Confession, by Martín Kohan

 

9781913867652

Charco Press, 2023

originally published as Confesión, 2020

translated by Daniel Hahn

162 pp

paperback

(read in March)

Confession is not a long novel, coming in at less than two hundred pages, but its short length disguises the complexity within. It also has a shocker of an ending that completely rattled me for days after finishing this book.  Related in three interconnected parts, the author sets this novel timewise over three periods: before, during and after Argentina's military dictatorship that existed between 1976 and 1983.

Briefly, since to tell any more would be to utterly ruin the reading experience, the narrator of parts one and three is the grandson of a certain Mirta López, and as the novel opens, he takes the reader back to a time in 1941 when his grandmother was a young girl first becoming aware of her sexuality.  It begins with Mirta confessing to her priest at the church of San Patricio in Mercedes.  Sometimes, she says, she experiences a "powerful tremor, a kind of whirpool, only hot, in her stomach, in her whole belly, a thing kind of like a fever and a perspiration ..." that was only calmed by "squeezing her thighs together."   All of this happens whenever she sees the oldest son of the Videla family walking by her dining room window, either going to or from the train station.  He would come home from his school, arriving on Satudays and going back on Sundays, and Mirta waited for him by her window faithfully every weekend.  As her feelings toward the Videla boy intensify and grow more sexual,  the number of trips she makes to the confessional increase, but  her disclosures grow less candid than previously.   Eventually she realizes that she's confessing with "omissions," realizing that if God is "all-knowing" then He must also be all-forgiving.   Mirta goes on to marry, but not to the Videla boy, who married a year later when a lieutenant in the army at the age of 23.  Interspersed throughout this section is another entire strand dealing with the Rio de la Plata, which makes up part of the border between Uruguay and Argentina and upon the shores of which sits the city of Buenos Aires.   The significance of this second narrative strand is highlighted in the second part of this novel, which describes the actions of a group of people, all of whom have "adopted a new name" to create a sort of anonymity as they plot to "strike at the regime, and in as extreme a way as possible." Their plan had been hatched in July of 1976, with the ultimate goal of   "killing the tyrant."  The group's members work both on the streets and below them, trying to conceal what they're doing from prying eyes and from state surveillance, which is everywhere.  In part three, we are reunited with an elderly Mirta López in the present day, during a visit from her grandson at the facility where she now lives.  The author sets up this section brilliantly, as the  two play a card game called truco, the main complexity of which, as noted here, "lies in the need to deceive the opponent and avoid being deceived."   Her short-term memory isn't what it used to be, but she hasn't lost the long-term memory which during this game her grandson tries to plumb to get answers about what she knows about his father who disappeared during the military dictatorship.  Little by little, in between plays of the game, he is able to elicit information that will ultimately tie all of the pieces of this novel together into a unified and extremely painful whole.  

I am drawn to books set during the time of the military dictatorship in Argentina, and Confession left me absolutely stunned. It continued to haunt me for some time, and reflecting on it now brings back all of the feelings it produced the first time around.    Each section of this novel focuses on some aspect of secrets that are held, thoughts or deeds that are left unspoken, things that are both known and unknown -- and what happens when those make their way to the surface.   The author explores the continuing impact of the past on the present, most especially in the ways in which ordinary lives are often randomly caught up in or bound to history.    It is one of the best books I've read this year, and without hesitation I can definitely recommend it.   

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch

 

9780861546459

Oneworld, 2023

308 pp

hardcover

As with more than a few books I've read recently, Prophet Song drew my attention by way of this year's Booker Prize longlist, from which it has now moved on to the shortlist.  This book was such a powerful read that it made me cry at the end, and that does not happen every day.  

With no back story to explain how it happened (and really, in my opinion, one is not needed -- the reader must accept that this is how things are for this story),  a group known as the National Alliance Party has come to power in Ireland, and under the pretext of combatting the "ongoing crisis facing the state," it has issued the Emergency Powers Act.  About a week later, the Party replaced the regular Secret Detective Unit  (which, according to a bit of research on my end has the mission to investigate "threats to State security" and to "monitor persons who pose a threat to this on both national and international fronts")  with the Garda National Services Board (GNSB), who are in control of the "maintenance of public order."  One person here refers to them as a sort of "secret police," which he notes, does not exist in Ireland, but given everything that is to come, is very likely a more realistic description.   As this story begins, it is two GNSB detectives to whom Eilish Stack opens her kitchen patio door one dark night, asking for her husband Larry, who is not home at the time.  They ask her to have him call when he returns, telling her that "it is nothing to worry about."   Eilish has no idea what this is all about, but she does have a feeling that "darkness has come into the house," something that she sees "skulking alongside her as she steps through the living room past the children." 

Larry, a teacher who is also the deputy general secretary of the Teachers' Union of Ireland, a "senior trade unionist," makes his way to the station, where he is told that in the eyes of the GNSB, his behavior seems to them to be the "conduct of someone inciting hatred against the state, someone sowing discord and unrest."  Evidently the party is not happy about an upcoming teachers' strike, and Larry, as it turns out, is working with Ireland's teachers "to negotiate for better conditions." Reminding the GNSB detectives that he has every legal right to do so, he leaves, but it's with an understanding that the familiar ground upon which he has been walking has most certainly shifted.  Soon the Stacks begin to hear of friends  being arrested, of constitutional rights being suspended and there are rumors of civil unrest and internment camps.  Eilish believes her phone is tapped and later, Larry is suddenly disappeared and no one knows anything about his whereabouts.   Eilish is warned to stay quiet, but refuses to do so,  drawing  the wrath of the government;  little by little she finds herself becoming more isolated, especially at her work.  With Larry gone, Eilish is left in sole charge of the family; she is also taking care of her widowed father, who lives alone and is sliding into dementia.  It takes all she has sometimes just to keep herself together so that she can be strong for her four children as their normal lives crumble.  She will soon discover that Larry's disappearance is only the beginning of her nightmare;  as the government works to consolidate its hold on the people through whatever means necessary,  she and her four children find themselves caught up in horrific events as they become part of a "society that is quickly unravelling."   Yet, it is not only society which is "unravelling" here -- the most powerful moments of this novel focus on Eilish as the situation takes an immense and unspeakable toll on each member of her family, leaving her to make some extremely painful choices in order to protect them and above all, to ensure their survival.  

About plot I will say no more, and the above description doesn't begin to cover all of the twists and turns that make the reading of this novel such a powerful experience.  While what happens here is set amid a "government turning toward tyranny," to think of Prophet Song as simply another work of  "dystopian fiction" does not do this novel justice.  That turn toward tyranny has happened, and more to the point is happening somewhere at sometime in our world, a reality with which we are all familiar, as well as a point strongly highlighted when the author writes

"... the prophet sings not of  the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report of on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore ..."

 Throughout the novel,  the author uses the present tense to not only communicate the ongoing changes that occur in the process, but also the very nowness of the situation, which is one factor in making this book so harrowing, and his examination of the lack of freedom of agency, as he notes here "when caught within such an enormity of forces" is another.   And while I will not divulge the ending, which actually flips the story back on the reader,  by the time I got there I was absolutely in tears, thinking not just of Eilish but of real-world mothers who have experienced some of the same terrors and who have somehow summoned the courage it must have taken to make the same kind of unbearable decisions, and quite frankly, who have come to a point at which they feel they must gamble everything  to protect their families under some of the same conditions.  

