South Africa from 1968 – 2000 is revealed with all its cultural variety and internal stresses through the life story of Paul Sweetbread, an overweight Jewish boy who is an outsider to everyone. Neither a Boer nor an Englishman, he is also not really a Jew, either, since his family has never been observant, leaving him without any common roots that connect him to his Caucasian countrymen. A person with a photographic memory, he is, from the outset, a victim of his memory. The action intensifies when Paul, having finished school in 1987, joins the South African Defense Force, instead of going to college. In bordering Namibia, formerly a German colony, revolutionaries are taking advantage of the confusion over who is in control–South Africa, the United Nations, or whoever can grab power for himself–and Paul is sent there to fight.
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In Yugoslavia the extermination of Jews started early and was almost totally successful within a matter of months, with most of the Jewish men of Serbia shot to death by the fall of 1941, and “the Jewish Question in Serbia almost completely solved” by April, 1942, when virtually all Jewish men, women, and children were dead. Imagining the lives of Götz and Meyer, two SS guards who were responsible for over 5000 Jewish deaths, the speaker examines the events for which Götz and Meyer were responsible between November, 1941, and April, 1942. Often juxtaposing atrocities against simple, folksy observation, the speaker puts himself into their minds, he wondering if they ever regretted what they were doing, since they were so good at their jobs. Throughout the novel, as Albahari includes the terrible statistics, he also exhibits the ironies of the circumstances, setting the facts into sharp relief and increasing the shock. A strange novel of the Holocaust, all the more shocking because of the contrasts between the facts and the dark humor, Götz and Meyer is a memorable short novel and worthy addition to Holocaust literature.
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The motley assortment of characters who live at 44 Scotland Street in Edinburgh, familiar to fans of the series, solve one personal problem at a time in each novel, continuing their stories and life issues into the next novel. McCall Smith is so good at creating these characters and capturing the essence of their imperfect lives that readers unfamiliar with the series need not fear that they are missing key background information. The “plot” of each novel (and one uses the term loosely here) is really a series of episodes in the lives of several loosely connected characters, rather than a single complex (and artificial) scheme which ties every character to the same set of problems and complications. Real life is real people living their own lives and dealing with their own problems, and for McCall Smith and his millions of devoted readers, that’s plot enough.
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Returning to Somalia twenty years after he was imprisoned and then sent into exile, Jeebleh arrives at a remote Mogadiscio airport now under the control of a major warlord. He has come from his adopted home in America to help Bile, his oldest friend from childhood, find and rescue his kidnapped daughter and a friend. Bile is affiliated with a warlord in the south of the city, but Jeebleh may be in a particularly good position to help him if the child has been taken by a rival, since he belongs to the same clan as the warlord controlling the north. The political situation is so tangled, however, that at times no one really knows who is allied with whom. As he travels around the ruins of Mogadiscio, once a beautiful city filled with educated people, Jeebleh comments to an acquaintance: “This city is a disaster. I haven’t met anyone who openly disapproves of what’s happening, and the fighting goes on and the clan elders continue soliciting funds for repairing deadly weapons.”
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Sri Lankan-born artist-writer Roma Tearne, who fled the civil unrest in her native country when she was ten, revisits the years leading up to the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983 – 2009) and its effects on families in her second novel, Bone China. In this novel, she is more interested in family issues than in politics, focusing on the lives of a Tamil Catholic family as it faces the inevitabilities of violence and warfare on their small island nation. Her previous novel, Mosquito, concerned itself primarily with an artist film-maker of Sinhalese background who recognized that the formerly repressed Tamils would fight to the death for recognition and dominance over the Sinhalese, and these two books taken together, reflect Tearne’s understanding of both sides of the brutally violent conflict which claimed so many lives over such a long period of time.
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