Twenty-First Century Novels
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Twenty-First Century Novels THE FIRST DECADE
VOLUME 1 A-E
Jeffrey W. Hunter EDITOR
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Twenty-First Century Novels: The First Decade
© 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning
Project Editor: Jeffrey W. Hunter Editorial: Sara Constantakis, Kathy D. Darrow, Matthew Derda, Kristen Dorsch, Reed Kalso, Jelena O. Krstovic, Camille Reynolds, Carol A. Schwartz, Lawrence J. Trudeau Rights Acquisition and Management: Margaret Chamberlain-Gaston, Sari Gordon, Sue Rudolph, and Robyn Young Composition: Evi Abou-El-Seoud Manufacturing: Cynde Lentz Imaging: John Watkins
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Twenty-first century novels. The first decade / [project editor, Jeffrey W. Hunter]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4144-8761-8 (set) – ISBN 978-1-4144-8764-9 (v. 1) – ISBN 978-1-4144-8765-6 (v. 2) – ISBN 978-1-4144-8766-3 (v. 3) – ISBN 978-1-4144-8762-5 (ebk.) 1. Fiction–21st century–History and criticism. 2. Fiction–21st century– Bio-bibliography–Dictionaries. 3. Fiction–21st century–Dictionaries. 4. Fiction–21st century–Stories, plots, etc. I. Hunter, Jeffrey W., 1966PN3504.T84 2011 809.3'051–dc22
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Contents VOLUME 1 Volume 1 Contents by Title ....................................................................................................
vii
Advisors .....................................................................................................................................................
xi
List of Contributors .......................................................................................................................
xiii
Preface .......................................................................................................................................................
xv
Entries A-E ............................................................................................................................................
1
Title Index
.........................................................................................................................................
xvii
Author Index ....................................................................................................................................
xxiii
Major Prizewinners ......................................................................................................................
xxix
Nationality Index ..........................................................................................................................
xxxi
v (c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Volume 1 Contents by Title The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Sherman Alexie .................................................................... 1 The Accidental Ali Smith ................................................................................... Across a Hundred Mountains Reyna Grande ................................................................... The Adventures of Vela Albert Wendt ..................................................................... The Age of Orphans Laleh Khadivi .................................................................... Air, or, Have Not Have Geoff Ryman...................................................................... An Altered Light Jens Christian Grøndahl............................................
6 11 15 20 24 29
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Michael Chabon .............................................................. 33
Arthur & George Julian Barnes ....................................................................
56
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing M. T. Anderson ............................................................... 60 The Athenian Murders José Carlos Somoza ......................................................
64
Atonement Ian McEwan .......................................................................
67
Austerlitz W. G. Sebald......................................................................
72
Await Your Reply Dan Chaon..........................................................................
77
The Ballad of Desmond Kale Roger McDonald ...........................................................
81
Baudolino Umberto Eco
..................................................................
85
Beasts of No Nation Uzodinma Iweala ...........................................................
90
American Gods Neil Gaiman .......................................................................
38
Beijing Coma Ma Jian...................................................................................
95
Anil’s Ghost Michael Ondaatje
.........................................................
42
Bel Canto Ann Patchett ...................................................................
100
Animal’s People Indra Sinha ..........................................................................
47
Bitter Fruit Achmat Dangor ............................................................
105
51
Blacklist Sara Paretsky ...................................................................
109
The Armies Evelio Rosero ....................................................................
vii (c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Volume 1 Contents by Title
A Blessed Child Linn Ullmann ................................................................ The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood ........................................................
113
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Díaz ........................................................................
197
118
The Broken Shore Peter Temple ..................................................................
202
Blindsight Maurice Gee ....................................................................
122
Brooklyn Colm Tóibín ...................................................................
206
Blood from Stone Frances Fyfield ...............................................................
126
Bruised Hibiscus Elizabeth Nunez ..........................................................
211
Blooms of Darkness Aharon Appelfeld ........................................................
131
The Bullet Collection Patricia Sarrafian Ward ............................................
215
Blue Heaven C. J. Box ............................................................................
136
Camouflage Joe Haldeman ................................................................
219
The Boat to Redemption Su Tong ..............................................................................
140
Captain of the Sleepers Mayra Montero.............................................................
223
Bold as Love Gwyneth Jones ..............................................................
145
Carpentaria Alexis Wright ..................................................................
228
The Bonesetter’s Daughter Amy Tan ............................................................................
149
Carry Me Down M. J. Hyland ..................................................................
233
The Book of Chameleons José Eduardo Agualusa ...........................................
153
Celestial Harmonies Péter Esterházy .............................................................
238
The Book of Dead Birds Gayle Brandeis ...............................................................
158
The Changeling Kenzaburo ................................................................ Oe
242
The Book of Negroes Lawrence Hill.................................................................
162
Child 44 Tom Rob Smith ...........................................................
246
The Book of Night Women Marlon James .................................................................
166
The Children’s Book A. S. Byatt ........................................................................
250
The Book of Not Tsitsi Dangarembga...................................................
171
Citizen Vince Jess Walter ........................................................................
254
The Book Thief Markus Zusak ................................................................
175
The City & the City China Miéville ...............................................................
258
The Bottoms Joe R. Lansdale.............................................................
180
City of Thieves David Benioff .................................................................
262
The Boy Next Door Irene Sabatini .................................................................
184
Clara Callan Richard B. Wright ......................................................
266
Brandenburg Gate Henry Porter ..................................................................
188
The Clothes on Their Backs Linda Grant .....................................................................
271
193
Cloud Atlas David Mitchell ...............................................................
275
Breath Tim Winton .....................................................................
viii
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Volume 1 Contents by Title
The Corrections Jonathan Franzen ........................................................
279
Dirt Music Tim Winton .....................................................................
350
Crabwalk Günter Grass ...................................................................
283
A Distant Shore Caryl Phillips ...................................................................
354
Crescent Diana Abu-Jaber ..........................................................
287
The Dive From Clausen’s Pier Ann Packer .......................................................................
359
Douglass’ Women Jewell Parker Rhodes
..............................................
364
Down River John Hart ..........................................................................
368
Duma Key Stephen King ..................................................................
372
El Dorado Dorothy Porter .............................................................
377
The Electric Michelangelo Sarah Hall .........................................................................
382
The Elegance of the Hedgehog Muriel Barbery ..............................................................
387
318
The Emperor of Ocean Park Stephen L. Carter ......................................................
392
323
The Emperor’s Children Claire Messud ................................................................
398
328
Empire Falls Richard Russo ................................................................
403
Declare Tim Powers......................................................................
332
English Passengers Matthew Kneale ...........................................................
407
The Deposition of Father McGreevy Brian O’Doherty ..........................................................
336
Everyman Philip Roth
.....................................................................
412
......................................................
340
Everything Is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer ................................................
416
Diary of a Bad Year J. M. Coetzee ................................................................
344
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Mark Haddon ................................................................
291
The Curse of Chalion Lois McMaster Bujold.............................................
295
Dancing to “Almendra” Mayra Montero............................................................. Dark Palace Frank Moorhouse ....................................................... The Day We Had Hitler Home Rodney Hall .................................................................... The Days of Abandonment Elena Ferrante ............................................................... De Niro’s Game Rawi Hage ........................................................................ Dead Europe Christos Tsiolkas .......................................................... Death with Interruptions José Saramago................................................................
The Dew Breaker Edwidge Danticat
299 303 308 313
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
ix
Advisors Betty Carter Carter is a former school librarian and Professor of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at Texas Woman’s University. She currently reviews books for Horn Book and has served on selection committees for several children’s literature awards, including the Newbery, Sibert, and Boston Globe-Horn Book awards.
Don D’Ammassa D’Ammassa has published several science fiction novels and short stories. A former editor of the Hugo-nominated fan magazine Mythologies, he is a noted critic in the genres of fantasy, horror, adventure, and science fiction. He is also the author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror, and The Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction.
Natalie Danford Danford is a novelist and book critic whose articles and reviews have been published in The Los Angeles Times, Salon, and many other publications. She is also co-editor of the annual Best New American Voices anthology series, which introduces emerging writers.
Harvey Freedenberg Freedenberg is a regular reviewer for BookPage, Bookreporter.com and Shelf-Awareness.com and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He also writes a monthly column on books for Harrisburg Magazine. The author of several prize-winning short stories, he is a longtime board member of the Dauphin County Library System and served on the One Book, One Community Selection Committee.
Dwayne D. Hayes Hayes is a Managing Editor at Cengage Gale and has edited several literature titles, including Contemporary Authors and the Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature. In 2002 he founded the literary journal Absinthe: New European Writing, a biannual magazine of contemporary European literature and art. Absinthe has published the work of over 150 European poets and fiction writers in English translation and has also sponsored readings and film screenings by international writers and filmmakers.
xi (c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Advisors
Pam Spencer Holley Holley is a retired coordinator of library services for Fairfax County, Virginia, Public schools. She has served on selection committees of many prestigious young adult literature awards, including the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the Alex Award, and the Michael L. Printz Award. She is an active member and former President of the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, and her reviews of young adult literature appear in numerous publications.
Dr. Elizabeth McMahon McMahon is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, where she is coconvener of the Women’s and Gender Studies program and the Australian Studies program. A former President of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), she is co-editor of the journal Southerly and a consulting editor for the Australian Humanities Review. She has published extensively on Australian literature and culture.
Dr. Víctor Federico Torres Torres is the author of Diccionario de autores puertorriqueños contemporáneos (2009) as well as a bio-bibliography of Puerto Rican writers and numerous articles in scholarly journals. He has taught in the Departments of Hispanic Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies and at the Graduate School of Science and Information Technology at the University of Puerto Rico’s Rio Piedras Campus.
Professor Lydia Wevers Wevers teaches at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where she is Director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies. A recent Fulbright Visiting Scholar in New Zealand Studies at the Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies (CANZ) at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., she is an editor and book reviewer as well as a literature critic and scholar.
xii
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
List of Contributors Alana Abbott
Cynthia Giles
Jenny Ludwig
Abbott is an editor, a published novelist, and a comic book writer.
Giles holds an M.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary humanities. She has been a university instructor and freelance writer.
Ludwig holds an M.A. in English literature and has been a university instructor and freelance writer.
Susan Anderson Andersen holds a Ph.D. in English and is a freelance writer.
Robert Berg Berg is a professional freelance writer and critic, with an advanced degree in History and Criticism. He also has an extensive academic background in literary analysis.
Margaret Haerens Haerens is a freelance writer and editor living in New York City.
Masoud is a playwright and screenwriter living in New York City.
Harrabeth Haidusek
Sean McCready
Haidusek holds an M.A. in English literature and is a university instructor.
McCready is a freelance writer and editor specializing in literary criticism.
Todd Breijak
Michele Hardy
Breijak is a freelance writer with a background in literary and film criticism and theory.
Hardy holds an M.A. in creative writing and is an instructor in English and humanities.
Joseph Campana
Kevin Hile
Campana holds an M.A. in English literature and is a university professor.
Hile is a published author, editor, and radio show host on the MIentertainment Radio Network.
Harriet Devine
Lois Kerschen
Devine has a Ph.D. in English literature and is a freelance writer.
Kerschen has a Ph.D. in English and is a freelance writer and college instructor.
Catherine Dominic Dominic is a novelist and a freelance writer and editor.
Bisanne Masoud
Sheri Karmiol Karmiol holds a Ph.D. in English literature and is a university professor.
Stephen Meyer Meyer has an M.F.A. in creative writing and has been a university instructor and freelance writer.
Melodie Monahan
Judson Knight
Monahan holds a Ph.D. in English and operates an editing service.
Knight is the owner of a literary agency.
Janet Moredock
Nancy Dziedzic
Marta Lauritsen
Dziedzic is a freelance editor and writer living in Michigan.
Lauritsen is a high school AP English teacher.
Greta Gard
Adam Lawrence
Gard has an M.A. in English literature and has been a university instructor and freelance writer.
Lawrence has a Ph.D. in English literature and is a university professor.
Moredock is a freelance writer and former university instructor.
Janet Mullane Mullane is a writer, editor, and English teacher with a background in the social sciences and the humanities,
xiii (c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
List of Contributors especially nineteenth-century literature and contemporary literary theory.
Anna Nesbitt Nesbitt is a former senior editor for Charles Scribner’s Sons with extensive background in literature criticism.
Wendy Perkins
Laura Pryor
Carol Ullmann
Pryor is a freelance writer who specializes in literature.
Ullmann is a freelance writer and editor who specializes in literature.
Rachel V. Smydra Smydra has an M.A. in English and is a university instructor.
Powder Thompson
Judith West
West holds an M.A. in English literature and has been an editor, writer, audiobook producer, and university instructor.
Thompson is a freelance writer and ivy-league graduate. He has advanced degrees in Shakespeare and Theatre.
Pamela Willwerth Aue
Perkins hold a Ph.D. in English and is a professor of American literature and film studies.
Doris Plantus-Runey
Pamela Toler
Kathy Wilson Peacock
Plantus-Runey holds a Ph.D. in English and is a university instructor and a translator and bilingual writer.
Toler has a Ph.D. in history and is a writer and university instructor.
xiv
Willwerth Aue is an educator, copyeditor, and writer in fields including business, science, and literature. Wilson Peacock is a published author and editor with an extensive background in literature criticism.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Preface Century Novels: The First Decade examines some of the most T wenty-First important fictional works published from 2000 to 2009. In order to help both students and casual readers develop a deeper understanding of these works, each title is covered in an entry that discusses style, characters, critical reception, and cultural and historical contexts, and provides recommendations of related materials and resources. With the participation of U.S. and international advisors, the list of titles has been developed to ensure broad coverage of world literatures, making Twenty-First Century Novels an excellent resource for multiethnic and multicultural curricula and communities. In selecting titles for inclusion, we’ve worked to provide a snapshot of the novel in the first decade of this century, with an eye to identifying works that are suitable for inclusion in a high school or college reading list in addition to being of interest to the general reader of literary fiction. We have kept in mind the criteria set forth by the College Board for works studied in an Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class, seeking out works that “invite and reward rereading and do not, like ephemeral works in such popular genres as detective or romance fiction, yield all (or nearly all) of their pleasures of thought and feeling the first time through” (English Course Description, Effective Fall 2010, p. 49). We hope and believe that many of the titles included here will still be read twenty or thirty years from now, and that each of them offers insights into the general human condition as well as the condition of the novel at the start of the 21st century. In order to provide a broad view of the entire genre, we applied a number of additional criteria in making the final selections. Awards: Winners of a small number of highly prestigious awards have been included by default. While there are many valid arguments both for and against the value of awards, we would be hard pressed to find individuals better qualified to judge fiction that the juries who make these selections. We also believe that much can be learned about the literary culture of a time by examining the creative works it chooses to honor. In assessing additional titles for inclusion, the short lists for these
xv (c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Preface
awards as well as other awards bestowed have also been taken into consideration. Lists of major award winners are provided in all three volumes. Genres: Despite the injunction of the College Board cited above, we acknowledge that many works in the “popular genres” do offer much more than simple entertainment. For that reason, no novel has been excluded simply because it belongs to a popular genre. Similarly, young adult fiction has been considered so long as it has significant adult readership and meets the other selection criteria. Outstanding series that began before 2000 but concluded during the decade have been treated in single entries; for ongoing series, individual books have been considered if they stand as serious contenders on their own. Graphic novels that are works of fiction have also been included. Finally, given that our primary audience will be English-speaking, we made the hard decision to include only works available in English at the time of compilation. Given that many very worthy works in other languages do not receive an English translation until years after they first appear, we reached that decision reluctantly. But we felt we would be doing the majority of our readers a disservice by pointing them at titles they could not in fact read. We hope the sampling of world literature provided here will whet English-speakers’ interest in international fiction and play some small role in stimulating the publication and teaching of novels in translation. Identifying the “best” or “most important” items in any large group of works is always a challenging and somewhat subjective task. It is particularly daunting to select a relatively small number of works from a genre as rich, varied, and global as the novel. We have no illusions that we have arrived at a definitive list; indeed, we are sure we have left out innumerable excellent works. Nonetheless we feel confident that we’ve provided a valid and vibrant picture of the novel in the first decade of the century. The Editors TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
xvi
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian By Sherman Alexie
W Introduction Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a semi-autobiographical memoir of Alexie’s own efforts to escape the downward spiral of reservation life. The narrator is Arnold, or Junior as he is called. The novel begins with Junior’s description of his physical defects and progresses to an introduction to his family and to the absolute poverty of reservation life. After he finds his mother’s name inside his geometry book, Junior throws the book at Mr. P., his geometry teacher. Mr. P. tells Junior that he must leave the reservation and or he will be destined to the same lost dreams and poverty that he sees around him. Junior enrolls at Reardan High School, a school for rich white students, located twenty-two miles from the reservation. His best friend on the reservation, Rowdy, gives Junior a black eye for leaving the reservation and refuses to speak to Junior. At first Junior suffers in his new school. The only Indian at Reardan High, Junior is an outcast; he does find some friends, though, but is bullied until he begins to fight back. Eventually the other students begin to respect Junior, especially after he is invited to play on the varsity basketball team. There are times when Junior’s dad does not pick him up at school, and he is forced to walk home, but Junior never complains and is happy at his new school. Junior’s freshman year at Reardan High is marked by his exclusion from the reservation. Besides the loss of his friendship with Rowdy, other people on the reservation are angry that Junior has left the reservation school for a white school. People on the reservation see Junior’s actions as a rejection of Indian life. In contrast, Junior finds acceptance at his new high school and begins dating Penelope, one of the most popular girls in his class. A drunk driver kills Junior’s grandmother, but before she dies, she says that she forgives the Indian driver. When Reardan plays a basketball game
against Junior’s former school, Junior emerges as a heroic figure, even though he does not score many points. He realizes that beating the ill-equipped reservation school is an empty victory against kids who probably have not even eaten breakfast. Junior’s sister Mary dies in a fire she is too drunk to escape. At her funeral, Junior and Rowdy finally reconcile. Junior completes his first year of high school and realizes that he is part of many tribes, not just the Indian tribe on his reservation.
W Literary and Historical Context
Often times, diaries are not published; typically, they are written as an expression of personal experiences and private feelings. Because Alexie wrote The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian with the intention of having it published, he created a persona—Junior—as a means of transforming his autobiography into fiction. Some elements of Junior’s life are based on Alexie’s life. For instance, Alexie was born with hydrocephalus, and he grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, near Wellpinit, Washington. Alexie also left the reservation to attend high school in Reardan, Washington, after discovering his mother’s name written inside a school textbook. Like Junior, Alexie was also a star basketball player, and his sister died in a trailer fire. As part of his acceptance speech at the Horn Book Awards, Alexie said that The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is about three-fourths autobiography and one-fourth fiction. Indians living on reservations experience the most extreme poverty of any minority in the United States. Reservation life is often compared to life in Third World countries, with limited access to electricity and indoor plumbing (Carlson, Rogers). Indian reservations are typically located in remote rural areas, which limits job and educational opportunities. Only a few businesses
1 (c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
MAJOR CHARACTERS MR. P., Junior’s geometry teacher, tells Junior that he must leave the reservation if he is to have a future. PENELOPE is Junior’s love interest at Reardan High. She is bulimic, which teaches Junior that even rich white girls have problems. ROWDY, Junior’s friend on the reservation, resents Junior for leaving the reservation school but eventually reconciles with him. ARNOLD SPIRIT, called Junior, is the fourteen-year-old narrator. DAD SPIRIT, Junior’s father, is an alcoholic but also a talented singer and musician. GRANDMA SPIRIT is Junior’s mentor and the source of much good advice. She teaches Junior tolerance. MARY SPIRIT, also known as Mary Runs Away, is Junior’s sister. After she leaves the reservation and moves to Montana, she dies in a house fire, too drunk to wake up and escape.
provide jobs and incomes or even the necessary supplies for living. Poverty leads to higher rates of disease, such as diabetes, which is tied to a poor diet. Alcoholism and tuberculosis are also common on reservations. There is limited health care, and the Indian Health Service is often relegated to antiquated buildings and equipment. Many Indians receive food stamps and government-issued commodities, but these are inadequate to support a healthy life. Contrary to expectations, gaming and casinos have not eliminated poverty, since most casinos are only marginally profitable. Indian reservations are on land set aside by the federal government for Indian use. They are selfgoverning but fall under the regulation of the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In some cases, individual Indians own the land on which they live, but in most cases, the land is held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which prevents Indians from securing loans by using their homes as collateral. To improve their property, most homeowners use home equity loans to borrow money. Indians are unable to do this, and as a result, many homes are little more than shacks in a terrible state of disrepair.
