What happened to Bermuda?

My last Tournament of Stars update is on ESPN.com. I still have some video to file as well.

I mentioned in my St. Kitts post that my wife and I decided against a return trip to Bermuda for our 15th anniversary after we went there on our honeymoon, our fifth anniversary, and our tenth anniversary. A few of you asked me to elaborate, so I’ll do so, but I have to emphasize up front that our last trip there was (if you’re too lazy to do the math) five years ago, and it may be out of date.

Let me start with what we liked about Bermuda. It’s a beautiful island, naturally pretty, but was also fairly prosperous and well-maintained. The capital city, Hamilton, is like something out of a dream, clean, bright, open, busy in a quiet way, walkable with shops and restaurants up and down its few main streets. There’s a second town, more of a village, called St. George, on the east end of the island, also worth at least one visit. The island is small and easily navigable by moped – tourists are not permitted to rent cars – and I have to say that sitting in a closed car would rob you of some of the experience. Locals would chat with us while we were stopped at red lights, and we got a restaurant recommendation or two that way. The beaches have sand flecked with pink, and the water is as blue and clear as anything we found in St. Kitts. One of my favorite rums in the world, Gosling’s Black Seal, is blended and bottled in Bermuda. Most of the people we met on our visits there were friendly. And it’s just a two-hour flight from the east coast of the U.S.

We had a few favorites for food across our trips. The best place that’s still operating is Bistro J, in downtown Hamilton, where the menu changes daily, with five entree options and I believe two or three desserts written each afternoon on a blackboard in the dining room. Everything we ate there was spectacular and I will always remember that as the place I first tried sticky toffee pudding. Monty’s was at one point a simple, slightly cheap spot for locals that served amazing breakfasts, although it had gone upscale by the time we visited in 2005. The Hog Penny is a British pub in Hamilton that we discovered on our first trip, and the Swizzle Inn does make a killer rum swizzle, a cocktail that masks its potency with fruit juice. Paraquet is a little place catering mostly to locals that makes an incredible fried fish sandwich; it’s located in an apartment complex in Paget Parish right on South Road.

We stayed somewhere different on each trip; our favorite was the Salt Kettle Inn, a very small but perfectly located B&B just across the bay from Hamilton and thus a short ferry ride or moped trip into town. (The benefit of taking the moped in the mornings is that you get to see Johnny Barnes, the friendliest man in the world, waving to you and all the other commuters into Hamilton each morning.) We also stayed at the Elbow Beach resort for our honeymoon in 1995; the beach is outstanding for swimming, but the hotel itself is just an average American hotel with shops and restaurants added, with the room no better than what you’d find at a standard Hilton or Marriott, but at twice the price.

Hotel beaches in Bermuda are largely private, but they do have some excellent public ones. Our favorite public beach was Church Bay, on the western side of the south shore. The snorkeling there was amazing with plenty to see even when the water is just a few feet deep, and the water is fairly calm because of outlying rocks. There’s another beach on the eastern half called Shelly Bay Beach that’s very long and shallow and would be great for kids or unconfident swimmers. We usually took an afternoon to visit the small zoo and aquarium, and just generally tooled around the island. Getting around the island was simple between the moped and taxis, and we could go from St. George to the Dockyard (one end of Bermuda to the other) in about an hour.

That’s the good, but when we went back in 2005 we found it didn’t measure up to our memories from the first two trips. The biggest issue was that the place was starting to look a little run down. They’d had a hurricane a year prior but by August of ’05 still hadn’t finished basic maintenance tasks, like fixing a broken walkway from the parking area to the sand at Church Bay. We saw drunk locals in the streets of Hamilton for the first time – completely harmless, but still a sign that the economy there wasn’t in such great shape. And Front Street in Hamilton had gone from three department stores in 1995 to none in 2005, and as far as I can tell none has been replaced. (I understand that those stores were critical to locals, but they offered plenty for tourists who were looking for non-touristy shopping.)

We also found that the quality of the food at several of our favorite places had fallen off. We ate at the Hog Penny at least twice on that last trip, and everything we had underwhelmed us, even though in probably a half-dozen or more meals there on the previous two trips we had always loved the food. The Swizzle Inn changed its menu completely between 2000 and 2005, and the food quality went south as well. The food at Monty’s didn’t change, but the price went up with the décor, although it’s still the best breakfast bet we found on the island.

I also noticed in 2005 that while locals were still on the whole very friendly, we encountered more rudeness than we had before, and my guess is that it was a little anti-Americanism at work. (For whatever it’s worth, and that may be nothing, the poor treatment we received never came from black Bermudians, only whites. I don’t know why that would be true, but it is.)

