The House of Doors

 by Tan Twan Eng

This story is set in Penang Malaysia in the early 1920's primarily.

The main character is a British woman, Lesley Hamlyn, who is the mother of two sons and married to a lawyer.  She really likes their home in Penang. However, she and her husband do not really have a loving relationship.

The author Somerset Maugham comes to stay with them for a few weeks, along with his male lover.  He is escaping from his wife in England.  He is devastated to learn that he made some bad financial investments and is now in serious financial trouble.  He realizes he has to write some books to make some money.  He is afraid his lover will leave him when he learns about his financial situation.

The Hamlyn's are introduced to a Chinese revoluntionary, Sun Yat Sen.  Lesley is impressed by him and tries to help him by promoting him in Penang and helping him translate some of his pamphlets into the local language for the local Chinese population.

Lesley is devastated when her brother, who is a newspaper Editor in Penang, tells her that her husband is having and affair.  He thinks she will divorce her husband.  However, after thinking things over Lesley decides divorce would be devastating for her and her sons financially and socially so she decides to stay in the marriage.  Eventually she finds out that the person her husband is having an affair with is a male chinese  This is more of a shock than the initial news of his adultery.

When she is working on translating Sun Yat Sen's pamphlets she is working in a house in the chinese section of the city.  There she meets another Chinese man.  He tells her about Chinese history and takes her to a house he inherited from his mother.  The house is full of carved/decorated doors hanging from the ceiling.  Apparently it is a chinese tradition to decorate the entrance doors to houses.  They eventually start having and affair.  Lesley is so happy and doesn't feel guilty at all.

Eventually she confides about her love affair to Maugham, he assumes her lover is Sun Yat Sen.  Lesley is worried that Maugham will put her story into one of his published stories but then realizes it is too late to worry about that.  She feels good at being able to tell someone about it.

While all this is going on Lesley's best friend, a married woman,  is arrested for murder of a man who was her lover.  The woman and tried to break off the relationship but one night the man comes to her house when her husband is not home and she shoots him. She does not admit she was having an  affair, rather says the man invaded her house and tried to rape her.  Lesley speaks in her defense at the trial but does not divulge that the woman was having and affair.  The public think the woman will be acquitted as she is British but the jury finds her guilty and she is sentenced to be hanged.  The woman's husband has been supporting her all along and they are appealing the sentence.  However, the woman gets tired of the delay and asks for a pardon from the Sultan, this does not acquit her but she escapes the death sentence.  She is forced to leave the country and returns to England alone.

Maugham does write a stories about his time in Penang, these stories upset many of the locals because they know he is writing about them.  Fortuanatley for Lesley he does not write about her.  One of the main stories he writes is about Lesley's friend the murderess.

Eventually Sun Yat Sen's many attempts to overthrow the Chinese dynasty succeeds and Lesley's lover decides he has to go to China to join the fight.  She is devastated that he is leaving her and they never see each other again.

From the beginning of the story Lesley's husband, a veteran of WWI has been talking about moving to South Africa for his health.  Lesley says she will not go with him but after a number of years her husband decides to move and she goes with him.  They live out their life together in South Africa.  Neither ever mentions their affairs.

The book was interesting for the description of the times, and the locale but after reading I was thinking, so what's the point of it all?  It certainly portrayed the disparity between the rich and the poor (Asians) in Malaysia and the Chinese history was interesting but wonder what purpose all the unhappy people and affairs.  People stay in unhappy marriages just for the economic convenience/necessity. Plus the doors, what is about that? the importance of acknowledging and preserving history?  The book also hinted about the impact foreign "invaders"can have on a country and culture and the disparity between the Brit expats and the people who end up serving them.

akeThe Librarianist

 by Patrick deWitt

I have read other books by  this author including French Exit and Sisters Brothers and thought they were okay.  I really enjoyed this book, maybe because it is about a Librarian, but I found it a nice gentle story.

