Author Alexander MacLeod has won literary prizes for his short stories, and the reaction to this collection, with two shortlisted nominations for the Giller and Commonwealth Book Prizes, suggest more prizes will be coming. His stories feel, at first, as if the characters are ordinary people leading ordinary lives, but the author is so creative and so in control of every aspect of these stories, that he is always able to take them in new directions, full of surprises and irony. His work is filled with unique and heart-breaking insights, presented with empathy, as his characters realize their limitations and recognize a pathway forward, a pathway often unexpected, based on the characters’ decisions and recognitions as shown within these seemingly simple but powerful and often unusual stories.
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Posted in 08-2022 Reviews, Experimental, Historical, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Psychological study, Social and Political Issues, Uruguay on May 8th, 2022
This unusual novel focusing on a talking frog and his help for a tormented man allows author Carolina De Robertis to explore philosophical ideas of governance and individual responsibility. Here author Carolina De Robertis describes the difficult inner world of a member of Uruguay’s Marxist Tupamaros during his fourteen year imprisonment in a hole deep underground during the 1970s and 1980s. This is a man who has been wounded six times during various escape attempts from confinement, who fears for his own mental health during his torture and imprisonment, but who is ultimately elected Uruguay’s President from 2010 – 2015. Author Carolina de Robertis’s intense and involving story, based loosely on the traumatic life and career of the real President, José Mujica, during that period, focuses on the man’s involvement in the political changes in the early twenty-first century. Though it is filled with the horrors of revolutionary warfare and its personal effects on the participants, the resulting fictionalized biography is often very funny, filled with ironies.
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