SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Dan Vyleta’s The Quiet Twin offers a unique perspective on the growing menace of National Socialism in Vienna, in 1939. Using an ordinary apartment building and the events which affect the seemingly ordinary characters who inhabit it as a microcosm for the terrifying realities which are about to come, Vyleta creates an almost unparalleled atmosphere of fear and dread. An absorbing literary novel, which never loses its way as it progresses, it is ultimately a horror novel which out-horrors almost all others, not because of the awful events which unfold, but because the unfolding action feels so casual and so domestic in the context of the residents’ lives. And that is the whole point. Throughout the action, each character decides in a moment of crisis, that “just this once” s/he will ignore the promises made to others and the values which have always been paramount in civilized society in favor of what works best for himself/herself at that moment. The result is a societal compromise of epic proportions, one which allows the Nazi menace to take hold. The word “Holocaust” never appears, though the psychological horror, political horror, sociological horror, and moral horror come to life in new ways as the action in this apartment house unfolds.

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In this readable, exciting, and historically enlightening novel with two separate plots, Audrey Schulman accomplishes an incredible task. She makes the individual plots totally compelling and uniquely character-driven as they shift back and forth in alternating chapters, always leaving the reader panting for more and anxious to keep reading toward a conclusion. What is most seductive about the novel is that the plots take place in two different time periods and settings—one, in the area of what is now Kenya in 1899, and the other, in Virunga National Park, on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, in 2000. In the first plot a man from Bangor, Maine, responsible for building a railroad from Mombasa to Kisumu, through Amboseli, must deal with two large and bloodthirsty lions, reportedly over nine feet in length, as they lie waiting to pick off railroad workers; in the second, a young scientist with Asperger’s Syndrome is charged with finding a vine that is consumed by mountain gorillas and which dramatically reduces the incidence of both stroke and heart disease in their species. If Max, the researcher is able to obtain samples of the vine, a pharmaceutical company will, among other benefits, provide armed security to ensure the survival of the gorilla population in Virunga National Park, ad infinitum. Somehow Schulman manages to connect these two disparate plots in the conclusion, leaving the reader wholly satisfied on all levels.

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Told by Marianna, a young woman who has lost all sense of “home” as a result of the more than ten years of warfare she lived through in her homeland of Lebanon, this impressionistic psychological novel begins with her dreams of “before the war was real.” Romantic images of her mother “wander[ing] outside, smelling the ghostly jasmine in the dark, and Daddy open[ing] another old book under a lamp” overlap with images of her grandparents lighting the candles on a Christmas tree while sweet wine boils on the stove. Now the war is “real,” however. Years have passed, and the old reality she yearns for remains only in her dreams. Marianna, now eighteen, is in another place, America, her father’s birthplace, where, she believes, “nothing can be beautiful” and where she looks “inward to the night, to my dream self who had promised that this time I really had gone back home to my true life.” The warfare she experienced in Lebanon, which began in 1975-76, when she was seven, is now thousands of miles away, but she has been unable to cope with a new life in the US. Focusing almost exclusively on the four people in this family, on their friends, on those who died in the war (between 1975 and 1990), and on Lebanon itself, author Patricia Sarrafian Ward recreates the psychological damage of war.

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William Kennedy’s latest novel in the Albany Cycle, his eighth, continues the story of several repeating families from Albany, New York, during the heyday of its infamous, politically corrupt “machine.” Focusing on Daniel Quinn, a newspaper reporter who is the grandson of the Daniel Quinn (who reported on the Civil War in Quinn’s Book), this novel begins in August, 1936, when Daniel is a child, watching as his father brings a piano (origins unknown) into the Mayor’s house. Cody Mason, a pianist specializing in Harlem “stride,” is about to put on a private show with the young Bing Crosby. Only six pages (and twenty-one years) later, Quinn, an experienced reporter, is in Havana in March, 1957, hanging out at the El Floridita bar and hoping that Ernest Hemingway, will show up. He also hopes to interview Fidel Castro. These two opening scenes, the arrival of Hemingway and his boorish attack on a tourist, and Quinn’s trip to Oriente province, establish the narrative tone and atmosphere for this novel which focuses on two revolutions, the Castro-led revolution in Cuba and the slightly later revolution in the US in the 1960s regarding civil rights. Humor and irony add considerable charm to the novel, and for many readers will more than outweigh the sometimes wooden characters and wandering narrative.

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After an apprenticeship as a shipwright, William Adams takes to the sea in 1587, at age 23, commanding a supply ship carrying food and ammunition to the English fleet as it battles the Spanish Armada. A dozen years later he is commanding a ship going to the Spice Islands on a route around South America. At the end of nineteen catastrophic months, the 36-year-old Adams and twenty-four desperately ill and dying crew members arrive at the south end of Japan, the first Englishmen ever to do so. Giles MIlton writes an extremely readable, scholarly study of the opening (and in 1637, the closing) of Japan to western trade. Using many primary sources, Milton creates an exciting story of how Japan comes to be “discovered,” what its values and culture are, and why the intrusion of the west and the possibility of trade are eventually rebuffed. The contrasts Milton sets up throughout the biography attest to his appreciation of 17th century Japanese society and their superior “civilization” to that of the British at the time.

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