Library Limelights 204

Jo Nesbø. Knife. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2019. 

It's the long awaited return of Harry Hole who is in a minor position in the Oslo Police due to past transgressions. Now he's obsessed that Svein Finne, a madman recently released from prison, is the perpetrator in the killings of three women. Although confined to an office, he deviously tries to locate Finne. Paranoia takes over when Rakel, the love of his life, becomes a fourth victim. Shut out from the investigation, Harry persuades friends Alexandra, Bjørn, and Kaja to become allies in his quest. Never mind that the husband is always the first suspect in a domestic murder. Sad to say, alcohol is eating Harry's brain cells and his once vaunted gut instinct seems untrustworthy; anxiety attacks and self-recrimination haunt him. He tries to keep himself in a dream state to avoid the shattering grief and pain of reality.

What follows is a convoluted, agonizing process as Harry ‒ basically, by himself ‒ eliminates one suspect after another for his wife's murder. Who would guess that so many people could have a motive? Yet each, despite guilty secrets Harry extracts from them, has an alibi. Chasing Finne is only one part of it, the creepy part. Harry is left with the last solution: that he did it himself in a drunken blackout ... oh, Harry! Kripos (the national police) are taking the case away from his Crime Squad boss Katrine; they've come to the same conclusion. Nesbø is at the top of his game in Nordic noir, even if Harry's future looks grim.

One-liners:

▪ "I'm not saying this to humiliate you, Harry, just to show you what happens when you drink." (21)

▪ "You weren't filling any sort of vacuum when we got together, but you left a huge, gaping hole when you went." (128)

▪ The click of the handcuffs sounded like a damp kiss in the empty cemetery. (146)

▪ Ståle Aune had warned him about Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which was when alcoholics slowly but surely drank away their ability to remember things. (270)

▪ Photographs revealed more about the person who had hung them up than the images in them. (271)

Multi-liners:

▪ Psychology and religion have one thing in common: to a large extent, they both give people what they want. Out there in the darkness, where the light of science has yet to reach, psychology and religion have free rein. (25)

▪ Harry had danced. To a turgid version of "Let It Be" played on panpipes. That was the proof: he was hopelessly in love. (36)

▪ "There, there, everything's going to be fine. Do you want to make me a happy man and marry me?" (119)

▪ "They took someone we loved away from us. Prison isn't enough. An easy death isn't enough." (245)

Katrine remonstrates:

"To be blunt: at the present time, Hagen and the Oslo Police District would not find it remotely helpful if the press were to publish an interview with an unhinged police officer who was drunk on duty." 

"Don't forget paranoid. Paranoid, unhinged and drunk." Harry tipped his head back and drained his glass. 

"Please, Harry, no more paranoia. I've spoken to Winter at Kripos, and there's no evidence to suggest it's Finne." 

"So what is there evidence to suggest, then?" 

"Nothing." 

"There was a dead woman lying there, of course there's evidence." 

Harry gestured to Nina that he was ready for his next glass. (63)

Wasting no time:

"I've recruited one of Svein Finne's rape victims to act as bait, in order to catch him red-handed. I've persuaded an innocent woman to wear a microphone and record him in the belief that it's part of a police operation, whereas it's actually a solo performance directed by a suspended police officer. Plus his accomplice, a former colleague. You." 

Kaja stared at him. "You're kidding." 

"No," Harry said. "It turns out I have no moral boundaries when it comes to how far I'm willing to go to catch Svein Finne." 

"Those are precisely the words I was going to use." 

"I need you, Kaja. Are you with me?" (118)

Unhinged:

"I'm babbling, I ..." He closed his eyes. "I'm babbling so I don't wake up." 

"Wake up?" 

Harry took a deep breath. "I'm asleep. As long as I'm asleep, as long as I can manage to stay in the dream, I can carry on looking for him. But every so often it starts to slip away from me. I need to concentrate on sleeping, because if I wake up ..." 

"What?" 

