In The Elephant Keeper’s Children, Hoeg continues his focus on philosophy, this time dealing with the search for faith and meaning through an exploration of life and its parallel search for love and happiness – be it through Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism. He does this, not as the main focus of the novel, but as part of the backstory involving three children who are searching for their mother and father, who have disappeared. Their father is the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark on the island of Fino, where they all live, and their mother, the organist, is a mechanical genius with a gift for invention beyond what anyone in their congregation can imagine. The result is a farcical, picaresque story of chases and escapes in which the fourteen-year-old main character (named, in typical Hoeg fashion, Peter, suggesting issues the character might have in common with those of the author, on some level), along with his sixteen-year-old sister Tilde and terrier dog Basker, sets out to find their parents, sometimes aided by Hans, their older brother who is studying away from home. They know they must find their parents themselves before they are remanded to a children’s home by adults who seem to fear what they might do if left alone.
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As a boy in Trujillo, Peru, Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua has his fortune told one Sunday, in the plaza just outside the local basilica. A fortune-teller, with a miniature cathedral on his cart, has trained a monkey to draw fortunes from small drawers in the façade of the little cathedral. When Victor and his aunt receive his fortune, they see no ironies in the fact that Don Victor had just gone to Mass and confession and that this fortune is drawn by a monkey from a toy cathedral. Both believe in the inscribed destiny: “Beware! There are those who think you a dreamer. Pay them no mind. They are small-minded people… who would have you doubt your goals.” Victor eventually goes to engineering school, doing his apprenticeship with a papermaker, and eventually building a factory in the Peruvian jungle, where his employees make cellophane. This discovery leads to the fulfillment of the dire predictions of the second half of his childhood fortune—and to the action of this novel, which is divided into three “plagues.” A “plague of truth” follows the discovery of cellophane, as each character, including the priest, confesses his/her romantic indiscretions. A “plague of hearts” follows, with each person pursuing new love or rekindling old love. Ultimately, a “plague of revolution” comes to Floralinda, as government soldiers invade Floralinda, and local workers blame Don Victor and his cellophane for these troubles. Ironies abound. Expansive in scope and theme but magnificently controlled in its execution, Cellophane is thoroughly entertaining, filled with humor and irony and many hilarious scenes. Reminiscent of the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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In this impressionistic novel about the on-going conflicts between Irish Loyalists and the Irish Republican Army and its militias in Belfast, author Tom Molloy’s dramatic scenes bring the full horrors of this long civil war to life, though for some partisans, death is preferable to life as they have known it in their impoverished and violent neighborhoods. As the father of one Catholic from the Falls Road area of Belfast tells his son, “I am your father but they treat me like a child. I am a man and they will not acknowledge my manhood. See this, understand it, stand up to it when you can. This is our country. Often we can only fight them with our humor. Resist.” A former freelance journalist who accompanied the IRA during some of its bloodiest street battles, author Tom Molloy’s descriptions of Belfast and its battles bear the heavy truth of what he has seen and felt, and few readers will leave this novel without absorbing the full impact of the long enmity between those Catholics who still support turning the entire island into one Irish republic and those Protestants who believe that Northern Ireland should remain just as it is, part of the United Kingdom, supported by British troops. For those readers who believe that the Good Friday Accords of 1998, approved by voters from both parts of Ireland, effectively ended the hostilities which have torn apart the island for almost a hundred years, think again. Extremists on both sides keep the enmity alive, even after a generation.
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Axel Vander tells us from the opening of this sensitive and tension-filled study of identity that he is not who he says he is, that he has assumed another man’s identity. A respected scholar and professor at a California college, Vander is recognized by the literati for his thoughtful philosophical papers and books, especially his ironically entitled The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity. Just before he leaves for a conference on Nietzsche in Turin, however, he receives a letter from a young woman in Antwerp, raising questions about his real identity and asking to meet with him. He agrees to meet her in Turin, and as the novel unfolds, we come to know more about the “real” Axel Vander and more about his mysterious correspondent, the disturbed Cass Cleave, whose madness does not preclude the truth of her discoveries. Banville’s novel is intense, highly compressed in its development of overlapping themes, and filled with suspense, both real and intellectual. The plot, though entertaining and often exciting, reveals the dark, interior worlds of Vander and Cass so fully that a more detailed plot summary might jeopardize the reader’s own pleasure of discovery. Banville is a master craftsman who has interconnected every plot detail with his themes of identity and selfhood, the relationships we create with the outside world, and our desire to be remembered after our deaths.
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From the first pages to the last, this refreshing, original, imaginative, thoughtful – and often humorous – debut novel kept me glued to the chair, reading as fast as I could while trying to force myself to read more slowly to savor the fun to the utmost. I confess that I have never been a fan of fantasy, and my knowledge of computer science would fit into a URL line, but I was completely charmed by the style of this novel, an unusual mix of ephemera and cutting edge computer science, and I became totally caught up in it – not just for the excitement of the story itself, but for the ideas it presents and the hints it gives of the future of writing itself. Sure to be at the top of my list of Favorites for the year, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore may be every serious reader’s fantasy, a novel in which an innocent and unsuspecting person takes a night job at a bookstore where he inhabits the world of ancient manuscripts and ancient typefaces – only to discover that his seemingly innocuous, middle-of-the-night customers are all part of a secret cult working to fulfill a six-hundred-year-old mission, the nature of which is unknown to him.
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