The Midnight Promise

Zane Lovitt
The Midnight Promise

Europa Editions, 2013

John Dorn is a lonely private detective who lives in Melbourne. He certainly is a heir to Marlowe and his contemporaries: Dorn lives in his own office, drinks heavy, suffers from being lonely, takes not promising money cases. But Dorn at the same time is our contemporary, not a figure frozen in the past; fedora on his head, the joke on the lip, a gun in his pocket. All the stories in the collection are written in the present tense, and it's just a sign that Dorn is here and now, this is what happens to us. Present tense is a literary device. One story flows into the other, forming a novel in stories, rather than a collection of stories. Each story is a separate case, and all the stories here are in chronological order. With each turn of the page reality is changing for the worse: things are becoming more disturbing and hopeless, and Dorn's life is becoming more and more miserable.

Typically, a private detective is a knight with morality and conscience that prevents his sleep at night. Private eye is the embodiment of a doer, who commits acts to prevent something bad or bringing to justice those who committed this bad. So the stories about private detectives are often written in the past tense: work is done, time for fun. The detective solved a crime, boasted about it, and this boast of a certain kind usually becomes a short story. For John Dorn this is not so. He is also suffering from the pangs of conscience, but he is often non-doer, who refuses, and with his inaction he saves himself and his client. You’d hardly call Dorn a coward (he is against psychopaths and armed private investigators bending the law here), but he can not be called brave, either.

The Midnight Promise offers a ruthless view of modern Australia, about which we know a little, and private investigators from green continent are almost never seen.

Undoubtedly, 99 percent of stories about private detectives are the opposite of noir. The Midnight Promise by Zane Lovitt is just this one percent, the name of the series World Noir is telling the truth. Do not promise what you can not do.

The Last Banquet

Jonathan Grimwood
The Last Banquet

Europa Editions, 2013


The protagonist of this novel is an orphan, Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout, whose parents have died of hunger: they were aristocrats, but for the debts everything had been taken from them. After their death, little Jean-Marie lived by himself, alone, eating insects and herbs, until he was picked up in 1723 by some aristocrats and sent to an orphanage, where Jean-Marie was fed twice a day and kept in the barn. At seven, he goes to St. Luke's School, with the children of titular officials of France. There the boys also live and study science. Jean-Marie’s best friend becomes Emile Duras, whose father was a lawyer. In the course of training, Jean-Marie secretly learns to cook different dishes from the most unlikely ingredients, from mice to cats. The boy from an early age has developed a taste, and he is always in pursuit of new flavors.

When Jean-Marie has the opportunity to select desired profession, he chooses to be a cook. He is allowed to work in the kitchen to help chefs, learn new recipes. Ahead of the protagonist lays a long eventful life.

The novel has been compared to Suskind’s Perfume, but I haven’t read Perfume, so I can not compare them. What The Last Banquet reminded me is it's like a mix between Victor Hugo with an adventure novel by Jules Verne. Before us is really entertaining historical fiction, full of real characters, not boring at all and quite clever.

Style of the book is one of its biggest advantages. Usually this kind of literature suffers from historicisms, stylization to literature of the past, and, therefore, such literature is hard to grasp. It is clumsy, slow, pompous, it smells musty. Fantasist Grimwood writes fiction, on the contrary, easily, skillfully, adding to the authenticity of it here and there the French word, archaic expression, historical detail. So we does not forget that the events are taking place in the XVIII century, but it does not take away from the novel its lightness and elasticity.

Grimwood remains a fantasy writer, skillfully alternating between adventures and amorous affairs. There is a lot of adventures for the main character and his friends from the dog's execution to the final with a tigress. Events are rushing gallop, you would’nt have time to yawn. The protagonist of the novel, Jean-Marie, is an interesting character. He feels very keenly the world, wanting to know everything that this world has to offer. Orphan, who became Marquis, try the taste animals, insects, women, developing his taste - gastronomic. But this novel has not converged on a wedge of gastronomy. The desire to know everything through a tongue is just one of the desires of the Marquis. He just has a zest for life. He is pulled to the animals, to women, to nature, to politics, to philosophy, but he seemed to be indifferent to their own children. Jean-Marie is a controversial person: on the one hand, he quickly becomes bored of the old things like he was bored of his wife, on the other, he remains faithful for many years – he’s loyal to friends, the tigress, his king.

If Grimwood had put events of the book in a fictional country, not in France, in front of us there would be a fantasy. But Grimwood has chosen the path of the historical novel. And it is still quite tasty.

The Homecoming Party

Carmine Abate
The Homecoming Party
Translated from the Italian by Anthony Shugaar

Europa Editions, 2010

A book, which is a portrait of childhood, can be interesting for reading not only by its author, but readers too, if it not simply imposes one memory to another, simply strings little pieces of memories on a skewer of fiction: the meat may be good, but the dish will not work (cooks should forgive me for the invasion on their territory). A story can have no plot (but better have it), but some secrets should be present.

There is a mystery in this novel by an Italian Abate, as there is weak but enjoyable plot. A story rolls up and rolls out like a carpet, which then have been put into a corner, then roll on the floor, and the center of the story is in one place. For Marco, a boy from an Italian family, living with his mother, grandmother, sister La Piccola and dog Spertina, time is measured not by calendar years, but by those intervals when closer to Christmas his father returns home from France where he worked as a miner to feed his family. The father of Marco had not an easy life: he left home early, lost his wife, stayed with a baby (Marco's sister Elisa, who is studying at a university), remarried, and now every spring after spending the winter home with children and the wife is forced to detach himself from his family and goes back to almost a year of work. The father once explained Marco why he leaves every year: imagine that someone puts a gun to your head and says: «Leave, or I'll pull the trigger!», and you should leave , there are no other choice.

Secret is here for Marco and for a reader at once becomes Marco's sister Elisa. The boy accidentally sees his sister in the woods kissing with some man who once saved Marco’s dog. Elisa's secret meetings with the stranger will stimulate mind of the narrator because his father and mother still can not guess who their daughter secretly meets with.

«The Homecoming Party» is a portrait of Italian small-town life. Here you all day play football, walk the dog in the woods and eat your mother's food, watch out for your sister, and the worst that can happen - you will get a fever, and even then it will play into your hands.

This book is hardly something special, it is too conflict-free, but you can not to dislike it. You can pull the trigger, I'm staying.