Literary Lollapalooza May 2009

In this month’s edition of Literary Lollapalooza, a timeless classic, and a new release by one of Mystery-Thriller’s brightest young voices.

This is Literary Lollapalooza, May Edition.

Books Acquired:

Fiction: Dark Places by Gillian Flynn, and Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea

Non-Fiction:

Books Borrowed: The Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight

Books Read:

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky is one of those writers I always felt like I should read. Out of obligation to…I don’t know, all self-respecting literature hounds. However, between feeling like I should read Dostoevsky out of some misguided need to feel better about myself and the easier option of taking a look at the sheer HEFT of Crime and Punishment and putting it off indefinitely, the procrastinator in me always won out. This last month though I struck a compromise with myself: I would read Dostoevsky, but I would read something much shorter, and something with a fun title. Hey guess what? That smart Russian guy wrote a book called The Idiot. Sounds funny.

Okay, so no. The Idiot isn’t really funny. It is not short-listed for a film-adaptation by the Farrelly Brothers (though I must admit I’d love to see that). What it is, is a fairly light Russian novel about the dangers of independence and of being kind-hearted in a modern society. It is a sweeping tale involving many characters over a period of years, and yes it does wear its moral heart on its sleeve.

It is also a very good read. Not fun or thrilling, but a very involving and accessible story about people not so very different than you or I. And it’s considerably shorter than Crime and Punishment. So you can feel good about yourself without the strain of those heavy Russian novels.

The Idiot refers to the title character of Prince Myshkin, a kind-hearted and guileless rube from the countryside who travels to the city and makes a splash in good Petersburg society. The word idiot here does not really refer to a stupid person, just a simple one. Childlike, trusting, without personal machinations, Prince Myshkin is laughed at openly, the unwitting butt of his own joke. But his honesty, unselfconsciousness, and lack of agenda quickly make him a party favor of sorts, with good families requesting his presence at gatherings as a conversation-piece. He is tossed immediately into the maelstrom of society, money, marriage, wealth, and backstabbing.

The story is a complex one, and it would be a disservice for me to try to summarize it here. The point is that these are relevant characters, finely drawn, unique and immediately recognizable. The situations are, while steeped in Russian upper class history, easily transferrable to our own societal stratifications. Imagine a poor country bumpkin, unaccustomed to societal niceties and oblivious of faux pas, suddenly becoming a mascot to the very wealthy, treating him like an odd bird, and never truly accepting him as a human being until he too has gained some status of wealth.

There is a lot of humor, and a lot of quirky characters, and tons of intrigue and double-dealings and love and heartbreak. It took me nearly six weeks to read the damn thing, but now that I’m through it, I’m very glad I read it. And not in an intellectually superior way either. Nope, I’m just glad I’ve gotten to know these characters and that I invested my time into understanding them, maybe just a little bit. AND I get to say I read Dostoevsky. So suck it.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn.

And now for something completely different. Gillian Flynn is a bright new up-and-comer in the mystery/thriller world who was short-listed for an Edgar Award for her first novel Sharp Objects. Dark Places is her second novel, and I can’t wait to read more from this young lady.

The first thing one might notice about Ms. Flynn’s books are the simple, sparse and captivating cover art. The cover of Dark Places features a prominent pad lock in the hatch of the kind of lock one puts on basements, or dungeons. The kind of lock one puts on a door to keep people out or maybe more importantly to keep something inside.

Dark Places refers to those parts of one’s psyche we’d rather believe didn’t exist. We lock them away and keep them far from the cold sane light of day, because looking at them, admitting they are there might somehow make us a little less human. Libby Day, the story’s protagonist is the sole survivor of a massacre that took place when she was a young child way back in 1985. It seems Libby’s brother Ben, in the early hours of Jan. 3 1985 slaughtered his entire family as part of an elaborate Satanic ritual, and Libby alone survived to testify against her brother, putting him away for life.

Libby is now in her early thirties, and has eked out an existence on the pity of strangers sending donations to “that poor Day girl”, but now the donations have dried up. It seems no one cares about a thirty-something tragedy survivor. So in an attempt to further capitalize on her past Libby begins selling memories and memorabilia to local so-called Kill Clubs, a group of individuals obsessed with horrific serial killers. But Libby soon starts to uncover bits and pieces of her past that were supposed to stay hidden forever. As Libby traces the clues to her own past, she sets off on a terrifying journey of discovering the hidden truth of her family’s deaths.

I loved Gillian Flynn from the first paragraph of this book:

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you can stomp on it.”

Anyone who can write a line like that is okay in my book. Plus, Stephen King calls her writing “an admirably nasty piece of work…” And I am sold.

This reads along at a dizzying pace, flipping forward and backwards from the present to that fateful January day back in 1985, keeping you constantly moving forward searching for the next piece of evidence. But what stayed with me long after the nightmares faded were the scary-but-true insights Ms. Flynn uncovers about the human psyche. Again we’re talking about those dark places. The ones we’ve shoved deep in a closet and pretended never existed. Heck we’ve even bolted that door with a padlock. How disturbing it is then to have Ms. Flynn parade those skeletons right past you, your head nodding in recognition before you have the good sense to shudder and quickly shove them away again.