SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

“Look at them…Gather ye rosebuds while ye may and all that.  It’s the end of Europe, and that’s why they’re dancing, and of course Lisbon is the end of Europe, too.  The fingertip of Europe.  And everything that Europe is and means is pressed into that fingertip.  Too much of it.  It’s a cistern full to overflowing…”

Lisbon, 1940, provides a temporary safe haven and hope for emigrating citizens from every country in Europe as they try to secure visas for passage by ship – any ship – out of Europe and away from the Nazis.  For Americans with valid passports, life is more secure.  The U.S. government has commandeered the S. S. Manhattan to transport stranded Americans in Lisbon back to New York.  For these people, the biggest challenge is to pass the time till the ship sails, and many of them do it in extravagant fashion.  A few, however, including characters here, have more difficulty leaving Europe, physically and emotionally, than one might expect.  As one character notes, in retrospect, “Now it seems churlish to speak of our plight, which was nothing compared with that of real refugees – the Europeans, the Jews, the European Jews.  Yet at the time, we were too worried about what we were losing to care about those who were losing more.”  Author David Leavitt, in describing life in Lisbon in these crucial weeks before war engulfs all of Europe, examines four characters – three of them Americans awaiting the S. S. Manhattan – as they reveal their attitudes toward Europe, toward the United States, and ultimately toward each other.

By using Lisbon primarily as an incidental setting for the characters’ lives, and not as the main focus of the novel, Leavitt provides an unusual vantage point from which to approach the horrors of the war and its psychological effects on those trying to escape it.  Two couples, Pete and Julia Winters, and Edward and Iris Freleng, meet for the first time at the Café Suica, when (in a symbolic moment) Edward Freleng inadvertently crushes Pete’s eyeglasses as they fall to the pavement.  The couples, both in their early forties, become friendly, though superficially they have little in common.  Pete, from Indianapolis, has been working most of his life as a car salesman, while his Jewish wife Julia, from New York, has dreamed all her life of having an apartment in Paris, a goal which the two have recently achieved.

Santa Justa Elevator.

Edward and his British wife Iris come from more privileged backgrounds, with Edward admitting that he has “never had a job in [his] life.”   He and Iris have lived in dozens of hotels and resorts all over Europe and write mystery novels for fun under the name of Xavier Legrand.

The differences between the couples are further emphasized through their different addresses in Lisbon.  While Pete and Julia are lucky to have found a hotel room at all, at the Francfort Hotel near the Café Suica, Edward and Iris are staying at the similarly named Hotel Francfort, a different, more elegant hotel near the Santa Justa Elevator, which allows people on the street to travel from ground level to the much higher levels of the hillside without the effort of climbing on foot, the Elevator also symbolizing the differences between the two couples themselves.

The two couples have far more in common in their secret lives than they do in the superficial lives which initially bring them together.  Before fifteen pages have elapsed, Edward is flirting with Pete, and Pete is not discouraging him.  The women, too, have secrets which are revealed in the course of the novel, and as the time for the departure of the Manhattan gets closer, their behavior becomes more and more frantic, with Julia insisting that she cannot possibly return to New York, and Iris manipulating Pete and Edward in order to maintain her own sanity and her own sense of power.  The women and men go in different directions for much of the novel, enjoying many hours of independence from each other, with their activities often fueled, in the case of Pete and Edward, by absinthe, “the green fairy.”  Julia continues to play games of solitaire throughout the novel, Iris continues to play power games, and the tensions within all the relationships get closer to the breaking point.

Antonio de Oliveira Salazar

While the characters are developing, the author also includes a few of their observations of life around them, adding to the picture of life in Lisbon during the emergency.  Refugees sleep on the beach and in chairs in hotels, if they are lucky.  A shortage of food supplies in Lisbon and throughout Europe brings volunteer church groups from the US to try to help.  For wealthy refugees, obtaining a car and a driver’s license has become almost impossible, a “hardship” for them in their boredom as they await their ship, and one Jewish couple whom Pete and Julia know has been unable to get a visa to the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or Cuba, though they might get one from Cambodia, “for a price.”  Particularly poignant is Pete’s witnessing of the beating of two eight-year-old children, each one wearing only one shoe, by the police of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s regime.  Salazar has proclaimed that everyone in Lisbon must wear shoes because he believes that this shoe policy will “bring the country up to snuff for Lisbon’s Exposition [of 1940]” which he hopes will rival the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.  The boys’ poor family can afford only one pair of shoes for two children.

