Brief Mention: Volume Two of LADY JOKER from Kaoru Takamura Has Released

Were you (are you still?) a Godfather fan as all the books came out? Do you love long novels that probe history, culture, and crime? Have a special interest in Japan, with its sharp differences from Western life?

Great! LADY JOKER by Kaoru Takamura is meant for you ... and will keep your bedside table occupied for months ahead.

The first volume of this sprawling epic, which Takamura builds from a real unsolved kidnapping case that took over Japanese news for two years, was released in the US by Soho Press in May 2021 under its Soho Crime imprint. At 576 pages, in small type with narrow page margins, it marked a return to "long publishing" intended for committed readers. The characters and plot twists are compelling -- so Volume 2, which came out a couple of weeks ago (588 pages!), provides the delight and relief of bringing the story to its cynical and thrilling conclusion.

Here's a sample from Goda's investigation in Volume 2:

He didn't feel like hearing Hirase's voice, so Goda jotted down on a blank report—Attn: Sergeant Hirase. Anonymous tip-off call to my residence at 11:50 p.m. Male caller. "I'm giving you the telephone number being used for contact between Hinode and LJ." The number reported is as follows: 3751-921 ... Signed, Goda—and faxed it to Special Investigation Headquarters.

Only after he looked back at the page that he had just sent did Goda realize that he recognized the 3751 exchange because it fell within his precinct's jurisdiction.

Or this, from the viewpoint of Monoi:

He gazed at the girl's peaceful face muscles relaxed in sleep. The fiend was still murmuring inside his belly, but even that gradually came to sound more like the meaningless chant of a sutra, and Monoi tried convincing himself at last—I no longer need an escape. Now I would rather stay a fiend until I die. I must remain a fiend.

As you can see, translators Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell do a masterful job of bringing the novel into English, without losing the flavor of Japan. Mark off time to read this pair ... or spend your entire winter walking with the crime and investigation in all their haunting flavor.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Brief Mention: Deluxe Edition of THE THIEF by Fuminoro Nakamura

THE THIEF is a remarkable work of crime fiction built on postmodern narrative, issued by Soho Crime as a powerful translation from the Japanese by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates. Our review from 2012 is here.

Now Soho Crime (an imprint of Soho Press) has reissued THE THIEF in a deluxe edition that includes a new introduction by Duane Swierczynski to put this thriller into perspective. There's also an afterword by the author to mark this 10-year retrospective.

If you're intrigued by how crime fiction maneuvers across language and culture, this edition definitely belongs on your shelf.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

CLARK AND DIVISION, a World War II/Chicago Crime Novel from Naomi Hirahara

It's hard to face some of the nastiest tragedies of wartime. That's a good reason for historical fiction — it gives us vision through the eyes of someone we care about, without having to endure the burden of grief and rage that nonfiction reporting often conveys.

Naomi Hirahara's new crime novel CLARK AND DIVISION (to be released by Soho Crime on August 3) provides a well-told crime narrative, as 20-year-old Aki Ito delves into the short life and recent death of her older sister. The Ito family arrived in Chicago during World War II in stages: first Rose, the beautiful and confident older sister, in autumn 1943, then then Aki and their parents, a few months into the new year of 1944. But the night before the family's arrival, Rose died in a train accident, presumed suicide, and this tragedy knocks them out of hope and into despair.

They hadn't even had time to get accustomed to hope, really. As Japanese-born individuals, Aki's parents were targeted right after the Pearl Harbor attack, and with their daughters they'd subsisted in the rough cold life of the desert location called Manzanar. Their business, their home, their belongings, nearly everything was stripped from them. Arrival in Chicago was supposed to give them a chance for a new start. And instead, it seemed it would destroy them.

But in a meeting with the coroner, who tells her bluntly that her older sister had an abortion a couple of weeks before her death, Aki steps unexpectedly out of her culturally instilled roles and speaks up:

"You have made a mistake," I said. My declaration surprised even me. I usually would not tell any authority figure, especially a hakujin man, that he was wrong. Why was he mentioning an unspeakable criminal procedure like an abortion wen my sister was dead. "A train ran over her." ... My sister didn't kill herself. Not on the day before we were coming to Chicago.

