Thoughtful and full of heart, this novel by Ojibway author and storyteller Richard Wagamese is so gripping that it is hard to imagine any reader not being left breathless from the sheer drama of the writing and its overwhelming message. On a magnificent, clear night, Franklin Starlight, age sixteen, and his father Eldon, from whom he has been estranged for nearly all of his life, sit smoking around a campfire in the mountains. Eldon, an alcoholic who is just days away from death, has persuaded his son-in-name-only to accompany him on his final trip “beyond the ridge.” As Eldon shares his story, he makes in a final effort to connect with his son and to reconcile himself with his own guilt about actions from his past. It is a wondrous novel about stories, their importance in our lives and memories, their ability to help us reconcile the past with the present, and ultimately their power to teach us the nature of the world and our relationship to it.
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Although Jack Livings’s experiences in China were in the 1990s, when he was a student and then an English teacher, the life he lived there and the knowledge he gained from his conferences with students about their writing have stood him in good stead with this stunning and dramatic story collection. As he tells the Wall Street Journal, the title story, “The Dog,” is a story told to him by one of his students, a story he embellishes in his own writing here, about a weekend trip to the countryside taken by his student and her family. Also on the trip was her father’s cousin Zheng, a sleazy operator in the import/export business who “moved in dangerous circles” in the city and who brought with him a dog which he owned jointly with her father, one they had been using for gambling in illegal dog racing in Beijing. Because of a government crackdown, the men need to get rid of the dog; hence, the weekend trip to the countryside and a planned family barbecue. The bleak ironies and absurdities of this story and its surprising descriptions epitomize the author’s style as he creates seven additional stories of personal crisis from all parts of China, including some areas and cultures with which most of us in the West are unfamiliar.
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In 1985, thirty years after the period in which this novel is set, and twenty years after the escape of author Heda Margolius Kovaly from Czechoslovakia to the United States, she wrote Innocence, her only novel. She had come to admire the work of Raymond Chandler, among other English-speaking authors, and in this novel, she uses Chandler’s abrupt, noir style to flash back and bring to life some of the horrific crimes of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia against ordinary citizens. Fortunately, Part I, the Chandleresque section (from which the introductory quotation is taken) is followed by a Part II, which pays more attention to the psychological effects on ordinary people caught up in the maelstrom of political unrest. The two parts, taken together, provide a unique perspective from which to evaluate both the daily horrors and their longer-term effects.
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In what appears to be a series of autobiographical episodes, Chilean author Alejandro Zambra creates eleven stories so firmly grounded in reality and filled with carefully chosen detail that they seem to be from his own life, though it is impossible to know for sure without hearing more from the author himself. Likewise, we cannot know how much may be inspired by his own life but altered for the purpose of improving the story, or how much may be created from whole cloth for the purpose of recreating a period in history or illustrating a theme. Ultimately, this collection of stories vibrantly recreates an unusual childhood from the perspective of a child, while also revealing the speaker’s early adulthood and his lack of confidence in his own maturity. In several stories, the author conveys the feelings at the heart of parent-child relationships, from the points of view of both; political revolution and trauma lurk in the background throughout all the stories. As he wrestles with his stories and how to present the personal and community values of Chile during this period in the late twentieth century, the author also contributes much to our understanding of the art of writing itself. Ultimately, these intense, compressed, clear, and unpretentious stories breathe with quiet life, focused on reality as a simple, if sometimes heart-breaking, concept.
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It is 1963, as the novel opens, and the devastating Hurricane Flora, “bigger than all of Cuba,” is now lashing the island, having already caused devastation throughout Haiti, where it killed five thousand people. Main character Maria Sirena, age eighty-two, has been forcibly evacuated from her small seaside house by Ofelia, one of Castro’s soldiers, who takes her and seven other women to safety on the top floor of Casa Diego Velazquez, the sixteenth century home of the first governor of Cuba, now an historical museum. For the couple of days, Maria Sirena rides out the storm with the officer, Ofelia, and seven other women, keeping her companions occupied with stories from her own life and the lives of her parents and grandparents as they live through Cuba’s various wars for independence from the late nineteenth century up to 1963. She has much experience as a story-teller, having been for many years a lector, a reader hired by a cigar factory to read stories to the workers so that they will not become bored during their repetitious hand-work as they make cigars. Author Chantel Acevedo, a second-generation Cuban American, wisely keeps her focus on the lives of “ordinary” people like Maria Sirena and her fellow guests of the Casa – hardworking folks, often poor, who have struggled all their lives – showing how they survive and what they have to do to live. It is through this personal focus, rather than any detailed historical focus, that almost a hundred years of modern Cuban revolutionary history emerge for the reader.
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