One of the peacocks at the Castelo de Sao Jorge, where Pete and Edward meet late in the novel.

Intriguing in its focus, the novel maintains its pace and keeps the reader entertained and interested throughout, despite the fact that the characters are not as fully developed as one might wish for.  The insights into their characters are based primarily on their superficial, outward behavior and upon secrets from the past which are sometimes withheld until the conclusion, preventing the reader from fully understanding the characters and their motivations as the novel unfolds.  None of the characters can be considered “heroes” by any standards, nor are they in any way admirable.  Obvious symbols abound – from the title and the Elevator to Julia’s constant playing of solitaire, the depiction of the Winters’s apartment in Vogue magazine, and the meeting between Pete and Edward at the crumbling Castelo de Sao Jorge, with its ubiquitous peacocks.  The conclusion, a tour de force, with its commentary on the writing process itself, will intrigue (and perhaps amuse) lovers of literary fiction.  All in all, Leavitt creates an unusual treatment of a tension-filled time and place with characters whom he manipulates effectively to illustrate his themes.  Ultimately, “there are occasions when none of the choices are good.  You simply have to calculate which is the least bad.”

The Castelo de Sao Jorge, now restored.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.nndb.com/

The Santa Justa Elevator, by Luca Galuzzi, may be found on http://en.wikipedia.org

Absinthe, “the green fairy,” is depicted here: http://www.alandia.de/

The photo of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, leader of Portugal, is from http://en.wikipedia.org

The peacock from the medieval Castelo de Sao Jorge in Lisbon is shown on http://www.thenyloncarryall.com,  part of an article by Katy Scrogin.

The medieval Castelo de Sao Jorge, which was crumbling in 1940, when the novel takes place, has been restored in recent years. http://en.wikipedia.org/

ARC: Bloomsbury

“Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I look back now and I think of…[the Toxleys] standing there on the platform at Thorpe Station [when I arrived] and I want to scream at them, I want to run and shake them, I want to look them squarely in their faces and say, you knew, you knew even then.  Why didn’t you warn me?”—Eliza Caine

The Halloweens of my childhood were times in which our imaginations ran riot with mysterious haunted houses, the terrifying old “witches” who inhabited them, and the ghosts and other presences who kept them company.  The scariest film I’d ever seen was “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” with its Headless Horseman, nothing like the films of today.  Memories of old stories like these come roaring back to life with this Dickensian melodrama, set outside of Norfolk, England, in 1867.  Eliza Caine, who has suffered a series of personal disasters which have left her an orphan, has made a sudden decision to leave the family “home” in London, in which she has spent her life, to accept the position of governess for a family she does not know in a city she has never seen.  She is anxious for change, however.  Just one week past, her father had ignored her pleas that he remain at home to nurse his cold and had, instead, attended a reading by Charles Dickens on a miserable, rainy night. He succumbed to fever shortly afterward.  Almost immediately after her father’s death, Eliza is informed that the family home is not, in fact, owned by the family, and that she will have to vacate the house.  Seeing an advertisement in the newspaper for a governess, signed by “H. Bennet,” she has chosen to leave her current teaching job at a girls’ school and move elsewhere.

Photo by Mark Condren

From the beginning of the novel, Irish author John Boyne draws parallels between Dickens’s work and his own.  The Dickens reading, which Eliza and her father attend, is of a ghost story Dickens wrote for the Christmas number of All the Year Round, “a most terrifying tale…of the paranormal, of the undead, of those pitiful creatures who wander the afterlife in search of eternal reconciliation…I wrote it,” Dickens confesses, “to chill the blood of my readers and dispatch ghouls into the beating heart of their dreams.”  Eliza is particularly vulnerable to suggestion, at this point, because she has recently seen another face just below her own in her mirror, a face resembling that of her deceased mother and which she sees again as she walks to hear Dickens. After the reading, she admits to her father that “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced fear in the way that others do.  I don’t understand what it is to be truly frightened,” though she acknowledges that stories of the afterlife and about forces that the human mind cannot understand are “disquieting.” She prefers Oliver Twist and David Copperfield to Scrooge and Marley.