The coroner looked at me silently, and I knew what he was communicating. She had taken her life because we were coming—probably out of shame for her situation.

"Rose wouldn't do that."

Aki's conviction drives her to investigate Rose's life as well as death, a slow process since she's also got to handle earning a living and taking care of her devastated parents. But Chicago is riddled with crime, gangs, and the kind of prostitution that depends on half-starved immigrant women. Aki may be right. 

Hirahara's crime exposition works well, and Aki's investigation operates with alternating success and barriers. The closer she gets to solving her sister's murder (and it is indeed murder), though, the more danger she's in, herself. Plus she's depending on others, from American-born Japanese to other kinds of Americans, to assist her in the doubly strange new world she's entered.

Hirahara's earlier publications include two mystery series, as well as nonfiction books including Life After Manzanar. A hint of stiffness in the text gives the feel of translated work, which this clearly isn't -- but perhaps the author struggled at times to translate the emotional impact of Manzanar and persistent anti-Asian attacks into another time, and bring them back to us. It's a forgivable struggle, very understandable. 

The greatest delight of reading CLARK AND DIVISION (the title refers to a street district in Chicago) is stepping inside the mind and heart of the "other," as Aki Ito begins to determine what it is to be a Japanese American in a bold new world. Hirahara's given a protagonist who'll feel more like a friend by the end of the book, a route to insight and refreshed experience for her readers.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Brief Mention: LADY JOKER, Volume 1 of Kaoru Takamura's Japanese Crime Epic

LADY JOKER came out in mid April with many thoughtful reviews. At 576 pages, it's far from beach reading. Even the reviews have been on the long side -- really, they have to be. One of the most enjoyable articles on the book's release from Soho Press is this interview with editor and publisher (and author) Juliet Grames, full of its own twists. From the true-crime basis of the three-volume epic (the Glico-Morinaga case of the 1980s) to the challenges of translation, the interview itself is compelling.

Though LADY JOKER is a suspense novel and came out under the Soho Crime imprint, it also fits two other notable descriptions: It's obviously the Japanese version of the Godfather series, rich with the frictions of Japan's own caste system and the criminal temptations of corporate greed and advantage, framed around a high-stakes kidnapping. And it's a scorching indictment of capitalist manipulations of both government and society—one that could as easily apply to America or today's Russia as it does to Japan. If the love of money is the root of evil, Kaoru Takamura's portrait of the postwar profiteering and manipulations of the Hinode Beer Co. shows five decades of festering injustice, evil, and eventually manipulative and ruthless violence.

This book requires slow, persistent reading, as it's not constructed with "thriller" props or passionate emotions. But for those who savor the view of our global perils through the lens of all-too-human history, it's a dark treasure well worth the time for reading.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Mass Killings, Cultural Collapse, or Just Murder ... in CULT X from Fuminori Nakamura

Japanese noir can finger the dark and dangerous side of urban life deftly -- a long-term slide from the twists of culture and despair that William Gibson's Neuromancer laid out for us in (the real) 1984. It's the obverse of the playful simplicity of manga's wide-eyed images. And because Japan's imperial drive toward domination remains bottled up inside today's imposed regimen of gun scarcity and forbidden military action, there's an aspect of sharpening blades for action that can be terrifying.

Fuminori Nakamura (the pen name of a Tokyo author) showed in The Gun his capacity for binding emotions around a small symbol until the pressure to act -- and act violently -- can't be restrained. In his newest novel, CULT X, set for release by Soho Press on May 22, he's chosen to probe an appalling moment of recent Japanese history: the 1995 sarin subway attack in Tokyo. That attack was the second to rip news headlines, preceded by the 1994 sarin poisoning that took place in Matsumoto City, Japan.

As in his earlier work, Nakamura moves toward the criminal actions in increments rooted in damaged lives.  Toru Narazaki can hardly believe it when he learns that the woman who disappeared from his life -- hinting at suicide -- has been seen alive. His desire to rediscover this woman, Ryoko Tachibana, pulls him out of his ordinary life, into exploration of what he thinks at first is a religious retreat group. The sleuth who's informed him that Ryoko is alive gives us a window into Narazaki's soul as he reflects that Narazaki "looked like he'd lost something he needed to go on living. Yet his gaze was terribly powerful, and had a strange radiance."

