Been there, done that, read both books. First book, bleerghh, second book still astonishes me.
Apparently someone else felt the same.
Apparently someone else felt the same.
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Spoilers What Book Are You Reading?
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I just finished "Killers of the Flower Moon"
Really compelling and terrifying.
Really compelling and terrifying.
Well, we are approaching Hallowe'en; what better than to treat myself to a week-end of such enjoyable (and well-written - he catches the voice of an upper middle class bright kid of that era exceptionally well, and, - as for the language (it's brilliant, clever, subtle, articulate and sometimes, very funny), and references (again, clever, sharp, - informative, I love books where I find out, or learn, new things, - witty, and sometimes, very, very, funny - this is a book I find myself grinning at - and occasionally, laughing aloud, while reading).
You are absolutely right to call out individuals who devoured Harry Potter yet complain about language and references here.
Anyway, I love the language and the references; they really make the books.
Nooooooo.
A TV series, maybe, I can forgive, as the TV series allows for character development and nunaces of the narrative or plot to be explored, but a film/movie, nooooooo.
I hate movie adaptations of books I have loved; almost invariably, they get it wrong, or traduce the work.
Now, granted, The Godfather (Godfather I & Godfather II - and here, I refer to both) was the exception that proved the rule: A film/movie adaptation that was better than the book that inspired it.
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And a tv series of The Godfather way back then wouldn't, IMHO, have been anywhere as good as the film versions. "Made for tv" back then was pretty lame.
But I do agree, I'd rather see a tv series.
The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
Metamorphosis - Kafka
Two quick a profound reads
Metamorphosis - Kafka
Two quick a profound reads
Current
(no recipes here, more a combo of personal reflections and travelogue)
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
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www.penguinrandomhouse.com
(no recipes here, more a combo of personal reflections and travelogue)
National Dish by Anya von Bremzen: 9780735223172 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
Named a Best Book of 2023 by Financial Times, The Guardian, and BBC's The Food Programme “Anya von Bremzen, already a legend of food writing and a storytelling inspiration to me, has done her best...
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Eve by Cat Bohannon: 9780385350549 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST • THE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR SPECIES: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm...
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
Later made into a movie. I just started it but it looks like a good example of 60’s sci-fi.
the movie is very faithful to the boook
Comicbooks are books right?🤓 Right?🤗🤗 Oh right, they're called graphic novels now.😐 Call a spade a spade, I say.
a
Now I wait for #4.
Now I wait for #4.
Agree, and you make an elegant and salient point.Comicbooks are books right?🤓 Right?🤗🤗 Oh right, they're called graphic novels now.😐 Call a spade a spade, I say.
a
Now I wait for #4.
However, I think that the term "graphic novels" is supposed to be a means (perhaps even something as unsubtle as an inspired piece of marketing) whereby adults can feel that what they are reading (choosing to read) is somehow more, er, more adult, more serious, more sophisticated, more worthy, - above all, more respectable - than the comics that would be the normal fare for children.
It is a term designed to persuade adults that This Is Not A Comic, but rather, is an intellectually respectable publication that just happens to have pictures.
Rather, it is a Serious Work That Happens To Have Pictures (never mind that the images are an integral part of the narrative and tone and text of the work).
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Glad I did a search as I was looking to see if anyone has read or is reading this book. I just picked it up on a blind buy. I saw the preview for the new show and was reading the comments and almost all of them mentioned the book. So I picked it up. It has been moved to my next book t read.
Comicbooks are books right?🤓 Right?🤗🤗 Oh right, they're called graphic novels now.😐 Call a spade a spade, I say.
a
Now I wait for #4.
Don't let anyone tell you different. I love them and still read and collect them to this day!!!!!
Okay, herewith some thoughts on this book.
