The Mankell-Bergman connection

Why didn't I know this? Today I learned that Henning Mankell is married to Ingmar Bergman's daughter Eva. I had no idea!

Mankell was talking about Bergman in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, pegged to the French release of The Troubled Man -- apparently the final Wallander novel (at last!). At one point the interviewer says to Mankell that the characters in Depths are depressive, and asks if that's a trademark of Scandinavian literature, from Strindberg to Hamsun:

If you want really melancholy literature, check out Portugal! I'm not sure melancholia is a dominant trait of Swedish or Scandinavian literature. That's a myth spread by the movies of my father-in-law, Ingmar Bergman. He often joked that it was all his fault! But there's an inherent melancholia to an Europe that's searching for itself right now.

Q: What did you talk about with Bergman?

We were very close. The last few years, I was one of the last people he stayed in touch with. We chatted a lot, mostly about music. You can talk about music in a thousand different ways. And he had his own little cinema. We watched about 150 movies together: silent classics as well as recent films. It was always thrilling to hear his comments. He was the first one to read my plays. I miss him a lot.

Q: Can you name a specific memory?

He was very happy that I joined him in loving Hour of the Wolf, one of his most underrated, most misunderstood movies. I think I represented the brother he never had. The last time I saw him was a few days before his death. I knew he was dying. And in fact he died at the hour of the wolf, between 4 and 5am -- allegedly the time when people are born or die.

How not to do historical fiction

Following recommendations, I picked up Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy. This has got to be a cult classic of some kind, because two more people, seeing me read it outside the theater and on the subway, broke out in spontaneous praise for Kerr. But I have to admit I gave up after the first novel, March Violets, and didn't finish the trilogy. A couple of things kept tripping me, preventing full immersion.

One is Kerr's relentless use of hard-boiled similes. Taken separately, they're inventive and evocative, but when you have three per page, it becomes a tiresome tic.

A building's red-brick walls "heaved into sight like the muddy flanks of some horny-skinned dinosaur."

A black door is "polished so keenly they could have used it as a mirror in a negro jazz-band's dressing room."

"He edged towards me like a crab with a bad case of corns."

"The voice emptied slowly out of the Boris Karloff mouth, with its slightly protruding teeth, like grit from a bucket."

"She produced a small lace handkerchief which seemed as improbably in her large, peasant hands as an antimacassar in those of Max Schmelling, the boxer…"

The last brings me to the other thing that bugged me: the constant overexplaining of terms and references — something that's particularly common in historical fiction. "She poured herself a glass of Bowle, Berlin's favorite summer drink, from a tall, blue-glass pitcher…"

So Berlin Noir went back to the mid-Manhattan library, unfinished. I replaced it with Sofi Oksanen's Purge, a Finnish-Estonian literary novel that's getting excellent reviews in France. Only a dozen pages in so far, but it's very promising.

And today I did my first trade at the Mystery Swap run by the Community Bookstore in Park Slope: Bring in a mystery novel, pay $1 and you can take one from their stash. I brought a couple of books, gave my $2, and made off with Carl Hiaasen's Basket Case and Maj Swöwall and Per Wahlöö's The Terrorists.

From the land Down Under, part 4

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was keen on procuring some Australian novels during my trip. This proved harder than expected. Not that the pickings were slim; it's just that with the Aussie dollar higher than ever (or the US dollar lower than ever), the exchange rate made books particularly prohibitive. $26 for a new trade paperback? Yikes! So I checked used bookstores, which meant I had to throw my want list out the window and make the most of the available options.

Luckily, I found a couple of great places and came back with some nifty stuff. The highest I paid was $8; the rest of the haul cost less than $3 per book, with a couple of $1 catches.

In Port Douglas, I picked up Crew, an amusingly trashy 1980s novel about surfboat racing in Sydney; Ride On Stranger (1943) by New South Wales lefty writer Kylie Tennant; and Stiff, the first book in Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan series. I polished off Crew in a single day at the beach, then started on Stiff. The series revolves around a member of the Labor party in Melbourne, making for a really great mix of politics and crime. Maloney's humor and locale-specific details aren't unlike the ones in Carl Hiaasen's earlier (and best) novels.