And the final straw for us was the price. It’s very expensive to stay and eat in Bermuda, and the lack of any major U.S. Chain on the island means that frequent-guest points are useless there. (There are two Fairmont hotels, if that’s how you roll.) Renting a moped for the week, while fun, isn’t cheap, and heading there now with a four-year-old would mean a lot of cab fares, and getting a cab from a public beach was not easy.
But Bermuda has a more fundamental price problem – they slap a tax of 25% or more on all imported goods, so the prices of even basic goods are jacked up, and it flows through to restaurant meals, hotel prices, and of course affects people who live on the island greatly. Add to that their unwillingness to wean themselves from the teat of cruise ship docking fees, even though cruise ship customers do nothing to help island businesses directly but are happy to come and consume public resources like beaches, making it less appealing for people who want to come and actually contribute directly to island hotels, restaurants, and shops.

Bermuda was a little less appealing for us than it might be to a first-time visitor because we will compare everything to our previous visits to the island; I imagine if we went there for the first time now, we’d find it charming, because we lacked any knowledge of what it was like ten or fifteen years ago. And, again, we haven’t been in five years, so it may have made a major turnaround in that time. I haven’t heard anything to that effect, and as far as I know the massive import tax is still in place and the cruise ships are still coming and throwing their weight around. I would love to have my old Bermuda back, but I’m afraid now it may be gone for good.

Ubik.

Those of you on the fence about buying a Kindle from amazon.com may be interested to learn that they’ve cut the price to $189. Competition is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Philip Dick’s novel Ubik made the TIME list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, one of the few genre novels on the list (and, I’m guessing, a book for which Lev Grossman stumped). I’d read nine other Dick novels, putting The Man in the High Castle – the least sci-fi of any of the books I’ve read from him – on the Klaw 100, but hadn’t read any of his work in close to a decade before picking up this title.

Ubik is typical Dick in that it involves reality turned on its head, where he changes the fundamental conditions of our physical existence, then inserts relatively ordinary people and sees how they act and respond. This time around, there’s a new scientific process that allows people who have died to be placed in a state called “half-life,” where they remain physically dead but their brains can continue to function when they are, in effect, plugged in, a period amounting to a few hours in total between physical death and brain death. So Glen Runciter, who runs an anti-psychic operation, can communicate with his dead wife for a few minutes when he has to make a critical business decision (how terribly romantic), although he runs into trouble early when one such session is interrupted by a neighboring half-lifer who manages to invade the signal.

Joe Chip is one of Runciter’s employees and he, Glen, and ten other employees embark for a highly lucrative mission that goes very wrong when a bomb explodes and somebody dies. What is not clear to the reader is who has died: to the employees, it appears that they all survived but Runciter died, but their world begins acting oddly and they receive messages from their old boss that indicate that they are in half-life and he was the only survivor. The primary mystery of the book is whether or not Joe and his dwindling team are actually alive or in half-life, and they try to chase Runciter’s clues and figure out what they need to do to (half-)survive, with a secondary thread surrounding who is actually controlling their new, unpredictable environment. And the title, a play on the Latin word, ubique, meaning “everywhere” (present in our word ubiquitous or in the Spanish verb ubicar, “to be located”), turns out to be a substance that combats in the rapid physical decay that starts to overtake the members of Joe’s team.

The chapter intros, advertising all manner of products under the Ubik name, usually with comical product warnings, reminded me of the epigrams and fake quotes before chapters in Jasper Fforde’s novels, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to hear Fforde was a Dick devotee. (Stop laughing.) I also thought the idea of a world being created to order for the person(s) experiencing it has been reused a few times, including The Matrix and one episode of 1980s revival of “The Twilight Zone,” at the least.

Dick uses a few early misdirects to keep you guessing about the real explanation behind the bomb and the weird possibly-half-life world, although the result does leave a few plot strands hanging. I also thought the final chapter, barely over a page in length, felt like a cheap add-on, one that undermined a fairly strong if slightly conventional conclusion in the prior chapter. And it takes a good 20-25 pages for Dick to set up his universe, explaining in often dry terms the various forms of psychic abilities in use as well as the whole half-life phenomenon, a section that took up about 10% of the book. Overall, though, it’s a clever, mind-bending novel, and following Joe (the main protagonist) through his confusion about the changing world and then his attempts to save himself, if not others on his team, was compelling.

The question I have is whether this merited inclusion as one of three true sci-fi novels on the list (along with Neuromancer, a decent novel worthy for its prescience; and Snow Crash, a good read but a poor selection for the 100), along with a pair of fantasy novels and a comic book. I’m not an aficionado of the genre, but I could make a case for the Foundation trilogy (they did give The Lord of the Rings a spot, as well as A Dance to the Music of Time), and would argue for Dick’s alternate-history work The Man in the High Castle as more literary and seemingly more serious. And there’s a separate debate over whether six entries out of 100 is too much for the combined sci-fi/fantasy genre, not including works like Never Let Me Go, A Clockwork Orange, or Animal Farm that used elements of altered reality to tell much more serious stories. I liked Ubik and would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind a little sci in his fi, but as a top 100 candidate it fell short for me.

Next review: I don’t usually review Agatha Christie novels, but Taken at the Flood interested me enough that it’s worth a few grafs.

Farewell, My Lovely.

