If ever there were someone who had a right to be angry and bitter about the fate of Iraq and its intellectuals, Mahmoud Saeed has that right. Arrested and jailed for a year and a day in 1963, when he was twenty-four, and again five more times after that, through 1980, he was never again to see any of his books published in Iraq, and two of his manuscripts were burned by authorities. Yet even Saddam City (released in the US in 2006), about a similar young man unjustly imprisoned and tortured, is a novel filled with humanity and hope, despite the author’s own traumas. Even stronger feelings are evoked in this novel. Obviously autobiographical, at least in part, Saeed examines the various kinds of love which a young boy from Mosul discovers as a youth, sweeping the reader along on a tide of empathy and making him/her feel at one with the main character. Providing wonderful insights into the lives and cultures of the main characters – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish – many of whom are friends of the young boy and his family, The World Through the Eyes of Angels is aimed directly at the heart without a shred of easy sentimentality.
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Mixing the supernatural with dramatic and horrifying realism, this generational novel contains all the ingredients necessary to become a huge popular success. Spanning the years between the 1920s and the present, author Bernice L. McFadden focuses on three generations of the Hilson family as they interact with each other, with others in their segregated neighborhood, and with the white world beyond. Using the town of Money, Mississippi, itself as the “narrator,” the author creates lively scenes involving Reverend August Hilson, new pastor of the only black church, and his family, who have escaped the violence of Tulsa to settle in this small town near Greenwood, Mississippi, along the Tallahatchee River. Moving from the 1920s to the present, with considerable time spent on the torture-murder of Emmett Till in 1955, Bernice McFadden focuses on the everyday lives of all her characters, both black and white, as they navigate the thorny paths of racial prejudice within a small community.
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Posted in 9-2012 Reviews, Australia, Book Club Suggestions, Coming-of-age, Historical, Literary, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Social and Political Issues on Feb 26th, 2012
If there is such a genre as “Australian Gothic,” this novel would be one of its best-written examples. The sights, sounds, and smells of the bush, filled with storms, heat, dust, and exotic birds and animals, vibrate with life—and death—both physical and spiritual. Set in remote and sparsely populated Western Australia in the early 1940s, this 2008 novel recreates the life of Perdita Keene, a ten-year-old child not wanted by her British expatriate parents, who had hoped she would die at birth. Perdita, whose childhood is formed by the aborigine women who nursed her in infancy, develops a strong friendship with Mary, an aborigine girl five years older, and Billy, the deaf-mute son of the Trevors, white people who run a local cattle station. All three children are outcasts for various reasons, and their bonds with each other are total and life-affirming. The murder of Perdita’s father, described in the opening pages, is at the core of the novel, and the circumstances surrounding the case are not clear. All three children witness the crime, but Perdita, the narrator for most of the novel, is so traumatized that she cannot remember details. Lyrical, sensual, and full of passion, Sorry is a novel that is dramatically intense, full of emotion.
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It has been two years since I have added a new book to my list of All-Time Favorites, but that has just changed with the release of this novel which deserves a special place on my Favorites list. Set in the mining country of South Wales, Vanessa Gebbie’s incandescent new novel captures the cadences and speech patterns that lovers of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood have celebrated for years, and as I read the book (as slowly as possible), it felt as if Richard Burton, whose recording of Under Milk Wood is still in demand, were whispering in my ear. A collection of stories narrated by Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, a beggar who lives on the front porch of a disused chapel in a Welsh mining town, the novel eventually becomes the history of the town itself, and readers will come to know all the characters and their families going back for three generations. The emotional power of this novel is overwhelming without becoming sentimental or syrupy. Filled with wonderful descriptions and emotionally moving insights into people of all types, The Coward’s Tale recreates an entire town, and as the characters develop and overlap throughout the book, the wonder of this author’s achievement expands.
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Dan Vyleta’s THE QUIET TWIN offers a unique perspective on the growing menace of National Socialism in Vienna, in 1939. Using an ordinary apartment building and the events which affect the seemingly ordinary characters who inhabit it as a microcosm for the terrifying realities which are about to come, Vyleta creates an almost unparalleled atmosphere of fear and dread. Otto Frei and his sister are twins, and Zuzka and her sister Dasa are twins, but the real “twins” of this novel’s title are all the individual characters who have “quiet twins” – completely different selves in private from what is known in public to everyone else, including sometimes the reader. An absorbing literary novel, which never loses its way as it progresses, it is ultimately a horror novel which out-horrors almost all others, not because of the awful events which unfold, but because the unfolding action feels so casual and so domestic in the context of the residents’ lives. Throughout the action, each character decides in a moment of crisis, that “just this once” s/he will ignore the promises made to others and the values which have always been paramount in civilized society in favor of what works best for himself/herself at that moment. The result is a societal compromise of epic proportions, one which allows the Nazi menace to take hold.
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