Category: book reviews / recommendations

I picked up a copy of Colum McCann’s new novel, Zoli, when I was in New York for the PEN festival, on the recommendation of a couple of friends, including my editor at Algonquin. The story begins in the 1930s, when a young Roma girl named Marienka (nicknamed Zoli) loses her entire family in an attack by Hlinka guards. (Fascist attacks against such minorities were common in Czechoslovakia at the time.) Zoli escapes with her grandfather, and together they join a kumpanija, a traveling group of Romani musicians. Zoli’s extraordinary ability to remember and to write songs and poems soon attracts notice–from Swann, an expat translator, and Stransky, a Slovak poet and editor. Zoli’s growing fame is quickly co-opted by the Communists, who want to make of her a poster child of Romani “integration” in a new society. The novel explores questions of belonging–national, cultural, linguistic–as well as class and ideology, without ever once slipping into a harangue. A rare feat these days. McCann immersed himself in Roma culture to write this novel, and the care with which he draws this world is palpable. He breathes life into very different characters, giving them each the space in which to tell their story. A great book.

A father and son walk along a road in a post-apocalyptic future. Around them, everything is dead or dying. Between sunup and sundown, the sky’s color changes by only a few shades of gray. It’s numbingly cold, and ash falls from the sky nearly all the time. The reader is never told what could have caused the world to turn out like this, but it’s not hard to imagine that it could be a nuclear explosion. In the end, it doesn’t much matter what caused it all, because there is life to attend to. The little boy needs to be fed and protected, and the father devotes himself to that. There are other survivors, but it’s hard to tell who “the good guys” are, those “who carry the fire.” McCarthy ventures into the deepest, darkest recesses of the human heart, and chronicles what he sees in vivid, yet restrained prose. Some survivors engage in cannibalism; others have organized in armies, red scarves at their necks, killing and stealing and rampaging; slavery reappears; and through all this madness the father must find food and protect his little boy. I had to put this book down a couple of times because I was not sure I could finish it. But I cared about the characters far too much to stay away, and so I picked it up again and finished it in one sitting. What Cormac McCarthy has done in his new novel is difficult, brave, and incredibly well-executed. A masterpiece.

I’ve had a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for a long, long while, and I finally got to read it last week, on the plane to New York. It’s her memoir of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of a massive heart attack while their only daughter, Quintana, was in the hospital, receiving treatment for septic shock. (After the book was completed, but before its publication, Quintana passed away, in an almost unbearable post scriptum.) Didion chronicles the process of grief and mourning with stunning clarity, and many times I was moved to tears and had to put the book down. But there were also moments when I was frustrated by the sheer amount of control in the prose, as if the words could somehow serve as refuge from things Didion might not want the reader to know.

This weekend I tried reading Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack, translated by John Cullen. Khadra, you may recall, is the pseudonym of Algerian novelist (and ex army officer) Mohamed Moulessehoul. While his earlier work was set in his native Algeria, The Swallows of Kabul was set in Afghanistan, The Attack is set in Israel, and his latest, The Sirens of Baghdad, is set in Iraq. (By the way, do you think his next one will be set in Iran? With a title like The Sparrows of Tehran?)

The Attack is about a successful Arab Israeli surgeon named Amin Jaafari who works to save the many victims of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, only to discover that his wife Sihem was behind the terrorist attack. Let’s just say I couldn’t get very far into the novel. I thought it relied too much on cliché both in terms of character development, and in terms of the language itself (e.g., “The eyes in [a sheikh] ascetic’s face glinted like the blade of a scimitar.”)

I just finished reading Tahmima Anam’s first book, A Golden Age, a historical novel set during the Bangladeshi war of independence. It follows a young widow named Rehana, as she tries to keep her small family–her son Sohail, and her daughter Maya–together through the horror of the 1971 war with Pakistan. A Golden Age has one of the best opening chapters I’ve read in a while, and so it was good to see it included in the latest issue of Granta magazine (Granta 96: War Zones).

Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s It’s Not And All Night Fair is one of those books where very little happens–a man travels from Jakarta to his home village in Java to see his father, who is fatally ill–and yet I couldn’t put it down. It paints the portrait of a complex father-son relationship in modern-day Indonesia. The father fought for independence from the Dutch, chose to stay in his village, and has clung to his ideals, while the narrator has only known the corrupt rule of Sukarno, has moved to the big city, and is mostly preoccupied with making it. Once, the father had been offered a chance to join a local assembly, which would have meant he could have become part of the ruling elite, but he refused the appointment: “The local assembly is only a stage. And I don’t fancy becoming a clown–even a big clown.” By contrast, the son worries about the cost of everything, and describes his salary as being ” only enough to allow you to go on breathing.” We get a picture of a country in which hopes of a better life after independence have been dashed, and where the older man has more aspirations than the younger one. The prose is very plain, but the images are striking. On a long evening, for example, we are told that “the night outside went on swallowing the span of men’s lives.” The book stayed with me.

It’s Not And All Night Fair was originally published in 1951, translated from Bahasa Indonesia by C.W. Watson in 1973, and finally released in the United States last fall.