Cayetano Brule, an unemployed Cuban who is living in Valparaiso with his well-connected Chilean wife, escapes the tedium of a cocktail party one evening by disappearing into the library of the estate where the party is being held. Appropriating a wing chair, he begins to muse, perhaps even doze, until he hears footsteps behind him and meets Pablo Neruda who is also escaping. Neruda is dying, and he has a task for Cayetano – to locate Dr. Angel Bracamonte, whom he has not seen for thirty years. Though the doctor has been researching local plants used in native cancer treatments, Neruda wants to see him for other reasons, personal ones. Cayetano’s task takes him to Mexico, Cuba, East Germany, and Bolivia. While the search is on, author Roberto Ampuero also reveals the political situation in Chile from 1971 – 1973, with the main characters, including Neruda, being supporters of Marxist president Salvador Allende. The situation becomes tense as the two plots overlap. “Machismo” takes on new meaning as the book builds to its climax in revolution.
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Lysander Rief, the actor-son of famed Shakespearean actor Halifax Rief, is in Vienna, as the novel opens in August, 1913, seeking treatment for an embarrassing sexual problem. A close friend has suggested psychoanalysis, and Lysander has gone there for treatment. His doctor, a believer in “the fabulating function” of Bergson, not the methods of Freud, has told him that “If the everyday world, everyday reality is a fiction we create, then the same can be said of our past – the past is an aggregate of fictive realties we have already experienced – our memories.” His goal is nothing less than to make Lysander change the damaging “old fictions” into a unique blend – “a union, a fusing – of this individual imagination and reality.” What is real versus what merely seems real is obviously the primary theme here as Lysander deals with his problem, even as Europe deals with its problems and past histories in the lead-up to World War I. Additional themes of love and sex, and life and death as they overlap with the ideas of reality and fantasy enhance the main theme and bring it to life in new ways. However well drawn the themes may be (and the fiction vs. reality theme is extremely well done), the novel is memorable primarily for its good story, a trademark of author William Boyd throughout his long career. Providing plenty of well-developed background for his main characters, Boyd also leaves mysteries in their lives, developing these mysteries to add complexity to his plot as the novel progresses.
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Focusing on the attitudes and beliefs of four time periods, author Andrei Makine analyzes what it means to be human; whether an individual is important in his own right or as part of a community; what makes life worth living; what obligations, if any, an individual has toward other individuals; and how and why individuals expresses themselves in art, literature, or music. Main character Shutov’s favorite authors, Chekhov and Tolstoy, whom he often quotes, are from the early twentieth century, yet they have helped provide Shutov with the values he retains even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Georgy Lvovich, known as Volsky, a character with whom Shutov has a life-changing conversation in Parts III and IV has survived the Siege of Leningrad in the 1940s, then has had to deal with the aftermath of the war and the communist crackdowns and mass arrests in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. Shutov himself grew up in the mid-‘fifties but knows little about a life like Volsky’s, having left for France in early 1980 and lived a fairly anonymous life. His affair with young Lea, followed by a visit to St. Petersburg to a former flame, show him how much times have changed, and Shutov has failed to adapt to the times, not even acknowledging that adaptation might have some value. The novel, powerfully and passionately drawn, presents well developed themes about life, death, individuality, and the arts, and their significant changes during a century of historical and philosophical upheaval. Romantic and often heartbreaking.
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Focusing on Ceausescu’s last hundred days as ruler of Romania, author Patrick McGuinness recreates all the forces leading to the overthrow of the government, telling his story through the eyes of an unnamed twenty-one-year-old speaker from the UK. The speaker had applied for a foreign posting upon the death of his father and was given a job teaching English in Bucharest, one for which he had neither applied nor appeared for an interview. In Bucharest his mentor, Leo O’Heix, shows him “the Paris of the East,” which now more clearly resembles “a deserted funfair.” Leo has adapted to Romanian life completely, ignoring most of the other Brits there and carving out his own identity – as the biggest black-marketeer in Bucharest. Gradually, Bucharest comes to life through the speaker’s eyes. The city is being bulldozed at a rapid rate, and the old architectural monuments and historical buildings are being replaced with cheap, modern buildings. Shop signs appear on new buildings but have no shop behind them, people are hungry, and even the headstones in the cemeteries have disappeared. The speaker finds himself growing up as he makes choices or has them made for him, and he discovers that no one is who s/he seems to be. Subtle, often humorous, and profoundly ironic, this is a unique approach to a study of a city in the midst of evolution and then revolution and its aftermath, and none of the characters here will remain unchanged.
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Billed as a master of “Cuban noir,” José Latour presents a dark novel of gambling, the American mob, and violence in Havana in 1958, during the presidency of Fulgencio Batista, a friend of mob boss Meyer Lansky. Fidel Castro is making some waves politically with his appeal to the poor, but he is still in the provinces and unlikely to have much influence on Lansky’s gambling empire in the immediate future. Of far more importance to Lansky and his henchmen in Havana is the threat posed by Joe Bonnano and his “family” in New York, mobsters who are threatening to muscle in on a piece of Lansky’s gambling “pie” in Havana. Lansky is deeply involved with the Casino at the Capri Hotel, having made deals with many of the casino’s employees, inspectors, and supervisors. With his direct connection to President Batista, no one in Havana thinks the casino is a mere adjunct to the hotel – the opposite is very much the case. Now, during the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves, Lansky’s involvement in gambling extends way beyond the boundaries of the casino, and he expects to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars in bets on the games. Complex and exciting in its plotting and fully detailed in its depiction of 1958 Havana, this is a fine novel, bold and masculine in its presentation and full of the violence and uncertainty which presaged Castro’s arrival into Havana.
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