Olsson's: Buyer's Corner

Olsson's is a locally Owned & Operated, Independent chain of six book and recorded music stores in the Washington, D.C. area, started by John Olsson in 1972. Each week the Head Book Buyer blogs about interesting new books that are available.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Joe Murphy on The Meaning of Night

Hi Everyone-

Book CoverWell, it's technically still summer, but the Fall book season is in full swing, and Fall titles are coming in fast and furious. As I mentioned last week, the other buyers and I have been deep in the throes of picking titles for our annual Holiday Gift Guide. Our biggest problem really is the number of great titles coming, and this is a partularly strong fiction season. New works are coming from Dave Eggers, Walter Mosley, John Mortimer, Isabel Allende, John Le Carre, Mark Haddon, Edward Jones (we have signed first editions in stores now!!!), Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, and even Thomas Pynchon has a 992-page extravaganza on the way.

Book CoverThere's also been great review attention for Marisha Passl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. I'd just like to throw one more great fall novel into the mix: first-time author Michael Cox's just-published The Meaning of Night. It's an immensely entertaining narrative with a perfect-pitch Victorian setting and a completely riveting narrator/lead character: Edward Glyver. Glyver seems at first to be competing for the Unreliable Narrator Hall of Fame, opening the book with the stunning sentence: " After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for supper." That, and his seemingly unreasoning hatred of doggerel-poet Phoebus Rainsford Daunt (do names come any better?) make the opinions he offers the reader seem highly suspect.

Book CoverThe novel serves up all the great conventions of Victorian literature: questions of inheritance, a fight over the most beautiful estate in England, and colorful (and colorfully named) characters galore. Glyver views Daunt as a master criminal who ruined Glyver's prospects; Glyver immerses himself in the seedy Victorian underworld, doing dirty work for a powerful law firm, and bides his time, waiting to take revenge on Daunt. As the plot unravels, the reader realizes that perhaps Glyver's assessment of Daunt isn't that far off the mark; in fact, Glyver's biggest problem with Daunt may turn out to be that he has underestimated him.

The settings range from Evenwood, the gorgeous estate that Cox succeeds so well in making a perfect object of desire, to the most disreputable corners of 19th century London. The plot encompasses murder, manipulation, and conspiracy on a grand scale. The result is what may be my favorite novel of the season, an absolute must-read, and (naturally) an Olsson's Buyer's Choice. When I read it last spring, my home life nearly ground to a stop: I found myself cooking dinner by holding the book in one hand and stirring a pot with the other. As the weather cools, stop by our stores, pick up a copy, and find the most comfortable chair you have, because you won't be leaving it for a while.

See you in the stores,

Joe Murphy
Head Book Buyer

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Alexis Akre, a DC-area native, has worked at Olsson's for almost six years. She received her BA in English from Barnard College, and lived in New York for several years. Since her return to her home town, Alexis has honed her gift for skewering both vapidity and pretension with concise, well-worded psychological assessment. She can be seen tooling around town on her minty green bike, reading one of the hundreds of books she has stacked in her home, and teaching her cat to do tricks.


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