Daryl Wolfe Wolfe من عند Bârcaciu 217302، رومانيا من عند Bârcaciu 217302، رومانيا

I really like Jodi Picoult; I think every book of hers I've read, I've finished in fewer than three days. They're fast reads, and they really really draw you (well, me) in. There's always a mystery, a romance of some sort, and a twist. My problem with some of them is that they don't actually give you the answers to the questions they've been dangling in front of you. This book definitely did not do that; you had every answer to every question at the end, even if some of them were a little bit too neatly wrapped up. This one's about a woman who finds out, 28 years after the fact, that her father kidnapped her from her mother. There's a lot of--this book demands that parents be perfect, selfless, heroic beings, which obviously I find problematic. There are a lot of references to and depictions of alcoholism, and there are detailed directions for cooking meth.

Persian fever dream novel from 1937, full of macabre, transgressive imagery. It's exactly like a nightmare and so a bit boring. But you have to admire how much there is to interpret. The main character is by turns himself, his uncle/father, a man who gave him a ride to the cemetery, his wife's other lover, and perhaps at the end his dead wife, to whom he is related and who is allegorically his mother. Well, I'm not sure, and who knows--it's hard to follow and, worse, hard to care about this more than any other dream someone repeats to you. It does capture the feeling of repetition in dreams, where the same people and things (a jar of wine, paintings of an old man and a woman, buildings with particular shapes, etc.) keep showing up in different places, and maybe they've changed, but it's not too mysterious because you just know what they are and that they belong there. And I suspect some of the grotesque images here have cultural resonances that would be interesting to know more about. But to the extent that there's anything enjoyable in this novel, you'd get the same (with less effort) out of just trying to recall your own weird dreams.