Libyan author Hisham Matar draws on his own life to provide insights into this story of a son’s yearning for the father he loved but who vanished when he was fourteen. In real life, Matar’s father Jaballa, once a member of the Libyan delegation to the United Nations and, after Muammar Gaddafi’s coup, a political dissident, went into exile in Egypt in 1979, when his son was nine. He was kidnapped in 1990, when his son was twenty, his fate unknown to this day. This fraught background provides the structure of Matar’s novel, the story of Nuri el-Alfi, a young boy whose mother dies rather mysteriously when he is nine. When Nuri is fourteen, his father and his new wife Mona meet Nuri in Switzerland at the Montreux Palace Hotel, and it is on this vacation that his father is abducted. The Swiss police have no leads. As the author continues Nuri’s story from that moment up to age twenty-four, the bare bones outline of his life at the time of the kidnapping gradually broadens and gets filled in, and his life as an exile, without family or country, takes shape. Through flashbacks and reminiscences, the reader also comes to know more about Nuri’s younger life and his father’s role as a dissident in exile.
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Set in Kuwait in the time between the two Gulf wars, Small Kingdoms is as close to a perfect novel as I’ve seen in years. Not a word is out of place. Every image works, and many show a startling originality. All the plot lines are successful, without an overwhelming reliance on coincidence to tie them together and resolve them at the end. The characters, even those from Kuwait, with their completely different society and culture, feel natural and comfortable as we read about them, people we can recognize for their common humanity and can respect for their differences from our own way of thinking. The novel is rich with ideas, complete in the depiction of cultural differences and sensitive to ideas which Americans, especially women, may find alien, ideas which are an integral part of Kuwaiti Muslim culture. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
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David Mitchell’s past work, full of literary excitement, has been almost universally lauded for its originality and experimentation, and two of his novels, number9dream (2001), and Cloud Atlas (2004) have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Ghostwritten (1999) won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and in 2007, Mitchell was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. This novel will come as a surprise to many of his long-time fans. Here, Mitchell writes a historical novel—a HUGE historical novel—set in Nagasaki at the turn of the 19th century, when the Dutch East India Company was Nagasaki’s only trading partner. In an unusual change, Mitchell writes in the 3rd person here, taking an omniscient point of view which allows him to unfurl fascinating tales and re-imagine historical events in dense prose packed full of energy and local color.
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Recreating the events which led to the catastrophic battles for power which engulfed Liberia from 1980 – 1996, author Russell Banks shows how four different home-grown armies, each with their own goals, aggressively engaged in atrocities to ensure victory for their own side. Employing child soldiers, and killing and maiming anyone who stood in their way, including women and tiny children who simply had the misfortune to belong to the wrong rural tribe, these armies massacred a quarter of a million people and displaced a million others. Banks describes this turmoil through the eyes of a radical American anti-war activist named Hannah Musgrove who arrives in Liberia from Ghana under a false name in 1976. Musgrove is on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for her activities as a member of the Weather Underground, having been indirectly involved in a New York City townhouse bombing in which three people were killed in the late 1960s.
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Forty-six-year-old journalist Peter Niels, who has traveled the world since his youthful marriage ended, is touring Taiwan, a country he thoroughly enjoys, when he and his photographer, Josh Pickett, have a day free from professional responsibilities. Deciding to visit the famous Taroko Gorge, they become involved in a strange disappearance. A group of ninth grade Japanese students has come to Taroko for an end-of-the year class trip, and both Niels and Pickett hear three schoolgirls singing as they explore the area in their “sailor-suit” uniforms. Niels falls asleep, and when he awakens, he sees that Pickett has just returned from a sidetrip. Immediately afterward, he hears a Japanese boy and girl calling for some of their fellow students who have not returned from exploring. As the author deals with issues of one person’s responsibility for others (or not) and the nature of inner peace vs. guilt, the investigation shows the characters rapidly descending into mistrust and open allegations against others, raising the tension. The resolution comes naturally from the plot and ties up the loose ends without any major surprises.
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