Jerome Charyn

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't it. Jerzy is funny, curious, soft, endearing, and strange, and I enjoyed it immensely. The first narrator was my favorite, but the other narrators helped fill in the details of a very complex, indefinable protagonist. It's odd to me that I'm left with a feeling of softness, since so much of the story was harsh and damaged, but the depth of character in this book is incredible.

I opened "Maria la Divina" to sample the first chapter briefly, and came up to breathe 60 pages later. This is a delicious, binge-worthy story about a woman in love with her music. (Men and butterscotch sundaes figure into the plot as well.) The pages are populated with strong personalities, a storyline that doesn't let up, and rabid "loggionisti" that remind me of college football spirit squads ("BravaMaria!" instead of "Roll Tide!")

Jerome Charyn, a new-to-me author, made the opera show more accessible to those who wouldn't know bel canto from Taco Bell by describing the stories and the techniques used by singers to perform them in a way that made the terminology clear without talking down to us country/bluegrass fans. show less

Not really my taste, but I enjoyed it a bit more than the other one of Charyn's novels I've read, Paradise Man.

This one is a savage satirical fantasy (I hope!) about gangsters on New York's East Side. The twist is that the gang consists almost entirely of professional people of the sort we would consider least likely to be running cocaine in derelict buildings: publishers, lawyers, nurses, musicians, KGB officers. Of course it turns out that they all had their lives messed up working for the show more CIA in Vietnam. The style is vaguely Runyonesque, but the characters are all straight out of Graham Greene, whilst the plot has as many twists as you could desire, and then a few more. By the end it's a fairly safe bet that you won't have any more idea who was really working for whom than the main characters do. show less

Extraordinary and strange tale of a blue-eyed Jewish New York detective, abandoned by his mentor, Isaac Sidel, tossed from department to department, loathed as a spy by his fellow cops, he is thrust into the dealings of the Guzmann family from his old Bronx neighbourhood to shut down the delivery of young girls to Mexico. Surrounded by enemies, Coen is tough but vulnerable, and only has time for ping-pong. Told in lovely, lyrical prose that packs more info and character and sights and sounds show more in a single paragraph than most writers can manage in a whole book, Blue Eyes is fast, furious, almost hallucinatory, a bit like Chester Himes or James Ellroy, but utterly unlike them at the same time. show less