Status Updates From Heat of Passion

"One thing I knew from the blood I inherited from my mother: the Portuguese don't forgive and forget. And they love a good blood feud...I wasn't the same person anymore. Angola had changed me. I didn't know what had happened to me in that ravaged land. Maybe working for a living changed a person."

'Four [women]?' 'You wouldn't begrudge a man two steaks would you?'...Who the hell was I to begrudge a starving man?"

A shame the books we don't want to are the ones running at an easy pace. This is why I'm not a businessman; too much run-around being done with communicative truth---don't tell it how it and provide clarity, find a nicer term for w/o being helpful. It shows on the business dealings and manner of communicating such here. Exploit or be exploited. Charity or health-care.

Got through the entire mere 20ish pages of part 5, POV Marni's (NGO aide worker and past relations with our protagonist) and her past/raising, seeing how much her mother suffered under the Mormon church's strictures of family and life expectations, become more and more mentally unstable. At first I misread it, husband's action for father's (strict, good Mormon vs backslid), as odd juxtaposition, but I caught myself.

Reflections on Mormon ceremonial and cultural tradition. That's new: Joseph Smith, inaugural prophet, was a Mason, and that Mormon rites can be cited as mimicing Masonic rites. How much can this be historically verified? Or was it a rhetorical device for the sake of the context of the story?

Hard hitting as Malaya all the same.

"Countries are like people, Marni thought. They develop personalities and emotional distress, just as individuals do. They can go schizo like Germany did under the Nazis, paranoid like Russia under Stalin. Angola she saw as a beaten child, whipped and starved, raped and tortured, until it no longer knew what a normal existence was. Traumatized, the whole country acted psychotic

OK, progress. I got through the entirety of part 4---no matter how brief at close to 70 pages---just tonight, which is very good progress for a distracted reader like me. But distracted reader I remain, as with this page count, I could've finished another book.

"Funny---in America or Europe, people would threaten to call the police. In Angola, the threat is that you'll be murdered."

" 'Cross, one thing you need to learn in life, people are consistent. Losers never make it big. And achievers succeed at anything they try. Running a diamond mine isn't any more complicated than winning a race in a sailboat...What my old man taught me was that people are consistent. A thief is a thief is his whole life, even if he only indulges once. And an honest man doesn't steal.'

I like this internal narration of Liberte apprising the situation with his first visit and tours of the mine, as well as his managers of the it, whose characters he's attempting to pry out as well as explain the behavior of. This is a literary element I greatly appreciated in some choice books I read a decade ago: to trace the logic and thought process.

'Stealing at work was something shared w/your lover, not wife.'

We're privy to the narration of Liberte, and we get to see his silent process in judgment of character---asking after the clues of cognitive dissonance and apparent discrepancies, and what those mean for his management and business. This could almost be something of an MBA study.

Misplaced and just found again after almost a couple of months!

"Like the country, Cross struck me as something of a war zone. Some guys wonder how much money you make when you meet them---others wonder how tough you are.
...
White paint on a wall proclaimed, SOCIALISMO O MUERTE! Socialism or death...But someone has crossed out part of it, leaving it to read, SO MUERTE! Only death."

Finished part III. Nice prompt leading to the past again with Joao meeting who would become his wife. And spice involving his wife and his daughter in becoming acquainted with the diamond mine heir.

Well, we meet the ladies we are first introduced with in warring affections for their man...

"Things were still a little blurry because I was still dizzy from the crash landing, but I could see what I had called living was just a series of isolated events rather than a whole performance. Like the title of a book I was supposed to read in college....my life had been all sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Clip back to Joao's early days. I like the historical aspect to the diamond trade: passing from the Mughals to the Persians to the Kurds; stolen from Hindu idols; carrying with them a trail of murder and betrayal.

"Both gems had histories of murder and intrigue, and, as human nature would have it, that just made them all the more desirable and valuable. A name and a history, even bad luck, increased a gem's value."

Got through part II---the context and the catastrophe set up for the rest of story, I guess. The characterization is interesting and for some reason---probably just the diamond business fortune background---reminds me of Jeffery Archer's from Kane and Abel. Lots of little, unimportant notes and quotes probably not worth sharing. The part where our dispossessed heir protagonist realizes he's friendless is relatable.

OK, so I guess after the interlude in detail and the intricacies of the diamond business, we get back to the male audience explicit raunchiness.

"Some women love speed. Something gets inside them, triggering more desire than a man's touch...But good sailors also know that every wind has a personality of its own. Like women, some come across and others are just prick-teasers...you have to adapt to the conditions.

A very different tone to the story in part II, in describing Win's childhood growing up learning all the intricacies of the diamond cutting business and his father's observant eye, a passage of which seems to be a foretaste hint of some of the novel's tension and suspense. The diamond cutting and examination business and history is related through the MC's father and uncle showing him the whole process, memorizing it

Part 1. Though this is the author's estate's posthumous completion of one of his unfinished manuscripts, call me naive, but I did not expect my first Harold Robbins to be so brusquely explicit. It's like a Jackie Collins novel geared toward men, so it'll be interesting comparison reading from both simultaneously. But there is fun prose otherwise, well-done characters & some cultural/social generational commentary!