JFDI #52 EDUCATED Tara Westover

EDUCATED-Tara Westover

An astounding journey of escape, discovery and development. 

REVIEW OF STORIES OF YOUR LIFE

TOM’S REVIEW

All head and no heart. That's Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others. Cerebral, meticulous and challenging, for sure. Original, philosophical and even spiritual, yep. Moving, emotive and poignant, nuh-uh.  

If I had one word to describe this collection of seven stories written over the course of twenty years it would be "detached". One of the recurring themes that Chiang explores--you could say it's the primary one--is how language connects not just humanity with itself but also with AI and ETs. But Chiang's lexicon centres on words such as gestalt and logogram and teleological and eunonym and hermeneutics, not exactly quotidian idiom.  "Coca-cola, ok" it ain't.  

And maybe that's the point. Maybe Ted Chiang is the forerunner of Yuval Noah Harari, describing worlds in which you up your brain or get left behind. Or, if you fall prey to such sloppy sentiment as undying love, an eternity in Hell. 

3.77629 stars

Written in the Gatwick departure lounge. Radios, amigo. 

50th COMMEMORATIVE DINNER

Eight years. 50 books. Laughs and tears. Well done, JFDI confreres. 

Once a JFDI, always a JFDI. 

JFDI #50 STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS

STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS

Ted Chiang

JFDI #49 RED RIDING 1974

RED RIDING 1974

David Peace

RED RIDING 1974- REVIEW

Tom Wells

 

This is the city. I mean, the shire.  I mean, the administrative county.  Every two days, there’s a murder; every two hours, an assault; every two seconds, a secretion, a suppuration, an emission, a discharge. That’s where Edward Dunford comes in. He carries a badge. A press badge. 

In his novel 1974, David Peace wants West Riding to be James Ellroy’s Los Angeles only more. Or less. More corrupt, more dangerous, more deadly. Crazier, grittier, edgier. And less hygienic.  A lot less hygienic.  The result is a mama’s stew of pornography, gore-nography and pore-nography that in the end is so OTT as to make you reassess a book that starts out as a decent enough page-turner.

Not least because Peace writes in a punchy style that evokes LA mystery writers while staying true to its time and place.  The story is being told by an actual writer--not a cop with literary ambitions, but the newly minted North of England Crime Correspondent for a regional newspaper. Edward Dunford is fresh off his first Page One story and jonesing for more.  But it wouldn’t be proper noir if he didn’t have an amoral rival, didn’t run afoul of every form of authority and wasn’t his own worst enemy.

Blessed with the kind of intuition noir protagonists invariably have, Edward senses that the recent disappearance of a ten-year-old girl is tied to two similar murders in the previous five years. His editor wants proof. So do the cops. Edward sets out to find some. 

His desultory investigation gets a kick in the right direction when his colleague Barry, an investigative journalist with his nose in the business affairs of local developers, dies in a traffic accident involving a delivery van, sheet glass and decapitation.  Suspicious? Apparently only to Edward, who is bequeathed Barry’s horde of incriminating files.

Along the way to solving multiple mysteries, Edward treats everyone and everything very badly: girlfriends, witnesses, colleagues, his mother, his father’s memory, his father’s watch, office equipment, vehicles, home furnishings.  He is unable to have a conversation with a woman without it escalating into a knock-down drag-out fight or fuck. Coupled with his inability to keep bodily fluids—spit, snot, piss, pus, cum, blood, sweat, tears--from entering the eco-system and possessed of a two-word potty mouth, he is not exactly the poster boy for Northern hospitality.     

The local police therefore take every opportunity to knock some manners into the pesky busybody and, in the end, literally beat the shit out of him.  Yet, despite being on the wrong end of the mother of all brutality, Edward still manages to dust himself off and go on a rampage for justice that makes Buford Pusser look like the Dalai Lama.

Who would no doubt advise Edward, “Be kind whenever possible; it is always possible.” To which Edward would no doubt reply, “The Dalai fucking Lama.”

  **½

METROPOLIS Philip Kerr. Review

Tom Wells

Berlin, 1927. The Weimar Republic is in the middle of its so-called Golden Era, though you’d never know it if you walked a kilometer in Detective Bernie Gunther’s shoes. Purges of Jews, Communists and other undesirables would not begin for another six years, but someone is already beta-testing the Nazi social contract by targeting prostitutes and homeless WWI veterans, deemed embarrassing reminders of Germany’s defeat and decline since 1918.  New to the police department’s murder squad, Gunther can suffer the slings and arrows of standard procedure only so long before he hits on the idea of going undercover as a homeless veteran himself.  Along the way, he enters the seedy world of Cabaret and rubs elbows with the brightest artistic lights of the day, including Fritz Lang (director of the 1927 film classic that gives the book its name), his collaborator/wife Thea Von Harbou and the artists George Grosz and Otto Dix (who actually did paint homeless, disfigured veterans on Berlin’s straßes).  

Although it’s been awhile since I’ve read the first three of the eight Bernie Gunther books, my memories of them are fonder than those of Metropolis.  In the early books, the interweaving of historic figures with fictional narrative seemed seamless. Metropolis , on the other hand, reads as two books: a bog-standard police procedural; and a non-fiction description of a year in the life of the Weimar Republic. With the notable exceptions of Bernie’s day-to-day meetings with Bernhard Weiss, Berlin’s real-life Chief of Police, and Ernst Gennat, a legendary homicide detective, the intersection of fiction and historic figures/events too often feels forced.  Descriptions of real people and places read like encyclopedia entries, while the 21-page (in Kindle) summing up of events by the gangster Erich Angerstein is more newspaper account than storytelling. 

That is not to say that Metropolis is not a good read.  There are more than a few passages that give Raymond Chandler a run for his money. “My brain felt like a half lemon in a bartender’s fist.” “A naval- style black cap with a shiny peak that probably resembled his soul.” “One of his ears reminded me of an unborn fetus.” It’s just a shame there wasn’t more Chandler and less Wikipedia.  

Three stars