The Promise

Damon Galgut

Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, The Promise by Damon Galgut is a family saga of the Afrikaner Swart family in South Africa. Beginning in 1986 and spanning four decades, it is set against the backdrop of a changing South Africa. The novel opens with the death of the matriarch, Rachel Swart. Rachel is survived by her husband, Manie, and their three children, Anton, Astrid, and Amor. Before her death, Rachel extracts a promise from Manie that he will bequeath a small homestead on their property to Salome, their black housekeeper. The promise is witnessed by Amor, a young child at the time.

Upon her mother’s death, Amor reminds her father of his promise. He denies making it. As the decades unfold, Amor is haunted by the unfulfilled promise. She reminds her siblings of the promise after their father’s death; she reminds Anton of the promise after Astrid’s death. Anton assures her he will honor the promise, but he never does. It is only after his death when Amor inherits the property is she able to honor her mother’s wishes and legally transfer the homestead to Salome. By this time, Salome is an elderly woman and the property is virtually worthless.

The novel is in four parts, beginning with the death of Rachel followed by the deaths of Manie, Astrid, and Anton in that order. Each of the four sections focuses on one family member, and each section includes a death and a funeral. The characters are skillfully portrayed, unveiling more of themselves as the years unwind. In voices that are unique and authentic, their interiority reveals them to be tortured, fractured souls.

From the outset, the Swarts are depicted as dysfunctional and non-communicative. They don’t know how to express or feel love for one another. Manie is alienated from his wife and children; Anton is a military deserter, a failed novelist, and an alcoholic; Astrid is a self-absorbed, status-conscious housewife; and Amor is the quiet, aloof, and unobtrusive loner. Their downward spiral and unravelling begin with Rachel’s death and the unfulfilled promise to Salome. As such, the family can be viewed as a microcosm of South African society with its fractured white minority subjugating and betraying a non-white majority with false hopes and broken promises.

The story is compelling, but the real strength of the novel lies in the agility of the narrative voice. The narrator shifts seamlessly, often in mid-sentence and mid-paragraph, between characters, points of view, dialogue, and interiority. Occasional direct addresses to the reader pepper the narrative with unflinching honesty and commentary. Their effect is to generate a feeling of immediacy—of actually being there and witnessing the events. These intrusions are sometimes dark; sometimes hilarious; sometimes sarcastic; sometimes irreverent; sometimes accusatory; sometimes ironic; sometimes playful; sometimes self-conscious; sometimes self-deprecating; but always, always engaging.

A cleverly-executed and compelling novel, well-deserving of its award.

Dandelion Wine

Ray Bradbury

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury opens with twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding eagerly embracing the first day of his summer holidays. It is the summer of 1928 in a small town in Illinois. Doug experiences the world around him with a newly-found understanding of the ephemeral nature of time and of his own mortality.

Soliciting the help of Tom, his younger brother, Doug aims to freeze time by recording every unusual occurrence in the town. These occurrences include purchasing a new pair of sneakers; rescuing a mannikin from destruction; listening to an elderly man as he brings history to life; accompanying a neighbor as she launches a takeover bid for the presidency of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge. The events run the gamut from the mundane to the profound, from the delightful to the frightening. At times, Douglas is a participant; at others, he is a passer-by, observing and recording. Through it all are the bottles of dandelion wine, processed daily during the warm summer days to be savored and enjoyed during the cold, winter months. Like Douglas’ written record of events, each bottle of dandelion wine conjures up a different memory of a significant event that occurred on a specific day in the summer.

The tone throughout is nostalgic. Bradbury captures a time and place when life seemed simpler; when neighbors helped each other out; when the traveling junkman saves a seriously ill child by encouraging him to breathe bottles of air captured in far-off places; when children are invited on the last trolley ride in town or to enjoy an unusual ice cream flavor at the local drugstore. The events are episodic in nature in a series of interconnected, poignant short vignettes, some of which don’t involve children, but all of which contribute to the fabric of life in a small town in the summer of 1928.

Bradbury captures the magic in the mundane. He describes the children’s flights of imagination in words of bubbly profusion. The unusual juxtaposition of descriptive language and the manner in which some words tumble after each other is very much reminiscent of the exuberant poetry of Dylan Thomas. The episodic quality brings to mind the fabric and texture of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone books.

There is an enduring quality about this novel that addresses a universal need to hark back to a time and place when life seemed simpler, when children were loved and protected, when they could thrive in nature and community, and when they could enjoy the freedom and exuberance of the carefree summer months.

A joy to read.

The Old Woman with the Knife

Gu Byeong-Mo; trans. Chi-Young Kim

The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-Mo, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim, is an engaging crime fiction thriller with a twist. An international bestseller, the novel is a fast-paced page-turner.

The narrative opens with a middle-aged, non-descript woman who gets on a crowded Seoul subway train. She blends in with her surroundings and watches quietly when a belligerent male passenger berates a young pregnant woman for occupying a seat on the train while he remains standing. The middle-age woman follows him when he gets off the train and, without so much as batting an eyelid, she fatally stabs him with her knife before proceeding calmly to the restroom.

This is our introduction to a six-five-year-old woman, code-named Hornclaw. Hornclaw works for a company specializing in disease control. But this is no ordinary disease control. And Hornclaw is no ordinary employee. This company employs assassins who commit murder for paying clients. Hornclaw has been in the line of work of eliminating “vermin” for over forty years. She asks no questions and follows orders. She is a well-respected professional in her field and continues to work in spite of her declining physical abilities. For obvious reasons, she is a recluse, living alone with an aging rescue dog she named Deadweight as her only companion. Things are proceeding relatively well for her until she becomes a target. And that’s when the cat and mouse games begin leading to a bloody crescendo at the end of the novel. The final fight scene is bloody, violent, and visceral.

