Optic Nerve

Maria Gainza; translated by Thomas Bunstead

Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, is in the first-person voice of an Argentinian woman who peppers stories of her past and present with reflections on paintings that hold significance for her.

The novel has no plot, per se. It unfolds in a series of vignettes or snapshots about the narrator’s life and family. These are punctuated with her recollections of a specific painting. The reverse is true since specific paintings conjure up scenes from her past. The scaffolding of a half-built house reminds her of Hubert Robert’s paintings of ruins. A flashback of a visit to the seaside triggers her recollection of seeing Gustave Corbet’s “The Stormy Sea.” The poster of a Rothko painting in a doctor’s waiting room prompts her to remember her husband’s hospital stay.

Pivotal moments in the narrator’s life are intricately bound with the paintings she describes. In each case, she delves briefly into the artist’s biography and includes some intriguing anecdotes about his life which have the effect of demystifying the artist. But where she excels is in her analysis of each painting and in demonstrating the impact it has had on her perceptions and her life. Her allusions are quirky and fascinating. She braids art works seamlessly into her life: a painting triggers a flashback; a flashback or an image triggers her reflections on a painting. We gain insight into the narrator through snippets of her life, through how she perceives the painting, and through her evolving perceptions.

The narrator’s experience of art is unfiltered, genuine, and deeply felt. She integrates the aesthetic experience into her life. Her observations of each painting are astute and original; her engagement is immersive. She sustains reader interest through her conversational style and her fresh discussion of paintings and their artists.

The novel’s structure is unique; the format, meandering. The whole is thoughtfully executed with a discerning eye for detail. And in case we need reminding, the narrator demonstrates the transformative power works of art can have on our perceptions and our lives.

A compelling and engaging read. Highly recommended.

Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations

Michael Sells

In Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, Michael Sells translates and comments on several short, hymnic Suras (chapters) that were among the first revelations to the Prophet Muhammad. Appearing at the end of the Qur’an, they are frequently the most often memorized, quoted, and recited. Since they don’t address the legal, political, and historical details of the later Suras, they are more easily accessible to those unfamiliar with the historical context. Their focus is on the Islamic fundamentals of belief in the one God, faith, prayer, and social justice.

Sells approaches these Suras by analyzing their distinctive tone and unique literary character. His translation and commentary highlight the ambiguities and subtle nuances of meaning frequently missing in other translations. He draws attention to the position of words in a verse, word endings, word sounds, and how certain sounds and words echo other Suras. His analysis is detailed and exhaustive.

Evidence of the complexity of gendered language in the Suras is teased out in Sells’ chapter, “Sound, Spirit, and Gender.” He argues much of gendered diction is, unfortunately, lost in many translations, adding to the erroneous characterization of Islam as a male-focused religion. Selected Resources for Further Reading and a CD Recording of the Islamic Call to Prayer and Six Suras as recited by several men and women are included with the book. Sells explains the different recitation styles and provides a transliteration of some of the Suras so non-native speakers can follow the recitation.

Sells’ approach to understanding the early revelations is scholarly, exhaustive, and accessible. He accentuates the complexity, hymnic quality, poetic diction, and calm and meditative aural resonance of the early Suras. This is a valuable and compelling approach to the Qur’an for those interested in exploring the aural qualities and interpretative ambiguities of the early revelations while getting a background on major concepts in Islam.

Very highly recommended.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

David Graeber and David Wengrow

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is the product of a decade’s worth of extensive research on how new evidence in anthropology and archaeology inform our understanding of humanity’s past. The authors debunk many of the conventional narratives and the assumptions on which they are based.

Graeber and Wengrow dismantle previous theories, including the concept of the child-like, noble savage of popular imagination; the origins of private property; the inexorable force of agriculture in shaping a society; the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers; the definition of a city; the existence of hierarchies in large communities; the inevitability of a centralized administration in large cities; the late emergence of symbolic behavior; the beginnings of democratic institutions in Athens; and the linear and uniform progression from “primitive” to “civilized.”

Through a wealth of examples from ancient sites around the world, the authors demonstrate repeatedly that human beings were not passive recipients of forces beyond their control. They engaged in political debate and made collective decisions. They made conscious and deliberate choices, rejecting one mode of social organization and adopting another. Movement was never “linear” in that sense. People frequently shifted between different forms of social organization depending on their values, on the season, or because they wanted to distinguish themselves from their neighbors. The situation was fluid.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally challenges our understanding of humanity’s past. It exposes the cultural bias of historians of the past and critiques previous narratives of the progress of human history. It is wide-ranging and expansive, provides a wealth of information, and is impressive in scope and scholarship. The Notes and Bibliography together amount to 150 pages. The style is conversational. But the sheer volume of the work, the digressions, the repetitions, and the extensive number of examples it provides make it a challenging read. It would have benefited from some serious editing.

