Nazneen, a young bride married at sixteen to a 40-year-old man, is wrenched from the only life she has ever known in the countryside of Bangladesh and conveyed to England, where her new husband, Chanu, has a job. Taught from the day of her birth that “fighting against one’s Fate can weaken the blood,” or even be fatal, she accepts the miserably lonely existence fate has bestowed on her in a London council flat. Though there are others from Bangladesh living there, Chanu believes the other immigrants to be uneducated, illiterate, and uncultured, and he discourages any reaching out Nazneen might do to these people who are “below” them. Author Ali shows Nazneen’s world in all its earthy details. Ali’s depiction of a woman’s coming of age through the process of acculturation is striking in its level of detail. Decisions which many of us take for granted assume new meanings when they are made by Nazneen.
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Writing one of the must unusual and imaginative books I’ve read in a long time, Tasmania native Richard Flanagan presents a multi-leveled novel which is full of wry, sometimes hilarious, observations about people and history. At the same time, it is a scathing indictment of colonialism’s cruelties and its prison system, in particular. Almost schizophrenic in its approach, the novel jerks the reader back and forth from delighted amusement to horrified revulsion in a series of episodes that clearly parallel the unstable inner life of main character William Buelow Gould, who lives in “a world that demanded reality imitate fiction.” Sentenced to life imprisonment on an island off the coast of Tasmania, Gould cleverly plays the survival game, ingratiating himself with the authorities through his willingness to paint whatever they want–species of fish for the surgeon, fake Constable landscapes for the turnkey Pobjoy, murals for the Commandant’s great Mah-jong Hall, and backdrops for his railroad to nowhere.
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Recreating the traumas that Third World citizens face every day, Djaout offers vivid pictures of their complex but fragile lives. Here, in an unnamed country, presumably Algeria, government bureaucrats are concerned only with protecting themselves, their jobs, and their kickbacks, their fear of change so ingrained that any hope of modernization and real progress is squelched. The average citizen tries to remain anonymous, making do in a society which does not reward excellence. As one bureaucrat explains, “…the words ‘creation’ and ‘invention’ are sometimes condemned because they are perceived as heresy, a questioning of what exists already…of the faith and the prevailing order.”
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It is profoundly affecting to read a book which is not in its final form because its Algerian author was assassinated in 1993, at age thirty-nine. Doubly moving for the reader is this book’s warning cry against mindless practitioners of fundamentalist oppression, the very people responsible for the author’s death in Algeria. Djaout clearly knew he was in danger, knew why he was in danger, and knew why he, along with other writers and artists, represented a threat to single-minded fanatics in his country, yet he continued to create, leaving behind this final book, a legacy not just to compatriots who might feel like lonely soldiers against intolerance but to lovers of books throughout the world who sometimes take for granted the power and glory of a free press. Almost plotless, the book reveals the thoughts and feelings of Boualem Yekker, a lonely man who finds himself living “a blank life” in a society which has been subsumed by the Regulators of Faith, zealots who worship a god of vengeance and punishment and do not recognize love, forgiveness, or compassion.
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Set in 1994, when Cuba allowed its citizens to leave the country for the United States on anything that would float, Ruins, by Achy Obejas is a touching, close-up look at one man and his family and how he represents the life of the failed revolution of 1959. Like his countrymen, Usnavy Martin Leyva, named for the ships outside his mother’s house near Guantanamo Bay, has always lived in the shadow of the United States, ninety tantalizing miles away. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Usnavy truly believes in the revolution and in the revolutionary songs sung by elementary school children. Even now, two years after the Russians have abandoned Cuba, taking away with them the last of their meager financial support, Usnavy believes in the future, though he and his neighbors are starving. The emotions conjured in this book are intense, though the action is limited to the everyday life of Usnavy as he tries to live a real life within a revolutionary framework that he will not admit has failed him. With its compressed imagery and symbolism, and its dark vision of life as it may still exist today, Ruins by Achy Obejas is a memorable addition to “Cuban noir.”
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