23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
DARING, ADVENTUROUS, POWERFUL, December 25, 2007
This review is from: Diablerie: A Novel (Hardcover)
Compact, concise, compelling. Dark. Walter Mosley has crafted a brief novel, an exploration of the human psyche that grips the reader with the opening page.
We know the protagonist's name. It is Ben Dibbuk, he's an almost 50-year-old computer programmer, married with a daughter in college. He has Svetlana, a Russian mistress his daughter's age. Nonetheless, exactly who is Ben Dibbuk? He's alienated, unable to care for anyone or anything. Nothing matters to him - not his wife, Mona, his daughter, Seela, or his work. He simply would like to be left alone.
Earlier he had suffered from frightening nightmares and went into therapy at the behest of Mona. The terrifying dreams stopped after awhile as did his visits to the therapist. One day Mona insists that he go to a banquet with her, an evening with her co-workers at a fashion magazine, Diablerie. It is there that he's approached by the keynote speaker, Star, a woman who claims to know him. He has no recollection whatsoever of her. When she tells him the exact date they were together, he replies, "That's back when I was still drinking......I was just telling the waitress there that I've forgotten more nights than I remember."
That same evening he is introduced to Harvard Rollins, a fact-checker for the magazine, and as he later learns his wife's lover, the man she has asked to look into Ben's past. Why?
At this point for whatever reason he feels compelled to get in touch with his mother, a woman he hasn't seen in 15 years. Just before Ben hung up he heard his mother say, "...I never thought I'd feel that I regretted my own son's birth but-"
He also places a telephone call to his brother, Briggs, who is now in jail. Briggs remembers another phone call from Ben some 20 years earlier in which Ben asked questions about criminal apprehension, mentioned something wrong that he had done, and that there had been a witness - a woman by the name of Star.
Moseley is a master of prose. Who else would describe an alcoholic's desire for cognac as "...rich amber liquor moving through my veins like chamber music on a sunny afternoon in a many-windowed room in July"?
He's also a master at creating an intriguing mystery, one that is irresistible to readers and grows deeper as the narrative moves on. Daring, adventurous, powerful, Moseley is all of these as he proves once again in the hauntingly erotic Diablerie.
- Gail Cooke
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mosley takes another walk on the mental side..., February 18, 2008
This review is from: Diablerie: A Novel (Hardcover)
To be honest I was a little wary about getting this book because I saw the ratings. However, Walter Mosley is a favorite of mine and I wanted to see for myself. I REALLY liked this book. I think the problem that a lot of people are having is comparing this work to his Easy Rawlins series. I've (mistakenly) done it with other authors and people are doing it with this one. You CAN'T compare the two. When you read this book the worst thing you can do is compare it with his other stuff.
Easy Rawlins, Fearless Jones are icons that make literature fun and make literature timeless. But Mosley is too talented to be limited to that. Diablerie was a novel that compltely messes with your mind and pulls you in the mind of a regular man with some serious problems. It's a very, very short book which actually adds to the story. This is a cross beteween a mystery, psychological thriller, erotica, and just plain good ole fiction!
I really enjoyed 'Killing Johnny Frey'and I enjoyed 'Diablerie'. I like how Mosley "steps out" and does something unconventional. I, for one, hope he continues on this path. I'll always love and enjoy Easy, Mouse, Jesus, and Bonnie but a talented author like Mosley probably needs to push the envelope to keep his mind and imagination sharp.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A novel about real people with real weaknesses, March 14, 2008
This review is from: Diablerie: A Novel (Hardcover)
The great mystery novelist Lawrence Block once told me that he could write a cookbook at that point in his career and it would be shelved with the mysteries in bookstores. Such is the peril of being stereotyped as an author.
Walter Mosley could have faced a similar fate. As the author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins series, he is a "name" mystery writer. But he has worked hard and prolifically over the years to branch out into other genres, such as literary novels, science fiction and nonfiction. Last year he wrote KILLING JOHNNY FRY, which was sexually frank or, in Mosley's words, a "sexistential noir."
