Discoveries

Troll: A Love Story

Johanna Sinisalo

Translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas

Grove Press: 278 pp., $12 paper

Those Finns. Remember the Rachel Ingalls novel “Mrs. Caliban” about the housewife who fell in love with the giant sea monster? In “Troll,” young Angel, an ad photographer, finds a baby troll on the street, brings it home and falls in love with it. First, the problem of what to feed a baby troll. Second, how to hide it from the prying eyes of neighbors. (The troll is clever and quickly learns how to open the door of the apartment.)

These and many other problems conspire to steer Angel’s happy-go-lucky gay lifestyle in a perversely domestic direction. For information on his new flat mate, Angel relies on everything from Finnish mythology to proceedings of the Finno-Ugrian Society to troll sightings reported in newspapers around the country. At first Angel is attracted to the “cubbishness” of his new “pan-Scandinavian carnivore” but this attraction grows into something deeper. Hard to say what, really. When the troll kills a friend, the pair flee into the forest, the police in hot pursuit.

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The News From Paraguay: A Novel

Lily Tuck

HarperCollins: 256 pp., $23.95

“Nouns always trump adjectives,” Lily Tuck warns in her author’s note, “and in the phrase ‘historical fiction’ it is important to remember which of the two words is which.” If blurry lines between fact and fiction annoy you, this novel, set in Paraguay in the mid-1800s, will drive you insane. But if you are able to float along on the buoyant half-truths, decorous detail and vivid imagery (from jungle parrots to aquamarine necklaces to amputated limbs), you will not find yourself longing for historical accuracy.

The trusting reader ricochets from one adventure to the next, beginning on the ship that carries Ella Lynch, a young Irish beauty, from high society Paris to Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. (When her Parisian lover goes off to fight in the Crimean War, Ella finds a new paramour in Franco, the wealthy larger-than-life son of the Paraguayan president.)

Once installed in her new pink palace, Ella keeps up a crisp correspondence with her friend Princess Mathilde in Paris. She also keeps a journal. But Tuck fashions a point of view from gazette-style news flashes: Some are mere digressions into the lives of the people around Ella (her doctor, her ladies-in-waiting, her wet nurses). Others are political bulletins: Franco becomes president when his father dies, he leads the country straight into war. Reading “The News From Paraguay” feels like looking into a crystal ball: seeing pieces of a garden, storm clouds building, lives passing. Through it all, this surprisingly strong, elegant and frivolous character cuts the path that will be her fictional history.

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The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime

William Langewiesche

North Point Press: 240 pp., $23

“The Perfect Storm” was the tip of the iceberg. Though author William Langewiesche intended this book as an expose of the piracy, “stateless terrorism” and outrageous lack of enforceable laws protecting the environment, sailors and passengers, it reads more like a collection of real-life thrillers. Like Sebastian Junger, Langewiesche relies heavily on the details of the lives of the characters in each of his scenarios; Capt. Ko Ikeno of the Alondra Rainbow, whose $10-million cargo of aluminum ingots was abducted with the ship by pirates in 1999; Urmas Alender, a singer on the ferry Estonia, which went down, killing more than 850 people in 1994; or Capt. Allen Marin of the decrepit ship Kristal, a 560-foot-long tanker that went down in 2001. Langewiesche follows the trail of blame in each of the stories he chooses, but the moral (usually some version of financial imperative driving underpaid captains and crews to push less-than-seaworthy ships) often gets lost in the fearsome telling of lives lost and ships crashing to pieces.