Setting her novel in Cagliari, Sardinia, author Milena Agus creates a story which spans three generations, focusing on women from two families who are joined through marriage. An unnamed contemporary speaker feels particularly connected with her paternal grandmother, and as the speaker pieces together this woman’s life from what she herself recalls and from family lore, she creates a woman who not only searches earnestly for love but is absolutely determined to experience it in all its splendor, believing that it is “the principal thing in life.” The novel deals beautifully with primal events and universal themes—the need to belong, the importance of ties to a community, the yearning for true love, the vagaries of chance or fate, and the importance of memories. As the generations move forward from World War II to the present, each character must protect his/her memories against change in order to preserve a sense of selfhood. It is only the speaker who has the liberty to tinker with the past and/or the truth. Passion, in all its many forms, rules the lives of the characters here—and affects the reader, too.
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“Before you go splashing paint, making a gigantic picture of Hannibal’s battles, you need to know how to draw a horse.” In this novel by Yishai Sarid, an unnamed speaker is clearly “drawing the horse” of Israeli society and establishing the setting in which the animosity between Arabs and Jews has festered, then exploded into a series of continuous battles. Working undercover for the Israeli secret service, the speaker approaches Daphna, an Israeli woman who now teaches writing. He is interested in befriending Daphna, whose long-time friendship with Hani, a seriously ill “man from Gaza,” might lead him to Hani’s son Yotam, regarded as an Arab terrorist and hiding from security, perhaps in another country. Eventually, the speaker must decide whether to allow his humanity to become more important than his lock-step adherence to the age-old belief in the inherent enmity of all “others.” In the process the reader comes to understand the agonizing tension between these two traditional foes and hope that at some point it will be possible for reason to become part of the equation of their lives.
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This sensitive and memorable depiction of the establishment of Soviet Socialist Republics by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1939, with its bloodshed and violence, is filled with trenchant observations of real people behaving realistically during times of real crisis. In clear, unadorned prose, author Theodore Odrach depicts the lives of rural peasants with sensitivity and an awareness both of their independence and of their shared values, contrasting them with the mindless, bureaucratic officials who enjoy wielding power over human beings which have become mere ciphers to them. A sense of dark humor and irony, which may be the only thing that makes survival possible, distinguishes this novel from other novels of this period, and no reader will doubt that this book is written by a someone who has seen the atrocities unfold, experienced the injustices, empathized with his fellow citizens, and felt compelled to tell the world about the abuses. Odrach sets his story in Hlaby, in the Pinsk Marshes, an enormous marshland which extends into Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine, a place which is so remote that it cannot be reached except in the winter when the marsh is frozen. When the Bolsheviks arrive in 1939, they announce that henceforth this village will be part of the Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic.
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Set in Kuwait in the time between the two Gulf wars, Small Kingdoms is as close to a perfect novel as I’ve seen in years. Not a word is out of place. Every image works, and many show a startling originality. All the plot lines are successful, without an overwhelming reliance on coincidence to tie them together and resolve them at the end. The characters, even those from Kuwait, with their completely different society and culture, feel natural and comfortable as we read about them, people we can recognize for their common humanity and can respect for their differences from our own way of thinking. The novel is rich with ideas, complete in the depiction of cultural differences and sensitive to ideas which Americans, especially women, may find alien, ideas which are an integral part of Kuwaiti Muslim culture. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
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Set in England in the era between the two world wars, God on the Rocks, with its sly, multi-layered title, is one of Jane Gardam’s earliest novels, a delightful but carefully considered look at society, religion, personal responsibility, and acts of fate in the lives of several families. Eight-year-old Margaret Marsh, the primary speaker, is energetic and thoughtful, living comfortably with her very religious bank manager-father and her subservient and seemingly passive mother. The family has recently been joined, however, by Lydia, a “fallen woman” whom her father Kenneth believes he is called upon to “save.” On Wednesdays, Lydia takes the Bible-spouting Margaret on little trips, and through her, Margaret discovers a world she has never even imagined. Without ever losing her sense of humor, often very dark, Gardam explores the contrasts between “good” and “evil”—the fun that Margaret has with the unrepentant Lydia vs. the predictable boredom that she has with her parents. As Kenneth Marsh begins to wonder what Lydia and Margaret do at the beach (and as Lydia begins to brush suggestively against him at their house), Kenneth decides to accompany them to the beach one Wednesday, using his visit to hold forth on sin, preaching his religion to the vacationers on the beach, a “soapbox bloke.”
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