The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

This historical novel by Richard Zimler is compelling and well-written, but tough going. The narrative covers several days of the 1507 massacre of "New Christians" -- forcibly converted Jews -- and makes for often gruesome reading. Zimler spares few details of dismemberment and burning, sudden death and suffering in the frenzy of persecution.

But those tragic events are the backdrop for a mystery involving betrayal within the Jewish community. Berekiah Zarco's beloved uncle, the leading kabbalist in the community, is slain during the riots not by Old Christians but by someone within his inner circle who knew his secrets. These are not kabbalistic rituals, but the safekeeping and smuggling of forbidden Jewish manuscripts. Berekiah, a young illuminator and would-be kabbalist, finds his uncle's body in compromising circumstances but knows from the manner of death and location of the body that one of possibly half a dozen people was the culprit.

He sets himself to find out who killed his uncle and to avenge him. He must fight his own grief and the skepticism of the grieving survivors in his family, while avoiding the ever-present risks of the sectarian violence.

Zimler narrates all this with a tactile feel for medieval Lisbon and an authoritative understanding of the Jewish milieu. He never takes time out to pendantically explain kabbalism, and in fact this esoteric Jewish practice does not play a major role in the plot. Rather it colors the characters and lends further mystery to the action.

The story is about remaining true to your beliefs in a time of deceit, and loyal to your comrades when betrayal can save your life. Many of the characters make some compromise to survive, but there is a clear line separating those whose faithlessness costs the lives of others. Berekiah comes to see that his uncle's killer is not the only villain.

Unraveling the mystery is an intricate and sometimes bewildering process as Berekiah suspects and then clears each of his uncle's inner circle, only to have them fall under suspicion again as new evidence emerges. The reader has to do some work to keep track of the comings and goings of the characters.

The story is framed by Berekiah in later life in Constantinople and his decision to go back to Lisbon and bring his remaining family away from Christian Europe into the safety of the more tolerant Muslim domains. The portrayal of Old Christians, and especially the Dominican Inquisitors who fomented the massacre, is unrelentingly harsh. The bleakness and cruelty of medieval society portrayed here is reminiscent of Arras under the plague in Andrzej Szczypiorski's A Mass for Arras. 

Berekiah is skeptical that Christian Europe will ever be safe for Jews and of course the events of the 20th century bear this out. But neither are the Muslim domains and perhaps the real lesson is that no one is ever safe from bigotry.

Thriller fails

I try to support Politics & Prose by choosing books at random based on what they display on the tables. The books are attractive, I sometimes know the authors, and the blurbs and opening pages convince me to buy. But lately I've been striking out, coming home with books that I quickly become disappointed with.

The latest was Don't Cry, Tai Lake by Qiu Xialong, featuring his Inspector Chen in Shanghai. I've had his Death of a Red Heroine on the shelf for some time but never gotten around to reading it. I gave this book quite a while, a good halfway through it, letting the exotic setting in a resort outside Shanghai, the plot about environmental decay and the author's penchant for quoting poetry, both classical Chinese poetry and Chen's own verses carry me along. But it was just plodding along. The writing, aside from the poetry, is lackluster, the characters like a literary version of naive art, and the mystery anything but compelling.

This miss closely followed an earlier purchase of Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon. I've read several of Kanon's books, though I didn't think his later novels matched the quality of his debut, Los Alamos. Obviously, the setting in postwar Istanbul intrigued me, but I found the beginning of the book at least quite dull, sort of Alan Furst without the drive (just as the later Furst books seem to lack any oomph). It may be that I'll pick this up another time and get into it, but I'm leaving it aside for now.

The first strike of the three was The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri, the new novel featuring Inspector Montalbano, which I've already commented on.

Let me indulge in a quibble. My theory is that an author will not have a main character who smokes unless the author him(her)self smokes. Camilleri leaves you in no doubt because he's holding a cigarette in his author photo in the best 1950s fashion. I accept that culturally, in Sicily and China, for instance, a lot more people still smoke and it's perfectly logical to have a character with this habit. But at this point I personally just find it offensive and while I might be willing to overlook it in a crackerjack book that I can't put down, it just becomes another annoyance if I'm plodding along in a dull narrative. In general, I think it rarely contributes in any significant way to atmosphere or characterization and sometimes even seems to be a passive-aggressive act of defiance on the author's part. So fine, ohne mich.

