2019 Reading: Fiction Part 3

Okay, this should be the last of the fiction.

41.  An Elderly Lady is up to No Good, by Helene Tursten.  "No good" doesn't begin to describe it!   Maud is 88, living in a fabulous, rent-free apartment, which some no-goodniks would like to get their hands on.  Maud takes care of them, all right.  Great fun.

42.  Fiori sopra l'inferno, by Ilaria Tuti.   A thriller set in a small town in Italy, close to the Austrian border.   Teresa Battaglia is sent to Travenì to investigate a series of gruesome murders and mutilations.  She has to work with a rather arrogant, much younger cop, and contend with a village that would rather not know and would rather not have the outside world know it.   The narrative goes back and forth between the present, and events in an orphanage years earlier.   The end is heart-rending.

43.  Fox, by Dubravka Ugresic.  The fox is a trickster, a shapeshifter, and so is this book.  Hard to describe its mix of fiction and history, invented characters and real people, its story told in several section jumping to different parts of the world.  What's true and what's false?  It's not an easy book, but it's worth the effort.

44.  The Willow Pattern, by Robert van Gulik.  A Judge Dee story, with plague and murders.  
45.  Sperando che il mondo mi chiami, by Mariafrancesca Venturo.   The title is a bit of a pun.  Carolina comes from a family of teachers, and is herself what we call in the States a substitute teacher.   It's really hard to get a full-time position, and to get a temporary one, you have to be constantly on call and nearby.  (You'll learn a lot about the Italian educational system and what it's like to be a teacher there from this book.)  Carolina loves her work, and she has an amazing ability to establish rapport and understanding with her young charges, even when she's there a very short time.  Her desire to figure out what's best for them and what's best for her is what drives the plot.  Secondary characters are drawn really well.  We understand her close connection with her grandmother, for instance, and her need to help a student in distress.  The book does not appear to have translated into English (yet), which is a shame.

46.  Little Novels of Sicily, by Giovanni Verga, translated by D.H. Lawrence.  More short stories than novellas, this volume includes the story on which the opera, Cavalleria Rusticana, was based, though there's a whole lot more to it.   The stories reveal the lives of rural Sicilian peasants, corrupt clergy, and greedy landowners.   

47.  The Sole Survivor, and the Kynsard Affair, by Roy Vickers.  Two, two, two mints in one!  Okay, two stories in the same volume.   In the first, a group of men are stranded on an island following a shipwreck.  One survives.  What happened to the rest?   Some were clearly murdered, but the last might have been a suicide.  A judicial inquiry may or may not reveal the truth.  In the second, the question is, who has been killed?  A naked corpse is discovered, and there are two possible victims.  Or are the women one and the same?

48.  Cakes for Your Birthday: a criminal extravagance, by C. E. Vulliamy.  The Liquidation Committee decides to perform a public service, and rid their town of a nasty, malicious, slander-slinging biddy. The chair, a retired headmaster, and his younger accomplices, take advice from a dahlia-loving professional hit man. Things go wrong. 

49.  The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner, by Giles Waterfield.  Oh, funny!  A a satire on what goes on behind the scenes in museums, covering twenty-four hours in the run-up to the gala opening of an exhibition at "BRIT: the Museum of British History".  If you've worked in a museum, if you go to museums, if you know anything about them, you'll enjoy the romp.

50 and 51.  False Dawn and The World Over, by Edith Wharton.   

In False Dawn, Lewis Raycie's father sends him to Europe to buy "great art", which will be the nucleus of a collection that will make Raycie's name echo down the ages.   But in Italy Lewis falls under the influence of John Ruskin, and the art with which he returns is not what was expected.  His father basically disowns him, and it is not until years later, when it is too late for him or his widow financially, that the paintings are truly appreciated.   Read for a class and it engendered quite a good discussion about "what is art".   

The World Over is a collection of short stories, set in Wharton's usual worlds of Gilded Age New York and the Europe of wealthy American travelers.

52 - 56.   The Code of the Woosters; Right Ho, Jeeves; Heavy Weather; Galahad at Blandings; Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (a/k/a The Catnappers), by P. G. Wodehouse, of course.  What else needs to be said?  If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you'll like.  I do and I did.

57.  Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar, by Olga Wojtas.  I picked this up because I thought the concept was interesting, but it goes horribly wrong.

The protagonist, Shona McMonagle, is a librarian and a graduate of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, snitched from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  But this connection goes nowhere, so what was the point?  She finds herself on a time traveling mission to tsarist Russia, but has not been told where she's going, what year it will be (she never finds out), or what her mission is, which is a strange way to go about things. And this, naturally, contributes to her idiotic behavior, behavior that one would not expect from a theoretically intelligent woman, one who comments that being wrong was a new experience for her. She is ridiculously dense, missing things that anyone with an ounce of common sense would realize immediately.

A note at the end of the book suggests that there will be more books featuring this woman. I will not be reading them.

58.  Sorcery and Cecelia: the Enchanted Coffee Pot, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.  An epistolary novel set in Regency England featuring Cecelia and her friend and cousin Kate.  Wrede and Stevermer alternate the writing, so Cecilia and Kate each has her own distinctive voice.  It's got fantasy, magic, wizardry, as well as a couple of feisty teen-aged girls.  I enjoyed it.

59.  A Coin in Nine Hands, by Marguerite Yourcenar.  This is a collection of short stories, culminating with an assassination plot against Mussolini, linked by the "coin" of the title. Everyday lives, isolated, lonely, are connected as the ten-lira piece changes hands.

To be continued  .  .  .  with non-fiction.