Days of Feasting and Rejoicing is a haunting literary crime novel by award-winning author David Bergen. Keep reading for Doreen’s review./span>
Esther Maile is a woman adrift. After leaving the American Midwest to travel, she fell in with the worldlier and wealthier Christine Case, who offered to share a duplex with her in Thailand. With their similar dark hair and statures, the two twenty-somethings could easily be mistaken for one another at a glance. So when they travel to Bali together, and Christine drowns, an emotionally overwhelmed Esther doesn’t correct the police when they assume that it was she herself who died and Christine who survived.
The reality of what she’s done quickly sinks in, however, for both good and ill. Stepping into Christine’s shoes is both unnerving and thrilling, and not just because Christine had significantly more money than she did. Esther now has to grapple with the repercussions of her unexpected windfall, defaulting to rationalization in order to handle her new reality:
The money wasn’t hers, of course, but Christine no longer had any use for it and there was no written will that she knew of, and if there had been a will, it was possible that Christine would have bequeathed everything to Esther. Possible. Besides, she used some of it to pay the salaries of Chai and the cook, Oy, and there was the rent to pay as well. She didn’t like the feeling ofneedingthe money. It felt unrefined and crass to be hoarding cash under her bed, as if she were some common criminal. She’d always admired Christine’s nonchalance around money, her ease and casual acceptance of her own privilege, which she never flaunted. And so, it was disconcerting now to be so grasping and greedy.
Of course, Christine’s absence doesn’t go unnoticed. After returning to Thailand, Esther tells everyone that Christine decided to fly off to India on a lark, to do some soul-searching at a remote retreat. The locals, being used to the vagaries of Westerners, accept her story without question. Christine’s brother back in Canada, however, smells something fishy and contacts the local police. Soon, Esther is going to increasingly desperate lengths to cover her tracks, even as dedicated Thai police captain Net Wantok attempts to extract the truth from her tapestry of lies.
This mash-up of Patricia Highsmith’sThe Talented Mr. Ripleywith the Old Testament’sThe Book of Estheris certainly a fresh take on the subject of the seemingly successful sociopath.Days Of Feasting And Rejoicingworks better when it hews more closely to the former than the latter, though. While the Esther of this novel might be persuading herself that she’s helping others as the Biblical queen did, she’s really only looking out for herself. That said, it was easy to pick up on the themes of disguise common to both sources, as Esther recreates her appearance again and again in order to better hide from those seeking to discover the truth and to punish her for it – though she’s far less justified for doing it here than her namesake was in scripture.
The deep dive into our main character’s psyche is at once illuminating and unnerving. Esther simply doesn’t understand how others feel: whether that’s due to her inherent nature or to the painful lessons of her upbringing is left up to the reader to decide. Here, she’s studying strangers on the street in Pattaya, with the theme of disguise once more reappearing in another fashion:
From her balcony, Esther looked down on the city lights, and imagined the whole world descending through the layers of debauchery into the inferno of hell. On the nights when she could not sleep, she dressed and left the hotel and wandered the streets[.] She was surprised by how happy everyone appeared. Surely they must be pretending. There was much laughter and drinking and dancing and lots of hugs. Even the young girls who were flirting with the men seemed contented. She did not understand. She believed that all of this was a lie, that the surface was light and gladness but underneath there was a teeming self-disgust. How easily this kind of existence led to self-deception.
Despite the celebratory nature of the title, this is a book that reflects its protagonist’s deadening lack of joie de vivre. It’s a sombre study of the kind of person who might be driven to kill, that follows closely in the footsteps of Ms Highsmith’s masterpiece. I was actually grateful for Net’s viewpoint chapters, which punctuated Esther’s dissociative worldview with his much more reality-based problems and sorrows. The descriptions of Thailand, the weather, and especially the food, also brought memories of Southeast Asia back to me vividly, as someone who grew up in neighboring Malaysia.
Filed Under: book reviewcrime thrillersDavid BergenDoreen SheridanLiterary Fictionpsychological thrillersReadReviews
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Doreen Sheridan
Doreen Sheridan is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. She microblogs on Twitter @dvaleris.
