Described by Milan’s daily newspaper Corriere della Serra as “the only true first-rate writer that the new millennium has given us for now,” Erri De Luca writes a story of Naples, and its “persons.” The author has made it clear that you “don’t call them people, they’re persons, each and every one. If you call them people you lose sight of the person. Here he recreates Neapolitan life, filled with well-developed characters who live through three different time periods – 1943, as Naples has its popular uprising against their German occupiers; the early 1950s, when the unnamed narrator, a young orphan of about seven, is growing up; and the early 1960s, when the young man is now finishing school and about to set out on his own. The novel moves back and forth in time, as the author writes an often lyrical novel full of noble sentiments and wise observations, at the same time that it is packed with details about life and behavior. Intense in its imagery and emotion, this novel credits the reader by believing that s/he is capable understanding on a level beyond that of plot, and that the longings of the main character and his search to belong are universal and not limited to this one character in this one set of circumstances and times.
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Set in Oslo in 1961, author Roy Jacobsen tells the story of Finn, a small boy of about nine, and his divorced, and later widowed, mother as they cope with life’s hard realities. Extremely close, they struggle to make ends meet, his mother always making it a point to be at home when he returns from school, and working only part-time at a shoe store. Finn’s “hard realities” become much harder when circumstances force his mother to rent out his room to a boarder. One interview with a potential boarder is so intense that she closes the door on Finn and conducts it in private, learning that the woman is not a potential boarder but her ex-husband’s second wife, the mother of Finn’s half-sister Linda. She does not share any of this information with Finn, but she is preoccupied and tense for weeks afterward. When his mother finally admits that not only does he have a half-sister named Linda but that the strange little girl will be moving in with them immediately, Finn’s world crashes, and he begins his journey toward understanding of himself, his mother, and life in general. Filled with surprises and shocks.
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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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