The work is a formidable tome, intellectually fascinating for its challenge of our fundamental assumptions about our history. Its critique of previous narratives, assumptions, and methodology; its impressive and exhaustive evidence; the questions it poses; and the implications it raises for what it means to be a free, civilized, and cultured society are groundbreaking and profoundly thought-provoking.

The Women of Troy

Pat Barker

In The Women of Troy, Pat Barker picks up from where The Silence of the Girls ends. Here Barker focuses on the plight of women after the fall of Troy while the Greeks await favorable weather to return home. She fashions new elements into the story, including the story of Priam’s burial and the urgency of hiding the birth of a new-born Trojan male from the Greek captors.

The novel opens with the prelude to the fall of Troy. Greek warriors cram together in the wooden horse waiting to be dragged inside the city. The description is masterful, evoking the stench, sweat, and fear of the Greeks as they sit in the dark, terrified to make a sound while listening to the muffled voices of the Trojans debating what to do with the horse. We see the scene through the eyes of Pyrrhus, Achilles’ sixteen-year-old son. This is followed with the bloody raid on Troy and Pyrrhus’ savage murder of Priam. The Greeks plunder the city; kill all the males, including infants; enslave or marry the women; and wait for favorable weather.

The narrative unfolds through the first-person voice of Briseis, now the wife of Alcimus and pregnant with Achilles’ baby. Her status as the wife of a Greek gives her freedom of movement, allowing her to observe and comment on characters and events. She shuttles from her home to the enslaved women’s quarters, visits Hecuba, Cassandra, and Andromache. Interspersed throughout are occasional chapters depicting the perspective and internal thoughts of Pyrrhus and Calchas, the seer.

Barker immerses the reader in the atmosphere of the Greek camp. The men are bawdy, crude, violent, and one step away from taking their frustrations out on each other. They drink themselves into a stupor each night. They participate in the games and races Alcimus organizes to distract them during the day. The Greeks are clearly delineated and depicted as well-rounded individuals, the most prominent being Pyrrhus. He is a child in a man’s body; a blundering fool who fears being ridiculed, especially by women; riddled with insecurities; and desperate to garner the respect worthy of the son of Achilles. He falls short at every turn. Calchas emerges as a distraught seer, worried about his tenuous position in the Greek camp.

The perspective, however, is primarily and solidly female. Barker portrays the women as unique individuals with complex responses to their captivity. She captures the trauma of women who have witnessed the brutal deaths of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. They live in fear, subject to the sexual and physical abuse of their Greek victors. Some are described as hollow shells, performing their daily tasks with vacant stares. But among them are defiant women, like Amina, Cassandra, and Hecuba—women who refuse to succumb to fear or intimidation. Briseis emerges as intelligent, practical, and shrewd. She facilitates the bonding of women and promotes their resilience, strength, and survival.

Barker’s pacing is solid. Her characters are well-developed and authentic. The setting is saturated with the dirt, grime, and blood of a fallen Troy; its wind-swept beaches; its smoke and dust-filled air; its exposed, decaying bodies; and its shores littered with dead sea creatures. Her blunt diction captures an atmosphere fraught with tension.

Barker’s lens is unswerving and unflinchingly honest as she directs it at the women left to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of war.

Songbirds

Christy Lefteri

Christy Lefteri’s Songbirds is based on a real-life tragedy in which five female migrant domestic workers and two of their children disappeared in Cyprus and were later found murdered. Lefteri incorporates the tragedy into her story of Nisha, a migrant worker from Sri Lanka. Nisha’s mysterious disappearance sets Yiannis, her lover; and Petra, her employer; on a quest to discover her whereabouts. The novel alternates between the first-person voices of Yiannis and Petra.

Nisha has been employed by Petra for nine years as a housekeeper and nanny to Petra’s daughter. Petra had taken Nisha for granted. Although she never abused her, she never made a serious attempt to know her. Only later does she recognize the sacrifice Nisha made by leaving her own daughter with relatives in Sri Lanka to earn enough money to support her daughter’s education. Through her search for Nisha and through learning of the experiences of other migrant domestic workers, Petra comes to recognize the injustice and insidious racism of a system which treats these women as disposable commodities.

Yiannis earns an income by poaching precious songbirds and selling them on the black market. Lefteri describes in graphic and disturbing detail the indiscriminate capture and killing of thousands of birds. In love with Nisha, Yiannis proposes marriage to her the day before her disappearance. He thinks his marriage proposal or his confession to Nisha about his illegal activities may have caused her to run away. But when he teams up with Petra to search for Nisha, he realizes something terrible has happened to her.

In the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, Lefteri describes learning about the plight of migrant domestic workers in Cyprus. They have few friends and many enemies. Police indifference to the disappearance of these women and their failure to investigate their complaints of abuse exacerbates their desperate plight.

