The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai

First published in Great Britain in 2011; published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on December 6, 2011

The Artist of Disappearance consists of three long stories (billed as novellas).  Stories of this length deserve to be reviewed independently.

A young civil servant in training, stuck in the backwaters of India, must decide how to respond to a request for government support to preserve a private museum and its surprising collection of treasures.  Later in life, the man is occasionally troubled by self-doubt for reasons that the reader must intuit.  Apart from my appreciation of Anita Desai’s writing style, nothing about this story grabbed me.  “The Museum of Final Journeys” is my least favorite of the three.

In “Translator Translated,” a woman searches for her roots by relearning her childhood language and visiting the remote region where it is still spoken.  The lyrical work of a provincial writer inspires her to translate the text, but she finds its eventual publication to be less than the transformative experience she had imagined.  When the writer sends the translator a disappointing novel, the story explores the role of the translator:  should she be faithful to the original text or should she try to improve it, essentially becoming a co-author?  This is the best of the three stories.

“The Artist of Disappearance” starts as the story of a quiet life -- too quiet to be gripping.  Ravi, an adopted boy, raised to be rarely seen and never heard, becomes a reclusive adult, more comfortable in the wilderness than in the company of people.  The story gains energy when documentary makers, searching for environmental degradation, stumble upon the landscape art that Ravi has devoted himself to creating, a garden that has blossomed out of devastation.  But will Ravi’s work be desecrated if outsiders are permitted to gaze upon it?  The weak opening and a mediocre ending bracket excellent storytelling in the middle.

Anita Desai is unquestionably a fine writer.  She writes earnestly of people and their pain.  She paints characters with astonishing clarity.  For the most part, I admire her writing style, although I think she occasionally tries too hard to be eloquent, forcing words into contexts where they didn’t quite fit, sometimes indulging herself with unnecessary adverbs.  On the whole, however, her prose is a pleasure to read.

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Too Much Stuff by Don Bruns

Published by Oceanview on December 12, 2011

James and Skip, the two lads who founded More or Less Investigations, are hired to find a ton of gold that went missing in the Florida Keys during a hurricane in 1935. James and Skip are about as well equipped to handle investigations as Wayne and Garth (in fact, they often reminded me of Wayne and Garth), but the promise of earning a small fortune if they find the gold, not to mention the inducement of $1,000 in expense money, sends them on their way. The task will not prove easy; another pair of investigators, hired six month earlier, has disappeared. Of course, in their effort to find the buried treasure the young men uncover something far more sinister and find themselves surrounded by danger.

Too Much Stuff is a fun novel, more a comedy than a mystery/thriller. The mood is light, the characters amuse themselves with entertaining banter, and the plot has just enough goofiness to offset the traditional trappings of a PI story. This is a quick and easy read, a nice respite from thrillers that take their tough guy heroes too seriously.

James and Skip would never be described as tough; they're easy-going guys who don't carry guns or litter the landscape with corpses. In James and Skip, Don Bruns has created a pair of engaging characters: James has a way with the ladies while Skip can't believe he's lucky enough to have a girlfriend. James has a head full of movie trivia and frequently quotes his favorite lines of movie dialog while Skip tries to guess the source. Yes, that's been done before, but even if the use of film trivia is unoriginal, it adds to the novel's entertainment value.

Bruns writes in a breezy style that's well suited to the novel's subject matter. He creates a strong sense of place in the book's Florida Keys setting. A plot twist near the story's conclusion is a bit obvious -- it's hard to believe James and Skip couldn't figure out what was happening -- and the action-filled ending is wildly improbable, but it doesn't detract from the novel as a whole, provided you're willing to trade amusement for credibility.

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Murder in Mount Holly by Paul Theroux

First published in the UK in 1969; published by Mysterious Press on December 6, 2011

Originally published in Great Britain in 1969, Murder in Mount Holly is one of Paul Theroux’s early novels.  A prologue introduces its three main characters:  Herbie Gneiss, having unwillingly dropped out of college, must even less willingly find a job so he can support his gluttonous mother after his father’s death.  Mr. Gibbon is an aging veteran who walks around town carrying wrinkled paper bags when he’s not working in a war toy factory.  Miss Ball, a kindergarten teacher who collects products with catchy names, rents rooms in her house to Herbie and Gibbon so she’ll have extra money for the school janitor, with whom she’s having an affair.

“If you don’t laugh, you’ll go crazy,” says Herbie.  Murder in Mount Holly offers ample opportunity to increase your daily laughter quotient.  Theroux’s characters have ridiculous conversations, filled with non sequiturs and nonsense, and yet they all seem real, like recordings of conversations your near-deaf and slightly dotty grandparents might have with each other.  The older characters -- Gibbon, Ball, and Herbie’s mother -- are barely in touch with reality, living their lives in a past that never existed.  They are racially and religiously intolerant, wedded to political views that make Barry Goldwater seem like a pacifist.  To prove that they “still have a lot of spunk left,” they turn to crime, somehow justifying their scheme as a blow against communism.  It’s no surprise that things go wrong from the very start.  Meanwhile, Herbie gets his draft notice.  The old folks are delighted; whether he comes home is less important than their familiarity with someone who has been called to battle the communist menace.

If the story seems a bit dated, if Theroux’s targets seem too obvious, if the novel is less substantial than Theroux’s later work, the humor that inheres in his eccentric characters and absurd dialog endures, in the way that old Woody Allen comedies will always be funny.  I recommend Murder in Mount Holly to fans of offbeat comedy for that reason.