One of the advantages of buying books online is that you can do a little research before actually making the purchase. While the star ratings may be a little dubious, they do win in credibility with numbers and you can always look for outside reviews. Most of my online purchases start the other way -- I run across someone who raves about a particular book and go to Amazon for the purchase after some cursory due diligence. I will continue to browse at P&P, but I will be more cautious about impulse purchases.

We Live in Water

This terrific collection of short stories by Jess Walter is a virtuoso performance by one of my favorite authors. The stories range from the touching quest of a homeless man to buy a birthday present for his son in "Anything Helps" to a Cloud Atlas-like future world in "Don't Eat Cat."

Most are set in the Pacific Northwest where Walter, a native of Spokane, lives, and they feature normal men and women -- mostly white, mostly poor -- who live there. Walter's characters drive vehicles they need to park on a hill in order to start and a disturbing number have amputations from diabetes. The protagonists are flawed, often deeply so, and there's a fair amount of murder and mayhem.

But these characters generally are trying to carve out some bit of integrity in their lives, whether it's a father who puts himself in harm's way to make sure his little boy makes it home safely or a mechanic who stands up to a boss who systematically cheats a senile customer. They are not perfect, but they are trying to be better. In many of the stories, it's the responsibility of parenthood, the desire for their children to do well and be safe -- even if the parent has screwed up his own life -- that motivates them.

All of this told in an array of voices that once again matches the virtuosity of David Mitchell, with a comfortable American twist. Walter reminds me most of early Don De Lillo, with the same wry, post-modernist view of the world. It's a perfect book for serial reading, following on the short story collections of Hemingway and Maugham.

Odds Against Tomorrow

It's not often that I just go read a book after reading the review, but the NY Times Book Review's article on Nathaniel Rich's new novel struck the right chord. The book is witty, laugh-out-loud funny and satirical but the humor does not completely mask the hard edge.

Mitchell Zukor is obsessed with catastrophe and channels his affinity for it into a lucrative career as a futurist, forecasting scenarios for corporate clients. While many of these people seem to view his advice as simple catharsis -- by imagining the worst, they somehow avoid it -- Mitchell never forgets that he is talking about a possible reality and never really relaxes.

The hook used by the Times reviewer is that the catastrophe that plays out is one all too realistic after Hurricane Sandy led to widespread flooding in Manhattan. Once the tidal surge covers most of Manhattan in water, it is like Sandy meets Katrina, and Mitchell's trip in a canoe is reminiscent of Zeitoun's real-life meanderings through a flooded New Orleans.

I'm a big fan of catastrophe films. It's embarrassing how many times I've watched Dante's Peak, Volcano, Contagion, Day After Tomorrow, Armageddon, 2012 and so on. And yet, Mitchell's encounter with this all-too-imaginable catastrophe is not science fiction or fantasy but a drama about how we cope with existential fear in our fragile environment.

Rich is screamingly funny in articulating these fears -- from the consequences of climate change, to nuclear and terrorist threats, up to asteroids hitting the earth. The week after the Boston Marathon bombing and the day the Times reports that a Midwest scarred by drought is now covered with floodwaters makes them seem anything but remote.

Rich is a post-modernist writer in the vein of Don DeLillo and Jess Walter -- sardonic, cynical, but deep down idealistic about human nature. Mitchell remains sympathetic even in the disturbing end of the book when, having survived this catastrophe, he accepts the consequences of what this means for how he lives his life.

There are two women in Mitchell's life -- the mystical Elsa and the pragmatic Jane. He is subservient first to one and then to the other, breaking free only after he has had to make his choices about dealing with catastrophe and mastering his fear. At least, we presume he has mastered it, because his life is changed and he is for once truly independent.

Mitchell's parents and his FutureWorld employer offer humorous sidelights, but it is Jane -- ambitious, bright, sexy, vulnerable -- who brings what passes for normalcy in our society into conflict with Mitchell's own quest. He deals with Jane's various temptations even as he seeks answers to Elsa's mysterious exile in a survivalist farm and her own way of dealing with a mortally dangerous heart condition.

