In this brutally satiric little novella, the “downstairs” servants of the aristocratic Klopstocks, living in Switzerland, have their lives all planned out for the immediate future. They will not be spending another day with the Klopstocks—at least not a day in which the Klopstocks are alive, and they are breathless with anticipation. Lister, who manages the household, knows that both the Baron and the Baroness will be meeting in the library that evening with Victor Passerat, “Mister Fairlocks,” someone with whom the Baroness is passionately in love but who is himself passionately in love with the Baron. Posting a “Not to Disturb” sign on the door, the triangle of lovers meets, determined to settle their issues, but these can be settled only one way—with gunshots. “The eternal triangle has come full circle,” one servant observes.
Read Full Post »
Lowboy is the powerful and moving story of a paranoid schizophrenic teenager who, hospitalized for almost two years, goes off his meds and escapes back to New York City’s subways in an effort to spread his “message” and prevent global warming from destroying life as we have known it. Ali Lateef, a New York City detective whose area of expertise is “Special Category Missing,” is hoping that Will’s mother, “Miss Heller,” sometimes known as Violet, can provide enough information to allow him to find Will in the seven or eight hours before his lack of medication pushes him into violence, but she, too, has her problems. Highly praised for both his imagination and his careful structuring, John Wray is one of the most exciting young novelists in the country today. (On my Favorites List for 2009)
Read Full Post »
Author Danticat introduces her story of Haitian immigrants and the lives they have escaped in Haiti with the story of Ka, a young sculptress whose parents think of her as a “good angel,” her name also associated symbolically with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ka is in Florida with her father to deliver a powerfully rendered sculpture to a Haitian TV actress. Ka’s father, who served as the model for the sculpture, however, destroys it, confessing tearfully that he is not the man his daughter has always believed him to be, that he was a “hunter,” he says, and “not the prey,” one of the “dew breakers,” or torturers, who as part of the Tonton Macoutes, committed political assassinations and inflicted unimaginable tortures on orders of dictators Francois Duvalier and his son “Baby Doc” between 1957-86. In a series of episodes which resemble short stories more than a novel in form, Danticat illuminates the lives of approximately a dozen Haitian immigrants as they remember this traumatic period “back home.”
Read Full Post »
Described as a “masterpiece of Korean fiction of the twentieth century” and as “one of the outstanding literary achievements during Korea’s colonial era,” Three Generations, written in 1931, has recently been translated into English for the first time. The novel traces three generations of one family–the Jo family–consisting of the grandfather and family patriarch, his middle-aged son (Sang-hun, and his wife), and Sang-hun’s 23-year-old son Deok-gi (and his wife and baby), the character around whom most of the action revolves. The family lives in Seoul in a large traditional house with inner and outer quarters, separate living areas for the several families, and spaces for the family’s servants. Within the household, traditional family values are being threatened. Arranged marriages are sought and performed (even for Deok-gi) to protect the family’s wealth, and real affection is not a requirement since the taking of concubines is accepted. No legal obligations exist between men and these concubines if the women have children, and their difficult lives come under scrutiny here.
Read Full Post »
Maaza Mengiste’s remarkable debut novel, set in her home country of Ethiopia in 1974, brings to life the historical period from the assassination of Emperor Haile Selassie through the communist revolution and the subsequent resistance movement which followed shortly on its heels. A well-publicized 1974 television documentary, showing the educated Ethiopian public the horrors of famine, in which 200,000 people died in the remote areas of their country, juxtaposed against films of the wasteful excesses of palace functions, set the country up for revolution. As all the characters gradually become drawn into the larger political conflicts of the country, the reader is shocked by the extreme cruelty, both physical and emotional, of whoever is in power. The violence, which increases in intensity over the course of three hundred pages, involves false arrests, beatings, rapes, psychological warfare, brutal tortures in an effort to extract sometimes non-existent information, and the mutilation of women and children–very difficult to read for the length of the novel.
Read Full Post »
