Esteemed novelist Jane Gardam follows up on the success of Old Filth, her highly successful 2005 novel about the life of Sir Edward Feathers, with the companion story of Sir Edward’s wife, Betty. Each novel benefits from the other, and together they are a stunning study of a marriage–not ideal, but “workable.” Beginning with Old Filth allows the reader to set the story and see the marriage from the point of view of Sir Edward. That novel is sophisticated and subtle, much like Sir Edward himself, with a sly sense of humor which allows the reader to feel part of the scene. Betty, someone we really see for the first time in this novel, is also a product of the same time, place, and class. The sophisticated style of Old Filth, appropriate for a novel about Edward, yields in this novel to a more down-to-earth and overtly romantic style, more typical of Elisabeth, with coincidence and romantic intervention playing a part. The often hilarious (and ironic) dialogue combines with a wry satiric sense to produce a conclusion which is everything that such a novel deserves.
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Once again, Richard Powers has emerged with a new novel which reinvigorates the whole concept of the “novel of ideas.” As the novel opens, an unknown speaker, acting as a kind of narrative seer, describes Russell Stone’s first night as an adjunct professor at Mesquakie College of Art in Chicago. Russell’s class consists of the usual assortment of art students of various ages with various goals, and, through the information they learn from and about each other as they read their journal entries on successive class meetings, they soon become close. Thassadit Amzwar, a twenty-three-year-old Algerian Berber from Kabylie, however, quickly becomes the focus of the entire group for her perennial good humor and upbeat attitudes. At the same time that Thassa is charming and winning her classmates with an optimism that cannot be quenched, Thomas Kurton, a pure scientist studying the human genome is investigating the chemistry that underlies emotions and the genome which may be responsible for human happiness.
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The Yacoubian Building is a true literary blockbuster—“the best-selling novel in the Middle East for two years and the inspiration for the biggest budget movie ever produced in Egypt,” according to National Geographic. American readers coming to this novel will find it a vibrant and descriptive primer illuminating the various forces in contemporary Egypt that affect its current political climate. It is also a thoughtful analysis of why certain forces are as influential as they are today—the movement for democracy, the growing Islamist counterculture, the power of the sheikhs and their differences in scriptural interpretation, the inbred culture of the military and the police, the student movements, and, most of all, the long-term influence of generations of poverty. Set in a ten-story building built in 1934 and located in downtown Cairo, the Yacoubian building was once the ultimate in luxury, but the Yacoubian Building has changed its character, as has the surrounding neighborhood, and it is now a microcosm of life in Egypt.
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A plaintive cry from an unnamed speaker, “age eleven years and two months,” reflects the angst of a child whose whole life has turned inside out through decisions he has made himself, decisions that seemed ideal when he made them but which, as is typical of childhood decisions, have brought consequences he never expected. Israeli author Amos Oz’s novella about childhood in 1947 Israel bursts the bounds of its setting and achieves universality through the wonderfully observed character of the child, his self-created predicaments, and his intelligent commentary about life and change. The feelings of the speaker toward adult authority, especially his father, will resonate with readers. This appears to be an experiment with the child’s point of view which Oz develops more fully in his other novel of childhood, A Panther in the Basement.
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Eleven years after the publication of Fugitive Pieces, her only other novel (and winner of the Orange Prize), Anne Michaels has published a monumental philosophical novel which is also exciting to read for its characters and their conflicts. Complex and fully integrated themes form the superstructure of the novel in which seemingly ordinary people deal with issues of life and death, love and death, the primacy of memory, the search for spiritual solace, and the integrity of man’s relationships with the earth and the water that makes the earth habitable. The first part deals with the excavation of Abu Simbel and its relocation above the cliffs when Lake Nasser was created. The second with the St. Lawrence Seaway and the dispossessions that caused as a new lake was formed, and the third with the rebuilding of Warsaw after World War II. Michaels’s talent as a poet is obvious in her gorgeous ruminations about the meaning of love and life, and in her evocative, unique imagery, but the beauty of the language is matched by the richness of the novel’s underlying concepts, which give depth and significance to this challenging and satisfying novel.
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