clair081

In The Unspeakable , set in the dusty northern provinces of South Africa in the last decades of Apartheid, Peter Anderson invokes a number of literary precedents, but one in particular, James Hadley Chase, whose novels are glimpsed in a roadside diner’s book rack, kept coming back to mind as I read the main narrative thread of the novel. There is a pulp-noir sexuality driving the story, as well as a cast of characters (the professor, his pretty young girlfriend, a cameraman who is her former lover, and a black sound technician and driver) whose interactions lead toward a violent blowup.  The story is told in the voice of Rian, the cameraman, hired to record the professor’s documentary film on the origins of the human race, but the novel’s roadtrip through the South African wilderness also provokes Rian’s memories of childhood on an Afrikaner farm, and these reminiscences are vivid and evocative. Particularly in the longest of these flashbacks, dealing with events...

Each of Fuminori Nakamura's novels published in English so far is quite different from the others. The newest, Last Winter We Parted (from Soho Press, translated by Allison Markin Powell), is a twisty noir thriller, with murder, false identity, sexual perversion, and revenge. The story alternates among several narrators, focusing on a photographer who is awaiting execution for the murder (by fire) of two young women. The first fire was thought to be an accident and he was burned in a possible attempt to save the first of the victims, the second, almost identical fire was most damning evidence against him (and there is some evidence that, instead of rushing to aid the women, he photographed their deaths). A writer approaches the condemned man for an interview, intending to publish a book on the murderer and his crimes, but the killer deflects the writers advances in odd ways, as does the murderer's sister. And the writer discovers a subculture of lifelike dolls, created by a mas...

It's been obvious since her first book that Tana French's true milieu, as a writer, is adolescence: all her books include a substantial element of childhood or youth, and sometimes even the adults talk and act like teenagers. But in The Secret Place, adolescence per se is her subject, specifically the tiny worlds of tight adolescent friendships. There is an odd supernatural/telekinetic element to the story (though it's not a Irish ghost story), which is resolved near the end in a way that illuminates French's view of these relationships in particular. The story revolves around a private girls' school in Dublin. There are two "tracks," a current investigation that takes place all in one day and a back story, looking at the girls through the lens of two cliques, rivalries of a sort. What we don't get much of is the "school" part of their experience: most of what the girls are shown doing is worrying about their friends, contemplating the opposi...