August Blue by Deborah Levy

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 6, 2023

As a foster child, Ann Anderson was adopted by Arthur Goldstein, a famous piano teacher who lived near London. She has always refused to read her adoption file and does not know the identity of her biological parents. Arthur changed her first name to Elsa (her middle name is Miracle) and trained her until she attained critical acclaim as a concert pianist.

After dying her hair blue, Elsa messed up while playing Rachmaninov during a concert in Vienna. For two minutes and twelve seconds (a time frame that recurs throughout the novel), Elsa played something that was in her mind, not on the sheet music, something that one listener regarded as remarkable. Elsa then walked off the stage and fled to Greece, where the novel begins.

A woman who looks very much like Elsa purchases some small mechanical horses that Elsa wanted to buy. Elsa seems to have stolen the woman’s hat. Elsa believes she saw the same woman in London. She sees her again in Paris. The woman throws her cigar into Elsa’s drink and runs away. Elsa regards the woman as her psychic double. Could it be that Elsa is seeing herself? Is she seeing the mother who gave her up for adoption? Elsa doesn’t smoke cigars but a student tells her that she smells like cigar smoke. Maybe an English lit professor will read the book and explain it to me.

Elsa gives piano lessons to rich kids during the pandemic as she contemplates whether her career is over. She almost makes love in Greece with a man named Tomas but ultimately pushes him away. Elsa teaches piano to a mentally fragile girl of sixteen in Paris, returns to London, and finally reunites with Arthur on his deathbed in Sardinia, where he is being attended by a longtime friend who has always disliked Elsa. She finds the answers to some of her questions in Sardinia but realizes that her piano teacher has always given her the answers she needs.

While Elsa’s questions are to some extent answered, the reader’s are not. Elsa meets her doppelganger again — they chat and smoke cigars — but the woman’s identity remains a mystery. Elsa comes to wonder whether the woman is her opposite: knowing, sane, and wise, while Elsa is unknowing, crazy, and foolish. Yet they enjoy the same lip balm and both love pets. Whether the woman is real or imagined is presumably unimportant; her role is to force Elsa to think about who she is and who she might become.

I like Deborah Levy’s use of repeating rhythms in her prose, a technique that makes sense in the story of a musician. I like her riff on Montaigne’s “Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man may lay his head.” Elsa would prefer the comfort of ignorance (as do so many people who live in an alternate, fact-free reality), but she forces herself to confront truth before the novel ends. Just what that truth might be is a bit ambiguous, but at least she’s moving toward it. While the novel’s ambiguity is a bit much for me, the story is interesting and Levy’s prose is seductive.

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The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

Published simultaneously in Spanish and English; published in translation by Ballantine Books on June 6, 2023

The Wind Knows My Name tells the stories of three American immigrants who were forced to leave their homelands to escape oppression. A Jewish child who escaped from Austria in 1938 thrives in the US. A Salvadoran child who entered the US in 1969 makes a happy life for herself. During the pandemic, a child from El Salvador whose mother fled domestic violence is at risk of being deported. The story is a powerful reminder that America is shirking the role it once embraced as a sanctuary for those who are “yearning to be free.”

The novel begins with the stories of two children who survived attempts to exterminate their communities. Samuel Adler’s parents send him from Austria to Great Britain before they die in the Holocaust. Leticia Cordero is in a hospital, away from her village in El Salvador, when the village is destroyed by soldiers who believe that its inhabitants might be harboring insurgents. Her father, the lone survivor in her family, smuggles her into the US.

Samuel grows up to play the violin in the London Philharmonic, although his true love us jazz. On a visit to New Orleans, he meets the rebellious Nadine LeBlanc. They might not be a perfect fit, but she is the love of his life. They are together and apart at various stages of their lives, but Samuel explains that they “invested so much into our relationship that it was always worth saving.” The need to accept the inevitability of change is one of the novel’s themes.

As an adult, Leticia’s father and husband die within months of each other. A friend helps her begin a career as a cleaner.