 Lefteri is to be commended for using her novel as a vehicle to highlight the abuse, exploitation, and physical and sexual violence these women experience. But the novel’s execution is awkward, its message too blatantly obvious and heavy-handed. Yiannis and Nisha are flat, dull characters who fail to generate sympathy or interest. They serve merely as vehicles to expose the inhumane treatment of migrant workers. Their backstories feel like unnecessary fillers and do little to advance the plot. Because Nisha is seen through their remorse-filled eyes, she is depicted as faultless and not fully human.

The novel is very slow to start and only begins to pick up pace as the mystery of Nisha’s disappearance unravels. Between some of the chapters are baffling, italicized interludes about the mangled, decomposing corpse of a hare ravaged by insects and birds. Although the purpose of these inserts becomes somewhat evident at the end, their intermittent presence throughout the narrative is jarring and bewildering.

Lefteri’s heart is in the right place, but this is not up to the same standard as her very compelling novel, The Beekeeper of Aleppo.

The Yield

Tara June Winch

Winner of the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Yield by Tara June Winch is a compelling narrative unfolding through three related threads. The threads combine to expose the racism, abuse, exploitation, government-sanctioned violence, and attempts to eradicate the culture of the indigenous peoples of Australia by their British colonizers.

The primary thread is of August Gondiwindi, an Australian Wiradjuri, who has been adrift in England for several years. She returns to the rural Australian town of Massacre Plains to attend her grandfather’s funeral. The second thread goes back in time with August’s grandfather, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, Poppy decides to compose a dictionary of his people’s language to preserve it for future generations. The final thread is in the epistolary form and goes even further back in time. Beginning in 1915, Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf, a missionary sent to Massacre Plains, addresses a series of letters to Dr. George Cross of the British Society of Ethnography.

August’s return to her home generates difficult memories of her childhood and of her sister’s disappearance. Her interaction with her grandmother, aunts, cousins, and childhood friends also triggers some positive memories, especially of her grandfather’s love and devotion. Learning that her Poppy was writing a dictionary, August determines to locate the book. Her search immerses her deeper into her cultural heritage until she determines to stay in Australia to fight the mining company wanting to repossess their land.

Poppy’s Wiradjuri dictionary begins with the letter ‘y’ and moves backward through the western alphabet. The complete dictionary is available at the end of the novel. In the process of defining words of his native language, Poppy includes elements of his culture’s mythology and belief systems, his conversations with deceased ancestors, animal fables, his personal history, and his attempts to instill in the young pride in their cultural heritage. His language is lyrical when speaking of his ancestors and recalling their stories. He also chronicles the abuse he experienced as a child forcibly removed from his parents and thrust into a boarding school where he was forbidden to speak his language or practice his traditions.

Reverend Greenleaf’s letters reveal his recognition of the abuse and discrimination mounted against the indigenous population of Massacre Plains. His respect for them grows with time as does his anxiety to preserve their culture, their language, and their lives. His letters amount to a plea for justice and greater compassion for the people, but his pleas fall on deaf ears.

Tara June Winch, an Australian Wiradjuri, has written a complex, compelling novel chronicling the abuse, discrimination, and atrocities perpetrated on Australia’s indigenous peoples. Her language is powerful and unflinchingly honest. The three seemingly disparate threads coalesce to depict cultural genocide from different angles layered at different time frames. Her novel is a moving testament to the suffering of the indigenous population, their resilience, and their determination to retain ownership of their land and to keep their cultural traditions alive through language and action. She is well-deserving of the awards and accolades she has received.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, which won the 1975 Pulitzer for non-fiction, is a veritable feast for the visual and auditory senses. Dillard’s exhilaration at the profusion, complexity, and diversity in nature is impressive.

Immersing herself in the flora and fauna of Tinker Creek, Dillard charts its seasonal changes. Her observations are intense. Her prose is dense, adding detail upon detail, so much so that it occasionally feels labored and bogged down in minutiae. Taking nothing for granted, Dillard questions, probes, and draws connections. When describing the beauty, bounty, wonder, and diversity of nature, her words tumble out in language that soars, echoing Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty.” Her technique veers toward stream of consciousness as she makes associations and frequently launches into some wild and often perplexing mental leaps.

Threaded throughout her observations are anecdotes about nature; the words of philosophers and theologians; citations from sacred texts; and insights from botanists, zoologists, and entomologists. Her intense observations in nature trigger spiritual musings and meditations on life and creation. She communes with nature, but her proclivity to insert herself and her reactions into nearly every scene can be intrusive, blocking the view instead of letting nature sing for itself.

Despite its sometimes overly embellished language and its forays into self-absorbed meanderings, Dillard’s book is recommended for its observation of and exuberance at the diversity and beauty of the natural world. As Dillard shows us, natural wonders are at our fingertips if only we have the patience to pause, see, listen, touch, and smell.

Around the World in Eighty Days

Jules Verne

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne recounts the adventures of Phileas Fogg, the unforgettable, unflappable, stiff-upper-lip English man who travels around the world with his trusty valet, Passepartout.