I loved this book and cannot say enough good things about it; this story will haunt me for some time and it is one I most definitely recommend.  

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka

 

9781908745903

Sort of Books, 2022

385 pp

hardcover

Not too far into the first chapter I realized that this book and I were going to get along just fine, and I was right.  To put it bluntly, I effing loved this book and have been telling everyone about it. 

  The author sets his story in 1990, and as it opens,  the main character Maali Almeida wakes up (as he believes)  "hungover" to find himself in an "endless waiting room" not knowing how he got there.  He is sure that he's hallucinating, having a "trippy dream" from the "silly pills" given to him by his friend Jaki, but he's actually awoken in the afterlife where he is standing in a queue.  Evidently it is as completely disorganized as any typical earthly bureaucracy, with plenty of people complaining and the office "short-staffed and looking for volunteers."   The woman who seems to be checking him in hands him a dried printed palm leaf, telling him that he needs to get his ears checked, his "deaths counted," his "sins coded" and his "moons registered," and that he (along with everyone else coming in that day) has "seven moons."  Here seven moons equates to seven days, rather than the typically-understood idea of moons as months;  Almeida is also handed a checklist of things to be taken care of before he can enter "The Light," which is, as the woman notes, "Whatever You Need It To Be."  That is the short answer; later he will learn that all who come here to "wander the In Between" have his or her allotted moons "To recall past lives. And then, to forget."  For some remaining in the In Between, however, "forgetting cures nothing," believing that "Wrongs must be remembered."  

Very briefly, largely because I'm so behind here,  in 1990, Sri Lankans were in the thick of that country's civil war which had begun in 1983 and didn't end until 2009.   It was a violent, horrific time, with death squads everywhere and scores of people being murdered or disappeared, many never to surface again.  Maali  Almeida is a photographer who had a complicated life, as noted at the beginning when he talks about what his business card might have said about him:  "Maali Almeida: Photographer.  Gambler. Slut."  He had lost lots of money at the casinos, was (as quoted in the dustjacket blurb) a sort of outcast "closet gay"  in love with his friend DD (although he sleeps around on his many travels) and more importantly,  he  had been witness to the terror and the carnage through his work as a fixer for various groups including politicians, army officers, NGOs, the press, and other dubious clients. He figured that by working on all sides, he would be seen as favoring none of them, a strategy that in hindsight, obviously didn't work out well for him. He had also taken a number of photographs that as he had once told his friends, could "topple the government," now sitting in envelopes in a box under his bed.  These photos are incriminating to the point that if seen, "this country will burn again," but he had hoped that by making them public they might bring some sort of accountability and judgment, especially against those who participated in the 1983 massacres and other atrocities, or quite possibly even end the conflict.   Part of what Maali needs  to accomplish during his seven-moon span  is to somehow have his closest friends DD and Jaki   take out and exhibit these photos publicly, but there are certain constraints in place that make it difficult for him to make contact directly with the living, so he has to learn to rely on the dead (and in one case, a creepy medium linking both worlds) to help him in his task.   But that's not all -- he also wants to solve the mystery of his own death.  As time starts to tick down,  another mission is added to this lineup -- he will somehow need to protect his friends who, in the aftermath of Maali's photos, get caught up in a chain of events putting their lives in jeopardy.

This is a book I just could not stop reading, and the way the author structured his story I thought was absolute genius.  It is a mix of historical fiction, humor and political satire in which the author not only exposes the horrors of these dark years, but also through the many ghosts with whom Maali Almeida speaks, imagines what those who died during this conflict might say if only they had a voice, making me  wish that the book's original title, Chats With the Dead would have been retained.  It is also part ghost story and part whodunit, for me an unbeatable combination.  As seen in both the afterlife and in earthly life, the novel also speaks to those in positions of power who put their own self interests ahead of everything else, making it a timely read for sure. It's one of the most original books I've had the pleasure to have read in a long while, and most certainly a book I can recommend.  

The Trees, by Percival Everett

"History is a motherfucker." 

9781644450642

Graywolf Press, 2021

308 pp

paperback

Another novel from this year's Booker Prize longlist, but I first read it a year ago during my nothing-good-is-happening-in-my-life  funk so once again,  because of its inclusion on the longlist, it was a reminder that  I owed it to myself to do a second read.  Hell of a great book, for sure.  

The novel begins in "what might have been loosely considered a suburb, perhaps even called a neighborhood" by the name of Small Change,  just outside the  town of Money, Mississippi. Wheat Bryant,his wife Charlene and their four children  live in one of the  "small collection of vinyl-sided, split-level ranch and shotgun houses," and at present there is a small family gathering going on.   Wheat's widowed mother Carolyn (Granny C) lives there as well, tooling around the yard in her "wide-tired" electric buggy that had originally come from Sam's Club.  Times are hard -- Wheat is sort of permanently in between jobs after having fallen asleep at the wheel and nearly driving his truck off the Tallahatchie Bridge.  Rescue came, but so did the press, capturing "some forty empty cans of Falstaff beer spilling from the cab and raining into the current below."  Also at this small gathering is Wheat's cousin Junior Junior Milam.  Granny C is staring off into space, thinking about something that had happened in the past, a lie she'd told "all them years back."  She had "wronged" someone, and knows that "like it say in the good book, what goes around comes around."  She doesn't know the half of it, nor does she know how prophetic her words will turn out to be.  

The troubles begin when Deputy Sheriff Delroy Digby takes a call directing him to the home of Junior Junior, where his wife Daisy had just returned from a "big swap meet" in the parking lot of Sam's Club. On her return she'd discovered a horrific sight -- her husband was dead, beaten to a pulp and left with barbed wire wrapped around his neck; pants undone and his scrotum missing.  Digby and another cop also find a dead African-American man wearing a dark blue suit, face beaten, his neck scarred "seemingly stitched together," the missing body parts in his hand.  Both bodies are taken to the morgue, but the body of the African-American man has gone missing.   The story goes viral after the local paper ran a picture of the missing corpse's face; it was picked up by wire services, cable news and the internet, and the mayor is not happy.  It seems that people in the capitol don't trust the local boys to take care of things, and have sent two detectives (both African-American)  from the MBI to investigate.  

As one of these men jokingly (but seriously, really) notes, they had joined the police ranks "so that Whitey wouldn't be the only one in the room with a gun."  As one might suppose, their presence is unwelcome in Money both by the police and the racist locals.   The body is eventually found, this time at Wheat's house, where Wheat has also been murdered in much the same way as Junior Junior with the same African-American man in the room.  The detectives from the MBI are told that their help is no longer needed, since the locals have found the body, but it goes missing yet again only to be found at another murder scene.   As the detectives start considering what the hell is going on, at first they make jokes about it, with one of the detectives positing that some of the local "peckerwoods" might be behind it, or that it might  be "some kind of Black ninja ... like Bruce Lee or some shit.  Jamal Lee swinging lengths of barbed wire in Money, Mississippi," but as the death toll rises and reports come in from across the country of the same sort of killings,  they realize that there's a hell of lot more going on than meets the eye.   

