The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

From The Week of January 23, 2012

Power can be a pernicious force. For not only can its possession encourage the sweet-natured to be tyrannical, its loss can leave us feeling helpless and enraged. Power stokes our ego, allowing us to feel useful and confident, but it can leave us numb to the suffering of those who don't have it, dismissing them as weak and foolish, unworthy of our notice. Power changes how we view the world. Thus, anytime it shifts, there is cause for anxiety. Though this cynical and short piece from the legendary Mr. Tolstoy primarily concerns the dissolution of a marriage, it is the consequences of the redistribution of power that underpins his tale. It is a point sublimely, if unintentionally, made.

On a commuter train journeying through 19th century Russia, a truculent passenger makes a startling confession to those of his fellow travelers inclined to hear him. He has murdered his wife. After a long and difficult marriage, characterized by emotional and verbal discord, Pozdnyshev, the confessor, returns home from business to find his wife entertaining her musical instructor in their home. Embittered by years of disharmony and utterly incapable of blessing his wife with a moment's happiness and freedom, he flies into a rage which culminates in the flight of the instructor and the violent assault of his wife. This leads to not only the dissolution of his family -- his wife, on her deathbed, vengefully removes their five children from his care and gives them to her sister to raise --, it brings about her painful demise for which Pozdnyshev is tried. Dismissing the crime as one of passion, Pozdnyshev is acquitted and allowed to go free, having ruined all for which he cared.

Constructed as a conversation between Pozdnyshev and the story's narrator, The Kreutzer Sonata is, in the main, a warning against carnal love and a dissertation on female power and the extent to which its ascendance stokes male paranoia. Pozdnyshev, made callous by a loveless marriage, lays the blame for his unhappiness at the feet of his own male weakness and the liberalization of womens rights. He holds the view that men and women are fundamentally animalistic creatures, that the purpose of womankind is to perpetuate the species. Consequently, if women are given control over their own bodies, their own destinies, it will yield only disastrous results for the weak-willed man for which woman was created. Repeatedly, he reveals how he expected marriage to be a beautiful and fulfilling engagement, but that his joy was ruined by his wife's willingness to disagree with him, fight him, thwart him. He is completely incapable of realizing that his intractable nature is the cause of all his misery.

The Kreutzer Sonata is cynicism at its most potent. In Pozdnyshev, Mr. Tolstoy has seemingly created a straw man in whom all the author's dismay over the condition of man's soul can be invested. He appears to argue that, by dint of man's weakness and woman's deceptiveness, marriage is bound to be loveless and broken. But of course, this is nonsense. Marriage may well constrain us in ways that it is less than natural for us to be constrained, but Pozdnyshev's problem is that he expected his wife to be his perfect servant, not his perfect partner. He anticipated domination and received, instead, defiance. His inability to understand, respect or cope with this is the cause of his unhappiness, not the weakness of his soul. This is true of any marriage, the dissolution of which is rooted in an inability to adapt and communicate, not in some fundamental flaw. Human nature is imminently malleable. The moment we believe otherwise is the moment we condemn ourselves to rigid lives.

Deeper yet, we fear the loss of power. Having held its reins for so long, we have expectations that, when flaunted, cause us to salve our wounded pride with anger and rage. How dare our lessers defy us! How dare they possess their own wills to choose what they wish! This is what plagues Pozdnyshev. He cannot fathom a world in which he must enmesh his own behavior, his own desires, his own expectations, with his wife's. He cannot conceive of a marriage that does not spring up, fully formed and perfectly blissful. He cannot bring himself to understand that he will only harvest bitterness from a partnership into which he contributed nothing but his arrogance and his preconceived notions.