 While playing a card game with his friends in the Reform Club, Fogg calmly announces he can travel around the world in eighty days. His companions refute his claim, and a wager is set for the princely sum of twenty thousand pounds. The wager begins that day. Fogg insists on finishing the card game before setting home to announce to his astonished valet to pack his belongings in preparation for a trip around the world. And so the adventure begins.

 Fogg and Passepartout travel to exotic locations, including India, China, Hong Kong, and North America. They travel in whatever means of transportation is available, whether it is by steam ship, train, elephant, and even a sledge that hurtles across the snow. They are on a tight schedule, missing their connections on more than one occasion. Somehow, Fogg finds alternatives to get him where he needs to be. Along the way, they intervene in a suttee by rescuing an Indian woman from being burned alive on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre. They are chased by priests in India and attacked by Sioux in Nebraska. They are stalked in their travels by a detective who is convinced Fogg is a bank robber. And all the while, time’s winged chariot ticks loudly in the background.  

 This delightful classic, first published in 1872, has held up well over time. Adventure, excitement, exotic locales, cultural contexts, interesting observations, glimpses into an era long gone, and a cast of colorful characters make this a light, refreshing, and thoroughly enjoyable read, one that has survived the test of time with flying colors.

 Highly recommended.

The Whale Rider

Witi Ihimaera

The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera is a young adult novel that tells the story of eight-year-old Kahu, a female descendent of Kahutia Te Rangi, the whale rider.

Kahu is a member of the Maori tribe of Whangara, New Zealand. Her great grandfather, Koro Apirana, is the elderly chief. Desperate to seek a male successor, he pins his hopes on a male great grandchild since Maori tradition stipulates a male heir. So when Kahu is born, he is devastated. Kahu’s determination to earn her great-grandfather’s love is undaunted. She is unsuccessful at gaining his acceptance until that fateful day when hundreds of whales beach themselves and Kahu proves she is the rightful heir of the whale rider.

The narrative is loosely structured with a lengthy digression in which the narrator, Kahu’s uncle, travels to Sydney and Papua Guinea. The digression does little to advance the main story line which is about Kahu’s ascent as the tribe’s whale rider. The diction is simplistic and with minimal character development.

Ihimaera weaves Maori mythology and sprinkles Maori words in the narrative. These lend authenticity to the tale. A Glossary is provided to explain the phrases and words. The novel’s strength lies in the intersection of mythology with reality. It depicts the struggle of the indigenous tribes to maintain traditional belief systems in the face of modernity. Its primary appeal is to a young adult audience who may see it as a heart-warming tale of a young girl’s successful struggle to overcome the challenges of a male-dominated culture.

The True Deceiver

Tove Jansson; trans. Thomas Teal

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, consists of a battle of wills between two women while it explores the issue of lies—those we tell ourselves and those we tell others.  

Katri Kling is an outcast living in an isolated Swedish village. She keeps to herself, eschews pleasantries with the villagers, and is taunted by the village children. But she is good with numbers, and so the villagers seek her advice with their finances. Her companions are a dog she refuses to name and her simple-minded brother, Mats. Katri has been Mats’ care-giver since their parents died. She is very protective over him, caters to his obsession with boats, and wants to buy him his own boat.

Anna Aemlin is an elderly, highly successful illustrator of children’s books. She submits her paintings to her publisher who then contributes the story to go with the pictures. Anna’s illustrations capture the forest ground in minute detail. She populates her paintings with bunny rabbits adorned with little flowers. As the village celebrity, she is well-respected. She lives alone in a large family home dubbed the rabbit house.

Katri ingratiates herself with Anna, orchestrating a fake burglary in Anna’s house to convince her she should not be living alone. Anna agrees. After Katri and Mats move in, Katri proceeds to make herself indispensable. She picks up Anna’s groceries and mail, replies to her correspondences, and manages her finances.

The two women, having very different dispositions, constantly tangle with one another. Katri is cynical, suspicious of people and their motivations, judgmental, and always on the lookout for being exploited. Anna seems trusting, simplistic, and leads a sheltered life. She refuses to soil her fingers with discussions of money and is oblivious as to how she is being cheated by merchants and publishers until Katri informs her. A gradual, almost imperceptible, shift in attitudes occur. As Anna becomes more reliant on Katri, she becomes increasingly distrustful of her neighbors. Her suspicions seem to thwart her creativity. For her part, Katri regrets planting the seeds of suspicion in Anna’s mind and retracts her accusations.

In spare, taut, and disarmingly simple language, Jansson situates the narrative in a harsh winter climate with its unrelenting freezing temperatures and dark days. The frigid atmosphere reinforces the chill and remoteness of human interactions. The point of view constantly shifts from third person to Katri’s first-person voice. This inexplicable shift in narrative voice is unnerving and contributes to the simmering tension. Jansson skillfully conveys the tense atmosphere with few words and a controlled prose. Katri and Anna seldom speak to one another. Instead, they engage in the occasional flash of verbal jousting tinged with a mutual distrust, after which one or both exit the room leaving the atmosphere charged with electricity.

