Emily St. John Mandel's LAST NIGHT IN MONTREAL

Gorgeous writing, irresistible scavenger hunt of a story

Up to my eyes in research, rough writing, and revisions on a work in progress, I have absolutely no time for pleasure reading right now. So it was a huge mistake to allow even a passing glance at an advance copy of Emily St. John Mandel's lovely debut novel, Last Night in Montreal. I can't help it; I am about to utter the hacky cliche of all book recommendations: I couldn't put it down. The words "pleasure reading" hardly begin to describe it. This was somewhere between a spa treatment and mid-day lovemaking. It's a mystery and a love story, a twisting path through the heart and mind of a richly drawn character.

This is not the blockbuster you're going to see on an endcap at Borders, but I hope hope hope it catches on with book clubs. There's so much fertile ground for discussion here, and this talented author deserves the affirmation.

Originally posted on Amazon.com as Joni L. Rodgers

NPR's Nancy Pearl gives a boost to some terrific under-the-radar fiction

According to librarian Nancy Pearl on NPR's Morning Edition, there's some great fiction out there just below the blockbuster bellowing radar. Among her favorites, Blood Harvest, a "spine-tingling gothic thriller" by S.J. Bolton, Under Heaven, a genre-defying historicalish kinda literary scifi/fantasy novel by Guy Gavriel Kay ("superb...gorgeously written and thoroughly researched"), and Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel.

Pearl had picked up the freshly minted Montreal paperback at the library, then searched out ESJM's latest, The Singer's Gun...

"I've been trying to think of what metaphor to use in order to convey my experience with both these outstanding novels. To me, reading them was like watching through the lens of a camera as its focus gradually widens from a close — up shot; with each page the camera pulls farther and farther back, and we see more and more detail about how that initial view (person, event) fits in the larger picture. Or, alternatively, reading Mandel's books is akin to watching the ripples spread out from the initial "plunk" of a pebble tossed into a pond."

Click here to read/listen to the rest.

Ghosts, shadows, and other traces left behind

As promised, three quick questions for Emily St. John Mandel, author of two extraordinary novels about the urge (or the need) to disappear: Last Night in Montreal and, just this month, The Singer's Gun.

The Los Angeles Times review of The Singer’s Gun refers to “what it means to be both native and foreign” — could you speak to that a bit?

Absolutely. Just to give our readers some context, that passage in the review refers to Elena, a character in the novel who's living as an illegal alien in New York, and her constant fear of being caught. I think that the political spasms concerning the issue of illegal immigration over the past few years have forced us, wherever we stand on the issue, to think more deeply about what it means to be an American: who gets to be a citizen, who gets to live here and under what conditions. It's a complicated question. I was born and raised in Canada, and have lived in the United States for seven years. My presence here is perfectly legal: it happens that my father was born in California, which entitles his children to US citizenship. But am I really more "American" than a hypothetical adult who immigrated illegally as a small child, loves this country and has lived here his whole life, holds down a job and pays taxes, but can't find a way to become a legal citizen and has therefore lived his life in the shadows? Is that hypothetical illegal alien truly a foreigner? Illegal aliens live in a sort of parallel country, a shadowland of anxiety and constant risk. I wanted to capture that pervasive sense of anxiety in the book.

So then, Elena’s story, obviously, is important to you. But it is Anton’s moral dilemmas and his desire for a more normal (less crime-centered) life that drives the novel.

True. The idea of honor is interesting to me. Anton is someone who wants to live an honorable life, but everyone around him is corrupt—his parents are dealers in stolen goods and his first job was a partnership venture with his cousin, selling forged passports to illegal aliens in New York—so he doesn't really have a good model of how to go about doing this. He's trying to create a different kind of life for himself but he falls back sometimes on old habits, with eventually fatal results. He represents an extreme example of this sort of thing, but I think that the question of how you're going to live in the world—and what kind of person you want to be—is something that a lot of us find ourselves thinking about at some point in our lives.

As much as your books are about disappearance, they seem to me to be about living with the traces people leave behind. Could you speak to that?