Fascinating work. Of course, it's possible that Mr. Tolstoy intended this to be satire, but the epilogue to the piece makes that possibility sadly remote. Love exists, just not when the power is this unbalanced. (3/5 Stars)

Raylan by Elmore Leonard

From The Week of January 23, 2012

Who are the criminals in our world and why do they do what they do? Do they act out of desperation driven by poverty, or is it instinct, a desire that must be fulfilled? We know this much; they act for significant gain. After all, the code of consequences that defines their world is so harsh that it wouldn't be worth it to live the life for any other reason. But it can't all be gain. Surely some measure of alienation, of being different, of not belonging, must also be included in the heady brew of personality common in the Underworld. Interestingly, Mr. Leonard dismisses most of these introspective theories in favor of a much simpler explanation. In the end, it's all about from where and whom you come. This is what defines Raylan.

A U.S. marshal with a propensity for shooting people, Raylan Givens can chase criminals as far as he wishes, from the mountains of Italy to the swamps of Florida, but he'll never get eastern Kentucky out of his blood. Those coal-rich hills were in him long before he earned his marshal's star. Back then, he was just a kid, working for his family, digging coal with swindlers and gun-thugs, cheats and dogs, bound together by the brotherhood of one of the dirtiest businesses in the world. That he left that behind 20 years ago doesn't mean a thing now that he's back in Kentucky, dumped in backwater America on account of being a little too free with his finger trigger.

If his superiors thought, even for a moment, that things would be quieter for Raylan back in Kentucky, they were fools. Trouble finds this roguish marshal wherever he goes. In the Appalachias, it's just a different set of problems. This time, trouble has three faces and all of them female. Carol, a ruthless representative of big coal, has her cold heart set on owning coal-rich Black Mountain and she won't stop at murder to get it either. Layla, a transplant nurse, is tired of being treated like a blowup doll for the pleasures of horny, arrogant doctors. She's going to show them how to make serious bank, even if it costs her her soul. Jackie Nevada has a serious head for poker and she's willing to play deep, no matter what the stakes. So what happens when a powerful and bored millionaire stakes her to some serious games? Deadly problems all...

Buoyed by the ratings success of FX's Justified, Raylan is Mr. Leonard's most thorough portrait of the laconic character he originally created and which Justified popularized. In these three intertwined narratives which liberally share both characters and themes, Mr. Leonard re-imagines a tale already told by the television drama while proffering two new and compelling stories for the writers on Justified to depict. Though all three work equally well, fans of the drama will be floored by the gaping absence of the mesmerizing Mags Bennett around whom Justified's second season orbited. Here, Mags is exchanged for the equally wiley but half as compelling father of the IQ-challenged Crowe clan who, fuelled by their weed business, are a powerful force within the so-called Dixie Mafia, the South's answer to Atlantic-based organized crime.

Though Mags Bennett is sorely missed, Mr. Leonard does not otherwise disappoint. Fifty years and countless stories later and the old master still has his fast ball, blending his inimitable wit, his suave characters and his breezy descriptions of extraordinary violence to create a gray world dripping in cool. You don't know why you like them, only that you do, that they possess the same, inexplicable but irresistible charm that made the cool kids so alluring. Neither fans of Justified nor of Mr. Leonard will close this slim novel, with its fine, minimalist prose, having considered their money wasted. (3/5 Stars)

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung

From The Week of January 23, 2012

Since the agricultural revolution secured our position as the dominant species on our planet, we have been searching for the answer to a persistent and as-yet-unsolved problem.

What is society's optimal form?

Drawing on our animal heritage, we first tried communal living in the form of tribalism in which the burdens of the one were shared by all. But when those tribes were either wiped out or absorbed by larger, more organized, authoritarian states, we gave despotism a chance, hoping that some measure of good fortune might fall to us from the grasping hands of our monarchical masters. But when rampant corruption and unfairness toppled authoritarianism, we landed on democracy, hoping that, if the many were given a choice in their leaders, some measure of accountability and cohesion would arise to replace our banished kings. Now, we face yet another stage in societal evolution, a new form of government, one that is less than a century old but which promises to be popular in the 21st century. I speak, of course, of the one-party state that has sent a resurgent China roaring into the future. What does life look like in this new China? And will the fat years last? Mr. Chen speculates in his dense novel.

