Eight stories comprise this “novel in stories”, and they are some of Israeli author Amos Oz’s strongest and most intriguing stories. All the stories take place in Tel Ilan, a “pioneer village” already a hundred years old. The old village is changing, on its way to becoming a summer resort. The village has already become “gentrified,” with boutique wineries, art galleries, and stores selling cheese, honey, and olives. As the individual stories unfold, Oz stresses the changes in focus that are also taking place among the residents themselves. No longer unified by the common goals which in early days motivated and drove its residents to build the thriving state of Israel, most of the characters in this collection are at loose ends–lonely, if not alienated–and often unable to communicate or identify with others on the most basic level. The younger generation has a different vision of the future, and the present society or government is not compromising in its views. Though these stories are exciting to read, a great deal of fun, and decidedly apolitical, they nevertheless suggest that the author is not seeing much hope for optimism (or long-term compromise) within present Israeli society or its government. The power of this story collection, which is absolutely riveting, lingers long after the book is closed.
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In this old-fashioned, “once-upon-a-time-in-the-old-country” saga set in northern Italy, author Vittorio Massimo Manfredi introduces the Bruni family of farmers. Living in the rural hills outside of Bologna, Callisto and Clerice, parents of seven sons and two daughters, have worked the same land as generations of their ancestors. When World War I begins, the war changes the very heart of the nation, not just because of the hundreds of thousands of young men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, but because of the totality of the horrors for every person in the country. The years of Fascism form the second part of the novel’s structure, with each of the brothers and their friends responding differently to the rise of Mussolini and his dictatorship. The third part of the novel features the next generation of Bruni sons as they deal with the many factions within Italy during World War II. Various Resistance groups fight against the Fascist Republican Army, or its extreme wing, the paramilitary Black Brigades, but the Resistenza itself is fragmented. This novel has something for everyone, and that is both its joy and its limitation. The fact that there is not a moment of boredom in the entire novel attests to the author’s prodigious narrative abilities, but the thirty-year focus results in a novel that is diffuse and sometimes unfocused, and the conclusion itself peters out.
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Booker Prize winner Graham Swift has never shied away from literary challenges, and with this novel he tackles two issues which few other writers would even attempt, much less succeed in overcoming. This novel is almost totally about death in all its aspects, with no humor to leaven the heavy mood and the profound sadness which the novel ultimately evokes. And, making his subject and themes even more difficult to bring to life, he creates a main character and many peripheral characters who are inarticulate people who think in clichés and deal with the everyday challenges of their lives in “tried and true” fashion. The reader quickly becomes aware that these characters have few, if any, thoughts about the larger world, any perceived role they might have in it, and even how they might differ, in the grand scheme of life, from the animals on the farm to which they have devoted their lives. Still, Swift manages to create a novel which inspires the reader’s complete empathy with his limited main characters who stay true to their limited views of life and their limited expectations. His novel becomes, ultimately, a study of how an unreflective, uneducated everyman handles the disasters that fate and time deal out to him, over which he believes he has no control.
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Readers who enjoyed Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s first mystery to be translated into English, The Keeper of Lost Causes, which I found “as close to perfect as a mystery can be,” will probably become as captivated by this second novel as they were by the first. The Absent One, however, is somewhat different in its focus from the first novel, spending less time on establishing the character of Detective Carl Morck, who has been assigned to run Department Q of the Copenhagen Police Headquarters. Morck described in the previous novel as “lazy, surly, morose, always bitching, and [constantly] treating his colleagues like crap,” has experienced the trauma of having one partner killed while another, the gentle, six-foot, nine-inch giant Hardy has ended up paralyzed from the neck down in a fight from which Morck himself escaped serious injury. He has always blamed himself for the terrible outcome and has had little interest in doing much of anything at work, as a result. This case concerns a group of friends whose relationship goes back to prep school. With one major exception, all have become immensely successful – and wealthy. The only female of the group disappeared long ago. As Morck, Assad, and Rose investigate, the female, Kimmie, is tracked by the rest of the gang, fearful of what she might reveal.
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Posted in 9-2012 Reviews, Belgium, Biography, Democratic Republic of Congo, England, Exploration, Historical, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Literary, Peru, Social and Political Issues on Aug 16th, 2012
Mario Vargas Llosa opens this fictionalized biography of Roger Casement as Casement awaits a decision on his application for clemency from a death sentence. As he reconstructs Casement’s life as a reformer and advocate for benighted native populations being exploited by various countries and corporations, he returns again and again to Casement throughout the novel as he rethinks every aspect of his life. Casement concludes, in most cases, that he acted honorably – or tried to. An advocate for indigenous populations exploited by governments and corporations, Casement has revealed the horrors of the Congo under the rule of Leopold II, and of Amazonia at the turn of the century, when a Peruvian entrepreneur controls vast quantities of land over which he has total control. His rubber company has many London investors. Ultimately, Casement believes that the Irish who are being ruled by the British have similar problems to indigenous populations, and he acts against the British and must face the consequences.
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