The narrative unfolds in unembellished, straight-forward diction. Hornclaw’s background and how she ended up in this line of work is revealed intermittently throughout the narrative. Her interiority is penetrating. Her comments on aging and the invisibility of the elderly in society—especially women—are incisive. She is empathic at times, ruthless at others. That Byeong-Mo generates sympathy for an aging, cold-blooded murderer is a testament to her skill as a writer and a credit to the translation of Chi-Young Kim.

The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and its People

Barry Kemp

The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and its People by Barry Kemp is a detailed and comprehensive account of Professor Kemp’s findings during the 35 years he spent excavating the ancient city of Akhetaten, known as Tell el-Amarna, in Egypt.

Professor Kemp explores every aspect of this ancient site. He begins with Akhenaten’s vision to establish a city in the middle of the desert dedicated to the worship of Aten, the sun-god. From there he goes on to explore the city’s available resources; its physical lay out; the pharaoh’s palaces/apartments; the city’s inhabitants, including their quality of life, clothing, food, and spiritual lives. He concludes with an overall view of the city’s very nature.

This is not a study of the lives Akhenaten and Nefertiti. It is very much an analysis of the site’s excavations and what they reveal about its structure, architecture, and inhabitants. Professor Kemp describes in painstaking detail the size of buildings and records the measurements of even the smallest objects. He analyzes each item and describes its composition and the location of its discovery. The extensive technical details can get overwhelming in their intricacy, but the work as a whole is fascinating. Although we are introduced to some prominent characters who lived and worked in Amarna, the focus is squarely on the archaeological findings. Included in this comprehensive study are drawings, extraordinarily beautiful color plates, and photographs of reconstructions and models of the city. There is also an extensive bibliography, notes, index, and list of illustrations.

In his analysis of the site’s excavations, Professor Kemp contests modern notions of cities, work places, homes, and living space. He provides an intense and penetrative view of the life at Amarna, a place he describes as an “urban village.” The study does not provide insight into the person of Akhenaten or the aftermath of his brief reign. But Professor Kemp does dispel some of the mythology surrounding Akhenaten, specifically that Akhenaten required strict and exclusive worship of Aten. Evidence has been unearthed that demonstrates former household gods were still worshipped in Amarna, suggesting there was more flexibility in spiritual leanings than had previously been assumed.

This definitive study of Amarna is highly recommended. It is an invaluable resource for information on a fascinating interlude in the civilization of ancient Egypt.

What You are Looking for is In the Library

Michiko Aoyama; trans. Alison Watts

What You Are Looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, translated from the Japanese by Alison Watts, is a feel-good story of five interlocking vignettes. Each vignette is in the first-person voice of a character facing a challenge in his/her life.

The novel opens with Tomoka, a twenty-one-year-old womenswear sales assistant who feels she has a dead-end life and a dead-end job. This is followed with the voice of Ryo, a thirty-five-year-old accounts manager who dreams of owning his own antique shop. Then there is Natsumi, a forty-year-old former magazine manager and mother of a toddler. Natsumi has ambitions of becoming a literary editor. Thirty-year-old Hiroya, currently unemployed and living with his mother, has a talent for drawing but has been unable to find fulfilling work in his field. Finally, there is Masao, a 65-year-old recently retired man who worked with the same company for forty-two years. Masao is at a loss with what to do with the rest of his life.

The common thread that ties the characters is their interaction with Sayuri Komachi, the reference librarian in the library at the Hatori Community House. Each character asks Ms. Komachi’s assistance in locating books specific to his/her needs. Ms. Komachi prints out a list of suitable books to address the requests. In addition, she includes a different book for each patron that seems totally unrelated to the specific topic. She also gives each patron a hand-made bonus gift. Although she is a woman of few words, what she says coupled with the reading materials she recommends triggers in each patron a path of self-discovery. The patrons read the books, contemplate her words, and consider the subtleties underlying the bonus gift. In the doing so, they tap into their inner strength and locate the means and energy to achieve what had so far remained dormant.

This international best seller is ultimately about the power of books to heal broken spirits. It also illustrates the pivotal role human connection plays in our need for self-actualization. Ms. Komachi’s ability to discern a person’s stated and unstated needs enables her to intuit which book will facilitate each unique journey of self-discovery.

This is a quick and easy read with characters who are relatable and sympathetic. Their first-person voices allow us access to their internal struggles and challenges. Each finds a path forward through human connection, friendship, community support, and through the all-important, transformative power of books. That the characters are at varying stages in their lives serves as a potent reminder that personal growth at every stage in life is possible if we remain open to opportunities and seize them when they make themselves available.

A charming little book that is light, untaxing, and easily digestible.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

Lisa See

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See opens in 1988 with young Li-Yan from the Akha tribe of China’s Yunnan province. Her family are tea growers, and Li-Yan learns the trade from her parents. Steeped in the beliefs, superstitions, rituals, and taboos of her community, Li-Yan aspires to transcend her socially constructed gender restrictions. She receives an education and is set to take the exam to continue her education when she becomes pregnant. With the help of her mother, a respected midwife and healer in the community, she conceals her pregnancy. She gives birth to a baby girl and abandons her outside an adoption clinic. Regretting her decision, she spends the next two decades trying to locate her daughter. She later learns she has been adopted by an American couple and taken to America.

