The relationship between the sexes over time and across civilizations is a unifying theme of this broad historical novel and philosophical exploration of the role of the individual within his society. Opening in the court of Akbar the Great, head of the Mughal Empire, Salman Rushdie’s latest novel moves back and forth between Mughal India, the Florence of the Medicis, and the Turkish court of the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, his characters even look toward a new land, recently discovered and named by Amerigo Vespucci, a cousin of one of the main characters. Though the novel is complex in its structure and sometimes challenging with its swirling time frame, Rushdie keeps his tone relatively playful, filling the novel with the fantastic, even as he is also depicting violent battles, internecine intrigues, and bloodshed. As always, his prose style is breath-taking, and the questions he raises are thought-provoking.
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Sarah Carrier Chapman’s fictional recollections of her family’s involvement in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 are so psychologically and emotionally vibrant that readers will mourn the plight of the innocents who were hanged and empathize with their bereft families. At the same time they will also get a sense of some of the pressures that led to the acceptance of the accusations of witchcraft and the trials that led to the executions of nineteen women and one man. Seven more women died in prison awaiting trial. Telling the story obliquely from her own perspective as a nine-year-old living in Andover, not Salem Village, Sarah Carrier reveals the strained and seemingly cold relationships within her immediate family and, by contrast, the warm and emotional relationships within the family of her aunt, uncle, and cousins. Both families have secrets which are revealed in the course of the novel, but none of these secrets come close to explaining the madness which eventually spreads from Salem Village to the surrounding towns.
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With sales of over half a million copies in Europe, this clever novel may make Muriel Barbery as much of a literary phenomenon in the U.S. as she is there, despite the novel’s unusual philosophical focus. The first narrator, Renee Michel, is a fifty-four-year-old woman who has been working for twenty-seven years as concierge of a small Parisian apartment building. Describing herself as a “proletarian autodidact,” she explains that she grew up poor and had to quit school at age twelve to work in the fields, but throughout her life she has been studying philosophy secretly, insatiable in her quest for knowledge about who she is and how she fits into the grand scheme of life. Alternating with Renee’s thoughts about her life and the books she has been reading, are the musings of Paloma Josse, the twelve-year-old daughter of wealthy parents whose father is Minister of the Republic and whose mother, with a PhD in education, has an active professional life. Like Renee, Paloma pretends to be just average, carefully constructing her own façade so that she can fit in at school, though she has the intellectual level of a senior in college. She plans to kill herself on her birthday.
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In this powerful 1974 novella by Naguib Mafouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, a narrator stops in at the Karnak Café, an off-the-beaten-path café in Cairo run by Qurunfula, a former belly dancer, famous because she raised her craft to the level of true art. Recognizing her immediately, despite the passage of time since her prime, the narrator, a great admirer, stays and visits. He is soon seduced by the atmosphere in the café and by the charm of a small group of regulars–three old men, three young people, and the PR director of a company—who, along with the steward behind the bar, a waiter, and the bootblack, visit each other every day at the café and create their own urban “family” while responding to some key moments in contemporary Egyptian history. The three young people and their fates become the focus of the narrator when the young people inexplicably disappear for several months.
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With Friendly Fire, A. B. Yehoshua, one of Israel’s most honored contemporary novelists, creates a magnificent novel filled with real, flawed characters who come alive from the first page. The alternating narratives of Daniela Ya’ari, who is visiting her brother-in-law in Tanzania, and her husand Amotz Ya’ari, who remains behind in Tel Aviv, reveal their relationships to each other, their family, their culture, and ultimately their country. Daniela has been protected by Ya’ari (as he is usually identified) for her entire marriage, but she has traveled to Tanzania alone this time. Her older sister Shuli died two years before, while Shuli and her husband Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) were living in Tanzania, and Daniela, who has never really grieved, wants to come to terms with her death. Yirmi has suffered a double loss. He has lost not only Shuli but also their son Eyal, a soldier who was killed in the West Bank by “friendly fire,” and he refuses to return to Israel.
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