While all of this may seem like a lead up to a crime novel about a serial killer, that's not what's happening here at all.  Anyone who is familiar with civil rights history should have glommed on to the fact that Money, Mississippi was the site of the horrific violence perpetrated on young Emmett Till who was killed for whistling at a white woman outside of Bryant's Store in 1955.  In The Trees the past catches up with the present, and payment comes due for the horrors of the past, especially lynchings, which one character, a 105-year old root doctor named Mama Z, has spent her life recording and keeping archives beginning with the murder of her father.  As she says at one point, "History is a motherfucker" and here she speaks truth.  The question becomes one of how to tell this story which brings to the forefront our nation's inability to confront its racist, violent past  so the author brings together a number of genres in doing so.   He begins with humor,  stereotyping the southern white characters as ignorant rednecks, "peckerwoods," etc., and while the laughs pile up, at the same time the crime story slowly moves into what seems to be a revenge thriller before taking a supernatural turn.   It's one of those novels where the humor belies the seriousness of what the author is saying, and I think it's fair to say that even though I laughed out loud in parts, neither the tragedy nor the lesson were lost on me at all.  

 The second reading with a clearer head made me love it even more than the first time; it is farcical and absurdist, at times slapsticky but deadly sincere in its seriousness. As one of the dead Black characters in the novel notes, "I'm gonna die now, for a while. But I'll be back. We'll all be back."  And indeed they will --  to mete out punishment or justice where there was none before.   This awesome satire flips the white narrative about race in America completely on its head, and it is a beyond-brilliant story told by a master of his craft, one  I can and do recommend it to everyone.  Sadly, the people who really should  read it and glean something from it probably won't or will miss the point entirely.  

bottom line:  READ THIS BOOK!

Tomb of Sand, by Geetanjali Shree

 "A border, gentlemen, is for crossing." 

9781911284611

Tilted Axis Press, 2021; originally published as Ret Samadhi (2018)

translated by Daisy Rockwell

739 pp

paperback

It was the first paragraph that sold me on this story, which is highly unusual but it's what happened.  Here the author  reveals that "this particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please," but even more to the point, that 

"The story's path unfurls, not knowing where it will stop, tacking to the right and left, twisting and turning, allowing anything and everything to join in the narration.  It will emerge from within a volcano, swelling silently as the past boils forth into the present, bringing steam, embers and smoke."

I sat back, reread at that initial paragraph and guessed right away that I had here in my hands something completely and refreshingly different.  Evidently I wasn't alone -- at the website for the International Booker Prize, the blurb for this book states that the author's "light touch and exuberant wordplay ensures that Tomb of Sand remains constantly playful -- and utterly original."  And while the word "playful" fits, this novel takes a rather serious and surprising turn in its last section, making this book a most welcome addition to the world of Partition literature, described here as having 

"helped generations to make sense of a period in the subcontinent's history that is quite difficult to fathom in its entirety."  

Tomb of Sand is, as translator Daisy Rockwell notes in her "Translator's Note," 

"a tale woven of many threads, encompassing modern urban life, ancient history, folklore, feminism, global warming, Buddhism and much more."

It is all that and more; it is also hands down one of the best books of my reading year so far and sadly, I would not have known about it except that it was longlisted for the International Booker Prize which it would go on to win, deservedly so in my opinion.  I can honestly say I've never read anything quite like it.  

An older, eighty-year old woman  (known mainly as Ma)  who is a mother, grandmother and now a widow, becomes seriously depressed at the death of her husband and decides that she will not be getting up.  Wrapping herself in a quilt, she remains in her room in her son's Bade's house, with her "back to the world, as though dead"  ignoring the rest of the family's pleas for her to get up.   She had, it seems,

"grown tired of breathing for them, feeling their feelings, bearing their desires, carrying their animosities. She was tired of all of them and she wanted to glide into the wall with a tremor ..."

Things begin to change though first with the arrival of a cane brought by one of Bade's children, known as Overseas Son, a CEO of the overseas branch of the company for whom he works.  At first, his grandmother remained unimpressed; but one day her other grandson Sid comes in to her room and sees her holding the cane "at a ninety-degree angle, eyes closed, still as a statue, looking every inch an otherworldly idol."  On the verge of laughing at this sight,  Sid hears his grandmother declare "I am the Wishing Tree," which, while she continues to remain in bed, has the effect of bringing into the house a host of people hoping that she'll grant their wishes. It isn't too long afterwards that "poof, she'd disappeared into thin air," and this is where the story truly takes off, as she is sought and found and returns not to her son's house, but to that of her daughter Beti.   It isn't long until Beti notices the reversal in their roles wherein "Beti became the mother and made Ma the daughter," and while Ma's presence tends to upset Beti's independent lifestyle, Beti also sees that it's a good arrangement.  As she notes, "When Ma came to my home she began to dream new dreams."   

One of the frequent guests at Beti's apartment is Rosie Bua, a hijra (often described as  "third gender"), who is very close to Ma with whom she shares  (unknown until further on in the story) a history.   One of Rosie's plans was to someday travel to Pakistan; when tragedy strikes, Ma decides that she will go for Rosie, dragging Beti and an old Buddha statue that his been in her family for years along with her on a trip that is plagued by problems almost right away.  

It is a gorgeous book, not only brilliantly written by its author but also brilliantly and skillfully translated by Daisy Rockwell, who says in her "Translator's Notes" that "to the translator, Tomb of Sand is a love letter to the Hindi language."  Noting that the author is fluent in English, she also says that Shree chose to write in her "mother tongue," relishing the "sound of words, and how they echo one another, frequently showcasing their dhwani," described as "an echo, a vibration a resonance."  It can be

"deliberate and playful, as in double entrendre and punning, an accidental mishmash of sameness, or a mythical reverberation."

Admittedly I didn't get all of the references and spent much time with my tablet on my lap while reading, but really, it just didn't matter to me -- I absolutely loved this book.  It is a great example of what a writer can do not just with story but also with language and storytelling;  above all it is a book about borders, physical and otherwise.  "A Border," as Ma says to a group of men in Pakistan, "is for crossing" and it is just a joy to read about how many borders this woman (and other people as well)  refuses to be confined or defined by as she comes into her own.  As the back-cover blurb notes, it is a "timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders."  There is so much happening in this book that makes it pretty impossible to encompass in a brief post, but it is rare that I find something like this novel which, despite the tragedies here, is so very life affirming in so many different ways.  If you need the quick story fix you won't find it here; I'd recommend it to those readers who are willing to take a chance on something very different than the norm.  I feel so lucky having made my way through these pages; it's a novel I will never, ever forget.  

a quick BTW:  I've recently read that Tomb of Sand will be available in the US as of 2023, but I bought my copies (yes, I made an error and ended up with two)  from Tilted Axis Press and having forgotten I'd done that, I turned to Waterstones in the UK.   I'm beyond happy I bought my book when I did.  

An Island, by Karen Jennings

 

9781910668922

Holland House Books, 2019

179 pp

paperback

"... he would not leave; he would never leave. The land was his always." 

