Review: THE BONE MAN, by Wolf Haas

The Bone Man, by Wolf Haas. Published 2013 by Melville House

This is a very silly book indeed. It's also fairly gruesome as crime novels go. But it's got a great detective in Simon Brenner and a fun plot. Set in present-day Austria, the story focuses on a chicken shack where the well-heeled forsake gourmet fare in favor of the greasy stuff. You know, like when someone eats cheap barbecue because it makes him feel like a man of the people. That. But when some bones more human than chicken turn up in the pile, some questions need to get answered.

Investigating this mess, Brenner turns up all kinds of dirty dealings, including someone's head in a soccer bag. Haas's tone is ironic and silly as well as dark and he's got one of the funnest narrative voices in crime fiction as far as I'm concerned. He creates a very colorful world filled with bizarre characters you have to read to believe and a plot straight out of "Eating Raoul".

I read this book a while ago and a lot of the details are escaping me now, so I can't write a very long review other than to say Wolf Haas is a writer to check out, and The Bone Man is silly fun right till the end. If you like absurdist crime, definitely add Wolf Haas to your reading list.

Rating: BEACH

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

REVIEW: Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov

Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov. Published 2011 by Melville House. Fiction. Crime Fiction. Translated from the Russian.

The last in my little mini-series of reviews of Melville House's International Crime line is the first book in Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov's Penguin series, Death and the Penguin. This book is laced throughout with both black humor and tenderness, but it's still a crime novel about murder and death.

We start off with Viktor Zolotaryov, a poor writer living in Kiyv whose best friend- only friend- is a penguin named Misha, whom Viktor has rescued from a closed-down zoo. Soon, though, Viktor gets a job writing "living obituaries" of people who have not yet died- though they do die, and not long after Viktor pens their obits. At the same time, Viktor takes in little Sonya, the young daughter of a friend, and Nina, a young woman he initially hires to look after Sonya. Tentatively, the four form a family that becomes threatened by the mafiosi behind the obituaries.

Of the three crime novels I've reviewed this week, Death and the Penguin is definitely the lightest and silliest, but there is an undercurrent of tragedy in Kurkov's depiction of the chaos of post-Soviet Ukraine, where people are adrift and almost everyone is a criminal or threatened by criminals. At the same time, the serious stuff never overwhelms the surreal and comic side, or the tender, bittersweet side. You'll have to read to find out how exactly Viktor comes to own Misha, how Misha becomes a pawn and how he eventually saves the day for Viktor and his new found family. Kurkov is the author of 13 novels and definitely knows how to tell a story, and he knows how to tell one unlike anything you've read before at that.

Rating: BACKLIST

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

REVIEW: Happy Birthday, Turk! by Jakob Arjouni

Happy Birthday, Turk! by Jakob Arjouni. Published 2011 by Melville House.
Crime Fiction. Translation.

So I guess this is unofficially Melville House International Crime week; I'm trying to catch up on my crime fiction reviews and it just so happens a bunch of them are from the terrific publishing house and its fun International Crime line, which includes books from all over the world including crime writers that are very successful worldwide and little-known inside the U.S. Melville hopes this will change and so do I!

Today I want to tell you about the fab Jakob Arjouni and the first book in his Inspector Kemal Kayankaya series, Happy Birthday, Turk! Set in Frankfurt, Germany, the book covers the investigation into the murder of a Turkish immigrant in a seedy part of town. Kemal Kayankaya, a private investigator and himself an ethnic Turk raised by a German family, takes the case after the deceased's wife comes to him. Kayankaya, culturally German but marked out as different in a society valuing conformity and order, is in a difficult position both with the Turkish family he's trying to help and the German authorities he needs to both utilize and avoid to solve the case.

The case brings him into contact with drug users and dealers, prostitutes and pimps, as well as a thoroughly conventional retired German cop who helps him with information. What I loved about this book, and what distinguishes it from other crime novels and procedurals I've read lately, is Arjouni's hysterical sense of humor. I must have laughed once on every page- at least. A favorite passage, about dinner at the cop's house as Kayankaya tries to play nice:

The Löffs' dining room looks like the showroom of a plastics factory, a space designed for messy little kids. The pale yellow walls are adorned with recipes encased in plastic. The chairs and the dining table are bright orange, and he floor is covered with dark green linoleum. Our place mats were washable plastic. All it needed was an open drain, and the place could have been cleaned with the garden hose.

