A Shower of Summer Days - May Sarton
This is a three person novel. A middle -aged couple (Violet and Charles) come to live in the once-grand house in Ireland where she grew up. Sally, the daughter of Violet’s sister, arrives for a two month stay (and is not at all happy at having been “sent” to Dene’s Court). Charles is mainly a steadfast presence; it’s the emotional life of the two women that gets Sarton’s attention. But, as complications accumulated, I couldn’t relate to the feelings that were being bandied about. I grew more and more detached and wound up abandoning the book at the halfway point. This was my only experience with the highly prolific Sarton. She published fifteen volumes of poetry and twenty-one novels, but she was mainly known as an autobiographical writer – six of her books have the word “journal” in the title. Many people have found sustenance in her accounts of aging and illness, and this is surely due to the fact that in these works she had a subject – herself – who was real and whose feelings had authenticity. For me Violet and Sally lacked those qualities.

The Third Reich - Roberto Bolano (Spanish)
The book takes the form of a diary of a young German on vacation in Spain with his girlfriend. Why he can write like a sophisticated novelist didn’t bother me (until later, when a lot of things bothered me). I liked the freshness of the voice and the situation – mainly its modernity. Udo has a workaday job, but his passion is for a specific kind of gaming, one that involves re-enactments of WWII campaigns. The historical outcome of battles – and the war – can thus be altered if the gamer is skilled in his tactics. Udo is a major figure in this arcane world. But his gaming isn’t initially given a lot of space; mostly we get an account of his vacation-time activities with Ingeborg. They link up with another German couple – Charly and his girlfriend. There’s a lot of late night partying. Charly seems to be a dangerous nut case, especially when he drinks too much, which is often. There are other residents of the resort town thrown into the mix, including a man deformed by burns and the German proprietress of their hotel. But gradually the aimlessness of the plot, along with Udo’s shifting moods (which are perplexing even to him) began to wear thin. If there was some point to the random events I wanted it to emerge. Charly goes out windsurfing and never returns (Is he dead? Is he playing one of his tricks?), but his disappearance soon gets relegated to insignificance. The two girlfriends depart, and the Burn Victim and Frau Else play a prominent role, but Udo’s relationship with them is murky and conflicted. More attention is given to his gaming, which I found silly and boring (Bonano could have introduced a neo-Nazi slant to this, but he never does). By the time I quit reading my interest had faded to nothingness. I had hopes, but Bonano turned out to be just another author who can’t (or chose not to) tell a coherent story. Last note: on the info page I saw that he died in 2003, at the age of fifty, but the book wasn’t copyrighted by his heirs until 2011. Also, despite its considerable length, it was serialized in The Paris Review.

A Young Man in Search of Love – Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
Singer describes this book, which was published when he was seventy years old, as part of a “spiritual autobiography.” It’s slim in every way except ideas. But the ideas aren’t anything new; the young men in Shosha and The Family Moskat went over the same ground, though their contemplation of life and God and politics was embedded in novels with many characters and events. Nothing much happens to Singer, who comes across as passive and controlled. He’s in a search, but it’s for a meaning to his existence and a place in the world; the book is filled with philosophical musings. He has a strong need for sex, but his relationships with women are marked not by love but by dissension. The most interesting character is Gina, a landlady/mistress more than twice his age, who makes the decision to withdraw not only from Singer but from the battle of life. Only she takes on a dimension that I found touching. Nothing else stirred me, including Singer’s misery; by delving at length into his troubled state of mind he defuses its impact. Singer’s major work came out in the fifties and sixties; this book reflects a compulsion to continue writing, even though he had nothing much to say. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978, the same year Young Man was published, and Doubleday gave it the deluxe treatment: over-sized volume, thick paper, and drawings by Raphael Soyer. These spidery, washed out drawings succeed in capturing the characters – and the mood of Warsaw between the world wars – better than the author’s words.

Mrs. Starr Lives Alone - Jon Godden
At last, a writer who’s able to create convincing characters and place them in a plot that’s absorbing from beginning to end. This isn’t a great book, but it provided me with a pleasurable reading experience. Meg Starr, recently widowed, discovers that someone is living in the loft of her house. It turns out to be Chris, a sixteen year old runaway. Meg allows the girl to stay with her. She does it out of compassion, though her loneliness plays a role. She’s also foolishly naive. She remains blind to – or makes excuses for – Chris’s lies and manipulation. She’ll learn, abruptly and forcefully, that she’s made a major mistake: the girl is a dangerous case. Since this is a suspense thriller, I won’t go into the plot. Suffice to say that Meg becomes a captive in her house. As all good suspense thrillers must be, this is a character study of three people (Chris wasn’t alone in the loft; her boyfriend Roy later emerges). Chris is the most compelling of the three – her steely determination is chilling. Godden moves things along nicely – her prose is straightforward and she writes with intelligence. Nothing occurs that’s illogical. Meg uses her only resource – her brain – to try to figure a way out of the trap she’s in. But even there she’s limited; Chris has covered all the bases (or almost all). I never bonded with Meg, though I believed in her. She’s a woman who’s led a sheltered life and who has never learned the value of suspicion. The same can’t be said of Godden. She was sixty when the book was published, and it reflects a fear of disaffected, amoral youth.