City of Glass
Paul Auster
A postmodern meta riff on the suspense novel. Overall I enjoyed it, even if in the end it seemed too clever by half. It shares with some other novels I have read a denouement that places the protagonist(s) in a shrinking universe, partly of their own making, including John Williams's Stoner, E.L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley, and Kafka's story A Hunger Artist.
The Keeper
Tana French
This completes her Ardnakelty crime trilogy, featuring the transplanted American cop Cal Hooper and his constructed Irish family. As in the previous installments, the village of Ardnakelty forms a collective character, often manifested in the person of Mart Lavin, Cal's crusty and not entirely trustworthy neighbor and confidante. French is the master of this kind of psychological and anthropological entertainment, and for the most part The Keeper does not disappoint. I could have wished for a little more of Trey, Cal's tough-as-nails, more-or-less adopted teenage daughter; and I found the resolution of the suspicious death at the center of the plot not entirely credible. But none of those quibbles will stop me from snapping up the fourth installment, if there is one, or whatever French's next book happens to be.
A Fool's Kabbalah
Steve Stern
This is about as entertaining as a historical novel about the Holocaust by bullets could be. The book switches between twin narratives. One follows Gershom Scholem as he travels through eastern Europe after the War, attempting to gather and save Jewish books looted by the Nazis, including historical documents relating to Jewish mysticism. The other narrative features the antics of the village fool Menke Klepfisch, as the Nazis occupy his shtetl and visit one atrocity after another on the hapless and superstitious residents.
The book is ultimately about the futility of some of the most deeply human defenses against the vicissitudes of life – whether religious mysticism, rational philosophy, or humor – in the face of the ultimate evil. But it is often touching and very funny. Stern surely wants us to feel discomfort when we chuckle, given the horrors he rather graphically describes. He succeeds.
