In the forty-two stories included in A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense by Anton Chekhov, the author expresses both his ironic humor and his dark assessment of humanity. Though he is better known now for his playwriting skills, Chekhov was a prodigious writer of stories from 1880, when he was a twenty-year-old medical student, until 1890, and it was these stories that kept his family fed and clothed for most of that decade. By 1884, Chekhov, still writing stories, was a practicing physician traveling the countryside and not charging the poor for his services, and much of the social breadth we see in his stories came about directly as a result of this close contact with all levels of society. The conflicts in his stories, sharply realized, show the chasm between rich and poor, and educated and uneducated, and Chekhov, almost without exception, depicts the poor and uneducated as having more integrity, and less tempted by “the devil.” It is the reader’s recognition that Chekhov believes what s/he believes that makes Chekhov’s work so memorable and significant—and which makes his irony work.
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Set in various countries in West Africa, with one sojourn to Ethiopia, Susi Wyss’s debut “novel in stories” takes advantage of the more than twenty years that she lived in Africa—three years as a child in the Ivory Coast, two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic, and fifteen years managing health care programs throughout different countries in West Africa. Her sensitivity to place, culture, and people, particularly those who have left their homes for lives elsewhere, and her sense of honesty and forthrightness give a particular poignancy to the lives of the five women who are the subjects of the stories here. Three of these overlapping stories are set in Ghana, two in the United States, and one each in Malawi, the Central African Republic, and Ethiopia. The novel has much charm, less plot, with characters who feel real and with whom the reader will identify. The places Wyss “visits” are both intriguing and realistic, even including the unexpected violence that appears at some points. The novel is full of easy and obvious cultural conflicts and contrasts, with themes that often appear as moralizing at the conclusions to the stories.
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Author Dieter Schlesak was only ten years old when the Russians invaded his town of Sighisoara in German Transylvania on August 1944, and he has been struggling to understand the Holocaust and how it happened ever since. Though he tried to write a novel about it once before, he says in a statement written in February, 2011, that he “threw 450 pages of an ‘author’s text’ into the wastebasket, because I, as an author, have absolutely no mandate, and could never, even stylistically or linguistically, approach such horror.” Schlesak, however, succeeds in creating a monumental analysis of Auschwitz, almost paralyzing in the completeness of its horror on every possible level, by using a “collective narrator,” a character he calls “Adam Salmen.” Adam as narrator is a Sondercommando of the Jewish “special action squad” under the Germans, a man whose agonizing job it is to report on the deaths in the gas chambers and the tallies of the cremation ovens. Photos, and much of Adam’s commentary, reflect the human side of the Holocaust, smaller pictures of real people performing real actions, rather than the overwhelming horrors of mass graves. Powerful and important.
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A reporter of cricket matches who also wrote the cricket-tour book Pundits from Pakistan, Indian national Rahul Bhattacharya spent some time in Guyana covering matches in 2003 – 2004, so enjoying the country that he decided to return again later to spend an entire year meeting new people and exploring places most outsiders never come to know. The result is a unique travel book of great originality, chock full of outlandish characters, trips to places the reader will not even have imagined, and risky adventures to the interior. Not a “novel” by any stretch of that word’s definition, the book feels, overall, like a wonderfully described diary, with events unfolding more or less at random. It is a lively account of those who live on the fringes, taking big risks and chances, and surviving any way they can and at any cost. Trips to the interior for diamond-hunting, an analysis of the drug wars involving the East India vs. African gangs, and a bewitching woman with whom the author travels to Venezuela are part of the action. Those who are looking for a balanced picture of Guyana, a country of extraordinary beauty and much charm, will want to look elsewhere.
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Julio Llamazares will win many new readers with this powerful and richly atmospheric novel, a classic in Spain for the past twenty years, but only recently available in English translation. Capturing the love of an old man for his land and for the village in which he and his ancestors were born, it is also a study of the inexorable effects of time and the pressures it exerts on isolated communities and the human inhabitants who lack direct connection with a wider world. Told from the point of view of a now-elderly man who, along with his faithful, unnamed dog, is the last remaining inhabitant of Ainielle, a crumbling village in the Pyrenees, the novel details his physical and emotional deterioration as he observes the parallel collapse of the town, “whole buildings kneeling like cattle,” the village itself a mangled and sad “unburied corpse.” His wife Sabina, who had remained with him after all the other inhabitants gradually departed, has now been dead for ten years, and as the novel opens, Andres believes that this is the last day of his life.
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