St. James Church, Paddington, where the funeral was held for Eliza’s father. Photo by Martin Addison

Eliza is about to discover just how “disquieting” her life can be, as author Boyne creates a story about the inhabitants of Gaudlin Hall, the estate to which Eliza is traveling, which directly parallels much of what Charles Dickens has included in the story he has read to his audience.  Many clichés of spooky Victorian novels are repeated here:  Eliza arrives by train during a fog so dense she can not even see in front of her (and almost gets hit by a passing train).  She collides with “HB” on the platform, and only later realizes that it is the “H.Bennet” who advertised for the governess position that she has accepted.  HB is now racing to catch the train back to London.  Heckling, the farm worker who picks her up and drives her to Gaudlin Hall, reluctantly answers her questions about H. Bennet and the “Master” of Gaudlin by saying only that Bennet was not the owner of Gaudlin but a departing employee, a revelation which shocks Eliza, who had been imagining herself as “the young lady at the heart of Pride and Prejudice,” Dickens’s novel of the Bennet family.  As for the Master of Gaudlin, “There ain’t no master of Gaudlin.  Not no more.  Missus took care of that, di’nt she?”

Paddington Station, from which Eliza departs for Norfolk, in Victorian Times

Two children, Isabella Westerley, a twelve-year-old with a “mistress-of-the-house expression on her face,” and Eustace, her innocent eight-year-old brother, are the children Eliza will teach.  Except for Heckling, a Mrs. Livermore who comes every day, presumably with food, and who then seems to vanish, and Mr. Raisin, the Westerley family lawyer (and whose secretary is named Mr. Cratchett), Eliza is the only other adult at Gaudlin Hall.  She soon discovers that there, are, however, “presences” at Gaudlin which pull on her ankles when she is in bed, try to strangle her while she is sleeping, prevent doors from opening, push her out windows and pull her back, change cold water to boiling water without warning, and stir up tornado-like winds which buffet only her.  It is not long before she concludes that there are two distinct presences at work, vying for control of her life, as they also did with the five governesses who preceded her over the course of the past year.

The gargoyles at Gaudlin Hall have a habit of falling.

In the midst of her turmoil, Eliza seeks out Rev. Deacons of the local church for a theological discussion of issues that were undoubtedly being discussed in England in 1867, the time of this novel.  Though Boyne does not spend much time on theology, this was a time of great upheaval, just eight years after Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, which cast doubt on the church’s Doctrine of Separate Creation, and it was only one generation before the movement toward Spiritualism of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a strong proponent, with public séances and attempts to raise ghosts through mediums.  Heaven, Hell, and even Purgatory are not enough, Eliza Caine feels, to explain the presences she has experienced in Gaudlin Hall, and she suggests that there may be a fourth level of existence in which a spirit can linger for a time on earth, watching over those it loves, until it is “reconciled” with the forces of nature, and the ties that have bound it to earth are then cut.

Boyne’s goal here is pure entertainment, however, and he matches his prose style to that of Dickens effectively, though in one case, after a question, one finds the forced archaism, “Answer came there none.”  All the clichés of Victorian plot appear here, and the dramatic and inexplicable actions by ghosts create an atmosphere of doom which will keep a smile on the face of readers familiar with the novels of the period. The characters are vehicles for the plot, rather than compelling personalities in their own right, and the lack of realism throughout is exactly what one expects of a Victorian ghost story.  Only a dark twist in the conclusion takes this novel into more modern times, stylistically.

ALSO by John Boyne: THE ABSOLUTIST,     A LADDER TO THE SKY

Eliza mentions several times that she has used a “dandy-horse,” a kind of scooter with a seat, when she has gone on short trips.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Mark Condren appears here:  http://www.theguardian.com/

The funeral of Eliza’s father takes place at St. James Church, Paddington.  Photo by Martin Addison on
http://commons.wikimedia.org

Paddington Station, from which Eliza took the train to Norfolk looked like this in Victorian times:
http://en.wikipedia.org

The gargoyles at Gaudlin fall occasionally.  Those pictured are from Magdalen College:
http://www.thelandofshadow.com

The “dandy-horse,” similar to a scooter with a seat, was invented by Karl Von Drais in 1819, and is depicted on http://en.wikipedia.org/

ARC: Other Press

Note: This novel was SHORTLISTED for the Man Booker Prize for 2013 and is a FINALIST for the 2013 National Book Award.

“There was something elemental about so many human beings in motion at once: walking, sitting in busses and trams, pulling or being pulled along in rickshaws…The clamor of so many motors, of so many scooters and lorries and buses and cars, filled their ears.  ‘I like this view,’ he said.”—Udayan, talking to Gauri.