Li-Yan becomes a tea entrepreneur, successfully establishing a business selling tea grown in her community. She marries a prosperous business man, and they move to his home in California. Li-Yan travels to China during tea-harvesting season to oversee her business.

Appearing intermittently in Li-Yan’s narrative is the narrative of Haley, her daughter, growing up in California with her adoptive parents. As a Chinese American, Haley struggles with her identity. Samples of her letters and school assignments are included in her narrative. Haley graduates from high school, attends university, and drafts a research proposal on the impact of climate change on the medicinal attributes of tea. She goes to the region in China famous for its tea to conduct her research. This just happens to be the same region where her mother is from.

There is much to appreciate in the novel, especially its depiction of the strong mother/daughter bond. See skillfully immerses the reader in the culture and lives of the Akha people through her use of sensory detail. Her extensive research on Akha culture and on the growing, harvesting, and processing of tea and its different properties is evident. But sometimes the copious information about tea—its attributes, its varieties, its impact on the taste buds, its different methods of production, etc.—becomes overwhelming and weigh the narrative down. Li-Yan’s meteoric rise to wealth and success as a tea purveyor seems somewhat improbable as do the many coincidences. And to top it off, in spite of See’s efforts to generate suspense, the conclusion is highly predictable.

Prophet Song

Paul Lynch

The winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song makes for a harrowing reading experience. The events take place in Ireland, but the descent into madness it portrays reflects what is currently happening in some parts of the world.

The events unfold as the elected rightwing National Alliance Party of the Republic of Ireland creeps toward strangling its population. The repression goes unnoticed at first. But then trade union lobbyists disappear. Civil liberties erode. Freedom of movement, freedom of speech are severely restricted. Legal recourse for locating missing loved ones is non-existent. Dissenters are captured, tortured, and killed. Civil war breaks out with innocent people caught in the crossfire. Snipers take pot shots at civilians. Bombs drop on homes with sleeping residents. Road blocks litter the town. Food shortages, curfews, sporadic electrical power cuts, house searches, internet blackouts, and bureaucratic labyrinths become routine. The institutions of a civilized world collapse.

This nightmare scenario is experienced through the eyes of a young mother of four, Eilish Stack. Larry, her husband and trade union leader, is taken by the security forces and disappears. Eilish struggles to maintain some semblance of normalcy for her children and for her elderly father who has dementia. All the while, she keeps hoping Larry will walk through the door and life will get back to normal. He never does, and life only gets worse. Her eldest son joins the rebellion and disappears. Her younger son refuses to attend school. Her daughter withdraws into herself and is not eating. And her infant son demands to be fed and changed.

Eilish is resourceful, brave, and fiercely determined to protect her children, even dodging sniper bullets to visit her injured son in hospital. She clings desperately to hope. Because she cannot come to terms with abandoning her missing loved ones, she initially refuses to be smuggled out of the country. By the time she agrees to leave, she has lost half her family.

Through graphic content and style, Lynch immerses the reader in a world gone mad. His diction is lyrical and dark. The absence of paragraph breaks and lack of quotation marks to indicate direct speech capture Eilish’s lived experience. The rapid succession of events is reflected in rapidly moving sentences. Reality is blurred; dialogue is filtered; nothing seems real. The atmosphere is breathless, claustrophobic, and terrifying. Eilish has no breathing space, no time to get a solid footing, barely recoiling from one catastrophe before being thrust into another. She is powerless to arrest the daily shrinkage of her world. Her inability to get closure on the whereabouts of her loved ones realistically reflects the heart-wrenching reality of those who survive. She is at the mercy of others, especially when she tries to escape with her surviving children. Her journey, described in harrowing detail, echoes the journey thousands of refugees take to escape persecution from their totalitarian governments in their war-torn lands.

This is not an easy read. But it is an essential one. Paul Lynch brilliantly captures the lives of those experiencing the violence and terror of totalitarian regimes. His song of grief at human suffering is a forceful and eloquent plea for the empathy and compassion due to those currently living the nightmare and those trying to escape it.

Lady Tan's Circle of Women

Lisa See

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See vividly captures upper class life in 15th century imperial China. The novel is based on the life of a historical figure, Tan Yunxian, a female physician who lived during the Ming Dynasty and whose book on Chinese medicine has survived the centuries.

Born into an elite family in 1461, Tan Yunxian is raised by her grandparents after the death of her mother. Both grandparents are doctors. Since male doctors were forbidden to see, touch, or speak directly to female patients, the need for female physicians emerged. Tan’s grandmother specialized in treating women’s illnesses and teaches Tan the foundations of Chinese medicine. Tan continues to practice what she has been taught even after her marriage into a prosperous family. She records female ailments and treatments in a notebook, per her grandmother’s instructions. She publishes these in a book, which later forms the foundational text in the treatment of women’s ailments. She also learns about midwifery through her life-long friendship with Meiling, a young midwife. The novel charts Tan’s life through to her early fifties when she becomes the female head of her husband’s household, responsible for all aspects of managing the house and the people within it.