The first time I read about this book after its placement on this year's Booker Prize longlist, I knew I had to have it, and I absolutely knew within the first few pages of reading it that this was a book that I was going to love, given its subject matter.  The surprise was just how very much it crawled under my skin. 

It was the blurb that sold me on this book:  

"... A young refugee washes up unconscious on the beach of a small island inhabited by no one but Samuel, an old lighthouse keeper. Unsettled, Samuel is soon swept up in memories of his former life on the mainland: a life that saw his country suffer under colonisers, then fight for independence, only to fall under the rule of a cruel dictator; and he recalls his own part in its history..."

Samuel, in his seventies now,  had been used to discovering bodies washing up on the island over the over the last twenty-three years he's been living there; this  "young refugee" is the latest  in a series of thirty-two "nameless, unclaimed others."   At first, officials would come out to look for bodies, to "find all those who suffered under the Dictator"  so that now the nation could  "move forward," but as time went on and more bodies came to shore, officials brushed them off as possibly "another country's refugees," now unwanted.   Samuel was told to do what he wanted with them; it was not the government's problem.   This time around though, Samuel was surprised to find the man alive.  Planning to send him back on the supply boat coming the next day, Samuel takes the man into his cottage, feeding him and giving him warm clothing,  just waiting until "the island was his again."  However, even though they don't speak the same language,  the refugee panics at the sight of the supply boat before its arrival, and begs Samuel for help. Samuel recognizes something in that plea for help, and the other man is there, it seems, to stay.  His presence there rekindles bits of Samuel's memory of his pre-island days; memories that were "things best forgotten now approaching as steadily as waves approach the shore."  As more of his past is revealed, in the present he wavers between trust and paranoia toward the stranger, the latter growing steadily as he wonders about this man's true intentions.  

To say too much more about this novel would be criminal; I will only reveal that even though this story is less than two hundred pages long, there is much to unpack here, including the upheavals in ordinary people's lives as they suffer through political strife and struggle, and the emotional and physical tolls that remain as a result.  As the memories come back, so too does Samuel's awareness of the humiliation he'd suffered over the years, and he comes to the realization that this "land was his, always."  Soon  the presence of this outsider becomes untenable; this is Samuel's  home, and no one will take it from him. 

As bleak as this book is, as allegorical as it may be, it is a beautifully-written, insightful novel that begins rather quietly before readers are abruptly jolted back into the past, returned to the present, and jolted back again.   I'm wondering if these interruptions are meant to somehow mirror Samuel's mind, as it is certain interactions between him and the stranger which cause these memories to come to him, something as simple as the sight of a flower that the other man has made from odd bits laying around Samuel's cottage.  It can make for reading distraction,  but Samuel's past has a direct connection to what will eventually happen in his present.  I love the way the author set this all up, including the early foreshadowing  that sets the atmosphere, and then the slowly-building drama that results from Samuel's somewhat broken memories of the past.  And do pay attention to the red hen, although I won't say why.  There's so much more, of course, but this is truly a novel to be experienced.  

 Don't let the short length of  An Island  fool you -- it is a powerhouse of a novel that even now, several days after finishing it, is still haunting me.  

I am recommending it to everyone I know. 

The Mermaid of Black Conch, by Monique Roffey

 

9781845234577

Peepal Tree Press, 2020

188 pp

paperback

(read earlier this month)

I loved this book, and thank goodness that Peepal Tree Press had the smarts to publish it.   In an interview with author Monique Roffey, she states that she finished writing this novel in 2017, but "the reality was that nobody wanted to buy it," and that she was "turned down by every big mainstream publisher."   Too bad for those big mainstream publishers -- in 2020 this book won the author the Costa Award, and I can only imagine the kicking of selves that went on among said mainstream publishers.  

The first time David Baptiste saw the mermaid was in 1976 while out fishing in the waters off Black Conch Island.  He dropped anchor, and after lighting his spliff began to sing to himself while strumming his guitar.  It was then that she made her appearance,

"A red-skinned woman, not black, not African. Not yellow, not a Chinee woman, or a woman with golden hair from Amsterdam. Not a blue woman, either, blue like a damn fish. Red. She was a red woman, like an Amerinidian. Or anyway, her top half was red. He had seen her shoulders, her head, her breasts, and her long black hair like ropes, all sea mossy and jook up with anemone and conch shell.  A merwoman."

From that moment, he "ached to see her again," and five days later she returned, attracted to his music. She came back now and then, listening to his songs; unfortunately, during the annual fishing competition held in Black Conch in late April, she got too close  to the Dauntless, a whaler on which two Americans, father and son, were fishing.  She was caught by their hook and while she put up a great fight, she lost; when they realized what they had caught, the Americans were determined to take her back to shore, as "she's worth millions."  The men on the boat from the island were stunned, "lost for words and for what to do" -- they had heard about mermen in their part of the ocean, but never a merwomen and at first, they realized that "this was wrong," as "she carried with her bad luck at best," but soon one of them also "began to see dollar signs."   She is reeled in, captured and taken back to the docks where she is hung up like a fish, but later David cut her down and took her to his house.  This is where the story actually begins,  as he tries to keep her not only alive but hidden away from prying eyes as an all-out search begins for the mermaid; it isn't long though until he realizes that she's begun the  transformation from mermaid to young woman. 

If you're rolling your eyebrows at this juncture, wait.  This isn't Splash or The Little Mermaid, but rather a powerful story of otherness, women and the assumptions men make about them as well as the destructive  power of envy, a love story and a quick run through the history of the Caribbean,  pre- and post-colonial.   The mermaid, Aycayia,  was much older than her newly-transformed self revealed -- she was once a woman of the Taino , who had lived on an island "shaped like a lizard," and had been there long before Europeans found their way to the islands and prior to the arrival of enslaved Africans. She had become a mermaid due to a curse put upon her by jealous women, who through the goddess Jagua, "seal up my sex inside a tail, Good joke to seal up that part of me men like."  Through Aycayia's narrative, which is interspersed throughout, she offers a look at pre-colonial history and indigenous myth and legend, while in the main story, the author examines slavery and its legacy in the descendants of the enslaved on Black Conch and in one woman, Arcadia Rain, who owns a large part of the island and can't quite escape her own family's history as slave owners.  Here though, Roffey differs in the usual telling, as Arcadia understands her position on the island and what it represents; she has, along with her young son, isolated herself in the old family home  "to keep away from this hatred. History. The great tragic past."  And there's much, much more.  

The Mermaid of Black Conch is an excellent novel, so beautifully told and so powerful, and I can't say I've ever read anything quite like it.  It is one of those books with the originality I crave in terms of story and writing, it has its own special vibrancy that brings both place and people to life, and there are so many layers embedded within this tale waiting to be uncovered that it never has time to be anything but captivating.  

Here's to Peepal Tree Press for taking a chance on this novel.  

I can't recommend this book highly enough.  

Night Theater, by Vikram Paralkar

We'll call this one fiction from India.  Although the author lives and works in Pennsylvania, he was born and raised in Mumbai, and the novel is set in his home country.  

