People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry

"People are afraid of stories like Lucie's, stories about meaningless, brutal, premature death, but most of them cannot own up to their fear. So they take comfort in the certainty of moral judgements, which they brandish like burning branches waved in the night to keep off the wolves."

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is quickly becoming one of my favorite publishers. A chunk of my favorite reads from last year, notably The Submission and The Marriage Plot, were published by FSG. When I signed up for their Work In Progress newsletter, they promised me a review copy of People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman. (Me and the other first 500 people to sign up.) It was my first true crime book I've read and man, was it good. I knew little going into this one and I believe, like most mysteries, that is the best way to go into it, as it heightened my reading experience. I had a hard time putting this one down and I read the first half of the novel in 24 hours. People Who Eat Darkness follows the Lucie Blackman case in which a 21-year-old, thin, blond girl from England moves to Tokyo with a friend, in hopes of to mainge big money, and disappears. The details surround her disappearance suggested she was abducted, but there weren't many details from the start aside from a strange phone call and a mystery man. The author of the book, Richard Llyod Parry, was quite close to this case for its entirety. I didn't feel like there were any holes or questions left unanswered. In fact there were times when I felt there was almost too much detail given, but those instances were few. For over ten years Richard Lloyd Parry followed the case while he earned the trust of Lucie's family and gained countless interviews from those who knew her best.

Lucie was a hostess in Toyko, entertaining men in night clubs for a living. But this role should not be confused with prostitution. A hostess was never expected to preform intercourse with their clients, but rather play toward their fantasies psychologically. One hostess explains:

We were taught three things when we started. How to light our client's cigarettes, how to pour his drinks, and not to put our elbows on the table... Those rules aside, your job was to to fulfill his fantasy. If he wanted you loud, you were loud. If he wanted you intelligent, you were intelligent. If he wanted you horny, you were horny. Sordid? Yes. Degrading? Yes. But one thing it wasn't was the White Salve Trade. The one thing the hostess bars are not about is sex. 

It turns out, this is much more than a true crime book. It's also a lens for what happens behind closed doors in eastern culture, like an anthropological look at the darker, hidden aspects of this culture and their obsession with ritual and role play. For instance the practice of the "water trade" and the long-time tradition of women as a form of entertainment. 

One of the reasons I found this book so interseting is because I learned a lot about the east and how it differs from the west in terms of government, law, and media. Of the handful of times I've traveled abroad, I have never gone further east than Rome, so much of this was new to me. I also felt that I could identify with some of the girls described who traveled to Japan, who had hopes of a more exotic and exciting life. What girl hasn't dreamed of moving to a place that holds such promises? Sadly, it all went down hill pretty quickly for Lucie but just as her family and friends didn't know what happened to her right away, neither does the reader. The crime is unfolded chronologically which really makes for a compelling and fast-paced read. Despite the one night of nightmares I had while reading this book, (yeah, it has happened before) I couldn't be happier this book found its way into my hands.   The horrific crimes inflicted on Lucie Blackman were nothing short of pure evil, and this book will ensure her story isn't forgotten anytime soon.  

Chris Cleave called this book "In Cold Blood for our times." Needless to say, I'm really excited to pick that one up, disturbing as it may be.

People Who Eat Darkness will be published May 7th.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Sugar In My Bowl by Erica Jong

I need a little sugar in my bowl,

I need a little hot dog, on my roll

I can stand a bit of lovin', oh so bad,

I feel so funny, I feel so sad

-Bessie Smith

Here is the thing about a collection of essays, I know not every piece in the book is going to be stellar. Some will be mediocre, a few might be flat out bad, but the hope is that there will be enough good ones to hold the reader's interest. I've got to say Sugar in My Bowl did not deliver enough essays to keep me very interested. I'll admit, about halfway through the book I began to skim and even skip essays that didn't grab my interest in the first couple of pages. I decided life is too short to read vanilla. I should mention that this collection also included short stories, one graphic novel and a trialogue. Some of these pieces of fiction resembled erotica rather than the real women and real sex I was told I'd be reading about. These bits really didn't do it for me. Compared to the essays they felt, surprise surprise, less authentic and somewhat campy.