I was happy to find another used Maloney novel at Melbourne's New International Bookshop on Victoria Street. The hallway leading to the store was lined with $1 bins that were actually packed with goodies like out-of-print Daphne du Maurier. While avidly foraging, I was interrupted by a young man who invited me to "the workshop about the Vietnam War."

Fittingly, the store is next door to the Victorian Trades Hall Council, "the voice of Victorian workers since 1856" (Victoria being the state Melbourne is in). And down the block is the Old Melbourne Gaol, where Ned Kelly was hanged in 1880 and whose tour include an interactive feature where "visitors are 'arrested' and encounter what it is like to be locked up."

In short: the perfect place to buy a Shane Maloney book!

Brain in a jar

A few days after grandly announcing my retirement from Scandi crime and here I am again, reading Arnaldur Indriðason's Hypothermia and watching Jar City, a movie adaptation of one of his early books.

Indriðason is definitely up there when it comes to utter bleakness. His books revolve around detective Erlandur, from Reykjavik, who is just an incredibly sad sack: divorced with two dysfunctional grown children, and a seeming inability to ever enjoy himself. Mostly this goes back to a youthful trauma: Erlandur's brother disappeared in a snow blizzard and never resurfaced. All of Indriðason's book involve flashbacks, and the key to the mystery always lays in history.

This makes sense for Iceland-set novels, since the country seems to have an intense relationship with its history and itself, as illustrated by the project in which the entire population's DNA is recorded in a database. Jar City is a good illustration of Indriðason's m.o. — the database plays a big role and the action hinges on 30-year-old events — plus the movie offers an excellent visual adaptation of the books' very specific mood. Typical is a scene in which Erlendur stops by a fast-food place and orders sheep's head from the drive-through window. Then we see him eating his take-out back home, on the 16th floor of a grim high rise. He absent-mindedly extracts an eyeball and munches on it, then breaks the sheep's skull in two. It's a good deal, too: the meal comes with a side of mashed potatoes. Also noteworthy: Erlandur coming up to a key character while carrying a brain in a bowling bag.

Iceland being small, I haven't seen many noir novels from there. I enjoyed Árni Þórarinsson's Le Dresseur d'insectes (unavailable in English, as far as I know), because it has a sense of humor that breaks with the genre and because its hero isn't a cop or a lawyer but a journalist. As with other Nordic noir authors, he's quite popular in France, where I randomly picked up the aforementioned novel.

As I'm departing for vacation in Australia in a couple of days, I'm researching local authors so I can pick up some paperbacks while there. Shane Maloney looks intriguing, for instance, as well as Leigh Redhead (I may be influenced by her name) and Kel Robertson. Any other recommendations? (Other than Peter Temple and Garry Disher, whose work I'm already familiar with.)

Crime, Italian style

I realize that Scandi crime is super-hot right now, what with Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy being a phenomenon and all — every day I see at least one person reading one of those books on the subway. It's so huge that it even made the cover of Entertainment Weekly, and when was the last time that mag had a book on the cover? I've seen quite a few "If you like Millennium, you'll like these Scandi noirs" sidebars too, and of course they're kinda funny. If you like Stieg Larsson's proto-feminist thrillers you'll like Henning Mankell's dry procedurals? These writers have little in common — it's like saying, If you like Mary Higging Clark, you'll like Patricia Highsmith, just because they're both American women writing thrillers. But then I myself enjoy both Larsson and Mankell so who am I to say?

Anyhoo.

I've been beating the drum for Scandi crime for a while (like here for instance), but I may now be officially tired of it. Okay, I know I've said this before (as in this 2007 entry) and I keep going back to the trough, but this time I mean it!

What to replace Scandi crime with though? Sticking to the geographical angle, Italy looks like my next goldmine. What makes Italian noir novels particularly interesting is that Italy itself is such a mess. In Scandinavia, there's a sense of a strong, ordered civil society, which makes violent transgressions particularly glaring. That, of course, is the appeal of noir books from northern countries.

But the borders are a lot more blurred in Italy — after all, this is a country where the underground, off-the-book economy is almost as big as the regular one. The criminal enterprises known as the Camorra, the Mafia or the 'Ndrangheta originated in Italy, not Sweden or Denmark.

