Filled with dry, ironic humor, Quartet in Autumn is a poignant depiction of the lives of four elderly people, who have worked together for several years. All of them live alone, and none of them have much of a life outside of their repetitive and intellectually deadening jobs. They treat each other only as colleagues and not as friends, both in and out of the office. The two women consider the two men to be merely “part of the furniture,” and the men have no interest in the women beyond their function in the office. As a result, they have never socialized, visited each other’s houses or apartments, shared a lunch hour together, or come to know each other as human beings. When the two women retire, life for all of them changes dramatically. When the men decide to take the “old dears” to lunch several weeks after they retire, the four of them have their first social occasion, with mixed results. Pym is very funny, her images and description of events incomparable. She calls a spade a spade, and her ironic depiction of old age is one that no one nearing that age will ever forget.
Read Full Post »
Within the two hundred fifteen pages of this short, allegorical novel, Evelio Rosero creates a microcosm of Colombian rural life in the fictional community of San Jose, where no one knows who will attack them next—the army, the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, or the drug lords. Though the residents are peaceful small farmers and businessmen with few, if any, ties to the “outside” world and virtually no interest in the country’s politics, every militant faction vying for power in Colombia somehow believes that these residents constitute an imminent threat. Every character in the novel becomes a sort of Everyman, an ordinary person living his own life, just like the ordinary people in any other country, with similar kinds of goals, a similar desire for love and family, and a similar belief (or non-belief) in a higher spiritual power. Because Rosero also creates intriguing, quirky personalities for his characters, they are livelier than most other generic, “Everyman” characters, and they therefore generate sympathy and understanding of their individual problems while they also represent broader, more elevated themes.
Read Full Post »
Set in 1963 in Wisla, the rural Polish town where author Jerzy Pilch himself grew up, A THOUSAND PEACEFUL CITIES a satirical, fictional retelling of life in Poland in the years preceding the Student Revolt of 1968, disguising the autobiographical memories it contains. In 1963, the Communist party is in power, and the country is under Soviet influence but not control. At the outset of the novel, the reader immediately discovers that Jerzyk’s father and his father’s friend, Mr. Traba, an alcoholic former clergyman, plan to kill First Secretary Wladysaw Gomulka in Warsaw. They had, at first, thought of killing Mao Tse-tung to make a statement but decided it was impractical: “Better a sparrow in the hand than Mao Tse-tung on the roof.” What follows is a wild ride through rural Poland in 1963, novel that is, by turns, hilarious, thoughtful, filled with metaphysical and dialectical argument, and embellished with lyrical details from the natural world. This is satire used for its most noble purposes.
Read Full Post »
An unnamed writer is hired by a friend who works with the human rights office of the Catholic Church of an unnamed country to edit and proofread eleven hundred pages of testimony—“the memories of the hundreds of survivors of and witnesses to the massacres perpetrated in the throes of the so-called armed conflict between the army and the guerrillas.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the army declared that the indigenous Indians who had lived in remote Mayan villages for hundreds of years were anti-government leftists, and soldiers conducted widespread genocide wiping out hundreds of villages and killing over a hundred thousand people. Now, many years later, the human rights office at the cathedral plans to publish the survivors’ testimonies for the first time. Castellanos Moya creates a powerful work of fiction from some of the western hemisphere’s most horrendous brutality, giving enough detail to shock the reader into questioning how human beings could not only commit some of these atrocities but enjoy the bloodshed in the process. At the same time, however, he is aware of the limits on violence that a reader can comprehend before “tuning out,” a rare quality which he exploits by juxtaposing some of the worst details of torture against images of the absurdities in the speaker’s personal life.
Read Full Post »
When the obnoxious Sean Rafferty, a twenty-six-year-old “pasty-face” with a link to drug gangs, is murdered, his aunt Gina, a young businesswoman, is shocked, and hastens to console her much older sister Catherine, Sean’s mother. Within twenty-four hours, her uncle, also named Sean Rafferty and someone to whom she has always felt close, dies in what is assumed to be a driving accident. The younger Sean worked for Terry “the Electrician” Stack, a man linked to drug suppliers operating out of the Netherlands, but there were no gang wars going on. The elder Sean Rafferty was a partner in BCM, a structural engineering firm involved in the Richmond Plaza development. BCM was hired to work with Paddy Norton, chairman of Winterland Properties, the developers of Richmond Plaza, and with Martin “Fitz” Fitzpatrick, his security expert. Before long, the reader, like Gina, suspects that there was an error, and that the wrong Sean Rafferty may have been killed first. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
Read Full Post »
