Thoughts on reading Ira Levin's 'A Kiss Before Dying'

A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a great thriller. I discovered A Kiss Before Dying by accident. It was on sale for 99p in Kindle format. I had been having a break from reading crime novels. I had got bored with so many of the mediocre crime novels that are being published at the moment; police procedurals that vied with each other as to who could produce the most dysfunctional detective or describe the most sadistic of murders most gruesomely, all the while bewildering me with constant changes of point of view, head-hopping like a louse on speed.
Oh what a joy to read this 1950s classic. A crime thriller which concentrated my attention and got me into the mind of a killer and his victims. The whole novel is brilliantly structured, plot wise. I had my expectations totally subverted just over half way through.
My greatest surprise of all, however, was the discovery that Ira Levin was only 23 years old when he wrote this novel. The man was clearly a genius at telling a story and telling it well.
I'm very glad I had never seen either of the adaptations of this novel into film. This is a novel where the impact is very much in the way events pan out. It is also not a story which could have been set today. Facebook and Google would have both rendered the plot unworkable!



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The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Lighthouse is one of those novels which grows on you as you read it and you only realise how good a novel it is a little after you have finished it.
It is written from the point of view of 2 characters. Both have boring, mundane lives. The man,Futh,is someone to whom things happen. He is not a person who could ever be described as proactive. The woman, Ester,is a sad and disappointed person with an inappropriate libido. Futh and Ester virtually never meet or speak to one another but the whole story is about how they are connected.
The plot itself, about a man's one week walking holiday in Germany, is fairly irrelevant. This novel is all about backstory which is fed to the reader drip by drip until, eventually, one realises what has happened and what, indeed, must happen (though the ending is ambiguous).
Throughout this novel about memory the senses dominate. Smell is perhaps the most frequently used but taste and touch are both important too.The writing transports you to a gentle yet cruel world in which very ordinary people live from day to day.


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And when did you last see your father?

'When he went to the bar to buy me a J2O, Sir'

(William Frederick Yeames, painted 1878. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool collection).

Separated at Birth?

In anticipation of the re-run of season 2 of Spiral (Engrenages) on BBC4 tonight, I thought I would point out a certain similarity which recently occurred to me:

Spiral's Judge Roban ( played by actor Philippe Duclos). A man who has a major job bringing justice to the criminal underworld in Paris.

Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF

Do you agree?

What was your best read of 2011?

Mine was the wonderful One Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
I am a long term fan of David Mitchell (that is the literary one not the budding national treasure one) and knew I would like 1,000 Autumns but was not prepared for quite how much I would love it. It is a novel about understanding, how we communicate with others who speak another language. How different cultures communicate, trade, dominate, serve, love and hate. It has a massive sweep over modern history and examines the relationship between East and West. A novel set in 1800 yet speaking to us in the 21st century.
So what did you enjoy reading in 2011? By that I mean books you read in 2011 regardless of when published.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thousand-Autumns-Jacob-Zoet/dp/0340921587/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325537743&sr=1-2