Hilary Mantel has never hesitated to say exactly what she means, and her descriptive abilities leave no room for doubt about exactly why she believes as she does. Though she is praised for her elegant turns of phrase when those are appropriate, she is equally skilled at stating, in no uncertain terms, her opinions about less elegant subjects. When Mantel’s recent short story collection, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher was first published in September, 2014, Mantel found herself on the front News page of the London Daily Mail, having done the unthinkable by imagining a story in which a man with Irish ties decides to assassinate the then-Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher had died only a year before the story was published, and the public and many politicians were outraged by this story. Mantel held her ground, telling the Guardian in 2014 that she “feels boiling detestation” for Thatcher and considers her an “antifeminist psychological transvestite who did long-standing damage to the UK.” In comparison to these remarks, the short story of “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” feels almost tame, however dark or ill-advised it may have been. Death, marriage, infidelity, psychiatric ailments, the writing life, book clubs, and issues of adolescence, among other themes dominate these stories, but Mantel writes with a rapier in her hand, often turning a seemingly innocent scene into a scene of dark twists and sometimes ironic humor.
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Remembering and forgetting are the essence of French author Patrick Modiano’s writing as he creates almost dreamlike images and sequences which fade in and out as the time frame changes, often unexpectedly. New images and memories force themselves into his consciousness, only to vanish back into the netherworld from which they have come. Almost as famous for the bizarre and often cruel life he experienced as a child as he is for his Nobel Prize for Literature, Modiano, through his novels, mines his own past for clues as to who he was and who and what he has become. Repeating images and events combine with references to absent parents and circus people, some of whom engage in unlawful activities, to reinforce the idea that the only love and care Modiano knew as a child came from strangers. In this newly translated novel from 2003, Modiano depicts a main character, remarkably like himself, as a twenty-year-old walking late at night, when a car emerges from the darkness and grazes his leg from knee to ankle, then crashes. A woman stumbles out of the driver’s seat, and she and the speaker are ushered into a nearby hotel lobby to await a police van and medical help. From the outset, the circumstances of this accident are unclear. The flashbacks and flashforwards begin seemingly at random, as he recalls his father’s cruelty on the rare occasions he saw him and also meets a philosopher who runs classes for his student disciples. He meets a girl, a music teacher, then suddenly finds himself, thirty years later, overhearing a familiar name on the loudspeaker at Orly Airport, at which point he races to find the person. Time before and after the accident become confused, as the same or similar images and memories appear and reappear, and names in one time period reappear in another.
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Famous for grand novels in which his characters try to digest what is happening around them while important world events unfold over an extended time frame, William Boyd has become a master of the genre, creating main characters who feel real as they and their families deal with the traumas they face over a long period of time, coming to new recognitions about life and themselves. In this new novel, William Boyd “breaks the rules,” taking the point of view of an ambitious woman who becomes a photographer the moment her father gives her a Kodak Brownie No. 2 for her seventh birthday in 1915. Avoiding the usual traps of a man writing as a woman, Boyd creates a fine portrait of Amory Clay, a woman who defies the usual limitations placed on women in British society during the early and mid-twentieth century, showing her life as she travels to political hot spots; records major and minor events in the years after World War I, through World War II, postwar France, and Vietnam. She also associates with the aristocracy, literary lights, and artists and creates her own rules regarding her love life – and just about everything else. Neither beautiful nor brilliant, Amory relies on her own insights, talent, and sense of adventure to reveal hidden worlds through photography, not in the dramatic sense of revealing the horrors of battle and its destruction, but through those moments in the midst of crises in which people reveal their humanity and connect with others, including the reader. Numerous vintage photographs add to the atmosphere and characterization.
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Norwegian author Per Petterson dedicates the ten short stories of Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes (1987) to his own father in his first published book, creating a lovely and loving portrait of a father, his young son, and a few other members of their family as they go about their everyday lives in 1960s Sweden. Main character Arvid, who will go on to star in some later books by Petterson, is six years old in the collection’s opening story, growing to the age of ten by its conclusion, a hypersensitive child who notices and cares about the family around him even as he is also aware of how much he depends on them. Arvid’s unique point of view, his life, and his reactions to events in these stories, though perhaps more emotional than what most other children his age experience, are nevertheless so plausible and filled with heart that one cannot help believing that many of the happenings here were real and that the stories are somewhat autobiographical. Seeming to breathe on their own, they need very little exposition to work their magic and draw in the reader, to whom they feel somehow familiar, no matter how the time, setting, and action may differ from our own. A very small book, with very short stories, Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes carries a disproportionately large impact, a debut which clearly presages the enormous success this author would eventually have in the literary world.
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Thoughtful and full of heart, this novel by Ojibway author and storyteller Richard Wagamese is so gripping that it is hard to imagine any reader not being left breathless from the sheer drama of the writing and its overwhelming message. On a magnificent, clear night, Franklin Starlight, age sixteen, and his father Eldon, from whom he has been estranged for nearly all of his life, sit smoking around a campfire in the mountains. Eldon, an alcoholic who is just days away from death, has persuaded his son-in-name-only to accompany him on his final trip “beyond the ridge.” As Eldon shares his story, he makes in a final effort to connect with his son and to reconcile himself with his own guilt about actions from his past. It is a wondrous novel about stories, their importance in our lives and memories, their ability to help us reconcile the past with the present, and ultimately their power to teach us the nature of the world and our relationship to it.
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