In this magnificent novel of family relationships, which is also a love story and a story of betrayal on several levels, author Jhumpa Lahiri introduces four generations of one family whose history begins in their home in Tollygunge, outside of Calcutta, and then moves off in many different directions.  Traveling back and forth in time, with points of view shifting among several different but interrelated characters, the novel creates an impressionistic picture of events which begin in 1967 with a political uprising, the family effects of which continue into the present.  Two brothers, only fifteen months apart in age, become linchpins of the novel.  Subhash, the older, more cautious brother, is far more apt to watch any action, even as a child, than his brother Udayan, the more adventuresome brother, who is always participating in the action and testing limits.  As they grow up, the brothers remain close, even as they move in different directions for college, with Subhash studying chemical engineering at one college, while Udayan studies physics at another.

When, in 1967, an uprising in Naxalbari, four hundred miles from Calcutta, presages the beginning of a larger revolution of peasants against wealthy landowners throughout India, Udayan sees this as an impetus for wider change as a member of the CPI (M), a Soviet-style Marxist organization, and after that, as a member of the Naxalites.  While Subhash is studying out of town, Udayan is painting slogans and stimulating revolution.  Eventually, Subhash decides to enter a PhD program in marine science based in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.  Udayan, however, remains in Calcutta, still involved in political causes, and when he meets Gauri, a philosopher who seems to share his point of view, he suddenly marries her, without seeking permission from his family and foregoing all the usual traditions.  By doing this, he alienates his new wife from his mother from the outset and severely limits her personal and professional opportunities. Subhash, informed of Udayan’s marriage by mail, has now begun working on a research ship in Buzzards Bay as part of an oceanographic research program in Woods Hole, while Udayan is building bombs and planning an assassination in Calcutta.

When Subhash returns to Calcutta, he arrives at Howrah Station, here.

The author explores the differences between Gauri’s upbringing and that of Udayan, and between the relationship which Subhash begins with a then-married woman in Rhode Island and the marriage of Udayan, however iconoclastic that marriage may be by Calcutta standards.  When Subhash receives a telegram to return home to Tollygunge immediately, however, he knows that some family disaster has occurred.  His return shows him how much Calcutta has changed, how much the family has changed, and how much he has missed in the interim.  Ultimately, he returns to Rhode Island, but this time he is joined by his new bride, pregnant with a child which is not his.  The father is his brother, Udayan.

Subhash has missed the “cycle rickshaws,” one of which, here, transports ten schoolgirls.

The remainder of the novel considers all aspects of what constitutes a family, what responsibilities of family life can (or should) supersede all aspects of one’s personal desires, and how, if at all, love can flourish under circumstances in which two people decide to adhere to a set of traditions and responsibilities not necessarily of their own choice.  As Subhash and his wife and the child, Bela, live in Rhode Island, essentially as outcasts of their Indian family, they “make do” personally, living honorably under the circumstances which life has dealt them, regardless of the fact that these are not of their own choosing.  The novel follows these characters until Subhash is in his sixties, when Bela, brought up as his daughter, is about forty.  Characters come and go, but always, the theme of family responsibility is explored in all its variations and all its emotional traumas.  Lahiri makes all her characters come alive, and the conflicts they face within themselves, in addition to their conflicts with the different people involved in their lives, are issues of such universality that readers understand and identify with them, regardless of any cultural differences which may arise.

Students in the Marine Biology program at the University of Rhode Island explore the shore of Narragansett Bay, where Subhash was teaching.

The novel revolves around the idea that “you can’t go home again,” physically or emotionally, at the same time that it also considers the ideas that we are who we are.  Accepting the latter, however, is not good enough, unless we are also prepared to accept the consequences to others of our decisions to “be ourselves.”  In this novel the interactions, responsibilities, and consequences are particularly fraught as the novel moves through nearly fifty years of personal and social change within one family through several generations.  A mother, whose need to grow supersedes her ability to respond to the needs of her child; a father, whose need to protect his child supersedes his ability to be honest about her parenthood; and a child whose personal needs, having been unmet by both people who are acknowledged as her as parents, supersede any sense of identity with either parent as a real person, all show the fragility of relationship, no matter now conscientious and caring the characters are, at heart.  There’s no going back, the novel seems to suggest, but then, the author hints, that may not always be the case.

Narragansett Bay, to the west, in Rhode Island. and Buzzards Bay (center) are both depicted here. Click here for larger map.

