Nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982, when it was first published in London, Wish Her Safe at Home is a startling novel with an even more startling main character, Rachel Waring, a forty-seven-year-old woman who has a dead end job, a cynical roommate, and no friends. Brought up by an overbearing mother whose sense of “correct behavior” seems to have ruined any chances Rachel might have had for a happy life, she is lonely and repressed, with absolutely no understanding of how to meet and make connections with strangers. Every event here is filtered through Rachel’s own mind, and when she becomes the sole beneficiary of an elderly aunt’s Georgian home in Bristol, she decides to leave London and her roommate. Once ensconced in the old house, which she proceeds to refurbish and refurnish, however, she becomes a “new woman.” As her voice becomes increasingly confidential and revelatory, the involved reader cannot help but recognize with alarm the growing contrast between Rachel as she sees herself and Rachel as she appears to the rest of the world. Classic psychological novel.
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In the second novel of the Copenhagen Quartet to be published in the US, American expatriate Thomas E. Kennedy shows his immense versatility, writing a totally different kind of novel from In The Company of Angels (2010), the first novel of the quartet. In this new novel, Kennedy provides a vision of a different side of Copenhagen in a different style of writing, broadening his overall themes and his depiction of this city. Though no less serious in terms of its themes, Falling Sideways focuses on the business world of one company, a world writ small, instead of the world in its grandest terms, thematically. Though it is sometimes termed a satire, this novel is less a satire than it is a dark commentary on the shallow and self-absorbed lives of the employees of “the Tank” as they navigate the shoals of big business during difficult economic times. Here Kennedy uses the business framework to establish a set of characters whose business lives become part and parcel of their personal lives, with the two different aspects of their lives so intertwined that the characters fail to grow or even recognize who they really are.
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Extremely emotional and powerfully moving, the novel begins as the story of a seventy-year-old man who has returned to Mauritius with his son, specifically to visit the grave of his best friend, David Stein, who, we learn in the first ten pages, died in 1945 at the age of ten. The speaker, Raj, of Indian descent, has never been able to come to terms with the circumstances of David’s death, and has blamed himself for many years for his own part in possibly hastening David’s end. As a child, Raj was shy and lonely, especially after losing both of his brothers in a flash flood, and though he has always been close to his mother, he fears his brutal father, who beats him and his mother. When fate steps in and makes it possible for Raj to come to know a young Jewish orphan, who is interned in the camp where Raj’s father is a warden, he protects this secret relationship, willing to risk all for David, who has become his “last brother.” Author Nathacha Appanah tells the story in poetic language of great natural beauty and imagery, and her musical cadences give the novel a flow much like that of an opera.
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Written in 1933, and newly translated into English, Kornel Esti is Dezso Kosztolanyi’s last book, a unique combination of wild romp, thoughtful contemplation of life’s mysteries, and dark commentary on life’s ironic twists. Dezso Kosztolanyi (1885 – 1936), a Hungarian poet, fiction writer, and journalist, creates a narrator who is also a writer, telling us from the outset that the narrator, now forty, had not seen his oldest friend Kornel Esti, also a writer, for ten years. Now, however, the narrator has decided to contact him. Born on March 29, 1885, the same day and time as both the narrator and author, Kornel Esti also looks just like the narrator and is clearly his alterego, now down on his luck. What follows is a series of eighteen episodes, which may or may not be metafictional, ranging from Kornel Esti’s first day of school, in 1891, through a symbolic tram ride at the end of the novel, a brief chapter in which the author’s entire philosophy is summed up through Esti’s late-in-life experiences on an overcrowded tram. In between are moments of high comedy, poignant drama, and shocking cruelty, all reflecting aspects of Esti’s life, either real or imagined, and all contributing to the broad panorama of human existence.
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I was stymied by this short book at first, and even after completing it, I was not sure exactly what I had read, though I recognized that humor and dark irony were at the root of much of the novel. It was not until I had spent considerable time looking up the story of the author’s own life and the historical events in Chile with which he had been involved that the full impact of this novel became clear. How anyone who suffered so much could retain any semblance of humor, no matter how dark, is an amazing tribute to the human spirit. Ultimately, I found this one of the most interesting novels I have read in a long time, but it is complex, in part because of its brevity, and in part because there is no introduction which provides the background which many non-Chilean readers, such as myself, may want or need to appreciate this book fully. (Brief background material is presented is in the review.)
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