Emma Healey and Chuck Palahniuk

     Delaying writing something about books I have read has the disadvantage that one forgets some of the details. This reminds me of my experience in going into the Library of Congress and searching for the list of books I have narrated--and there are over a hundred of them. You would think that having read a book aloud, one would remember it; but as I scan the list of titles, many of them mean absolutely nothing to me--I have no idea of what they were about.
     I strongly recommend Emma Healey's novel "Elizabeth is Missing." It was a page-turner, but off-hand I cannot remember the name of the narrator--who is suffering from dementia and her days in the here and now are totally confused, but she has almost 
photographic memory for events of fifty or so years ago. To remind myself a bit of the characters I turned to a Guardian review, which begins--

"This debut novel comes garlanded with the heavy weight of both expectation and recommendation. Deborah Moggach: "I read it at a gulp." Emma Donoghue: "Elizabeth Is Missing will stir and shake you." Jonathan Coe: "One of those semi-mythical beasts, the book you cannot put down." It was the subject of a bidding war between nine publishers, the TV rights have already been sold and you can almost hear the calls being placed to Dame Judi and/or Dame Maggie."

     The narrator is Maud, and in the present day she is obsessed with what has happened to her friend Elizabeth, who seems to have vanished. But she also casts her mind back into the postwar period, when her sister, Sukie disappeared, shortly after marrying a shifty character called Frank. Maud's recollections of that time are detailed and crystal-clear. When Sukie disappears, her new husband, Frank, falls briefly under suspicion. And Maud's family's lodger, Douglas, seems to know more than he's telling. And perhaps the strange madwoman who lives rough on Sukey's street also knows something? And the past mystery is solved in the present day.

    I am not sure what to make of Chuck Palahniuk's novel "Doomed." I had read occasionally about this writer's talents but never tried a book of his. "Doomed" is, to say the least, an enormously original conception, and very, very funny, although the 'plot' or story-line got me very confused towards the end. The chapters are mostly blog-posts by Madison Spencer, the daughter of two film-star celebrities (think Brad Pitt and his spouse whose name eludes me) who has died at the age of thirteen. Her blog posts are made under her e-mail address---madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell. Her mother seems to have been guided in life by one leonard brainiac (yes, lower case) who contributes the odd chapter as hadesbrainiacleonard@aftrlife.hell. There are many references back to Plato and the mysterious "thing child" is often mentioned, as is the North Pacific Gyre, where supposedly all the plastic trash in the oceans is gradually collected and creating an island--or is it? As you can see from my account--I got a bit lost in all this--but Palahniuk is clearly a unique talent, and this book is worth a try to see if you are hooked. I tried another one by him and gave up after the first chapter.

     I have also recently read a book about art forgery called "The Forger's Spell" by Edward Dolnick. It focuses on the Dutch forger Van Meegeren and his forgery of Vermeers; but it also discusses the wider questions of why and how forgers succeed, and why is a successful forgery worth millions when it seems to have been properly authenticated and worth nothing when exposed as a forgery. After all it looks the same. I liked the vignette about a British forger who started by selling paintings marked on the back "Genuine Forgery," but then he was led astray by a friend who had been offered $100,000 by a prominent auction house for a painting that their experts were sure was genuine. The book also has quite a lot about Holland during the German occupation in WW2.