Within this engrossing story of love and war in Berlin and Mostar, Yugoslavia, from 1989 to 1992, John Marks considers the subject of divided cities-and the damaging effects on the people who live in them. The Wall dividing East and West Berlin has just come down, and Germany is in the process of reunification, attempting to erase the invisible walls still dividing the people of Berlin and of Germany as a whole. Arthur Cape, an American reporter for Sense magazine, has been in Berlin since 1989, when he arrived there from India at the age of thirty. He and Eric Hampton, the senior editor, have been filing reports from Berlin, documenting the story of the reunification and the surprises which have accompanied it. The novel gets off to a quick start with the appearance of the Halloween “revenant,” and Marks’s crisp prose and ability to select perfect, illustrative details advance the action and keep the story moving at breakneck speed. The peaceful reunification of Berlin offers a poignant and moving contrast to the growing violence of Mostar, with Marks presenting a clear picture of the conflicts through the action, never allowing the complexities of historical background to overwhelm his story.
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A fast-paced thriller in which the action and blood never stop, this strong debut by Spanish author Juan Gomez-Jurado will keep many readers going until well into the night. Set in Vatican City during the conclave to elect a new pope following the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, the action begins with the grisly deaths of two cardinals planning to participate in the conclave, their bodies tortured and mutilated almost beyond recognition by a serial killer on the loose. That serial killer is Victor Karosky, a priest. As Rome begins to fill up with all the cardinals returning for the conclave, clergy of all denominations, pilgrims who wish to view the Pope’s body, heads of state arriving for the funeral, tourists, and news organizations with their equipment, the various security forces are frantic to find the killer and prevent additional killings.
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Posted in Egypt, Historical, Literary on Jan 15th, 2011
Written in 1974 and newly translated by Roger Allen, the novel takes place in the mid-1960s and focuses on the Karnak Café regulars as they respond to some key moments in contemporary Egyptian history. For the young people, “history began with the 1952 Revolution,” in which the army, led by a young officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Farouk, abolished the pro-British monarchy, and established a republic, inspiring other Middle Eastern and north African countries in an Arab sovereignty movement. In 1954, Nasser became President of Egypt. Hopes were high then and continue to be high for the young at the café in the early 1960s, despite the acknowledged (and continuing) problems with civil rights, poverty, and the abuses of the police. The three young people and their fates become the focus of the narrator when the young people inexplicably disappear for several months. Mafouz recreates in a mere one hundred pages the historical record of a country yearning to be free at the same time that he depicts the movements against individual freedom which are at their peak. (On the Favorites List for 2008)
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The search for dinosaur fossils amid sandstorms and desert heat is anything but dry in this lively story of the excavation in January, 2000, of a site in the western Egyptian desert, partially excavated by Ernst Stromer in 1911, but untouched since then. Nothdurft, a professional writer, working in concert with Josh Smith, the young paleontologist who was the team leader of the January, 2000, dig, tells the stories of both the 1911 and the 2000 excavations, along with the fossil discoveries made by each group. Stromer, a German aristocrat and meticulous paleontologist, found the fossils of four unique, 95-million-year-old dinosaurs in Bahariya in 1911, spent twenty years analyzing them, and then supervised the fossils’ installation at the Bavarian State College of Paleontology and Historical Geology in Munich. In April, 1944, everything was lost in the allied bombing of Munich.
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Posted in Historical, Literary, Turkey on Jan 15th, 2011
The rich story-telling tradition of the Middle East enlivens Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s novel about the residents of Kars, a town in the remote northeast corner of Turkey, as Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka, returns after many years to investigate a spate of suicides by young women forbidden to wear headscarves in school. Though Kars, which comes from the Turkish word for “snow,” was once a crossroads for trading between Turkey, Soviet Georgia, Armenia, and Iran, all of which are within a few miles of the town, it is now “the poorest and most overlooked corner of Turkey.” All the conflicting political and religious tensions of the country are seen here, its residents representing a melting pot of historical influences—socialism and communism, atheism, political secularism, ethnic nationalism (especially the Kurds), and the most rapidly growing movement, Islamist fundamentalism. Many-leveled, beautifully wrought, and complex in its themes, this is a novel which thoughtful western readers will want to explore, a haunting novel rich with insights which should not be ignored.
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