The Haunting of L.

We picked this book for our Book Club and it has proved to be one of our all time favorites. Harold Norman is an excellent writer and the story will keep you on the edge of your seat. I am now looking forward to reading his other 2 novels. Do not pass this one up.

I look forward eagerly to every new release from Mr. Norman, for I know that I will be dazzled by his writing. His books about the Canadian Maritimes are excellent, and his writing style is just sparse enough to give the reader a heightened sense of interest in the plot. As usual with Mr. Norman, the plot itself is interesting and entangled at the same time. We have a young man caught up in adultery with the wife of his odd employer, and there are spirit photographs, mysterious and dangerous British millionaires, baptized Eskimos, and a crippling snowstorm, just to name some of what happens in this work. There is enough foreshadowing that you just feel the ominous sense of impending tragedy, though when it comes you realize that you weren't expecting it in just that way. I don't want to give away much of the plot, for it is integral to the enjoyment of the book as a whole. Just take my advice and read the book; you won't regret it!

Howard Norman is a terrific, contemporary American novelist and deserves to be read widely. His work is intense and cohesive, demanding that the reader not look away. The Bird Artist may be the strongest of his three most recent novels, but The Haunting of L. is a beautiful, disturbing study of characters and their motivations. The novel gets off to a relatively slow start, but there's nothing like adultury and a plane crash to get a plot moving. And the photographer of the dead introduces complications readers can't really expect.Norman's strength is his ability to create quirky characters we don't think we know in real life but want to know, if only to make our own lives more intriguing and tangible than they are without these characters. These same characters in another author's hands would be too unbelievable, but Norman conveys them with such depth and assurrance that we cannot undo their seams. His characters taunt us, entice us to want to know the possibly odd and dangerous motivations that are potentially forming in all of us.Don't be put off by the setting--it's no contemporary United States in Norman's novels. Don't stop reading in the early pages, when you might not know exactly what's going on or why you're starting to care about characters you know you shouldn't like as people. Read The Haunting of L., maybe read The Museum Guard, but definitely also read The Bird Artist, Norman's most inviting work.

In the final volume of his Canadian trilogy ("The Bird Artist," "The Museum Guard"), Norman again uses the isolated wilds of winter Canada as catalyst and character in this atmospheric story of love, art and violence in 1926-27 Manitoba and Halifax.The novel opens in the middle, with the narrator, young Peter Duvett, waking beside his lover, Kala Murie, to recall the previous night's dinner with her seething, menacing husband, Peter's employer, the photographer Vienna Linn. During dinner Kala had prodded her husband to produce a letter just received from a photography expert, engaged by wealthy British collector Radin Heur to pronounce on the authenticity of a "spirit photograph" Linn has offered for sale. The photograph shows the souls rising from three "Esquimaux" killed in a small-plane crash. A crash that Kala, we learn, only just survived. And believes her husband caused by sabotaging the plane in order to kill her.In this first chapter, Norman plunges the reader into a tantalizing story of intrigue and adultery, made powerful by the subtle, vicious manipulations of husband and wife and the passive wariness of the narrator. "It all but made my skin crawl, the civility."Peter, though a photographer's assistant, is no photographer and has no ambition to be one. Instead, Peter makes up captions, obsessively. "So that, for instance, if I left my raincoat inside on a rainy day, I would immediately think, MAN WHO FORGOT RAINCOAT STANDING ON STREET." Peter is also aware that his situation is precarious, fluid, temporary. "The foretaste of regret. I was convinced that I was building up such an archive of memories - all these various views of Kala sleeping - that I could never get them out of my mind. And where would that leave me, should it happen that we didn't stay together? I'd suffer one of Miss Houghton's hauntings, except without any photographs involved."Miss Houghton is the author of Kala's favorite book, her professional Bible, "The Unclad Spirit," devoted to the investigation of spirit photography and quoted frequently in the course of Peter's narration. "A spirit photograph is one in which someone whom Miss Houghton called the 'uninvited guest' was present." Uninvited, often unwanted, always dead: an estranged spouse, a debauched uncle, a secret lover. Kala lectures on spirit photography and Miss Houghton and it was in this capacity Peter first encountered her on his arrival at a rustic, nearly deserted hotel in Churchill, Manitoba. Her audience consisted of three Eskimos and her husband - or husband-to-be, as it was their wedding day.The pair have an extended history, though, and Peter begins to learn about it on his very first night, as Kala celebrates her new marriage by coming to his bed. It is not long before he discovers that Vienna Linn is in hiding from the collector Radin Heur, who pays in advance for grisly accident photographs. Heur had, it seems, paid for a photographic record of a train wreck, but Linn botched the wreck and

This third and final novel in a trilogy about Canada is haunting, as the title implies. The story and the language linger in my mind. Norman's new novel is sensuous, romantic, mysterious. The author always writes about eccentric characters. His vision and voice are original, not at all ordinary, and we learn much about history and human nature from reading his books.I loved this novel, could not put it down and have recommended it to several people.