az- Summerhouse, Later: Stories: Judith Hermann (German)
Harper Perennial (April 1, 2003) 4 1/2 stars 2 customer reviews
-melancholy self-absorption of Hermann's characters -youngish to middle-aged Berliners- restless, their desires oblique and unfocused, their memories more real than their real-life encounters.
-dream-like -suspended, remote


az- Eagles and Angels: Juli Zeh (German)
Granta Books (September 2003) 4 stars 1 customer review
-A haze of drug addiction and anomie hangs over this bleak tale of obsessive love and underworld dealings, the first novel by a young German writer. When Max, a successful Viennese attorney in his early 30s, is left desperate and forlorn following the suicide of his girlfriend, Jessie, he calls Clara, a 23-year-old radio host. She wants his story for her psychology dissertation. In exchange for being put up at her apartment, Max agrees to talk into a DAT recorder between lines of coke. As he tells it, he first met Jessie at boarding school, where she was dating his roommate, Shershah, and dealing coke for her sinister father, Herbert, and brother, Ross. Tiny and unstable, Jessie reenters Max's life 12 years later and sucks him into her downward spiral. As Max continues spinning his tale on tape, he begins to uncover larger conspiracies and connections that threaten not only him but also his odd partnership with Clara and his memories of Jessie. Folding the story of Max's tortured love for both women into a larger chronicle of European drug smuggling and related war crimes, Zeh weaves a nightmarishly effective tale of personal and societal collapse. doesn't sound like my kind of book. but it was-
-Zeh's intriguing debut is part crime drama, part love story, and part drug novel, and it functions well as each of these. What makes it a great book--and probably why it won last year's German Book Award for most successful debut novel--is its skillful yet subtle integration of the politics of expansion into both foreground and background.


az- Troll: A Love Story: Johanna Sinisalo (Finnish)
Grove Press (February 19, 2004) 4 stars 17 customer reviews
-This strange, captivating novel, winner of Finland's top prize for fiction, is set in a familiar world just slightly askew from our own. The basic premise is quite simple, in the book, trolls are real creatures found primarily in northern reaches of Scandinavia and Russia, and are treated as a rare species of animal. They were definitively "discovered" in 1907, but have since remained elusive to science, and little is known about them. Although they tend to keep far away from human settlements, the book opens in a city (presumably Helsinki) with a good-looking young gay photographer (Mikael) coming across a sick young troll late a night. Stumbling home drunk and depressed from a failed night of wooing, Mikael's judgment is poor and he brings the creature into his apartment. ..As the nursing succeeds, the troll grows healthier and stronger, and there becomes a noticeable juniper-berry odor in the apartment. This is the scent of the troll's pheromones, and Mikael becomes steadily more infatuated with the creature, who reciprocates and treats him as the Alpha-male; Mikael is slow to realize the consequences of this, with horrible results.
The book does a nice job of using fairy tales and becoming one itself - an entertaining fable on the relationship of the natural world to man's world.
-The author raises questions about man's relationship with wild creatures-- how much we know or don't know about them and what they know about us. She seems to say something about the animalistic tendences that lie deeply hidden in the most civilized of us just waiting to be let loose.
-The story is fascinating. If I met the troll Pessi, I'd have adopted him too.


az- The Tooth Fairy: A Novel: Graham Joyce (English)
Tor Books (December 15, 1998) 4 stars. 52 customer reviews
-The disquietude in Graham Joyce's coming-of-age tale is that of having too much power as a child--the kind of power that turns your slightest wishes into mayhem.
-Seven-year-old Sam first lays eyes on the Tooth Fairy, oddly dressed and smelling of horse's sweat and chamomile, in the middle of the night after he has stashed a tooth under his pillow. Over the years, the fairy becomes a fixture in his life. No one else can see or hear this odd creature, who is sometimes male, sometimes female and alternately coy, cruel, cuddly. Joyce engagingly describes the boys' childhood experiences -sampling drugs, toying with explosives, worrying over acne- and carefully portrays their childlike stoicism in the face of several horrifying tragedies. Sam worries that the Tooth Fairy, who grows menacing and sexually demanding, is responsible for those calamities.
-The underlying question in The Tooth Fairy isn't whether or not the Fairy is real (although it is a minor subplot), but if the Fairy is a good or evil influence. Late in the book, you realize that the Fairy, real or not, stands as a metaphor for certain aspects of being a child. On the surface, there is a simple story about a young boy plagued by a childhood demon, but underneath runs a Jungian psychodrama saying, in effect, that we all have these demons, and dealing with them is a process of maturing.
-a very creepy, touching, and perfectly bizarre book.


az- Where Does Kissing End?: Kate Pullinger (Canadian born, moved to London)
Serpent's Tail (October 1, 1995) 5 stars. 1 customer review
-Pullinger has an interesting, blunt style...
-Sensual and fascinating: 'Kissing' is the story of the curious relationship shared by two twentysomethings: an illegitimate child-woman named Mina, and Stephen, the man obsessively in love with her. Occasionally explicit in language but subtle in its eroticism, it is an engrossing study of two people's growth, from youth to adulthood, together and apart from one another. A beautiful short novel that arouses as it draws blood; highly recommended.


