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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In the first biography of his new Great Stars series, which also includes Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, and Bette Davis, author David Thomson examines the career of Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman (1915 – 1982), from her makeup-free screen test for David O. Selznick (1939) through Autumn Sonata (1978) made with Ingmar Bergman. Using the plots of her films as a framework for placing Bergman’s life and career into perspective, Thomson shows how each film drew on her life experience and increasing maturity to provide added depth to her characterizations. Thomson, a film critic, film historian, and author of Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films, is uniquely suited for this role, and as he presents each film and critiques Ingrid Bergman’s performances, the reader sees her growing on both the personal and professional levels. Remarkably, her reputation rests almost exclusively on the ten films she made between 1942 and 1949.
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Maaza Mengiste’s powerful debut novel, set in her home country of Ethiopia, brings to life the historical period from the death of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 through the communist revolution and the subsequent resistance movement to that revolution which followed shortly on its heels. The Emperor had failed to recognize and take action to mitigate the horrific famine which had cost two hundred thousand lives. A well-publicized 1974 television documentary, showing Ethiopians the graphic horrors of the country’s famine for the first time, was juxtaposed against films showing the excesses of palace functions, setting the country up for revolution. Initially planned by students who wanted the government to show more accountability and to allow for change, the revolution was soon pre-empted by the strong military, which had its own agenda. The novel is well constructed, with characters the reader comes to care about, but it is difficult to read. The violence, which increases in intensity during the novel’s three hundred pages, involves false arrests, beatings, rapes, psychological warfare, brutal tortures, and the mutilation of women and children.
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First published in France in 1985, The Prospector signaled a change in what had been the author’s style until then. Abandoning the experimental style he employed in the 1970s, with its elusive characters and almost plotless “stories,” author J. M. G. LeClezio 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 exploit the land and use it for commercial purposes, specifically the plantation owners who have created and cruelly oversee the sugarcane fields worked by underpaid local help.
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Posted in 1: 2009 Reviews, US Regional on Dec 16th, 2009
Once Publisher/Editor Christopher Kimball became committed to a low-fat cookbook which put flavor first, America’s Test Kitchen, which is associated with Cook’s Illustrated, assigned two dozen test cooks, editors, food scientists, tasters, and cookware specialists to the task. The Test Kitchen had the time, energy, creativity, and resources to try all possible combinations of cooking methods and lower fat ingredients, some of them surprising. Most of all, they had the determination to create low-fat recipes that tasted so good that home cooks would choose to use them again and again. A light recipe you make only once is not very helpful,” they agreed. The result is this landmark cookbook, one you really will use again and again. Test Kitchen cooks include the story of each recipe and how it was developed—a play-by-play diary full of drama, describing the low-fat ingredients and combinations they tried, their experiments with cooking methods, and their results, including the reasons for rejecting all possibilities until they came up with the final recipes published here. And these recipes are sensational!
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Set in the 1930s and published in 1945, Cairo Modern is, by turns, an ironic, satirical, farcical, and, ultimately, cynical morality tale which takes place in a country in which life’s most basic guiding principles are still undetermined. As the novel opens, four college students, all due to graduate that year, are arguing moral principles, one planning to live his life according to “the principles that God Almighty has decreed,” while others argue in favor of science as the new religion, materialism, social liberation, and even love as guiding principles. Among the students, Mahgub Abd al-Da’im is the poorest, living on a pittance, which is all his father and mother can provide him. His father, unable to work, has only enough money to survive for one month after Mahgub graduates on May, so finding a job is truly a matter of the whole family’s survival for Mahgub. When Mahgub contacts a former neighbor, Salim Al-Ikhshidi, for help, Al-Ikhshidi lays out the facts of life regarding government jobs like his own—certain people will help him in exchange for a flat fee or a portion of his salary over several years—unless he can find a wife among the daughters of ministers. Here Mahfouz pens a wicked satire of the lure of wealth, the arrogance of power, and the willingness to sacrifice principle for expediency.
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Hamilton is a writer of enormous gifts, and his sense of time, place, and voice bring backstreet London in the 1930s alive with sense impressions. At the same time, Hamilton creates characters the reader instinctively cares about, even when they are being foolish. Evoking emotions ranging from anger to pity, they are depicted with a kind of dark humor which prevents the action from becoming sentimental and the characters from appearing self-indulgent. Three overlapping novellas, thought to be semi-autobiographical, focus on three different characters associated with a pub called “The Midnight Bell,” providing a close look at ordinary people living at the margins of society and doing the best they can in often fraught circumstances.
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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 so skillfully the story of an unnamed narrator dealing with the pangs of adolescence that the reader can easily associate it with the author’s own childhood. 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. The novella illustrates a panoply of adolescent issues–the death of family members and the loss that represents, the changes which accompany death, an individual’s relationship with the past and history, the importance of memory, the growth of sexuality, and the extent to which other people’s perception of reality can color forever the reality itself for the participants in those same events. A coming-of-age classic.
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