My first notes piece from the Tournament of Stars is up, along with a video of right-hander Christian Montgomery.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

How can you not like Raymond Chandler? He was a serious, literary writer who chose the detective story as his milieu and even wrote one of the greatest essays ever on the art of writing (“The Simple Art of Murder”). His prose was sparse and forceful like Hammett’s, but with a constant undercurrent of wry, self-deprecating humor. And his influence has been enormous.

I think the critical consensus has The Big Sleep as his best novel, but for my money Farewell, My Lovely surpasses it, with a more involved plot, much more insight into the character of the detective, Philip Marlowe, and more dry humor. Marlowe stumbles on a giant man, Moose Malloy, who storms a black nightclub that was previously whites-only, and is more or less dragged upstairs where he sees Malloy slug the bartender and hears him shoot the owner. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a cold call from a potential client who wants him to provide protection for a brief job that night, and despite his own suspicion, goes along … and that’s where the fun really starts.

Chandler weaves the two cases in and out of each other as Marlowe chases one while the other might be chasing him, and while there’s a natural suspicion that the two tracks are related, the answer to that isn’t clear until the very end of the story. I thought we got more insight into Marlowe’s character in this book, from the way he uses the weakness of Jesse Florian to get more information from her to the way he manipulates her nosy neighbor to his handling of the liberated young Anne Riordan. There’s a con-man psychic, marijuana cigarettes, a kidnapping, lots of booze, and the usual spot-on prose from the master of the genre.

Next review: Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

Death in the Truffle Wood.

Pierre Magnan’s Commissaire Laviolette novels have long enjoyed success in France but have just recently become available in English, starting with the series opener, Death in the Truffle Wood.

A number of hippies have gone missing recently in a small, nondescript town in Provence, and as the novel opens the reader witnesses another murder, unrelated except for the fact that it occurs as the serial killer is dumping one of his bodies, tying the two crimes together, albeit clumsily. Long, lazy passages introduce us to the various residents of the town (that is, the pool of potential suspects), most of whom are involved in some way with the truffle business. (The mushrooms, that is, not the chocolates.) Magnan gives us a few passages devoted to the fungus and local customs and dishes built around it, but not quite enough for my tastes. Eventually, the book’s nominal star, Laviolette, arrives in the town on an ambiguous, almost unofficial assignment to solve the string of murders, and he begins by trying to break down the barriers thrown up by the local citizens, most of whom date their heritage in that town for generations, toward any outsider.

Two aspects of Death in the Truffle Wood bothered me. One was the language, which could be a translation issue as much as a prose issue, but throughout the book Magnan showed a sparse style that seemed less an homage to the classic hard-boiled novels I enjoy than just laziness, like Magnan couldn’t be bothered with details, as in this absymal section on a kitchen scene that’s tangential to the main action:

The owner, in a state of panic at his overloaded stoves, inundated his underlings with contradictory orders. Little by little, however, everything fell into place and order reigned once more.

Oh, everything fell into place? That’s nice to hear. If you’re not going to fill in the picture, don’t sketch out the outline. As it was, Magnan had several asides along those lines that desultory nods toward the standard expectations of scene-setting, which stood in stark contrast to his over-long descriptions of the potential suspects, presented in awkward internal monologues before the plot can really get rolling.

The second problem was the fact that the alleged star of the book, Commissaire Laviolette, fades so easily into the background and has little to do with solving the case. In fact, he missed one of the most obvious clues I have ever seen in any detective novel, the pig’s reaction to a specific patron in the town’s bar. But he also lacked character or personality, and the novel reads like a mystery that solves itself.

I’m willing to concede that some of the trouble could be the result of a poor translation and would give the series another chance, but I’m going to try to get the next book, The Messengers of Death, in the original French and see if that makes a difference (even though it will take me substantially longer to get through it). But right now, I have a feeling this is another case of reviewers fawning over a novel that was a hit in another language and country first even though, had it been written by an American and published first in English, they would have seen it for the thin, somewhat drab novel that it is.

Next review: Back to a master of the genre, Raymond Chandler, with Farewell, My Lovely.

Saint Kitts.

As most of you know by now, I was completely off the grid last week for a family vacation to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, half of a two-island nation (Saint Kitts and Nevis, formerly Saint Christopher and Nevis) in the Leeward Islands, a little bit east of Puerto Rico. My wife and I settled on St. Kitts for a few reasons, one of which was the presence of a Marriott where I could utilize all these points I’ve racked up, and another was the fact that we didn’t know anyone who’d been. I’d read previously that the island had been making a strong effort to cultivate high-end tourism as its main economic activity, since the sugar cane industry had died owing to high labor costs (the canes have to be harvested by hand) and the United States’ absurd sugar quotas, which prop up a dying domestic sugar industry in Florida, support our nation’s addiction to high fructose corn syrup, and really stick it to various allies of ours in the sugar business, including Australia. But I digress. We had fun and ate well, but it’s more of a rest-and-relax destination than a place for serious sightseeing.

