MIND'S EYE by Hakan Nesser

Janek Mitter wakes up to find his wife Eva dead in the bathtub after a night of serious drinking for the two of them.  Janek is certain that he did not kill his wife, but he cannot remember what happened the previous evening.  He soon finds himself arrested and convicted but is placed in a mental institution.  Inspector Van Veeteren has a hunch that Janek is not the murderer, and a subsequent murder convinces him completely.  Since Eva and Janek both taught at the same school, Van Veeteren and his staff spend a good deal of investigative energy checking out the alibis of the school’s employees and students.  They also drop in on some of Eva’s old friends and discover several deaths in Eva’s realm—her father, a classmate, and her young son.  Are these deaths, originally ruled as accidents, really homicides related to Eva’s?  I enjoyed the speedy pace of this novel, which accelerates toward the end when Van Veeteren sets his own deadline by booking a vacation trip to Australia, and I have no complaints about the writing, the translation, or the dialog.  However, none of the characters came sufficiently to life for me, perhaps because they all seem to be loners to some degree.  The novel is driven by the quest to solve the crime, rather than any sympathy for the police or the victims.

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh

Thank goodness this book is fiction, because otherwise it would be appalling.  The unnamed first-person narrator is a young, beautiful, affluent New Yorker who wants to reboot her life by sleeping for a year.  However, she finds her goal not that easy to attain and enlists the help of Dr. Tuttle, a psychiatrist who prescribes every nature of sleep-inducing drug imaginable and can’t remember that the narrator’s parents are both deceased.  The fact that the narrator is now an orphan may be what has propelled her toward hibernation, but I was never totally sure about that.  Her one friend, Reva, checks up on her now and then but mostly just envies and aspires to the narrator’s effortless beauty and style.  So how can a novel about a sleeping beauty hold the reader’s attention, especially since there is no prince to come wake her up with a kiss?  For one thing, the narrator sometimes wakes to find that she has left her building and gone shopping, among other things, while she was under the influence of a drug called infermiterol (invented by the author).  Her ex-lover Trevor has moved on, but that doesn’t stop her from calling him and threatening suicide in order to get his attention.  In other words, this woman is disturbed, but perhaps her self-prescribed sleep therapy will work, after all.  She just needs to devote as much effort to getting her act together as she does to achieving a year of dormancy.

A REPLACEMENT LIFE by Boris Fishman

Slava Gelman’s grandmother has just died.  She escaped a Jewish ghetto in Minsk, Belarus, at the age of 15.  Now it’s 2006, and she is eligible for restitution from the German government, if only she were still alive.  Slava’s grandfather wants to claim the benefits in his late wife’s stead, even though he is not eligible, and he knows just the person to fabricate his whereabouts during the war.  Slava is on the staff of a New York magazine, but he never actually writes anything.  At first he is alarmed by his grandfather’s suggestion that he pen some fiction on his behalf, but then Slava warms to the idea as a way to honor his grandmother’s suffering.  Things spiral out of hand, as Slava finds his talent in demand, when his grandfather’s friends seek him out to fabricate stories for them as well.  Slava has a certain amount of ambivalence about how he is attempting to bilk the German government, but he enjoys this work more than his unchallenging paying job.  He becomes romantically involved with the woman in the adjacent cubicle, whose job is, ironically, fact-checking.  He hilariously interrogates her about how she goes about her job without disclosing why he suddenly has an interest in exposing fraudulent copy.  I loved the storyline, but I was never really sure in which direction Slava’s moral compass was pointed.  More annoying was how the narrative was a little jumpy, and sometimes my mind did not make the leap immediately.  On the whole, though, the premise is fascinating from both an ethical and a literary standpoint, and the writing is superb.

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN by Jonathan Lethem

Lionel, the narrator of this noir crime novel, has Tourette’s syndrome, which causes him to utter nonsensical words and to touch things he has no business touching.  He works for L&L Car Service in Brooklyn, but it’s really a detective agency—kind of.  L&L’s owner is Frank Minna, who recruited all of his “agents” from an orphanage when they were teenagers.  Minna dies of a stab wound early in the novel, and Lionel decides to become a true detective and investigate Minna’s murder.  Dubbed “Freakshow” by Minna, he battles his Tourette’s every step of the way, but he is probably the smartest of the Minna men and therefore may have the best shot at discovering the truth.  Basically, this is a book about small-time wiseguys who don’t even carry firearms.  The author does a great job of generating a mood that mimics early twentieth century crime novels where the detective wore a fedora.  This novel even has a shady femme fatale in the person of Julia, Minna’s widow, who hightails it out of town as soon as she hears the news of her husband’s death.  The villains are a pair of mobsters, Matricardi and Rockaforte, known as The Clients, and the Fujisaki Corporation, which may be using a Zen studio as a front.  The conclusion of the book is a little rushed and not totally crystal clear to me, but the writing is excellent.  At one point, Lionel describes his tongue as feeling like “it had been bound in horseradish-and-cola-soaked plaster and left out on the moon overnight.”  Even if the storyline is a little thin, Lionel and his trippy exclamations are worth the ride.