Handelman, Imprecateur, Grand Vizier de la nuit, Le reste est silence... by Jaloux, Juan Maldonne, Georgette Garou

I'm reading a truckload right now because I ordered the rest of my Femina and Goncourt winners from Interlibrary Loan and then found out a bunch of proposals I had made had come through with support. Wow! Do I have work to do!



I liked the start of Imprecateur, and the end, too. It's a first person narrative of mysterious deaths in the French subsidiary of an internal company, and it starts with the narrator in a psych hospital and ends with the narrator being released, and learning afresh about the murder that landed him in Psych in the first place just having occurred. Daring and entertaining, but the middle part bored me. Juan Maldonne is set in post WWI Turkey, with all the plot twists you might expect of a picaresque novel. Grand vizier de la nuit by Catherine Vieille is another skillful novel about the same-sex love of a servant for his master, and all the events that flow from it, with murder, love and betrayal, and at the end the death of the storyteller. It is set in the middle East in about 800 C.E. Le reste est silence, by Jaloux and Georgette Garou have as their themes marital infidelity perpetrated by women. In Jaloux's novel, the young son narrates, and comes to realize the sacrifice his mother made in staying in the family, a bourgeois French family at the turn of the century. In Georgette, it's a woman farm-owner who sleeps with another man to have a child, as her husband is sterile, and eventually leaves, realizing her husband drove her to the adultery. It is skillfully written as well, I suppose my taste for early 20th century literature is showing.



The book by Howard Handelman was about less developed countries, and the chapters corresponded to the problems they face. I was hoping for more public administration that this book actually had, but it was very complete and thorough in its approach. It's a quick easy read. I also read the third volume of Politics of Nonviolent Action -- also a breeze. I suppose after Heidegger, anything is easy.