In the process of depicting the challenges, successes, and failures of Tan’s life, Lucy See immerses the reader in the life of the upper classes in 15thC China. Her extensive research of the period is apparent. She demonstrates how the hierarchical social structures and gendered attitudes codify behavior and dictate dress and mannerisms. The rigid codes of conduct and rituals imposed on upper class girls and women are described in vivid detail. Tan is required to greet her grandparents a certain way, serve tea to her mother-in-law every morning, and bow her head in obeisance whenever she is spoken to by her husband or by those above her in the social and familial hierarchy. Women, regardless of class, are treated as the property of men and are expected to be seen but not heard. Their sole function is to birth sons to continue the legacy of their husbands’ families.

Woven throughout the novel are formulas for traditional Chinese medicines as well as maxims about life. In intricate detail, See describes jeweled, textured, and decorative clothing; elaborate hairstyles and hair pins; precise application of makeup; and socially constructed mannerisms and norms for females. Her setting is authentic; her portrayal of social mores convincing. She also describes in graphic detail the very painful process of Chinese foot binding, the purpose of which is to restrict female mobility, differentiate upper class women and concubines from lower class women with “big feet,” and increase their sexual attractiveness to future husbands. In spite of all the rigid restrictions imposed on women, Tan Yunxian manages to create a safe, gendered space for herself and for other women.

In addition to depicting life in 15th century China, the novel conveys the important role a circle of women plays in the sharing of experiences, in validating women’s voices, and in supporting one another to address uniquely female challenges and ailments. This was true in Tan Yunxian’s 15th Century China. It is no less true today.  

An accomplished historical novel that illuminates a fascinating period in Chinese history.

Barbara Isn't Dying Yet

Alina Bronsky; trans. Tim Mohr

Barbara Isn’t Dying Yet by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr, charts the gradual awakening of Walter Schmidt, a curmudgeon grandfather and retiree in his seventies.

Walter wakes up one morning and is surprised that the familiar smell of coffee hasn’t wafted all the way up to his bedroom. The initial irritation that his wife Barbara is late in making his coffee becomes more pronounced when he finds her lying on the bathroom floor. He helps her get back into bed, fully anticipating she will be up and about in no time to make him his coffee. When Barbara is unable to get out of bed, Walter reluctantly embarks on a journey where he has to learn to fend for himself.

The opening chapters of the novel are funny. Walter struggles to navigate his way around what is very much Barbara’s kitchen. He searches cabinets for coffee, wrestles with the coffee machine, and then abandons the enterprise to purchase coffee and pastries from a local bakery. He convinces himself Barbara will be fine after she has had something to eat. But, alas, for poor Walter, Barbara’s condition deteriorates. When their son insists on taking her to the doctor and then to the hospital to run tests, Walter doesn’t want to know the diagnosis. Barbara’s refusal to go the hospital reinforces his conviction that she’s fine and simply needs nourishment.

Walter’s pride initially prevents him for listening to his children’s advice to hire a cleaning lady and cook. He assumes the unfamiliar role of caregiver and provider. He goes grocery shopping and becomes adept at cooking by watching a chef on the internet. He takes the dog for walks and is constantly bombarded by apparent strangers who ask him about Barbara’s health. He discovers Barbara has friends on the internet, is popular in the neighborhood, and does volunteer work at a local center.

It gradually dawns on poor Walter he has been so selfishly focused on himself during their 50 years of marriage that he was thoroughly oblivious to all aspects of Barbara’s life, including how she had organized everything—from her pristine kitchen to her daily routine—to cater to his every need. He takes faltering steps in recognizing his total dependence on her and on his selfishness and emotional distance from his wife and children. He appreciates all that Barbara has done for him and tries to demonstrate this appreciation by cooking elaborate meals for her. But Barbara has lost her appetite and won’t eat. When Barbara’s friends parade in the house to visit her with food and flowers, when their children break down in tears, when she weakens physically on a daily basis, it becomes apparent to all—all except Walter—that Barbara is dying.

In the skilled hands of Alina Bronsky, what begins as humorous, almost slapstick comedy morphs into a moving, bittersweet tale of an elderly man’s awakening. Kicking and screaming all the way, Walter transforms himself from a self-absorbed, rude, grumpy old man to a compassionate human being who finally appreciates his wife, who recognizes the importance of human connection, and who goes out of his way to help strangers. Using diction that draws you in, Bronsky succeeds in making us like and sympathize with this elderly curmudgeon. She concludes the novel with a poignant image that tugs at the heartstrings.

The Gardens of Consolation

Parisa Reza; trans. Adriana Hunter

The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, opens in 1918 in Iran. The narrative is in five sections. The first two sections focus on Talla and Sardar, their marriage and their departure from their small Iranian village to a suburb of Tehran. The third section transitions from Talla and Sardar to their son, Bahram. And the final two sections focus almost exclusively on Bahram, his shenanigans with women and his political activities.

The novel is set against the background of internal political upheaval in Iran while world powers jockey for power and for control of Iran’s rich natural resources. The politics becomes increasingly prominent as the novel progresses until it virtually dominates the latter sections as Bahram becomes embroiled with the various political factions demanding reforms as well as the expulsion of colonial powers.

The Talla and Sardar sections of the novel are engaging. Young and illiterate, they enter into their marriage having a modicum of knowledge of one another. But they develop a tender love toward one another, are fiercely loyal and protective of one another, endure challenges, work hard, share a profound appreciation for the beauty in their natural surroundings, demonstrate an unconditional love toward their son, and embrace unwavering faith in God. The images in these sections, especially of the young married couple as they cross the desert to their new home, are powerful. Talla and Sardar are simple, modest, genuine, honest peasants who show little understanding for or concern with the political upheavals swirling around them. Their life together is described in simplistic, almost child-like diction.

