Category: Support Your Library Challenge 2009

Georges Simenon’s The Man On The Boulevard

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

I borrowed The Man on the Boulevard by Georges Simenon, translated by EileenEllenbogen, from my local library. It is the third Maigret book I’ve read in the past few months and all the way through I was thinking this was the best of the three, until the end that is. It has a puzzling murder to solve – Louis Thouret is found stabbed in a little alleyway. Seemingly a perfectly ordinary man of regular habits who leaves his home in the suburbs to go to his job as a storekeeper in Paris for the past twenty five years. His wife is surprised to find he was wearing light brown shoes because he always wore black, a flamboyant tie unlike the one he normally wore and that there were two cinema tickets in his pocket as well as more money in his wallet than he normally carried with him.

So it turns out that Louis has a double life that his wife knows nothing about. It appears he has been having an affair and for the past three years he has not had a job, so how has he managed to bring home his monthly salary? Where does he change his shoes every day and why?   It’s the shoes that set Maigret on the right track to solving the mystery. The book was originally called Maigret et l’homme du banc or Maigret and the man on the bench – it just so happened that Louis spent part of the day sitting on a bench talking to an unknown man, ‘the sort of person who sits on benches’ and that forms another important clue.

man-on-the-b

There were lots of things I liked in this book – the attention to detail, the descriptions of the weather (cold and wet), and the characters themselves.  It’s set in Paris and without knowing the location of the various boulevards I could still get a good impression of the city and its suburbs.  I liked the theme of a man following a double life and the way Louis resolves his problem of keeping up appearances with his wife and family although I thought his method of maintaining his income was rather implausible.

Maigret and his colleagues gradually discover Louis’s secrets and I was beginning to wonder just where this was taking me as I couldn’t work out who had killed him. I really had no idea who it could be.  And then the book was spoiled for me by the abrupt and unsatisfactory ending. The culprit was someone who hadn’t been mentioned at all. It was such an anti-climax as though Simenon just ran out of inspiration.

When Will There Be Good News?

Published on by Margaret6 Comments
When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3)


Complex but so very satisfying!  This has had very mixed reviews on Amazon which just goes to show that you have to make up your own mind about a book. I read it very quickly because I loved it. I know I missed bits – just when did Jackson lose his jacket? I’ve tried to track it down but I can’t spot it, so I’m thinking of reading it again before I have to take it back to the library.

It really is a case of bad news all round. To start at the beginning – six year old Joanna witnesses the murder of her mother, older sister and baby brother.  It goes from bad to worse with several interlinking plots (some with convenient coincidences) to keep me guessing what disaster would happen next.Thirty years later the killer is about to be released. Joanna, is now Dr Hunter, and has a baby and an unlikeable husband Neil. She is helped by Reggie, an extremely likeable and resourceful sixteen year old girl. When Joanna goes missing Reggie is the one who insists the police in the form of Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe (not very likable) investigates. Louise has her own problems in the form of a likeable husband. Then there is Jackson Brodie, formerly a police officer and private investigator, who gets involved due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At times the plots got so complicated that I couldn’t quite remember who did what – one problem of reading too quickly. Reggie had to leave school after the death of her mother. She is still doing her A-Levels and is tutored by her former teacher, Ms MacDonald who is suffering from cancer. Her brother Billy and his ‘friends’ threaten both Reggie and Ms MacDonald with unpleasant consequences. Then there is Alison living in dread of the return of  her homicidal maniac of a husband who is on the run, a train crash, and the unexplained murder of two men in a burnt down house – etc, etc.

It seems like a catalogue of disasters but it’s also funny and light at the same time and there are plenty of allusions to keep me working out where they come from. The easiest were the nursery rhymes Joanna sings to her baby and that Kate Atkinson works into the text. It’s set in Edinburgh, a place that is new to me, but as my son and family are now living nearby, of great interest and I could identify some of the locations. There is plenty of action, good  characterisation and dramatisation of how relationships work – or don’t work.

I’ve previously read Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, also featuring Jackson Brodie and I thought I’d read One Good Turn, the second Jackson book – but I haven’t. It’s a toss-up now between re-reading When Will there Be Good News? and One Good Turn (which I own). I just hope no one has reserved the library book!

Fire in the Blood

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

I bought Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky ages ago, full of enthusiasm to read it at once. I read a few pages and then for some unknown reason left it lying around unread. A few weeks ago I borrowed Fire in the Blood from my local library and once I started to read it I just had to finish it. Now I’ll have to read Suite Francaise as soon as possible.

