Ever so noir and a touch Gatsbyesque, “The Other Typist” is a twisty tale of a clerical worker at a Manhattan precinct house during Prohibition. Suzanne Rindell has written a novel so cinematic that it reads as if it’s in preproduction.Rose refers to herself as being in the “police business.” She’s a typist who takes down and transcribes confessions, a graduate of the Astoria Stenographers College for Ladies who works on the lower East Side and lives in a Brooklyn rooming house. The year is 1924.
The delicious first line: “They said the typewriter would unsex us.”
Being desexualized is hardly an issue for Rose. Or rather, it’s already been taken care of. True, there was that “friendship” with another girl that seemed to cross a line at the Queens convent where Rose was raised. But her plain looks, mannish clothes and shrilly correct demeanor accomplish what nature could not, effectively stifling any suggestion of a sexual self.
Rose is repression personified, beating out 150 words per minute on a typewriter, 300 on the stenotype. She’s deadly accurate, too.
Sometimes it seems as if the roguish Lieutenant Detective is flirting with her, but she reserves what smoldering feelings are left unsuppressed for the safely married Sergeant. Until Odalie shows up, that is.
If Odalie were a cocktail, she’d be a blend of self-possession and class poured over allure. Add a dash of mystery and call it Rose’s Ruin.
Odalie strolls into the station house to apply for the job of the other typist. She makes an immediate impression on Rose.
“She was the dark epicenter of something we didn’t quite understand yet,” Rose observes, “the place where hot and cold mixed dangerously, and around her everything would change.”
Rose is almost as astute as she is susceptible. In just a flurry of time, she’s out of dreary Brooklyn and occupying the other bedroom in Odalie’s suite at a swank Manhattan hotel. Rose is also joining Odalie at speakeasies. Since the main job of work at the precinct house is enforcing the Volstead Act, Rose has assumed a compromising position.
Rindell conjures the aura of vulgar decadence that Baz Luhrmann will soon bring to the screen in “The Great Gatsby.” She even throws Odalie and Rose into high society at a house party on Long Island. It’s at the mansion with vast property fronting both the Sound and the sea that the novel turns sinister.
Obviously, Odalie isn’t typing for money. Rose wises up to the real game fast. She’s also given several versions of Odalie’s past, even as Rose becomes complicit in the sordid present. We know all this, because Rose tells us so.
But can she be trusted? Rose, after all, is a worrisome package of obsession and repression. She may be able to record a confession almost faster than it can be spoken, but how good is she with the truth outside of the interrogation room?
“The Other Typist” is seductive, shady fun, an ideal read for the beach on West Egg.
ON OTHERS' WORDS
“The Golem and the Jinni" is a fantastical tale about, well, a golem and a jinni who cross paths in lower Manhattan at the turn of the last century. No one should have trouble picturing a golem on the lower East Side or a jinni in Tribeca, then or now.Helene Wecker’s story begins in 1899 as a Polish Jew spends his remaining fortune on a golem — fashioned from clay into a human figure, as golems traditionally are. This particular golem is meant to serve as the man’s wife, as he prepares to emigrate to New York. He dies onboard ship, while she lives and ends up working in a Jewish bakery on the lower East Side.
Meanwhile, the jinni travels to Manhattan’s Little Syria in a flask opened by a tinsmith at his shop near Washington St. The golem, Chava, is lost without a master while the jinni, Ahmad, must rid himself of the wizard who first imprisoned this devilish spirit capable of taking human form.
The two inevitably meet and that Jewish-Arab chasm is nothing to these mystical, tormented beings. Each has a particular destiny to defy as they chase through the streets and over the rooftops of the long-ago city. The tale is meant to be magical, and it is, but Wecker’s real sleight of pen is re-creating Manhattan as it was then. She has a historian’s grasp of detail and a novelist’s flair.
Source : http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/typist-golem-jinni-book-reviews-article-1.1332363
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