Kill for Me, Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh

 

Good page-turner. Not great. sort of the premise of Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN exploded to a bunch of Manhattanites in the current time frame, grief support groups mined for victims of violent crime who will agree to murder someone who ANOTHER alleged victim wants revegne on.

Every Exit Brings You Home by Naeem Murr

 

Good, if grim. Egyptian-born, Gaza-raised, Chicago-residing airline steward undergoes much sacrifice as 1) head of his Chicago condo 2) long-suffering husband of ailing childless Palestinian wife 3) possible bisexual, certainly promiscuous.

Murr's prose and description and character sketches are knife-like - he summons such a vivid external landscape of Chicago neighborhood life, and at the same time a jolting inner landscrape of memory and desire - Gaza, Egypt, endless airline flights.

Recommended but bleak.

Festival for Spies by E. Howard Hunt

Rabbit hole of reading Richard Helms book THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRET. This novel (according to a footnote in TMWKTS) was given BY MY OWN FATHER to another CIA agent, Victor Marchetti, in Helms' office - Helms was a spy fiction fan and kept a stack of same on hand for distribution.

This is of course the same EH Hunt famous for his Watergate exploits - he was semi-retired by the CIA already in early 1960s and charged with writing sanitized spy novels where the good guys always won, a reaction to the more knotty guiltily-existential novels of someone like Le Carre.

I bought it thinking it would be a joke - and it is light unintentionally semi-humorous reading, melodramatic, purple prose, all breezily accomplished in around 130 pages - but the travelogue descriptive prose on southeast Asia is quite nice. I'd read another of his, guiltily. Complicitly!

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

 

Got halfway through, it's beautifully written, but the conspiracy - the twelve men's role in murder/robbery/coverup plot - is too drawn out and 12 is too many variations of complicity for me to follow.

Good New Zealand local description, eye-opening, had never really thought about its "colonial history".

But over all annoyed feeling at wasted effort.

I read about this novel in some discussion of meta-novels and DFW and Infinite Jest. There's a horoscope/celestial cast of characters list and pie chart at the beginning, supposedly indicating fate tracking movement of starts, etc. - but I couldn't follow it. 

And really won't be bothered.

The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA by Thomas Powers