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By Zachary Lazar
Without knowing it, I'd always had two unspoken arrangements with the world. The first was that I would not trouble it with unpleasant conversation...
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Diablerie
by Walter Mosley
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Synopses & Reviews In this icy noir from a master of American fiction, the darkest secrets are the ones we keep hidden from ourselves.
Ben Dibbuk has a good job, an accomplished wife, a bright college-age daughter, and a patient young mistress. Even as he goes through the motions of everyday life, however, inside he feels nothing. The explanation for this emotional void lies in the years he spent as a blacked-out drunk before pulling his life together — years in which he knows he committed acts he doesn't remember. Then a woman from his past turns up at a gala for his wife's new gig at a magazine called Diablerie and makes it clear that she remembers something he doesn't. Their encounter sets wheels in motion that will propel Dibbuk toward new knowledge, and perhaps the chance to feel again. With the same erotic force as Killing Johnny Fry, but grounded in a far darker vision of human nature, Diablerie is a transfixing new novel from one of our most powerful writers. Review: "In this short, intense roman dur (or 'serious novel'), Mosley probes the human condition through Ben Dibbuk, a black man whose name evokes the dybbuk of Jewish folklore. A 47-year-old computer programmer for a New York City bank, Dibbuk is married to Mona, the editor of a new cutting-edge magazine, Diablerie, which 'can mean either mischievous or evil.' He has a daughter at NYU and a 21-year-old Russian mistress whose apartment and graduate school tuition he pays for. Then a woman he doesn't remember threatens to shatter the shell Dibbuk has built to protect himself from his troubled, alcoholic past. When Dibbuk discovers Mona is having him investigated, he realizes he risks being charged for a murder he can't remember but may have committed. As Dibbuk struggles to escape the emotional vacuum of his life, he may not be free to enjoy his reawakening. This is Mosley at his deepest and best, scratching away the faces we wear to reveal the person behind the masks." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "Even as he was writing his popular Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones series, the prolific Walter Mosley published other, darker novels that were far less accessible to mainstream readers. A year ago he released 'Killing Johnny Fry,' which, as his publisher puts it, blurred the line between literature and pornography. His new novel, 'Diablerie' (the word translates, we are told, as either 'mischievousness' ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) or 'evil'), is not precisely porn, although its characters engage in explicit, more or less nonstop sex. Its real subject, however, of which the mostly cheerless sex is only a symptom, is human isolation and despair. The publisher and some reviewers have called this an existential novel, but that's a rather murky designation, so let's just say it's a murder mystery that centers on a profoundly alienated 47-year-old African-American named Ben Dibbuk, who may or may not have killed a man in his youth. And let's note that Mosley chose Dibbuk's name to suggest the Yiddish word 'dybbuk,' which refers to a disembodied human spirit that, because of former sins, wanders the Earth. There are the opening words of the novel: 'The apartment reeked from the acrid odor of roaches — a whole colony, tens of thousands of them, seething and unseen in the walls and under the dull, splintery floorboards of the vacant tenement apartment.' That's a description of an East Village apartment Dibbuk's college-age daughter lives in, but more importantly, it's a warning to readers that not everything will be peaches and cream in the pages to come. We soon learn that Dibbuk has a well-paid but dull job as a computer programmer ('My job is more boring than fungus growing in the dark'), that he doesn't love his daughter or his attractive wife, Mona, and that he's carrying on a torrid affair with an insatiable Russian graduate student named Svetlana, whose rent he pays. Svetlana professes to love Dibbuk, but she's pretty much your basic male-fantasy sex-machine, although it must be said that she enlivens the story considerably. When Dibbuk's wife says he acts as if he hates her, his response is, 'I don't hate anybody,' and he goes on to reflect, 'nor do I love or fear or worry about anyone.' Perhaps the most urgent question the novel raises is whether this man is capable of feeling any emotion for anyone. Interestingly, he doesn't blame racial prejudice for his alienation: 'I'd been a black man in America for five decades, almost, and nothing about that meant anything to me. Life for all Americans, whether they knew it or not, was like playing blackjack against the house — sooner or later you were likely to lose.' In time, we learn the sources of his despair. His father rejected his love and regularly beat both Dibbuk and his brother for the slightest infractions. As an adult, Dibbuk refused to go to the man's funeral, and has cut off relations with his mother and his brother, who's in prison for selling heroin. In his 20s, Dibbuk lived in Boulder, Colo., where he worked on construction jobs and spent his nights boozing, brawling and picking up women in bars. Finally, fearing that alcohol would kill him, he quit drinking, moved to New York, married Mona and began the zombielike existence that he thinks will keep him alive and sane. As the novel begins, however, his carefully structured life starts to fall apart. Not only is his wife talking about a divorce, but he also learns she's having an affair with a white co-worker at the magazine where she's an editor. Mosley contrives to have Dibbuk hide in a closet while his wife has sex with her lover far more enthusiastically than she ever has with him. Typically, he reflects, 'I wondered why I wasn't aroused by the sexuality and why I wasn't angry at either of them.' He's similarly indifferent when Svetlana confesses to another lover, and when his daughter admits that her sex life has been more extensive than he had imagined. In this novel, everybody's doing it. When Dibbuk settles on a bench in Central Park to read the paper, he ends up watching 'a big blustering pigeon try time after time to mount shy and reluctant hens.' The novel's main plot involves a woman from Dibbuk's past who charges that 20-odd years before, in Colorado, he killed her abusive ex-lover. Dibbuk can't remember the woman or killing anyone, but Colorado authorities are closing in and he fears that he could go to prison. Is prison to be his destiny, or could this exceedingly bleak book have a happy ending? Let's just say the ending is less bleak than I had feared. The talented and uncompromising Walter Mosley has earned the right to write whatever he pleases, and he may be correct in suggesting that millions of Americans are as emotionally numb as Ben Dibbuk, but it's unlikely that large numbers of readers will be drawn to this dismal vision of reality. The good news is that, with the Easy Rawlins series now apparently ended, Mosley has signed a three-book contract for a new series about an African-American private eye in New York. Praise be." Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "Where in earlier novels Mosley championed stalwart, nurturing men (while giving them violent alter egos), lately he writes about men who yearn to dominate women sexually and whose primal instincts must be honored....[G]ive him credit for continuing to take chances and confound expectations." Booklist Review: "Provocative, haunting, satisfyingly inconclusive work from a storyteller of formidable gifts and boundless ambition." Kirkus Reviews Synopsis: With the same erotic force as "Killing Johnny Fry," but grounded in a far darker vision of human nature, "Diablerie" is a transfixing new novel from a powerful writer. About the Author Walter Mosley is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today. He is the author of more than twenty-eight critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times magazine and the Nation, among other publications. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and the PEN American Center's Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781596913974
- Author:
- Mosley, Walter
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- General Fiction
- Subject:
- Self-perception
- Subject:
- Memory
- Subject:
- Erotica
- Edition Description:
- First
- Publication Date:
- December 2007
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 192
- Dimensions:
- 8.60x6.52x.73 in. .73 lbs.
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