W Themes The poverty that permeates the Indian reservation is an important focus of The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian. In the first few pages of the book, Junior witnesses his father shooting the family dog because they are too poor to pay for veterinary care. The reservation
2
Portrait of Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
schools use the same textbooks generation after generation because they cannot afford to buy new books. Often, children attend school without eating breakfast, sometimes without having eaten dinner the night before. Junior writes that poverty feels deserved, that people are poor because they are stupid or ugly and that poverty saps the strength needed to fight poverty (13). Loss of hope is common on the reservation. In one of his cartoons, Junior draws his parents as they might have been had they not lost hope in the possibility of a successful future. At one of the many funerals that Junior attends, he notes that Indians have “LOST EVERYTHING” (173). They have lost their land, their languages, and their culture. To combat the grief that threatens to overtake his life, Junior makes a list of all the things that give him joy and hope. He lists his family and friends, but the list also includes favorite foods and books. The list contains small things, but Junior knows that hope is based on small things and not on wishes for success. Junior must try to balance his Indian identity on the reservation with his life at a school off the reservation. At the reservation school, the students take time to joke, but TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
(c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
at Reardan High, the emphasis is on grades and sports and doing well. Off the reservation, Junior is more focused and serious, and he instinctively understands that he must leave his Indian identity behind if he is to succeed. On the reservation, he is called an apple—red on the outside but white inside. Junior explains to one of his new friends at Reardan that his reservation friends think “you become white if you try to make your life better” (131). For Junior, the struggle is to find a way remain connected to the Indian community and at the same time become a successful individual.
W Style Alexie uses cartoons as a device to express Junior’s sense of humor and the deep ironies of his situation. Junior escapes into his cartoons, which he calls his “lifeboats” (6). While not everyone understands a different language, many people understand graphic art. Junior’s cartoons reflect on the cultural duality he experiences. He draws his parents as they might have been had the weight of reservation life not destroyed their hope for the future. He draws himself, exaggerating his physical flaws as a way to make fun of himself. Junior also draws himself as split down the middle, with one side as he really is—a poor kid from the reservation—and the other side, as he hopes to become—a preppy adolescent in expensive clothing. Alexie uses first-person point of view, as is suitable to a diary format. This perspective puts readers on the inside of Junior, seeing through his eyes. Junior’s self-depreciating humor and his grief are expressed in an intimate, straightforward manner. His diary provides the evidence of the family’s loss and poverty, but it also reveals the laughter and joy that come from small triumphs. In the diary, Junior explores his identity and the grief that envelops him. First-person point of view draws readers as confidants in that exploration. Crude humor and irony are survival strategies. Junior uses humor both as a way to survive loss—his dog, his grandmother killed by a drunk driver, and his sister, killed in a house fire. By the time he is fourteen, Junior has already attended forty-two funerals. Alcohol, poverty, and lack of hope destroy people on the reservation, but Junior has learned that humor is one way to cope.
W Critical Reception Reviews of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian were exceptionally positive. Typical is the review by Paula Rohrlick for Kliatt, who wrote that Alexie’s novel is “breathtakingly honest.” Rohrlick focused on the novel’s emotional content, calling it “raw emotion leavened with humor,” and noting that the novel is “funny, profane and sad” in its honesty. Rohrlick also pointed out that Junior’s voice “will stay with readers” and enlighten them
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sherman Alexie was born October 7, 1966, at the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, near Wellpinit, Washington. He was born with hydrocephalus (water on the brain) and was not expected to live. Alexie chose to be educated off the reservation and attended school in nearby Reardan. He then attended Gonzaga University and later the University of Washington. Alexie’s first two books of poetry were published shortly after he graduated from college. These works encouraged him to continue writing. Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues (1995), won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award and the Murray Morgan Prize. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie’s third novel, received several awards, including the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the Peter Pan Award, as well as the New York Time’s Notable Children’s Books of 2007 award. Alexie is also the author of multiple collections of short stories and several television and film scripts.
about the reservation experience. In her review for the Toronto Globe & Mail, Susan Perren focused on The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian as a “voyage of self-discovery.” According to Perren, Alexie’s novel is “brave, brash, bracing, iconoclastic and heart-breakingly tender.” Other reviewers, including Bruce Barcott in his review for the New York Times, expressed similar views. Barcott claimed that The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian might well be Alexie’s “best work yet.” Because this novel is so closely focused on action and emotion, reading this novel, Barcott suggested, “becomes more like listening to your smart, funny best friend recount his day.” The novel’s intimacy was also noted by Kate Agnew, who wrote in her review for the London Guardian that Alexie created a protagonist who is “funny, articulate and quick-thinking.” In other words, Junior is the ideal best friend whose stories engage readers and pull them into a narrative that is “bittersweet . . . funny, heartwrenching and utterly gripping.” Many reviewers of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian focused on the cartoons and their role in captivating readers. Kathleen Odean’s review for Teacher Librarian was typical in that the cartoons “draw a wide range of readers into this outstanding novel.” In a review for USA Today, Whitney Matheson called the cartoons in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian “flawless artwork” that is “invaluable to Alexie’s story.” Of course, it is not just the cartoons that make this novel so remarkable. Matheson claimed that the book will also “resonate” with readers and “lift spirits of all ages for years to come.”
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Alexie’s early life and the beginning of his writing career.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Agnew, Kate. “Education: The Lesson: The Book: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” Rev. of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. guardian.co.uk. Guardian 3 June 2008. Web. 8 Sept. 2010.
Grassian, Daniel. Understanding Sherman Alexie. Columbia: U. South Carolina P, 2005. Print. A literary biography that traces Alexie’s life and works and compares Alexie’s work and that of other Native American writers.
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian. Illus. Ellen Forney. New York: Little, Brown, 2007. Print.
Margolis, Rick. “Song of Myself: Sherman Alexie’s First YA Novel.” School Library Journal 53.8 (2007): 29. Print. Interview focuses on influence of reading and books in shaping his life.
———. “Boston Globe—Horn Book Award Acceptance.” www.hbook.com/magazine/articles/ 2009/jan09_alexie.asp. Horn Book Magazine Jan.-Feb. 2009. Web. 8 Sept. 2010. Barcott, Bruce. “Off the Rez.” Rev. of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. nyt.com. New York Times 11 Nov. 2007. Web. 8 Sept. 2010. Carlson, Peter. “In the Year of ‘Dances with Wolves,’ Everybody Wanted to Be on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Nearly a Decade Later, It Can Hardly Get a Quorum.” washingtonpost.com. Washington Post 23 Feb. 1997. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. Matheson, Whitney. “USA Today’s Whitney Matheson Checks Out Some Other New Young-Adult Novels.” Rev. of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. usatoday.com. USA Today 18 Oct. 2007. Web. 8 Sept. 2010. Odean, Kathleen. “Boys Past and Present.” Rev. of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. Teacher Librarian 35.5 (2008): 10. Print. Perren, Susan. “No Reservations.” Rev. of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. theglobeandmail.com. Globe & Mail 24 Nov. 2007. Web. 8 Sept. 2010. Rogers, Tom. “Native American Poverty.” www .spotlightonpoverty.org. Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. Rohrlick, Paula. Rev. of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. Kliatt 41.5 (2007): 6. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Berglund, Jeff, and Jan Roush, eds. Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays. Salt Lake City: U. Utah P, 2010. Print. A dozen interdisciplinary essays that explore Alexie’s work and will appeal to both scholars and fans alike. Cline, Lynn. “About Sherman Alexie.” Ploughshares 26:4 (2000-2001): 197-202. Print. Provides a profile of
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Nelson, Joshua B. “‘Humor Is My Green Card’: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie.” World Literature Today 84.4 (2010): 39-44. Print. Interview in which Alexie speaks about loss of native cultures and language, the importance of education, and the antiintellectualism prevalent on reservations. Newton, John. “Sherman Alexie’s Autoethnography.” Contemporary Literature 42.2 (2001): 413-28. Print. Explores Alexie’s effort to distance himself from the previous generations of Native American writers and his efforts to focus on personal relationships and interrelationships between Indian and white. “Teens on the ‘Rez’ Underground and in the Office.” Rev. of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. canberratimes.com.au. Canberra Times 25 Oct. 2008. Web. 8 Sept. 2010. Notes that the heartbreak and poverty in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian reveal the universality of Junior’s experiences. Gale Resources
Brill, Susan B. “Sherman (Joseph), (Jr.) Alexie.” Native American Writers of the United States. Ed. Kenneth M. Roemer. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 175. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Sept. 2010. http:// go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE% 7CH1200007252&v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r&p= LitRC&sw=w McFarland, Ron. “Sherman (Joseph), (Jr.) Alexie.” Twentieth-Century American Western Writers: First Series. Ed. Richard H. Cracroft. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 206. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Sept. 2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE% 7CH1200008364&v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r&p= LitRC&sw=w Quirk, Sarah A. “Sherman (Joseph), (Jr.) Alexie.” American Novelists since World War II: Seventh Series. Ed. James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 278. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Sept. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id= GALE%7CH1200011218&v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it= r&p=LitRC&sw=w “Sherman Alexie.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Sept. 2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1000110878&v=2.1& u=itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w Open Web Sources
Alexie’s Web site, at http://www.fallsapart.com contains information and links on the author, his works, awards, and other relevant topics. Alexie appeared on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central, October 28, 2008, to discuss politics and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The video of this appearance is available at http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbertreport-videos/189691/october-28-2008/shermanalexie Alexie was interviewed by Ross Frank for UCSD Guestbook (University of CA San Diego television station programming) on January 31, 2008. The video, in which Alexie speaks about his childhood and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWol PAoDk3g National Public Radio interviewed Alexie on September 21, 2007. The audio file can be found at http:// www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php? storyId=14586575
For Further Reading
Alexie, Sherman. The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Grove, 2001. Print. Collection of short stories about the difficulties in balancing Indian heritage and life on and off the reservation. Bruchac, Joseph. The Way. Plain City: Darby Creek, 2007. Print. Story of a young Native American boy who is bullied in his new school. Carvell, Marlene. Who Will Tell My Brother? New York: Hyperion, 2002. Print. The effort to remove offensive Indian mascots from a high school helps a teenage boy learn about his own Indian heritage. Castile, George, and Robert L. Bee, eds. State and Reservation: New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy. Tucson: U. Arizona P, 1992. Print. Ten essays that explore the reservation system, including historical, political, and economic topics. Esckilsen, Erik. Offsides: A Novel. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Print. About Native American soccer player who refuses to play for his new high school unless they get rid of their Indian school mascot. Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, and Teresa L. McCarty. To Remain an Indian: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Print. Critical evaluation of U.S. educational policies as experienced by Native Americans during the twentieth century. Peterson, Nancy J. Conversations with Sherman Alexie. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 2009. Print. Interviews from 1993-2007, in which Alexie speaks about his childhood, family, and reservation life. Sheri Karmiol
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5
The Accidental By Ali Smith
W Introduction The Accidental has been hailed as a technical tour-de-force for Ali Smith’s verbal facility, merging of multiple perspectives, and creation of an atmosphere of both mischief and menace. Smith’s accomplishment is considered all the more remarkable for its innovative transformation of a familiar plot device, succinctly described in an Atlantic Monthly review of the novel: “family succumbs to magical charms of irresistible stranger and is forever changed” (Judd and O’Neill). The stranger in question is Amber MacDonald, a bewitching thirty-something vagabond who insinuates herself into the dysfunctional workings of a middle-class British family vacationing for the summer in a less-than-ideal Norfolk country cottage. The alluring but devious Amber draws each member of the Smart family into her web of intrigue: the mother Eve, a best-selling author suffering from writer’s block; the father Michael, Eve’s philandering college-professor husband; and Eve’s two children from a previous marriage, the suicidal seventeen-year-old Magnus and the irritatingly precocious twelve-year-old Astrid. The Accidental is layered in structure, consisting of a series of overlapping descriptions of Amber’s mysterious visit from the differing viewpoints of Eve, Michael, Magnus, and Astrid. Amber permanently alters the family dynamic and, “with eerie cunning, locates the secret latch in each member’s psyche and flips it” (Miller). The novel is thus an exploration of the metamorphosis of identity using the deus ex machina device of the unexpected visitor. But it is also and, according to critics, more importantly, an exploration of the art of storytelling and its capacity to represent meaning. Laura Miller’s review continues: “But as any farmer’s daughter or man who walks into a bar can tell you, the premise isn’t what counts most. Success is a matter of delivery; at least, Ali Smith’s novel The Accidental—winner
of the Whitbread Award and finalist for the Man Booker Prize—places all its chips on that bet.”
W Literary and Historical Context
The Accidental recalls the Italian film Teorema, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Terence Stamp (mentioned on the book’s first page) as a mysterious vagrant who descends upon an Italian family and, in his just as sudden departure, induces them to confront the emptiness of their bourgeois existence. The Accidental is typical of Smith’s stories in its unconventionality. It is considered postmodernist in its use of metafictional devices that self-consciously fragment the classic structure of the novel in the realist vein. The Accidental is divided into three sections that correspond to the formal elements of the traditional novel: Beginning, Middle, End. But within each of these three sections are four third-person narratives devoted to each of the Smarts, distinctive in voice and perception of Amber. Complicating these disparate viewpoints is Amber’s first-person commentary, also contained in four sections, starting and finishing the novel and forming a bridge between the parts. The effect of these contrasting narratives of similar events is to disrupt traditional notions of objective reality, aligning The Accidental with postmodernist inquiries into the nature of truth and its modes of representation. Smith explained her approach to fiction in an online discussion forum, responding to questions about the competing narrative perspectives in her earlier novel Hotel World (2001), a work similar in structure to The Accidental: “For me there’s no story without voice, no voice without story, and no single story that doesn’t imply another one right next to it, or behind it, or in front of it—there’s always another story. . . . It’s a take on novel-writing that some readers, who like their worlds to be more complete and hermetic and their stories to be more comforting, to
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The Accidental
take a less fragmented or multilogued direction, might find exasperating. It asks a reader to do quite a lot of work, and to participate. For me it’s the thing that drives the novel form” (“Ali Smith”). The classic elements of novelistic structure are turned on end in The Accidental. Writing for the London Sunday Times, Lucy Hughes-Hallett remarked, “Smith has written a proper novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, but turned it into an exuberantly inventive series of variations. At her beginning, each character is facing some kind of dead end. By the end, everything, including the story of the stranger on the doorstep, is ready to begin again.” The conclusion of The Accidental is anything but. The Smarts return from their holiday to find that Amber has emptied their house of its entire contents except an answering machine on which she has left a message directing them to reconcile with their pasts. The empty house—now devoid of any remnants of the Smarts’ past lives—suggests a new beginning rather than an ending.
W Themes None of the Smarts openly questions Amber’s sudden appearance, each one thinking she is somehow connected with another member of the family. In the end, Amber produces a profound change in all of them, breaking them of their complacent acceptance of their “unsettled settled lives” (Clark). Eve, thinking that Amber is just another one of the coeds Michael has seduced, eventually throws her out of the house, but not before Amber has convinced her that she is wasting her talents as a hack writer of imaginary afterlives of ordinary people who died young. Amber flirts outrageously with Michael but ultimately deflates his male ego and makes him conscious of his middle age and waning charms. Amber instead turns her libido on Magnus, whose suicide attempt she narrowly interrupts, persuading Magnus not to punish himself for a school prank that led to the death of a classmate. And Amber befriends the impressionable but jaded Astrid, opening her eyes to the possibility of uncensored interaction with her surroundings. Critics agree that it is the experimental narrative strategies, thematic as well as stylistic, which Smith uses to develop these character transformations that make a success of the novel. Thematically, Smith relies on a variety of intertextual strategies that filter reality through various media and reinforce the theme of the subjectivity of experience. Amber relates her own history through a series of cinematic vignettes that blur the distinction between fantasy and reality and call into question the actuality of her existence. Eve’s biographies, though imagined hypotheticals, are part of a series of books titled “Genuine Article.” Astrid spends her time filming her surroundings before Amber throws her camera over a
MAJOR CHARACTERS MICHAEL FLINT is a pompous professor of English with an addiction to younger women. In the end he loses his teaching job because of his numerous romantic flings with his students. He is married to Eve Smart, a popular writer with two children from her first marriage, Astrid and Magnus. AMBER MACDONALD is the mysterious uninvited guest at the Smarts’ vacation house. She claims car trouble to inveigle her way inside, then dramatically alters the life of each of the family members by drawing them into her curious spell. Eve Smart finally throws her out of the house. ASTRID SMART is Eve Smart’s precocious young daughter, mature beyond her twelve years even before the arrival of Amber. EVE SMART is the wife of Michael Flint, the mother of Astrid and Magnus, and a writer of popular biographies that speculate on the afterlives of people who died young in the World War II era. Eve believes that Amber is one of Michael’s sexual conquests. MAGNUS SMART is Eve’s son, a seventeen-year-old burdened by the guilt of having been involved in a school prank that claimed the life of a fellow student. He tries to commit suicide but is apprehended by Amber, who then becomes his lover.
bridge. And the dead girl that Michael obsesses over killed herself as a result of a widely circulated e-mail that displayed her head attached to the naked body of another woman.
W Style Stylistically, Smith also uses varying intertextual strategies appropriate to recording each character’s method of apprehending reality. Astrid’s story is told through stream-of-consciousness technique, Magnus’s through a series of repetitions that seem to mimic the formulae coursing through his math-whiz brain. Michael at first holds forth as if lecturing to a classroom full of undergraduates but midway through the novel his narrative changes to the hackneyed and confused Byronic sonnets he writes documenting his infatuation with Amber. Eve turns the Genuine Article interview formula inward on herself, but refuses to answer her own most relevant questions. These narrative constructions are meant to call attention to themselves as deliberate strategies, and the writerly playfulness extends to the language as well, imbuing the novel with what Steven Poole describes as “an infectious sense of fun and invention.” The Atlantic review concluded that Smith’s style itself was the
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The Accidental
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ali Smith is a highly acclaimed author of unconventional novels, short stories, and plays. She is known for her exuberant wordplay and inventive narrative techniques calling into question the reliability of truth and representation. Twice shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, for the novels Hotel World (2001) and The Accidental (2005), the latter was awarded the prestigious Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. Smith taught for a time at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007, and now writes full time from her home in Cambridge, England, also contributing articles to such newspapers as the Guardian, the Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement.
intended focus of the novel: “The real story, though, is the language. . . . Smith maintains a playful, poetic idiom of startling and clarifying emotional power, so that the prose, in its logical beauty and its surprisingness, serves as an analogue of the enchantment dispensed by Amber. It’s
an enormous technical accomplishment that reminds us of the difference between linguistic hocus-pocus and real writing; more important, it casts a spell.”
