SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

In this alternative history set in 1952, debut author Guy Saville assumes that the negotiations of Lord Halifax, a British advocate of appeasement throughout the war, has led ultimately to détente between Great Britain and Germany. In 1943, the two countries, wanting to avoid war, had met at the Casablanca Conference and agreed to divide the African continent into two spheres of influence. The divisions would be primarily along the historical colonial lines: West Africa would remain largely under German rule, while much of East Africa would remain British. In a dramatic opening scene, a British assassin arrives in Kongo disguised as an SS surveyor, hoping to kill Walter Hochberg, the Governor General of Kongo. Cole stabs him to death, then escapes with some of his co-conspirators, only to discover later that Hochberg is somehow alive. Reading this novel is like reading a movie. The action is so graphic and so cinematic, that it is easy to imagine a hardcore action thriller, peopled with characters as impervious to pain as Superman. By the halfway point, Burton Cole and Patrick Whaler have been beaten, stabbed, slashed, smashed, and tortured to what would be the breaking point if these bigger-than-life men could be broken, but the chases and escapes continue. The characters on both sides are stereotypical, but Saville is an exciting new author with a suspenseful, dramatic style, but I’ll be hoping for more depth of character and more fully developed motivation to bring his future novels to life.

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Writing of Albanian life in Gjirokaster, the city of his birth, during World War II and its aftermath, Ismail Kadare creates a deceptive novel which looks, at first, as if it is going to be a simple morality tale. “Deceptive” is the operating word here, however. There is nothing simple about this novel at all, perhaps because Kadare, constantly under the gaze of Albania’s communist officials in his early years, always had to invent new ways to disguise what he really wanted to say without being censored. As a result, he began writing in a style akin to post-modernism, creating a literary soup which mixed fact and fiction, past and present, reality and dream, truth and myth, and life and death. By mixing up time periods, bringing ghosts to life, repeating symbols and images, and leaving open questions about the action of a novel, he was able to disguise the harsh truths of everyday life and the horrors of past history. That style continues in this novel from 2008 (newly translated by John Hodgson), despite the fact that Kadare was granted political asylum in France in 1990. Those who like their novels “neat” and unambiguous may find Kadare’s style especially difficult.

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Zachary Karabashliev creates a darkly humorous, entertaining, and compulsively readable novel so full of life that it bursts its way through several different genres. First, it is a love story, though in this case, it is a love story gone awry: the main character, also named Zack Karabashliev, has been living alone, miserably, at his home in San Diego for the past nine days, his wife having left him. It is also a story of the immigrant experience, in that Zack and his wife Stella met as students in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1988, and came to the United States as graduate students, working at several different kinds of jobs until they finally found financial, if not personal, success. The novel also becomes a quest, when Zack, in despair over the absence of Stella, decides to drive to New York to meet friends, traveling from California through the southwest and across the Mississippi and Midwest, stopping at small towns and bars along the way and observing how others live their lives. What makes this novel most unusual, however, is that it is also a well-developed metaphysical exploration of what it means to be alive, how we see our lives in the continuum of time, and where and whether happiness and an appreciation of beauty fit into the picture at all. Funny, poignant, and chock full of twists, turns, and surprises.

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Australian Patrick White’s genius for story-telling is on full display in this big,old-fashioned saga filled with intriguing characters exploring the difficult terrain of their inner lives. For a number of characters, all male, that personal inner journey is also part of a daring adventure they make into the interior of Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, an area previously unexplored by the white people who have recently discovered this continent. The female characters in Sydney during this same period have a far more difficult time exploring their inner natures, even in the unlikely event that they might be interested in doing so. Here, the women are very much a product of their upbringing in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. As the daughters and wives of successful merchants or entrepreneurs, their educations have been in the social graces far more than in academic learning as they ready themselves for their perceived roles in society as the wives of successful men and mothers of a new generation of Australian gentry. The novel is satisfying on every level, thematically, historically, and emotionally, and the characters are memorable. His descriptions are unparalleled, especially in the clever, often satiric presentations of some of the more unpleasant characters, introduced only briefly.

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Algerian author Amara Lakhous, now an Italian resident, pens a sly satire of an immigrant’s life in Italy, using the murder of a young man in the elevator of an apartment building adjacent to Piazza Vittorio as the catalyst through which he explores the hidden and not-so-hidden prejudices of Roman residents toward “outsiders.” The victim, Lorenzo Manfredini, also known as the Gladiator, drew nasty pictures, wrote obscenities, and urinated in the building’s elevator, earning the enmity of every resident. When the police investigate, each of the residents and merchants in the immediate vicinity tells his story, revealing hidden agendas and casual resentments against immigrants. Amedeo, a respected resident thought to be an Italian volunteer helping immigrants deal with Roman bureaucracy, is sought for the crime. No one has seen him since the murder. Lakhous cleverly creates twelve unique voices, with each person telling “the truth according to…” These separate voices alternate with “wails” from Amadeo, as he gives his own “take” in response to each statement. Amedeo is not, in fact, an Italian, though he speaks Italian like a native, and his running commentary on life in the apartment building and in Rome, as an immigrant sees it, points up the contrasts between what people say when they think he is Italian and what they say and do about their immigrant neighbors behind their backs.

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