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. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
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Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel soars to new heights, taking fiction itself to an exhilarating new level and blurring the lines between fiction and reality in new ways. Ostensibly the obsessive love story of Kemal Basmaci, age thirty, for a beautiful shop-girl named Fusun, eighteen, the novel explores much more than that, examining not only the physical passion which underlies their relationship and their lives, but also broader themes involving the connections between love and memory, between memory and reality, and between love and reality. Including metafictional elements in the telling of Kemal’s story, Pamuk himself participates in the story as both a fictional and a real character, adding another level to the story. In a unique tour de force, the author is now creating a (real) Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, located in the house in which Fusun and her fictional family “lived.” In essence, we have author Pamuk creating a fictional story about fictional people, whose real house and the objects in it (described fully in the fictional story) become a real physical memorial to the fictional characters in the love story which Kemal has “asked” Pamuk to write for him.
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Major Max Chadwick is the Information Officer for the British army on Malta during World War II. “Loyal Little Malta,” a British colony strategically located between Sicily and North Africa, has been bombarded non-stop by the Germans and Italians for many months. Though British submarines based on Malta have been interrupting German shipping in the Mediterranean since the war began, the British are almost helpless against the Axis air power. In April, 1941, “the Luftwaffe flew a staggering 9600 sorties against the island, almost double the number for March, which itself had shattered all previous records.” The British have three hardy biplanes–Faith, Hope, and Charity–which have been in the air around the clock in an effort to delude the Italians and Germans into thinking they have more planes than they really do. Virtually all their Spitfires and Hurricanes have been destroyed, many while still parked at the airport, and new planes have not arrived. Then several murders occur to set nerves even more on edge.
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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 regime or be mistaken for someone who has. Being free only means one thing: imminent arrest.” Though he is completely innocent, Noman spends the next year being moved from prison to prison, where he and those with him are tortured by some of the most painful methods ever devised. Told in an almost journalistic style, author Mahmoud Saeed, who himself was arrested and jailed for a year in 1963 and rearrested five more times after that–up to 1980–uses his personal observations and his own feelings to pay witness to the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
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Posted in 9b-2010 Reviews, Exploration, Panama on Jan 20th, 2011
Jenny Dunfree gets her first hint of some of the difficulties she will face during an ornithological research project in the San Blas Islands, off the coast of Panama, when the ticket agent at the airport refuses to sell her a one-way ticket. Insisting that she does not want to return the following day, Jenny is unable to convince anyone at the airport that she will stay on Sugatupu for an extended period of time. Her duties, funded by a foundation, are to study a nest of harpy eagles, a rare species, and keep notes on their behavior, their feeding habits, and any eaglets which may appear. Author Louise Young, herself an ecologist who began working in the San Blas islands in 1996, had intended this book to be a National Geographic-style travel piece in which she used the voice of an “armchair anthropologist,” but she says she eventually found that a fictionalized anthropological framework worked better. “Fiction became my tool to muscle stick-figure stereotypes into the array of personalities that inhabit all human communities,” she says.
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