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It’s been a long time since I posted any book reviews. It’s not because I stopped reading, but I’ve had other things on my mind. So, as the year comes to an end, here are some of the books I really liked during 2023.

This is Marra’s second novel – his first was more than 10 years ago, but it was worth the wait.

It’s 1941, Artie Feldman is founder and CEO of the titular studio – a producer of B movies that keep the country’s screens filled when the finer products of Hollywood are unavailable. It’s a tough business and the studio is facing a number of problems. The Senate is investigating whether Artie’s studio, among others, is trying to goad the country into war, the Production Code Administration is constantly cutting scenes from Artie’s movies because they might ‘offend the people’s sensibilities’ and Artie’s brother, the finance guy, is angling to take over the studio.

Artie is the kind of guy we’ve met before – he is concerned that his bald spot is growing and he keeps a row of toupees on display in his office. He has never met a bad idea he doesn’t love.

Artie’s principal defender and the feisty central character of this complicated novel is his deputy producer, Maria Lagana. She’s a 28-year-old Italian American with “the talents of a general, diplomat, hostage negotiator and hairdresser.” She has a special knack, Marra explains, “for smuggling subtext past the border guards of decorum at the Production Code Administration.” When Artie tells Maria she can have a producer’s credit if she gets their latest film past the censors, she takes the challenge.

Maria is a hard worker and clever but she feels a sense of guilt for her relative comfort at the studio while others struggle both in Hollywood and abroad. What feels at first like a charming flashback to Maria’s youth in Rome is, in fact, an explanation for her abiding sense of guilt. As a strident teenager, she acted rashly to protect her father in a way that accidentally led to his arrest under the fascist reign. While Maria escapes to the United States, her dad remains behind and becomes embroiled in a convoluted murder plot that ricochets through several lives.

When Marra switches back to the United States, that frightening vision of Italian fascism serves as both contrast and caution. As the country enters the war, Mercury Pictures joins the effort to convince Americans of the purity of their cause and the villainy of their enemies. But, of course, many of those propaganda films are written, directed, produced and even performed by the very kinds of people that the U.S. government is busy demonizing.

When Artie decides to make, against the strident denunciation of the Motion Picture Board, “Devil’s Bargain” , the story of a German filmmaker who agrees to make propaganda movies in exchange for financing his masterpiece, begins as another one of Mercury’s middling movies but ends, after the film’s literally riotous reception on Dec. 6, 1941, with Artie suddenly looking prescient. Those isolationist senators who thought the studios were goading the nation toward war? Now they want Artie’s help making more “patriotic” pictures like “Devil’s Bargain.” The interpretation of art, it turns on a dime.

The book is filled with funny and interesting characters and Marra’s incisive writing brings out their personalities, quirks and weaknesses. I laughed out loud more than once reading the book. You might too.

This is a book you should read carefully. It is a kind of mystery with clues hidden everywhere. Much of the action — lovers’ trysts in abandoned buildings, covert wartime operations, transportation of contraband goods and illegally imported greyhound racing dogs — takes place not just in the metaphorical darkness of unreliable memory and deliberate deception, but in a “wet, pitch-black universe” occasionally illuminated by the guiding glow of what was known as a “bomber’s moon.”

Ondaatje sets up his novel with its very first line: “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” The narrator, Nathaniel Williams, is 14, his sister Rachel almost 16. Their first disillusionment comes when they discover, months after their mother’s departure, that she isn’t where she said she was going. Warlight is Nathaniel’s attempt, some 15 years later, to figure out where his parents did go, and why he and his sister were left in the dark.

They are left in the care of a burly, eccentric man they call the Moth, who is host to a motley, ever changing crew of visitors to their own old London home. A central figure is the Darter, a man engaged in evidently nefarious activities, usually by night, whom Nathaniel adopts as a father figure. The Darter is involved in the illicit import of greyhounds at a time when greyhound racing was apparently unregulated; more crucially, he later takes Nathaniel and his girlfriend, Agnes, on secretive nighttime missions, making contraband deliveries by boat up the Thames.

The novel is filled with nicknames, aliases, and disguises. Nathaniel’s mother, Rose, calls her children Stitch and Wren. She’s known on the airwaves by her code name, Viola — the object of a furious manhunt that also threatens her family. Nathaniel refers to his first girlfriend as Agnes Street, after the location of the empty rental property where they first meet for sex. Real names and identities are lost in the shuffle, as are both Nathaniel’s original family and the eccentric, makeshift one he cobbles together by circumstances.

“The past … never remains in the past.” That is the signature theme of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, which juggles time in much the same way that memory does, interlacing the war years of the 1940s with their immediate aftermath and then jumping forward a decade or so, only to dart back to the war again. At the outset, Ondaatje’s narrator, Nathaniel, is 14; by the last page he is in his late 20s.

