SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Vietamese-born Linda Le, one of France’s most popular authors, moved to Paris in 1997 when she was fourteen, accompanying her mother, grandmother, and three sisters soon after the fall of Saigon. In this energetic, sometimes raucous, and always surprising novel, Le describes the lives of three other young Vietnamese women who are also living in France—now totally assimilated after twenty years of living there. Two sisters, known as Elder Cousin, or Potbelly, who is pregnant, and her younger sister, Long Legs, a “cutie” who is living with someone she hopes is a ticket to wealth, have decided to invite their estranged father, King Lear, to come from Saigon to Paris for a three-week visit. Potbelly will pay for the trip, since she is married to a wealthy French “Hardware Man” in the “nutsandbolts business” who will be away during the visit; Long Legs has no money, spending her small salary on clothes, makeup, and trinkets. The third member of the Three Fates, Southpaw, referred to at one point at Albatrocious, is their cousin, a young woman who has lost a hand. The sisters have few expectations regarding their reunion with King Lear, and Long Legs does not even remember the language, but they do plan to impress him with their financial and social success in France and show him how “French” they are.

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When the story opens, Arvid’s mother has just discovered that she has a recurrence of cancer, and she has decided to take the ferry from Norway back to her “home,” on Jutland. Arvid has had a testy relationship with his mother over the years and has not talked with her in a while, trying to avoid telling her that he and his wife are getting a divorce, but when he gets a message that his mother has left home, he, too, takes the ferry to Jutland. During this time, he is inundated with memories, which come at random from different times in his life—his decision to become a communist, then leave college and join the “proletariat” working in the factories (like his parents); his memories of vacationing in Jutland as a child; the loss of the brother who came just after him in birth order. Throughout, however, he returns to stories of his mother, who, when he decided to leave college and give up his chance to escape the kind of life she and her husband had been living, smacked him, hard, across the face. Ultimately, Arvid becomes a character so real that even the author has said, “I recognize myself in him…”

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Zambra is a unique writer, one who belies the stereotype of a writer as someone who becomes impassioned by an idea, then hies off to his quiet garret to write furiously, developing, refining, and then ultimately promoting it. Zambra, like his alterego Julian, also an author, ties himself to the most mundane aspects of everyday life, which he then describes succinctly and, at times, lovingly. There are no spectacular scenes, no dramatic displays of emotion, and no real plot here, just the story of Julian, a university professor who teaches all week, entertains his stepdaughter with a continuous story of the private lives of trees, and on Sundays works on his novel, a long project which was once three hundred pages but which he, calling himself a “self-policeman,” has whittled down to a mere forty-seven pages. His novel is about a young man tending a bonsai tree, similar to the one given to him by his friends, and which he has neglected to the point that it may die. Filled with warmth and a sly sense of humor about writing, about life in Chile, and about his main character Julian, who is often ineffective, Zambra creates a wonderful irony—it is almost impossible to remember that the main character is Julian and not Alejandro Zambra.

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Once you enter the world of Trevor Comerford, you will not re-emerge unscathed. Formerly employed in Dublin at the Central Remedial Clinic, Trevor was empathetic and anxious to help his students in his English classes there, creating firm bonds of friendship with them by making them laugh at his vulgarity, by refusing to recognize their physical challenges as “limitations,” and by taking them on day-trips (which became shoplifting expeditions to the local shops). His departure from Dublin for a new life in New York City was made in full knowledge of the challenges he would have dealing with the chaos of that city’s street life, which, in many ways parallels the chaos in his own life. An ad Trevor finds in the Village Voice requests a companion for Ed, an extremely bright teenager with muscular dystrophy who has little time left to live, and Trevor, upon investigation, quickly learns that the typical “companion” for Ed lasts only a week. Thoughtful and often hilarious.

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Author “James Church,” a career diplomat with years of experience in Asia, including, one assumes, North Korea, sets his second mystery starring Inspector O of the Ministry of People’s Security, in the country’s capital of Pyongyang. Though O is an Inspector, he, like those he works with, has no idea who is really in charge of the investigations to which he is assigned. For Inspector O, the best approach has always been to keep his head down, do what he is told, try to laugh at the absurdities, and close his eyes to the atrocities. Hidden Moon continues the story of O’s life after The Corpse in the Koryo, and readers who have read that novel will have a decided advantage as they read this one. A shocking robbery at the Gold Star Bank, the first ever in Pyongyang, challenges the Ministry and Inspector O, especially since O is not called to deal with it until a week after it has happened.

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