Bob Comet is  retired Librarian.  After he retired he seems to have been basically a recluse.  One day he is out and encounters an old lady who seems disoriented.  He finds a sign around her neck indicating where she lives and he takes her back to her care home.  While there he meets the manager of the facility and agrees to come and talk to the residents about books. He does that a few times but it doesn't go well -- they aren't really interested in book talks so he starts coming back just to visit with the residents.

As the story progresses we find out that Bob had two really good friends in his early adult hood, a male friend and his wife.  Initially he tries to avoid having his wife and friend meet but eventually they do.  They three of them do things together.  Bob is devastated when soon after his wife leaves him for his friend.  He never develops any other relationships after that just does his job at the library.  About a year after his wife leaves him, Bob learns that his friend has been killed by a car.  He feels there is some justice in that.  He imagines his wife will come back to him, but she never does and he never tries to find her.

The book then goes on, in a strange diversion, not sure of the purpose or value of it.  When he is a young boy Bob is living with his mother. One day his mother leaves him overnight with some friends so she can have an evening with a male friend.  Bob is upset by her "abandoning" him and jumps on a bus.

On the bus he is befriended by two women entertainers who take him under their wing and take him with them as an unofficial, unpaid assistant.  After a week or so the local sheriff recognizes him and arranges for him to get home.  There is no mention in the book about reception he gets when he gets home.

Eventually Bob's health  fails and he ends up moving into the care home.

It was a gentle story, I enjoyed it.

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

 by Sangu Mandanna

Mika Moon is one of a few witches in Britain.  She was "raised" by another witch who for the most part left her care to a series of Nannies.  As soon as Mike showed some unusual behaviour the nannies memories were erased and the nanny was sent packing, to be replaced by another one.

No Mika is an adult.  She doesn't feel safe because her mentor witch, Primrose, tells her she must not let anyone know she is a witch.  Primrose is the leader of a coven of witches who gather every few months to socialize.  Primrose believes witches must remain lone and isolated for their safety but this has made for a very lonely life for Mika who keeps moving often.

To let out her frustration Mika has a web page on the Internet where she pretends to be a witch, it has some appeal.  One day Mika receives an email from a man, who is convinced that she is a real witch.  He wants her to come and mentor three young witches that are in his care.  Mika is a bit concerned and worried at first, but decides to go and check it out.  She finds a beautiful house, with three adults who are looking after three young witches.  They want her to mentor the young witches so they know how to utilize and control their power, especially as their sponsors lawyer is coming soon to check on the property as he has not been able to contact the owner of the property for some time.

The adults and two of the young witches welcome her, but a third young witch doesn't and ends up doing a spell that puts Mika in bed for days.

Mika likes the girls and the other residents.  This is the first time she feels part of a family and accepted for who she is.  One of the adults, a young man, is at first suspiciuos of her but eventually they do admit they are attracted to each other.

A crisis occurs when Mika is away from the property, the lawyer has arrived early and the young witches decide to unbury and try to animate the woman who was owner of the property.  She had died and the adults buried her on the property because they didn't know what to do.  The lawyer is freaked ou out and threatening to go to the police.  The adults have locked him in a building

Mika doesn't know how to erase his memory or go back in time.  She reluctantly contacts Primrose for help.  They are all shocked when Primrose arrives.  She looks exactly like the dead woman, because she is the dead woman's sister.  Primrose wipes the lawyers memory, convinces him that she is Lillian and dismisses him.

Mika is delighted that Primrose agrees to her staying on to be a mentor for the young witches.

It was a cute story in time for Halloween.

The Spare Man

 by Mary Robinette Kowal

This book was recommended by my niece Caley.  The author is supposed to be a reknowned sci-fi writer. I was very disappointed in the book, it was very slow going.

The story is about a tech billionaire/guru and her husband he go on a flight to mars for their honeymoon. The husband has retired from his private investigator job.  The woman is physically in rough shape after an explosion in a lab.  She is wired with a bunch of pumps that help her control her pain.  She also has a little terrier therapy dog.