Now Mosley has penned DIABLERIE, which echoes some of the themes of Johnny Fry to once again paint a devastating portrait of an ordinary man in extraordinary crisis. DIABLERIE cements Mosley's reputation as one of our best writers of modern noir.
On the surface, Ben Dibbuk is an American success story. He is a 47-year-old computer troubleshooter for a huge New York City bank. Married for 23 years to an upwardly mobile wife, they raised a daughter now in college. And he created this comfortable life by overcoming his own personal demons. Once a blackout drinker and rambler in the years before his marriage, he has been clean and sober for over two decades.
But if there is one rule of noir, it is this: nothing is what it appears to be on the surface. Beneath the surface, Ben is emotionally dead. He describes his feelings when his daughter smiles at him: "While she beamed at me, the feeling that lurked in my shoulder blades took over. Not an emotion or something physical like pain or heat or cold, it was more akin to a void, a sensual numbness."
Ben's relationship with his wife, Mona, is in a freefall. He says, "We just wrangled, disputed over anything: Seela's future, our sex routines, what life had or had not brought to either or us." So Ben now pays the rent and bills of a much younger, Russian college "student" (perhaps mistress, perhaps hooker). Svetlana is on call 24/7 to have sex with Ben.
But even wild sex with a woman half his age doesn't work for Ben anymore. "`I don't hate anybody.' I said, thinking, nor do I love or fear or worry about anyone." Ben's entire existence is about keeping control. "The idea of me, Ben Dibbuk, losing control, even for a moment, was ridiculous."
Then his life of quiet desperation is thrown into chaos when a lady apparently from his past walks up to him at a business dinner he is forced to attend by his wife, a magazine editor. The mystery woman seems to know him, but Ben has no recollection of her. What's worse is when she appears again a few days later at his office, demanding to know why he wants to "hurt" her.
His drinking days are a "shadow," which "contained a mountain." Ben then finds that his wife not only has taken a lover, but is having him investigated by a detective. Why? What crime might he have committed with this mystery woman? Ben says, "I was beginning to feel fear...What was happening to me? Why was my past, a past that held nothing but a few drunken benders, coming back?"
Soon, cops from Colorado ask Ben to come in for questioning about a murder that happened 20 years before, of which he has no knowledge. Like the Edmond O'Brien character in the great film noir DOA, Ben has entered the perpetual noir night. He thinks, "Darkness was up ahead, I knew. Death and demolition were my destination, if not my destiny --- that is what I felt. But I didn't care. The void in my shoulders protected me from the fear." He won't be going into work at the bank anytime soon. And he starts smoking again. For the first time, Ben is forced to face the truth, not only about his drinking days, but about his parents and his brother in prison, and the possibility of true love and redemption in life.
Mosley has once again written a great book that will keep you turning pages right until the end. Faulkner once said that "the problem with the past is that it is never past." And that is certainly the theme here. But Mosley's brilliance is that he writes about a world in which comfort and security is an illusion. Any day can bring a wrong turn on the road at the exact wrong moment, a voice from the buried past on the phone or the spot on the CAT scan that might throw us into the noir night.
Mosley writes, "Life for all Americans, whether they knew it or not, was like playing blackjack against the house --- sooner or later you were going to lose...The winners were my bosses' bosses' bosses. They lived in the Alps or Palm Springs or somewhere else where the earth is run from...Black people in prison, Iraqis blown up on job lines in Baghdad or Vietnamese peasants in their rice paddies becoming target practice for passing American helicopters --- we were all dealt a losing hand."
And that is why DIABLERIE is even scarier than the mysteries for which Mosley is famous. Here, he has written a novel about real people with real weaknesses and vulnerabilities who miscalculate when everything is on the line. Ben Dibbuk could be any one of us on a really, really bad day.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
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