Author Bohumil Hrabal, a captivating story-teller whom many consider the Czech Republic’s best novelist, brings to life the real town in which he lived for many years. The castle in this novel, once the home of Count Spork, just outside “the little town where time stood still,” is now a retirement home, residence of elderly pensioners given much freedom to lead comfortable lives, along with a number of old pensioners who need kindly delivered terminal care. “Rediffusion boxes” playing “Harlequin’s Millions” are on the walls everywhere, both inside and outside the castle, and everyone who hears this tune is “entranced” by its “melancholy memory of old times.” The unnamed speaker, the wife of the former owner of a brewery, her husband Francin, and his older brother “Uncle Pepin,” have come to the castle as residents late in life, after losing their brewery when the communists took over in the aftermath of World War II. The speaker, for thirty years an independent and beautiful local actress, has felt at home among the wealthiest residents of their community, but though she is now elderly, toothless, and poor, that changed condition barely fazes her. Still independent in spirit, she embraces her new surroundings, explores them with enthusiasm, and enjoys hearing the stories of other residents at the castle and the history of their much earlier predecessors from as long ago as the seventeenth century. Superb! (This book is #1 on my list of Favorites for the year so far.)
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A great deal of fun mixes with nightmare in this surprising and complex novella about writing in general, and about all the permutations of truth vs. fiction, and reality vs. the imagination. The speaker, named Domingo, is participating in a writing experiment/game with six other journalists, named Lunes, Martes, Miercoles, Jueves, Viernes, and Sabado, representing the days of the week, and they are living in a laboratory with limited access. “It’s not even top secret…Rather, to the world, it doesn’t exist. So if for some reason I were to forget my name…I’d die empirically: the possibility of anyone remembering me would die as well.” The seven participants, all among the top students in the Biology Department at the Universidad de Chile, have expressed an interest in discovering “what is beyond science,” and they have volunteered for this writing project. Each participant writes part of a story for others to complete. If the project fails, or if an individual student fails, the organization eliminates that person. At least four, possibly five, of Domingo’s fellow players, have disappeared. “There is only one way to stay alive: make it to the end.” s a “literary descendant of Roberto Bolano,” author Carlos Labbe creates a memorable and utterly absorbing story which defies genre, bringing his thematic concerns with reality, imagination, and their connections to good and evil to life in unique and absolutely unforgettable ways.
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Mai Jia, a popular novelist and winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, China’s highest literary honor, writes here under a pen name after serving for seventeen years as a member of the People’s Liberation Army and its intelligence services. Mai’s novel Decoded, originally written and published for a Chinese audience in 2002, and newly translated and published in English, provides a fascinating study of cryptography and its dedicated cryptographers, many of whom give their lives (and even their sanity) to their work. Astonishing in its focus on the travails and inner torments of one major character, Rong Jinzhen, the novel features a psychological, individualized approach, something I did not expect for characters living within the group culture of China, especially among characters from the army and its secret intelligence services. Though the novel cannot be considered a “psychological novel,” as we know it, the author does depict his main character, Rong Jinzhen, empathetically, as an individual within the state, giving him a real personality with which we can identify as he develops from childhood through early adulthood. A literary novel, unique in its focus, setting, and subject matter, Decoded lives up to its title, providing exciting new insights into many aspects of life in the People’s Republic of China.
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Many readers will argue that this work is not a novel at all. Certainly it does not adhere to the traditional expectations of a novel, no matter how flexible the reader is with definitions. Begun at the end of the 1980s and still unfinished at the time of author Roberto Bolano’s death in 2003, at the age of fifty, The Woes of the True Policeman was always a work in progress, one on which the author continued to work for fifteen years. Many parts of it, including some of the characters, eventually found their way into other works by Bolano, specifically, The Savage Detectives and his monumental 2666. But though it is “an unfinished novel, [it is] not an incomplete one,” according to the author of the Prologue, “because what mattered to its author was working on it, not completing it…Reality as it was understood until the nineteenth century has been replaced as reference point [here] by a visionary, oneiric, fevered, fragmentary, and even provisional form of writing.” As one character discovers, “The Whole is impossible…Knowledge is the classification of fragments,” and Bolano leaves it to the reader – his “true policeman” of the title – to figure it all out.
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Addressing a “hypocritical reader, my double, my brother,” a former revolutionary from Chile is telling her story to a someone who may be part of a truth commission investigating events that occurred in Santiago in the 1970s, a man who has traced her from Chile to a hospice in Stockholm. Lorena has consented to being interviewed, though she has little hope that the writer will be accurate in conveying what she wants to say, fearing that he will reduce her story to a “moral adventure tale.” She is old and dying, and she has a long history, however, and as she begins her story, we see her back in the years just before the death of President Salvador Allende (in 1973). She is a young woman and a new, unmarried mother. When a university friend visits her after the birth of her baby and takes her to a political demonstration in Santiago, she soon finds herself “caught up in something big, an enormous collective body.” She eventually becomes an active participant with this group, the Red Ax. Readers will empathize with Lorena, recognizing some of the turning points in which she may have made the wrong decisions, and, at the same time, understanding the pressures which have led to her decisions. As she tries to protect her interests on both sides of the political spectrum, Lorena eventually finds herself admitting, “I’m the one I want to erase from my life.”
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