It started with "The Age of Miracles" by Karen Thompson Walker, of which I wrote earlier in this blog. A promising premise in that one! I can't help but feel cheated when the story took a wrong turn and became rumblings of a teenager who just happened to live in interesting times, when the Earth's rotation slows rapidly and affects the life on the planet. You can read my full rant here.---
Next, I listened to the audiobook "The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story" by Robert and Dayna Baer. A real life love story of a CIA couple - what a gem to read for a journalist, I thought. Better yet, a part of it happens in Croatia and Bosnia, where I spent a few years of my photo-journalistic career. And that's where the problem lays. Well, first I had to try and get over the horrible reading of the book. The authors have done it themselves, and I was excited with the prospect of hearing the real CIA lingo, but there was none of it - they read like semi-literate high school students, without emotion, in flat tone. They also butchered every local term and name they mentioned. After a while I listened with permanent goosebumps, as if they were dragging fingernails across the blackboard the whole time.
The premise of the book is - two CIA operatives describe their spying jobs, making it sound more mundane than any regular office job, in places that would sound exotic if anyone else was telling the story - Kazakhstan, Middle East, Latin America, and, finally, the Balkans. It's a collection of loosely connected anecdotes, which didn't say much about the life and work of CIA operatives, except that they were utterly clueless about the real life in places they operated at. They travel with pre-assumed American attitude and that never changes. They see local life only through the lens of their occupation and their country's interests. After getting over being irked with their naivety, I actually felt sorry for them. The book was also supposed to be about them falling in love and screwing up their respective previous marriages, so they can start a new one. Except, there was no romance - there was only a long car ride from Croatia to the south of France when Dana sort of figured out that she likes Bob, but if you wanted more juice, you were out of luck. They either weren't romantic, or don't know how to write it in the book.
Lastly, mind-jarring for me was a blatant inaccuracy that could (and should) have been caught by any writer with an IQ higher than rainworm's: there is a scene when another couple is sent to relieve Dana and her CIA partner in Sarajevo. Dana says there was nothing to eat in the apartment, so the replacements went to grab a pizza in the town of Mostar, which, she said, was half an hour drive away. Well, even a casual search on Google maps will show you how inaccurate that is - Mostar is, according to Google, 129 kms away from Sarajevo, which is 2 hrs drive. With the checkpoints, I would guess at least double that time - I've done the drive a few times myself at about the same time, and it always took the whole day. On the way back from Mostar, allegedly, the woman was shot in the stomach. It's the event that ejects Dana and Bob from Bosnia for good, so it's important. Yet, she didn't get the places, the distances and the circumstances right. If she lied about that, what else they lied about in the book? Yes, it leaves the sour taste.
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After those two rotten apples, I dove into Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" with great expectations. He won Booker prize for it, after all, it's bound to be good!
I read his "The Enchantress Of Florence" previously and loved it. But, when the "Children" started, it felt deja vu. It felt the same as the Enchantress. Same jokes, same light tone, same mixing of fantasy and history. Except in the Children, Rushdie kept telling through his narrator what he's going to write next. I hate when the book is hinting what will happen in the next chapter. I was put off with the tone, style and the corruption in India for about a hundred pages, then I simply gave up. There are just so many jokes about the big nose (of the main character) and lame "comical" situations I can digest in one book. When reality started mixing with fantasy too much, when what was supposed to be funny became forced and dull, it was a sign to put it down.
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The last in this rotten quartet was "The Midwife of Venice" by Roberta Rich. The story develops simultaneously in Venice and Malta in 1573. Historical fiction is my favorite, as long as it's plausible. Well, the Midwife was hard to swallow. Here's why:
Hannah and her husband Isaac were Jews from the Ghetto in Venice. She was extremely skilled midwife, but without a child of her own. He was a merchant enslaved on Malta, pending ransom. As the book opened, Hannah went to deliver a Venetian nobleman's baby in exchange for a handsome sum so she can ransom Isaac. The thing is - it was illegal for a Jew to tend to a christian, punishable by death not only hers, but the whole of the ghetto too. Yet she did it for the love of her husband. So far, so good. The descriptions of the midwifing were too expansive and too detailed, but all in all it was suspenseful and entertaining.
Then the problem started - with the plausibility. The nobleman whose boy she delivered had two brothers whose inheritance would go to the infant, so they naturally wanted the baby dead. Yet, the parents decided to go on a trip and leave the baby behind in their palace at mercy of the brothers. They traveled to Ferrara, the trip that the author informed us, takes 3-4 days. The same evening one brother tried to kill the baby, but Hannah followed him and saved the boy by stabbing and killing the bad guy. The NEXT DAY she took the baby back to the palace - the parents should have been somewhere half the way to Ferrara by then - yet the servant opened the door, told Hannah they got a word from Ferrara that boys parents have died from the plague which scourges Venice at the time, and shooed Hannah away. Now - how is it possible that not only they reached Ferrara so quick, but they also managed to die from the plague - all over one night!
As the story went on, it got more and more unbelievable - characters appearing always at the nick of time with the only possible solution Hannah needed to solve problems the plot presented her with. The ending was happy, entirely unsurprising and uninspired.
The story had so much going for it, it was almost more difficult to screw it up, than to end it properly. Yet, the author managed to ruin the promising tale.
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