An unnamed writer is hired by a friend who works with the human rights office of the Catholic Church of an unnamed country to edit and proofread eleven hundred pages of testimony—“the memories of the hundreds of survivors of and witnesses to the massacres perpetrated in the throes of the so-called armed conflict between the army and the guerrillas.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the army declared that the indigenous Indians who had lived in remote Mayan villages for hundreds of years were anti-government leftists, and soldiers conducted widespread genocide wiping out hundreds of villages and killing over a hundred thousand people. Now, many years later, the human rights office at the cathedral plans to publish the survivors’ testimonies for the first time. Castellanos Moya creates a powerful work of fiction from some of the western hemisphere’s most horrendous brutality, giving enough detail to shock the reader into questioning how human beings could not only commit some of these atrocities but enjoy the bloodshed in the process. At the same time, however, he is aware of the limits on violence that a reader can comprehend before “tuning out,” a rare quality which he exploits by juxtaposing some of the worst details of torture against images of the absurdities in the speaker’s personal life.
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Posted in 9b-2010 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Classic Novel, England, Historical, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Psychological study on Jan 21st, 2011
Described by the [London] Daily Telegraph as “a criminally neglected British author,” Patrick Hamilton wrote nine novels from the 1920s through the early 1950s, along with the famous dramas of ROPE and GASLIGHT, and though he earned the admiration of a host of famous authors, from Graham Greene and Doris Lessing to Nick Hornby, he never achieved the popular success he deserved, either in his own time or throughout the twentieth century. In this decade, however, virtually all his novels have been reprinted in both Europe and in the US, and he is finally beginning to be recognized for his astute observations about his times and for his insights into the minds of his characters. Set in 1943 at the Rosamund Tea Room, a boarding house to which some residents of London have moved to escape the Blitz in London, Hamilton lays bare the inner lives of his characters, not through interior monologues but through their behavior, their revealing conversations, and their interactions with others. (On my All-time Favorites List.)
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Saudi author Yousef al-Mohaimeed, whose book, according to Scott Wilson of the Washington Post, sold five hundred copies in just three days at one bookshop in Riyadh, is certain to gain western readers with his intense and often moving story of a love gone wrong. Munira al-Sahi, a beautiful thirty-year-old woman, has been studying for her graduate degree and working at a counseling center for abused girls and women in Riyadh. She also writes a once-a-week column for a local newspaper. Though she has heard all manner of terrible life stories from the women she counsels, she never suspects she herself will become another sad statistic: the man who has been courting her is an impostor, someone who is using her to gain revenge on one of her brothers by ruining her life and making her his legal and emotional prisoner forever. Through his focus on Munira, Yousef al-Mohaimeed reveals a much larger purpose than just a sad love story. Here he recreates the lives of many seemingly typical Saudi women in 1990, a time in which American Patriot missiles and Russian Scuds are streaking through the sky in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
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It is difficult to know even where to begin in reviewing this novel, a novel so broad in its themes and scope and so sensitive to the details which make it come alive that other American readers, like me, will undoubtedly be waiting as impatiently as I am for the rest of the novels which make up the “Copenhagen Quartet.” Main character Bernardo (Nardo) Greene, an “ordinary” Chilean school teacher, was tortured for two years during the Pinochet government because he varied from the assigned curriculum in order to expand the minds of his students. Ostensibly a love story between Nardo, a widower whose wife and son were “desaparecido” during his incarceration and torture, and Michela Ibsen, a forty-year-old Danish woman whose ex-husband abused her and whose seventeen-year-old daughter committed suicide, the novel examines many themes related to love and death, freedom and forced confinement, and the worldly and the spiritual. (My favorite novel of 2010)
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