Tag Archives: Book Review

High Fidelity – Music and Misery

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity is narrated by Rob, a list maker whose love for music made him think it would be a good idea to purchase a failing record store. That’s the least of his troubles. He can’t commit to anything, which frustrates his girlfriend, Laura, so much she leaves him, though it would be more correct to say he drove her away. Recounting his other break-ups, he wonders “What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?”

He believes he’s a decently average guy, but he’s a man-child who believes a lot of stupid things. Proof no.1: he thinks “it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” Proof no. 2: he’s concerned that it’s not “possible to maintain a relationship and a large record collection simultaneously.” But the stupidest thing he believes is that he’s a decently average guy. He’s just a selfishly average guy, and that’s hard to like – though oddly women do seem to like him. It strains credulity, but here we are: expected to care whether Rob succeeds in winning Laura back. It’s a big ask, because Laura clearly should keep running.

Here’s the problem. Rob’s self-inflicted wounds and failures to launch would be more understandable and relatable if he was 25, but he’s 35. Gradually, he realizes that “it’s not what you like, but what you’re like that’s important.” Why did it take him 35 years (no, I’m sorry, he’s now 36) to reach this rather prosaic conclusion? Why is he stunted? Do we care? Why is this book 323 pages long? Haven’t these issues been examined ad nauseam for 100 years at least?

Granted, the story was published in 1995, and it’s set in the mid-1990s when slackers were as cool and interesting as they were ever going to be. But they’re rather dated and stale now. They don’t hold up 25 years later. We still have self-absorbed and selfish people, and they’re still annoying and exhausting; we just give them a different label. Here’s one: uninteresting. Rob’s journey towards self-discovery is funny at times. He does have excellent taste in music and books. But it’s a long journey, and the path has been traveled many times before and since.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Voltaire and the Art of Gardening

Written in 1759 Voltaire’s Candide remains relevant. That’s quite a feat, so let me revise that lackluster opening sentence with this: the story is a timeless treasure; a garden of raucous flowers all with sharp edges. There, that’s better. Am I the only one sexually aroused now? Surely not.

Candide is a “young boy whom nature had endowed with the gentlest of dispositions.” He is “sound in his judgment” and has the “most straightforward of minds.” His tutor is the great German philosopher, Pangloss, who taught him “everything is for the best.” So when Candide is literally kicked out of a baron’s castle for kissing his daughter, Cunegonde, and ends up forsaken, cold, and hungry in a nearby town where he is “recruited” into the army on the eve of battle, he is not concerned. “Everything is connected in a chain of necessity, and has all been arranged for the best.” That’s comforting to know.

But then the prevailing army kills the baron, destroys his castle, gang rapes Cunegonde, drives Candide out of the territory where he encounters the Spanish Inquisition, plagues, earthquakes, and every other kind of human and natural disaster. Still, he remains indifferent. After all, Pangloss always said “Individual misfortunes contribute to the general good with the result that the more individual misfortunes there are, the more all is well.” I’m still sexually aroused.

Candide is a stunning satire that has you laughing at the most degenerate of humanity’s creations: war, religion, philosophy, civilization, government. The list goes on. Candide travels the world and everywhere his foundational belief in optimism is challenged and fails. Eventually he lands in Turkey where he abandons optimism as a “mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”

But what philosophy can replace optimism? Don’t we need a philosophy to understand why humanity exists? When Candide questions a learned dervish why there is so much evil in the world, the dervish asks “What does it matter whether there’s evil or good? . . . When his Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?” My guess is no.

Leaving the dervish, Candide encounters a humble, but content, farmer who advises him to cultivate his garden because “Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”

So cultivate your garden, my friend, and may you prosper from your endeavors. Still sexually aroused.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Tiger by the Tail

In Real Tigers, the third installment in his entertaining Slough House series, Mick Herron asks one important question. Can you tell the difference between a real tiger and a paper tiger? The answer better be yes, or you may end up dead, dead, dead. At least that’s what happens in this diverting page turner.

Slough House is where Britain’s MI5 dumps its slow horses, spies who are either cursed, incompetent, unlikeable, or addicted to something. Then it gives them nothing to do. The delightfully malevolent Jackson Lamb is the foul-smelling misanthrope in charge of Slough House. He is roused from his alcohol-aided slumbers when one of his team goes missing.

Catherine Standish leaves Slough House one intolerably hot evening and runs into an old MI5 colleague. She gets nervous because there’s no “friend falser than another spook.” Minutes later she is lifted from the street and thrown into a black van. Was that meeting on the street just a coincidence? Sure, why not?

