The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak

Warning: Some Spoilers Below

This is the other historical fiction I was reading while I was reading Wolf Hall, and musing about my reactions to both. I would still say that Wolf Hall is a step above most historical fiction I've ever read, but this wasn't bad. It wasn't earth-shattering, either. But not bad.

The Winter Palace is about a young woman employed by the Empress Elizabeth of Russia as a spy on the rest of the court, (officially, a lady-in-waiting, of a sort). But she becomes friends with the future Catherine the Great, and turns coat to report to Catherine as well, particularly when Catherine seems to be isolated and alone.

Wow, I seem to have run out of things to say fairly early in this review. Why is that?

I think it's because, while The Winter Palace is a fun read, there's little that sticks with me. Normally, I'm bursting with themes, or characters, or ideas, or moments to explore, either good or bad. In this case, very little sticks out. Varvara, the main character, never really won my affection, but she never alienated it either. I guess, in the end, I don't really care about her that much.

Oof. That's a problem. I hadn't really been fully cognizant of how little the book struck me. It was a pleasant read, but there is so little more. The court politics in the book are fine, but not that acute. In fact, many of the emotions seem muted, even the ones surrounding children being taken away. There is one good crying jag, and then a lot of bitterness - but the bitterness itself seems washed out and distant instead of burning. The book talks about grand passions, but I felt little of them. Possibly because they were supposed to be of the characters Varvara was watching, but mostly from a distance.

And the crux of the betrayal at the end seems slight. Varvara is devastated to learn she wasn't the only spy Catherine had? After a lifetime of living at court and being told be absolutely everyone that everyone has multiple spies everywhere? "I thought I was special but now I find out I'm not" just seems rather toothless in this particular circumstance.

I couldn't tell you why that is, though. Stachniak certainly shows us the repercussions for one other discovered spy, but there's no real sense of danger around Varvara. She seems to skillful at what she does, and the suspense is not effectively communicated. There's just something lacking here, a real sense of urgency and the ability to make emotions keenly felt.

I think this is an issue of the writing, which is otherwise quite competent. It just needs that extra edge to make this story compelling. As it is, it's an enjoyable read, but very little of it really distinguishes itself for me.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Let me try to explain why I didn't like this book very much. I believe one of the sales quotes on the back of the book can help me communicate why. Keep in mind that this is, at least in part, a book about French complicity in the Holocaust:

"Sarah's Key unlocks the star-crossed, heart-thumping story of an American journalist in Paris and the sixty-year-old secret that could destroy her marriage."

And that, unfortunately, is how the story reads sometimes. Not all the time, but there is a good deal of the book where it feels like the rounding up of Jews in Paris and their subsequent journeys to Auschwitz are mostly important for the strain it puts on an American journalist 60 years later, and how it affects her marriage.

Now, if this were more sensitively written, if that were the story, how researching trauma can alter a person and have a deep and lasting impact on themselves and their lives, that would be extremely interesting. This is not that book. This is the book where the American journalist is, at least at the beginning, the only one who cares about this atrocity, and all the French are, to put it lightly, assholes. A few become less assholish, the rest, from her husband, to some of her in-laws, remain these caricatures of French asshattery.

She cares, you see! They don't! They just want to ignore it! (If this book had explored the reasons why people have a hard time acknowledging trauma, that would also have been extremely interesting. Do we see a pattern here? If this book had...if, if, if. But it doesn't.)

It also has annoyingly short James-Patterson-style chapters. Why? They flip back and forth between the present and World War II. But we're not given enough time in either time period to really get invested. I just really hate the extremely short two-to-four page chapter thing that Patterson made so popular. I can see the occasionally short chapter thrown in for emphasis, but when the whole book is like that, it's choppy.

And it's irritating, because some of her material about the past is actually quite affecting. But then we jump away to the annoying story of Julia and her asshole husband who has been cheating on her for years, treats her like shit, and doesn't want her to have a baby. This story has no depth, the characters are almost cartoonishly evil or good. Sarah's actual story is heartbreaking, but it's undercut because it keeps being important because of its impact on Julia, and this is not dealt with well or with real understanding.

