A young Kurdish boy, living in the Zagros Mountains in 1921, has always felt loved and protected, despite his family’s “poverty.” He enjoys “flying” from the roof of the family’s hut, experiencing the soaring feelings of earth and heaven at the same time, and identifying with the falcons. In gorgeous and poetic language, author Laleh Khadivi, recreates the “gloried ground” to which the boy is connected by birth and culture. Soon after his initiation into manhood, at age seven, he accompanies the village men to a mountain lookout, where they wait for the shah’s troops. In the ensuing massacre, the boy is orphaned, and he leaves the battlefield with the shah’s army, without a backward glance, ultimately consoled by the fact that he will be getting boots, a whole new “family,” and a new way of life. His eventual assignment to Kermanshah, a Kurdish city, in 1940, and his long residence there, bring his personal conflicts to a head.
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Seeing himself as “panther in the basement,” much like Tyrone Power in a favorite old film, Proffi, the 12-year-old son of activist parents in Jerusalem in 1947, is a member of an “underground cell” which he and two friends have formed. Their objective, like that of their parents, is the ouster of the British, who have been mandated by the UN to set up a Jewish homeland. Though the children enjoy “spying” and see themselves as glorious heroes, their plans of attack are distinctly childish. When Proffi finds himself drawn to Sgt. Stephen Dunlop, a gentle, shy British soldier from Canterbury, who wants to learn Hebrew and to teach Proffi English, Proffi justifies this friendship as his chance to probe for information for his own “secret DOD agency.” (On my list of All-Time Favorites.)
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May Flynn, the daughter of actor Errol Flynn and a beautiful Jamaican girl, has always wondered about her roots. Brought up by her mother and grandfather, and, for four years, a foster family, May is clever and tough from a young age. Always an outsider, she could pass for white, though she is not part of the white world of her father and maternal grandfather. Not part of the black world, either, though she considers herself “colored,” she is often mocked by her dark Jamaican peers. Frequently alone, she enjoys keeping journals, filling them with stories of pirates, inspired by the films she sees at the local cinema and starring Errol Flynn. As May discovers more about her mother and her mother’s life before, during, and after her birth, she creates the story of her own life, which ultimately becomes this novel. Filled with colorful characters, the patina of Hollywood, and the violence of political change, the novel is a fast-paced melodrama and family saga. The author’s style is clean and simple as she traces lives across generations, providing enough description to enable the reader to create vibrant pictures of the action without bogging down the narrative.
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South Africa from 1968 – 2000 is revealed with all its cultural variety and internal stresses through the life story of Paul Sweetbread, an overweight Jewish boy who is an outsider to everyone. Neither a Boer nor an Englishman, he is also not really a Jew, either, since his family has never been observant, leaving him without any common roots that connect him to his Caucasian countrymen. A person with a photographic memory, he is, from the outset, a victim of his memory. The action intensifies when Paul, having finished school in 1987, joins the South African Defense Force, instead of going to college. In bordering Namibia, formerly a German colony, revolutionaries are taking advantage of the confusion over who is in control–South Africa, the United Nations, or whoever can grab power for himself–and Paul is sent there to fight.
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V. S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize for Literature celebrates the long and illustrious career of a writer of extraordinary narrative gifts, amply demonstrated in this novel. The reader can choose any page of the book at random and be stunned by a graceful turn of phrase, a unique observation, the pleasing alternation of starkly simple and elegantly complex sentences, or a perceptive comment presented with grace. Though it is relatively short, it is dense in its thematic development, tracing the peripatetic life of Willie Somerset Chandran across three continents, and from his teen years to his early 40’s, as he attempts to fit in, to be part of some mainstream. The offspring of a Brahmin functionary in a maharajah’s court and an Untouchable woman, someone to whom his father was drawn temporarily in an effort to emulate the sacrifice of Gandhi, Willie belongs to neither group, an outsider even to the lowest caste. Because Naipaul has mined the theme of displacement repeatedly in his novels and non-fiction, one cannot avoid wondering how much of this book is autobiographical.
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