A Great Reckoning (2016) By Louise Penny

 

I have heard my niece talk about Louise Penny, an author I was not familiar with despite her appearances on the New York Times Best Seller List on multiple occasions. She is a mystery writer in Canada. So, when I came across A Great Reckoning at book fair last summer, I bought it.

After reading A Great Reckoning, I discovered it is book 12 of a 21- book series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. However, it reads comfortably as a stand-alone novel.

Gamache had been the head of Homicide at the Sûreté du Québec in Montreal – the provincial police département. In retirement, Gamache was living a quiet life in the rural Village of Three Pines, when he was asked to return to active service and take charge of the scandal plagued police training Academy where he had trained at the beginning of his career years ago. Feeling it a duty to help right the situation, he reluctantly agrees.

The challenges at the Academy include professors and their egos, cadets and their ambitions, and a need for a major restructuring and restaffing of the training program, not all of which would be received favorably. Add to that agenda a murder, and you have a mystery. The structure of the Academy reminds me -- in a good way -- of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series.

While most of the story is set at the Academy, a significant portion of it take places in Three Pines, the town where Gamache and his wife live. It is a picturesque, mostly forgotten little village with an old restaurant/bistro; an all but abandoned Catholic Church; and several loveable, yet weird, neighbors (who I suspect are regulars in the full series).

When the owners of the bistro were renovating, they discovered an old map caught inside one of the original walls. The map will become an essential element of the story. The map subplot also provides an interesting history of map making.

Recommendation:  Yes. I will at some point read Book One. As for the other twenty, we will see.

Love Medicine (1984) By Louise Erdrich

 

The bargain shelf at a book store was not where I expected to find anything by author Louise Erdrich, but there it was, Love Medicine.

It was published in 1984, the first book of what has been a lengthy and successful writing career. Erdrich has won multiple book awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I eagerly bought it because I wanted to see what her writing style was at its start, comparing it with a couple of her later works that I have read.

The simple but perfect prose was clearly there from the start. But the book structure was a challenge. Love Medicine has a huge cast of characters, with frequent narrator changes, and flashbacks that often cause confusion. By the time she wrote The Bingo Palace ten years later, she began to narrow her focus to main characters, which helped dramatically when it came to the complex plot of The Round House.

Which is not to say that the “lesser” characters had “lesser” stories. They had interesting personal testimonials, often tragic ones helping tell the stories of more modern-day Native Americans, particularly as they pertain to reservation life and discrimination in the country.

The book (the Harper Perennial edition) includes a chart/family tree which is mind-numbing, outlining “Catholic marriages,” “traditional Ojibwe marriages,” and “sexual liaisons,” not to mention the history of “take-ins” (informal foster adoptions). The individual stories of the people on the family tree are told non-sequentially, though they do tie together in a compelling conclusion. Overall, it was a complex and convincing first novel about what holds your life together through the challenge of living. It secured her place as a writer of significance.

Recommendation: You bet.

India in Mind (2005) edited by Pankaj Mishra

 

India in Mind is an anthology of excerpts, often whole chapters, of novels and poems written by major authors who have lived in or visited India. It is a literary sampling of the continent by, and mostly for, the non-Indian world.

The book is edited and introduced by Pankaj Mishra, a well-regarded Indian writer. Each selection includes a brief biography of its author drafted by Mishra and explains their connection to India. Included are chapters from such expected authors as E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham; and the not so obvious Octavio Paz, Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, and even George Orwell; among others.

The works cover a variety of topics from travel difficulties, language barriers, the imperialism of the British Raj and the unwitting arrogance of its administrators, religion, animal population, marriage customs, and of course partition history. There is even a Journal selection from visitor Allen Ginsberg which is, true to form, incomprehensible.

One of the most thought-provoking excerpts is Desert Places by Australian author Robyn Davidson who talked about the Raban nomads of the desert region of western India and how the loss of such nomadic tribes would be unnoticed by the outside world.

Also of note is Jan Morris’ short essay titled Mrs. Gupta Never Rang about the capitol city of New Delhi.  George Orwell’s contribution from Shooting an Elephant is a phenomenal essay on what being a “Sahib” entails.

Paul Scott’s excerpt is The Jewel in the Crown, about the British Raj experience. I’ll read his book The Raj Quartet sometime in the future. I’ll also read the full version of The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux.

Mark Twain of course, brings in the humor, not disrespectful, but hilarious by telling of his experience when interviewing prospective “bearers” a.k.a. manservants, who did, and did not, know English.

Not to be outdone by the others, Gore Vidal goes deep into a discussion of nirvana with a wandering Budda.

Recommendation: Yes, this was a fun and informative literary sampling.