Throughout these five stories, the reader becomes hypnotized by the succession of Bolano’s images, by the lives he depicts (including his own in the two essays which follow), and by the metaphysical suggestions and possible symbols of his stories, despite the fact that Bolano does not make grand pronouncements or create a formal, organized, and ultimately hopeful view of life as other authors do. There is no coherence to our lives, he seems to say: chaos rules. Although artists of all kinds try to make some sense of life, Bolano suggests that their visions may not be accurate since they have no way of knowing or conveying the whole story, the big picture, the inner secrets of life. He himself avoids such suggestions of order in life. Vibrant and imaginative, Bolano’s stories seduce the reader into and coming back to them again and again looking for answers or explanations that often remain tantalizingly out of reach. Two essays at the end are particularly poignant and important for students of Bolano and lovers of literature. “Literature + Illness = Illness,” dedicated to “my friend the hepatologist, Dr. Victor Vargas,” explores the relationship between writing and the illness which would claim Bolano’s life at age fifty, soon after writing this. In “the Myths of Cthulhu,” a wonderful companion essay, he eventually concludes that “Writers today…are no longer young men of means unafraid to inveigh against the norms of respectable society, much less a bunch of misfits, but [instead] products of the middle and wofire eater imagerking classes determined topampas photo scale the Everest of respectability, hungry formara hare2 rpampas photoespectabilitypampas photopampas photo
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In this energetic, sometimes raucous, and always surprising novel, Le describes the lives of three other young Vietnamese women who are also living in France—now totally assimilated after twenty years of living there. Two sisters, known as Elder Cousin, or Potbelly, who is pregnant, and her younger sister, Long Legs, a “cutie” who is living with someone she hopes is a ticket to wealth, have decided to invite their estranged father, King Lear, to come from Saigon to Paris for a three-week visit. Potbelly will pay for the trip. The story, such as it is, is told primarily through Southpaw, but it switches, without warning, to other characters, sometimes in succeeding sentences. Since the author has chosen not to include any paragraphing (which leads to many pages of gray, margin-to-margin text), the reader has few visual clues regarding shifts in voice and changes in speakers, a challenge for the reader who must depend on context clues. Despite this, the story is relatively easy to follow at the beginning of the novel. As the scenes become a bit more complex, and the author conveys dream sequences, memories, and imagined events, however, the novel begins to resemble a long, symbolic poem rather than a novel.
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Arvid is fifty when the novel opens, and he, a long-time communist, has witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the demise of Communism, along with major changes in his own life and in the lives of his family members. He, like Chairman Mao, feels like cursing “the river of time,” seeing himself as “a man out of time,” one who has learned that “in the end [beautiful experiences] could be ground into dust.” The novel opens in the middle of a swirl of memories: Time has flashed back to 1989, and Arvid is thirty-seven, at a major crossroads in his life. Taking an oblique approach, author Per Petterson embeds Arvid’s story within his memories, conveying them in language which twists and turns in upon itself while slowly moving forward in strong, musical cadences. Vibrant imagery, some of it symbolic, connects past, distant past, and present, as Arvid’s story, propelled by his recollections of family relationships and his own life choices, evolves to show how he became the person he is. Throughout, however, Arvid returns to stories of his mother, with whom he has had a testy relationship. This is an extraordinary novel by one of Europe’s most esteemed authors.
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Described as “the greatest writer of Chile’s younger generation,” Alejandro Zambra won numerous prizes, including Chile’s National Critics’ Prize for his previous novella, Bonsai. Like that novella, The Private Life of Trees is also a small, carefully constructed work which achieves elegance through its careful pruning of unnecessary detail from the story at its heart. Zambra, like his alterego Julian, also an author, ties himself to the most mundane aspects of everyday life, which he then describes succinctly and, at times, lovingly. There are no spectacular scenes, no dramatic displays of emotion, and no real plot here, just the story of Julian, a university professor who teaches all week, tells the continuous story about the private lives of trees to his eight-year-old stepdaughter at bed-time, and on Sundays works on his novel, a long project which was once three hundred pages but which he has whittled down to a mere forty-seven pages. Filled with warmth and a sly sense of humor about writing, about life in Chile, and about his main character, Zambra creates a wonderful irony—it is almost impossible to remember that the main character is Julian and not Alejandro Zambra. Those who believe that “more is better” may be surprised at now much Zambra can reveal in the belief that “less is more.”
