July 20, 2005
In the Name of Salome
It's 1960, and 65-year-old Camila Ureña decides to join the New World. Castro's new world, that is, which she has been following on the news with a heated excitement she hasn't felt for years. Forced into early retirement from her 20-year post as a Spanish teacher among the perky white girls of Vassar College, Camila faces a choice: whether to move to Florida and live down the block from her best friend or to fly over Florida and into Havana where her brothers live--and thereby land in a place of upheaval and hungry ghosts. The hungriest ghost of all is Camila's mother, Salomé Ureña, whose poems became inspirational anthems for a short-lived revolution in the late-19th-century Dominican Republic.
Based in fact, In the Name of Salomé alternates between Camila's story and her mother's. Camila's chapters are written in the third person, Salomé's in the first. By calling Camila "she," Alvarez alienates her within the text--as if in her attic at Vassar she is floating outside herself in an America that does not belong to her. In contrast, Salomé's chapters vibrate with life and tears and melodrama. Through the alternating voices, which Alvarez handles masterfully, the reader comes to grasp Camila's longing for the color and music of her mother's lost world--how the meek daughter wishes "she" could become the "I" of her mother's revolutionary and passionate life as a poet, which began under a pseudonym, Herminia, in a local political paper:
Each time there was a new poem by Herminia in the paper, Mamá would close the front shutters of the house and read it in a whisper to the rest of us. She was delighted with the brave Herminia. I felt guilty keeping this secret from her, but I knew if I told her, all her joy would turn to worry.
Yet for Salomé, her pseudonym allows her to become the voice of a country, "and with every link she cracked open for la patria, she was also setting me free." --Emily White
Posted by Femke at 03:20 AM | Comments (0)
God of Small Things
With sensuous prose, a dreamlike style infused with breathtakingly beautiful images and keen insight into human nature, Roy's debut novel charts fresh territory in the genre of magical, prismatic literature. Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol, the cousin of the novel's protagonists, Rahel and her fraternal twin brother, Estha. In a circuitous and suspenseful narrative, Roy reveals the family tensions that led to the twins' behavior on the fateful night that Sophie drowned. Beneath the drama of a family tragedy lies a background of local politics, social taboos and the tide of history?all of which come together in a slip of fate, after which a family is irreparably shattered. Roy captures the children's candid observations but clouded understanding of adults' complex emotional lives. Rahel notices that "at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside." Plangent with a sad wisdom, the children's view is never oversimplified, and the adult characters reveal their frailties?and in one case, a repulsively evil power?in subtle and complex ways. While Roy's powers of description are formidable, she sometimes succumbs to overwriting, forcing every minute detail to symbolize something bigger, and the pace of the story slows. But these lapses are few, and her powers coalesce magnificently in the book's second half. Roy's clarity of vision is remarkable, her voice original, her story beautifully constructed and masterfully told. First serial to Granta; foreign rights sold in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Holland, India, Greece, Canada and the U.K.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Posted by Femke at 03:19 AM | Comments (0)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night
Christopher Boone is a boy aged 15, with Asbergers Syndrome. It explores an adventure involving him, which starts when he discovers his neighbour's dog dead, in her back garden. Over a length of time, this mystery gradually unfurls, until about half way through the book, after searching and trying to find the killer, the culprit finally admits to killing the dog. But this turns out to be only a sideline to the plot, even though the book is called 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time'. Christopher ends up on a much more complicated, and somewhat sinister and confusing adventur
Posted by Femke at 03:15 AM | Comments (0)
Twelve Bar Blues
Telling the story of Lick Holden, "the greatest...horn man that was ever lost to history," Neate recreates the early days of New Orleans jazz in Storyville, with characters like Buddy Bolden, Fate Marable, Louis "Dipper" Armstrong, Kid Ory, and King Oliver. Crafting the novel in the pattern of the twelve bar blues, described in the opening pages, Neate presents each half of the novel in twelve chapters, which move back and forth and around in time and location, from the early 1900's to the present, from Africa to New Orleans, New York, and Chicago. Lick's life story and his long love of Sylvie intertwines with the African legend at the beginning of the novel and with a present-day search by Sylvia DiNapoli, a black woman in her mid-forties, for her past. An additional contemporary setting in Africa, involving later generations of the characters from the opening legend, offers a counterpoint to Sylvia's search, and like a jazz motif, becomes part of it. The dominant themes of fate and choice, love and sorrow, dreams and tragedy, guilt and redemption weave through all the personal stories.
Posted by Femke at 03:11 AM | Comments (0)
The Master Butchers Singing Club
Having survived World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend, killed in action. With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious knife set, Fidelis sets out for America. In Argus, North Dakota, he builds a business, a home for his family - which includes Eva and four sons - and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. When the Old World meets the New - in the person of Delphine Watzka - the great adventure of Fidelis's life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted. She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These moomentous encouters will determine the course of Delphines' life, and the trajectory of this brillian novel.
Posted by Femke at 02:58 AM | Comments (0)
White Man in Tree
Kurlansky is best known for such quirky nonfiction surprise bestsellers as Cod and The Basque History of the World and here turns his hand for the first time to fictionAwhich won't make the same market splash as his earlier, offbeat offerings, but should produce some ripples. The author was for many years a newspaper correspondent in the Caribbean, and an intimate knowledge of the islands and their sometimes peculiar approaches to life and ways of doing things permeates these affectionate and often wryly amusing tales. The title story is a delicious fable about a Danish filmmaker who thinks he has found nirvana with a beautiful Haitian mistress, only to discover that her views of the possibilities of the relationship are profoundly different. "The Unclean" tells of efforts to produce kosher chickens for a Dutch West Indies island, and the confusions that result. "Naked" is a sweetly satirical account of the political bureaucracy at work in the wake of an island hurricane. "Beautiful Mayaguez Women," set in Puerto Rico, details some of the odder corners of labor relations and cross-dressing on the island. "Packets and Paperscraps" is a perceptive and poignant story of an island stud and his problems with the arrival of AIDS precautions. Only "Desparecidos," an unsettling tale of a journalist traveling around South America who discovers he has a doppelg?nger filing stories in his name, strikes a darker note. But this is basically a sunny collection, lithely written and full of Caribbean sunshine.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Posted by Femke at 02:49 AM | Comments (0)