I found it in Alan Furst. About a year ago, I discovered his work and bought several novels. He has several mysterious and appealing novels. I even recently picked up on in audio CD.

For my first foray, I read The Polish Correspondent. The titular character is Alexander de Milja, an aristocrat who becomes an excellent spy as he traverses Europe in the wake of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. First, he oversees the smuggling of Polish gold reserves aboard a nondescript passenger train, which de Milja himself selected. The journey culminates in a shoot out with bandits and a mad dash to Romania. But, tellingly, the heroes are as much the Polish commoners aboard the train as they are de Milja. This appears to be a Furst theme.

De Milja later settles in Paris — often the centerpiece of Furst’s tales, I gather — to conduct espionage for the Poles and the English. The likable officer quickly becomes exceptional as a spy and handler. So good, in fact, he out survives his own operatives, like the memorable teenage radio operator whose demise from chomping down on a cyanide capsule matches the bomb with which she kills her SS nemesis. The scene is a wonderful, understated bit of black humor that Furst excels at.

De Milja also has love affairs — alluring, middle-aged European women who keep Alexander at a distance emotionally so that the inevitable partings ache, but only a little.

Finally, the Polish officer is assigned to the Eastern front, a veritable hell on earth. It’s a mission he enters knowing he won’t survive. But, then, de Milja learns to master life as a partisan, too. He completes his futile mission in rescuing a Pole, who later dies. Finally, it’s time for a desperate and cold escape with a Jewish woman whom he saves. Here, de Milja shows again his likable qualities as he sacrifices much to save her (and himself).

De Milja’s a wonderful protagonist — likable, smart, properly cynical when he must be. He’s a very Euro-styled James Bond in a much harsher milieu. But the minor characters surrounding him are just as likable and richly written.

If the novel suffers at all, it’s from its episodic structure. It works nearly as a collection of novellas rather than a novel structure. The train escape, taken alone, is a fine short work. The drama of the final book builds to a climactic prison escape, but then flattens out as de Milja and the Jewish woman flee. As such, the novel survives as a reflection on the troubling nature of war and espionage. While there are exciting scenes, the book is not a thriller. Furst takes his time in parts. In others, he’s wry and sometimes implies the dirty work of war and spying, making the reader understand the remains of violence in a confectioners shop, for one example. 

Furst’s writing is rich and detailed, but not overwrought. He captures rich, European details — early war Paris comes alive in his prose. He has a legion of delightful and tragic minor characters, themselves also rich and quintessentially European. All is contained within a novel with a subtler structure than the usual spy thriller. The end result is superb, but will not deliver a quick fix or adrenaline rush.

The Polish Officer: A

The narrator is one of the Midnight’s Children, a child born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the day of India’s independence. These thousand babes grow to earn supernatural powers. The narrator can read thoughts, which accounts for much of his storytelling, and he assembles the thousand children into a kind of telepathic congress. He’s not alone — his “twin” has supernatural knees. Yes, knees, between which he can crush and kill.

The twin is actually a family friend, but there’s a critical twist. An English nursemaid switches the two boys at birth, and the narrator himself is born a bastard of a renegade Englishman and his servant Indian mother. But, because of the switch, he’s raised instead in a wealthy family of unusual characters. Meanwhile, the other boy grows in the poor family and becomes a violent killer then war hero, all hinted at a distance through the narrator’s tales.

That narrator is an untrustworthy fellow. He is — or claims to be — the catalyst of so many of the affairs and deaths and dramas surrounding him. The narrator often refuses to admit his responsibility, or to downplay his involvement. The effects are often tragic.

What his story crafts amid the web of magical realism and shady retelling is a strange and sometimes beautiful menagerie of tales that stab at the heart of India in the modern world. It’s not a subject I know much about, but Rushdie brings alive India of the 1950s and 1960s in personal detail, from the toothpaste brands to the wars in Kashmir. Mumbai in particular percolates with color and colorful characters.

It’s a challenging book, dense in its sometimes feverish prose and thick with layers of filtered tales. The book trails off into oblivion as modern India — and it’s pickled curries — grow beyond the reach of the narrator’s arms. He falls apart, literally, and the reader realizes there’s one thing he didn’t lie about: “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

Midnight’s Children: A-

In an echo of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales, Chabon casts two very different sword-swinging wise-crackers. Both are Jews from disparate backgrounds. Amram is a hulking African who wields a Varangian axe and a command of languages far and wide (he’s served the emperor of Byzantium). His counterpart is Zelikman, a lanky Frank physician with a gloomly disposition. Both are wildly clever and ably skilled. Chabon makes both endearing, but Zelikman usually steals the scenes with his obnoxious hat and anti-hero antics.