W Critical Reception As if in response to Smith’s commentary in the online discussion forum quoted above, Neel Mukherjee affirmed the success of her project to engage the reader in the performance of her writing: “There are no clear-cut answers, only teasing hints. It is a kind of writing that is nothing short of an enormous vote of confidence in her readers’ imagination, an invitation to a true, joyous interaction.” Most critics of the novel have applauded Smith’s inventive narrative strategies and unpredictable language play. The commentary of London Telegraph reviewer Alex Clark is representative. Describing the place of the novel within the whole of Smith’s output, Clark declared, “True to form . . . it is a novel grounded on the idea of fracture—a fissiparous, splintered artefact that has little to do with willful gimmickry and everything to do with its author’s delight in story-telling, linguistic exuberance and ambitious, frequently painful truthseeking.” But a few reviewers were not enthusiastic
Ali Smith, author of The Accidental, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. ª Colin McPherson/Corbis
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The Accidental
In The Accidental, a British family spending the summer in a countryside cottage is visited by a beautiful young stranger who forever alters their lives. witchcraft/Shutterstock.com
about Smith’s privileging of experimentation over the demands of a traditionally developed plot. For example, Eoin Cunningham complained that “the main feeling one takes from this novel is that a very clever writer has decided to ‘do a Shakespeare’ and borrow a stock situation, characters and plot to use as a framework from which their experimental literary riffs may take flight. That would be fine if it worked, but The Accidental ends up more an exercise in cleverness than a story.” In discussing Smith’s characterizations of the Smart family, most reviewers have singled out Astrid for special praise. For example, Yvonne Zipp called Astrid “the book’s crowning glory” and Poole averred, “The only problem with the brilliance of Astrid as a fictional creation is that it rather makes you wish that the whole novel was hers.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
“Ali Smith.” encompassculture. British Council Arts. Web. 6 Sept. 2010. Clark, Alex. “Fresh Light on Amber and Eve.” Telegraph [London], 29 May 2005. Web. 30 Aug. 2010. Cunningham, Eoin. Rev. of The Accidental, by Ali Smith. Bookslut. Web. 5 Sept. 2010.
Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. “Fiction: The Accidental by Ali Smith.” Sunday Times [London], 22 May 2005. Reviews of Books.com. Amazon. Judd, Elizabeth, and Joseph O’Neill. “Finds and Flops.” Atlantic, 297.1 (Jan.-Feb. 2006): 173. Miller, Laura. “Who’s That Girl?” New York Times Book Review (5 Feb. 2006): 14 (L). Mukherjee, Neel. Review of The Accidental, by Ali Smith. Sunday Times [London], 1 Sept. 2005. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Poole, Steven. “The Genuine Article.” Guardian, 11 June 2005. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Zipp, Yvonne. “The Guest Who Throws a Family into Crisis.” Christian Science Monitor, 10 Jan. 2006. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Rev. of The Accidental, by Ali Smith. Kirkus Reviews, 73.22 (15 Nov. 2005): 1209. Brief plot review concluding, “It’s not so much about the story as it is about the virtuosity of the telling.”
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The Accidental
Rev. of The Accidental, by Ali Smith. metacritic.com. Web. 8 Sept. 2010. Provides access to numerous reviews of The Accidental from leading sources, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the London Review of Books, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. Bailey, Paul. “House Breaker.” Independent [London], 10 June 2005. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. High praise for The Accidental, calling the book a “page-turner,” Amber a “brilliant creation,” and Michael’s sonnet narrative an “isolated tour de force.” Dervin, Dan. “Unexpected Visitor Alters Family Life Already Dysfunctional.” Free Lance-Star [Fredericksburg, VA], 15 July 2007. NewsBankinc. Access World News. Web. 2 Sept. 2010. Commends the novel’s spirit of innovation. Schaub, Michael. “Surprise Visit Upends a Family’s Vacation.” San Francisco Chronicle 8 Jan. 2006. SFGate.com. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Remarks upon Smith’s successful manipulation of multiple viewpoints, also praising Smith’s humor and creation of a sense of mystery. Whitney, Scott. Rev. of The Accidental, Audiobook. Booklist, 102.18 (15 May 2006): 64. Finds that the ensemble cast successfully re-creates the “hypnotic appeal” of the print version. Winter, Jessica. “Amber Alert.” Village Voice, 27 Dec. 2005. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Review of The Accidental that looks at the book within the context of Smith’s other stories and her penchant for metafiction. Gale Resources
“Ali Smith.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Also covered in Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, vols. 88, 159, and 199.
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Open Web Sources
The hyperlink “CultureBooksAli Smith” at the website for the London Guardian contains a useful summary of Smith’s life and works, with a suggested reading plan and another link to reviews of her latest stories. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/11/ alismith For Further Reading
The Man Who Came to Dinner. Dir. William Keighley. Perf. Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Monty Woolley, Richard Travis, Jimmy Durante, and Billie Burke. Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD. Comedy about a famous radio wit and cultural critic who takes over a small-town Ohio household after injuring himself in a fall on the ice outside the home. The fractures heal but the uninvited guest fakes the extent of his injuries to prolong his stay. Smith, Ali. The Seer. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Print. A comedy of manners founded on a premise similar to The Accidental, concerning an Edinburgh couple whose life is completely disrupted by the arrival of the woman’s sister. In the play, the Amber figure, the sister, is even more a force of anarchy but the effect is one of farce. Teorema. Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Perf. Terence Stamp, Silvana Magana, Massimo Grotto, Anne Wiazemsky, and Laura Betti. Mondo Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Film with a plot very similar to The Accidental and actually referenced in the novel. Terence Stamp plays the charming stranger in the movie, seducing all the members of a wealthy Italian family before mysteriously disappearing. This DVD is in Italian with English subtitles. Janet Mullane
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Across a Hundred Mountains By Reyna Grande
W Introduction Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) is Reyna Grande’s first novel. Largely autobiographical, the book opens with a poverty-stricken family living in a cardboard shack on the outskirts of a small Mexican village. Juana is a young girl whose father, Miguel, has left his family to find work en el otro lado—“on the other side.” He finds a “coyote” to take him to America, promising to send money to his family. After two years, the family has heard nothing from Miguel. Juana loses her baby sister in a flood, and the family is deeply in debt to the village’s loan shark. Juana, convinced that her father is across the mountains, leaves her mother to find him. Juana’s story is intercut with a narrative from the point of view of Adelina Vasquez, a Mexican girl who is a social worker in Los Angeles. Adelina is traveling to Mexico in order to discover the truth about her own father’s disappearance nineteen years earlier, and to get away from her pimp/ boyfriend. Traveling in opposite directions on similar quests, the two women meet in a Tijuana jail, where Adelina agrees to help Juana find the “coyote” who brought her father across the border and into the United States. While on the surface, Across a Hundred Mountains chronicles the personal journeys of two women, it also considers the larger issue of immigration and examines the poverty and destitution experienced by scores of Mexican families who risk their lives trying to escape their situations by crossing the U.S. border.
W Literary and Historical Context
Across a Hundred Mountains takes as its subject matter the contemporary phenomenon of Mexican immigration
into the United States. Although the book is a fictional account of immigration, Grande drew heavily upon her own experiences. Born in Mexico in 1975 and left behind to be raised by her grandmother while her parents immigrated to the United States to work, she came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant at the age of nine. Unable to find books that she could relate to, Grande has said, “I wrote this story because all of the books that I read, especially those by Latino authors, never quite captured my own experience,” adding, “A lot of books deal with the children of immigrants—what they go through and their identity as U.S.-born Latinos. I always felt a little left out because I wasn’t born here, and these stories weren’t reflecting my personal experience” (Rappaport). Rather than discuss the political implications of the immigration issue, Grande personalizes and humanizes the poverty and desperation faced by the thousands of Mexican immigrants coming over the border each year. Speaking about her own experience, Grande has commented, “The poverty—that’s very real to my experience. . . . My sister in Mexico had a habit of picking up things off the ground . . . and eating them, just because we didn’t have any food” (Rappaport). The border’s tendency to break families is illustrated in the novel as well as in Grande’s experience. Her father left for the United States, followed by her mother. When Grande crossed the border after them, several years later, her parents were divorced. According to the Los Angeles Daily News, “She has no memory of her parents ever living together. And when she arrived in the United States, she lived with her father, and although her mother was just 20 minutes away, she only saw her once or twice a month,” adding, “Grande said those childhood experiences reverberate in her writing” (Coca). In the book, Juana’s family is broken when her father leaves—an event that is a catalyst for further fractures and disconnects within the family, ultimately leading to Juana’s own journey and self-discovery.
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Across a Hundred Mountains
MAJOR CHARACTERS DON ELÍAS is a money lender from whom Miguel has to borrow in order to pay the “coyote” to ferry him across the border. When Lupe cannot pay him, he demands that she sleep with him, starting her descent into depression, alcoholism, and insanity. JUANA GARCIA is a poor Mexican girl whose father leaves for the United States and disappears. Two years later, Juana goes after him and, in Tijuana, meets Adelina, who agrees to help her across the border. LUPE GARCIA is Juana’s mother. After her husband leaves for the United States, she loses three of her children and finds herself deeply in debt to Don Elías. She spirals into alcoholism and madness, inspiring Juana to leave the village to find her father. MIGUEL GARCIA is Juana’s father. He borrows money from Don Elías to pay a “coyote” to take him across the Mexico/ U.S. border. His intention is to support his family, but he is not heard from again. ADELINA VASQUEZ is a social worker from Los Angeles who is traveling to Mexico to discover the truth about her father’s disappearance nineteen years earlier. She meets Juana in a Tijuana jail and agrees to help her on her quest.
W Themes Cultural identity assumes a fluid nature in Across a Hundred Mountains. Upon crossing the border, people’s identities shift and change. When characters enter a country that does not want them, they become anonymous and alone. Families on the Mexican side of the border, stuck in a cycle of poverty and violence, are torn apart as a result of members leaving. Despite his intention to effect a change by earning more money for the family, when Juana’s father leaves, the family’s misfortunes intensify. Grande assigns an almost mythical quality to the journey from Mexico to the United States by referring to the destination as “the other side.” She equates the journey from Mexico to the United States with a kind of rebirth, where new identities are acquired, but the novel shows that ultimately cultural identity is inescapable. The theme of cultural identity is extended by Grande’s treatment of duality in the novel. Juana and Adelina represent two sides of the same coin, each on a journey to discover themselves. Early in the novel, Juana meets a man who, speaking of the moon, tells her, “‘It has two faces. She only shows one face to the world. Even though it changes shape constantly, it’s always the same face we see. But her second face, her second face remains hidden in darkness. That’s the face no one can see. People
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Mexican immigrants enter the United States illegally. Across a Hundred Mountains features the story of a young Mexican girl trying to locate her father, who disappears after sneaking into the United States to find work. Spencer Grant/Photo Researchers, Inc.
call it the dark side of the moon. Two identities. Two sides of a coin.’” (Grande 25). Rather than maintaining one identity, the novel illustrates the modernist notion of a fractured, multiplicity of identities.
W Style Grande’s narrative in Across a Hundred Mountains shifts between her two main characters. The book opens with a section told from Juana’s point of view. Héctor Torres, associate professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, has commented, “‘Adelina’ opens the narrations, situating the reader amid the search for the lost/absent father. The reader finds Adelina looking for the lost bones of her father. Nineteen years have passed, the narrator tells us, since the search began: ‘Too many years thinking he had abandoned them.’ Grande leaves her reader suspended over this abyss of narrative time and the corpse Adelina’s search has uncovered” (Torres). Across a Hundred Mountains has a narrative structure that TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Across a Hundred Mountains
manipulates time by situating Juana in a linear, chronological trajectory, while Adelina, generally moving forward through her time, is simultaneously allowed to move backward, through Juana’s time. As Torres observes, “Grande plays with narrative time, making it move backwards and forwards with each name until they collide, unsettling the formula of self-identity, A=A” (Torres). Grande uses deceptively simple language to tell her characters’ stories, with short, sometimes clipped sentences. This makes for a fast-paced story, and also gives the reader a sense of the complicated emotional states occupied by people living very simple lives and dealing with very basic human needs. One critic has suggested that, “Across a Hundred Mountains . . . maintains its power throughout because Reyna Grande keeps control over her language and does not feel a need to trumpet emotionally volatile scenes of alcohol and drug abuse, rape, poverty and infant mortality” (Olivas).
W Critical Reception Garnering critical acclaim, Grande’s novel won an American Book Award (2007) and an El Premio Aztlán Literary Award (2006). Called “a breathtaking debut from a young writer who has a remarkable literary future before her” (Olivas), Across a Hundred Mountains has been praised for its sparse language and honest portrayal of the realities of Mexico’s poor and of the immigration experience. One critic observed that the novel is written “In evocative language that never falls into the trap of bathos,” which contributes to “a striking and moving story” (Olivas). Another, calling the book “a powerful story that balances cultural trauma with reterritorialization and cultural renewal,” calls attention to the book’s “disarmingly simple prose” (Torres). Many critics note that Grande drew on her own life experiences while writing the novel, one commenting that the fact that “the novel is filled with details drawn from Grande’s own life adds immeasurably to the poignancy of the story” (Rappaport), but Grande maintains that the work is not entirely autobiographical—merely informed by her experience with Mexican poverty and as an undocumented immigrant. Commenting on Grande’s use of autobiography, one critic noted, “While acknowledging that the process draws from her personal experience, [Grande] was also quite candid about her disposition to depart from it and make up a tale free to bend the codes of authority housed under the name of realism” (Torres). While the vast majority of critics gave Across a Hundred Mountains rave reviews, some registered complaints about the writing, accusing the novel of having such shortcomings as “stereotyped characters and wildly melodramatic plotting” (Reese). Grande has been accused of writing with a melodramatic bent in the past. The Los Angeles Daily News reported that “Grande . . . said her melodramatic bent was understandable considering she’s
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Reyna Grande was born into poverty in rural Mexico and crossed the border to live with her father in Los Angeles when she was eight years old. At the urging of an English teacher at Pasadena City College, Grande attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing in 1999. Her senior project in UCSC’s Literature Department was the first eighty pages of Across a Hundred Mountains. After graduating, Grande was named a 2003 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellow, which enabled her to enroll in free writing classes at UCLA. Now an American citizen, she lives in Los Angeles, teaches English as a second language, frequently visits schools to talk about writing and her books, and continues to write fiction.
from Mexico. . . . ‘Mexicans watch soap operas,’ [she] said with a laugh” (Coca). BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Coca, Rick. “Beyond Melodrama First-Time Novelist’s Fiction Underscored with Personal Truths.” Los Angeles Daily News, 2006. HighBeam Research. Web. 10 Sept. 2010. Grande, Reyna. Across a Hundred Mountains. New York: Washington Square Press: Atria, 2007. Print. Olivas, Daniel A. Rev. of Across a Hundred Mountains, by Reyna Grande. Latino Stories.com. El Paso Times, 16 Apr. 2006. Web. 10 Sept. 2010. Rappaport, Scott. “Alumni Profile: Across a Hundred Mountains.” UC Santa Cruz Review. UC Santa Cruz. 2007. Web. 10 Sept. 2010. Reese, Jennifer. Rev. of Across a Hundred Mountains, by Reyna Grande. Entertainment Weekly, 23 June 2006. Web. 10 Sept. 2010. Torres, Héctor. “Across a Hundred Mountains.” Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, 2008. HighBeam Research. Web. 10 Sept. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Rev. of Across a Hundred Mountains, by Reyna Grande. Color Lines Magazine, 2006. HighBeam Research. Web. 10 Sept. 2010. Brief review of Across a Hundred Mountains praising Grande’s voice and use of detail. Shank, Jenny. “Reyna Grande’s Across a Hundred Mountains.” New West Books and Writers, 16 Aug.
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2007. Web. 13 Sept. 2010. Long review of the book that includes notes on the author, plot summary, and criticism of Grande’s characterization. Gale Resources
“Reyna Grande.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Sept. 2010. Open Web Sources
Grande’s website featuring a biography, speaking engagements, sections dedicated to her books, and contact information is at http://www.reynagrande. com/index.htm Grande’s publisher’s website includes a biography, interviews, reviews, and excerpts from her novels. http:// authors.simonandschuster.com/Reyna-Grande/ 27097999 An interview with the author in which she discusses her books and her career is at http://thedarkphantom. wordpress.com/2009/03/31/on-the-spotlight-
reyna-grande-author-of-across-a-hundred-moun tains/. For Further Reading
Grande, Reyna. Dancing with Butterflies: A Novel. New York: Washington Square Press, 2009. Print. Grande’s second novel, told from the perspectives of four different women in a Los Angeles dance company. Pérez, Ramón “Tianguis.” Trans. Dick J. Reavis. Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1991. Print. Autobiographical account that deals with the economy and culture of the United States from the perspective of an undocumented immigrant. Zucker, Norman L., and Naomi Flink. Desperate Crossings: Seeking Refuge in America. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. Print. Political and social analysis of refugee policies since the end of the Cold War. Discusses the 1980s exodus from Central America and the Haitian and Cuban exoduses of 1994. Todd Breijak
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TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Adventures of Vela By Albert Wendt
W Introduction Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela begins as Alapati, the narrator, meets the immortal Samoan storyteller Vela when they are assigned adjacent hospital beds. Vela, who is emaciated, dying, and desirous of death, anoints the narrator as his chronicler in English. Vela is three hundred years old, so the story of his life spans that of the colonial period of Samoan history. The novel is both a revisionary account of Samoa from the point of view of the colonized and a set of meditations on what it means to write history. The Adventures of Vela, which was written over a period of nearly two decades, first appeared in 1995 as a long poem in Wendt’s collection Photographs. It is the longest novel in verse to come out of New Zealand and the Pacific, and Wendt refers to it as his life’s work. The novel won the Commonwealth Prize for literature in 2010.
W Literary and Historical Context
The Adventures of Vela is set in Samoa, a chain of volcanic islands in the South Pacific Ocean about 2,200 miles south of Hawaii. Under colonial rule from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Samoan islands were split into two sections at the turn of the twentieth century. The eastern islands, today referred to as American Samoa, became territories of the United States in 1904. The western islands became known as Western Samoa (now just Samoa) and were controlled first by Germany and then by New Zealand beginning in 1914. New Zealand administered Western Samoa under the auspices of the League of Nations and then as a United Nations trusteeship. A resistance movement to both German and New Zealand rule, known as the Mau (“strongly held view”) movement, helped to edge the islands toward
independence on January 1, 1962, making it the first Pacific Island country to gain government autonomy. The Adventures of Vela, like Wendt’s previous work, falls in the category of postcolonial literature, a genre that reacts to, and usually against, the discourse of colonization. These works typically offer a critique of the ideological and historical effects of colonial rule in countries that are now independent. Postcolonial literature is also concerned with both the cultural and political policies implemented during colonial rule and the way that those policies changed the native cultures that existed before colonization. Works in the genre often critique classical English language texts that carry racist or colonial undertones through the process of “writing back.” Writing for the Journal of Pacific History, critic Paul Sharrad describes Wendt’s Samoan fiction as “a corrective reclamation of literary history” that counters the “false and demeaning images of Islanders and island life perpetuated in outsider writing and taught in colonial schools.” As Wendt says in a Dominion Post interview with Diana Dekker, the English programs of his own school days were structured “exactly like they were in England. . . . No New Zealand literature at all. I think they started teaching New Zealand literature in the 1970s.”