An unusual novel, skillfully executed, and with a haunting atmosphere that leaves one with more questions than answers. The reader is left wondering who is to be trusted, who is being deceptive, when did the deception start, and, finally, whether there is a connection between self-deception and creativity.

Recommended.

Deacon King Kong

James McBride

Deacon King Kong by James McBride is an absolute masterpiece.

Set in the vicinity of a south Brooklyn housing project in 1969, McBride’s novel sizzles with energy. At its center is seventy-one-year-old Sportcoat, the deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church who ambles through life with the aid of a home brew he has affectionately labeled King Kong. For some inexplicable reason, Sportcoat wakes up one morning and fires a gun at the young ringleader of the local drug gang. Over a dozen people witness the incident, but no one steps forward to assist the police. As for Sportcoat, he was so drunk he has no recollection of the incident.

Sportcoat’s action sets off a series of events that involve local police; drug gangs fighting over territory; the hunt for a mysterious artefact smuggled out of Europe after the war; murders; several attempted murders; a contract on Sportcoat’s life; lucky escapes; the occasional slap-stick humor; coincidences; love interests; a big-hearted, lonely policeman; honorable and not so honorable mobsters and drug-dealers; charitable acts; and several disparate threads that eventually converge. Infuse every page with humor and a delightful cast of characters who share a common history, invade one another’s lives, continuously spout their opinions, and fiercely protect one another from outsiders, and you begin to get a taste of the electricity surging throughout in the novel.

The housing project neighborhood is racially and ethnically diverse. McBride’s motely cast of characters are colorful, unique, and easily identifiable should they step off the page. Their dialogue is an authentic replication of the back and forth of actual speech. They are flawed, loveable, and street-smart. Although they are very aware of the racial inequities in society and their drug-infested, crime-riddled neighborhood, they are not bitter. Their lives intertwine with one another. They attend church, bicker profusely, laugh at the ironies in life, and love and support each other with a fierce intensity that is unshakeable. What emerges is their powerful sense of community.

The novel moves at a breath-taking pace with the occasional interruption of a character’s back story. The prose radiates energy, capturing the vibrant pulse of the community. The sentences can extend for several lines, piling on details and images. Chapter 7, which describes the progression of a colony of red killer ants from Colombia to their invasion of the housing project in Brooklyn, is nothing short of brilliant. How McBride manages to pack so much and juggle it all with such dexterity is a testament to his absolute genius.

A boisterous barrel of fun. Very highly recommended.

Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World

Candace Savage

Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World by Candace Savage is an engaging tribute to the multi-faceted crow. Relying on research and some fascinating anecdotes, Savage explores the tool-making and tool-using capabilities of crows, their intelligence, their ability to relay information to other crows (“crow language”), their trickery, their social interactions, and their family dynamics. Peppered liberally throughout the text are short myths and fables featuring crows and ravens, as well as some beautiful illustrations of the birds, including delicate water colors, engravings, prints, and photographs.

The book avoids technical language, making it a very readable and engaging introduction to all manner of crow-dom. Although there is a lot we know about crows, Savage clearly indicates there is much we don’t know. Further research is needed to fully explore the capabilities of this interesting species with whom we seem to have a lot in common.

Recommended.

Pond

Claire-Louise Bennett

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett lies somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories. It consists of a series of chapters or fragments, varying in length, in which the first-person narrator pours out her thoughts.

The unnamed narrator lives in a coastal town in Ireland (“the most westerly point of Europe, right next to the Atlantic Ocean”). Her rambling, stream-of-consciousness thoughts explore the minutiae of everyday objects, surroundings, and activities. She engages in extensive navel-gazing, analyzing her thoughts in minute, step-by-step detail. She is also painfully self-conscious, second-guessing herself and her interactions with others. She will occasionally drop oblique hints about her appearance, education, and love life. Articulate and intelligent, she has a dry sense of humor that surfaces in the most unexpected times.

She has a keen eye for observing even the most trivial details and recording them. A whole chapter is dedicated to her faulty cooker knobs. Her keen eye for detail extends to her natural surroundings. She charts the passage of a beetle as it skirts across her forehead and listens to a spider moving through the grass. Nature assumes an almost mythic quality in some of her descriptions. In between her rambling thoughts and convoluted sentences, she will hit you with a prescient insight that can take your breath away.

Whether you like the novel or not depends on what you think of the narrator. Some readers may lose patience with her and dismiss the novel as a pretentious exercise. Others will enjoy getting inside the skin of a narrator who is intense, intelligent, funny, observant, self-aware, and who reflects on and delights in the mundane.

Recommended.

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy concludes The Mayor of Casterbridge with the following words: “. . . happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” These words sum up the tenor of the novel.