This is an imaginative, ultra-timely, idiosyncratic portrayal of the dark side of our modern world -- the fears we try to keep at bay but which are never far away.

The Panda's Thumb

I was glad when somebody in my new book group suggested this collection of essays by Stephen Jay Gould as our selection for April. It had been sitting on my shelf (shelves, really, since it moved with me several times) for a good 30 years.

I'm glad I finally got to read (most of) it, but I understand now why it sat on my shelf for so long. Gould is an entertaining writer, witty and widely read. But these are unredacted columns he published on a monthly basis in the 1970s. This means the essays are pointed and informative, but also somewhat repetitive and shallow, and by now out of date.

As I said during our discussion of the book, what struck me most was how his openness to the facts of science challenges the reader to face up to legacy notions of creationism, intelligent design, and progress. Gould's full-blooded Darwinism leaves no room for a divine plan or a special place for mankind in creation. Even his concession that our cultural evolution is "Lamarckian" in nature -- we are able to pass on acquired attributes -- begs the question of how much progress mankind has actually made. There may be a way to reconcile this science to faith, but that's not my challenge and I'm not sure how it would be done.

I didn't get through all the essays, but I think the book served its purpose for me after the several I did read -- it opened my eyes to looking at the fact of the world we live in, the scale of time that it's in and the perspective on life that it brings. At one point, Gould observes that a mite who has impregnated his sisters before birth and dies a few brief moments after birth has made the same contribution to carrying on his species as Abraham and all his decades. Funny, true, but a pointed reminder that life is so much more than our biological function.

I have two or three other books by Gould sitting on my shelf, but I have the feeling that the window of opportunity for me to read them and get something from them has passed. I was not as enthralled by the science and scientific method on display here as some of the other members of the book group. I don't think that reading some more old columns with variations on the theme would enrich my life significantly, at least not in comparison to the pleasure or learning from alternative choices. So I may finally be able to pack these natural history books up to give away.

I also have several books by David Quammen. It's clear that the idea of natural history -- a holdover from my dinosaur phase? -- intrigued me. Quammen wrote the lead review in last Sunday's NYTBR, a history of the discovery of gorillas. I'll have a go at one of those to see how I like that author before packing them up, too.

Woodrow Wilson

When I first joined Goodreads some time ago I hoped it would be that virtual book club that would let you discuss whatever book you wanted to read with other like-minded people without spending time reading books you weren't interested in. I could never make it work that way for me. The 50-state mystery challenge, for instance, never generated any real discussion, only people ticking off another state. But what can you say, really, about a mystery set in Utah if no one else has read it?

So now I'm trying something different -- joining in a common reading of the biography of the 28th president by John Milton Cooper Jr. This is a lot like being in a real book club and deciding you like the book other people chose, but I have been interested in Wilson for some time. Also, there is actually a reading schedule of about a chapter a week and a discussion thread for each week.

If I keep with it and comment often enough, I will probably update this post with my successive comments. The first one, today, covered the Prologue and Ch. 1, pp. 3-32 in the book:

It's interesting how little most of us know about Wilson or how vague our impressions are. What struck me is the claim that Wilson was not "Wilsonian" any more than Marx was "Marxist." Put me down for one of those who thinks of Wilson as a woolly-headed idealist. I look forward to Cooper's evidence debunking that idea.

The other thing that struck me about these opening pages was the description of Wilson as a transformational president. This is certainly the aspiration of the current occupant of the White House and it will be interesting to compare notes on the two presidents.

Update April 14 (chs. 2 and 3):

This quote from Wilson about how he lacked a scientific mind caught my eye: "I have no patience for the tedious toil of what is known as 'research'; I have a passion for interpreting great thoughts to the world." p. 51 Cooper. Even though Cooper goes on to say it was not quite true, it's an insight into Wilson's brimming self-confidence.

What surprised me most in these two chapters was the portrayal of Wilson as a passionate lover of his wife and a father who plays tag with his children -- only because my knowledge of him was limited to stern photographs like the one on the cover. I might have thought he was a taskmaster and disciplinarian so these anecdotes certainly round out the picture.