The third set of principal characters includes Selena Durán, a social worker who deals with migrant children at the Mexican border. She recruits a prestigious law firm to help Anita Díaz, a blind child whose mother was denied asylum (the gunshot wound in her stomach wasn’t enough to prove her life was in danger). Anita is being held with other detained children while her lawyer, Frank Angileri, fights to win her asylum claim. Frank and Selena also search for Anita’s mother, who wasn’t officially deported but doesn’t seem to be in the country or in the refugee camps on the Mexican side of the border.

The lives of characters intersect as the novel progresses. Some fall in love. They cope with misfortune in different ways. Leticia smiles and rumbas and refuses to be gloomy. Anita has long talks with her dead sister.

The stories are tied together by the theme of oppression and survival. The Holocaust, the destruction of villages during the Salvadoran Civil War, the Maya genocide, the Salvadoran femicide, and the plight of refugees who are denied the right to make a case for entry into the US all contribute to that theme. These are big themes, but they are explored through the lens of small stories, personal stories, one way in which fiction distinguishes itself from history.

Perhaps connection is the novel’s strongest theme. Characters are connected by family bonds, shared experiences, and employment. Three characters who are not related to each other in any meaningful way eventually live together as a family, illustrating the changing nature of what the word “family” means. Samuel’s marriage to Nadine was long but unconventional; Selena resists the white-picket-fence domestic life that her fiancé envisions and might want a different kind of family.

Characters are also connected by shared values that so many Americans have lost, including the belief that the government should not separate families. As Selena remarks, too many Americans only value white children. Beginning with slavery, keeping nonwhite families intact has never been an American priority. It is nevertheless a priority to characters who are bonded by their shared experience of forced separation from parents.

Isabel Allende gives a fullness to her characters that should be expected from literary fiction. Samuel, near the end of his life, embraces the pandemic because it allows him “to distance himself from people he didn’t like and free himself from obligations that no longer interested him.” He disguises those standoffish traits with a façade of friendliness and a reputation for eccentricity that comes with his British accent. At the same time, Samuel is a compassionate man who is moved by the experiences of Leticia and Anita, experiences of being uprooted that parallel his own.

Although key characters are victimized by villainous people — human traffickers, men who rape and kill women — the villains are collateral characters in the story. The novel focuses on positive responses to evil rather than evildoers. This is a moving story about the things that should bring us together at a time when culture warriors strive to tear us apart. The Wind Knows My Name is a truly enriching novel that probably won’t be read by the people who would most benefit from its message

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Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on June 6, 2023

For fans of Siddhartha, Such Kindness is a modern retelling of a personal journey that allows a man to transcend suffering. The narrator achieves a kind of enlightenment by letting go of everything but love. Whether that’s possible is up to the reader (of either book) to decide.

Tom Lowe earned enough credits to acquire two bachelor’s degrees but never managed to graduate with one. That was fine. He was a skilled carpenter and earned a decent living remodeling houses. He was married to Ronnie and had a son named Drew. He wanted to give Ronnie everything but, by working so hard to pay for each day’s acquisitions, he failed to give her what she needed most.

Tom fell from a roof, fracturing his hips and pelvis. He let his insurance lapse shortly before the fall so he couldn’t cover his medical bills. Even before he fell, he was having trouble paying the mortgage. Dealing with excruciating pain, Tom became addicted to opioids, started feeling sorry for himself, and lost everything. Soon after the novel begins, Tom has no job, no car, no telephone, no regular contact with Drew. Even his laptop computer dies, cutting him off from the outside world.

Tom is not to blame for his misfortune. He didn’t ask to become disabled or addicted to pills. His wife could have honored their vows and been supportive instead of making the selfish decision to cheat on him with a man who isn’t disabled. At the same time, Tom knows he was a difficult husband, particularly after he got hooked on opioids. He was a bad father when he encouraged Drew to buy him more pills from a dealer. He’s perceptive enough to wonder whether he would have stayed with his wife if she had become an addict. Andre Dubus III paints Tom in a light that makes it possible for a reader to feel empathy with him while recognizing that his response to misfortune was not ideal.