The latter sections focus on Bahram, his schooling and his young adulthood. A gifted, talented student, Bahram develops a reputation as a lady’s man. He spends much of his time using his good looks and charm to ensnare young women, calculating moves and words with precision to bring about the desired outcome. He becomes politically active, debating the pros and cons of various political factions. These explorations read almost like a history lesson. They deliver a crash course in Iranian politics and the violent coups of the early twentieth-century and conclude with the CIA-orchestrated coup of 1953.

Reza’s narrative transitions from an exploration of a humble peasant family with its rituals, traditions, and beliefs to a society experiencing vast changes domestically and internationally. It is both a deeply personal and touching love story and a sweeping panorama of the complex socio-political and economic history of early to mid-twentieth-century Iran.  

The Royal Physician's Visit

Per Olov Enquist; trans. Tiina Nunnally

The Royal Physician’s Visit by Per Olov Enquist, translated from the Swedish by Tiina Nunnally, is a compelling historical novel set in the royal court of Denmark beginning in the 1760s.

The drama begins when the inept and seemingly mad monarch King Christian VII is assigned Johann Friedrick Struensee as his personal physician. Struensee is an intellectual German doctor who has embraced Enlightenment idealism. The two form a bond with Christian becoming increasingly reliant on Struensee to direct him. Eventually, Christian makes Struensee the de facto ruler of Denmark, granting him the power to issue decrees and reform institutions based on the principles of Enlightenment. Struensee abolishes torture, frees the press, reduces the size of the army, and holds even the rich and powerful accountable under the new laws.

Not surprisingly, Struensee makes powerful enemies within the establishment, including the Dowager Queen and the Machiavellian religious zealot, Count Guldberg. It doesn’t help his position that he has an affair with Christian’s wife, Queen Caroline Mathilde, and fathers a child with her. The nature of his liberal reforms, the speed with which he implements them, and his love affair with Queen Caroline eventually give his enemies enough ammunition to have him executed. All his liberal reforms and efforts are reversed after his death.  

The novel is based on extensive historical research. Enquist cites letters and reports from various government officials, including foreign ministers and ambassadors to the Danish court. Christian is portrayed as an unruly sick child, prone to temper tantrums and incoherent ramblings. His childhood upbringing and education are designed to break his spirit and turn him into an obedient, obsequious puppet with the goal of creating a power vacuum to be filled by members of the court. He is subject to beatings, rote memorization of speeches, required to act a certain way, publicly humiliated, and beaten into submission. These pedagogical methods are successful in that Christian becomes pitiable, child-like, convinced he is acting in a play, and always in search of someone to direct him. What the court does not anticipate is the power vacuum so methodically created will be filled by Struensee.

The novel’s characters emerge as authentic, fully-developed, and unique individuals. They love and hate with a passion. They plot and scheme in a Danish court riddled with corruption and hypocrisy. They come alive. Christian is sympathetic, babbling, paranoid, weak, and delusional. The young Princess Catherine emerges as a strong, fearless queen. Struensee is an intellectual whose heart is in the right place but who moves too quickly to implement reforms. And Guldberg, who suffers from low self-image, justifies his cruelty by claiming he is saving Denmark from catastrophe. The novel concludes as it began with the British Ambassador to Copenhagen describing Christian’s obsequious behavior toward Guldberg while attending the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen in 1782, ten years after the execution of Struensee.  

A blend of historical events with plausible embellishments, coupled with an intriguing narrative voice that probes into motives and asks rhetorical questions to engage the reader. A successfully executed and compelling read.

Paradise

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Set just before the beginning of the first World War, Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah explores the life of Yusuf, a teenager sold as an indentured servant to pay off his father’s debt to Aziz, a rich and powerful Arab merchant.

Yusuf works in Aziz’s shop and then joins him as he treks Africa’s interior in a trade caravan. The journey exposes him to an Africa rife with tribal warfare, brutality, corruption, bribery, disease, superstition, and slavery. He encounters African Muslims, Arabs, Europeans, and Indians; tribes that are hostile and tribes that are welcoming; terrain that is taxing and terrain that is breathtakingly beautiful. After his return to his village, Yusuf encounters the German army as it forcibly assembles village males to serve as soldiers in preparation for the war. The novel concludes with Yusuf running towards the German army instead of running away from it.

This story of an African boy’s coming of age is set against the background of a pre-colonial, turbulent Africa. Snatched from his parents at a young age, Yusuf lacks a firm grounding. His exposure to the different ethnicities and systems of belief continue to baffle him and leave him without a firm foothold. His odyssey depicts him as a pawn in the hands of others. More acted upon than acting, he is tossed about from one location to the next, going where he is told to go and doing what he is told to do. He is stripped of all agency. His good looks garner unwelcome advances from both men and women, advances which he is constantly having to thwart. One such attempt at seduction is strikingly similar to Zulaikha’s attempt to seduce the prophet Yusuf in Surah 12 of the Qur’an. Tragically, because he has never been free, Yusuf opts to be included in the German army rather than experience the alternative—the terror of freedom.

A complex novel, episodic in nature, that is as much about the exploitation of a young boy as it is about the exploitation of a whole continent in the hands of its European colonizers.

A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki unfolds in two parallel lines. It opens with Nao, a Japanese American teenager who has been transplanted from Silicon Valley back to Japan when her father loses his job. Nao is sixteen years old and is thoroughly miserable. She is bullied mercilessly at school, ostracized for being a Japanese American, worries about her suicidal father, and contemplates her own potential suicide. She writes her thoughts in a diary which she hides inside the covers of a volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Somehow the diary washes up in a Hello Kitty lunchbox on an island in British Columbia.

