In this extraordinary memoir from 1932-1934, Kitty Crockett Robertson describes her life on the North Shore of Massachusetts during the Depression, a time when she, a Harvard graduate, became a hard-working apple farmer to save the family farm in Ipswich. Her physician father had died, and Kitty, wanting to keep the farm from being sold for development, which her Boston-based brothers favored, decided to give up her job working at the Harvard Library to try to make the orchard profitable enough to save the land. Working almost single-handedly, she spent the next two years doing all the dirty work, learning in the process that “The Depression was that time of leveling when she and her neighbors kept going on the strength they learned from each other.”
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Described as a “masterpiece of Korean fiction of the twentieth century” and as “one of the outstanding literary achievements during Korea’s colonial era,” Three Generations, written in 1931, has recently been translated into English for the first time. Published in Seoul as a newspaper serial from January through August of that year, author Yom Sang-seop appeals to his Korean audience with his vibrant characters and his depiction of real life, especially as lived by traditional, middle-class Koreans. The action shows, on the domestic level, the challenges to traditional ways of life and the sociopolitical conflicts of the era. The novel traces three generations of one family–the Jo family–consisting of the grandfather and family patriarch, his middle-aged son (Sang-hun, and his wife), and Sang-hun’s 23-year-old son Deok-gi (and his wife and baby), the character around whom most of the action revolves.
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With this stunning debut novel, John Wray leaps onto the literary stage fully mature, with a book so polished and assured that lovers of great writing will be celebrating this book for a long time. Wray shows no uncertainty. He has total control of his dramatic raw material–the rise of the Nazis in Austria, the Dollfuss Affair, and the Anschluss–and he never once stoops to sensationalism, never pushes any of those easy anti-Hitler buttons, never loses his characters in the intensity of the action, and never lets us forget that Hitler’s rise was possible because ordinary people allowed it to happen.
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This novel was WINNER of Italy’s Moravia Prize for Fiction in 2001: In 1967, an unnamed writer begins writing a long letter to an unknown recipient in Italy, a letter he knows will take weeks, if not months to conclude. The writer’s references to the Six Day War and to the fact that “here most of the people have no past and no one is surprised” quickly establish the letter writer’s home as Israel, but there are no clues about the person being addressed. Writing from Tel Aviv, the narrator reconstructs that time in his life “before Israel,” when he lived in Rome, and where his parents owned the Albergo della Magnolia, an elegant hotel. The speaker, whom we learn is Dino Carpi, has been only a “twice a year Jew,” on Yom Kippur and Passover, and he ignores the then-”unimportant” cultural differences to pursue his love of Sonia, the Catholic daughter of a Rome banker. His family is comfortable and well respected, and he is anxious to be accepted by her family, even denying his own culture toward that end. The love of Sonia and Dino is increasingly tested by political forces, and their families begin to exert ever more pressure on their relationship. Filled with wonderfully observed descriptions, this deliberately simple story is all the more powerful for its clarity and its unambiguous presentation of everyday life in pre-war Italy, a subject which has received little literary attention.
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In September, 1957, Joseba, the speaker who opens the novel, and his friend David Imaz are both eight years old when they introduce themselves to the new teacher at their Basque school in Obaba, near Guernica, Spain. Forty-two years later, Joseba is visiting David’s widow, not in Basque country, but at Stoneham Ranch in Three Rivers, California, where David has been raising thoroughbred horses for more than twenty-five years. Mary Ann has a mission for Joseba. She wants him to take one of the three copies of a book that David has written in Basque back to the library in Obaba. It is David’s life story, including his involvement in the history of his Basque village, and it reveals important discoveries he made about other people in the village, including some of his own family, who sided with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 39) and may have murdered some of their fellow citizens. Written by one of the few novelists still writing in the Basque language, The Accordionist’s Son is a novel of epic scope and broad social impact,
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