flying_monkey's reviews
499 reviews

The series continues after Book 1, as a straight-down-the-line crime series in many ways, although it takes a while to settle, like Maria herself. From being a part-time police officer in Helsinki in Book 1, she moves through being a lawyer in a small-town firm in Book 2, to being the local Sheriff in her (even smaller) hometown in the dreary ex-idustrial of Finland in Book 3 to (finally?) in Book 4 and 5, settling down to a longer-term job as a police detective in Espoo, a municipality next to Helsinki of which the small town in Book 2 is also part. In Book 2 and 3, you almost get the feeling, as people she knows always seem to get killed, that this might end up being like a Finnish version of Murder, She Wrote, but by Book 4, this seems to have been abandoned. It might not be so much Maria who has settled down, as Leena Lehtolainen.
 
 Maria's character definitely starts to become more defined too. She's fierce and impulsive and a little careless of her own safety sometimes, but perceptive and caring for the safety of other's. Like almost everyone in Finland it seems from these books, she is super-fit and loves the countryside and the lakes and sea. Her relationship with her partner, an old friend who she reconnected with in Book 1, goes from being difficult to being increasingly loving and necessary to both. It's actually good to see an uncomplicated relationship painted well. Her relationship with her colleagues and her struggles as a female officer in the face general arseholery are well done. There is a lot more social observation in these books too, with class and racial tensions playing important roles in both the background and increasingly in the foreground too.
 
 As I said though, these are still pretty much straight-ahead: everything is always seen through Maria's eyes, with the occasional exception of a prologue; there is a murder and while initially baffled or even misled, the plot proceeds to the resolution. In a couple of the books, almost exactly the same thing happens, which is that Maria tells us that she has worked out who the killer is but then doesn't tell us the name as she proceeds onwards, which just reads weirdly when you are supposed to be 'in her head'. It breaks the atmosphere and the link we have to the character. There are better ways of doing this. Another one: we know the author is a huge figure-skating fan and even writes about it for newspapers. In Book 5, she suddenly makes Maria a bit of a figure-skating fan out of nowhere, solely for the sake of the plot, which concerns the death of a promising teenage skater - I think skating was mentioned once before in the entire series to this point.

A classic of Japanese crime fiction, this is an atmospheric, dated and also highly irritating novel. The authorial voice is smug and teasing throughout, and at times it almost seems to be a kind of fan fiction, pointing out similarities to European crime stories, and detective novels even play a role in the solution to the case, and the way in which the private detective in the story, the scruffy young intellectual, Kousuke Kindaichi, thinks. Some fans really seem to like this kind of stylized, Cleudo-esque set-up, where everything is like a puzzle (but a puzzle you can only work out in retrospect because for all that there are clues, there's no way the ridiculous solution could ever be worked out from those clues). That said, the members of the Ichiyanagi family are well-painted  in the very short time we get to know them - except for the fact that some, like the younger children are mentioned at the start and must be around but are never, ever seen again in the whole novel - and there are some nice satirical touches about Japanese rural life in early Showa era, and the persistence of the old class system even in this 'modern' era of the 1930s. This was the first of over 70 novels Yokomizu wrote featuring Detective Kindaichi. Only one other has so far been translated in to English, and I may read it just to see if it's any better, but frankly my pleasure in this highly artificial sub-genre of crime fiction is very limited. 

For people who liked The Time Traveller's Wife or The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, or any of those popular variations on the Faust or Orlando stories, we have The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue. Born in a small village in France in the C18th, Adeline La Rue is different. Of course she's conventionally beautiful - we can't have a romantic heroine being anything but, right? - but she's different. She doesn't want to get married, she just wants to wander aroud wistfully and draw and hang out with the village witch, who teaches her about the old gods and how to communicate with them. And of course she warns Adeline never to call to the gods of the darkness. She makes that very clear. So you know what's going to happen. Upon finding out her parents are going to make her marry a palid older widower with two small children, she flees the evening wedding and rushes off into the woods, not noticing the time and calls for help. Help turns out to be a dark presence which takes the form of the dark curly-haired green-eyed fantasy man she's imagined since she was a child. And he offers her a deal: she can be free forever but no-one will ever remember her, and when she has had enough of this, it will take her soul. She can't age, she can't really be injured, she doesn't need to eat, but she still feels the pain of all of these things, but as soon as she is out of the sight of any person, they completely forget her. And she can't make a record of her existence in any way: if she writes, it fades away in front of her, and photographs as she finds out much later, record her as a blur. 

