Describe your new book: This book is the story of my life — the ups, the downs, and the music. If someone were to write your biography, what...
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Author(and artist)De Waal has created a genre unto itself--a treatise on art, a reflection on collecting, a memoir, a travelogue, and a drama, all as he tracks a collection of netsuke(the small carved figurines which held bags on kimono sashes). These small objets d'art are the only remnants of his family's fortune. He traces them and his family from Paris to Vienna through the Holocast to a vitrine in his hallway in London; it's a jouney that transports the reader as well. One of the best books of the past few years. Period.
Walter Mosley has carved a sizeable ouvre out of California’s past, making the sixties, seventies and eighties each a setting for one of his successful series. Recently, however, he has given signs of moving on; he killed off Easy Rawlins, married off Socrates Fortlow, and put Fearless Jones on hiatus. Sure enough, in his latest novel, he has deserted the hard-boiled past of Los Angeles for the harder-boiled present of New York. The stocky, fifty-ish, African American native New Yorker Mosley has created a new protagonist—Leonid McGill, a stocky, fiftyish African American native New Yorker. The son of a Communist union organizer who “believed in living with everybody but his family,” McGill has not seen it easy. After watching his white mother die of a broken heart, he grew up making his own way “in a world of chains and choking, imperfect choices and the fools who made them..” A trained boxer, he works out to a “rhythm of violence” that keeps up his balance “in the rotted infrastructure of my city and my life.” He’s a tough guy in a tough business, a “moral illiterate” who took money from anyone to trace anyone down, whatever the consequences.
Until now. One of those consequences caught up with him, and he turned a corner when the result died in his arms. His determination to change his ways is tested, however, when the four men he is hired to find start dropping dead around the city and state. Faced with a force of evil, as well as former mob employers, he cannot escape the darkness in the heart of New York, the capitol of noir.
Of course, Mosley explores more than one aspect of blackness in his books. As he takes us into unseen parts of the city, McGill, a descendant of a slave dealer, gives us glimpses of the plight of the black man in America today. A young blonde receptionist looks at him as if he “…were a city trash collector walking right from my garbage truck into the White House and asking for an audience with the president.;” an African American guard gives him extra scrutiny because he, like McGill, “…had descended…from a long line of suspicion.” As opposed to his previous series, these encounters smack of the here and now, not the once upon a time of his California books.
We also meet his personal circle of hell: the cop whose sole purpose is to bring McGill down; his disaffected spouse, with whom he had a marriage full of“…decades of detritis;” his biological son who rejects him; and the son from an affair of his wife’s “…a lively trout slipping between my fingers in an icy-cold stream.” whom he loves most dearly and goes to great lengths to protect. Of course, there is the “other” woman who loves Leonid unrequitedly, the one who helps us understand why he is so appealing a character: “You are a man on the road,” she tells him. Some men might lie and blame others, but McGill to her is “…right out there in the light of day. That’s all I want from a man.”.
And that’s what we want from a Mosley detective. Like Mosley’s previous protagonists, McGill endears himself to the criminal class and reader alike, a common man with an uncommon streak of outrage at injustice in all its forms. He will certainly return to take us on another tour through the dark side of the city that never sleeps.
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Tim Gautreaux brings his evocative prose and his protagonist, Sam Simoneaux, out of the bayous into New Orleans for his latest novel. Sam, nicknamed Lucky because he got back from WWI without firing a bullet in battle, cadges a cushy job in a downtown New Orleans department store. Then, one day, a gang of toughs conks him on the head and absconds with a three-year-old girl. They run out of the store with the child, and Sam’s luck. He gets fired, and can’t get a job because everyone knows him as the man who couldn’t stop the kidnappers. All he can get is a job on the dance boat where THE MISSING girl’s parents work. He signs on as third mate and second-rate piano player, in hopes that he can hop off at stops along the river to search for any clues to the child’s disappearance.
