Libyan author Hisham Matar draws on his own life to provide insights into this story of a son’s yearning for the father he loved but who vanished when he was fourteen. In real life, Matar’s father Jaballa, once a member of the Libyan delegation to the United Nations and, after Muammar Gaddafi’s coup, a political dissident, went into exile in Egypt in 1979, when his son was nine. He was kidnapped in 1990, when his son was twenty, his fate unknown to this day. This fraught background provides the structure of Matar’s novel, the story of Nuri el-Alfi, a young boy whose mother dies rather mysteriously when he is nine. When Nuri is fourteen, his father and his new wife Mona meet Nuri in Switzerland at the Montreux Palace Hotel, and it is on this vacation that his father is abducted. The Swiss police have no leads. As the author continues Nuri’s story from that moment up to age twenty-four, the bare bones outline of his life at the time of the kidnapping gradually broadens and gets filled in, and his life as an exile, without family or country, takes shape. Through flashbacks and reminiscences, the reader also comes to know more about Nuri’s younger life and his father’s role as a dissident in exile.
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The acolyte Tancredo, the tormented main character of this wicked satire by Colombian author Evelio Rosero, has a terrible fear of becoming an animal, especially on Thursdays. A young hunchback from Bogota, Tancredo has been living in the rectory of the church since childhood, when he was taken in by Fr. Juan Pablo Almida and given an education with the idea that he would one day enter the church. The biggest problem for Tancredo, however, is that he is worked so hard he has little time for anything else, especially since he has been assigned the task of running the Community Meals Program, Monday through Friday, each day serving a different congregation. The arrival of Fr. San Jose Matamoros del Palacio and the departure of Fr. Almida and his sacristan (Tancredo’s superiors) for a meeting with Don Justiniano, the church’s patron, set the stage for the novella’s turning point, both hilarious and horror-filled. Fr. Matamoros is totally different from Almida and Machado, singing the Mass and inspiring the congregation with his passion. When Fr. Matamoros concludes the service, he is persuaded to stay the night in the presbytery, and when all the electricity goes out, those who have worked much of their lives in and for the church make their confessions, suggesting indirectly some of the sins of Fr. Almida and Celeste Machado. A terrific satire!
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With a breezy, irreverent point of view and a fine eye for the kinds of details which make characters and scenes memorable, Aravind Adiga tells an often humorous morality tale about life in an area of Mumbai undergoing residential redevelopment. And just as his Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, was celebrated because “it shocked and entertained in equal measure,” this novel, too, both shocks and entertains. Here Adiga also explores the theme of moral compromise, which India seems to require of its citizens if they are to become financially “successful.” The extreme poverty and the masses of other enterprising residents with whom everyone except the very rich must compete make absolute morality impossible, Adiga seems to suggest, a luxury which few can afford, and Adiga draws from these conflicts in his novels. The fifteen apartments of Vishram Society Tower A in Vakola, “the toenail of Santa Cruz,” near Mumbai’s airport, are home to a group of relatively middle-class residents – a social worker, a hardware specialist, a retired accountant, a teacher, and a journalist, for example. When Darmen Shah, who works for the Confidence Group, makes an offer to buy out the residents to build a super-luxury apartment building, most of them are ecstatic. He is offering a windfall of the equivalent of $330,000 per apartment if they will vacate so he can tear down their building and build his new development. The only catch is that all of the residents must agree to sell.
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On the opening page of this emotionally overwhelming novel, Lilly Bere, age eighty-nine, begins the grand story of her seemingly insignificant life, a story in which she speaks directly from her heart, begging to know “How can I get along without Bill?” her grandson who has just died following the First Gulf War in Kuwait (1990 – 1991). Each of the next sixteen chapters is one more numbered day “without Bill,” and we soon learn through flashbacks that Lilly and her family have suffered deaths connected to three earlier wars – the Great War (1914 – 1918), the Irish War for Independence (1919 – 1921), and Vietnam (ca.1965 – 1975). Though all the men she loved did not necessarily die in combat, their deaths were all inescapably war related, and Lilly becomes, in many ways, the prototypically devastated wife of Tadg Bere (in the Irish Revolution), sister of Willie Dunne (the Great War recruit featured in The Secret Scripture), mother of Ed (in Vietnam), and grandmother of Bill (in Kuwait), a mourner who is equally a victim of the wars that have taken her men. One of the best novels I have read all year.
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As a long-time fan of author James Sallis, I am excited to see how this novel “plays,” now that it has just been released as a film, a first for Sallis. A novelist who writes some of the most compressed novels ever, with big stories conveyed in a few perfect word choices, absolutely right images, and terse but revelatory dialogue, Sallis says more in one sentence than most other authors say in a page or two. His novels are the darkest of the dark, and the lives of his damaged characters are often the messiest of the messy, but his style is powerful and exhilarating despite the misery. In Drive, a quintessentially minimalist novel, a main character known only as “Driver” works as a stunt man by day and as the driver of getaway cars at night. Purely pragmatic and living only in the moment, he has no real dreams and no long-term goals, the result of his violent childhood, which was not a childhood at all. Opening dramatically with Driver leaning against a wall in a Motel 6 room, his arm wounded so badly it is useless, with three dead bodies around him, the novel repeats these images like a bizarre refrain throughout, as the background for this scene and the action which follows are revealed. In terse prose, as efficient in conveying information as Driver is in killing those who threaten him, Sallis follows Driver as he moves between Los Angeles and Phoenix, doing jobs.
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