Death in Brittany (Commissaire Dupin series #1)/ Jean-Luc Bannalec

This was a serendipitous find on the library’s downloadable service. Commissaire Dupin is a Parisian who was shipped out to the “boonies” on the Celtic fringe of France to continue his police detective career after he apparently stepped on some toes in the capital city with his sometimes unorthodox approach. Brittany is as much of a character as any human character in this book—its landscape, its history, its culture, its language, its food.

I really liked Dupin and his constant need for quality coffee and a good entrecôte. The murder plot was captivating, taking place in Pont Aven, the artists’ colony that most famously is associated with Gauguin before he went to Tahiti. I had the feeling that I was reading a native’s view of the province, but found out later that Jean-Luc Bannalec is a pseudonym for a German author. And so popular is the series in Germany that it has even been made into a television series. I felt like it was more authentic to France than Cara Black’s Parisian mysteries, in any case! Wish there were more ready to go in English. As it is, there are only two available presently (though many more in German).

Comments

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys

The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her? Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable? Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea . It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre . I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall. Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage. All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course th...

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog