Odysseus overcoming obstacles as he takes ten years to travel home from Troy to Ithaca has become a well know archetype. In This Tender Land, William Kent Krueger changes Odysseus into a twelve-year-old boy, and the setting to the Depression era Mid-West USA filled with shanty towns, soup kitchens, Evangelical revivals.
Odie, Odysseus, and three other children travel by canoe down the Minnesota River, each of them looking for a different kind of home. Setting the scene perfectly is the epigraph, a quote from The Odyssey, “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story.”
Odie, the storyteller and musician of the group, is the instigator of this mythic, fairy tale-like adventure. The four orphaned children have escaped from a school where Native American children were sent to be “civilized” but found cruelty and misery instead. Only one of the four travelers is an Indian, symbolically mute. On the trip down river, they encounter their Cyclops who temporarily imprisons them. They also encounter their siren, but she is more angel than wicked enchantress. Finding the allusions to the Odyssey, the Wizard of Oz, other books and fairy tales is a large part of the fun of this novel.
For those with access to Spotify, there is a playlist of the songs played by Odie on his harmonica. They were beautifully chosen to represent the time. Some of the most reminiscent renditions come from the Library of Congress, sung by the likes of Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bill Monroe, and Ella Fitzgerald.
Just before midnight, Mari is reading in a Tokyo Denny’s. When Takahashi joins her, he orders the best thing Denny’s has to offer, chicken salad. Kaoru, manager of a love ho, a hotel where rooms are rented by the hour, completes the trio.
In a different place, in a parallel story, a television watches a young woman sleep.
Quirky is overused when it comes to the world of Haruki Murakami, but for his novel After Dark it is appropriate. Under the superficial oddness, however, something rock solid glimmers. He is interested in people as self-contained individuals who are at the same time part of a collective entity. Is there a time of night when the barriers between people are porous?
Lonely Mari sees herself as second best to a beautiful sister. Jazz trombonist Takahashi understands that he is a player who is only adequate. Kaoru, running from trouble, fears she will never be safe. Eri, the sleeping beauty, doesn’t care to wake-up and has been sleeping for two months. Ordinary people meet after dark one night and help each other move towards connection and strength.
I didn’t realize that making playlists connected to books is a “thing.” After Dark is suffused with references to jazz (Murakami used to own a jazz club) and sure enough, there is a playlist on Spotify.
For those not yet familiar with Murakami, there is a visual taste available on Netflix, Tony Takitani, based on a short story published in The New Yorker. A lonely artist marries a woman with a compulsion to buy designer clothes.
Elly Griffiths never disappoints. Stranger Diaries, first in the Harbinder Kaur series, is a page turner. Her characters – readers, writers, English teachers on one side, and scrappy, dogged, intuitive detective sergeant on the other – are easy to like. The plot, not easy to solve, offers a subtle one sentence clue at the beginning, somewhat like Agatha Christie. Different characters have their own chapters, giving the reader varied viewpoints of the same occurrence.
Griffiths uses the story within a story technique to give depth and a hint of the supernatural to her novel. It begins when Clare uses “The Stranger,” a Gothic murder mystery, to illustrate points to her creative writing class. Excerpts continue throughout the novel. Two murders at Clare’s college echo scenes from the short story. She has lost one of her best friends plus the head of her department. When Clare opens her diary to write about these terrible events, she is chilled to see someone else’s handwriting.
DS Harbinder Kaur of the Sussex Police Department, age 35, proud of her job, is unmarried and lives with her traditional Sikh parents. She enjoys her mother’s excellent curries and puts up with her veiled inquiries about possible husbands and grandchildren.
Two smart women, Clare and Harbinder, gain each other’s respect as they try to figure out why the events of a ghost story have infiltrated their lives.