As the novel progresses, Ondaatje reveals more little tidbits to us and we realize that some of what we thought was insignificant when we first read it, is really an important part of the story. People, and stories, are elusive and evasive. from those figures of Nathaniel’s and Rachel’s teenage years to Marsh Felon, the man with whom Rose has been in an ambiguous relationship all her life, and, of course, to Rose herself. We first meet Felon when, as the youngest member of a family of thatchers, he falls off the roof of Rose’s parents’ house in Suffolk when she is just 8, a story she tells her children that doesn’t seem significant until, very far along, we meet him again with a shock of recognition. This is one of several instances when the novel mirrors Nathaniel’s observation that “you return to that earlier time armed with the present.” Some previous incident or reference is clarified much later; you understand why that was important, why that person or that event mattered.

This is an amazing novel, full of detail and wonderful characters. Read it…and read carefully – you will enjoy it.

This is a novel about a young woman named Kathy H., and her friendships with two schoolmates, Ruth and Tommy. The triangle is a standard one: Kathy is attracted to Tommy; Tommy gets involved with Ruth, who is also Kathy’s best friend; Ruth knows that Tommy is really in love with Kathy; Kathy gets Tommy in the end, although they both realize that it is too late, and that they have missed their best years. Their lives are short; they know that they are doomed. So the small betrayal leaves an enormous wound.

That sounds simple and is a common theme but it ignores the terrible premise of the book which is only slowly revealed. Since it’s the nature of Ishiguro narrators to postpone a full reckoning of their place in the world, all we know in the early going is that we don’t quite know what’s going on.

We have inklings. The novel’s 31-year-old narrator, Kathy H., announces on the first page that she has worked for more than 11 years as a “carer.” The people she assists in her line of work are “donors” at a recovery center, in pain and doped up on drugs. Logic suggests that bodily organs are involved. But gently decent Kathy is our host on this journey, and instead of surveying her life in the present (that would be “England, late 1990’s,” according to an introductory note) she likes to let her mind wander back to the years she spent with her two closest friends, Ruth and Tommy, at boarding school -a fabled, bucolic place in the countryside with the Dickens-parody name of Hailsham.

Kathy and her classmates were taught to think of themselves as supremely lucky for having gone to Hailsham. It was the best, the most privileged of schools. Still, we can hear off notes. The place was run by “guardians,” who come across like nuns devoted to a faith other than religion. Both maternally protective and weirdly distant, these women prevented students from leaving the campus, and had them screened each week by a doctor. And they kept the kids busy with art projects that seemed freighted with meaning, as if a child’s creative output might hold a clue to her fate.

Slowly, we’re led to see that she and her classmates are clones, reared in isolation at a special school, pampered and sheltered and encouraged to feel like children for as long as possible but trained for a mean postgraduate destiny. It’s a shocking setup.

Ishiguro is trying, quite successfully, to show us what is human about us even in the most horrible situations – how we love and laugh and enjoy life all the while heading to an unavoidable, early end. We root for Kathy — which is not quite the same thing as identifying with her. For, authentic as her emotions may be, by definition she’s personality-challenged. At times uncomfortably, for a work that aims to give us a distilled and persevering human essence, we can sense the controlling care with which Ishiguro invents and organizes her memories. Yet if the novel feels a bit too distant to move us to outright heartbreak, it delivers images of odd beauty and a mounting existential distress that hangs around long after we read it.

We all know the story of Odysseus. It’s been told, at length, by poets, novelists and filmmakers. The Trojan war lasted ten years and his travels/adventures on the way home lasted another ten. We know a bit less about his wife, Penelope who we him as a teenager and bore him one son, Telemachus, just before Odysseus’ departure. She remained faithful to Odysseus the entire time, fending off hundreds of suitors through a variety of cunning tricks, one of which is to pretend to be weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s elderly father Laertes and claiming that she will choose a suitor when she has finished. Every night for three years, she undoes part of the shroud, until Melantho, a slave, discovers her chicanery and reveals it to the suitors.

This novel is one of a number of recent retellings of Greek myths from a female perspective. Penelope is Queen of Ithaca, but she is not really the ruler of the island. Nor is her son, Telemachus, the ruler while his mother still lives. Ithaca is an island of women, young boys and old men; all the eligible men having sailed to Troy in pursuit of Helen alongside Odysseus.

When pirates begin to attack the island, Penelope must act in order to protect her husband’s birthright and his people, but what can she do as a woman, when to be a powerful woman in Greece is to make yourself a target? There is clever plotting at the heart of this book which is fitting given that Penelope and Odysseus were known for their wits.

The book, interestingly, is narrated by Hera, Goddess of marriage, women and family, and the protector of women during childbirth. According to myth, she is defined by her jealous and vengeful nature in dealing with those who offend her. Within this novel, the author really taps into that, and we are treated with a narrator who tells us the story with a heavy amount of sarcasm and a good deal of irony, which honestly, was entirely amusing and on point. It’s a fun story and I enjoyed it.

It’s worth noting that Claire North is a pen name for Catherine Webb who also writes under the name Kate Griffin.

Yes, another retelling of Greek mythology, this one by Costanza Casati, from a different point of view, this one about Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon and half-sister of Helen. She is best known for known for murdering her husband, King Agamemnon, after he returned home from the Trojan War.

