Set in Oslo in 1961, author Roy Jacobsen tells the story of Finn, a small boy of about nine, and his divorced, and later widowed, mother as they cope with life’s hard realities. Extremely close, they struggle to make ends meet, his mother always making it a point to be at home when he returns from school, and working only part-time at a shoe store. Finn’s “hard realities” become much harder when circumstances force his mother to rent out his room to a boarder. One interview with a potential boarder is so intense that she closes the door on Finn and conducts it in private, learning that the woman is not a potential boarder but her ex-husband’s second wife, the mother of Finn’s half-sister Linda. She does not share any of this information with Finn, but she is preoccupied and tense for weeks afterward. When his mother finally admits that not only does he have a half-sister named Linda but that the strange little girl will be moving in with them immediately, Finn’s world crashes, and he begins his journey toward understanding of himself, his mother, and life in general. Filled with surprises and shocks.
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With a breezy, irreverent point of view and a fine eye for the kinds of details which make characters and scenes memorable, Aravind Adiga tells an often humorous morality tale about life in an area of Mumbai undergoing residential redevelopment. And just as his Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, was celebrated because “it shocked and entertained in equal measure,” this novel, too, both shocks and entertains. Here Adiga also explores the theme of moral compromise, which India seems to require of its citizens if they are to become financially “successful.” The extreme poverty and the masses of other enterprising residents with whom everyone except the very rich must compete make absolute morality impossible, Adiga seems to suggest, a luxury which few can afford, and Adiga draws from these conflicts in his novels. The fifteen apartments of Vishram Society Tower A in Vakola, “the toenail of Santa Cruz,” near Mumbai’s airport, are home to a group of relatively middle-class residents – a social worker, a hardware specialist, a retired accountant, a teacher, and a journalist, for example. When Darmen Shah, who works for the Confidence Group, makes an offer to buy out the residents to build a super-luxury apartment building, most of them are ecstatic. He is offering a windfall of the equivalent of $330,000 per apartment if they will vacate so he can tear down their building and build his new development. The only catch is that all of the residents must agree to sell.
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On the opening page of this emotionally overwhelming novel, Lilly Bere, age eighty-nine, begins the grand story of her seemingly insignificant life, a story in which she speaks directly from her heart, begging to know “How can I get along without Bill?” her grandson who has just died following the First Gulf War in Kuwait (1990 – 1991). Each of the next sixteen chapters is one more numbered day “without Bill,” and we soon learn through flashbacks that Lilly and her family have suffered deaths connected to three earlier wars – the Great War (1914 – 1918), the Irish War for Independence (1919 – 1921), and Vietnam (ca.1965 – 1975). Though all the men she loved did not necessarily die in combat, their deaths were all inescapably war related, and Lilly becomes, in many ways, the prototypically devastated wife of Tadg Bere (in the Irish Revolution), sister of Willie Dunne (the Great War recruit featured in The Secret Scripture), mother of Ed (in Vietnam), and grandmother of Bill (in Kuwait), a mourner who is equally a victim of the wars that have taken her men. One of the best novels I have read all year.
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Winner of an extraordinary number of literary prizes in Tasmania, Australia, and England, including the London Observer’s Book of the Year Award, WANTING by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan emphasizes, by its ambiguous title, two of the most contradictory characteristics of Queen Victoria’s reign—the “wanting,” or desire, to conquer other lands and bring “civilization” to them, and the “want,” or lack, of empathy and respect for the people and cultures which they deliberately destroy in the process. The same contradictory characteristics are also reflected in the personal relationships of the socially prominent men and women of the era, some of whom we meet here. As the action moves back and forth between Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) and London and from 1839 through the 1840s and 1850s, Flanagan gives depth to the bleak picture of colonial life, creating an emotionally wrenching portrait of Mathinna, orphaned child of aborigine King Romeo, as she is wrested from her countrymen, exiled on Flinders Island, and brought into the home of the ambitious Lady Jane Franklin. Determined to prove that this savage can be civilized, Lady Jane forces the child to imitate a proper British young lady in her education, dress, and demeanor, allowing her no connections to her past but providing nothing of value in its place. Outstanding and memorable novel.
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Cairo-born cartoonist Tarek Shahin, who counts Garry Trudeau as one of his idols, reveals many of the same insightful, irreverent, and humorous attitudes toward life in this collection of his own cartoons as Trudeau has shown in Doonesbury during his long career. Published every day, from April, 2008, through April, 2010, in the Daily Star, Egypt’s independent English language newspaper, Shahin’s “Al Khan” cartoons foreshadowed the popular revolution which eventually took place in Tahrir Square between January 25 and February 11, 2011. Using daily life and newsworthy events, both social and political, as his inspiration, Shahin provides an unforgettable vision of what life was like in Cairo in the months leading up to the revolution. For a western reader like myself, who saw the revolution from a distance and may have regarded it as a bit of a surprise, Shahin’s cartoons make this momentous event much more personal, immediate, dramatic, and most of all, understandable because the forces leading up to it, along with its full, lasting impact, can be connected with “real” people, even though those “real” people are cartoon characters.
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