Primitive, Orlando Furioso, Caveman's Valentine

Primitive was an amazon kindle freebie, and Mark Nykanen has a bit of a name as a psychological suspense writer, so I picked it up.  It was fine, with the tension ratcheting up well toward the end, but that's as far as it goes.

On the trip to Israel, I finally finished Orlando Furioso (I posted about part 1 here).  My first, philistine, reaction was "Wow, that was a long poem..."  I noted in my earlier post that Orlando doesn't play much of a role.  He doesn't play much of role here, either; Ruggiero and Bradamante really steal the show.  I wonder if the first version of the poem gives Orlando more prominence, which would be swallowed up in the expansions.  Certainly, the late expansions aren't all particularly relevant to the plot -- Reynolds's notes point out in a few places where sections are late additions, some of them running over 500 lines, and a lot of them are "prophecies" of the future or digressive stories told by one character to entertain others.  But the poem's length also lets some sections assume a proper proportion.  The long funeral service at the end, for example, would feel garish in a much shorter poem.

In general, I liked the exuberant way that Ariosto's imagination moves all over the place.  He has a character fly to the moon, where all lost things are kept (including Orlando's wits, which is a funny conceit).  He has no qualms diverting into a funny story about two cuckolded husbands.  He can do heart-tugging imagery (the above-mentioned funeral), bawdy humor, and so on.  Sadly, he also does some brown-nosing about the greatness of his patron, Ippolito, which is dreadfully dull stuff, but I suppose that's the price of reading a work from that period.

On the flight back, I read George Dawes Green's The Caveman's Valentine, which is a thriller from an interesting viewpoint.  Green's protagonist is a paranoid schizophrenic, convinced that a man who controls all the electricity and TV rays in the world is out to get him.  When he finds the body of a frozen bum, he's convinced that it's part of the plot against him, and tries to convince the police to investigate.

Green needs a bit of reality-stretching to make the whole thing work; there's just no way for Romulus to get anywhere without a few helping hands that probably wouldn't be there in real life.  But they're not too outrageous, and you just accept them as part of the wild ride into Romulus's warped view of the world.