Zimbabwean writer Ian Holding, a school teacher in Harare, is a white settler who has decided to stay in Zimbabwe, a country riven with violence for many years. Robert Mugabe, a leader of Zimbabwe’s liberation movement against the British, was elected to power in 1980 and remains in power to this day, supported by his army. Over the past thirty years, the economic situation in Zimbabwe has worsened. In this novel Holding writes two parallel stories, divided into four parts, which intersect at the end and provide a kind of conclusion, though not necessarily resolution. The first part is a dramatic, horrifying, and immensely sad story of a post-apocalyptic “society” in which a few survivors try to stay alive in a bombed out and completely devastated city. In Part Two, the scene shifts to the journal of Ian, a schoolteacher whose family has lived on a farm in the highland for decades before emigrating – the parents to Australia, one brother to London, and one to Canada. Only Ian remains behind, and he, too, is thinking of leaving. Dramatic, horrifying, and filled with vibrant language which swirls around, creating word pictures which the reader will often find difficult to accept, this novel is a heartfelt cry for understanding in a place where it appears to be rare.
Read Full Post »
Setting this novel in Cairo in the early to middle part of the twentieth century, Naguib Mahfouz creates a variety of characters who depict the many manifestations of love. Simple in approach, uncomplicated in its depictions of personalities, and firmly rooted in the social structure that Mahfouz himself knew and grew up in, the author provides insights into the love between parent and child, the passionate and totally committed love between a man and woman, thwarted love and the obsession it breeds, the love between friends, and the love of home, neighborhood, and country. Here he recreates the lives of neighborhood people of the middle and upper class, some of them wealthy and some of them much poorer (especially the widows), with all of them firmly entrenched in their own social classes in which few have visions of a future which extends beyond the neighborhood and social milieu they already know. Mahfouz shows that love pays little attention either to social class or to the traditions which govern marriage and courtship. As the novel unfolds, the course of true love is a rocky, even dangerous, proposition filled with universal predicaments similar to those of modern novels set in different places and times.
Read Full Post »
Setting his latest novel on the Oronsay, a passenger ship going between Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and London in 1954, Michael Ondaatje writes his most accessible, and, in many ways, most enjoyable novel ever. Having grown up in Ceylon, from which he himself was sent to England to be educated as a boy, the author certainly understands what it feels like to be a child on a ship for three weeks, like his main character here, but author Ondaatje says that all the characters in the book are fictional, including the main character. The novel has such a ring of truth and Ondaatje’s depiction of the characters is so true to the perceptions of an eleven-year-old traveling on his own, however, that it is difficult to remember that the boy in the book is imagined and not real. Since the boy grows up and becomes an author like Ondaatje, his adult conclusions as he looks back on the importance of these events and what they have meant in the grand scheme of his life become even more vivid.
Read Full Post »
Described by Milan’s daily newspaper Corriere della Serra as “the only true first-rate writer that the new millennium has given us for now,” Erri De Luca writes a story of Naples, and its “persons.” The author has made it clear that you “don’t call them people, they’re persons, each and every one. If you call them people you lose sight of the person. Here he recreates Neapolitan life, filled with well-developed characters who live through three different time periods – 1943, as Naples has its popular uprising against their German occupiers; the early 1950s, when the unnamed narrator, a young orphan of about seven, is growing up; and the early 1960s, when the young man is now finishing school and about to set out on his own. The novel moves back and forth in time, as the author writes an often lyrical novel full of noble sentiments and wise observations, at the same time that it is packed with details about life and behavior. Intense in its imagery and emotion, this novel credits the reader by believing that s/he is capable understanding on a level beyond that of plot, and that the longings of the main character and his search to belong are universal and not limited to this one character in this one set of circumstances and times.
Read Full Post »
What an astonishing book! Completed in 1973 and packed away for almost forty years, the manuscript of The Wandering Falcon found a publisher only when the world’s attention suddenly focused on the virtually unknown tribal cultures living along the bloody border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. With great sensitivity, respect, and sympathy for his characters, seventy-nine-year-old author Jamil Ahmad has created a collection of unique, often interconnected, stories about vibrant individuals from the various tribes living in and near the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) of Pakistan. These nomads have followed the seasons and the needs of their animals and families for thousands of years, and they have no concept of national boundaries. The author, a powerful Pakistani official who lived and worked in the tribal lands from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, believes that the people he came to know in the Swat Valley possessed a kind of honesty, openness, and lack of pretense which is absent from much of “civilized” society. He is the only person to have recorded details of their lives, making this an extremely important work.
Read Full Post »