I read several novels by Sicily's Leonardo Sciascia when I was in my twenties and thirties. NYRB Classics has published quiet a few of them, and I cannot recommend them enough. Sciascia wrote a lot about the impact of the Cosa Nostra on Sicilian society but in a kind of literary way. Don't look for hardboiled stuff or tight procedurals — it's no coincidence these books are often described as metaphysical crime. Sciascia is depressing because he shows how the Mafia thrives in a dysfunctional society and political system; in fact, how both sides of the legal divide feed on each other, need each other. To Each His Own and Equal Danger are particularly good novels, while The Moro Affair is an account of the killing of politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in the 1970s.

Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series is also set in Sicily but casts a much lighter look at that region. Camilleri's book are very funny — by contrast, I can't think of any Scandi procedural being funny.

Europa Editions has put out a few good volumes too. I enjoyed Massimo Carlotto's The Goodbye Kiss, which was particularly brutal. Even better is Carlo Lucarelli, whose Commissario De Luca trilogy is a great read. The action is set immediately after WWII, when there was great confusion as to who the "good guys" were. The lead character was a police officer under Mussolini: Did that make him an active participant in fascism or was he just one of those obeying public servant who nevertheless kept the fascist state going? The power struggles between Communists and Christian Democrats in the post-war period are also quite fun to read about.

My latest discovery is Giorgio Scerbanenco, who was recommended at the used bookstore L'Amour du Noir in Paris. The book the owner picked for me as an entry point is Les Enfants du massacre (1968), even though it's the third in the Duca Lamberti series. Wow! Scerbanenco set his books in Milan and reading about that city as it was in the 1960s is bracing. Scerbanenco's most famous creation is Lamberti, a doctor who does time for euthanasia then starts working for the police since he can't practice medicine anymore. The level of amoral brutality in Les Enfants du massacre is staggering, especially since the ones performing it are teenagers, and young ones at that. Of course Scerbanenco betrays some hang-ups of his time, notably in the way he refers to an "inverted" boy not being a "real man" (a lesbian secondary character doesn't do much better). But I find it hard to let this bother me since the worldview is so jaundiced towards everybody.

Scerbanenco has been compared to Simenon, and I can see why. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be easily available in English. Perhaps NYRB Classics — my favorite American publisher — will rise to the challenge?

James Ellroy's one cranky dude

Upon the recent publication of the last part of his Underworld USA trilogy, Blood's a Rover, in France, James Ellroy has been on a big publicity blitz over there. I just got around to reading a very entertaining interview with him in the weekly mag Les Inrockuptibles. Here's my (somewhat hasty) translation of a few choice exchanges between Ellroy and journalist Serge Kaganski. (Confusingly, the French title of the book is Underworld USA.)

SK: One of the things that stick out in the book is the racism of some of the characters, starting with Hughes and Hoover, and the frequent use of racist language in your dialogue.
JE: [interrupting] I see where you're going, let me explain.
SK: Wait, I'm not insinuating that you or your book are racist, but are you fascinated by racist language just the way you're fascinated by slang or ghetto speak?
JE: Hey! You're interrupting me here! Don't interrupt me! Okay… [goes on to talk about his characters]
SK: But what's your relationship toward that racist language? Is it simply realism? Are you fascinated by it?
JE: It doesn't bother me at all. I like the various forms of the American language. I like racist insults. I like using Yiddish words. I like slang. I like hipster talk. I like jazz speak…
SK: So for you, racist expressions are a purely literary device?
JE: Ask me questions! You're just interpreting my answers!

A bit later…

SK: You like writing only about the past. It's both great and a pity. America is very interesting right now with Obama in the White House.
JE: I don't care at all! I've already said it but you don't seem to listen. I don't care about the modern world. I don't go to the movies, I have no Internet, no cell phone, no TV, I don't read newspapers. I have an assistant who takes care of my bills. I live like a hermit. I don't want to know what's going on in France, I don't give a shit! I just want to live only in the world I create.
SK: But you live now!
JE: No, wrong answer! Okay, I live now, I go to the supermarket, I see what's around me… But history, politics, the news don't interest me at all, and I'll never write about these times. So give me a break with Obama!
SK: You enjoy confirming your reputation as a conservative?
JE: Yes, absolutely, I'm a conservative. Beyond that, I don't comment on my political opinions. I don't like computers, I don't like digital technology, I don't like crowds in the streets. I like looking back and focus on something that's controlled, organized and programmed in my head. That's the kind of place where I like to live, that's where I'm comfortable, safe. But though the world of today doesn't interest me at all, I'm still very happy to be alive.
SK: You're held as one of the greatest American writers—
JE: It's true!
SK: —are you also a reader? Which novelists do you value?
JE: I don't read at all. I know nothing about current culture. I'd still mention one writer, Don DeLillo, whose Libra inspired American Tabloid.