We spent most of our time at the resort itself, largely a function of our daughter’s primary interest, going in the resort’s pools. The St. Kitts Marriott is adjacent to a beach – all beaches in St. Kitts are public so it would be inaccurate to say the hotel has a beach – but it’s on the Atlantic side of the island, with somewhat rougher waters and zero scenic value. The pools are perfect for kids; the two we used go no deeper than four feet, including the one with the swim-up bar. The staff were over-the-top friendly, and the service everywhere in the hotel was top-notch, although my wife and I noticed that each new staff member we met began with a slight standoffishness that disappeared after a few moments of chatter. When I asked one of the waitresses we knew particularly well if that had something to do with Americans being rude*, she confirmed it, off the record of course.

*Seriously. I don’t know if Americans – and we saw at least two such incidents ourselves – treat the staff there rudely because the staff members are not Americans, or because they speak with accents, or, most likely, because they are black, but if you’re one of those Americans, do me a favor and stay home, so I can stop pretending I’m Canadian every time I leave the damn country. The waitresses and porters and valets are service workers, but that does not entitle you to treat them like they’re the help.

There were a few hiccups at the hotel when we got there, as they “upgraded” us to a room that turned out to lack air conditioning (we were told, after three calls to the front desk finally produced a staff member at our door, that the “chiller” was broken), but they did fall all over themselves to make it right. I also think it’s weird that the towel hut by the pools closes at 6:30 pm – if you don’t return the towels by then they charge you $25 – when the pools are open till 11 and guests might want to take towels to an off-site beach.

And we did, as we found a superior beach within walking distance of the hotel (or a $6 cab ride away) at Frigate Bay, home also of a row of restaurant-bars known as the Strip. Frigate Bay Beach sits on the Caribbean side, and despite the lack of a visible row of rocks to break some of the waves, it was significantly calmer than the beach next to the Marriott, and my daughter was thrilled at the number and variety of seashells there. We ate at one of the restaurants on the Strip, Mr. X’s Shiggidy Shack, but I’ll save that for the food portion of the post.

The third beach we visited was a haul from the hotel, a $22 cab ride that took at least 20 minutes, but it was the most beautiful by far: Cockleshell Bay Beach, on the southern tip of the island of St. Kitts, only about two miles from Nevis. The sand was the cleanest, the scenery the most lush, and the view of Nevis is tremendous, with the latter’s central volcano practically throwing its shadow on you. And, true to its name, it had many shells, mostly cockles.

Our one other expedition outside the hotel was to “the city,” Basseterre, the nation’s capital and the only significant population center on the island. It was disappointing, although I think that is in part because we compared it to Hamilton, Bermuda, the only other island town we’ve ever visited; Hamilton is (or at least was in 2005) clean, bright, and busy, with wide streets and plenty of places to eat and shop. Basseterre has a shlock district called Port Zante that is new, bright, and full of stores selling crappy trinkets, cheap liquor (not that there’s anything wrong with that), jewelry, or other duty-free items for tourists on cruise ships, who generally do little to help the economies of the islands they visit. From there, we crossed into the Circus area, where we found a few local shops but not much in the way of restaurants or other establishments to keep us in town. The streets are narrow and many of the buildings outside of Port Zante were run down. I’m well aware that the town is there for its residents and not its tourists, but I saw a lost opportunity there for an island that is trying to cultivate a niche in high-end tourism.

You can do some nature tours within Saint Kitts or Nevis, both of which have rain forests around their central volcanoes (Saint Kitts’ peak is extinct, while Nevis’ has been dormant for millennia), but even without my daughter there I’m not sure I would have suggested that sort of activity. It was way too hot.

The airport merits mention because it’s so hilariously small. There are four “gates,” which are just doors a few feet apart in the same wall of the lone departure lounge, and all exit to the same piece of asphalt. The tower is actually across the runway in an adjacent field. There is no restaurant, just a tiny bar that serves prefab sandwiches and three trinket shops before security. The duty free stores after security did offer excellent prices on liquor, cheaper than anything I saw elsewhere. I’ll get to the liquor in a second.

My main complaint about St. Kitts aside from the absence of a nice town is the expense of getting around the island. Getting from the hotel to town was $12 without tip each way, for a trip of about ten minutes. It’s not an exorbitant fare, but suddenly it’s $30 round-trip to get to Basseterre, $50 round-trip to get to Cockleshell Bay (and a good restaurant there), $15 each way from the airport, and it adds up. I’d rather spend my money on food or local goods than on getting around, but there’s no alternative, and we spent more time in the hotel as a result. We also skipped Nevis, partly for cost reasons (it would have been $80-100 round-trip just to get there), but mostly because we didn’t think my daughter would be up for the roughly 90 minutes it would have taken each way to get from our hotel to the Botanical Gardens, the one site on Nevis we thought might hold her interest. At the end of the day, she was happy in the pool.