The lack of diversity was also disappointing. When "real women" talk about "real sex" I want variety. However, each story related was told from the viewpoint of a straight woman. The focus of each story was heterosexual sex. It would have been nice to have a bisexual, lesbian, or transgender viewpoint in an essay or two. Let's be real, this is the 21st century and diversity keeps it interesting. There were two bisexual women who wrote stories for the collection, but their stories didn't reflect their bisexual viewpoint and instead focused on male and female relationships. If I hadn't googled the contributors, I would have never known. Moreover, there was very little diversity in terms of race and ethnicity of authors.

With all that said, I do want to highlight the portions of the book I did enjoy. My favorite piece is entitled "The Diddler" by J.A.K. Andres, in which she discusses her young daughter's tenancy to, well, diddle herself. It's fresh, well-written, and laugh-out-loud funny. I also enjoyed "Cramming It All In: A Satire" by Susan Kingsloving and "My First Time, Twice" by Ariel Levy. I did liked that the general concept of the book is unique to the publishing world and while there were bits worth reading, as a whole this book left me uninspired.


Publisher: Ecco Press, 2011

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

I read Middlesex earlier this year and it quickly became one of my favorite books. It's no surprise that Eugenides won the Pulitzer in 2003 for this grand narrative that weaves together the story of three generations Greek-Americans and explores, among other things, the idea of splits and divides within our identity, our desires, our families and our place in the world. Middlesex was so amazing that it took Eugenides nine years to finalize his follow-up, the much anticipated The Marriage Plot. I couldn't wait until October 11th to buy Eugenides latest, and I also couldn't shut up about it. Then the lovely and generous librarian Melissa Rochelle from Life:Merging came to my rescue and offered to mail me her ARC, which basically made my week.

The Marriage Plot has been dubbed a "romance," but I wouldn't let that classification deter you from this book if it's not your thing, because it really is so much more than that. On the surface it is a love triangle, but it also examines the confusion and angst of early 20-something college graduates; the uncovering of identities and the difficulties of deciding what direction your life will take, when you don't even know exactly what you want to get out of it. This novel, among other things, explores exactly how we get where we do, even when we aren't planning on it. As Eugenides explains, "People don't understand their lives or what happened to them; they only think they do." One of my all-time favorite bands, The Talking Heads, has a popular song that Eugenides quotes in his epigraph: And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?/And you may tell yourself,/This is not my beautiful house./And you may tell yourself,/This is not my beautiful wife. I think that epigraph really captures the ideas Eugenides takes on in The Marriage Plot.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be done with it? To be done with sex and longing? Mitchell could almost imagine pulling it off, sitting on a bridge at night with the Seine flowing by. He looked up at all the lighted windows along the river’s arc. He thought of all the people going to sleep or reading or listening to music, all the lives contained by a great city like this, and, floating up in his mind, rising just about the rooftops, he tried to feel, to vibrate among, all those million tremulous souls. He was sick of craving, of wanting, of hoping, of losing.

I should also mention the plethora of bookish details and our lead character, Madeleine, an English major who is writing her dissertation on the marriage plot; the plot device that characterized the Victorian novel, whether or not the hero and heroine would get married. Eugenides takes 19th century notions of love and compares them to our modern day counterparts. Can we have a modern-day love story that is just as romantic and unforgettable as Wuthering Heights or Daniel Deronda despite the complications of prenups, gender equality, sexual liberation, and divorce?

The novel had reached is apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely.

Well, in my opinion, I don't want a retelling of the marriage plot. I want a reinvention of it, something equally as satisfying, but post-modern, which is exactly what Eugenides delivered. I adored this book. Eugenides prose is just as beautiful and detailed as it was in Middlesex, and his characters just as memorable. The plot maintains a steady pace, even as the characters develop and change. Upon finishing the book, I gave it a big hug, because it has one of those endings that you can't help not to hug it. As I mentioned in some post-reading thoughts, this book had the most satisfying ending of any other book I've read this year. I'm so tempted to share a passage from the ending (if you've read it I'll bet you know the one!), but I'm worried it would be a spoiler. So instead, I'll tell you this one is well-worth the read. You can buy The Marriage Plot at bookstores everywhere today. A big thanks to Melissa for lending me her ARC.

If you're interested in learning more, I'd like to direct you to Nymeth's review of The Marriage Plot.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011