Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese author who now teaches French literature at UCLA, writes an often hilarious, non-stop narrative full of life and excitement, a narrative which, at the same time, is also mordant in its depictions of life. The main character, a Congolese alcoholic named Broken Glass, is memorializing the sad stories of his fellow patrons of a bar called Credit Gone West in the beachfront city of Pointe Noire in the Republic of Congo. A teacher, until he was accused of pedophilia for drunkenly baring his buttocks to his class, Broken Glass has traveled the world through books, loving the adventures of Tarzan, Tintin, and Santiago the fisherman, while he was a child, and then going on to study and enjoy the French classics. Ultimately he tells the “civilized” literary world that “Until the day your characters start to see how the rest of us earn our nightly crust, there’ll be no such thing as literature.”
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Posted in 9b-2010 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Classic Novel, England, Historical, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Psychological study on Jan 21st, 2011
Described by the [London] Daily Telegraph as “a criminally neglected British author,” Patrick Hamilton wrote nine novels from the 1920s through the early 1950s, along with the famous dramas of ROPE and GASLIGHT, and though he earned the admiration of a host of famous authors, from Graham Greene and Doris Lessing to Nick Hornby, he never achieved the popular success he deserved, either in his own time or throughout the twentieth century. In this decade, however, virtually all his novels have been reprinted in both Europe and in the US, and he is finally beginning to be recognized for his astute observations about his times and for his insights into the minds of his characters. Set in 1943 at the Rosamund Tea Room, a boarding house to which some residents of London have moved to escape the Blitz in London, Hamilton lays bare the inner lives of his characters, not through interior monologues but through their behavior, their revealing conversations, and their interactions with others. (On my All-time Favorites List.)
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Mma Precious Ramotswe never changes, and that is one of her most obvious charms. “Traditionally built,” and focused on the traditional values of Gaborone, Botswana, where she runs the #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe is genuinely “nice”–always believing in the goodness inherent in even the most challenging adversary, sympathetic without being a pushover when someone needs help, and thoughtful and intuitive in sniffing out the motives which underlie the behavior of people who consult her. Married to Mr. J. L. B. Matakone, a kindly auto mechanic whose garage adjoins her office, she is also the devoted mother of two adopted children, both of whom need special attention, and a mentor to anyone who seeks her advice. Four revolving plot lines keep the reader involved and often amused as Mma Ramotswe tries to help her clients resolve their problems. While this story is unfolding, Mma Ramotswe receives a letter from a lawyer in the US, telling her that an elderly woman who had been on a safari to the Okavango delta four years ago is now “late,” and that in her will she has left a sizable inheritance to the camp guide who was so helpful to her. The only problem is that the old woman could not remember the name of the guide or the name of the safari camp when she made her will. This requires Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi to take a trip to the delta for a few days, a trip neither of them has ever made.
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John Banville, in his first “literary” novel since his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, presents a most unusual novel which takes place in Arden, a large family home somewhere in Ireland or England, as the family gathers to pay homage to the dying patriarch, Adam Godley. Godley, who has had a stroke and is thought to be unconscious, is a mathematician renowned for having posited an “exquisite concept, time’s primal particle, the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation…the infinities.” Hermes, the son of Zeus, is the primary narrator, commenting on what is happening in the house and among the characters, while, at the same time, keeping an eye on his father, the randy Zeus, who is found asleep and sucking his thumb following one amorous encounter. The novel often resembles a farce, but it lacks the spontaneity that makes that genre so much fun. Instead, it feels as if every aspect of the novel has been composed and organized to the nth degree. At times it also feels like a novel of ideas, but those ideas are often murky, and there were times in which I wondered what Banville’s purpose was in writing the book.
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Despite the tacky cover, with its closeup of perfect, cellulite-free legs and the suggestion of other enhanced body parts, this book is no “penny dreadful.” Instead, the cover accurately reflects the values of the beautiful people of Cascade Heights, a gated and walled residential community thirty miles outside Buenos Aires with full-service security–along with a golf course and top-quality tennis. The wealthy residents of The Cascade, as they call the community, have left their old lives behind, and many of them are delighted to have escaped some unpleasant memories. Living in elaborately built houses with spectacular landscaping, the three hundred residents have created a world apart, their children leaving for brief periods each day to attend an equally elite school outside the community, and then returning home, where they can wander the grounds at will, without supervision. The women have few, if any, interests outside the community. Argentine author Claudia Pineiro carefully analyzes the behavior of these residents, concentrating, in particular, on four couples who live in the same neighborhood. Suddenly one night, after playing cards, three of the four men are found dead in the pool. The investigation reveals the essence of the community.
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