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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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 Ancient Light, the final novel of a trilogy involving Alexander Cleave, Cass Cleave, and Axel Vander, John Banville brings the arc of his continuing story to its conclusion, both in terms of plot and in terms of theme. Here, sixty-five-year-old Cleave and his wife Lydia (whose name is really Leah) are still mourning the death of their pregnant daughter Cass, who died ten years ago. Lydia has full-fledged night-time rampages in which she panics, convinced that Cass is still alive in the house somewhere, while Cleave, sometimes has strange dreams and “manifestations.” Their dreams are always a combination of reality and memory, presented in new forms through the kind of invention which comes through troubled sleep. With its parallel narratives of Cleave as a young man having an affair with Mrs. Gray, his best friend’s mother, and Cleave as a sixty-five-year-old actor trying to save Dawn Devonport, the reader is kept totally engaged with two vibrant stories filled with excitement, yet the scenes and events constantly suggest that there is more underlying the action than meets the eye. The result is thrilling, with the reader willingly assuming the roles of both detective and psychologist, analyzing the details, and finding the answers all related thematically, all part of a trilogy, every detail on every level connected to every other detail.
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Axel Vander tells us from the opening of this sensitive and tension-filled study of identity that he is not who he says he is, that he has assumed another man’s identity. A respected scholar and professor at a California college, Vander is recognized by the literati for his thoughtful philosophical papers and books, especially his ironically entitled The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity. Just before he leaves for a conference on Nietzsche in Turin, however, he receives a letter from a young woman in Antwerp, raising questions about his real identity and asking to meet with him. He agrees to meet her in Turin, and as the novel unfolds, we come to know more about the “real” Axel Vander and more about his mysterious correspondent, the disturbed Cass Cleave, whose madness does not preclude the truth of her discoveries. Banville’s novel is intense, highly compressed in its development of overlapping themes, and filled with suspense, both real and intellectual. The plot, though entertaining and often exciting, reveals the dark, interior worlds of Vander and Cass so fully that a more detailed plot summary might jeopardize the reader’s own pleasure of discovery. Banville is a master craftsman who has interconnected every plot detail with his themes of identity and selfhood, the relationships we create with the outside world, and our desire to be remembered after our deaths.
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Firmly connected to the cold, often bleak landscapes they inhabit, Per Petterson’s characters are never frivolous, however impulsive and even violent their actions might be. Often shackled by circumstances over which they have little control, they respond in the only ways they can, sometimes self-destructively. Their parents can sometimes offer little guidance, even by way of example, and growing up becomes a question of actions followed either by reward or, more likely, by punishment. In the ironically entitled It’s Fine By Me, an early Petterson novel from 1992, Audun Sletten shares his life from his teen years to age twenty, always honest in his feelings, sometimes to his own detriment, and always sensitive to his personal standards of behavior which the rest of the world does not always understand or share. Beautifully developed and filled with details which ring true, not just in terms of the time and setting, but in terms of psychological honesty, It’s Fine By Me feels almost autobiographical in its ability to convey real feelings by real people. The moving conclusion to this novel shows Ardun’s growth – often with the help of those who care about him – and readers who see themselves (at least in some aspect) within the character of Ardun will celebrate his coming of age – all the while knowing that Ardun is a work in progress and that he’ll never be able to take life or his own responses to threats for granted.
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