Here’s another coincidence. Peter Judd, Britain’s home secretary, has hired a tiger team to infiltrate MI5 and test its internal defenses. Judd is a messy mop-haired scamp – a “public buffoon and private velociraptor.” If you’re thinking Boris Johnson, congratulations. You’ve connected the very obvious dots. He’s in a power struggle with MI5’s first desk and its second desk. They’re all rivals, and they hate each other. But he has a secret plan that will cage his rivals, and the tiger team is going to help.

Poor Judd. A few ex-soldiers on the tiger team have their own plans, and they don’t play ball with their corporate overlords. Slough House is brought in to help clean the mess or, in the alternative, be blamed for it. And they still need to find Catherine.

It’s best not to think too hard about the plot. It’s unnecessarily convoluted and doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. However, you don’t read Slough House novels for intense psychological drama and seamlessly constructed plots. You read them because they’re fun. The characters are deliciously petty and only begrudgingly helpful. As the story reaches its bloody conclusion, we learn who’s real and who’s paper.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Schlitz and a Pack of Luckies

Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies is aptly titled. Mercy in South Boston is as rare as a Yankee fan. Though published in 2023, the story is set in 1974 during school desegregation. “It was very hot in Boston that summer, and it seldom rained.” The white “Southie” community is virulently opposed to school busing, which will send their children to a different high school in September. Gasoline has been poured on the racial tensions. I hope no one strikes a match.

Well, hope moved out of South Boston long ago, so the match gets struck. A high school boy, who is black, turns up dead in a Southie train station. On the same night a white high school girl goes missing. The girl’s name is Jules. Her mother is Mary Pat, a rage-filled Southie woman who is not afraid to break a punk’s nose. The boy’s name is Auggie Williamson. His mother works with Mary Pat. What are the chances these two events are related? Exactly.

In Southie “you’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.” Mary Pat is most certainly a fighter. When Jules doesn’t come home after 24 hours, Mary Pat knows going to the police is pointless. She goes to the Butler crew, a criminal gang that offers “protection” to the Southie neighborhood, instead. The Butler crew, however, isn’t all that interested in figuring out what happened to Jules. That’s when Mary Pat takes matters into her own hands, and absolutely everyone better watch out. There is “something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable [living] at the core” of her. She’s the kind of vigilante who would make Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson say hey, Mary Pat, you’re kinda freaking us out. Have you thought of anger management classes?

Lehane tells an engrossing, fast-paced story using a thesaurus devoid of pretty words. Vile racial epithets abound, but the brutal language is appropriate given the subject matter, time, and place. We aren’t reading about Disneyland. Southie is a small world, but it’s not a kids’ ride. “In Southie, most kids came out of the womb clutching a Schlitz and a pack of Luckies.”

While racial divisions are the paramount problem here, Lehane doesn’t ignore the economic divide. “We all know that the only law and the only god is money. If you have enough of it, you don’t have to suffer consequences and you don’t have to suffer for your ideals, you just foist them on someone else and feel good about the nobility of your intentions.” The private schools will remain segregated, as will the schools in the wealthy suburbs.

Hypocrisy and corruption are everywhere in Boston. Yet, somehow, Mary Pat believed Southie was exempt. “You know, we always say we stand for things here. We might not have much, but we have the neighborhood. We got a code. We watch out for one another . . . What a crock of shit.” When the truth finally smacks her in the face, Mary Pat hits back. Hard.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Vanishing Act

Many things vanish in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, including an entire town in Louisiana. However, the plot revolves around twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, and how one of them (Stella) vanishes. Not through foul play but simply because she can. Actually they both vanish at first. One comes back after 14 years, but the other doesn’t. This is getting confusing. I better start over.

In Mallard, Louisiana, no one marries “dark”. The town’s founder was a freed slave who had a white father. He built a town for people like him – people “who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.” After several generations the Mallard folks are light skinned. “But even here, where nobody married dark, you were still colored and that meant white men could kill you for refusing to die.” That’s what happened to the twins’ father. He was lynched when they were young children. They saw him dragged out of the house.

The story opens in 1968. The twins have been gone 14 years when Desiree walks into town pulling a 7 or 8 year old girl. The town is shocked because the child is not light skinned. She’s “midnight”. The twins had run away to New Orleans and found jobs, but then Stella realized how easy it was for her to pass as white. Soon after, she vanishes. Desiree eventually moves to Washington, D.C. and marries a physically-abusive man. They have a daughter, Jude. When Desiree concludes her husband is likely to kill her, she vanishes again – returning to Mallard with Jude.

Vanishing is not the same as escaping. “You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood. Somehow, the Vignes twins believed themselves capable of both.” They were wrong.

Similarly, passing is not the same as being. “At first, passing seemed so simple . . . But she was young then. She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.” The story spans several decades – from the 1950s to 1988, and eventually Stella does turn up. When she does, her past is waiting.

