Tag Archives: arnaldur indridason

What I Read, May 2024

Posted on by under book review, lists, month in review, review, Zola

What a terrific month! Yes, the first ten days were busy: bringing the semester to a close; dealing with the fallout of the lousy previous months; celebrating with our graduates. But then the pace shifted entirely. Amazing how much better I feel when I exercise regularly, eat better, sleep well, and sit on the back deck with a fantasy novel for an hour just because.

It occurred to me recently that in my moaning about last month I forgot something amazing. The eclipse! Little Rock in the totality for something like two and a half minutes, and the experience was as incredible as everyone said it would be. How lucky to simply walk down the block to an open space for an incredible view of the thing. How amazing that people in our neighbourhood (who normally never have anything to say to each other) were out and about, portable lawn chairs and to go cups in hand. Strong school’s out for summer vibes. 10/10, absolutely recommend.

Here are the books I read:

Franz Marc, Two Women on the Hillside, 1906

Arnaldur Indridason, The Darkness Knows (2017) Trans. Victoria Cribb (2021)

In wintery Iceland, retired cop Konrad is pulled into an ongoing investigation that to his surprise helps him learn more about the mysterious death of his father.

Arnaldur Indridason, The Girl by the Bridge (2018) Trans. Philip Roughton (2023)

In summery Iceland, retired cop Konrad is pulled into an ongoing investigation that to his surprise helps him learn more about the mysterious death of his father.

Look, sometimes you need to read something as undemanding as possible.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Lord of Emperors (2000)

Longer and even more satisfying sequel to Sailing to Sarantium, which I read a few months ago. This will sound weird, but I get the same feeling reading Kay as I do watching David Simon shows: intense investment on my part in the characters, sighs of bittersweet pleasure when things come to a close. Like its predecessor, Lord of Emperors is modelled on Byzantium under Justinian and Theodora. The mosaicist hero of the first volume—summoned to Sarantium to tile a version of the Hagia Sophia—is joined in this book by a doctor from lands to the east. Political upheaval leads to changing religious and artistic standards; the eventual fall of the Empire is hinted at. (Kay develops this unthinkable outcome in his more recent books.) There’s an exciting chariot race, too.

Christine Lai, Landscapes (2023)

Matt Keeley calls this the Sebaldian country house novel you didn’t know you needed. Which is a good description. Set in England in the near-future in an isolated house among desiccated fields and dead woods, Landscapes centers on an art historian who is first brought to the house by one of a pair of wealthy brothers only to flee from his violence into the arms of the other. Lai’s world-building won’t win any awards—it’s clearly not what she’s most interested in, though her description of literal zones of climate-controlled safety around city centers and other wealthy enclaves feels all-too plausible—and her characterization is uneven. (The only vivid character is the empty, preening, vain cruel brother.) But the book had me thinking anew about the role of art in an era of climate catastrophe and the Benjaminian claim that every document of culture is also a document of barbarism.

Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman (2023)

My first Abbott, unaccountably. But not my last.

Thriller with a side of body horror about a pregnant woman who accompanies her husband to his family’s summer place in Michigan’s upper peninsula for the first time. Plenty of Gothic accoutrements: kindly father, a former doctor still grieving his wife’s death decades ago, who might not be what he seems; mysterious housekeeper; isolated home. Abbott excels at creating menace, unease, and doubt. A story about what men will do to control women’s bodies: very much of our time.

Perfect reading for the first hot Sunday of the summer.

Émile Zola, La Bête Humaine (1890) Trans. Roger Pearson (1996)

“Too many trains, too many murders,” an early critic wrote, preposterously, of this terrific late novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. As if a book could have too much of either!

Although I still have plenty of Zola ahead of me—I’ve read about half of the RMs now—I’m willing to say that this is the most Zola-esque Zola of all. The train system, with its switches, branches, tunnels, wheelhouses, and miles of track, is the perfect metaphor for the books’ obsession with the interconnected systems and institutions of Second Empire France, especially because it affords new expressions of crime, sexual desire, and violence.

Reading La Bête Humaine, I was reminded of the opening of Peter Brooks’s argument that sight is the realist sense par excellence; of the many descriptive set pieces in this novel, Zola’s favourites seem to be the ones depicting the railyards of the Gare St Lazare as seen from the balcony of an apartment building inhabited by railway workers. In the opening scene a railyard supervisor named Roubaud awaits the return of his wife, Séverine, in a borrowed apartment in that building. She’s been shopping while he’s been getting a dressing down from his superior, a pickle he escapes thanks to the influence of a man named Grandmorin, a former judge who is on the board of the railway and has taken Roubaud on as a protégé because of his fondness for/guilt toward Séverine, whom he knew as a child. What promises to be a cozy tête-à-tête between newlyweds turns ugly, when a change remark by Séverine’s reveals that the judge had sexually abused her for years. Roubaud sees red and after nearly throttling his wife immediately plots to kill the judge, forcing Séverine to send the man a note asking him to meet her in a private car on the evening train to Rouen. This violence unfolds against a backdrop of gaiety and hilarity rising from the apartment below, where two sisters run a non-stop party of singing, dancing, and drinking.

Over the course of four-hundred increasingly intense pages—filled with one sensational, over-the-top scene after another—Zola builds to an indelible ending in which the strains of violence, misogyny, wounded male pride, hilarity, and excess that are already present in the beginning return in reconfigured form: a runaway train, its driver and fireman thrown off after a terrible fight, filled with drunken, bawling recruits headed to the front of what will be the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, hurtles unchecked and to certain disaster under a full head of steam.

I couldn’t get enough of the novel’s proto-Freudian and phrenological-criminological-eugenicist ways of thinking about human behavior. The other main character—the connection to the Rougon-Mcquart family—is the train driver Jacques Lantier (whose mother and brothers appear in The Assommoir, The Masterpiece, and Germinal, respectively), who literally sees red when he is aroused by a woman, wanting only to dismember her. (A long time ago I saw the Renoir film—though I remembered almost nothing; it must be so different from the book—and I could only picture Lantier as Jean Gabin, which is unfortunate because he’s much more like Peter Lorre.) And lest I make it sound like this is a book about men, that’s only partly true. In addition to Séverine, there are two other terrific female characters. The one who broke my heart was Flore, an operator at an isolated railway crossing, and whose unrequited love for her cousin Lantier leads to a disastrous outcome.

I could say a lot more about this book. Check out our conversation at One Bright Book to hear more. And speaking of more, I feel compelled to read more Rougon-Maquart before long. Summer of Zola, anyone?

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star (2020) Trans. Martin Aitken (2021)

The reason I so seldom follow through on reading plans like the one I just suggested is that I just cannot stop from being distracted by unexpected things that come my way. I’d been paying even more attention than usual to Brandon Taylor’s reading because he’s been championing Zola lately. So when he tweeted repeatedly about this latest series from Knausgaard, I thought maybe I should investigate. I hadn’t paid any attention to this, other than to vaguely note Jeez, that Norwegian guy has another set of books. If I expected anything it was that the books would be autofiction in the vein of My Struggle. (I read the first two of those with great pleasure a long time ago and then… just didn’t keep up: now I want to close that loop, too.) But The Morning Star is a proper novel, in the sense that it is composed of long sections narrated by different first-person narrators, most of whom link up in sometimes unexpected ways. The action takes place in a hot summer in and around Bergen, in something like 2016. There is plenty of the deep ordinariness of middle-class Norwegian life that I found compelling in My Struggle (cabins to close for the season, impromptu dinner parties to arrange, elderly parents to look after, marriages to keep on life-support). But there’s also a lot of weird stuff: a priest conducts a funeral for a man who turns out to look identical to the one who asked her an impertinent question in the airport the night before; a creature, whether human or not is unclear, roams the forest, possibly in connection to the disappearance of a man from a mental institution and a shocking satanic cult murder; and, most powerfully of all, a dazzlingly bright star suddenly appears in the sky.

The novel seems to be about the relation between the mundane and the extraordinary: I say seems because for me Knausgaard incites a delicious reading fugue state, where undistinguished sentences roll on into compelling blocks of text and the pages keep turning as if by themselves. As soon as I reached the end of its 600+ pages I ordered the 800+-page sequel…

Berthe Morisot, In England (Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight), 1875

Honestly I enjoyed all these books, even those Indridasons. See anything you fancy here?

A Summer’s Worth of Crime Fiction

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Summer isn’t over yet, of course, especially not in Arkansas. But my summer almost is. Administrative duties begin this week, and the first day of classes is only three weeks away. I’m sure I’ll dispose of a few more crime novels before the semester really starts to pinch, but for now here are a few thoughts about some I’ve read lately:

Gallows View—Peter Robinson (1987)

The first in the long-running Inspector Banks series, and a pretty good debut. For a while there I read the new installments of this series religiously. I’m a few behind now, not sure why, they’re always solid, often much better than that, and Banks is likeable enough, a kinder, less tormented Rebus. I don’t always need to know so much about the music he’s listening to, though. I’d never read the first five or six, though, and it’s interesting to compare the later installments to the first one. Robinson has become a better writer, but already here he shows a light touch in explaining the story of Banks’s move from London to Yorkshire. And his pacing is good, too. At 250 pages this book is the right length. I’ve bemoaned many times the bloat in crime fiction, with novels regularly topping 400 pages. In fact, Robinson himself has since succumbed to this tendency. Still, meeting Inspector Banks has reignited my interest in the series and I plan to read the next few.

