what i’m reading

recommendations
from my library

June 2022: First of two Cordelia Gray novels, “An unsuitable Job for a woman” is not just a good whodunit by james, and a good Cambridge novel – it is a beautiful coming-of-age novel, about a woman trying to prove herself in a men’s-world, and also a meditation on the gender-bias of the genre James was about to dominate for so many years.

Edith
November 2021: From time to time i need to go back to Patricia Highsmith, to be reminded how things are done and from how little a “Thriller” can be made. But is “Edith’s Diary” a thriller at all? I’m not sure. What it is, with no doubt, is Highsmith’s saddest novel. 
September 2021: It’s not exactly a thriller, but Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuck’s “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead” plays well with the genre and its norms and offers a great leading charachter (and narrator) and a brutal depiction of Men’s relatioship with nature and animals.
July 2021: And this time a movie too: I just discovered Brian De-Palma’s unbelievably funny take on Hitchcock, Film Noir and male phantasies, which is at the same time an extremely effective thriller and an (almost) abstract meditation on the nature of the spectator’s gaze while watching “Noir”. So good!
July 2021: from time to time one needs to go back to Chandler, to remind himself the literary achievements one can have while writing “genre”…
June 2021: I’m not sure I’ve ever read a detective novel more metaphysical than “The Pledge”. Durrenmatt is now a true favorite!
May 2021: While teaching a seminar on Sherlock Holmes, i
re-read this imaginative “undiscovered Watson story”, telling what really happened to Holmes while he was presumably dead after “The Final Problem” – a true gem!
December 2020: A beautiful christmas present from France: the letters of Jean-Patrick Manchette, a rare insight into the mind and wiriting-room of a very original crime writer
November 2020: Sciascia is definitely my favorite writer of the moment and the most influential on the new Avraham novel i’m writing. You want to know how deeply metaphysical and political the crime novel can be? Read him!
August 2020: Jean Claude Izzo’s “Total Chaos”: When airports are closed, a great literary travel in Marseilles

July 2020: Ricardo Piglia’s
“The Absent City”

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