In this unusual metafictional novel of the Spanish Civil War, author Javier Cercas experiments with the voice of his main character and with the form of this novel, which he describes as “a compressed tale except with real characters and situations, like a true tale.” The unnamed speaker, a contemporary journalist in his forties, is investigating the story of Rafael Sanchez Mazas, a “good, not great” writer of the 1930s, who, in the final days of the Civil War (1936 – 1939) escaped a firing squad and lived to play a role in Franco’s Nationalist government. The complex history of the Spanish Civil War in the first part of the novel is slow, full of unfamiliar names, places, and political alliances, but as the story of Sanchez Mazas and the people involved with him unfolds, the reader gradually becomes involved with the action and warms to the speaker’s quest to learn everything he can about the incident in the forest. The scenes near the end of the book, set in a nursing home, are full of touching and emotional realizations, conveying powerful, universal messages about war and heroes from one generation to another (and to the reader) without being didactic.
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The novel’s “perfect crime” takes place in 1913, at the House of Swaps, once the estate of the Marquise of Santos, but currently owned by Polish Doctor Miroslav Zmuda, who uses it as a gynecological medical clinic during the day. At night, however, it becomes the city’s most exceptional brothel, a place where men rent the services of prostitutes dressed as nurses and where women, too, may rent the services of men. A rumored secret tunnel connects these premises to the palace which belonged to Emperor Pedro I in the early nineteenth century. On June 13, however, a murder takes place at the brothel, involving the personal Secretary to the President, who has been a client of Fortunata, and who has disappeared. Almost immediately after these introductory scenes, the author begins his promised digressions into the city’s past history, which he presents out of chronological order, with stories ranging from the sixteenth century to the present – “the concept of city is independent of the concept of time.” Back and forth the narrative rambles, adding small bits to the story of the murder and much more information about the history of the city. Eventually, the author begins tackling sociological issues, discussing adultery as a cultural characteristic. The interruptions in the main story can become frustrating, and the book appears to have been written for a super-macho male audience, without considering the large number of women who may be interested in the story.
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Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Historical, Italy on Sep 2nd, 2013
When Elena Ferrante created her long epic about the women in Naples as they faced major cultural changes from the early 1950s to the present, it was issued in installments as three separate books. My Brilliant Friend, the first installment, released in 2012, focuses on a broad spectrum of Neapolitan life in the 1950s, and this year’s volume, The Story of a New Name, focuses on the same families and main characters as they continue their lives into the 1960s. Readers of My Brilliant Friend, will remember from the Prologue to that novel, that Elena Greco, then sixty-six and living in Turin, received a long-distance telephone call in 2010 from the son of Lila Cerullo, once her best friend, asking for help in locating his mother, who disappeared from Naples two weeks before. Out of touch with Lila for years, Elena is convinced, based on past experience, that the dramatic and spontaneous Lila does not wish to be found, and she decides to write down everything she can remember of Lila and her life from her birth in 1944 to 2010. The trilogy which results recounts the life of Lila and illustrates her own long relationship with her as a child and young woman, their two lives intertwining but moving in dramatically different directions in the course of the action. At over eight hundred pages for the first two volumes, this trilogy is truly epic in length, and in its depiction of Naples in the aftermath of war, primarily in My Brilliant Friend, it adds epic themes and ideas. In this second novel, however, the novel focuses more specifically on the minutiae of their daily lives, especially their turbulent love lives.
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Setting his latest novel in Vienna in 1948, nine years after the setting for his previous novel, The Quiet Twin, author Dan Vyleta continues the story of the city and some of its characters in the aftermath of the Holocaust’s atrocities, though this novel stands alone and is not really a sequel. Here Vyleta uses characters some readers already know in order to show how they have changed in the nine years that have elapsed since The Quiet Twin, while, at the same time, introducing these characters in new contexts and illustrating their changed lives, which makes them fresh and intriguing to new readers of Vyleta’s work. The Crooked Maid, set in 1948, shows how they have been changed by war’s horrors, by imprisonment (in some cases), by living as refugees in other countries, and by the cumulative trauma of a city which has been in the grips of unimaginable evil and now finds itself uncertain of its values and its future. As the dramatic action begins to unfold, the novel may appear, at first, to be a simple murder mystery within an historical setting, similar, perhaps to those written by many popular, best-selling authors, but Dan Vyleta transcends genre, his writing more similar to that of Dostoevsky than to pop fiction. The many mysteries and even murders that take place during this mesmerizing and fully-developed novel grow out of the moral vacuum in Vienna after the war, the macabre details of these crimes so deeply rooted in the city’s psyche that they feel almost “normal” in the context of the times. Outstanding!
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Thomas Keneally, an Australian National Treasure, winner of the Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark in 1982, and the author of thirty-one novels and seventeen non-fiction books, has never limited himself to subject matter from Australia, however rich and compelling that might be. Only about a dozen of his novels are actually set in Australia. His other novels, many of them prize winners, have been set in places ranging from Antarctica to Yugoslavia, Eritrea, and the Middle East, so it should be no surprise that Keneally became fascinated enough by the issues involved in the American Civil War that he wrote Confederates in 1979, a dense, epic novel of American history written on a scale reminiscent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and filled with similar themes, though it is only half as long. Unlike War and Peace, Confederates also spurns romanticism, employing instead the innate dignity of ordinary men and women and the mundane details of real life to convey the horrors of warfare with a realism almost unmatched in Civil War literature. With no comic relief, no hints at happy endings, and no escape from the inevitability of this nightmare, the cumulative effect of Keneally’s novel is staggering. The Confederate army we meet here consists of ragged and hungry teachers, musicians, small farmers, orphaned children, men in their 60’s, conscripts, and even the sorely ill and walking wounded, all people the reader comes to know well through the stories they share and the simple dreams they reveal as they trudge resignedly and painfully across Virginia toward their destiny – the Battle of Harper’s Ferry/Antietam.
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