Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

This is a wonderful novella, one of the best works of fiction I've read in a long time. It stars an elderly, deerstalker-wearing detective (who is solving perhaps his last case), a young Holocaust refugee (whose case it is), and a gnostic parrot (who knows the secret). The book's short and beautiful and comes to a crushing conclusion which, of course, I won't spoil. (I'd be interested in your take on it, though.) Chapter 10, written in the bird's voice, is a tour de force, but here's a taste of Chabon's glowing prose:

The old man stood, shrugging. With the consciousness of failure, a gray shadow seemed to steal over his senses as if, steady as a cloud, a great obstructing staellite were scudding across the face of the sun. Meaning drained from the world like light fleeing the operation of an eclipse. The vast body of experience and lore, of corollaries and observed results, of which he felt himself the master, was at a stroke rendered useless. The world around him was a page of alien text. A row of white cubes from which there escaped a mysterious drone of lamentation. A boy in a glowing miasma of threads, his staring face flat and edged with shadow as if cut from paper and pasted against the sky. A breeze drawing rippling portraits of emptiness in the pale green tips of the grass.