Having read The Age of Orphans, the first novel in Laleh Khadivi’s trilogy, published in 2009, I vividly remember the author’s haunting style and musical, even psalm-like cadences, along with the power and passion with which she creates that novel’s memorable main character, seven-year-old Reza Khourdi, who grows up under the Shah. This book, though similar in the best aspects of its style, is truly different, and in its differences, it hits heights rarely seen in a second novel, especially by such a young novelist. Beginning in the earliest days of the Iranian Revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, The Walking is simultaneously much narrower in focus and much more universal in its themes. The author says almost nothing about the revolutionary events themselves, concentrating instead on the lives and innermost questions, thoughts, and fears, of two Khourdi brothers, ages nineteen and seventeen, who leave Iran secretly after a bloody incident involving their father, Reza from The Age of Orphans. They become part of the Iranian diaspora – young men and families who leave to create new lives in another world while they still have a chance to escape. A novel which stuns with its insights, hitting all the right notes.
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Author Louise Erdrich, herself a member of a Chippewa (Ojibwa) band of Native Americans, here writes one of her most powerful and emotionally involving novels. Though it starts as a crime story, it is, like all Erdrich’s novels, much more than that, quickly developing into an examination of the lives of her characters, both old and young, as they face the challenges of reservation life. In a powerful opening scene, filled with symbols and portents, thirteen-year-old Antone Basil Coutts (Joe), only child and namesake of Judge Coutts and his wife Geraldine, is helping his father to pull tiny seedlings from cracks in the foundation of their house. They are awaiting Geraldine’s return from the office, where she works recording the genealogies of the members of their band of Chippewa, keeping track of marriages, births, who is living there, and who has moved away. When she finally arrives at home, she is almost unrecognizable, so badly beaten she can hardly see, reeking of gasoline and so traumatized by rape and other crimes against her that she has become mute. She claims not to know who has committed this crime or where it took place, hiding out in her room after she is released from the hospital and refusing to leave. The boy, known as Joe to his friends, knows that it will be up to him and his father to try to find out who has done this. They begin to study cases in which his father has been involved to look for clues.
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When three middle-aged losers independently and simultaneously show up to look at an old farmhouse for sale in the countryside of Campania, outside of Naples, each sees it for its potential as a Bed and Breakfast retreat. For each of these men, creating such a retreat would represent a whole new way of life, one far more satisfying than anything he has known to date. None of them can afford this dream, however. Though they do not know each other, they are (barely) smart enough to realize that the only way any of them can afford to participate in the B & B project, is to pool their resources and buy it together. Within a month, this disparate group has signed the papers together and received the keys to a farm that someone else once tried to restore but has abandoned. The novel is clever and well developed, great fun for those who are looking for a different kind of novel, a wonderful break from the bleak and often depressing noir novels which have also been coming from Italy recently. If this were summer, I might say that this is the perfect “beach read,” full of fun, very funny, and very exciting, but as it is not, I will say only that readers here and now will be wise to pay particular attention to the titles of the last three chapters, each of which is from the point of view of a different main character. The cumulative effect of these chapters provides the real conclusion which will delight readers, even in the short, dark days of winter.
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In The Elephant Keeper’s Children, Hoeg continues his focus on philosophy, this time dealing with the search for faith and meaning through an exploration of life and its parallel search for love and happiness – be it through Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism. He does this, not as the main focus of the novel, but as part of the backstory involving three children who are searching for their mother and father, who have disappeared. Their father is the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark on the island of Fino, where they all live, and their mother, the organist, is a mechanical genius with a gift for invention beyond what anyone in their congregation can imagine. The result is a farcical, picaresque story of chases and escapes in which the fourteen-year-old main character (named, in typical Hoeg fashion, Peter, suggesting issues the character might have in common with those of the author, on some level), along with his sixteen-year-old sister Tilde and terrier dog Basker, sets out to find their parents, sometimes aided by Hans, their older brother who is studying away from home. They know they must find their parents themselves before they are remanded to a children’s home by adults who seem to fear what they might do if left alone.
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Firmly connected to the cold, often bleak landscapes they inhabit, Per Petterson’s characters are never frivolous, however impulsive and even violent their actions might be. Often shackled by circumstances over which they have little control, they respond in the only ways they can, sometimes self-destructively. Their parents can sometimes offer little guidance, even by way of example, and growing up becomes a question of actions followed either by reward or, more likely, by punishment. In the ironically entitled It’s Fine By Me, an early Petterson novel from 1992, Audun Sletten shares his life from his teen years to age twenty, always honest in his feelings, sometimes to his own detriment, and always sensitive to his personal standards of behavior which the rest of the world does not always understand or share. Beautifully developed and filled with details which ring true, not just in terms of the time and setting, but in terms of psychological honesty, It’s Fine By Me feels almost autobiographical in its ability to convey real feelings by real people. The moving conclusion to this novel shows Ardun’s growth – often with the help of those who care about him – and readers who see themselves (at least in some aspect) within the character of Ardun will celebrate his coming of age – all the while knowing that Ardun is a work in progress and that he’ll never be able to take life or his own responses to threats for granted.
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