Mrs. Löff shoveled sausages, mashed potatoes and sauerkraut onto my plate. I twisted the tops off two bottles of beer.

There were a great many half-raw chunks in the homemade mashed potatoes. But they were homemade.

"You can really tell this isn't that instant stuff."

Mrs. Löff thanked me for the compliment.

And so on. After several beatings, a gas attack and  uncovering some corruption, he solves the case, but not in the way I expected. That's another thing I liked about the book- the bittersweet twist ending. I have three more books in this series on deck and I would definitely recommend it to noir/crime readers looking for something off the beaten path. It takes place in the same kind of seedy underworld as many noirs but the specific geographic and cultural location, not to mention the humor, make it different too. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Arjouni's world and hope to return soon!

Rating: BUY

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

REVIEW: He Died With His Eyes Open, by Derek Raymond

He Died With His Eyes Open, by Derek Raymond. Published 2011 by Melville House. Literary Fiction. Crime Fiction.

I first heard of Derek Raymond's frankly fantastic He Died With His Eyes Open at last year's Boston Book Festival, when I stopped by Melville House's booth and their marketing rep pressed it into my hands, saying it was one of the darkest- and one of the best- things he'd ever read. I've been on a bit of crime (fiction) spree this summer and read it in a couple of days while on vacation back in July. Wow.

The book is great, gripping and poetic crime fiction. The book starts with the brutal murder of a middle aged alcoholic in a seedy part of London; the police almost can't be bothered to investigate, thinking what's the point, it's probably just a case of one lowlife killing another. The book is set in Thatcher-era Britain, and the poor are garbage to anyone above their particular station. So, who cares. But the head Detective Sergeant of the Department of Unexplained Deaths cares, because this man, Charles Staniland, was a human being whose life had value and dignity, and he sets himself to the task of finding his killer. As he investigates, he finds that the victim was a talented man though failed in life and love, who had unfortunately hooked up with wrong femme fatale. But then, is there ever a right one?

He finds Staniland's voluminous taped diaries and learns that Staniland was an educated man with an artist's eye and an aesthete's soul:

Nobody who mattered like his sculpture [Staniland says of an artist he admires]; when I went over to his council studio I understood why. His figures reminded me of Ingres crossed with early Henry Moore; they were extraordinarily graceful, and far too honest to mean anything whatever to current trendy taste. There was  quality in them that no artist nowadays can seize anymore; they expressed virtues--toughness, idealism, determination-- that went out of style with a vanished Britain that I barely remembered. I asked him why, with his talent, he didn't progress to a more modern attitude, but he said it was no use; he was still struggling to represent the essence of what he had experienced in the thirties. 'What I am always trying to capture,' he explained, 'is the light, the vision inside a man, and the conviction which that light lends his action, his whole body...'"

Sounds like what Raymond is trying to do here, too. He Died With His Eyes Open is the first of five crime novels set in the "Factory," the Department of Unexplained Deaths, and for all its bleakness, violence and death, there is something touching and optimistic about the unnamed detective's utter belief in the worth of every human being, no matter how marginalized or alienated from society. And the book is totally addictive reading. More than that though, it's a beautifully written literary novel that just happens to be about a cruel murder. It's violent and dark, for sure, but Raymond writes with heart and from a place of real kindness. I loved this combination of disturbing subject matter and generous point of view.  I can't wait to read more from Derek Raymond!

Rating: BUY

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

REVIEW: Nairobi Heat, by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Nairobi Heat, by Mukoma Wa Ngugi. Published 2011 by Melville House (Melville International Crime). Crime Fiction.

