Review: The Pisces, by Melissa Broder

 

So I think in my last post back in 2019 I said I just bought The Pisces and was looking forward to it. I read it not long after and loved it. It's this incredibly emotional and raw story about a woman in Venice Beach, California, who falls in love with a merman. So it's kind of erotic fantasy if you will.

Anyway I loved the book for its honesty about women, about sex and love and bodies and minds and how they all go together or don't. There is some disturbing content in the book vis-a-vis a dog that doesn't end happily but it's mostly about this messed up, real, relatable (I think) young woman trying to figure it out and falling in love with someone totally unattainable. Like, the relationship is dead-on-arrival-unattainable. They fall in love, they have sex (graphic sex) and everyone wants more, but what it will take to have more may be too much.

I don't mean to give you spoilers but this is a fairy tale more like Angela Carter or Catherine Breillat than anything else. I actually could see Catherine Breillat making a really great movie from this book.

I ended up re-reading the book recently because I enjoyed it so much and just came back from a trip to California that included Venice. And as it turns out I have some stuff going on in my personal life that resonates with this emotionally and I relived my own heartbreak from the past reading this wonderful book again. Melissa Broder has two other books of prose- so sad today, which are essays, and Milk Fed, which came out relatively recently, and she writes them in her signature style, and this book will give you a taste of that. Highly recommended if you are ok with the sex and body talk and can tolerate what happens to that that poor dog.

I did not receive this book for review.

Review: BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS, by Lawrence Osborne

Beautiful Animals, by Lawrence Osborne. Published 2017 by Hogarth/Crown/Random House. Literary Fiction. Crime Fiction.

Beautiful Animals lives in that yummy space between literary fiction and the crime novel. Set on the Greek island of Hydra and among the fashionable rich, author Lawrence Osborne tells the story of Naomi Codrington, a young woman retreating to her parents' world of privilege after a humiliating professional setback, and Faoud, a Syrian refugee who washes up on Naomi's playground.

The reader feels right away that there is something toxic in Naomi's idle boredom, which preys on her and leads her to temptation. Crucial to this alchemy is Naomi's burgeoning friendship with Sam, an altogether ordinary young woman spending time with her parents. The women form a bond that just teeters on sexual but never quite loses its balance; both become infatuated with Faoud, a handsome young man whose origins are murky but seems to come from a privileged background himself.

In Beautiful Animals, Osborne treads familiar ground- what happens when the ultrarich mix with the poor and desperate. Faoud is a man of Naomi's own creation; she creates a narrative for him in which she herself will figure prominently, and soon Naomi writes the chapter she thinks will make for him a happy ending. Naomi lives with her wealthy father and stepmother, whom she disdains, and she concocts a plan to help Faoud at what she is sure will be little cost. Of course these things never go as planned, and soon the costs climb higher than anyone could have imagined.

I would love to see a movie made of this book. Osborne's writing is so atmospheric and evocative; you can feel the heat of the sun, the salt of the water and stain of blood as you read. Later on Osborne introduces a kind of detective character and the book wakes from its delicious paresse and takes on a crime-novel pace, then settles in for a low-key, dark finish. Beautiful Animals would be a wonderful choice for the literary reader's beach bag, a great follow up for fans of Katie Kitamura's A Separation or similar. Lawrence Osborne never disappoints.

Rating: BUY

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review.

Review: ELDERS, by Ryan McIlvain

Elders, by Ryan McIlvain. Published 2013 by Hogarth/Random House. Literary Fiction.

I had Elders in my to-be-read pile for a long time, just about since the paperback came out, and yes, what prompted me to finally pick it up was going to see the musical "Book of Mormon" on Broadway this summer. That said, this beautiful, bittersweet book is nothing like what I saw on stage (which I also loved). Elders is an absorbing and accomplished story about growing up and testing limits and finding what it takes to take the steps you need in life.

The book focuses on two Mormon elders on their mission in Brazil. Elder McLeod is an American from an elite family. He is partnered with Elder Passos, a Brazilian convert from a poor background who is both zealous and ambitious. Elder McLeod has the relaxed attitude of someone who takes his faith for granted. It's simply the air he breathes, but sometimes he can't quite.  Passos is a convert with something to prove to himself and others. Alongside his holy mission to bring new people to his church is Passos's personal mission is to gain admission to Brigham Young University and a make life in the United States, and he is equally dedicated to both.

McLeod and Passos work together just fine and get along okay, enduring the daily grind of prospecting. McLeod has even invited Passos to stay with his family in Utah if Passos succeeds in his mission to get into BYU. But when they meet Josefina, an attractive woman genuinely excited about converting to Mormonism, things begin to fall apart. Josefina's husband Leandro neither shares her enthusiasm nor trusts these handsome young men who pay so much attention to his wife, and as it turns out the very Mormons who hold the key to Passos's future have some things to say about Josefina's conversion too.

