Thinly veiled memoir or literary gamesmanship? You be the judge.
An unusual, unsettling collection of short narratives, originally published in Germany in 2009, that blur the distinction between life and art.
Though this debut by German author von Schirach has been labeled “fiction,” the short stories derive their authority from his reputation as one of Berlin’s most prominent veteran defense attorneys. Each of these stories begins with a matter-of-fact, emotionless account of some situation leading to a crime, or at least the suspicion of one, with the unnamed narrator eventually entering to provide counsel for the accused. Are these straightforward accounts of actual cases—some never really resolved and some graphically gruesome? Do they use real-life incidents as inspiration for fictional recasting? Or are they (as at least a couple seem to be) parables or fables that illuminate the darker recesses of the human condition? While the author’s experience sheds plenty of light on the legal system—at least the German legal system, with small but significant differences from its American counterpart—the narrative tone is closer to Kafka than to Grisham or Turow. Perhaps the strangest story here is “Self-Defense,” in which a seemingly innocuous man viciously kills two thugs who have attempted to mug him. After arrest, he refuses to speak or to otherwise reveal anything about his identity or nationality. Even his clothes have been stripped of their labels. Was his lethal response permissible in self-defense? Was he also responsible for another killing, for which he was never charged? Who is he? Who arranged for his defense? The conventions of mystery fiction, which demand that plot strands must be tied together with a resolution, remain unsatisfied here and in many of the other stories. From the perspective of this particular defense attorney, matters such as “truth,” “innocence” and “justifiable” are more complex than generally considered, perhaps even unknowable.
Thinly veiled memoir or literary gamesmanship? You be the judge.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59415-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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