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Collateral Damage by H. Terrell Griffin

Published by Oceanview on December 5, 2011

Trouble surrounds Matt Royal despite his residence in paradise. It seems that Florida's Longboat Key isn't paradisiacal for everyone. A young man is shot by a sniper while he's walking on the beach near the Hilton, just a day after his wedding. Then a dinner boat runs aground after nearly colliding with Royal's boat. Then the bodies of two more murder victims are discovered, both of whom had been passengers on the dinner boat. When a town resident is killed, it looks like a serial killer has invaded paradise. The killings aren't connected in any obvious way, leaving Royal's friend, Detective J.D. Duncan, without any obvious hope of solving the crimes. When a former soldier from Royal's past shows up, the father of one of the victims, Royal joins the search for the elusive killer. Every now and then another death occurs, leaving the reader, like Royal, to puzzle out the connection that links the murders.

Some aspects of the plot are hard to accept. Royal is a retired lawyer. The victim's father wants Royal to start a lawsuit -- against whom, he's not sure -- to help gather information against the murderer of his son. It's difficult to believe that the police would willingly hand over their investigative file to him; giving open files concerning recent unsolved murders to private lawyers just isn't done. If you can suspend your disbelief in that regard, however, the story that follows is entertaining. It isn't particularly credible but that's standard for a thriller, and it's not much more difficult to believe than some newspaper stories.

The need to suspend disbelief isn't limited to the plot. One of the characters -- a waitress -- is the typical part-time computer hacker; a couple of community college computer courses and she can hack into airline and bank records, not to mention databases maintained by rental car, credit card, and telephone companies. Another character works for a double secret American intelligence agency. Royal's convenient friendships with people who can instantly access any information he needs is good for plot development but not so good for verisimilitude.

The investigation sends Royal down several blind alleys, all in a reasonably effective attempt to keep the reader guessing. An interesting plot twist occurs when Royal begins to wonder whether he can trust the quasi-romantic interest in his life. The solution to the complex puzzle -- the link that binds the murders -- is interesting although I had the feeling I was reading plotlines recycled from other thrillers and mashed together in an attempt to create something new.

While Royal engages in the occasional episode of hand-to-hand combat, he has a more fully developed personality than the standard tough guy character. Someone during the course of the novel accuses Royal of being a philosopher. He's no Aristotle, but he's capable of subtle thought, a trait often lacking in fictional tough guy heroes.  All the characters -- even the minor ones -- are refreshingly intelligent.

H. Terrell Griffin writes vividly, if not originally, about Royal's service as a Green Beret in Vietnam. His writing style in general is fluid, tight, and cliché-free. He blends action and exposition effectively, although the story is a bit exposition-heavy toward the end.

Collateral Damage is the sixth Matt Royal novel but the first I've read. It likely won't be the last.

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Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov

First published in Russian in 2002; published in translation by Melville House on September 27, 2011

When we last saw Viktor Zolotaryov (at the end of Death and the Penguin), he was fleeing the crime syndicate that threatened his life, leaving Misha, his penguin, in an animal hospital in Kiev. Now on an island near Antarctica, Viktor is offered the opportunity to adopt a new identity. Returning to Kiev, the melancholy with which he was afflicted in Death and the Penguin is replaced, at least temporarily, with "a cheerful touch of mystery," largely the result of a happy encounter with a part-time prostitute named Svetlana. Still, the murder of his former editor reminds him that "every story must end at a full stop, and none bolder or more final than that of death."

Viktor's search for Misha brings him back into contact with some shady characters. Even worse, he becomes a political consultant, a job that gives Andrey Kurkov the chance to lampoon politicians, their image makers, empty promises, and hypocrisy. Fans of cynicism will find much to love in this novel, but so will fans of humanity. The tender relationship that Viktor established with a little girl, Sonya, in Death and the Penguin continues in Penguin Lost, but Viktor's time in Kiev is limited. Soon he is off to Moscow, on three missions: one for the man whose identity he borrowed; one for his political employer; and most importantly, one of his own -- his search for Misha. Viktor will do almost anything to recover Misha, but does that include traveling to Chechnya?

The Russia and Ukraine that Kurkov describes are full of problems and (as one of the characters advises us) woefully short of individuals who are capable of solving them. The characters in Kurkov's novels are resigned to their dismal fates, but they persevere in their grim lives -- even Misha. Viktor endures his trouble-filled life yet always retains a faint hope that something better might come along; a hint of optimism flickers throughout the story as Viktor ponders the nature of fate.

Of course, there is always the chance that what comes along next will be death, but death might not be so bad. Viktor finds something enviable in the death of fisherman whose frozen body he finds on a lake; he deems the man "worthy of respect, though, not having known him, he could not say in what particulars." The comment is typical of Kurkov; respect for the living and for the dead who surround them is inherent in his work.

The story Kurkov tells is odd (the supposedly dead don't always stay dead in Penguin Lost), filled with strange twists and unexpected turns, but in Kurkov's view, life in Ukraine and Russia (and particularly Chechnya) is odd. "The absurd here was amazingly real," Kurkov writes. "Life here was ruled by it." The absurd is more real than Viktor's life; in his isolation, "noticed by too few to feel real himself," he wonders if he even exists. He wants to feel something, to recover himself, but only in rare moments does he feel empowered to control his own destiny. Fortunately, if there is one thing that can be counted upon in a dismal world, it is a man's love for his penguin.

Kurkov balances the story's darkness with light touches, comic moments that provide relief from the gloom. Of course, political corruption is always good for a laugh, and any scene centering on a penguin is bound to provoke a smile. Reading Kurkov's short chapters is like eating tasty snacks -- they're easy to devour and it's difficult to stop.

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