Last stop before I run through the restaurants: St. Kitts does have three local rum producers, and I brought home one bottle of Belmont Estates’ gold rum. It’s unaged, which means it has a harsher taste than any of my preferred rums from around the region (Appleton and Cruzan are my favorites at the moment), and the bars at the Marriott didn’t offer it. They did offer Brinley rums, five varieties of flavored rums blended on the island but (I believe) distilled elsewhere, and anyway flavored rums are for sissies so I never bothered. The third kind is CSR, short for Cane Spirit Rothschild, distilled from sugar cane rather than from molasses, and like that style of spirit it’s more for sipping than for mixing. The duty free stores I found usually had a few options from around the region, including Appleton, Cruzan, Bacardi (a waste of good molasses, in my opinion), Myers, and Mount Gay, as did the bars at the Marriott*.

*Rum and ginger ale was my drink of choice during the week, with either Myers dark or Appleton gold, but I did order two other drinks. One was a guava daiquiri, mostly because I love guava anything, but the resulting drink tasted mostly of … guava, with the rum well buried in the background. The other was planter’s punch, which I thought was always based on a fairly standard formula, but the Marriott’s version had Bacardi, Myers dark, a liqueur I didn’t catch, and a splash of juice. If I had gone in St. Kitts to forget something, it would have been the perfect drink.

Now, the food, starting with the options in the hotel. Cafe Calypso serves breakfast and lunch, and the breakfast buffet is pricey ($21-25) but excellent. There’s section of local breakfast items, with one rotating protein dish (fried tilapia, a stew with salt cod, pork stew, some kind of spicy chicken) alongside fried plantains, cinnamon-tinged jonnycakes, grilled vegetables, and crepes with what I assume was a house-made three-berry compote that was incredible – my daughter and I inhaled the stuff. They also have the standard assortment of American foods, and a strong array of pastries which were definitely made in-house (we talked to the pastry chef). The only miss was the horrible tea selection: I’m in a former British colony and you’re offering me … Bigelow?

The lunch menu isn’t long, but it’s diverse, including a turkey BLT with a fried egg as one of the layers, a Caesar wrap with fried fish (tasted great, but the heat from the fish made the dressing run), a chicken roti (traditional local fare, with curried chicken wrapped in a lavash-like bread, but the filling had zero salt and thus near zero taste), chimichurri skirt steak with mashed potatoes (the steak was a little undermarinated but they had the righ idea), and, my favorite item, ribs with a guava BBQ sauce (extremely tender with a sweet-and-sour sauce that would go on just about any meat – I’d love that with duck). The chefs all over the hotel are accommodating if you have an off-menu request, and they made grilled cheese for my (vegetarian) daughter that was actually grilled, with grill marks; I don’t think she failed to finish any of the ones she had at the Calypso.

Outside the restaurant is the actual cafe, with a full assortment of espresso-based drinks, although their espresso-making skills are a little lacking; twice I saw the barista put the grounds in the portafilter without tamping them down, which is a good way to make brown water if that’s what you’re going for. They have a pastry case with cookies, muffins, and, for $4, desserts like slices of opera cake or Black Forest Cake, or individiual tiramisu portions that were big enough for my wife and I to split. We ate well in the hotel all week, but the pastry chef gets the gold star for the tiramisu and for the donuts, also made in-house and likely the best I have ever tasted.

It is also worth mentioning that the staff at the Calypso were outstanding and took the time to learn our names, greeted our daughter every morning (even waitresses who weren’t working our section would come over to say hi), and memorize our drink orders. They don’t have to do any of that, and I would never expect it, but it added a lot to our stay. And they did this knowing full well that we came from the U.S. In fact, we found everyone we met on the island to be friendly once we proved we wouldn’t bite, and many locals thanked us for choosing to take our vacation on St. Kitts.

Still in the Marriott, there’s a very strong Italian restaurant called La Cucina that has an antipasto bar that I’d call a can’t-miss, including real prosciutto, marinated artichokes, roasted peppers (three colors!), and a giant block of Parmiggiano-Reggiano from which you can carve your own slices or chunks. The entrees I had were both just short of great. The risotto with wild mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes had huge mushroom flavor, including morels (that is, an actual wild mushroom, as opposed to places that say “wild mushroom” and give you creminis), but they used a strain of rice I haven’t seen in risotto before, and it didn’t produce the right creamy texture I’d expect in that dish. The ravioli in butter were just that: House-made ravioli served in melted butter, not fried briefly in butter to get some color on the pasta, then served in brown butter. It was fine, and my daughter might not have tried them if they’d been browned, but nothing that an average home cook couldn’t produce. My wife had the pasta alla bolognese twice, getting a generous portion of pasta and meat with a sauce that featured strong, fresh flavors of all the vegetables it contained (carrots, onions, and celery, at the very least).