After a very rough few years, gradually she learns to make the best of this life, and even make an impression on artists in particular - did I mention she was beautiful? - who can record her even if they don't remember who she was afterwards and can't put a name to the beauty they have drawn or painted or sculpted. She travels Europe and then further afield, surviving revolutions and wars, before finally ending up in New York in the 2000s. And this is where the book falls apart. Up until this point the book has been sweeping and melodramatic in the best way, cutting through history and very well-written. But in New York, the book is overtaken by a group of frankly very dull and self-involved vapid hipsters, who it's hard to imagine a 300-year old woman being interested in, let along falling in love with one, even if he is the only man she has ever met who can remember her. And here the language of the book starts to purple out of control and the romantic clichés start to get tiresome. By far the best bits of the book at this stage remain Addie's deeper, longer-term love-hate (but really just hate) relationship with Luc, the ever-changing, evil, green-eyed spirit of the woodland dark who trapped her all those years ago and remains unable to stay away from her for more than a couple of decades, always trying to get her to give up her soul, but seemingly also obsessed with her.

Lots of people love this book, they seem almost in ecstasy about it. And to be fair there's a lot to love. But the flaws are large and annoying, and they have nothing to do with the type of book or the genre, they are just about the choices the author makes and the failure of the New York sections and the weak New York characters to stand up in comparison to the rest. Schwab tries very hard and fails, ultimately, to make me love New York. Frankly, there's enough New Yorkers out there who won't shut up about how great New York is. I want to read something different about the city, or just about a different city.

I've enjoyed the other fictions I've read by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and, at least when I was younger, I was partial to a bit of gothic horror, so I was looking forward to this. And it didn't disappoint. If you want a tl;dr pitch, this is Rebecca meets Crimson Peaks in post-colonial Mexico. 
 The set-up is a classic situation: Noemí Taboada is a young, beautiful wealthy socialite in Mexico City in maybe the 1950s (it's not entirely clear and it could be earlier). Although she lives a deliberately frivolous life, behind the party frocks and cocktails, she is actually an independent and intelligent woman who wants to study anthropology, a subject that certainly plays a role in the story that follows, not least because Noemí herself is of indigenous descent on at least half of her family tree. But Noemí's indulgent life comes to an abrupt end when she is sent by her domineering father to inquire into the health and wellbeing of her slightly older cousin, Catalina, who got married very suddenly a few years before to the apparently disreputable descendant of an eccentric English silver-mine owning family, the Doyles, who live in a remote mansion in the interior of the country near their abandoned mines. 
 The house is the classic haunted mansion, and very much a Mandalay, and the family make The Adams Family look completely normal. The house is run by Florence, an strict spinster obsessed with order. The listless and haunted Catalina is married to Virgil, a handsome and magnetically sexual but clearly nasty man, who tries to get his hooks into Noemí as soon as she arrives. However Noemí finds herself more drawn to his somewhat fey and intellectual brother, Francis, who is a botanist and mycologist - although maybe not initally at least, a fun guy to be with. Ruling over the family is the dying patriarch, Howard, a very old, tremendously creepy, loathsome, foul-smelling creature, who inabits the bedroom at the top of the house, and whose every groan and whim must be catered to. But the most important character of all is the house, and more accurately the whole colonial family, alive and dead, that is surrounds, embodies... and, as Noemí soon discovers, imprisons. 
 There is so much more, which I can't discuss without giving away too much, but if I say that this bizarre English family are obsessed with eugenics and white superiority, you will understand that colonialism and race and their legacies in Mexico play a large part in this too, which adds a seriousness to the usual gothic tropes that also revitalizes them. All in all, this is a really strong book with a sympathetic heroine and well-drawn characters (even the minor ones) and while there are a few places where I winced at word choice or phrasing, the writing is excellent too.

