Setting this unusual, aesthetically intriguing, and often exciting novel in Malaya/Malaysia, author Tan Twan Eng* provides insights into the Japanese Occupation of Malaya from 1941 – 1945, while recreating the horrors endured by the local population. At the same time, he also illustrates the highly formal aesthetic principles which underlie Japanese gardens, ukiyo-e prints, and the practice of horimono (literally “carving”), which is part of the long tradition of irezumi, Japanese tattooing. Amazing as it may sound, Tan succeeds in accomplishing an elegant blend of these seemingly incompatible subjects and themes while also appealing to the reader with characters who face personal tragedies and strive, somehow, to endure. Through hints and small details mentioned throughout the novel, Tan creates interest in Yun Ling’s history, and the eventual discovery of how she becomes the sole survivor of her work camp in the mountains is one of the most dramatic sections of the novel.
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Author Bernardo Atxaga, whose previous works have been set in his native Basque country in Spain, provides only basic information about the rule of King Leopold II and Belgium’s Force Publique in the Congo in 1903. Spending little time on the grand scale of the atrocities this group committed historically against the native population, he focuses instead on the behavior of the individual officers of one small garrison in Yangambi as they conduct their daily lives. This creates a unique narrative in which the author explores what happens when there are, essentially, no limits on what individuals may do to keep themselves entertained – life is truly a “jungle.” By creating Chrysostrome Liege, a young soldier who is both naïve and timid, Atxaga also creates scenes in which Chrysostrome’s reactions set the behaviors of the others into sharp relief. He has no sense of being part of the group and no apparent need to become part of it, and since he also has no feeling for irony or absurdity, even in circumstances in which the ironies and absurdities are patently obvious, the reader is alternately horrified by some of the officers’ activities and somewhat nonplussed by Chrysostrome’s apparent attitude of being above it all. As one of the officers notes, “I’ve no idea whether he’ll be a good soldier or a bad one, but he’ll certainly be a miserable one. As miserable as a mandrill.”
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Eight stories comprise this “novel in stories”, and they are some of Israeli author Amos Oz’s strongest and most intriguing stories. All the stories take place in Tel Ilan, a “pioneer village” already a hundred years old. The old village is changing, on its way to becoming a summer resort. The village has already become “gentrified,” with boutique wineries, art galleries, and stores selling cheese, honey, and olives. As the individual stories unfold, Oz stresses the changes in focus that are also taking place among the residents themselves. No longer unified by the common goals which in early days motivated and drove its residents to build the thriving state of Israel, most of the characters in this collection are at loose ends–lonely, if not alienated–and often unable to communicate or identify with others on the most basic level. The younger generation has a different vision of the future, and the present society or government is not compromising in its views. Though these stories are exciting to read, a great deal of fun, and decidedly apolitical, they nevertheless suggest that the author is not seeing much hope for optimism (or long-term compromise) within present Israeli society or its government. The power of this story collection, which is absolutely riveting, lingers long after the book is closed.
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In this old-fashioned, “once-upon-a-time-in-the-old-country” saga set in northern Italy, author Vittorio Massimo Manfredi introduces the Bruni family of farmers. Living in the rural hills outside of Bologna, Callisto and Clerice, parents of seven sons and two daughters, have worked the same land as generations of their ancestors. When World War I begins, the war changes the very heart of the nation, not just because of the hundreds of thousands of young men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, but because of the totality of the horrors for every person in the country. The years of Fascism form the second part of the novel’s structure, with each of the brothers and their friends responding differently to the rise of Mussolini and his dictatorship. The third part of the novel features the next generation of Bruni sons as they deal with the many factions within Italy during World War II. Various Resistance groups fight against the Fascist Republican Army, or its extreme wing, the paramilitary Black Brigades, but the Resistenza itself is fragmented. This novel has something for everyone, and that is both its joy and its limitation. The fact that there is not a moment of boredom in the entire novel attests to the author’s prodigious narrative abilities, but the thirty-year focus results in a novel that is diffuse and sometimes unfocused, and the conclusion itself peters out.
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Booker Prize winner Graham Swift has never shied away from literary challenges, and with this novel he tackles two issues which few other writers would even attempt, much less succeed in overcoming. This novel is almost totally about death in all its aspects, with no humor to leaven the heavy mood and the profound sadness which the novel ultimately evokes. And, making his subject and themes even more difficult to bring to life, he creates a main character and many peripheral characters who are inarticulate people who think in clichés and deal with the everyday challenges of their lives in “tried and true” fashion. The reader quickly becomes aware that these characters have few, if any, thoughts about the larger world, any perceived role they might have in it, and even how they might differ, in the grand scheme of life, from the animals on the farm to which they have devoted their lives. Still, Swift manages to create a novel which inspires the reader’s complete empathy with his limited main characters who stay true to their limited views of life and their limited expectations. His novel becomes, ultimately, a study of how an unreflective, uneducated everyman handles the disasters that fate and time deal out to him, over which he believes he has no control.
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