As the four-deck sternwheeler steams up and down the river, stopping at towns both large and small, the author matches his narrative to the meandering pace of life on the Mississippi post-WWI. Along the way, crowds of people hungry for the entertainment pour onto the boat from poor towns, and rich, All of them take to the “new” jazz, “the bounce and surprise of the music, the sass of the trumpet.” Some of the crowds just stand in awe, but the dancers, “they walked on the notes, the women turning and shimmying, throwing the spangled tassels on the dresses straight out until their youth sparked like struck flint on the rumbling dance floor.” Sam gets to sit in sometimes, “feeling sad enough to cry while making the dancers step and spin, and smile.” Whether playing along or moving the crowds along, Sam comes up with astute observations, providing context and commentary on life along the river. In the middle of a crowd of people “spending money like water at a whorehouse fire,” Sam wonders “how much time was spent in the world protecting people from one another, folks who had no cause to fight, no reason at all.”
He also up comes with the identity of the girl’s kidnappers—the Skadlocks, who “…would carve out the pope’s eyeballs and bring ‘em to you in a coin purse if you was to pay enough.” Sam figures somebody who saw her singing with her parents paid them enough to “…save her from a musician’s life.” Sam’s tenacity ultimately brings him to the girl, but also leads him and her family on a journey tinged with painful loss. In any other novel, the return of the child would be the end of the story; in Gautreaux’s hands, it is simply the beginning of the end. There is more missing in this meaningful story than just a little girl.
When Sam first meets the girl’s parents, he realizes he “...was only one person in a planet full of incomplete seekers, and now the Wellers had joined him.” He himself lost not only his entire family when he was six months old, but his only child. As the story progresses, the void left in his life by that tragedy looms much larger; he feels an “immeasurable and growing loss.” He begins “to greet the phantom waiting in every room, to long for the ghost in the kitchen chair.” He even has a dream, himself in someone’s lap like he is holding the child, “…his stomach full, and a callused hand pressed down on it as though holding a jewel secure.” When he realizes he had “rescued the child, but so far as (she)was concerned, he’d brought only part of her back,” he endeavors to bring her all the way back. It is this book’s accomplishment that Sam brings them together through “…a door that had been locked between them,” into a resolution of both of their losses. It is the author’s accomplishment as well, that he does so with prose as lyrical as the jazz he so obviously loves to write about, prose that makes “…hips to slide, feet to rise like boats lifted on a freshet of notes.” Few novels this year will hold so much story, craft, and song.
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The title of this book is a bit misleading: Bruno is not just the chief of police, he is the entire police force of the tiny village St. Denis. Deep in the Perigord, this village preserves the qualities of provincial France so treasured by tourists and natives alike—the fortress-like church, the market square, the ritual morning coffee at the cafe on the town square. A veteran of the Kosovo conflict, Bruno spends his time negotiating between feisty neighbors, arranging holiday parades, and renovating his ancient farmhouse. He hasn’t even taken his pistol out of the office since that kangaroo got away from the circus. After all, what can happen to a town of only 2,900?
The twenty-first century, of course. Just outside of town there is a re-enactment park playing to the tourists, where Joan of Arc is burned at the stake twice a day. Bruno collaborates with the local cheesemakers to avoid the EU inspectors and their Draconian regulations. And then—a murder. An Algerian war hero, who recently moved to be near his family, is found dead with a swastika carved in his chest. Suspicion comes down on local youth members of the far right Front National, and the Front National comes down on St. Denis. So does the national press, and the national police, looking like emissaries “…from an advanced and probably hostile civilization.” The murder also exposes the deep schism even in St. Denis, the sentiment that the “Arabs” are “different.” Bruno must do everything in his power to defend his home; he cannot let this murder rend asunder the delicate fabric of his community.
His search leads him from the present to the past, which is ever near to hand in France. With research from some unlikely sources, he soon discovers a truth: “The past doesn’t die. It even keeps the power to kill.” Indeed, the killers emerge from the past in a united effort inconceivable except to right some powerful wrong. Bruno must play out his hand carefully if he is not to destroy the fragile balance in his community. At the hands of the author, he does so with a sense of grace, and ultimate justice. “Vive la France!” cry the June 18 Resistance parade marchers. “Vive le Bruno,” cries the reader of this new series.
