An unnamed writer is hired by a friend who works with the human rights office of the Catholic Church of an unnamed country to edit and proofread eleven hundred pages of testimony—“the memories of the hundreds of survivors of and witnesses to the massacres perpetrated in the throes of the so-called armed conflict between the army and the guerrillas.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the army declared that the indigenous Indians who had lived in remote Mayan villages for hundreds of years were anti-government leftists, and soldiers conducted widespread genocide wiping out hundreds of villages and killing over a hundred thousand people. Now, many years later, the human rights office at the cathedral plans to publish the survivors’ testimonies for the first time. Castellanos Moya creates a powerful work of fiction from some of the western hemisphere’s most horrendous brutality, giving enough detail to shock the reader into questioning how human beings could not only commit some of these atrocities but enjoy the bloodshed in the process. At the same time, however, he is aware of the limits on violence that a reader can comprehend before “tuning out,” a rare quality which he exploits by juxtaposing some of the worst details of torture against images of the absurdities in the speaker’s personal life.
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It is difficult to know even where to begin in reviewing this novel, a novel so broad in its themes and scope and so sensitive to the details which make it come alive that other American readers, like me, will undoubtedly be waiting as impatiently as I am for the rest of the novels which make up the “Copenhagen Quartet.” Main character Bernardo (Nardo) Greene, an “ordinary” Chilean school teacher, was tortured for two years during the Pinochet government because he varied from the assigned curriculum in order to expand the minds of his students. Ostensibly a love story between Nardo, a widower whose wife and son were “desaparecido” during his incarceration and torture, and Michela Ibsen, a forty-year-old Danish woman whose ex-husband abused her and whose seventeen-year-old daughter committed suicide, the novel examines many themes related to love and death, freedom and forced confinement, and the worldly and the spiritual. (My favorite novel of 2010)
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Set in the 1940s and published in 1945, Cairo Modern is, by turns, ironic, satirical, farcical, and, ultimately, cynical, as the author creates a morality tale which takes place in a country in which life’s most basic guiding principles are still undetermined. World War II has kept the British in Egypt as a foreign power, a weak Egyptian monarchy is under siege by reformers, and the army is growing. The plight of the poor is an urgent national problem. Among the four Cairo University students who open the novel, Mahgub Abd al-Da’im is the poorest, living on a pittance, which is all his father and mother can provide him. After graduation, however, a “friend” comes up with an unusual way for him to get a good job with the government.
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Eleven years after the publication of Fugitive Pieces, her only other novel (and winner of the Orange Prize), Anne Michaels has published a monumental philosophical novel which is also exciting to read for its characters and their conflicts. Complex and fully integrated themes form the superstructure of the novel in which seemingly ordinary people deal with issues of life and death, love and death, the primacy of memory, the search for spiritual solace, and the integrity of man’s relationships with the earth and the water that makes the earth habitable. The first part deals with the excavation of Abu Simbel and its relocation above the cliffs when Lake Nasser was created. The second with the St. Lawrence Seaway and the dispossessions that caused as a new lake was formed, and the third with the rebuilding of Warsaw after World War II. Michaels’s talent as a poet is obvious in her gorgeous ruminations about the meaning of love and life, and in her evocative, unique imagery, but the beauty of the language is matched by the richness of the novel’s underlying concepts, which give depth and significance to this challenging and satisfying novel.
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Naguib Mahfouz is a never-ending source of literary surprises. In this unusual and often charming novel from 1948, newly translated and republished by the American University of Cairo, Mahfouz writes his only Freudian, psychological study, an analysis of Kamil Ru’ba Laz, a young Egyptian man so dominated by his mother that he is unable to make a single decision or form a single successful relationship with the outside world. When the novel opens, his mother has just died, and Kamil, in his mid-twenties, is devastated. The first person novel which results is Kamil’s attempt to put his life into some sort of perspective and, perhaps, to find some hope for the future, some understanding of “life’s true wisdom,” a journey which will take him outside himself for the first time in his life.
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