Nordic noir from a Norwegian author. I seldom read horror but I saw this book on the new book shelf at my library and I had enjoyed one prior book wriNordic noir from a Norwegian author. I seldom read horror but I saw this book on the new book shelf at my library and I had enjoyed one prior book written by him.
The story is in three parts. The first two-thirds is full-scale horror-fantasy. There’s a guy in town who lives in the ‘night house’ who is evil incarnate. He does things like sucking kids up bit by bit through a telephone in a phone booth.
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The main character is a young boy, early high-school age, who is a bully and bullying is a major theme of the book. The boy’s parents died in a fire when he was a young boy living in the city. Now he lives in a small town with an aunt and uncle who are foster parents to him. The author does a good job of giving us a picture of the psychology of a young bully:
“Tom looked like I hit him; I guess he didn't like me imitating his stammer. I didn't like it either, I just couldn't help it. It's always been like that. If people didn't already dislike me, I soon made sure that they did. It's the same sort of reflex that made people like Karen and Oscar Jr. [his foster parents] smile and be nice so that everyone liked them, only the opposite. It wasn't that I didn't want to be liked, it was just that I knew they weren't going to like me anyway. So I kind of preempted them: I got them to dislike me on my terms. So they hated me, but at the same time they were a bit scared of me and didn't dare mess with me.”
Shortly into the novel it dawned on me, ‘this is a YA book’ – young adult writing. I hadn’t expected that but I stuck with it. Sure enough, in the last third of the book everything changes. A famous author of a best-selling young-adult horror novel (titled The Night House, lol) is coming to town for his 15-year high school reunion. And guess who that famous author is? He’s a changed person. He even apologizes to his former classmates for being a bully. They accept his apology – no big deal – let bygones be bygones – that was years ago. But the horror hasn’t ended. (view spoiler)[ They haven’t forgotten at all – they plan to kill and eat him. (hide spoiler)]
The last section of the book switches the story on us again. A 3.5 rounded up.
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The Norwegian author, Nesbo, is obviously a brilliant, multi-talented guy. Consider that he is also a professional rock musician and song writer, and that after he received his economics degree he had worked as a stockbroker and a journalist. Until sidelined by an injury, he was a professional footballer (soccer). He’s most famous for his detective Harry Hole series of which I enjoyed reading one, The Snowman. He’s a best-selling internationally-known author – the book jacket tells us his books have sold 55 million copies – not bad, lol.
Top photo of Bergen from visitnorway.com The author from onassis.org...more
A cute tale about a high-school-aged boy who is struggling to come to grips with the death of the grandfather who raised him. The boy [Edited 1/15/22]
A cute tale about a high-school-aged boy who is struggling to come to grips with the death of the grandfather who raised him. The boy struggles to know what to do next with his life. I gave this read a ‘4’ as a young adult novel. I don't know if it is intended to be YA or not, but judged as an adult read, I would have only given it a 3.
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It's a fantasy set in Japan about a boy taking over his grandfather’s used bookstore. A talking cat comes to him and needs his help. The cat leads him on four adventures into Borges-like labyrinthine libraries of fantastic architecture where books are being abused in various ways. In each case the boy attempts to end the abuse by citing lessons he learned about books from his grandfather.
The ‘abuse’ of books includes (view spoiler)[ that by a wealthy man who has a fantastic library kept only to himself; a man who has a company who shreds books as they are abridged and adapted for speed-reading, and a behemoth company that only sells mass media ‘books that sell’ and discards anything else. (The speed-reading guy is struggling to get Goethe’s Faust down to two minutes.) (hide spoiler)]
The young man is hikikomori. The translator tells us that she kept this Japanese word because it has worked its way into the Oxford English Dictionary (and into my spell-checker!). The word means acute social withdrawal that mainly affects adolescents or young adults who live in isolation from the world.
The boy thinks he has no friends, but he’s wrong. A young woman and the high school’s ‘coolest guy’ drop by the bookstore repeatedly to try to talk him into going back to school. The young woman becomes his girlfriend and accompanies him on some of the feline rescue adventures.
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Some gems the boy learned from his grandfather:
“Books teach us how to care about others.”
“It's not true that the more you read, the more you see of the world. No matter how much knowledge you cram into your head, unless you think with your own mind, walk with your own feet, the knowledge you acquire will never be anything more than empty and borrowed.” [The grandfather knew the boy’s hermit-like tendencies and tried to get him out into the world.]
“Who does society value more – the man who reads the same book ten times or the one who reads ten books once each?”
