Barbara B. reviews Jean-Claude Izzo's Chourmo

Jean-Claude Izzo's noir deepens, darkens in Chourmo,

book 2 of the Marseilles Trilogy

More Marseilles.

In Chourmo, the second book in Jean Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, ex-cop  Fabio Montale gives us more food, more drink, more music, more women, more of the aura of Marseilles.

 Two of these women, he says, he should have married.

As reminiscence and regret erode the carpe diem present of Fabio’s world, flaws in his own character become more pronounced.

The sensual pleasures and camaraderie of Total Chaos have distilled to more than diversion in Chourmo; they’re all that’s left to make life worth living when dreams dissolve.  Beauty, food, music and “chourmo” counterbalance racism, brutality and transnational criminals as the noir gets darker.

Chourmo, we’re told, is a Provencal word derived from chiourme, the rower in the galley, a term taken over by young music fans to describe mingling and unifying: “you weren’t just from one neighborhood, one project. You were chourmo. In the same galley, rowing. Trying to get out. Together.”

             Why escape? In some ways, Fabio has the life.  He lives in Les Goudes, a small fishing village on Marseilles’ outskirts. He works a few hours in a bar owned by his friend Fonfon.  He’s’ fed – mouth-watering regional meals of local foods by his next-door neighbor, Honorine. He has a boat and has little to do but fish, eat and drink while the love of his life, Lole, is away visiting her parents.

Leaving Marseilles is impossible for Fabio.  Stuck in his rut, he’s as in love with memories of Marseilles as he is with his memories of its women. He says his problem is he can’t give up the past. Lole once told him:

               “Coming to terms with life meant coming to terms with your memories. …. It was pointless to question the past. It was the future you had to question. Without a future, the present is nothing but chaos.”

               Chaos in Chourmo is introduced by one of the many women of his life. His beautiful cousin Gelou who once kindled his adolescent desires, comes knocking on his door asking for help, drawing him back into Marseilles’ dark underside and triggering memories and regrets. Gelou has seemingly escaped her class; she’s driving a Saab, carrying a Louis Vuitton bag, and skiing in the Alps; she married and is living elsewhere.

               But her 16- year old son, Guitou, has disappeared – and is likely in Marseilles. She believes he may have made arrangements to meet Naima, a Marseilles young woman he fell in love with the previous summer. They’re star-crossed lovers. She’s an Arab and her brother is an Islamic extremist; his stepfather, Alex, who beats him, hates Arabs and must not know.

             Fabio finds Gitou too late; he’s been murdered along with a high profile Algerian historian who had fled his country when threatened with death by radical Islamists. Fabio will seek their murderers and try to find and protect Naima in a plot that will once again bring him into conflict with organized crime as well as Islamic fundamentalists.

            Along the way, we encounter more of Marseilles’ racial mixture, a despicable gypsy, Saadna, and a beautiful manipulative Vietnamese woman named Cuc, whose story of seeking a better life parallels that of Gelou.

             When Fabio served as a cop, he and a youth worker named Serge worked together to get kids some help, much to the dislike of those in his department who believed in taking a tougher stance. Fabio sees Serge killed and discovers that he was on a similar quest.  When questioned by the police about his connection to Serge, Fabio learns Serge was possibly a pedophile.

            And that’s where Fabio’s own troubling character gets ever more troubling for this reader. Not only am I uneasy about Fabio falling for anything in a skirt, often calling falling “love” and even fantasizing about his cousin, but Fabio overlooks Serge’s possible pedophilia, also confusing it with making children happy.

         A conversation with his friend Loubet:

         “‘He had a real faith in mankind, without God’s help. The kids were his life.’

           ‘Yeah and maybe he loved them just a little too much, eh.’

           'What of it? Even if it was true. Maybe he made them happy.’

            My attitude toward Serge was the same as with all people I loved. I trusted them. I could even accept it when they did things I didn’t understand. The only thing I couldn’t tolerate was racism. I’d spent my childhood watching my father suffer from not being treated like a human being, but like a dog. A harbor dog. And he was only Italian.”

