Book Tamers| book reviews

„There are eight million ways to die, and among them there are a lot that are appropriate for those who want to do it on their own. No matter how bad subways look, they do their job when one jumps before them. And the city has plenty of terraces and windows on the upper floors, and the shops are open twenty four hours per day and they sell razor blades and ropes and sleeping pills.”

Welcome to Matt Scudder’s world, a private detective. The hero in Eight million ways to die written by Lawrence Block is a „veteran” of the streets. One can say he has experienced everything. As a retired police officer, authorization-free private detective, AA member, Scudder accepts to help a prostitute get out of the system. What he doesn’t know is that in 48 hours, Kim will be found dead in a hotel.

From this moment on, Matt Scudder feels guilty for the prostitute’s fate and will do his best to find the killer. What really drives him is the fact that he becomes the client of the former pimp, Chance, who wants the exact same thing. Scudder lives in the city where there is nothing else but death and ignorance. But that will not stop him from finding the killer.

I don’t like going in too much in the plot of Eight million ways to die and that is mainly because a detective novel can’t be narrated. But I can congratulate the publishing house for their thriller& mystery collection which gave me the opportunity of getting to know one of Lawrence Block’s characters. But what has to be said is the feeling I had when reading Block: do you remember those movies in the 50’s or 60’s where private detectives solve every possible case? At first, this was the impression Eight million ways to die gave me. But soon, coming back to present day has made me come to life and recognize the style that is so captivating.

The action is told by the character/ narrator Matt Scudder, who apparently appears in many other novels. The reader finds out even Scudder’s thoughts between dialogues, and this brings more authenticity. Practically, the reader steps in the crowded city and follows the leads together with Matt Scudder.

Another thing that I liked was this incongruity with the ideal image of the hero-private detective. Lawrence Block’s Scudder is a former police officer, now an alcoholic who not only fights shady characters on the street, and faces crime, but he also has to face his urge to drink. The description of the character’s state of mind while drinking a glass of alcohol at the AA meetings is actually what makes him so real.

Characters in Eight million ways to die are common people and that is because they are built just as they would appear before our eyes. I just want to add that I am not a fan of detective mysteries, I haven’t tasted this kind of literature too much. But this novel made up my mind: Lawrence Block deserves all the prizes he received for his literary activity.

I could tell you more about the plot or about Matt Scudder but I would hate making you miss the pleasure of discovering this detective, his angst, Chance, the pimp with the dead employees and the rest of the characters that run their existence in Eight million ways to die.

Enjoy!

Written by Cristina

Some teenage friends saw me reading this particular book and they smiled at me with that ironic sprinkle in their eyes. „We have read that when we were young. Why wasting time on this”?  How could I explain them that a beautiful book never wastes one’s time. Or that this reader quality takes you out of the body’s traps and the flat reality dimension.
These friends have become grown-ups mentally. They have reached a point where they valued things on their price and dimension. Grown-ups love other type of books, the wrestling-type: The big Prince, Gorgon-eyed. The Oil Prince, the Wall Street King, the lord of the dance.

But there are things outside size. There is a place that allows our existence, the others’ existence, without self-proclaimed earthly kingdoms, without pride in the battle flag. A place where we can place Socrates, the philosopher who never wrote a book back in the Antiquity, and also Saint-Exupery. It’s not the size, but the nature of things that seem to have a real price. Why are they like that and what do they mean? That’s what Socrates searched for in the Athens’ agora many centuries ago. That’s what Saint Exupery is looking for in this parable of the little prince. The sound of things. The melody of beings. Their mystery. The beauty.

Socrates went to a merchant without caring if he was the greatest. For he was not a merchant or he rarely was one, he understood the one in front of him as a bearer of the merchant idea. But don’t we buy and sell all our lives? Don’t we try to embellish, sometimes artificially, our own things? Isn’t there any competition? Isn’t the merchant the one that can give us an image of the way these kind of relationships work in their natural habitat- the economical one- for us to understand their intrusion in our soul? And especially, asked Socrates, what is to be a merchant, king of Wall Street? How does it compete with life’s most important things, like the good, the beauty, the truth?
Facing cynical answers like the one that a merchant is beyond morality, he would shrug his shoulders and keep looking for somebody else to talk to. He was looking for that particular merchant who understood that talking about the nature of things is not a simple babbling, but a way of exploring one’s deepest abyss. It was a way of knowing oneself.