I particularly liked the analogy of speed-reading as equivalent to listening to a symphony fast-forwarded on a tape player. Another is the idea that reading a difficult book is like climbing a mountain.
So we are treated to all kinds of truisms about books and their value. Here and there we hear of what must be some of the author’s unusual favorite works: things like Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, Husserl’s works on Phenomenology, and Run, Melos, a short story by Osamu Dazai. (The last is a classic read by Japanese school kids.) I noticed that of about 20 or so classics or authors mentioned in the story, every single one was by a western author other than that short story by Dazai. (Adolphe intrigues me; maybe one of the first psychological novels – 1816? I have not read it.)
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The author (b. 1978) is a doctor as well as a novelist. He’s best known for a novel made into a film that translates as “God’s Medical Records” but I don’t see on GR that the book has been translated into English.
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Top and bottom illustrations: the bookcover art by Yuko Shimizu on yukoart.com Jimbocho Booktown in Tokyo from atlasobscura.com The author from asianwiki.com...more
Question: if a story is about three young women of college age, is it always a YA novel? This Japanese author is considered a YA author.
This is a bitQuestion: if a story is about three young women of college age, is it always a YA novel? This Japanese author is considered a YA author.
This is a bit of a strange story. The main character is an only child but she also grew up with her aunt and uncle and two female cousins who are sisters, one a year older, one a year younger. The two families run a small seaside resort and function as a single family. While we follow the main character as she tells the story, Tsugumi of the title is in a sense the real main character. Tsugumi has some kind of disabling disease, and it was thought she might die while young.
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The young woman who might die is beautiful and very intelligent but, because of her illness, she is spoiled rotten and one of the nastiest people you will want to meet. She enjoys being mean to people. Everyone in the family, adults and children, let her do and say whatever she wants. She constantly calls the other girls ‘dimwits’ ‘morons,’ and ‘assholes.’ She plays up her illness saying “You jerks sure are going to feel like crap if I die tonight!” And, of course, all of us older people remember how we used to say to our mothers things like “Keep your mouth shut unless you’ve got something worth saying.” She has tantrums and throws food. The family seems not only to indulge her, but to admire her for this behavior.
The girl with the illness also experiences a “white rage” if someone crosses her. And when her boyfriend gets involved with some thugs she takes revenge on them in away that is bizarre, almost Stephen King-ish.
It’s also a book about nostalgia. They all love their lives and the companionship at the hotel. Now the main character is going off to college in Tokyo and the aunt and uncle are selling the resort. They are all overcome with nostalgia as the last third of the book focuses on the last summer they will be together, while the girl’s illness becomes more serious.
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A good story; fast-paced, less than 200 pages. I rate it a 3.5, rounded up to 4. I liked a bit better the author’s novel Kitchen, about a young woman trying to overcome grief through gourmet cooking. Here it is you are interested: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Photo of a Japanese resort from pinterest The author from bongbongbooks.wordpress.com ...more
I didn’t intend to like this book. Not having read this author before, I thought, who is this guy who writes YA stuff and has a video [Edited 1/15/23]
I didn’t intend to like this book. Not having read this author before, I thought, who is this guy who writes YA stuff and has a video blog? But I read it because so many of my GR friends have read it and rated it highly.
Indeed, it’s a great book and not just YA. It gives a brilliant picture of three bright young people (barely college-age) struggling to deal with cancer. How do they deal with it? With loving parents, friendship, sarcasm, cynicism, irony, tears and anger.
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The main character, a young woman, not only has to “fight” terminal cancer but has to deal with knowing she, a single child, is the “alpha and omega of her parents’ suffering.” Her father is constantly in tears. She is devastated when she overhears her mother say, “I won’t be a mom anymore.”
She falls in love with a young man who lost a leg to cancer, but is in remission, and who has just lost a girlfriend to cancer. Initially she won’t return his affection because she thinks “I’m a grenade” and doesn’t want him to lose a second love. She corrects her parents when they say “Even if you die…” with “When I die…”
There are so many reviews that I will just focus on the good writing, much of which is dialog.
“But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is side effect of dying.”
“Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the rest.”
“…my dad just kept telling me he loved me in this voice that was not breaking so much as already broken.”
“And yet I still worried. I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.”
On phone calls with her boyfriend: “…we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.”
“Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.” This statement could be the thesis for a philosophical treatise on consciousness.
She calls one of the more sterile hospitals a “prematorium.”
One young man accidentally puts his hand on the leg of another young man who is terminal. “I’m taken” he says.