              That’s about all Fabio has to say though earlier he did concede that Serge reminded him of “a priest.” Fabio’s easy dismissal of the possible pedophilia will likely jar anyone who has feelings about the sexual exploitation of children – particularly children the predator is supposed to be helping though many others must have ignored such predation for it to have happened. What bothers me is that Izzo introduces the topic, but does almost nothing with it. So one asks why. Perhaps to underscore Fabio’s shallowness? Or to show his casual attitude mixing love and sex? My guess is because Izzo is making it up as he goes along and tosses ideas in and then only develops some. He intuits rather than plans his story.

                As for the Fabio’s hatred of racism, what do we make of his description of the gypsy Saadna:

“Saadna and I made no secret of our hatred for each other. He was the archetypal gypsy. Non-Gypsies were all jerks. Every time a young Gypsy got into trouble, it was of course the non-Gypsies fault. For centuries, we’d persecuted them. We were only there to cause them problems. We’d been invented by the devil, to piss off God the Father who, in his infinite goodness had created the Gypsy in his own image.”

                If you substitute any type – Arab, Italian, whatever in place of the word gypsy, you get a stereotype or an “archetype” that sounds pretty racist, both from Saadna’s point of view and Fabios.

What mitigates some of the problems of Izzo’s writing – so many underdeveloped ideas and characters who serve little purpose, some cluttered reflections, major diversions and Fabio’s character flaws is the full arc of the trilogy.  It’s as if Izzo writes without direction, but makes discoveries along the way. He raises the same questions a reader might and responds to them in each next book. Though neither tight, nor completely satisfying, what emerges is worth reading, particularly for the view it gives of Marseilles.

               Fabio’s condition in Chourmo seems best summarized by a passage:

              I lit a cigarette and closed my eyes. I immediately felt the gentle warmth of sun on my face. It felt good. That was all I believed in. These moments of happiness. These crumbs from the world’s plenty. All we had was what we could glean here and there. There were no more dreams left in this world. No more hope. And kids of sixteen could be killed for one reason or another. In the projects, coming out of a dance hall. Even in someone’s house. Kids who’ll never know the fleeting beauty of the world. Or the beauty of women.

             In Solea, this bleak view gets bleaker; noir, blacker.  Fabio confronts how he’s loved and lost the too many women of his life, and he comes up wanting.  No longer will carpe diem serve as way to get by. As all that’s worth living for gets taken away, Fabio will grapple with what’s worth dying for.

             More comments on Solea to be composed……

Josh reviews "Last Friends" by Jane Gardam

“Last Friends” is Jane Gardam’s cathartic finish to the trilogy that began with “Old Filth” and continued with “The Man in the Wooden Hat.” “Last Friends” came across as an author’s book to her fans. Gardam most assuredly did not need to write this book. The prior two books in this now trilogy were brilliant companions that functioned equally well as standalone works—much like the marriage of Edward and Betty Feathers.  Part of me suspects that “Last Friends” exists solely because of Gardam’s skill in creating such realistic and captivating worlds for her characters has created a need for it. Given two books to develop the stories of Filth and Betty, their friends and family, the various characters that inhabit their lives for decades, and the fascinating period of time in England’s history all of this takes place in perhaps Ms. Gardam felt (like many us) that the supporting cast of Filth and Wooden Hat deserved a proper ending as well.  Imagine if the last chapter of a John Irving novel, the one where every character we don’t already know the fate of is given at minimum a paragraph long coda letting us know where they end up, were expanded into a full novel. That novel would be “Last Friends.”

Ostensibly it is the back-story of the most important of these supporting characters from the prior two novels, Terry Veneering, and his relationships with Edward and Betty. It quickly turns into much more. Dulcie and Fiscal-Smith, two more characters with prominent supporting roles in prior books, also are given significant portions of the narrative. Ms. Gardam gives us Veneering’s story as much through their eyes as she does through his own.  Set primarily in the village of St. Ague in Dorset (where Betty and Edward, Veneering, and Dulcie and her husband all have retired to), Gardam ventures beyond simply telling us Veneering’s story.  The story of those who live on, the figurative “last friends” if you will, echo with personal experience and pain.  The challenges faced by the surviving characters in a time where everything and everyone they knew is changing or no more share the same sentiment, giving new meaning to the term bittersweet.

