If you're looking for a good thriller I recommend The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. It's a truly gripping police procedural/freelance tale about the corpses in the closet of a large Swedish industrial family. The oddly matched but effective "detectives" are a financial journalist and Salander, a tough waif with photographic mind and advanced computer skills. The result is a classic page turner. I was devastated to read in the author bio that Larsson has died since writing this--no more to anticipate.
And for something competely different, a quotation from a Tessa Hadley story, "She's the One," published in a recent issue of The New Yorker:
“She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she’d seen in a museum, with a sliding glass door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else.”

In the March 16th issue of The New Yorker, amidst articles on the fashion world, are nine poems by the late John Updike on the subject of his impending death, four of them sonnets. Years ago I heard Updike read his poems as part of a series at the University of Pittsburgh. In the front row of the audience sat his elderly mother, so often a figure in his work. Listening to him, looking at her, was an oddly moving experience, like seeing a fictional character come to life. This last poetry is very moving, especially since the speaker's voice, so often heard during my lifetime of reading, is no more except in his work. What I loved about Updike, even in the things that I didn't like, was his curiosity about the world and its inhabitants and his apparent belief in the ongoing power of ordinary. Thus in one of these poems, "Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth," he thanks his childhood friends, his classmates, for providing "a sufficiency of human types," which is the end, "all a writer needs." He goes on to claim that it was all a writer needs, that it was "all there in Shillington." I tend to believe that, moreso as the years go on. All we need to do is look around us, which is what Updike always did, even when he was dying.

I have a few books to talk about, and an odd assortment at that. In the order read in which I read them, the first is Jonathan Carr's The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany's most Illustrious and Infamous Family. Termed by one commentator "fiendishly enjoyable," it is all of that. It's also an absorbing history of Bayreuth, the theater that Wagner wanted it to be, what is has been and what it might be in the future. Although it's sometimes difficult to keep the family members straight, especially as time goes on and the cast grows larger, it's never hard to marvel at their eccentricities. Wagner's daughter-in-law (Seigfried's wife) Winifred looms large. Energetic, intelligent, opinionated and deeply compromised by her cosy relationship with Hitler, she is nonetheless largely responsible for the continued existence of the festival, which has survived two world wars and family conflicts beyond belief. Carr narrates the tale with aplomb and sympathy; he never neglects the moral issues raised by all this happening in Germany, but neither does he preach. He also displays a constant awareness of the importance of the great music without which there would be no story and takes a sensible attitude towards the issue of whether or not it is in and of itself anti-semitic. If you're at all interested in Wagner, or in modern Germany, this is a must.
Then I took a breather and read a thriller and a mystery. The thriller was The Silent Man, by Alex Berenson. Welcome back, John Wells, savior of America in The Faithful Spy and The Ghost War. A CIA agent, Wells is, however, the despair of the CIA establishment. Preferring to do things his own way, he is given assignments that no one else will touch or else he just takes them on, permission be damned. In defying death on a regular basis, he threatens his relationship with Jennifer Exley, the love of his life and an agent herself, but one less devoted to self-destruction. Berenson is a good plotter and the details always sound right even if maybe they're not. But somehow this one left me unsatisfied, as if I'd eaten too much candy and still wasn't sated--just a bit overstuffed. I kept thinking I'd read it all before--not that I could put it down, mind you. The story involves a stolen nuclear device and an awful lot of space was given to the plotters and the physics behind their venture--more than I ever wanted to know about concocting a nuclear device, especially when I knew it was doomed to be a dud.
As for the mystery, that was Fatal Lies, by Frank Tallis, who specializes in period mysteries set against the backdrop of late 19th-century Vienna. The gas lights flicker, the sachertorte is delicious, Strauss waltzes play in the background--what more can one ask? But to be picky, there's a thing called too much atmosphere and sometimes those gaslights glowed just a hair too long. Still, Dr. Max Liebermann, an expert in Freudian psychology--the good doctor even makes an appearance--is an attractive protagonist and the plot, centered on a brutal murder at an elite military academy, is believable. It all makes for pleasant reading, and would be perfect to take to Vienna if you're lucky enough to be headed that way.

The prolificBritish writer A.N. Wilson now tackles the challenge not only of Hitler, but of Richard Wagner. He does so in Winnie and Wolf, a fictionalized account of the relationship between Wagner's daughter-in-law Winifred and Hitler that occurred in the years between the two world wars. The result is an odd but informative book that attempts to shed light on Wagner's music at the same time that it explores the nature of Naziism and the German psyche. The story is told by a fictional character, a young male secretary at Wahnfried, the Wagner home in Bayreuth. The idea is that Winifred and Hitler (known as "Wolf" to the family) had a child who was ultimately adopted by the secretary and his wife. The novel is a letter to that child,now an old lady living under an assumed name in the US, explaining it all to her.
I read the book as part of learning more about Wagner, and in many ways I did as Wilson's effort to explain alway the composer's supposed fascist leanings is pretty convincing--although that's an argument that may never be resolved. The narrative is awkward at moments, so often the case with a fictionalized history--the gaps between reality and imagination show. But no matter, it's a good story. There is a wonderful and poignant scene towards the end when the narrator describes driving back into Bayreuth at the end of World War II, when the town has been badly bombed--he claims because of Wagner's sympathy for the Nazis, or rather, Hitler's love of his music. Their clothes having been destroyed, the townspeople have raided the costume racks at the theatre and are walking through the streets dressed as the Rhinemaidens, the Nibelungs, Parsifal, etc. It's a powerful image, suggestive of the interplay between Wagner's mythological world and ours.