From September, 1829, until early 1831, the British government overseeing the rule of Tasmania as part of its Australian colony, engaged in establishing the shameful “Black Line,” part of its Black War to remove all blacks in Tasmania. Numerous clans of aborigines, who hunted and farmed “their” Tasmanian lands at will for uncounted generations learned to hate the whites who appropriated their lands at will, destroyed their farms and habitat, and killed them and their families to take over their traditional lands. Rohan Wilson, a Tasmanian himself, tells the brutal story of the Black Line in the northeast part of Tasmania, in which a white farmer, John Batman, and Manalargena, an aborigine leader, among others, engage in a genocide sanctioned by Colonial Governor George Arthur on behalf of the British crown. As Wilson presents the bloody story of this period, he is sensitive to the historical record, telling of events as they happened, while also paying attention to the incalculable effects of this war on the aborigine people, either through warfare or through the transporting of the few survivors of this war to mainland Australia. His main characters are real and are presented realistically, not as stereotypes of good and evil as they struggle to survive.
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Otto Steiner, an Austrian whose diary from July, 1939, to August, 1940, forms the basis of this novel, is not worried here about any imminent danger because of his Jewish descent. Few people even know of his Jewish background because he has never practiced any religion, and he is not really concerned much with politics. He is a “pariah,” however,” because he is dying of tuberculosis and is confined to a sanatorium, not allowed to mix with the general population. As author Raphael Jerusalmy develops Steiner’s story, he incorporates many details of Steiner’s daily life in the sanatorium, along with the variety of people who live and work there, all drawn together because of a terrible illness and not for political or religious reasons. Jerusalmy uses Steiner’s personal isolation and his pre-occupation with his terminal illness to provide a new slant on events in Austria, 1939 – 1940. By limiting Steiner’s “world” to the sanatorium, his illness, and his dedication to music, the author avoids repeating details (and clichés) so common to “Holocaust novels.” When Steiner is visited by his friend Hans, who, like Steiner, is a writer about music and a critic, he learns that Hans has been preparing the program for the next Festspiele, set to occur in Salzburg in late July, 1940. The audience will be primarily Nazi officials and military. The entire music program, usually heavily Mozart (an Austrian), has been changed into a propaganda tool by the German occupiers, and he wants Steiner to help him by writing the program notes. Steiner is galvanized by this news and finally realizes that “Mozart must be saved.”
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Drawing many many parallels between the action in this novel and that in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, author Atiq Rahimi focuses on the psychological state of mind of Rassoul, an Afghan student who studied for years in St. Petersburg, Russia, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, before returning to his home in Kabul, a city occupied by the Russians and their army from 1979 -1989. For Rassoul, whose very name suggests his similarities to Raskolnikov, Kabul in the 1980s bears no resemblance to the exciting, intellectual, and independent city it was a generation earlier. The city itself is now devastated, its educated citizens unable to work in any meaningful job, and no one is sure of who is really in charge – the Russians, the Muslim mujahideen, the Afghan communists (like his father), or those seeking independence from all these competing interests. As the book opens, Rassoul has just killed an old woman with an axe. Though decides to take only her cash, and nothing else, he is unable to pry the wad of bills out of the dead woman’s grip. When he hears someone calling her name, he escapes, not knowing who the “intruder” is, and blaming Dostoevsky for “stopping me from…killing a second woman, this one innocent…and becoming prey to my remorse, sinking into an abyss of guilt, [and] ending up sentenced to hard labour…”
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Posted in 7-2014 Reviews, Australia, Book Club Suggestions, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Psychological study, Social and Political Issues, Switzerland on Jan 4th, 2014
Winner of the prestigious Patrick White Award in her native Australia, Christina Stead (1902 – 1983), acclaimed in England and Australia, still remains unknown to most readers in the United States, and that’s a shame. Her 1973 novel The Little Hotel, given to me by a friend from England, reveals her deliciously twisted sense of humor, her pointed social satire, and her vividly depicted but often very sad characters, and I am now poring through Amazon’s Marketplace listings to find as many of her other sadly neglected novels as I can. In this novel, set in a small hotel on Lake Geneva in the immediate aftermath of World War I, Stead introduces an assortment of bizarre characters who live at the small Hotel Swiss-Touring for various lengths of time, some of them for a season, and a few as residents. Most of them are there because they cannot afford the more elegant accommodations to which they have been accustomed, though the twenty-six-year-old hotelkeeper, Selda Bonnard, and her slightly older husband Roger do their best to meet their guests’ needs. Touring artists associated with a local nightclub, and the road companies that play the casino, also occupy the hotel, residing on another floor above the guests. All of Stead’s characters are flawed, and as all are shown in intimate scenes in which they reveal themselves, at least to the reader, they inspire a kind of empathy within the reader – and even a kind of pervading sadness – which does not often happen within social satire, which is usually characterized by sterotypes.
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Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903 – 1989), a prolific author, published two hundred novels and over one hundred fifty novellas during his long career, most of them involving mysteries of some sort. Though he is the author of the Inspector Maigret series, hugely successful in the film versions and TV series in addition to the novels, he was particularly proud of his much more serious novels, his “roman durs,” psychological novels in which he reveals his interest in how ordinary people deal with the many shocks and betrayals of their personal lives. Act of Passion, published in 1947, is one of these romans durs, a novel about which critic Roger Ebert has asked, “Why is there no sense at the end [of the novel] that justice has been done, or any faith that it can be done?…There are questions for which there are no answers. Act of Passion is essentially a question posing as an answer.” Ebert is not being coy. The main character here, a physician named Charles Alavoine, admits from the outset that he is guilty of premeditated murder, but he has had a good relationship with this magistrate, who investigated his story and interviewed the crime’s witnesses over the course of six weeks, and he feels that this magistrate, who is assigned only to investigate the case and not to try it, will understand him if he can only know about his life. If he can understand him, then Alavoine believes he will understand why he committed murder. A NYReviewClassic from 1947.
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