Ruth, a Japanese American writer who lives with her husband on the island, stumbles on the lunchbox. Her husband suspects it arrived on the throes of the tsunami. Ruth begins to decipher its contents, which include Nao’s diary and old letters from Nao’s great uncle, a Kamikaze pilot during World War II. His letters are addressed to Jiko, his mother and Nao’s great grandmother, a 105-year-old former anarchist now turned a Zen Buddhist nun.

The parallel threads alternate between Nao’s dairy and Ruth’s life on the island. Nao describes the punches, bruises, and sadistic bullying she experiences in the hands of her Japanese classmates. Severely depressed during the school year, she experiences transformation and spiritual growth the summer she spends with her great grandmother in the Buddhist monastery. There she learns to empty her mind, breathe fresh air, meditate, and scrub the dead skin off great grandmother’s back.

Meanwhile, Ruth struggles with writer’s block and with the challenges of living on an island beset with severe storms and frequent power cuts. She paces herself as she reads Nao’s diary and scours the internet to learn about Nao, her father, and her anarchist great grandmother.

The novel’s strength lies primarily in the Nao sections. Nao’s teenage voice is unique and authentic. She is irreverent, funny, articulate, and intelligent. Her story is compelling; her description of the abuse she experiences at the hands of her classmates is heart-breaking. Her sections keep the novel afloat, unlike the Ruth sections which tend to drag and have little content.

The novel is a hodgepodge. As the parallel threads unfold, Ozeki peppers the narrative with Zen Buddhism; Ruth’s attempts to decipher the documents in the lunchbox; interactions with a mysterious crow visitor to the island; bizarre happenings in which words disappear from the page; Nao’s halting conversations with her great uncle’s ghost; Ruth’s long dream sequence; alternative realities opening up different possibilities; parallel threads across time and space which seem to merge; Japanese phrases translated in copious footnotes. And to conclude it all, she includes a lecture on quantum mechanics.

A potpourri of a novel that plays with the concept of time, blurring the lines between the past and the present, reality and illusion, the here and the now, and with smatterings of Zen Buddhism thrown in for good measure.

The House of Doors

Tan Twan Eng

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng opens in 1947 in Doornfontein, South Africa. Lesley Hamlyn has just received Somerset Maugham’s collection of short stories in The Casuarina Tree. Cradling the book in her hands, she is transported back to the time she and her husband lived in Penang, Malaya, in the 1920s. She recalls the year 1921 when Somerset Maugham, her husband’s close friend, spent two weeks with them in Malaya. Maugham was accompanied by his secretary/lover, Gerald Haxton. As she reads his stories, Lesley marvels at how Maugham wove facts with fiction in crafting his stories.

Having set the background, Tan Twan Eng unfolds the novel in two threads. The first thread takes place in 1921 and consists of Lesley’s meeting with Maugham and subsequent conversations with him. The second thread consists of Lesley revealing to Maugham the events that occurred in 1910, eleven years before she met him. Included in these events is the discovery of her husband’s infidelity, her own affair, her political activism with Sun Yat-Sen’s movement to overthrow the government in China, and the trial of Ethel Proudlock for murder.

In essence, The House of Doors is about how real events and experiences are manipulated into material for fiction. Somerset Maugham does this when he crafts Lesley’s revelations into material for his short stories; and Tan Twan Eng does it by weaving into his novel Somerset Maugham’s actual Penang visit and referencing the short stories which emerged from the visit. The result is a book about memory, about the hunger to tell our stories and be heard, about the building blocks that form the foundations for story-telling, and about love and forgiveness.

Tan’s style is elegant and restrained; his prose, descriptive; his verbs, active; his recreation of the sights and sounds of plush, exotic landscapes, immersive; his characters, authentic; and his ability to weave an engaging story, masterful.

Highly recommended.

River Spirit

Leila Aboulela

River Spirit by Leila Aboulela is the story of the Mahdist war in the Sudan during the 1880s. The Mahdi claims to be descended from the Prophet of Islam. His ostensible mission is to conduct a holy war to liberate Sudan from its Ottoman-Egyptian colonial oppressors.

The novel unfolds through the perspectives of several different characters. Some are first-person narratives; others are in third person. Included is the perspective of Musa, an idealistic young man who aligns himself with the Mahdi uprising. Other perspectives are those of Yaseen, a young man who works with the Turkish colonialists; Richard, a Scottish artist who has come to Sudan to seek renewal after the tragic death of his wife; Fatimah, Yaseen’s mother; Salha, Yaseen’s wife; and Charles Gordon, the British general sent to quell the revolution and evacuate the British from Khartoum. The central figure is Akuany, later re-named Zamzam. She is a young woman who is sold into slavery several times over and who experiences the uprising from different vantage points. The chapters rotate between the perspectives of different characters but always return to Akuany as the anchor.

Aboulela presents a panoramic view of the Mahdi’s uprising and its impact on the people. Although she presents alternative views on the uprising and on colonial power, her lens focuses on those traditionally marginalized by the larger political context, namely, the experience of women and what women do in order to survive. At the end of the novel, Salha reflects on the impact of the uprising. Through letters, she reveals that after the Madhi’s unexpected death, his mantle is picked up by another who claims to be the new Mahdi and who proceeds to oppress the people. A revolution waged on behalf of the people ends up terrorizing its people. Desperate for a solution, the population seek a new redeemer only to be repeatedly let down and tossed from one oppressive government to another.

