C6


S BOOK WORLD


Bureaucrats go bang-bang


by Art Taylor


a four-page cast of characters, a four-page glossary of weapons, five pages of acronyms and terminol- ogy and 13 pages of “Real-World News Excerpts” from sources like Aviation Week,Defense Technol- ogy International and sinodefence.com. And that just brings you to the prologue. But high stakes await. Extrapolating from those


T


actual news snippets, Brown imagines an alterna- tive, not-too-distant future tipping toward tur- moil. Eight years after the 2004 American Holo- caust (a nuclear smackdown between the United States and Russia), Washington is gearing up for new dominance in space. Armstrong Space Sta- tion keeps close surveillance on global security, and armed satellites de- but a new non-nuclear weapon called Mjollnir, Thor’s Hammer, which of- fers blisteringly powerful strike capabilities at any point on Earth. As other nations confab about re- sponses, China emerges from its isolationist shell: “The world’s


largest


EXECUTIVE INTENT By Dale Brown Morrow 371 pp. $26.99


standing army from the world’s most populous country [is] doing what the world has feared for two millennia: breaking out of its borders and massing troops elsewhere on the planet.” Back in Washington, another bat-


tle brews between a concessionist president and his hawkish VP. Oh, and don’t forget the blood- thirsty Somali pirates. Followers of Brown’s novels will undoubtedly glimpse more substance behind the regular se- ries characters here, but anyone coming to him for the first time will find a story that resembles all that prefatory material: people dwarfed by lavish descriptions of aircraft, acronym-laden ac- tion sequences and endless governmental delib- erations. Many scenes sound like meeting min- utes, listing attendees before rolling out defense reports, strategic assessments and political ap- praisals. “DSP and SBIRS-High did exactly what they were supposed to do: detect the thermal bloom,” explains a brigadier general in a fairly standard exchange. “On a typical DF-21 attack, the missile rises almost straight up to its in- tercept point, which means no track develops, or the track was still obscured by the ground fire. Only SBIRS-Low or Kingfisher-Eight could have tracked a DF-21.” Small power plays ultimately reveal the book as not just speculative fiction but another brand of political fantasy, where tough-minded conser- vatives squash lily-livered liberals: “When being a globalist and appeaser is more important than even a single American life, I don’t want to be part of that administration,” one undersecretary of defense proclaims before resigning in protest, only the first of several such exits as domestic politics shift and shatter. But another, less self-righteous line might final- ly stick better: A State Department rep accuses a CIA man of “reading too many cheesy techno- thrillers.” Tongue-in-cheek? Sure. But like Thor’s Hammer, that comment hits its mark.


bookworld@washpost.com


Taylor reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Post and other publications. His own fiction appears regularly in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.


ALAMY In memory of the disappeared


MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL A Memoir


By Emmanuel Carrère Metropolitan. 276 pp. $25


by Marie Arana I


have a friend who likes to say that life is like a French movie: bleak, with sharp punctuations of great beauty; baffling, yet illuminated by a few jarring truths; bor- ing, until you get to the sexy parts; and then, in the end, you wonder what in the world you’ve just seen. His words came to


mind as I finished “My Life as a Russian Novel,” a memoir by the celebrated French author and screenwriter Emmanuel Carrère, not because those words describe his book, but because, in it, Carrère achieves the opposite. His chronicle of a trip to a re- mote, ruined village in Russia is quirky, verging on incomprehensible — what’s more, sex is its most boring part — and yet, in the end, Carrère brings the whole pastiche to sharp focus with a few jarring truths and a moment of great beauty. You leave its last pages with a deep appreciation for life. Carrère is best known for his book “The Ad-


versary,” an enthralling, true-crime chronicle of a man who murdered his extended family to prevent them from discovering the monumental lie his life had become. Compared by The Post’s Michael Dir- da to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” the book was a harrowing tale of burgeoning insanity, a cin- ematically vivid journey to the dark corners of the human mind. Carrère’s other works — novellas, screenplays, a biography of science fiction author Philip K. Dick — are all riffs on the same theme:


How close is any of us, really, to madness? The book begins with the memory of an erotic dream that Carrère experiences on a train in the wee hours of a Russian morning. He is somewhere between Moscow and Kotelnich, the village where he intends to film a documentary on the last pris- oner of World War II, a Hungarian who spent more than 50 years of his life in a psychiatric hos- pital there. The dream is careening wildly — as most of this memoir will — between Kotelnich and Sophie, the lover Carrère has left behind in Paris. Yet, in a swift aberration meant to give us a hint of the unruly story on which we have just em- barked, the erotic action suddenly admits a third person: the pert Japanese wife of a former Latin American president. The sex in this book is largely like that: abrupt, nonsensical, beside the point. In time, we become numb to it — an effect, in itself, oddly disconcerting. As we swing back and forth from Carrère’s libidi- nous dream life to the harsh reality he comes to rec- ord in that Russian backwater, we begin to see, how- ever dimly, the real story that has drawn him there. It is the story of his mother. Or, rather, the narra- tive his mother would rather he didn’t tell. She is Russian, grew up speaking Russian, although to- day she is a permanent secretary for the Académie Française. Her father, as it turns out, was a Geor- gian who loved literature, immigrated to Paris, drove a taxi, worked for the Nazis during the Occu- pation and then disappeared in the maw of post- war reprisals — dragged off, never to be seen again. Here, then, despite the numbing sexual asides, is a pulsing horror story. First, the shame of being an immigrant: “The most gifted, the most brilliant . . . has gotten nowhere. In French society, he is no one. No one.... He belongs to that mass you see in the Métro: poor, gray, dead-eyed, with shoulders


bowed beneath a life they never chose, insignifi- cant . . . A father who cannot stand tall for his chil- dren.” And, more acute, is the shame of being a col- laborator: “a broken man who knew he was con- demned and for whom the condemnation was the logical conclusion.” There, there, all right now, as Carrère says. “Once said, it’s not so terrible.” It’s the mantra of the memoirist, enough to make you cry. “It isn’t your story, it’s mine,” he tells Mama, and off it goes, into the archives of human history. When Carrère’s grandfather vanished, in other words — just as that last Hungarian prisoner of war vanished into the distant hinterland of Russia — he set off dominoes that would clack through the generations to produce the work of Emmanuel Carrère: the secrets that the murderer in “The Ad- versary” didn’t want told; the boy who went miss- ing in “Class Trip”; the destructive mind game of “The Moustache”; the lurking madness of Philip K. Dick. And now, this true story of work, love and obsession — all of it messy and forgivable. As I say, it doesn’t clack into place until the final


page. In the process, you’ll endure an embarrass- ingly silly, priapic story that Carrère published, against all literary prudence, in Le Monde, in or- der to impress a woman he lusted after, yet never really loved. The Hungarian prisoner of war gets dropped unceremoniously. The focus of Carrère’s documentary gets altered, all hope for the project abandoned, until tragedy and failure return to Kotelnich to save the day. Never mind. This mad- dening and uncomfortable book will be worth it. Unlike my friend with the French movie, you’ll know exactly what you’ve seen.


aranam@washpost.com


Marie Arana is a writer at large for The Post. Her most recent novel, now in paperback, is “Lima Nights.”


This is the story of Carrère’s mother, one she’d rather he didn’t tell.


here’s a lot of baggage to be checked before the real story takes off in the 22nd book fromace techno-thriller writer Dale Brown:


KLMNO


WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2010


LITERARY CALENDAR TUESDAY | Mark R. Warren discusses and signs his new book, “Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Justice,” at Busboys and Poets, 1025 Fifth St. NW, 202-789-2227, at 6:30 p.m.