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The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
Robert Moyer, September 20, 2011
Author(and artist)De Waal has created a genre unto itself--a treatise on art, a reflection on collecting, a memoir, a travelogue, and a drama, all as he tracks a collection of netsuke(the small carved figurines which held bags on kimono sashes). These small objets d'art are the only remnants of his family's fortune. He traces them and his family from Paris to Vienna through the Holocast to a vitrine in his hallway in London; it's a jouney that transports the reader as well. One of the best books of the past few years. Period.The Long Fall by Walter Mosley
Robert Moyer, June 16, 2009
Walter Mosley has carved a sizeable ouvre out of California’s past, making the sixties, seventies and eighties each a setting for one of his successful series. Recently, however, he has given signs of moving on; he killed off Easy Rawlins, married off Socrates Fortlow, and put Fearless Jones on hiatus. Sure enough, in his latest novel, he has deserted the hard-boiled past of Los Angeles for the harder-boiled present of New York. The stocky, fifty-ish, African American native New Yorker Mosley has created a new protagonist—Leonid McGill, a stocky, fiftyish African American native New Yorker. The son of a Communist union organizer who “believed in living with everybody but his family,” McGill has not seen it easy. After watching his white mother die of a broken heart, he grew up making his own way “in a world of chains and choking, imperfect choices and the fools who made them..” A trained boxer, he works out to a “rhythm of violence” that keeps up his balance “in the rotted infrastructure of my city and my life.” He’s a tough guy in a tough business, a “moral illiterate” who took money from anyone to trace anyone down, whatever the consequences.
Until now. One of those consequences caught up with him, and he turned a corner when the result died in his arms. His determination to change his ways is tested, however, when the four men he is hired to find start dropping dead around the city and state. Faced with a force of evil, as well as former mob employers, he cannot escape the darkness in the heart of New York, the capitol of noir.
Of course, Mosley explores more than one aspect of blackness in his books. As he takes us into unseen parts of the city, McGill, a descendant of a slave dealer, gives us glimpses of the plight of the black man in America today. A young blonde receptionist looks at him as if he “…were a city trash collector walking right from my garbage truck into the White House and asking for an audience with the president.;” an African American guard gives him extra scrutiny because he, like McGill, “…had descended…from a long line of suspicion.” As opposed to his previous series, these encounters smack of the here and now, not the once upon a time of his California books.
We also meet his personal circle of hell: the cop whose sole purpose is to bring McGill down; his disaffected spouse, with whom he had a marriage full of“…decades of detritis;” his biological son who rejects him; and the son from an affair of his wife’s “…a lively trout slipping between my fingers in an icy-cold stream.” whom he loves most dearly and goes to great lengths to protect. Of course, there is the “other” woman who loves Leonid unrequitedly, the one who helps us understand why he is so appealing a character: “You are a man on the road,” she tells him. Some men might lie and blame others, but McGill to her is “…right out there in the light of day. That’s all I want from a man.”.
And that’s what we want from a Mosley detective. Like Mosley’s previous protagonists, McGill endears himself to the criminal class and reader alike, a common man with an uncommon streak of outrage at injustice in all its forms. He will certainly return to take us on another tour through the dark side of the city that never sleeps.
(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
The Missing by Tim Gautreaux
Robert Moyer, June 16, 2009
Tim Gautreaux brings his evocative prose and his protagonist, Sam Simoneaux, out of the bayous into New Orleans for his latest novel. Sam, nicknamed Lucky because he got back from WWI without firing a bullet in battle, cadges a cushy job in a downtown New Orleans department store. Then, one day, a gang of toughs conks him on the head and absconds with a three-year-old girl. They run out of the store with the child, and Sam’s luck. He gets fired, and can’t get a job because everyone knows him as the man who couldn’t stop the kidnappers. All he can get is a job on the dance boat where THE MISSING girl’s parents work. He signs on as third mate and second-rate piano player, in hopes that he can hop off at stops along the river to search for any clues to the child’s disappearance.As the four-deck sternwheeler steams up and down the river, stopping at towns both large and small, the author matches his narrative to the meandering pace of life on the Mississippi post-WWI. Along the way, crowds of people hungry for the entertainment pour onto the boat from poor towns, and rich, All of them take to the “new” jazz, “the bounce and surprise of the music, the sass of the trumpet.” Some of the crowds just stand in awe, but the dancers, “they walked on the notes, the women turning and shimmying, throwing the spangled tassels on the dresses straight out until their youth sparked like struck flint on the rumbling dance floor.” Sam gets to sit in sometimes, “feeling sad enough to cry while making the dancers step and spin, and smile.” Whether playing along or moving the crowds along, Sam comes up with astute observations, providing context and commentary on life along the river. In the middle of a crowd of people “spending money like water at a whorehouse fire,” Sam wonders “how much time was spent in the world protecting people from one another, folks who had no cause to fight, no reason at all.”
