Newly translated into English, The Blindness of the Heart, a debut novel by Julia Franck, spans the period between the two world wars in which Germany took part, focusing on the effects of these wars on seemingly ordinary German citizens who were somehow detached from full knowledge of the causes for which they were required to fight. In the dramatic Prologue, which takes place in 1945, a young boy and his mother arrive at a train station from which there is a chance that they might escape the post-war horrors. For the boy, however, the horrors are just beginning. His mother abandons him at the station, without any warning, leaving behind his suitcase and instructions to whoever discovers him on where he should be delivered.
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Described as a “prodigy,” thirty-five-year-old Daniel Kehlmann, with German and Austrian citizenship, has already published four novels and a short story collection, winning the 2005 Candide Award, the 2006 Kleist Award, and the 2008 Thomas Mann Award. Kehlmann’s nine stories all deal with the ironies of people caught between reality and fiction. In “Voices” Kehlman tells the story of Ebling, who is mistakenly assigned the private number of famous actor Ralf Tanner when he buys a new cellphone. When he begins to answer as the actor, “It was as if he had a doppelganger, his representative in a parallel universe.” In “The Way Out,” Ralf Tanner the actor illustrates what has happened to his life since Ebling started answering his phone calls, his professional career and personal life in ruins. He participates in a disco contest which awards prizes to the person who most resembles someone famous, but is criticized because his body language is “not correct” for the actor Ralf Tanner. His use of a false name ironically gives him a chance at a real life.
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The fraught events in the Balkans leading to the occupation of Greece by the Nazis in April, 1941, form the structure of this complex novel, which begins in Greece and ranges through Albania, France, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey, as small, vulnerable Eastern European countries try to stave off both the Italians and the Nazis. Alan Furst, famous for his carefully researched espionage thrillers focusing on events from 1940 and 1941, recreates the confusions and the complications of the Balkan countries in early 1941, as they try to maintain some semblance of sovereignty against the massive war machine of Nazi Germany. Forty-year-old Costa Zannis, a senior police official in the northern Greek city of Salonika, is in the middle of the conflict. Zannis walks a tightrope, doing his part to aid people in Germany who have risked their lives to save others. His life becomes even more complicated, however, by his suddenly developed attraction to the wife of one of Greece’s wealthiest men.
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An unnamed writer is hired by a friend who works with the human rights office of the Catholic Church of an unnamed country to edit and proofread eleven hundred pages of testimony—“the memories of the hundreds of survivors of and witnesses to the massacres perpetrated in the throes of the so-called armed conflict between the army and the guerrillas.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the army declared that the indigenous Indians who had lived in remote Mayan villages for hundreds of years were anti-government leftists, and soldiers conducted widespread genocide wiping out hundreds of villages and killing over a hundred thousand people. Now, many years later, the human rights office at the cathedral plans to publish the survivors’ testimonies for the first time. Castellanos Moya creates a powerful work of fiction from some of the western hemisphere’s most horrendous brutality, giving enough detail to shock the reader into questioning how human beings could not only commit some of these atrocities but enjoy the bloodshed in the process. At the same time, however, he is aware of the limits on violence that a reader can comprehend before “tuning out,” a rare quality which he exploits by juxtaposing some of the worst details of torture against images of the absurdities in the speaker’s personal life.
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John Banville, in his first “literary” novel since his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, presents a most unusual novel which takes place in Arden, a large family home somewhere in Ireland or England, as the family gathers to pay homage to the dying patriarch, Adam Godley. Godley, who has had a stroke and is thought to be unconscious, is a mathematician renowned for having posited an “exquisite concept, time’s primal particle, the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation…the infinities.” Hermes, the son of Zeus, is the primary narrator, commenting on what is happening in the house and among the characters, while, at the same time, keeping an eye on his father, the randy Zeus, who is found asleep and sucking his thumb following one amorous encounter. The novel often resembles a farce, but it lacks the spontaneity that makes that genre so much fun. Instead, it feels as if every aspect of the novel has been composed and organized to the nth degree. At times it also feels like a novel of ideas, but those ideas are often murky, and there were times in which I wondered what Banville’s purpose was in writing the book.
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