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Contemporary Fiction Views: A life out of control [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-28
An 81-year-old woman's beloved husband and daughter have both died. She is no longer willing to abide her Milwaukee home, and heads for Europe. She finds solace helping people solve the problems in their relationships that she sees, whether they see them or not.
Things are going quite well until the murder.
With Covid closing borders around the world, Maggie Burkhardt escapes Switzerland and lands in Egypt. A once renowned grand hotel in Luxor has become her new home. She considers the manager, Ahmed, a friend. A gay couple are her best friends. Life is going quite well, all things considered.
Until she is caught meddling again. An eight-year-old boy who just arrived with his mother catches her. At first, Maggie thinks she and Otto will become co-conspirators. But she is wrong. Very, very wrong.
In Christopher Bollen's Havoc, Maggie soon realizes Otto has become her nemesis. Not only is he at least as clever as she is, but he also has the advantage of being a little boy who has obviously been sickly. Now the victim of blackmail, Maggie is determined to get her peaceful hotel back and reign as its queen. Otto has no intention of backing down.
The stakes continue to climb higher and higher as their battle continues. Victims start to stack up in acts of retaliation that may lose readers (animals are involved).
Just what in the world is going on? The reader starts to realize how unreliable, and unstable, Maggie is. How much of what she is describing is true? What if it all is? What if none of it is? Bollen, writing through Maggie's eyes, does a masterful job of describing her interior and exterior worlds collapsing. It's not clear until the very end just what is and is not real.
Until that point is reached, Havoc also serves as a way to describe how it feels when a person loses control over every aspect of life. The anger Maggie feels at losing her carefully constructed life is palpable. It screams off the page.
So many aspects of her life are not as she envisioned or thinks should be this way. That includes her long-held view of art. She and her late husband often spend time in museums. He thought she loved it. She hated it. In Maggie's view, that thousands of years of civilization resulted only in a few good chairs and a handful of interesting paintings is appalling.
More worthy of admiration to her are the works of the ancient Egyptians. Especially the artworks created for royal tombs, glorious works of art never meant to be seen by the living.
As the novel loses its veneer of arch Hitchcockian mischief and heads for the darkest of the movie auteur's vision, Maggie's opinions of art, people and how things should be fill in the portrait of who she is and how her world does not meet her expectations.
Viewed that way, Maggie becomes a stand-in for when many people feel things are out of their control, despite their best efforts.
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Some of this week's new releases, with links to The Literate Lizard and blurbs by the publishers.
Blob : A Love Story by Maggie Su
The daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Aimless after getting dumped by her boyfriend and dropping out of college, Vi works at the front desk of a hotel where she greets guests, refills cucumber water samovars, and tries to evade her bubbly blond coworker, Rachel. Little does Vi know her life is about to be permanently transformed when she agrees to a night out with Rachel. In the alley outside the bar, Vi discovers a strange blob—a small living creature with beady black eyes. In a moment of concern and drunken desperation, she takes it home.
The Girls of the Glimmer Factory by Jennifer Coburn
From the author of Cradles of the Reich, an intriguing story of childhood friends forced onto opposite sides of a propaganda war in a "model" ghetto in WWII Czechoslovakia, Hitler's "gift to the Jews."
Two childhood friends are reunited at a Jewish settlement in Czechoslovakia, the camp promised as a safe place to wait out the war, and each sees the other as a means to save what they love most. Hannah and Hilde were friends long ago, but when fate brings them back together at Theresienstadt, they are adversaries. At this so-called model ghetto, the Nazis plan to make a propaganda film to convince the world that the Jewish people are living well in Nazi-run camps. But Hannah and her fellow prisoners have other ideas. The young resistance members vow to disrupt the filming and derail the increasingly frequent deportations to death camps in the east. Meanwhile, Hannah’s old friend Hilde is a true believer in the Nazi cause, despite an outlook that looks like defeat. She can’t stop the Allied bombings, however she can help the party create a documentary that will renew confidence in Hitler’s plans for Jewish containment. When the filming of Hitler Gives a City to the Jews faces production problems, Hilde finds herself in a position to finally make a name for herself.
Grace of the Empire State by Gemma Tizzard
In this ... debut novel, a daring dancer must take her twin brother’s place as a riveter high atop the in-progress Empire State Building to save her family from ruin.
After the death of their father, it’s up to Grace O’Connell and her twin brother Patrick to support their family as the Great Depression takes its toll on New York City. When Grace is laid off from her dancing gig and Patrick is injured at work on the construction of the Empire State Building, desperation leaves them only one solution: Grace must disguise herself as Patrick and take his place on the half-built skyscraper.
We Rip the World Apart by Charlene Carr
When 24-year-old Kareela discovers she's pregnant with a child she isn't sure she wants, her struggle to understand her place in the world as a person who is half-Black, half-white — yet feels neither — is amplified.
Her mother, Evelyn, fled to Canada with her husband and their first-born child during the politically charged Jamaican exodus in the 80s, only to realize they'd come to a place where Black men are viewed with suspicion—a constant and pernicious reality Evelyn watches her husband and son navigate daily.
Years later, in the aftermath of her son's murder by the police, Evelyn's mother-in-law, Violet, moves in, offering young Kareela a link to the Jamaican heritage she had never fully known. Despite Violet’s efforts to help them through their grief, the traumas they carry grow into a web of secrets that threatens the very family they all hold so dear.
