The most detailed and complex novel that author Abdulrazak Gurnah (from Zanzibar) has written on the subjects of immigration and displacement so far, The Last Gift is a multigenerational novel which opens with Abbas, a sixty-three-year-old man whose origins are, at first, unknown, returning to his residence in England after work. A conscientious, driven man, he is also very private, keeping to himself and not sharing his past even with his family. He becomes ill on the way home one extremely cold day, so ill that this proud man “wishes for someone to pick him up and carry him home.” Collapsing, he is taken to the hospital, where, worried, in pain, and thinking he might die, he realizes “that he had left things for too long, as he had known for so many years. There was so much he should have said, but he had allowed the silence to set until it became immovable.” As Abbas tries to gain the courage to reveal his thirty-year-old secrets to his family, the points of view shift among Abbas, his wife Maryam, his daughter Hanna, and his son Jamal, all of whom are trying to discover who they are in the British culture which they find themselves and into which they do not seem to fit. Gurnah stresses the themes of alienation, displacement, escape, guilt, hope, and eventually resolution among the family.
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In this remarkable “novel” which defies genre – feeling like a memoir and structured like a collection of short stories – author NoViolet Bulawayo, from Zimbabwe, revisits her former country and its on-going, horrific history. Main character, Darling, is only ten; her friends Sbho, Godknows, Bastard, Chipo, and Stina, who has no birth certificate, are all close to her in age. Though they once attended school, their teachers “have left to teach over in South Africa and Botswana and Namibia and them, where there’s better money.” The scenes depicting Darling’s life, as she innocently tells her story, are shocking, not only for the facts which are depicted so graphically, but also for the sense she reveals that these experiences are somehow “normal” and even “ordinary.” The action, which begins in the late 1980s, shows that nothing is sacred now, and no rules, except the traditions of the old folks, seem to have survived the horrors of “independence,” which might have been a glorious celebration.
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Timeless in its themes and completely of the moment in its narrative voice, Kim Thuy’s Ru brings to life the innermost thoughts of one of Vietnam’s “boat people.” The author, whose family emigrated from Vietnam to Canada when she was ten, has created a vibrant novel that feels much more like a memoir than fiction, with a main character whose life so closely parallels that of the author that her publisher’s biography for her is virtually identical in its details to the factual material in the novel. Few, if any, readers will doubt that the author actually lived these events – her voice is so clear and so honest that there is no sense of artifice at all. A series of vignettes, presented in the “random” order in which the main character, Nguyen An Tinh, appears to have remembered them, allows the author to move around through time and memory, while also allowing the reader to participate, for short moments, in events that would otherwise feel alien in time and place. The action, often dramatic, just as often reflects the quiet, loving experiences of a family’s life; descriptions of hardship and deplorable, even repulsive, conditions are balanced by the author’s ability to see beauty in small, even delicate, moments.
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Daniel Silva, who was a journalist for years before he became a novelist, has always taken care to create plots that relate directly to current political and historical realities. In this novel Silva goes way beyond the facts that we all understand from the media, elucidating the complexities and the heartfelt commitments of both the Arabs and the Jews to preserving “their own” piece of the land in what is now Israel, and especially Jerusalem. Allon is restoring “The Deposition of Christ,” widely regarded as Caravaggio’s finest painting, working at night in the Vatican, when the body of a female curator in the antiquities department is found beneath the Michelangelo-designed dome of the basilica. While this is being investigated, Allon learns from Shimon Pazner at the Israeli Embassy that Hezbollah, aided by Iran, may be planning a major attack on some Israeli site in Europe. Eventually, these two plots coincide, but not before Silva has explored the complexities of the financial dealings at the Vatican; the personal alliances within the Vatican and within Rome itself; the financial and cultural interconnections between the Palestinians, Hezbollah, Iran, and the antiquities market; and the extreme actions suicide bombers are willing to commit to advance their agenda. No compromise seems possible in dealing with any of these issues as the reader becomes newly aware of the increasing tensions of the area and the unlikelihood that any solution, other than war, will be the result.
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It has been two years since I have added a new book to my list of All-Time Favorites, but that has just changed with the release of this novel which deserves a special place on my Favorites list. Set in the mining country of South Wales, Vanessa Gebbie’s incandescent new novel captures the cadences and speech patterns that lovers of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood have celebrated for years, and as I read the book (as slowly as possible), it felt as if Richard Burton, whose recording of Under Milk Wood is still in demand, were whispering in my ear. A collection of stories narrated by Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, a beggar who lives on the front porch of a disused chapel in a Welsh mining town, the novel eventually becomes the history of the town itself, and readers will come to know all the characters and their families going back for three generations. The emotional power of this novel is overwhelming without becoming sentimental or syrupy. Filled with wonderful descriptions and emotionally moving insights into people of all types, The Coward’s Tale recreates an entire town, and as the characters develop and overlap throughout the book, the wonder of this author’s achievement expands.
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