The novel opens with an infamous scene in which Michael Henchard, in a drunken stupor, sells his wife and young daughter to the highest bidder. Full of remorse when he realizes what he’s done, he spends the next few years searching for them. But to no avail. As penance for his actions, he abstains from drink for two decades, works hard, succeeds in business, and eventually becomes the respectable mayor of Casterbridge. When his wife shows up with her now fully grown daughter, Henchard tries to make amends. He re-marries his wife to give their relationship the cloak of respectability. All seems to be right with the world. But not so fast. This is Hardy, and his Henchard will not be let off so easily.

What follows is a series of challenging events, love triangles, unfortunate circumstances, secrets, past transgressions, regrets, and mistaken identities. Henchard constantly tries to be a better man, but he comes up short mainly due to his arrogance, pride, and quick temper. He is full of remorse for his mistakes. He no sooner regrets a past action when he has plunged himself headlong into another morass. His attempts to be good are thwarted at every turn. He is his own worst enemy and fails to see the good in others until it is too late.

Another character haunted by past transgressions is Lucetta. Hardy is equally tough on her. Lucetta tries to bury her secret past and lead a respectable life with a man she loves. But Hardy won’t allow it. There is no redemption for her or Henchard. Burdened with past mistakes, both characters die untimely deaths. The only characters permitted to have some modicum of a happy ending are those who are relatively blameless.

Hardy is masterful in establishing setting. He immerses the reader in rural Wessex and populates it with a motley crew of locals speaking in a dialect and diction barely intelligible to a modern reader. His plot is carefully constructed with twists and turns, unexpected appearances, and failed attempts at expiation. In Henchard, Hardy has created a complex, nuanced character riddled with flaws, one who is gruff and unlikeable. And, yet, somehow, he generates sympathy for him. We watch him struggle to be a better man. We want him to do well. But he disappoints and lets himself down at every turn. A Hardy-esque fate has him in its grasp and it won’t relinquish him.

Hardy’s vision is unrelentingly bleak, tragic, powerful, compelling, and masterfully executed. It is a cautionary tale of how mistakes made in one’s wild and woolly youth can have enduring and tragic repercussions.

Highly recommended.

In the Time of the Butterflies

Julia Alvarez

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez blends fiction with the true story of the three Mirabel sisters, operating under the code name “the butterflies.” The sisters were assassinated in 1960 for their opposition to the dictatorship of General Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.

The novel opens in 1994 with a journalist interviewing Dedé, the surviving sister, about the events leading up to the murder of her siblings. It unfolds in the alternating voice of each of the sisters (Patria, Minerva, Dedé, and Maria Theresa), and spans the decades between 1938 to 1960. It describes their lives as young girls, as teenagers, as young wives and mothers, as members of a clandestine guerilla cell, and ends with their murder. The Dedé 1994 sections which frame the narrative, articulate Dedé’s guilt at her failure to be as politically active as her sisters, her survival, and her ongoing struggle to come to terms with their deaths while honoring their memory decades later.

Alvarez breathes life into these historical figures. Each sister is portrayed as a unique individual who gradually gets drawn into the struggle to overthrow Trujillo. They are shown as inching their way to becoming revolutionaries, each with her own reasons for doing so. Forming a guerrilla cell, they meet regularly to plan and hide crates of guns and ammunition in preparation for the uprising. Eventually, they and their spouses are discovered and sent to prison. After the sisters are released from prison, they are placed under house arrest, their movements and phone calls monitored by the Military Intelligence Service (SIM). They live in fear, but their resolve is unwavering. It is while returning from a visit to their spouses in jail they are ambushed and murdered.

Through her powerful diction, Alvarez captures the sheer terror of living under a military dictatorship in which people are in constant fear of stepping out of line. Loved ones are routinely murdered, incarcerated, or disappeared. The filth, squalor, starvation, and constant fear of torture and beatings the sisters experience during their incarceration reinforces the trauma of life under dictatorship.

By blending historical fact and fiction, Julia Alvarez disseminates information about the heroic struggle of the Mirabel sisters to a wider audience. Their courage and determination elevates their stature to mythic proportions.

Recommended.

The Heroine with the 1,001 Faces

Maria Tatar

In The Heroine with the 1,001 Faces, Maria Tatar interrogates Joseph Campbell’s definition of the hero and the heroic quest in his landmark book, The Hero with the Thousand Faces. She argues Campbell’s definition is masculine-centered and blind to the heroism of women simply because women operate under a different set of constructs.

That women do not conform to Campbell’s model of heroism does not negate their status as heroines. Using examples from mythology, folktales, fairy tales, and a host of other works, Tatar argues for expanding our definition of heroism. As she convincingly demonstrates, women have traditionally operated under a different paradigm of heroism by using use a variety of woman-centered skills and tools at their disposal to save themselves and to rescue others. Words are wielded as weapons through their story-telling. And information is shared in women’s circles through what has pejoratively been labeled old wives’ tales or gossip. When women are denied voice, as in the case of Philomela whose tongue was cut out to prevent her from reporting her rape, women spin and weave and write their stories to warn others and to demand justice.