The story is an intriguing examination of what a person gives up when she decides to become someone else. Given the time’s overt racism, Stella’s highwire act has real risks. Which leaves the reader asking: considering everything she sacrifices, was “vanishing” worth it? It’s to Bennett’s credit that the reader struggles for an answer.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

White Noise: Always There, Just Like Death and Commercials

In White Noise Don DeLillo notes “All plots tend to move deathward.” I’m not sure if he is surprised by this, but he shouldn’t be. All life moves deathward. So how can plots do otherwise?

Let’s put that question aside and simply agree that DeLillo in White Noise is obsessed with death. But Gladiola, white noise is my favorite noise. How can it be linked to death? Sorry, my friend, white noise is always there in the background. Just like death. And Jack (the narrator) can’t stop thinking about death. Even when he’s thinking with his penis, his penis is thinking about death. He chairs the Hitler Studies Department at a small college on the hill. Why Hitler? “Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.”

Jack is married to Babette, and they have a blended family with a child from their own marriage but also children from several prior marriages. Babette is taking some kind of medication that she refuses to admit she’s taking. Like Jack, she is terrified by death. Even when she’s thinking with her vagina . . . well, you get it. “We (humans) are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.” When a train accident happens on the edge of town, a deadly toxic cloud gets released. Jack is exposed to the poison, and his fear of death becomes all-consuming. The novel explores the reckless ways Jack and Babette try and fail to manage this intense fear.

Published in 1984, the novel also skewers consumerism and our culture’s reliance on television – a precursor of the internet and social media. “When TV didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to death.” And it touches on inequality and inequity. During the toxic event, Jack thinks “These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters.” The novel succeeds best when it is focused on these themes. But back to death.

The lengths Babette and Jack go to calm their fear are hard to relate to. When they wonder why no one else is overwhelmed by the fear as they are, Jack acknowledges that “Some people are better at repressing it than others.” He’s wrong. Everyone is better at repressing it. They become the poster children for repression and denial being the correct strategy. And that’s good news for me because I repress and deny everything. So I must be healthy as hell.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Absurdistan: Love and Geopolitics

Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan is a geopolitical romp that ends on September 10, 2001. But the book was published in 2006 – so make no mistake – 9/11 hangs over the narrative like an ominous cloud. Don’t make this mistake either – though 9/11 was a tragedy and geopolitical catastrophe, the novel is a raunchy and satirical examination of life when you’re a geopolitical pawn. And we’re all geopolitical pawns.

As the narrator, Misha Borisovich Vainberg, tells us in the prologue, this is a “book about love. But it’s also a book about geography.” The story opens on June 15, 2001. Misha is 30 years old and the son of the 1238th richest man in Russia. That’s because his father is a kleptocrat.

During the 1990s Misha attended Accidental College in the mid-west. As a result he adores America and rap music. His rapper name is Snack Daddy, because he loves all the snacks that have turned him into a self-described “fatso”. Unfortunately, his father called him back to Russia, and he is stuck there because dad killed a politically connected Oklahoman in St. Petersburg. Now the U.S. won’t let Misha back.

Misha hates Russia and its corrupt transition from the Soviet Union – even though he has benefitted tremendously from that corruption. “These miscreants were our country’s rulers. To survive in their world, one has to wear many hats – perpetrator, victim, silent bystander.” He’s desperate to get back to his girlfriend in the Bronx – so desperate he travels to Absurdistan, where he has been promised a Belgian passport that will enable him to finally return to the U.S.

Absurdistan does not exist in the real world. I googled it. However, in the novel it is one of the Stans in the former Soviet Union. It consists of several ethnic groups, and they all hate each other. As soon as Misha shows up, civil war breaks out and the borders are closed. Each ethnic group wants to use Misha for its own political purposes, and Misha wants to use them to escape to the Bronx and his girlfriend. Sex, humor, and violence ensue.

Similar to Candide, Misha is a “holy fool” who is wrong about pretty much everything. Near the novel’s end he confesses, “I thought I was Different and had a Special Story to tell but I guess I’m not and I don’t.” Fortunately, he’s wrong about that as well.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Victory City – Miracles at Work

Salman Rushdie knows how to tell an engaging story filled with humor and tragedy. He’s done so time and again, and Victory City is the latest addition to his catalogue.

The story opens with the purported recent discovery of an epic poem written by Pampa Kampana in southern India during the 14th century. The narrator is a “spinner of yarns” who retells the story in “plainer language.” The epic begins with an unknown king losing a “no-name” battle. This unlucky king is beheaded by the opposing army. The women in the conquered city are even more unlucky. As tradition demands, these women commit suicide by walking into a bonfire. That’s what Pampa’s mother does – leaving the nine-year old an orphan who must now fend for herself.

