Set in 1988, twenty-five years after Algeria’s independence from France, the country is still suffering from political instability, corruption, and the residual rivalries and hatreds between those who supported French rule during the war and the FLN and other groups, socialist and otherwise, which fought against French rule. The internecine rivalries and hatreds among a multitude of these local groups, many of which shared the same general goals during the war, have divided families and continued into the next generation with even more bloodshed. The devastated economy at the end of the war has not been improved, people are living in poverty, religious fundamentalism is growing, the young have no future, and citizens everywhere are casting jaded eyes on those who reek of success—shady businessmen, corrupt politicians, and those who have achieved their wealth at the expense of their fellow citizens. In this newest installment of the Inspector Llob series, chronologically the “pre-quel” to the series, author Yasmina Khadra turns a spotlight on Algeria’s devastated country and its demoralized citizens.
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In 1967, an unnamed writer begins writing a long letter to an unknown recipient in Italy, a letter he knows will take weeks, if not months to conclude. The writer’s references to the Six Day War and to the fact that “here most of the people have no past and no one is surprised” quickly establish the letter writer’s home as Israel, but there are no clues about the person being addressed. Writing from Tel Aviv, the narrator reconstructs that time in his life “before Israel,” when he lived in Rome and where his parents owned the Albergo della Magnolia, an elegant hotel. The speaker, whom we learn is Dino Carpi, has been only a “twice a year Jew,” on Yom Kippur and Passover, and he ignores the then-unimportant cultural differences to pursue his love of Sonia, a Gentile. The love of Sonia and Dino is increasingly tested by political forces, and their families begin to exert ever more pressure on their relationship.
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Pierre Arthens, a French food critic who regards himself as “the greatest food critic in the world,” has just discovered that he is dying, with only forty-eight hours to live. A resident of the Rue de Grenelle apartment building which is the center of Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Arthens looks back on his life, trying, in his last hours, to remember the most special flavor of his lifetime, an effort to give his life meaning. As a critic, he has made and destroyed reputations with his pronouncements, but now, on his deathbed, he is vulnerable, forced against his will to confront what he has regarded as his life and to understand where he really fits into life’s grand scheme. Alternating Pierre’s comments about his life with comments by family members and others who have strong feeling about Arthens and his attitudes, author Muriel Barbery recreates in lush and elaborate prose the life of this difficult and unlikable man.
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Naguib Mahfouz is a never-ending source of literary surprises. In this unusual and often charming novel from 1948, newly translated and republished by the American University of Cairo, Mahfouz writes his only Freudian, psychological study, an analysis of Kamil Ru’ba Laz, a young Egyptian man so dominated by his mother that he is unable to make a single decision or form a single successful relationship with the outside world. When the novel opens, his mother has just died, and Kamil, in his mid-twenties, is devastated. The first person novel which results is Kamil’s attempt to put his life into some sort of perspective and, perhaps, to find some hope for the future, some understanding of “life’s true wisdom,” a journey which will take him outside himself for the first time in his life.
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In this rich, iconoclastic novel about poetry and the writing life. Paul Chowder, the speaker, has achieved modest success by writing “plums…That’s what I call a poem that doesn’t rhyme…We who write and publish our non-rhyming plums aren’t poets, we’re plummets.” Chowder has just compiled an anthology of poetry which he hopes will, one day, be used as the comprehensive anthology for college students and as a source of pleasure by all those who savor the music of language. Choosing the poems for the anthology was, for him, “like [being] that blond bitch-goddess on Project Runway,” and he must now write the forty-page introduction. His publisher is desperate for it, and Chowder has writer’s block. In a voice so “human” he sounds like an alterego for author Nicholson Baker, Chowder demystifies poetry—and plums—making often hilarious comments about the structure of language, the history of poetry, the lives of famous poets, and about his own struggles. Chock full of “a-ha” moments, the novel is a treasure trove of information and observation about poetry and poets, told with robust humor. (On my Favorites list for 2009)
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