From mythology, Tatar moves to fairy tales and folktales; to contemporary re-tellings of myths which give prominent voice to women who had been marginalized in male-centered heroics; to novels; to what female authors and their female characters have said about finding voice; to popular young adult novels about female detectives; and to current examples on television, films, and social media. She discusses the evolving definition of female heroism, women’s fight for social justice, and female vigilantes.

Tatar interrogates the word “curiosity.” She provides illustrations in mythology and fairy tales of women punished for all forms of curiosity, including sexual curiosity. Women’s curiosity has historically been muffled, silenced, or repressed. Tatar argues that rather than being a drawback, a woman’s curiosity is an invaluable asset for generating knowledge. It makes women particularly adept at solving mysteries, observing details in speech and action that others have overlooked, asking questions, investigating, cultivating an ethic of care and compassion, and pursuing social justice.

Tatar’s research is extensive; her examples are wide-ranging. Her expansion of the definition of heroism allows us to recognize the heroic work of a Shahrazad as we invite her to step up to the platform to receive her accolades alongside traditional male heroes. Who is to say that when Shahrazad rescues her community of women through story-telling she is any less worthy of praise than a blood-splattered hero emerging victorious from battling enemies? Her tools may be different, but her struggle and the struggle of all women who use their voices and the tools at their disposal to pursue social justice are worthy of the honorific title of heroines.

Maria Tatar’s exceptional, well-researched, and accessible study, with its extensive notes and index, makes an invaluable contribution toward re-defining our concept of heroism to include woman-centered voices and woman-centered work.

Highly recommended.

The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between

Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar’s The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between is a poignant memoir about his quest to learn the fate of his father. It includes background on Libya’s fight for independence from Italy and Ghaddafi’s emergence as Libya’s brutal dictator.

The memoir opens in 2012 with Hisham returning to his native Libya after Ghaddafi’s ouster. He reconnects with his extended family and seeks information about his father, Jaballa Matar. Hisham’s father had been a prominent political activist who used his money, influence, and voice to fight the Ghaddafi regime. The family escaped to Egypt when the situation became too dangerous for them in Libya. They lived in Egypt for several years until Jaballa was kidnapped and returned to Libya to be incarcerated in the notorious Abu Salim prison. That is the last his family knows of his whereabouts. In 2011, Hisham’s uncle and cousins are released from prison after serving 21 years for opposing the Ghaddafi regime. His father is not.

Hisham returns to Libya after an absence of thirty years. In the interim, he has acquired fame as an author. He was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. His fame and outspoken political activism earn him global recognition and garner influence with the British authorities by calling attention to the horrendous plight of political dissidents under Ghaddafi. He causes such turmoil for Libya that he is eventually able to extract a commitment for Ghaddafi’s son to reveal the fate of his father. Promises are made; promises are broken. And it is only after his return to Libya in 2012 that Hisham concludes his father was probably murdered by the Libyan authorities and that his body will never be found.

Matar’s diction is lyrical and emotionally gripping. He moves seamlessly between Libyan history to stories about his father’s incarceration, the brutality of the regime running as a common thread. Matar has been caught in a liminal phase since his father’s disappearance. He occupies a space between his adopted home in England and his homeland in Libya, feeling like an exile wherever he goes. He lives simultaneously in the past and present. His memoir consists of frequent flashbacks to the past, recalling incidents with his father, his life in Egypt, and the day of his father’s disappearance. He is trapped in the in-between space of not knowing whether his father is alive or dead. Should he continue to hope, or should he abandon all hope?  He fluctuates between anger and despair. This in-between psychic space has plagued Matar since his father’s disappearance and fuels his memoir.

Matar’s haunting memoir shows the perpetual impact of the disappeared on family members left behind. The agony of not-knowing permeates every aspect of Hisham’s life. He and his family share a common plight with family members of the disappeared all over the world as they desperately try to learn the fate of their loved ones.

A powerful memoir that depicts in meticulous and harrowing detail the emotional and psychological trauma of the search for truth and justice on behalf of the disappeared and their families.

Highly recommended.

Writers and Lovers

Lily King

Writers and Lovers by Lily King unfolds in the first-person narrative of Casey Peabody, an aspiring author who has been struggling to write a novel for six years. This is a coming-of-age story of a thirty-one-year-old finally finding her place in life.

Casey faces a lot of challenges. Still grieving over the sudden death of her mother, she works as a waitress, is burdened with student loans, and lives in a virtual hovel. She struggles daily with her writing, work, cramps, relationships, and a health scare. She is in survival mode as she goes through the motions of her daily routine while clinging to writing as a life jacket that will somehow rescue her from her emotional and financial crises. Having recently broken up with her boyfriend, Casey becomes involved with two very different men, unable to decide between the two. The novel ends on a happy note with things finally working out in Casey’s favor.