It's hunger and necessity gleaming at the surface of a life that's been ordinary until now. In fact, when Narazaki first visits the retreat building pointed out to him, and a middle-aged woman's voice inquires who he is, his reply is revelatory:

"My name's Toru Narazaki. I'm ... I'm not really anyone."

Although he's unaware of the force of his desire, Narazaki presses forward, trying to find Ryoko and make sense of her abrupt departure from his life. Long before he locates her, though, he's trapped in the power of his own longing for attention, sex, human contact in the most basic and childlike (although orgasmic) ways. His quest thus originates from almost pure physicality -- the exact opposite of what he'd imagined a religious process would involve.

It's not long before Narazaki realizes there are double undercurrents to what he's experiencing. On one hand, he's welcomed into a cult that's based in both philosophy and modern physics, with an engaging lecturer for its revered leader. And on the other, he's made himself into an ideal victim for the cult's enemies.

Sorting this into waves of external action, the book twists adeptly toward a horror-laden plot of mass destruction. Is Fuminori Nakamura suggesting that Japan's soul is a match to this protagonist's? I dread the notion, as the missing woman finally appears to greet the seeker, and Narazaki is intensely humiliated by the way she finds him:

When reality ultimately punctured one corner of his consciousness, the violence of his desires came rushing out. That's why I came here, Narazaki thought. To make my own real life seem like a fantasy. Out of contempt for my life ... No, contempt for the real world. But Narazaki couldn't say that to Tachibana. [...] Why am I like this? Why is my body like this? Narazaki's eyes began to tear up -- tears no one could sympathize with. Anger rose up to replace his embarrassment -- ugly, inappropriate anger.

Is that why the sarin poisonings took place? Out of an ugly anger rooted in abiding humiliation? In that case, what does the suspense here threaten, for all of us?

CULT X is a dark crime novel, published by Soho Crime (Soho Press). But it's also, like Nakamura's earlier books, a deliberate and painful fingering of old and new wounds. Horrifying, yes -- but worth confronting.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

 

Can a Murder Mystery Be Tender? Yes, with RAINBIRDS by Clarissa Goenawan

Soho Crime has just added to its Japanese mysteries by publishing the debut novel of Clarissa Goenawan, RAINBIRDS. It couldn't be much more different from the work of Fuminori Nakamura, whose spare, literary noir with crime twists (also from Soho Crime) comes with both power and significant darkness -- instead, Goenawan (born in Indonesia, now living in Singapore) has taken the formalized and gender-forced culture of Japan and embedded in it a work of deep tenderness and ardent storytelling.

The young man who narrates RAINBIRDS is named Ren Ishida; he is about to take his graduate degree in English literature when he gets word that his sister Keiko, whom he hasn't seen in years, is a murder victim, stabbed in the street on a rainy night in a small city quite distant from the siblings' original home in Tokyo. Since he's not needed in Tokyo -- his grad work is all done except for the final ceremony -- he races off to the scene of Keiko's death. And, in a quirky follow-up to the mystery of her life of the past few years, he agrees to temporarily take on her duties teaching English at a cram school. Will he discover who his sister was and why she was killed?

Goenawan clearly has written her own English language here -- no translator involved -- but there is a slight stiltedness to the prose that reminds me of well-done translations from the Japanese. I suspect this also reflects a difference in how a Pacific-Rim novel described different levels of thought and action, in contrast to an American or British one. Here's a sample from one of the more moving moments of RAINBIRDS, when Ren leaves his unexpected housing in the middle of the night to experience what his sister might have, at the same time of night, in the park where she was murdered:

I lay down on the ground, panting. The rain hit my face, but I stayed still and closed my eyes. All I could hear was the sound of rain.

My sister should have been able to guess nobody would come in this kind of weather. She would have known she was about to die. What was on her mind in those final minutes?  Had she thought about Mr. Tsuda, or the guy she had gone out with in Akakawa? Had she thought about me?

Since the day my sister had left Tokyo, I'd hoped for her return, but I'd never told her that. Had I been too proud, or too indifferent? If I'd asked her to come back, would she still be alive?

I clenched my fists. No use asking myself that now -- no answer would bring her back. The day my sister died, a part of me died, too.