I think I've always been interested in the traces of things—shadows, reflections, memories, ghosts. Part of writing novels is looking for an angle on the story, the best possible way to tell it, and there's something about the indirect view that appeals to me; it can be interesting to write about aftermaths. There is a ghost in this story—or at least, there's a character who thinks he's seen one—but ghosts are only the most obvious illustration of the idea of living with traces from the past. I think we all live with the traces left behind by others, to some extent. This isn't why I write, but it struck me as I was thinking about this question that books themselves (actually, any works of art) are in themselves traces left behind—Salinger's gone, but his body of work remains as a fractured reflection of his thoughts and interests and predilections.

Buy This Book: The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

I love a book that travels with me. I read Remains of the Day on a trip to London, The Big Sleep in a hotel on Sunset Blvd, Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France, last fall in Paris. I purposely saved The Singer’s Gun for my trip to Italy last month. From the flap:

Anton Waker travels to the Island of Ischia, off the coast of Italy, and waits, for what he does not know. As his past is peeled back, layer by layer, we learn that he is not what he seems and that no one in his life is without a secret.

Trying to describe the plot of this novel would be like trying to describe the train trip from Rome to Messina. On one side, there’s the Mediterranean. Shades of blue you didn’t know existed. On the other side, there’s green mountains, soaring cliffs, people making the best and worst of good and bad circumstances. As you travel along, you see layer upon layer of history exposed.

The Singer’s Gun takes you for that same sort of ride. Emily St. John Mandel’s writing is elegant and full of surprises, but the story is as serviceable and unstoppable as cars on rails. Great hardboiled suspense provides a sturdy bone structure for lush tangents, rich dialogue, and ghostly apparitions. She plunges you into a dark tunnel every now and then, but just when you start wondering, there’s a blinding flash of light.

Anton Waker grew up watching his parents fence stolen goods and continued the family tradition with his cousin Aria, selling fake credentials to illegal aliens in New York City. He makes a genuine effort to leave all this behind, lands a respectable job (with a fake diploma from Harvard), and marries his longtime girlfriend (while having an affair with his secretary). His past follows him on the honeymoon to Italy. Aria won’t let go, Anton’s new wife can’t hold on, and things go downhill from there. Meanwhile, Alexandra Broden, a State Department investigator, has been assiduously building a case against the Wakers. She’s closing in and plans to start knocking heads as soon as she pins down exactly how Anton figures into the scheme of things. Anton’s struggle to untie this knot is an exploration of the cost/benefit analyses that go into every choice we make in life. The mystery is as much about human hearts as it is about human heists. Every character is layered with history.

The Singer's Gun begins with Agent Broden listening to a recorded phone call from an Italian cell to a tapped land line in New York. A woman picks up. A man says, “It’s done.”

The last thing you suspect is the story that unfolds.

Click here to read an excerpt on the author's website.

Or here to download a free sample on Kindle.

Or better, yet, just buy right now from IndieBound.

And watch this space tomorrow. Fred has 3Qs for Emily St. John Mandel. I already know they'll be good ones.

Book Tour: Emily St. John, author of "The Singer's Gun"

In case you missed me shouting from the rooftops, I'm a fan of Emily St. John Mandel, who's out on tour with her second novel, The Singer's Gun. Watch this space next week; I'll blather on about how much I loved this book, and Fred will ask the author 3 Questions. Meanwhile, if you're in the vicinity...

Thursday, May 6 at 7pm
Pasadena, CA
Reading & Booksigning
Vroman’s Bookstore
695 E. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91101

Saturday, May 8
San Diego, CA
Birthday Bash - 12 pm Reading/QA -1pm Signing (w/cake & ice cream!)
Mysterious Galaxy Books
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd, Suite 302
San Diego, CA 92111

Tuesday, May 11th at 7pm
New York, NY
Reading & Booksigning
McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012

Friday, May 14 at 7pm
Clinton, NJ
Ladies Night Out - Reading & Discussion
Clinton Book Shop
33 Main Street
Clinton, NJ 08809-1410

Monday, May 17 @ 7:30pm Brooklyn, New York
Greenlight Bookstore - Reading & Booksigning
686 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, New York 11217

Go here for Emily St. John's summer schedule.

Loading my Kindle for Italy. Any suggestions?