This is a light, easy read. The pace, which is very slow going in the first half, finally picks up. King’s portrayal of Casey’s introspection and life struggles feel contrived—as if she threw all possible challenges at her protagonist before allowing her to emerge as a resilient and empowered female with a strong voice. The novel has the feel of a made for television show—light, entertaining, but lacking in depth, and with a conclusion leaning heavily on the happily-ever-after fairy tale variety.

The Celestial Hunter

Roberto Calasso; trans. Richard Dixon

Translated from Italian by Richard Dixon, The Celestial Hunter by Roberto Calasso moves at a dizzying pace reflecting the dizzying speed of Calasso’s thoughts. Calasso credits the activity of hunting as the source of rituals, cults, and myths, which, in turn, formed the basis of religions and the pursuit of all areas of human knowledge. Hunting, as represented by the celestial hunter Orion, permeated the divine, human, and animal realms, bleeding from one realm to the other through porous boundaries.

Hunting fundamentally transformed man’s relationship to his environment. Calasso traces the progression from man as the hunted to man as the hunter and beyond. Killing and eating what one has killed precipitated a momentous shift in human consciousness that informed man’s relationship with animals. When humans made the shift from prey to predator, when they changed from the hunted to the hunter, they began to see themselves as distinct from the animal kingdom, possessing a unique ability to exert power over nature.

Each time a hunter wore the skin of the animal he hunted, he experienced a metamorphosis. He straddled both worlds by “becoming” the animal. Accordingly, he developed rituals to merge with the animal, to kill the animal, to separate from the animal after a successful hunt, and to atone for killing the animal through libations and blood sacrifice. These rituals formed the foundation of all religions. From metamorphosis, humans shifted to reliance on a “prosthesis”—an arrow, a javelin, a remote-controlled drone—to become the most formidable species on the planet, the only species able to kill without touching.

Calasso’s knowledge of his subject matter is extensive. He moves with alacrity all over the map, weaving Greek and Egyptian mythology and statuary; Hinduism; the Eleusinian Mysteries; the words of Plato, Ovid, Homer, Nietzsche, Herodotus, Henry James, James Frazer, and a host of others including anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and academicians, all in a dizzying display of erudition. His process is non-linear, labyrinthine. His chapters encompass the breadth and scope of his vast knowledge as well as his sense of humor. His technique, akin to stream of consciousness, consists of leaping to whatever associations and anecdotes come to mind even though the connections may be centuries and worlds apart, and not evident to a general reader. It is a daunting task to keep up with his breathtaking pace and to follow his train of thought.

Calasso’s theory is fascinating; his insights are stimulating; his analysis is brilliant; his tone can be irreverent. At times, his mental leaps are baffling. One doesn’t quite know where he’s going or why. But always, always, the depth, breadth, and immense scope of his knowledge is evident.

A challenging book, but one that attests to the presence of a brilliant mind at work.

Highly recommended.

The Hunger Angel

Herta Müller; trans. Philip Boehm

Translated by Philip Boehm, The Hunger Angel by the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Herta Müller, captures in minute detail the horrors of life in a Soviet Union labor camp in 1945. Her novel is based on the true story of Oskar Pastior, a poet who survived the labor camp and described his experiences to her.

The novel opens when Leo Auberg, an ethnic German, is deported from his home in Romania and transported to a labor camp in the Soviet Union where he spends the next five years. Leo is an astute observer of human behavior. He chronicles in painstaking, minute detail his life and work in the camp. The smallest, most mundane tasks assume huge significance. Leo doesn’t just shovel coal. He describes the different types of coal and explains how to shovel each type in meticulous detail. He has an ongoing battle with cement. He provides step-by-step instructions on the best way to carry cinder blocks. He communes with insects. He flashes back to incidents in his past and hallucinates about flying home on a pig. He lists the different types of lice feeding on his body and the bed bugs that plague him at night. And threaded throughout every aspect of his life and activities is the hunger angel.

Hunger is personified in relentless detail. It permeates every aspect of Leo’s life. He calculates each load he shovels earns him 1 gram of bread. He chews his food, spits it out, and hides it to savor it later in the day. He exchanges pieces of bread with is fellow inmates, always suspecting they came out ahead. He rummages through garbage to eat potato peels and anything else he can forage. He goes to the village to exchange bits and pieces of his meager belongings in exchange for food. He avoids looking in a mirror because he feels ashamed of the skeletal appearance he has in common with his inmates. The images and the insatiable hunger continue to plague Leo for decades. Even decades after leaving the camp, he feels a social misfit and is unable to quell the constant feeling of hunger.

The novel is in short chapters with headings that enumerate Leo’s musings and the mundane objects which assume major significance in his life. Told in simple, almost lyrical prose, the accumulation of minute details and litany of daily activities convey an authentic picture of what life must have been like in a forced labor camp.

This is not an easy book to read. It is, however, a powerful and compelling narrative illustrating man’s inhumanity to man packaged in the words of a very talented writer.