Recreating the events which led to the catastrophic battles for power which engulfed Liberia from 1980 – 1996, author Russell Banks shows how four different home-grown armies, each with their own goals, aggressively engaged in atrocities to ensure victory for their own side. Employing child soldiers, and killing and maiming anyone who stood in their way, including women and tiny children who simply had the misfortune to belong to the wrong, rural tribe, these armies massacred a quarter of a million people and displaced a million others. Forcing the American reader to pay more attention to the full scale of these horrors, Banks describes this turmoil through the eyes of a radical American anti-war activist named Hannah Musgrove who arrives in Liberia from Ghana in 1976 on a passport which identifies her as Dawn Carrington. Musgrove is on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for her activities as a member of the Weather Underground. Though she suffers from a maddening anomie as a character, one which often makes her fate irrelevant to the reader, the novel vividly depicts the brutal history of Liberia, from the seemingly lofty goals of its founding to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
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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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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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Winner of major literary awards throughout France, where author Caryl Ferey lives, Zulu is a powerful novel set in South Africa during its transition from the rule of apartheid under white Boers, to the rule of Africans, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). The transition is not exactly smooth, no matter how much the leadership may have hoped for it, and the transfer of power is not automatic. Three Cape Town police officers–one black and two white– are called upon to investigate the death of a young woman, found mutilated in the Botanical Gardens of Kirstenbosch, and soon after, the death of a second woman. Both women had high levels of an unusual drug in their systems, and it becomes clear to investigators that someone or a group of someones is using these victims, and others who soon turn up dead, as guinea pigs for some bizarre and sadistic medical experiment. As the action unfolds, the involvement of high levels of society become clear, and the complicated interactions among all facets of society both protect and threaten to reveal the complicity of important members of society.
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Booker Prize-winning author John Banville, writing as “Benjamin Black,” has just published his third novel featuring alcoholic pathologist Quirke (whose first name remains a mystery). Set in 1950s Dublin, each of these three mysteries has been character-based as much as plot-based, and this novel develops his repeating characters even further, often referring to action in previous novels. Quirke’s estranged daughter Phoebe has contacted him because her best friend, April Latimer, a junior doctor at the Hospital of the Holy Family, where Quirke is a pathologist, has not contacted any of her friends for two weeks, and Phoebe is convinced that something terrible has happened to her. Part of a group of five friends who meet regularly, April has suddenly vanished from all their lives–Phoebe, to whom she usually spoke once a day; Patrick Ojukwu, an attractive Nigerian doctor and prince, whom people suspect as being April’s lover; Isabel Galloway, an actress rehearsing for a major role in a play; and Jimmy Minor, a neurasthenic newspaper reporter whom no one quite trusts and who is looking for a big story. Of the three Quirke novels, this one is the most sophisticated in creating a plot which develops intrinsically from the novel’s characters.
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In this extraordinary debut novel, author Lucia Orth uses the five years she worked for a non-profit organization in Manila to provide information, background, sensitive description, and color, however dark, about life in Manila for all levels of society. With an eye for the “unbelievable” and an ear for the absurd, she recreates Manila society in the early 1980s, the last years of the reign of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Focusing on Trace Caldwell and his wife Rue, Americans working for US National Security interests in the Philippines during the Reagan years, the author takes a microscope, one with no “politically correct lens,” to examine US policy regarding this third world country. A surprising love story adds to the excitement of this plot.
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Iraqi schoolteacher Mustafa Ali Noman has spent his life avoiding Saddam Hussein’s military, the Baath Party, and controversy in general. Happily married and the father of a young son and daughter, he and his wife are, for the first time, in a position to build a house, which he inspects on weekends, now that the house is close to completion. After leaving school for an hour to pay the final bill to the contractor, Noman returns to his class, but he is arrested by two Security officials as soon as he returns, taken to prison for interrogation, and slapped around. It is 1979, and Noman knows that “sooner or later, everyone is liable to run afoul of the Saddam Hussein regime or be mistaken for someone who has. Being free only means one thing: imminent arrest.” War crimes take on a whole new meaning as Noman becomes the symbol of all those innocents who were arrested, tortured, and even executed by Saddam Hussein.
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Concerned because nearly all the history books about Indonesia begin with the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to Asia, thereby reflecting a western slant, a young teaching assistant in Jakarta in 1964 symbolizes the growing desire among Indonesians for a history of “their own.” Indonesia had been a Dutch colony for three and a half centuries, and had been occupied by the Japanese for much of World War II. By 1964, when this novel opens, resentment against westerners is peaking. The Dutch are being arrested without warning and forcibly “repatriated,” the Chinese and Russians are exerting significant influence, Communism has become so popular that the president and the army fear a coup, and violence has become a way of life. Very dramatic and often very exciting scenes from past and present occur in rapid succession, keeping the reader’s interest high. Over all, Tash Aw has created an absorbing and unusual novel about a time in which the future of Indonesia hangs in the balance, connected to the lives of the characters in invisible ways and presaging a history which no westerner wants to see.
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