A new novel published by The Permanent Press in Sag Harbor, Long Island is a unique mix of a love story wrapped around a thriller.
Joan Baum has this review of The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove.
The title of 81-year old Paul Zimmer’s debut novel, The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove, is a kind of tease. The story’s not about “soldiers,” but two elderly characters, Cyril and Louise, who live in what Cyril calls a “geezer home.” That’s an assisted-living facility in Soldiers Grove, a small town in southwestern Wisconsin.
The book is about “mysteries,” but only as they relate to the little understood, often surprising effusions of the human heart. Or, as Louise says, things that just happen in “an aged person’s long night.”
Cyril and Louise are two childless seniors. They couldn’t be more unlike, but they find in each other a soul mate that changes them deeply and forever. Their story makes for a charming, intelligent, and funny exploration of older age, physical pains, cruelties and all.
But late-life romance is not the whole of this tale. Zimmer adds a menacing psychopath to the narrative mix, and the love story becomes a thriller. How will sweet Cyril handle an armed maniac?
Zimmer adds a menacing psychopath to the narrative mix, and the love story becomes a thriller. - Joan Baum
Cyril’s shy, kind, eccentric- a local who’s spent his entire life reading bios of just about everyone, living and dead. It’s a habit that began in childhood, when he needed to distract himself from the vicious arguments of his alcoholic parents. Now, decades and who knows how many encyclopedic entries later, he prattles on “a teller of lives,” well-known and arcane. Though no one seems impressed with the staggering variety and diversity of “Google Man's” little bios, his obsession gives his life purpose.
Typically, he gets back only a blank stare or indifference. But then, one night, in the middle of a blizzard, he starts rattling on to a character in a ski mask who’s helping himself to free gas. Does this guy know he looks like Elisha Kent Kane, the Arctic explorer from 1855? The answer is a gun in Cyril’s face and a forced ride in the robber’s truck, until he’s tossed out in the snow, left to die. Miraculously, he’s found, hospitalized, written up as a hero, but even the loss of fingers and an ear, as well as injury to his nose and having to use two canes, does not put a damper on his recitations, especially when he spies an attractive newcomer at the home.
Louise, a widow who was born in France, exudes culture and elegance. She loves poetry, art, music, gourmet food. As an opening gambit, Cyril strolls up to her table and asks if she knows she looks like Christine de Pisan. And lo! Louise starts reciting facts about this medieval beauty and writer. Cyril is stunned, numbed. All he can do is blurt out, “Will you marry me?” And from then on, it’s summer in winter with Zimmer depicting their affection with great sensitivity and realistic challenge. The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove is an inspiring, original, and entertaining tale.
