The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls Posted: AS the title of this book is so intentionally attention-seeking, we might as well deal with it first. The book, of course, has nothing to do with diabetes and little to do with owls (other than a stuffed one) and certainly nothing to do with owls with diabetes or discussions with owls about diabetes. So the title exists purely to catch attention, catch the reader off-guard and provoke curiosity. Which is perhaps not a bad summary of what David Sedaris is trying to achieve with this latest collection of essays and short pieces, many of which have appeared already in The New Yorker magazine. If I were to pick one word to describe Sedaris's world view, it would probably be "quirky". He delights in being something of a misfit, an outsider looking in, and is from time to time brutally honest about his failings and idiosyncrasies. Sometimes they even made me laugh. Sedaris is a comic writer and I had better admit from the start that comic writing has always been for me a very hit-and-miss affair. I have laughed my way through Spike Milligan's Puckoon, frequently quote some lovely lines from Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat and maintain to this day that A.A. Milne's Winnie-The-Pooh is one of the sharpest and funniest books ever written (together with those other childhood classics, the Just William books, but no-one, alas, reads them any more). But a book that sets out to make me laugh would probably never be near the top of my list. And perhaps it's just me, but despite occasional flashes of brilliance, nothing in Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls would make me want to change my mind. First piece up is "Dentists Without Borders", the title no doubt intended as an echo of Médecin Sans Frontièrs (Doctors Without Borders), that wonderful French charity that works indiscriminately on the frontline of warzones the world over. This is not about a war zone, however; it's about Sedaris's trip to his French dentist. It starts promisingly enough with his summary of the American view of European healthcare as one "where patients languished on filthy cots waiting for aspirin to be invented". I also liked his sharp exchange with his doctor over "a thunderbolt bisecting my left eyeball": "Where did it come from?" he asks. "How do we get most things?" the doctor replies. "We buy them?" quips Sedaris. Now this is not side-splittingly funny but it is nicely left-field, an unexpected response that catches both doctor and reader off-guard. But overall, this is a piece that could have pursued in depth and with wit the American/European divide over attitudes to health ("being American I want bigger names for things. I also expect a bit more gravity") but descends into a much more mundane and straightforward account of implants. Like many comedians, Sedaris is happy to milk his childhood, his home circumstances, his sexual preferences (he is gay) and his partner for material. Thus in "A Friend In The Ghetto", a chance telephone cold call comes from "some overseas call centre.... The man spoke with an accent, and though I couldn't exactly place it, I knew that he was poor. His voice had snakes in it. And dysentery, and mangoes". This quickly morphs into an account of his teenage desire to ask out on a date a poor, black, overweight girl from the wrong side of town because ... well, because she is those things rather than because he particularly likes her. I found this sad and slightly distasteful rather than funny, although to be fair to Sedaris he has no illusions about his conduct. In fact, for my money, the whole piece treads a very narrow line between brutal honesty and poor taste. Of the disadvantaged, he writes: "You need people like that in your life so you can feel better about yourself, my mother used to tell me", but later comes the sharp and self-aware comment that "We'd all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you have access to it". And at the end he rather misses the cold caller. So let's just say that, for this reader at least, the satire comes uncomfortably close at times to reinforcing the very prejudices it claims to be mocking. I also found it impossible to raise even the slightest smile at his account of maltreating baby sea turtles when a child. Feeding them hamburgers until the aquarium is clogged and stinking, he claims a kind of innocent ignorance: "Looking back you'd think that someone would have said something – sea turtles for God's sake! – but maybe they weren't endangered yet. Animal cruelty hadn't been invented either...." It may or may not be legitimate to blame ignorance and poor parenting for cruelty but to then make it the subject of a comic piece of writing raises all kinds of quite different ethical considerations. Sedaris is a live performer, a radio broadcaster and has many fans the world over who think he is absolutely marvellous. I suspect he is funnier live than I found him on the page. As it was, the best I could do was to raise a wry smile and be impressed at some of his better one-liners. Like most comedy, you either get the joke or you don't. Despite his obvious talents, I mostly didn't. |
