Petit’s heart-stopping performance as he walks the tightrope betweent he two World Trade Center towers becomes the pivotal event of this magnificent (and monumental) “New York novel” in which Colum McCann examines many facets of the city’s life in 1974. Focusing first on the down-and-outers—prostitutes, the desperately poor, the drug- and alcohol-addicted homeless, the infirm elderly, gang members, casual thieves, and bright young people with no futures—he recreates the lower depths of New York, a place where its citizens every day walk the fine line between survival and death on a completely different tightrope from that of Philippe Petit. Like Petit, however, all of them are also rejoice in moments of beauty, the only thing that can make their lives worth living—an unexpected kindness, the helpfulness of a friend (who happens to be a monk), and even the bright graffiti that shows up overnight, deep inside the tunnels of the subway. Unfortunately, for some, it also appears at the end of a needle. (My favorite novel of 2009)
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Setting this monumental family saga in Gaomi, in northeast China, where he grew up, Mo Yan, a member of the People’s Liberation Army who studied writing at their art academy, presents a realistic, rather than glorified, picture of life in China. Vividly portraying political and historical events—most of them bloody—over the course of the twentieth century, he portrays family life in rural China from the Boxer Rebellion to the Communist Revolution, the Japanese invasion, the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Mao. Shangguan Lu’s early marriage and domestic life unfolds through flashbacks. Through the developing stories of the eight daughters, their marriages, and their careers, the history of China from 1939 to the 1990s unfolds. Mo Yan’s novel is big, and it is important, the first really thorough portrait of rural life in China during the major historical movements of the twentieth century. His style, while often exciting is also brutally realistic and graphic in its violence. Though the author includes legends and cultural traditions as part of his picture of family life, the Shangguan family comes alive primarily through minute details.
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The Ventriloquist’s Tale opens and closes with addresses by a mysterious, third person ventriloquist/narrator, representing the old Amerindian culture of myth and magic of southern Guyana. This narrator indicates that he is not the hero of the book because, as he tells the reader, “Your heroes and heroines are slaves to time…. They’ve forgotten how to be playful and have no appetite for adventure.” As the narrator unfolds the stories of the McKinnon family, half Scottish and half Wapisiana, we see illustrated in their lives the conflicts (and occasional melding) of their ancient ways with western science, religion, and exploitation. The narrator and, one understands, the author come down strongly on the side of the ancients, as the Amerindian characters enchant, amuse, and play with us while they show us their struggle with European intruders, including, at one point, Evelyn Waugh in search of inspiration.
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When the Ibis, a “blackbirder” leaves Calcutta and sets out across the Bay of Bengal, carrying “indentured migrants,” many of whom will become the equivalent of slaves, the seas darken and become stormy. As the ship tosses and conditions deteriorate, the ship soon becomes a microcosm for life on land, full of tumult and unexpected twists of fate, and each person’s heart is laid bare. Everybody aboard is escaping from something, so anxious to put their problems behind them that they see no choice but to submit to the atrocious living conditions and sometimes sadistic overseers aboard the Ibis. Set in India in 1838, at the outset of the three-year Opium War between the British and the Chinese, this epic novel follows several characters from different levels of society, who become united through their personal lives aboard the ship and, more generally, through their connections to the opium and slave trades.
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