In this readable, exciting, and historically enlightening novel with two separate plots, Audrey Schulman accomplishes an incredible task. She makes the individual plots totally compelling and uniquely character-driven as they shift back and forth in alternating chapters, always leaving the reader panting for more and anxious to keep reading toward a conclusion. What is most seductive about the novel is that the plots take place in two different time periods and settings—one, in the area of what is now Kenya in 1899, and the other, in Virunga National Park, on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, in 2000. In the first plot a man from Bangor, Maine, responsible for building a railroad from Mombasa to Kisumu, through Amboseli, must deal with two large and bloodthirsty lions, reportedly over nine feet in length, as they lie waiting to pick off railroad workers; in the second, a young scientist with Asperger’s Syndrome is charged with finding a vine that is consumed by mountain gorillas and which dramatically reduces the incidence of both stroke and heart disease in their species. If Max, the researcher is able to obtain samples of the vine, a pharmaceutical company will, among other benefits, provide armed security to ensure the survival of the gorilla population in Virunga National Park, ad infinitum. Somehow Schulman manages to connect these two disparate plots in the conclusion, leaving the reader wholly satisfied on all levels.
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Jan-Philipp Sendker’s The Art of Hearing Heartbeats pulls out all the stops. Set in Burma (now Myanmar), it is the consummately romantic story of an abandoned and traumatized orphan boy, Tin Win, whose adoptive mother and the monks at the local monastery slowly enable him to make connections with the world beyond. It is both a look back at the past and a look forward into the future, as the boy’s story develops and he learns to love. The novel is also a triumph over adversity, as two characters, one blind and one crippled, movingly overcome their “handicaps” and no longer see themselves as any different from anyone else. The blind character learns to listen to the world so carefully that he can find people by listening for their unique heartbeats. The crippled character has a voice so beautiful that people come for miles to hear her sing. And it also a novel of suspense, as Julia Win, the young American daughter of Tin Win, searches for her missing father, traveling into rural Burma in search of the writer of a love letter from almost fifty years ago, which Julia has found among her father’s effects. Throughout the novel, the involvement of Burmese astrologers and helpful Buddhist priests add another dimension, both magical and mystical, to the thinking of the Burmese characters. Stories within stories within stories keep the love stories swirling and the sense of otherworldliness growing.
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Setting her novel at the end of the twentieth century, Penelope Lively begins Spiderweb (1998) by presenting a sociological picture of the west of England and the once-remote counties of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, which are now attracting new residents from “outside.” A letter from Richard Faraday to Stella Brentwood regarding a property in Kingston Florey in Somerset, inserted in the midst of this picture, describes a cottage for sale and its pluses and minuses, and indicates that he has been helping her find such a property to purchase. Gradually, the reader learns more about Stella, a sixty-five-year-old, newly retired social anthropologist and teacher, who filters all the impressions one gains about the village and its people through her own eyes. When she buys this cottage, she approaches her new village not as a new member of the community, but as an academic and specialist in social structures. Stella has never married, not because she did not have opportunities but because she has been completely driven by her interests in other cultures and her desire to stay on the move, professionally. Stella has squandered her chance to experience a full life, at least by the standards of most of the rest of the world, and whether she is or can be truly happy and adjust to this small town is the big question.
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Told by Marianna, a young woman who has lost all sense of “home” as a result of the more than ten years of warfare she lived through in her homeland of Lebanon, this impressionistic psychological novel begins with her dreams of “before the war was real.” Romantic images of her mother “wander[ing] outside, smelling the ghostly jasmine in the dark, and Daddy open[ing] another old book under a lamp” overlap with images of her grandparents lighting the candles on a Christmas tree while sweet wine boils on the stove. Now the war is “real,” however. Years have passed, and the old reality she yearns for remains only in her dreams. Marianna, now eighteen, is in another place, America, her father’s birthplace, where, she believes, “nothing can be beautiful” and where she looks “inward to the night, to my dream self who had promised that this time I really had gone back home to my true life.” The warfare she experienced in Lebanon, which began in 1975-76, when she was seven, is now thousands of miles away, but she has been unable to cope with a new life in the US. Focusing almost exclusively on the four people in this family, on their friends, on those who died in the war (between 1975 and 1990), and on Lebanon itself, author Patricia Sarrafian Ward recreates the psychological damage of war.
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Hannah Gonen, a young woman living in Jerusalem in the late 1950s, has been married for ten years to a man she pursued and married when she was in her first year at the university and he was a graduate student. Michael, who describes himself to Hannah as “good…a bit lethargic, but hard-working, responsible, clean, and very honest,” eventually earns his PhD. degree in geology and begins work at the university, but Hannah, who has given up her literature studies upon her marriage, soon finds married life – and Michael himself – to be tedious. Her only child resembles Michael in personality, a child rooted in reality, who “finds objects much more interesting than people or words.” Writing in short, factual sentences, which come alive through his choice of details, author Amos Oz, often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, recreates Hannah’s story of her marriage, a marriage which may or may not survive.
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