Irony is too mild a word to describe the twists, surprises, and reversals which bring this book (originally published. in 1935-6) so wildly alive that it is almost impossible to believe the book is not written by a contemporary author. In the first story, “A Cat, A Man, and Two Women,” a new wife prepares a gorgeous meal, thinking it for her husband, only to learn he wants it for his cat, real proof that “Cats Rule.” In “The Little Kingdom,” an ineffective male 5th grade teacher does not interfere when a new student moves to become “king of the playground,” a warning in 1936 about Japan’s possible future. “Professor Rado,” the most bizarre and absurd of the stories, is also the kinkiest. A professor and a reporter are both voyeurs and fetishists. Ultimately, all three stories concern themselves with the subjects of dominance and subservience, with power and how to achieve and use it, and with the psychology which makes dominance over others both possible and plausible.
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Author Gabriel Urza, whose family roots are Basque, lived in the Basque country himself for several years after college before returning to his birthplace in the U.S. to write and practice law, a background which gives this debut novel a sense of atmosphere, a feeling of strong roots, and a sense of the social and political vagaries which sometimes lead to crimes of passion and violence. To set the scene within Spain politically, the author opens and closes the novel with descriptions on a much broader scale – the 2004 bombing of the Atocha train station, outside of Madrid, which killed one hundred ninety-one people and wounded eighteen hundred, the deadliest terrorist attack in Spanish history. The novel, character driven, is told in the voices of three residents of Muriga – Joni Garrett, an elderly American who came to Muriga in 1948 to teach at a local school and never went home; Mariana Zelaia, widow of Jose Antonio Torres, a government official murdered six years before the bombing; and Iker Abarzuza, convicted of Jose Antonio’s murder when he was eighteen, a young man confined to the Salto del Negro Prison in the Canary Islands for the past six years. With his multiple points of view, well-drawn characters, shifting time frames, atmospheric style, and unusual historical perspective, Urza has developed a sensitive and often moving novel about a part of the world which is only now beginning to receive literary attention. Though the subject matter of the novel might have been treated sensationally, Urza wisely lets his story lines evolve subtly. The dramatic conclusion adds a stunning coda to the action.
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Although Jack Livings’s experiences in China were in the 1990s, when he was a student and then an English teacher, the life he lived there and the knowledge he gained from his conferences with students about their writing have stood him in good stead with this stunning and dramatic story collection. As he tells the Wall Street Journal, the title story, “The Dog,” is a story told to him by one of his students, a story he embellishes in his own writing here, about a weekend trip to the countryside taken by his student and her family. Also on the trip was her father’s cousin Zheng, a sleazy operator in the import/export business who “moved in dangerous circles” in the city and who brought with him a dog which he owned jointly with her father, one they had been using for gambling in illegal dog racing in Beijing. Because of a government crackdown, the men need to get rid of the dog; hence, the weekend trip to the countryside and a planned family barbecue. The bleak ironies and absurdities of this story and its surprising descriptions epitomize the author’s style as he creates seven additional stories of personal crisis from all parts of China, including some areas and cultures with which most of us in the West are unfamiliar.
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Dario Fo was WINNER of the Nobel Prize for Literature in1997, though he had never written a book. Instead, he was recognized by the Nobel Committee for his more than forty plays, his acting, his directing and his “emulation of the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.” This biographical novel is his first novel. Over the years, Italian author Dario Fo has made no secret of the fact that he believes that Lucrezia Borgia does not deserve her murderous reputation for more than five hundred years as the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI, formerly known as Rodrigo Borgia. The Pope himself was often manipulative, acting in response to the changing political landscape, and Lucrezia’s brother Cesare was even more self-serving –a murderer of anyone in his path to success. Fo believes that Lucrezia was not only intelligent and incisive in her insights into politics, but also innocent of the crimes which have made the Borgia name synonymous with treachery and danger. Still considered by many students of the Italian Renaissance to be a power-hungry madwoman, a poisoner of her enemies, and a lover of her brother, Lucrezia Borgia gains new respect in this sympathetic portrait by Fo, who admires her insights into the nature of power and how it may be used to benefit society, as she sees it, as well as herself.
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Have you ever read a book that so envelops you and feeds your imagination that you feel as if the author somehow knows every aspect of your life, even though the exotic settings and images of his story bear no resemblance at all to your own? I hadn’t. And when it happened in the first novella of this collection of three, “Afterimage,” I could hardly believe that I had lived totally, for the entire length of the novella, in French author Patrick Modiano’s world, a world of mysteries and uncertainty and no answers, and I had reacted to that world as if it had been my own. Instead of feeling let down by a lack of conclusion to the plot elements, as I often do when an author does not sum up and “resolve” the action, I felt energized instead, connected to the author and his alter ego/ protagonist in ways I never expected. I saw parallels with my own life, and most surprisingly, I found myself wondering about people I have not seen in years, curious about what happened to them; pondering mysteries of my own childhood; and wondering if I had misunderstood what was really going on beneath the surface of reality, as young characters do here. (Suspended Sentences is at the top of my Favorites list for the year.)
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