The Gare Bear and I are off to Italy next week, flying into Rome and taking the train to wherever it is we catch the ferry over to Sicily and on to the Aeolian Islands to meet my friend, Janet Little. I'm particular about what I read when I'm traveling, so I'm preloading my Kindle with just the right mix. Any suggestions?

Currently on tap:
Lift by Kelly Corrigan (Recently read and loved her memoir The Middle Place.)

Selected Stories of Anton Chekov by (duh) Anton Chekov (Good for trains.)

The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings by Carson McCullers

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann (That's right! I said V to the D, homes. You wanna make something of it?)

I'm also taking a galley proof of The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel, which is due out in May. I've had it for a while and started it a few times, but this is one of those books I wanted to read with my full brain and heart engaged. Emily's debut novel Last Night in Montreal is one of the loveliest books I've read in years. This girl's writing will always rank a vacation slot for me.

Last Night in Montreal (a strangely beautiful story of love and forgetting)

Up to my eyes in research, rough writing, and revisions on a work in progress, I have absolutely no time for pleasure reading right now. So it was a huge mistake to allow even a passing glance at an advance copy of Emily St. John Mandel's lovely debut novel, Last Night in Montreal. I can't help it; I am about to utter the hacky cliche of all book recommendations: I couldn't put it down. The words "pleasure reading" hardly begin to describe it. This was somewhere between a spa treatment and mid-day lovemaking. It's a mystery and a love story, a twisting path through the heart and mind of a richly drawn character.

From the flap:

Lilia Albert has been leaving people behind for her entire life. She spends her childhood and adolescence traveling constantly and changing identities. In adulthood, she finds it impossible to stop. Haunted by an inability to remember her early childhood, she moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers along with way, possibly still followed by a private detective who has pursued her for years. Then her latest lover follows her from New York to Montreal, determined to learn her secrets and make sure she’s safe. Last Night in Montreal is a story of love, amnesia, compulsive travel, the depths and the limits of family bonds, and the nature of obsession. In this extraordinary debut, Emily St. John Mandel casts a powerful spell that captures the reader in a gritty, youthful world—charged with an atmosphere of mystery, promise and foreboding—where small revelations continuously change our understanding of the truth and lead to desperate consequences. Mandel’s characters will resonate with you long after the final page is turned.

This is not the blockbuster you're going to see on an endcap at Borders, but I hope hope hope it catches on with book clubs. There's so much fertile ground for discussion here, and this talented author deserves the affirmation.

Warning: If you read the following excerpt, you will want to read more.

No one stays forever. On the morning of her disappearance Lilia woke early, and lay still for a moment in the bed. It was the last day of October. She slept naked.

Eli heard the sounds of awakening, the rustling of the duvet, her bare footsteps on the hardwood floor, and she kissed the top of his head very lightly en route to the bathroom—he made an agreeable humming noise but didn’t look up—and the shower started on the other side of the almost-closed door. She stayed in the shower for forty-five minutes, but this wasn’t unusual; the day was still unremarkable. Eli glanced up briefly when she emerged from the bathroom. Lilia, naked: pale skin wrapped in a soft white towel, short dark hair wet on her forehead, and she smiled when he met her eyes.

“Good morning,” he said. Smiling back at her. “How did you sleep?” He was already typing again.

She kissed his hair again instead of answering, and left a trail of wet footprints all the way back to the bedroom. He heard her towel fall softly to the bedroom floor and he wanted to go and make love to her just then; but he was immersed so deeply in the work that morning, accomplishing things, and he didn’t want to break the spell. He heard the dresser drawer slide shut in the bedroom.

She came out dressed all in black and carrying the three pieces of a plate that had fallen off the bed the night before; it was a light shade of blue, and sticky with pomegranate juice. He heard her dropping it into the kitchen trashcan before she wandered past him into the living room. She stood in front of his sofa, running her fingers through her hair to test for dampness, her expression a little blank when he glanced up at her, and it seemed to him later that she’d been considering something, perhaps making up her mind. But then, he played the morning back so many times that the tape was ruined—later it seemed possible that she’d simply been thinking about the weather, and later still he was even willing to consider the possibility that she hadn't stood in front of the sofa at all--had merely paused there, perhaps, for an instant that the stretched-out reel extended into a moment, a scene, and finally a major plot point.