Chabon writes one hell of an adventure tale. Each chapter is a fun twist and a healthy dose of cliff-hanging. The tale is almost effortless in its tidyness, yet somehow manages not to be predictable. After swindling some townsfolk, the pair get caught up escorting a prince who is not everything he appears to be, and yet is more. By the end of the  tale, they’ve jaunted about the foothills of the Caucasus, allied themselves with elephants against Rus invaders, fought — and then recruited — Muslim knights, and ushered in a coup.

The banter is fun, the action exciting, and Chabon sneaks beneath it all some commentary on Jewishness (and Islam) quite relevant to today. His prose in the book is baroque and obscure, deliberately so. It’s a nod, I think, to the idiosyncracies of many admirable pulp adventure writers. It’s at once a joke and tribute, and it also manages to keep the text’s voice lively and smart. It works.

Wonderfully, the book includes a brief afterword cum apologia by Chabon explaining his forays into the lands of adventure writing. He more famously treads in, as he calls it, late-century naturalism a la Wonder Boys. He also explains his only slightly tongue-in-cheek working title for the book, “Jews with Swords.” The afterword is well worth a read for anyone on either side of that absurd divide between serious fiction and everything else.

Gentlemen of the Road: A-

The Club Dumas is a mystery thriller with shades of the noir detective. In this case, protagonist Lucas Corso is a book detective. He’s a mercenary hired by rich — and usually corrupt — book collectors to buy, sell, trade and find rare books. I found Corso fascinating. (My wife, who read the book with me, found him deplorable. Ce la guerre!) He’s a weasel of a man, exceptionally clever, and lonely. He occupies his time drinking gin and romanticizing his Napoleonic ancestor. Oh yes, and books — very expensive, very rare books.

The story begins with a book collector’s suspicious suicide. Corso gets hired to verify the dead man’s possession – a rare manuscript written by Alexandre Dumas. It’s a chapter from The Three Musketeers. Subsequently, he’s hired by an obsessive collector of the occult to discover which of three extant editions of The Book of Nine Doors is a forgery.

Thus begins a twin strand of narrative where Corso races to find eccentric book collectors and examine their occult tomes while he’s pursued by a modern-day Milady and Rochefort (Dumas’ famous villains) as a strange conspiracy re-enacts The Three Musketeers with him at the center. The eccentrics wind up dead, and Corso demonstrates his cleverness.

Along the way he finds the girl. The alluring woman gives Corso fictional names and careless excuses. She’s slightly infuriating to read. Corso asks her questions I wanted to know, and she’s just aloof. There are many hints that she’s supernatural – a guardian angel maybe, or even the Devil. Through her shining, green-eyed seduction we learn that Corso once loved and lost. It explains his emptiness and callousness. And, in the end, explains why the green-eyed girl is so fond of him. She is, it turns out, rather diabolical.

Throughout the book, Corso works to unravel the pictorial mystery within The Book of Nine Doors. The book contains nine engravings, and the novel actually shows the images. This teases out one of the most captivating mysteries of the book. I desperately wanted Corso to unravel this occult puzzle. And, he does. But, the result is disappointing.

Pérez-Reverte gives us a lesson in narrative; I’m still not sure I needed it. At times, the characters actually imagine that their absurd situations are so dreadful that perhaps they’re merely fictional characters in a book. Of course, they are. The author’s teasinge. This itself, I don’t mind. He’s not the first to dabble in post-modernism. But, Pérez-Reverte has another, grander trick up his sleeve. To spoil it for readers, his trick is a lesson in how we perceive narrative. Those twin strands of narrative are ruses. They’re not intertwined. Corso – and therefore readers like me – have impressed upon these twin strands interconnectivity.

And what is the result? Corso, for all his cleverness, learns that he’s lost his soul long ago. He’s Faustian. And, in the end, he knows it. He’s smitten with the girl, and she’s pulling the strings behind it all, wrecking selfish interests for her own amusement. Let’s just say the devils in the details.