Shortly after the trip starts the couple witness a murder on the spaceship.  The husband seems someone  he can't identify run away from the scene.  The husband is assumed by the security on the ship to have done the murder and is  put under arrest.  They then spend the rest of the book trying to prove his innocence by solving the crime.  This is hard to do as their technology is turned off.  The woman is only allowed very limited access to her pit bull lawyer back on earth.  The woman eventually uses her name to try to some progress on the case and also threats of lawsuits from her lawyer.

I just felt the book dragged on way to long, no idea what the therapy dog really did for her, and don't understand the role of her infirmities to the plot.

Not very enjoyable, but I am generally not an sf fan.

 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

 by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Serendipity --

I recently saw the quote by Viktor Frankl

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves".

This is a very powerful sentiment for me right now with what I am going through.  I saw positive comments about this book and decided to pick up a copy of a whim and I am so glad I did.

The story is set in Tokyo in a little basement cafe where it is rumoured people can go back in time.  The story starts with a young woman whose boyfriend broke up with her at the cafe, telling her he is going to the US to work.  She is devastated as she thought he was going to propose.  She is so startled she doesn't say anything and he leaves.

She goes back to the restaurant and says she wants to go back in time to tell her boyfriend she doesn't want him to go.  The hosts of the cafe tell her she can go back but nothing she does will change the present, she can only go back for the time it takes for a cup of coffee to cool off, if she doesn't return on time she will become a ghost (there is one lady ghost in the cafe).  She goes back to the time her boyfriend broke off with her.  She does tell him that she doesn't want him to go and as she returns to the present she hears him say he will be back in three years.

The next customer is the wife of a cafe customer who has rapidly developing Alzheimers.  Her husband has left a letter for her at the cafe but she hasn't wanted to read it.  She wants to go back in time to when her husband can still remember her.  They meet and she confirms to him that she knows about his diagnosis.  He seems relieved that she knows about it.  The letter he gave her tells her she doesn't have to feel obliged to stay with him.  However, this meetings cements her commitment to care for him whatever happens (she is a nurse).

The third story is about a young woman who runs a restaurant near the cafe. She is estranged from her family. Her sister had kept coming to Tokyo to try to convince her to come home and help run the family in.  The woman hides from her sister because she feels either her sister is jealous of her or that her sister doesn't want to run the inn and wants her to have the responsibility.  On the last time the sister comes to visit she is killed in a car accident.  The young woman is devastated, she feels reponsible for her sister's death as do her parents.  She goes back in time to the sister's last visit and the sister tells her that her dream was to have the two of them run the inn together.  The restuarant owner promises her sister she will go back and run the inn in her sister's memory.

The last story is about the wife of the owner of the cafe,  she dies in childbirth because of a heart condition,  Years after the woman died a young woman comes into the restaurant and goes back in time to meet her.  Later the woman asks to go into the future and she meets the young woman, realizing she is her daughter.  The woman had been worried that her daughter would be angry at her for not being around to raise her but the young woman thanks her for giving her her life.

While nothing changes about the sad things in these stories, all the characters seem to find a new perspective going forward.  

I think this book is amazing, at least for me right now!

The Secret Life of Sunflowers

 by Marta Molnar and Dana Morton

This book was getting a lot of positive comments recently.  It is about the wife of Theo Van Gogh (Van Gogh's sister-in-law fought to get Van Gogh's art into the public attention after Vincent and Theo's deaths.  It was an interesting story but not as engaging as some of the comments I read implied it would be.  The death of the Van Gogh's occur early in the book, there is very little detail about Van Gogh's art development or his life.