As an aside, I wish to mention that I have (now) read the entire Arkady Renko series, and, as is the mad way of the world, in my professional life, I have had occasion to visit a great many - but not all - of the locations in these books (including Moscow, St Petersburg, Chernobyl, Minsk, Kyiv, Kaliningrad, some areas of the steppes of central Russia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Germany, among others).
I cannot be alone to have been absolutely bowled over by Gorky Park - the first of the Arkady Renko books - when it was published. This was an absolute tour de force.
This book was an incredibly well plotted and well researched thriller, set in an extraordinarily well realised world (and remember, when it was published, the Cold War was still very much a part of our lives and world).
More astonishing still, instead of a clichéd western hero, Smith gave us a sympathetic Russian protagonist, a classic flawed and frustrated hero - a thwarted idealist, an educated and cultured man with a rich and detailed and fully formed interior life, a nuanced, richly textured and compellingly credible background, one freighted down by the weight of his family's (and his country's) history while haunted by the ghosts of his own personal past. Even with the secondary characters, we are given glimpses of fascinating backstories, of lives lived and accommodations reached with the culture, context, and with the very world where those lives were lived.
And - in common with the very best such stories, the place where almost all of it takes place - in this case, Moscow - is also a distinct character, a gloomy, brooding character, whose blood drenched history and habits haunt the plot, and whose inhabitants came in a multitude of shades of defensive grey, morally, psychologically and physically. And then, there were the asides, acerbic, barbed, brilliant, and bitter sweet, informed by insights and knowledge and a complicated compassion wrung from Russia's history, culture and politics.
This was Soviet Noir, - a wholly new landscape of the mind - tapping into centuries of deeply depressed yet surreal Russian literature and culture - and it was brilliant.
Even the romance - awkward and edgy, tense, yet with real sparks - was credible, - charting, as it did, Renko's agonising change of orbit professionally and personally - while the breakdown of Renko's own marriage - which happens, in real time, in this first novel, is also sadly, all too believable in that context at that time.
And, as a thriller, as a murder mystery (or murder mysteries), it was still brilliant, compelling, and gripping, yet also morally and narratively satisfying.
Now, to my mind, none of the other works came close to the sheer power of this first work, although, taken loosely, the first three - which form a sort of trilogy - (Gorky Park, Polar Star, and Red Square), are all excellent, and form a sort of over-arching natural narrative arc, one which comes to an end - a natural conclusion - with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. And they are very, very, very good, terrific stories, some great characters, wonderful settings.
However, I would imagine that publishers and readers demanded more, and I am at least as guilty of this as everyone else, as I continued reading each of these books as they appeared: What happened to Arkady once his old world collapsed?
The next three books (Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs, and Stalin's Ghost) weren't at all bad, in fact, at times and in parts, they were very good, sometimes, very good indeed, but weren't anything like as good as the first three had been.
And, unfortunately, ever since then, - with Three Stations, Tatiana, The Siberian Dilemma, and now, Independence Square (among the weakest of them all), sadly, and unfortunately, this downhill trajectory - deterioration in content and quality - has become more marked, and more pronounced with each book.
In terms of plot - narrative - plot development and character development, Independence Square is one of the weakest of the entire series. Actually, I would rate it as deeply disappointing.
The cultural context - those sly and acerbic asides rooted in a deep historical knowledge and understanding of Russian history - always one of the most fascinating elements of these books - is almost entirely absent here.
Worse still - the book is peppered with careless and inexcusable elementary errors (such as when Renko and his latest love interest are strolling through Kyiv discussing the Dnieper river - which flows through Kyiv - with the remark that the Dnieper (one of Europe's great rivers) empties into "the Baltic Sea in the south" (p. 123 in the edition I read); of course, it does nothing of the sort; it makes its way to the Black Sea.
