Thrillers, mysteries, romances and far away places are the usual ingredients of the summer reading list. Here are a few volumes that have provided me with diversion recently.
Many of my favorite writers of entertaining fiction have left the scene, alas, and I still mis the likes of Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard who pioneered tales of genius heists undone and dimwit criminals who succeed. I console myself with writers like Michael Gruber, though he produces at a very stately pace, and the Bernie Gunther Third Reich noir of Philip Kerr.
Other series carry on, but the detectives are getting pretty long in the tooth. Both Harry Bosch and John Rebus were forced to take mandatory retirement, but their creators must have decided, like Conan Doyle before them, that a guaranteed payday for them took precedence over a well-deserved rest for their detectives. So Bosch is still entertainingly prowling the mean streets of L.A. in his latest, “The Wrong Wide of Good-bye.”
Followers of Gabriel Allon, the Israeli James Bond have to suspend more and more disbelief since he must now be well into his AARP years, and has used up at least nine lives, He has also participated in terrorist-thwarting exploits so dramatic and high profile that in our media saturated age his face would be as familiar as those of George Clooney or Beyonce. Extreme celebrity and undercover wet work would seem incompatible, but Daniel Silva’s hero still provides efficient if outlandish suspense in his latest, “House of Spies.”
I have finished a second Tana French Dublin Murder Squad mystery, “The Likeness.” This doppelgänger tale strains credulity as a lookalike police woman masquerades as a murder victim, but it is elegantly written, takes a psychological interest in its characters, and has a tactile feel for place, all of which put French’s work a cut above the usual page-turning police procedural.
Last winter I trekked through the first three books of Olivia Manning’s World War II saga, The Fortunes of War, they were called “The Balkan Trilogy.” I have now completed the journey with “The Levant Trilogy.” Together they follow the fraught path of a young British woman married to a self-absorbed schoolteacher posted abroad as the outbreak of World War II looms. They find themselves buffeted by history as they keep one jump ahead of invasion, occupation and cataclysm. The tales begin slowly, but gain power and depth as they conclude and are enriched by a poetic sense of places from Romania and Greece to Egypt and Palestine in the waning days of colonial empires. And a gallery of lesser characters keep stealing the limelight from the leads.
“Born a Crime” is the memoir of “The Daily Show’s” Trevor Noah. It described growing up a mixed race child in apartheid South Africa when his very existence was against the law. He faced discrimination on one side from the state and on the other side from black victims of the system who regarded him as neither one of them nor one of their oppressors. His surviving this absurd, soul-crushing situation is entirely due to his unbelievably tough, courageous, wily and unstoppable mother. Deftly and touchingly told with a few laughs and a lot more tears.
I have previously recommended anything Charles Nicholl writes, and have just finished “Somebody Else,” which does nothing to diminish my admiration for his skill. It narrates Nicholl’s voyage to discover the lost years of symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. He amazed and scandalized late 19th century France with his brilliant poetry and bad behavior, then quit writing forever at nineteen and vanished into Africa.
The arch bohemian became an ambitious capitalist and reckless adventurer opening up new territories to trade, running guns, and enduring mortifications of the flesh in an unforgiving environment filled with dangerous foes — human, animal and bacterial. His motivations remain mysterious, but this waste of a prodigious talent yoked to a troubled soul satisfies the classical definition of tragedy, something arousing pity and terror in the onlooker. He spent his life running away from home, in one way or another, yet came near the end to say, “I now see existence is just a way to use up your life.”
Nicholl was smitten with Rimbaud as a young man, as many are, and describes his middle-aged journey on Rimbaud’s trail to Aden and places like Djibouti and Harar and Ankober in Ethiopia, that were all but inaccessible in the 1880s and still no picnic when Nicholl undertook the search a century later.
Finally, I continue to recommend the beautiful, allusive, oddly inconclusive fictions of Ward Just. In books like “American Romantic,” “In the City of Fear” and “Echo House,” he has written brilliantly of Washington power and Vietnam at the time of that war, when he was a foreign correspondent. He also has books about politics and newspapering in his native midwest, like “A Family Trust,” and on characters as various as a retired CIA agent in the Pyrenees who fears old enemies are active in “Forgetfulness,” and a Hollywood film director who is no longer in vogue but who is invited to Berlin shortly after the Wall comes down, in “The Weather in Berlin.”
His most famous film, made in the 1970s, was set in Germany in 1921 and is a cult favorite in that country. He has been offered a sort of artist-in-residence gig and meets East German film makers who show him a world he has never seen. In the process they rekindle his ambition to return to his art. As is often the case in Just, past and present intermingle in a meditation on time, loss and memory. Thus, the protagonist realizes he shares a familiar human dilemma, that “everyone was a product of his own time and place, described one way by those who had lived through it and quite differently by those who looked back on it.” Ain’t it the truth.