We ate one other meal at Blu, a seafood restaurant at the Marriott with an impressive array of fish options, although the best thing I had there was the mashed potatoes with truffle oil, sweet, ridiculously creamy, but with the irregular texture of “smashed” potatoes, a nice contrast to the largely soft potato-crusted grouper I had as my main course. The house salad has a pomegranate vinaigrette that wasn’t cloyingly sweet like berry vinaigrettes usually are, and the greens looked like they’d just been picked*. The chocolate-and-peanut-butter mousse tart could have been a little darker, but was otherwise excellent. My wife went with the pork chop – she doesn’t care for fish – and said it was good but so thick that it started to dry out on the edges.

*That was actually a trend all week: Unbelievable salad greens. Brighter colors, crisper leaves, fresher flavors. Maybe that’s their niche within their niche: Come for the beaches, stay for the produce.

Moving off site … Mr. X’s Shiggedy Shack is, in fact, a shack on Frigate Bay Beach, covered but open, with a limited menu that ranges from $30 grilled lobster to $5 burgers. Every local we talked to said that was the one place to eat outside the Marriott, and our favorite waitress at the Marriott told me to get the mahi-mahi, which was incredibly fresh and clean and perfectly grilled, one of the two best pieces of fish I had in a week where I ate a lot of fish. The sides mostly just took up space. Their house rum punch, the Shiggedy Jig, wasn’t very strong and had a liqueur I couldn’t place (Amaretto?) but that dominated the drink. In a rum punch, I should taste the rum, right?

PJ’s is an “authentic” Italian place on the same road as the Marriott and is awful. Imagine if a lifelong resident of St. Kitts had never visited Italy or eaten Italian food but got an old Italian cookbook and decided to open an Italian restaurant. That’s PJ’s.

The Spice Mill has been open on Cockleshell Bay Beach for about a year and a half and had the most innovative menu we found anywhere on the island. My wife had a pulled pork sandwich that she said was outstanding aside from the huge smear of mayonnaise on the bun, which wasn’t advertised on the menu and was about three times as much as a sandwich really needs (besides, pulled pork doesn’t really scream for mayo). I took the server’s advice and went with the Greek salad with mahi-mahi; the fish was the best piece of fish I had all week, immaculately cooked, and the salad was bright and fresh with some mixed greens and diced mango … but feta and mahi-mahi just don’t go together. If they took the cheese out and just called it a mixed salad with mahi-mahi, it would be worth the $50 round-trip cab fare alone.

And that brings me to my last point: For some reason, you need to jump up and down or light your table on fire to get a check at any restaurant in St. Kitts other than Calypso. It took a minimum of 15 minutes from when I asked for the check to when I had a copy of something to sign at La Cucina, the Spice Mill, and Mr. X’s, although the Shack at least deserves credit for owning up to the fact that their register was on the fritz and having the server come to the table and add up the bill for us on a calculator. I’ve heard about people moving on “island time,” but when a customer asks for the check, the restaurant’s goal should be to give it to him and clear the table ASAP.

Would we go to St. Kitts again? Maybe, but I feel like it’s a place worth seeing once rather than twice. There isn’t enough on the island for a young child to do beyond the beaches, and while I like museums that’s not what I’m going for when I head to an island where it’s 90 degrees every day. Once I rack up enough miles to for another island trip, we’re probably headed for someplace new, since St. Kitts didn’t have the same appeal as Bermuda did once upon a time (the decline of Bermuda is another post entirely) and we’d like to experience and see something else. If you’re looking at trying St. Kitts for the first time, though, it’s pretty enough and the Marriott would be an excellent choice for the stay for its staff, its food options, and for its proximity to Frigate Bay Beach, and I can guarantee you that your visit will be appreciated.

Fer-de-Lance.

I’m back from a week of vacation in St. Kitts with my phone completely off and no access to email. Add to that a copious supply of rum and it might have been the greatest week of my life. I will get to a post running through the places where we ate as well as general thoughts on the island later in the week.

I also went through seven books in seven days, mostly detective stories, starting with my first exposure to Nero Wolfe in print form with Rex Stout’s first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance. I’ve heard several of the classic radio programs starring Sidney Greenstreet as the corpulent, eccentric genius who solves crimes without leaving his office/apartment and raises and breeds orchids when he’s not playing detective. The real leg work falls to his employee and occasional verbal sparring partner Archie Goodwin, who also handles some of the orchid-management duties and often finds himself frustrated in the face of Wolfe’s ability to draw correct conclusions from limited data.

Fer-de-Lance is the first of the 33 novels Stout wrote, although he didn’t write it as an introductory novel, making references to (nonexistent) prior cases and character histories so that the novel’s beginning isn’t bogged down in lengthy details or dull tangents. The case involves an Italian immigrant who goes missing and turns up dead and a college President who drops dead suddenly on a golf course, with Wolfe and Goodwin making the connection and Wolfe figuring out how the core murder was committed but not knowing for certain who committed it until later in the book. The climax, where Wolfe reveals the killer’s identity to the police, is a bit over the top but certainly enjoyable.