9781948226547

Catapult, 2020

originally published in 2017 as The Wounds of the Dead

206 pp

paperback

I can honestly say I've never read anything like this book, and that's a very good thing.  I seriously get tired of same old same old, and Night Theater is anything but. I have no idea how the author came up with this idea (unless it was from reading a lot of Kafka) but it's pure genius. I'll caution anyone contemplating reading this novel  that there are elements of, as the dustjacket blurb notes, "magically unreal drama," requiring a suspension of disbelief.  Let yourself go with this "fabulist" novel in that regard, and you will be rewarded many times over. 

The first words of the book offer a clue as to the strangeness to come:

"The day the dead visited the surgeon, the air in his clinic was laced with formaldehyde."

The surgeon, who remains nameless throughout the story, has been running a  four-room clinic in a small, rural village in India for the past three years, with neither the amenities of a modern practice  nor a budget big enough to keep on hand what he needs to do a proper job.   The walls have cracks in them, the windows have gaps, and he has been spending his own money just to keep the place "from turning into an archaeological ruin." There is no nurse to help him (his budget request for one remains in bureaucratic limbo);   he relies on the pharmacist for assistance.  After a visit from his supervisor, an official dropping off vaccines and angling for a payment to ignore nonexistent "irregularities," he decides that he'll give it two more months "at the most" before leaving, vowing  "No more."   Tired and desperately needing sleep, he'll have to wait as a teacher, his pregnant wife and her son walk into the clinic asking for help.  They are strangers from another district, the victims of thieves who had taken their valuables, stabbed them and left them on the roadside just an hour or so earlier; they're also quite dead.  If the doctor can operate on them and fix their wounds before sunrise, when the blood will flow again, they can remain in the world of the living; if he fails, they must return to the afterlife from whence they'd come.   

To say that the surgeon is overcome is to wholly understate his situation; it's much more as if the floor just dropped out from beneath him and he is left trying to find something to hold on to before he falls through.  It's the pregnant woman and her young son that convinces him, and enlisting the help of the pharmacist and her husband, he decides that he will do as they ask.  For him, it is an "inescapable madness" that he "would have to get through;" he would have to 

"pretend that the visitors had been wheeled in on gurneys, with lolling heads and frothing mouths, victims of some mysterious accident. He would just do his job, and let the pieces fall as they would."

 Once he begins, the surgeon becomes locked into what is best described as a ticking time-bomb  situation, and the tension builds as the clock slowly counts down the hours until sunrise.  As he makes his way through this challenging night,  he finds not only his medical knowledge tested in ways he could never imagine, but also his beliefs as he gleans from his patients, as the dustjacket notes, "knowledge no mortal should have."  

I had to set aside time and put everything on hold once I started Night Theater because I couldn't tear myself away from it.  I also had to jerk myself back to earth and reality once I'd finished as I was so caught up in the tension here as well as the off-kilter premise and the blurring of the lines between living and dead.  It is definitely a high-stakes story, one that will have huge ramifications for everyone involved.   Surprises abound, but what also kept me riveted was the way in which the author wove into his story important and relevant issues such as corruption, inequality and health care, especially the idea of bureaucrats having power over whether one lives or dies.  

Very well done, and the more I've thought about this book since reading it the more it's grown on me.  It was so good that now I'll look forward to reading anything Mr. Paralkar writes in the future. Night Theater likely won't appeal to readers who need straightforward realism, but for everyone else it's a no-miss.   And no, there are no zombies here. 

very very highly recommended. 

The Slaughterman's Daughter, by Yaniv Iczkovits

 

9780805243659

Schocken Books, 2021

originally published 2015

translated by Orr Scharf

515 pp

hardcover

The year is 1894, or the year 5654 as reckoned by the Jewish calendar.  In the latest issue of the paper Hamagid Mende Speismann reads a notice entitled  "Wife Lost," which stated the following:

"A woman went out in the second hour after midnight and has not returned since. All of our efforts to look for her in villages and towns, forests and rivers have failed. Her whereabouts are unknown and there's not a trace of her to be found...She has left her husband, five children, and miserable mother-in-law in despair in their village home."

Mende sets the paper aside for a moment before she reads the rest of the notice revealing that the missing woman is her sister, Fanny Keismann.   Mende lives in the village of Motal, in the Pale of Settlement,  the only legally-authorized territory in which Jews could reside "within the borders of czarist Russia."  Mende's husband Zvi-Meir had left his wife and children some ten months earlier,  and on her birthday, Mende tries to kill herself.   Fanny, a woman who wants to "mend the entire world," understands that it's not soul mending (tikkun) that Mende wants, nor is it really Zvi-Meir, but rather "she yearns for the authority of a husband and for the life of a wife" to make her life meaningful.   Fanny decides that she will take herself to Zvi-Meir in Minsk, to make him sign "a writ of divorce," and make things right.   Leaving her own home and her husband the cheesemaker, she slips out "in the second hour of midnight" determined in her mission.   She travels the seven versts from her village of Upiravah to Motal where the boatman, Zizek Breshov awaits to take her across the Yaselda river.  From there she plans to hire a cart and horses to begin her journey, and is surprised when Zizek, who "never leaves the Yaselda" follows after her.  Another surprise is in store when she realizes that he had not only hidden a wagon and two horses in some trees, but after helping her into her seat, he grabs the reins and "starts turning the horses."   

Thus begins Fanny's journey, and despite the potential dangers of being a Jewish woman on the road, she's not too worried.  She had been known since her girlhood  as "die vilde chaya," the wild animal,  learning and practicing her father's profession of ritual slaughtering.  Although she'd given up the profession when she married, she still carried a knife "tied to her right leg" as she had since childhood, always keeping it sharpened.  It comes in handy early on when she and Zizek come upon "a band of thugs" out to steal their cart and their horses; unfortunately this encounter results in the unwanted attention of the authorities who are sent to capture them.

Enter Piotr Novak, a district commander for the secret police (Okhrana).  Novak had formerly had a brilliant career in the military up until a horrific accident which not only shattered his leg but also "destroyed his life's dream."   When he learns of the deaths of the bandits, he is not inclined to take up the case, believing it should go to the regular police agency instead; that changes when he learns that the knife had been used in the way that "żyds slaughter animals."  While he thinks it highly unlikely, he believes that "this style of slaying" is "distinctive, and therefore sends a clear message: the Jews are responsible ..." and that "these murders might have been spurred on by an ideological motive, after all," and that perhaps he's "uncovered a new form of insurgency."  The chase begins,  and while Fanny and Zizek continue on their mission, they encounter a number of significant people, each with his own backstory and history that highlight not only the acts of individuals as opposed to the collective, but also how it is that, as Fanny notes early on,  "silent acceptance" allows for injustice and worse.   

The dustjacket blurb calls The Slaughterman's Daughter a "rollicking and unforgettable work of fiction," and the pursuit that begins just a short time after Fanny and Zizek cross the Yaselda certainly earns the "rollicking" description,  but it is much more:  an examination of an empire on the brink of tremendous change, a meditation on the meaning of freedom, a portrait of the Jews who have set themselves apart in a Russia that doesn't want them, sharing "the same soil but not the same world."  Most of all though this is Fanny's story, one of finding her way in the world and discovering who she is.  Yes, it's a bit long; yes, parts of might have been pared a bit, but I don't care. I loved this book, and it's one I'd continue to love even if the rest of the world hated it.  The Slaughterman's Daughter is so  refreshingly different, reminding me somewhat of an old-fashioned adventure story mixed with history, but one still very much pertinent in our own time.  