Unlike the prior two novels in the trilogy, this is not a book I would recommend reading either on its own or before its predecessors. “Old Filth” and “The Man in the Wooden Hat” could be read in whatever order you like, but for “Last Friends” you really need the depth and detail of this world going in.  Gardam deserves high praise for what I would call an almost audacious work of literature.  It’s the equivalent of the proverbial “but wait, there’s more!” dressed up in Gardam’s signature wit, wisdom and care. We care so much about these characters because she so obviously does too.  For me, it was like a trip to my grandmother’s house to hear more stories about the people in her life.  From the very beginning, dropping the reader into the funeral of Edward Feathers, Gardam’s tone has a “now where were we? Oh yes, Filth had just passed. Let me tell you about his funeral,” feel to it.  It having been a year or two since I last read Filth and Wooden Hat, it took me a little bit to get back into Gardam’s setting; once there, I came close to missing my stop on the train fighting to get just one more line, one more paragraph before I had to close the book.

I should note that this is the sixth book I have read by Jane Gardam, my third this year. By this point, it’s readily apparent that her style, tone and prose more than work for me making me just the teensiest bit biased in her favor when approaching her novels. Much like John Irving, if you like one or two of Ms. Gardam’s books you are likely to like them all. There’s a comfort level for me in reading her, a cadence that is at once both familiar and new at the same time.  I’ve come away feeling like I have been lucky enough to have been pulled into exciting and sweeping stories; at the same time I have learned more about England’s culture between the world wars, the life led by those outside of London and the roles women play in that culture than I ever expected to through Gardam’s attention to detail. 

For fans of “Old Filth” and “The Man in the Wooden Hat” who wondered as the books closed what happened to Veneering’s and Filth’s homes after, what the funerals were like, what about Fiscal-Smith and Dulcie and Isobel and more “Last Friends” has the answers to all of it, as well as the intriguing third side of the Filth-Betty-Veneering story. Some may argue that Gardam has simply packaged a short story explaining Veneering’s back-story into a mélange of loose ends and squeezed it into a novel.  True, Veneering’s life story might not even fill up half the pages of this slim work, but I challenge any fan of Gardam to complain about getting more. Even if it is (and I firmly believe the opposite) filler for a short Veneering background, Jane Gardam’s filler is still better in my opinion than many other author’s best work.  If you haven’t read the previous two works in this trilogy, get to it soon so you can enjoy this final installment Ms. Gardam has given us.

Barbara B. reviews Total Chaos

Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles Trilogy sizzles with brutal crimes,  sensual pleasures: Book 1: Total Chaos

     Good food. Good drink. Poetry. Music. And Women, beautiful women.

     Marseilles, vibrant seaport of sensual pleasure may be a French melting pot for those who come to seek better lives – Italians, Armenians, Neopolitans, Spainards, Vietnamese, West Indians, North Africans and Arabs, but it’s a crime-fillled simmering one, always on the verge of boiling over in Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy, a series that comprises Total Chaos, Chourmo and Solea.  Izzo, who wrote the series between 1995 and his death in 2000 has been called the father of Mediterranean noir. The re-lease of his books this month is part  the launch of Europa Noir.

      In Total Chaos Fabio Montale is a cop whose childhood friends become part of the violent underworld in this city of exiles.  Following a youthful crime spree, Fabio turned against violence, while one friend, Ugo, fled it – only to be dragged back, and the angriest of the three, Manu, stayed so enmeshed in it, he could not escape. They remained tied together by loyalty and because of Lole, the woman they all love – in turns.

     After Manu is killed just as he and Lole plan to leave Marseilles for a better life, Ugo returns to avenge his death – and is killed in turn. That leaves Fabio who sends Lole away for her safety as he tries to find cause and identity of Manu’s killer. 

      While in the midst of unofficially pursuing the answers to that crime, Fabio gets a call from an acquaintance whose daughter has disappeared. Mouloud, an Arab who was lured to France in the 1970s with the promise a good job, a promise that faded when the factory closed has not heard from his daughter, Leila. His children are among anew wave of immigrants’ children, whose challenges mirror those Fabio and friends faced a generation before.  Leila, the rare one in a million on the verge of escaping poverty and embracing her family’s dreams is completing her university exams at Aix en Provence.  Driss, the angry one, redirects his aggression into boxing and working at a garage, and Kader works for an uncle at a grocery store in Paris.

     Izzo’s descriptions racism and subsequent crime unite characters and plot.  For Izzo  -- and Fabio, Arabs are just the latest in a line of those who were treated as less than French.  Both Izzo and Fabio share a mixed backgrounds and knew discrimination as youths. 