Thus, in the middle of the XX-th century, Saint-Exupery, the aviator, presents the Little Prince as a Socratic parable. He has the same curiosity when he looks for significations and symbols both in humans and in things. He tells us that each human being has a planet of his own, and that this planet embellishes or it is disfigured by the person’s behavior and nature. He also tells us that we live in a major illusion that makes us incredibly static. One imagines he’s a king but he has no servants. Another one is ready to lethally bite any other living being. One thinks that the meaning of people on Earth is to admire him. Some are slaves - like the Little Prince - of a beauty’s vanities.

That’s why sometimes, a journey is important for shaking the shackles’ rustiness from the realistic monotony of a “grown-up”. That’s why the two characters, the aviator and the Little Prince, are in their own way travelers that fell together in the same desert for a few days. The aviator is terrified by the perspective of his imminent death, his plane crashed in an isolated place, and the Little Prince is sad because his planet is full of baobabs and tyrannized by flowers. The things on his planet are not in the right order, and that’s why he visits other planets - to see something different, maybe something better.

Before I go any further, I should explain my own reaction. I could have joined my friends in irony if I had seen the book in somebody else’s hands. The beginning of the book gave me the impression of a fairytale in which a man in need creates himself an illusion to help him survive in the desert. But fiction will acquire during the deployment of the plot many other sentimental colors than an adult couldn’t possibly see, and the disappearance or the death of the Little Prince has a tragic, apotheosis tone. However, he didn’t even exist. But still, he exists beyond reality, there, on his planet and somewhere on everybody’s planet. It’s an intensity moment from childhood. From our eternal childhood.
What is childhood anyway? We ask this as Socrates does a child. No, not the greatest child, the king child. No. Just a regular kid. And we may receive the answer that in childhood we must remember about dreams and games. But does what we imagined start to make room into reality? And what are games but a repeated try to solve society’s puzzles?
That’s childhood in the Little Prince. He plays with curiosity and learns something from every encounter. It is everything he can take back to his planet, it’s everything that the aviator gets from him. Mirrors of the human abyss.

Here’s what a fox teaches him: that people need rituals and that they appreciate realities that can be tamed, like being cared for, raised and helped by the people around him. A snake shows him that among people one can feel alone, and a geographer reveals to him that beautiful things needn’t be on a map for they are ephemeral.

Why were those young people sarcastic with me? How many topics, similar to this story, could they have discussed? I feel for the first time the need to go back to this book and read it again because I was so touched by the little prince’s disappearance. But this time, in French, where I will definitely find delicacies that can’t be translate.

I would like to add something about Saint Exupery’s technique. It is close to Jacques Prevert’s simple attitude, it has a clear modern manner, it uses cinematographic procedures like moving away and foreground, it has no real background but who cares, really? I can’t really wait for the aviator’ engine to break down again. The Little Prince will show up asking for a sheep to be drawn and will drift away all my anxieties with his starry smile.

Written by Gabriel

So Many Ways to Begin is first and foremost a novel about a simple story, about a life like any other, but through the charm and attention of Jon McGregor it becomes a life of historic importance.

A dense novel, minutely built up, So Many Ways to Begin makes use of many starting points, stories that resemble threads which interweave to create the complex story of a simple man, David Carter.

The interesting construction technique

If one can’t find out the reason for the way the novel begins, one’s reading can be hardened and transformed into a tiring and discouraging one by the abundance of short chapters without apparent connection. But as the story develops, three main ideas stand out: David’s marriage to Eleanor, Eleanor’s childhood and David’s wish to shed light upon his past.

McGregor’s narrator is omniscient, although the narrative sometimes bounces between first and third person. However, the humanization of the narrator is achieved through the empathy and heart warmth showed towards the characters.

This aspect is also sustained by the new manner of involving dialogue in the text, by which McGregror manages to sweep away the barrier between words and feelings.

Life built up out of details

…hand-written letters, a cigarette-holder, a child’s gloves, a napkin, a salary note or a “metal, rusty biscuit-box, used as a piggy bank or to keep souvenirs” are the small things which we often miss, ignore and easily push away.

It is these little things that David has an interest in, these “meaningless things” help him discover the pleasure of life and through them he tries to bring out the past which keeps him prisoner. With the help of David we understand why nothing is meaningless, how every thing keeps memories and the force of the past which it represents, how life doesn’t need to be grandiose in order to be beautiful.

The mother as the eternal disappointment

McGregor’s novel abounds in mothers: young, old, with one child, more or none, loving, distant or violent. But none of them manages to have a healthy relationship with her child, to show or to prove her love; they all end up pushed away from the child’s life. From the exhausted and violent mother to the loving but incapable of understanding, to the one who would give her child anything but cannot give him birth or to the absent mother, without substance, maternity remains a failure in McGregor’s eyes.