Irène Némirovsky was born in Russia in 1903 and fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a best selling novelist. She moved from Paris just before the German occupation in 1940 and went to live in the small village of Issy-l’Eveque (in German occupied territory). She was arrested in 1942 and deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942.

Fire in the Blood is set in a small village based on Issy-l’Eveque between the two world wars. The narrator is Silvio looking back on his life and gradually secrets that have long been hidden rise to the surface, disrupting the lives of the small community. The people are insular, concerned only with their own lives, distrusting their neighbours. All Silvio wants now is a quiet life, but he cannot avoid being drawn into helping Colette, his cousin Helene’ s daughter, when her husband Jean is found drowned in the mill stream.

Although only a short book (153 pages) it is an intense story of life and death, love and burning passion. It’s about families and their relationships – husbands and wives, young women married to old men,  lovers, mothers, daughters and stepdaughters. Silvio in his old age feels rejected by life and lonely. In his youth he had travelled the world, seeking his fortune, propelled by the fire in his blood.  Now his passions are extinguished and he no longer knows who he is. He remembers :

When you’re twenty love is like a fever, it makes you almost delirious. When it’s over you can hardly remember how it happened … Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns itself out. Faced with this blaze of dreams and desires, I felt so old, so cold, so wise. (page 45)

The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire … That was what we wanted. To burn, to be consumed, to devour our days just as fire devours the forest. (page 152)

The characters are drawn with simplicity and detachment, but this is deceptive as there are layers upon layers and there is a brooding, silent and haunting atmosphere, almost menacing as the truth emerges. Added to this is the writing itself full of rich descriptive passages of the land and the people. It is indeed a gem of a book.

The First Blandings Castle Book

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I wrote about my first reactions to Something Fresh by P G Wodehouse in a Sunday Salon post – click here. I finished it a week or so ago (I borrowed it from the library) and it’s made me want to read more of Wodehouse’s books. It’s very entertaining and amusing, indeed farcical at the end.

I did find it mildly confusing when I read that Ashe Marson, the young English writer looking for ‘something fresh’ to get him out of the rut he was in, was renting a flat off Leicester Square in London for five dollars a week and there was a later reference to the cost of something (I forget what) in dollars. Wodehouse to me was a British writer and wrote very British books and this book was published in the UK. So I had to look it up. Ah – Something Fresh was first published in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post between June and August 1915, (American), then in the USA in book form as Something New on September 3 1915 and nearly two weeks later in the UK. So some Americanisms appear to have survived.

Once I got over this little stumbling block I read the book without any interruptions. As I wrote in my earlier post Ashe and Joan Valentine are both employed to retrieve the scarab that Lord Emsworth absent-mindedly pocketed when visiting Mr Peters his son’s future father-in-law. Lord Emsworth under the impression that Mr Peters has given him the scarab has exhibited it in the museum at his family home Blandings Castle.

Alerted to the plans to steal back the scarab, Baxter – the Efficient Baxter – Lord Emsworth’s secretary, sits on guard all night to foil the thief. The result is pure farce, with fights in the dark, mistaken identites, crashing furniture and valuable china smashed – most enjoyable mayhem. I much prefer farce on the page than on stage!

I loved the language -just one example picked at random:

The Efficient Baxter was coming down the broad staircase. A general suspicion of mankind and a definite and particular suspicion of one individual make a bad opiate. For over an hour sleep had avoided the Efficient Baxter with an unconquerable coyness. He had tried all the known ways of wooing slumber, but they had failed him, from the counting of sheep downwards. The events of the night had whipped his mind to a restless activity. Try as he might to lose consciousness, the recollection of the plot he had discovered surged up and kept him wakeful. It is the penalty of the suspicious type of mind that it suffers from its own activity. (Page 160)

Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge 2009

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I’d decided that I wasn’t going to join any more challenges for next year because I don’t want to feel that I’m reading to deadlines, but this one is ideal for me as I always borrow books from the library. The rules are simple:

There will be three sizes of challenges.

** The first is to read 12 books from your local library in 2009.
** The second is to read 25 books from your local library in 2009.
** The third is to read 50 books from your local library in 2009.

You decide which one of the three challenges is best for you.

  • You can join anytime as long as you don’™t start reading your books prior to 2009.
  • This challenge is for 2009 only. The last day to have all your books read is December 31, 2009.
  • You can join anytime between now and December 31, 2009.

So far this year I’ve read 33 library books, so I can easily attempt the second challenge. If I do read more than 25 that’s a bonus and I may even reach 50. If you want to join in click here.