     Izzo’s observations may give the reader some understanding of acts beyond understanding -- a sense of the difficulties that immigrants and their children face in another culture, difficulties that turn some angry young men into criminals and killers and their sisters into whores. Driss, a young Arab, who takes up boxing as an outlet for anger, mirrors in a small way the Chechen immigrant Tamerlan                Tsarnaev, whose frustrated inner life can only be imagined.

     In Total Chaos big dreams and boundless hope clash with the reality of economic recession, limited opportunity, violence and life in the housing projects. In the mix, already fragile families shatter. Danger lurks in the form of various transnational criminal organizations vying for power. One marvels that anyone makes it out in tact.

     Marseilles is not the only stew in this trilogy; the books themselves read as mélanges of ingredients of the noir detective genre. At times the books seem less plotted than improvised; Izzo tries a little bit of this noir convention here, a pinch of detective trait there along with a lot of spice to see what develops.  Elements of the detective genre are the ingredients he tosses in the pot.  The most flavorful is his love and knowledge of place describing the neighborhoods, the streets, the people, the smells -- the ambience that makes Marseilles, Marseilles. 

     Add to that: like other fictional cops, Fabio loves food, listens to many kinds of music including jazz, blues and rap, cites poetry, and literature. As in other police procedurals Fabio has a partner, Perol, and a nemesis in the department, Auch. Fabio, like others, is a loner cop; he has been marginalized because he stood up against police brutality and racism. He has a journalist friend, Babette, and one detective he trusts, Loubet.

     And like other crime solvers, Fabio loves but has trouble holding onto women.  That’s only a small problem because they’re drawn like moths to Fabio’s flames.  It’s difficult keeping track of them all: Muriel, Carmen, Clara, Zina, Rosa, Lole, Babette, Leila, Gelou. And they are all strikingly beautiful. Fabio, in turn, cannot commit to just one so his current solution is:  a) to be mothered by the 70-year-old next-door neighbor Honorine, a woman who loves to cook,  ‘’but she could only cook for a man” (and he’s that man) b) to make love with West Indian prostitute Mary Lou, another victim of lost dreams; c) to share information with the journalist Babette – one of the many women of his past.  His connection to the victim Leila is also romantic; he passed on her invitation to take him home because he thought she was too young. Noble, yes, but regret takes the form of odd thinking after he views her raped, dead body: “I should have married her,” he thinks. This would be less bizarre if he didn’t also think it in the next book Chourmo, when another woman, Gelou, his cousin, is also a victim. What a solution! If he had just married these women, he could have prevented their plights.  He seems to have a running joke with Babette, who becomes the focus of the third book, as well; he tells her he should have married her. And finally, he turns down Mary Lou as a consistent mate; he will not engage in the fantasy of cop marries hooker to save her from her life. Is Fabio some kind of bachelor tease?

     He’s a fickle man who defines love as mostly just the swoony falling part:  “I wanted to preserve the best part of those loves. The beauty of the first glance. The passion of the first night. The tenderness of the first awakening.” 

     While crime and racism are the roux that hold this stew together, sensual pleasures give Total Chaos its many flavors.  (Consider the food alone: focaccia, cod tongues, cuttlefish pizza, stuffed peppers with creme fraiche). Yet, this reader wonders how a man can get any work done with so much to distract him.  How can a reader follow the convoluted plot, distracted as I was by Fabio’s attractions?  How can a writer stay on track?

      Izzo doesn’t. He tries everything out and then systematically rids what will become the Marseilles trilogy of those ingredients that are of little use to him.  Partner Perol wasn’t doing very much anyway, so why not toss him? Fabio doesn’t need to be a policeman – the job was just a minor plot part as he seems more involved in unofficial investigations than assigned ones. He could get as much access

as a former cop, which is what he will be by book’s end. Lole will also return to Fabio’s arms leading to this reader’s expectation that the two might spend some time together  -- and we might get to know her a little better. But instead she’s really just another tied up loose end here. She’ll be conveniently away visiting her parents  in  Chourmo, an ingredient Izzo might – or might not  -- use again as he improvises another flavorful simmering plot.

            More to follow on that book in a few days. . .

