Recreating the traumas that Third World citizens face every day, Djaout offers vivid pictures of their complex but fragile lives. Here, in an unnamed country, presumably Algeria, government bureaucrats are concerned only with protecting themselves, their jobs, and their kickbacks, their fear of change so ingrained that any hope of modernization and real progress is squelched. The average citizen tries to remain anonymous, making do in a society which does not reward excellence. As one bureaucrat explains, “…the words ‘creation’ and ‘invention’ are sometimes condemned because they are perceived as heresy, a questioning of what exists already…of the faith and the prevailing order.”
Read Full Post »
It is profoundly affecting to read a book which is not in its final form because its Algerian author was assassinated in 1993, at age thirty-nine. Doubly moving for the reader is this book’s warning cry against mindless practitioners of fundamentalist oppression, the very people responsible for the author’s death in Algeria. Djaout clearly knew he was in danger, knew why he was in danger, and knew why he, along with other writers and artists, represented a threat to single-minded fanatics in his country, yet he continued to create, leaving behind this final book, a legacy not just to compatriots who might feel like lonely soldiers against intolerance but to lovers of books throughout the world who sometimes take for granted the power and glory of a free press. Almost plotless, the book reveals the thoughts and feelings of Boualem Yekker, a lonely man who finds himself living “a blank life” in a society which has been subsumed by the Regulators of Faith, zealots who worship a god of vengeance and punishment and do not recognize love, forgiveness, or compassion.
Read Full Post »
“Natives” and “exotics,” terms often used to describe the relationship of plants to their environments, also refers, in this novel, to the characters who populate it, since all of the main characters live in foreign environments which have their own native populations. The Forder family, in the first of three major story lines, is on assignment in Ecuador in 1970, where the father works for the US State Department. In the second section, which takes place in 1929, Violet Clarence (Rosalind Forder’s mother) is living in the bush in Australia, helping clear the land to build a home in the bush. Part III follows a distant relative, a Mr. Clarence, who in 1822 lives in Scotland, though he is not Scottish. He and his foster son George emigrate to St. Michael in the Portuguese Azores. In each of these three story lines, the “exotic,” foreign residents permanently affect the environments in which they live. Alison clearly believes that despoiling a natural environment by removing or adding new plants and/or animals is both dangerous and foolish, no matter how honorable the motives might be.
Read Full Post »
Full of the colors, scents, and sounds of exotic Burma and Malaya in the 1860’s, this novel comes to life within the Glass Palace of the royal family and in the streets of Mandalay, which are sometimes the only “home” of its ordinary citizens, in the final days before Britain’s voracious, imperialist juggernaut shoots its way up the Irrawaddy River. Giving life to the Burmese point of view, Rajkumar and Dolly, orphaned children working as servants when the novel begins, eventually become the founders of a family whose members, in succeeding generations, reflect the economic and the political realities in Burma, Malaya, and India over the 150 years from the British raj to the present day.
Read Full Post »
Posted in 9c-2009 Reviews, Argentina, Austria, Experimental, Germany, Literary, Mexico, Mystery, Thriller, Noir on Jan 16th, 2011
Mexican author Ignacio Padilla creates characters who move like pawns, as if they were pieces in the chess games which are at the heart of the action here–they are often being overtaken by events and supplanted by other men as part of the grand, overall “game” of life. Padilla raises thought-provoking questions about the nature of selfhood here, as men appropriate each other’s names, accept or reject the past which is connected with those names, and hope, ultimately, to change their destinies by living someone else’s life. The reader must constantly question whether each character is who he says he is, and whether he really is who we think he is. The tight story line maintains its tension, and the author’s ingenuity in manipulating characters and historical events provides constant surprises. The novel is very much an intellectual chess match between author and reader, and in this case, both turn out to be winners.
Read Full Post »
