Once again, Richard Powers has emerged with a new novel which reinvigorates the whole concept of the “novel of ideas.” As the novel opens, an unknown speaker, acting as a kind of narrative seer, describes Russell Stone’s first night as an adjunct professor at Mesquakie College of Art in Chicago. Russell’s class consists of the usual assortment of art students of various ages with various goals, and, through the information they learn from and about each other as they read their journal entries on successive class meetings, they soon become close. Thassadit Amzwar, a twenty-three-year-old Algerian Berber from Kabylie, however, quickly becomes the focus of the entire group for her perennial good humor and upbeat attitudes. At the same time that Thassa is charming and winning her classmates with an optimism that cannot be quenched, Thomas Kurton, a pure scientist studying the human genome is investigating the chemistry that underlies emotions and the genome which may be responsible for human happiness.
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Though Mario Alvarez, in Juan de Recacoechea’s novel American Visa, likes to think of himself as a hero created by one of the great writers of hard-boiled crime stories, he recognizes that, in reality, he is something of a romantic, “a lover of the impossible, a dreamer who never can choose his dream, an incomplete man.” He has come from Oruro to La Paz, Bolivia, to get a tourist visa for the United States, and he has only enough money for a week’s stay at the Hotel California, a seedy hotel in which his room is like “a cell for a Trappist monk.” Learning from an acquaintance that the owner of a travel agency can speed up the visa process for $800, since the agent knows people who work in the visa business, Mario is determined that somehow he will find the money to ensure that he gets his visa. The reader learns Mario’s family history and follows him as he wanders La Paz, a city which has changed dramatically in recent years with the arrival of half a million peasants, many of them Indian. “Local color” in this novel is dark and filled with misery, and as the action evolves and incorporates all levels of society, the sense of dramatic irony increases.
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Basing this fine novel about the settlement of Australia’s New South Wales on the real life and notebooks made by Lt. William Dawes from 1788 – 1790, author Kate Grenville subjects the empire-building attitudes of the Crown and its representatives to careful scrutiny and creates a novel filled with conflicts and well-developed themes. New South Wales was already inhabited by an aboriginal population which had its own language and culture when a thousand British officers and prisoners, both male and female, landed their eleven ships in Sydney Cove and took over land which had been the traditional homelands of the aborigines. Lt. Daniel Rooke, the main character, a stand-in for the real William Dawes, is an astronomer who sets up an observatory on a headland and works alone, soon befriending the aborigines who are so badly mistreated by his compatriots. Firmly grounding her narrative in the human feelings and human costs of all who were involved in this sad chapter of history, she tells an important story which questions the meaning of “justice,” especially when it is applied to alien cultures which see such justice as unadulterated cruelty.
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Set in 1988, twenty-five years after Algeria’s independence from France, the country is still suffering from political instability, corruption, and the residual rivalries and hatreds between those who supported French rule during the war and the FLN and other groups, socialist and otherwise, which fought against French rule. The internecine rivalries and hatreds among a multitude of these local groups, many of which shared the same general goals during the war, have divided families and continued into the next generation with even more bloodshed. The devastated economy at the end of the war has not been improved, people are living in poverty, religious fundamentalism is growing, the young have no future, and citizens everywhere are casting jaded eyes on those who reek of success—shady businessmen, corrupt politicians, and those who have achieved their wealth at the expense of their fellow citizens. In this newest installment of the Inspector Llob series, chronologically the “pre-quel” to the series, author Yasmina Khadra turns a spotlight on Algeria’s devastated country and its demoralized citizens.
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Acclaimed Belgian author Amelie Nothomb reminisces in this novel about her life in Japan in 1989. She was twenty-one that year, a recent college graduate seeking her emotional roots, and she had just returned to Japan, where she was born and lived with her diplomat parents for the first five years of her life. To earn some money while she studies business, she posts an advertisement offering language classes in French. She is immediately hired by Rinri, a twenty-year-old college student whose French is at the beginner level, despite several years of teaching by Japanese teachers. Before long, their teacher-student relationship becomes more intimate, and Amelie is learning more about Japanese culture than she ever expected.
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