Ren's continued probing of his sister's murder will give him a fresh view of who she was and what the relationship between the two of them, stranded by their embattled parents, had really, meant. At the same time, he questions his own behaviors -- perhaps very Japanese ones in terms of having sex with prostitutes and casual partners for one-night stands, but also his inability to commit to the woman who wants to marry him.

I would certainly read another book from Goenawan, and wonder whether the Japanese feel of her writing would continue if she places future novels in other locations, or whether it is somehow part of her personal style. Mystery readers who feel strongly about the conventions of the genre may not be happy with the way RAINBIRDS carves out its terrain. But those who already enjoy Asian literature (including work by Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami) and those accustomed to the genre bending that takes place in modern noir work will find themselves unexpectedly at home in this less dark, yet self-inquiring, work. Released today by Soho Crime (Soho Press).

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Japanese Noir, Painted in Precise Detail, from Fuminori Nakamura

The newest "Japanese noir" crime novel to arrive in the US from Fuminori Nakamura, THE BOY IN THE EARTH, begins as a slow, precise meditation by the protagonist (an unnamed Tokyo taxi driver who narrates all of the book), as he releases himself into being beaten and perhaps killed by a gang of motorcycle riders whose antagonism he has deliberately sought. Sentence by sentence, we sink with him into a crystalline awareness of the situation:

If they kept kicking me, if they beat me to a pulp, I might vanish into nothing, I might be absorbed by the earth, deep underground. It was terrifying. I felt robbed of my strength, and my heart raced painfully, although the twitching that ran up and down my spine was not unpleasant. Little by little, this fearful trembling was transforming into something else entirely, like a feeling of anticipation. Despite my terror, there was the definite sensation that I was patiently standing by. I experienced a moment of skepticism, but then it no longer mattered.

These precise details of sensation and taste-tested emotion make up an intricate portrait in motion, perhaps a dance -- each movement wrapped in hesitation and conflicted emotion and thought.

Our narrator, we soon realize, is an orphan -- or at least grew up in an orphanage, but also had devastating experiences in foster care. As if we were inside the core of a sociopath, a character on "Criminal Minds," an unfathomable criminal from yesterday's newspaper, we share the shiver of both disgust and realization.

So it is that this very short novel -- 147 pages as translated by Allison Markin Powell and published by Soho Crime -- blossoms in parallel to one of Nakamura's earlier meditations on crime, The Gun. Nakamura presents the small sharp fragments of injury that lead to a mind or soul ready to perform extreme acts. What THE BOY IN THE EARTH offers that differentiates it, though, is the delicate and repeated experience of holding back from action -- what the 12-stepper recognizes perhaps as "looking through the glass" to experience a moment of the future before taking a step in the present.

I found myself caught up in the dance of language and the intimate actions of the book. Dark, yes, and twisted, and deeply sad -- but it's also a book I'd recommend to adventurous readers who appreciate art and insight. There's nothing ordinary about it at all. And that, in the long run, becomes a remarkable experience in crime fiction.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

One "Thriller," Two Views: If You're Interested in Comparing Reviews of Nakamura's Latest Noir

Today's New York Times Book Review section is crammed with "thriller" reviews. I'm not convinced about the label -- some of the reviews in here are standard-genre mysteries, to my way of thinking -- but I surely enjoyed spending my Sunday morning browsing the opinions expressed, including a review by Lee Child (!). Fun idea for a summer surprise issue.

When I'm considering writing about a mystery, I almost never look at any reviews before I've written my own. And afterward, of course, I'm usually on my way to the next book, so there isn't time to compare. But I noticed this review by author Jan Stuart of Fuminori Nakamura's newest Japanese noir, The Kingdom, which I'd already reviewed back in early June, so I took time to think about the difference in review approaches.

Stuart focuses on summarizing the plot of the book but doesn't seem to much like it. (Look at the last line of that review, in particular: "Much like its alternately victimized and victimizing antiheroine, “The Kingdom” pins the reader in the cross hairs of bullets and bombast.")

I wasn't happy about reading Nakamura's work at first, and if it hadn't been brought to the American market by one of my favorite publishers, Soho Press, I probably would not have persevered. But with time, and having read several by now, I've decided that for me, Nakamura's fiction confronts global violence in necessary ways. The Gun is his most obvious effort at this, but The Kingdom also fingers personal violence, the kind that's manipulative and mean and even the verbal kind that we associate with bullies and sometimes politics.

