SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese author who now teaches French literature at UCLA, writes an often hilarious, non-stop narrative full of life and excitement, a narrative which, at the same time, is also mordant in its depictions of life. The main character, a Congolese alcoholic named Broken Glass, is memorializing the sad stories of his fellow patrons of a bar called Credit Gone West in the beachfront city of Pointe Noire in the Republic of Congo. A teacher, until he was accused of pedophilia for drunkenly baring his buttocks to his class, Broken Glass has traveled the world through books, loving the adventures of Tarzan, Tintin, and Santiago the fisherman, while he was a child, and then going on to study and enjoy the French classics. Ultimately he tells the “civilized” literary world that “Until the day your characters start to see how the rest of us earn our nightly crust, there’ll be no such thing as literature.”

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Described by the [London] Daily Telegraph as “a criminally neglected British author,” Patrick Hamilton wrote nine novels from the 1920s through the early 1950s, along with the famous dramas of ROPE and GASLIGHT, and though he earned the admiration of a host of famous authors, from Graham Greene and Doris Lessing to Nick Hornby, he never achieved the popular success he deserved, either in his own time or throughout the twentieth century. In this decade, however, virtually all his novels have been reprinted in both Europe and in the US, and he is finally beginning to be recognized for his astute observations about his times and for his insights into the minds of his characters. Set in 1943 at the Rosamund Tea Room, a boarding house to which some residents of London have moved to escape the Blitz in London, Hamilton lays bare the inner lives of his characters, not through interior monologues but through their behavior, their revealing conversations, and their interactions with others. (On my All-time Favorites List.)

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Thirty-five years after Henry Smart became one of the heroes of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, the most significant rebellion of the Irish against British rule in over a hundred years, Henry is in Hollywood, where he is an “IRA consultant” to director John Ford, a second-generation Irishman from Maine who plans to make a film about Henry’s life. The making of this film and its aftermath become a major focus of this final novel in the “The Last Round-Up” trilogy by Roddy Doyle, who had intended the trilogy to reflect Ireland’s history from its independence to the present day. This final novel covers eight decades as Henry Stark leaves Hollywood and returns to Ireland, attempting to live a normal life under Irish self-rule. Those who are unfamiliar with the preceding two novels will have a difficult time understanding who the characters are and what their backgrounds entail, and as the action moves back and forth in time, even someone familiar with the trilogy will sometimes be hard pressed to figure out what is happening.

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From the outset of this atmospheric, often nail-biting, story, the reader knows that s/he is in the hands of a mastercraftsman, a writer at the peak of her powers who is able to involve the reader in a story of escalating tension and heart-quickening suspense. After only one page, I was completely caught up in the action, holding on for dear life and “riding the dragon” as Miyabe introduced her unusual characters and their even more unusual problems. Shogo Kosaka, an investigative reporter at Arrow magazine, is driving through a typhoon late at night, nearly blinded by the rain, when he almost strikes a small, teenaged boy, huddled next to his bicycle on the side of the road. When the police suggest that Shogo and Shinji take refuge in a nearby all-night restaurant and small inn, Shogo takes their advice. He becomes unnerved when Shinji tells him the name of the cat belonging to a missing child, the name of the man at the front desk, and personal information about the desk clerk’s relationship with the waitress, things he should have no way of knowing. Later Shinji confides the truth–that he is different, “open,” and he can “scan” people to know what they are thinking.

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Over 2.5 million people in Scandinavia have seen this film, making it the first film in Scandinavian history ever to break the $100 million mark for European ticket sales, and US fans of Stieg Larsson’s bestseller of the same name may propel the film to similar records here. The R-rated film tells the story of Mikael Blomqvist, a disgraced journalist for Sweden’s Millenium magazine who accepts an invitation from an elderly businessman to investigate the disappearance of his niece Harriet, thirty-seven years ago. No trace of her has ever turned up, and the old man fears that a member of his family may have murdered her.

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