Combining natural history, a search for the remains of the Mysterious Bird of Ulieta, several love stories, and a number of exciting mysteries, author Martin Davies keeps the reader totally engaged and on the edge of his/her seat for the entire length of the novel. As the novel opens, famed researcher of extinct birds John Fitzgerald is visited by Gabriela, a former lover from Brazil whom he has not seen for 14 years. She is now in London with Karl Anderson, an aggressive researcher/natural scientist, who is actively searching for the Mysterious Bird of Ulieta, and Gabriela wants Fitzgerald to help. Anderson believes that if he can locate the remains of this mysterious bird for the Ark Project, a project to collect rare DNA, that it will not only boost the value of the shares but will also attract much needed publicity. Hoping to lure John Fitzgerald into helping him find the bird, Anderson offers him $50,000, an offer he refuses. Fitzgerald has decided to search for the bird himself, eventually aided by Katya, a young graduate student renting a room in his house. (For full review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
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Posted in Afghanistan, Coming-of-age on Jan 10th, 2011
A successful novelist now living in Fremont, California, Amir receives a phone call from his father’s former business partner, Rahim Khan, now in Pakistan. Rahim had stayed behind in Afghanistan when Amir and his father escaped to America in 1981, and he is now dying. An intimate part of the family, Rahim has long been aware of a childhood betrayal committed by Amir, one which had catastrophic consequences for others and which has tormented Amir for his entire life. “There is a way to be good again,” Rahim Shah tells him, and Amir immediately sets off for Pakistan to see him for the last time. In flashbacks, Hosseini recreates the day-to-day existence of Amir and his father, a highly successful merchant in Kabul in the 1970’s, creating a warm and emotionally involving story of childhood and its traumas and stressing the importance of family in times of trouble, as he follows the lives of Amir and his father until Amir is in his late thirties. Despite some narrative clumsiness, however, the novel is a moving, dramatic, personal, and compelling read, fascinating in its setting and in its development of the father-son relationship. I was totally engaged by its characters–and by its considerable charm. (Just click on the title to see full review.)
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In his longest novel, written in 1970, Nobel Prize-winning Australian author Patrick White examines the question of an artist’s creativity, where it comes from, whether it can be controlled, and what obligations, if any, accompany it. As he traces the life of Hurtle Duffield from the age of four until his death as an elderly (and successful) avant-garde artist, we see Duffield always as somehow different from his peers. The son of a laundress and a bottle collector, Hurtle is from birth inspired, painting large images on walls as a toddler, but he recognizes at an early age that “people look down at their plates if you said something was ‘beautiful.'” To provide him with opportunities which will allow his genius to flourish, his parents sell him, when he is four years old, to the wealthy family for which his mother works. (Just click on the title to see full review.)
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Posted in Australia, Classic Novel, Literary on Jan 9th, 2011
This complex, exciting, and tension-filled Australian novel by Patrick White begins as the straightforward story of Mary Hare, a strange, half-mad spinster who lives in Xanadu, a crumbling “pleasure dome,” with the busybody Mrs. Jolley, a servant she fears. At various times in her meanderings outside Xanadu, Mary meets a kind laundress named Mrs. Godbold, who lives in a shed with her nine children; Alf Dubbo, an often-drunk aborigine artist; and Mordecai Himmelfarb, a Jewish concentration camp survivor who has emigrated to Australia and now works in a machine shop. In succeeding sections, in which these characters overlap, their intricate interior lives are developed in colorful, memorable detail, and the reader quickly sees that each is a lonely survivor of some traumatic experience which has made him/her question the nature of good and evil. Each hopes to unravel some of the mysteries at the center of the universe.
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With delightful, tongue-in-cheek humor, P. G. Wodehouse continues the adventures of Bertie Wooster, an often silly member of the upper class who depends on his much more sensible “gentleman’s gentleman,” Jeeves, to keep his life from falling apart. In this novel, Wooster has been growing a mustache for the two weeks that Jeeves has been on a shrimping holiday, and he fears that Jeeves will not like it. Sure, enough Jeeves does not, and neither do any of his other friends–except for Lady Florence Craye, his former fiancée, now engaged (to Bertie’s great relief) to Stilton Cheesewright. The fate of the mustache is only the starting point for Wodehouse’s comedy of errors, however, as Bertie goes from London to his Aunt Dahlia’s country home, where Lady Florence, Stilton Cheesewright, and Percy Gorringe, a young man who wants to produce a play based on Lady Florence’s book, are also in attendance. (Just click on the title to see full review.)
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