Ellroy goes on to talk about how except for L.A. Confidential, he doesn't care about the screen adaptations of his books, he's only in it for the money they bring him, etc. The conversation switches to his stay in Paris. Typically, Ellroy sticks to his hotel and goes out only to do his promo rounds.

SK: But how can you not be interested in travel, in the pleasures of change and discovery?
JE: Sir, how to put it? I don't give a shit about all this! I love women, being alone, my fictional world, classical music, and dogs. That's a lot, and it's enough to fill up my life. Today I have a regular girlfriend, an American, so I don't ogle women anymore. But before, yeah, I looked. In that respect, there's a bit of myself in some of my characters.

Spend the summer with Georges Simenon

I've mentioned before that I regularly listen to French public radio via podcast. Of the various units of Radio France, I'm partial to France Inter and to France Culture. The former has particularly good talk shows and political satirists during the year but I'm not so keen on its summer schedule. The latter, on the other hand, can be stuffy during the year but really comes alive in July and August.

Last year, I raved about that the 16 hours France Culture dedicated to François Truffaut. This year, they're doing the same thing to Georges Simenon, with five distinct parts, each one centered around a location important to the writer: Liège, Paris, France, America, Switzerland. The whole thing should run about 17 hours.

Go to this site, which lists all the France Culture podcasts, and scroll down to "Simenon" to subscribe.

And while you're there, you might also check out "Conversation avec Losey" (Positif boss Michel Ciment chats with Joseph Losey in the late ’70s) and "Paroles d'actrices" (hour-long interviews with contemporary French actresses).

Parlez vous crime?

I love Scandi noir as much as anybody out there but that doesn't mean I have to lower my standards. I'm surprised, for instance, by the good will that's greeted Johan Theorin's Echoes from the Dead, considering it's completely by-the-numbers. "Another in a seemingly bottomless pool of sophisticated and effective Scandinavian crime writers"? Hardly.

The best part about the novel is its atmospheric description of an island community off the coast of Sweden, but this isn't enough to make up for the fact that the plot hinges on a contrivance: It works only because the main characters wilfully avoid sharing crucial information (which they all know the others have) as they try to solve the mystery surrounding the 20-year-old disappearance of a child. Of course if they did the normal thing and talked to each other, the book would be only about a hundred pages long.

Much better is Jo Nesbø's Nemesis. I had quite liked Nesbø's The Redbreast, which I had reviewed for Time Out New York when it came out here last year. Nemesis picks up exactly where its predecessor left off, and once again Nesbø somehow manages to make an alcoholic inspector with unorthodox crime-solving methods feel like a fresh character.

And speaking of classic Scandi cops: Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander has gotten another TV series, after the Swedish one in which he was played by Krister Henriksson. Oddly it's from the BBC and Wallander is played by Kenneth Branagh—which at least means we have a better chance of seeing it here than the other version.

Too bad American channels are as protectionist as American publishers when it comes to international crime, and open up only to English series. I've been catching up with a really fun French drama called Engrenages (on DVDs sent from the homeland) and while it doesn't hold up to The Wire—but then, nothing does—it's good watchin'. Following the British model, there's only ten episodes in a season, so one can watch the 20 Engrenages eps has so far in a relatively short amount of time.

When used to the American system, it's intriguing to see one where judges are very involved in inquiries—they drop by crime scenes for example—thus altering the triangular dynamic of cops, DAs and defense lawyers that drives most procedurals here. Another difference: The French cops are a lot more hands-on (as in, rough) with suspects than they are in American shows that aren't The Shield. But the biggest selling point of Engrenages as far as I'm concerned is the presence of two particularly compelling female characters: inspector Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust) and crooked lawyer Joséphine Carlsson (Audrey Fleurot).

The first season of Engrenages was shown on BBC4 under the title Spiral and it's now on British DVD; the second season is scheduled to air over there this winter. Check both out.

Kate Atkinson in the house

My review of Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? is in the new Time Out New York, as well as a preview of a metal extravangaza featuring Keep of Kalessin and Eluveitie, among others.