W Themes The Adventures of Vela fits strongly within the postcolonial tradition and, like Wendt’s earlier novels, struggles to provide a space in which the oral traditions of Samoa’s past can be accommodated, remembered, and reformed while resisting the reproduction of a homogenous “tradition”—a term, Wendt declared, that “means nothing to me” (Mallon). As Wendt notes in his essay “Towards a New Oceania”—often referred to as the founding document of Pacific studies—he is wary of the nostalgic desire to resurrect an imagined precolonial
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The Adventures of Vela
MAJOR CHARACTERS ALAPATI, the unnamed narrator of The Adventures of Vela, meets Vela in a hospital and consents to chronicle his life. Vela comes in and out of his life over the course of several decades, and the narrative of Vela’s past is interspersed with sections describing the relationship between Alapati and Vela and Alapati’s family life. VELA, the immortal storyteller whose life is nominally the subject of the novel, conscripts Alapati to tell his life story. The parts of the novel that take place in the past are mainly a chronology of his life.
culture, instead encouraging New Zealand to embrace cultural and racial complexity as a strength rather than a weakness. As such, the novel does not attempt to revive a pure Samoan past but rather is influenced by the idea of “hybridity,” the central concept in postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s argument in The Location of Culture. Bhabha contends that mixed cultural traditions present a challenge to colonial regimes specifically and to essentialist cultural beliefs and forms generally. Writers such as Wendt, Salman Rushdie, and Derek Walcott depict modern-day ethnic cultures that are strengthened by containing a mix of past and present and of Eastern and Western cultural traditions. In an interview with Vili Hereniko and David Hanlon in Contemporary Pacific, Wendt said, “It’s important that we decolonialize our histories. . . . In school, our histories were taught as prehistory or folk history.” The Adventures of Vela exhibits this desire to decolonize history by bringing the mythic figure from the prehistoric past into the present day and merging aspects of Samoan oral traditions with the literate culture of the present. Vela’s life span is long enough that his biography is itself the story of this endeavor, and his difficult friendship with the narrator is a metaphor for the attempt to provide a cultural form in which otherwise irreconcilable entities (mythic and historical, profane and ordinary, body and soul, past and present) can coexist. As Helen Watson White in the Sunday Star Times puts it, The Adventures of Vela is “storytelling about storytelling,” a novel that champions the possibility that many different voices can produce a more robust and complete version of truth and history than any one speaker can. The indefinite structure of the novel, which vacillates between a number of voices—not all of which are even identifiable but all of which speak with equal authority—suggests that even gods are simply additional voices witnessing events as they pass. The volatility of the text encourages multiple voices and rejects the cultural homogeneity that Wendt criticizes in “Towards a New Oceania.”
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A man in traditional Samoan dress. In The Adventures of Vela, Alapati meets Vela, a 300-year-old Samoan storyteller who appoints him to be his chronicler in English. ª Bill Bachmann / Alamy
W Style The Adventures of Vela, which White refers to as a “postmodern potpourri,” is composed of a mix of styles (poetry, short story, and images); vocabularies (lyric, profane, modern, and archaic); and ideas (religious, cultural, and political). The discontinuous narrative, fragmented verse forms, lack of novelistic conventions such as clear characterization and identifiable speaking styles, absence of markers of temporal and geographical placement, and use of Samoan words can make the novel slow and frustrating to read. Although the book is best described as a hybrid or mixed form comprising elements of poetry, song, drama, and folktales, in an interview with Pacific Starmap, Wendt refers to it as a “novel in verse” rather than a poem. Novels, he says in his interview with Hereniko and Hanlon, “present the most complex histories that have been written . . . [because] you try to bring out the complexity in the characters,” and the “character” of a country is depicted through the behavior and character of the people who inhabit it. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Adventures of Vela
Structurally, The Adventures of Vela resembles an epic or long poem. Like an epic poem, it is divided into “books”—“Beginnings,” “The Chronicles of Nafanua,” “Travel,” and “The Last Adventure”—each of which has several chapters. Paula Green, writing for New Zealand Listener, calls the novel “a sumptuous feast that brings to mind the resonating layers of Dante’s Divine Comedy or Boccaccio’s Decameron.” The piece, however, more closely resembles a modern epic poem or long poem than the Renaissance epic poem represented by Boccaccio’s and Dante’s works. The Adventures of Vela is formally similar to modernist works such as Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and Mina Loy’s Songs to Johannes. Its structure is discontinuous, composed of fragments of verse and phrases, and the difficulty caused by the collagelike arrangement of the poem is accentuated by the fact that most readers are not familiar with the mythic background of the novel, nor will they recognize the words and phrases in Samoan that are used throughout. Despite Wendt’s description of The Adventures of Vela as a novel, the book does not have a continuous narrative. It covers the fictional Vela’s lifetime, from precolonial days to the present, but it bounces around in time. The book begins with Alapati’s first encounter with Vela, but the point of view of the novel alternates between sections that are clearly in the voice of the narrator, sections in which the narrator is unmistakably telling Vela’s story, others in which Vela seems to be telling his own story, and still others in which it is simply unclear who is speaking. The work melds the styles of oral storytelling, novelistic interest in characters, and the fragmentary form of the avant-garde poem into a structure that integrates the past and the present.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Albert Wendt was born in 1939 in Apia, Western Samoa, where he spent his childhood and high school years. He attended Victoria University and, after receiving an MA in history, returned to Samoa to teach history and literature. In the mid-1970s he began teaching at the University of the South Pacific and became a leading figure in the study of indigenous literature of the South Pacific Islands, or Oceania. Wendt, who was the first professor in New Zealand from one of the Pacific Islands, remains influential in the field of postcolonial literature and a strong advocate for native Oceanic writers. He has been particularly involved in supporting efforts to publish and distribute literary works by indigenous and native authors in New Zealand, Australia, and abroad. Wendt, a celebrated novelist, poet, and literary scholar, writes mainly about his native Samoa. His best-known novel, Leaves of the Banyon Tree (1979), won a New Zealand Book Award in 1980. He is the author of the novels Songs for the Return Home (1973), Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree (1974), Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), Ola (1991), and The Adventures of Vela, as well as of collections of short stories and volumes of poetry. He has edited two major anthologies of contemporary Pacific literature—Lali (1979) and Nuanua (1995)—and volumes on contemporary poetry from Fiji, Samoa, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and the New Hebrides. Two of his novels, Songs for the Return Home and Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree, have been made into feature films.
whenever it occurred” to be “a merciful spell from considering bodily concerns.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
W Critical Reception The Adventures of Vela has garnered little attention in the press, though it won the prestigious Commonwealth Prize in 2010, edging out such internationally renowned writers as Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee. One of the few substantial reviews of the novel, written by Green, lauds the book’s origins in “both indigenous oral traditions and Western literature.” Green, a poet from New Zealand, appreciates Wendt’s ability to bring the mythic and the real together, putting “flesh on character beyond what one might expect from the legacy of mythological narrative.” She remarks that Vela and Nafanua, the Samoan goddess of war, “are neither sanitized nor stereotyped but step out of lines that circulate grit and vulgarity as much as they do the rhythms of the sea.” The language of The Adventures of Vela—which, as Green points out, is not “sanitized”—was a concern for White, who found the “surfacing of Wendt the lyricist
Works Cited
“Albert Wendt.” Pacific Starmap. Pacific Starmap, n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2010. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Dekker, Diana. “The Adventurous Albert Wendt.” Dominion Post 1 Aug. 2009: 20. Print. Green, Paula. “Layer by Layer.” Rev. of The Adventures of Vela, by Albert Wendt. New Zealand Listener 8-14 Aug. 2009. Web. 14 Nov. 2010. Hereniko, Vili, and David Hanlon. “An Interview with Albert Wendt.” Contemporary Pacific 5.1 (1993): 112-31. Print. Mallon, Sean. “Against Tradition.” Contemporary Pacific 22.2 (2010): 362-81. Print. Sharrad, Paul. “Albert Wendt and the Problem of History.” Journal of Pacific History 37.1 (2002): 109-16. Print.
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The Adventures of Vela
Wendt, Albert. “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body.” Span 42-3 (1996): 15-29. Print. ———. “Towards a New Oceania.” MANA Review 1 (1976): 1. Print. White, Helen Watson. “Free-Running Verse and Stories about Storytelling.” Sunday Star Times [Auckland] 26 July 2009: 8. Print.
The Emory University English Department’s Postcolonial Studies site provides a critical biography and bibliography on the author, as well as an analysis of the themes in Wendt’s early work. http://www. english.emory.edu/Bahri/Wendt.html
Criticism and Reviews
The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre features links to poems and poetic segments available online, in addition to a number of audio files of Wendt reading his own work. http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/ authors/wendt/
Ellis, Juniper. “‘The Techniques of Storytelling’: An Interview with Albert Wendt.” Ariel 28.3 (1997), 7184. Print. In this long interview, Wendt describes how his ideas about storytelling, form, and narration have changed over his twenty-year writing career.
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre offers a history of Samoa until 1918 and has, among its listings, a page on “Myths and Legends of Ancient Samoa.” http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-TuvAcco. html
Newton, John. “Challenging Pacific Poems.” Rev. of Photographs, by Albert Wendt. Evening Post [Wellington] 25 Aug. 1995: 5. Print. Newton’s review of Wendt’s 1995 volume Photographs describes the collection as “various, more formally ambitious [than his previous two books of poetry], and more abrasive.”
The Web site of the University of Auckland Library includes a comprehensive bibliography of Wendt’s literary and critical works. http://www.nzetc.org/ tm/scholarly/tei-TuvAcco.html
Additional Resources
Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void. Manchester: MUP/Auckland University Press, 2003. Print. Sharrad’s study, the first monograph on Wendt, examines his position as one of the foremost international writers of Pacific literature and reads his work in the context of his own critical writing. ———. “Still Life Moving: Albert Wendt’s Photographs.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 38:1 (1998): 56-68. Print. In this long review, the leading scholar on Wendt calls the “reconstruction in ‘The Adventures of Vela’ of traditional oral epic as verse narrative . . . a new element in Wendt’s poetry, and a very significant one.” Gale Resources
“Albert Wendt.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Nov. 2010. “Albert Wendt.” Contemporary Poets. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Nov. 2010. Open Web Sources
Wendt’s personal and professional Web site contains biographical and bibliographic information on the author. http://www.albertwendt.com/Home_ Page_Albert_Wendt.html On its Web site the New Zealand Book Council reprints the entry on Wendt from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature and offers additional biographical data. http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/wri ters/wendta.html
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For Further Reading
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. The encyclopedic format of the revised edition of this volume makes it a helpful introduction. It can be paired with Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s exhaustive sourcebook The Post-colonial Studies Reader (2006). Craig, Robert. The Dictionary of Polynesian Mythology. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Print. This alphabetized resource on Polynesian mythology includes the names and concepts from Samoan mythology that Wendt draws on in The Adventures of Vela. Craig’s introduction offers a useful historical overview of Samoa and its myths. Goetzfridt, Nicholas J. Indigenous Literature of Oceania: A Survey of Criticism and Interpretation. Westport: Greenwood, 1995. Print. Goetzfridt’s collection of critical and interpretive sources on literature of the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia covers poets, dramatists, and novelists beginning in the 1960s and focuses on academic criticism. Each entry is well annotated, and there is an extensive section on Wendt. Sharrad, Paul, and Karen M. Peacock. “Albert Wendt: Bibliography.” Contemporary Pacific 15.2 (2003): 378-420. Project MUSE. Web. 4 Nov. 2010. The compilation of sources on Wendt, compiled by prominent Wendt scholar Sharrad and updated in 1993 by Peacock, touts itself as the most complete collection of references on Wendt to date. Teaiwa, Teresia, and Selina Tusitala Marsh. “Albert Wendt’s Critical and Creative Legacy in Oceania: An Introduction.” Contemporary Pacific 22:2 (2010): TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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233-48. Print. This issue of Contemporary Pacific is devoted to Wendt’s work as a novelist, a poet, an intellectual, and a mentor. Teaiwa and Marsh’s introduction gives a brief but helpful overview of Wendt’s life and importance in the field of Pacific literatures and provides short annotations on the articles included in the rest of the issue.
Wendt, Albert. Photographs. Auckland: AUP, 1995. Print. A forty-page portion of The Adventures of Vela appears as the centerpiece of this book of mostly autobiographical poems.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Jenny Ludwig
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The Age of Orphans By Laleh Khadivi
W Introduction The first novel in Laleh Khadivi’s planned trilogy about three generations of Kurdish men from Iran, The Age of Orphans begins in 1921 with the brutal massacre of Kurdish guerrillas by the Persian military in the Zagros Mountains. Only one Kurd survives, an eight-year-old boy—witness to the slaughter of his father, uncles, and cousins—who is then adopted by the soldiers and conscripted into the shah’s army. Eight years later he is renamed Reza Khourdi in honor of the king, Reza Shah Pahlavi, notorious for a modernization campaign that involved the silencing of all ethnic minorities disloyal to the cause of nationalism. Reza Khourdi distinguishes himself in the army of the new Iran by virtue of his contempt for the Kurds, rises to the rank of captain, and, with his Westernized Tehrani wife, is sent back to his hometown, Kermanshah, to enforce the shah’s rule over his own people. The return to Kermanshah forces Reza Khourdi to confront his past and the suppression of his birth heritage, and his carefully crafted persona begins to crack. Khadivi’s portrait of his fracturing self has been frequently praised for its psychological depth as well as for its broader implications regarding the meaning of nationhood in cultural clashes and ethnic confrontations around the world. The novel has also been admired as a brutally graphic yet poetic conjuring of a world that no longer exists.
W Literary and Historical Context
Born in Esfahan, Iran, of Persian and Kurdish heritage, Khadivi was only a small child when her family decided to leave the country at the start of the revolution and the ascendancy of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In 2002 Khadivi began to research the history of the Kurds, the
largest ethnic group in the world without a country of their own. The Age of Orphans focuses on the time of the creation of the modern Iranian state. The Kurds were traditionally a nomadic people of goat and sheep herders living in the mountainous regions of southwest Asia. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I created new nation-states—Iraq, Kuwait, Syria—but left the Kurds segmented between Iran, Turkey, and Iraq. In 1925 Reza Shah Pahlavi, a former military officer and prime minister, became king of Persia. His monarchy was a centralized, authoritarian regime demanding that tribal populations pledge loyalty to the shah. This meant that the Kurds were to be stripped of their autonomy, including their languages and customs, in the name of progress. But the Kurds were more defiant than other tribes. Their resistance to assimilation resulted in the brutal battles depicted in The Age of Orphans, which takes place during the reigns of both Reza Shah Pahlavi (19251941) and his son and successor, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941-1979). It has been argued that the country’s name change in the 1930s was influenced by Nazis friendly with the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who suggested that the Persian word for the nation, Iran, a cognate of “Aryan,” was preferable to the Westernized version, Persia, and would signal a new beginning free of Russian and British influence.
W Themes Natsumi Ajiki observed in a review of The Age of Orphans in the Kurdish Herald, “Ms. Khadivi’s utmost interest in her novel is to tell a story about a man who, in his lifetime, is born into a tribe and dies in a nation, as a citizen of that nation.” The statement underscores the importance of the theme of identity in the book, which explores the toll of self-denial and the dangers of conflicted allegiances. Reza Khourdi’s fierce denunciation of his Kurdish self destroys his soul, a reality he confronts
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The Age of Orphans
in Kermanshah as memories of his mother and father mingle with images of his savagery in battle and his continuing suppression of the Kurds. Khadivi writes of Reza in the novel, “As a soldier he will be deftly divided through the head, as a murderer cut open through the heart and as an old man split so thoroughly that one side of him dies first, unbeknownst and long before the other, damned to serve in hell as a half a man” (qtd. in Al-Shawaf). Throughout the story, Khadivi uses a pattern of oppositions in developing the two sides of Reza Khourdi’s identity. The name given him in the Iranian army is doubly significant, “Reza” having been chosen in honor of the shah, “Khourdi” to denote his ethnic heritage. As Reza seeks to distinguish himself in the army, impulses of self-preservation collide with feelings of immense self-loathing, yet he continues on his brutal crusade, hoping to erase every element of the Kurd within him. His Tehrani wife, Meena, is everything he is not— educated, urban, Westernized; their station in Kermanshah is everything she abhors—rural, backward, tribal. The spiritual torture Reza begins to experience in Kermanshah derives from the conflicts between traditional and modern ways, the Kurd within him and the Iranian
MAJOR CHARACTERS BABA is Reza Khourdi’s beloved father, pummeled to death by the Shah’s army before Reza’s eyes. As an older man, Reza is haunted by his banishment of Baba to a “damp purgatory of forget and never-remember.” THE BOY is the name by which Khadivi uses to refer to Reza before he is orphaned and conscripted into the Shah’s army. MEENA is Reza’s Westernized wife from Tehran. She is vocal about her miserable confinement in Kermanshah and vies with Reza for dominance over the local Kurdish people and their many children. Meena is murdered by Reza. REZA KHOURDI is the main character in the novel, almost maniacal in his quest to distinguish himself in the Shah’s army by demonstrating his hatred for his own people, the Kurds. His programmatic denial of his heritage becomes a source of anguish, and his Kurdish-hating façade begins to crack after he is sent to subdue the Kurds in his home region.
The sun rises over the Zagros Mountains, the site of a violent slaughter that opens the novel The Age of Orphans. ª Lee Carruthers / Alamy
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The Age of Orphans
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Laleh Khadivi is a documentary filmmaker and writer of fiction. Prior to the critical success of her debut novel, The Age of Orphans, she received much recognition for the film 900, an exposé of a women’s prison in Louisiana narrated by Susan Sarandon. Khadivi was a creative writing fellow at Emory University, 2007-2009, and has published short fiction in various magazines. The Age of Orphans earned Khadivi a Whiting Writers’ Award and is the first installment of a projected trilogy about the oppression of the Kurds in Iran.
without. As he grows older, Reza’s anguish is manifested in his treatment of his bitterly dissatisfied and complaining wife and their six children. His actions perpetuate a cycle of violence and betrayal. He poisons Meena, eight months pregnant with their seventh child, by putting arsenic, cyanide, and bleach in her tea. And he orphans his children, who have been taught to hate the Kurds. Khadivi explained her intent in the novel to Ajiki: “Readers could read the story, learn about the difficulties faced by Kurds during this period but ultimately understand that we are all torn between one loyalty and the next and how artificial nationality actually is.”
Orphans well worth the effort, not only as a historical account of a little-documented aspect of prerevolutionary Iran, but also as commentary on current ethnic struggles. Donovan noted its relevance to the present situation in Iran: “[The] ayatollahs are simply the latest in a line of aspirants, wiping out the old failed regime and trying to claim ‘this invisible thing called Iran.’” Faye A. Chadwell credited the novel with an even broader significance: “With her eloquent portrayal of Reza, Khadivi has created an epitomic character representing so many 20th-century and current cultural, ethnic, and national identity clashes.” Khadivi received a $50,000 Whiting Writers’ Award for The Age of Orphans, a grant bestowed annually on ten promising new authors. Khadivi is now working on the second book in the trilogy, The Walking, which focuses on Reza Khourdi’s youngest son. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Ajiki, Natsumi. “Celebrate a Kurdish Writer, Laleh Khadivi: The Age of Orphans.” Kurdish Herald 1.2 (June 2009). Web. 25 Sept. 2010. Al-Shawaf, Rayyan. “Breaking Taboos in Middle Eastern Fiction.” Globe & Mail (Toronto) 2 Jan. 2010. Book Review Index Online Plus, Gale InfoTrac. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. Chadwell, Faye A. “Khadivi, Laleh. The Age of Orphans.” Library Journal 15 Feb. 2009: 96. Donovan, Deborah. “The Age of Orphans.” Booklist 1 Feb. 2009: 23.
