Fans of Yukio Mishima (1925 – 1970) will celebrate this first-ever English translation of STAR, one of the thirty-four novels written by Mishima before his death by ritual suicide at age forty-five. Written in 1961, Star tells the story of actor Rikio Mizuno, a twenty-three-year-old film star whose whole life is fraught with intense anxiety, alleviated only by his opportunities to become someone else in films. The author himself was well familiar with the joys of acting and producing theatrical works, writing approximately fifty plays, working as an actor, and even as a film writer, when he was not writing his thirty-four novels. His insights into acting and the actor’s feeling of becoming another “person” are obvious here in this novella, which is filled with insights into drama and its fine line between imagination and reality.
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Throw Me to the Wolves is a book which inevitably will be called a “murder mystery,” though that so underestimates McGuinness’s literary performance that it is almost an insult to limit it that way. Here the author uses the real murder of a young woman and its aftermath in the small British community in which she and the suspect both live as the starting point for a comprehensive study of the town’s various social groups, their values, their history, and the extent to which the citizens will force their wills on others to protect their own vision of what a community is and should be. What begins as a “detective story” quickly becomes an enthralling story of social interaction and reaction, a story of deep conflicts and divides, one which, ultimately, treads that narrow line between protecting social values and protecting one’s own sense of self. The novel, set in the 1980s, is based on a real murder and the teacher who becomes a suspect. A brilliant and lively study of the power of rumor and the press, and the state of the news media today. A big favorite for the year so far.
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In what is the most excitingly creative and unusual group of ten stories I have read in many years, Bosnian author Asja Bakic captured my attention totally, and kept it through several readings. In Bakić’s first story, “Day Trip to Durmitor,” for example, a young woman is surprised, after her own death, to discover that the afterlife is completely different from what she expected. When she wants to know where God is, she is rebuked, told that she “can’t champion atheism and then play cards with the Lord when you die.” In other words, “God slipped in the tub.” In another story, the speaker is magically sucked out of the celestial place where she has been writing, lands on earth, and sees her own reflection – as a non-human. Hidden treasure, a grandfather’s collection of pornography, a well-digger who is a forest monster, a robot who comes to life, a character with the same name as the author, who has been cloned four times, and people who live with a green spirit add further interest. Literary references add depth and interest.
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In this assured and evocative debut novel set in rural Kentucky, author C. E. Morgan comes closer to conveying the essence of life, as she sees it, than do most other novelists with generations more experience. Writing about an area in which she lived, Morgan recreates the bare bones lives of subsistence farmers who are irrevocably tied to the land, a land which is sometimes fickle in its ability to sustain those who so lovingly tend it. Interminably long days and aching physical labor are not always rewarded here, and despair is often the prevailing mood of whole communities when droughts or floods play havoc with man’s efforts. Yet each spring offers new opportunities and hope as the resilient farmers renew their back-breaking connection to the land once again. Orren Fenton is just out of college when his mother and brother are killed in an accident, leaving him the sole survivor of the family and the inheritor of the family’s Kentucky tobacco farm. He invites his girlfriend Aloma to join him in restoring the farm that had belonged to his grandparents. The work is brutal, their love is tested severely, and both learn, as does the local pastor. Insightful, philosophical, and mature, this portrait of three characters trying to understand themselves and their roles in the world as they face the hardships of everyday life in rural Kentucky is accomplished, moving, and insightful.
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The dramatic hit-and-run death of a respected cafe owner brings all the members of the man’s family to his home in the Mohave, to which he and his wife immigrated from Morocco when violence broke out in Casablanca in 1981. Each of these family members and many others in the community become first-person narrators as the action begins, the novel becoming a character-based study of people and how they respond to danger and threats. Nora Guerraoui, who becomes the main character, is a musician, composer, and grad student in California now, but on her return to the Mohave, where her parents live, she quickly re-adapts to the community where she grew up and reconnects with some friends from the past, some of them with long-standing prejudices. One of the best novels I’ve read all year, THE OTHER AMERICANS draws in the reader, provides constant interest and insights, and shows the sensitivity with which author Laila Lalami treats her subject without talking down and without lecturing. High on my Favorites list for 2019.
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