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March 01, 2006
Books I Read After Catching the Sick Child's Virus
With Child
by Laurie R. King
From Publishers Weekly: The third absorbing Kate Martinelli story (after the Edgar-winning A Grave Talent and its follow-up, To Play the Fool) leads the Bay Area cop into the Pacific Northwest, where a serial killer is on the loose. Kate's female lover Lee, severely disabled in an earlier tale, leaves to spend some time on an island off the Washington coast. At the same time, Kate's partner, Al, is wooing a woman whose precocious 12-year-old daughter, Jules, asks Kate to help her find a now-missing homeless boy whom she has met in a park. While struggling with little success to cope with Lee's absence, Kate finds Jules's friend but in the process gets hit on the head hard enough to have to take medical leave from the department?until her sporadic, debilitating headaches cease. When Al and Jules's mother go on their honeymoon right before Christmas, Jules stays with Kate; on a trip north, Jules disappears from the motel near Portland. The desperate search for the girl, who fits the profile of the killer's other victims, creates excruciating anguish for Kate, particularly after she is sent back to California. There, she breaks some rules to find out whether Jules was taken by the killer or by someone who knew her personally. Although readers may connect pieces of the puzzle sooner than Kate, the pleasure of her company and the accelerating suspense preceding the climax make for a compelling read.
My Review: Lest I begin to sound like a broken record, let me just say, entertaining but not great.
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Night Work
by Laurie R. King
From Publishers Weekly: The multitalented King (O Jerusalem, etc.) has not published a Kate Martinelli novel since 1996's With Child, so fans aplenty have been waiting for the next installment in this acclaimed series. San Francisco police detective Kate and her partner, Al Hawken, first introduced in the Edgar-winning A Grave Talent, have been called in to investigate the murder of a man who turns out to have a long record of beating up his wife. The wife, who took refuge at a battered women's shelter, has a rock-solid alibi and there are no other obvious suspects. Meanwhile, a group of feminist vigilantes called the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement has been exacting wickedly funny acts of minor revenge against men who physically abuse women. Kate has a sneaking sympathy for the work of the Ladies, but when more bodies of abusive men start turning up, it looks as though someone--some woman--in San Francisco has taken the ultimate step in vengeance. King brings her theme of women's rage against abusive men together with a focus on goddess worship, especially in Indian religions. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation, figures largely in this dense and suspenseful tale. As in her powerful thriller A Darker Place, King's ability to turn esoteric religious concepts into key narrative points makes this a highly unusual--and memorable--novel. It suffers a bit from talkiness, but even so, it's a compelling, effective piece of writing.
My Review: Without the Nyquil, I would have had a harder time getting through this book. Although I like the main characters, I think the whole modern-day detective story is getting a little tired. Perhaps I should try and space them out so I'm not averaging one a day...
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The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Many will greet this taut, clear-eyed memoir of grief as a long-awaited return to the terrain of Didion's venerated, increasingly rare personal essays. The author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and 11 other works chronicles the year following the death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, from a massive heart attack on December 30, 2003, while the couple's only daughter, Quintana, lay unconscious in a nearby hospital suffering from pneumonia and septic shock. Dunne and Didion had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years, and Dunne's death propelled Didion into a state she calls "magical thinking." "We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss," she writes. "We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes." Didion's mourning follows a traditional arc—she describes just how precisely it cleaves to the medical descriptions of grief—but her elegant rendition of its stages leads to hard-won insight, particularly into the aftereffects of marriage. "Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age." In a sense, all of Didion's fiction, with its themes of loss and bereavement, served as preparation for the writing of this memoir, and there is occasionally a curious hint of repetition, despite the immediacy and intimacy of the subject matter. Still, this is an indispensable addition to Didion's body of work and a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning literature.
My Review: I listened to this on audiobook, and had a hard time not bursting into tears every 10 minutes. I found that as long as I stayed focused on the story itself, I was ok. But as soon as I started thinking about losing one of my own family members, oh the tears. This was supposed to be a bookclub selection, but our meeting was cancelled. Looking back on it, I'm glad we didn't have to discuss it, since it would be embarrassing to bawl in front of my girlfriends.
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Love in a Dead Language
by Lee Siegel
From Publishers Weekly: "General observations, copulation, seduction, marriage, adultery, prostitutes, and erotic arcana," the seven subjects treated by the Kamasutra, are also the motifs of Siegel's whimsical farce. Presented as the unscholarly annotated version of the Indian erotic lexicon as translated by deceased professor of Asian studies Leopold Roth, the novel interpolates the commentary of Roth's skeptical literary executor and former student, Anang Saigha, with notes from ancient translators of the text. Roth's Kamasutra bears little resemblance to the original Sanskrit. It is, in fact, a hymn to entirely uninterested college senior Lalita Gupta, whom Roth construes as the vessel for all his romantic, Eastern fantasies. Ditsy, foul-mouthed Lalita cares nothing about her parents' native land, but to Roth she is a goddess, repository of the East's erotic and spiritual wisdom. Half-mad with love, Roth carries Lalita off to India for a "summer study course" (she's the only pupil) and seduces her in a hotel at Khajuraho where a famed erotic sculpture stands. Upon their return to L.A., Roth is suspended from teaching, Lalita's parents charge him with rape, and his wife, SophiaAwomen's studies prof and chair of the sexual harassment committeeAdumps him. While inserts and footnotes heighten the absurdity (the book is dense with cartoons, Hollywood memorabilia, news clips and 19th-century travelogues), Siegel's criticisms of orientalization and exoticism are serious. And Roth has more than just Lalita on his mind: his daughter Leila was murdered at the age of 12, leaving Roth, his wife and Leila's twin bereft. This multifaceted novel is also a whodunit, for Professor Roth died no natural death. His body was found in his office, hit from behind with a Sanskrit-English dictionary. While this ribald romp, satire on Westerners' spiritual hunger and sendup of academia may prove too rarefied and serpentine for some tastes, others will find it a sophisticated treat.
My Review: I picked up this book at a second-hand shop in Berlin and gradually worked my way through it. Let me say that everything written about it is true: it's raunchy, extremetly explicit, academic, erudite, and monotonous. I confess that I actually skimmed the last several chapters...after all, how much Kama Sutra can one sick girl take?
