SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

This novel is definitely not science fiction. Instead it is a wide-ranging novel about just about anything that comes into the author’s head, told in glorious and inglorious imagery throughout. Though it is set almost entirely between 1931 and 1939 and does trace the idea of teleportation as a motif throughout the novel, it is really the story of Egon Loeser, a young set designer at the Allien Theatre in Berlin who is determined to do something spectacular with his life. A proponent of the New Expressionist theatre as a reaction to realism, Loeser is, quite frankly, the “loser” that his name suggests, almost totally lacking success in the area of paramount importance to him – sex. As the novel jumps wildly around in time and place, Loeser becomes involved in a series of crazy episodes as the action continues and continues, ricocheting around through time and space, incorporating vivid stories. Characters are killed and disemboweled, their hearts removed; and ghosts appear and reappear, with one character breeding ghosts for use in a machine which they will power. Virtually everyone gets blackmailed about an assortment of crimes, and one character stays busy selling the skeletons of Troodonians. This novel is unique, one requiring a good deal of patience, and even fortitude, at least for some of us who are significantly older than the twenty-seven-year-old author.

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In this alternative history set in 1952, debut author Guy Saville assumes that the negotiations of Lord Halifax, a British advocate of appeasement throughout the war, has led ultimately to détente between Great Britain and Germany. In 1943, the two countries, wanting to avoid war, had met at the Casablanca Conference and agreed to divide the African continent into two spheres of influence. The divisions would be primarily along the historical colonial lines: West Africa would remain largely under German rule, while much of East Africa would remain British. In a dramatic opening scene, a British assassin arrives in Kongo disguised as an SS surveyor, hoping to kill Walter Hochberg, the Governor General of Kongo. Cole stabs him to death, then escapes with some of his co-conspirators, only to discover later that Hochberg is somehow alive. Reading this novel is like reading a movie. The action is so graphic and so cinematic, that it is easy to imagine a hardcore action thriller, peopled with characters as impervious to pain as Superman. By the halfway point, Burton Cole and Patrick Whaler have been beaten, stabbed, slashed, smashed, and tortured to what would be the breaking point if these bigger-than-life men could be broken, but the chases and escapes continue. The characters on both sides are stereotypical, but Saville is an exciting new author with a suspenseful, dramatic style, but I’ll be hoping for more depth of character and more fully developed motivation to bring his future novels to life.

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One of the best debut novels I have read in a long time, Falling to Earth focuses on the aftermath of the largest and most powerful tornado ever to hit the United States, one known as the Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, which traveled two hundred nineteen miles through northeast Missouri, across southern Illinois, and into southwest Indiana over the course of three hours eighteen minutes. Destroying everything in its path, it killed almost seven hundred people. Author Kate Southwood describes the aftermath of this storm in the town of Marah, Illinois, a rural composite of all the communities hit by this horrific storm. What elevates this novel above a journalistic report of buildings destroyed and communities devastated is Southwood’s focus on the effects of the tornado on one family – not the inspiring survival story of a family that has lost everything, as one might expect, but the story of a family that has lost nothing, their children safe, their home intact, and their lumber business safe. The novel’s fast pace, a direct result of the author’s ability to present details with which the reader will identify, combined with her careful building of the resentment against the Graves family, make this a novel which few will forget.

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For more than ten years, Harry Turtledove’s Ruled Britannia has been my personal Gold Standard for novels of alternative history. Having just read (and about to review) a new alternative history, I went back to this one to see how it stood the test of time. I liked it even better. Starting with the premise that England did NOT defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, during the rule of Queen Elizabeth I, author Harry Turtledove puts Elizabeth in the Tower of London and makes King Philip II the official ruler of Britain, with his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia representing him on the formerly-British throne. All the leading writers, philosophers, and artists so famous to students of Elizabethan England, when it WAS Elizabethan, are still hard at work in London, but now, their patron is Spanish, not British. Writing in the language and style of the period, author Harry Turtledove casually (and very skillfully) incorporates innumerable Shakespearean quotations into his text, often with humorous intent, and Shakespeare lovers will be kept busy playing the obvious game of identifying the plays in which these quotations appear. Puns, the off-color wordplay which so often provides comic relief in Shakespeare’s plays, dialogue in which characters talk at cross-purposes, and a character who constantly misuses “big words,” are a delight for language-lovers.

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In this thought-provoking and often enigmatic novel, Abdourahman Waberi reflects on the series of horrors – political, economic, religious, and environmental – which have dominated Djibouti in recent years, using five different speakers, each of whom comments on his life, past and present, often switching back and forth within a single monologue. The novel opens at Roissy Airport (Charles de Gaulle), where Bashir Assoweh, an uneducated, adolescent veteran of Djibouti’s civil war is hoping for admission into France, and asylum. Drafted to fight for his government against rebels, he has now been demobilized but never paid for his efforts. The war is over – “a tie game” – but he no longer has a home or family to return to, forced to spend his nights camping out in a tent beside the water, carousing with other young veterans, committing minor robberies, and smoking dope. Standing at Roissy, beside a middle-aged intellectual named Harbi, who will almost certainly be granted asylum because he has been an active opponent of the regime of Ali Arif, Bashir is assumed to be Harbi’s son. Neither of them corrects the French at Immigration. Abdo-Julien, Harbi’s real son, is not with Harbi, his whereabouts unclear, and Alice, Harbi’s French wife, is also not present. As the novel unfolds through monologues by five different speakers, the horrors of Djibouti’s recent history unfold.

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