Usually when I read a novel described as “controversial,” I find myself seeing both sides of the controversy and writing about both sides when I write a review. With this novel, however, I was so exhilarated at the author’s bold originality, his ability to juggle his characters’ vibrant and creative inner lives while also examining the depressing circumstances under which they lived, the sweeping historical scope which includes the entire twentieth century, and his total control of language with all its potential to amaze with its images and ideas, that this review will be, I hope, a celebration of one of the best and most innovative books I have read in a long time. Ulrich, the Bulgarian main character, is almost a hundred years old as the novel opens. Blind, impoverished (after all the failed economic experiments of the various governments in Bulgaria), and alone, he spends his days looking out a window from which he cannot see. His inner world, however, is lively and filled with events, real and imagined. What follows, is an extraordinary novel, however, controversial in its structure, which I found riveting. One of my favorites for the year.
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This sensitive and memorable depiction of the establishment of Soviet Socialist Republics by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1939, with its bloodshed and violence, is filled with trenchant observations of real people behaving realistically during times of real crisis. In clear, unadorned prose, author Theodore Odrach depicts the lives of rural peasants with sensitivity and an awareness both of their independence and of their shared values, contrasting them with the mindless, bureaucratic officials who enjoy wielding power over human beings which have become mere ciphers to them. A sense of dark humor and irony, which may be the only thing that makes survival possible, distinguishes this novel from other novels of this period, and no reader will doubt that this book is written by a someone who has seen the atrocities unfold, experienced the injustices, empathized with his fellow citizens, and felt compelled to tell the world about the abuses. Odrach sets his story in Hlaby, in the Pinsk Marshes, an enormous marshland which extends into Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine, a place which is so remote that it cannot be reached except in the winter when the marsh is frozen. When the Bolsheviks arrive in 1939, they announce that henceforth this village will be part of the Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic.
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Raised in Brazil, Japan, and the UK, Scudamore sets this novel in Sao Paulo, a city he obviously knows well, revealing his youthful enthusiasm for life, his sharp eye for injustice, and his (perhaps naive) hope for the future in a tale which follows the life of Ludo dos Santos from his childhood till about age twenty-seven. Ludo and his mother, a cook, had been plucked from Heliopolis, the largest favela (slum) in Sao Paulo, and established permanently at the weekend farm to which Zeno “Ze” Generoso, the fabulously wealthy owner of a chain of supermarkets, his British wife Rebecca, and his daughter Melissa travel on weekends. Telling Ludo’s story through flashbacks and foreshadowings of things to come in the future, Scudamore quickly establishes the atmosphere and the dramatic contrasts between the lives of the poor and those of the rich in a city with virtually no middle class. Caught between the world of the favela, which he does not remember, and the world of the rich, to which he feels he does not really belong, Ludo is unsure of his place in the world.
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Shortly after a taxi leaves the Miramax Hotel in Vienna for the airport, it veers off the autobahn, somersaults into a gully, and kills the man and woman passengers, both Albanian. The driver, seriously injured, is taken to the hospital in critical condition. A Dutch couple witnesses the accident, as does the driver of a Euromobil truck, and both give information to the Austrian police. The driver, when he is able to talk, tells investigators that when he looked into the rear view mirror, immediately before the accident, the couple were “trying to kiss,” a peculiar description. The dead man, Besfort Y., was an analyst for the Council of Europe on western Balkan affairs, and he had been a “thorn in the side of Yugoslavia” before its divisions–there is suspicion that he might have been responsible for the bombing of the country. Despite this, the accident is initially thought to be a routine traffic accident. It is not till several months later that the European Road Safety Institute, upon receiving a copy of the accident report, regards this as an “unusual” accident. Three months after that, the State of Serbia and Montenegro, which had had both victims under surveillance, begins to look into the accident, and their interest, in turn, sparks the interest of the Albanian Secret Service, an eventuality which makes the narrator wonder if this is a political murder after the fall of communism, or an example of residual “communist paranoia.”
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Earth and Ashes, a small novella, packs more feeling and more power into its few pages than most other books do in hundreds of pages, and few, if any, readers will emerge from it unscathed. Author Atiq Rahimi, an Afghan national now living in France, has recreated the Afghanistan he remembers when it was occupied by the Russians (1979 – 1989). He was seventeen at the time, and life has not improved much for the populace since then. Only the enemies have changed, and they now include many factions from within. Without preamble or any lengthy setting of the scene, the author introduces a main character who is faced with a family crisis from which he may never recover, then tells that story in plain, direct, and straightforward language which gains impact from its very simplicity. Earth and Ashes resembles some of the very best short stories by Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Andre DuBus, all of whom compress, compress, and then compress some more the images and details with which the reader comes to a full understanding of the author’s purpose.
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