Like I said, I’m not sure I needed the lesson in constructing narrative. Fortunately, I the lesson entertained the hell out of me. It had all the wonderful trappings of that Umberto Eco style occult mystery (Eco himself actually has a cameo in the story!) in a tidy detective fiction package. It’s a good read with some frayed ends.

The Club Dumas: B-

His memoirs on writing amused me. They might even have inspired. It’s not much of a book to review (Oh hell, ok: B+). But, it is full of great lines. Here are some of the best:

When you’re six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializingm, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remidn yoruself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

You go on the third level, of course, and begin to write real fiction. Why shouldn’t you? Why should you fear? Carpenters don’t build monsters, after all; they build houses, stores and banks. They build some of wood a plank at a time and some of brick a brick at a time. You will build a paragraph at a time, constructing these of your vocabulary and your knowledge of grammar and basic style. As long as you stay level-on-the-level and shave even every door, you can build whatever you like — whole mansions, if you have the energy.

But you need the room, you need the door, and you need the determination to shut the door. You need a concrete goal, as well.

I also tore through Private Wars, the next novel in the Tara Chace series.

Here, Tara Chace is out of the service with a baby. This is serious business given the thriller ending of the previous book. Meanwhile, Paul Crocker, her chain-smoking, hard ass boss deals with bureaucratic hell. His own boss is out to get him, and Tara’s replacement sends an operation into chaos. These first several chapters make for the most interesting reading in this more uneven book. In particular, Crocker’s at his most compelling here as Crocker plays politics and juggles his own home life some. He tends to be the best character in the series.

The rest of the thriller is set in Uzbekistan, where a dying dictator’s daughter and son squabble over who will assume control of the country. The daughter is a Machiavellian nymphomaniac whose lover is a secret police sadist. Turns out, this guy’s the real villain. So, the story pits Chace against him as she tries to smuggle the brother out of the country and maybe figure out where some rocket launchers are along the way.

The story is about Tara’s comeback to special operations and Paul Crocker’s desperation to avoid a lousy demotion. Again, Rucka is willing to do awful things to his protagonist. The effect is a build-up to Tara’s torture and near rape at the hands of the secret police antagonist. It’s tense, but it’s a no-brainer figure out Rucka won’t go that far. No rape is imminent, and her rescue is minutes away.

This willingness to torture Tara (figuratively and literally) is what makes Rucka’s writing so great. Here, it almost works as well as the previous novel. But, not quite. The plot becomes to uneven, particuarly at the fast-forward moment following Tara’s rescue. Rucka actually interrupts the narrative chapters with a psychological profile about Chace, who has post-traumatic stress disorder (who wouldn’t!) and a bloody obvious need for revenge. While a bit of interesting verisimilitude, the suspense suffers.

Of course, Tara enacts her revenge, and regains her hard edge as Britain’s finest “Minder” (Rucka’s slang for special agent). Best of all, she sneaks in one surprise decision at the close of the story that turns out to be the clearest sign that Tara Chace really is back, motherhood and all.

Private Wars: B-

The very brief review intrigued me.  I actually managed to remember the name of the book. It took me several weeks, but I tracked down Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition volume 1 at my local comic store. I was hooked.

I found volume 2 later on, and read it with the same enthusiasm. Tense writing, tought issues, modern relevance, and a complicated woman hero that was more interesting to read about than just the lady James Bond I first figured her to be. I still await volume 3. But, in the mean time, I caught on that author Greg Rucka penned two Queen & Country novels as well. I chewed through that 1,000 or so pages faster than any reading I’ve done in a while.

A Gentleman’s Game is the first novel, which squeezes in somewhere between other mission “arcs” in the comic book volumes. It’s easily the best Tara Chace story I’ve read (I later caught on that Rucka is more novelist than graphic novelist; fortunately he’s no slouch either way). It’s a story revolving around Tara Chace’s need to feel useful, perhaps seek some revenge on Islamic fundamentalist terrorists active in the UK and beyond. And, it also has Chace chasing after a genuine love interest in her former colleague.

Rucka does an admirable job shifting perspective among Chace, her hard ass boss Paul Crocker, and an English born Muslim terrorist antagonist. Rucka’s not shy about putting his protagonists in ugly territory, trusting that the reader will stick around. similarly, his work at making a messy character in the terrorist both utterly disgusting and fascinating. He manages to make a fanatic — and the terrorist truly is that — interesting. We get the inside voice on the terrorist’s resolve, but we’re not foolish enough to buy his madness and see it for the manipulative evil that he performs.

