A Dozen Good Reads Or More - Fiction

Casting back from 2007 to 2009, here are a dozen of my favorite fiction reads (OK, actually thirteen). Some titles will be familiar, others not. Some are literature and others are genre fiction (if that has any meaning at all). All are good.

I've been reviewing books pretty steadily on Amazon since 2006, but I had to leave out 2006 to keep my list at a manageable size. For whatever reason, 2006 was a very excellent reading year for me, worthy of a separate post. So, no Flashman, no Richard Sharpe, no A.B. Guthrie Jr. No, Patrick O'Brian, whose 21 tales of naval adventure, scientific exploration, and intrigue featuring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, I had already polished off before 2006.


The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill. Featuring "72-year-old state coroner Dr. Siri Paiboun...in Cotterill's engaging whodunit, set in Laos a year after the 1975 Communist takeover...". My review is here.

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The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell, Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, and The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge each examines the Stalinist terror, its destruction of its victims, who are often loyal Communists, the manipulation of the human mind and body, and the nearly univerisal failure of resistance. Koestler and Serge were both disillusioned Stalinists, but Serge has the 'advantage' of having experienced the terro first-hand. How Littell manages to keep up is a credit to his skill as a writer. Remarkably, each book is a work of excelling merit. 

The Stalin Epigram: A Novel by Robert Littell. From PW: In 1934, real-life poet Osip Mandelstam struggles to get published in the totalitarian state....Much to the despair of his fellow poets, Osip writes an epigram likening Stalin to a ruthless killer, leading to Osip's arrest, brutal interrogation and exile...Littell is unflinching in his portrayal of Osip's tragic arc, bringing a troubled era of Russian history to rich, magnificent life." My review is here.



Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.
Here is Christopher Hitchens' retrospective on Slate.com: "Koestler's chief character, Nicholas Rubashov, is modeled on those former Bolshevik intellectuals who made full "confessions" of fantastic and abominable crimes at the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. And, because Koestler had by no means forgotten what he had learned about the dialectic, he decided to place Rubashov in a dilemma from which he himself had escaped. What if the opponent of Stalin is still half-convinced that Stalin is morally wrong but may be "historically" right? He may decide to put his name on the confession and hope that history will one day vindicate him. His last duty to the Party may, in other words, be suicide."

My review of Darkness at Noon is here.


The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge has been republished as part of the marvelous NYRB Classics series. Here is my review.

NYRB says: "One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state."

Here is Hitchens again, this time in the LA Times reviewing a biography of Serge by Susan Weissman. And here is a review of that same biography on a web site called Revolutionary History:
"VICTOR Serge was one of the most interesting characters in left-wing politics during the first half of the twentieth century....Serge has been frightfully overlooked at all points of the political spectrum. This is not surprising, as his heartfelt defence of the October Revolution put him beyond the pale of most social democrats and anarchists, his active participation in the Left Opposition did likewise with Stalinists, and his clashes with Trotsky and often heretical views led him to be looked on with suspicion by many if not most Trotskyists."

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Shadow Country (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Peter Matthiessen.
Here is the PW review. And here is my review.

"Oh Lord God," she cries. "They are killing Mr. Watson!"

Shadow Country is Peter Matthiessen's reworked rendering of his earlier trilogy of historical fiction relating the life of the brutal Florida pioneer Edgar J. Watson. (This version still consists of three "books" and runs to almost 900 pages.

Shadow Country is almost entirely set in the 1890's and early 1900's in a frontier region not widely known - the Ten Thousand Islands of south Gulf Coast Florida (the Everglades area). The area was absurdly remote at the time and presented such daunting challenges and dangers to any settlers that it was in fact nearly unsettled. It is brutally hot and humid, resistant to agriculture, possessed of dangerous animals (on sea and land), prone to calamitous storms, infested with mosquitoes, and inhabited by a large proportion of suddenly violent men as well as sociopathic criminals. This is the place Edgar J. Watson chooses to live.

Within the first ten pages of Book One, the reader confronts this sentence: "Oh Lord God," she cries. "They are killing Mr. Watson!"

That Watson is an exceptional man is undoubted. Beginning with nothing, he manages to set himself up as a power to be reckoned with. He is also grandiose, violent, and merciless. But is he a murderer (several times over)? Opinions vary. He drinks too much. He loses what he has and what he wants and what he values. It is a hard life in a hard place. Edgar Watson was a hard man in dire need of some education and civilization, neither of which could be found in any quantity in the islands.

Shadow Country is an American epic of a mysterious historical character (yes, Edgar Watson really lived and died in the islands). The writing is at times exquisite. The story it tells is often brutal or just about plain hard life. The writing is compelling, the reading can be draining.

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Palace Walk (Cairo Trilogy) by Naguib Mahfouz.
My review is here.

"Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arabic language writer ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, begins Palace Walk with Amina, the devout and devoted Muslim wife of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad patiently waiting for her husband to return home from another long night of drinking, music, and carousing with his male friends and pursuing illicit sexual relations in Cairo's clubs and cafes. Mahfouz thus immediately establishes Amina's willing and absolute subservience to her husband. Mahfouz takes the next several chapters to develop al-Sayyid Ahmad's position as the unquestioned head of a family of two daughters, Khadija and Aisha, and three sons, Yasin an adult son from a prior marriage, Fahmy a law student, and young Kamal.


About two-thirds of the way into the book, the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 breaks out against the British occupation and draws the family into its vortex. Much of the final third of the book is taken up with the family's interactions with the British occupiers. The revolution provides an important historical background and Mahfouz masterfully recreates the sounds, sights, smells, and tastes of Cairo's streets, but his greatest triumph is the creation of the complete life of this urban yet intensely Islamic and Egyptian family, a family that is perhaps remarkable in some ways, but well within society's accepted bounds.

Take the time to savor Palace Walk. Mahfouz rewards the persistent reader by patiently building the remarkable depth and completeness of his characters. Once the last page is turned, the reader can rest secure in the knowledge that Palace Walk is only the first book in Mahfouz's great Cairo Trilogy. Highest recommendation."

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The Draining Lake: A Thriller (Reykjavik Thriller) by Arnaldur Indridason is another example of superb Scandinavian crime msyteries. Reviewed here on Euro Crime.
My review is here.
 
 

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The Radetzky March (Works of Joseph Roth) by Joseph Roth. More to follow.
 
 

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A Sailor of Austria: In which, without really intending to, Otto Prohaska becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire by John Biggins. Read John Biggins!
 
 

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The Singapore Grip (New York Review Books Classics) by J.G. Farrell.
Another gem recovered by NYRB Classics. Farrell specialized tales of the unraveling of the British Empire. He also wrote Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur. Then he managed to get himself swept off the shore while fishing and drowned.
 
NYRB summary: "Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming—what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation—but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end.


A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began with Troubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur."

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The Turnaround by George Pelecanos.
The WAPO journalist takes his crime fiction to a new level in this trip back to DC in 1972 and the echoes into the present. His web site. http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/georgepelecanos/turnaround/

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Little Big Man (Panther) by Thomas Berger. You've seen the movie, now read the book. It's even better.

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McAuslan in the Rough by George MacDonald Fraser.
The author of the Flashman series also wrote a fictionalized version of his days in the postwar army.