After witnessing the mass suicide, Pampa makes a decision. “She would not sacrifice her body merely to follow dead men into the afterworld.” A goddess (also named Pampa) hears this and grants her a blessing that changes young Pampa’s life. She begins to speak with the majestic voice of a goddess and becomes a prophet and miracle worker.

The goddess tells Pampa “you will fight to make sure that no more women are ever burned in this fashion, and that men start considering women in new ways, and you will live just long enough to witness both your success and failure.” That takes 247 years. And sometimes a blessing can be a curse, because 247 years means she will see everyone she loves die.

A few years later Pampa gets hold of magic seeds, and from these seeds Bisnaga (meaning Victory City) grows. In Bisnaga women are free to work at any job they want. The arts are not frivolous. “They are essential to a society’s health and well-being.” But one person’s art is another person’s porn, and every action has a reaction. Each success is countered by religious extremism until the prophecy is finally fulfilled.

No surprises here – Rushdie has personal experience with religious extremism’s brutality, and concerns about religious extremism are as relevant today as ever. So the story is absorbing for that reason alone.

But this is Salman Rushdie, so the story is much more than a battle between feminism and religious patriarchies. It is also about the importance of stories, because even Pampa doesn’t live forever. People die and cities collapse into ruins, but some stories live on. “All that remains is this city of words. Words are the only victors.” But that assumes the stories survive – that books and women aren’t fuel for bonfires.

Remember, Pampa’s poem opens with a forgotten king and a no-name battle. His story did not survive time’s ravages. And it is only through chance that Pampa’s does – after 450 years of silence. According to our “spinner of yarns” the poem was only recently found in a clay pot among ancient ruins.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Do What They Say or Else: Curiouser and Curiouser

Annie Ernaux’s Do What They Say or Else is a matter-of-fact coming of age story set in Normandy, France, in the late 1960s. It’s not sweet or sentimental. It’s straightforward and refreshing. Simple and profound.

Anne is 15 and a half, bored, disgusted by her parents, and intensely curious about sex. Sounds about right. She is suffering through the summer before she starts high school. This is the summer she begins to leave her parents behind and experiment with being an adult. She has secrets, which she is happy to share with the reader, but not with her parents. Smart decision.

One secret is “if I had to die, in a war for example, I would throw myself at the first guy who came along.” So would I. She is wise and makes keen observations – such as perverts start to “come out in March like the primroses.” Or this one about her parents: “you have to keep your mouth shut all the time so you won’t hurt their feelings.” She has just read Camus’ The Stranger and is deeply affected. She would love to discuss the book with her parents, but she knows they will not find that normal.

Like all teenagers, Anne is cynical but also naive. “There must come a day when everything is clear, when everything falls into place.” If only. Anne is a wonderful narrator because she’s curious about everything and insightful. She is every 15 year old I remember being, and it is fascinating to listen to her as she navigates to adulthood. “Curiosity is normal at my age: it would be strange if that wasn’t the case, except that for girls, curiosity can lead to anything, and it’s frowned upon.” Anne ain’t wrong.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Like Here But Worse

In 2022 Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker Prize for The Seven Moons of Maali Ameida. Hi ho. The book is bizarre in all the best ways.

It’s 1990 in Sri Lanka. Maali Almeida is a photographer, gambler, and self-described slut. He’s also a journalist and homosexual, so he has lots of enemies. And because Sri Lanka is in the middle of a civil war, it’s easy for a photo-journalist to die. It’s also easy for a homosexual to die – but not for the same reasons.

And what do you know? It’s page 1 and Maali is already dead. The after-life is a hellscape filled with demons, ghouls, ghosts, and bureaucrats who claim they want to help you. It’s just like the “living” world only worse.

Maali has no idea who killed him, why, or how he died. He has seven days (or seven moons) to figure it all out. Then he needs to decide what he’ll do next. To paraphrase The Clash: should he stay or should he go? Does his decision matter? Does anything matter? Yes, obviously, The Clash matters. Stay focused.

Seven Moons is impossible to categorize. It’s historical fiction in how it describes the Sri Lankan civil war. It’s a love letter to the Sri Lankan people traumatized by that war. It’s a satire on religion. It’s a parody lampooning people who try to change society through violence. It’s a deadly-serious comedy, and it succeeds regardless of the category you put it in.

But mostly, the story is a delight because, as flawed as Maali is, he is honest when it counts. Even though he lies to nearly everyone, he never lies to himself or the reader. He’s also brave, even when it’s not smart to be. When he is told his photos are gruesome, he responds “then maybe people should stop doing gruesome things.”

If Karunatilaka resembles any writer, it’s Kurt Vonnegut. At one time people read him. Maybe, with Seven Moons‘ deserved success, people will start reading Vonnegut again. If so, that would be another great thing about Maali Almeida.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor