complexly considered and captivatingly cosmopolitan
591357
This fascinating exploration of the interrelationship between the city of New York as an urban center and its portrayal throughout the history of moviemaking is filled with perceptive insight and thoughtful analysis. Highly recommended.
4625629
One of the (many) compelling aspects of Lisa Morrow's writing about Turkey is that she transcends "ex-pat" narrative. While Morrow is native to Australia, her immersion and understanding of Turkey and Turkish culture is unparalleled; her background as a sociologist shows in the way that she avoids the trap of orientalist "otherness."

Many tourists have experienced the hubbub of Istanbul and other popular holiday destinations, but Morrow shows us a side of Turkey that few casual visitors get to experience. And, while there is rich detail, the prose remains grounded in everyday life. There is surely recognition in these pages for those who have visited Turkey, but what's more important in this book is following the journey of a woman searching for belonging.
2424291
Transatlantic, by Colum McCann, is a wonderful symphony of a novel. Lilting in places; poignantly, achingly moving in others; powerfully grim, dryly witty; always sharply, beautifully composed; it is the kind of novel whose quiet nature seeps in under your skin and lingers well after that final page.

 Told in non-linear fashion, the novel moves between 1845 and 2012, with stops in the late 1800s, 1929, 1978, and 2011.  Ireland lies at the center of it all, with three important crossings to the island: the 1919 transatlantic flight from Newfoundland by two airmen--Brown and Alcock, an 1845 trip by Frederick Douglass, and one of George Mitchell's journeys over in 1998 as he tries to broker the eventual peace accord.  While all three journeys are made by men and famous historical figures at that, the book is much more the story of several generations of women who open and close the novel, tying its strands together and forming the true heart and soul of the story:
* Lily Duggan, a young Irish maid who meets Douglass on his trip and later emigrates to America
* Lily's daughter Emily, who as a reporter living in Newfoundland covers Brown and Alcock's journey and who also gives Brown a mysterious sealed letter to carry over to Ireland
* Emily's daughter Lottie, who takes photos to go with her mother's article and who travels with her to Ireland to interview Brown for an anniversary article in 1929, where he returns the letter he'd forgotten to deliver.
* Lottie's daughter Hannah, who with her mother meets Senator Mitchell during his trip in 1998 and who in 2011 is struggling financially and facing the loss of her home due to foreclosure, leading her to consider selling the still unopened letter.

The prose is lyrical and precise throughout, offering up an unending parade of beautiful, quotable lines (I dot each such one in the margins as I read and there are, believe me, a lot of dots in my copy). Perhaps the best review would simply be a listing of such lines; it would certainly be enough to ensure I picked up any book holding just a few of them.

Interior monologue dominates many of the longer sections, allowing McCollum (and the reader) to deep into his characters thoughts and feelings, both the historical figures and the fictional ones.  Each comes fully, movingly alive as McCollum wholly inhabits each separate voice.

The nonlinear structure lends great impact to events, coloring them and recoloring them, and the whole thing is masterfully put together, with a web of connecting tissue of character and setting and parallel themes and events.  Connections, to take one obvious example, are drawn between the American Civil War via Lily's experiences as a nurse and the Irish Civil Troubles through their impact on Lottie and Hannah and Hannah's son Tomas. Flight, freedom, slavery, the onward march of time, the difficulties of communication:  all of these themes wend their way through the work, along with others.

The book is filled with life and light and beauty as well as death and darkness and ugliness and McCollum weaves them all together with the assured and confident grace of a maestro.  "Nothing ever finishes," one of the characters, muses. Unfortunately, Transatlantic does, but its haunting, hopeful grace and elegance will stay with you some time. Highly, highly recommended.
3473216
Bodies strangely preserved in peat bogs, an enchanting touch of Celtic-style magical realism and a well-developed plot linking three US cities (New York, Washington and Kansas City) with the wilds of Ireland on an ongoing controversy  toxic chemicals in everyday cosmetics  together create seductive elements in this surprising contemporary novel.
Not to mention a colorful cast of characters including conniving, profit-at-all-costs corporate leaders, power-hungry politicians, and strange literary bedfellows - a skin specialist, an investigative medical reporter and a beautiful celebrity - battling the powers-that-be for the benefit of humanity.
Theres also fast, crackling dialogue from both sides of the Atlantic, the urbane from the urban and the riotously funny from the rustic rural. Highly recommended.
So many dramatic elements, Pretty Ugly could easily be turned into a box-office hit.
773920
Rodenbeck, a journalist for The Economist, has written a superior paean, one that mixes the intensity of first-hand experience with the fruits of a thorough immersion into the written record.  The result is both jaunty and learned, a pleasing whole that will interest those who wish to imagine that exotic locale as well as those who have personally experienced the city and wish better to understand its rhythms. Few cities can inspire as interesting a book as Cairo:  The City Victorious and few writers can carry it off as well as Rodenbeck.
Size and crowdedness tend to make Cairo less than a favorite for travelers - more a place to bear and get through than to enjoy.  But if one can endure the noise, dirt, and traffic, there is much to discover.  The city contains antiquities from an amazingly diverse collection of eras; only Rome can try to compete with Cairo's monuments that span the five thousand years from the great pyramids of Giza to the present. Rodenbeck breezes through ancient times and settles on the medieval era, then traces its decline during the dismal period 1500-1800. His account comes most to life in the late nineteenth century, when Cairo revived in the guise of a partially European city (in 1910, he reckons, one-eighth of the city was foreign-born) -- a heady, exciting place for the Europeanized elite.
"The first half of Cairo's twentieth century saw the West overwhelm the East.  High heels and two-tones clattered up marble stairs; camelskin babouches rustled down.  The century's second half saw the reverse:  silken slippers shuffling down, bare peasant feet and army boots stomping up." After the coup of 1952 that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, Cairo then suffered, as did the whole country, under Nasser's tyranny and the cost of his foreign adventures.  Even Rodenbeck's infectious narrative takes a somber turn, weighed down by totalitarian rule at home and military disaster abroad. Fortunately, things improved with Nasser's death in 1970 and the lighter rule of Sadat and Mubarak that followed, though our author finds much not to like in the present-day city. Fanatical Islamic sheikhs who would ban zucchini because of its suggestive shape are one sort of problem; the inevitable proliferation of McDonald's are another. Still, he counts on the city's "shambolic grandeur and operatic despair" to continue, on its "enduring, life-giving nonchalance" to sustain it beyond jihad or hamburgers.
Middle East Quarterly, September 1999
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I am glad Harriet Klausner liked this book, but I feel that her description may not give readers quite the right idea.  Peter Temple is a truly extraordinary writer.  This book has all the pleasures of the best crime fiction (if you like Michael Connelly, Lee Child and Robert Crais, this is a good choice), but it's also written in the most extraordinarily beautiful prose style, with a kind of simplicity and clarity and intelligence that's sort of like what you might get if you crossed Proust with Hemingway and picked only the best of the litter to keep.  The Australian settings are also strange and magical--not just crime fiction fans but pretty much anyone who cares about novels should be reading Temple's stuff.
1575203
If lithium were the elixir that sustains sanity, take me off of it forever.

 That's the effect this books has engendered on anyone that has any penchant for the whimsical, sensitive, evocative world Michael Alenyikov has masterfully created out of his lifetime of experience in New York and beyond. It seems an effect especially potent in its wisdom and perceptiveness as relating to the search for self and the search for love in the existential moroseness that has enveloped us all with varying degrees of cynicism. This topic he dwells upon never fails to enchant, to an extent that one cannot help wallowing in the happy delirium his chosen themes provoke upon closer contemplation - the search, not the goal; the journey, not the destination.

 As a poor boy who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, I can immediately relate to the profundity of these mystery-enshrouded characters who wend their way towards love and death with the enchantment of any Eastern European coming out of the Dark Ages of communism and indigence into a whole new world replete with the abstruse. Socio-political aspects aside, the novel contains much more in terms of character development to entrance and transport, and I am thus not apt to pin Misha and Ivan as just products of an order long defunct: they still breathe in my conscience, as I imagine how their lives must unfold after they empty the urn of its contents. They breathe with the waft of April narcissi from my granny's garden; they breathe with the palpability of May rains on the mushroom-studded emerald fields; their scent is redolent of the wet pavements of grand squares and pensive statues in arcade corners.
But what the novel does as an interactive canvas between a cobra and its pungi is also transport us to a world of primal desires, primeval urges, unnerving philosophy on the finite ethics of mankind, and, interspersed with that, we witness a background of crisp colors, urban decay and wistful aromas from a distant childhood. On a Jackson-Pollok-meets-Van Gogh-in-Kiev easel the result is a palette infused with inspirational humanity that always seeps through the cracks in the cold floor where ghosts from the past tread and the weeds of divine irony engulf us motionless and stupefied.

 In addition to the novel's insight into the mercurial nature of love and life, with all their unpredictability and unfathomable, fickle essence, I saw an original approach in the story's piecemeal recounting. However, it didn't overwhelm the narrative. That multiple-story balance keeping the mood and ambience even and uniform is the true mark of a talented artist, and I think Michael Alenyikov fully demonstrates that in these stories the novel is comprised of (never you dare construe them as separate pieces, or you will miss the whole point of interconnectedness, doom and the transferral of love).

 Self-indulgently speaking, I couldn't have imagined a better start to my own 2012, and, to paraphrase Elizabeth Gaskell's kudos to Anthony Trollope's "Framley Parsonage," "I wish Mr Alenyikov would go on writing `Ivan and Misha' for ever."
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Cerebral, yet entirely accessible, Old Glory is difficult to peg in terms of genre. Travel narrative approaches, but any classification would fall well short of the mark. Raban incorporates history, mesmerizing descriptive prose, biographical morsels, and sparse but welcome bits of dry British wit in this journey through America atop its longest river. In fact, Raban's Englishness is part of what makes the book so appealing. You see America, warts and all, from the eyes of an intrepid and analytical outsider. Raban is a stylist who reveals himself to the reader slowly. I found him to be a very interesting, complex, and slightly tortured figure. He is nearly as intriquing as the voyage itself.

Never again will I look at the Mississippi River as just some long line on a map. The whirlpools, the logs, the dangers; always moving atop and into the unknown on a vessel ridiculously undersized and unsuited for such a trip; a metaphor, certainly. In terms of writing style, there cannot be many better than Jonathan Raban. Here's a writer, you think, you will come back to.

Troy Parfitt, author of Why China Will Never Rule the World
3234344
Colm Toibin, long recognized for his sensitive character studies, adds to his list of fine accomplishments with this memorable study of young Eilis Lacey, on her own in New York while the remainder of her family stays behind in Enniscorthy, County Wexford.  It is less than a decade after World War II, jobs are hard to come by, and the economy in Ireland is a disaster.  When Father Flood, an Irish priest with a parish in Brooklyn, returns home for a brief vacation, he suggests that he can find Eilis a good job.  Though Eilis is woefully unprepared for the cultural changes that she will face, she decides to leave the familiarity of home for a new world.  "Parts of Brooklyn are just like Ireland.  They're full of Irish," she is told.

Focusing on the minutiae of life, which is Eilis's own focus, Toibin recreates her passage across a stormy Atlantic, her introduction to life in a Brooklyn boarding house, with its assortment of characters, and her experience as a saleswoman at a department store in the ethnically changing Brooklyn neighborhood where she lives.  She sometimes attends Saturday dances at the local parish hall, and she attends night school, studying to become a bookkeeper/accountant.  It is certainly not an exciting life, and it is not an exciting plot, yet Toibin recreates Eilis's feelings within these scenes so minutely and chooses his descriptive details so carefully, that her life becomes a delicate drama, a life filled with universal themes "writ small."

As she faces the challenges of her new life in Brooklyn,we see her as immature, nave, and touchingly anxious to please.  Sometimes timid, she is also, on occasion, almost impossibly righteous.  Despite her firm grounding in her Catholic faith, however, she is surprisingly enigmatic and vacillating--reluctant to take chances--and she can try the patience of her reader as much as she does some of the characters in the novel.  Through his simple and straightforward language and imagery, however, Toibin allows us to share Eilis's inner life, and we come to know her on an emotional level.  Immature and "unformed" as she may be, she is understandable and comes alive.  When she meets Tony, "innocent, eager and shiny,"  at a parish dance, it appears to be an ideal romance.

A trip home to Ireland leads to the climax, in which Eilis, like so many other emigrants before her, must confront how much she may have changed, if at all, as a result of her experience in another world and what she sees as her future.  Readers may argue about the "rightness" of the conclusion, the realism or its lack in Part IV, and the extent to which the author relies on coincidence to resolve the action, but in his characterization of an often conflicted main character (and in the vibrant supporting characters), Toibin has created a memorable novel which proves that a character "drama" like this need not always be shocking in order to be "dramatic."  n  Mary Whipple

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The images of earthy, well-developed characters that inhabit the steamy and sultry city of Iquitos Peru make this book a delight to read.  Although the chapters are linear, the action crisscrosses rapidly among both characters and venues, keeping the reader speculating about what will happen next in the mystery. One hates to reach the end of a book like this, because the identification with the characters is genuine. The descriptions of Latino festivals and culture are fascinating and leave the reader wanting to experience more of  this unusual city.
1716439
Some books dissolve in memory as soon as they are put down. Not a Joan Leegant book. Like An Hour in Paradise, her glowing collection of short stories, the novel Wherever You Go seems bound to leave something of itself with the reader. Through Leegant's deft structuring of the very different yet interlocking life transitions of three very different individuals, contemporary Israel itself becomes the primary character of this believably plotted and richly textured work. The result is not only a good read but a vividly real sense of the multi-layered complexity, contradictions, failure, and promise that describe not only her people and their relationships but the all-too-humanly dynamic organism that is the nation of Israel. Leegant's perceptiveness is sometimes breathtaking, which is largely why her people--and Israel itself--come to live and breathe on the page. Yes, the novel gets off to a leisurely beginning (perhaps just short of downright slow), but it builds deliberately, and by the halfway point becomes "couldn't put it down" material.  Book clubs are sure to find this a natural, with substance enough for rewarding discussion on any number of topics and levels. It strikes me as coming close to creating as tangibly real a sense of Israel as Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone does of post-war Ethiopia. Definitely a winner.
2906541
I came to this book by way of its beautiful first story, 'Dharma', which I found in an amazing collection entitled "The Art of Fiction". I was keen to follow up on its companion pieces and I wasn't disappointed. This is a tremendously accomplished work. Five luxuriously paced stories are linked by a clever framing device involving the first-person narrator, Ranjit, and his story-telling acquaintance, Subramaniam. Importantly, the frame neither distances the characters nor undermines the believability of the stories. The people and plots are fully developed and could easily stand alone. Yet together they add up to something more. First and foremost they sum to Bombay: a compelling and intriguing place, it emerges vibrantly as a city shot through with violence, riven with distinctions of religion, ethnicity and class, and haunted by love and desire. In its teeming history, secrecy, abundance and menace, the city becomes an image of the endlessly astonishing possibilities of human encounter. It's a virtuoso performance, in which Chandra shows himself to be both a master storyteller and a master stylist. In addition to a vast imagination and strong lyric gifts, he has the discipline necessary to bring his stories to fruition. What we find at the end is beauty and compassion. For despite an undertow of loneliness and mortality, human moments of epiphany make these stories journeys towards freedom and peace. The telling and hearing of tales, Chandra insists, can heal and exorcize. It's worth noting that the titles - Dharma, Shakti, Kama, Artha, Shanti - remain untranslated. As one critic observed, Chandra belongs to a confident generation of Indian writers in English who feel little compulsion to gloss. On the evidence here, that confidence is more than justified. Readers entranced by the noirish third story, 'Kama', will be happy to hear that the delightful Inspector Sartaj Singh reappears in Chandra's newly released novel, "Sacred Games".
4285776
Exotic,one of a kind, versatile and gorgeous
254983
RED is not a quick read. It is a book that demands your full attention. However, that attention will be abundantly rewarded. Pamuk is an author of such great talent that I would rank him with Calvino and Borges. And, like those two great artists, Pamuk presents you with many puzzles, many visions, and vivid details of lives both real and imaginary.

Superficially, RED is a murder mystery--and a very fine one--but I doubt that any reader who has gotten beyond the first 15 pages would continue reading merely to solve the mystery. As you read, Pamuk provides you with a great variety of treats: a living picture of Istanbul in 1550, a window into the lives of the master miniaturists of the period, an exploration of the attitudes of Islam towards varying degrees of artistic realism, a finely-nuanced love quadrangle, etc. And, the narrator of each chapter is, fairly often, an object rather than a person. These non-human narrators fit seamlessly into the telling of the story: there is nothing self-conscious about them. My favorite narrator of this kind is a gold piece; you learn where it was minted, where it has traveled, what it might buy, what it feels about being counterfeit--and, of course, how it feels about its role in the larger narrative. This chapter is a tour de force, but then so are the chapters with more usual narrators.

I cannot imagine the research involved in the creation of such a novel, but Pamuk wears this erudition lightly. When I read this book, I felt as if I had been casually welcomed into listening to the conversation of not one, but several, story-tellers of great fascination.

Another plus: there is no complex vocabulary--merely complex ideas gracefully presented.

This book is very hard to put down, but it is rich in so many ways that it would be a shame to rush greedily through it. Better to savor every page. You will very seldom come across writing this good.
3531677
Edward, struggling to come to terms with the untimely death of his sister, is offered the use of a tiny studio apartment in Paris by his university friend, Emilie. It seems an ideal solution, allowing him to escape into the anonymity of a big city and he spends his time crashing out in exhaustion in the tiny bedroom of the apartment, or else meandering around the Parisian bars trying out his schoolboy French.

Number 37, in the Parisian suburbs, represents a microcosm of France and the residents are a very mixed bunch, with their own individual preoccupations and concerns. There is the waiflike Anais, struggling to care for three small children while her husband, Paul, spends all his time at Bible study groups. Monsieur and Madame Marin, residing on the ground floor, lead increasingly separate lives, he attending to the cleaning of the bins while his wife decks herself out in her finery and heads out for a night on the tiles. Upstairs, Cesar and Chantal Vincent look like the perfect couple but Cesar is hiding a shameful secret; he has lost his job in banking, and hasn't the courage to tell Chantal. Instead, each day, he takes the metro to a remote area of the city and whiles away the time in a caf, where he begins to be drawn into dangerous company. Then into this mix a new pair of residents arrive, who happen to be Muslim.

Cooper is very skilful in her creation of these disparate characters  they're utterly believable and an astute combination of flaws and admirable qualities. But the real achievement in this novel is the way she blends the individual stories with the gradually mounting political unrest in the city for this is a book very much of our time and the reader is acutely aware of the growing sense of foreboding as the far right gains momentum. There are scenes that provide no-holds-barred details of violence but Cooper counterbalances this with some real tenderness and some delightfully humorous descriptions. When Edward is invited to have a cup of tea with Frderique, Emilies aunt, he finds himself seated in a very grand salon and, despite his efforts to be presentable (putting on his least crumpled T-shirt) he feels that he ought, at least, to have worn a proper shirt and muses, This room has the air of one that expects buttons.

