Author Alexander MacLeod has won literary prizes for his short stories, and the reaction to this collection, with two shortlisted nominations for the Giller and Commonwealth Book Prizes, suggest more prizes will be coming. His stories feel, at first, as if the characters are ordinary people leading ordinary lives, but the author is so creative and so in control of every aspect of these stories, that he is always able to take them in new directions, full of surprises and irony. His work is filled with unique and heart-breaking insights, presented with empathy, as his characters realize their limitations and recognize a pathway forward, a pathway often unexpected, based on the characters’ decisions and recognitions as shown within these seemingly simple but powerful and often unusual stories.
Read Full Post »
Set in contemporary Cuba, and focused on “ordinary” citizens trying to make ends meet so that they can enjoy their “freedoms” and their personal lives, author Carlos Manuel Álvarez writes his debut novel almost as if it were an opera. Intense and full of emotion, much of it kept hidden from the outside world, the novel features four main characters living their separate lives and sharing them with the reader throughout five different sections. The four characters appear in the same order in each of the sections – the Son, Mother, Father, and Daughter – giving the reader insights into their “solo” lives at the same time that their connections to the family as a whole become clear. Life in Cuba is difficult and often unpredictable, and though the foundation of the country is based on high ideals, the practicalities of staying alive in contemporary times sometimes depends on paring back the values and ideals and taking a less absolute approach. Author Carlos Manuel Álvarez completes his work in fine style, his imagery cementing the themes and providing both life and death in the novel and in the lives of his characters.
Read Full Post »
Cuban author Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, a poet, fiction writer, and playwright, challenges the reader of this experimental novel by developing her novel in fifteen overlapping stories, narrated by an unusual assortment of people. The book also comes with its own style, and a set of themes and characters which do not match what I’ve come to expect from international fiction in translation. A Cuban by birth, the author sets many of these stories in Cuba, but the narrator leaves Cuba for Miami in one story, and in another, “Sinai,” the main character is talking to God at “Mt. Sinai.” The “elephant in the room,” throughout, is a French bulldog, which, despite the title, plays a surprisingly small role for most of the book. Some of the poems which introduce the chapters refer to a French bulldog, but the narratives soon stop mentioning it. As readers approach the end of the book, they may even question why the French bulldog is part of the title at all. Then, suddenly, it all makes sense, as a bulldog sets the characters and their lives into perspective. Unique.
Read Full Post »
Dealing simultaneously with past and present, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez appears at first to be a fairly straightforward and unpretentious murder mystery, but it is far more complex than it seems. It shifts back and forth over the course of twenty-seven years as one person who was present at the time of a murder returns to the town many years later to re-examine his memories and those of others in an effort to identify the guilty party. The murder takes place after a three-day wedding celebration, as Santiago Nasar prepares to go to the port, naively going out the back door while the two men who plan to kill him wait for him at the front. All this because the groom, Bayardo San Roman, has returned the “soiled” bride to her family on their wedding night, and Santiago is thought to be involved.
Read Full Post »
Saul Indian Horse, who tells this story of his life as an Ojibwe living in a non-native society, is in his thirties as the novel opens, and he is at an alcohol rehabilitation facility to which he has been sent by social workers at the hospital where he has been a patient for six weeks. Now alcohol-free for thirty days, he admits that now it is time for his hardest work to begin. “If we want to live at peace with ourselves, we need to tell our stories.” Saul Indian Horse is just four years old in 1957, when his nine-year-old brother Benjamin disappears. His sister vanished five years before. These kidnappings are all part of a brutal program to separate aboriginal children from their families and their culture, send them to a school where they will live apart from everything and everyone they ever knew, and teach them English and the Canadian school curriculum. Ultimately, the goal is to turn them all into “Canadians,” without connections to their aboriginal past. “I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia, and broken hearts. I saw runaways carried back, frozen solid as boards. I saw wrists slashed and, one time, a young boy impaled on the tines of a pitchfork that he’d shoved through himself.” These children universally yearn for the freedom to be outdoors in nature, sharing the spirits of the earth and sky which have been so much a part of them until now. Fortunately, Saul Indian Horse is able to find some salvation in all this. St. Jerome’s has a hockey team, and he, at age eight, is desperate to be part of it, though he has never played. For Saul, hockey becomes the equivalent of a natural religion.
Read Full Post »
