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Diablerie
 
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Diablerie (Paperback)

by Walter Mosley (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 16.50
Price: CDN$ 11.91 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details
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Diablerie + The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow + The Tempest Tales
Total List Price: CDN$ 67.45
Price For All Three: CDN$ 43.92

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  • This item: Diablerie by Walter Mosley

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  • The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow by Walter Mosley

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this short, intense roman dur (or serious novel), Mosley probes the human condition through Ben Dibbuk, a black man whose name evokes the dybbuk of Jewish folklore. A 47-year-old computer programmer for a New York City bank, Dibbuk is married to Mona, the editor of a new cutting-edge magazine, Diablerie, which can mean either mischievous or evil. He has a daughter at NYU and a 21-year-old Russian mistress whose apartment and graduate school tuition he pays for. Then a woman he doesn't remember threatens to shatter the shell Dibbuk has built to protect himself from his troubled, alcoholic past. When Dibbuk discovers Mona is having him investigated, he realizes he risks being charged for a murder he can't remember but may have committed. As Dibbuk struggles to escape the emotional vacuum of his life, he may not be free to enjoy his reawakening. This is Mosley at his deepest and best, scratching away the faces we wear to reveal the person behind the masks. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From AudioFile

Walter Mosley's novels are full of everyday people with everyday problems. They rarely feature big, brave action heroes who laugh at death. DIABLERIE is odd, even by Mosley standards. The main character (not "hero," please) is an amoral computer programmer who can't seem to feel anything but lust. But it's just possible that during one of his alcohol-induced blackouts Ben Dibbuk found the passion to murder. Who can communicate all that? Richard Allen is up to the challenge. His rich baritone and silky-smooth delivery make Dibbuk and all the other characters seem so very real. He even makes Dibbuk's Russian mistress sound believable, no easy feat. M.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
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3.0 out of 5 stars To Feel or Not to Feel, Mar 10 2008
This review is from: Diablerie (Hardcover)
Diablerie occurs when a vampire drinks the blood and absorbs the soul of another vampire. In Diablerie, the surface meaning of the word is tied to a new trendy magazine that Ben Dibbuk's wife edits in Manhattan. But the imagery of the book is clearly tied back to the vampire concept.

Realize that this is not Easy Rawlins back in Watts trying to right a few wrongs. This is Ben Dibbuk, a fiftyish programmer who can keep out-of-date code working so Our Bank can process its accounts without installing a new system. He earns a good salary and no one bothers him. But life is definitely boring.

He has a lovely wife and a young adult daughter, but he doesn't feel much, except when he's engaged in bed with his young Russian girl friend. He didn't intend to have a girl friend: He just wanted to help out a woman and one thing led to another.

All that changes when his wife insists that he accompany her to an event for the magazine where he meets a woman who claims to know him very well. But Ben used to drink and doesn't remember anything from those years. After he reformed, his period of not feeling much began.

From there, Ben begins to tear apart the blind spots in his life . . . both before and now. Can he survive such an exposition? Or has his soul been permanently stolen when he was bled?

The strength of the book is seeing Ben gradually come back into control of his life and memory. The weakness of the book is that it's too much like just reading about a mid-life crisis that an aging man is experiencing and where sex with a young woman is the answer. I think the story would have worked better if Ben were much younger.

Like Killing Johnny Fry, Diablerie gains most of its strength from the extensive and extreme sex scenes. To me, those scenes felt more than a little gratuitous. But I can't argue with Mr. Mosley if he wants to develop a new audience that needs those thrills to enjoy his writing.

Ultimately, the plot seemed contrived to me. It just didn't ring true. I was left with unanswered questions that made the plot seem unbelievable on page after page. It's almost like this book was written by a new author rather than the highly skilled Mr. Mosley.
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5.0 out of 5 stars DARING, ADVENTUROUS, POWERFUL, Dec 25 2007
By Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Diablerie (Hardcover)


Compact, concise, compelling. Dark. Walter Mosley has crafted a brief novel, an exploration of the human psyche that grips the reader with the opening page.

We know the protagonist's name. It is Ben Dibbuk, he's an almost 50-year-old computer programmer, married with a daughter in college. He has Svetlana, a Russian mistress his daughter's age. Nonetheless, exactly who is Ben Dibbuk? He's alienated, unable to care for anyone or anything. Nothing matters to him - not his wife, Mona, his daughter, Seela, or his work. He simply would like to be left alone.

Earlier he had suffered from frightening nightmares and went into therapy at the behest of Mona. The terrifying dreams stopped after awhile as did his visits to the therapist. One day Mona insists that he go to a banquet with her, an evening with her co-workers at a fashion magazine, Diablerie. It is there that he's approached by the keynote speaker, Star, a woman who claims to know him. He has no recollection whatsoever of her. When she tells him the exact date they were together, he replies, "That's back when I was still drinking......I was just telling the waitress there that I've forgotten more nights than I remember."

That same evening he is introduced to Harvard Rollins, a fact-checker for the magazine, and as he later learns his wife's lover, the man she has asked to look into Ben's past. Why?

At this point for whatever reason he feels compelled to get in touch with his mother, a woman he hasn't seen in 15 years. Just before Ben hung up he heard his mother say, "...I never thought I'd feel that I regretted my own son's birth but-"

He also places a telephone call to his brother, Briggs, who is now in jail. Briggs remembers another phone call from Ben some 20 years earlier in which Ben asked questions about criminal apprehension, mentioned something wrong that he had done, and that there had been a witness - a woman by the name of Star.

Moseley is a master of prose. Who else would describe an alcoholic's desire for cognac as "...rich amber liquor moving through my veins like chamber music on a sunny afternoon in a many-windowed room in July"?

He's also a master at creating an intriguing mystery, one that is irresistible to readers and grows deeper as the narrative moves on. Daring, adventurous, powerful, Moseley is all of these as he proves once again in the hauntingly erotic Diablerie.

- Gail Cooke
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