Because I write "historically hinged" fiction myself, I read a lot of scholarly history -- and then enjoy diverting into really good historical fiction, where the action comes alive and the crises are emotional. In the same way, in an era when crime haunts all news channels and Presidential campaigns, it's a treat to dip into the emotionally potent storytelling of Nakamura's books. Count me in for the next one, too.

Empowering the Crime Fiction Genre: Fuminori Nakamura #10

A reviewer in one of this morning's powerful newspapers made the casual assumption that thrillers, a plot-driven subgenre of the mystery field, are written (like other mysteries) to provide escape time for readers. With Fuminori Nakamura's newest crime novel in mind, THE KINGDOM, that's simply not the case.

Instead, consider Dostoevsky's powerful novel The Brothers Karamazov  -- which could be described as driven by a plot involving patricide, the world-shaking killing of father by child. Amid all the twists of the book, the author's philosophizing (spoken by the characters) pounds against the soul like an ocean on a beach. Well, pardon the dramatic metaphor, but over and over, in THE KINGDOM, I thought of Dostoevsky.

The book's first-person narrative comes from Yurika, a professional prostitute in Tokyo's underworld (a career choice that won't surprise readers of Nakamura's earlier books). Not only is she soliciting men to have sex with her -- she's working for a mysterious organization that pays her to drug them men, set up items around their naked bodies (sometimes she is one of the items), and photograph them, obviously for the sake of power via blackmail. Yurika (dare we guess that the sound of her name, spoken aloud, is signaling something?) gets off on the vulnerability she creates through these stagings. But she's not clear on who actually is hiring her, to the point where she may even have created one or more stagings in opposition to her real bosses. Uh-oh.

When her own past suddenly takes center stage, she's trapped and frantic. And despite her logical reaction of terror and desire to escape, she's pinned ... and listening, against her will, to a very disturbing man she calls (whether it's his real name or not) Kizaki:

Kizaki moved his hand slightly.

"Let's say there is a man on the bed in a love hotel in Ikebukuro, and you stab him straight through the chest."

I focused on my nerves and maintained my smile. I'm sure he was saying on it purpose, but he didn't show it at all.

"Just staring cruelly at that man as he suffers from the wound is boring. Smiling while you watch him suffer, that's boring, too. You must feel what he feels. ... keep stabbing. Deeper. Deeper. Then, both the overwhelming, cruel joy of destroying a life and the warm feeling of sympathizing with that life will seep through you. ... those feelings will go beyond human capacity, and keep rising up forever. Like a whirlpool. What's important is to leave nothing unappreciated. It's great. That moment."

Kizaki reached out and suddenly grabbed the neck of the woman next to him.

The meshing of violence, sex, and an insistent pornographic attention to inner feelings places THE KINGDOM in a stance that may explain, for instance, the steady TV contracts to shows like Criminal Minds and books like The Silence of the Lambs. This is the inside-out of crime fiction: not the heroic stance of the crime solver, but the obsessive drive of the most twisted and potent of criminals, and the desire to watch.

And yet. Yurika is more than her paid work, and more than her trembling, half-exhilarated shock at what confronts her. Emerging from her isolation as a child orphan and then as an adult working in the most despised ways, she expresses a longing for something "other." She asks of herself, "What tide was I being tossed around by? Who or what had I betrayed? What had I escaped from?"

In this tenth of his crime novels, Nakamura presses more directly than ever on the dark side of urban lives, from Tokyo to its shadowed mirror in urban America. Wisely, he keeps the plot direct, clear, and compact -- THE KINGDOM wraps up at 212 pages -- and provides a classic in the making.

Obviously, if the violence and darkness repel you, don't read this one. But if you can bear walking through the book as a "watcher" of what Nakamura presents, then this book is well worth reading and owning. I'll be re-reading this and other Nakamura crime novels, for sure. Once again, Soho Crime proves that the "mystery genre" is far wider and more diverse than any casual assumptions might suggest.

Just make sure there's room in your schedule for recovery from this highly purposeful journey into darkness.