Ishmael, a black detective from Wisconsin, has a problem. A nameless young white woman has shown up dead on the Madison doorstep of Joshua Hakizimana, a hero of the Rwandan genocide modeled somewhat in the vein of Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose incredible story formed the basis of the 2004 film "Hotel Rwanda". But the resemblance between the two stops there. At a dead end with his investigation in Madison, Ishmael quickly hops a plane to Nairobi, Kenya, where, accompanied by local detective known simply as "O," he tracks down a number of dirty secrets. When he returns to America, he thinks he knows where the investigation will lead, but circumstances conspire to surprise him again.

Nairobi Heat is a fun travelogue/crime novel with an engaging hero in Ishmael. Some suspension of disbelief will be needed to get over some of the plot holes, but I have to say I had a good time reading this book. I enjoyed the armchair travel to Africa and Ishmael's thoughts about being a black policeman in the U.S. and in Kenya were interesting. True to genre, the story is filled with oddball characters, from the bizarre, slightly psychotic rich Englishman who the nonetheless lives in squalor, to "Muddy," the beautiful singer and survivor of Rwandan genocide, to the victim herself, whose identity and back story are revealed by the end.

The characters combined with the setting, rendered as gritty and slick with blood and tragedy, make for a very enjoyable read. It's not too violent although this is a crime novel about murder steeped in genocide and you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs! But I only had to look away a couple of times. I plan to keep an eye out for more from this author and I'd definitely recommend Nairobi Heat to crime readers looking for something off the beaten path.

You can also find out more about the Melville International Crime series here. Melville has some great-looking titles from all over the world and if you like crime fiction it's well worth a look!

Rating: BACKLIST

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

Art of the Novella Challenge: The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilych was one of the first "grown up" short stories I ever read. There was a great used bookstore in my town whose eclectic selection formed the basis of my largely self-directed reading as a teenager; I bought an old paperback of The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories for about a quarter and devoured it. It jumpstarted my lifelong love of Russian literature.

So naturally I had to read the Art of the Novella edition for this challenge, and it's the first time since I was a teenager that I've revisited this classic. The story is simple, about the life, illness and death of Ivan Ilych, a Russian attorney and judge who has been, all is life, everything that everyone has expected of him. He made all the right moves, married the right woman and settled into a successful career. Then, in late midlife, he's struck with a sudden illness, soon protracted into a painful and miserable slow death.

The story starts with his funeral then backtracks to his early life and childhood, following through to his final moments. Towards the end, he starts to question himself and his choices, but, certain as he is that he's always lived the right way, he never gets very far. Still, the suspicion gnaws at him like the pain. The only relief he finds is when his manservant elevates his legs, or when he can find a moment or two of solitude.

Reading this story now, it's just as powerful and moving for me as it was when I was younger. I feel a little more for Ivan Ilych now, being an adult now and feeling some of the stresses the narrator describes. I think when I was younger I saw more of the didactic morality tale, which I can still see, but which takes a back seat for me to the questions we all have to ask ourselves about our choices. I still love this story!

So that brings me to my goal of six novellas for the challenge. I'm officially "Captivated"!

Thanks to Frances of Nonsuchbook (who has my vote for Best Literary Blog in BBAW) and Melville House for hosting this challenge. It's been so much fun, and I know I'll continue to read these wonderful books.

Here are links to the rest of the novellas I read for the challenge:

The Duel, by Heinrich von Kleist
The Illusion of Return, by Samir El-Youssef
The North of God, by Steve Stern
Benito Cereno, by Herman Melville
Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance, by Sholem Aleichem

Art of the Novella Challenge: The Duel, by Heinrich von Kleist

Melville House just introduced a mini-series of books into their Art of Novella series; The Duel is a series of five novellas bearing that title by different authors. I read Heinrich von Kleist's Duel, originally published in 1810.

Von Kleist's Duel tells the story of German nobility caught up in a scandal. Littegarde, a beautiful noblewoman, is accused by Count Rotbart of having been his mistress. Rotbart himself is accused of plotting to kill her husband, his brother. His accusation of her is his alibi. Meanwhile, Littegarde's sweetheart, Sir Friedrich, leaps to her defense and challenges Rotbart to a duel and putting Littegarde's honor in the hands of God. If Friedrich wins, Littegarde will have been judged innocent by God; if he loses, she will be judged guilty and both Friedrich and Littegarde will die.