There is much to be admired in the novel. The wide scope and panoramic view immerse the reader in Sudan’s complex history during the 1880s. The novel effectively illustrates the desperate plight of a population ready to cling to anything promising hope. But the shifting of numerous perspectives can feel choppy and confusing at times, and some sections of the novel are better integrated than others. A few of the characters are not well developed and emerge merely as mouthpieces for specific points of view. However, if the goal is to capture a time in Sudan’s turbulent history from a variety of vantage points and shed light on the deleterious impact of colonialism, slavery, and the desperation of its population, then Aboulela has succeeded.

Tom Lake

Ann Patchett

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett unfolds in two interlocking threads. The first thread consists of flashbacks in which Lara Nelson, the narrator, tells her three grown daughters about the summer she played the role of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The second thread consists of the present in which the whole family works long hours to harvest the cherries in their Michigan farm. Popping in and out of both threads is Lara’s husband, Joe.

The three Nelson siblings are sequestered at home during the pandemic lockdown. They badger their mother to tell them about her short-lived experience as a young actress, including her stint at the Tom Lake summer stock theatre. They are particularly interested in her relationship with Peter Duke, a fellow actor and ex-boyfriend who later became a famous movie star. Lara muses on how much to reveal to her daughters and how much to hold back. The narrative voice alternates between Lara’s storytelling of her coming-of age, eventful summer in the long ago past and Lara as the first-person narrator telling the story to her grown daughters in the present. The switch from present to past and back again is done seamlessly.

The two threads intertwine and are integral to one another, enhancing the storytelling. Lara’s flashbacks are interrupted with comments and questions from her daughters. They demand details of her past, demonstrating their insatiable appetite to learn about their parents’ lives, pre-marriage and pre-children. Meanwhile, the family picks cherries during the day, swims in the lake for the occasional reprieve, and eats dinner together at night. Weaving in and out of both threads are references to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, when Lara and her co-actors rehearse the play, and to Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. What emerges from the two threads is the contrast between a young girl’s passionate first love with the strong, resilient, and mature love Lara feels for her husband and their three daughters.

The characters are lovingly and authentically portrayed. Each of the siblings has a unique identity with unique interests and unique temperaments. They bicker and tease one another, and tolerate one another’s foibles. But the strength of their bond is never questioned. Similarly, Lara’s and Joe’s relationship is on a firm foundation built of enduring love. Some of the best moments in the novel consist of the dialogue and touching moments between family members, especially when the girls begin to empathize with the young woman their mother once was.  

Unfolding in precise, measured prose, Ann Patchet’s quiet, unassuming book is a warm meditation on first love, on family love, on parenting, on marriage, and on the relationship between mothers and daughters. This is a beautiful story beautifully told with sensitivity and insight.

The Four Winds

Kristin Hannah

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah is set during the Great Depression.

The novel opens in 1921 in Texas with a young Elsa, marginalized by her abusive family and suffering from low self-esteem. She becomes pregnant, marries the father of her child, and moves in with his family. She quickly adjusts to farm life and gains acceptance and love from her in-laws. Elsa feels she belongs for the first time in her life. But then disaster strikes.

Severe draught and unrelenting dust storms plague Texas. The depression hits. Life becomes a grinding nightmare. Elsa’s husband abandons her and their two children. When dust inhaled in her son’s lungs causes his serious illness, Elsa decides it’s time to leave Texas. She takes her two children to the greener pastures of California. But reality soon hits. Her meager funds leave her no choice but to live in a make-shift camp with hundreds of others who, like her, have come to California hoping to find work. She becomes a field laborer, is exploited and castigated by landowners and town dwellers. The novel concludes with Elsa’s involvement in organizing a workers’ strike, an activity which leads to her ultimate demise.

The novel is weak in several areas. Its only strength lies in the detailed description of the dust storms and draught that plague the landscape. Hannah immerses the reader in howling winds and raging dust that get into every nook and cranny of the house and cover every inch and crevice of the body and clothing. Unfortunately, that is the only redeeming quality of the novel. The characters are flat, one-dimensional types with little depth. They never emerge as well-rounded, interesting individuals. The prose loses energy by suffering from too much telling and not enough showing. Attempts to manipulate emotions are blatantly transparent. The reader is constantly told what to think and feel, which is not the same as experiencing a feeling generated by descriptions of the situation. The contrived ending left a lot to be desired and was another obvious attempt at emotional manipulation.

Suffice it to say, the novel was disappointing. It just wasn’t for me.

House of Odysseus

Claire North

House of Odysseus by Claire North picks up where Ithaca, the first book in the series, left off.

The opening scenes of the novel plunge Penelope into a maelstrom. She continues to struggle with the suitors. Meanwhile, Telemachus has abandoned her to look for his father. To add to her complications, Elektra arrives in Ithaca with her brother, Orestes, seeking refuge. Plagued by the Furies who hover over him and chomp at the bit to avenge the murder of his mother, Orestes is a babbling mess. He has apparently descended into guilt-ridden madness for the matricide. Close on their heels is their uncle, King Menelaus. His ostensible aim is to help his nephew. But his real aim is to seize the throne of Mycenae from Orestes by declaring him mad. What follows is a thrilling, exciting, fast-paced novel saturated with palace intrigue and populated with unforgettable, well-developed characters.

