Library Limelights 202

Ann Patchett. Bel Canto. 2001. USA: Perennial/HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2002.

How wrong can a political kidnapping go? Totally ‒ far away in a Spanish-speaking second-world country. The target of the operation, the country's president, was absent when rebels entered a lavish reception to capture him. Apparently there was no Plan B. Instead, the rebel leaders (the "Generals") find themselves barricaded with fifteen child soldiers to guard hundreds of party guests speaking a dozen different languages. After some hostages are released and rebel demands are made, forty-nine remaining men settle in for the duration; the one woman among them is world famous opera singer Roxane Coss who'd been hired to perform for the original international gathering. The outside world does not exist except for visits from Joachim Messner, the Red Cross liaison officer. We are immersed with the hostages; negotiations are clearly at a stalemate as weeks, months, go by. Gen Watanabe is the tireless translator, enabling communications among the disparate groups and individuals.

The author has the most beautiful touch with the absurdity of the entire situation and the poignancy of developing relationships. Hostages and their captors can't help but interact. Everyone makes do with what they can, within prescribed boundaries. So many memorable characters — Mr Hosokawa, the opera fanatic; Vice-President Ruben Iglesias, host of the mansion where everything takes place; French ambassador Simon Thibault; Fyodorov, the bashful Russian; General Benjamin of the flaming facial shingles; Carmen, the illiterate female terrorist yearning to learn; Cesar, the boy who surprises with an angel's voice; Father Arguedas, the pragmatic, selfless priest; and more. Two love stories bloom. At first I wondered how I would bear the number of long passages with no paragraph breaks, but I was soon captivated. Even two off-of occurrences did not distract me. Thoroughly engaging, an amazing piece of work, no other way to describe it.

One-liners:

▪ Conversations in more than two languages felt awkward and unreliable, like speaking with a mouthful of cotton and Novocain. (113)

▪ To tell something to Carmen was to have it sewn forever into the silky folds of her brain. (209)

▪ Sleep was a country for which he could not get a visa. (210)

▪ Russian was by no means his best language, and if his concentration lapsed even for a moment it all became a blur of consonants, hard Cyrillic letters bouncing like hail off a tin roof. (210-11)

Multi-liners:

▪ It was soaring, that voice, warm and complicated, utterly fearless. How could it be at once controlled and so reckless? (6)

▪ "I'll shoot you, too, if I have to. Show me how to peel the eggplant. I've shot men over less than an eggplant." (191)

▪ Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane were standing at the sink. It was odd the way they never spoke and yet always seemed to be engaged in a conversation. (210)

▪ She knew the location of every creaky board, every potentially light sleeper. She knew how to flatten herself into the shadows when someone came around the corner headed for the bathroom. (252)

Discipline and order:

Things were very strict in the beginning. Guns were pointed, commands given and obeyed, people slept in rows on the living-room carpet and asked for permission in the most personal of matters. And then, very slowly, the details began to fall away. People stood on their own. They brushed their teeth without asking, had a conversation that was not interrupted. Eventually they went to the kitchen and made a sandwich when they were hungry, using the backs of spoons to spread the butter onto the bread because all of the knives had been confiscated. The Generals had a peculiar fondness for Joachim Messner (even if they did not demonstrate this fondness to him) and insisted that not only was he in charge of negotiations but that he must be the one to bring all the supplies to the house, to lug every box alone through the gate and up the endless walkway. (106-7)

Coping with mental breakdown:

He seemed to think that the comfort of his guests was still his responsibility. He was always serving sandwiches and picking up cups. He washed the dishes and swept and twice a day he mopped up the floors in the lavatories. With a dishtowel knotted around his waist, he took on the qualities of a charming hotel concierge. He would ask, would you like some tea? He would ask, is it too much of an imposition to vacuum beneath the chair in which you were sitting? Everyone was very fond of Ruben. Everyone had completely forgotten that he was the Vice President of the country. (132)

Stalled negotiations:

The things they were asking for had become reckless in the last month, the release of political prisoners from other countries, men they didn't even know, food distributors to the poor, a change in voting laws. General Hector had come up with that one after reading some of the Vice President's legal books. Instead of curtailing their demands, getting nothing had only made them want more. As usual, they made threats, promises to start killing the hostages, but threat, promise, and demand, had become a set of decorative adjectives. They meant no more than the stamps and seals the government affixed to their papers. (235)

A rising star:

Every morning, he unfolded his voice before them like a rare jeweled fan; the more you listened, the more intricate it became. The crowd assembled in the living room could always count on the fact that he would be even better than he had been the day before. That was what was so astonishing about it. He had yet to show the slightest hint of finding the edges of what he was capable of. He sang with hypnotic passion and then with passionate lust. How impossible it seemed, so much voice pouring out of such an average boy. His arms still hung useless at his sides. (308)

Beatriz Williams. The Golden Hour. USA: HarperCollins, 2019.