The Paris described in this slim debut novel is not the one the tourist usually sees but it is, in many ways, a welcome change and offers the reader a glimpse into the true nature of the city in todays turbulent times. These Dividing Walls certainly makes the reader ponder about the nature of prejudice and the hyper nationalism that seems to abound today. It is not, however, a depressing read as it offers hope for improvement. Edward, alone amongst these characters, manages to break through the dividing walls and make a connection with someone else and, through this, he begins the process of healing.
4330173
Being neither the right age nor nationality to have experienced the Pearl of the Orient at the height of its hedonistic lustre, this book delivers exactly what literary thrill-seekers like me are after: a good hour or two on the couch in quite another world, minus any brain-taxing flourishes of the scholarly. It reads like a gorgeously-filmed epic, complete with opium junkies, silk and whiskey, rickshaws (wonderfully quaint!), White Russians, massive wealth and dire indigence, cabarets and cheongsams and courtesans, guns and Occupation and Revolution, traids, Art Deco buildings, armies of servants, the Chinese literati and Jewish glitterati, fallen Manchu aristocrats, dinner-party orgies ... as well as the pre-requsite colonials in all their multi-faceted brilliance: corrupt, idealistic, capitalist, romantic. And over this teeming ferment, soon to prove itself sadly ephemeral, presided the grandiose skyline of the Bund, the most enduring image of Shanghai in popular memory, and here in Ms. Dong's 300-page cinematic capsule.
For all armchair adventurers who've been disappointed by modern Shanghai's impersonation of Manhattan by day and Las Vegas by night, this is the perfect trip, in every sense of the word.
804723
Open City is a vast (don't be fooled by its 259 pages) book of ideas, explored by its narrator Julius as the psychiatric intern follows the migratory string of his life through time/space. His life span fits neatly into the post colonial/post 9.11 eras, but his seemingly meandering ruminations expand those contexts considerably to include a time when exploiting slaves was a matter of daily business in New York before installation of the Statue of Liberty to welcome immigrants, and during a foray into the Old World he visits the Medieval practice of "prison" ships sailing port-to-port to collect "undesirables."

A word of warning to those who cherish character and plot: this is not the book for you. In the plainest of English, this is a complex and sophisticated monologue of the mind. Very little happens beyond the daily life of an unexceptional migrant from Lagos. There are no characters here other than the sketches the reader gets through the lenses of Julius' mind. No offense, but bugger off if that's what you expect from your reading.

That said, there is much thought in this deep and wide little book. Part of it is obvious as Teju Cole puts philosophical arguments in his characters' mouths, such as the Moroccan emigrant who strives to be the next Edward Said; or in-your-face accessible such as the neighbor whose wife passed away unnoticed by Julius; but many of the ideas are more subtle, such as the metaphor of migratory birds (a mythical metaphor for soul that serves as a thread through Julius' wanderings) that frames this mind movie of an emigrant/immigrant among emigrant/immigrants.

I scribbled pages of notes reading this little tome, and by no means did I pick up on even a majority of Cole's expansive allusions to the classical music world, or to literature (fact is I compiled a considerable reading list just noting the allusions).

But I did pick up on the metaphor of Julius following the string of his life, his mind movie, to discover how he fits into his time, and Time in the larger sense of the world. In addition to the migrating birds that frame the book, there is a bird representing a boy's soul tethered to the child by an electric blue string early on that serves as a handle for the reader to make sense of Julius' peregrinations as he explores his personal memory and how it fits into history. What some may find disconcerting is that the recounting of this journey through Julius' mind movie yields no result that can be expressed in the short concept statement favored by today's commercial movie industry.

For instance, Julius is morally neutral, even as the sister of a friend accuses him of seducing her while she was  intoxicated in their prior life in Lagos. There is no reaction at all from Julius to her confrontation. It's as if he has erased the event that sparked her accusation from his memory. This is how memory works, Julius finds. It is a palimpsest that allows him to erase such an event from his memory, not unlike the grave of 15,000-20,000 slaves whose final resting point serves as the foundation for office towers on some of Manhattan's priciest real estate.

Cole's book is artistic and it is impossible to do it justice in a review. It is so broad in its explorations, and  the connections so subtle that it would require several times the number of pages without yielding more insight than Cole challenges the reader to make.