Through flashbacks, an aging surfer, Brucie Pike (“Pikelet”), relives his coming-of-age on the west coast of Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. A lonely boy leading a solitary life, he finds a companion, if not friend, in Ivan Loon (“Loonie”), with whom he shares his love of extreme surfing. “How strange it was,” Pikelet remarks, “to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw and cared.” But the beauty of surfing quickly yields in importance to its excitement and its increasingly dangerous thrills. “There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn’t know what endorphins were, but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching,” Pikelet declares. Eventually, however, Pikelet begins to question the relationship between excitement, thrills, risk, and death and what maturity really means. In spare prose which uses some of the most vivid action verbs ever included in a novel, Winton tells an exciting story which makes the seductive thrills of surfing comprehensible to the non-surfer, while showing how his characters discover what makes men humans and ultimately what makes life worth living.
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Having read The Age of Orphans, the first novel in Laleh Khadivi’s trilogy, published in 2009, I vividly remember the author’s haunting style and musical, even psalm-like cadences, along with the power and passion with which she creates that novel’s memorable main character, seven-year-old Reza Khourdi, who grows up under the Shah. This book, though similar in the best aspects of its style, is truly different, and in its differences, it hits heights rarely seen in a second novel, especially by such a young novelist. Beginning in the earliest days of the Iranian Revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, The Walking is simultaneously much narrower in focus and much more universal in its themes. The author says almost nothing about the revolutionary events themselves, concentrating instead on the lives and innermost questions, thoughts, and fears, of two Khourdi brothers, ages nineteen and seventeen, who leave Iran secretly after a bloody incident involving their father, Reza from The Age of Orphans. They become part of the Iranian diaspora – young men and families who leave to create new lives in another world while they still have a chance to escape. A novel which stuns with its insights, hitting all the right notes.
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Winner of three major Japanese prizes during his long writing career, author Teru Miyamoto is still virtually unknown to English-speaking audiences. Sadly, Kinshu: Autumn Brocade, published in Japan in 1982 and translated into English by Roger K. Thomas in 2005, remains the only one of his novels available in English. In this quietly elegant novel focusing on the effects of a failed marriage on the two participants, Miyamoto explores the importance of marriage and its ramifications in Japanese society, emphasizing the characters and their culture rather than the kind of plot development and grand climax expected by most western readers. Readers interested in the effects of culture on character may find, as I did, that Miyamoto’s focus feels completely honest, true to life in ways that many plot-based novels do not, and this novel’s concise form allows him to explore serious themes without being didactic or held captive to plot. Immense sympathy is evoked as these two people find their lives permanently affected because they have been unable to surmount the barriers placed by tradition. As Aki and Yasuaki continue their new lives and try to understand the past, the reader also realizes that though the culture in which these new lives unfold differs from that of western readers, the human qualities of these individuals and their feelings are universal, not bound by culture.
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The Moresbys are about to get “all the way into life” in ways they have never expected. Having left the United States for an adventure in Morocco, main character Porter Moresby is careful to describe himself as a traveler, not a tourist. “The difference is partly one of time, he [explains]. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than another, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.” This is the Moresbys’ first trip across the Atlantic since 1939, since all of Europe and much of Africa has been consumed for ten years with World War II and its aftereffects. In 1949, when they decide to do some traveling, North Africa is one of the few places to which they can obtain boat passage. In this unusual and thoughtful debut novel, Bowles takes crass Americans out of their normal post-war environment, allowing the reader to see them in a more universal context. This is not a love story, by any means, despite Bernardo Bertolucci’s attempt to make it one in his 1990 film adaptation with Debra Winger and John Malkovich. Instead, the two main characters are so limited, both in their relationships with their peers and in relationships with the wider, outside world that neither is fully capable of feeling real emotion for anyone other than self. Their trip is a disaster. One of Modern’s Library’s 100 Best Novels of All Time.
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I am so sad that I have finished this collection of stories and must finally write a review. In fact, I actually read this book twice, but writing the review is like saying goodbye to people I may never see again, and these characters feel real, familiar, true to life, and ultimately memorable. I am not by nature a sentimental person – in fact, I may be more like some of the characters in this book than I am willing to admit – so this reaction is not characteristic. And when I say these short stories are among the best I have read since Robert Boswell’s The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, and then add that they are so clean, neat, and perceptive in their style and presentation that they remind me of those by Andre Dubus (the father), I am not exaggerating. Kane’s stories are sensitive, psychologically astute, and filled with observations that will expand your own viewpoint, maybe even allowing you to see yourself in new ways. The title says it all. Each character here (and some of them repeat in several stories) is facing an event which may change his/her life significantly. As the characters’ stories unfold, each person comes “this close” to having a life-changing revelation, only to have the opportunity escape them, in most cases, through their own inactions, as they turn back to the comfort of the familiar and the habitual, or as they ignore the possibilities.
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