SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Note: This novel was WINNER of Sri Lanka’s Gratiaen Prize in 2008, and WINNER of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2012, recognized as “the best work of fiction pertaining to the South Asian region published in the last year in English, including translations into English.” “I think of Pradeep Mathew, the great [...]

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This dramatic and heart-stopping novel recreates very real events of shocking, unimaginable brutality which take place in Argentina in the fall of 1979, three years after the end of the Peronist democracy, and you will not forget these events. After the military seizes power, the characters, as real as you and I, and with the same goals and dreams, have no alternative but to go about their lives trying to maintain a low profile, and as the atrocities continue, they begin to affect these characters and the people they know and love. The novel becomes a revelation in which one cannot help but wonder, ultimately, how these atrocities were allowed to begin at all, and, even more importantly, how they were able to continue unimpeded within a country which was part of the Organization of American States. Rich with history, the novel is populated by a large and well developed cast of characters. The insights into the US position regarding the human rights abuses in these countries, and the secrecy with which they were treated are illuminating, as is the collusion of the Catholic Church in the abuses. An incredible achievement,

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While on their honeymoon in Venice in the late 1920s, Czech citizens Viktor and Liesl Landauer meet architect Rainer von Abt at a party given by an acquaintance in an ancient palazzo. The next day the architect shows them display models of the surprisingly dramatic buildings he has created, and after indicating that he has been a student of Adolf Loos, who has hailed from their Czech city (known here as Mesto), he extols “the virtues of glass and steel and concrete, and [decrying] the millstones of brick and stone that hang about people’s necks.” He continues, “I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air. I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit.” Viktor is enthralled, suggesting, “Perhaps you could design a Glass Space (Glasraum) for us.” Focusing initially on the story of a great architectural achievement, the novel explores several stories of love and betrayal; stories of love sanctioned, illicit, and forbidden; and the fraught history of Czechoslovakia (and peripherally, Austria) between the wars. Though few exact dates are provided, the novel reflects the growth of the Nazi movement, the exodus of those Jews fortunate enough to have the means to escape, and the aftereffects on the Landauers, their household and on the Glass Room itself. Mawer’s prose is efficient and his style keeps the reader on pace, never having to stop to figure out what the author “really” means. Filled with vibrant imagery, both of the external and internal worlds of the characters, the novel has something for everyone.

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Revealing the final days of Alice Valentine, a former headmistress who is being attended by her sons and closest friends, Andrew Miller’s thoughtful novel Oxygen remains remarkably hopeful, never descending into the bathos of so many other end-of-life novels. Alice’s dying, though realistically described, becomes, in fact, the fulcrum upon which the novel studies three other characters as they gain new insights into their own lives. All of them have some “unfinished business” with which they have not come to terms, and as these characters focus their attention on Alice, while reminiscing privately about their own pasts, the novel goes far beyond the customary focus on the meaning of life and death to include each character’s secret failures, the guilt accompanying these, the nature of true happiness, what it requires to become a “successful” human being. Ultimately, Miller’s characters ask “Who are we?” Despite its complex, seemingly depressing subject, the novel is actually thrilling to read, in part because of Andrew Miller’s skill as a novelist. One of the clearest, cleanest writers in the world today, Miller chooses exactly the right word to meld perfect images with universal themes in new ways.

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In this complex, challenging, and unconventional novel, Iraqi author Ali Bader takes on the ethnic and political history of the Middle East from 1926 – 2006 for his scope. An unnamed Iraqi writer has been asked by USA Today News to write an article about the murder of Kamal Medhat, an eighty-year-old Iraqi violinist whose body has recently been found. Kamal Medhat is one of three completely different identities and separate cultural backgrounds used by the same man, however, and the writer is hard pressed to follow the violinist’s trail as he moves through Iraq, Iran, Syria, Russia, and even Czechoslovakia. Author Ali Bader has long been fascinated with metaphysics and views of identity, and he uses the violinist’s three personas in direct parallel with the three personas used by Fernando Pessoa in his poetry book The Tobacco Shop, selections of which begin the novel and echo throughout. Carefully organized thematically, the novel is unconventional in style, and some confusion also results from the fact that the journalist “reports about,” instead of bringing a character to life the way one expects of fiction. Ultimately, the author writes a novel of broad import from a unique point of view. Different from the typical novel in style, this is very challenging but very rewarding.

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