Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua creates a surprising novel of ideas which ranges widely, as it examines such issues as reality vs. the recreation of reality through art and film and myth; life, as opposed to the afterlife, and whether the afterlife is real or an imagined fantasy; the actualities of the past vs. memories of the past; the concept of guilt and whether one can atone; and the many aspects of love – love and death, love and hatred, love and jealousy – as it controls our actions (and even our politics). The story line itself is not complicated. Famous Israeli director Yair Moses has received an unexpected invitation to attend a retrospective of his films to be held in Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. He arrives with Ruth, an aging actress whom he regards more as a character in his films than as a real person. The films to be shown are all his earliest films, each made with the help of a brilliant screenwriter, Shaul Trigano, one of his students. The novel is rich in detail, ideas, and symbolism, and the author’s narrative is both energizing to the reader and exciting in its possibilities. Like so many other novels of ideas, however, it subordinates characters and their lives to the overall structure in order to clarify and illustrate philosophical and thematic ideas. As a result, the characters become vehicles, rather than living, breathing “humans” as they move in and out of their films and their “reality,” which is, of course, reality as depicted in an imaginative and unusual piece of fiction.
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For more than ten years, Harry Turtledove’s Ruled Britannia has been my personal Gold Standard for novels of alternative history. Having just read (and about to review) a new alternative history, I went back to this one to see how it stood the test of time. I liked it even better. Starting with the premise that England did NOT defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, during the rule of Queen Elizabeth I, author Harry Turtledove puts Elizabeth in the Tower of London and makes King Philip II the official ruler of Britain, with his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia representing him on the formerly-British throne. All the leading writers, philosophers, and artists so famous to students of Elizabethan England, when it WAS Elizabethan, are still hard at work in London, but now, their patron is Spanish, not British. Writing in the language and style of the period, author Harry Turtledove casually (and very skillfully) incorporates innumerable Shakespearean quotations into his text, often with humorous intent, and Shakespeare lovers will be kept busy playing the obvious game of identifying the plays in which these quotations appear. Puns, the off-color wordplay which so often provides comic relief in Shakespeare’s plays, dialogue in which characters talk at cross-purposes, and a character who constantly misuses “big words,” are a delight for language-lovers.
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Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Catalonia, Experimental, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Short Stories, Spain on Jan 21st, 2013
Catalan author Quim Monzo’s new collection of short stories captures the reader’s attention with its surprises, tickles with its humor, bewilders with its disturbed, often absurd characters, and ultimately arouses deep sadness with some of its portraits of the elderly and those close to them. Included are seven full-length stories in Part I, and twelve, very clever one- or two-page mini-stories in Part II, each of these stories playing with reality, especially the reality of love, as Monzo’s characters and his readers understand it. These characters often experience and react to a very different reality from that of the reader, and, therein lies the stories’ tension as the characters make unexpected or bizarre decisions and move in unique directions. These sudden twists lead to innumerable surprises even for the most jaded reader, and no one can dismiss these stories as “too weird” (even if one were ungracious enough to want to do so) simply because the characters and their stories share so many details with our own everyday realities. As absurd as the characters and their lives may be, we can see that there are always strong and familiar truths embedded within even the strangest realities here, and we are always able to empathize with some aspect of the characters’ lives. Filled with wonderful stories which are full of surprises, A Thousand Morons reflects life’s absurdities at the same time that it also reflects the realities of life and love, an intriguing collection of stories told with wit and great panache.
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Author Bernardo Atxaga, whose previous works have been set in his native Basque country in Spain, provides only basic information about the rule of King Leopold II and Belgium’s Force Publique in the Congo in 1903. Spending little time on the grand scale of the atrocities this group committed historically against the native population, he focuses instead on the behavior of the individual officers of one small garrison in Yangambi as they conduct their daily lives. This creates a unique narrative in which the author explores what happens when there are, essentially, no limits on what individuals may do to keep themselves entertained – life is truly a “jungle.” By creating Chrysostrome Liege, a young soldier who is both naïve and timid, Atxaga also creates scenes in which Chrysostrome’s reactions set the behaviors of the others into sharp relief. He has no sense of being part of the group and no apparent need to become part of it, and since he also has no feeling for irony or absurdity, even in circumstances in which the ironies and absurdities are patently obvious, the reader is alternately horrified by some of the officers’ activities and somewhat nonplussed by Chrysostrome’s apparent attitude of being above it all. As one of the officers notes, “I’ve no idea whether he’ll be a good soldier or a bad one, but he’ll certainly be a miserable one. As miserable as a mandrill.”
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Set in Spain in 1941 during the rule of General Franco and the Falangists, with their connections to the Nazis, and again in 1981, in the run-up to the first real democratic elections, debut author Victor del Arbol creates a whirlwind of mysteries within mysteries that will keep even the most demanding reader entertained. Filling the novel with twists and turns, surprises, and action that doubles back on itself, the story line constantly changes, rewriting the information we think we already know, and creating new complications to ponder as we try to reconstruct what we think is happening. The interrelationships among the main characters and their families continue for the forty years of the time span, becoming ever more complex as motivations, betrayals, lies we have accepted as truth, and characters who are not who we think they are become central to the action.Complex and challenging in its plotting, the novel is also energetic and fast-paced. The characters are memorable, in part because none of them are perfect, and several are trapped into committing terrible acts because they believe they have no choice. The interrelationships between guilt, innocence, chance, and fate keep the reader engrossed, and though the violence is sometimes excessive and melodramatic, the author avoids neat “fictional packaging” in his ending. Fate rules.
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