And a real tear-jerker.
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With the sale of 50 million books, John Green (b. 1977) is one of the best-selling authors of all time. Many of his books on Goodreads have ratings numbering in the millions – right up there with the Harry Potters. After Fault, his most popular books are Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns and Turtles All the Way Down.
Top photo from nhsctcancerservices.hscni.net The author from nytimes.com ...more
This is a young adult novel, set in Paris and translated from the French. A friendship develops between a 13-year old special ed girl and a young womaThis is a young adult novel, set in Paris and translated from the French. A friendship develops between a 13-year old special ed girl and a young woman (18 years old) who lives on the streets. The latter is Nolwenn, the “No” of the title.
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We’re never given a diagnosis in the story but we realize the special ed girl is autistic, and seems to have Asperger’s syndrome. She’s brilliant but stands by herself under a tree at recess; stifles her laughter; whispers in class; is terrified at having to make a class presentation. When she has to speak, her mind becomes a jumble of thoughts and she freezes up. She’s seldom invited to parties but even so, she’ll pass. She’s invited to go skating but declines because she’ll tangle the shoe eyelets.
Psychologists have told her parents she is precocious and has a “disturbing maturity.” She reminds me of some other special ed characters in books such as the boy in Me and You or the older characters in The Solitude of Prime Numbers who very well know how to “act normal” but it’s just so exhausting! [Coincidentally both of these other books happen to be by Italian authors.]
The girl tries the best she can: she hangs out at the train station to study other people’s emotions. Some of her thoughts:
“Sometimes it seems as though something’s lacking inside me, like there’s a crossed wire, a part that’s not working, a manufacturing error. Not, as you might think, something extra, but something missing.”
“They shouldn’t make people believe that they can be equal, not here [in school] and not anywhere.”
“My mother’s right. Life’s unfair and that’s all there is to it.”
Her parents are supportive but they have their own problems that add to the girl’s burdens. A short time ago her mother lost her baby sister and now is so depressed she never leaves the house; she has no energy for even simple household tasks; she sits in the dark staring into space. Of her mother she says “I don’t want to talk to her because she doesn’t know who I am any more, because she always seems to be puzzling over what the link is between the two of us, how we’re related.” The girl hears her father sobbing in the bathroom at night.
The special ed girl meets the young street woman when she decides to do her school project on homeless people. We know the sad story of the young woman and we know she’s on drugs and where her spending money comes from. And we know that due to her “disturbing maturity,” the 13-year old knows what’s going on too – it’s just not explicitly stated since this is a young adult novel. The parents of the girl agree to take her into their home under “tough love” rules and she makes an impact on the whole family. The story is realistic, so we don’t expect a happy ending.
All in all, a pretty good read for both young and old adults. The author may be specializing in writing about personality disorders because her latest work, Nothing Holds Back the Night, is about a family coping with a woman’s bipolar disorder. ...more
Who would have thought that Zafon, best known for The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game, started his w[Edited for typos, pictures added 5/28/22]
Who would have thought that Zafon, best known for The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game, started his writing life as a young adult author? After he became famous his YA books were published in English translation, some of which had won YA awards in Spain. I picked it up without knowing it was a YA book.
The story is a spooky mystery based around the main character, a pre-teen boy, his older sister and the boy’s older friend. It is set in a coastal village in Spain just before WW II. So within the first few pages we have a railway station clock running backwards. And I thought – “I get it – Harry Potter!” And the story is Harry Potterish.
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With the war pending, the boy’s father decides to move the family out of the big city to a coastal village. At first the family is unaware that the last boy who lived in that house drowned.
We have a sunken ship in shallow water that the kids dive to and pick up treasures; a cemetery of circus freak statues that move and change position; an evil cat that sends a little girl into a coma; an ancient mariner who built his own lighthouse; an old film projector in the basement and old films that start showing current events. Of course the boy’s sister and the older friend fall in love.
You don’t read a YA book for its literary value, so you get some clichés and lame metaphors like this when the boy learns they are going to move: “To him, the news felt like a mad steam train hurtling through a china shop. His mind went blank, his mouth sagged, and his eyes glazed over.” I’m not a YA reader but I thought it was a good story and it kept my interest.
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The Spanish author is best known for his Cemetery of Forgotten Books trilogy: The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel's Game and The Prisoner of Heaven. He died in 2020 from cancer at age 55.
Top photo: Cartijo Jurado ‘one of the most haunted houses in Spain’ from idealista.com The author from reddit.com ...more
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