Posted in 9-2012 Reviews, Belgium, Biography, Democratic Republic of Congo, England, Exploration, Historical, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Literary, Peru, Social and Political Issues on Aug 16th, 2012
Mario Vargas Llosa opens this fictionalized biography of Roger Casement as Casement awaits a decision on his application for clemency from a death sentence. As he reconstructs Casement’s life as a reformer and advocate for benighted native populations being exploited by various countries and corporations, he returns again and again to Casement throughout the novel as he rethinks every aspect of his life. Casement concludes, in most cases, that he acted honorably – or tried to. An advocate for indigenous populations exploited by governments and corporations, Casement has revealed the horrors of the Congo under the rule of Leopold II, and of Amazonia at the turn of the century, when a Peruvian entrepreneur controls vast quantities of land over which he has total control. His rubber company has many London investors. Ultimately, Casement believes that the Irish who are being ruled by the British have similar problems to indigenous populations, and he acts against the British and must face the consequences.
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In this autobiographical novel, author Vaddey Ratner has accomplished what every novelist hopes for—she has created a main character and family so vibrant that every reader will truly feel “replanted” and rooted in a different place – Cambodia – where they then share every aspect of these characters’ lives and hopes for the future. Telling the story is Raami, an engaging seven-year-old child of a large and loving Phnom Penh family, which also includes her nanny, cook, and beloved gardener. Together they inhabit a lush, lovely, and endlessly fascinating natural world which offers constant visual surprises and inspires the stories, tales, and poems Raami relates here. Many of these poems and stories have been written by her father, a man she adores, and they infuse her whole life with the magic and beauty of words, offering hope and inspiration even through the atrocities she eventually witnesses when the Khmer Rouge take over the country. Directed by revolutionary officers and moved from village to village at the whim of the Khmer, the family performs menial labor as they try to hide their background, dealing with starvation, disease, exhaustion, killings. It is her memory of her father’s stories which keep her sane. Beautifully written, totally involving, and eventually uplifting.
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While the head of the ICBM is addressing participants at a literary conference in the King David Hotel, Jeusalem is being shaken by bombs. When the lights go out, the conference simply continues under candlelight. Attending this conference is the novel’s unnamed speaker, “E.H,” now living in Rome in the aftermath of a two-year convalescence from a serious illness. He has written nothing at all during that time, and he has no idea why he has been invited. The list of other participants offers him no clues: one man is an expert in Jewish religious texts and a passionate lover of chess; another, from Colombia, collects stamps and has written a grammar book; a third, a Miami-based, former evangelical pastor, ex-con, and drug addict has written only religious texts; and the lone woman, a porn actress and the founder of the highly successful Eve Studios, has been the star and producer of Screw Me, Screw Me, I Don’t Want this to End. Each of these participants will tell a novella-length story during this conference on biography and memory, and as their stories unwind, the reader begins to wonder if the conference itself is a kind of necropolis, a memorial to mankind’s complex past and its yet-to-be-buried horrors, attended by speakers, each of whom inhabits a personal “necropolis” as s/he revisits the past.
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From the explosion of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, to the killings of prisoners by the Cubans and Spanish in the aftermath of the Protocol of Peace on August 12, 1898, American news correspondent Sam Carleton records his day-by-day actions during the Spanish-American War. Sam Carleton is only “six weeks into his twenty-seventh year” when he arrives in Cuba, a five-foot six-inch, one hundred-twenty pound man with a bad cough, who feels that “his literary future is behind him.” The author of a book about the Civil War published in 1895, Carleton, a pseudonym for author Stephen Crane, had abandoned the idea of war as an epic, full of heroes making courageous decisions and willingly sacrificing their lives for a cause. Instead, he focused on the specific – the small, personal aspects of daily life among ordinary Union soldiers – describing how the soldiers feel, what they are thinking, and even, in some cases, their fear. Time moves back and forth, in and out of the past, and in and out of Carleton’s imagination as his story of the Spanish-American war takes place. Another story evolves in parallel with the story of Sam Carleton. Appearing and reappearing without warning throughout this novel, George Fleming, son of Henry Fleming from The Red Badge of Courage, accompanied by Esther Slone, travels to a collapsed mine in western Pennsylvania to help rescue sixty trapped miners. Filled with facts about the life of Stephen Crane, all of which are included in footnotes at the end of the book, the novel creates a powerful picture of Crane’s life.
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Cayetano Brule, an unemployed Cuban who is living in Valparaiso with his well-connected Chilean wife, escapes the tedium of a cocktail party one evening by disappearing into the library of the estate where the party is being held. Appropriating a wing chair, he begins to muse, perhaps even doze, until he hears footsteps behind him and meets Pablo Neruda who is also escaping. Neruda is dying, and he has a task for Cayetano – to locate Dr. Angel Bracamonte, whom he has not seen for thirty years. Though the doctor has been researching local plants used in native cancer treatments, Neruda wants to see him for other reasons, personal ones. Cayetano’s task takes him to Mexico, Cuba, East Germany, and Bolivia. While the search is on, author Roberto Ampuero also reveals the political situation in Chile from 1971 – 1973, with the main characters, including Neruda, being supporters of Marxist president Salvador Allende. The situation becomes tense as the two plots overlap. “Machismo” takes on new meaning as the book builds to its climax in revolution.
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