Bandit Queens

 by Parini Shroff

This book was on the best seller list, I didn't really know anything about it.  It certainly was not anything I expected.  The book takes place in India.  The main character is part of a group of women who get loans to create home crafts.  She is feared in the village because people believe she murdered her husband.  One of the women in her group, whose husband beats her and steals the money she makes to buy booze, comes to the woman and asks for help killing her husband.  The woman is shocked and doesn't want to have any part in this but the woman keeps nagging her so eventually she does help the woman accomplish the task by suggesting how to make a poison.

However, this turns out badly for her beause the woman whose husband was murdered comes to her and says now that her husband is dead she needs money to support her family and she insists the woman give her money or she will go to the police.  The widow says she will deny all knowledge of the murder.

Then another woman comes to her asking for help to murder a man.  She reluctantly agrees to assist with a distraction so the woman can get some poison in a garden.  But in the end the woman ends up murdering the man herself beause he tries to rape her.

One day, the main character's husband shows up claiming he is blind.  He steals her money but tries to endear himself to her.  Eventually she figures out he is faking blindness.  She tries to get him to leave with no success.

While this has all been occuring the woman had met a man who was a bootlegger who was mixing gasoline in with his alcohol, testing concoctions on stray dogs.  She steals one of his dogs and threatens to report him.

At the end of the book the bootlegger shows up at her house.  Her husband had agreed to let the bootlegger beat up his wife in payment for debts he owes the bootlegger.  In the rucus some of her female friends arrive at the house, her husband is shot in the leg by the bootlegger and the woman convinces him that if he leaves her alone she will not report him.

The woman someone gets her husband to leave and at the end delivers divorce papers to him at his parent's house where he is sponging off them.  It is very difficult for women to get a divorce even if spouses are abusive, the woman had to have a local council that would believer her.

This was a very strange book, but an interesting read.

The War Librarian

 by Addison Armstrong

This is another one of the books where the author combines a stories in the past and present and the stories connect at the end.  Why are so many authors doing this these days?  Why isn't one good story enough?

The story starts with a young woman whose grand mother has died.  She is working in a lost letter office trying to get letters that have not been delivered  back to their source.  I guess people may not have put return addresses on them.  She starts working on a letter and finds it is from a young man she grew up with and whom she likes very much.  He is writing from Europe to a New York debutante asking her to write him. It sounds like he hopes to marry her.  However the young woman know the debutante has recently married.  She is angry that the debutante did not have the guts/courtesy to write him back and tell him she is married  It is against the rules but the girl writes back to him as if she were the debutante.

Shortly after that she volunteers to go to France to work as a librarian in medical camps.  When she gets to France she is befriended by a young ambulance driver and wonder of wonders meets up with the soldier she wrote the letter to.  I can't remember if she tells him his girlfriend is married.

The other story is of a young man in the 70's who has been accepted into the U.S marine corps, the first class to accept women.  The women all go through terrible trials by the men and one man in particular takes a dislike to her and assaults her and sets her up for downfall.

The young woman and soldier become closer and eventually have sex.  While this is going on there is a campaign to not allow certain books about war, by germans, etc to be read.  If they show up in boxes of books donated the librarian she is supposed to destroy them.  The young woman reads a letter about a Librarian in the U.S. who is fired becasue he refuses to abide by these rules.  She and her soldier friend write a letter to the newspaper in the Librarian's city urging support for him.  In the meantime the girl has been hiding some forbidden books in her room.  She is discovered and sentenced for treason.  She is to be taken to a court in another city by the ambulance driver but the driver wants to get her to freedom. They change clothes for the drive.  Unfortunately their car is hit by a bomb and the ambulance driver is killed.  As the other young woman is dressed like the driver she takes her ID and eventually gets back to America.  She is pregnant.

In the end it turns out that the cadet's grandmother is the war librarian.

It was an okay story....

The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

 by Hester Fox

I would descibe this as a Gothic Horror with of course a romantic twist.

A young, poor woman from London is contacted by a lawyer to tell her she is the last surviving member of the Hayworth clan and she has inherited the family estate.  The only proviso is she must live there.

