A fast-paced plot, a setting that is both horrific and familiar, a mixture of fantasy with traditional religion, and unusual characters dealing with pressing political, economic, and moral issues capture one’s attention from the opening pages, as author Michele Roberts keeps the reader moving swiftly through the French countryside from 1931 – 1945. In many ways the two girls who are the protagonists of this novel represent the dichotomies of their times. Jeanne will do whatever is necessary to survive, including stealing food from the convent, and later taking jobs which demean her. Marie-Angele and her family, for all their religiosity, consider themselves superior because they are wealthier, and these hypocritical attitudes are also reflected, ironically, in the attitudes Jeanne experiences with the nuns in the convent. Though Jeanne is the primary narrator, Marie-Angele also serves as a narrator, expressing her own versions of events and her own attitudes toward life, and the two reflect very different realities which also reflect the realities of France during this period. Because time is not linear in this novel, the author is able to paint a picture of life from several different vantage points, not just in point of view but also in time. Sure to become an immense popular success not just for its story but for its style, this novel will surely appeal to a wide audience. Recommended for book clubs.
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Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Catalonia, Experimental, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Short Stories, Spain on Jan 21st, 2013
Catalan author Quim Monzo’s new collection of short stories captures the reader’s attention with its surprises, tickles with its humor, bewilders with its disturbed, often absurd characters, and ultimately arouses deep sadness with some of its portraits of the elderly and those close to them. Included are seven full-length stories in Part I, and twelve, very clever one- or two-page mini-stories in Part II, each of these stories playing with reality, especially the reality of love, as Monzo’s characters and his readers understand it. These characters often experience and react to a very different reality from that of the reader, and, therein lies the stories’ tension as the characters make unexpected or bizarre decisions and move in unique directions. These sudden twists lead to innumerable surprises even for the most jaded reader, and no one can dismiss these stories as “too weird” (even if one were ungracious enough to want to do so) simply because the characters and their stories share so many details with our own everyday realities. As absurd as the characters and their lives may be, we can see that there are always strong and familiar truths embedded within even the strangest realities here, and we are always able to empathize with some aspect of the characters’ lives. Filled with wonderful stories which are full of surprises, A Thousand Morons reflects life’s absurdities at the same time that it also reflects the realities of life and love, an intriguing collection of stories told with wit and great panache.
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Deola Bello, a thirty-nine-year-old Nigerian expatriate who has been living in London since the 1980s, is now working for LINK, a non-profit charity which funds projects in Third World countries. She is about to travel “home” to Lagos on business for a week to report on two projects in Lagos, and her brief return will coincide with the fifth anniversary of her father’s death. The family memorial service will draw large numbers of family and friends. With the focus on the small, the specific, and the individual, as these details relate to the general state of middle-class life in Lagos, the author shows how these characters compare and contrast with those Deola sees in London, who are also described in the same kind of detail as they try to communicate with each other and the outside world. In paying such close attention to “Who are we, really?” this book feels quite different from other books set in Nigeria. Atta is far less interested in using a story to illustrate universal themes or endemic problems than she is in looking at her characters’ lives through a magnifying glass, describing what she sees (without editing all the plebeian details) and allowing the reader to share the point of view of Deola, the character who is making the observations.
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Opening with a scene in which a priest is painting a vibrant black Madonna, this novel focuses on the life of the model, Niki, a woman who posed originally because she desperately needed the money and was willing to travel thirty-five kilometers to Fr. Claerhout’s studio, often on foot. She is a favorite model, along with her daughter Popi, a five-year-old, light-skinned child with blue eyes and softly waving hair, two symbols of South Africa for author Zakes Mda. With vivid scenes from South African life, both the good and the bad, from the 1970s to the present, author Mda presents a clear-eyed vision of South Africa’s transition from a restrictive, white-ruled government to a democratically elected government with room for both races. The black people here are real, not idealized, people with real hopes, dreams, and strategies for survival, and they evoke enormous sympathy from the reader, especially as their personal limitations and faults become clear. Though Mda has no sympathy for the abuses inflicted by the Afrikaners who were in power for so long, he reveals a broad vision of a future that includes both races working together. Concentrating less on national violence and battles for survival, and more on the individual, racial conflicts of people in Excelsior, many of whom the reader has come to like and respect, he presents an exciting story of complex issues in a clear, straightforward narrative which throbs with life and offers both hope and warnings for the future.
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Australian Patrick White’s genius for story-telling is on full display in this big,old-fashioned saga filled with intriguing characters exploring the difficult terrain of their inner lives. For a number of characters, all male, that personal inner journey is also part of a daring adventure they make into the interior of Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, an area previously unexplored by the white people who have recently discovered this continent. The female characters in Sydney during this same period have a far more difficult time exploring their inner natures, even in the unlikely event that they might be interested in doing so. Here, the women are very much a product of their upbringing in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. As the daughters and wives of successful merchants or entrepreneurs, their educations have been in the social graces far more than in academic learning as they ready themselves for their perceived roles in society as the wives of successful men and mothers of a new generation of Australian gentry. The novel is satisfying on every level, thematically, historically, and emotionally, and the characters are memorable. His descriptions are unparalleled, especially in the clever, often satiric presentations of some of the more unpleasant characters, introduced only briefly.
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