Thursday Revue
Yes, it’s that time again–time for What Is Lili Reading? and the Thursday Revue.
A word about my reviews: I tend to focus on books I really like. A book has ten pages to hook me, or I set it down. Except research reading into boring historical questions, which I normally find fascinating because I am a weirdo.
Nuff said. On with the show!
First off, Philip Kerr. Oh, my God. Where has this author been?
I am a big fan of noir. Daishell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, and Raymond Chandler are some of my very favorite authors. There’s a funky little subgenre of noir–Berlin noir–that deals with Berlin just pre-or-post-World War II. Sometimes it’s shelved in mystery, sometimes in suspense, and sometimes in lit fic.
And Kerr is a master of the genre.
I came across an ARC of his latest (working for a bookstore does have some perks) The One from the Other, due out September 7th. The cover was okay, and I flipped it over to read the back.
Munich? Post World War II? A private detective? All right, let’s give it a shot. And damn, am I ever glad I did.
Bernie Gunther is just trying to survive in postwar Germany. He used to be a cop, and a good one–and then the Nazis came along, and everything went to hell. This is, I think, the fourth book in the Gunther series (the other three can be found in a trade paper edition from Penguin) but the exposition overload from previous books is minimal. Which means I wasn’t lost, even though it’s a series continuation. The One From The Other stands well on its own.
I LOVED this book. I loved Bernie’s refusal to cut himself some slack. I loved the way he didn’t try to minimize the horror of the war or the Holocaust. I loved his smart mouth and the fact that he does get beaten up; he’s not as young as he used to be. We meet Bernie as he’s closing down his father-in-law’s hotel. His FIL is dead and Bernie’s wife is in an insane asylum, catatonic. Oh, and the hotel? It’s spitting distance from Dachau.
Along comes an American military man who has a Nazi war prisoner, and soon they’re digging in Bernie’s father in law’s hotel garden for a box of valuables stolen from Jewish victims. Bernie’s digging because the Nazi war prisoner is a very sick man, and even if Bernie hates his guts he can’t stand by and watch another human being be forced at gunpoint to work.
Bernie’s seen too much of that sort of stuff already.
What with one thing and another, Bernie decides to close up the hotel and move back to Munich, where he can be closer to his wife and also earn a little money as a private detective. There are a lot of missing people in postwar Germany that someone wants found. But the cases he takes start getting more and more dangerous, and they start showing some distressing similarities. Is Bernie just paranoid, or is something dangerous and deadly going on?
Kerr writes sparely and fluidly, but it’s his dialogue that really shines. One can imagine the characters speaking in German and being translated into idiomatic English. I found myself thinking of this book as Philip Marlowe in Berlin (though Bernie doesn’t get to Berlin in this book) with a scar under his arm and a wolfish smile touching his face when he thinks I’m not looking. Seriously, if I had to pitch this book in one sentence it would read: Hard-boiled noir PI with dash of “Cabaret” thrown in; add to a heavy helping of spy thriller and great dialogue. Shake, don’t stir.
Yes, I know that’s two sentences.
There are two problems a reader may encounter with this book. The first is that Bernie tried so hard to hold onto his own soul during the war and was only partially successful. Those who are looking for clear-cut bad guys of a certain race will be disappointed. In Bernie’s world, everyone’s got an angle, whether American, British, German, or Russian–or otherwise. The people you think might be the good guys are the bad guys, and even when the good guys are fighting for what they think is right they might easily be taken for bad guys. The ambiguity of good and evil in this book will give you problems if you’re looking for clear-cut moral choices.
The other problem is information dump. It’s obvious Kerr knows his stuff, and sometimes there’s a bit of wading-through-exposition that needs to be done. I will say that the history lessons are all informative and fit into the book well, representing only a temporary speedbump for me.
The only other thing that might be a problem for readers is the book’s pace. There are so many disparate elements tied into the denouement that halfway through the book one’s wondering where the hell Kerr is going–but I found myself perfectly willing to come along for the ride. And, dare I say it, half in love with Bernie Gunther, the way I’m half in love with John Dalmas and the Continental Op.
All in all, I give this book an enthusiastic thumb’s up. It was so good I ordered the previous Gunther books in the Penguin edition linked above, and I can’t wait for them to arrive.
The Kiwi enthused over Freakonomics so hard she almost popped a blood vessel, so I stole her copy and read it in one day. (Bookstore folks. We are sneaky.) It’s well-written, engaging, and enjoyable.
And it demolishes a few sacred cows. The assertion that Roe vs. Wade is responsible for the (historically speaking) recent drop in crime dropped my jaw the first time I read it. The explanation of why teachers and sumo wrestlers would cheat was priceless (and incidentally makes me (and other parents, I guess I’m not alone) question the WASL more than I did already. While I don’t agree with some of Levitt’s logic (seeing human beings as being driven exclusively by any abstract, including “incentive,” is a tricky proposition at best, just take a look at Communism) I do applaud the common sense and refusal to ascribe to conventional wisdom that he espouses. (The Freakonomics blog is pretty sweet too.)
The book’s thin, for all its densely-packed information and analysis, so I’d get it in trade paper. But it’s a wonderful brain massager and very well written–more well-written, in fact, than several novels I’ve attempted recently. It is also a fascinating examination in the way a mind can be trained to work–discarding “convention” and looking at how people practically act instead of theoretically should act. Another thumb’s up and a GeekStar award.
There you have it, my opinion from soup to nuts. Happy Thursday, Readers!
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August 10th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Leavitt and Dubner are writing Freakonomics 2, I think.
August 21st, 2006 at 11:09 pm
I actually came across the trilogy “Berlin Noir” in Fairfax County jail, where I was serving a 15 day sentence for trying to see if I could outrun one of Fairfax County’s finest, while in my car nonetheless. My cell was right next to the jail library (a thirty year old bookcase containing about 400 books), and Philip Kerr helped me mark the time. It also helped that I have been to Germany and know intimately many of the locations in the book. I would recommend “Berlin Noir”, and Philip Kerr, to any fan of books that allows you to escape. Bernie Gunther’s outlook was the same outlook I had while in jail; asking oneself “How’d I get in this mess…..”….which is the way Bernie Gunther seems to feel about his country and his life.