The Republic of Thieves [book review]

At last! The third volume in Scott Lynch’s Gentlemen Bastards series has appeared!After several years of despairing ever seeing the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora and of Red Seas under Red Skies, The Republic of Thieves eventually appeared.  The author thus managed to get over his chronic depression to produce a book in par with the previous two volumes… Judging from the many reviews found on the Web, reception ranges from disappointed to ecstatic. I do think this volume is very good, if below the initial The Lies of Locke Lamora in terms of freshness and plot. There is consistency in terms of the series, some explanations are provided wrt earlier obscure points, new obscure points are created in preparation for the next volumes, and the main characters broaden and grow in depth and complexity. Mostly.

The book The Republic of Thieves is much more innovative than its predecessor from a purely literary viewpoint, with story told within story, with on top of this a constant feedback to the origins of the Gentlemen Bastards upper-scale thieves band. The inclusion of a real play which title is the same as the title of the book is a great idea, albeit not exactly new (from Cyrano de Bergerac to The Wheel of Time to The Name of the Wind), as it gives more coherence to the overall plot. The Gentlemen Bastards as depicted along those books are indeed primarily fabulous actors and they manage their heists mostly by clever acting, rather than force and violence. (Covers hence miss the point completely by using weapons and blood.) It thus makes sense that they had had training with an acting troop… Now, the weakest point in the book is the relationship between the two central characters, Locke Lamora and Sabetha Belacoros. This is rather unfortunate as there are a lot of moments and a lot of pages and a lot of dialogues centred on this relationship! Lynch seems unable to strike the right balance and Locke remains an awkward pre-teen whose apologies infuriate Sabetha at every corner… After the third occurence of this repeated duo, it gets quickly annoying. The couple only seems to grow up at the very end of the book. At last! Apart from this weakness, the plot is predictable at one level, which sounds like the primarily level… (spoiler?!) until a much deeper one is revealed, once again in the final pages of the book which, even more than in the previous ones, turn all perspectives upside-down and desperately beg for the next book to appear. Hopefully in less than six years…

走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること [book review]

The English title of this 2007 book of Murakami is “What I talk about when I talk about running”. Which is a parody of Raymond Carver’s collection of [superb] short stories, “What we talk about when we talk about love”. (Murakami translated the complete œuvres of Raymond Carver in Japanese.) It is a sort of diary about Murakami’s running practice and the reasons why he is running. It definitely is not a novel and the style is quite loose or lazy, but this is not a drawback as the way the book is written somehow translates the way thoughts drift away and suddenly switch topics when one is running. At least during low-intensity practice, when I often realise I have been running for minutes without paying any attention to my route. Or when I cannot recall what I was thinking about for the past minutes. During races, the mind concentration is at a different level, first focussing on keeping the right pace, refraining from the deadly rush during the first km, then trying to merge with the right batch of runners, then fighting wind, slope, and eventually fatigue. While the book includes more general autobiographical entries than those related with Murakami’s runner’s life, there are many points most long-distance runners would relate with. From the righteous  feeling of sticking to a strict training and diet, to the almost present depression catching us in the final kms of a race, to the very flimsy balance between under-training and over-training, to the strangely accurate control over one’s pace at the end of a training season, and, for us old runners, to the irremediable decline in one’s performances as years pass by… On a more personal basis, I also shared the pain of hitting one of the slopes in Central Park and the lack of nice long route along Boston’s Charles river. And shared the special pleasure of running near a river or seafront (which is completely uncorrelated with the fact it is flat, I believe!) Overall, what I think this book demonstrates is that there is no rational reason to run, which makes the title more than a parody, as fighting weight, age, health problems, depression, &tc. and seeking solitude, quiet, exhaustion, challenge, performances, zen, &tc. are only partial explanations. Maybe the reason stated in the book that I can relate the most with is this feeling of having an orderly structure one entirely controls (provided the body does not rebel!) at least once a day.  Thus, I am not certain the book appeals to non-runners. And contrary to some reviews of the book, it certainly is not a training manual for novice runners. (Murakami clearly is a strong runner so some of his training practice could be harmful to weaker runners…)