In this unusual novel about an unusual and touching friendship, author Georgina Harding tells the story of life in a rural community in Romania beginning in the 1930s and extending through World War II and the Communist Occupation. As the novel opens, a sick and starving man has just arrived by train in Iasi, a place with which he is completely unfamiliar. He is looking for a woman, but he does not know where or how to find her. Eventually, he sees a nurse dressed in white walking past him and, thinking she is an angel, he follows her to a hospital, where he collapses. The man is Augustin, known as Tinu, and he is looking for Safta, a childhood friend whom he has not seen since they were separated by the war and Communist Occupation. Tinu is both deaf and mute, uninterested or unable to learn sign language. His only form of communication is through haunting drawings which he makes with soot and spit on found materials – paper, boxes, wrappings, pieces of cloth – and these drawings reflect an unusually selective view of the world. On my Favorites list for the year.
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In this autobiographical novel, author Vaddey Ratner has accomplished what every novelist hopes for—she has created a main character and family so vibrant that every reader will truly feel “replanted” and rooted in a different place – Cambodia – where they then share every aspect of these characters’ lives and hopes for the future. Telling the story is Raami, an engaging seven-year-old child of a large and loving Phnom Penh family, which also includes her nanny, cook, and beloved gardener. Together they inhabit a lush, lovely, and endlessly fascinating natural world which offers constant visual surprises and inspires the stories, tales, and poems Raami relates here. Many of these poems and stories have been written by her father, a man she adores, and they infuse her whole life with the magic and beauty of words, offering hope and inspiration even through the atrocities she eventually witnesses when the Khmer Rouge take over the country. Directed by revolutionary officers and moved from village to village at the whim of the Khmer, the family performs menial labor as they try to hide their background, dealing with starvation, disease, exhaustion, killings. It is her memory of her father’s stories which keep her sane. Beautifully written, totally involving, and eventually uplifting.
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Focusing on Ceausescu’s last hundred days as ruler of Romania, author Patrick McGuinness recreates all the forces leading to the overthrow of the government, telling his story through the eyes of an unnamed twenty-one-year-old speaker from the UK. The speaker had applied for a foreign posting upon the death of his father and was given a job teaching English in Bucharest, one for which he had neither applied nor appeared for an interview. In Bucharest his mentor, Leo O’Heix, shows him “the Paris of the East,” which now more clearly resembles “a deserted funfair.” Leo has adapted to Romanian life completely, ignoring most of the other Brits there and carving out his own identity – as the biggest black-marketeer in Bucharest. Gradually, Bucharest comes to life through the speaker’s eyes. The city is being bulldozed at a rapid rate, and the old architectural monuments and historical buildings are being replaced with cheap, modern buildings. Shop signs appear on new buildings but have no shop behind them, people are hungry, and even the headstones in the cemeteries have disappeared. The speaker finds himself growing up as he makes choices or has them made for him, and he discovers that no one is who s/he seems to be. Subtle, often humorous, and profoundly ironic, this is a unique approach to a study of a city in the midst of evolution and then revolution and its aftermath, and none of the characters here will remain unchanged.
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In the introduction to this re-publication of Crusoe’s Daughter (1986), author Jane Gardam admits that “This [is] by far the favourite of all my books.” Brought up in near isolation in rural northeast England like the main character of this novel, Gardam herself eventually escaped to college in London, but though she joined London’s academic world and had great success as a novelist, her mother remained in the rural north for her whole life. Gardam uses her mother’s life as the starting point of this novel, setting it at the turn of the twentieth century on the northeast coast of Northumberland. In her loneliness main character Polly Flint finds her greatest solace from the books in the library of the house, especially when she discovers Robinson Crusoe, whose own twenty-eight-year isolation on an island offers her a way of dealing with her own. Gardam creates real atmosphere here in both time and place, and rural northeast England becomes almost a character of its own. The novel’s realism keeps Polly’s story from becoming a romance, however much the reader may empathize with her, and the author’s honest feelings for her characters, many of them based, in part, on her own family members, endow the novel with a poignancy that one does not often find elsewhere in Gardam’s novels.
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Posted in 9-2012 Reviews, Australia, Book Club Suggestions, Coming-of-age, Historical, Literary, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Social and Political Issues on Feb 26th, 2012
If there is such a genre as “Australian Gothic,” this novel would be one of its best-written examples. The sights, sounds, and smells of the bush, filled with storms, heat, dust, and exotic birds and animals, vibrate with life—and death—both physical and spiritual. Set in remote and sparsely populated Western Australia in the early 1940s, this 2008 novel recreates the life of Perdita Keene, a ten-year-old child not wanted by her British expatriate parents, who had hoped she would die at birth. Perdita, whose childhood is formed by the aborigine women who nursed her in infancy, develops a strong friendship with Mary, an aborigine girl five years older, and Billy, the deaf-mute son of the Trevors, white people who run a local cattle station. All three children are outcasts for various reasons, and their bonds with each other are total and life-affirming. The murder of Perdita’s father, described in the opening pages, is at the core of the novel, and the circumstances surrounding the case are not clear. All three children witness the crime, but Perdita, the narrator for most of the novel, is so traumatized that she cannot remember details. Lyrical, sensual, and full of passion, Sorry is a novel that is dramatically intense, full of emotion.
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