Pulitzer Prize winning author Jeffrey Eugenides creates a story, set in the 1980s, in which the entire novel incorporates and illustrates the marriage plot, with three main characters all pursuing the goal of marriage. These young students at Brown University are all conscientious, and all have real academic interests, but they also follow their libidos into sometimes new directions with the goal of experiencing a “full” and “satisfying” life. Madeleine Hanna, the English major of the quotation above has just discovered semiotics and the excitement of this esoteric academic subject; Mitchell Grammaticus, who has loved and fantasized about Madeleine since he first met her, is fascinated by religion and philosophy; and Leonard Bankhead, with whom Madeleine is passionately in love, wants most to “become an adjective,” like Joycean, Shakespearean, Faulknerian, Chekhovian or Tolstoyan. Eugenides creates a novel which is fully successful in developing these characters and their interactions, and when, at the end of this year, they separately arrive in New York City and find themselves at the same party, they are quite different from who they were just a year ago. As the party progresses, the reader, too, having had the opportunity to get to know them, their family backgrounds, and their goals from their earlier lives, comes to new appreciation of who they all are. Firmly grounded in the reality of the individual lives of students in the 1980s, the novel concerns itself with the self-absorbed and individual lives of the characters, often at the expense of universal insights.
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Libyan author Hisham Matar draws on his own life to provide insights into this story of a son’s yearning for the father he loved but who vanished when he was fourteen. In real life, Matar’s father Jaballa, once a member of the Libyan delegation to the United Nations and, after Muammar Gaddafi’s coup, a political dissident, went into exile in Egypt in 1979, when his son was nine. He was kidnapped in 1990, when his son was twenty, his fate unknown to this day. This fraught background provides the structure of Matar’s novel, the story of Nuri el-Alfi, a young boy whose mother dies rather mysteriously when he is nine. When Nuri is fourteen, his father and his new wife Mona meet Nuri in Switzerland at the Montreux Palace Hotel, and it is on this vacation that his father is abducted. The Swiss police have no leads. As the author continues Nuri’s story from that moment up to age twenty-four, the bare bones outline of his life at the time of the kidnapping gradually broadens and gets filled in, and his life as an exile, without family or country, takes shape. Through flashbacks and reminiscences, the reader also comes to know more about Nuri’s younger life and his father’s role as a dissident in exile.
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When three-year-old Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759 – 1824) goes suddenly and completely blind one night as she sleeps, there is no dearth of physicians willing to treat her. Empress Maria Theresia of Austria immediately provides all the resources of the court – and of her court physicians. French author/journalist Michele Halberstadt creates a fascinating study of the young pianist, whose blindness has been diagnosed by court physicians as amaurosis, a form of blindness “that appears suddenly without any malfunctioning of the optical system. Its onset is either toxic, congenital, or nervous.” Certainly there is a chance that this wis a kind of hysterical blindness, caused by some trauma, perhaps within her family, but Sigmund Freud and his theories, are still a hundred years in the future, and there appears to be no way, at that time, to discover what it is that is blocking her sight. When Maria Theresia is eighteen, Franz Anton Mesmer, meets her father, and a “cure” begins.
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The structure of a folk song, as author Monika Fagerholm describes it here, explains the overall structure of this novel, with many repetitions through time and space, through past and present, and through new generations and old. Points of view constantly change among the many characters as the chronology moves between 1969 and 2012 and back. Bits of information are provided about one character in one section at one moment in time, contradicted in another section, and denied completely in yet another. Different characters go to the same places at different times and perform the same actions, but the results may be described differently, and may actually be different, depending on who is telling the story. If this sounds complex, it is. Finnish author Monika Fagerholm challenges the very nature of story telling in this novel, which has, at its heart, a series of dark mysteries which echo through more than one generation.
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In this exciting and rather “old-fashioned” prize-winner from 1975, newly reprinted by Bloomsbury, Thomas Williams creates a novel about fiction writing and its relationship to the “immensities” with which every human being must contend, for better or worse, during his lifetime. Telling the story of a novelist who is writing a novel in which a character is also writing a novel, Williams creates, first, Aaron Benham, a professor at a small New England college in the 1970s. Williams tells the reader at the outset that the story Aaron Benham is creating is “a simple story of seduction, rape, madness and murder—the usual human preoccupations,” but that is a misleading summary. Aaron’s novel, set in the 1940s, is actually a study of very real characters dealing with their lives, their expectations, and the world as they see it within the microcosm of a small college. Constantly playing with fiction vs. reality, fiction as part of reality, fiction as an alternative to reality, and the special fictions one creates for love, the author writes a powerful and dramatic novel, filled with events which keep the reader constantly involved with his characters, even when they are behaving very badly. Powerful and unforgettable.
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