The book’s a thriller, and fills that role well. While I saw the dramatic ending coming in those final chapters, the pacing and excitement throughout makes for a great read with enough carefully considered real-world relevance to avoid the escapism route.

A Gentleman’s Game: A

Up next, Private Wars, the second Tara Chace novel, and a bit more about the woman character.

I haven’t posted in some time. Time has a way of knocking a fellow around. I managed to read a few things in the meanwhile, and endure some ups and downs in life. I’ve been fighting a minor medical malady that doesn’t seem so minor sometimes. And, stress piles on among a blast of joys. Oh! And graduate school sneaks in there, too. I’m pursuing my MBA part-time, which started in Janurary.

Anyway, since I last posted, I’ve only managed to read about one book from my reading list from last year. But, I did manage to read a couple other books, too.

I finished White Noise a few months ago, but never posted my review. (I did bother to post a grade of C+ on the reading list entry.)

Of course, the problem with collecting my thoughts on a book I finished a few months ago is that they’re as fleeting as a dream now. The book is clever. Delillo’s nothing if not clever. The protagonist’s friends and family suffer all manner pop-culture neuroses, the most obvious of which is the mysterious chemical explosion that erupts over their town.

The post-nearly-apocalypse for the family becomes a tense affair between the protagonist and his wife (among which are nestled bizarre hypochondriac interludes involving mainly his children), and I think I started to suffer my own neurosis because I wanted the characters to stop talking like clever Don Delillo and start acting like smart people who are frustrated and unhappy.

When I finished the book, I tried to describe it to someone like this. “Well, it’s entertaining and funny, I guess. But, I just wanted the characters to stop talking like a writer and start talking like people.”

Delillo has something to say here, and I think there are times I agree with his black humor commentary on modern existence, consumerism, and family. I even giggle a little. But, whether or not his quirky academic protagonist and quirkier (if possible) friends and family have a point, I just can’t bring myself to care about their plight. Or, thus, ours. And, considering the climactic love-affair-gone-attempted-murder, I think I should. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to smack them around a little bit for being fools.

White Noise: C+

It could be worse. I still think Delillo’s a highly admirable writer. I can’t say that of Paul Coelho. The wife and I decided that we needed a hobby together. So, we thought reading a book together to talk it over would be a good way to go. We toured Borders and settled on The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. I had suspicions then that this was a thinly disguised self-help book, which I don’t see as a benefit.

Turns out I was right. I caught on pretty quickly. Coelho’s tale is a well-meaning fable of a Spanish shepherd boy who learns his Personal Legend (capital letters and all) is to seek out treasure buried near the Pyramids. So, he goes out to seek his Personal Legend and travels across Gibraltar and through the Sahara.

I don’t mind the tale. Oh, it’s contrived, certainly. But, the short little narrative is reasonably entertaining with it’s adventurous romp. The boy encounters some personal calamity, and waivers on whether to continue his Personal Legend. He meets others variously failing and succeeding on their own Personal Legend. He meets a terribly uninteresting love in the desert. He meets other mostly uninteresting characters, too. And, in the end, he finds his treasure after learning some accept-it-on-faith lesson about wisdom and patience (or something).

The tale is inscrutable. It’s exactly the kind of book that, when faced with criticism, can be answered with something nonsensical like “Well, then you just aren’t pursuing your Personal Legend.”

I can’t say the book didn’t make me think about what I’d like to accomplish in life. For that, I give it credit. I can say that the book reminded me that one of the things I want to accomplish in life is not to succeed by attributing success to interpreting omens set before me by supernatural agency!

The Alchemist: D

I think I needed to get those reviews out of my system and flush out frustrations I had about not posting here. I look forward to posting more frequently now.

This guy was older than me, like most of my co-workers at the time. He was thin, and had a kempt beard as long as I knew him. He had a bleak sense of humor, and as I got to know him over the couple of years I appreciated it more and more. He and his counterpart co-worker used to leave this mannequin in various hilarious poses. It was funny to find Al, as they called the dummy, sitting in chairs, wearing ties, bivouacking in a file cabinet. But, mostly, that damn mannequin made me jump out of my skin when I caught him out of the corner of my eye where nobody was supposed to be.