Two major facets of Fer-de-Lance propelled the book forward for me. One is the two fascinating characters of Wolfe and Goodwin. Wolfe is a maddening (but not mad) genius, exacting, arrogant, but brilliant and logical, relying on the psychology of suspects much as Hercule Poirot typically does. Goodwin chafes under his boss’s condescension but ultimately must bow to Wolfe’s superior powers of deduction; he’s too much of a dandy to be hard-boiled but does fill the role of the hard-boiled detective who pounds the pavement, threatening and being threatened, while Wolfe sits in the comfort of his office. Stout sets up a number of avenues of friction between the two for subsequent books.

The other was Stout’s approach to revealing the crime to the reader, which deviated from the standard formula where the author saves the final details for the last chapter or two of the book. In many detective or mystery novels, that’s almost a requirement, as the reader’s curiosity provides velocity to the text that is lacking in pedestrian writing, but Stout’s characterization and simple and witty prose are strong enough to drive the reader forward even after Wolfe and Goodwin have settled on the killer’s identity and instead work backwards to prove that Wolfe’s answer is correct, rather than following clues to a conclusion that ends the book.

I enjoyed Fer-de-Lance but wouldn’t class it with Christie’s intricate, subtle plotting, or Chandler’s terse, literary prose; it’s faster and easier but without the same depth, definitely worth the time if you’re familiar with any of the Wolfe adaptations and want to see the character in his original form, or if you’re looking for a quick, fun, yet still intelligent detective novel.

Next up: There’s not too much new to say on the 20th Wodehouse novel I’ve read, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, other than that it’s vintage Wooster, so I’ll skip ahead to Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood for the next writeup. I’m currently reading Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi (also published as The Zen of Fish).

Olive Kitteridge.

She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy; but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted o be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed.

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge , winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is a novel of short stories, all connected by their setting and the presence of the title character, the crotchety, depressed, and often cruel retired schoolteacher whose role varies from episode to episode. In several stories, she sits at the center, sometimes with her long-suffering husband Henry, sometimes with her semi-estranged son Christopher (whose life appears to be the long process of recovery from having Olive as a mother), and at the end, in “River,” as the star.

Along the way we meet many other residents of the small town Crosby, Maine, the suicides and would-be suicides, the drunks, the faithless spouses, the grieving widow, the older couple looking for safety in each other, almost nobody happy and nearly everyone dealing in some way with depression. That makes for compelling reading, as Strout’s understanding not so much of the human psyche but of the why and how we become depressed is so deep that she can paint these characters with a delicate hand, but it also makes for a complete freaking downer of a book. It is great literature, with prose reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s, and Olive is a riveting and fully realized character, but she’s also unlikeable for her coldness and her refusal – or inability – to take responsibility for her actions and their effects on those around her.

The short story novel concept is a new one to me – whether this even qualifies as a novel is a matter of opinion, but the presence of Olive in every episode and the overarching story arc of this later period of life does tie everything together with a clear direction from start to finish – and reading it gave me the feeling of watching a season of a TV series, each episode self-contained, introducing a new cast around the central character. The downside is that we merely get glimpses into each side character, such as Angie, the alcoholic piano player whose role as the other woman is contributing to her malaise, or Julie, the overdramatic woman jilted on her wedding day by a fiance who wants to be with her but not to marry her, and whose conclusion is open-ended and unsatisfying. But I don’t think Strout’s goal was to satisfy but to, as the blurb on the back cover says (in a rare instance of one of such text proving accurate), “offer profound insights into the human condition.” And I’d say on that front, she succeeded. I just wouldn’t call her if I had a case of the blues.

Next up: Vacation, with at least nine books in tow, starting with Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance and Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood. And since this is a real vacation, involving planes and such, I’ll be offline all of next week, including, most blissfully of all, email.

The Magician’s Assistant, etc.

I loved Ann Patchett’s breakout novel, Bel Canto, in every way imaginable – for its plot, for its prose, and for its rich, wide array of compelling, well-drawn characters*, but found her follow-up, Run, to be a thin, hackneyed love letter to then-candidate Barack Obama disguised as a novel.

*The Q&A with Patchett at the back of her last novel had an enlightening line from her about how, to her, all her novels are alike, because each is her attempt to rewrite Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I got about 40 pages into that book and bailed, because the prose was maddening, but knowing the general plot I can see the correlation between it and Bel Canto. So, nice work, Ann – I think you rewrote it in a way that people are more likely to finish it.

The Magician’s Assistant precedes Bel Canto in Patchett’s bibliography and shares its theme of people from different worlds thrown together by fate, although its cast is smaller and there are some elements of magical realism that weren’t in either of her two later novels. The novel opens as Sabine, the assistant of the title, finds herself suddenly widowed after the magician she assisted for twenty years suffered an aneurysm. But it turns out that the magician, Parsifal, was gay, and their marriage was one of convenience, with Sabine’s love for her boss-turned-husband unrequited, and Parsifal’s partner, Phan, died not long before Parsifal did. And after Parsifal’s death, Sabine finds out the family he claimed died in a car accident is, in fact, alive in Nebraska, and when they learn of her existence, they fly to Los Angeles to meet her, which results in a trip for Sabine to Nebraska to explore her late husband’s past.