Eluveitie was the highlight of PaganFest a few months ago and a must-see live. It's pretty exciting that after over two decades and hundreds of gigs, a band can still come out of nowhere and make my jaw drop. I distinctly remember watching Eluveitie at BB King's and thinking "And I thought I'd seen it all…" Clearly not.

Atkinson's latest is one of my favorite books of the past few years. Too often I finish genre novels because something about the plot compels me to see how they end. It's a purely mechanical reflex and not much pleasure is derided from it. But Atkinson writes well, which has become so rare that it's almost miraculous.

Thank god for metal and books, which are distracting me from the American presidential campaign. Every time I think it can't get any crazier, it just does. Crazier, and more offensive, too: Just how fricking stupid does McCain think Americans are? The answer, my friends, is that he's absolutely right to bank on this country's stupidity. That there's still a large number of undecided people at this stage is just one more sad joke among others.

Which reminds me… A few days ago I got embroiled in a particularly insane conversation with a rep from my health insurance. We got stuck in a circular argument and there was no getting out of it because her logic made no sense. At a loss, I said, "But this is completely Kafkaesque!" She didn't know what it meant. Yet if there's one word American health-insurance reps need to know, it's Kafkaesque.

A resource for Scandi noir

Thanks to reader Avi, who told me about a good new blog about Scandinavian crime fiction translated into English. Recent posts include coverage of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, as the first volume is about to hit America, and the site includes a very helpful list of blogs dedicated to international noir. There's even a companion site with additional resources (including a breakdown of authors by country) hosted by Gustavus Adolphus College's Folke Bernadotte Library. It is located, of course, in Minnesota, the epicenter of all things Scandinavian in the U.S.

Noir whiteout

Because it's been lovely and sunny here in New York for the past couple of weeks, I sought a bit of a cold draft by tearing through four novels from Scandinavia.

First up was Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, translated from the Swedish. I previewed it in the new issue of Time Out New York, so check that out for more info. Basically Larsson has fitted together financial muckracking + serial killers + a locked-room disapperance, three plots that may or may not be linked, making the book the lit equivalent of Russian doll. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first volume in a trilogy but unfortunately Knopf isn't putting out the next one until summer ’09. I may have to buy the French version, which has been out (and on the best-seller lists) for a couple of years now, as I'm not sure I can wait a whole year to find out what happens next. Yes, Larsson's that good.

Second was Per Petterson's marvelous To Siberia (which my colleague Drew Toal covered in the aforementioned issue of TONY). I hadn't read Pettersson's critically lauded Out Stealing Horses, so this literary novel (which actually predates Horses) was a discovery. Pettersson crams a lot in a small number of pages, and I guess my surprise at it says something about the bloat that's crept into fiction over the past few years, making short novels a rarity.

Third was Henning Mankell's Depths. This stand-alone novel (so no Kurt Wallander) takes place in 1914 and has got to be one of the bleakest things I've read in a while. In fact, it's like a parade of all the clichés people associate with northern Europe: relentless gloom, miserable characters, frozen landscapes, and depression, alcoholism and death at every corner. And yet I made it all the way through, slogging through the tale of Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, an officer reading depths for the Swedish Navy. Unsurprisingly, it turns out the methodical Tobiasson-Svartman is ill-prepared to measure, let alone deal with the depths lurking within himself (I bet you didn't see this one coming), and all's bad that ends badly.

Mankell provided a blurb for fellow Swede Kjell Eriksson's The Demon from Dakar, ie book no. 4 and a return to genre. Nothing special about this one, a by-the-number procedural. I have no idea why I even finished it, considering I had thought the exact same thing about Eriksson's The Cruel Stars of the Night. Recommanded only to hardcore Scandi-noir fanatics.

In print

My review of Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast is in this week's Time Out New York. The book, a Norwegian thriller, provided a bit of relief just when I was getting a little sick of Scandi noir—which is a shame since I do tend to prefer crime in a cold climate. It's just that as with all trends, Scandi noir has been mined to death and the latest books to come out here in the US have been by decidedly lesser lights. Critical attention seems to have switched to the likes of John Burdett's Thailand-set series (Bangkok 8, Bagkok Tattoo) but I find his plots and characters preposterous. Bit of a problem for a book…

Anyway, The Redbreast's certainly a good page-turner and I'm looking forward to more Nesbø. Now if I could also get my hands on Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy… Best-sellers in Europe, these Swedish novels are still not available in the US, though Amazon seems to indicate a British edition of the first volume is due in January.