W Style Khadivi’s introduction of first-person accounts narrated by people known to Reza—his wife, his children, the girl he rapes, his commanding officer—enhances the portrait of his duality and the clash between modern and tribal society, adding, according to Bookslut reviewer Jacob Silverman, “a prismatic and humanizing perspective” on Reza. The style of the novel has received much attention, with critics disagreeing on the success of its richly evocative language. Brandon Robshaw remarked, “The style is poetic, intense and lyrical, even when describing events of great brutality.” Deborah Donovan described the language as “luminous . . . by turns graphic and poetic.” But a writer for Kirkus Reviews found the book “somewhat marred by a false and overlush lyricism.” And Silverman complained that the meaning of several passages was compromised by the accumulation of detail in densely phrased sentences with little punctuation. Rayyan AlShawaf appeared to agree, calling Khadivi’s prose “by turns beautifully lyrical and frustratingly grandiloquent.”
“Khadivi, Laleh: The Age of Orphans.” Kirkus Reviews 15 Dec. 2008. Robshaw, Brandon. “The Age of Orphans by Laleh Khadivi.” Independent on Sunday [London] 29 Aug. 2010. HighBeam Research. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. Silverman, Jacob. Rev. of The Age of Orphans, by Laleh Khadivi. Bookslut Mar. 2009. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Adil, Alev. Rev. of The Age of Orphans, by Laleh Khadivi. Independent [London] 4 Dec. 2009. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. Describes the orphan’s rebirth as the fierce soldier and the book’s representation of a cycle of violence. Rev. of The Age of Orphans, by Laleh Khadivi. Daily News [South Africa] 26 May 2010. HighBeam Research. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. Judges the book difficult to read because of its heartbreaking subject matter but in the end well worth the effort.
W Critical Reception
Rev. of The Age of Orphans, by Laleh Khadivi. Publishers Weekly, 8 Dec. 2008: 41. A concise plot summary.
Some reviewers remarked on the difficulty of reading a novel so graphically violent, but most found The Age of
“Emory Fellow Wins Whiting Writers’ Award.” US Fed News Service, including US State News. Ht Media Ltd.,
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The Age of Orphans
2008. HighBeam Research. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. Press release announcing Khadivi’s selection as a winner of the 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award. The piece provides some biographical details pertinent to the composition of The Age of Orphans and the planned trilogy. Fox, Catherine. “Severed Roots Are Haunting.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 8 Mar. 2009. NewsBankinc. Access World News. Web. 26 Sept. 2010. Mainly biographical piece based on Fox’s interview with Khadivi at her Atlanta loft. Gurría-Quintana, Ángel. “Kurd of Honour: A Loss of Innocence and the Birth of Kurdistan.” Financial Times [London] 7 Nov. 2009. NewsBankinc. Access World News. Web. 26 Sept. 2010. Finds much to praise in The Age of Orphans but notes that Khadivi sometimes sacrifices clarity to poetic flourish. Gale Resources
“Laleh Khadivi.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Web. 19 Sept. 2010. Open Web Sources
The author’s website provides access to a brief biography of Khadivi and reviews of The Age of Orphans. http:// lalehkhadivi.com/about.html In a YouTube video filmed at Kepler’s Books, Khadivi speaks about The Age of Orphans and her interest in the Kurds. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=NMrLDa2lrqM Alan Cheuse reviews Khadivi’s The Age of Orphans and Ismail Kadare’s The Siege on NPR’s All Things Considered, April 7, 2009. http://go.galegroup. com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CA197405669&v=2.1& u=itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=w
http://www.bloomsburyusa.com/bloomsbury/ downloads/guides/ageoforphans.pdf For Further Reading
Abdolah, Kader. My Father’s Notebook. New York: HarperPerennial, 2007. Print. Novel in which an Iranian political exile attempts to decipher the cuneiform writings of his deaf-mute and nearly illiterate father, born to the temporary wife of a Persian nobleman early in the twentieth century. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor, 1994. Print. Achebe’s masterpiece, a novel in many respects similar to The Age of Orphans in its depiction of the destruction of an individual and the culture that gave birth to him. Things Fall Apart takes place in Nigeria and describes tribal life before and after colonialism. Kamrava, Mehran. The Political History of Modern Iran: From Tribalism to Theocracy. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers, 1992. Print. Examines Iran’s political history from the establishment of the Qajar dynasty in 1785 to the present, with special attention to issues of tribalism, religion, and demagoguery. Pezeshkzad, Iraj. My Uncle Napoleon. Trans. Dick Davis. New York: Random House, 2006. Print. A cultural reference point in Iran, first published in Tehran in 1973 and made into a popular television series in 1976, but banned since the Islamic Revolution. The story, set during the Allied occupation in World War II, is a humorous take on events that occur in an Iranian mansion occupied by three wealthy families under the sway of a paranoid uncle. Janet Mullane
Khadivi’s publishers have drawn up a series of discussion questions on the novel for reading groups.
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Air, or, Have Not Have By Geoff Ryman
W Introduction Geoff Ryman’s acclaimed novel, Air, or, Have Not Have, combines elements of alternative universe science fiction, fairy tale, realism, and mysticism to relate the tale of a poor woman, Chung Mae, living in a small village, Kizuldah, in the fictional country of Karzistan. Kizuldah is described in the novel as “the last village in the world to go online,” and the story examines how Mae endeavors to prepare her people for the future (1). “Air” is a wireless network that connects all people to one another, brain to brain, giving them the ability to access all information currently found on the Internet, and more, but without needing a computer. During a disastrous test of the system in which many people lose their lives or their sanity, Mae’s mind accidentally fuses with that of a dying, elderly woman, causing Mae to gain all of the old woman’s memories. Mae’s experiences with this new, shared personality inspire her to learn all she can about Air and the outside world. Air explores the advantages and disadvantages of globalization and third world peoples being unwillingly and abruptly thrust into an advanced technological world, through a narrative that blends stark realism with a hint of pseudoscience that verges into the magical realm as well. Air won the British Science Fiction Association Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
W Literary and Historical Context
As Air takes place in an alternative universe, some could argue that the book has little or no historical context. However, science fiction often comments on and reflects the society or world in which it was written, and many readers and critics have inferred that Ryman intended Air
to present an examination of the ever-changing and developing technology of the early twenty-first century. Karzistan, though fictional, is reminiscent of the real world’s nation of Kazakhstan in Eurasia. Furthermore, the harsh plight of the peasants’ lives—most of them poor rice farmers—living in Kizuldah seems inspired by the denizens of the rural areas of China, particularly in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Although Air occurs in the early twenty-first century, most of its characters seem to come from a time centuries earlier, who only relatively recently and very slowly begin to integrate such modern-day conveniences as electricity into their everyday lives. The network, Air, is a fictionalized upgrade of the World Wide Web. Air, much like the Internet, is suddenly able to make the world much smaller. Using Air, even people in tiny, remote communities can now connect with other people thousands of miles away. Ryman looks at recent discussions of how the old world is dying and takes his examination one step further. Given the dramatic impacts of personal computer use and the Internet in the real world, he prompts readers to imagine a reality in which minds themselves are all connected, and both the wonder and fears that such a device, or ability, might engender in humanity. Ryman argues that the future is not here for better or for worse, but for better and worse.
W Themes Air revolves around such themes as memory, change, and rebirth. Human beings are shaped and defined by their memories, and when timid Mae’s mind merges with that of Mrs. Tung, Mae begins to adopt many of the attributes of this elder woman who was extremely courageous in her younger life. Mae conducts an affair, threatens a brutish neighbor with a knife, and decides to gain as much knowledge as she can about the world outside the small, poor village in which she has lived her entire life. There is a degree of irony in the fact that another woman’s
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Air, or, Have Not Have
memories of the past inspire Mae to look toward the future. Meanwhile, the change that Mae begins to embrace is reflective of the transition occurring in the outside world due to the new technology. Some people mourn the death of the old ways, and Ryman’s skillful portrayal of the dying traditions is poignant and sad. On the other hand, the new future promises unanticipated new growth, beauty, and potential. As Robert K. J. Killheffer explains, Ryman “recognizes the tremendous losses that change brings . . . but . . . balances his elegies with equally beautiful observations on the wisdom and necessity of acceptance.” This is perhaps best reflected in the flash flood that destroys the village near the end of the book. In her eulogy, Mae mourns the people and homes lost but concludes on a hopeful note: “But look at the beautiful new sea. Look at it sparkle. Look at how full of hope it seems; look, it has seagulls, who could hate such a beautiful sea?” (358).
W Styles Although Air is primarily a science fiction novel, Ryman uses a number of styles that are most often associated with more experimental literature. The majority of the book is written in stark, unembellished prose with only the most subtle of literary flourishes. Ryman introduces us to the characters of Kizuldah via restrained descriptions of their actions and daily lives, painting a picture that firmly establishes the initial verisimilitude of the world of the novel. As the novel progresses, he deals with the narrative’s mystical elements through a more postmodern style, blending in elements of stream-of-consciousness and magical realism. Though Air is technically a sci-fi conceit, Ryman never provides a full, explicit explanation for how it works. Instead, it seems to manifest itself in an almost spiritual manner, which is heightened by the presence of Mrs. Tung’s “ghost” in Mae’s mind. When Mrs. Tung speaks to Mae, Ryman presents the connection in a dreamlike style, forgoing quotation marks. Instead, the novel’s third-person narrator alternates with dialogue between Mrs. Tung and Mae, with verbal cues rather than punctuation indicating who is speaking. The way the text shifts from traditional narrative to strange images, memories, thoughts, and flashes of the future and past creates a surreal atmosphere that clearly marks these portions as separate from the depictions of the relatively mundane reality of the characters’ outer lives. Ryman is also aware of the irony that he is using the medium of the printed word in order to depict a future that has progressed beyond the need for paper and ink. He, therefore, consciously uses a very literary style in order to impart this tale about the future, and perhaps
MAJOR CHARACTERS FAYSAL HASEEM is a brutish, cruel misogynist who makes a living out of ruining others’ lives. A turning point in Chung Mae’s life occurs when she threatens him with a knife. SUNNI HASEEM is the pampered, shallow woman whose husband, Faysal Haseem, makes a habit of bankrupting poor farmers by granting loans they cannot afford. She seems sweet on the surface but is vicious underneath. JOE is Chung Mae’s kind but weak husband, who fails to satisfy her emotionally. With the intention of taking over Joe's farm, early in the novel, Faysal Haseem tricks Joe into taking a loan that he cannot afford to pay back. KEN KUEI is Chung Mae’s next-door neighbor and grandson to Mrs. Tung, the old woman whose memories transfer to Chung Mae upon Tung’s death. Shortly afterward, Chung Mae conducts an affair with Ken. CHUNG MAE is a poor, illiterate woman whose life is fundamentally altered by Air during the initial testing when the memories of a dying, elderly woman, Mrs. Tung, fuse with hers, inspiring Mae to embark on an internal quest of self-discovery. MRS. TUNG is an elderly grandmother at the start of the novel. When she dies during the initial testing of Air, her memories merge with those of Chung Mae. The merging enables Chung Mae to discover how brave and rebellious Mrs. Tung had been in her younger days. KWAN WING is Chung Mae’s good friend and confidante.
even more interestingly, focuses his tale on a group of poor peasants in a place that is the opposite of most traditional sci-fi settings.
W Critical Reception Air was released in 2004 to mainly positive reviews. London’s Guardian critic named it a “deft synthesis of science fiction and the literary mainstream novel,” praising it for its sensitive examination of the effect of globalization and modern “technology on the third world.” Additionally, this reviewer was impressed with Ryman’s concept of Air as a “metaphor for the inevitability of change,” and how Ryman juxtaposes his science fiction concept with moving and incisive characterizations of simple peasant life. Similarly, Publishers Weekly declared that the novel was, for Ryman, a “triumphant return to science fiction . . . superbly crafted,” and also commended him for his vivid and detailed portrayal of the lives of the people of
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Air, or, Have Not Have
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Canada in 1951, science fiction and fantasy writer Geoff Ryman moved to the United States at age eleven, and has spent the majority of his adult life in England. Known for writing extremely literate sci-fi, one of Ryman’s primary interests is in examining fantasy itself, probing how the stories of childhood affect and are affected by the process of growing up, a theme he explored to great effect in Was, a rumination on The Wizard of Oz. Ryman also spearheaded the “Mundane SF” movement, whose goal is to produce realist sci-fi that explores the connection between everyday people and technology. Interestingly, despite this credo, the novels Ryman is most noted for, such as Was, Lust, and Air, all incorporate elements of magical realism into their narratives.
Kizuldah. The reviewer called Air a “treat for fans of highly literate SF,” arguing that “this intensely political book has important things to say about how developed nations take the Third World for granted.” Although Air was generally well received, some critics did express qualms regarding Ryman’s style in the novel. Robert E. Brown of Library Journal wondered to
whom exactly the novel might appeal, claiming that “the tech stuff isn’t high-octane enough for techies, and the rural realism breaks no new ground.” A Kirkus Reviews critic held a more positive view regarding the characterization and prose, stating that Mae “is an impressive heroine, and the text is full of sharp commentary and vivid characters” but felt that the story “fails to engage fully and bogs down for long stretches.” Air won a number of prestigious literary awards, including the British Science Fiction Association Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It was also short-listed for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
“Air.” Rev. of Air by Geoff Ryman. Kirkus Reviews 15 Oct. 2003: 1248. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 July 2010. “Air.” Rev. of Air, by Geoff Ryman. Publishers Weekly 10 Nov. 2003: 47. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 July 2010. Brown, Robert E. “Ryman, Geoff. Air.” Rev. of Air, by Geoff Ryman. Library Journal 129.1 (Jan. 2004): 160. Print. General OneFile. Web. 18 July 2010.
Image of medical technology as art, simulating the network called “Air” that links the minds of characters in the novel. kentoh/Shutterstock.com
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Air, or, Have Not Have
Killheffer, Robert K. J. “Edenborn.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 108.4 (Apr. 2005): 33+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 July 2010. “Review: Paperbacks: Fiction: Air, by Geoff Ryman.” Rev. of Air, by Geoff Ryman. Guardian [London] 4 Nov. 2006: 18. Print. General Reference Center Gold. Web. 18 July 2010. Ryman, Geoff. Air (Or, Have Not Have). New York: St. Martin’s, 2004. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Allberry, Russ. “Air by Geoff Ryman.” Rev. of Air, by Geoff Ryman. Eyrie.org., 13 Feb. 2006. Web. 18 July 2010. A review of Air that discusses Ryman’s key themes and metaphors and how he weds his science fiction concept with a rich portrayal of the characters that encourages reader empathy and understanding. Chiang, Ted. “Is Air Mundane?” Extrapolation 49.2 (2008): 211+. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 July 2010. Geoff Ryman spearheaded the “Mundane SF” movement—hard science fiction set in a “real world” more invested in exploring people’s interactions with technology than investigating potential future breakthroughs such as time travel, parallel dimensions, and other prospective inventions. Ryman has also claimed, however, that Air is not Mundane SF. This essay examines the novel from that perspective, attempting to determine whether or not Ryman is correct. Easterbrook, Neil. “‘Giving an Account of Oneself’: Ethics, Alterity, Air.” Extrapolation 49.2 (2008): 240+. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 July 2010. This essay explores the central metaphors of Air, particularly those of change and rebirth.
Open Web Sources
An interview with Ryman focusing on Air in which he discusses things such as his motivation for writing the novel, his style and technique, done via cyberspace, can be found at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/ nonfiction/intgr.htm Ryman wrote an “interactive novel” called 253 or Tube Theatre, subtitled A Novel for the Internet about London Underground in Seven Cars and a Crash. Each section delves into the mind of a different character in one of the train cars, and by clicking on hyperlinks, one can “travel” to the minds of nearby characters or those in different cars who are connected, in some way, to that character. One can read the book “linearly” or by bouncing around via the hyperlinks. The entire novel is online at http:// www.ryman-novel.com
For Further Reading
Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. New York: John Day, 1931. Print. This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel set in late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century China depicts the lives of destitute people not far removed, culturally or technologically, from the characters of Air. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984. Print. An acclaimed novel credited with starting the “cyberpunk” movement of literature and film. Very different in tone to Air, it is thematically reminiscent, detailing a future in which everyone’s consciousnesses are connected to a global computer network.
Melzack, Geneva, and Iain Emsley. “Two Views: Air by Geoff Ryman.” Rev. of Air, by Geoff Ryman. Strange Horizons. 7 Nov. 2005. Web. 18 July 2010. This article compares two viewpoints on Air—both are very positive—each zeroing in on different aspects of the novel.
Mitchell, David. Ghostwritten. New York: Vintage, 1999. Print. This novel of interlinked short stories includes a section on a poor woman who operates a tea shack on the side of a mountain in China, reminiscent in theme and tone to Air. Like Air, Ghostwritten explores themes of globalization and how seemingly disparate cultures are connected on a basic, human level.
Soyka, David. “Air.” Rev. of Air, by Geoff Ryman. SF Site, 2007. Web. 18 July 2010. http://sfsite.com/ 02a/ai241.htmThis compelling review categorizes Air as a sort of inverted cyberpunk novel. Instead of the narrative existing inside of a computer’s virtual reality, the majority of the book takes place in the real world, examining people’s reactions to extreme technological advances.
Ryman, Geoff. Was. New York: Penguin, 1992. Print. Arguably Ryman’s best-known book, this novel depicts the lives of various people affected by The Wizard of Oz, from an alternate version of Dorothy Gale to Judy Garland to a young man dying of AIDS. Includes elements of magical realism and incisive character development similar to those Ryman would later use in Air.
Gale Resources
“Geoffrey Charles Ryman.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 July 2010.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2002. Print. Written by a Nobel Prize winner, this book examines the policies that have furthered globalization and their negative effects on “Third World” countries.
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Air, or, Have Not Have
Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It. Harrisonburg: R. R. Donnelley, 2008. Print. Presents interesting explorations of the impact the Internet has had on our world and how it might
develop in the future. While Zittrain’s beliefs might appear alarming to some readers, they do speak to several of the same issues that Ryman deals with in Air. Robert Berg
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An Altered Light By Jens Christian Grøndahl
W Introduction Jens Christian Grøndahl’s An Altered Light begins as the story of a middle-aged divorce lawyer, Irene Beckman, whose husband Martin of over thirty years suddenly leaves her for a younger woman. In the first several chapters, the novel focuses on Irene’s reactions, on those of the couple’s grown children, and those of her mother Vivian in hospital facing hip replacement surgery. The fact that Vivian fears she may not survive the surgery leads her to entrust Irene with a journal written many years earlier, containing the secret of Irene’s paternity. Coupled with this revelation comes the subplot concerning publishing editor Thomas Hoppe, a man fifteen years Irene’s junior, with whom Irene had a brief affair a decade earlier. Thomas and his wife Susan are now seeking a divorce, and he too has become involved with a younger woman. The two plot lines concerning the aftermath of these current divorces leads into a third plot concerning Vivian and her first lover and Irene’s biological father, Samuel Balkin. Irene’s story is connected to European military history via her biological father and the story line connected to Thomas Hoppe and his second love interest, Tatiana. The surfacing story regarding Samuel Balkin begins in the late 1930s, when the Balkin family fled anti-Semitism in Leningrad and made their home in Copenhagen, where Samuel was a cellist, on the eve of World War II. With the Nazi occupation of Denmark and increasing threat to Jews in the country, the Balkins fled to Sweden, without knowing that Samuel had impregnated Vivian. The second connection to European history is through Thomas via the author Herbert Verhoeven, whose apartment Thomas uses for his trysts with Irene. In editing posthumously Verhoeven’s unfinished memoirs, Thomas meets and falls in love with the author’s protégée Tatiana. These papers taken together
with Tatiana’s own story report on how Herbert and Tatiana returned to Belgrade, the city of her birth, during the Balkan unrest and witnessed student protests against Slobodan Milosevic. Exploiting these political and national threads, Grøndahl shows how people living in Denmark were shaped by events that happened elsewhere in Europe. Grøndahl’s novel explores the idea of life paths and the way choice, timing, and military and political events conspire to determine people’s lives, creating the intersections in which relationships are forged or broken. In that everongoing process of meeting and separating, individuals face repeatedly the chance to say yes or no to the direction their lives are propelled to take. Jens Christian Grøndahl’s novel, written in Danish and published as Et andet lys in 2003, was translated by Anne Born into English and published as An Altered Light in 2004.