Moreover, during that same conversation, a reference is made to the fact that the Dnieper river - at one point - flows close to Chernobyl; yes, it does, but this misses entirely Renko's own narrative history, or background, for he knows this - or, ought to know this - perfectly well, as he spent almost all of Wolves Eat Dogs (book 5) in Chernobyl, while books five and six (Stalin's Ghost) saw him commence (and continue) a relationship with a doctor from Chernobyl, who had herself walked through that radioactive cloud, as a child, in the notorious May Day Parade (in 1986) that took place in the immediate aftermath of the explosion in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
Now, for what it is worth, I have actually been to the very shores of the Black Sea - several times, when I spent two years in Georgia with the EU, - and, some years earlier, I had spent several months in the Baltic states on an EU travelling fellowship, - and yes, visited the Baltic Sea, standing on its shores - so, yes, I do know where these places are, and the difference between them. And yes, as it happened, I have also been by the Dnieper in Kyiv.
And with this latest book, the romance is - to be candid - risible.
Actually, apart from the first three books, (and, to a lesser extent, the fifth and sixth books) Renko's romances are becoming tedious, for the story is thought to require a fresh love interest in almost each book, (something I, personally, do not believe necessary).
Moreover, these romances lack any sort of credibility supplied by the context, culture, or character, and that is not even mentioning Renko's age, for, while he ages, he ages considerably less than the real world where his investigations take place, while the age of whatever woman he romances for that book slides correspondingly, making the age gap between them ever greater, and the story (and romance) ever less credible (and not even interesting from a narrative perspective).
I suppose that one could argue that the early death of his mother may have conditioned Renko to accepting (or seeking) a life where women leaving him (through death or other forms of departure) is his version of normal. The problem is that too many of the books open by letting us know that the love interest from the previous book has simply left, (without showing us how this happened, - not even in flashback - which would have been an interesting story), which means that the plot must somehow contrive to furnish Renko with a fresh love interest.
Actually, most of the female characters in this work are poorly written, and poorly conceived, while the male characters aren't much better; the rich worlds and briefly sketched but fully realised (or guessed at, or glimpsed) backgrounds of the secondary characters that were such a delightful feature of the earlier books are absent.
Even Zhenya, the child chess prodigy who came into Arkady's life as long ago as Wolves Eat Dogs, and with whom he has had an almost inarticulate, at times awkward, but close and affectionate relationship, plays but a small role.
And Renko himself is tired, worn out, and a shadow - mentally and physically and narratively - of his former self.
Now, Martin Cruz Smith has revealed that he has Parkinson's Disease, - and - in one of the few sections of the book that actually works well, and is quite powerful, Renko comes to learn that he suffers from the condition, too, and spends some of the book attempting to come to terms with this.
Nevertheless, and very much against my better judgment, needless to say, of course, I'll still seek out, and read Arkady Renko No 11 if it is ever written and published, but, I feel that I must say that - for the first time ever - I sincerely hope that it isn't written, and isn't published and that it doesn't ever make an appearance on our shelves or in our libraries or book shops, book stores, or Kindles.
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I was thinking of T.S.Eliot, and some of his work.
So much of it (Preludes, Prufrock, Wasteland, Hollow Men) is just depressing.
And then he compensates with Old Possum's book of Practical Cats.
So much of it (Preludes, Prufrock, Wasteland, Hollow Men) is just depressing.
And then he compensates with Old Possum's book of Practical Cats.
Prufrock is superb, but Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is genuinely brilliant.
That got me thinking about book titles that were changed for "foreign" markets, such as:
The Sun Also Rises <=> Fiesta (what, Hemingway wrote a spring break novel???)
Nineteen Eighty-Four <=> 1984 (I like the look of the first edition cover best)
Men Who Hate Women <=> The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (this change radically affects how the text is viewed, no?)
Don't forget
Schindler's Ark -> Schindler's List
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone -> Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
and one that nobody knows about -- The Philosophy of Everyday Things (POET) -> The Design of Everyday Things.
Northern Lights <=> The Golden Compass
I'm currently starting "The Blade Itself" by Joe Abercrombie