The Duel is a very entertaining and suspenseful read. The idea of divine justice- that God's will will be revealed in the outcome of an Earthly contest- is a great premise for a tale of courtly intrigues. The story reads a little bit like a late-eighteenth-century soap opera. The novella is one of the shortest in the series at a mere 50 pages; however, The Duel is more than its 50 pages. It's what Melville House is calling a Hybrid book. A QR code at the end gives readers access to 133 pages of content on a range of electronic devices. Bonus material for The Duel includes excerpts of Ivanhoe, selections from The History of Dueling by J.G. Milligen, Johann Ludwig Uhland's poem "The Fatal Tournament," Don Quixote, and more. It's like a mini-course on the subject, and it's yours for the taking with the book!

This is the fifth book I've read for the Art of the Novella Challenge. One more to go and I'm at my goal of 6!

Links to my other Art of the Novella reviews:
The Illusion of Return, by Samir El-Youssef
The North of God, by Steve Stern
Benito Cereno, by Herman Melville
Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance, by Sholem Aleichem

The Challenge is hosted by Frances of Nonsuchbook. Visit- and shop- from Melville House here.

Art of the Novella Challenge: The Illusion of Return, by Samir El-Youssef

"It was the last night the four of us were together."

The line "It was the last night the four of us were together" echoes like a drum beat through this slow-moving, thoughtful story. The last night the four Palestinian friends- the narrator (nameless), Ali, Maher and George- were together started in a café in Israeli-occupied Lebanon. They met to talk about life, philosophy, politics, all the big-picture things young people love to talk about over coffee and cigarettes. They avoided private pains- the death of a sister, of a brother, the failure of a family and looming murder of one of their own- that come as consequences of the very politics they discussed with such fervor.

The Illusion of Return is the story about a man in middle age revisiting memories of his youth in Lebanon from the vantage point of his new life in the United Kingdom and the day he visits with Ali. The narrative alternates between the day of his visit with Ali at Heathrow Airport and the friends' last night together. Secrets are shared that night; some more are shared years later, while others are kept. The narrator seeks validation from Ali, and at the same time fears what meeting him again will mean, and what it will not.

Can you go home again? What does that mean in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or in the context of the life of an individual? Does the concept of return belong to one people, or several, or to no one? What does home mean? Does it mean your family? What if your family has been destroyed, or has destroyed itself through secrets and shame?

El-Youssef tackles some difficult questions in his beautifully written, challenging novella that is nonetheless a lovely gem of a book. For all the discussion of politics, it struck me as not particularly a political story but one about how individual lives are lost- and found- as larger-scale events and movements wash over them, a theme with universal relevance. And he's written some wonderful characters, like the narrator who struggles so much and especially Ali, who seems so glib at first but whose own life has been mired in the same struggle as the narrator's. It's just that he's found a way to find peace, and to offer it up to his friend.

This is the fourth novella I've read for the Art of the Novella Challenge, hosted by Frances at NonsuchBook. Visit the Melville House website here, and buy some of their wonderful books from your local independent bookstore today!

Links to my other Art of the Novella reviews:
The North of God, by Steve Stern
Benito Cereno, by Herman Melville
Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance, by Sholem Aleichem

The Art of the Novella: Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance, by Sholem Aleichem

For my third novella, I chose Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance, because it's been in my TBR pile for a long time and it's about time I got around to reading it!

Stempenyu tells the story of a famed Yiddish violinst who travels from place to place winning fans, fortune and acclaim- and leaving a trail of broken hearts. Then one day he meets Rochalle, a beautiful married woman and a kind of Emma Bovary of the shtetl, and falls in love.

But Rochalle isn't like Emma in one respect- despite her love for Stempenyu, she has no real desire to actually cheat on her husband, or indulge in a fantasy life. True, she's frustrated and lonely, and true, her husband doesn't appear to have much to offer, but she's smart and she's lucky, and things might not turn out so badly for her after all.