This is the first in a long-running series of Finnish crime novels featuring Detective Maria Kallio, which is now running at a dozen or so, with 11 of them translated into English so far. As a fan of scandi-crime, I'd been curious about them for a while, so when the Kindle Store suddenly had them on sale for the ridiculous price of 99c each, I bought every single one...
 
My first impressions are not to be overwhelmingly impressed. There are some very strong points. It's good to have a protagonist who isn't a middle-aged alcoholic male walking disaster (the standard scandi-noir hero) - and in fact, in a nice twist in this one, it's Maria's (largely absent) boss who fills this role and you have no sympathy for him at all, especially once he returns from his absence to royally mess things up at the last. At the same time, Maria isn't an overdrawn hyper-competant retort to all that. She's intelligent enough, fit enough, good-looking enough and so on, but is remarkable in her job largely only because she's the only woman, and that situation isn't really too her liking. She's only working for the police supposedly temporarily after having left to pursue a law degree. The novel also doesn't dwell overly on the violence in the way that some of the darker Scandanavian crime novels do.
 
This story finds her having to deal with the suspected murder of a member of a local choral society, a handsome and charming lothario, who any number of rivals, husbands and spurned lovers might have wanted to kill. The slight complicating factor is that Maria used to hang out with this crowd while she was at university and there are all kinds of unresolved feelings hanging around the case.
 
The less impressive aspect is simply the plotting. The story is straight, too straight. With the exception of the prologue where the body is found, it's all written from a very simple Maria-centred viewpoint. There aren't really any serious twists or red herrings or major diversions. The investigation just proceeds, interrupted, but not diverted, by a little bit of drinking and self-doubt, towards its conclusion.
 
 The Helsinki atmosphere is good enough, although the city does not, at least in this first novel, emerge as a character as strongly or distinctively as the Stockholm of Martin Beck, the Edinburgh of Rebus, or the Bergen of Varg Veum. This vagueness is partly reflective of the somewhat indistinct character of Detection Kallio. Maybe she's just young, but while there are some gesturing at social justice, there's little in the way of political critique (again as in the Beck novels) or a really powerful depiction of social reality. And above all, if you had told me this novel was written by a man, I wouldn't have disagreed - there's actually very little about Maria Kallio that suggests a distinctive women's view, with the exeption perhaps of a short side case to do with a serial park rapist - and even that seems remarkably blasé. Those Finns, eh?
 
 Because first novels are often far less impressive than those that follow, and characters grow and become more interesting as stories progress, I'm going to continue with these. This first one really wasn't bad at all, just relatively unremarkable in a very crowded field.

I probably read this a long time ago, but if so, I forgot how utterly atrocious this collection is. With the exception of Ursula Le Guin's superb novelette, The Word for the World is Forest, and the odd interesting story, this successor to the far superior Dangerous Visions represents everything that was bad about 'boundary-pushing' science fiction of the late 1960s and early 70s. Just as prog-rock provides the obvious rationale for punk and new wave, so this kind of the science fiction provides the explanation (and indeed the necessity) for the emergence of cyberpunk, feminist SF and a whole lot more. The main 'danger' provided by the stories seems to be either self-indulgence or heterosexual white men fantasizing about being able to get away with even more of what heterosexual white men get away with. It's made infinitely worse by the editor's interminable, blokey, inside-jokey, and altogether insufferable introductions to each story - he's great friends with all the authors and admires all their lovely, perky wives, don't you know? - and the introduction to the book itself, which basically expounds upon Harlan Ellison's favourite subject - himself and how brilliant he is - at even greater length. I'm not generally in favour of book burnings, but if all existing copies of this book happened to fall into a pit of fire, the world would lose nothing.

I love David Byrne's music, whether it has been as part of Talking Heads, or with Brian Eno, or St. Vincent, or whoever. He's endless curious and inventive and surprising. This book is a collection of his writings on different aspects of music and the music industry. There are some really excellent sections and a lot of insight into his creative process and music more generally, but it's basically a meandering monologue - that's the way it comes acrosss - and unlike his recordings, there is no actual music here to support the voice, so it can become a bit tiresome.