Teddy Todd, age eleven in the opening quotation from the early pages of the novel, has a poet’s nature, and at times he dreams of becoming a poet and writer. Sensitive to the sights, sounds, and smells of nature, he seems to be on his way to a life of beauty, which may be attainable during his life of privilege within his large multigenerational family. This single moment in 1925, in which he feels his “exaltation of heart,” however, turns out to be the only moment of complete euphoria he is ever likely to experience. The “darkness” which his older sister Ursula says hides the “light” is already being felt by the adults in his life. By 1939, when he is twenty-five, he himself is on his way to war as a Halifax pilot, part of the Bomber Command in Yorkshire, on the first of seventy sorties for his country in which he and his crew kill hundreds of enemy fighters and civilians – and a few of his own men. This novel, author Kate Atkinson’s “companion novel” to her earlier Life After Life, reintroduces the Todd family, and Ursula, Teddy’s sister, who is the main character of that earlier book. The styles of the books are very different, however.
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Kenneth Brill, the main character, is in a military prison in an unidentified location as the novel opens, feigning sleep as Davies, his interrogator from the Air Ministry, arrives to interview him in preparation for his trial for espionage. Brill emphasizes that he has served with honor during the war and has been almost single-handedly responsible for the camouflaging of a British airbase at El Alamein in order to protect it from Nazi bombs. His background as a former art student from the Slade, one of the best art schools in the world, helped him create a “stage set” of a base in the desert, drawing attention away from the real base in Egypt, near Libya, and attracting the attention of Nazi bombers away from the real base. As the novel opens, however, Brill has been caught painting a large number of landscapes of the farm area where he grew up, a few miles outside of London. While a reader might find this a seemingly innocent activity for someone who is been recovering from a gunshot wound for months, Davies quickly disabuses him. The farm area in the Heath, which Brill’s family has farmed for generations, is “shortly to become one of the biggest military air bases in Europe. That land has all been requisitioned by the Air Ministry” for a new aerodrome at “Heathrow.” Evidence from Brill’s past suggests he may be using the paintings to send coded messages to the Nazis.
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In what appears to be a series of autobiographical episodes, Chilean author Alejandro Zambra creates eleven stories so firmly grounded in reality and filled with carefully chosen detail that they seem to be from his own life, though it is impossible to know for sure without hearing more from the author himself. Likewise, we cannot know how much may be inspired by his own life but altered for the purpose of improving the story, or how much may be created from whole cloth for the purpose of recreating a period in history or illustrating a theme. Ultimately, this collection of stories vibrantly recreates an unusual childhood from the perspective of a child, while also revealing the speaker’s early adulthood and his lack of confidence in his own maturity. In several stories, the author conveys the feelings at the heart of parent-child relationships, from the points of view of both; political revolution and trauma lurk in the background throughout all the stories. As he wrestles with his stories and how to present the personal and community values of Chile during this period in the late twentieth century, the author also contributes much to our understanding of the art of writing itself. Ultimately, these intense, compressed, clear, and unpretentious stories breathe with quiet life, focused on reality as a simple, if sometimes heart-breaking, concept.
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It is 1963, as the novel opens, and the devastating Hurricane Flora, “bigger than all of Cuba,” is now lashing the island, having already caused devastation throughout Haiti, where it killed five thousand people. Main character Maria Sirena, age eighty-two, has been forcibly evacuated from her small seaside house by Ofelia, one of Castro’s soldiers, who takes her and seven other women to safety on the top floor of Casa Diego Velazquez, the sixteenth century home of the first governor of Cuba, now an historical museum. For the couple of days, Maria Sirena rides out the storm with the officer, Ofelia, and seven other women, keeping her companions occupied with stories from her own life and the lives of her parents and grandparents as they live through Cuba’s various wars for independence from the late nineteenth century up to 1963. She has much experience as a story-teller, having been for many years a lector, a reader hired by a cigar factory to read stories to the workers so that they will not become bored during their repetitious hand-work as they make cigars. Author Chantel Acevedo, a second-generation Cuban American, wisely keeps her focus on the lives of “ordinary” people like Maria Sirena and her fellow guests of the Casa – hardworking folks, often poor, who have struggled all their lives – showing how they survive and what they have to do to live. It is through this personal focus, rather than any detailed historical focus, that almost a hundred years of modern Cuban revolutionary history emerge for the reader.
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In a novel which defies genre, author Horacio Castellanos Moya takes paranoia to new and often darkly humorous heights as an unnamed speaker, a journalist who has been living in exile in Mexico, tries to fulfill his dream of returning to his home in El Salvador, now that that country is beginning to seem less dangerous after its many coups. The author’s real-life experience gives verisimilitude to the speaker’s story, and his sense of perspective regarding his own life allows him to depict the excesses of the speaker’s chronic over-analyzing and unproductive dithering with kind of humor rare for a novel about revolutions and revolutionaries. Castellanos Moya himself lived through many events similar to those affecting the speaker. His first novel, known in English as Senselessness, became a controversial success for its unvarnished depiction of the genocide of Mayan Indians, and when the author’s mother received an anonymous death threat aimed at him, the author went into self-imposed exile in Mexico for ten years. Of the four novels by Castellanos Moya which have been translated into English, this is the lightest, and though it has some serious ideas, it is also the funniest and most seductively involving. Translator Katherine Silver, who keeps the stream-of-consciousness style running nonstop in colloquial English, also makes the details so lively that the story is both compelling and full of fun.
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