I can’t recall when I’ve ever felt so strongly the musical rhythm of an author’s style, or the extent to which it changes to suit the tempo of the action and themes. In the first third of this wonderful book by a very talented writer, conversations between the simple Mary and Granny Tamihana, the guardian of Maori traditions, echo and sound like chants; between Roimata and Hemi, a happily married couple, they resemble duets with complimentary themes. The scene in which Mary gives birth is a grand, complex chorus with the several family members singing over, around, and above each other as they fight for the narrative line. Toko’s story of his big fish is a soaring aria which ventures into a mystical realm, for Toko is a seer. And all this music seems totally appropriate to the lives of these Maori characters living in harmony with the land and their ancestors.
Read Full Post »
South Africa from 1968 – 2000 is revealed with all its cultural variety and internal stresses through the life story of Paul Sweetbread, an overweight Jewish boy who is an outsider to everyone. Neither a Boer nor an Englishman, he is also not really a Jew, either, since his family has never been observant, leaving him without any common roots that connect him to his Caucasian countrymen. A person with a photographic memory, he is, from the outset, a victim of his memory. The action intensifies when Paul, having finished school in 1987, joins the South African Defense Force, instead of going to college. In bordering Namibia, formerly a German colony, revolutionaries are taking advantage of the confusion over who is in control–South Africa, the United Nations, or whoever can grab power for himself–and Paul is sent there to fight.
Read Full Post »
V. S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize for Literature celebrates the long and illustrious career of a writer of extraordinary narrative gifts, amply demonstrated in this novel. The reader can choose any page of the book at random and be stunned by a graceful turn of phrase, a unique observation, the pleasing alternation of starkly simple and elegantly complex sentences, or a perceptive comment presented with grace. Though it is relatively short, it is dense in its thematic development, tracing the peripatetic life of Willie Somerset Chandran across three continents, and from his teen years to his early 40’s, as he attempts to fit in, to be part of some mainstream. The offspring of a Brahmin functionary in a maharajah’s court and an Untouchable woman, someone to whom his father was drawn temporarily in an effort to emulate the sacrifice of Gandhi, Willie belongs to neither group, an outsider even to the lowest caste. Because Naipaul has mined the theme of displacement repeatedly in his novels and non-fiction, one cannot avoid wondering how much of this book is autobiographical.
Read Full Post »
In Yugoslavia the extermination of Jews started early and was almost totally successful within a matter of months, with most of the Jewish men of Serbia shot to death by the fall of 1941, and “the Jewish Question in Serbia almost completely solved” by April, 1942, when virtually all Jewish men, women, and children were dead. Imagining the lives of Götz and Meyer, two SS guards who were responsible for over 5000 Jewish deaths, the speaker examines the events for which Götz and Meyer were responsible between November, 1941, and April, 1942. Often juxtaposing atrocities against simple, folksy observation, the speaker puts himself into their minds, he wondering if they ever regretted what they were doing, since they were so good at their jobs. Throughout the novel, as Albahari includes the terrible statistics, he also exhibits the ironies of the circumstances, setting the facts into sharp relief and increasing the shock. A strange novel of the Holocaust, all the more shocking because of the contrasts between the facts and the dark humor, Götz and Meyer is a memorable short novel and worthy addition to Holocaust literature.
Read Full Post »
In what may be Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s most playful—and, perhaps, popular—novel, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a secondary school history teacher, views a film given to him by a colleague and discovers in the film an actor who looks exactly like him in every respect. Though the film was made five years before and the actor was wearing a mustache, the two men are identical otherwise. Tertuliano, a somewhat gloomy, divorced man, has always liked the routine of his solitary life, and though he is a daydreamer, he has never before acted on those dreams. When he sees his double, he is stunned. “One of us is a mistake,” he declares, and as he begins, typically, to overanalyze the situation and chat with himself about the fact that “never before in the history of humanity have two identical people existed in the same place and time,” he finds himself wondering what it would be like to find and meet this double.
Read Full Post »