W Literary and Historical Context
The contemporary literary context for An Altered Light is much fiction written in the early 2000s that explores multiple points of view and the relativity of human experience. In the early 2000s, novelists as different as Annie Dillard, Rafael Yglesias, and Elena Ferrante set about to explore marital relationships from various perspectives, noting the subjectivity and relativity that determine how individuals define themselves and come to understand their relationships to others and the trajectories of their lives. The sense among many novelists in the twenty-first century is that reality is not single or constant. It is subjectively experienced and understood, and it is colored by more than external experiences, for dreams and daydreams also affect people’s experience and how they understand themselves. There is an assumption in the early 2000s that part of understanding the self
29 (c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
An Altered Light
MAJOR CHARACTERS IRENE BECKMAN, the protagonist and main point-of-view character, is a fifty-six-year-old divorce lawyer, married to a banker and mother of two grown children, Peter and Josephine. MARTIN BECKMAN, Irene’s husband of over thirty years, decides to leave his marriage and marry his mistress, Susanne, age thirty. PETER BECKMAN, brother of Josephine, is married to Sandra and has adopted fraternal twins, Emil and Amalie. SAMUEL BALKIN, a Russian Jew and former cellist, is the biological father of Irene Beckman, whom he meets in Ljubljana, Slovenia. SALLY HOPPE, married to Thomas Hoppe, faces his decision to get a divorce and seeks Irene’s legal advice. THOMAS HOPPE, married to Sally and with her the parent of son Magnus, seeks a divorce in order to marry Tatiana Pogorelic. TATIANA POGORELIC, born in Belgrade and protégée of author Herbert Verhoeven, falls in love with Thomas Hoppe when she seeks his editorial assessment of a manuscript Herbert left unfinished upon his death. VIVIAN, Irene’s mother, reveals that her first lover, Samuel Balkin, is actually Irene’s biological father.
requires facing the past that has directed a person to a certain place in the present and has shaped the evolving personality and values of that person. An Altered Light speaks to this awareness. The historical context for An Altered Light is virtually the history of Europe and the Middle East in the twentieth century. The earliest aspect of this context is the anti-Semitism enforced under Stalin in the USSR in the 1930s, with the closing of Yiddish schools and the removal of Jewish leaders, and the growth of Zionism among Russian Jews who set their sights increasingly on a nation state in Palestine. In the late 1930s, some Russian Jews immigrated to neutral Denmark, which had in 1939 signed a treaty of nonaggression with Germany. Nonetheless, Germany invaded Denmark in 1940, and the unprepared Danish government surrendered quickly. In its uneasy relationship with the German occupation, the Danish Parliament complied with some German orders but resisted others. It complied with German efforts to purge communists, but it resisted German efforts to identify the Jewish minority. By 1944, when news reached the Danes of the Nazi decision to purge Denmark of all its Jews, private citizens using motorboats
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over a period of two months successfully transported most Danish Jews to safety in neutral Sweden. The Balkins in An Altered Light were likely among these Jews. The state of Israel was established in 1948 (Declaration of the Establishment), but conflict over boundaries and various wars scarred the area through the twentieth century and remained unresolved in the early 2000s. Another important historical context is the Yugoslav wars that stretched through the late 1990s and led to the breakup of Yugoslavia into separate nations. Also, included in the novel are references to the role of Slobodan Milosevic (1941-2006) as president of Yugoslavia and the demonstrations that forced his resignation in late 2000. Milosevic went on trial in The Hague on various charges and died there of a heart attack.
W Themes Repeatedly, Grøndahl refers to determining factors that impinge on individuals regarding their relationships or circumstances. His novel explores whether people are actually able to remain faithful to their response either way to a choice or decision and what factors make those responses more temporary than individuals making them assume. One instance in which he explores this idea occurs when Irene considers her mother’s journal in the light of a remembered photograph taken of Vivian in the spring 1944 when she is early in her pregnancy. This photograph reminds Irene of those of murdered people printed in newspapers. The victims “smile with the same trusting face, as if nothing bad can happen to them,” but with the knowledge of what has happened to them, the viewer does “violence to the expectant innocence shining in their eyes” (106). The point seems to be that retrospect allows a person to see in “an altered light” what in the ignorance of a past moment individuals cannot imagine as true for themselves. So people respond with a yes, for example, in their wedding ceremony, and yet in time that yes morphs to no, as they “lose their foothold” (117) in marriage and an unforeseen extramarital relationship ignites. The future forces at work in shaping these paths cannot be envisioned before their impact is experienced. This point is illustrated in the accident Irene has in which Thomas Hoppe on his bicycle collides with her car. If that accident had not occurred, she would never have met Thomas. The relationship they had ten years earlier is “only visible in the light of her past” (29). It leaps into view when her legal services are sought by Sally Hoppe who wrestles with the reality that Thomas is leaving her for another woman. People cannot help but reflect on the past in light of subsequent events; yet Irene, who looks back a lot, surprises herself when she remarks that “Looking back only gives you a stiff neck” (177). Doing so actually provides much more for Irene herself, especially regarding her meeting with the elderly Samuel Balkin. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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An Altered Light
W Style Grøndahl wrote An Altered Light in limited omniscient third-person point of view, using several point-of-view characters and three plotlines, which emerge piecemeal and not in chronological order. The thrust of the novel is from the present catalytic event (Martin Beckman’s dinnertime announcement that he is leaving the marriage) into the past as Irene traces the decisions and forces that determined the trajectory of events and brought key characters in her life to certain intersections in their lives. The tracing of these past events requires the information provided in Vivian’s early journal and the gleaning of information regarding the life of Samuel Balkin. Additionally, Irene unearths information about Herbert Verhoeven and Tatiana Pogorelic, since their relationship and Verhoeven’s death brings Tatiana face to face with Thomas and ultimately determines his decision to get a divorce. Other aspects of style in Grøndahl’s novel are dependent on Ann Born’s translation of the Danish into English. Though some awkwardness mars the translation, as in Born’s use of the cliché in “raise his nose from the grindstone” (17), the English seems faithful to Grøndahl’s rendering of perspective through the light
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born November 9, 1959, in Lyngby, Denmark, Jens Christian Grøndahl produced seventeen books between 1985 and the early 2000s, four of which were translated into English. An Altered Light, the English translation of his novel Et andet lys, was short-listed for the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
of certain moments. For example, when Irene watches “a ferryboat pass through the dewy, straw-yellow hemisphere of her wine glass” (164) and as she muses about how life “is ceaselessly altering, and there isn’t a place in the world where we belong” (270), only a “flowing beneath an awning between glinting spots of light on the calm surface of the water . . . shining with moist resin” (271). Grøndahl seems particularly interested in examining the factors that alter characters’ understanding of themselves and their circumstances. Their increased understanding alters the light in which they see themselves.
In An Altered Light, Irene’s biological father, Samuel Balkin, lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, during the 1930s to try to escape the antiSemitism in Russia. ª Jon Arnold Images Ltd / Alamy TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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An Altered Light
W Critical Reception Jens Christian Grøndahl’s An Altered Light was received favorably, though it appears not to have made a large splash. Joanne Wilkinson described it as “a penetrating examination of the shifting complexities of marriage.” Wilkinson also noted that the novel is “filled with philosophical ruminations and lyrical prose . . . [and] moves in unexpected directions and at its own measured pace.” Janet Evans agreed, describing the protagonist Irene Beckman as “introspective, philosophical, and psychological as she reflects on the years that passed all too swiftly.” Evans described Grøndahl as “one of Denmark’s most widely read contemporary authors” and explained that his experience as an essayist, playwright, and film director can be felt in this novel. Among more moderate evaluations was a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, who labeled the novel “a thoughtful, probing and fiercely introspective character study” but faulted it for “some pedestrian plotting.” The stronger part of the novel, according this Publishers Weekly review, is “the final narrative spin,” in which Irene searches for and meets Samuel Balkin. In all, this reviewer found that the best part of the novel is its “impressive insights about the unknowable nature of love and the partners we choose.” In the Kirkus Reviews best books of 2005 article, the reviewer praised Grøndahl for how he “coolly observes Irene’s slow transformation, and frames visual observations with painterly skill.” This article also quoted Grøndahl in commenting on what seemed to be a lackluster U.S. reception to the English translation: “I am confident that Americans . . . share my propensity for stopping in the middle of things,” Grøndahl is quoted as saying, “and looking back and thinking for a moment or two about how our lives are actually shaped. . . . In any case, I am glad to think of the unknown reader in, say, Idaho, who will eventually stumble upon a yellowed copy of a book of mine in the musty darkness of someone’s garage, and feel recognized.” It is this meditative, backward-glancing quality in An Altered Light that provides its distinction, and certain readers who encounter the novel may agree that it is just what they were looking for. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
“An Altered Light.” Rev. of An Altered Light, by Jens Christian Grøndahl. Publishers Weekly 31 Jan. 2005: 46. Declaration of Establishment of State of Israel, 14 May 1948. www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 14 May 1948. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.
Grøndahl, Jens Christian. An Altered Light. Trans. Anne Born. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004. Print. “Grøndahl, Jens Christian: An Altered Light.” Rev. of An Altered Light, by Jens Christian Grøndahl. Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2005: 72. Print. “We at Kirkus Reviews Are Delighted to Present the Best Books of 2005.” Rev. of An Altered Light, by Jens Christian Grøndahl. Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2005: S3+. Print. Wilkinson, Joanne. “Grøndahl, Jens Christian. An Altered Light.” Rev. of An Altered Light, by Jens Christian Grøndahl. Booklist, 1 Mar. 2005: 1137. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Battersby, Eileen. “Strong Chance of First Irish Winner for Literary Award.” Irish Times, 6 Apr. 2006. Print. Sees Grøndahl’s novel not as a winner but as strong nonetheless and likely to find a wide audience. For Further Reading
Andreb, Hans-Jurgen. When Marriage Ends: Economic and Social Consequences of Partnership Dissolution. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009. Print. Scholarly essays on divorce matters in European countries, including Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Dillard, Annie. The Maytrees. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print. Tells the story of a marriage, a divorce, and in after years an unusual reconciliation. Ferrante, Elena. Days of Abandonment. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions, 2005. Print. Tells the story of a married woman, abandoned by her husband, who goes through a painful adjustment. Grøndahl, Jens Christian. Silence in October. Trans. Anne Born. Orlando: Harcourt, 2000. Print. Plays with the same ideas as those in An Altered Light, but from the perspective of the husband who is left by his wife. Kostyrchenko, Gennadi. Out of the Red Shadows: AntiSemitism in Stalin’s Russia (Russian Studies). New York: Prometheus Books, 1995. Print. Relies on declassified documents in the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the KGB to document the suppression of Jewish culture and removal of Jews from public roles. Yglesias, Rafael. A Happy Marriage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Print. Autobiographical novel depicting how two people are shaped by a long-term marriage and how the husband copes with the untimely death of his wife. Melodie Monahan
Evans, Janet. “Grøndahl, Jens Christian. An Altered Light.” Rev. of An Altered Light, by Jens Christian Grøndahl. Library Journal 15 Mar. 2005: 70+. Print.
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TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay By Michael Chabon
W Introduction The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), by Michael Chabon, follows the wild and difficult success of cousins Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay who find themselves as central figures in the Golden Age of comics with their creation, the Escapist. They are living in New York City in the 1940s, just before the United States enters World War II. At the same time, Joe’s family in Prague is under threat from the Nazis—and nothing Sam or Joe can do and no amount of money or creativity can save them. Joe eventually flees from his friends and family to enlist in the navy for a chance to pound out his frustration and anger on real enemies. Long after the war has ended, he returns to New York City, ashamed and estranged, and finds redemption and no more need of escape. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was followed in 2004 through 2006 with a comic book featuring the Escapist. Titled Michael Chabon Presents . . . the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, the eight-issue series was published by Dark Horse Comics and won a prestigious 2005 Eisner Award for best anthology.
W Literary and Historical Context
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was published at a time when superheroes were making a comeback in both film and print. Batman, directed by Tim Burton, was released in 1989, kick-starting the revival interest in superheroes. Television shows such as Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (19931997) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) secured teenage audiences and carried them through to the blockbuster film hits of the early twenty-first century,
including Mystery Men (1999), X-Men (2000), Unbreakable (2000), Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004; for which Chabon was a screenwriter), The Incredibles (2004), Batman Begins (2005), Hancock (2008), Iron Man (2008), and Watchmen (2009). Anime, or animated Japanese shows and films, became popular in the United States during the 1990s, making way later in the decade for the print medium of manga, a form of Japanese comic. Anime and manga are not exclusively composed of stories about superheroes, but there is a strong association between these forms and heroes. Early manga titles that crossed over into the U.S. market and became popular included Sailor Moon and Ghost in the Shell. The 1986-1987 comic Watchmen, by Alan Moore (illustrated by Dave Gibbons), is a thoughtprovoking work that explores new visual layouts and ways of interpreting superheroes. Watchmen won a Hugo Award in 1988. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (published in two parts, 1986 and 1991) also took the comic book genre in new directions. This graphic novel, with the Jews drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats, is based on the actual survival of the Holocaust by the author’s father. Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Following a decade of relative peace in the United States, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the subsequent military action in Afghanistan and Iraq made heroism fashionable, even necessary to fill the ranks. As the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq neared a decade in length, the superhero genre of film, television, and print continued to be strong. Like the golem of Jewish folklore, superheroes gave people hope—however fantastic—that terrible enemies and impossible odds could be overcome.
W Themes Courage, in a book about comics and superheroes, is an easy theme to point toward, but Chabon’s novel dwells very little on the courage of the Escapist except to draw his magnificent feats in broad strokes. Instead, the
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
MAJOR CHARACTERS SHELDON ANAPOL, a shrewd businessman, is the owner of Empire Comics. TRACY BACON is an exuberant and fun-loving man and Sam’s lover. SAM CLAY is a shy, quiet Jewish boy from Brooklyn and Joe’s American cousin. TOMMY CLAY is the son of Rosa and Joe, named for Joe’s brother Thomas who died during World War II. CARL HENRY EBLING is a mentally unstable Nazi sympathizer. LONGMAN HARKOO, Rosa’s father, is an eccentric, wellconnected, wealthy surrealist-art dealer. JOE KAVALIER is the protagonist, a clever artist and illusionist who flees Nazi-occupied Prague to live with his cousin Sam in New York City. ETHEL KLAYMAN, Sam’s mother and Joe’s aunt, is a practical woman who reluctantly supports the artistic pursuits of her son and nephew. BERNARD KORNBLUM, a retired illusionist, teaches his escape tricks to a teenaged Joe in Prague. ROSA LUXEMBURG SAKS, a bold, resourceful, and sensitive young woman, is Joe’s true love and muse.
author, through the actions of Joe, Sam, Rosa, Tracy, and others, examines the nature of courage in everyday lives. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is not simply a book about superheroes and their creators. It describes the courage of those unafraid to be themselves, such as Longman Harkoo and Tracy Bacon; to the courage of those who would put themselves in danger to help others, such as Bernard Kornblum; and the courage of those who continue to live when so much has been lost, like Joe. Survival also figures strongly in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, stemming from—but not limited to—its immigrant, post-Holocaust perspective. Some feats of survival are strictly physical, and these are the specialty of Joe and Bernard Kornblum, trained illusionists. Other feats of survival are emotional, such as Sam’s coming to terms with his homosexuality and Rosa’s having Joe’s baby after he has abandoned her. Moreover, the two cousins negotiate and survive the cut-throat world of comic book publishing. Survival in and of itself is not always a boon; it can also be a burden. For example, Holocaust survivors mourn the people and places they had to leave behind. Their survival can seem to have happened by chance and, therefore, feel meaningless. Chabon’s novel brings all these threads together, concluding that the purpose of survival is concerned with
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the future (i.e., Joe and Rosa’s son Tommy) and not about the past (Joe’s brother Thomas).
W Style The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay traces the growth of Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay from childhood to adulthood. One of the literary techniques that Chabon uses to mark the growth of his characters over the course of the novel is tone. Tone is the mood of a work. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay starts with a tone of mischievousness, when Joe is still in Prague, then turns more serious when he arrives in New York City and begins to collaborate with Sam. The middle section of the novel, during Joe and Sam’s young adulthood, is both joyous and dangerous as they each fall in love, create marvelous works, and run up against hard realities. The tone of the novel changes dramatically to grim and unhappy when Thomas dies and Joe leaves Rosa and Sam to enlist in the military. Fear and confusion turn to joy at the end when Rosa and Joe are reunited and Sam finally decides to live the life he’s always wanted. Foreshadowing is a technique that Chabon uses to hint at future events, heighten drama, and make events seem more plausible when they do occur. Joe and Thomas nearly die by drowning in the River Moldau, foreshadowing Thomas’s death by drowning six years later. Joe has unaccountably good luck and is continually escaping implausible situations, foreshadowing his survival of Ebling’s terrorist attack, carbon monoxide poisoning at the Kelvinator Station, and jumping from the Empire State Building. Foreshadowing causes the reader to anticipate what is to come without the reader knowing for sure how events will transpire.
W Critical Reception Many critics considered The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay to be the novel that marked Chabon’s maturity as a writer. David Horspool, one such critic, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that this novel was “proof of the abiding power of complex, serious, engaged, but above all entertaining story-telling.” The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, inevitably bringing it under close critical scrutiny. While reviews were generally positive and critics, such as Jonathan Levi of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, were enamored with Chabon’s lyrical prose, not all were unequivocally won over. John Podhoretz, in a detailed review for Commentary, concluded that “this extraordinarily ambitious novel does not have all that much of interest to say.” Amy Benfer, in her Salon review, concurred with Podhoretz on some points but ultimately found that Chabon has succeeded in his approach: “It would seem like a guilty gorgefest, a sugary pop concoction, if, like pop art itself, it TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
weren’t so heavily fortified with all the vitamins and minerals of true art.” Writing for the New York Times, Ken Kalfus disagrees with Podhoretz’s disappointment: “the depth of Chabon’s thought, his sharp language, his inventiveness and his ambition make this a novel of towering achievement.” Popular with readers as well, Kavalier & Clay was a strong seller at bookstores and continued Chabon’s ascent as a major twenty-first century writer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Picador, 2000. Print.
Born in Washington, D.C., on May 24, 1963, Michael Chabon knew he wanted to be a writer from a young age. His first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was published in 1998 and brought Chabon both popular and critical success; it was made into a movie in 2008. His second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), was also captured on film, in 2000. Chabon’s literary success continued with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Summerland (2002), The Final Solution (2004), The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), and Gentlemen of the Road (2007) followed, with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union winning the Hugo Award in 2008. As of 2010, Chabon lived in Berkeley, California, with his wife Ayelet Waldman and their four children.
Harspool, David. “Sam and Joe Take on the Nazis.” Rev. of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. Times Literary Supplement 6 Oct. 2000: 24. Print.
NYTimes.com. New York Times, 24 Sept. 2000. Web. 18 July 2010.
Kalfus, Ken. “The Golem Knows.” Rev. of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon.
Levi, Jonathan. “Hope against Hope.” Rev. of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Benfer, Amy. Rev. of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. Salon.com. Salon, 28 Sept. 2000. Web. 18 July 2010.
A man takes in the view from the top of the Empire State Building in New York City, the hometown of comic book creators Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. ª DaZo Vintage Stock Photos/Images.com/Corbis
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, at the 2010 New Yorker Festival. Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The New Yorker
Chabon. Los Angeles Times Book Review 8 Oct. 2000: 2. Print. Podhoretz, John. Rev. of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. Commentary 111.6 (2001): 68. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Behlman, Lee. “The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction.” Shofar 22.3 (2004): 56-71. Print. Compares Chabon’s novel with works by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander, regarding their treatments of fantasy and reality in writing about the Holocaust. Dirda, Michael. “Review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” Rev. of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. Washington Post Book World (17 Sept. 2000): 15. Print. Praises Chabon’s sprawling narrative, including its cameos of historical figures, varied settings, and relentless theme of escapism. Maslin, Janet. “A Life and Death Story Set in Comic Book Land.” Rev. of The Amazing Adventures of
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Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. NYTimes.com. New York Times, 21 Sept. 2000. Web. 20 July 2010. Describes the carefully crafted tension between the wild successes of the two comic-book-writing cousins and the grim struggles of their family in Europe. Punday, Daniel. “Kavalier & Clay, the Comic-Book Novel, and Authorship in a Corporate World.” CRITIQUE 49.3 (2008): 291-302. Print. Discusses Chabon’s novel in the context of economics to come to a better understanding of how the relationship between comic book authors and illustrators and their publishers affect the originality of the work. Sullivan, James. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: A Novel.” Rev. of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. Book Nov. 2000: 66. Print. Commends Chabon’s treatment of creativity and redemption. Gale Resources
Meanor, Patrick. “Michael Chabon.” American Novelists since World War II: Seventh Series. Ed. James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 278. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 July 2010. http://go.galegroup.
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com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1200011233& v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w “Michael Chabon.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 July 2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/ i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1000016823&v=2.1& u=itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w “Overview: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” Novels for Students. Ed. Ira Mark Milne. Vol. 25. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 July 2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i. do?&id=GALE%7CH1430006436& v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w Open Web Sources
Michael Chabon’s official Web site provides information on current projects as well as photographs of the author and free samples of his essays and fiction. http://www.michaelchabon.com The Amazing Web site of Kavalier & Clay is a fan site that collects information about the novel, reviews and criticism, Chabon and his other works, the history behind the novel, and other media related to the book. The owner of the site, Nate Raymond, also maintains a blog providing up-to-date news about Chabon. http://www.sugarbombs.com/ kavalier
For Further Reading
Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print. Presents an alternative history about a present-day fictional settlement of Jewish people in Alaska following the demise of the nascent state of Israel during World War II. Chabon, Michael, et al. Michael Chabon Presents . . . The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. Vols. 1-3. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics, 2004-2006. Print. Presents the three graphic novels depicting the adventures of the Escapist, Luna Moth, the Machine Gun, and more. Doctorow, E. L. Ragtime. New York: Random House, 2007. Print. First published in 1975, this novel is a groundbreaking work of historical fiction that blends fictional characters with historical figures, telling a story that is uniquely American. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper, 1994. Print. Presents work of respected theorist on comics in art and communication, told in black-and-white comic book style. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Print. Recounts Holocaust survival of Spiegelman’s father in graphic novel format.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Carol Ullmann
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American Gods By Neil Gaiman
W Introduction Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods is a melting pot of mythology, deftly weaving together modern incarnations of deities as far reaching as India’s Kali, Africa’s Anansi, the Germanic Easter, Egypt’s Thoth and Anubis, and the Algonquin Wisakedjak. Shadow, the protagonist, is pulled into the action of a mounting war between the old gods, who have immigrated to the United States and are slowly being forgotten, and the new gods of technology, who grow in strength and worshippers daily. In this novel, Gaiman explores issues of faith, truth, and identity while referring to Norse and Christian myths in the resolution of Shadow’s journey. American Gods won the 2002 Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and Bram Stoker Award and was a finalist for the 2002 World Fantasy Award. Although it was not a mainstream critical hit for a writer best known for his short stories and graphic novels, the novel was popular among fans of Gaiman and of the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Gaiman followed up American Gods with Anansi Boys (2005), a novel about Mr. Nancy’s two very different sons. Anansi Boys found more immediate commercial and critical success, perhaps due to the quiet popularity of American Gods.
W Literary and Historical Context
Religion became a political issue in the United States beginning in the late twentieth century, when the Christian Right, a movement that sought social conservatism through political change, began to take hold in Washington, D.C. Evangelical pastor Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority group in 1979, which had significant influence on the formation of the New
Christian Right and national politics in the 1980s. Through the campaign work of the New Christian Right, the Republican Party was able to claim control of the U.S. legislative, judicial, and executive branches during the 1980s and 1990s. The change in political activity toward social and religious conservatism was not reflected in the makeup of U.S. citizens and is largely a factor of media spin and political control. The Pew Research Center, as reported in a 2008 press release by Juliana Horowitz, found that between 1992 and 2008, the percentages of people who self-identified as liberal (18-21%), moderate (36-38%), and conservative (36-38%) did not change significantly. According to statistics released by the American Religious Identification Survey, the numbers of people selfidentifying as Evangelical Christian tripled from 1990 to 2008, but the raw numbers represent a very small fraction of the overall U.S. population (0.3 to 0.9% of the population). In the same period, Christian membership dropped by 10 percent and those identifying as having no religion rose by almost 7 percent. Both diversity and constant movement characterized the religious makeup of the United States, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in June 2008. In a February 2008 report, Pew found that 92 percent of Americans believe in “God or a universal spirit” (5) and 56 percent say that religion is important in their lives.
W Themes “This is not a land for gods” (245) is the underlying premise of American Gods. As people immigrated to North America, incarnations of the deities they worshipped followed them and settled down in this new land, only to find themselves over time weak and nearly forgotten. Thus faith is a central theme in American Gods. Belief is what empowers the gods, but in the United States, a young nation driven by industry and settled by people looking to make a new life, faith in the old gods
38 (c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
American Gods
MAJOR CHARACTERS SAMANTHA BLACK CROW is a young woman Shadow befriends during his travels. CZERNOBOG, whose name translates as “black god,” is a Slavic deity who is a close ally to Mr. Wednesday. FAT KID is a modern god of computers, the Internet, and technology. MR. IBIS is the Egyptian god Thoth, arbitrator and inventor of writing. He works in a funeral parlor with Mr. Jacquel in Cairo, Illinois. MR. JACQUEL is the Egyptian god Anubis, who prepares and guides the dead to the Underworld. He works in a funeral parlor with Mr. Ibis in Cairo, Illinois. LOW KEY LYESMITH is Loki, trickster god of the Norse pantheon. He is Shadow’s prison cell mate. An Egyptian ankh. American Gods, a spiritual thriller, is riddled with religious myths and symbols. hao liang/Shutterstock.com
LAURA MOON, Shadow’s wife, is reanimated from the dead after Shadow drops a special coin in her grave. She helps Shadow throughout the book. MR. NANCY, also known as Anansi, is a trickster god who sides with Mr. Wednesday. SHADOW, the protagonist of the novel, is a large, quiet man, thirty-two years old, who is drawn into a war between gods. At the end of the novel, he is thought to be Balder, a god of the Norse pantheon, or perhaps Jesus. MR. WEDNESDAY is a modern incarnation of Odin and father of Shadow. MISTER WORLD is the main antagonist of the novel. He has Mr. Wednesday killed during a truce meeting. THE ZORYA is a triplicate deity who represents the Morning Star, the Evening Star, and the Midnight Star. In the novel, the triplicates live with Czernobog and help Shadow.
A spiritual Egyptian statue. In American Gods, a coming battle between the ancient gods and the modern gods looms in the distance. Ralf Juergen Kraft/Shutterstock.com
has fallen to the wayside. By contrast, Shadow observes that humans do not need the faith of other people to continue to exist, loosely declaring humans to be agents with free will, whereas the gods are prisoners of their own constituents. Trickery and the nature of truth constitute another important theme in American Gods. Many gods from pantheons around the world are associated with trickery, truth-telling, fortunes, misdirection, and wisdom. Low Key Lyesmith and Mr. Nancy are incarnations of trickster gods; Mr. Wednesday is representative of Odin, known as a god of wisdom in the Norse pantheon. In this novel, Mr. Wednesday is a grafter (one who plays confidence tricks). The central plot of the story concerns a confidence scheme on the part of Mr. Wednesday and Low Key Lyesmith. Shadow, who is an honest man, is not
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American Gods
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Neil Gaiman was born in Portchester, England, in 1960. A voracious reader as a child, Gaiman left school in 1977 and, after collecting rejections for his short stories, began working as a freelance journalist. He returned to fiction in the mid1980s by writing for comic books, a medium he had loved for a long time. Gaiman took up retired DC Comics character the Sandman and, beginning in 1988, produced DC’s best-selling and award-winning series, The Sandman. American Gods was published in 2001. In 2002 American Gods won three major awards for works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Gaiman also won the prestigious 2009 Newbery Medal and the 2010 Carnegie Medal for the young adult novel The Graveyard Book (2008). In 1985 Gaiman married Mary McGrath and they have three children together; they divorced in 2008. Gaiman lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota.
as easy to trick as they assume. Through Shadow’s character and his success against Mr. Wednesday, Gaiman underlines the importance and power of truth. Wisdom is hard to come by: Shadow must hang upon a tree for nine days, die, and be revived in order to understand the advantage of being human.
W Style The setting of a work is the time and place in which the action takes place. Gaiman purposefully chose the United States in the late twentieth century for the setting of his novel American Gods. The United States is a relatively young country, just over two hundred years old at the time of this publication, populated largely by immigrants from around the world. The author sets this nation apart from all others because the incarnations of the deities that the immigrants brought with them have not fared well as the attention of their believers has drifted. The popularity of technology in the United States is another element that plays into Gaiman’s choice of this country for the setting; as mortals put their faith in cell phones, computers, the Internet, and the media, new gods arise to represent these elements of technology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Rev. of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Publishers Weekly 28 May 2001: 46. Print. Bolonik, Kera. “Review of American Gods.” Rev. of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. New York Times Book Review, 29 July 2001: 16. Print. De Lint, Charles. “American Gods.” Rev. of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 101.3 (2001): 97-98. Print. Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. New York: HarperTorch, 2001. Print. Horowitz, Juliana. “Winds of Political Change Haven’t Shifted Public’s Ideology Balance.” pewresearch.org. Pew Research Center Publications, 25 Nov. 2008. Web. 22 Aug. 2010. Kim, Ann. Rev. of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Library Journal 15 June 2001: 102. Print. Kosmin, Barry, and Ariela Keysar. American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2008. trincoll.edu. Trinity College, Mar. 2009. Web. 22 Aug. 2010. Olson, Ray. Rev. of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Booklist 15 May 2001: 1707. Print.
W Critical Reception Gaiman was best known for his work in the graphic novel industry, especially the multiple-award-winning series The Sandman, when American Gods was published in 2001. The novel received limited critical attention. Mainstream reviewers generally gave the novel a lukewarm reception, with Ray Olson of Booklist summarizing American Gods as “a tale that is just too busy and . . . unengaging.” Publishers Weekly called the plot “aimless” but predicted
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that it would do well among Gaiman’s fans. Ann Kim of Library Journal, by contrast, found the novel “compellingly imaginative,” declaring “the fascinating subject matter and impressive mythic scope are handled creatively and expertly.” Kera Bolonik agreed. Gaiman “has a deft hand with the mythologies he tinkers with here; even better, he’s a fine, droll storyteller,” wrote Bolonik, reviewing for the New York Times Book Review. Charles de Lint, a respected fantasy author in his own right, reviewed the novel for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and, true to Publishers Weekly’s forecast, gave the novel a good review, concluding that it would be a big hit for the year. He declared American Gods to be “a big, sprawling book that seems to take forever to get to its point, but what a wonderful journey it is to get there.” American Gods swept the genre fiction awards in 2002, taking home the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Bram Stoker awards. It was also nominated for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Mythopoeic awards in 2002.
U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation— Diverse and Dynamic. pewforum.org. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Feb. 2008. Web. 22 Aug. 2010. U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Beliefs and Practices: Diverse and Politically Relevant. pewforum. org. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, June 2008. Web. 22 Aug. 2010. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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American Gods Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Dalgleish, David. “Mythologizing America.” Rev. of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. januarymagazine. com. January Magazine, July 2001. Web. 22 Aug. 2010. Gives a positive review of Gaiman’s novel, hailing it as his most ambitious since The Sandman. DuMond, Lisa. Rev. of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. sfsite.com. SF Site, 2001. Web. 22 Aug. 2010. Celebrates Gaiman as a strong horror writer and predicts many award wins for this novel. Jensen, Jeff. “American Gods.” Rev. of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Entertainment Weekly 604 (13 July 2001): 75-76. Print. Offers a good review but criticizes Gaiman for an anticlimactic ending. Miller, Laura. Rev. of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. salon.com. Salon, 22 Jun. 2001. Web. 22 Aug. 2010. Detailed positive review, faults Gaiman only for not including Jesus and the Greek deities. Slabbert, Mathilda, and Leonie Viljoen. “Sustaining the Imaginative Life: Mythology and Fantasy in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.” Literator 27.3 (2006): 135-55. Examines the use of myth to connect readers to spirituality. Gale Resources
“Neil Gaiman.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Aug. 2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? &id=GALE%7CH1000034859&v=2.1&u =aadl&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w Sanders, Joe. “Neil (Richard) Gaiman.” British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers since 1960. Ed. Darren Harris-Fain. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 261. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Aug. 2010. http://go.galegroup. com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1200010793 &v=2.1&u=aadl&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w
in 2001. He enjoyed the experience of blogging so much that he developed the journal into a full-blown Web site featuring a biography, information about his novels, a message board, links to Web sites associated with Gaiman’s work, full-text short stories, and other extras—in addition to the journal that started it all. The full-text of the first chapter of American Gods, along with excerpts from his other books, can be found at http://www.neilgaiman.com HarperCollins, publisher of American Gods, has made the first one hundred pages available to read online free of charge at http://www.harpercollins.com/browsein side/index.aspx?isbn13=9780380789030 For Further Reading
Gaiman, Neil. Anansi Boys. New York: William Morrow, 2005. Print. Takes the character of Mr. Nancy (Anansi) from American Gods and tells the story of his two very different sons. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubery de Selincourt. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print. Travelogue and examination of the places Herodotus visited in his fifth century BCE travels; inspiring to Shadow in American Gods. James, John. Votan. London: Bantam, 1987. Print. Tells a story of a young Greek man who travels to Germany during the late Roman period, adventures that form the basis for Odin’s mythology. Jones, Diana Wynne. Eight Days of Luke. New York: Random House, 1990. Print. Story about a boy who inadvertently releases Loki from prison, instigating a battle between the gods. Riordan, Rick. The Lightning Thief. New York: Hyperion, 2005. Print. Story about a boy who learns he is the son of Poseidon and embarks on a quest to find Zeus’s lightning bolt. Willis, Roy, ed. World Mythology. New York: Holt, 1993. Print. A lavishly illustrated general introduction to the myths of nineteen cultures from around the world.
Open Web Sources
Carol Ullmann
Gaiman began an online journal, or blog, as part of the promotion of American Gods when it was published
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Anil’s Ghost By Michael Ondaatje
W Introduction
W Literary and Historical
Anil’s Ghost (2000) is a work of historical crime fiction set against the backdrop of civil war and insurrection in 1980s Sri Lanka. The book received the Giller Prize, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, and the Governor General’s Award for English Language Fiction. The novel is divided into eight subsections, each one focusing tightly on the character or subject referred to in the title of that particular section. The narrative of the novel unfolds through this series of close examinations, and uses the main characters’ experiences to recount the events of the plot and to paint a vivid picture of a country torn apart by civil war, government-sanctioned murder, and secrecy. Anil, the protagonist, drives the story both narratively and thematically. Native to Sri Lanka, but educated in the West, Anil is uniquely suited to reflect the contrasts between East and West and the tensions between the two with regard to cultural outlook and the place and “definition” of truth in society. Michael Ondaatje uses this character as a lens to examine both the history of the Sri Lankan civil war and the international reaction of human rights organizations to this conflict. In the novel, Anil, a forensic pathologist, has returned to Sri Lanka as part of a human rights fact-finding mission. Anil and Sarath Diyasena, an archaeologist, discover evidence that suggests an unknown victim, nicknamed Sailor by the two investigators, has been murdered by government forces. As Anil digs further and further into this investigation she places herself in grave danger, and the novel builds to a suspenseful climax as layer upon layer of Sri Lanka’s interconnected turmoil is revealed.
Context
The Sri Lankan civil war began with “the advent of serious revolutionary disorder in 1983” (Matthews). The government faced intermittent insurgency by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also known as the LTTE or the Tamil Tigers. The root of the insurgency was caused by ethnic tension between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. The aim of the LTTE was the formation of a separate Tamil state in the northern part of Sri Lanka. Proscribed as a terrorist group by 32 countries, the LTTE allegedly employed tactics which included threatening or attacking civilians, ethnic cleansing, suicide bombings, and/or the recruitment and use of child soldiers (Bhattacharji). However, in opposing the LTTE, the Sri Lankan government has also been accused of extrajudicial killings, abductions, extortion, conscription, and the use of child soldiers (Bhattacharji). The war officially ended in May 2009 with the Sri Lankan government victorious. Anil’s Ghost was published in 2000, nine years before the official end of the war. The perspective of the novel is particularly useful for a number of reasons. The book provides an array of characters through which to view both the events of the Sri Lankan civil war and the differing value placed on the “truth” regarding certain incidents, and the differing versions of truth ascribed to certain events by Eastern and Western cultures. This offering of multiple perspectives enables the novel to be more accessible to readers from either hemisphere. Michael Ondaatje, while born in Sri Lanka, was educated in the West, much like his lead character, Anil. The official end of the war provides a new context for Anil’s Ghost, but it remains to be seen if the root causes of the war have been successfully dealt with or not.
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Anil’s Ghost
W Themes The war, and its effects on the people of Sri Lanka, is a major theme within the book. The civil war, and a string of human rights violations arising out of the war, prompts Anil’s return to Sri Lanka as she devotes herself to discovering the truth about what is happening in her former home. Some, like Gamini, barricade themselves off from the world. As Margaret Scanlan notes: “Gamini is visibly traumatized by war . . . [and] survives by immersing himself in his work.” Palipana, Sarath’s mentor, goes even further and withdraws from society altogether, choosing to live as a hermit. Others, like Sarath’s wife and Ananda, attempt to escape through suicide. The effects of the war are felt everywhere in Sri Lanka. Other major themes of Anil’s Ghost revolve around the concepts of truth and secrets. Anil comes to Sri Lanka in search of the truth. With Sarath’s help, she uncovers a number of hidden, buried, or obscured things, some hidden more thoroughly than others. However, Sarath himself remains largely an enigma, and Anil is never quite sure of his true nature. She remains unsure until the conclusion of the novel, when Sarath finally reveals himself through the actions he takes to save Anil and her research. Palipana, Sarath’s mentor, serves as another key element in examining the theme of truth. Lisa Pace Vetter explains that “for Palipana, the truth is not simply irrelevant or merely fabricated. Rather, truth must be understood as extended through time and composed of many different elements, objective and subjective.” This conclusion stems from a discussion Palipana holds with the novel’s protagonist, Anil.
