The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

This is a book recommended as the next-read in my wife's Book Club. It is a 600-page tome and not that easy or interesting to read. But I read it anyway.

None of the characters in this book deserves the painful life that the author has imagined for them in creating the story around them. But, whatever. The author has created the story. So, it is his prerogative. 

The title has nothing to do with much of the story. There is a reference to a Bee Sting, that turns out to be not a bee sting at all. The main characters are Dickie, Imelda, Cass and PJ. Others are Frank, Elaine and Victor. Each chapter is told from a character's perspective and takes on the tone that is appropriate to the character. One thing I have never seen in any other books is the language in Imelda's chapters. It is totally devoid of punctuations, except for question marks. (Read my blog post about Eats, Shoot and Leaves by Lynn Truss, which is a best-selling book about punctuation, if you can believe it.) Imelda's chapter is written in a fashion as if it is Imelda's stream- of-conciousness. Thankfully, at least the start of each sentence is capitalized, that makes reading and making sense of the language, less of a chore. (I have a theory about this approach by the Irish author, Paul Murray. I think he got struck by a ruler one too many times on his knuckles by his Irish teacher-nun for making punctuation mistakes. So, he said "I will show her" and decided to write a successful novel without punctuation.) 

Imelda is beautiful girl from a poor family with a despotic father, and Frank is from the local rich Barnes family that owns a car-dealership, also with a controlling father, Maurice. Frank was the love of Imelda's life, but he dies in a car accident just before they are to be married. Frank's brother provides a sympathetic shoulder to Imelda, gets her pregnant and then marries her. That does not seem to be the start of a good marrige and proves to be such. Eventually, the car dealership business is failing and everyone has to deal with the transition from rich to not-so-rich. On top of all this, Dickie has a clandestine gay life that is being exploited by his unscrupulous lover, Ryszard, to blackmail him. Dickie is also convinced that there will be some disaster that would require him to have a secret survivalist bunker that he is building with his handyman, Victor. Dickie and Victor devise a plan to eliminate the blackmailer, Ryszard, and that appears to end in an unimaginable disaster, that the author eludes to, but leaves it to the reader to imagine. Like I wrote in the beginning, none of the main characters in this novel deserve what the author has devised for them. I feel bad for all these fictional people, none of whom are bad, but bad things are heaped upon them by Paul Murray.

Absurdistan by Gary Shteynhart

There was an article about the author, Gary Shteynhart, in the New York Times, "Is Gary Shteyngart One of the Last Novelists to Make Real Money From the Craft?". Reading the whole article did not reveal any justification for the title. The article only talked about his expensive bespoke suits, watch collection and the fact that he has made money from his writing. The eye-catching title sucked me into reading the article. But still, it did point me to his author and I borrowed his second book from the library.

I am always disappointed by books that are acclaimed by book critics. Generally, I find them boring. Maybe I just don't understand the deep meaning hidden in the writing.  So, I was not surprised when I read this book and wondered what the hullaballoo was about? The story is about as absurd as it could be given its title, and maybe that is the point. It's funny in parts and meanders along. 

A small country on the Caspian sea is sunk in a civil war between its two ethnic groups, the Suvis and the Svanis.The leader of the previous ruling group is apparently assassinated and the controlling Svanis are struggling to bring "democracy" to the country.Maybe the country has oil. American companies like "Gollyburton", KBR, and ExxonMobil are there for the money that is to be made. The protagonist is a 350 lb man named Misha Vainberg who is the 1,238th-richest man in Russia. He wants to emigrate to the USA to be with the love of his life from the South Bronx from his time at an Amrican university in Chicago. But, the US would not give him a visa because his now-deceased father had murdered an Oklahoma businessman. Misha is desperate in his atempts to get to the USA but gets drafted to be the Cultural Minister in Absurdistan. The absurdities continue in in this parody of America's purported attempts to bring democracy to any country in the world, whether it wants it or not. Predicatably, the results are as disastrous as with any of the USA's past attempts at interfering in other countries' internal affairs.