While no one will ever say that this novel by McCabe is anything but dark, he has a much broader than usual canvas here, delving into the life of an entire community located on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. McCabe himself grew up (and still lives) in Clones, a town also on the border, and his vibrant descriptions of Cullymore in this novel obviously owe much to life as he has known it in Clones. An odd novel in some ways, Stray Sod Country chooses not to focus on a single main character, instead giving portraits of many people from the community as they deal with changes in society from 1958, when Laika the Russian space dog captured the imaginations of the townsfolk, through the turbulent 1970s, and up to the present. An early comic episode establishes the feeling of menace which permeates the book, affecting virtually every character, some of whom find their bodies taken over momentarily by a malevolent outside force which impels them to say and do things that they would never do on their own. Who the spirit is is not quite clear at the beginning, but he appears to be The Fetch, a kind of devil who, along with Nobodaddy (from William Blake), has played a role in community folklore and history whenever evil has occurred.
Read Full Post »
Eliza Peabody begins writing to her neighbor Joan, not a close friend, almost immediately after Joan leaves her husband Charles and disappears, leaving behind only a series of addresses around the world where she may be contacted by her family. Eliza takes it upon herself to write to Joan repeatedly, offering unsolicited advice, observations (unintentionally insulting) about Joan’s husband and children, and comments about her own marriage and beliefs about her role as a woman, which she knows that Joan does not share. Joan never answers. As Eliza goes about her daily life, including her hilarious attendance at a local literary group meeting, the author’s ability to create clever satire and wonderful observations about love, marriage, and friendship (and incidentally, the literary world) shines with the candor of one who has little patience with pretension and a person’s lack of self-awareness. Sly humor, clever concept, delicious satire.
Read Full Post »
Setting her novel in Cagliari, Sardinia, author Milena Agus creates a story which spans three generations, focusing on women from two families who are joined through marriage. An unnamed contemporary speaker feels particularly connected with her paternal grandmother, and as the speaker pieces together this woman’s life from what she herself recalls and from family lore, she creates a woman who not only searches earnestly for love but is absolutely determined to experience it in all its splendor, believing that it is “the principal thing in life.” The novel deals beautifully with primal events and universal themes—the need to belong, the importance of ties to a community, the yearning for true love, the vagaries of chance or fate, and the importance of memories. As the generations move forward from World War II to the present, each character must protect his/her memories against change in order to preserve a sense of selfhood. It is only the speaker who has the liberty to tinker with the past and/or the truth. Passion, in all its many forms, rules the lives of the characters here—and affects the reader, too.
Read Full Post »
“Before you go splashing paint, making a gigantic picture of Hannibal’s battles, you need to know how to draw a horse.” In this novel by Yishai Sarid, an unnamed speaker is clearly “drawing the horse” of Israeli society and establishing the setting in which the animosity between Arabs and Jews has festered, then exploded into a series of continuous battles. Working undercover for the Israeli secret service, the speaker approaches Daphna, an Israeli woman who now teaches writing. He is interested in befriending Daphna, whose long-time friendship with Hani, a seriously ill “man from Gaza,” might lead him to Hani’s son Yotam, regarded as an Arab terrorist and hiding from security, perhaps in another country. Eventually, the speaker must decide whether to allow his humanity to become more important than his lock-step adherence to the age-old belief in the inherent enmity of all “others.” In the process the reader comes to understand the agonizing tension between these two traditional foes and hope that at some point it will be possible for reason to become part of the equation of their lives.
Read Full Post »
This sensitive and memorable depiction of the establishment of Soviet Socialist Republics by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1939, with its bloodshed and violence, is filled with trenchant observations of real people behaving realistically during times of real crisis. In clear, unadorned prose, author Theodore Odrach depicts the lives of rural peasants with sensitivity and an awareness both of their independence and of their shared values, contrasting them with the mindless, bureaucratic officials who enjoy wielding power over human beings which have become mere ciphers to them. A sense of dark humor and irony, which may be the only thing that makes survival possible, distinguishes this novel from other novels of this period, and no reader will doubt that this book is written by a someone who has seen the atrocities unfold, experienced the injustices, empathized with his fellow citizens, and felt compelled to tell the world about the abuses. Odrach sets his story in Hlaby, in the Pinsk Marshes, an enormous marshland which extends into Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine, a place which is so remote that it cannot be reached except in the winter when the marsh is frozen. When the Bolsheviks arrive in 1939, they announce that henceforth this village will be part of the Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic.
Read Full Post »
