Set in Chechnya between 1994 and 2004, and moving back and forth through history and the lives of the main characters, Anthony Marra’s brilliant debut novel focuses on the threats to the life of an eight-year-old child, the daughter of a man seized and forcibly “disappeared,” and those who are determined to protect her, even at the cost of their own lives. In 2004, Haava, around whom the action revolves, is ordered by Dokka, her father, to run with her suitcase of “souvenirs” into the woods and hide, as soon as he sees soldiers coming toward their house. The house and all its contents are then burned by soldiers, and Dokka is taken, “the duct tape strip across his mouth wrinkled with his muted screams.” Rescued from the woods by Akhmed, a neighbor and failed physician (who would rather be an artist), Haava leaves the village of Eldar that night with Akhmed, hoping to reach the hospital in Volchansk, miles away. There Akhmed hopes to persuade a doctor he knows to care for Haava. As the novel progresses, Haava, Dokka, Akhmed, Sonja, Natasha, Khassan, Ramzan, their spouses, lovers, and families come fully alive here as individuals, even as they also exemplify broader aspects of life in Chechnya during the horrors of the two wars. The action in Haava’s life in 2004 takes place during only five days, but the book achieves almost epic status in the depth of its pictures of life in Chechnya and its past history. Ultimately, author Mazza touches on the same themes that one sees in other epics of war and peace, with life reduced to its most elemental parts: “Life: a constellation of vital phenomena – organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
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Lisbon, 1940, provides a temporary safe haven and hope for emigrating citizens from every country in Europe as they try to secure visas for passage by ship – any ship – out of Europe and away from the Nazis. For Americans with valid passports, life is more secure. The U.S. government has commandeered the S. S. Manhattan to transport stranded Americans in Lisbon back to New York. For these people, the biggest challenge is to pass the time till the ship sails, and many of them do it in extravagant fashion. A few, however, including characters here, have more difficulty leaving Europe, physically and emotionally, than one might expect. As one character notes, in retrospect, “Now it seems churlish to speak of our plight, which was nothing compared with that of real refugees – the Europeans, the Jews, the European Jews. Yet at the time, we were too worried about what we were losing to care about those who were losing more.” Author David Leavitt, in describing life in Lisbon in these crucial weeks before war engulfs all of Europe, examines four characters – Americans awaiting the S. S. Manhattan – as they reveal their attitudes toward Europe, toward the United States, and ultimately toward each other. All in all, Leavitt creates an unusual treatment of a tension-filled time and place with characters whom he manipulates effectively to illustrate his themes. Ultimately, “there are occasions when none of the choices are good. You simply have to calculate which is the least bad.”
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Reading something fun by Daniel Silva always seems to be connected with my summer reading, and this novel is no exception – though not as interesting or challenging as his previous novel, The Fallen Angel, which dealt with on-going Arab-Israeli conflicts, a planned terrorist attack on an Israeli site in Europe, and the possibility that there is a very early Jewish temple built underneath the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. The English Girl, by contrast, feels much more “domestic,” concerning itself for much of the book with the kidnapping of a young woman who has been the lover of the Prime Minister of England, a circumstance which the prime minister’s political friends want resolved privately and as quietly as possible. Gabriel Allon, an Israeli art restorer who also works for the Israeli secret intelligence agency, has connections to intelligence services throughout the world as a result of his international work, and when he is contacted by the deputy director of MI5 in England, he agrees to try to find and free Madeline Hart, the woman being held hostage in some unknown place. The novel divides into two parts In the second part, and the novel becomes more complex and more relevant to present day international relations. When, during his investigations, Allon finds evidence that the Russians are interested in drilling for oil in the North Sea, he calls on Viktor Orlov, once one of the richest oligarchs of the Russian oil industry, for more information. The maneuvering for the European oil market becomes the main plot in the second half of the novel.
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Vincent Balmer’s decision to write a “novel” about Antonio Flores, with whom he works, results in an engaging story in which Vincent, a writer, talks about his writing, his troubled characters explore the present and share their unhappy pasts, his lovers fall in and out of love and fail to connect with the objects of their desire, and a confessed serial killer goes on trial, “half asleep in the dock, utterly silent, his eyes blank.” I put the word “novel” in quotation marks here because though the speaker’s “novel” contains all the ingredients which could make Antonio’s story an exciting best seller, author Herve Le Tellier himself deliberately rejects the traditions of the novel as it has been written for hundreds of years. As a member of the French literary group “Oulipo,” a “workshop of potential literature,” Le Tellier is dedicated to finding “new patterns and structures which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.” As a result, he takes this novel in the many different directions which he fancies, leaving the reader to tag along for the ride. Vincent has recently returned to Lisbon from Paris following a failed love affair. A journalist, he is working with Antonio Flores, a photographer, covering the trial of a serial killer for a Paris magazine, a narrative which fades into the background when the speaker becomes more interested in writing the story of Antonio, the people they both know, their overlapping histories, and their real and imagined amours. Clever and full of fun (and games), Electrico W examines the themes of love and death with a good deal of honest emotion.
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As a boy in Trujillo, Peru, Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua has his fortune told one Sunday, in the plaza just outside the local basilica. A fortune-teller, with a miniature cathedral on his cart, has trained a monkey to draw fortunes from small drawers in the façade of the little cathedral. When Victor and his aunt receive his fortune, they see no ironies in the fact that Don Victor had just gone to Mass and confession and that this fortune is drawn by a monkey from a toy cathedral. Both believe in the inscribed destiny: “Beware! There are those who think you a dreamer. Pay them no mind. They are small-minded people… who would have you doubt your goals.” Victor eventually goes to engineering school, doing his apprenticeship with a papermaker, and eventually building a factory in the Peruvian jungle, where his employees make cellophane. This discovery leads to the fulfillment of the dire predictions of the second half of his childhood fortune—and to the action of this novel, which is divided into three “plagues.” A “plague of truth” follows the discovery of cellophane, as each character, including the priest, confesses his/her romantic indiscretions. A “plague of hearts” follows, with each person pursuing new love or rekindling old love. Ultimately, a “plague of revolution” comes to Floralinda, as government soldiers invade Floralinda, and local workers blame Don Victor and his cellophane for these troubles. Ironies abound. Expansive in scope and theme but magnificently controlled in its execution, Cellophane is thoroughly entertaining, filled with humor and irony and many hilarious scenes. Reminiscent of the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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