The Vanishing Point: Stories by Paul Theroux
The stories in Paul Theroux’s fascinating new collection are both exotic and domestic, their settings ranging from Hawaii to Africa and New England. Each focuses on life’s vanishing points—a moment when seemingly all lines running through one’s life converge, and one can see no farther, yet must deal with the implications.
Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids: Stories by Leyna Krow
What do we owe our family and friends in times of wild uncertainty?
That’s the question the women of Leyna Krow’s ... darkly fabulist story collection grapple with as they strive to be good mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, wives, and companions in a world that is constantly shifting around them. Set in the Pacific Northwest, these stories blend high concept magic with the sometimes subtle, other times glaring, realities of climate change.
As protagonists contend with doppelgänger babies, hordes of time travelers, mysterious portals, and supernatural siblings, there lurks in the background the effects of the region’s rapidly shifting environment. There are wildfires, wind storms, unrelenting heat, disrupted butterfly migration patterns, a new plague, and a catastrophe on the slopes of Mount Rainier that reverberates through three generations of a single family over the course of a half dozen linked stories.
Tartufo by Kira Jane Buxton
After nearly losing the election to a geriatric donkey, newly installed Mayor Delizia Miccuci can’t help but feel like the sun has finally set on the rural Italian village of Lazzarini Boscarino. Tourists only stop by to ask for directions, Nonna Amara’s cherished ristorante is long shuttered, and the town hall is disgustingly overrun with glis glis poo—even Postman Duccio has been disgraced. All that’s left is Bar Celebrità, a rustic establishment where weary locals gather to quibble over decades-long disputes, submit their poor stomachs to bartender Giuseppina’s volcanic espresso, and wonder what will become of the place where together they’ve spent their entire lives.
Little do the villagers know that local truffle hunter Giovanni Scarpazza has just happened upon something that could change everything. A truffle—un tartufo, that is—sits beneath the soil with the power to either be the greatest gift or the foulest curse the village has ever seen.
Too Soon by Betty Shamieh
Arabella gets an unexpected chance at love when she’s thrust into a conflict and history she’s tried to avoid all her life.
Zoya is playing matchmaker for her last unmarried granddaughter and stirring up buried memories.
Naya is keeping a secret from her children that will change all their lives.
Thirty-five-year-old Arabella, a New York theatre director whose dating and career prospects are drying up, is offered an opportunity to direct a risqué cross-dressing interpretation of a Shakespeare classic—that might garner international attention—in the West Bank. Her mother, Naya, and grandmother, Zoya, hatch a plot to match her with Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Arabella agrees to meet Aziz, since her growing feelings for Yoav, a celebrated Israeli American theatre designer, seem destined for disaster.
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.
The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.
So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.
Bronshtein in the Bronx by Robert Littell
A wry, thought-provoking fictional portrayal of ten pivotal weeks in the life of Leon Trotsky, inspired by the Russian revolutionary's exile in New York City in 1917, by the New York Times bestselling author of The Company.
January 12, 1917: An ocean liner docks in New York Harbor. Among the disembarking emigrants is one Lev Davidovich Bronshtein—better known by his nom de guerre, Leon Trotsky. Bronshtein has been on the run for a decade, driven from his beloved Russia after escaping political exile in Siberia. He lives for—and is ready to sacrifice his life for—a workers’ revolution, at any cost. But is he ready to become an American?
Penitence by Kristin Koval
For readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng, Penitence is a poignant exploration of love and forgiveness. It’s a suspenseful, addictive page-turner filled with literary insight that compels readers to consider whether the worst thing we’ve ever done is all that defines us.
When a shocking murder occurs in the home of Angie and David Sheehan, their lives are shattered. Desperate to defend their family, they turn to small-town lawyer Martine Dumont for help, but Martine isn’t just legal counsel—she’s also the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian, a now-successful New York City criminal defense attorney. As Julian and Angie confront their shared past and long-buried guilt from a tragic accident years ago, they must navigate their own culpability and the unresolved feelings between them.
The English Problem by Beena Kamlani
Shiv Advani is an eighteen-year-old growing up in India. But he is no ordinary young man. Shiv has been personally chosen by Mahatma Gandhi to come to England, learn their bill of rights, and then return home and help drive the British out of India using their own laws against them. Before he leaves, his family insists he fulfill his arranged marriage and is hastily betrothed to a young woman he hardly knows.
He arrives in London in 1931. He is not dressed for the British rain, and, shivering, rings the doorbell of the people who have agreed to host him in this strange land. He finds that his benefactors are having a party and warmly welcome him. He is the only brown person in the room and made acutely aware of his differences. By the end of the evening, he vows he will never become an Englishman. Later, at a different social gathering, he tries to approach a beautiful white woman but is intercepted—disqualified and barred again because of the color of his skin. But as he is leaving he meets a captivating young man who seems keen to show him the rules of polite British society, if only to later break them. That night, unexpectedly, he meets the two people who will show him how to fight back and win.
Northern Boy: A big Bollywood dream. A small-town chance by Iqbal Hussain
Joyful, defiant and dazzling, this is the story of Rafi Aziz – a northern boy dreaming of his name up in lights.
It's 1981 in the suburbs of Blackburn and, as Rafi’s mother reminds him daily, the family moved here from Pakistan to give him the best opportunities. But Rafi longs to follow his own path. Flamboyant, dramatic and musically gifted, he wants to be a Bollywood star.
Twenty years later, Rafi is flying home from Australia for his best friend’s wedding. He has everything he ever wanted: starring roles in musical theatre, the perfect boyfriend and freedom from expectation. But returning to Blackburn is the ultimate test: can he show his true self to his community?
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