"Then I'll know that it's true. And then I'll die." (219)

Joshua Hammer. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu. USA: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

"... And their race to save the world's most precious manuscripts." Little-known to most of us, the city of Timbuktu in Mali has been a cultural and teaching centre of Mahgreb scholarship in different periods of its history. Often the ancient manuscripts and books were held as individual family property, seen as a safeguard against intervals of destructive invaders. In the late twentieth century, Abdel Kader Haidara became a reluctant archivist although his father had had a longtime mission to collect and preserve such material for the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research. The young man soon warmed to his job, visiting families everywhere, sometimes arduously in the remotest areas to make purchases. Initially, persuading them that their treasure would be better off with professional care took much time and effort. Timbuktu became the new home for dozens of libraries, Haidara's own family holdings among them.

But divisions among Islamic tradition resulted in the rise of Al Qaeda with their inevitable imposition of Sharia law. Northern Mali and Timbuktu became extremely dangerous; their fighters swept into the city and even camped in the Ahmed Baba Institute. Haidara wanted to act before irreplaceable heritage items could be destroyed; international funding was obtained. The clandestine transfer of thousands of manuscripts back into safe houses was an amazing enough act of organization. But then, they had to be moved a second time, out of the city altogether: tons of trunks and lockers precariously balanced on river boats. The devotion of so many volunteers is astounding. The author visited Timbuktu several times before and after these events. It serves to remind us that brutal fundamentalists can exist anywhere, yet the human spirit can prevail.

One-liners:

▪ The confrontation between these two Islamic ideologies—one open and tolerant, the other inflexible and violent―would bedevil Timbuktu over the following five centuries. (24-5)

▪ A new crop of librarians was emerging in Timbuktu, almost all of them the descendants of the great scholars and manuscript collectors from centuries ago. (61)

▪ In 2011 the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library in Timbuktu was fast becoming one of the world's most innovative manuscript conservation centers and a symbol of Timbuktu's cultural renaissance. (115)

▪ What drove him most was a belief in the power of the written word—the rich variety of human experience and ideas contained between the covers of a book. (117)

▪ Timbuktu had been the incubator for the richness of Islam, and Islam in its perverted form had attempted to destroy it. (212)

Multi-liners:

▪ They're going to break into our libraries, and steal everything inside, and destroy the manuscripts. What do we have to do to save them? (138)

▪ He knew that many of the works epitomized the reasoned discourse and intellectual inquiry that the militants, with their rigid views of Islam, their intolerance, and their hatred of modernity and rationality, wanted to destroy. (155)

Collecting in the late 20th century:

Haidara was developing an acute sense of each book's worth, and was becoming a skilled negotiator. If the manuscript was complete, which was not that common, it would elevate its value. If Timbuktu's scribes had made copies of a single work it would diminish the price. He valued manuscripts written by Timbuktu's most illustrious calligraphers—a handful of artistic geniuses identified by the colophons at the end of each volume―far more highly than the work of lesser scribes. Subject matter was another key criterion. Haidara highly esteemed works on conflict resolution, contemporary politics, geography—particularly those with detailed and colorful maps―and government corruption, because few such studies existed, and he also placed a high value on medical manuscripts, because the knowledge they imparted was often applicable today. (37-8)

Ahmed Baba Institute, the one place that suffered:

Now [January 2013], on the verge of being expelled from Timbuktu, the Al Qaeda fighters would exact their retribution. The men swept 4,202 manuscripts off lab tables and shelves, and carried them into the tiled courtyard. In an act of nihilistic vindictiveness that they had been threatening for months, the jihadis made a pyre of the ancient texts, including fourteenth- and fifteenth-century works of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, their fragile pages covered with algebraic formulas, charts of the heavens, and molecular diagrams. They douse the manuscripts in gasoline, watching in satisfaction as the liquid saturated them, and tossed in a lit match. The brittle pages and their dry leather covers ignited in a flash. The flames rose higher, licking at a concrete column around which the volumes had been arranged. In minutes, the work of some of Timbuktu's greatest savants and scientists, preserved for centuries, hidden from the nineteenth-century jihadis and the French conquerors, survivors of floods and the pernicious effects of dust, bacteria, water, and insects, were consumed by the inferno. (209-10)

A mild nutshell:

In a low-tech operation that seemed quaintly anomalous in the second decade of the twenty-first century, he and his team had transported to safety, by river and road, past hostile jihadi guards and suspicious Malian soldiers, past bandits, attack helicopters, and other potentially lethal obstacles, almost all of Timbuktu's 377,000 manuscripts. Not one had been lost en route. (211)

David Szalay. All That Man Is. USA: Graywolf Press, 2016.

