An author revered as much for the controlled lyricism of his prose as for his careful attention to details of the natural world, his uncompromising characterizations, and his ability to incorporate subtle symbols, Swiss author Jacques Chessex (1934 – 2009) was the first foreign citizen to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. In this dramatic novel, he tells the story of Jean Calmet, a thirty-eight-year-old schoolteacher, whose physician father has just died and with whom he has had a fraught relationship. The youngest of five children, Jean both loved and feared his father, with good reason, and he is glad that his father has been cremated, rather than buried. “The doctor would be reduced to ashes. He could not be allowed any chance of keeping his exasperating, scandalous vigour in the fertile earth,” Jean thinks. “Make a little heap of ashes of him, ashes at the bottom of an urn. Like sand. Anonymous, mute dust.” As the family gathers to choose an urn, Jean meditates on his father’s relationships with the whole family, and especially on his own chances for a life of his own. With no emotional resources of his own to sustain him, even by the age of thirty-eight, he is a completely lost soul, someone ready to become a victim of others, if not himself.
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Much admired by both Roberto Bolano and by Carlos Fuentes, Mexican author Daniel Sada has now been published in English for the first time by Graywolf Press. Almost Never, “a Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing,” provides a bawdy and mildly satiric look at the whole concept of machismo as it exists in the mid-1940s in Mexico. Sada’s main character, Demetrio Sordo, almost thirty when the novel opens in 1945, grew up in northern Mexico, but he has recently been living near Oaxaca in southern Mexico, working as an agronomist in charge of a large ranch. Bored by the usual nightly “entertainments,” he finally concludes that “Sex was the most obvious option.” Taking a taxi to a local brothel, he meets the beautiful brunette Mireya. His eye-opening relationship with her, graphically described, comes to a temporary stop, however, when he receives a letter from his mother in Parras, asking him to come home at Christmas to accompany her to a wedding in Sacramento, even farther away to the north. There he meet and falls in love with a strictly virginal local girl, Renata. The story with all its complications and bawdy language mocks the pretensions of its characters at the same time that it explains and even, in some cases, tries to justify them in terms of the social context of the period. A new Mexican author of great esteem, now translated into English for the first time.
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“On Wednesday 23rd March 1983 there appeared in the Guardian the following report: ‘An inquest is to be held on the two elderly women whose bodies were found on Monday in the dilapidated North London house they shared with a man who was the brother of one of them and the brother-in-law of the other. Postmortem examinations yesterday revealed that they had both died from natural causes – but that the older woman had been dead for up to a year.’ ” No one incorporates black ironic humor into novels about earnest, often batty, elderly people better than the British, and Benatar is one of the best of the best. Paying special attention to characters who are dealing with significant emotional stresses, he fills his novels with psychological insights and feelings the reader understands, even as his mordant wit draws the characters to the edge, allowing the reader to watch them cross the line into darker and darker worlds of their own. Focusing primarily on Daisy and the havoc she wreaks, the novel starts at the end and works its way back to the beginning, jumping back and forth among time frames as the backgrounds and the entire histories of each character are laid bare. Brilliant dialogue reveals attitudes and interactions in this ironic and darkly funny novel of dysfunction. If this were a Hitchcock film, Betty Davis would have been perfect as the scheming Daisy.
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With the centennial of the Titanic disaster now approaching, Europa Editions has re-published Beryl Bainbridge’s 1996 novel Every Man for Himself, the Whitbread Award-winning novel of the ship’s doomed voyage, a concise and “awe-full” story of life and death, primarily among the first class passengers, most of them super-rich industrialists and their heirs. A nephew of J. P. Morgan, recently graduated from Harvard, tells the story, providing a new, first person vision of the ship’s lively social life from April 12 through the ship’s demise on April 15. Fictional characters who feel real mix with real characters whose presence on the ship is well documented, as Bainbridge recreates the giddy excesses and the sense of entitlement exhibited by the top deck passengers. Though some readers may be “Titanic-ed” to death by the number of books and articles written about this disaster for the centennial, along with new National Geographic photographs and the 1997 film being released in 3D on April 3, Bainbridge’s contribution is a worthy and beautifully written study – witty, insightful, and consummately ironic.
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Elsa Ahlqvist is dying, something she learned only six months ago. A seventy-year-old psychologist married for fifty years to Martti, a well-known artist, Elsa is being attended at home by her physician daughter Eleonoora (Ella) and her granddaughters, Anna and Maria. As each member of the family reacts to Elsa’s declining health, the entire family dynamic unfolds. Elsa tries to keep the mood light, recreating the past and its happy memories. When her grandmother playfully suggests that they play “dress up,” as they once did, Anna goes to the closet and discovers, not the dress she used to wear when she pretended to be “Bianca from Italy,” but one which she has never seen. Anna soon learns that it belonged to Eeva, a stranger to her, who, she discovers, lived with her grandparents and mother for three years, over forty years ago. The characters’ behavior and emotional reactions to living together are explored with sensitivity, but since the story is told in retrospect, Eeva’s long term effects on the main characters’ lives are obvious to the reader from the beginning. There are, however, surprises, as the relationships with Eeva unfold, and lovers of psychological novels will not be disappointed.
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