Posted in 08-2022 Reviews, Experimental, Historical, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Psychological study, Social and Political Issues, Uruguay on May 8th, 2022
This unusual novel focusing on a talking frog and his help for a tormented man allows author Carolina De Robertis to explore philosophical ideas of governance and individual responsibility. Here author Carolina De Robertis describes the difficult inner world of a member of Uruguay’s Marxist Tupamaros during his fourteen year imprisonment in a hole deep underground during the 1970s and 1980s. This is a man who has been wounded six times during various escape attempts from confinement, who fears for his own mental health during his torture and imprisonment, but who is ultimately elected Uruguay’s President from 2010 – 2015. Author Carolina de Robertis’s intense and involving story, based loosely on the traumatic life and career of the real President, José Mujica, during that period, focuses on the man’s involvement in the political changes in the early twenty-first century. Though it is filled with the horrors of revolutionary warfare and its personal effects on the participants, the resulting fictionalized biography is often very funny, filled with ironies.
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In her latest study of an animal species, Audrey Schulman focuses on dolphins, their intelligence, their verbalization, their relationships with humans and each other, and the possibility that they may be able to initiate communication with humans if they and the humans can evolve a common language. Set in St. Thomas, and based on research done in the mid-1960s (and continuing to the present), her main character, Cora, lives with the dolphins and eventually focuses on a particular one, with whom she shares a “homearium,” living in the dry section of the building, while “Junior” lives in the sea section, which overlaps with it. Fascinating work involving animal behavior and speech.
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However many surprises the artwork of Felix Vallotton (1865 – 1925) may provide for the viewer, this book, a record of two art shows in 2019 and 2020, will provide even more. Five critics, including novelist Patrick McGuinness, give important general information about why Vallotton, a Swiss, may not have received the attention of artists like the impressionists and post-impressionists who were purveyors of new styles. Vallotton,. too, provides new views of the world, but his are unique, not part of a movement. In addition to his insightful, often personal, and sometimes even amusing, paintings, Vallotton revived the whole concept of the wood block print, creating dozens of commentaries on daily life from his perspective as an anarchist, used in newspapers, often in place of cartoons. One picture of one painting by Vallotton, sent to me by a friend this past year, was all it took to unleash weeks of pleasure for me through the study of Vallotton’s work. This book, filled with many pages of color photographs and block prints, will lead, I hope, to similar discoveries among others who read and view it and celebrate the new worlds it opens.
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Setting his third novel in the south of Ireland in the years between 1920 and 1982, author Billy O’Callaghan writes a semi-autobiographical account of a large, extended Irish family always struggling to stay alive, meet their responsibilities, and love their children. O’Callaghan, a master of description, both physical and emotional, creates scenes of great sadness, stressing the goodness of the people and the horrors of outside events – from the Potato Famine through a world war and a society and church in which women have little control over their lives. The strength of these women lies in their love of family, especially their children, and their willingness to do whatever is necessary to save them under horrific conditions. Their hard lives are their “normal,” one which becomes real as a result of O’Callaghan’s insightful descriptions of the conditions under which these women live and the creativity with which they approach their difficult roles as mothers and caregivers.
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In this psychological study of Pietro Vella, who is a thirty-year-old teacher in Italy at the beginning of the novel, author Domenico Starnone concentrates on themes of love, the self-knowledge it needs to grow, and the kind of honesty which evolves from the trust and respect which two people must have in each other. The novel opens with Pietro’s early love of Teresa, a wild, brilliant, and impulsive woman, whose relationship with Pietro lasts for three years, before her career beckons. Nadia, Pietro’s next love, with whom he eventually has a family, is Teresa’s opposite, and their decades long marriage and family, become a key to the novel and Pietro’s happiness – or not. The three main characters- Pietro, Nadia, and Teresa – each with his/her own section – provide alternative visions of major events as the characters show their interactions, their love, and their self-awareness – or not – as fifty years pass, lives grow and change, and the characters share their lives with the reader.
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