Once again this holiday season year-end review begins with the confession that my year didn’t include many memorable works of fiction. Not that I didn’t read plenty of it, but almost all of what I read were older books I’d somehow never gotten around to — J.G. Farrell’s magnificent “Empire Trilogy” (“The Siege of Krishnapur,” “Troubles” and “The Singapore Grip”), for example — or books to which I returned for the sheer pleasure of rediscovery, including a bracing dollop of P.G. Wodehouse. I still love novels, but fewer and fewer contemporary novelists (American ones especially) appeal to me, and I find it ever more difficult to avoid writing formulaic fiction reviews, which are no treat for me or my long-suffering readers.
So of the 11 books that make my best-of-the-year list, only two are works of fiction, both by writers whose work I have long admired. The first is “Saints and Sinners,” a collection of short stories by the remarkable Edna O’Brien. Now in her ninth decade, the Irish writer gives not the slightest evidence of running out of the very considerable steam that has always animated her work. To be sure, there isn’t much erotic steam in these stories, for a change, but as always there is a powerful evocation of Ireland, her love for which in recent years has been tempered by exasperation and pain at what happened to the country during the few years in which the Celtic Tiger roared. This seems to me her best book in many years.
(Back Bay/ ) - ‘Saints and Sinners: Stories’ by Edna O'Brien
George Pelecanos is about as different from O’Brien as a writer could be, except in one important respect: Place is of central importance to both. O’Brien’s place is Ireland, while Pelecanos’s is the District of Columbia and, to a lesser extent, its beyond-the-Beltway suburbs. “The Cut” is his 17th book but the first featuring Spero Lucas, a veteran of the Iraq War who hires himself out to track down missing items of value to their owners. He gets a cut of what they’re worth if he succeeds. In this case the quest for the pot sends Lucas deep into some of the District’s more dangerous places and requires him to use some of the skills he polished in Iraq. It also gives Pelecanos the opportunity to paint a remarkably broad and deep portrait of places in Washington that probably are little known, if at all, by people who read (or write) book reviews. “The Cut” is presented as the first in a series, so the sequels should be well worth waiting for.
As for my considerably longer nonfiction list, it begins with three books that defy easy classification. Mark Adams’s “Turn Right at Machu Picchu” is at once a travel book, a work of popular history, an exploration of the many mysteries of one of the world’s most remarkable places, and an inquiry into certain engagingly eccentric aspects of the Peruvian character. Adams is married to a Peruvian and has spent a good deal of time in her country, but he hadn’t ventured far beyond Lima until he decided to retrace the footsteps of Hiram Bingham, the Yankee who “discovered” Machu Picchu (discovered it, that is, for non-Peruvians) a century ago. He hired a guide and a couple of helpers, and set off on foot for what he thought would be a breezy walk through the Peruvian countryside. It turned out to be much more than that, of course, but he had a good time and so does the reader.
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