It's really, really good.  

tissues a must: Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart

 

9780802148049

Grove Press, 2020

423 pp

hardcover 

(read earlier this month)

Quite honestly, had I not seen this book on the Booker Prize longlist, I may have never read it and that would have been a shame.   I nearly passed on it after reading the back-cover blurb by Sandra Newman who described the book as 

"an intimate and frighteningly acute exploration of a mother-son relationship and a masterful portrait of alcoholism in Scottish working-class life..." 

because  my initial impression was that this is yet another book about yet another dysfunctional family and I have been avoiding that sort of thing for some time.  I couldn't have been more wrong.  As it turns out, Shuggie Bain not only turned out to be a great book, but also one that now, ten days after finishing, I'm still thinking about and still talking about to anyone who will listen.  

While the novel opens in 1992, the bulk of this story takes place during the 1980s.  Hugh "Shug" Bain, his wife Agnes and their three children are all living in Glasgow, in a "high-rise flat" they share with Agnes' parents.   Agnes had been married before to Brendan McGowan, the father of Catherine and Alexander (who goes by the name of Leek); Shuggie (Hugh Jr.) came along after she'd left Brendan and married Hugh.  Agnes spends time reflecting on happier times, and  has dreams of a better life, but all too often alcohol gets in the way.   On one particular night while Shug and the older two children are out and Agnes' parents are watching TV,  she is feeling somewhat sorry for herself and decides that she and Shuggie should "have a wee party."  He dances for her, makes her laugh, and to keep her laughing, 

"he did whatever had caused her to laugh another dozen times till her smile stretched thin and false, and then he searched for the next move that would make her happy." 

The night ends with Agnes singing along with the music, "her voice cracked with the poor me's," then deliberately setting the bedroom curtains on fire.  The pattern of her "poor me's" while drinking and Shuggie searching for "the next move that would make her happy" will continue over the years, as the Bain family (minus Catherine, who's married and gone abroad) leaves Glasgow for a house Hugh had bought in desolate Pithead, and as Hugh decides he can't stay with her any longer because of her "wanting" and "All that drinking."

The remainder of the novel takes us through Shuggie's childhood and his relationship with Agnes as  her drinking becomes worse.  Although Leek tries to look out for the family, eventually he is unable to take much more and leaves Agnes to Shuggie's care, not always easy for this young boy who is also trying to deal with his own growing pains, including, as the dustjacket cover says, a feeling that he is "no right."  

This is just a thumbnail sketch, of course -- I haven't said anything about the times or the Thatcher era policies that sadly left so many people out of work, nor have I said anything about Glasgow as a setting or the bleak landscape of Pithead that mirrors the bleakness of the lives of the working-class families who live there.  That's all to be discovered  in the novel, so vibrantly and yet so achingly described. 

My worries about this book completely dissipated once I got into it, and it came to be a story not just about an alcoholic mother, but of the boy who loves her so unconditionally and so deeply despite all of her failings as a parent -- as he said to her at one point, "I'd do anything for you."  It was difficult to watch Shuggie take on so much at such a young age, having to deal with Agnes' ups and downs; at the same time, the intensity of his devotion to his mother fairly leaps off of the pages, even during the worst of times.   Agnes presents as a character in conflict, but she was also an object of my sympathy.  As frustrated as I was with her most times, there were times when I couldn't help but admire her fortitude.  As we're told in Chapter 20, 

"She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but ... Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise."

Shuggie Bain is the author's first novel, and it is absolutely gorgeous.  While it is bleak, there are parts here and there that will make you laugh, and the book leaves you with a small bit of hope at the end.  I made it through the story dry eyed, but I must have been holding everything inside while reading because the minute I read the last word, the floodgates opened and I had to run for tissues.   I can't stress enough the beauty to be found here, and it is a book I very highly, highly, highly recommend.  

One final thought:  From the author in The New Yorker, September 7 2020:

"Shuggie and Agnes feel like real people to me. I only hope that I can make them proud."

I'm sure you did, sir, especially Agnes.  Very much so. 

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, by Shokoofeh Azar

As I generally do prior to reading any book, I take a glance at the dustjacket blurb, both for the basic outline of what it is I'm about to read and for information about the author, as well as the translator if there is one.  I got a bit of a jolt this time around -- there's the normal  bit about the author, Shokoofeh Azar, saying that she moved to Australia in 2001 as a political refugee, but the surprise is that the translator's name has not been provided, "for reasons of safety and at the translator's request."  After reading what's in this book, I'm not surprised, but to the anonymous translator: thank you and well done. 

9781609455651
Europa Editions, 2020
originally published 2017
232 pp
paperback

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree  is, in a word, stunning.  As the Stella Prize Judges' Report said of this book, "the novel presents a richly woven magical reality:"

"Drawing on techniques of classic Persian literature, and recalling aspects of South American magic realism, Azar powerfully juxtaposes the beauty of Persian culture and mythology with the brutality of a political regime responsible for the destruction of so many lives." 

The story begins in 1979 and plays out amidst the backdrop of the Islamic Revolution, following the lives of a family from Tehran who become caught in its wake and decide to flee, wanting only to "disappear in silence."   They make their way to remote Razan, where the father, Hushang, sees the "calm eyes of the villagers" and knows they're at the "safe place where we were meant to be."  What they don't know at the time is that this place, where as the dustjacket blurb notes, they were "hoping... to preserve both their intellectual freedom and their lives,"  will not stay remote for long, as the revolution will eventually make it way there as well, nine years later in 1988.  As it happens,  in August 1988, at 2:35 p.m. Roza, the mother in this family, "attained enlightenment" as she sat "atop the grove's tallest greengage plum tree" overlooking the village.  Not so coincidentally, 1988 was the year of the "prison massacres" (which, as of 2018 the government of Iran had still not acknowledged);  it was the very moment of her own son Sohrab's execution, in which he was

"hanged without trial and unaware he would be buried en masse with hundreds of other political prisoners early the next morning." 

 The story is narrated by Bahar, one of the two daughters in this family, and reveals the impact that events during this decade had on this family.   The fact that she is a ghost (not a spoiler since it's also on the dustjacket blurb) is not so extraordinary in this book -- as the author stated in an interview at the LA Review of Books,

"People of old or ancient cultures sometimes seek the metaphysical solution for realistic problems. And it has nothing to do with superstition or religion. If you learn to look at these beliefs in the right way and deeply, you can find the roots of myths, and important and beautiful meaning in these beliefs."

In Azar's telling, the forests around the village of Razan are filled with ghosts as well as jinns and other spirits;  the village is plagued by different events including a black snowfall and an overflowing river of tears spilled from the eyes of ghosts, and Beeta, Bahar's sister, will go on to become a mermaid, among other sorts of mystical occurrences.  Quite honestly, it all seems perfectly natural to these people, which is why I didn't even bother to question these more fantastical elements -- here they are interacting with and dealing with their world in their own way. 