Sunburnt noir

I had a lovely chat with noir author Peter Temple a couple of weeks ago, and parts of our conversation have surfaced in this week's Time Out New York. It's really hard to make procedurals feel fresh, but Temple does just that in his latest, The Broken Shore. I did not have the space to elaborate on that point in my piece, but one of the things I like best about Temple is his ability to write good dialogue—something that too often takes a backseat to plot convolutions in genre fiction. Whether it's blokes discussing footie in a pub or the sexually charged banter that precedes a kiss, Temple's lines crackle and pop like they're out of a Ben Hecht screenplay.

Stephen Booth's The Dead Place, on the other hand, is a striking example of how not to do it. I find it impossible not to finish a crime novel once I've started it so I had to get to the end of that book, getting increasingly annoyed by my own stubborness. A few pages in, I realized I had actually read another Booth novel, One Last Breath, and managed to completely purge it from my memory. No wonder: His leads, Detective Constable Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, are wafer-thin creations with no distinguishable characteristics whatsoever, save for the fact that Cooper is detail-oriented and Fry is both closed-minded and aggressive about it. This does not take us very far.

The Dead Place revolves around the type of killer who leaves pretentiously cryptic messages about the horrors he's up to. If we haven't seen his sad kind a thousand times… Watching Cooper and Fry (a name better suited to a comedian team from the ’50s) bumble their way around, deal with potential suspects, a profiler and other assorted archetypes of contemporary procedurals, you just want to scream at the suffocating mediocrity of it all.

Pink is the new black

The upcoming New York Times Book Review includes Marilyn Stasio's regular roundup of crime and noir fiction. I don't always agree with Ms. Stasio's taste but whatever, that's par for the course. But what really stopped me in my tracks is a sentence in her review of Kjell Eriksson's The Cruel Stars of the Night (which, incidentally, is sitting in my "to read" pile). The novel seems to be rather grim: Stasio talks about "the autumnal melancholy that pervades the story," while a detective acknowledges "a nauseating feeling of indifference." No surprise here: We're talking not only about a crime novel, but about a Swedish crime novel.

But then Stasio muses, "Why genre readers are tickled by such morbid views of suffering humanity is anyone's guess."

Come again? Stasio wasn't describing, say, gratuitous scenes of torture by that Thomas Harris hack but a cop who doesn't just have a blues day, but an entire blues month. Ms. Stasio, the title of your column, which you have been writing for years, is "Crime." We indeed may be talking about genre here, but it's not romance or science fiction—it's not called noir for nothing. Suffering humanity is the name of the game, and acting all prim about it strikes me as either hypocritical or deluded. Should crime books have more happy endings? Should they be either about cats or cowritten by them? Would the inclusion of recipes help? What about even more cutesy bios for the lead characters, like a nun-turned-investigative mechanic, a snooping golf pro or a sleuthing chiropractor? And should these characters be put on a solid diet of antidepressants, lest they give the readers a bummer of a ride?

And what about that use of "tickled," as if readers of noir fiction found its often-pitch-black worldview sexy? Of course readers get tickled, but Stasio gets the source of that tickling wrong. Or should we assume that someone who's been reviewing genre lit for the Times for years isn't, on some level, tickled—not by violence but by clever plotting and well-drawn characters? I, for one, certainly hope she is.

Meet my PEN pals

PEN's World Voices festival, on April 24–29, is a rare chance to see/meet/hear non-English and non-American writers in New York. (You'd think this shouldn't be such a rare occurrence in this cosmopolitan city of ours, but the state of translation in the US is pretty pathetic.) Anyway, some of the groupings are intriguing. What to expect, from instance, from a reading including Miranda July, Eric Bogosian and Algerian noir auteur Yasmina Khadra on April 28? Will I suddenly sprout the gift of ubiquity so I can go to the panel on literary thrillers with Vladimir Sorokin and Jean Echenoz that same day? And some of these writers are pretty damn busy: Alain Mabanckou is listed as participating in four events, as is Khadra (including a great-sounding panel on Mediterranean thrillers with Massimo Carlotto and Carlo Lucarelli).

