Aware that nearly all the history books about Indonesia begin with the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to Asia, thereby reflecting a western slant, a young teaching assistant in Jakarta in 1964 reflects the growing desire among Indonesians for a history of “their own.” Indonesia had been a Dutch colony for three and a half centuries, and had been occupied by the Japanese for much of World War II. Though long-time leader Dewi Sukarno declared the country’s independence–and became President–after the defeat of the Japanese, the Dutch remained a dominating presence in the country’s economy, to their own benefit far more than the Indonesians’. By 1964, when this novel opens, resentment against westerners is peaking. The Dutch are being arrested without warning and forcibly “repatriated,” the Chinese and Russians are exerting significant influence, Communism has become so popular that the president and the army fear a coup, and violence has become a way of life. “The police can kill anyone nowadays,” a teacher remarks, “and we just say, ‘Hey, there’s a dead body,’ without really knowing, or caring, who it was.”
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In this brutally satiric little novella, the “downstairs” servants of the aristocratic Klopstocks, living in Switzerland, have their lives all planned out for the immediate future. They will not be spending another day with the Klopstocks—at least not a day in which the Klopstocks are alive, and they are breathless with anticipation. Lister, who manages the household, knows that both the Baron and the Baroness will be meeting in the library that evening with Victor Passerat, “Mister Fairlocks,” someone with whom the Baroness is passionately in love but who is himself passionately in love with the Baron. Posting a “Not to Disturb” sign on the door, the triangle of lovers meets, determined to settle their issues, but these can be settled only one way—with gunshots. “The eternal triangle has come full circle,” one servant observes.
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Lowboy is the powerful and moving story of a paranoid schizophrenic teenager who, hospitalized for almost two years, goes off his meds and escapes back to New York City’s subways in an effort to spread his “message” and prevent global warming from destroying life as we have known it. Ali Lateef, a New York City detective whose area of expertise is “Special Category Missing,” is hoping that Will’s mother, “Miss Heller,” sometimes known as Violet, can provide enough information to allow him to find Will in the seven or eight hours before his lack of medication pushes him into violence, but she, too, has her problems. Highly praised for both his imagination and his careful structuring, John Wray is one of the most exciting young novelists in the country today. (On my Favorites List for 2009)
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Naturalist/writer Gerald Durrell, with a writer’s eye for the odd detail, a great sense of humor and absurdity, and an unquenchable enthusiasm for finding unusual animals and telling stories about them, recounts his third animal-collecting trip to the Cameroons in this 1960 memoir. Recently reprinted by Penguin Books, the book is a classic of nature-writing, filled with amusing anecdotes about the animals, the discoveries made about them, and, especially, about the people whose interactions with them often led to hilarious escapades. Durrell is a lively writer with a commitment to conservation and a tremendous sense of fun. Giving the flavor of the whole trip, not just the academic details, he provides a sense of realism at the same time that he displays his own irrepressible humor, much of it directed at himself. Durrell’s zoo on Jersey has now celebrated its 50th anniversary.
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Author Danticat introduces her story of Haitian immigrants and the lives they have escaped in Haiti with the story of Ka, a young sculptress whose parents think of her as a “good angel,” her name also associated symbolically with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ka is in Florida with her father to deliver a powerfully rendered sculpture to a Haitian TV actress. Ka’s father, who served as the model for the sculpture, however, destroys it, confessing tearfully that he is not the man his daughter has always believed him to be, that he was a “hunter,” he says, and “not the prey,” one of the “dew breakers,” or torturers, who as part of the Tonton Macoutes, committed political assassinations and inflicted unimaginable tortures on orders of dictators Francois Duvalier and his son “Baby Doc” between 1957-86. In a series of episodes which resemble short stories more than a novel in form, Danticat illuminates the lives of approximately a dozen Haitian immigrants as they remember this traumatic period “back home.”
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