While it is often emotionally tough to read, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree addresses not just the horrors of this particular decade but also what it takes in order to survive through the worst.  It deals with grief and loss, seeking and finding, life and love.  It is a most original and powerful book that I will probably never forget, almost dreamlike in the telling.    You will have to wind your way through the elements of magical realism to keep  a chronological eye on the narrative, but as you do so, savor the time you spend there.

Most likely not a book that everyone will like, but for me, it's now of one my favorites of 2020.  I loved this book.  Absolutely.

Ashenden, by W. Somerset Maugham

9780099289708
Vintage UK, 2000
originally published 1928
332 pp

paperback

In the preface to Ashenden,  Maugham wastes no time in revealing that this book is "founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during the war, but rearranged for the purposes of fiction."  He later goes on to say that

"the work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic and probable,"

and that is exactly what Maugham does here.

Ashenden was first recruited by a man known only as "the Colonel" or "R,"  whom he had met at a party, who later in a private meeting noted Ashenden's "particular qualifications for the secret service."  His knowledge of different languages was a plus, as was the fact that he was a writer, allowing him the perfect cover -- traveling to a neutral country to work on his latest project, as he was already known for his plays.  Once he takes on his duties in intelligence Ashenden's "official existence," as we learn, is "as orderly and monotonous as a city clerk's," but the work he does is  "evidently necessary."  He knows that he functions as a "tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine," in which he "never had the advantage of seeing a completed action," most of the time not knowing "what his own doings led to."  His main job is to keep an eye on things, listen, and report back to his superiors.  Over the course of this book he will find himself involved with a unique array of people, including a strange general known as the Hairless Mexican whose destiny is often told in the cards, an elderly British chaperone to two princesses, an Italian music-hall dancer in love with a seriously-dangerous Indian agitator and "fanatic," and a talkative American who "would not listen to reason."  Love and betrayal weave their way through these stories, and while some are a bit on the entertaining side,  it is impossible not to be absolutely devastated at the outcomes of a few of the others.   What Ashenden has to do is often not pretty, but he never fails in his duty, despite what he feels toward "the bigwigs," who

"shut their eyes to dirty work so that they could put their clean hands on their hearts and congratulate themselves that they had never done anything that was unbecoming to men of honour."

 Ashenden is a fine book, filled with stories which Maugham handled with a mix of deadly earnest and levity.   It is definitely not the edge-of-your-seat stuff of later spy thrillers in which the work of intelligence gathering often becomes life-threatening business, although Maugham makes crystal clear that there are risks involved in what Ashenden does.  While his work is "evidently necessary," there is another side to it that comes with very human consequences, which are played out again and again throughout this novel.  By the way, feel free to argue that it is not actually a novel -- we'll just agree to disagree on that point.

So very highly recommended -- I loved this book. 

What an excellent start to the new reading year!

Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry

9781782116172
Canongate, 2019
213 pp
hardcover
(read in August)

"There's grief, and the longer we go on, the more of it we've the burden of."

"You look for quiet spaces in a life, Charles. And do you find them?"


I couldn't wait for the US publication of this novel, which happens September 17th,  so off to the UK it was for me via an online purchase.  Money well spent, as it turns out; when I finished it, I noticed my spouse staring at me like "what?" because I was a wee bit choked up on turning the last page.  It is such a fine book, really -- sad and moving with more than a touch of black humor, and for me, excellent. Then again, it's the work of Kevin Barry we're talking about so no surprise there.

It's October 2018, and two men "in their low fifties" are sitting on a bench at the ferry terminal in the Spanish port of Algeciras, a place with a "haunted air, a sinister feeling" that "reeks of tired bodies, and dread."  Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond are men for whom

" The years are rolling out like tide now.  There is old weather on their faces, on the hard line of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain -- just about -- a rakish air." 

Maurice has a "jaunty, crooked smile," that appears "with frequency."  Charlie's face has an "antique look, like a court player's, medieval, a man who'd strum his lute for you... Hot adulterous eyes and again a shabby suit... Also, stomach trouble, bags like graves beneath the eyes, and soul trouble."

They are awaiting  Maurice's twenty-three year-old daughter Dilly, from whom he's been estranged for over three years. They've been told that she'll be headed for Tangier on the titular Night Boat or "possibly coming back" from there, and  while they wait they pass out flyers with her picture on them, look for and harass "crusty types" who might know something about Dilly.  We meet them as they are looking

"blithely at the faces that pass by in a blur of the seven distractions - love, grief, pain, sentimentality, avarice, lust, want-of-death." 

 As "the hours melt one into the other," during this "lizard night,"  they also spend time reflecting on the past.  Exactly how these two men have come to this point  is revealed via a series of flashbacks that encompass these "seven distractions" while recounting how their years  in the drug trade not only made their fortunes, but also took a tremendous toll on their lives and those of the people closest to them, leaving no one unscathed, most especially Dilly and her mother Cynthia. 

cover of the US edition, from Doubleday

Night Boat to Tangier is many things, the history of a friendship, a story of love and loss, but most especially it is a tale of the past that continues to haunt the present, in more ways than one. It is

"a tremendously Hibernian dilemma -- a broken family, all the melancholy rest of it..."

 and while it can verge into the morose and become brutal in places,  there's also a sort of humorous, witty edge that offsets things so that you don't find yourself stuck deep in "all the melancholy rest of it"  the entire time.  The back-and-forth bickering/repartee between Charlie and Maurice ranges between funny and heartbreaking at times, then there's the story of Maurice's doomed building site which just may be a fairy fort, two men watching tv and mouthing the words to Rumblefish while in a mental hospital ... sometimes you can't help but laugh. 

As with the two men waiting in the terminal whose stories manage to entrance some of their listeners, Kevin Barry has "woven a ring" that "shimmers" here, one that is "made of these odd, circling words."  The man is truly a gifted storyteller.

I loved this beautiful, haunting book. 

****

real reviews:
Nicole Flattery, The London Review of Books
Alan Warner, The Guardian

A "novel-bomb" ... Harbart, by Nabarun Bhattacharya

9780811224734
New Directions, 2019
originally published 1994
translated by Sunandini Banerjee
122 pp

paperback

Every week I grab my copy of The New Yorker out of the mailbox, and before I do anything else, I turn to the "Briefly Noted" section for leads on new books to read.  [It's hell on the wallet, but so far I haven't been let down by my choices.]  In one of the July issues, I came across this title and knew I had to have it -- I just sensed it would one of those out-of-the-ordinary books I look for but rarely find.  I was so right.

This novel hits so many of my reader buttons it's unreal. Harbart is  political, gritty, loaded with satire and teeming with history, as well as social critique; it is sad but graced with a measure of dark humor that will leave you giggling when least expected,  and at times it not only teeters on the very edge of the fantastic, but gives it free rein.    It really is, as Siddhartha Deb says at The Paris Review website, "a novel that ticks like a bomb."  (FYI, Deb also provides the Afterword in this book, which is the same material found at Paris Review.)   It's also one of those stories where I enjoyed the dark humor but at the same time felt guilty for laughing.  I'm so impressed with Banerjee's translation -- it couldn't have been easy at all to carry this "novel-bomb" from its original Bengali to English with such relish and passion.