The year is 2013 and, thanks to the swift and uncontrolled depreciation of American economic power, China has become an unrivaled and ascendant superpower. Its economic reforms of the early 1990s, an opening up of its markets coupled with harsh, government controls on the extent of its lending, have elevated millions of Chinese out of poverty and delivered them a nation they can be proud of. Now, 20 years later, with the continuation of these wise policies, along with the suppression of discordant elements, China, after a 400-year exile, has returned to its proper place on the world stage, front and center. These are the governments words. This is what the history books say. This is what everyone knows to be true.

Lao Chen, a Taiwanese author living happily in China, is, like all of his friends, a happy man. Life in China used to be marked by strife and discord. But for the last few years now, everyone has been happy. The economy is healthy, China is strong, and there are no longer any protests. The world is as it should be. But when Little Xi, an old friend of Chen's, resurfaces, armed with a strange and paranoid tale of dislocation, mental illness and chilling state power, Chen is drawn down into a terrifying conspiracy in which a few beleaguered and lost souls are trying to find answers to some troubling questions. Why has everyone but them forgotten the most vital month in recent history? Why is everyone so happy? And who is behind the lies that underpin Chinese society? Transfixed by his affection for Little Xi, Chen delves into the mystery, afraid of what he'll find but determined to discover the truths that will bring peace to the woman he loves.

Drawing from one of the most powerful and frightening literary conceits (the omnipotent government), Mr. Koonchung, in The Fat Years, summons the spirits of the great dystopian novels of the 20th century and re-imagines their threats in a 21st century world. Though none of this is particularly new, or striking -- it seems like the West's doom is heralded daily of late --, the extent to which the author mashes fiction, science and economics together into a compelling and terrifying product elevates Mr. Koonchung's work above the fray. But as much as this is an economic treatise and clarion call to democratists, it is also a mystery, an effort to engage the reader in a circle of bewildering characters, all of whom have been, to varying degrees of success, brainwashed into believing in Chinese primacy that is both truth and lie. The extent to which the characters eventually solve the mystery but are powerless to do anything about it is a worthy homage to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Fat Years is far from a masterwork. Its plot is limited to a series of vignettes, some of which succeed far better than others. More over, the hectoring tone of its far-too-lengthy economics lecture, though interesting as an intellectual exercise, drags and irritates, causing the work to fracture into its component parts. I recognize that the tone here is meant to mirror the lofty pulpit from which China's party elites sneer down at its citizens, but knowing this is not enough to save this section. For all its flaws though, Mr. Koonchung is a talented author who successfully taps into our fears of state power and channels from them a plausible scenario in which its ugliest form could rise. And given that all that authoritarian states require to persist is the passivity of its citizenry, his uncomplicated and yet cunning scenario has my attention.

A disturbing ride, but far from perfect. (3/5 Stars)

Lucrezia Borgia by Sarah Bradford

From The Week of January 23, 2012

Though we all live lives of imperfect freedom, limited as they are by both the wise and the foolish strictures of government, there can be no doubt that most of us have infinitely more control over our existences than did those of generations past. Whereas we make philosophical arguments for the freedom to imbibe various banned substances, secure as we are in far more fundamental rights, those who came before us often struggled for the power to make even the most basic choices, their destinies predetermined by the shackles of their cast and their sex. What would life be like operating within such restrictions? Ms. Bradford offers up the infamous Lucrezia Borgia as a case study. But while the subject does not disappoint, Ms. Bradford certainly does.

Born in the violent fractiousness of 15th century Italy, Lucrezia borgia was, by dint of being the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, a powerful figure in Italian politics. The subject of much historical debate, centering on various marital and familial scandals, time and the vicissitudes of history have made her the most widely remembered member of a ruthless clan of nobles who played the game of thrones with vicious vigor. Reputed to have been avid poisoners, the borgias killed their enemies both as a means of acquiring the wealth of their vanquished foes and as a means by which to secure their preeminent positions in tempestuous times. Given this, it would be logical to deduce that Lucrezia, the family's most famous beauty, would be deeply entangled in the family business, but to what extent did she actually earn her reputation for opportunism, slatternliness and incestuousness and what measure of it was foisted on her by the self-righteousness of future historians?