Lahiri’s prose is often elegant, and her descriptions of settings are perfect for the uses she makes of them.  Rhode Island, along the coast, is true-to-life in its damp response to changing seasons and its glorious flourishing of life in the estuaries and marshes.  The novel is somewhat less successful in its depictions of some characters, especially those of the mothers, both the mother of Subhash and Udayan and of the mother of Bela, whose  career decision appears to be cruel.  Because she is not fully developed, her actions are, unfortunately, less understandable to the reader than they might have been.  The author does a remarkable job of straddling the line between realism and melodrama on an almost epic scale, however, a saving grace which keeps the reader actively involved and enthusiastic as Subhash and his family develop over three generations.

ALSO  by Lahiri:  WHEREABOUTS

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://www.theguardian.com

Howrah Station (photo by Supe), is seen here:  http://wikimapia.org/

The cycle rickshaw, a staple in Calcutta in this period, is found on http://shabanaadam.wordpress.com/

Students in Marine Biology at University of Rhode Island, based at Narragansett Bay, are part of a program described here: http://omp.gso.uri.edu/

The map of Narragansett Bay, Buzzards Bay, and Nantucket Sound may be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/

“Everything is falling apart…The parents are demanding to pick up their children. The barricade is crowded with people who intend to help them free the children…It feels like they might start throwing rocks or let the dogs loose on the police…They don’t understand what they are risking if the infection gets out and there isn’t any medicine.”

This dramatic quotation instantly establishes the intensity of this new novel from Sweden by Anna Jansson, candidate for the Glass Key Award for Best Scandinavian Novel in 2012 for its story involving a pandemic of bird flu on an island off the Swedish coast. A new name to American readers, Anna Jansson has had a dual career as both a nurse and a writer, and has already sold over two million copies of her Nordic crime novels throughout ten countries in Europe. This novel, the first in the Maria Wern series to be translated into English, is also the inaugural hard-copy novel by her publisher, Stockholm Text, which for the past two years has published only e-books, releasing seventeen of them in that short time and dramatically increasing the name recognition of Anna Jansson and the publisher’s other Nordic crime authors. Now available to an English-speaking audience, Strange Bird will undoubtedly captivate new readers, sweeping them up with the provocative opening chapters, as the action begins on Gotland, a sparsely inhabited island in the Baltic, sixty miles off the coast of Sweden. Unlike most noir novels, this novel involves characters one comes to appreciate for their simple honesty and the genuine feelings they convey for each other.

Photo by Leif R. Jansson/Scanpix

As Strange Bird opens, Ruben Nilsson, a man in his seventies, is reminiscing about Angela Stern, the love of his life, though fifty years have passed since he missed his chance to tell her how much he loved her. At the critical time, when he might have declared his love, “all he could think of to say was that the price of wool didn’t look too good but that potatoes were doing fine.” Even now, he wishes he could have changed that outcome. Ruben’s only family now is the pigeons he raises and races. When the novel opens, a new pigeon has arrived and settled on Ruben’s roof – a foreign bird with an identifying ring around his leg, different from those of Swedish birds. Excited by this change in his normal routine, Ruben quickly looks up the identification and is surprised to discover that the bird has arrived from Belarus. The next day the bird is dead.

Norway is to the northwest, Denmark to southwest, Gotland to east.

Alternating memories from the past with circumstances in the present, Jansson creates initial scenes in which Ruben Nilsson becomes a kind of everyman, a carpenter with some skills as a mason but little education, less ability to understand how others think and feel, and no ability to understand himself. “His language was in his hands,” a conclusion he accepts. His neighbor, Berit Hoas, helps him out the next day when he feels ill, feeding his pigeons and providing him with some morels for his supper. She then goes off to work in the lunchroom at a soccer camp for children. Soon she, too, is seriously ill. Convinced that she and Ruben might both have become ill from the mushrooms she fixed for supper, she goes to the emergency room of the hospital where she has to wait. In the meantime, a jogger discovers the body of a man, his throat slit, in a small pup tent at an abandoned farm.