Now Tom lives in a subsidized apartment near his former home in Cape Ann, a house he built with money he borrowed from a bank before he was subprimed into a foreclosure. He blames his lending officer, Mike Andrews, for talking him into an adjustable rate loan that was adjusted out of his ability to make payments. He blames his insurance company for not covering his medical bills after collecting premiums for years. He has three “revenge folders” on his laptop: banks, insurance, and Big Pharma.

Tom begins the novel with a scheme to steal Andrews’ credit card data, a plan concocted by his neighbor Trina. Trina has two kids from Hell, probably because she’s the mother from Hell. Tom needs money to pay traffic tickets and get his car out of impoundment. He doesn’t want to sell his tools — it would be like selling his penis — but he knows that turning to crime isn’t his best option. One of Tom’s redeeming features is his unwillingness to make money by hurting others, as does Trina’s friend Fitz, who makes money by stealing drugs from a hospital and selling them to addicts.

Tom and Trina’s friend Jamey later debate whether the ends justify the means (Jamey has been crapped on his whole life and feels he’s entitled to take something from credit card companies that can afford the loss). Tom quickly realizes he can’t be that kind of man, no matter how much he resents his banker. He doesn’t want Jamey to be that kind of man either.

The novel features several more conversations, as well as Tom’s introspective musings, about moral issues. Whether people who feel they are better than other people are just fooling themselves. Whether Tom’s reticence about interacting with the world makes him a taker rather than a giver. Whether parents are responsible for their adult children’s failings.

Before the novel’s midway point, after events seem to leave him with no hope at all, Tom has a multi-part epiphany. In part, regretting his disconnect from his adult son, he realizes that his feeling of uselessness as a father nearly killed his love of being a father — a feeling distinct from his love of his son, which never wavered. In part, he realizes that he’s become disconnected not just from his son, but from everything he cares about in the world. In part, he comes to realize that all the neighbors he’s been ignoring have value and that he doesn’t really listen to anyone. In part, he gives new thought to the old adage, “We have to play the hand God gave us.” In part, he comes to understand the need to let go of grievances and self-loathing.

And in large part, he realizes the importance of kindness — to strangers, even to himself. When he starts to notice them, he is surprised by and grateful for every random act of kindness he experiences — a nurse who helps him track down his son, a neighbor who shares a dessert, a beauty shop owner who lets him borrow her phone, a stranger who buys him a bagel. When a woman he barely knows wishes his son well, he is buoyed by the woman’s benevolence.

At times, his appreciation of kind acts seems almost feverish, an overreaction to abandoning the years in which he blamed other people “for the shitty hand I got dealt.” Because of those times, I was preparing myself to conclude that the story of Tom’s journey is just too hard to swallow, too divorced from reality. But by the novel's end, I couldn’t make myself be that cynical. I was sucked into Tom’s journey and ended the novel with nothing but admiration for someone who (believably or not) learns to transcend suffering.

As Tom begins to feel “broke but not so broken,” he gives extensive thought to the notion of happiness. His elderly neighbor tells him that it’s good to be happy, but we shouldn’t want to be happy every day. A physician’s assistant makes him believe that nothing can make someone happier than helping others. When a cop tells him that he should act his age, Tom wonders why others should expect him to want things he no longer regards as important — a job, an intact family, good health. Perhaps Tom is delusional as he thinks about Siddhartha and strives for the inner peace that (supposedly) comes from abandoning all desires, or perhaps he is on his way to Nirvana.

By the end of the novel, Tom is convinced that he can fix other people, make them understand his new perspective on life and use that perspective to find jobs, quit drugs, be better parents. It’s commendable that he wants to help and protect people, but he has clearly set for himself an impossible task. And yet, at the end, with his troubles arguably greater than they have ever been, Tom maintains a serenity that Siddhartha would recognize. It’s nice to imagine that such inner peace is a possibility. If it is, Such Kindness is a roadmap.