Josh reviews "Falling to Earth" by Kate Southwood

Oomph. If I had one word to describe "Falling to Earth," by Kate Southwood, oomph would be that word. I approached this book, which I assigned for my May book club, warily. The early press and accolades were far from subtle, praising the author, the story and the prose as nothing short of remarkable. Further, it was another American author and American-set work from Europa. While Europa has published far fewer American works than those from other parts of the world, I have (with the exception of "Everything Happens Today") thoroughly enjoyed works like "Wichita," "Zeroville," and "These Dreams of You." All of the above set a rather high bar going in.

The critics and reviewers are correct; this is a brilliant novel. It is most assuredly not the novel you need to bring with you to the beach, pool or park for a light spring or summer day. It's gut wrenching from the first page to the last. Southwood grips you from the first page, introducing us to the Graves family the morning of the Tri-State tornado of 1925, and not really letting us go once we finish the last page. Call it a testament to her strength as a writer that I was heartbroken by the destruction to this town full of people I didn't know and yet at the same time I had a clear picture in my head of each of the Graves family as if I'd lived next door for years. The physical destruction of the tornado, taking up the first third of the book, had all the detail of a news report and all the action and suspense of the best "Twister" scenes. It's harrowing, dramatic and frenetic.

It's also just the beginning. Post-tornado, the real destruction begins amid the rebuilding of Marah. Southwood has her hand on the pulse of what brings out the best and worst of human nature making what unfolds among the citizens of Marah and the Graves family is tragic, powerful and devastating-all without any clear villain or demarcated line between right and wrong. Another strength Southwood brings is her ability to make the personal and intimate tragedies just as powerful as the epic nature of the tornado, or perhaps it's the way she makes the tornado as intimate and powerful as the personal, individual tragedies that follow. Either way, a book this gloomy should not be the page-turner it turns out to be. And yet, as the final chapters unfold and I panned out from the final scene, for all its loss and heartbreak and tragedy it is not by any stretch a hopeless book. That sounds confusing even as I write it, and I cannot point to any specific instances where this hope comes through, but hope remains nonetheless.

I'm looking forward to what my book club says about "Falling to Earth," curious to see if they see Southwood's book as nothing more than elegant tragedy porn or if they too see something beyond the story and into her ruminations on the inherent strengths and failings of the human spirit. I would recommend this book to everyone here on the Challenge blog, save this for that rainy summer weekend afternoon and perhaps a good bottle of wine. I'll end not with my words, but with Southwood's:

"A tornado is a spasm is a thundercloud, a thing of chance arising out of nature. It might touch down, and it might not. A tornado is a ravenous thing, untroubled by the distinction in tearing one man apart and gently setting another down a little distance away. It is resolute and makes its unheeding progress until, bloated and replete, it dissipates. A tornado is a dead thing and cannot acknowledge blame. If a tornado smashes your house or takes your child, it does no good to blame it. You can even rail against God, and it will be no use. The tornado is gone, used up. You can't throw it into reverse and resurrect your house and your child by laying blame. And even after you've yanked up another house in the place your old one stood and planted flowers in the dirt where you laid your child, your fury remains as well as your desire to lay blame."

Diane R. reads Margherita Dolce Vita

Margherita Dolce Vita by Stefano Benni

Challenges read for:  Goodreads, Europa Editions

Book Cover:  I do like the simplistic covers for Europa Editions.  This cover is sunny and warm and I like that!

Quirky and fun, a quick read.  14 year old Margherita lives on the out skirts of town, quiet and somewhat isolated until one day the "Black Cube" is erected--life is never the same.  Margherita watches her family fall under the spell of these new neighbors, changing them beyond recognition and to a disastrous ending.  It's a coming of age story, very well written and translated--and sometimes hysterically funny.

It's a great book for fans of Europa Editions!

Marie C. Reviews THE JASMINE ISLE by Ioanna Karystiani

The Jasmine Isle, by Ioanna Karystiani. Published 1997 by Europa Editions.

The Jasmine Isle is an epic tale of lost love and a beautiful story of the love between sisters, set in Greece at the beginning of the 20th century. Straddling the old world and the new, Ioanna Karystiani tells the story of the Saltaferos family. Minna is a matriarch, a woman who runs the lives of her daughters Orsa and Mosca. Orsa, the elder of the two, is beautiful and in love with Spyros Maltambes, but Minna makes her marry another man. Orsa's husband is a good man who cares for his lovely wife, but Orsa cannot help but pine for Spyros, who marries the person Orsa loves most in the world save for himself.

