Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India will expand and alter your view of India, Pakistan, and the British Raj. Using a child-narrator, a literary device over-employed and often unsuccessful, this author has found the perfect vehicle for conveying the heart-breaking story of the Partition of India in l947, without being coy and without descending into bathos. Lenny, as the child of a Parsee family, roams freely through the Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, and Parsee society of her household and neighborhood in Lahore. Because she is lame and receiving private schooling, she is at home when momentous events and important conversations occur, and because she is very young and has no ethnic biases, she observes the disintegration of her society with the puzzlement of an outsider.
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In Yugoslavia the extermination of Jews started early and was almost totally successful within a matter of months, with most of the Jewish men of Serbia shot to death by the fall of 1941, and “the Jewish Question in Serbia almost completely solved” by April, 1942, when virtually all Jewish men, women, and children were dead. Imagining the lives of Götz and Meyer, two SS guards who were responsible for over 5000 Jewish deaths, the speaker examines the events for which Götz and Meyer were responsible between November, 1941, and April, 1942. Often juxtaposing atrocities against simple, folksy observation, the speaker puts himself into their minds, he wondering if they ever regretted what they were doing, since they were so good at their jobs. Throughout the novel, as Albahari includes the terrible statistics, he also exhibits the ironies of the circumstances, setting the facts into sharp relief and increasing the shock. A strange novel of the Holocaust, all the more shocking because of the contrasts between the facts and the dark humor, Götz and Meyer is a memorable short novel and worthy addition to Holocaust literature.
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Every Sunday afternoon in Kigali, Rwanda, the pool at the Mille-Collines Hotel is a gathering spot for government workers, wealthy Rwandans engaged in various trades, aid workers, journalists, foreign visitors, and enterprising prostitutes, who gather to drink, exchange news, gossip among themselves, and participate in the “vaguely surrealistic play being acted out at the pool.” The pool is, in many ways, a microcosm of life in Rwanda, illustrating the pressures and competing interests among various facets of society, all wanting to protect what they already have, at the very least, and, they hope, to increase their power, influence, or wealth.
Through these people who visit the pool, all of whom were real and who are described with their real names, Gil Courtemanche, a former journalist in Rwanda himself, boldly illustrates the growing resentments and fears which tear apart the fabric of society and lead to the genocide of almost a million Tutsi people in 1994.
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Eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison, the daughter of a Nigerian mother and a British father, has a particularly difficult time deciding who she is, and she seems to fit in nowhere. Significant emotional problems leave her unable to deal with the outside world, and she can spend five or more hours hiding in the family’s linen closet, attempting to find some sort of “fragile peace” in the tumult which she sees as her life. Given to uncontrollable screaming fits, both at home and at school, she also falls ill, sometimes with high fevers, has panic attacks, and often talks to herself. A psychological horror story, the novel provides plenty of intense scenes, somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and the battle for Jess’s soul is dramatic and action-packed. The conclusion feels somewhat artificial, since it relies on accident and is not the inevitable outgrowth of the actions of a rounded character, but Oyeyemi has created a page-turner that dares to be different.
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In what may be Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s most playful—and, perhaps, popular—novel, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a secondary school history teacher, views a film given to him by a colleague and discovers in the film an actor who looks exactly like him in every respect. Though the film was made five years before and the actor was wearing a mustache, the two men are identical otherwise. Tertuliano, a somewhat gloomy, divorced man, has always liked the routine of his solitary life, and though he is a daydreamer, he has never before acted on those dreams. When he sees his double, he is stunned. “One of us is a mistake,” he declares, and as he begins, typically, to overanalyze the situation and chat with himself about the fact that “never before in the history of humanity have two identical people existed in the same place and time,” he finds himself wondering what it would be like to find and meet this double.
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