She is shocked but delighted and sets off to her new home.  There is a small staff who treat her respectfully but the Housekeeper is reluctant to let her go into the huge library.  She eventually gets her way and goes into the library to start cataloguing the contents.  She is puzzled at times by strange feelings when she is in the library.

She is a bit lonely so when a young man, from the local gentry befriends her she is delighted, despite warnings about him from the staff at her house.

Eventually we find out the young man is part of of group of people who want to get control of the house and especially the library.  Gradualy the young woman gets weaker and weaker.  Her male friend asks her to marry him and she agrees.  He locks her into a room, telling her it is for her own good, telling her they are married. She doesn't remember the wedding.

Eventually she sets a fire in her room and escapes, not before she and a young man who works on the estate find and destroy the tomb of a monk.  It seems this monk's "apostles" were looking for a secret book and the spell which would bring the monk back to life.

It was an okay summer read.

Victory City

 by Salman Rushdie

This is the story of a young woman who, after seeing her mother die on a funeral pyre, takes some seeds and creates a city from them.  I have not read anything by Rushdie before.  He has a lovely writing style however while it was a good story I didn't feel it said anything particularly new or profound, as one review says "His new novel is about a kingdom that is founded on pluralism but fails to live up to its ideals".

Two cattle herders? come to the city and take power as King, first one brother and then the other.  The young woman, Pampa, ends up marrying them both.  She attempts to direct things to a society where women are equal and all views are respected but has limited and no lasting success.  The story is all about how people scheme and fight for power and in the end the city is destroyed. Pampa lives to be almost two hundred years old so she is witness to, and documents, the history of her city.

 

Lessons

 by Ian McEwan

I really enjoyed the last book I read by McEwan, Machines Like Me.  It was fascinating and thought provoking.

I absolutely hated this book and had to force myself to finish it....I skimmed over the last 60 pages.

This is the story of a man Roland Baines who really has a sad life.  As a child his soldier father and mother ship him off to boarding school at an early age.  His mother had two children from a previous marriage but they also have been shipped off so he does not have much contact with them til he is an adult.

While he is at boarding school the Cuban Missle Crisis occurs.  The boys at the school are worried about the end of the world and that they will die without having had sex.  Roland starts taking music lessons with a female music teacher.  She thinks he has talent but she also lusts after him.  Roland quits lessons and his school work suffers but eventually he goes to her place and they start having an affair.  Eventually he goes to live with her and she basically keeps him trapped in her house, wearing pajamas all the time.  She plans for them to go to Scotland when he is 16 where it will be legal for them to marry.  He is shocked at this news and leaves her.

It was thought he could have a brilliant musical career but he doesn't go on to university and instead drifts around different jobs and with different women.  He seems obsessed with sex but unable to commit.

Eventually he meets a woman and marries her.  He is trying a career as a poet without much success.   They have a baby and when the baby is about 18 months old his wife leaves him.  At first the police think he may have killed her but she sends sporadic postcards for awhile.

When he happens to be in Berlin at the fall of the  wall he happens to see his wife in a restaurant.  She a become a successful author.  She tells him she wants no contact with him or her son.  Her mother felt that her life was ruined, her career plans erased, when she had children and Roland's wife doesn't want that to be her fate.

Roland reads her books and realizes she is a great author and that she probably couldn't have achieved what she did staying with him.  He raises their son and seems to be a caring father.  He seems to scrape by playing piano in a hotel bar at night.

Eventually he meets another woman and they start a relationship but while their two sets of kids get along they keep separate households. He thinks of asking her to marry him but doesn't get around to it.  He is sad when she decides to get back with her abusive husband.

His son eventually finds his mother and she basically slams the door in his face saying she wants nothing to do with him.

At one point Roland goes to see the piano teacher and threatens to expose her.  She doesn't think he has proof but he has the train tickets and marriage licence.  He decides not to proceed with anything.

