The Late Monsieur Gallet

The second in the series of reissues of Georges Simenon's Maigret novels finds the detective traveling outside Paris to investigate a strange death in a hotel: A man has had half his face shot away and also been stabbed in the heart. In this rotten world, Maigret arrives not as an avenging angel but more of a resigned observer. The case will get solved, as usual, but the result is not cause for relief, much less celebration.

Europe in Sepia

Dubravka Ugresic, whose Starbucks name became "Jenny" after an abortive attempt at communicating her real one, is still adrift 20 years after leaving her native Croatia and being denounced there as a traitor. There is a chip on her shoulder, which makes for some strong essays on subjects like women's role in literature, the Internet, nostalgia for ex-Yugoslavia, and the consumer culture of publishing. The points are well taken, but I found myself wishing she would name names in many of the instances when generic attacks were offered instead.

Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler

It's clear what Joe Queenan doesn't like, although rarely why. In this collection of essays he spews negative adjectives all over the place, but after a while reading that a movie has all the earmarks of "high suck" gets old. Still, his breakdowns of dentistry, cannibalism and ear abuse in movies are entertaining enough, and his takedowns of Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen hit the bull's eye.

This Blinding Absence of Light

Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel is based on interviews with a survivor of Morocco's secret dungeon prison at Tazmamart. The prisoner's strategies for survival lean heavily on religion and a rejection of memory and hope. Although the novel highlights brute cruelty without reference to political philosophy, it finds echoes in Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

Blott on the Landscape

At the center of this Tom Sharpe novel, amid the pages of satire and absurdity, beats a moral heart. It belongs to Blott, "who would die rather than give up the right to be needed."

Indecent Exposure

The Buster Keaton-like calamities (exploding ostriches, e.g.) take center stage in this Tom Sharpe satire on the South African police, but at least a couple times he tips his hand. On p. 32, for example: "His professional task was to root out enemies of the state and it followed that enemies of the state were there to be rooted out." And p. 242-3: " 'Nothing like the threat of terrorism to keep the electorate on our side,' said the Minister of Justice." An optimistic reader might think that the practices so savagely ridiculed in a 1973 novel about South Africa would be extinct, but that reader would be wrong.

The Stranger

Today, Meursault would have been acquitted with a "stand your ground" defense (the Arab flashed a knife). He also bears a resemblance to our "whatever" type, but with this difference: His final revelation, far from being a negation, is an affirmation that "everybody (is) privileged."