As their relationship with the couple develops, fault lines open up between the two men. McLeod finds Passos rigid and difficult; Passos finds McLeod lazy and spoiled. Each questions his relationship to the church for different reasons and also the necessity of their partnership as time goes on. When the situation with Josefina erupts into open conflict their relationship deteriorates alongside it.

I loved Elders and strongly recommend it to readers of literary fiction. McLeod and Passos are believable and detailed characters; their lives felt very real to me. McIlvain's writing is excellent; he draws with a sure hand. His portrayal of these men and their life is nuanced and thoughtful and thought-provoking. He captures a piece of religious life not often seen in mainstream fiction and he captures it beautifully with its beauty and its flaws.

Rating: BUY

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

Review: THE BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER, by Lawrence Osborne

The Ballad of a Small Player, by Lawrence Osborne. Published 2014 by Hogarth Books. Literary Fiction.

"Sometimes one can feel that one has suddenly lost something that one never had in the first place. It just slips out of the hand and breaks."

This sentence appears about halfway through the haunting new novel by travel writer and novelist Lawrence Osborne but its message and impersonal tone could be said to sum up the entire story. An Englishman on the run from the law and from himself, an ordinary man who styles himself "Lord" Doyle, is hiding out in the casinos and hotels of Macau, playing baccarat but really playing at winning and losing himself and his soul.

Baccarat is his favorite game because the way he plays it, it is pure chance. Nine is the magic number, and soon he finds himself on an unprecedented winning streak. But before he gets there he becomes besotted with a mysterious prostitute who is not what she seems. He falls ill and they spend a hazy time in her apartment; she feeds him, takes care of him and he wallows in this reverie until reality in the form of his gambling addiction takes hold again. Then he must navigate his way out of the dream and find out what's real, what will break and what won't.

I loved this book less than his first novel, The Forgiven, which had a stronger plot, but I was still entranced by this moody travelogue and tale of desperation and love. Osborne uses his travel-writing skills to immerse the reader in the setting- the smoky hallways and shady characters come alive, along with the bland hotel rooms, impersonal restaurants and overwhelming atmosphere of loneliness. The Ballad of a Small Player is above all a book for the senses and I'd recommend it to armchair travelers and those intrigued by slow simmering suspense and illusion.

Rating: BACKLIST

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review.

Review: THE DINNER, by Herman Koch

The Dinner, by Herman Koch. Published 2013 by Hogarth Press. Literary Fiction. Translation.

It's been a while since I read something as messed up as The Dinner, recently published by the Random House imprint Hogarth. I'm big fan of Hogarth; two of the books they published last year ended up among my favorites for the year (The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya and The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne.) This one was blurbed by no less a personage in the world of thrillers than Gillian Flynn, and the premise- two couples meet for dinner, an explosive secret between them- intrigued me.

I can't say I was disappointed. The book delivers when it comes to the shocks, the twists and turns. Paul and his wife Claire meet his brother Serge and Serge's wife Babette at a chic eatery in the Netherlands. Serge is a politician about to run for (and likely win) the office of Prime Minister. Paul and Claire are the first to arrive. When Serge and Babette get there, it's obvious Babette has been crying. Why?

Little by little, Herman Koch teases out the knotted threads that bind these four people. The book is divided into sections representing the courses of the meal and facts are dished out with the languor of a luxury meal. We learn, among other things, that Paul is quintessentially unreliable, unstable and worse. We learn what his son and Serge's son did, what they may still be doing. And we learn what one of the party is willing to do to make sure no one ever finds out.

This was a tough, tough read, and even if it doesn't show up on the year's favorites, it will be one of the year's most memorable books for sure. If you thought Gone Girl had some psychos, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. At this point I really don't want to think much more about this book, because it was that disturbing, like a bad nightmare, but one you can't turn away from. I think it's masterfully written, so drawn out and slow yet the impressions it leaves are indelible, like a stain you can't get out. I've heard some people say the book has no sympathetic characters and I don't agree. There is one person who tries to do the right thing. The problem is that Paul has us hating that person. Paul ridicules this individual but we are seeing him through Paul's eyes, and remember what I said about Paul. I had a great deal of sympathy for this character, particularly by the horrible end.

Take it on if you're up for a challenge, but don't mistake this for an easy read.

Rating: BUY but buyer beware!

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Hogarth.

REVIEW: The Forgiven, by Lawrence Osborne

The Forgiven, by Lawrence Osborne. Published 2012 by Hogarth Press. Literary Fiction.

 I think I need to read everything Hogarth Press publishes.

