Man's Fate

I suspect this Andre Malraux novel about the defeat of Chinese Communist insurrectionists in Shanghai in 1927 would benefit from a better translation. I picked it up on the recommendation of Mario Vargas Llosa, who surely read it in the original French. Still, despite chunks of clunky philosophical exposition, there are passages of great insight into the minds of the characters: revolutionaries, businessmen, intellectuals, and opportunists.

Last Exit to Brooklyn

With this novel, Hubert Selby Jr. extended the literary ground broken by John Dos Passos outward into new areas of frankness and downward into new levels of depravity. It is a work that is both horrifying and tender.

The Sound of Things Falling

This novel by Colombian Juan Gabriel Vasquez examines the price the nation's drug economy exacted on everyday people in the 1980s. Themes of transgression, ambition and benevolence are cooked into a compelling stew.

Lock No 1

The first disappointing Maigret in the reissue series, this novel is dreary and plodding. The characterizations are mostly astute but the action is tentative and blandly presented.

Fire and Fury

Other than the urge to take a long, hot bath after finishing this book, what stands out is the almost total absence of interest by Michael Wolff, the author, or anyone in the White House for that matter, in addressing issues of policy. You know, the business of government. It is all backstabbing, lying, and plotting at about the level of an MTV reality series. The problem is, the institutional damage will endure long after the clown show leaves town.

Ethan Frome

The New York Times review of Ethan Frome in 1911 talks of the novel's cold, harsh physical climate as a kind of chorus accompanying the narrative, and that is what is likely to leave its mark on the reader.

Count Bruga

Is it possible for a satire published in 1926, about a poet now largely forgotten, to provide a reader nearly a century later with enjoyment? With Ben Hecht writing, the answer is a qualified yes. Hecht's send-up of his friend, Maxwell Bodenheim, has no doubt lost some of its punch as the mists of time have obscured the public character of the Greenwich Village poet. And the fictionalized version, Count Hippolyt Bruga, is mostly tedious. But there is a long section in the novel's core, about a magician, that is as sensitively done as Mann's Mario and the Magician and just about as creepy.

In Another World

Subtitled "Van Morrison & Belfast," this brief volume by Gerald Dawe collects previously published work and weaves it into a mini-history of postwar Belfast and its music. The book is particularly good in evoking the city before the sectarian strife created no-go zones, when youths of all religions could come together in clubs to hear visiting and local bands play R&B and jazz. It was out of this milieu that Morrison developed his skills as a musician and songwriter, never losing sight of his hometown but eventually transcending it.

The Peron Novel

Tomas Eloy Martinez's fictionalized account of Juan Domingo Peron's return to Argentina in 1973 from exile in Spain is richly detailed, drawing from sources both real and imaginary to paint the general, his three wives, his hangers-on, and the opposition forces awaiting his return. The story is by turns poignant, tragic, and ludicrous. Martinez shows here, as the best novelists can, how fiction illuminates fact.

Class Trip

This short, creepy novel by French writer Emmanuel Carrere follows an awkward adolescent to a school ski trip at which his imagination and, eventually, events run wild. It is a cold, perceptive study of youthful alienation.