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Picks of the Week

  • Benjamin Black: The Lemur: A Novel

    Benjamin Black: The Lemur: A Novel
    Anyone who thinks John Banville lacks a sense of humor clearly did not read his serial for the New York Times magazine, available in novella-ish format in July. The story has all the basic crime ingredients - blackmail, adultery, murder, betrayal, that sort of thing - but it is so, so clear how much fun Banville had writing this pseudonymous exercise, loading up sentences filled with bizarre but well-placed metaphors and gently (or not so gently!) lampooning his characters as he moves them around his narrative chess board.

  • Cassandra Clare: City of Bones

    Cassandra Clare: City of Bones
    I read this on the flight home from the LA Times Festival of Books and it really is about the perfect airport read: fantastic storytelling, characters whose adventures and melodramas wrap you in their spells and really ass-kicking action scenes involving demons and all manner of underworld types. Sure, Clare clearly owes a huge debt to Buffy and Harry Potter, but dammit, I want to find out what will happen next to Clary, Jace, Simon & co. - and that's exactly the button that's supposed to be pushed.

  • Ibi Kaslik: ANGEL RIOTS

    Ibi Kaslik: ANGEL RIOTS
    Reading this novel was like being transported back to the mid-1990s Montreal I knew during my college years. But it also affords an inside look at the ups and downs, the politics and the dramas, the hookups and breakups endemic to a rising rock band. It's clear, whether told from the vantage point of the young violin prodigy with a boy's name or her bandmate looking to redefine himself outside the orbit of his best friend (and leader) that Kaslik knows this world cold, and we're privileged to share in this knowledge.

  • Irene Nemirovsky: David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

    Irene Nemirovsky: David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    I'd recommend this simply based off of the utter gobsmacking brilliance that is LE BAL, one of the most crystalline and shocking novellas I've ever read, but the other three works simply confirm Nemirovsky's literary brilliance. THE COURILOF AFFAIR is a wonderful surprise for mystery readers because it's her version of a spy novel, tackling the moral quandaries of terrorism for a so-called greater good by personalizing the narrator's deeds and misdeeds. In other words, Nemirovsky's entire backlist can't be translated fast enough for me.

  • Sarah Hall: Daughters of the North

    Sarah Hall: Daughters of the North
    Goddamn, Hall can write, and her chosen dystopian subject matter gives her the chance not only to show off her sentence-by-sentence chops but to demonstrate how few steps removed our current culture is from the apocalyptic fervor of her world, where the reproductive rights of women are trampled on so definitively it takes an army of women to try, however futile the exercise might be, to take some independence back. I can't think of enough good things to say about this except that it should be read, now and years to come.

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November 18, 2005

Don't stay away from this DOPE

Sara Gran, whose forthcoming novel DOPE absolutely blew me away, talks to Bookmunch's Peter Wild about her novels and what prompted her to tackle the subject matter she did for the new one:

PW: Your next novel Dope is published later this year in the US and early 2006 in the UK - and it's a bit of a departure from your earlier books in that it's historical fiction. What attracted you to the action of Dope ?

SG: Well, lots of stuff. For years I had wanted to write a mystery novel, but particularly a mystery novel with all the minor characters made major. If you're a fan of mystery books & noir movies from the forties & fifties you'll know what I mean: the bums, the addicts, and most of all The Girls -- I wanted to take the background and make it the foreground. There's a kind of formula, which you also see a lot in contemporary fiction and film, of Nice Guy meets Bad Girl and gets nothing but trouble. So I'd always thought, well, what if you just get rid of the nice guy? I mean, who needs him? Why not just shift the perspective over. So, with my main character being a woman, a former drug-addict and very much a Bad Girl, in 1950 New York, I got to play around with that.

I also was interested in how you can break some of the rules of a mystery novel, while still including all that satisfies about a mystery. I think to get into genre, you have to first of all love the genre, even if you want to fuck with a bit. So, I don't know if I fulfilled my own rules here, but I tried, and it was fun.

Boy, did she ever. I could probably rhapsodize for hours if I had the chance, but I'll limit my praise to this: everything, absolutely everything, is pitch-perfect. From the opening scene, a simple transaction that illuminates character in a variety of ways, to Josephine Flannigan's valiant struggle against addiction, to the spare but decaying description of 1950s New York, to a plot that always surprises, and an ending that I never saw coming.

There is no earthly reason not to read this book.

 

Posted at 09:30 AM in World of Mystery |

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Comments


Sarah you're teasing me again. DOPE sounds terrific, but now i gotta use a favor from putnam to get an ARC. can't wait. jon

Posted by: jonathon king | November 18, 2005 at 05:46 PM

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