In Tyrant Memory, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s second novel to be translated into English (and published by New Directions), the author once again speaks out courageously about repression, abuses of power, military dictatorship, and cold-blooded executions in Central America, this time setting his novel in El Salvador in 1944. General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, a fascist known here as The Warlock, had come to power in a coup led by the military in 1931, and was still holding the country in an iron grip in 1944. Believing that a communist conspiracy was underway in the capital of San Salvador, he used the power of his army to clamp down on individual freedoms and terrorize his citizens into submitting to his gross abuses of human rights. Dona Haydee Aragon, the middle-aged wife of Pericles Aragon, becomes the first person narrator of the events that eventually culminate in a general strike aimed at the general’s removal. At this point, the novel becomes a two-part dialogue, with Dona Haydee writing her casual and chatty diary about what is happening in her life in San Salvador, while two fugitives, her son and nephew, provide commentary on their own activities, often very funny, even farcical, as they try to avoid the military who have them on their death list. Part III takes place in 1973 and brings the fates of the various characters up to date.
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Alaa al Aswany made his literary mark in 2002 when he wrote The Yacoubian Building, a novel set in one apartment building in central Cairo in which virtually all the pressures within the country are illustrated. It was “the best-selling novel in the Middle East for two years and the inspiration for the biggest budget movie ever produced in Egypt,” according to National Geographic. Now Al Aswany may become even more famous for a series of articles he wrote for the Arabic press from 2005 to the present. Always a believer in human rights, which he believed were being trampled under the thirty-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, who appeared to be preparing the country for a handover of power to his son Gamal, the author became a vocal supporter of those who began to challenge Mubarak publicly beginning in 2005. In a series of regular articles and columns that he wrote for an Egyptian audience, Al Aswany used his popularity and literary power to try to reach all elements of Egyptian society, examining some of the issues which separated Egyptians from each other in an effort to show the importance of cooperation for the larger purpose of bringing about democracy in a country which had known only despotism, poverty, and corruption for decades. This book, published by the American University in Cairo Press, is a collection of these articles, written primarily between the summer of 2009 and October, 2010. Explaining complex issues in language which all can understand, Al Aswany worked toward a new beginning in Egypt
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In the second novel of the Copenhagen Quartet to be published in the US, American expatriate Thomas E. Kennedy shows his immense versatility, writing a totally different kind of novel from In The Company of Angels (2010), the first novel of the quartet. In this new novel, Kennedy provides a vision of a different side of Copenhagen in a different style of writing, broadening his overall themes and his depiction of this city. Though no less serious in terms of its themes, Falling Sideways focuses on the business world of one company, a world writ small, instead of the world in its grandest terms, thematically. Though it is sometimes termed a satire, this novel is less a satire than it is a dark commentary on the shallow and self-absorbed lives of the employees of “the Tank” as they navigate the shoals of big business during difficult economic times. Here Kennedy uses the business framework to establish a set of characters whose business lives become part and parcel of their personal lives, with the two different aspects of their lives so intertwined that the characters fail to grow or even recognize who they really are.
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Those who are interested in reading about the sociological underpinnings of the current rebellion in Egypt will be interested in a novel which has been the best-selling novel in the Middle East for the past two years. It is also the basis of a blockbuster film. Please don’t miss this, if you are interested in reading about the issues that have come to the fore in Egypt in the past week.
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When the story opens, Arvid’s mother has just discovered that she has a recurrence of cancer, and she has decided to take the ferry from Norway back to her “home,” on Jutland. Arvid has had a testy relationship with his mother over the years and has not talked with her in a while, trying to avoid telling her that he and his wife are getting a divorce, but when he gets a message that his mother has left home, he, too, takes the ferry to Jutland. During this time, he is inundated with memories, which come at random from different times in his life—his decision to become a communist, then leave college and join the “proletariat” working in the factories (like his parents); his memories of vacationing in Jutland as a child; the loss of the brother who came just after him in birth order. Throughout, however, he returns to stories of his mother, who, when he decided to leave college and give up his chance to escape the kind of life she and her husband had been living, smacked him, hard, across the face. Ultimately, Arvid becomes a character so real that even the author has said, “I recognize myself in him…”
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