When the Author, the otherwise unnamed main character of Amos Oz’s newest work, arrives at a literary evening at the Shunia Shor Community Center in Tel Aviv as the special guest, he expects the usual sorts of questions from his audience. What his audience never suspects is that the author, while answering their sometimes intrusive questions about himself, is secretly inventing names and imaginary lives for them, connecting them to each other, and even continuing his musings about them well into the night after the meeting is concluded. Approximately thirty-five characters, either in the audience or peripheral to the stories the Author is creating, dominate the Author’s interior life, even as the real humans behind these stories are talking with him about his work. When the audience leaves the community center, they are unaware of their continuing lives in the Author’s imagination. These lives become this novel.
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Winner of the UK’s Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, the Orange Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Andrea Levy’s Small Island has just been released in the US, where it may win as many readers as it has “across the pond.” Set in London in 1948, it focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own “small island,” move to England, the Mother Country, for which the men have fought during World War II. Their reception is not the warm embrace that they have hoped for, nor are the opportunities for success as plentiful as they have dreamed. Alternating among four points of view, Levy involves the reader in their interconnected stories, which she tells with an honesty and vibrancy that make the tragicomedy of their lives both realistic and emotionally involving. (One of my Favorites for 2005)
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The land of Mesopotamia, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, once boasted the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, among the Seven Wonders of the World. Highly developed ancient civilizations competed for power there, leaving behind sites of immense archaeological importance as they defeated each other and formed new civilizations. In the modern era, Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq, fell under a succession of foreign rulers, and by 1914, when this novel opens, it was ruled from Constantinople by the weakened Ottoman Empire. Virtually every country in Europe is on site, vying for oil. The Germans are building a railroad from Basra through Baghdad, an American from Standard Oil is there, the French are trying to gain a foothold so that the railroad will not take shipping business from them, and the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian Empire may help finance the railroad in exchange for a piece of the action. Trying to ignore most of this turmoil is John Somerville, a thirty-five-year-old archaeologist who has been working an ancient site near Baghdad. In the nonstop action, no one can trust anyone else. Unsworth creates a vibrant picture of a tumultuous time and place, endowing what might have been an exotic tale of archaeological discovery with a broader thematic scope.
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Jerome Battle, who describes himself as an “average American guido,” has managed to live most of his sixty years “above it all,” never quite engaging with those around him or becoming truly intimate. On weekends he is aloft in his small plane, his “private box seat in the world and completely outside of it, too,” flying alone around Long Island. Unfortunately, Jerry also lives his personal life the way he flies his plane, as if he’s seeing it from a great distance. Slowly, inexorably, the author develops the family’s crises until they finally force themselves onto Jerry’s personal radar screen. A couple of emergencies, he finally realizes, “are new instructions from above (or below or beyond), telling me in no uncertain terms that I cannot stay at altitude much longer, even though I have fuel to burn, that I cannot keep marking this middle distance.”
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Just beside the cash registers of a large mall bookstore this week was an entire table of books, arranged attractively for Mother’s Day—all were “Jane Austen books.” Of the fifteen or so books, however, only one of these was actually a book written by Jane Austen. The others, all presumably “books Mother would love,” included: Jane Austen Ruined My Life by Beth Pattillo, What Would Jane Austen Do? by Laurie Brown, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, and the unforgettable Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by “Jane Austen” and Seth Grahame-Smith. Five or six other books focused on Mr. Darcy in various new adventures. Author Claire Harman tells how Jane achieved such fame.
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