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The Siberia Job by Josh Haven

Published by Mysterious Press on June 6, 2023

The Siberia Job is less a crime novel than the story of business transactions undertaken in difficult circumstances. Because the story takes place in the Eastern European version of the Wild West — the transition from the fallen Soviet Union to unregulated capitalist markets — crime becomes integral to the plot.

While a work of fiction, the novel is based on real events. The story is wildly improbable but a forward suggests that the novel’s most improbable scenes are the closest to the truth. The forward also suggests that the rise of Russian oligarchs is associated with the “murder-y” methods that were used to acquire ownership of newly privatized companies.

When former Soviet companies privatized, their countries’ citizens were given vouchers that could be traded for shares of companies that were formerly owned by the government. Most people were happy to sell their vouchers for relatively small amounts of cash because cash is what they needed. When the day came to register the vouchers in meetings that were operated by the IMF, voucher owners received stock in the company in proportion to the percentage of total vouchers they registered.

One of the two protagonists, Petr Kovac, happens to meet John Mills in a London bar. Both men are young. Both have acquired some wealth and are looking to acquire more. Petr is a Czech national who bought up vouchers for Czech companies, used them to obtain stock, then sold the stock at a massive profit. John has experience with investment funds and is looking to start his own. He partners with Petr in a plan to purchase vouchers in Russia, using funds supplied by his investor contacts who buy into his new investment partnership.

The most profitable company they can acquire is a massive producer of oil and gas. The executives who run the company plan to acquire it for themselves. While those executives are trying to hold registration meetings on short notice in remote locations to deprive people of the chance to register their vouchers, John and Petr acquire inside information about the meetings. They travel to the area where the first meeting will be held, buy up all the vouchers they can find for American cash, and register the most vouchers at that meeting, much to the dismay of the company representatives who expected to be the only people registering vouchers.

Several more registration meetings are scheduled, sending John and Petr all around Russia in their quest to gather vouchers. They travel by train, bus, bush plane, and car — buying cars when necessary.  They rescue a cigarette girl who is about to be raped on a train ride, then hire her as a translator.

The three voucher buyers need to split up when three registration meetings are scheduled in distant locations on the same day. One of the men takes a dog sled to the most remote place where vouchers are being registered. The varied scenes of travel though the vast country are thoroughly engaging. This is as much a story of travel adventure as it is of crime and business.

The novel takes its subject seriously, but the story doesn’t lack humor. My favorite moment occurs when, to move a tank that is blocking the road to a small Siberian town where John needs to attend a voucher auction, John bribes the tank driver by arranging a lunch date in LA between the soldier and his favorite Playboy model.

The intriguing setup establishes the likable young characters and sets their adventure in motion. Neither Petr nor John are action heroes, although they find themselves being shot at and chased from time to time. They use their wits, contacts, and negotiating skills to avoid being murdered. The story’s roots in reality add intrigue, but Josh Haven scores a winner by telling the story with a light touch that suits the “truth is stranger than fiction” tone of the novel.

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The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry

Published by Atria Books on May 30, 2023

Spy novels are fundamentally about the betrayal of trust. The strategy of spying dictates that it is dangerous to trust. Yet spies must be trusted by their sources or the sources will not divulge valuable information. Determining the trustworthiness of sources and the information they provide is part of the espionage game. The Peacock and the Sparrow explores the difficulty of winning the game when spies base their assessment of trustworthiness on what politicians want to hear.

Shane Collins is an aging spy who has been posted to Bahrain. He is there in 2012, surrounded by rumors of the Arab Spring. Collins spends most of his time drinking, but he’s developed a source named Naqid. Collins trusts Naqid. The reader will wonder whether Collins is being played.

Collins’ head of station, Whitney Alden Mitchell, is the youngest station chief in CIA history. Mitchell has a strong sense of what his bosses want to hear. He specializes in giving them intelligence that makes them happy and assessing intelligence as unworthy of belief if his bosses won’t want to believe it.