Arctic Chill

It's hard to explain the charm of these Nordic thrillers set in the icy, dark winter, but I suspect it's the quality of the writing as much as anything else. At the end of this procedural by Arnaldur Indridason, his detective, Erlendur, is asking himself how people live in Iceland:

As so often before at this darkest time of the year he wondered how people had survived for hundreds of years in a country with such a harsh climate. The frost tightened its grip as evening fell, whipped up by the chill Arctic wind that blasted in from the sea and south over the desolate winter landscape....The wind howled and shrieked between the buildings and down the empty streets. The city lay lifeless, as if in the grip of a plague. People stayed inside their houses. They locked their doors, closed their windows and pulled the curtains, hoping against hope that the cold spell would soon be over.

Erlendur is, as this shows, the brooding sort. He broods about his wayward children, whom he neglected when they were growing up. He broods about his cases -- here the seemingly pointless death of a 10-year-old Thai immigrant child as well as a wife gone missing. He broods about his dying superior, whose hand he holds as he passes away and whose urn he buries shortly before the passage cited. Above all, he broods about his lost brother, whose hand slipped out of his during a blizzard and who was never found, dead or alive, though Erlendur survived by burrowing into a snowdrift. (The reader, of course, wonders if the brother some day will turn up alive.)

The plot, involving the child of a Thai mother and Icelandic father, dealt with racism and nationalism. The contrast between the sunny, optimistic disposition of the Thai woman and the dark, brooding Icelandic mentality intensified the racist undertones. And yet, the bigotry was of a relatively gentle sort, and the nationalism was not as heavy-handed as in Jo Nesbo's portrayal of Norway.

The names of the characters are wonderful. You feel like you've been transported to Valhalla or are sailing with a group of Vikings -- Ragnar, Sigridur, Elinborg, and so on. The only reasonably familiar name was that of the dying superior, Marion Briem, and one character commented how odd this name sounded. Indridason doesn't spare us the names of Reykjavik's streets or Iceland's mountains, but he is not nearly as punctilious as Stieg Larsson is with Stockholm.

The plot develops, quirky characters and potential suspects come and go, clues are tenaciously followed up and finally enable the detectives to unravel the mystery. Nothing can bring back Elias, the 10-year-old boy whose Thai name, Aran, meant forest, and who wrote in his exercise book, How many trees does it take to make a forest?

The brooding Erlendur is a complex character whose preoccupations are not as obvious as Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander. Other characters also have some depth and in this book a whole new side of Sigurdur Olli, Erlendur's deputy, is developed. I liked Silence of the Grave and this confirms me as a fan of the series.

I picked up this book after two "fails." The cover and opening lines of The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri had beguiled me when I saw it on the table at Politics & Prose. It was the latest in his series featuring Inspector Montalbano, procedurals set in sunny Sicily. The Italian setting appealed to me and I knew there was a TV series based on the books. However, I just couldn't get into it. Montalbano was a scruffy old detective constantly firing up his cigarettes, arguing with his lady friend, and saying fairly inane things to his colleagues. Camilleri's descriptions of the environment had none of the detail or sense of place that Indridason brings to Iceland, let alone the sheer lyricism. The characters seemed shallow compared, in retrospect, to Erlendur, Sigurdur Olli and their cohorts. Maybe the earlier Montalbano books were better; maybe at some point I'll try reading them in Italian.

The other "fail" was The Coffee Trader by David Liss, which has been sitting on my shelf for a long time. I liked A Conspiracy of Paper the plot involving coffee trading in Amsterdam -- in the same Jewish community that Spinoza lived in (as portrayed so dramatically in the play "The New Jerusalem") -- had a lot of appeal for me. I was well into the book when I noticed I was bored -- stiff. The stilted language which worked in the earlier book to carry the reader back in time simply seemed stilted this time. The pace was languid and it was when yet another character noted for the dozenth time that Jews were not allowed to trade with Gentiles under threat of excommunication that I realized I wasn't enjoying this book. Maybe another time, but I don't think so.