Timeless in its themes and completely of the moment in its narrative voice, Kim Thuy’s Ru brings to life the innermost thoughts of one of Vietnam’s “boat people.” The author, whose family emigrated from Vietnam to Canada when she was ten, has created a vibrant novel that feels much more like a memoir than fiction, with a main character whose life so closely parallels that of the author that her publisher’s biography for her is virtually identical in its details to the factual material in the novel. Few, if any, readers will doubt that the author actually lived these events – her voice is so clear and so honest that there is no sense of artifice at all. A series of vignettes, presented in the “random” order in which the main character, Nguyen An Tinh, appears to have remembered them, allows the author to move around through time and memory, while also allowing the reader to participate, for short moments, in events that would otherwise feel alien in time and place. The action, often dramatic, just as often reflects the quiet, loving experiences of a family’s life; descriptions of hardship and deplorable, even repulsive, conditions are balanced by the author’s ability to see beauty in small, even delicate, moments.
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Author Louise Erdrich, herself a member of a Chippewa (Ojibwa) band of Native Americans, here writes one of her most powerful and emotionally involving novels. Though it starts as a crime story, it is, like all Erdrich’s novels, much more than that, quickly developing into an examination of the lives of her characters, both old and young, as they face the challenges of reservation life. In a powerful opening scene, filled with symbols and portents, thirteen-year-old Antone Basil Coutts (Joe), only child and namesake of Judge Coutts and his wife Geraldine, is helping his father to pull tiny seedlings from cracks in the foundation of their house. They are awaiting Geraldine’s return from the office, where she works recording the genealogies of the members of their band of Chippewa, keeping track of marriages, births, who is living there, and who has moved away. When she finally arrives at home, she is almost unrecognizable, so badly beaten she can hardly see, reeking of gasoline and so traumatized by rape and other crimes against her that she has become mute. She claims not to know who has committed this crime or where it took place, hiding out in her room after she is released from the hospital and refusing to leave. The boy, known as Joe to his friends, knows that it will be up to him and his father to try to find out who has done this. They begin to study cases in which his father has been involved to look for clues.
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In The Elephant Keeper’s Children, Hoeg continues his focus on philosophy, this time dealing with the search for faith and meaning through an exploration of life and its parallel search for love and happiness – be it through Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism. He does this, not as the main focus of the novel, but as part of the backstory involving three children who are searching for their mother and father, who have disappeared. Their father is the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark on the island of Fino, where they all live, and their mother, the organist, is a mechanical genius with a gift for invention beyond what anyone in their congregation can imagine. The result is a farcical, picaresque story of chases and escapes in which the fourteen-year-old main character (named, in typical Hoeg fashion, Peter, suggesting issues the character might have in common with those of the author, on some level), along with his sixteen-year-old sister Tilde and terrier dog Basker, sets out to find their parents, sometimes aided by Hans, their older brother who is studying away from home. They know they must find their parents themselves before they are remanded to a children’s home by adults who seem to fear what they might do if left alone.
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As a boy in Trujillo, Peru, Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua has his fortune told one Sunday, in the plaza just outside the local basilica. A fortune-teller, with a miniature cathedral on his cart, has trained a monkey to draw fortunes from small drawers in the façade of the little cathedral. When Victor and his aunt receive his fortune, they see no ironies in the fact that Don Victor had just gone to Mass and confession and that this fortune is drawn by a monkey from a toy cathedral. Both believe in the inscribed destiny: “Beware! There are those who think you a dreamer. Pay them no mind. They are small-minded people… who would have you doubt your goals.” Victor eventually goes to engineering school, doing his apprenticeship with a papermaker, and eventually building a factory in the Peruvian jungle, where his employees make cellophane. This discovery leads to the fulfillment of the dire predictions of the second half of his childhood fortune—and to the action of this novel, which is divided into three “plagues.” A “plague of truth” follows the discovery of cellophane, as each character, including the priest, confesses his/her romantic indiscretions. A “plague of hearts” follows, with each person pursuing new love or rekindling old love. Ultimately, a “plague of revolution” comes to Floralinda, as government soldiers invade Floralinda, and local workers blame Don Victor and his cellophane for these troubles. Ironies abound. Expansive in scope and theme but magnificently controlled in its execution, Cellophane is thoroughly entertaining, filled with humor and irony and many hilarious scenes. Reminiscent of the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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In this impressionistic novel about the on-going conflicts between Irish Loyalists and the Irish Republican Army and its militias in Belfast, author Tom Molloy’s dramatic scenes bring the full horrors of this long civil war to life, though for some partisans, death is preferable to life as they have known it in their impoverished and violent neighborhoods. As the father of one Catholic from the Falls Road area of Belfast tells his son, “I am your father but they treat me like a child. I am a man and they will not acknowledge my manhood. See this, understand it, stand up to it when you can. This is our country. Often we can only fight them with our humor. Resist.” A former freelance journalist who accompanied the IRA during some of its bloodiest street battles, author Tom Molloy’s descriptions of Belfast and its battles bear the heavy truth of what he has seen and felt, and few readers will leave this novel without absorbing the full impact of the long enmity between those Catholics who still support turning the entire island into one Irish republic and those Protestants who believe that Northern Ireland should remain just as it is, part of the United Kingdom, supported by British troops. For those readers who believe that the Good Friday Accords of 1998, approved by voters from both parts of Ireland, effectively ended the hostilities which have torn apart the island for almost a hundred years, think again. Extremists on both sides keep the enmity alive, even after a generation.
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