The novel is filled with people, nearly all women, in various stages of broken, with Sabine perhaps at the top of the list. She’s confused by Parsifal’s refusal to confide the details of his past in her, and grieves in part through dreams or visions of Phan and eventually Parsifal in some sort of afterlife. While she’s looking for direction, the women in Nebraska – Parsifal’s mother and two sisters – are each looking for something different, closure for the mother, an escape (or simply an answer) for the older sister, a connection to a lost brother for the younger one. It’s not devoid of action, although some of the most active scenes are told through flashbacks, but the book is driven by the emotions of the central characters, and other than a sentimental (but, I confess, moving) ending, these emotions felt very real throughout the novel.

Patchett was still rounding into form in this novel, and the book suffers from its lack of a decent male character – decent in the sense of well-formed but also as a comment on their behavior. Sabine’s father is wonderful, but a cipher in the context of the book. The two best male characters to get any screen time are both dead. Parsifal’s father, brother-in-law, and younger sister’s fiance are all two-dimensional and either jerks or wallflowers. Bel Canto had far better developed male characters as part of its amazing menagerie of hostages and terrorists, each drawn clearly and fully in ways that the men of Magician’s Assistant are not. It’s worth reading, but only after you’ve read Bel Canto.

I mentioned starting Walter Moers’ Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures, but quit after 150 pages because the book wasn’t going anywhere and I had 500+ pages to go. I loved Moers’ The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear and liked The City of Dreaming Books, but he repeated himself in Rumo and the latter book didn’t have the whimsy or character development of the other two novels.

Next up: I’ve got about 50 pages to go in Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, which for some unknown reason is only $6 on amazon.com.

The Big Short.

My final draft reviews are up for the American League and the National League.

I’ll be on KNBR 1050 in San Francisco at 1 pm PDT today with my friend Damon Bruce. I’m sure we’ll talk about how bad AAA pitching is and why the Giants need more veteran presence.

I’m leaving for vacation on Saturday, so between now and then I’m going to try to do a few quick dish posts on books I’ve read since the draft rush began.

Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine follows three investors who foresaw the meltdown in the subprime mortgage market and each made a killing off of it, using their stories as a way to expose the lunacy of the collateralized debt obligations used to sell these destined-to-fail loans (much of which was new to me) and to do something Lewis does very well: Create villains and take them down.

Lewis has two great strengths as a writer: His prose is easy and natural, and he has a gift for finding interesting protagonists. Of the three profiled in The Big Short, none is more compelling than Michael Burry, the awkward, antisocial neurology student whose investment blog becomes so legendary that he quits medicine to raise his own value-investing fund, only to abandon that approach and bet everything on what he saw as the inevitable collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Second in interest level is Steve Eisman, the perpetually angry hedge-fund manager who spends the entire book in a state of mounting disbelief at the stupidity of nearly everyone involved in the giant Ponzi scheme of subprime mortgages. The third major winner on bets against the market, the three-man investment outfit Cornwall Capital, had an incredible run of success, turning a $100,000 initial investment into a nine-figure fund, but their stories just aren’t as compelling as Eisman’s or particularly Burry’s.

The real villains here are the ratings agencies who weren’t so much asleep at the wheel as passed-out drunk. Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch continued to give high ratings to investment vehicles they didn’t examine or even understand, and once Lewis’ protagonist investors realized what was going on, they ratcheted up their bets against the subprime market, with one going to so far as to short the stocks of the ratings agencies. Lewis does spread the blame around, vilifying the investment banks who sold CDOs while enabling bets against them, the mortgage originators who gave out loans to people who lacked the income to pay for them and which were structured to fail, and the host of people who made money from the industry and didn’t want to hear the doomsayers’ warnings about an impending collapse. But the biggest culprit of all is human nature: We respond to incentives, and the system provided incentives for almost every villain to do what he did. Originators were paid for originating but faced no consequences when their loans went bad. Ratings agencies had immunity from claims when their ratings turned out to be bogus. And nothing prevented investment banks from betting everything on black or from profiting by playing both sides of a gamble.

I listened to the audio version of The Big Short and thought the reader did an excellent job in both pacing and distinguishing between all of the while middle-aged men who populated the book.

Draft day 2010.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS tonight during the draft, probably once a half hour, starting at 7:10 and 7:40 pm EDT. When I’m not in the studio I’ll be live-blogging with Jason Churchill on ESPN.com, and there’s a Cover It Live event as well. Also scheduled to be on The FAN 590 in Toronto tonight at 6:05 pm.

All my draft content is up now. The last full mock draft is up, and you can see the full index of player cards, maybe 110-120 … I lost count. I chatted today and will chat again Tuesday at 1 pm.

Thank you all for bearing with me over the last few weeks. I should have a dish post or two up later this week before I head out on vacation.