Anyway, this co-worker of mine was quite the reader. And, it took even longer for me to catch on he was quite the writer, too. Turns out he was a playwright and screenwriter, and a local director filmed his movie. I still haven’t seen his movie. I really want to.

They laid him off one day about two years ago. He had great taste in books, and he and my old boss used to exchange notes. They let me in on the gag once in a while. I had to go look up his name, because I forgot it. It was two years ago, and I forgot. It’s funny how long something feels when you get wrapped up in a place like work.

I picked up Blood Meridien right before he was laid off. When I did, a newer novel of McCarthy’s caught my eye. It was No Country For Old Men. That was in my Western buying phase. I bought several novels I thought would help inspire me for Dust Devils, a Western role-playing game I created. So, I made a note that it looked like a good candidate for later on.

Fast forward many months. Last year, I was strolling through my favorite used book store, and I found a nice trade paperback edition of No Country For Old Men. It was a little worn, but it sure was cheap. I’d heard a movie was coming out, and I wanted the edition before all the copies were blasted with movie marketing and actors for the cover. It’s a small vanity, I know.

I read it. I strayed from my reading list, but I wanted to have it in my brain before the movie tainted anything. More vanity.

I was taken with with that book — the kind of adoration you feel when something hurts you, moves you out of comfort to confront some hard ideas. It stuck to my ribs. I couldn’t get it out of my head, because I was very troubled by the fate of Llewellyn Moss, and even more troubled by Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff whose story it really is.

I knew I wanted to see it in the theater when the movie came out. So, two weeks ago, on a cold and blustery friday, I found myself alone from my wife and kids. She took them to her sister’s for supper and movies with the girls. After work, I shuttled around in the winter weather for a quick bite of tacos, then off to the theater to stand in a long line that nearly made me walk away for fear of missing any part of the movie.

I watched it alone, seated in the second row to the right. It was marvelous. As close a match as any novel-to-film translation I’ve seen.

When it was over, there was silence. Dead silence. The end scene took the air out of the room. I don’t know all the baby boomer couples there with me were as shocked I felt them to be. But, it seemed to me they sat theredumbstruck, as though they’d been tricked into watching a “good movie” and gotten suckerpunched instead. For me, having read the book, it was no shock. Just another kick in the soul. That’s how I described it to my wife.

I can’t really describe it here. It disturbs me greatly. Oh, yes, the book and the movie are disturbing. There’s terrible, heartless violence, and the tale doesn’t end well. But, that’s not quite what I’m getting at. Not quite. What disturbs me is that I have no quibble with it. I have nothing to add. I just have to shrug and nod and think, yep, that’s how things are.

I would be a damn fool to think no one else is affected as much as me. That’s more vanity, and really awful vanity at that. But, still, No Country For Old Men resonates with me. It hits close to home. I can say I admire the film and the novel, and I say that because I find it both to be powerfully true as art. I believe they hit close to home to me especially (among others, no doubt). But, in very brief and few discussions with others, they seem less affected, less troubled and more wowed by a great movie they’re enthusiastic about. Maybe I just need to talk with others more.

I do not think I’ll be able to see the movie again soon. I feel as though it spoke directly to someone like me, someone with my particular impression of the world. It’s not because my life is teetering on the edge of violence like that in the novel and film. But, it hits me harder and closer than any other art I’ve experienced.

And, I hate that idea, that I’m just one of those suckers who sees some movie and tells all his friend it changed his life. That’s so useless to me. It didn’t change me. I didn’t walk out the door and think, you know what, I really out to go climb a mountain before I die. What horseshit that’d be.

I just drove home with the radio off. Felt like thunder in my chest for a little while there. Going alone was probably both the wisest and the stupidest thing I could have done.

At midnight, When my wife brought the kids home — one asleep on her shoulder and bundled up, the other staggering half-awake — she said “What’s wrong?” She knew I really wanted to see it. “Didn’t you like it?”

I couldn’t form an answer. I don’t like it. It’s not something I can talk about like I can with other movies. I don’t love it. It haunts me. I told her I didn’t want her to see it, ever. I said it was because I think I’m afraid of what she’ll think, and that it might ruin some secret hope I have that maybe I’m wrong about it all. Like seeing it might take away her innocence or something.

If you’ve seen the movie, and think anything like I do about it, you’ll know it’s a false hope.

She looked at me like I was crazy, but then she shrugged. “Well, I don’t want to see it now!”

And, I think I’m fine with that.