I kind of loved this little book. I've tried to read Aleichem before and never really had much luck with him, truth be told. Wandering Stars, his novel about traveling Yiddish actors, is still gathering dust somewhere in my house. But this book was just my speed- charming and loquacious like all of his work, it has a strong plot and wonderful characters, and without giving too much away, I'm glad that he gave his heroine a happy ending. It's a refreshing change from novels where women are punished for their passions. It's also a really fun and loving portrait of a lost world and the colorful figures that inhabited it. I'm so glad I finally got around to reading this great novella!

The Art of the Novella Challenge is hosted by Frances of Nonsuch Book. You can also visit the Melville House site here.

Other novellas I've read for the challenge:
The North of God, by Steve Stern
Benito Cereno, by Herman Melville

This brings me up to the 3-book level. I'm going for 6! Next up is The Illusion of Return, by Samir El-Youssef.

Art of the Novella Challenge: Benito Cereno, by Herman Melville

Benito Cereno is a novella by Herman Melville; originally published in 1855, it tells the story of an American merchant vessel that comes upon a mysterious Spanish ship off the coast of South America. The captain, Benito Cereno, is taciturn and sullen. Followed everywhere by his African servant Babo, he seems indifferent to his difficult situation: most of the crew are dead and those remaining are all behaving oddly. The American captain, Delano, offers help and is rebuffed; he tries to find out what's going on but gets nowhere, until Cereno makes a move that illuminates the situation and forces a resolution.

This book was one of only a few Art of the Novella books available at the bookstore, and to be honest I picked it up because it was short. But it is really incredible; dense and detailed with tragedy of many kinds at its core, it's hard to place but impossible to put down. Melville builds the tension slowly until the story explodes in violence. Although the story is based on true events, Melville seems to scrupulously avoid taking sides, as the debates around the political and philosophical message of the story show. I think I agree with the critic who said that at the end of the day, what it's really about is brutality. I'd recommend it to readers wanting to try out a little Melville without committing to Moby-Dick (I've never been able to finish that book myself); it's great American literature all by itself.

Also read for the Art of the Novella Challenge:
The North of God, by Steve Stern

I guess this means I'm going beyond the 1-book level and shooting for 3!

The Art of the Novella Reading Challenge: The North of God, by Steve Stern

One of my favorite bloggers, Frances of Nonsuch Book, is engaged this month in a challenge that I think is just fabulous: she's reading all 42 of Melville House's Art of the Novella books, and blogging about them! She's attracted Melville's House's attention, not surprisingly, and they're promoting the challenge with a host of giveaways throughout August. To participate, go to Melville's page here.

I'm participating at the "Curious" level- one book- and the book I've chosen is Steve Stern's remarkable The North of God. Part of The Contemporary Art of the Novella series, Melville published it in 2008. It's the story-within-a-story of Velvl, trapped in a cattle car with an unknown woman and her child, on their way to God-knows-where during the Holocaust. To keep them all sane he tells her the story of Herschel, a young shtetl scholar set to marry the daughter of a rich man, then seduced by a succubus. He loses his mind and runs out of his wedding ceremony only to be haunted by his passion for this elusive demon. Part one is wholly Herschel's story; Velvl appears only as a supporting character, one of the boys at Herschel's cheder.

The theme of this brief tale is the power of storytelling to save. First and most obviously, Herschel survives because Velvl is there tell his tale. But storytelling saves Herschel, too; he meets a traveling theater man, and storytelling becomes his way out of his life of wandering when he gets the idea to go to America and put on Yiddish plays: "He thought he might be able to do something interesting with the story," he thinks to himself. Herschel's stories therefore have a power to save him that may be denied to his storyteller, on his way to a concentration camp. For his part, trapped in the train, Velvl believes that his stories will help ensure the survival of his little trio: "So long as he could keep the mother and daughter captivated, he could keep them safe." Later, when Velvl tries to bargain with a Nazi officer using storytelling as a chip, he's rebuffed: "What am I thinking? This is the place where all stories end."

Stern is an exuberant writer and this story is heartbreaking as well as full of bluster, sex, scatology and violence. If you've read his novel The Frozen Rabbi you'll have a little idea of what to expect here- a mixture of legend and realism, flights of fancy combined with raw, moving and unexpected expressions of human nature. It's a little gem! I wish I had more of these books around!