FOR YOUNG READERS


IT’S A BOOK By Lane Smith


Roaring Brook. $12.99. Ages 6-8


DOG LOVES BOOKS By Louise Yates


Knopf. $16.99. Ages 4-6


MOCKINGJAY By Suzanne Collins


Scholastic. $17.99. Ages 12 and up This eagerly anticipated final book in the Hunger


Games trilogy finds Katniss Everdeen, 17, the reluctant symbol of an uprising against the dictatorial govern- ment of Panem, a futuristic United States. Reluctant? Her time in the brutal gladiatorial arena of the previous novels has honed the girl’s fighting skills and sharpened her suspicions. Is she only a pawn in a power play televised by the rebel leaders? They want her and other warrior-teens to be the “on-screen faces of the invasion,” a scarred-but-still-photogenic rallying force for the oppressed people of Panem. Nothing is black or white in this gripping, complex tale, including the angry, self-doubting heroine. Throughout the strategizing, the grim losses and the required prettify- ing for the ever-present cameras, Katniss struggles to hold onto her sense of what’s right and real. As for the love triangle introduced in the first book involving fierce Gale, Katniss’s childhood companion, and kindly Pee- ta, her gladiatorial ally, it continues with complications aplenty. This dystopic-fantasy series, which began in 2008, has had such tremendous crossover appeal that teens and parents may discover themselves vying for — and talking about — the family copy of “Mockingjay.” And there’s much to talk about because this powerful novel pierces cheery complacency like a Katniss- launched arrow. Look skeptically at computer and tele- vision images, it suggests, be aware of spin, gaze upon the young faces of the world’s soldiers. Children forced to kill children? It’s not just in the pages of a novel. —Mary Quattlebaum


Authors who take books as their subjects may bor- der on solipsistic, but then, who are their readers if not self-absorbed children? And pushing books rather than the latest product tie-ins can’t be all bad. In the case of these two titles, it’s actually all good. Lane Smith’s hero is an urbane monkey-minus-the-tail who sports a polka-dotted shirt, a straw boater (concealing a surprise sidekick) and a book under his arm. His nemesis is a computer-savvy donkey — a jackass — who just doesn’t understand what monkey’s retro pa- per package is all about. “ ‘Can it text?’ ‘No.’ ‘Tweet?’ ‘No.’ ‘Wi-fi?’ ‘No.’ ” Donkey’s gradual capitulation to the power of a real book is marked by both the hands of the clock (in a droll double-page time-lapse se- quence) and the angles of his ears. But it’s amouse’s


final insouciant line that garners the biggest laugh. While Lane Smith’s monkey heads for the library, Louise Yates’s book-loving dog takes a different tack and opens a bookstore. Alas, alack: Customers fail to flock. A silver-haired matron requests tea, and an el- derly gent stops in for directions . . . but Dog is not downhearted because he loves books. “He loved the smell of them, and he loved the feel of them. He loved everything about them.” He whiles away the time read- ing the stock, and when a young customer finally ap- pears, he’s able to recommend the perfect book to her because he’s read them all! Even in these hectic elec- tronic days, these two titles prove there’s no substi- tute for the right book for the right child (or donkey) at the right time.


— Kristi Jemtegaard


THEY CALLED THEMSELVES THE K.K.K. The Birth of an American Terrorist Group By Susan Campbell Bartoletti


Houghton Mifflin. $19. Ages 12 and up After bondage and the Civil War, newly freed slaves


were treated to the fresh horrors of Reconstruction and hooded night riders. In her latest exploration of groups grounded in fear and hatred (her previous non- fiction book was the Newbery Honor Book “Hitler Youth”), Bartoletti shows where and how the Ku Klux Klan began and spread. It’s tough reading, but Barto- letti presents this sobering slice of history with essen- tial background information, memorable testimony from KKK members and victims alike, and plenty of edifying period engravings.


Klansmen — and the women who helped them —


created a hostile world in which the newly freed couldn’t be productive. Four murders in Choctaw County, Ala., led one sharecropper to abandon his field, saying, “I have no heart to work all day and then think at night I will be killed.” African Americans were often prevented from going to church or school, and they could not hope for justice since local law enforce- ment officers were often KKK members or KKK-friend- ly. The extent of the terrorism couldn’t have been imagined before President Ulysses S. Grant sent un- dercover detectives into the South to infiltrate the Klan. Although Bartoletti focuses on the KKK’s origins, she also touches on the group’s periodic surges of membership over the last century and makes it clear that we haven’t yet stamped out racial fear and vio- lence.


LOUISE YATES LANE SMITH — Abby McGanney Nolan


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58