Oh, the pleasure of holiday reading. No distractions. Time to waste.
This was a nice collection, mainly light-hearted with few of great distinction. A few police procedurals, two court cases, some general silliness and some worth remembering.
Miracle à la Combe aux Aspics by Ante Tomić (Croatia) … a light-hearted romp through the antics of a family of Croatian hill-billies searching for wives. Silly but entertaining.
Terra Alta by Javier Cercas (Spain) … a police procedural where the investigator is a minor player in the squad. Different.
Impossible by Erri de Luca (Italy) … an investigating magistrate questions a political activist suspected of a murder. Intelligent conversations but all a little too pat for me.
L’Île des Âmes by Piergiorgio Pulixi (Sardinia) … a police procedural in a location that was new to me. Challenging!
Ritournelle by Dimitri Rouchon-Borie (France) … novel based on a true court case arising from the mindless violence of a group of thugs. Sickening and compelling.
L’Anomalie by Hervé le Tellier (France) … fantasy exploring the idea of a bifurcation in time where the same airplane lands twice, after a three month interval, producing a kind of parallel universe for the affected passengers. The idea was fun for a while but I think the author failed to sufficiently exploit a good idea. The style reminded me of Andreas Eschbach, but I think he’d have drawn more out of it.
★★★ Le Silence des Carpes by Jérôme Bonnetto (France) … the best so far! A guy whose life is coming apart takes off to the Czech Republic on a whim and rediscovers himself through immersion in Czech culture and a diverting missing persons project. Quite a gem! Intelligent, imaginative and completely plausible.
Eichmann à Buenos Aries by Ariel Magnus (Argentina) … a fictionalised account of Adolf Eichmann’s secret life in Argentina until he was “renditioned” by the Israelis to stand trial in Jerusaleum. Heavy going and not a great read.
★★★ La Rose des Vents by Andreï Guelassimov (Russia) … interesting piece of (fictionalised but ‘true’) naval history where a Russian naval crew disguised as merchant seamen take a flat bottommed cargo ship across two oceans to reach their own eastern coast in a voyage of exploration to see if the River Amur is navigable (and therefore suitable to defend the territory against the aspirations of the Chinese and the British).
★★★ Le Metropol by Eugen Ruge (Germany) … a fiction based on the show trials in 1936/7 USSR. We follow a minor character lodged at the State’s expense in the ‘luxurious’ Hotel Metropol awaiting her fate at the hands of the State. All about her, early morning arrests are sweeping up ‘enemies of the nation’ and everyone is denouncing everyone else. A MASTERPIECE. See also.
Asynchronists 