicago, and an even more farcical series with photographers Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak. Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum gets wild. Joan Hess's Maggody series takes a few loops on its way around the block. But before I started thinking about single books or had a chance to leave the U.S., I saw the word "inventions," and that meant William Marshall's Sci Fi, a book in his Yellowthread Street series set in the fictional Hong Bay district of Hong Kong.

If Yellowthread isn't the most unusual police procedural series in mysterydom, I'd like to hear what is. Marshall is a one-man band of off-the-wall humor; writing full of italics, capitalizations, and word repetitions; and plots you won't believe. As The Washington Post Book World says, "Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense with wild humor and making them both work." We'll explore this series later, but for now, look at Sci Fi. Here's how it begins:

"The Martians had landed.

"And, with them, the Venusians, the Saturnians, the Moon-People, Gill-Man, the entire complement of Star Wars extra-terrestrials, Chest-burster, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, The Hulk, The Alien, The Contagion, and, for the joy of antique and nostalgic older souls, several variations of Oriental Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and--particularly popular among the more diminutive--Peter Lorre and The incredible Shrinking Man.

"The second day of the All-Asia Science Fiction and Horror Movie Congress was in full swing in Hong Bay and so far there had been so many outside invasions of the place by sea and by land that if Paul Revere had been resurrected to take on the task of announcing them to the Colonials he would have retired from the scene with terminal laryngitis after the first fifteen aircraft-fuls."

This is not great literature, but it is great fun. I never miss the chance fate hands me to visit Marshall's exotic world. If you have an appreciation for the off-beat and the wild, I invite you to join me there. This series is not for everyone, but it is for me. And maybe for you, too.

The fortune: "Don't let unexpected situations 'throw' you"

My eyes raced to that word "throw," and my heart did a cha cha cha. I deeply love baseball, and now I had an excuse to indulge a passion. Up to bat came Harvey Blissberg, narrator of Richard Rosen's Strike Three, You're Dead. Blissberg's lead-off words: "It's when you're going good that they throw at your head." He was center fielder for the Boston Red Sox, but now he's been traded to a not-so-stellar expansion team, the Providence Jewels. Blissberg is not a happy man, but he's a good man and a team player, so when his closest friend on the Jewels, star reliever Rudy Furth, is found murdered in the locker room whirlpool, Blissberg wants to know why. With the help of his beautiful TV sportscaster girlfriend and his brother, he fields an investigation.

Vikram Chandra's
928-page Sacred Games

You don't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate Strike Three, You're Dead, although that makes the read more special and gives you an edge in the detection. Rosen is a skilled writer, and his tale moves with the effortlessness of an All Star third baseman. Artful plotting, good characterization, and knowledgeable sports writing.  The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association selected it as one of their 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century. You can go into extra innings with the rest of the Harvey Blissberg series, in which he's retired from baseball to become a private eye. All in all, this series is a solid hit.

Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone

Fortune: "Life is a game of complex strategies"

I gazed at the books on my shelf. I'm saving a book recommended by a friend, The Shadow of the Shadow by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, for a vacation. It's a book involving four friends who meet nightly in 1922 at a Mexico City hotel bar to play dominos. Have you read it?

Another game, chess, has plenty of complex strategies, but I'd already read Joanne Harris's Gentlemen and Players and Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Flanders Panel, and I didn't want to read them again.

Cameron McCabe's The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

I eventually picked two books to match this fortune. The first is Ignacio Padilla's Shadow Without a Name, a complicated and compelling book involving identity and Nazi history. A 1916 chess game on a train traveling to the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Eastern Front determines the fate of two men. The winner will assume the identity of Viktor Kretzschmar, a railway pointsman on the Munich-Salzburg line; the loser, Thadeus Dreyer, a newly conscripted soldier bound for the Front. Life will become an extremely complex game for these men. I want to talk more about this interesting book at another time.

The second is an old friend whom I hadn't seen in years, Michael Gilbert's Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens, a 1982 collection of short stories told in an inimitable clipped yet dramatic way. Calder and Behrens are top British espionage agents who have been working together so long they can anticipate each other's moves. They are now working undercover for the Joint Services Standing Committee, ready to be whisked anywhere their special skills are needed. When they're not putting England's enemies in check, they are merely old friends and neighbors who play chess in Calder's study with the Persian wolfhound Rasselas at their feet. (Gilbert was famous for his love of dogs, and Rasselas, a skilled operative himself, is a terrific character.)

Charlotte Jay's Beat Not the Bones

I could go on, telling you about the books I matched to my fortunes, but I'm going to stop now because I'm curious. I'd love to hear which book you'd choose, if fate handed you a fortune. (I've listed some fortunes below.) I bet you'd like to hear what your fellow blog readers would choose, too. You can answer either here with a comment, or better yet, let's take this discussion to our 3rd Degree page.

Remember, the idea is to choose a book you haven't read, but might like to read, to match the fortune. That's the purpose of this fortune cookie quotation procedure, to help you select a book when you can't decide what to read. Make your book match the fortune based on any book criteria you want: title, topic, characters, cover, page length, what you know about the author, what you've heard about the book. You can pick a book you've read to match the fortune only if you love the book and would actually like to read it again.

Here are some fortunes that need a matching book:

Agatha Christie's Death Comes at the End

"Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise."
"A cheerful greeting is on its way."
"Don't look back, always look ahead."
"Your most memorable dream will come true."
"In youth and beauty, wisdom is rare."
"You will take a pleasant journey to a faraway place."
"Enjoy the spotlight."
"Many opportunities are open to you, seek them out."

Okay. What fortune did fate hand you, what book did you select, and why?

One more question.

If you don't use fortunes to help you when you can't decide what to read, how do you finally decide?