In Lucrezia Borgia, Ms. Bradford, a British author, meticulously reconstructs the tumultuous life of this Italian noblewoman, presenting an image of a woman more wronged than wronging. Sympathetically, Ms. Bradford frames Lucrezia as a creature regarded as a plaything of both her machiavellian father and her salacious brother. The former, Alexander VI, cajoled, maneuvered and even forced Lucrezia into three marriages, at least one of which appears to have been against her will. The latter, Cesare, ignoring Lucrezia's powerlessness, pursued her to the point of being the likely murderer of some of her lovers and suiters. Beset by such powerful players, the author appears to contend that Lucrezia essentially fought a lifelong, defensive battle against her fellow Borgias, yielding ground to their political and even sexual desires while preserving some measure of happiness for herself.

While Ms. Bradford's account of Lucrezia's life has much to recommend it -- she relies heavily on the noblewoman's own letters while keeping her own opinions and speculations to a bare minimum --, she fails utterly to generate a portrait of her subject. Yes, the author has painstakingly rebuilt Lucrezia's life, detailing her rivalry with Isabella d'Este, her plights with her various husbands, her difficulties in childbearing and her various strategic engagements with her family, but her account reads as a chronology of the princess' life, not a biography of it. To meet this simple requirement, Ms. Bradford would have to speculate on who Lucrezia might have been. And certainly there's plenty of room to do so given that much of the woman's early life is lost to the destructive tides of time. Her unwillingness to venture an opinion, or to provide really any historical context for Lucrezia's outlook, prevent this work from becoming anything more than a bland, straightforward chronology of events long past.

Disappointing. I'd hoped for much more than a simple line. Informative, and certainly protective of her subject, but there's little of heart or spirit here. (2/5 Stars)

Kokoda by Paul Ham

From The Week of January 23, 2012

For humans, war should hold no surprises. It has been perpetrated so often, with such ferocity, that we ought to be quite familiar with the depths of its depravity. And yet, there are crimes of war so dark, both in the ordering and in the executing, that they shock even the most hardened cynics and leave them fearing for what will become of us. Of these shamefully numerous incidents, the Kokoda Campaign was one of the worst. This is Mr. Ham's lively and opinionated account of its many sins.

In July 1942, during the darkest hours of World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army, seeking to cut Australia off from its allies, landed and occupied the island of Papua New Guinea, then an Australian possession. If Japan could hold and utilize the island, it would not only have a friendly base from which to launch attacks against shipping and naval interests, it would have a platform from which to begin an invasion of Australia itself. Having never seriously faced such an existential threat to its sovereignty, and with its military assets all-but-entirely deployed elsewhere, at the behest of and under the command of the British Empire, Australia was, to say the least, ill-prepared for this dark reality. A force would have to be hurriedly assembled, armed and hurled into the breach in hopes of buying the country time to recall its regular troops from their distant theatres and re-deploy them at home.

Thus, without training, and often without even the basic necessities of combat, the 39th battalion was scraped together, thrown onto Papua New Guinea and ordered into some of the most forbidding mountains in the region. There, for the next six months, they engaged with and halted the advance of the Japanese Imperial Army, some of the most supremely trained and ideologically driven soldiers in the world. Imbued by the divinity of their emperor and sworn never to retreat, let alone be captured, their thousands should have swiftly overwhelmed the mongrel force of Australians slapped together to impede them. Yet, in battle after battle, skirmish after skirmish, the stubborn defenders resisted, often with their lives, forcing the Japanese to pay dearly for the ground they won, lost, won again, and finally, fatefully, relinquished. For not even the fabled will of the Japanese soldier could withstand months at war without food, without home, and without hope of victory, not against a resilient foe able to resupply, recharge and replenish its forces.