Since Williams is known as a romance writer, I approached this bestseller with some skepticism, drawn by the background of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor period in the Bahamas. To be pleasantly gratified by the elevated level and flavour. Lulu Randolph is providing a regular gossip column to a New York newspaper about Nassau high society during the Second World War; she hobnobs with the celebrity Windsors. Benedict Thorpe is a British soldier temporarily stationed there. Lulu's everyday life is full of town details and real-life characters that revolve around the never-solved Sir Harry Oakes murder case. As Lulu narrates, she falls hard for Thorpe and they marry, upon which he disappears to be next reported in a German prison camp. Time fast-forwards to efforts by his sister and Lulu to release him.

It's when we tangent off on the backstory of Thorpe's parents that the plot becomes muddy (third-person narration). Even prior to the First World War (more time-switching) Elfriede von Kleist, Thorpe's mother, is a magnet for tragedy. Her dysfunctional domestic life in Germany seems dominated by pregnancies and postpartum depression. Forward to Nassau again: Lulu is secretly involved in more than reporting to her publisher, although who-when-how is not evident throughout. Thorpe's character and military role are even more opaque; thinly portrayed, he seems unlikely to inspire a woman's wild infatuation. Eager to spring surprises, the author fails to fill us in on some important behind-the-scenes activities, losing the desired effect. Basically, the novel is a "historical romance" with token dashes of murder and espionage. The extent of the Windsors' pro-Nazi sympathies remains safely locked in the royal family vaults.

Nassau —

▪ "She's concerned about the Windsor public image, poor dear. Wants to make sure it's shown in the most flattering light possible, by a pet journalist trained to eat right from the hand." (108)

▪ I remember the duke just about spat with rage. The damned yellow disease is spreading right across the Pacific, he said. (142)

▪ (151)

▪ Wallis looked away from me and toward her own portrait, above the mantel, right between our two chummy husbands. (371-2)

▪ "Oh, champagne. I knew I married the right sort of woman." (379)

▪ "What would you say, Duchess, if I told you that I had made copies of all those documents I passed along to you?" (426)

Germany —

▪ But what will I do when you've gone? she whispered. (95)

▪ If her husband's died of fever during this past hour, she will never regret leaving him to die alone. (131)

▪ Elfriede's mother kept gazing in rapture at her daughter's belly, as if unable to believe that a grandchild existed therein. (162)

▪ "We'll start again, our souls clean, our hearts pure. How does that sound, Elfriede?" (173)

▪ "I loved you too much to make you stay at home. And I trusted your love." (356?)

▪ "At least when this baby kills me, you'll be free." (358)

Personal perception:

The exact shade of her eyes was so particular, so remarkable, a plush, vivid lavender, they had a name for it: Wallis blue. Her wedding dress, I'm told, matched that shade exactly. And I don't blame her. Those eyes, they held you in thrall, especially when she wanted them to. When she channeled the full force of her charm through them and into you. On that July day, the duchess was as much a mystery to me as to everyone else who wasn't married to her, and maybe even—maybe especially—to the fellow who was. I perhaps thought her morals a little wanting, her ethics a little thin, her mind a little shallow, her clothing a little fabulous and perhaps the most interesting thing about her. (87)

The in-law from hell:

At last, at last, Helga's spleen is set free. Elfriede, wandering among the hibiscus with her garden shears, pretends to listen. Helga gets such pleasure from her lectures, such luxurious satisfaction from her exhibitions of piety. One by one, snip, snip, Elfriede lays the hibiscus in the basket and nods along. She meditates on this human craving for moral superiority, more powerful perhaps than the craving for sex. Why? What power do we gain from believing, asserting, tirelessly burnishing our virtue? To shame others, that's the point of life. (259)

Finally, optimism:

She'll give Wilfred babies of his own, delightful ginger-haired babies, two or three at least, and this time she'll nurse them herself, she'll care for them herself in the bedroom she shares with Wilfred, the house she shares with Wilfred, and won't the girls be delighted at these darling new arrivals! Won't they be a large, happy family together! Why, it's all so simple! Why was she so afraid? She wants to laugh out loud. (271)

Public perception:

I'm told the duchess's dress was made by Mainbocher out of Wallis blue satin, to match her eyes, but of course you can't tell about color in a black-and-white photograph. Suffice to say the dress fits the occasion, long and rather demure, flattering all the same. No surprise there. It's their faces, my God. Her face, and his face. I mean, they're not smiling, either of them. In fact, they remind me of a pair of aristos about to board the tumbrel. She wears an expression of taut stoicism, and he looks scared out of his wits. I believe Cecil Beaton himself took those photographs. I sometimes wonder what he was thinking as he snapped the shutter. (370-1)

Lars Kepler. The Rabbit Hunter. 2016. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2018.

