Instinctive and natural as an actress, and impulsive and romantic as a person, Bergman conveyed sensuality at the same time that she conveyed innocence, and the public loved her. They saw her as Sister Mary Benedict in Bells of St. Mary’s and as Joan of Arc, never knowing much about her private life, and ignoring the fact that she left her young child and husband, Petter Lindstrom, at home in Sweden to come to the US to make movies. Her affairs with Gary Cooper and Victor Fleming were never reported. Alfred Hitchcock was unabashedly in love with her and was devastated, as was her public, when she became involved with Roberto Rossellini in 1950, while working on the film of Stromboli. Her flagrant affair, her pregnancy, and her out-of-wedlock child in 1950 became the subject of a speech on in the US Congress and were regarded as a complete betrayal of the public trust which had believed her image. “As it was, Ingrid Bergman was only really “Ingrid” from Casablanca [1942] to Under Capricorn [1949]—seven years,” in which she made ten hit films.
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Maaza Mengiste’s remarkable debut novel, set in her home country of Ethiopia in 1974, brings to life the historical period from the assassination of Emperor Haile Selassie through the communist revolution and the subsequent resistance movement which followed shortly on its heels. A well-publicized 1974 television documentary, showing the educated Ethiopian public the horrors of famine, in which 200,000 people died in the remote areas of their country, juxtaposed against films of the wasteful excesses of palace functions, set the country up for revolution. As all the characters gradually become drawn into the larger political conflicts of the country, the reader is shocked by the extreme cruelty, both physical and emotional, of whoever is in power. The violence, which increases in intensity over the course of three hundred pages, involves false arrests, beatings, rapes, psychological warfare, brutal tortures in an effort to extract sometimes non-existent information, and the mutilation of women and children–very difficult to read for the length of the novel.
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Nobel Prize winner J. M. G. Le Clezio here creates an adventure story which is also a coming-of-age story and an exploration of culture. Set in Mauritius, where his French family has deep roots and where he now has a home, the novel is unique—filled with lush descriptions and vibrant characters who appeal to the romantic in all of us while simultaneously evoking the violence and horror which mar their lives and make a mockery of “civilization.” The novel’s exotic setting inspires dreams of lost worlds, mysteries, and lives tied to nature and its beauties. At the same time, however, the author is exploring the damage wrought by foreigners whose sole purpose is to tame the land and use it for commercial purposes. The novel often resembles an allegory in that every phase of the action over thirty years teaches a particular lesson or emphasizes a theme, to which the author calls attention. Readers interested in becoming acquainted with Le Clezio’s writing may find this novel an ideal starting place.
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Set in the 1940s and published in 1945, Cairo Modern is, by turns, ironic, satirical, farcical, and, ultimately, cynical, as the author creates a morality tale which takes place in a country in which life’s most basic guiding principles are still undetermined. World War II has kept the British in Egypt as a foreign power, a weak Egyptian monarchy is under siege by reformers, and the army is growing. The plight of the poor is an urgent national problem. Among the four Cairo University students who open the novel, Mahgub Abd al-Da’im is the poorest, living on a pittance, which is all his father and mother can provide him. After graduation, however, a “friend” comes up with an unusual way for him to get a good job with the government.
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The last novella written by acclaimed Italian author Romano Bilenchi before his death in 1989, The Chill, written in 1982, is a coming-of-age story so universal that it could just as easily have been written in 1902 or 2002. Set in the mid-1920s, in the hill towns between Siena and Florence, the novella recreates the story of an unnamed narrator dealing with the pangs of adolescence so skillfully that the reader can easily associate it with the author’s own childhood—and though the setting is dramatically different from that of J. D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, or any of the other coming-of-age novels one might recall, the issues are similar, if not identical in many respects. With its focus on family history, death, friendship, love, betrayal, and revenge, this novella deals with the most important of life’s issues.
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