The Things That Shape Our Writing

I read last week that Netflix has attempted to do what I thought was impossible – turn One Hundred Years of Solitude into a 16-episode television series. 

I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez when I was in college in the early 1970s. It had been translated into English and published in the U.S., and I bought the paperback edition at the LSU Union Bookstore. It might have been near exam time; I had a habit of buying riveting novels at exam time, when I should have been studying.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest. 

Some Wednesday Readings

 

A Note to a Writer on Writing into the Dark – Harvey Stanbrough at Harvey’s (Almost) Daily Journal.

 

Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 81 Years Later – David Unsworth at Fox News.

 

Whodunnit? The Strange Case of Shakespeare’s Will – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. 

Poets and Poems: Jen Karetnick and "Inheritance with a High Error Rate"

I’ve read several of Jen Karetnick’s poetry collections over the years, and I’ve come to expect an expert eye for image and metaphor. With five poetry collections, poems published in a host of literary journals and magazines, and several prizes for her work, you would expect her to know how to use words and language. Yet she always manages to go beyond the expected, with images that intrigue, challenge, sometimes jar the mind.

 

Her latest collection, Inheritance with a High Error Rate, does not disappoint. Whether she’s writing about a deceased brother, the symphony of a tropical storm, selling a waterfront home in Miami or 10 things you don’t know about the city, or being followed by @Death on X (formerly Twitter), she surprises and delights with how she makes sense out of marrying two very different ideas or words together.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Be Mindful – poem by Paul Wittenberger at Paul’s Substack.

 

Poetry Prompt: How Does Your Garden Grow? – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Sonnet 98 by William Shakespeare – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“In That Sleep of Death” by Jonathan Dunsky

I can’t make up my mind here. Is In that Sleep of Death, the latest Adam Lapid story by Israeli author Jonathan Dunsky, a mystery or a literary novel? The obvious answer is that it’s some of both. 

It’s 1952. Lapid is a private investigator based in Tel Aviv. He has a painful past – a police detective in Hungary who, with his wife mother, and two daughters, was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 for the crime of being Jewish. He is the family’s only survivor. 

 

For a time after the war, he hunted former Nazis in Europe, quietly and effectively exacting justice. He emigrated to Israel in time for the 1948 War of Independence, in which he was seriously wounded after a heroic action to save his unit from Egyptian gunners. Now he’s a private detective; he bears no great regard for the police, as it was the Hungarian police who herded his family into a boxcar.

 

Sometimes, after nightmares leave him unable to sleep, Lapid wanders the streets of Tel Aviv. And so one night he sees a fellow night wanderer and feels a kinship, even though the two never speak. It’s Lapid who finds the man’s body and calls it in anonymously to the police, and it’s Lapid who takes on his own investigation after the police come up short. And his investigation takes him into the stories of pre-war Jewish Poland, the Holocaust, and contemporary frauds. And it make be taking him into unexpected romance.

 

Jonathan Dunsky

Dunsky is best known for his Adam Lapid mystery stories, with eight published: Ten Years Gone, The Dead Sister, The Auschwitz Violinist, A Debt of Death, A Deadly Act, The Auschwitz Detective, A Death in Jerusalem, and now In That Sleep of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; the short story “The Unlucky Woman,” and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

 

In That Sleep of Death is a fine mystery, but it’s also something I hadn’t noticed before in Dunsky’s books – it’s something of a literary novel as well. It has a Kafkaesque beginning, the wandering of empty nighttime streets. It has the overall feel of a literary novel, and yet it’s clearly a detective mystery, not unlike the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Dunsky has produced a good story, an intriguing mystery, and a solid literary effort.

 

Related:

 

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Dead Sister by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Auschwitz Violinist by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of A Debt of Death by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of A Deadly Act by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Auschwitz Detective by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of A Death in Jerusalem by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Rise of the Cyber City – Walter Russell Mead at Tablet Magazine.

 

Post Office Tower and Tower Tavern – A London Inheritance.

 

Charles Spurgeon’s Londoners – Spitalfields Life.

 

Things Worth Remembering: ‘We Will Fight with Stones in Our Hands’ – Douglas Murray at The Free Press on Golda Meir’s speech in 1948.

Why trust?

After Hebrews 6:13-20

 

Why trust, you ask,

why believe that

a promise made

eons ago will be

delivered? Time passes,

cries made in pain

seem met with

silence.

 

I tell you this:

the promise will come,

the promise is coming.

It was made

with an oath; 

it was made with

perfect character;

it was made with

the sacrifice

of the son. 

Photograph by Jannis Lucas via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Some Sunday Readings

 

Debunking Four Retirement Myths – Kristin Brown at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics. 

 

Poetry: The Spiritual Terrain of David Middleton – James Matthew Wilson at The Catholic World Report.

 

Rome Is Not Our Home: Live Counterculturally During Election Season – Pete Nicholas at The Gospel Coalition.

 

Saturday Good Reads - April 20, 2024

I’m sure the people at National Public Radio feel like they’ve had better weeks. After business editor Uri Berliner’s essay in The Free Press last week, NPR CEO Katherine Maher suspended him for five days without pay. Then Berliner resigned. The conservative and independent press took a look at Maher and her history on social media, including what was called her “guide to the holidays.” Stephen Miller at The Spectator asked where all of Berliner’s defenders in the news media might be, while Matt Taibbi at Racket News took both The New York Times and NPR to task for burying the story’s lede. And Jonathan Turley at The Hill asked the biggest question overall (in my humble opinion): Should NPR rely on listeners rather than taxpayers like you? 