Naqid is a member of “the opposition.” The opposition makes a nuisance of itself, throwing the occasional Molotov cocktail, as it protests the royals who govern Bahrain. There is good reason to protest the royals, as they have no regard for human rights. Yet the US supports them because the US perceives the enemy to be Iran and Bahrain is the enemy of that enemy. On the other hand, the opposition views westerners as infidels, despite Naqid’s apparent friendship with Collins.

A series of minor bombs near coffee shops frequented by Americans are blamed on the opposition. Mitchell has been told that the explosives were provided by Iran. Naqid tells Collins that the bombs were planted by the royals to win support from the Americans, including the lifting of sanctions so Bahrain can better respond to terrorist threats. Mitchell dismisses Naqid’s report because it isn’t what his bosses will want to hear. Could Naqid be telling the truth? Collins believes that what he’s saying makes a certain amount of sense.

The novel raises profound questions about whose side the US should take in the Middle East, or whether the US should be taking sides at all. Certainly, there’s truth in Naqid’s complaints that the ruling family suppresses dissenting voices and tortures prisoners, but the US is unreasonably tolerant of human rights violations that are committed by its allies. By the end of the story, it becomes clear that the opposition’s revolution will not be a favorable replacement for the ruling family. Sharia law is enforced overnight: assaults on liquor store owners, the imposition of strict dress codes, brothels burned, gay men shot, lawyers arrested. American expats who enjoyed cheap rent and cheaper sex are lining up to be evacuated. The CIA is shredding documents before the Embassy is overrun.

The plot follows Collins as he does some remarkably stupid things to assist Naqid, including dumping a dead body and picking up a package in Cambodia. Collins also continues a relationship with an artist named Almaisa after the CIA tells him she’s a security risk who needs to be kept at a distance. Why Collins makes such poor choices might be attributed to the fog of alcohol through which he perceives the world, although we don’t learn his true motivation for becoming the opposition’s courier until the novel’s end.

The Peacock and the Sparrow is unlike most spy novels in that the first-person narrator is not only unreliable but a poor excuse for a human being. Collins’ unreliability pertains to his inability to acknowledge his weaknesses. He drinks too much but denies his alcoholism. He justifies harmful acts by telling himself “I couldn’t have known.” He even asks himself, “What is knowledge?” Do we really know what we know? Collins indulges in philosophy to make his betrayals abstract and less important.

Collins’ first sexual encounter with Almaisa is pretty clearly a rape (he tears off her dress and apparently regards submission as consent) but, while he entertains a moment’s regret, he quickly convinces himself that he did nothing wrong. He meets women in brothels to confirm information he’s been given and, for no operational benefit, sleeps with them on the taxpayer’s dime. He punches Mitchell in the face, which clearly isn’t a wise career move. He tells himself he’s a good spy, but his tradecraft is lax (he doesn’t see a man who hits him on the head and robs him). He puts his hand on a gun that was used to shoot someone, one of several acts that potentially create incriminating evidence that could be used against him.

Collins’ paranoia seems to be sending him off the deep end. Is he being followed? Did someone break into his hotel room and search his luggage? Is Mitchell sleeping with Almaisa behind his back? All those things could be true, but they might be the alcohol-fueled imaginings of a mind that has lived too long in the darkness of espionage. The truth is not always clear, to either the reader or Collins, although most mysteries are resolved in the closing pages. A final twist sheds some light on who the novel’s greatest betrayer might be.

The novel builds tension as it nears its climax, particularly when Collins crosses borders and encounters checkpoints. Strong characterization is supported by observant prose and a grim but authentic sense of atmosphere in Bahrain and Cambodia. Collins isn’t likable but his messy life and dangerous liaisons are fascinating. The Peacock and the Sparrow is a skillful blend of history and fiction. It will certainly be among the best spy novels I’ll read this year.

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