Marisha Pessl: Night Film

During the holidays, I wanted to read - as always - something that is not at all related to my work, usually something criminous. Normally I like to read something hardboiled or noirish, but during this holiday I decided to try something else entirely.

I'd heard good things about Marisha Pessl's Night Film, and though it's over 700 pages in Finnish translation, I read it. I wasn't disappointed, and the length didn't bother me at all. There's bound to be some padding in 700 pages, but not overtly so in this case. Night Film (translated Yönäytös, which is a literal translation, though it misses the "film" part) is about the mysterious film director Stanislas Cordova and his legacy, and the death of his daughter that seems like a suicide at first. An investigative journalist starts to dig around Cordova and finds himself deep in the mysteries and even horrors of Cordova's films.

There's some forced deepness in the book, especially in the end, but then again the ending is also fitting with the rest of the book and the themes of Cordova's films, which, quite wisely, are described only shortly. There are also some scenes that are gripping as all hell, and I found myself turning a page after another and not wanting to stop reading. (This also affected our Christmas holiday, as I didn't seem to be interested in the festivities.)

Night Film wasn't 100 % non-work reading, as I have an unfinished novel manuscript in which similar things happen, but in a Finnish milieu instead. Don't really know if reading this helped, but I also wanted to know what roads had already been traveled. I'm thinking I'd order me a copy of Tobe Hooper's novel, Midnight Movie, and maybe go back to Theodore Roszak's Flicker (a great novel, if you ask me). Night Film resembles Flicker, by the way, but not too much, and the conspiracy theories Roszak weaves are much more world-embracing than the ones Pessl has.

By the way, I seem to remember stumbling on a mention of a new novel, possibly translated from German, that's also a thriller about a mysterious film or a film director. I can't trace this anymore, so if somebody could help me identify the book, I'd be grateful.

I also managed to squeeze in a Sue Grafton title (C Is for Corpse) in a memory of her death. I've never read her much, but can't see why: Kinsey Millhone is a likable protagonist and the stories are believable and complicated.