Eleven years after the publication of Fugitive Pieces, her only other novel (and winner of the Orange Prize), Anne Michaels has published a monumental philosophical novel which is also exciting to read for its characters and their conflicts. Complex and fully integrated themes form the superstructure of the novel in which seemingly ordinary people deal with issues of life and death, love and death, the primacy of memory, the search for spiritual solace, and the integrity of man’s relationships with the earth and the water that makes the earth habitable. The first part deals with the excavation of Abu Simbel and its relocation above the cliffs when Lake Nasser was created. The second with the St. Lawrence Seaway and the dispossessions that caused as a new lake was formed, and the third with the rebuilding of Warsaw after World War II. Michaels’s talent as a poet is obvious in her gorgeous ruminations about the meaning of love and life, and in her evocative, unique imagery, but the beauty of the language is matched by the richness of the novel’s underlying concepts, which give depth and significance to this challenging and satisfying novel.
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Author Elizabeth Kostova’s unusual debut novel combines her ten years of scholarly research on Vlad Tepes, the Impaler of Wallachia, sometimes known as Drakulya, with the stories that have become part of local folklore in Bulgaria and Rumania, and the legends created and perpetuated by Bram Stoker (in his novel Dracula). A sadistic prince from the mid-fifteenth century who killed up to 15,000 of his own people, often impaling them on stakes and leaving them to die horrible deaths, Vlad terrified his enemies from the Ottoman Empire, though it was Stoker who created the belief that he was a vampire. Historians and scholars will be fascinated by the detailed information revealed in this novel as the three main characters uncover key information about Vlad/Drakulya. Though the story is often exciting—and has a conclusion which packs a wallop–the novel involves serious, scholarly research, and the “novel’s” characters themselves are undeveloped.
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“Natives” and “exotics,” terms often used to describe the relationship of plants to their environments, also refers, in this novel, to the characters who populate it, since all of the main characters live in foreign environments which have their own native populations. The Forder family, in the first of three major story lines, is on assignment in Ecuador in 1970, where the father works for the US State Department. In the second section, which takes place in 1929, Violet Clarence (Rosalind Forder’s mother) is living in the bush in Australia, helping clear the land to build a home in the bush. Part III follows a distant relative, a Mr. Clarence, who in 1822 lives in Scotland, though he is not Scottish. He and his foster son George emigrate to St. Michael in the Portuguese Azores. In each of these three story lines, the “exotic,” foreign residents permanently affect the environments in which they live. Alison clearly believes that despoiling a natural environment by removing or adding new plants and/or animals is both dangerous and foolish, no matter how honorable the motives might be.
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A Jerusalem bombing results in the death of an unidentified forty-eight-year-old woman, after she has been comatose for two days. Unvisited at the hospital during the last days of her life, she remains, unmourned, in the local morgue for more than a week, until a pay stub finally traces her to the bakery where she worked. When an aggressive newspaper reporter breaks the story of the unmissed and unmourned employee, the bakery’s eighty-seven-year-old owner is both embarrassed by the publicity and furious at the story’s accusations that the woman was treated callously by the bakery’s management. For the owner, an apology on behalf of the company is not enough. He assigns the human resources manager to find out who the woman is so that “a more tangible expression of regret from himself and his staff, a clearly defined gesture” can be made on her behalf. Serious thematic questions arise: Who is responsible for Yulia in Jerusalem? She herself? Her employer? The people who knew and liked her? The government in Jerusalem? Her family back home? No one? And if she is not solely responsible for her own life, how much, if anything, does anyone else owe to her? With an ending that readers will celebrate for its perfection, Yehoshua brings the action, themes, and characters full circle. (On my Favorites List for 2006)
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Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India will expand and alter your view of India, Pakistan, and the British Raj. Using a child-narrator, a literary device over-employed and often unsuccessful, this author has found the perfect vehicle for conveying the heart-breaking story of the Partition of India in l947, without being coy and without descending into bathos. Lenny, as the child of a Parsee family, roams freely through the Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, and Parsee society of her household and neighborhood in Lahore. Because she is lame and receiving private schooling, she is at home when momentous events and important conversations occur, and because she is very young and has no ethnic biases, she observes the disintegration of her society with the puzzlement of an outsider.
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