He also up comes with the identity of the girl’s kidnappers—the Skadlocks, who “…would carve out the pope’s eyeballs and bring ‘em to you in a coin purse if you was to pay enough.” Sam figures somebody who saw her singing with her parents paid them enough to “…save her from a musician’s life.” Sam’s tenacity ultimately brings him to the girl, but also leads him and her family on a journey tinged with painful loss. In any other novel, the return of the child would be the end of the story; in Gautreaux’s hands, it is simply the beginning of the end. There is more missing in this meaningful story than just a little girl.
When Sam first meets the girl’s parents, he realizes he “...was only one person in a planet full of incomplete seekers, and now the Wellers had joined him.” He himself lost not only his entire family when he was six months old, but his only child. As the story progresses, the void left in his life by that tragedy looms much larger; he feels an “immeasurable and growing loss.” He begins “to greet the phantom waiting in every room, to long for the ghost in the kitchen chair.” He even has a dream, himself in someone’s lap like he is holding the child, “…his stomach full, and a callused hand pressed down on it as though holding a jewel secure.” When he realizes he had “rescued the child, but so far as (she)was concerned, he’d brought only part of her back,” he endeavors to bring her all the way back. It is this book’s accomplishment that Sam brings them together through “…a door that had been locked between them,” into a resolution of both of their losses. It is the author’s accomplishment as well, that he does so with prose as lyrical as the jazz he so obviously loves to write about, prose that makes “…hips to slide, feet to rise like boats lifted on a freshet of notes.” Few novels this year will hold so much story, craft, and song.
(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker
Robert Moyer, June 16, 2009
The title of this book is a bit misleading: Bruno is not just the chief of police, he is the entire police force of the tiny village St. Denis. Deep in the Perigord, this village preserves the qualities of provincial France so treasured by tourists and natives alike—the fortress-like church, the market square, the ritual morning coffee at the cafe on the town square. A veteran of the Kosovo conflict, Bruno spends his time negotiating between feisty neighbors, arranging holiday parades, and renovating his ancient farmhouse. He hasn’t even taken his pistol out of the office since that kangaroo got away from the circus. After all, what can happen to a town of only 2,900?The twenty-first century, of course. Just outside of town there is a re-enactment park playing to the tourists, where Joan of Arc is burned at the stake twice a day. Bruno collaborates with the local cheesemakers to avoid the EU inspectors and their Draconian regulations. And then—a murder. An Algerian war hero, who recently moved to be near his family, is found dead with a swastika carved in his chest. Suspicion comes down on local youth members of the far right Front National, and the Front National comes down on St. Denis. So does the national press, and the national police, looking like emissaries “…from an advanced and probably hostile civilization.” The murder also exposes the deep schism even in St. Denis, the sentiment that the “Arabs” are “different.” Bruno must do everything in his power to defend his home; he cannot let this murder rend asunder the delicate fabric of his community.
His search leads him from the present to the past, which is ever near to hand in France. With research from some unlikely sources, he soon discovers a truth: “The past doesn’t die. It even keeps the power to kill.” Indeed, the killers emerge from the past in a united effort inconceivable except to right some powerful wrong. Bruno must play out his hand carefully if he is not to destroy the fragile balance in his community. At the hands of the author, he does so with a sense of grace, and ultimate justice. “Vive la France!” cry the June 18 Resistance parade marchers. “Vive le Bruno,” cries the reader of this new series.
(2 of 3 readers found this comment helpful)