There are a lot of places where this could have been a better book. But I was very disappointed.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

When this story started to come together, when all the disparate threads started to weave together and create some sort of momentum, this book was suddenly a lot of fun and pretty damn amusing. Unfortunately, it didn't hit that point until about 340 pages in, with 40 pages left to go. While I enjoyed the last forty pages quite a bit, that's not really enough to make up for the way the previous pages didn't really engage me at all.

It's billed as hilarious. At most, I'd say moderately amusing. It's not a terrible book, and I'm not angry I read it. I was just a little bored by it. And here's why:

So little mattered to the main character.

And so, in consequence, I found it hard to have anything that happened matter to me. I don't like these detached, dissociated characters. I'm not interested in them, and their lack of connection to the world to me seems less a statement than lack of attention to writing a vivid character. <i>The Stranger</i> bothered me in the same way, but at least Camus was trying to do something there. In this case, it seems like the author is trying to create a blank slate and I don't think it helps the story.

The inside cover bills this as Forrest Gump, if Forrest Gump were 100, enjoyed vodka and knew how to build explosives. As far as we can tell, Allan Karlsson, the main character doesn't share the intellectual disabilities of Forrest Gump, but his life takes him through a surprising number of world events, including helping build the first atomic bomb, accidentally giving that secret to the Russians, drinking with Truman, saving Franco, not getting along so well with Lyndon B. Johnson, getting along quite well with Mao Tse-Tung, getting sent to a gulag in Vladivostok, etc., etc.

Allan's just not interested in politics, you see, and so he meets these people and doesn't pay attention to the political nonsense they speak, he just wants a drink. But while I think you can get away with a character who isn't as interested in world events as world events are interested in him, I don't think it works to have the main character care about nothing. If world events happen to him and are the backdrop for something that does have meaning to him, then that's one thing. But nothing does. Except maybe a drink. But even that isn't urgent enough to mean that much - he gives up drinking for over five years in Vladivostok, with nary a tremour. It does eventually drive him to leave, but apathetically. It's all apathetically. He does things, with a minimum of effort, but does them. And doesn't care.

For that to be enough to carry the work, everything else would have to be a damn sight more vivid than it is. Instead, it retains that detachment, that apathy, that lack of concern. And I didn't find that funny, I just found it tedious. And although the ending started to bring it together in amusing ways, that was not enough to make me fall in love with this world and this character.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I have a confession to make. One that may make a pariah amongst all right-thinking book readers and reviewers.

I often read the back couple of pages long before the end of the book.

It’s a very old habit, and one that I’ve never been able to entirely break. (And since I read about a study that claimed that people who participate in this shameful practice still get the same enjoyment out of books as those who don’t, I haven’t worried about it too much.)

So, in reading Gone Girl, about 30 pages in, I felt that old tug. Just check the back few pages. Go ahead, do it. And I tell you, I’ve never been good at ignoring that voice when it insinuates itself into my head.

And this is a book where that knowledge from the last few pages definitely changes how you read the whole thing. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you (at least, I’ll try not to), but knowing the ending made me read the whole book very differently. And I enjoyed that. I think I would have been frustrated had I not known how it was going to end.

Sorry, I’m an unrepentant sinner.

Gone Girl is what, nouveau noir? Where everyone could be a little bit shady, and crimes are flying fast and witty? Well, it doesn’t have that noir turn of phrase that you get with the great classics of the genre, but the story is solid, and the twists and turns very enjoyable.

Nick Dunne’s wife has disappeared, in a struggle. He reacts inappropriately to some of the succeeding search. But did he kill his wife, or is there something else afoot? That wife, Amy, was the subject of a bestselling series of books written by her child psychologist parents. She was Amazing Amy to the world, and had attracted some stalkers in the past. Are they involved? And what about that diary?

I’m not sure I can tell you anything else without doing to you what I happily did to myself.

But Gone Girl was a fast read, an entertaining one, and if you like a twisted mystery, worth picking up.