But wait, there’s much more to the story. Clytemnestra had her reasons. First, Agamemnon murdered her husband and infant son so that he could have her. Years later, he kills his and Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice to turn the winds in the Greek army’s favor. Finally, he brings home from Troy his captive and lover, Cassandra. All of this is, of course, condoned by the other men of Greece including Clytemnestra’s childhood friend, Odysseus. Let’s take a look at her story.

When we meet Clytemnestra, she is a young princess of Sparta; a hunter and fighter who is close to her family, especially to her sister, Helen, the famed beauty who later flees for Troy.  

Growing up, the princesses of Sparta train in wrestling, spear-throwing and sword-fighting, and are relatively able to do as they please. Their mother rules alongside their father – or at least appears to. “It is hard to find a man who is really strong. Strong enough not to desire to be stronger than you,” she tells Clytemnestra.  

On her deathbed, Clytemnestra’s grandmother tells Clytemnestra and Helen that their family is a “dynasty of queens” and that “you girls will be remembered longer than your brothers”.

For this, she says, they’ll need “ambition, courage, distrust”. If her message is cryptic in that moment, it becomes increasingly clear as the two princesses grow older and face one betrayal after another.  

After all, ancient Greece is a man’s world. Yes, young Spartan women are trained to be strong. But the reason is so they can “bear healthy children”, Clytemnestra says. If their lower positioning in the social hierarchy is not apparent at first, it becomes abundantly clear when Theseus, the king of Athens, kidnaps and rapes Helen. Her siblings are furious and want revenge, but her father will hear none of it – “Theseus is a hero and he does what heroes do.”

After the murder of her first husband and their baby son, Clytemnestra transforms her heartbreak into steel. When she is raped by Agamemnon and forced to become his wife, she decides she will be a leader in her own right.  In one memorable scene, when a group of merchants question her authority, Clytemnestra punches their ringleader so hard that he loses consciousness.

When Agamemnon returns to the palace after the Trojan War, with his concubine, the Trojan princess Cassandra, in tow and being greeted by his wife, entered the palace for a banquet while Cassandra remained in the chariot. Clytemnestra waited until he was in the bath, and then entangled him in a cloth net and stabbed him. Trapped in the web, Agamemnon could neither escape nor resist his murderer.

Meanwhile, Cassandra saw a vision of herself and Agamemnon being murdered. Her attempts to elicit help failed (she had been cursed by Apollo that no one would believe her prophecies). She realized she was fated to die, and resolutely walked into the palace to receive her death.

Years later, Clytemnestra’s son Orestes, accompanied by her daughter Electra, track down Clytemnestra and kill her in revenge for their father. Life was tough in ancient Greece.

I enjoyed this novel. I had a rather classical education which included a lot of Greek and Roman myths and history and that may explain why I’m drawn to these stories.

This is an amazing book, an autobiography unlike any you have ever read; you might call it a collective autobiography of a generation. The book spans the timeframe from the author’s birth in 1940 up to 2006, and moves from her working-class upbringing in Normandy to her years teaching French literature in a lycée, living in the Parisian suburb of Cergy, raising two sons and eventually divorcing. But it is not a straightforward autobiography; rather it is told in a choral “we”, which sometimes shifts into the third person, so the author appears as “she”. This is as close in as it gets.

Throughout “The Years,” Ernaux traces the collapse of Catholic prudishness as it’s attacked by secularism, the pill, the legalization of abortion and the women’s movement. While as a teenager she was terrified of losing her virginity before marriage, in late adolescence her unmarried sons begin to sleep with their girlfriends at their mother’s apartment.

She marvels at how quickly people have learned to use the mobile phone, computer, iPod and GPS — and she is unable to imagine the devices we’ll be using in 10 years’ time. People must keep up, acquire the latest gadgets; to fall behind would be to accept aging and dying. She remarks on how goods can freely circulate, unlike refugees, who are “turned away at the borders.” She knows that possessions can’t make people happy, but also acknowledges the popular belief that this “was no reason to abandon things.” She talks about how the consumerist economy has enveloped us all with ‘so many types of yogurt that you could eat a different one every day for a year and not have them all’.

“It will be a slippery narrative,” she writes, “composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.” It is comprised of her own memories, of historical events, of scraps of popular culture, slang, notes on the subtle transformations of the culture. We encounter the war in Algeria, Sartre and De Beauvoir, Edith Piaf’s “Les Amants d’un Jour” (which “gave us goosebumps”), fondue bourguignonne, Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur, May 1968, the pro-abortion rights manifesto of the 343 salopes, nuclear threat, the explosion of consumerism, unemployment, immigration, the advance of technology. Ernaux captures the ineffable passage of time, which she layers like “palimpsests”, in order to express the “lived dimension of history” and, perhaps more crucially, to “give form to her future absence”.

She laces the book with photos of herself and others at various stages in life and she fills the book with interesting and amazing anecdotes and reminded me, at least, of many things in my own past that I had forgotten. This is a great book and you should read it.