The novel unfolds in the first-person narrative voice of Aphrodite. She watches the events unfold and comments on the proceedings and the characters in her inimitable manner. She is sensuous, bawdy, scandalous, irreverent, and funny—everything one imagines a goddess of love to be. Her interactions with Athene and Artemis show her skill in communication. She carefully measures when to speak, when to touch, and when to back off so as not to risk offending her fellow immortals.

The novel’s characters are authentic, well-crafted, and convincing. Menelaus is cruel, vindictive, malicious, and power-hungry. A shrewd Laertes provides comic relief in his banters with Menelaus. But it is Penelope who emerges as the star player. She is intelligent, shrewd, and a brilliant strategist. It is fascinating to watch her and Menelaus as they try to out maneuver each other in a deadly game, articulating pleasantries that neither one means, and exhibiting behaviors riddled with deceit.

In true feminist fashion, the novel celebrates woman power. Penelope’s entourage of women are fiercely loyal to her. They protect, support, and obey her while maintaining a façade of frivolous, helpless women in order to fool Menelaus and his motley crew of Spartans. Priene, her fearless warrior, exudes strength and power. Helen fools everyone with her drunken, mindless babble. And Elektra matures from a selfish, arrogant girl to a woman who understands her place and who recognizes her reliance on the intelligence and political savvy of Penelope. And ever present in the background is the cacking laughter of the Furies.

Claire North fleshes out the story of Ithaca during Odysseus’ long absence. By retelling the story to include Menelaus’ scheme to usurp his nephew’s throne, she adds a new level of intrigue, suspicion, and suspense to an Ithaca already beset with problems. Her retelling is engaging, rich in historical detail, and an absolute delight to read.

By the Sea

Abdulrazak Gurnah

By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of two refugees from Zanzibar whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways.

The novel opens with Saleh Omar’s arrival in a foggy coastal town in England. He has fled his home to seek asylum in England. An anomaly because he is older than most asylum seekers, he is initially sent to a detention center. He carries a fake passport in the name of Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, and he pretends he cannot speak English. Rachel, a social worker specializing in immigration cases, takes an interest in his case. She contacts Latif Mahmud, originally from Zanzibar, to act as translator. Latif Mahmud, who just happens to be the son of Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, is a professor of literature in a London university. He is curious to know who has taken on his father’s identity.

After Saleh Omar reveals to Rachel he is fluent in English, she contacts Latif Mahmud to tell him his translation services are no longer needed. But Latif Mahmud decides he wants to meet this elderly refugee from Zanzibar to discover why he assumed the identity of his father. The two finally meet and unravel the complex story of the tangled relationship between Saleh Omar and Latif Mahmud’s family. They are initially distrustful of each other and share different versions of the past through extended flashbacks. Eventually, their versions coalesce, with each filling gaps in the other’s story.

Much of the novel takes the form of stories recalling the past. Saleh Omar shares his stories with Rachel and then with Latif Mahmud. It is through these stories he becomes a character in his own tale. He describes his initial success in his furniture business, his marriage, his incarceration, his release after many years, and his eventual escape from his homeland. Latif Mahmud has his own story to tell of his family life, a scholarship to study in East Germany, and his escape to England.

The novel moves at a slow pace with leaps backward and forward in time. What emerges from the story is the strong sense of displacement experienced by both characters. Although Latif Mahmud is a successful author and university professor and although Saleh Omar is settled comfortably in his new surroundings, neither one feels at home. The two come together because of a shared history in a country that spit them out and because of shared feelings of displacement in a foreign land.

Abdulrazak Gurnah conveys the complexity of his characters’ psychologies and their feelings of rootlessness with sensitivity and compassion. He probes delicately into the psychology of refugees clinging to the stories of their former lives as a means of remembering who they are and where they came from while simultaneously struggling to make sense of their new lives in an alien land.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Mark Haddon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon unfolds in the first-person point of view of Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy with autism. The novel is an unusual combination of genres: a coming-of-age novel with a detective story. Christopher is portrayed authentically and with a sensitivity laced with gentle humor.

Christopher lives with his father. Because he is incapable of lying, he believes it when his father tells him his mother died in hospital of a heart attack. His life is very regulated. He has his likes and dislikes, avoids anything in yellow and brown, goes to school where he excels in math, and determines the quality of his day by the number of red or yellow cars he sees on the way to school. He seems moderately content, that is until he finds his neighbor’s dog with a garden fork plunged through his chest. Christopher embarks on “detecting” to solve the mystery of who killed the dog. And that is when his life begins to unravel. His “detecting” leads to unintended consequences. He uncovers information that erodes trust in his father, after which he embarks on a terrifying journey on London’s trains and subways.

What makes this book so fascinating is the insight we gain into the mind of a child with autism. Christopher is an autistic savant—a genius when it comes to facts and figures. His ability to see and to recall details is prodigious. His matter-of-fact revelations about his likes and dislikes, his need for routine and structure, his love of science and mathematics, his quirks, his logic, his literal-minded understanding, his need for specificity, his fear of crowds and of being touched, his interactions with others—all are, at times, hilarious, and, at other times, poignant and emotionally heart-breaking. His trip to London realistically captures his fear of being in unfamiliar settings, surrounded by crowds. But it also captures his immense bravery and determination to overcome obstacles.

In Christopher Boone, Mark Haddon has created an unforgettable character who elicits compassion, empathy, and understanding. The irony is he does it through a character who is emotionally detached, one who is completely oblivious to the emotional lives of people around him—even those who love him and try to protect him.

An impressive achievement. Highly recommended.