Category: fiction (Page 2 of 11)

Andrea Camilleri’s latest Montalbano novel is disappointing on many levels. Not until you read the afterword do you learn that, although it was published in the US in August 2017, that Camilleri wrote A Nest of Vipers back in 2008. Camilleri notes that it was held back as the theme was too similar to his 2004 novel, The Paper Moon. The so-called similarity is not the most disappointing aspect, at least to me. Rather, with Montalbano aging (ever so slightly) with each novel, I had looked forward to reading more about the ramifications from the two previous novels, A Beam of Light and A Voice in the Night. With 20 plus novels sketching Montalbano’s life, each one takes us little further, and A Nest of Vipers fails in that regard.

A greater disappointment, however, is that I solved the mystery less than five chapters into the novel. Usually with Camileri’s novels he’s far more careful: sowing seeds of doubt, planting false leads, tying in strange coincidences and sub-plots. An early sub-plot lasts no more than a few paragraphs, and other characters play minor roles. Even the title gives away too much.

A Nest of Vipers had one thing going for it: the murder victim. Father of two adult siblings, he was a ruthless business-man, philander, and blackmailer. Everyone, it seems, had a motive for killing him. Yet Camilleri ticks off one wronged person after another almost as fast as we’re introduced to them and their motives.

The entire supporting cast in the fictional town of Vigàta is in place, playing their familiar roles. Montalbano’s long-distance girl-friend makes a brief appearances. Enzo the chef prepares vast meals just for the Inspector. Fazio and Augello remain steadfast lieutenants, and Catarella mangles the language as brutally and comically as ever. Even the good forensics coroner Pasquano manages to insult Montalbano about “busting his balls” several times. While the supporting cast rarely veers from the set path, the various people Montalbano meets during his vacation draw little interest, at least this time. While the supporting cast has grown stale over the years, Camilleri usually draws other interesting characters, from young, beautiful students with dark pasts, to businessmen with various scruples, and the odd Mafia member in the background. Not so much this time, as only two main characters get much time in the novel, and then fades into the background. One character hovers in the background, then acts as a deus ex machina to explain a crucial bit of evidence right at the end.

A Nest of Vipers lacks much of the humanity in other Montalbano novels, and were it not originally written so many years ago I would call it a step back in the series. Had it been published in the right sequence maybe I would have walked away with a different impression. In the meantime, while I wait for the next novel, maybe it’s time to re-read The Age of Doubt or The Dance of the Seagull. In the meantime, titles of untranslated works continue to tease at least two more novels in the series.

I chanced across a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and placed it on top of my rather large To Read stack.

Growing up in the 1980s I read fiction across all genres. A teenager at the time, I read my own books, but also read as many books as possible from my parents’ shelves. This included thrillers like Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, Wilbur Smith, crime writers like Ed McBain and Agatha Christie, along with a host of names long since forgotten.

The past two decades I’ve generally not read much crime fiction, with the exception of the Norwegian writer Gunnar Staalesen. He lives and writes about Bergen, a place I lived a few years, and where I have roots. The names of other crime/mystery writers slide past my consciousness, but I tended to either read science fiction or American novels from the early twentieth century.

A couple of years ago I read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, like so many others. This year I picked up a couple of Ian Rankin books, and once again I feel the strong pull of crime fiction. Oddly enough, I’m reading quite a few Scandinavian and European books, from Rankin to Andrea Camilleri, to Jo Nesbø to Asa Larsson, along with other Swedish writers like Henning Mankel and Per Wahlöö.

I have yet to dive into American crime fiction, but I have list of names, most of them authors I’ve never read, which I think is an exciting prospect.

There used to be a book store in San Antonio called “Remember the Alibi.” I find it tragic that this store is gone, but even more so now that I’m re-discovering this genre.

Earlier this year I resumed writing fiction. I’ve wanted to be a writer for longer than I can remember. I wrote a few short stories, received a few favorable comments from friends. I took one story to a writers’ group a few years ago, and watched them flay it to shreds, not so much for the story itself but smaller errors. Or least, that’s how it seemed to me. I don’t think I returned after the third meeting. It was a long drive, I told myself, and maybe they were right. Still, I wrote a couple more stories, and even 35,000 words of a fantasy novel, but maybe the writing group experience disillusioned me. I quit writing fiction for many years.

Ideas still came to me, and I wrote a few of them down. Often these ideas appeared as titles, either made up, or snippets stitched together from something I’d heard.

Last year my father sent me a very nice pen for my birthday, and said he hoped it would help write a book. A short while later a friend who I hadn’t heard from in years wrote me, and remembered I had mentioned I was writing fiction. Was I still writing? The universe appeared to supply me with strong hints. I am older now, and have fewer pretentious, but I still felt the need to create fiction.

On January 24, 2014 I sat down and wrote a few words. Each night I returned, and after three weeks I finished a short story. I started another one, writing a few words every day. I showed the stories to no one. I went through this purely as an exercise, a way to scrape off layers of rust. In two months I finished six stories and a novella, four of the pieces set in a sort of shared alternate universe, the other three in different genres. Then I started a novel.

I always thought I would write only science fiction and fantasy. The modern writers that I admired (i.e. not dead) tended to write in these genres. Perhaps I tried to emulate certain favorite writers: Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, Tim Powers, to name a few. I let the ideas and stories dictate the genre, and so I wrote one sf story this year, and one horror story. The rest I am not sure where they fall. The novel that I started on March 21 was a mystery novel, a complete surprise to me. I read mysteries years ago, but currently only read two mystery writers: Gunnar Staalesen in Norwegian, and Ian Rankin in English.

I worked from a vague outline and a specific setting, and found that characters presented themselves and the story evolved. On May 30, just over two months and ten days after I started the novel, I sat in an airport lounge and wrote 1,200 pages, including the words, “The End.” I typed the last two words just as they announced that my plane was boarding. I had written the first draft of a short novel, just over 61,000 pages long.

Writing is a matter of applying your rear to a chair and typing one word after another. I wrote my fiction in various location and various times: late at night, in the car at my daughter’s soccer practice, on a wobbly camping chair in front of a tent on a boy scout campout, in an airplane squeezed between two people whose elbows invaded my small seat, in hotel rooms when traveling. I’ve written every day for 135 days now.

I know the next steps include painful revisions, even more painful outside critiques, then if the stories stand up to scrutiny, query letters to find them a home. I’m not sure how to approach that next stage. I’m letting my novel percolate in the back of my mind, or maybe just receded from my immediate memory, and I am currently working on another short story. It’s almost scary that this week I came up with two more novel ideas for the same character as in my mystery novel, to go along with a third idea that I actually came up with while halfway through the novel, and then in half an hour six short story ideas – but then, ideas are easy, putting them to paper takes time and effort. I almost feel that this short novel was a warm-up, a prelude to the real thing. Maybe that’s just an excuse to ignore the edits and revisions, as writing for the sake of writing seems so much easier.

We shall see.

This list is brilliant and spot on. A neat way to recognize some of the interesting and anti-autoritarian characters in film and TV.

One week after the death of Jack Vance, another towering giant in the sf world passed away. Iain M. Banks was only 59 years old when he died in June 9. He had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer only a few months prior, and knew his time was marked and short.

I’ve mainly read his Culture and other sf books, all under the Iain M. Banks name, rather than his Iain Banks literary fiction. His two most memorable books are Feersum Endjinn and Player of Games, and while at times his penchant for twist endings seemed contrived, everything prior to his endings stood out as an example of superb writing and dazzling imagination at furious work. Time, I think, to look for his non-sf books and mourn his loss by celebrating his fiction.

While out of the country recently I learned that Jack Vance passed away on May 26. Though Vance was in his late nineties, I almost expected him to live forever. Words cannot begin to describe the effect and influence his writing has had on my appreciation of fiction in general and the sf/fantasy genre. I read my first Vance story when I was nineteen, and no other write before or since has meant as much to me as Jack Vance. Elsewhere I will write my tribute in full. The world of genre fiction is far gloomier place without him.

Learned today that the sequel to Michael Shea’s novel, The Extra, entitled Assault on Sunrise, will be published in August of 2013. I’m thrilled to learn of a new book from one of my favorite authors, and hopefully this also means he’ll be writing some more short fiction soon.

And not the pirated kind, but audio readings, from Huxley, Asimov, and others. The original link has more information.

Over at Washington Times a review of The Bull, a novel by Matthew Weber. I’m planning a review of this book in Prometheus, along with a stack of other books I need to get through.