As powerful as it is scathing, Kokoda is both a detailed history of a crucial WWII battle and a stinging indictment of those who orchestrated it. For as much as Mr. Ham, an Australian-born journalist and historian, celebrates the willpower and the tenacity of the belligerents to endure any hardship in the achievement of their goals, he does not allow more than a handful of pages to pass, in his lengthy account, without condemning the pigheadedness and pugnaciousness of the leaderships that ordered it. Though the author castigates both sides for the extent to which they worsened the suffering of the men under their command, he saves most of his bitter fire for the Australian brass which, but for a few beleaguered lights, is almost universally portrayed as a collection of selfish and stubborn politicians, more interested in promotions and medals than in the health of their men. In this, there is no doubt that Mr. Ham's sympathies lie firmly with the soldiers who fought fiercely and died horribly in a most terrible war.

Mr. Ham is a talented author. Though his narrative occasionally digresses into the lives and the quirks of figures somewhat peripheral to the Kokoda campaign, his vivid depictions of the ugliness of war, his psychological profiles of the men who prosecuted it, and his revealing portrayals of the politicians who oversaw the whole mess infuse his history with energy, authenticity and gravitas. He leaves no hero unheralded nor villain unscorned in an attempt to frame what must have been one of the most difficult chapters of a long and costly war. Excellent if grim work. (4/5 Stars)

The Secret In Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri

From The Week of January 16, 2011

For humans, love is the richest emotion. It drives us through challenges; it propels us through peril; it shields us from loneliness. It is a transformative feeling without which our days are cold and dull, but why? Why does love outstrip and outlast anger, or resentment, or disgust? Why does it brighten our days unlike any other? Because of what it asks of us. For to love someone is to extend to them the deepest measure of our trust, our faith, our credulity. To feel love, we must be naked before it. This vulnerability is both the strength of its source and the cause of its devastation. For as much as love can bestow us with the light of happiness and warmth, it can take the light away, plunging us into the darkness of isolation and grief the likes of which few can stand. Many have described love's darker side, but few have managed it with such quiet and moving potence.

At the best of times, justice in South America has been a fleeting and inconsistent virtue, undermined by the criminal and elitist exceptions powerful interests have burrowed through it. At the worst of times, it is nothing more than a cheap veneer, a half-hearted sop to a frightened public from a ruthless government that cares far more for unchecked power than it does for righteousness. Having lived through some of the worst of these times, specifically Argentina during the Dirty War of the 1970s, Benjamin Chaparro, an officer of the court, knows this all too well. For, over his 40 years working in the judiciary, he has watched incompetents promoted and protected, cases killed and buried, innocents roughed up and robbed. He has watched as the smart and the connected worked the system, reducing it, at times, to a mockery.

The worst of these cases, or at least the worst that Mr. Chaparro has committed to paper, concerns Ricardo Morales who, not long after his marriage to the love of his life, came home, in 1968, to find her raped and murdered. For months, in spite of the best efforts of a sympathetic Chaparro and the honest cop assisting him, the brutal incident proved inscrutable until a chance discovery by Chaparro produces leads that must be followed, leads that will set into motion events both terrible and unforeseen. This is justice in the darkest times, shoved forward an inch at a time by a few honest men compelled to act. This is Chaparro's story.

As much a memoir as a dramatization of his most memorable case, The Secret in Their Eyes is gripping crime fiction. Animated by the same gritty realism that imbued The Wire with so much authenticity, Mr. Sacheri's tale never drags even as its protagonists exhaust themselves just to advance the case a few meager inches at a time. It conveys the powerful, and no doubt true, impression that the so-called wheels of justice most often turn at the behest of self-interested careerists fixed upon their own advancement, not the proper execution of their jobs. Righteousness has to be compelled by the pooled wills of multiple souls who must be resolute in the face of the inevitable, and sometimes murderous, reprisals.

Translated from the original Spanish, these pages are filled with Mr. Sacheri's acerbic wit and his earthy characters upon whom time and the perils of life exact a toll. Yes, the author is prone to treating his readers like dullards, leading them through his uncomplicated mystery as though it were the literary equivalent of the Gordian Knot, but the themes of unrequited love, toothless justice, and shattered dreams that suffuse this tale more than make up for this underestimation of our intelligence. For as much as the plot coheres around its central mystery, it is animated by the lives of the men and women who inhabited corrupted Argentina in its darkest hour. It is their struggles, their unrealized desires, that elevate this tale up from the ordinary.