Boeing’s woes continue, with another whistleblower testifying about safety problems with the 777 and the 787 Dreamliner (like what we usually fly when we go to London). Maureen Tkacik at The American Prospect took a look at the revised statement by the whistleblower found dead of an alleged self-inflicted gunshot wound. And she describes what Boeing did to the guys who remember how to build a plane. And I keep thinking, this is Boeing!

 

Netflix has done what I thought was impossible: created a movie version of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. You can watch the trailer here. 

 

More Good Reads

 

Israel

 

How Did the War Begin? With Iran’s Appeasers in Washington – Michael Oren at The Free Press.

 

Leonard Cohen: Hippie Troubadour and Forgotten Reactionary – Simon Lewson at The Walrus reviews Who by Fire by Matti Friedman. 

 

Passover 5784, reliving ancient history – David Horowitz at The Times of Israel.

 

Life and Culture

 

Inside the disinformation industry – Freddie Sayers at UnHerd.

 

Poetry

 

James Matthew Wilson on Bookmaking – Let Go the Goat. 

 

Wobbly, I am – John Kerrigan at London Review of Books on The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid.

 

“Break, Break, Break,” poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Anthony Horowitz on Giving Himself a Role in His Latest Mystery – John Valeri at Crime Reads.

 

Think AI Is Bad for Authors? The Worst is Yet to Come – Mike Trigg at Writer’s Digest. 

 

Faith and Russian Literature – Gary Saul Morson at First Things Magazine.

 

Eugene Vodolazkin on the Puppeteering of History – Joshua Hren at Church Life Journal.

 

Faith

 

It’s Okay to Be a Two-Talent Christian – Tim Challies.

 

Your Faith is Secondhand – T.M. Suffield at Nuakh.

 

American Stuff

 

Taps: How a Medal of Honor Recipient Gave America Its Most Famous Military Bugle Call Ever – Stephen Ruiz at Military.com. 

 

British Stuff

 

In the Roof of St. Paul’s – Spitalfields Life. 

 

Sancte Michael – Gregorian Chant by Gloriae Dei Cantores

 Painting: Reading the Standard, oil on canvas by Charles Spencelayh (1865-1958).

An oath, a promise

After Hebrews 6:13-20 

He swears an oath,

he makes a promise,

an oath, a promise

given in his name,

because no one is

greater. The man

receives the oath,

the promise, and he

waits, patiently,

because he knows

they are good,

they will be made

good. The promise 

would be realized;

the promise would be

obtained.

 

Photograph by Marcus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Anne Askew – featured poet at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

You Know the Way – Cody Ilardo at Power & Glory.

 

To Welcome a Stain – Seth Lewis.

 

Vespers – Anna Friedrich at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“Fides, Spes,” poem by Willa Cather – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Letter from the Dead" by Jack Gatland

It starts at a funeral. Detective Inspector Declan Walsh watches as the coffin of his father, retired Chief Superintendent Patrick Walsh, is lowered into the ground. The man died in what was determined to be a roadway accident; Declan suspects it was murder.  

Declan’s own police career is problematic at best. He’s been suspended, ostensibly for punching a priest involved in a dognapping scheme. He knows, as does everyone on the force, that it was Declan’s uncovering a number of corrupt police officers. His choices look limited indeed, until his father’s former DCI, Alexander Monroe, offers an opportunity – joining what is a cold case squad based in the Temple area of central London. It’s a squad of police misfits, including Monroe himself, people chucked away from the primary police force for reasons of embarrassment, politics, or career missteps. They call themselves the “Last Chance Saloon.”

 

The first case Declan works on is a murder from 20 years previously. A wealthy woman was pushed to her death from the roof of the family estate. Her husband was convicted and sent to prison. The death happened during a fundraiser for the Labour Party, and three then-rising political stars were possibly involved as well. One is now homeless and living on the streets of London. One became a YouTube religious personality. And the third may become Britain’s next prime minister.

 

Jack Gatland

What reopens the case is a letter – a letter from the dead woman written shortly before her murder. The letter was found in old police files. And no one can explain why it was never investigated. It suggests that the killer may be someone other than her convicted husband, who died in prison from cancer. And the letter will take Declan and his team on a whirlwind of a case, with implications for the police, the people originally involved, and the British government.

 

Letter from the Dead is the first of the currently 18 DI Declan Walsh mysteries by British writer Jack Gatland. Gatland is the pen name for bestselling writer Tony Lee, who’s written comics, graphic novels, audio drama, TV and film series, the BBC and ITV, and a host of publishers. In addition to the Declan Walsh series, he’s also published four novels in the Ellie Reckless series, six in the Tom Marlowe series, and several others. The 19^th Declan Walsh novel is to be published in June 2024.

 

I’m always looking for a new mystery series, and Letter from the Dead suggests I’ve found a real gem. 

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Bloody-Minded Business: Julian Symons Evolution as a Crime Fiction Critic – Curtis Evans at CrimeReads.

 

The Microcosm of London – Spitalfields Life.