This translation was long awaited. Swedish detective Joona Linna is back but oops, he's serving (deserved) time in prison. Valeria, a former high school girlfriend, brightens his days with her visits. Inevitably ‒ when the baffling murder of a highly place politician indicates that more will follow ‒ Joona is approached by the Security Police for assistance. Cozying up to a fellow prisoner and the subsequent information leads to an unexpected but spectacular firefight in a remote boatyard; never mind the loss of lives, it's an epic fail for the cops and Joona is back in prison, all promises for his release forgotten. Yet his uncanny ability to imagine the mind of a killer is appreciated only, it seems, by the loyal Saga Bauer, herself no slouch in detective skills.

Upon finding a clue to an exclusive private school of international students, once again Joona is given temporary release. The investigation goes in an entirely different direction where some prominent citizens are nervous about their shared history. Shades of "The Riot Club"?! ... distasteful on more than one level. Rex, a celebrity chef, struggles to reacquaint himself with his son while his manager DJ deals with personal issues, like narcolepsy. Visualizing the complicated locations of action is a challenge. This particular killer employs a spooky nursery rhyme to declare his intentions (just as the Kepler team can be expected to employ a bizarre psychosis). I even had to look up my previous blurb: https://anotherfamdamily.blogspot.com/2016/07/library-limelights-111.html to confirm that the ending here is more dramatic than ever. But somehow, the whole is less realistic, less cohesive, than anticipated.

One-liners:

▪ "And if you do actually manage to discover information that helps stop these terrorists, I'll see to it that you get your old life back." (68)

▪ "Everyone's just decided that I have a problem without asking me." (75)

▪ Rex would listen, of course, but DJ's job is to help Rex, not burden him with his own worries. (130)

▪ "If you lie to me again, I'll arrest you, and drag you to Kronoberg Prison," Joona says to the headmaster. (320)

▪ Both his motives and modus operandi are emotionally charged, and all the evidence suggests that he has a warped and chaotic personality. (363)

▪ Rex lowers the rifle and meets Sammy's contrary stare, but instead of being annoyed he smiles. (450)

Multi-liners:

▪ Saga has experienced waterboarding. It formed part of her advanced training, but she doesn't consider it particularly effective. (42)

▪ He hadn't counted on being attacked in the square. He had to improvise to make it look like an accident. (447)

▪ "They say I became psychotic, but to me it was reality ... I hid myself away in order to survive." (469)

The first takedown:

"It'll be a big operation tonight, won't it?" Joona asks, looking down at the glossy photographs: blood, spattered kitchen cabinets, an overturned potted plant, the Foreign Minister's body from various angles, his blood-soaked torso, hands, and crooked, yellowish toes. 

"Do you really think you can pull this off?" she asks seriously. 

"Pull it off? That's what I do," he replies. 

He hears her laugh to herself. 

"You're aware that you've been away for two years, and that this killer is particularly efficient?" 

"Yes." 

"Have you read the forensic timeline?" 

"He knows what he's doing, but there's something else, I can feel it. There's something disturbed about it." 

"What do you mean?" (146)

Truth:

"Valeria ... I'm not really here on leave." 

"Did you escape?" She asks with a smile. 

"Not this time," he replies. 

She lowers her bright, brown eyes, and her face turns almost grey, as if she were trapped behind a wall of ice. 

"I knew it would happen. I knew you'd go back to being a police officer," she says, swallowing hard. 

"I'm not a police officer, but I've been forced to do one last job. There was no other option." 

She leans gently against the wall. The veins in her neck are throbbing hard, and her lips are pale. 

"Were you ever in prison for real?" 

"I accepted the job the day before yesterday," he replies. 

"I see." 

"I'm done with the police." 

"No," she smiles. "Well, you may believe that, but I could always tell you wanted to get back in." 

"That's not true," he says, even though he realises that it is. (166)

Nursery rhyme:

Ten little rabbits, all dressed in white, 

Tried to get to heaven on the end of a kite. 

Kite string got broken, down they all fell, 

Instead of going to heaven, they all went to ... (236)