Poignant stuff that seems tailor-made for the big screen. For anyone who appreciated The Wire, this will be cause for both enjoyment and nostalgia. Likewise, for anyone who enjoys this book but has not seen The Wire, you will not be disappointed. Moving work... (4/5 Stars)

Low Town by Daniel Polansky

From The Week of January 16, 2011

Of the many blights that can befall a people, surely none are more destructive than injustice. Levelled cities can be rebuilt; devastated economies can be revitalized; lethal plagues can be cured; but a people's broken faith cannot be restored. For the trust of the people is not a stone to be shaped, a formula to be reworked, a disease to be isolated. It is the living embodiment of our faith in institutions that we depend upon daily for the proper functioning of our societies. If they let us down, worse yet, if they sell us out to powerful interests, we are left with no choice but to turn to our own, vigilante remedies which, while bringing some immediate satisfaction, only strengthens chaos in the long term. The end result is the night of nihilism pierced by only the occasional shimmerings of truth. This is Mr. Polansky's lesson in Low Town; he teaches it with violence and vigor.

Tucked within a province of a powerful empire, squatting within the throng of a bustling city, there lies a slum called Low Town. This lawless, rat-infested labyrinth is home to the world's unwanted. Orphans and thieves run the streets while angry men, battered women and those who enable them both cohabit in a jungle of unhealthy shops and unhealthier homes. Few outside its clutches care for it, but they cannot escape events within it, events that will spill out and infect them too.

Known on the street as the Warden, the protagonist and narrator of our story is a crime boss in this den of iniquity. During the administration of his ugly trade, he tries to bring some order to the streets, even if it is the order of the blade and the fist. Some may interpret this nod in the direction of structure as a flicker of altruism, but the Warden may well be just scratching an old itch. After all, prior to his mysterious fall from grace over a woman he may or may not have loved, he was an imperial agent, a detective imbued with the imprimatur of the crown to bring about justice. Before that, he was an officer in the imperial army where he was a witness to events so dark and savage that, all these years later, they will not allow him to sleep peacefully. But if order is in the Warden's blood, he faces the worst week of his life, for in his slum surfaces the mutilated body of a young girl, a girl so grievously wronged she evokes even the Warden's seldom-tapped reservoir of sympathy. Much as he loathes the idea, the Warden may well have to return to his post as an imperial agent, for a little while. A crime so heinous, committed on his territory, cannot go unpunished. But is the Warden ready to grapple with the darkness that lies behind recent events? Is his slum ready for the death it promises?

Though Low Town occasionally stews overlong in its own nihilism, and though certain of its characters are far too mechanical to be considered more than automata, Low Town is an exciting and atmospheric tumble through a splendidly savage world of thieves and slumlords, mages and lordlings, each of whom is wrapped up in one egotistical scheme or another. Adopting the more pleasing conventions of the noir detective novel, Mr. Polansky doubles down on darkness by building atop this grim foundation a world of injustice and misfortune, murder and sacrifice, all while spinning a plot in which redemption can only be brought about by bloodshed. The author's cruel wit is a match for his keen eye for melancholy which, together, bestow an authenticity upon the setting, a world forever on the edge of sliding into the abyss.

Though Low Town has much to recommend it, sharing as it does in the dark traditions established by Misters Morgan, Kearney, and Abercrombie, it is not without flaws. The Warden's mountainman of a best friend is a feeble character whose only purposes here are to be alternately sad and tortured. He, like several of Mr. Polansky's other characters, never advance beyond caricature. However, this blot on the work is balanced by the Warden who is drawn with a kind of authentic and well-meaning cruelty, the likes of which has rarely manifested on paper. If Joe Abercrombie was able to put his fiendish hands on Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden, strip him of his magic and torment him for a few thousand years in Hell, Daniel Polansky's Warden might well be the result.

Wonderful noir which balances its fantasy, its mystery and its cultural satire far better than one might expect for an author's first effort. I eagerly await more from Mr. Polansky. (4/5 Stars)