Photo by RATAEDL

The novel immediately intrigues the reader for its dramatic events, which the author allows the reader to interpret on his/her own, and for its unusually vivid characters, however “ordinary” they may seem. It is not until this point, fifty pages into the novel, that Anna Jansson finally introduces main character Maria Wern, a Detective Inspector with the Gotland police, who interviews the jogger who discovered the murdered man’s body. Maria becomes a fully developed and sympathetic character, far different from the usual alcoholic loner so common to Nordic noir. Her life, presented so naturally that she feels “familiar” to the reader from the outset, makes the challenges she faces with this case even more intense and personal than one would expect. Living only a few hundred yards from the scene of the murder, the newly-divorced Maria is still learning to handle the communication difficulties with her ex-husband regarding their two children, while working full-time. Dropping off a flashlight to her son at the soccer camp, she discovers that Berit Hoas, the cook, has not arrived at work in the lunchroom that day, and when she stops at Berit’s house later, she sees a police car at the house next door, that of Ruben Nilsson.

The yellow Warfsholm Guest House, with its turret and white porch, where Maria and the disease specialists have a community meeting.

From this point on, the action keeps going and going and going, with one surprise after another as many more characters and plot complexities involve the reader. The problems with a developing pandemic of bird flu become far more critical than finding the murderer of the man in the pup tent. The hospital has set up an observation ward and keeps sick people isolated. The children at soccer camp are quarantined to protect as many as possible, and those who develop flu are transported elsewhere. The shortage of Tamiflu, is kept a secret from the population, and the availability of some medications on the internet – for a large fee – highlights “entrepreneurs” who are willing to exploit life-or-death emergencies for profit. A growing list of deaths, threats made to medical and police personnel, and the fear that the epidemic will spread beyond the island add to the drama. The medieval history of the island contributes to the morbid atmosphere with tales of the Black Death which occurred there.  Eventually, a physician begins to consider the almost impossible idea that the pandemic may be deliberate.

Although the novel has, perhaps, a few too many complications within a story that is already inherently terrifying, the author does keep the interest high and the tempo of the novel moving quickly. Her unusually good characterizations of people who are unpretentious and fairly “typical,” rather than unique in oddball ways, makes them memorable – people the reader feels s/he can “know.”   The concluding pages contain shocking twists. With this strong start in the Maria Wern series, it is easy to imagine a long series of successful new Scandinavian crime novels from this intriguing author and unusual publisher.

St. Nikolai Cathedral, established 1215. Maria plans to meet someone near here, late in the novel.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Leif Jansson/Scanpix may be found here: http://www.dn.se/

The map of Gotland and its relation to Sweden and other countries is from  http://www.geoexpro.com This site also has some other outstanding photos of Gotland.

The racing pigeon, photo by RATAEDL may be found on http://en.wikipedia.org

The Warfsholm Guest House, where Maria has a meeting with the community, is a real place, described as a “yellow building with its charming tower and big white porch, bathed in warm evening sun, as if no evil existed.” Other photos here. http://www2.destinationgotland.se/

The photo of St. Nikolai Cathedral is from http://www.kultudralen.se/

ARC:  M. Zegarek for Stockholm Text

“Rodrigo Rey Rosa is the most rigorous writer of my generation, the most transparent, the one that knows best how to weave his stories, and the most luminous of all.”— author Roberto Bolano.

Though he has been lauded by Roberto Bolano and many other Latin American authors and critics, Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa, has been a well-kept secret to most English-speaking readers.  Of his almost two dozen works published to acclaim in Latin America, only four have been published in English, and three of those are translations into English by famed American expatriate author Paul Bowles, who was Rey Rosa’s literary mentor.  Living in Morocco while he translated several of Paul Bowles’s novels into Spanish, Rey Rosa came to know the country well, finding life on the African shore of the Mediterranean markedly different from that of the European shore represented by France and Spain, both of which had claimed Morocco as a protectorate until after the mid-1950s.  Rey Rosa’s most recent novel to be translated (by Jeffrey Gray), The African Shore, sweeps the reader into a world in which Europeans still see some aspects of their cultures in Morocco in the late 1990s – the varied cultures contributing to a Moroccan society that is often magical, elusive, and mysterious, but which is also filled with ominous hints about a future which may change dramatically as the country continues in its own direction and establishes its own identity under its own leaders.

Rodrigo Rey Rosa. Photo by EFE.

Rey Rosa reflects upon these changes as he presents three interrelated scenarios, in which three separate characters express their own points of view and live independent lives which sometimes overlap with other lives within the book.  Rey Rosa composes these separate scenarios so carefully that each could stand alone as a short story or novella, and they are often so poetic and filled with lyrical details that critics have described them as “prose poems.”  Part I takes place in the rural countryside and features Hamsa, a young shepherd whose vision of the world is colored by local superstition, a belief in animism, and a long history filled with traditions.  He understands the natural world, which is beautifully evoked in sensuous terms – the wind “rattling branches and leaves like a thousand maracas” and paths winding through thickets of thorns to “keep away the djinns which hated thorns,” and which was why the Muslims let thorns grow on their family graves.

