Mai Jia, a popular novelist and winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, China’s highest literary honor, writes here under a pen name after serving for seventeen years as a member of the People’s Liberation Army and its intelligence services. Mai’s novel Decoded, originally written and published for a Chinese audience in 2002, and newly translated and published in English, provides a fascinating study of cryptography and its dedicated cryptographers, many of whom give their lives (and even their sanity) to their work. Astonishing in its focus on the travails and inner torments of one major character, Rong Jinzhen, the novel features a psychological, individualized approach, something I did not expect for characters living within the group culture of China, especially among characters from the army and its secret intelligence services. Though the novel cannot be considered a “psychological novel,” as we know it, the author does depict his main character, Rong Jinzhen, empathetically, as an individual within the state, giving him a real personality with which we can identify as he develops from childhood through early adulthood. A literary novel, unique in its focus, setting, and subject matter, Decoded lives up to its title, providing exciting new insights into many aspects of life in the People’s Republic of China.
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This can’t-put-it-downer of novel about the interconnected lives of a disturbed family excites and unnerves the reader at the same time that it puzzles and sometimes terrifies with its eerie atmosphere and constant sense of imminent doom. A coming-of-age novel with a twist, it reveals the trials of a young boy, age six when the novel opens, constantly moving through dark locales in and around Copenhagen with his father, who is obviously hiding a terrible secret, not only from the boy, who is never named, but also from everyone else. The boy and his father clearly love each other and want to help each other, but they are constantly moving, and their lives are always changing with the father’s succession of oddball, low-paying jobs. Filled with surprises, the action in this novel is non-stop, and many readers will be unable to put down the book, once they get into it. The sense of menace throughout contrasts with the intrinsic “niceness” of the boy allowing the reader to wish fervently for his success while fearing the worst. The author releases information and paces his dramatic moments effectively so that there are no “dead spots” in the novel. Past and present overlap, often converging unexpectedly and then veering in new directions to provide new information. The author is so good at controling his tone and the sense of atmosphere, that it may not be until the conclusion that readers will begin to wonder about some of the “reality” here and whether it actually makes sense. Outstanding novel which defies genre.
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Told by Aaliya Saleh, a woman who “long ago abandoned [herself] to a blind lust for the written word,” this remarkable literary novel by Lebanese author Rabih Alameddine allows readers to follow the speaker into worlds which often feel familiar because of the emphasis on books the reader knows, but also into other worlds, previously unknown, based on her life in Beirut. From the opening pages, Aaliya, in her seventies, is totally honest with the reader. Within a few pages of the book’s opening, we learn that Aaliya is now a divorced, single woman who translates one novel every year from English or French to Arabic. Gradually, Aaliya fills in further details of her life, eventually bringing the chronology to the present, but it is a wayward journey, one the literature and music lover will thrill to take with her, reading slowly to savor her observations and the way she connects her life to observations by dozens of novelists and philosophers from all periods and from all over the world, often to the accompaniment of musical references to provide additional mood. Despite its lack of strong plot, there is nothing bland about this fascinating and absorbing novel, and booklovers will smile at the ironies involved in the conclusion.
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Drawing many many parallels between the action in this novel and that in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, author Atiq Rahimi focuses on the psychological state of mind of Rassoul, an Afghan student who studied for years in St. Petersburg, Russia, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, before returning to his home in Kabul, a city occupied by the Russians and their army from 1979 -1989. For Rassoul, whose very name suggests his similarities to Raskolnikov, Kabul in the 1980s bears no resemblance to the exciting, intellectual, and independent city it was a generation earlier. The city itself is now devastated, its educated citizens unable to work in any meaningful job, and no one is sure of who is really in charge – the Russians, the Muslim mujahideen, the Afghan communists (like his father), or those seeking independence from all these competing interests. As the book opens, Rassoul has just killed an old woman with an axe. Though decides to take only her cash, and nothing else, he is unable to pry the wad of bills out of the dead woman’s grip. When he hears someone calling her name, he escapes, not knowing who the “intruder” is, and blaming Dostoevsky for “stopping me from…killing a second woman, this one innocent…and becoming prey to my remorse, sinking into an abyss of guilt, [and] ending up sentenced to hard labour…”
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Using Bobby Mahon as the central character around whom most of the action revolves, Irish debut novelist Donal Ryan writes a dramatic and affecting experimental novel in which the story and its symbols, such as the “spinning heart” on his father’s gate, evolve through the points of view of twenty-one different characters, all of them living in the same town, knowing the same people, and contributing to the network of rumors and innuendos as members of “the Teapot Taliban,” as one character calls them. The father of Pokey Burke describes his two sons – Eamonn, his first son, whom he loves more than his second son, Pokey, whom he has spoiled over the years to make up for his lack of affection for him. Pokey’s father, Joseph, now blames himself, in part, for the economic problems now affecting so many families in the village. The village’s young men, in particular, have especially serious problems during the recession, since they often feel that their efforts have been betrayed and their manhood has been compromised. The breezy, casual, and sometimes highly confidential stories the characters share with the reader range from darkly humorous to frightening, reflecting the uncertainties of life itself and the often dominating role played by the church and by the characters’ unresolved issues regarding sex.
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