Dark, Compelling, Insistent: THE GUN, Fuminori Nakamura

When a culture completely bans private possession of an item, does its value rise? Does its presence generate a fascination that will lead to obsession and deadly results?

On the surface, the intense and unavoidable map of Fuminori Nakamura's college-student protagonist in THE GUN says exactly that. In the midst of an unremarkable and boring life, where classes are easy to sleep through or avoid and the biggest challenge is getting laid with new women on a regular basis, this student, Nishikawa, suffers the accident of finding a gun next to a dead man under a bridge. When he yields to impulse and seizes the weapon for himself, in Japan's gun-empty climate, he moves from ordinary to extraordinary in one swift choice.

From here, the movement of the plot zigzags between suspense -- how will the student keep his discovery private, how will it overtake his mind, who may intrude on his private world and challenge his possession -- and inevitability: when will he yield also to the gun's own design and purpose and choose to fire it, and at what? Where? Why?

It sounds almost simple as a premise. But the steady pounding of the existential narrative acquires, in Nakamura's hands, a frightening force. At the same time, the gun itself becomes a love interest, far more possessive than the women weeping and having hook-up sex with the young man.

This is actually Nakamura's prize-winning debut novel, although Soho Crime released three of his others in earlier translations: The Thief, Last Winter We Parted, and Evil and the Mask. It's not clear why this one was delayed. But it has the force of many a debut novel, where the press of a contract hasn't yet forced the author to hurry -- each phrase, each scene cuts a precise step toward the book's conclusion.

Beyond the premise of a machine that begs for being used as designed is another layer of cultural critique, as the author makes it clear that Nishikawa associates the gun with America: a place where life involves more surprise and variety, at least on the surface, than in Japan. Tickling at the edge of this awareness is a lecture given by his professor:

"What is so powerful about American culture" -- he got this far and then sneezed once, loudly -- "however, is America's diversity itself. The Americanization of Japan is nothing new, but I would hate to think that it demonstrates a scarcity of Japanese culture. Yet the longing for American culture has existed since our defeat in the war up through the present day . . ."

Nishikawa's only half listening to the professor -- his thoughts are already wound around his secret possession. "I led a boring life. It stood to reason that the gun would act as a stimulant within such tedium. ... I could think only of it causing injury, of destroying life; it had been created expressly so that a person could commit such deeds."

The gun becomes a symbol for more than cruelty, more than precise intent: It carries away the possibility of sane and loving life in community.

I live in a gun-welcoming culture, in rural Vermont, where a gun is hardly more lethal, and no more focused on cruelty, than a pipe wrench. (You probably don't want the gruesome details of what happened near here with a pipe wrench a couple of years ago.) It's more complicated than that here, though -- you can't access a "long gun" (at least, for legal use) until you acquire a certain age or standing (such as taking a hunter safety class, in order to get your deer hunting license), and for many youngsters, receiving a gun of their own is as potent a sign of "adulthood" as a first beer or a car.

And I don't for a moment believe that the device itself turns someone into a killer. Nor do I think Nakamura is proposing that ... although the steady poisoning of his student's mind is fully believable.

But I do think the role of firearms is one of the crucial results of the difference between Japan's island-based culture and the American "Manifest Destiny" and wildlands. A small personal story here: A couple of decades ago, my teenaged sons and I enjoyed our first Japanese student guests in our home. I think it was the second one who, upon arrival, looked around the cozy country kitchen with fear and asked, "Where are the guns?" When we said we didn't have any, he asked, with even more fear, "Will there be guns at school on Monday?" Looking back, our quick response of "No, of course not!" was naive and innocent -- the dailiness of gun killings in 2015 has been one of the most terrible shocks of the year. We could have seen it coming.

No, THE GUN isn't a cultural critique. It's a short, intense work of suspense and increasing madness, really. It moves with long paragraphs, little dialogue, a constant first-person view without much inner forethought, and with a rising tide of horror. Framing it around "the student" places it parallel to The Little Prince and several works of French and German philosophy-in-fiction. It's a good read (if you can handle "noir").

But it's also more than that. I tip my hat to Soho Crime for providing it (release date is January 5). And of course to the author.

THE GUN is a book I'll never forget. What I'll do with that, I'm not quite sure. Yet.