Set in Zimbabwe from the early 1980s through the late 1990s, Irene Sabatini’s debut novel focuses on the racial conflicts which underlie the history of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, which was under British rule for a hundred years before being granted independence in 1980. Using the love story of a white Rhodesian man and a mixed race, “colored” woman, over the course of almost twenty years, Sabatini traces the country’s deterioration economically, culturally, and socially, under President Robert “Bob” Mugabe, who is still president of Zimbabwe after more than thirty years. Ultimately, Sabatini creates a vibrant novel in which she explores the downward spiral of Zimbabwe over the past nearly-thirty years. The corruption, the intolerance, the sense of entitlement by soldiers and militias who have fought against the white establishment, the economic hardships, the violence of the army and police against those who oppose those currently in power, and the complications created by South Africa and other African countries who may fear the possible effects of a free Zimbabwe are all explored in detail, especially as they affect Lindiwe, Ian, and their friends.
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In the forty-two stories included in A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense by Anton Chekhov, the author expresses both his ironic humor and his dark assessment of humanity. Though he is better known now for his playwriting skills, Chekhov was a prodigious writer of stories from 1880, when he was a twenty-year-old medical student, until 1890, and it was these stories that kept his family fed and clothed for most of that decade. By 1884, Chekhov, still writing stories, was a practicing physician traveling the countryside and not charging the poor for his services, and much of the social breadth we see in his stories came about directly as a result of this close contact with all levels of society. The conflicts in his stories, sharply realized, show the chasm between rich and poor, and educated and uneducated, and Chekhov, almost without exception, depicts the poor and uneducated as having more integrity, and less tempted by “the devil.” It is the reader’s recognition that Chekhov believes what s/he believes that makes Chekhov’s work so memorable and significant—and which makes his irony work.
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Set in various countries in West Africa, with one sojourn to Ethiopia, Susi Wyss’s debut “novel in stories” takes advantage of the more than twenty years that she lived in Africa—three years as a child in the Ivory Coast, two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic, and fifteen years managing health care programs throughout different countries in West Africa. Her sensitivity to place, culture, and people, particularly those who have left their homes for lives elsewhere, and her sense of honesty and forthrightness give a particular poignancy to the lives of the five women who are the subjects of the stories here. Three of these overlapping stories are set in Ghana, two in the United States, and one each in Malawi, the Central African Republic, and Ethiopia. The novel has much charm, less plot, with characters who feel real and with whom the reader will identify. The places Wyss “visits” are both intriguing and realistic, even including the unexpected violence that appears at some points. The novel is full of easy and obvious cultural conflicts and contrasts, with themes that often appear as moralizing at the conclusions to the stories.
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In The Snowman, the latest of five Nesbo novels to be translated into English, is a complete surprise with its element of horror, but it may soon become his most popular novel here in the U.S., a breakthrough novel which may finally put to rest the misperception that the Norwegian Nesbo, with a total of sixteen award-winning novels, is some kind of “successor” to the Swedish Stieg Larsson. A series of disappearances and/or murders, all involving a snowman on the site, challenge Harry Hole and his men as they try to find a serial killer who began his killings in 1992 and has continued to 2004, as the novel opens. The novel is detailed and intelligent, and will keep even the most jaded mystery lover intrigued and wanting to see how it is all resolved. When the last little piece falls into place at the end, every detail at every point in the novel suddenly all makes sense—and provides a satisfying sense of finality to this challenging case. A non-stop thriller that may very well keep you up reading till the wee hours—and great fun!
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Author Dieter Schlesak was only ten years old when the Russians invaded his town of Sighisoara in German Transylvania on August 1944, and he has been struggling to understand the Holocaust and how it happened ever since. Though he tried to write a novel about it once before, he says in a statement written in February, 2011, that he “threw 450 pages of an ‘author’s text’ into the wastebasket, because I, as an author, have absolutely no mandate, and could never, even stylistically or linguistically, approach such horror.” Schlesak, however, succeeds in creating a monumental analysis of Auschwitz, almost paralyzing in the completeness of its horror on every possible level, by using a “collective narrator,” a character he calls “Adam Salmen.” Adam as narrator is a Sondercommando of the Jewish “special action squad” under the Germans, a man whose agonizing job it is to report on the deaths in the gas chambers and the tallies of the cremation ovens. Photos, and much of Adam’s commentary, reflect the human side of the Holocaust, smaller pictures of real people performing real actions, rather than the overwhelming horrors of mass graves. Powerful and important.
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