The Birds

This was a pretty good Norwegian book. It's by Tarjei Vesaas. I loved his book The Ice Palace and decided to read another book by him. It's about a simpleton who does small jobs here and there. He lives with his clever sister who puts up with him. One day a lumberjack enters their life and the mentally disabled man fears for his future when he hears the two are in love. From there the book gradually ends in tragedy. You really enter into the head of the simpleton he sees beauty in nature like no other and when he worries about his future you feel it too. He is like the beautiful woodcock that gets tragically killed in the beginning of the book. Goodreads doesn't have a 3.5 rating so I rounded it up to 4. I couldn't give it a 3 because it deserved better. I need to read more Vesaas.

The Heron

This wasn't my favorite book by Bassani. This is the third one I've read of him and The Garden of Finzi-Continis continues to be the masterpiece. It's about a middle-aged man who shoots a heron during a hunt and he reflects about his existence and the death of the bird. I didn't hate the book but it didn't captivate me either.

Cassidy's Girl

The backstory of Cassidy's Girl is that Cassidy used to have a comfty job on an airplane but he was blamed for a crash that wasn't his fault. Afterwards he got addicted to booze and from there he met his nasty wife Mildred. Although the sex is great, the relationship has a lot of problems. He begins to look elsewhere and gets attached to Doris, a woman who is even more addicted to booze than him. Even though he dumped Mildred there's a man obsessed with her who starts bothering him. Then his life gets enomrously bad. I'm not going to say how but it was over the top. The journey from there is fun to read. The surprise of the book is that Mildred isn't as bad as the reader was first inclined to believe. David Goodis wrote Dark Passage, which was made into a famous Bogart moive. He was of noir's best writers . I've read a few of his books and I have to say this was the funnest.