Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy, of which this novel is the second in the series, incorporates four novels set in four different time periods, illustrating Mishima’s extremely conservative attitudes toward the changes in Japan from the 1912 to 1970. Born in 1925, Mishima had, throughout his life, mourned the loss of samurai ideals, including reverence for the Emperor. As the novel opens, Shigekuni Honda, a main character in Spring Snow, the first novel in the series, is now a judge in the Osaka Court of Appeals. He has reached the age of thirty-eight, a man leading a quiet life of reason who believes that his youth ended with the death of his friend Kiyoaki Matsugae, eighteen years ago. When he is asked to substitute for his Chief Justice at a kendo exhibition in Nara, some distance away, he accepts. The star of the exhibition is young Isao Iinuma, the nineteen-year-old son of Kiyoaki’s tutor during their childhood. Honda, who has always grounded his life in reason, soon has reason to believe that Isao is the confident samurai reincarnation of Kiyoaki, who was a sensitive man of passion and emotion a generation ago. As he follows Isao’s life, he gives an ironic blueprint for his own life in 1970.
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Pulitzer Prize winning author Jeffrey Eugenides creates a story, set in the 1980s, in which the entire novel incorporates and illustrates the marriage plot, with three main characters all pursuing the goal of marriage. These young students at Brown University are all conscientious, and all have real academic interests, but they also follow their libidos into sometimes new directions with the goal of experiencing a “full” and “satisfying” life. Madeleine Hanna, the English major of the quotation above has just discovered semiotics and the excitement of this esoteric academic subject; Mitchell Grammaticus, who has loved and fantasized about Madeleine since he first met her, is fascinated by religion and philosophy; and Leonard Bankhead, with whom Madeleine is passionately in love, wants most to “become an adjective,” like Joycean, Shakespearean, Faulknerian, Chekhovian or Tolstoyan. Eugenides creates a novel which is fully successful in developing these characters and their interactions, and when, at the end of this year, they separately arrive in New York City and find themselves at the same party, they are quite different from who they were just a year ago. As the party progresses, the reader, too, having had the opportunity to get to know them, their family backgrounds, and their goals from their earlier lives, comes to new appreciation of who they all are. Firmly grounded in the reality of the individual lives of students in the 1980s, the novel concerns itself with the self-absorbed and individual lives of the characters, often at the expense of universal insights.
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Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo’s latest novel is a stand-alone, not part of his Harry Hole series, and it provides yet another example of Nesbo’s immense talent as a story-teller. In this novel, however, Nesbo lets his darkest, most deadpan humor loose in a wild but carefully constructed mystery in which the several sections of the novel parallel textbook recommendations regarding interviewing and hiring candidates for executive positions – seemingly a straightforward process. Nesbo turns the whole thing all on its head, however. Nesbo’s “headhunter,” Roger Brown, though much in demand both by individuals looking for new opportunities and by corporations seeking the perfect new president, is a loathsome human being, but he is as close to a “hero” as one gets in this page-turner. He has powerful enemies who are at least as clever, at least as opportunistic, and certainly as amoral at he is. By limiting his focus to these characters, however, Nesbo frees himself from the limitations of a police procedural and can take his story in new directions, omitting the law entirely from almost all of the action, and creating a plot in which Roger Brown and his enemies essentially play a game in which the “king of the chessboard” is the person who survives.
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Libyan author Hisham Matar draws on his own life to provide insights into this story of a son’s yearning for the father he loved but who vanished when he was fourteen. In real life, Matar’s father Jaballa, once a member of the Libyan delegation to the United Nations and, after Muammar Gaddafi’s coup, a political dissident, went into exile in Egypt in 1979, when his son was nine. He was kidnapped in 1990, when his son was twenty, his fate unknown to this day. This fraught background provides the structure of Matar’s novel, the story of Nuri el-Alfi, a young boy whose mother dies rather mysteriously when he is nine. When Nuri is fourteen, his father and his new wife Mona meet Nuri in Switzerland at the Montreux Palace Hotel, and it is on this vacation that his father is abducted. The Swiss police have no leads. As the author continues Nuri’s story from that moment up to age twenty-four, the bare bones outline of his life at the time of the kidnapping gradually broadens and gets filled in, and his life as an exile, without family or country, takes shape. Through flashbacks and reminiscences, the reader also comes to know more about Nuri’s younger life and his father’s role as a dissident in exile.
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The acolyte Tancredo, the tormented main character of this wicked satire by Colombian author Evelio Rosero, has a terrible fear of becoming an animal, especially on Thursdays. A young hunchback from Bogota, Tancredo has been living in the rectory of the church since childhood, when he was taken in by Fr. Juan Pablo Almida and given an education with the idea that he would one day enter the church. The biggest problem for Tancredo, however, is that he is worked so hard he has little time for anything else, especially since he has been assigned the task of running the Community Meals Program, Monday through Friday, each day serving a different congregation. The arrival of Fr. San Jose Matamoros del Palacio and the departure of Fr. Almida and his sacristan (Tancredo’s superiors) for a meeting with Don Justiniano, the church’s patron, set the stage for the novella’s turning point, both hilarious and horror-filled. Fr. Matamoros is totally different from Almida and Machado, singing the Mass and inspiring the congregation with his passion. When Fr. Matamoros concludes the service, he is persuaded to stay the night in the presbytery, and when all the electricity goes out, those who have worked much of their lives in and for the church make their confessions, suggesting indirectly some of the sins of Fr. Almida and Celeste Machado. A terrific satire!
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