Karystiani's style is dream-like and impressionistic. Sometimes I had to reread passages to follow her loose-woven paragraphs and storytelling but I fell under her spell nonetheless. She creates vivid characters and palpable tension between them as time goes on and the family grows and changes. Set on a seafaring island, death is a constant presence in the lives of the Saltaferos family and indeed of every family in their orbit. The men are all sailors, traveling the world and risking their lives while the women wait and worry. They bring back treasures from around the globe but the real treasure- their love- seems to elude even the most well-meaning among them. Or at least that's how it seems.

The Jasmine Isle is an elusive novel, the characters slipping away from each other and from us, never quite in our grasp. I don't mean this in a bad way, just that Karystiani transmits the melancholy and isolation they feel as wars and love and passion and disappointment wash over each one in his or her turn. Poor Orsa, and poor Mosca too, and even poor Minna, as frustrated and bitter as the rest. The men don't fare much better. So it's a beautiful novel but a sad one, but one I'd recommend to literary fiction readers, about staying behind in more ways than one.

Karystiani has a new book out, Back to Delphi, which I hope to read soon.

This is my sixth book for the 2013 Europa Challenge.

Pushpak K. reviews DEATH'S DARK ABYSS by Massimo Carlotto

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

- Edgar Allen Poe

When the first humans stood under the night sky, staring with wide-eyed wonder at the luminous moon set against innumerable stars; they certainly felt a primal connection with the Universe - a connection that resonated with something dark within themselves and their world. Predators, from beyond and within, consumed the weak and the defenseless. It may well be that our first attempts to ‘socialize‘ were a passive defense mechanism against the dangers of the night, known and unknown. Over millenia, this ‘collective consciousness’ (as Carl Jung defined it) has distilled our association with the night as a darkness not of the world, but of the soul itself. Myths, legends, histories and literature have all served as the vehicles of propaganda against this darkness. Spectators who witnessed these works, from the earliest records of human civilization to the everyday audience on Broadway, have all displayed a deep rooted sense of identity-projection with the ‘anti-hero’ - the underdog character with morally questionable beliefs.

No other genre of contemporary popular literature has been as successful in delving into the dark mysteries of the soul as the crime noir. And of the various pockets of thriving noir fiction, the Meditteranean noir (Med-noir) is a class apart when it comes to representing the duality of soul juxtaposed with the duality of the deceptively elegant environs. The setting of such stories typically takes the reader through a sanguine backdrop of sunny beaches, sprawling estates, fine wine and food; while depicting the lives of protagonists who are broken, corrupt, violent, with a highly ambiguous sense of morality that we behold with equal measures of repulsion and fascination. 

Masssimo Carlotto has emerged as one of the finest noir-fiction writers from Italy, the mecca of Med-noir. “Death’s Dark Abyss” (originally published as L'Oscura inmensità della morte) is the fourth novel in his crime noir repertoire. The protagonists of this story are Rafaello Beggiato - a lifer convicted of brutal murders of an eight year old boy and his mother, and Silvano Contin, the father and husband of the victims of this horrific, impulsive crime. His accomplice remains at large. The title refers to the last words of the dying wife, Clara. These are the words that Silvano lives by - foregoing his once opulent and flashy lifestyle to escape from his past. The story begins with Rafaello requesting Silvano for a pardon. The convict has been diagnosed with cancer and has a few months to live. He requests that he would like to die as a free man. Grasping a chance to find out the identity of the elusive accomplice (who Rafaello repeatedly claims was the one who fired the gun), Silvano sets in motion a plan that results in gruesome consequences. We watch his uncontrollable fall into the dark abyss of death and violence as he seeks revenge for the murders of his wife and child. It is a testament to Carlotto’s skill as a plot-weaver, and Lawrence Venuti’s impeccable translation that the reader is riveted through the many twists and turns in the story. As we watch the horror unfold, we find ourselves question the true meaning of “crime” and “morality.” Carlotto deftly weaves a complementary ‘rise’ from darkness and despair, to redemption and balance while hauling us along into the depths of the abyss. The story ends with an unsettling, yet satisfying conclusion.

Very Highly recommended !!