Still, I can't help but whip out my red editor's pen. PEN dedicates a section to translation, something close to my heart for obvious reasons. Among other things, it includes the titles of non-English novels that deserve to be translated or are out of print in English. Amélie Nothomb's last name is misspelled twice by the very person who recommends her. Pretty scary, considering the books are nominated by PEN members.

All right, enough with the petty hating: Despite its establishment timidity, I love PEN, really I do! So let's end this post with a special shout-out to all my PEN peeps and their new prez, the stone-cold fox (librarian division) known as Francine Prose! Go Licky!

MP3 Larry Tee featuring Princess Superstar "Licky (Hervé Goes Low Mix)"

Thanks to my colleague Bruce Tantum for alerting me—and all Time Out New York readers, for that matter—to this awesome track.

Crap on toast

For some unfathomable reason, there seems to be some kind of buzz around Marcus Sakey and his debut novel, The Blade Itself. First a positive blurb and an interview in PW, now a fairly encouraging review from Janet Maslin in the Times. I know, I know—Maslin's taste is incomprehensible. But how could even she get hoodwinked by such a pathetic thriller? Actually, the word "thriller" should come in quotation marks whenever used in conjunction with The Blade Itself, a book in which each plot turn is so clumsily phoned in that any reader with half a brain will be able to skip a few pages and not miss a thing.

As for style, every other sentence drips with the kind of affected toughness that contaminates the worst noirs. Sakey has obviously read his elders and betters, but he hasn't absorbed what it is that makes them good—moral ambiguity—and only regurgitates chunks of ultra-pasteurized clichés; it boggles the mind that he could be mentioned in the same breath as James Ellroy or even the overrated Dennis Lehane (has anybody praising him actually read his preposterous Shutter Island, from 2003?).

But perhaps it's Sakey's reading of his peers that's the problem. As he says on his website, "Mostly I read crime and lit-fic, but every now and then you gotta branch out" (this in regard to Philip Pullman's wonderful The Golden Compass). Well duh! No wonder Sakey's novel feels so limited: It draws not from life or fiction in general, but from a narrow sliver of fiction. As Gordon Ramsay would put it: Oh for fuck sake!

Last remarks on the French trip, I swear!

This didn't feel like it belonged in the Quartett post, but there were actually other things happening in France. (I know, I know…)

• Oddball stage adaptations: There's now Bagdad Café: The Musical, adapted by director Percy Adlon from his own inexplicably overrated 1987 film. But perhaps you'd prefer Dolores Claiborne, a play based on Stephen King's novel of the same name, and starring comedian Michèle Bernier?

• Also live in the flesh in Paris: Hollywood's favorite Hire-a-Frog Jean Reno, Alain Resnais regular Pierre Arditi, diaphanous blonde Isabelle Carré, snooty brainiac Jeanne Balibar, dryly funny Catherine Frot.

• But wait, there's better: Dita von Teese was making her debut at the Crazy Horse Saloon! Like the Lido, the Crazy Horse Saloon is a Paris-style cabaret, meaning it doesn't involve Gershwin or Porter but topless ladies cavorting on a small stage while the audience dines at surrounding tables—kinda like Cristal Connors's numbers in Showgirls but, you know, with French boobs.

• What's up with Harlan Coben?!? French libraries stack his books in huge piles and every other person on the metro seemed to be reading him. Not only that, but Coben's thriller Tell No One was turned into one of the fall's big French films, Guillaume Canet's Ne le dis à personne. Actually, someone should look into how American or English thrillers often are adapted into completely different but very good French movies: Ruth Rendell's A Judgment in Stone became Claude Chabrol's The Ceremony and Jim Thompson had the honors twice: Pop. 1280 became Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon (transposed to colonial Africa) and A Hell of a Woman became Alain Corneau's Série Noire.

• And speaking of books: On my next-to-last day I gave in to curiosity and purchased Jonathan Litell's mega-hyped doorstopper, Les bienveillantes, a book mentioned as a candidate to every French literary prize. Even better, I bought it at a supermarket in the Corsican boondocks, putting it in my basket between the chestnut pasta and the yogurts. For indeed many French supermarkets carry books and CDs. Just imagine being able to buy a 900-page novel narrated by a gay SS officer at Key Food…