This sensitive and memorable depiction of the establishment of Soviet Socialist Republics by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1939, with its bloodshed and violence, is filled with trenchant observations of real people behaving realistically during times of real crisis. In clear, unadorned prose, author Theodore Odrach depicts the lives of rural peasants with sensitivity and an awareness both of their independence and of their shared values, contrasting them with the mindless, bureaucratic officials who enjoy wielding power over human beings which have become mere ciphers to them. A sense of dark humor and irony, which may be the only thing that makes survival possible, distinguishes this novel from other novels of this period, and no reader will doubt that this book is written by a someone who has seen the atrocities unfold, experienced the injustices, empathized with his fellow citizens, and felt compelled to tell the world about the abuses. Odrach sets his story in Hlaby, in the Pinsk Marshes, an enormous marshland which extends into Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine, a place which is so remote that it cannot be reached except in the winter when the marsh is frozen. When the Bolsheviks arrive in 1939, they announce that henceforth this village will be part of the Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic.
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Set in Kuwait in the time between the two Gulf wars, Small Kingdoms is as close to a perfect novel as I’ve seen in years. Not a word is out of place. Every image works, and many show a startling originality. All the plot lines are successful, without an overwhelming reliance on coincidence to tie them together and resolve them at the end. The characters, even those from Kuwait, with their completely different society and culture, feel natural and comfortable as we read about them, people we can recognize for their common humanity and can respect for their differences from our own way of thinking. The novel is rich with ideas, complete in the depiction of cultural differences and sensitive to ideas which Americans, especially women, may find alien, ideas which are an integral part of Kuwaiti Muslim culture. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
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Set in England in the era between the two world wars, God on the Rocks, with its sly, multi-layered title, is one of Jane Gardam’s earliest novels, a delightful but carefully considered look at society, religion, personal responsibility, and acts of fate in the lives of several families. Eight-year-old Margaret Marsh, the primary speaker, is energetic and thoughtful, living comfortably with her very religious bank manager-father and her subservient and seemingly passive mother. The family has recently been joined, however, by Lydia, a “fallen woman” whom her father Kenneth believes he is called upon to “save.” On Wednesdays, Lydia takes the Bible-spouting Margaret on little trips, and through her, Margaret discovers a world she has never even imagined. Without ever losing her sense of humor, often very dark, Gardam explores the contrasts between “good” and “evil”—the fun that Margaret has with the unrepentant Lydia vs. the predictable boredom that she has with her parents. As Kenneth Marsh begins to wonder what Lydia and Margaret do at the beach (and as Lydia begins to brush suggestively against him at their house), Kenneth decides to accompany them to the beach one Wednesday, using his visit to hold forth on sin, preaching his religion to the vacationers on the beach, a “soapbox bloke.”
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Jay R. Tunney, a son of the famous prizefighter Gene Tunney (and also vice-president of the International Shaw Society), recreates the story of the twenty-year friendship between his father and George Bernard Shaw with such love, admiration, and sensitivity to the intensely personal relationship between these two men that the reader cannot help but be swept up by this story of two men who, ignoring a forty-year age difference, found enduring satisfaction in each other’s company: John James (Gene) Tunney was thirty-two; Shaw was seventy-three when they met in 1929 when Tunney was on his honeymoon with his bride, Polly Lauder, heiress to the Carnegie fortune. Both men had already achieved the peaks of their professions by that time, and they now had the leisure to explore new realms. Tunney had retired as heavyweight champion of the world in 1928, and Shaw had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Shaw has said that Tunney helped him “to plant my feet on solid ground.” And Tunney has said, “I think of Shaw as the most considerate person I have ever known.” (My Favorite non-fiction for 2010)
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Earth and Ashes, a small novella, packs more feeling and more power into its few pages than most other books do in hundreds of pages, and few, if any, readers will emerge from it unscathed. Author Atiq Rahimi, an Afghan national now living in France, has recreated the Afghanistan he remembers when it was occupied by the Russians (1979 – 1989). He was seventeen at the time, and life has not improved much for the populace since then. Only the enemies have changed, and they now include many factions from within. Without preamble or any lengthy setting of the scene, the author introduces a main character who is faced with a family crisis from which he may never recover, then tells that story in plain, direct, and straightforward language which gains impact from its very simplicity. Earth and Ashes resembles some of the very best short stories by Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Andre DuBus, all of whom compress, compress, and then compress some more the images and details with which the reader comes to a full understanding of the author’s purpose.
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