It is difficult to know even where to begin in reviewing this novel, a novel so broad in its themes and scope and so sensitive to the details which make it come alive that other American readers, like me, will undoubtedly be waiting as impatiently as I am for the rest of the novels which make up the “Copenhagen Quartet.” Main character Bernardo (Nardo) Greene, an “ordinary” Chilean school teacher, was tortured for two years during the Pinochet government because he varied from the assigned curriculum in order to expand the minds of his students. Ostensibly a love story between Nardo, a widower whose wife and son were “desaparecido” during his incarceration and torture, and Michela Ibsen, a forty-year-old Danish woman whose ex-husband abused her and whose seventeen-year-old daughter committed suicide, the novel examines many themes related to love and death, freedom and forced confinement, and the worldly and the spiritual. (My favorite novel of 2010)
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In this extraordinary debut novel, author Lucia Orth uses the five years she worked for a non-profit organization in Manila to provide information, background, sensitive description, and color, however dark, about life in Manila for all levels of society. With an eye for the “unbelievable” and an ear for the absurd, she recreates Manila society in the early 1980s, the last years of the reign of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Focusing on Trace Caldwell and his wife Rue, Americans working for US National Security interests in the Philippines during the Reagan years, the author takes a microscope, one with no “politically correct lens,” to examine US policy regarding this third world country. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
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Telling Avgoustis’s story obliquely from several points of view, including that of Litsa, the true love of his life, whom he has abandoned in Greece, author Ioanna Karystiani creates a tender portrait of a proud man in thrall to the “swell,” with little to draw him home. It is only when the reader discovers (early in the novel) that Mitsos is actually blind, something that he has been able to keep secret from everyone, including his crew, that some of his deliberate self-isolation begins to make sense. He knows every foot of his ship, the Athos III, eats every meal alone in his cabin, stares at maps “from memory,” grows a beard so he will not need to shave, and lets his hair grow to shoulder length. He runs the ship by feel, through the “swell,” even bringing the ship safely through bad storms and equipment failures. As long as he does not return to Greece or be available to meet company representatives, they cannot force him to give up his ship.
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Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel soars to new heights, taking fiction itself to an exhilarating new level and blurring the lines between fiction and reality in new ways. Ostensibly the obsessive love story of Kemal Basmaci, age thirty, for a beautiful shop-girl named Fusun, eighteen, the novel explores much more than that, examining not only the physical passion which underlies their relationship and their lives, but also broader themes involving the connections between love and memory, between memory and reality, and between love and reality. Including metafictional elements in the telling of Kemal’s story, Pamuk himself participates in the story as both a fictional and a real character, adding another level to the story. In a unique tour de force, the author is now creating a (real) Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, located in the house in which Fusun and her fictional family “lived.” In essence, we have author Pamuk creating a fictional story about fictional people, whose real house and the objects in it (described fully in the fictional story) become a real physical memorial to the fictional characters in the love story which Kemal has “asked” Pamuk to write for him.
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Iraqi schoolteacher Mustafa Ali Noman has spent his life avoiding Saddam Hussein’s military, the Baath Party, and controversy in general. Happily married and the father of a young son and daughter, he and his wife are, for the first time, in a position to build a house, which he inspects on weekends, now that the house is close to completion. After leaving school for an hour to pay the final bill to the contractor, Noman returns to his class, but he is arrested by two Security officials as soon as he returns, taken to prison for interrogation, and slapped around. It is 1979, and Noman knows that “sooner or later, everyone is liable to run afoul of the regime or be mistaken for someone who has. Being free only means one thing: imminent arrest.” Though he is completely innocent, Noman spends the next year being moved from prison to prison, where he and those with him are tortured by some of the most painful methods ever devised. Told in an almost journalistic style, author Mahmoud Saeed, who himself was arrested and jailed for a year in 1963 and rearrested five more times after that–up to 1980–uses his personal observations and his own feelings to pay witness to the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
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