Without saying too much here, the novel begins with Harbart's suicide in 1992. From there it weaves its way through the story of what exactly prompted his death, introducing us to the main character who had lost his parents when he was just an infant.  His aunt is the only one who seems to actually care for him, along with his nephew Binu, who Harbart respects and admires.  As Harbart gets older, he becomes caught up in forces and events  greater than himself over which he has absolutely no control, a scenario which, by the way,  the author mirrors in the story he tells of Calcutta over Harbart's lifetime.   It is the death of this beloved nephew that strikes Harbart to his core and leads to his newly-found career as someone who can speak with the dead, a vocation that will eventually lead to  some unforeseen consequences of its own.

While the story itself is a great one and Harbart is one of the most hapless but lovable characters I've come across in a long time, there is so much more to be found here.  Siddhartha Deb notes in the Afterword that "Harbart's character does not encompass the novel as a whole," and that it focuses more on relationships

"between the individual and the scattered collective, between revolution and the afterlife, between cockroaches and fairies."

At the same time, "it is always about language."  So true.  So very, very true.  The author's writing is described on the back-cover blurb as "anarchic," which describes it perfectly.

With afterword and translator's notes, this book runs to only 122 pages, but don't let that fool you.  I started reading this book late one afternoon, but the 70-something pages I'd read replayed in my head over and over and over again until I actually got up at 4:30 in the morning to finish it.  That's  just the sort of novel it is.   I will say that for many readers it may be a challenge; as John Domini notes in his review at The Washington Post,  "the names alone can present a stumbling block," but sticking with it yields great rewards.  It is a book I will never forget; I am only frustrated because my few words here don't even begin to do it the justice it deserves.

I loved this book.

another hidden treasure discovered on the shelves: The Vet's Daughter, by Barbara Comyns

9781590170298
NYRB Classics, 2003
152 pp

paperback

I've been sitting here trying to think of ways to describe this book, and no matter what I write, it seems that nothing I can say can give it the justice it deserves.  It's one of the rare few novels that left me sitting  in my chair unable to move for a while, unable to stop thinking, and it followed me on into the rest of my day.  While I was completely absorbed in this story, I was even more impressed and carried away because of the writing.  It is, in a word, brilliant. 

The vet's daughter is young Alice Rowlands, seventeen, and she lives in a household completely dominated by her father.  It takes no time at all to discover that there is something utterly monstrous about this man, who, when given animals to be put down, sells them instead to the vivisectionist.  He has always been a cruel man, but the disappointment he'd suffered upon buying what was to supposed to have been a "flourishing practice" along with a "commodious, well-furnished house" only to discover it was nothing of the sort seems to have scarred him for life.  His frustrations are taken out on his wife and daughter -- his wife is timid, looks "scared," and is afraid to speak in his presence; she eventually falls ill and even then tries to hide her illness from her husband. Alice is treated much more like a servant than a daughter, sometimes subjected to cruel treatment at his hands, and mainly ignored.   Life is bad enough for Alice, but when her mother dies and is replaced three weeks later by a barmaid ("a strumpet if ever there was one"), things move from bad to worse.  Somehow though, Alice discovers something within herself that allows her to detach from it all, a power that manifests at her lowest moments.

At this juncture, just before Alice is about to escape from the tyranny of her father and his mistress, we move into the world of the strange. All along, Comyns writes so believably, eloquently mixing the mundane with the horrific so that when we get to the point of Alice's discovery, what happens now seems no stranger or any less plausible than anything in this novel so far.  Alice is so trapped in her world that her newly-found ability makes sense as way to escape for a while, or to detach herself from her situation, even if only for a short time.

The Vet's Daughter is bleak, sad, and difficult to read emotionally, but at the same time it is hauntingly beautiful. The story told here is one of overwhelming loneliness and powerlessness, the stuff of many a novel, but recounted in a unique way that sets this book apart from others with the same themes.   Not one word of the author's exceptional writing is wasted here -- she has this knack of not only  making the horrific seem normal but also of turning the implausible into something believable in the world that her main character inhabits.

I can't recommend this book highly enough or offer enough superlatives about it.   It won't be for everyone, especially those people who insist on strict realism in their reading, but for it is perfect for readers who want a great combination of captivating story and superb writing.  This is my first book by Barbara Comyns but far from the last.

The Alienist, by Machado de Assis

9781612191072
Melville House, 2012
translated by William L Grossman
originally serialized 1881 in A Estação as "O Alienista"
published 1882 as part of  Papéis Avulsos 
86 pp

paperback
(read earlier this month)

"I know nothing about science, but if so many men whom we considered sane are locked up as madmen, how do we know that the real madman is not the alienist himself?"

The Alienist is part of Melville House's lovely Art of the Novella series; books are available individually or as part of a subscription service, and they're well worth every penny.  I certainly got my money's worth with this book, which is true satire in every sense of the word.

We discover right away that the titular Alienist, Doctor Simão Bacamarte, "one of the greatest doctors in all Brazil, Portugal, and the Spains" is driven by science and rationalism.  As he replies when offered two very high offices by the King of Portugal who tried to prevent his return to Brazil, "Science...is my only office..."  And for sure, he makes scientific studies of everything. When he married his wife, for example, he chose her because she

"enjoyed perfect digestion, excellent eyesight, and normal blood pressure; she had had no serious illnesses and her urinalysis was negative."

She was also "neither beautiful nor charming," another point in her favor, since Bacamarte wouldn't be "tempted to sacrifice his scientific pursuits" contemplating her "attractions."  When she couldn't conceive, he even started on an "exhaustive study of sterility,"  as we're told, reading the "work of all authorities."  When his prescribed "special diet" didn't work, he "cured himself of his disappointment by plunging even deeper into his work."  As a result, he finds himself studying psychopathology, a "field, indeed, in which little responsible work had been done anywhere in the world."  In his town of Itaguai, the mentally ill have been neglected; eventually Bacamarte is able to persuade the Council to build a "madhouse," which comes to be known as the Green House.  It is there that the doctor plans to

"study insanity in depth, to learn its various gradations, to classify the various cases, and finally to discover the cause of the phenomenon and its remedy."

The trouble is, however, that there is no true scientific definition of what exactly constitutes mental illness, and as Bacamarte develops new theories, his ideas begin to change and so do his candidates for those to be sent to the Green House, to the point where "one no longer knew who was sane and who was insane."   Needless to say, there are people in Itaguai who don't necessarily agree.

 That's a very quick summary of the plot, but in this book there's much more than merely plot to consider as is usually the case in satire;  aside from the focus on the changing definitions of insanity by a self-professed authority  (a commentary, I think, on the folly of relying solely on science-based reason), ideas,  society and politics of the time are put squarely under the microscope here as well.  And then there's an interesting look at conformity, both inward and outward.  I don't want to say any more than that because it certainly is a story not only worth reading, but also worth spending time pondering to pick up what's actually going on here.  I loved this little book.