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Author Carmine Abate grew up in Carfizzi, a small Arberesh village in the toe of Italy, and he returns to that area again* in this novel, a warm and embracing story of a young man’s growing up and his search for his place in the world. MarArberesh wedding costumeco has a differentArberesh wedding costume life from that of boys in other parts of Italy. Like his father, he may also be destined to leave his home, one day, to spend long periods of time in the mines and fields of France earning enough money to support a family in Italy. Marco and his family are Arberesh, descendants of Albanians who emigrated to southern Italy from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries and who keep their ethnic ties, their language, and their culture alive within their small communities, which remain poor “while the world outside [gets] better. While the rest of Italy progresse[s].” As his father explains to the son who desperately misses him for the large part year that he is in France, “If I come back [home to stay], who’ll send us money so that Elisa can go to University? What are we going to eat if I come home: nails?” For Marco, however, “My father was a chronic source of pain under my skin.”
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Posted in 0: 2010 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Experimental, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Literary, 2010 reviews, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, US Regional on Jun 30th, 2010
Once you enter the world of Trevor Comerford, you will not emerge unscathed. Formerly employed in Dublin at the Central Remedial Clinic, Trevor was empathetic and anxious to help his students in his English classes there, creating firm bonds of friendship with them by making them laugh at his vulgarity, by refusing to recognize their significant physical challenges as limitations, and by taking them on day-trips which became shoplifting expeditions to the local shops. His departure from Dublin for a new life in New York City was made in full knowledge of the challenges he would have dealing with the chaos of that city’s street life, which, in many ways parallels the chaos in his own life. When he arrives in New York, he takes a job caring for a teenager who is near death from muscular dystrophy. In a profane and casual stream-of-consciousness style, Trevor reveals all his thoughts as they occur. By correlating these scattered thoughts, the reader soon becomes aware that Trevor is an exceptionally unreliable narrator, a young man with serious problems finding his place in the world. As he and Ed, his charge, negotiate their lives, the novel becomes a psychological study of two people learning how to channel anger into kindness.
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An unnamed writer is hired by a friend who works with the human rights office of the Catholic Church of an unnamed country to edit and proofread eleven hundred pages of testimony—“the memories of the hundreds of survivors of and witnesses to the massacres perpetrated in the throes of the so-called armed conflict between the army and the guerrillas.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the army declared that the indigenous Indians who had lived in remote Mayan villages for hundreds of years were anti-government leftists, and soldiers conducted widespread genocide wiping out hundreds of villages and killing over a hundred thousand people. Now, many years later, the human rights office at the cathedral plans to publish the survivors’ testimonies for the first time. The eleven hundred pages of testimony include stories of four hundred twenty-two massacres. The editor, whose stream-of-consciousness opinions and emotional reactions involve the reader from the outset, becomes a true character here, his sardonic humor vying for attention with his paranoia about being pursued by the army, his relentless sexual fantasies and attempted seductions, and his commentary about particularly memorable and poetic sentences that he finds in the testimonies of the uneducated survivors.
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Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese author who now teaches French literature at UCLA, writes an often hilarious, non-stop narrative full of life and excitement, which, at the same time is also mordant in its depictions of life, a story much like life itself–one never-ending narrative in which there are no periods, and in which the only words deserving of capital letters are names and places. Unlike the more “literary” stream of consciousness novels with which we are more familiar, this one is so unpretentious, so natural, and so conversational that the reader never has to stop to puzzle about where ideas begin and end or what the author might mean. The main character, Broken Glass, for all his differences from those who will read his story, is in many ways a universal character, a broken man whose life cannot be fixed, a man who muddles along and lives in his imagination. Slangy, funny, and filled with unique observations, Broken Glass’s story reveals much about his society and about himself.
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