In this stylistically daring look at the environmentally devastating ivory trade in India, author Tania James provides a broad look at all the factors involved in this gory business while keeping her focus on the individual, the small, the personal. To develop her broad message within a manageable focus, she creates three unique stories which evolve simultaneously – the third-person story of the Gravedigger, a lone elephant without a herd and without the grounding in elephant lore which young elephants need to survive; the story of the Poacher, involved in the lucrative ivory trade, told by his younger brother Manu, who is naïve regarding his brother’s motivations; and the story of the Film-maker, in which cinematographer Emma Lewis describes her efforts to document the work of Dr. Ravi Varma, the head veterinarian of the Kavanar Wildlife Park, who works to rescue and rehabilitate orphaned elephant calves. The three separate points of view provide unusual depth to the examination of poaching without leading to didacticism and preachiness. By rotating the focus among these points of view, the author keeps the suspense high, constantly adding new information to each individual story while leaving other mysteries about the Gravedigger, the Poacher, and the Film-maker undeveloped till the end. This is an imaginative presentation of the issue of poaching and ivory sales and the damage done to the environment and its integrity for all species, both human and animal. Very exciting.
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It is 1963, as the novel opens, and the devastating Hurricane Flora, “bigger than all of Cuba,” is now lashing the island, having already caused devastation throughout Haiti, where it killed five thousand people. Main character Maria Sirena, age eighty-two, has been forcibly evacuated from her small seaside house by Ofelia, one of Castro’s soldiers, who takes her and seven other women to safety on the top floor of Casa Diego Velazquez, the sixteenth century home of the first governor of Cuba, now an historical museum. For the couple of days, Maria Sirena rides out the storm with the officer, Ofelia, and seven other women, keeping her companions occupied with stories from her own life and the lives of her parents and grandparents as they live through Cuba’s various wars for independence from the late nineteenth century up to 1963. She has much experience as a story-teller, having been for many years a lector, a reader hired by a cigar factory to read stories to the workers so that they will not become bored during their repetitious hand-work as they make cigars. Author Chantel Acevedo, a second-generation Cuban American, wisely keeps her focus on the lives of “ordinary” people like Maria Sirena and her fellow guests of the Casa – hardworking folks, often poor, who have struggled all their lives – showing how they survive and what they have to do to live. It is through this personal focus, rather than any detailed historical focus, that almost a hundred years of modern Cuban revolutionary history emerge for the reader.
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In 1963, author David Stacton was listed by Time Magazine as one of “the best American novelists of the preceding decade,” his name ensconced among luminaries like John Updike, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, and Bernard Malamud. Stacton’s novel of The Judges of the Secret Court, the story of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and its aftermath, had been published to great acclaim in 1961, when the author was only thirty-seven. A prolific author, whose Wikipedia page lists an incredible twenty-three novels published in the eleven years between 1954 and 1965, Stacton has now, sadly, almost completely vanished from American literary history. Now republished by New York Review Books Classics, Stacton’s The Judges of the Secret Court, the only one of his novels currently in print, provides readers with a sense of what they have been missing, unknowingly, all these years – and this novel is a wonder. Filled with real characters acting like real people as they deal with the aftermath of the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865, and the ensuing tumult, the novel shows through its characters the continuing resentments between the North and the South, as it recreates all the tensions and the growing horror of the times.
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Colin Barrett, a thirty-two-year-old author from rural Knockmore in County Mayo, Ireland, sets his six stories and one novella in the fictional town of Glasbeigh, located near the Atlantic and “the gnarled jawbone of the coastline,” with its gulls. In many ways Glasbeigh’s location resembles that of his own childhood in Knockmore, and his stories of the “young skins” who have been born and bred and probably will always live in Glasbeigh not only ring true but come alive in surprising and often darkly humorous and ironic ways. His main characters, young men in five of the stories, and only slightly older in the last two, have the same urges and needs of all young people, but these youth are limited in their outlooks by the paucity of opportunities, and while some may have dreams, they are most often small dreams which they hope to achieve within their current constricted lives. Writers who straddle the line between tragedy and comedy seem to live in greater numbers in Ireland than anywhere else that I know of, and it is rare that I become so enchanted by an author’s unique style and insights into big themes that I can hardly wait to get to the next story. The novella, “Calm with Horses,” for all its violence, never abandons character, and the final story, about two men trying to decide whether to attend the funeral of a woman they both loved provides an appropriate ending and vision of hope. This book has won three major prizes.
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At last, a novel recently discovered in Germany and written in 1932, at the end of the Weimar Republic, presents a picture of Berlin as it really was, not as it appears in the sterilized portraits released by Hitler’s army and staff beginning a year later, when Hitler officially came to power. Like many other cities recovering from a Depression, Berlin did have its seamy underside, along with the poor, the homeless, the street gangs, and the petty criminals dependent on pickpocketing and small thefts in order to eat. Poor women, of course, had their own resources, with prostitution and the bar scene playing a big role in their lives. Whole sections of the city were occupied at night by the wandering homeless, including young teens. The best that many of them could hope for, as they looked for a place to keep warm, seemed to be the temporary hostels, filled with smoke and the stench of unwashed bodies, where they could stay, and perhaps get some sleep, during brutally cold days. Ernst Haffner, the journalist who wrote this novel, uses a collection of individualized vignettes, connected by the overriding story of two of the young men, Ludwig and Willi, to show Berlin as it really was. Little is known about Haffner. At the time of the book’s publication IN 1932, it attracted considerable notice in Germany for its honesty and its insights, and it was well reviewed in German newspapers, but it was outlawed by Hitler the following year, and virtually every copy was burned in the Nazi book-burnings. Haffner, according to the records, was summoned by the culture ministry of the Third Reich in 1938, after which he disappeared, with no record of his residence anywhere in Germany after that.
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