Eventually Roland gets back with the second woman, who has divorced her husband.  He asks her to marry him but before they get married she finds she has stage 4 cancer.  He looks after her til she dies.... what is the world trying to tell me, many thinks I have read/watched laterly are about spouses dying o cancer.  It is so depressing.....

Anyway, the woman asked Roland to sprinkle her ashes but a bridge in the country but only when he was ready to do it. Her ex starts bugging him to get the ashes to disperse them or come along.  Roland knows his wife wants her ex not to have anything to do with that.  He sets off to the country and is in the process of scattering the ashes when the ex shows up.  They wrestle, the ex pushes him off the bridge and dumps the ashes.

Roland returns home "somewhat sad" about what transpired.  He is not alone.  He seems to have a good family around him, his son, step children and their partners and a german granddaugter who really loves him.

Shortly after his ex wife gets in contact with him through her publisher.  She says she wants to see him.  She is in a wheelchair as she has had to have a foot amputated.  He is furious with her because in her last book she wrote of a couple, living in the town they lived in.  The woman in the story left an abusive husband.  He believes people will think she is writing about him.  She dismisses this saying people will know it is fiction.  She tells him that she really did love him but his neediness was too much for her. 

Various stages of the man's life mention major historical events: Bay of Pigs, Chernobyl, Berlin wall coming down, Brexit and the pandemic.  Not sure what the point of that was... other than to place his life in a particular time period.

I hated this guy, he had no drive, just seemed to float through life.  The only thing he seems to have done right was his care for his son. I know he had a traumatic childhood but geeze pick yourself up and make some decisions.  I hated the guys wife for what she did to him and their child. The piano teacher was despicable.

Some reviewers say the book is reflecting the ennui of our times.... maybe.  But I certainly did not enjoy any part of it.

The House on the Cerulean Sea

 by TJ Klune

I read another book by this author, Under the Whispering Door.  I really liked it, it made me laugh and it made me cry both times I read it.

I think this book is even better.  It is about a caseworker for the Dept in Charge of Magical Youth, who is sent to an island to do an assesment of a care home there.  The care home has some strange children, a female garden gnome, a pixie, a boy who tranforms into a terrier when he is scared, a creature like a octopus or jellyfish who aspires to be a doorman at a hotel another creature and last but not least Lucy, the AntiChrist who loves old blues and rock and roll music.

The caseworker Linus, is very nervous at first as he is really out of his comfort zone, but he has been entrusted with this task because of his very objective reporting on previous facilities.

However, Linus becomes anything but objective as he comes to know and love the children and their caregiver, Arthur.  The children are feared by people on the mainland.  Linus thinks the kids should go on an outing to the town.  It goes well for the most part but a couple residents are not happy with the visitors.

Linus files his reports including his final report that the facility should stay open.  His recommendation is accepted, much to his surprise.  He decides life on the island is more appealing than his job so quits and goes back to the Island to marry Arthur and help raise the children,

It was a fun, very senstive book.  I really enjoyed it.

The Personal Librarian

 by Marie Bendict and Victoria Christopher Murray

This book is the fictional story of a real person Belle de Costa Greene who gets the job as the personal librarian for J.P.Morgan who is trying to build a library of early books to rival the Medici library that was developed in Florence.

Belle has a secret, she is really of negro ancestry but her mother has chosen to make a life for them where they are pretending to be white.  Belle's parents separate when the family moves from Washington to New York.  The father is the first black graduate of Harvard and is actively working for black civil rights.  He cannot agree with what his wife is doing.

Belle had been a librarian at Princeton.  She is recommended to Morgan by a young relative.  As time goes on Belle studies Greek and Latin and ancient art and literature and becomes not just a librarian to Morgan but also a confident and even a buyer for him, travelling the world to attend auctions and bid on items for the library.

All the while she is terrified her background will be revealed.  She keeps telling people her skin colour comes from a Porugese grandmother.