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The Strangler Vine—M . J. Carter (2014)

This first time novel by a historian begins what promises to be a very good series. Someone recommended this in the TLS Summer Reading series, and I’m glad I followed up on it. William Avery is a young soldier recently arrived in India in the 1830s. Languishing in Calcutta before joining his regiment, he is charged with accompanying Jeremiah Blake to find a well-known poet, the Walter Scott of Anglo-India, who has gone missing. Blake is a shadowy figure who is employed by the East India Company but lives in disrepute in the “native” part of the city, and in fact seems to have repudiated the Company altogether. Avery is naïve, a bit complacent and blustery, though a good sort. Blake is mercurial, expert in a dozen Eastern languages, an expert at tracking people who don’t want to be found. There’s an extended “meet cute” in which Blake is contemptuous of Avery and Avery horrified by Bake before each comes to appreciate the other, work as a team, etc. Avery is disabused of his faith in the Company; Blake regains some of his faith in the human race. So far, so conventional. Fortunately, Carter doesn’t push the Holmes/Watson comparison too hard. And her knowledge of the period is impressive. She describes the 1830s as a time when an earlier openness on the part of Company officials for India’s cultural traditions was hardening into something more dogmatic and oppressive, an incipient White Man’s Burden. The book drags a little at times, especially in the middle third, usually when Carter tries to burden her story with too much information. But the ending is genuinely moving and I look forward to the next installment, which, it seems, will be set somewhere quite different. (Already out in the UK—Book Depository order necessary? Hmm…)

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Invisible City—Julia Dahl (2014)

I read this because it’s ostensibly about the Hasidic community in New York. But it’s actually about the newspaper business in the era of social media, which interests me a lot less. Dahl’s portrayal of an insular world in which wrongdoings are overlooked in a tacit understanding between community leaders and secular officials is fine as far as it goes. But Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker piece from last year explores the same topic much more probingly. It tells you something that a few later I can’t even remember the protagonist’s name, but she has a complicated back-story that allows her access to this relatively closed world. I didn’t find that story interesting enough to want to read the just-released follow-up.

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Oblivion—Arnaldur Indridason (2014/2015 English translation Victoria Cribb)

Indridason is one of my absolute favourites and I always order his books from the UK since they come out a year earlier there. Some are stronger than others, of course, but this one is particularly good. A couple of years ago, Indridason concluded his series centered on his melancholy detective, Erlendur. But then he had the idea of writing about Erlendur’s early days. Last year’s Reykjavik Nights showed us Erlendur’s life as a traffic cop in the early 70s. In this follow-up, set a few years later, Erlendur has become a detective. He investigates two unrelated crimes, one recent and one from twenty years earlier. The resonances between them—they are linked only thematically, in relation to the American military presence in Iceland after the war—are intriguing but not hammered home. I’ve written before about my love of Iceland, so maybe this stuff interests me more than most people. But everyone ought to appreciate how almost insistently low-key these books are. Indridason is especially good at showing how awkward it can be to investigate crimes in a small country, where everybody almost knows everybody else.

Dissolution—C. J. Sansom (2003)

I’m not much of one for classical/medieval/Renaissance-era historical mysteries, but I quite liked this first installment of a series centered on Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer working for Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s who increasingly finds himself torn over his master’s methods. At least I liked it until I read Jenny’s damning but compelling complaint about the implausibility of importing what are essentially 19th/20th century narrative protocols on to the Early Modern period. After that I liked it less. I might continue with the series anyway, though: the first one was definitely readable, and I enjoyed the counter-perspective on Cromwell, who I only know from Hilary Mantel. This book is fine, but it’s no Wolf Hall! Think Sansom is tired of hearing that yet?

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The Red Moth—Sam Eastlake (2013)

Found this while in Canada and it seemed like the kind of thing that might be hard to get in the US, plus I’m a total sucker for WWII crime/espionage fiction. The inspector is a Finn who once worked for the Tsar and then was recalled from Siberian exile and put to work for Stalin. It’s all most implausible—Stalin is even a character, which doesn’t work out too well: I get that the point is that he’s not a frothing madman, but the picture of him as simply a malign functionary is fairly preposterous. A perfectly adequate vacation read, but I doubt I’ll be getting to the rest of the series anytime soon.

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Ngaio Marsh—A Man Lay Dead (1934)

Marsh is one of the most famous Golden Age British crime writers along with Christie, Allingham, and the utterly glorious Tey. This is the first of her Inspector Alleyn series. It’s not perfect—Marsh can’t quite seem to figure out what she wants Alleyn to be like: is he nice, is he brooding, is he a bit callous?—but it’s thoroughly enjoyable, a classic country house murder with a hint of espionage. Read it—it absolutely stands the test of time. Looking forward to reading more of her work.