Henry Smart, born at the turn of the century, leads such a miserable childhood that he is on the streets by the age of five and solely responsible for his younger brother Victor by the age of nine. Always cold, hungry, and lacking a warm place to sleep, Henry and Victor are at the mercy of the elements, so concentrated on staying alive from moment to moment that they have no time to think toward the future. By the age of fourteen, Henry has met up with other poor who have some of the same resentments he has toward those who have dominated the land and commerce for so long. In 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood takes over the General Post Office on Easter Monday, declares the establishment of a new government, and raises its flag, and Henry is there–not out of a sense of patriotism so much as a sense that he is at home–and is fed–when he is among these people. When the shooting starts, Henry’s first bullets are aimed not at the British or at the police, but at the store window across the street, which he sees mocking him with its shiny new boots, something he has never had.
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A plaintive cry from an unnamed speaker, “age eleven years and two months,” reflects the angst of a child whose whole life has turned inside out through decisions he has made himself, decisions that seemed ideal when he made them but which, as is typical of childhood decisions, have brought consequences he never expected. Israeli author Amos Oz’s novella about childhood in 1947 Israel bursts the bounds of its setting and achieves universality through the wonderfully observed character of the child, his self-created predicaments, and his intelligent commentary about life and change. The feelings of the speaker toward adult authority, especially his father, will resonate with readers. This appears to be an experiment with the child’s point of view which Oz develops more fully in his other novel of childhood, A Panther in the Basement.
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In September, 1957, Joseba, the speaker who opens the novel, and his friend David Imaz are both eight years old when they introduce themselves to the new teacher at their Basque school in Obaba, near Guernica, Spain. David, sometimes called “the accordionist’s son,” is, like his father, an accordionist–an “artist” at his craft–and almost instantly, he finds himself perched on top of a desk, playing for his delighted class. Forty-two years later, the accordion is put away, and Joseba is visiting David’s widow, not in Basque country, but at Stoneham Ranch in Three Rivers, California, where David’s uncle once lived. Joseba, a published author who also participated in the events in Obaba with David, discovers when he reads David’s book that “events and facts have all been crammed” into the book, “like anchovies in a glass jar.” He suggests to Mary Ann that he rewrite the book, expanding David’s memoir and setting the record straight, promising that “any lines I add…must be true to the original.” Mary Ann agrees, and three years later Joseba has completed the book which becomes the text of this novel. (On my Favorites List for 2009)
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Naguib Mahfouz is a never-ending source of literary surprises. In this unusual and often charming novel from 1948, newly translated and republished by the American University of Cairo, Mahfouz writes his only Freudian, psychological study, an analysis of Kamil Ru’ba Laz, a young Egyptian man so dominated by his mother that he is unable to make a single decision or form a single successful relationship with the outside world. When the novel opens, his mother has just died, and Kamil, in his mid-twenties, is devastated. The first person novel which results is Kamil’s attempt to put his life into some sort of perspective and, perhaps, to find some hope for the future, some understanding of “life’s true wisdom,” a journey which will take him outside himself for the first time in his life.
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To Siberia, the latest of Petterson’s novels to be translated into English, continues these themes. Nominated upon its publication in 1996 for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (which Petterson won in 2009 for I Curse the River of Time, not yet available in English), it is set in Skagen, in Denmark, at the tip of Jutland. The unnamed speaker, who is aged five when the novel opens, is a worrier—a little girl worried about the fierce-looking lions who guard the gate to a nearby house and about her father’s ears freezing and falling off when he does not wear a hat. Almost anonymous, the little girl comes closest to having a name when her devoted brother Jesper refers to her as “Sistermine.” The two are extremely close, though Jesper is three years older, and they spend much time together, sharing their dreams. Jesper plans to become a Socialist and go to Morocco, while Sistermine intends to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Dark and often bleak, To Siberia uses its title as a symbol of the yearnings of the main character, and the reader recognizes almost from the outset that she is already in Siberia, emotionally.
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