She becomes the toast of New York for her succes and eventually has an affair with a married man, an art historian and art dealer.  When she becomes pregnant he arranges for her to get an abortion in London but he is not there for her.  She is distraught at his treatment and eventually they carriy on a correspondence over the decades.  His wife is okay with their affair.  However, she finds that rumours are swirling around her and she has to lie to Morgan that she is not having an affair.  He seems to want  her for himself (not as a lover).   She feels he is treating her as his property, a slave, but she stays working for him.  When Morgan dies she receives a big bequest which helps her family's stability.  She has been supporting her mother, siblings and ultimately their spouses for years.

I found the book, especially the first half , really slow and uninteresting.  It was about her early years as the librarian which is okay but then had lots about balls and operas, etc.  I think most of that could have been shortented.  At times she was so stressed she started to drink too much and could have done something to damage her reputation but she managed to keep her secret over the years.  I don't know how or when the truth actually came out.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

 by Shehan Karunatilaka

This book won the Booker Prize this year.  I can certainly understand why it was selected.

It was a very creative, powerful, commentary on the conflict in Sri Lanka.

The main character Maali is killed. He is a photographer, a gambler, and a closet queen.   He can't remember how or why he died.He finds himself in a nether region where he is told he has seven days to do what?  Not sure? But his main goal becomes contacting two close friends to get them to display photos he has taken which he hopes will rock Sri Lanka.

Mention is made of going into the light.  What is the light... he gets different answers: heaven, rebirth, oblvion.

Maali was not a very principled person in life.  He gambled a lot, took photos for anyone in the Sri Lankan conflict who would pay him, the government, ngo's or the "terrorists".  He even took photos of things he knew were not true, for example some rural people are massacred and dressed in uniforms of one of the rebel fighters.

He is having a homo sexual relationship with a young man who asks him to be faithful and he says he is, but that is a lie. There is a young woman, a friend he lives with, along with the young man, who seems interested in him but he won't tell her he is gay.  He promises his lover to go away to a place where they can live safely, but he never follows through with that.

As Maali travels in the netherworld he finds he can fly on the wind and get to places he has been before including his family home, his own home, etc.  He meets ghouls and other ghosts and ghosts who claim to be there to guide and assist him.  Can he trust them?

As the days pass he comes to remember that he was killed by some thugs and his body dismembered with his head thrown into a river/pond (like others have been disposed of) and his body bagged and disposed of elesewhere.  

His friends and family report him missing and seek the help of two police officers who agree to look for him once some money crosses their palms. Eventually he is able to put ideas into his friends heads so that they can find the photos he has stashed away.  

At one point his girl friend is arrested by officials and is taken to a building where she is going to be tortured.  Through his intersessions he is able to get her out before she is hurt.

But the government officials take the photos from them.  Eventually he is able to tell them where he has the negatives for the photos and the friends make copies of the photos and put them on display.  Some photos he didn't plan to have displayed (of gay lovers) also end up on the walls.  People come to see the photos including goverment officials who take some of them away.  The pictures obviously do not have the desired effect he expected.

At one point in the book a person decides to take a bomb to the government building where people are tortured.  Maali doesn't want the bomb to be set off as innocent people as well as the bad guys will be killed but the explosion occurs.  It is around this time that Maali learns that the father of his lover, a goverment official, is the one who had him killed becasue he didn't want his son in a homosexual relationship.

As the seventh moon approaches Maali is given a choice to drink from one of several cups.  One would take him to the light, one would take him wherever he was needed, I can't remember what the options were.  He chooses to be where needed and becomes a greeter to the dead where he helps someone.  He is then offered another drink and decides to stay as a helper.

This book was very diffiult to read at times because of the violence but it was amazing the world of the dead that was created and how the author developed the story as Maali regained his memory of his death.  In the end he seems to have transitioned from a very unprinciped, unethical, totally self-centred waste of space to someone who truly cared about others and wanted to help them.