The curse of the blood

David is the adult who finds out that his whole life has been built upon a false foundation. The truth propels him in a never-ending search and investigation of the past, but leaves him with the disillusion of having only what he has built up in the present, with the past being impenetrable.

So Many Ways to Begin has a devastating force, achieved through the simplicity and clarity of the style. The characters are molded attentively and with patience, the feelings are real and the implications have echo in the soul of every reader.

Written by Ama

A book’s normal course in a publishing house should be the following: translator- editor- translator- imprimatur (the last one being also a person, who checks the book for mistakes one last time before printing). Even though there might be people to say that the lack of spelling mistakes is not the most important thing in a book (and they would be right), this time I had the feeling that the book jumped from the translator directly into the printing house.

Even from the very beginning I came up against phrases that had little meaning because of their awkward construction. Other problems were the sequence of tenses and words that required another translation than the one given, as it was a matter of context. A literal translation of some sentences from Romanian would sound like this: “After that, when the rain had stopped, people are dancing noisily in a horrible place.” I haven’t read the English version of the book, but it is clear to me that part of its value, if any, was lost in translation.

The subject appears promising in the beginning: a female protagonist wakes up in the middle of a bar without knowing where she is or why she is there, as a consequence of memory losses which she claims she frequently experiences. However, the construction of the first person narrative is discouraging but out of a few foreign opinions I understand that this construction is the author’s innovation, the reason she is so appreciated. I find it hard to believe, though, that out oh her original words can be understood as little as from the translation.

Unfortunately, as I turned the pages, I realized that the plot is not as attractive as i thought. Why? Because almost the whole 300 pages are an interior monologue in which Hannah describes her alcoholism, frustrations, her failures, drunkenness and at times the dates with the one who appears to be her soul mate. Nothing extraordinary happens to her.

Two hundred pages of constant drunkenness, the purpose of which I failed to understand. What is the author’s actual pursue? What did she want to prove? Behind the minute introspection there doesn’t seem to lie anything. I don’t think that the intention was to help readers understand alcoholics. The protagonist does nothing to grow in the eyes of the readers, her degradation even increases with every page.

”I have no children, no hobby and I don’t have any plan, I can’t even sing anymore, but I can still rely on my soul, the recording of my sins. My work of a life-time. I am no stranger to lies, secrets and blasphemies, I keep my Sundays busy and filthy, I fight with God and sometimes I resolve to violence and mean forms of theft.”

Written by Raluca

I admit wanting to read this book because I was sure I would crave for delicious meals. Mark Crick is practically an unknown voice in the world of letters and about his first book he says it was funny to conceive. We know it’s true that discussions with writers are spicy; why wouldn’t we know what they are up to in the kitchen? Not everyone is familiar with the secrets of Ars culinaria; not even in the gourmet position we can’t imagine all those presented in the book, but it is a good exercise.

In his Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin says that there is a sensual predestination for gourmandise (a word that can’t really be translated in other languages and which hasn’t its flavor but in French). I don’t know how many are those who could ever imagine Kafka eating, let alone cooking. It is probably the explanation why his recipe is the one that entitles the book. There is a resemblance of the soup can on the cover with Warhol’s can, each chapter being associated with images from Picasso’s, De Chirico’s or Matisse’s works, that Crick himself painted.Whether there are luxuriant coq au vin or plaice à la Dieppe or the more laic mushroom risotto or cheese sandwiches, the fourteen recipes are an occasion for imitation for the author - Crick himself says that it was very hard to render the stream of consciousness technique in Virginia Woolf’s style- and an original method through which the reader gets in touch with the style of an author he doesn’t still know.

The recipes are in no evident order, neither chronological, nor alphabetical, but consist of the four meals presented during a feast, all guaranteeing the good stimulation of the taste buds of a fan of extraordinary foods. My imagination being started, I have to admit that I would have figured that Marcel Proust was more fascinated by a cake with figs and pears, marinated in Jamaican rum and not by the trivial tiramisu. Also, the sexual hints in the chicken recipe à la Marquis de Sade are quite frail; or the relationship between the sexual and the culinary appetite is undeniable.

Parodying the expression techniques of the writers in question does not remove in any way the innovating manner with which the British writer approaches the 14 writers. This book is probably a precedent for the one who will try structuring an anthology about the drinks that influence a writer to write in a certain way.

Written by Ioana