az-Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City: Edward Carey (English)
Harcourt (March 1, 2003) 5 stars. 5 customer reviews
-English playwright Edward Carey's novel Alva & Irva is an inventive tale with a vein of half-ironic sadness running through it that brings to mind the works of other European masters of this genre, namely Gunter Grass, Italio Calvino, and Milan Kundera. what genre? imaginative fiction.. with vein of ironic sadness running through? Alva & Irva is in part the life story of eccentric twin girls who create a plasticine model of their small European city and also a guidebook to the fictional city of Entralla, a place so like countless small, undistinguished cities in Europe (right down to its invented brush with history--a rumor that Napoleon had spent a night there) that one could probably use Alva & Irva as an actual guidebook, standing in any number of piazzas, plazas, and squares, and glancing around at the cafes, cathedrals, chapels, post offices, and municipal buildings.
-In the spirit of his well-received first novel, the modern gothic Observatory Mansions I think Paul Constant read & liked this?, Carey crafts another fantastic tale, this one revolving around a pair of lonely identical twins. Alva and Irva live in the imaginary (vaguely Nordic) city of Entralla. Their father dies the same day they are born, and the twins are brought up by their reclusive mother. Inseparable from the beginning, they are also polar opposites: Alva, the novel's narrator, longs to see the world, and Irva, her silent twin, is content to stay home forever. When they are still very young, a gift of plasticine inspires them to build a model of their street; soon they are building an imaginary city, Alvairvalla. But then they grow older, and Alva craves independence, finally taking a job at the Entralla post office. Shut up in her room, Irva withdraws further, and Alva torments her by having herself tattooed all over with a map of the world. But in the end the tattoo haunts her and catapults her back into her sister's greedy embrace. Together, the two embark on their greatest plasticine project yet-a model of the whole city-little suspecting how useful it will become after disaster strikes Entralla. Structured around whimsical guidebook entries describing the landmarks of Entralla, and illustrated with photographs of buildings molded out of plasticine (Carey created his own two-by-three-foot model of the city), the novel casts a powerful if sometimes stifling spell.
-Poignant is the closest I can come to explaining the tone of the book, but all is not as sad as that term might suggest. Like his Observatory Mansions, it's all about the people. Please read this book. It is a one of a kind.
-This is a story of place. And it is one I found particularly touching. You will feel the same if you've ever walked aimlessly through a city's streets as you wondered what it would be like to live there, or - if you lived there - wondered what it would be to leave. Edward Carey has found the perfect metaphors for the alternate yearnings, to stay or go, in his characters Irva and Alva. The real brilliance of his story, though, lies in how he manages to illuminate every emotional aspect of how we regard the places we are and may go, and he does so in such an unforced and natural way that we've hardly realized the depth of his contemplation by the book's end. His touch is light, but the feeling is strong...Alva documents the outside in photographs and measurements while Irva remains inside and sculpts. The tiny buildings "may not have been mathematically accurate, but they were, let there be no doubt about this, emotionally precise." It is emotional accuracy that matters. "Miniature things move people." In Carey's world and in real life, it is because the perspective granted by things reduced focuses the emotions we associate with those things. When Alva's and Irva's sculpture is reluctantly displayed to a scarred populace, both the smallness and the significance of the peoples' lives are somehow simultaneously grasped. These oppositions of place are difficult to hold in the same hand. When the writer of this guidebook is revealed who? I don't remember, the significance of small lives is once again emphasized and along with it the unavoidable bitterness of travelling alone in a vast world. This final revelation is devastating and beautiful in a novel full of contradictions. I don't ever expect to read any other book that so perfectly evokes my own feelings towards the places I have been. wow good review.
-I would say Alva and Irva is a little more solemn than Carey's first novel, but certainly a good read. The last portion had me talking out loud and murmuring, "Oh god. Oh my God. Oh no!" You don't believe the lengths the characters go to to secure themselves against their fears and angers until you are on to the next shock.
-An extended meditation on the sense of place, an inquiry into what it means to belong, the book is written alternately as a guidebook for tourists coming to Entralla, and as the memoir of Alva Dapps, the more outgoing of the two sisters. It comes complete with a detailed map, recommendations of where to stay and where to dine, which trolley bus to take to which destination; and the sad inner struggles of two odd and lonely girls who never belong anywhere.


. . .
anomie. drug story, love story. bleak. creatures: troll, tooth fairy, vampire. horse sweat, chamomile, juniper berries, blood, dirt. the woods. under the spell of drugs or a call to wildness - a magical creature or a vampiric curse. or eros. eros-magic. under a spell. place. yearnings. together or apart. stay or go. twins.
. . .


catalogue of novels liked, seattle-chicago at 2/01/2007 09:28:00 PM