Carte Blanche, by Carlo Lucarelli

Facing a quiet evening ahead early last week, I decided to pick up something new to read rather than one of the two books I was already in the midst of. With an upcoming trip to Italy in mind, I pulled out the appealingly short Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli, which I picked up a few years ago at my old favorite thrift shop on Third Avenue. I read about half the book that very evening. The next morning, I read a few more pages before work. I had contractors in my house that week doing work on my kitchen and they arrived that morning half an hour before my workday. I got out of their way and brought the book with me to the office to get some reading done there, and that was the start of the whole mess. 

When I'm reading a book, it lives on the coffee table across from my couch, or in my purse if I'm taking it out with me, but once I'm back home it returns to the coffee table before long. I don't read in bed, so I don't have bedside table books. My books are in the living room. The kitchen work had compacted my living room. The coffee table where the book should go was pushed away in a corner. In any case, I brought the book upstairs to my office. I remember bringing it to my bedroom at one point and then, I thought, back to my office. And then I lost track of it. I hadn't been loving the book, but it was so short I was determined to finish it. I couldn't understand how I might have lost it. Every couple days I would puzzle over it briefly, then forget about it. It seemed bound to turn up, but I was fairly certain it wasn't in my office or bedroom, the last places I remembered having had it. There just wasn't a place for it to hide in either room. 

Two days ago, I decided to just give up. Some people I knew were starting up a new book as part of an ongoing book club and I decided it was a good enough excuse to consider Carte Blanche abandoned. After work on Wednesday, I sat down on the couch and read one chapter of the new book. Later that evening, as I was having dinner at my dining table, which was still pushed close to my couch for the kitchen work (though it had finished a week earlier), I noticed a little blue-green corner sticking out from between two pillows on the couch. My missing book showed up just when I was ready to move on. This evening after work I finished it. 

Carte Blanche is a crime novel set toward the end of WWII in Italy, when the many competing military and political powers each had its own police force, muddying authority and politicizing crimes. When an influential, womanizing friend to the fascists is killed, the policeman at the center of the book simply wants to do his job without being part of a larger agenda, but this proves impossible. In a long foreword, the author explains how his inspiration for the novel resulted from his own academic research into the many competing police forces during that period of Italian history, and a particular policeman who ended up serving in many of them – even those from regimes at opposite ends of the political spectrum. He believed himself beyond the political, that being a policeman he could stand outside those forces. While on the one hand, this book showed that to be impossible, on the other, it didn't question that as an ideal itself. As an avid watcher and occasional reader of mysteries, this is something I grapple with not infrequently – I'm familiar with the concept of copaganda. I don't intend to entirely defend the genre, but the cozy murder mysteries I consume are practically in the realm of fantasy. Whereas Carte Blanche wanted to portray an honorable cop in a flawed system. (This is a whole genre of its own, I know, but not one I consume typically.) But I can't accept the idea of an honorable cop serving a fascist regime. 

Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, by Maria José Silveira, and Drunk on Love, by Jasmine Guillory

I started Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters back in late October. I read it for a week or two and I was enjoying it, but this was during the period when I was about six weeks out from my move with a vacation to Italy right in the middle and I was just terrible about reading. As readers of this blog will know, I measure my reading in years. I suppose many people do. I have a sort of tradition at the end of the year, when I allow myself to give up on books that I started at some point during the year and never got around to finishing. Some books don't even make it to this stage, I'll just abandon them outright, but this annual reset keeps me from feeling the weight of unfinished books hanging over me indefinitely. The process for me formally abandoning a book was to mark it abandoned in Goodreads (I've stopped using Goodreads this year and moved things over to The Story Graph, so I guess now it will happen there) and to either get rid of the book or, in some cases, to return it to my shelf (usually with the bookmark still in place, so I guess these cases aren't really total abandonments). Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters would have been destined for this fate except that, surprisingly enough, my Women In Translation book club selected it as our next book. (I was the person who added it to the list we voted on, but I didn't really expect it to win.) And so I kept it out, knowing I needed to return to it in time for our next meeting in early March. Last Thursday I did return to it and I finished it this past Wednesday.

Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters is the second Brazilian novel I've read, but in many ways it felt like the first. (The actual first was Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart, which I read some 20 years ago.) It spans 500 years of Brazilian history told, as the title suggests, matrilineally. Each chapter picks up the story of a new mother/daughter, following them down through the generations, and through their lives and experiences we get a full history of Brazil since the arrival of Europeans. But along with the story of the country, we get intimate portraits of these women some with wonderfully long lives, some with tragically short; some wealthy, some poor, some enslaved; some urban, some rural. I believe Silveira attempted to capture every angle of Brazilian life, every corner of the country as much as could possibly be done in under 400 pages. It's an impressive feat. 

Before my return to Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, and while also in the midst of reading two other books, I took a little break and read Jasmine Guillory's latest book, Drunk on Love. It delivered in all the ways I expected it to – funny, relaxing, with a satisfying end. Jasmine Guillory's books always include plenty of food, and this one – set in Napa – left me craving arancini and wine. Her books are escapist for me, not just because of the romance but every character is out there doing their best. Friends are supportive in exactly the ways they should be. Family dramas exist, but are resolved or turn out to be one big misunderstanding. The conflicts that arise loom large for the characters, but are on some level trivial and you know they'll be worked out. I never knew this was something I was looking for in books – and, to be honest, most of the time it's not. But now and then it can be pure pleasure to read something that's comforting, that you know will resolve in the way that you want it to, and that will make you laugh along the way.