Posted in 9c-2009 Reviews, Coming-of-age, Croatia, Experimental, Historical, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Yugoslavia on Jan 17th, 2011
Croatian author Josip Novakovich crafts a novel here which bursts the bounds of genre. Both naturalistic in its depiction of the Yugoslavian war and its atrocities, and fantastic and darkly absurd in its depiction of the life of main character Ivan Dolinar, the novel seesaws between the horrific and the hilarious. Surprising in his ability to wrest unique images from universal experiences, Novakovich writes with such clarity and directness that the reader immediately identifies with Ivan in his predicaments and empathizes with him as uncontrollable forces buffet him throughout his life. The novel follows him from childhood to his fifties, and the conclusion is a blockbuster, sixty pages of the most absurd, farcical, and hilariously ironic writing in recent memory, a section which comes close to slapstick at the same time that it is indescribably bleak.
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Seeing himself as “panther in the basement,” much like Tyrone Power in a favorite old film, Proffi, the 12-year-old son of activist parents in Jerusalem in 1947, is a member of an “underground cell” which he and two friends have formed. Their objective, like that of their parents, is the ouster of the British, who have been mandated by the UN to set up a Jewish homeland. Though the children enjoy “spying” and see themselves as glorious heroes, their plans of attack are distinctly childish. When Proffi finds himself drawn to Sgt. Stephen Dunlop, a gentle, shy British soldier from Canterbury, who wants to learn Hebrew and to teach Proffi English, Proffi justifies this friendship as his chance to probe for information for his own “secret DOD agency.” (On my list of All-Time Favorites.)
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Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India will expand and alter your view of India, Pakistan, and the British Raj. Using a child-narrator, a literary device over-employed and often unsuccessful, this author has found the perfect vehicle for conveying the heart-breaking story of the Partition of India in l947, without being coy and without descending into bathos. Lenny, as the child of a Parsee family, roams freely through the Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, and Parsee society of her household and neighborhood in Lahore. Because she is lame and receiving private schooling, she is at home when momentous events and important conversations occur, and because she is very young and has no ethnic biases, she observes the disintegration of her society with the puzzlement of an outsider.
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In Yugoslavia the extermination of Jews started early and was almost totally successful within a matter of months, with most of the Jewish men of Serbia shot to death by the fall of 1941, and “the Jewish Question in Serbia almost completely solved” by April, 1942, when virtually all Jewish men, women, and children were dead. Imagining the lives of Götz and Meyer, two SS guards who were responsible for over 5000 Jewish deaths, the speaker examines the events for which Götz and Meyer were responsible between November, 1941, and April, 1942. Often juxtaposing atrocities against simple, folksy observation, the speaker puts himself into their minds, he wondering if they ever regretted what they were doing, since they were so good at their jobs. Throughout the novel, as Albahari includes the terrible statistics, he also exhibits the ironies of the circumstances, setting the facts into sharp relief and increasing the shock. A strange novel of the Holocaust, all the more shocking because of the contrasts between the facts and the dark humor, Götz and Meyer is a memorable short novel and worthy addition to Holocaust literature.
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The motley assortment of characters who live at 44 Scotland Street in Edinburgh, familiar to fans of the series, solve one personal problem at a time in each novel, continuing their stories and life issues into the next novel. McCall Smith is so good at creating these characters and capturing the essence of their imperfect lives that readers unfamiliar with the series need not fear that they are missing key background information. The “plot” of each novel (and one uses the term loosely here) is really a series of episodes in the lives of several loosely connected characters, rather than a single complex (and artificial) scheme which ties every character to the same set of problems and complications. Real life is real people living their own lives and dealing with their own problems, and for McCall Smith and his millions of devoted readers, that’s plot enough.
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