Hogarth is a new imprint of Random House, named after the press founded in 1917 by Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf. Our Hogarth Press is a new home for edgy, voice-driven fiction, and it produces about four titles a season. I've read three Hogarth titles now and each has been outstanding in its own way. The Watch, by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, was a brilliant indictment of the war in Afghanistan; The Dead Do Not Improve, by Jay Caspian Kang, was a comic crime novel set in San Francisco among hipsters, gangbangers and surfers, and now there's The Forgiven, a searing, atmospheric story of lust and death in the Moroccan desert.

David and Jo Henninger are a wealthy British couple on their way to a weekend bacchanal at a lavish estate; Richard and Dally, their hosts, spare no expense to give their friends a getaway filled with bountiful meals, free-flowing wine, and sex, and drugs, and whatever else they want. But David has had too much to drink and the couple gets lost on the way. They hit and kill a young Moroccan man named Driss, who may or may not have wished them ill, but who is, nonetheless, very dead. David and Jo arrive at the party with the young man's corpse in tow. Richard and Dally and their servant Hamid wait to see what will happen next, which is that Driss's father shows up and makes David an offer he can't refuse.

In the mean time, the narrative alternates between the party and Driss's short life, including his adventures in France, which story may or may not be true. Osborne, a travel writer, excels at creating atmosphere and mood; the plot is enough to keep you going but it isn't really the point. What's interesting to watch is the way the characters develop, the way each reacts to the crisis and how the grow and change. The characters' interactions and reactions to each other make up so much of the action, their prehistoric prejudices collapsed into modern day post-colonialism and post-9/11 anxiety. The Moroccans in the book make their living selling fossils, the characters' attitudes towards each other as old and as integral to who they are as the ammonites and trilobites they buy and sell. Both sides are stained to the marrow with hostility and hatred; neither side can do anything to please the other, except, maybe, the one thing David refuses to do.

So, I loved it. Even though the plot is far from razor-sharp, I was riveted to this book which manages to be both slow to savor and quick to read. It's intoxicating and langorous but at the same time I really wanted to know what was going to happen. The answer, which doesn't come till the final line, is devastating. I strongly- strongly- recommend this to literary fiction readers and anyone else who would enjoy gorgeous armchair travel combined with a haunting, and haunted, narrative of lost souls.

Rating: BUY

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

REVIEW: The Watch, by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya

The Watch, by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya. Published 2012 by Hogarth Press. Literary Fiction.

If you want a book that's going to pull you in a dozen different emotional directions, confuse you, intrigue you, then rip your heart into shreds, The Watch is the book for you. It's a brilliant, multi-dimensional examination of the war in Afghanistan told from different points of view- an Afghan woman, a translator, a military doctor, a commander, and more.

The basic story centers on a troubling, ambiguous incident taking place in the middle of the Kandahar plains. After a brutal firefight between U.S. forces and Afghan insurgents, a lone woman, legless, wheels herself towards a U.S. military outpost to demand the return of her brother's remains for burial. Her brother was killed in the battle and she wants to bury him according to her culture's requirements. A Tajik translator is sent to talk to her, to explain that the U.S. military will not return it to her. They fear that she is a suicide bomber and that she is lying, and they have orders with respect to the body.

The book shifts the point of view among an array of characters- the woman, first, then a lieutenant, then the outpost's doctor, then the translator, and more military personnel, and shifts a little through time, too. We get back story and extended narratives from some of the characters, and we meet the Kandahar storyline at slightly different points on the timeline, too. I liked that Roy-Bhattacharya did not just tell the same story over and over from different points of view Rashomon-style but gives us different segments and facets of the story as well as the characters. Telling the story this way, a little broken up, helped keep it interesting and fresh for me.

Then there's the incident itself, and the woman's intentions, which Roy-Bhattacharya wisely keeps us guessing at right till the end. And I do mean the end, as in the very last words. There's so much going on around this character- so much drama swirling, emotional issues, issues about the nature of military service, the demands on soldiers for obedience, the psychological stress of battlefield life and the specific right- or wrong-ness of the Afghan war- that it's easy to forget that she's what the story is about, that her mission is the embodiment of the mess that is this war. Roy-Bhattacharya draws all of his characters with a devastating humanity- you can't help but feel for all of them, what they're all going through, from the conflicted translator and the overworked doctor and even the rule-bearing commander. But it's this woman who carries the most devastating burden of all.

It's very challenging and not always easy to read in terms of the ideas and psychological complexity of its universe, but it's a really incredible book. It will truly stay with you for a long time after you put it down, and you won't want to. I was not intending to read it to the end when I picked it up; I thought I was just going to be dipping in and maybe coming back later, but Roy-Bhattacharya hooked me from page 1. So here I've written a lot about this book, and in the final analysis what I want to say is that it's a brilliant novel.

Click here for some other recommended reads about Afghanistan.

Rating: BUY

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Random House.