| Posted: SWEDISH author Liza Marklund's sleuth-protagonist recalls American Sue Grafton's redoubtable Kinsey Millhone of the long-running "alphabet mysteries" – both are tough female investigators and both come with complex back-stories woven from family and personal issues. With Marklund's Annika Bengtzon, we get a compelling personality on the trail of Scandinavian bad guys. She has a disquieting range of flaws and foibles, notably obnoxiousness and recklessness. But this being pulp-thriller territory, Marklund's investigative journalist is, above all, sharp and courageous. The gripping Lifetime is seventh in the Annika Bengtzon series, though all the books can be read as standalones. Annika – a hapless intern in book one, and head of her newspaper's crime section by this instalment – is a fighter who is balancing parenthood and marriage with her literally bloody work. Here we move on from the broad sweep of Last Will, the previous book, which had as its white-knuckle backdrop the Nobel Prize ceremony, one of the most suspenseful in the whole series. This time, we are presented with what appears to be a "domestic" situation gone horribly wrong, and we gradually learn that the extent of the human tragedy sprawls far and wide. The sky falls in for Annika when her husband leaves her for another woman and threatens to take their children. Meanwhile, two cops on patrol are called to a shooting in Södermalm, in central Stockholm. One of Sweden's most senior and respected police officers, David Lindholm, has been found dead, shot once in the head and once in the groin. His now-widow Julia – an acquaintance of Annika's – is in a distraught, blood-spattered state, shrilly blaming the "other woman" for both the killing and for the apparent abduction of her young son. But first impressions clearly mark Julia as the trigger-puller. Her yarn about her missing son sounds a bit fishy to the cops as well. Södermalm was, of course, ground-zero of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, and has been the setting of many fictitious homicide scenes since. Understandable, since it's a hell of a cinematic locale, with its Baroque and Gothic architecture, mix of Bohemian and well-to-do denizens, dive bars, posh restaurants, tattoo parlours, and Scandinavia's highest concentration of Asian eateries. This Stockholm-born reviewer is well-acquainted with its aromatic streets but I've never seen so much as a jaywalker or a double-parked Volvo in this part of the city. Nevertheless, a slew of writers have seen a dark side to the neighbourhood, and Marklund is adept at capturing Södermalm at its apparent edgiest. Only Annika doubts Julia's guilt, and undertakes her probe solo, as the police and everyone else have already leapt to judgement. Amidst this, Annika also has to pull her chaotic personal life together. She discovers that the deceased policeman concealed another life and was likely involved in illegal business activities that led to his murder. Her race against time to uncover the truth and exonerate Julia is almost thwarted, time after time, by multiple obstacles, including the dead hand of state bureaucracy and office politics at her newspaper. The latter is exacerbated by Annika's editor-in-chief's plan to retrench 60 employees in a cost-cutting exercise. The damaged domestic life of the victim mirrors Annika's own problems. But even when she finds herself homeless, her dogged determination to find the real killer remains intact. And yet her desperation is all too palpable, as revealed when she agrees to baby-sit her own children at her husband's mistress' house. There's a lot in Lifetime apart from the killings. With Annika's newspaper facing staff cuts, there are authentic insights into the workings of a Stockholm newsroom, because like so many of her Scando-crime-fiction peers, Marklund was a journalist herself. And she knows her craft as a fiction writer too; there are enough loose ends dangling at the conclusion for the reader to crave a sequel (which is indeed in the works). The first Scandiavian noir writer – and still the best in this reviewer's opinion – to have a global impact was Henning Mankell, who lit the fuse with his Scanian (a region in Sweden) chiller Faceless Killers in 1990. A few years ago he did Marklund a big favour by dubbing her "The Queen of Scandinavian Crime Fiction". Her work does not have his subtlety, or Larsson's breath-taking pacing and audacious plotting; nevertheless, Marklund has become an important name in the genre. Readers can keep looking north for their Scandinavian chills and thrills. Marklund is secluded in her Stockholm flat, penning the next Annika Bengtzon mystery, The Long Shadow, as you read this. |
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