SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Using different genres for each of his three novels which available in English, Horacio Castellanos Moya creates dramatically different tones, despite their common settings in Central America, and translator Katherine Silver’s own versatility is obvious as she recreates the different moods. Senselessness (2008), Castellanos Moya’s most powerful and most dramatic novel, conveys the horrors of Mayan genocide in an unnamed country which resembles Guatemala. By contrast, Tyrant Memory (2011) often verges on farce in its satirical depiction of the popular rebellion against a pro-Nazi dictator in El Salvador in 1944, an otherwise serious subject. The She-Devil in the Mirror (2009), also set in El Salvador and the least political of the three novels, is a murder mystery, told as a long monologue by Laura Rivera, a privileged, upperclass woman whose best friend has just been murdered. Castellanos Moya’s pacing is flawless as he suggests but does not always confirm the reader’s conclusions about these characters as described by Laura, and the novel’s finale is memorable, perfectly in keeping with tone and character. The details and subject matter are universal, rather than specific to El Salvador, and readers from around the world will be entertained and often amused by Castellanos Moya’s foray into noir fiction.

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Opening with a scene in which a priest is painting a vibrant black Madonna, this novel focuses on the life of the model, Niki, a woman who posed originally because she desperately needed the money and was willing to travel thirty-five kilometers to Fr. Claerhout’s studio, often on foot. She is a favorite model, along with her daughter Popi, a five-year-old, light-skinned child with blue eyes and softly waving hair, two symbols of South Africa for author Zakes Mda. With vivid scenes from South African life, both the good and the bad, from the 1970s to the present, author Mda presents a clear-eyed vision of South Africa’s transition from a restrictive, white-ruled government to a democratically elected government with room for both races. The black people here are real, not idealized, people with real hopes, dreams, and strategies for survival, and they evoke enormous sympathy from the reader, especially as their personal limitations and faults become clear. Though Mda has no sympathy for the abuses inflicted by the Afrikaners who were in power for so long, he reveals a broad vision of a future that includes both races working together. Concentrating less on national violence and battles for survival, and more on the individual, racial conflicts of people in Excelsior, many of whom the reader has come to like and respect, he presents an exciting story of complex issues in a clear, straightforward narrative which throbs with life and offers both hope and warnings for the future.

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With unusual insight and great enthusiasm, Ross King has several times written books about monumental works of art, placing them in historical context, characterizing the artist, and emphasizing what makes these artistic achievements unique. Each of these books about an artwork – the dome of a cathedral, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the Last Supper mural – has received international recognition for its literary style, the accuracy of the research, and the excitement King generates as he details the trials and troubles the artist faced while creating his work for a sometimes less-than-adoring public. Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture was Non-Fiction Book of the Year for Book Sense in 2000. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling was nominated for both the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award (Canada), and this year Leonardo and the Last Supper was winner of the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction – all well deserved prizes. King’s fast-paced narrative style, his vibrant descriptions (aided by well chosen illustrations), and intuitive understanding of what makes art come alive for readers make him unique among contemporary authors, a man whose writing about an artwork pays true homage to the art itself. This is an exciting and utterly absorbing study of an artist, his work, his frustrations, and his glory.

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Author Elizabeth Jolley, whose portraits of elderly characters are unparalleled in their sensitivity and in the sly amusement she brings to their creation, gives life to Dorothy Peabody – or as much life as this quiet, fearful, and unimaginative woman can be said to possess, until that moment in which her life suddenly takes wing through her ongoing correspondence with author Diana Hopewell. Jolley also creates additional, vibrant and often surprising characters, also middle-aged single women, who are the protagonists of the new novel-in-progress which she shares in her correspondence with Miss Peabody. As the point of view moves back and forth between Miss Peabody’s life in Weybridge, outside of London, and Diana Hopewell’s novel-in-progress, which takes place in a polite boarding school in western Australia, Elizabeth Jolley keeps the humor and surprise at a high level, while also commenting on the nature of writing and the role of the novelist. With her wry, often poignant descriptions, and the ability to reveal her characters’ deepest yearnings through subtle and beautifully developed scenes and dialogue, Elizabeth Jolley is a writer of formidable talents and remarkable insights. Outstanding novel!

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This strange and sometimes eerie collection of short stories by Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan is guaranteed to stick in the minds of its readers, not just because it is wonderfully written by a man whose country is not as open to foreigners as this book is, but because its reality is so far removed from what any of us have experienced or even imagined. Seven short stories and one novella create a sometimes mystical or mysterious mood, oftentimes more akin to horror than to fantasy, a mood that is guaranteed to make readers sit up and take notice, even as they may be lulled by the “folky” and confidential attitude of several speakers as they reflect on their lives. Whether one should interpret some of the events described in this collection as dark humor, shocking dramatic irony, or simply as the reality of the various Chinese speakers and, one presumes, the author, is a question which readers will have to explore on their own. Though author Amy Tan, in a blurb on the book’s cover, suggests that “Mo Yan’s voice will find its way into the heart of the American reader, just as Kundera and Garcia Marquez have,” I suspect that many readers will react as I did – my heart was, in fact, aching, often shocked, and sometimes appalled at what passes for normal life in rural China. The residual feeling of this collection, at least for me, is not that of folk tales or fantasy, in which one can smile, amused, at the flights of imagination, but of the sometimes terrible realities which underlie these stories.

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