Julian Trevelyan-Tubal, the second son of Sir Harry, is now the eleventh generation of Tubals to have run the family’s bank, an old and prestigious institution which has, now, not surprisingly, fallen victim to the same deteriorating economic forces as every other bank and investment company in London and around the world. With Sir Harry in Antibes, where he is recuperating from a stroke, Julian has been responsible for managing the “firm.” Julian wants to accept an offer to sell the bank to an American, Cy Mannheim, but he has found it necessary to borrow two hundred fifty million pounds from the family trust for a limited time to shore up the bank, which now has eight hundred million pounds worth of toxic assets and useless mortgages in territories the bank has never even visited. Justin Cartwright, an award-winning author who was born and grew up in South Africa and now lives in London, uses his dry wit and sense of satire to tell the story of the Tubals, a family which has few inner resources to deal with the crisis the bank is facing: “The money simply imploded. It no longer exists. Nobody can explain it.”
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Eerily prescient in its depiction of the overwhelming desire among Islamic populations to take action to establish sovereign Islamic governments and free themselves from tyranny in North Africa and the Middle East, this 1955 novel should have been a wake-up call to the western world half a century ago when it was written. Paul Bowles (1910 – 1999), an American expatriate who lived in Morocco for over fifty years, was an eyewitness to the uprisings which occurred there in 1954 after the French deposed the much-loved Sultan Mohammed V. The tumult that developed in Fez in the wake of the Sultan’s removal, and the many factions that evolved within the local population in response to colonial high-handedness, will strike a familiar chord among contemporary readers who are now seeing exactly the same issues being addressed by residents of many other countries in the region, with the same kind of attendant violence provoking the same perplexity among western powers. A novel to fascinate anyone who has any interest at all in the current issues rending North Africa and the Middle East.
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When Lisa Napoli, a journalist who had worked for public radio and CNN, attends a cookbook party in New York City, her friend Harris introduces her to a singularly attractive man. The handsome friend, Sebastian, is about to accompany him to Bhutan to do research for an article for Gourmet magazine. Napoli soon discovers through conversations with the two men that Bhutan is “the happiest place on earth” a place that keeps a “Gross National Happiness Index.” In the midst of a midlife crisis, Napoli feels she has “been there, done that” for too long in the same job, adrift socially after the breakup of a long-term relationship. Now forty-three and childless, she reluctantly returns to her job at her home base in Los Angeles. Three weeks later, she receives an e-mail, asking her if she’d like to go to Bhutan to help with the start-up of a radio station, Kuzoo FM. With scarcely a second thought, she obtains a six-week leave of absence from her job and takes off for Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom known as the Land of the Thunder Dragon.
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With a poet’s sensitivity to words and images, and a ballad-singer’s awareness of cadences and narrative tension, Michael Crummey creates a rich novel of Newfoundland from the nineteenth century through World War I. Deftly combining the brutal realities of subsistence fishermen and farmers with the mythic tales that give hope to their lives, he traces the lives of two families through six generations in Paradise Deep and the Gut, rural areas worlds away from life in St. John’s. With its huge scope in time and its limited scope in location, the novel straddles the line between the epic and the comic epic, honoring the characters’ resilience as they struggle to survive during times of extreme privation (and six months of nearly paralyzing winter), while also celebrating the stories and long-held myths which give interest and even hope to their lives. The individual stories of the two main families over six generations here are complex, and two helpful genealogies at the beginning of the book may become well-worn as the reader tries to keep the characters all straight. The novel should appeal to those who enjoy historical family sagas.
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It’s always fun to reread a novel that was a favorite fifteen years ago and discover that it’s just as much fun the second time around. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1994, The Shipping News is set primarily in Newfoundland, the ancestral home of Quoyle, a widower from New York, and his aunt, Agnis Hamm, who return to Newfoundland with Quoyle’s two young daughters to try to create new lives. Quoyle, with minimal experience as a newspaper man in New York, gets a job at the local newspaper, the Gammy Bird, at Killick Claw, recording the weekly shipping news, doing features on visiting ships, and covering local car wrecks. Life in Killick Claw is often bleak, and its population must deal with violent storms, winters lasting six months, few connections to the outside world, and sudden death at sea, all of which Proulx describes in vivid and moving passages. But survival in this world also inspires kinship among its residents and a kind of dark-humored resignation which is even more vividly depicted.
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