Carlos

I started the audiobook of Lolita one day at the gym while “Jersey Shore” played on one of the big TVs in the cardio section, and found myself thinking there was some sort of irony there, listening to Jeremy Irons' silky tones narrate a tale of a man whose behavior goes past the bounds of decency while images of people engaging in more banal forms of debauchery played in front of me. This is all a round about way of expressing my own trepidation when I began Lolita, the first-person account of one man's criminal relationship with a 12-year-old girl. Yet, Lolita is less about the narrator's crimes than about his own mental derangement. The spirit of Poe hangs over the novel, from the beginning when we learn that Humbert Humbert (our narrator) mourns for a childhood love named Annabel Leigh, and I found myself thinking much of The Tell-Tale Heart. Nabokov takes all of the sickness, literary style, rationalization and guilt of that short tale and stretches it out into a strange, haunting aria of obsession and memory, with a healthy dose of black comedy. Yet he does not let us completely off the hook, and we often see through Humbert's narration, though he is blind to it, the terrible impact of his actions. It's the sort of novel that lingers long after the last page, like a vivid dream whose images continue to haunt long after wakefulness has returned.

I saw a tweet today which stated:

honestly PINK FLAMINGOS is such a potent depiction of the difference between transgression and edgelordiness

Would it be strange to wish that this book had been written by [a:Irene Nemirovsky 5772020 Irene Nemirovsky http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]? I'm not saying that Nemirovsky should have written of life under the Soviets or that I wish this book had her more subtle touch. I wouldn't change a word of it, but swapping Nemirovsky's name for [a:Ayn Rand 432 Ayn Rand http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1168729178p2/432.jpg]'s would make this a better book. (Also, lose any introduction or afterword.)I realize this sounds like a strange notion, but when you pick up a Nemirovsky book, you know that whatever it's flaws, the main goal is to tell a story about flawed human beings coping with the vicissitudes of life. “We the Living” begins in 1922 with the return of the Argounova family to Petrograd after the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. The action principally follows Kira, the oldest daughter, who is eighteen at the beginning of the story, but as the novel proceeds it expands to include members of Kira's extended family, as well as her friends. So we get a view of the horrors of Soviet Russia from several views, including that of young party members. One of these, a man named Andrei, who is a member of the secret police and a hero of the revolution, falls madly in love with Kira. However, she herself has already fallen in love with Leo, the son of an aristocrat.Rand is a powerful witness to the criminality of the Soviets: their corruption, their arbitrary use of power, their lack of principles. The powers-that-be talk about liberating the people, but instead they starve them, brutalize them and force them to volunteer hours to hold on to menial jobs, while corrupt party officials game the system for their own good and flaunt their ill-gotten riches. Though the dialog is sometimes clunky, Rand's writing is very evocative, conveying the destitution of the regime, the way it crushes some and corrupts others. Perhaps most heartbreaking is the plight of men such as Andrei and Stepan Timoshenko, men who fought against the injustice of the Czars only to be betrayed by the new regime.If Nemirovsky's name were on the title page, this would be a tale of the way that a brutal system damages people, and in Kira, we would see the odd girl whose reaction to the Soviets is flawed and off-kilter because she is just a human being reacting to a terrible situation. In truth Kira, like Gutierrez' Juan Moreira, is a character whose thoughts and actions I did not always agree with, yet whose willingness to stick to her ideals, even if it means death, makes her admirable.Yet, because this is a Rand novel, Kira is not just a flawed human being, but Rand's stand-in. Her off-kilter philosophy is meant to be the lesson of the book, and this is where the book's major flaw lies. “We the Living” presents us something peculiar, a novel in which the narrator is trustworthy but the author is not. Rand is a great witness of the life under the Soviets, but her interpretation of things (as reflected by Kira) leaves a lot to be desired.For Kira/Rand's view is not that the Soviets are an elite using power only to serve themselves while millions toil for little, but is that they scorn men like Leo, whose lives are more meaningful than those of ordinary men. This is perplexing, since it's never clear what makes Leo so great, except that he's handsome, haughty and selfish.If this were a “Brave New World”-style dystopia, where the contentment of the many bought at the cost of the creative or the different, this would be a reasonable objection. However, it's so clear that talk of the proletariat is just window dressing for a self-serving regime, that Kira's inability to see this makes her seem sort of clueless.Even worse, when Andrei once asks her, “Don't you know that we can't sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?” her response is not that this is precisely what the Soviets are doing are that you cannot bring about justice through injustice, but the following rant:What are your masses but millions of dull, shriveled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains?So, this should be a brilliant and powerful novel, did it not stop so often to remind me that it was in service to Rand's agenda, her idea of the proper places of the aristocracy and the rabble, the warped views of her stand-in.Rand meant this book as being not just about Russia or Communism, but about totalitarianism. However, the book falls short compared to Orwell's 1984, which sees to the true dark heart of dictatorship in which power is not a means but an end.

The word “thug” comes from the Thuggee (deceivers) who allegedly plagued India prior to the arrival of the British. Though there is some controversy nowadays as to the extent of their existence, tales of their exploits made a strong impression on the 19th Century British and helped justify a stronger colonial presence on the Indian subcontinent.

Confessions of a Thug is the story of one of these men, Ameer Ali, a Muslim thug who led a long and successful career as a Thug before his luck ran out. Ali relats his story to an English interviewer, starting with the death of his father at the hands of thugs and his adoption by the band's leader. Soon, he is grown up and interested in taking up the family trade, which his bravery and cleverness make him particularly suited to.

Though the interviewer occasionally interjects to render moral observations on the action, the voice that predominates is that of Ali, who comes across as an interesting anti-hero. With his cunning and boldness and his travels across India in search of those to rob, he comes across as an exotic adventurer-criminal, like some mix of Sinbad the Sailor and Tony Soprano. This is somewhat underscored by his tales of commanding men under the Pindaris, using freebooting armies to extort treasure from defenseless communities. Ali is as proud of his battlefield exploits as of his work with the strangling cloth.

An interesting story of crime and death on the Indian subcontinent, with many interesting local details. Somewhat dated nowadays, especially in its transliterations from Hindi, but still an interesting read.

A nice conclusion to the Ambergris saga. Relatively straightforward noir-style detective tale lacks some of the postmodern fun of the previous works.