Depicting today's modern man, the author presents nine short stories ranging from teenagers travelling on break to septuagenarians. Ages, locations (an international travelogue of Europe), personalities, and circumstances vary. Of the spectrum, I find only one who feels happy or fulfilled and he's in mid-career. Many stories involve hotels or being away from home. There's much vacant staring ‒ out of windows, at the floor, at the sky. Some are well educated; others are barely articulate. More than a few share unease on interacting with women, or with their own sexual urges. So many of them seem devoid of emotional feeling, but they experience an existential longing for they know not what.

From youngster to oldster completes a circumference here. Is the spectre of loneliness, emptiness, what the author intended? That life is not all it's cracked up to be, and impermanence rules? Draw your own conclusions?

Simon the travelling British student:

▪ What am I doing here? (8)

▪ "You leave me alone?" she laughs. "You leave a lady alone?" (31)

▪ There is a strange sense of loss, a sense of loss without an obvious subject. (35)

Bernard a delinquent French dropout in Cyprus:

▪ His mother's near-tearfulness, his father's smouldering fury, are just familiar parts of the family scenery. (44)

▪ Sitting on one of the single beds, he starts to feel that it is probably unacceptable for him not to have access to a shower, and decides to speak to someone about it. (50)

▪ With his eyes shut, it seems to him that he can hear every grain of sand moving on the sea floor. (81)

Balázs the Hungarian bodyguard in London:

▪ Sitting there in the shadows, he thinks with shame and sadness of his own life, his own things, his pathetic pleasures. (117)

▪ "You speak English, you fucking gorilla?" (118)

▪ Everything was quiet, and there was a pleasant emptiness inside him too ‒ something like the unlit windows of the houses he walked past, a peaceful vacancy. (123)

Karel the Belgian academic going to Warsaw:

▪ Yes, he likes the little world of the university. He likes its claustral narrowness. Sometimes he wishes it were narrower still. (130)

▪ He asks, trying to sound loving or sympathetic or something, "What do you want to do?" (144)

▪ And in fact, to his surprise, there is a trace of sadness now, somewhere inside him ‒ a sort of vapour trail of sadness on the otherwise blue sky of his mind. (150)

Kristian the Danish newspaper editor:

▪ "If he sues, we have no defence." (167)

▪ The story. The dangerous information detonating, tearing through the fabric of public life. (196)

▪ He feels the adrenalin start to move in him. The lift doors shut. Yeah, this is what it's about now. (196)

James an estate agent in the French Alps: 222 not young

▪ This is pretty small-time stuff. No oligarchs venture up this sleepy valley. (207)

▪ That's the thing about fate, the way you only understand what your fate is when it's too late to do anything about it. (212)

▪ "We could do luxury here. Do you see what I'm saying?" (222)

Murray a Scottish boor in Croatia:

▪ The underlying premise of their friendship is that neither of them ever has anything else to do. No one else to see. (240)

▪ "What the fuck does she see in you?" he says. (244)

▪ Yesterday he experienced a sort of dark afternoon of the soul. Some hours of terrible negativity. A sense, essentially, that he had wasted his entire life, and now it was over. (251)

Aleksandr the Russian billionaire on his yacht:

▪ "I said to Alain, 'I want sushi tonight. Proper sushi, okay? Not some local shit, okay?'" (297)

▪ The whole Communist experiment, with all its hope and suffering, had passed like a storm, he said, and left things exactly as they were. (299)

▪ "Somehow ..." Aleksandr looks miserable. "I've lost the meaning of life. Do you understand?" (308)

Tony the declining British Senior in Italy:

▪ He feels no more prepared to face death, though, than he ever has. (319)

▪ He got lost and flustered, and ended up driving the wrong way down a narrow one-way street. (323)

▪ Do we all end up just fading away? (326)