Rodrigo Rey Rosa with his mentor Paul Bowles. Photo copyrighted by Cherie Nutting and posted with her permission.

Hamsa describes his life with an ingenuous honesty – his hopes for an improved life, his willingness to be used by his uncle in illegal activities so that he will eventually have “cars and as many women as you want,” and even his enjoyment of kif.  His rescue of a drowning sheep, at the risk of his own life, leads to his near death in the surf, and his recovery is complicated by a high fever.  When his grandparents take care of him at the Monte Viejo estate of Mme. Choiseul, where the grandparents work, the author sets up casual contrasts in their life styles.  It is Hamsa who later captures an owl with a wounded wing, which becomes a mystical symbol repeating throughout the novel.

Colombians who lost their passports had to see the Honorary Consul in an office in the Casbah, Tangier.

In the second and longest section, “Skulls,” a Colombian who has lost his passport during a night of carousing, prepares to apply for a new one in Tangier.  Through his eyes, the role of the Sultan, the culture of the city in which women resort to prostitution as a way to gain a dowry, and the lively local drug culture are all revealed.  The involvement of the Colombian Mafia in drug sales is no secret, and the corruption of the Colombian “honorary consul” in granting a passport is taken for granted.  As this Colombian traveler moves through the city, he sees a young boy selling an owl with a wounded wing and purchases it.  He meets up with two French women – an older woman who owns property from the days of the French protectorate and a younger woman of his own age – and travels with them to their house in Monte Viejo.  Again, the wounded owl and the despoliation of the natural world add a sense of mystery and ominous prescience to the narrative as the Colombian traveler experiences Morocco.

Part III gives new meaning to the symbol of the owl and the actions of the characters, as Laura, the wife of the Colombian, who has remained behind in Cali, describes what is happening there regarding her husband’s missing passport and with the job to which he has intended to return.  As the Colombian continues his life in Morocco and then plans a further trip to Spain, the sinister overtones deepen, with repeating images of a cat suggesting the uncertainties regarding the future.

King Mohammed VI succeeded to the throne in 1999.

Elegantly written, The African Shore conveys much information about cultures, past and present, along with the people who straddle the worlds of Europe and Africa.  The animism of the rural farmers, which infuses their lives with magical explanations; the Muslim culture, which provides comfort and identity to large numbers of people from all levels of society; and the criminality which seems to be filling a vacuum in the wake of the country’s independence from Spain and France, all play a role in the imagery and symbolism which connects the many facets of this marvelous work.  The author conveys information simply, subtly, and poetically, allowing the reader to participate by “accompanying” the three speakers as they live their parallel but very different lives. The haunting atmosphere which results is far from romantic, hinting at ominous outcomes, even menace, as people work in their own best interests with little sense of a common purpose or fate.  The theme of change is tied to nature, its seasons, and its extremes, at the same time that it often originates in human nature, with all its urges and constraints, both personal and cultural.

In February, 2014, Yale University Press released another new translation by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, SEVERINA, a novel about a bookseller.

Stunning in the simplicity and clarity of its style, this novel says a great deal in very few words, and the ending is perfect.  The final scene between Hamsa, who has cured the owl’s injured wing, and a Christian woman who has come to purchase the owl, is darkly ironic, revealing more about the separate cultures than any sociological treatise could possibly convey.  As Hamsa tries to reach a bargain with the Christian woman, all the twists of fate and all the ironies involved in these characters’ separate lives converge, with only the owl having the perspective to see the world for what it is.

Photos, in order:

The author’s photo by EFE may be found on http://noticias.emisorasunidas.com

The photo of Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Paul Bowles, copyrighted by Cherie Nutting and posted with her permission, appears on www.paulbowles.org.

The Casbah, where the “honorary consul” for Colombia had his office, is seen on this site: http://travel.aol.co.uk/

Mohammed VI succeeded to the throne of Morocco on July 23, 1997, upon the death of his father, King Hassan II. http://www.usa-morocco.org/

ALSO: Severina, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, set in Guatemala, was published in translation by Yale University Press in February, 2014.

ARC:  Yale U. Press