Read this book! Read this book!
I'm not sure I'll come across a better novel this year - certainly not a better mystery novel. It's the best book I've read in a long time. Since almost any "foreign" thriller will find itself inevitably compared to Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, let me come out and say that this novel blows away any of those books.
It's simple, elegant, moving, extremely well-thought out, beautifully diagrammed, with a stunning twist. You can't possibly guess the ending.
The plot: An abusive ex-husband comes around, threatening his ex-wife and stepdaughter. When the women kill him, they're unsure how to dispose of the body. Luckily, the shy math professor next door - hopelessly infatuated with the woman - has a plan.
A day later, a body is found along the bank of a nearby river.
Two Japanese detectives consult with a brilliant physics professor, who begins to try and piece together the case. Both of them suspect the woman, though her alibi is rock-solid. How'd she pull it off?
It gets complicated when the physics professor realizes that the woman's neighbor, a mathematical genius slumming at a local high school, might have abetted her.
Higashino gives us a unique look at Japanese culture. It's a book rich in thematic heft - loyalty, selflessness, problem-solving, respect, friendship. The ending is shattering.
It's equally worth noting that mathematics plays a strong role in the book. Both adversaries, the math teacher and the physics prof (old friends, it turns out), try to stay one step ahead of each, continually constructing problems and theories or trying to un-prove them.
(Warning: In my edition, there were a couple of editing typos.)
Check this out: http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2011/02/11/is-this-guy-the-next-steig-larsson/
One object that plays an important part in the book that readers might be unfamiliar with is a kotatsu table.
This is a low, wooden table frame often covered with a futon or thick blanket, upon which a table top sits, common in most Japanese homes. Modern kotatsus have an electric heater attached beneath the table. Most Japanese homes don't have central heating, so people tend to sit with their legs beneath the warmed blankets - kotatsus are very similar to our heated mattress pads, etc. In the winter, especially, families sit around kotatsus eating and watching TV.
Samuel Morse
1791-1872
Inventor
Time in Paris: 1829-1832, 1839
Known for: Inventing the electric telegraph, Morse code. It was when he was coming home from Europe in 1832 that he overhead a conversation about telegraphs. Within a few years of his return, he pretty much gave up painting and focused all his energies on electric telegraphs. (Morse would face many lawsuits in his life about the rights of the telegraph). Short-distance landline telegraphs would play an important role in the Crimean War and American Civil War. When in Paris in 1839, Morse met up with Louis Daguerre and, returning home, became one of the first Americans to make dagguerotypes in the U.S.
In The Greater Journey, author David McCullough focuses on Morse's first stay in Paris, when Morse was recognized as one of American's premiere painters. (In an attached article below from Smithsonian, you can read how Morse's eventual failure as an artist led the way for him to switch careers and focus to become the important inventor he was.) In Paris, he went to the Louvre every day and painted all day long, studying and reproducing the artists he most admired. His major work during the Paris years was Gallery at the Louvre (1832). This was a massive work, the result of a long ordeal, not a terribly original work, but ambitious as all-get-out.
There are 38 pictures on the wall (all to be found in the Louvre), mostly Italian Renaissance works.
Here's a key to the painting:
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2011/morse/morseinfo.pdf
Morse didn't complete the painting until he got back to the New York, for he still had to paint the frames around each of the paintings in the piece. During its exhibition, the painting actually lost money! A few years later and Morse was focused on his new career and the rest is... heee-story!
Why'd he go to Paris: In part, because he was sad. His wife had just died, leaving him alone with his three kids (who didn't end up going to Paris with him). In another respect, he felt incomplete as a painter. He was primarily doing nothing but portrait paintings at that time. He felt his education wouldn't be fully realized until he went to Paris. While there, he became close friends with James Fenimore Cooper and his family.
Savannah Book Festival tomorrow!
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