Vincent Balmer’s decision to write a “novel” about Antonio Flores, with whom he works, results in an engaging story in which Vincent, a writer, talks about his writing, his troubled characters explore the present and share their unhappy pasts, his lovers fall in and out of love and fail to connect with the objects of their desire, and a confessed serial killer goes on trial, “half asleep in the dock, utterly silent, his eyes blank.” I put the word “novel” in quotation marks here because though the speaker’s “novel” contains all the ingredients which could make Antonio’s story an exciting best seller, author Herve Le Tellier himself deliberately rejects the traditions of the novel as it has been written for hundreds of years. As a member of the French literary group “Oulipo,” a “workshop of potential literature,” Le Tellier is dedicated to finding “new patterns and structures which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.” As a result, he takes this novel in the many different directions which he fancies, leaving the reader to tag along for the ride. Vincent has recently returned to Lisbon from Paris following a failed love affair. A journalist, he is working with Antonio Flores, a photographer, covering the trial of a serial killer for a Paris magazine, a narrative which fades into the background when the speaker becomes more interested in writing the story of Antonio, the people they both know, their overlapping histories, and their real and imagined amours. Clever and full of fun (and games), Electrico W examines the themes of love and death with a good deal of honest emotion.
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Addressing a “hypocritical reader, my double, my brother,” a former revolutionary from Chile is telling her story to a someone who may be part of a truth commission investigating events that occurred in Santiago in the 1970s, a man who has traced her from Chile to a hospice in Stockholm. Lorena has consented to being interviewed, though she has little hope that the writer will be accurate in conveying what she wants to say, fearing that he will reduce her story to a “moral adventure tale.” She is old and dying, and she has a long history, however, and as she begins her story, we see her back in the years just before the death of President Salvador Allende (in 1973). She is a young woman and a new, unmarried mother. When a university friend visits her after the birth of her baby and takes her to a political demonstration in Santiago, she soon finds herself “caught up in something big, an enormous collective body.” She eventually becomes an active participant with this group, the Red Ax. Readers will empathize with Lorena, recognizing some of the turning points in which she may have made the wrong decisions, and, at the same time, understanding the pressures which have led to her decisions. As she tries to protect her interests on both sides of the political spectrum, Lorena eventually finds herself admitting, “I’m the one I want to erase from my life.”
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Whenever art lovers see “The Center of the World,” J. M. W. Turner’s masterpiece, for the first time, all are stunned by its power. Some of these viewers come close to venerating the painting in a religious sense, as they spend hours staring into it and experiencing the waves of pleasure that accompany every viewing. Because of its very nature and the powerful sexuality it exudes from within, however, it is a painting that the patron and the artist never expected to be shown publicly. A mysterious painting which vanished almost immediately after it was finished, the ‘The Center of the World’ is indeed the hub of this novel’s wheel, drawing everything else into it as the novel unfolds through several different points of view. On its surface, Thomas Van Essen’s debut novel is a quest to find the missing painting, but the novel is more than that. It is also a study of ecstasy, what creates it, and what enhances it, in art and literature (and even, indirectly, religion) and in real life. The novel’s various points of view, in time periods extending over the course of one hundred fifty years, illustrate the history of this (probably) mythical painting from its creation to the present, convincing the reader that it is both real and as powerfully seductive as was Helen of Troy herself.
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When Eirene Sklavos, a school-age child, sees Mrs. Bulpit for the first time, she has not even started to come to terms with the fact that her mother will be leaving her with Mrs. Bulpit indefinitely. Having traveled with her mother from Greece to Australia to escape the horrors of World War II, Eirene has already dealt with the death of her father, a communist fighting for what he and his wife believe to be a better world for Greece. Almost immediately after Eirene meets Mrs. Bulpit for the first time, her mother departs for Alexandria, where she plans to continue her political efforts. Alone in a foreign country, Eirene will have to learn the hard way who she is and where she belongs. She soon meets Gilbert Horsfall, a boy her own age, who is also living with Mrs. Bulpit, though his trip to Australia from England has taken much longer. His father is working in New Delhi; his mother is dead. He, too, has growing pains, and he, too, is a foreigner to Australia. The degree to which the two children may be able to help each other is a question for much of the novel, as are the effects of uncontrollable outside forces on their lives as they grow and develop. Written in experimental style.
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Helen, a young croupier on the night shift at a London casino, is traveling home during the wee hours in a taxi shared with two co-workers. When they stop at a traffic light, two men, obviously homeless and perhaps drunk, arrogantly step out from the curb just as the the light is about to change and walk slowly, at their own pace, across the street, seeming to dare the stopped cars to move when the light turns green. Wild-looking, scraggy, and rather frightening, one man makes Helen pay attention, though she hunches down in the back of the taxi to avoid being seen. “Brian, it was Brian,” she thinks in astonishment, “her brother Brian,” whom she has not seen for twelve years. Stunned, she silently begins to make excuses for “Brian’s” behavior at the street crossing, applying her memories of Brian’s mild personality to the behavior of the younger of the two strange men on the street. Establishing some of the novel’s main themes in this opening scene, which is more dramatic because of the violence which does not take place, author James Kelman follows Helen from that moment with “Brian” to her arrival at the home she shares with her six-year-old daughter and Mo, a South Asian man who represents “normality” to her. For the next twenty-four hours, Kelman keeps the reader inside Helen’s head as she tries to sort out her life and figure where she may be going.
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