Raised in Brazil, Japan, and the UK, Scudamore sets this novel in Sao Paulo, a city he obviously knows well, revealing his youthful enthusiasm for life, his sharp eye for injustice, and his (perhaps naive) hope for the future in a tale which follows the life of Ludo dos Santos from his childhood till about age twenty-seven. Ludo and his mother, a cook, had been plucked from Heliopolis, the largest favela (slum) in Sao Paulo, and established permanently at the weekend farm to which Zeno “Ze” Generoso, the fabulously wealthy owner of a chain of supermarkets, his British wife Rebecca, and his daughter Melissa travel on weekends. Telling Ludo’s story through flashbacks and foreshadowings of things to come in the future, Scudamore quickly establishes the atmosphere and the dramatic contrasts between the lives of the poor and those of the rich in a city with virtually no middle class. Caught between the world of the favela, which he does not remember, and the world of the rich, to which he feels he does not really belong, Ludo is unsure of his place in the world.
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Shortly after a taxi leaves the Miramax Hotel in Vienna for the airport, it veers off the autobahn, somersaults into a gully, and kills the man and woman passengers, both Albanian. The driver, seriously injured, is taken to the hospital in critical condition. A Dutch couple witnesses the accident, as does the driver of a Euromobil truck, and both give information to the Austrian police. The driver, when he is able to talk, tells investigators that when he looked into the rear view mirror, immediately before the accident, the couple were “trying to kiss,” a peculiar description. The dead man, Besfort Y., was an analyst for the Council of Europe on western Balkan affairs, and he had been a “thorn in the side of Yugoslavia” before its divisions–there is suspicion that he might have been responsible for the bombing of the country. Despite this, the accident is initially thought to be a routine traffic accident. It is not till several months later that the European Road Safety Institute, upon receiving a copy of the accident report, regards this as an “unusual” accident. Three months after that, the State of Serbia and Montenegro, which had had both victims under surveillance, begins to look into the accident, and their interest, in turn, sparks the interest of the Albanian Secret Service, an eventuality which makes the narrator wonder if this is a political murder after the fall of communism, or an example of residual “communist paranoia.”
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In much the same way that Virginia Woolf focuses on one day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway, in the aftermath of World War I, to show the dramatic changes in everyday British life as a result of the war, author Mollie Panter-Downes shows the equally dramatic changes which have occurred in Wealding, near Portsmouth in the south of England, in 1946, in the aftermath of World War II. Panter-Downes lived in the picturesque village of Haslemere, and she uses her own experience to create sensitive, often unique, images about everyday life in her town (which becomes Wealding). Here she creates a vibrant portrait of ordinary people coping, or not coping, with a whole new way of life. In lush, often musical prose, she appeals to the reader’s senses, as well as the heart, as the Marshall family–wife Laura, husband Stephen, and daughter Victoria–go about their business in a world which no longer resembles anything they have known before. The village, the author tells us, “had very slightly curdled and changed colour.”
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Bernhard Schlink faces a monumental challenge in this novel in which he attempts to connect the terrorism of the Red Army Faction (represented by the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany in the seventies) with the earlier German national terrorism that the Nazis represented and the contemporary terrorism of Al-Qaeda. Here he investigates what makes people become terrorists and what happens to them in the aftermath of their crimes. At one point Schlink even has a character question whether Germany is the victim of a curse: “Isn’t it a curse, what’s being passed on from the [World War II] generation before Jorg [a Baader-Meinhof member who killed four people] to Jorg, and from Jorg to his son? It seems like one to me.”
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If there is truly a separate genre known as a “Jewish novel,” then this novel would have to be its crowning achievement. An expansive and wide-ranging novel about the many facets of being Jewish (or “Finklerish,” as Treslove sees it), The Finkler Question examines the lives of three friends: Julian Treslove, a now forty-nine-year-old Gentile, has always been fascinated by all things Jewish. A romantic who has never been able to maintain a relationship, Julian has been abandoned by all of the women he’s known in the past, including the two who bore his sons. Sam Finkler, Julian’s former classmate, writes wildly popular (and popularized) editions of philosophical ideas “for all occasions.” Libor Sevcik, almost ninety, their former teacher, who eventually became a commentator on the entertainment business, has just lost his devoted wife of over fifty years, and his former students have been trying to see him more often because he feels so lost. As the three interact and share their lives with each other (and the reader), often hilariously, the author takes the unusual approach of showing how these actions reflect both their interdependencies and their religion–or lack of it.
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