W Style Ondaatje’s writing in the novel has been described by Publishers Weekly as “cryptic, elliptical.” This description stems, in part, from the postmodern style in which the book is written. As Chelva Kanaganayakam notes, this elliptical or fragmentary style is a literary device “that postmodern novelists use in order to move away from traditional linear narratives.” Anil’s Ghost exemplifies this “deliberately fragmentary style.” Scanlan further argues that Ondaatje’s “distinctive achievement in Anil’s Ghost is to create a narrative structure that replicates the experience of terror.” The disjointed scenes mirror the fragmentary nature of life as experienced by those caught in the war. Snapshot memories of horror are the primary recollections that stand out in the linear timeline surrounding the civil war. The structure of the novel, as well as the prose used within, help to shape the effect of the narrative on the reader. Anil’s Ghost is divided into eight subsections. This is one key structural component that contributes to the
MAJOR CHARACTERS ANANDA, a wreck of a man, driven to drink by the loss of his wife. At one time, he was a renowned painter and sculptor, partaking in the traditional eye-painting ceremony which gives life to statues, most notably figures of the Buddha. Ananda is enlisted by Anil and Sarath to re-create Sailor’s face. After he completes his work, Ananda attempts to kill himself by slashing his own throat. He is rescued by Anil and Sarath. SARATH DIYASENA, an archaeologist, is a Sri Lankan official who works closely with Anil to investigate the murders. Often aloof and of unknown political affiliation, Sarath provides Anil with an invaluable link to Sri Lanka. His connections provide access to the people, places, and things needed to complete their investigation. Sarath frequently challenges Anil’s assumptions, most notably in terms of what role truth plays in government and in life. GAMINI is Sarath’s younger brother and a doctor who works tirelessly on the never-ending stream of war victims. Gamini grew up in Sarath’s shadow, is addicted to speed, and was once in love with Sarath’s wife. Gamini helps Anil and Sarath save the life of Gunasena, a man they found nailed to the road as they traveled. Also known as “the Mouse,” Gamini’s perspective frequently provides a medical professional’s point of view. SAILOR is the name given to the skeleton of the unknown victim found by Anil and Sarath. Sailor proves to be a key to Anil’s human rights investigation in Sri Lanka. Discovering who he was and what happened to him becomes the main focus of the novel. ANIL TISSERA is a young woman who works as a forensic pathologist. She was born in Sri Lanka but left the country to pursue her higher education in the West. She returns to conduct a human rights investigation into various murders connected with the Sri Lankan civil war. The novel makes significant references to Anil’s past life in America, as well as her current activities in Sri Lanka.
elliptical or postmodern style of the novel. Each subsection is given its own thematically significant title: in some instances the name of one of the characters; in other cases a more interpretive or thematic nomenclature are used. For example, the subsection titled “The Mouse” refers to, and is written from, the perspective of Gamini. This allows the novel to retain islands of discrete, narrative structure, while simultaneously abandoning the linear format. Italicized anecdotes and narrative snapshots appear throughout Anil’s Ghost. Many are written from a firstperson perspective, increasing their immediacy. Some address past events, or allow the reader to glimpse
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Anil’s Ghost
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Ondaatje is a Canadian author and poet. Born in Sri Lanka in 1942, Ondaatje is perhaps best known for his novel The English Patient. Ondaatje’s personal narrative style involves weaving together a narrative from various disparate scenes or “threads.” These threads, while not always aligned in strict causal or temporal order, link together (often thematically) to create the narrative of the novel. Ondaatje premiered this style in his 1976 work, Coming through Slaughter, and it has been argued that The English Patient is a masterfully realized example of this form. Ondaatje has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Man Booker Prize, awarded to The English Patient; and the Canadian Governor General’s Award, for both his fiction and his poetry. Ondaatje is also an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
otherwise hidden scenes, things not always witnessed firsthand by the primary characters of the book during the course of the narrative. These vignettes serve to illustrate certain aspects of the war and the realities faced by the citizens of Sri Lanka.
W Critical Reception Anil’s Ghost was greeted with a wide range of critical response. Given the political nature of the novel’s subject matter, as well as its contemporary relevance to the then ongoing Sri Lankan civil war, criticism focused not only on the merits of the work as an artistic endeavor, but also on the place of the work within a social and/or political context. Kanaganayakam believes that “multiple analyses advanced by critics have specific implications for the evaluation of Sri Lankan fiction in particular and for postcolonial literatures in general.” New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin responds to some of the inherent difficulties with the postmodern form, remarking that the connection between the powerful images of the war scattered throughout the book and the plot of the novel are “indistinct. Frustratingly so, since the scattered aspects of this voyage of discovery are separately so powerful.” In her opinion, “the book’s real strengths lie in its profound sense of outrage, the shimmering intensity of its descriptive language and the mysterious beauty of its geography.” Theo Tait of the London Review of Books likewise expresses the view that while containing powerful imagery, the novel suffers from a disconnecting of events and a breakdown of plot progression that result from
Homes that were damaged in the Sri Lankan civil war, the same war that is featured in Anil’s Ghost. ª Howard Davies/Corbis
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Anil’s Ghost
Ondaatje’s signature style. He compares Ondaatje to one of the author’s literary characters, calling him one of his own “outlandish figures of comparison, the excellent novelist and the hammy, rather suspect wordsmith seem intertwined.” Other reviewers have lauded Anil’s Ghost, citing the opinion that this work, rather than an imperfect novel, is an inspired exploration of the form. Such reviewers have appreciated Ondaatje for pushing the envelope and bringing a poet’s aesthetic to the prose novel form. Still others prefer to focus on the social or political impact the book might have. Regardless of motive, the novel continues to provoke a wide spectrum of responses. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
“Anil’s Ghost.” Publishers Weekly 247.12 (2000): 70. Print. General OneFile. Web. 9 July 2010. Bhattacharji, Preeti. “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (aka Tamil Tigers).” Council on Foreign Relations. 20 May 2009. Web. 9 July 2010. Kanaganayakam, Chelva. “In Defense of Anil’s Ghost.” ARIEL 37.1 (2006): 5+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 9 July 2010. Maslin, Janet. “Books of the Times; Unearthing the Tragedies of Civil War in Sri Lanka.” Rev. of Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje. New York Times 11 May 2000: n.p. Print. NYTimes.com. Web. 9 July 2010. Matthews, Bruce. “The Limits of International Engagement in Human Rights Situations: The Case of Sri Lanka.” Pacific Affairs 82.4 (2009): 577+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 9 July 2010. Scanlan, Margaret. “Anil’s Ghost and Terrorism’s Time.” Studies in the Novel 36.3 (2004): 302+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 9 July 2010. Tait, Theo. “Hit the Circuit.” Rev. of Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje. London Review of Books 22.14 (20 July 2000): n.p. Print. Lrb.co.uk. Web. 9 July 2010. Vetter, Lisa Pace. “Liberal Political Inquiries in the Novels of Michael Ondaatje.” Perspectives on Political Science 34.1 (2005): 27+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 15 July 2010. Additional Resources
Center. Web. 13 July 2010. Review focusing on the theme of war and the importance of death in Anil’s Ghost, with brief mentions of connections between the work and certain archetypal protagonist characteristics. Kertzer, Jon. “Justice and the Pathos of Understanding in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” English Studies in Canada 29.3-4 (2003): 116+. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 July 2010. A critical essay that addresses the political aspect (or lack thereof) of Anil’s Ghost, and examines questions of pathos, ethics, and responsibility. New, William H. “Anil’s Ghost.” Journal of Modern Literature (2000): 565. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 July 2010. Places Ondaatje’s work, focusing on Anil’s Ghost in particular, into the context of works written by other contemporary Canadian authors. Ratti, Manav. “Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Aestheticization of Human Rights.” ARIEL 35.1-2 (2004): 121+. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 July 2010. Critical essay that addresses questions of the political and social impact of Anil’s Ghost, and expands the book’s potential impact on human rights into the question of minority rights and state sovereignty as well. Smothers, Bonnie. “Anil’s Ghost.” Booklist 15 Mar. 2000: 1294. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 July 2010. Brief plot summary and review in support of Ondaatje’s style and the effects of the book as a work of art. Gale Resources
Guneratne, Anthony R. “Michael Ondaatje (12 September 1943-)”. South Asian Writers in English. Ed. Fakrul Alam. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 323. Detroit: Gale, 2006. 273-280. Print. From Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online. Web 12 July 2010. “Michael Ondaatje (1943-)”. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 180. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 173-285. Print. From Literature Criticism Online. Web 12 July 2010.
Criticism and Reviews
Open Web Sources
Allen, Brooke. “Meditations, Good & Bad.” New Criterion 18.9 (2000): 63. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 July 2010. Highly critical review that deconstructs Anil’s Ghost from the perspectives of language, plot, and poetic effect.
Michael Ondaatje’s personal website includes biographical information, quotes, and video clips. It is located at http://michaelondaatje.com/
Cusk, Rachel. “Sri Lankan Skeletons.” New Statesman 129.4485 (8 May 2000): 55. Print. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 180. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Print. Literature Resource
The Poetry Foundation’s website has an extensive entry on Michael Ondaatje. It includes a biography, a current bibliography of his work, a career synopsis and an extensive list of works for further reading. http:// www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html? id=5142
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The Contemporary Writers website offers a biography of Michael Ondaatje, as well as an extended critical perspective on his various works. It also features a current list of prizes and honors awarded him. http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/? p=auth205 For Further Reading
De Silva, K. M. A History of Sri Lanka. Rev. ed. 2005. London: C. Hurst & Company, 2005. Print. A history of Sri Lanka; of particular note is chapter 38, which covers the change in regime and the beginnings of the Sri Lankan civil war. Gunawardena, C. A. Encyclopedia of Sri Lanka. Rev. ed. 2006. Elgin: New Dawn Press Group, 2005. Print. Covers major aspects of Sri Lankan history, geography, people, places, art, and culture. Jewinski, Ed. Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully. n.p.: ECW Press, 1994. Print. A biography of Michael Ondaatje, published before he wrote Anil’s Ghost.
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Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1992. Print. Arguably Ondaatje’s best-known novel, winner of the Man Booker Prize, adapted into an Academy Awardwinning film. ———. Running in the Family. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. Print. Fictionalized memoir by Ondaatje about his imagined return to Sri Lanka in the 1970s; involves aspects of magic realism and explores themes of memory, family, and societal expectations. ———, with Ellen Kanner. “New Discoveries from the Author of The English Patient.” Bookpage.com. Web. 13 July 2010. An interview with Michael Ondaatje, conducted shortly after Anil’s Ghost was published; includes some of his feelings about Sri Lanka and the impulse behind the writing of the novel. Powder Thompson
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Animal’s People By Indra Sinha
W Introduction Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People is a darkly satirical tale set in present-day India, in the city of Khaufpur. The city is a fictionalized version of Bhopal, the site of the 1984 Union Carbide pesticide leak, the worst recorded industrial disaster in history. The protagonist of Sinha’s novel is a nineteenyear-old man whose parents were among the thousands killed in a comparable chemical leak. Instead of killing him, however, the chemicals have caused his spine to become so twisted that he is forced to walk on all fours—thus his nickname, Animal. What might otherwise be a very bleak book is lightened by the novel’s dark sense of humor. Animal is not only incredibly profane but he is also perpetually horny, lusting after numerous women (including the daughter of a local musician) and bragging about the size of his penis. Further humor arises from his relationship with Ma Franci, the deranged French nun with whom he lives, as well as with his dog, Jara. The novel also incorporates numerous elements of magical realism. Animal’s People was short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, as well as the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book).
W Literary and Historical Context
Although the Bhopal disaster occurred over twenty-five years ago, its effects are still being felt today. On December 2, 1984, a gas leak occurred at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant, which caused thousands of people in the surrounding area to be exposed to harmful chemicals such as methyl isocyanate (MIC). The leak caused somewhere between 3,000 and
15,000 deaths, many of which were immediate, and many more of which were the result of diseases related to gas exposure. To this day, survivors continue to suffer from related illnesses and injuries, in no small part due to the fact that even after the main leak, abandoned chemicals continued to pollute the groundwater. The gas leak in Bhopal, India, is considered the worst chemical disaster in history. More than twenty-five years after the tragedy, several criminal and civil cases are still pending, both in the United States and India. Seven former employees, including the ex-CEO of UCIL, Warren Anderson, were convicted in June 2010 for criminal negligence, each one sentenced to two years in prison and a $2,000 fine. An eighth was convicted but died before his sentence could be carried out. The leak was blamed on numerous factors, including inadequate maintenance, the fact that at the plant, MIC was being stored in tanks filled far past recommended levels, and the failure of numerous safety systems, many of which, including the tanks’ refrigeration system, were deliberately turned off in order to save money. Contributing to the severity of the disaster were the large number of slums (and therefore countless people) in the immediate area, the lack of any safety plan in case of a catastrophe, and poor availability of health care. Top symptoms and injuries that resulted include respiratory and eye problems, neurological disorders, and birth defects.
W Themes Animal’s People centers on an exploration of how corporate greed can lead to the devastation and destruction of human lives, casually and senselessly sacrificed in the name of cutting corners and saving money. It uses a fictionalized account of the Bhopal disaster’s aftermath to demonstrate how the world’s poorest people have no voice in how the world is run, or even in something as basic as their own survival.
47 (c) 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Animal’s People
MAJOR CHARACTERS ANIMAL, the narrator and protagonist, is a crude and perpetually horny nineteen-year-old whose spine is so twisted he has to walk on all fours ELLI, is a doctor from the United States whose goal is to open a free clinic in Khaufpur, to help the victims of the gas leak. MA FRANCI is a French nun who was poisoned in the gas leak, causing her to lose her mind, along with her Hindi and English. She can communicate only in French with Animal, with whom she lives. NISHA is the young woman with whom Animal has fallen in love, despite the fact that she is Zafar’s girlfriend. ZAFAR is an activist who preaches for nonviolent methods of retaliation against the company that ruined the lives of his people. He is also the boyfriend of Animal’s crush, Nisha.
Years later, the people of Khaufpur continue to suffer, their torment given representation in the form of Animal, whose body is as twisted and damaged as the plight of the people among whom he lives. Throughout the novel, his deformity is a constant reminder of the wrongs that have been done to him and his people, even as his crude personality and obsession with sex reassert Animal’s humanity. He may be horrifying to look at, the novel stresses, but he has the same needs, desires, and drives as any other person. Animal also serves as an extreme symbol for all impoverished people in Third World countries who may seem unapproachably alien to First World people, but who are no less deserving of human rights. He is fiercely individual and refuses to allow his identity to become regarded merely as a statistic.
W Style Sinha writes Animal’s People as a first-person narrative, in the voice of Animal, a device that places the reader directly in the center of the tragedy and fear that continues to affect the lives of the people who populate the novel. The word khauf, part of the city’s name, means fear or horror. “I used to be human once,” Animal says at the start, a declaration that speaks both to his physical deformities and to how the public outside of Khaufpur has come to ignore his people’s plight, treating them as less than human (1). The novel is structured in the form of transcripts of tape recordings that Animal is supposedly making for a reporter, who plans on using his testimony, as well as that of other Khaufpur residents, to write a book about the
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A mosque in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. A fictional version of Bhopal serves as the setting of the novel Animal’s People. ª Photosindia/Corbis
tragedy. Animal remains acerbic and cynical throughout, telling the journalist, “You were like all the others, come to suck our stories from us, so strangers in far off countries can marvel there’s so much pain in the world. Like vultures are you jarnaliss” (5). Regarding the last word, Animal, frequently speaks with mispronounced or even made-up words that reflect the mix of Hindi, French, and English languages that surrounds him. He mistranslates the word, company as “kampani” and refers to spying as “jamisponding,” a verb phonetically derived from “James Bond” (27, 105). Animal’s dark sense of humor and unique perspective on the world adds a satirical layer to the proceedings that keeps the novel from being fully bleak, even as it underlines his humanity. He is, after all, partaking in the particularly human practice of dealing with tragedy through humor and selfdeprecation. Animal can also read minds and even communicates with a two-headed fetus (another result of the gas leak) that has been preserved for study at a local laboratory—a nuance that references the magical realism that runs throughout much of Indian literature. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Animal’s People
W Critical Reception Upon its release, Animal’s People was lauded for the creative and uncompromising manner with which it confronted readers with the victims of the Bhopal disaster. Leslie Patterson of Library Journal praised Animal as a narrator for his “lively mind and . . . way with words, some of them angry and profane, some of them bitterly funny,” calling the novel a “gripping” reminder of a “continuing real-life tragedy.” Entertainment Weekly’s Karen Valby additionally called Animal “as delightfully human a narrator as one could hope to find.” Kirkus Reviews went so far as to say that Animal was “destined to be one of fiction’s immortals.” In the same vein, Donna Seaman of Booklist was very impressed with how Sinha yields humor from the tragedy. She described the novel as being a “story . . . imaginatively told. Writing with both serious intent and exuberant satirical humor, Sinha tells an antic, ribald, and searing tale of greed and heroism.” She went on to applaud “Sinha’s daring farce . . . [for asking] what it means to be human, . . . [rekindling] compassion for the still uncompensated victims of the real-life catastrophe, and . . . [celebrating] the resiliency of love and goodness in the poorest and most poisoned of places.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in India in 1950, Indra Sinha spent the majority of his adult life in England, where he was voted as one of the top ten best British copywriters of all time. His specialty was in producing uncompromising, forceful ad campaigns for such charities as the Bhopal Medical Appeal and Amnesty International. Although he resigned in 1995 to focus on literature and nonfiction writing, his interest in human rights and humanity in general recurs throughout his work. His writing abounds with empathy for the less fortunate, particularly in Animal’s People, in which he places the reader inside the perspective of a most afflicted narrator.
Some critics took issue with the novel’s use of magical realism. London’s Sunday Times found these elements of the novel to be underdeveloped and “halfhearted,” while Ligaya Mishan in the New York Times felt that they were “more disorienting than enlightening . . . Sinha veers between comedy and tragedy,
An abandoned factory sits in ruins. In Animal’s People, a chemical leak from a similar factory leaves the main character, Animal, so deformed that he must walk on all fours. ª Nathan King / Alamy TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Animal’s People
awkwardly stuffing his story with improbable high jinks.” She was also not the only critic to find a great number of the characters other than Animal to be rather twodimensional, built on personality quirks rather than on “fully realized interior lives.” Despite that, however, even she found moments of great power in the novel: “every now and then his prose achieves a plainspoken lyricism that brings his subject into sharp focus.”
Irani, Anosh. Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 13 Oct. 2007: D4. Explores how Sinha fictionalized the true story of the Bhopal disaster in this novel. Gale Resources
“Sinha, Indra (1950-).” Student Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 2009. “Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People.” Student Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 2009.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. Kirkus Reviews 1 Jan. 2008. “Human, All Too Human; Fiction.” Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. Sunday Times [London], 30 Sept. 2007: 54. Mishan, Ligaya. “POISONED.” Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. New York Times Book Review, 9 Mar. 2008: 13(L). Patterson, Leslie. “Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People.” Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. Library Journal 133.5 (2008): 61+. Seaman, Donna. “Animal’s People.” Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. Booklist 15 Feb. 2008: 35. Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Print. Valby, Karen. “Animal’s People.” Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. Entertainment Weekly 7 Mar. 2008: 96. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
“The Animal Kingdom.” Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. India Today (2007). This mostly complimentary review from India nevertheless argues that the novel’s main flaw is that the grotesqueries of Sinha’s fictionalized Bhopal are not nearly as upsetting as what actually happened. Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. Guardian [London, England], 15 Sept. 2007: 17. Analyzes how Sinha infuses the entire novel with a sense of unspeakable horror that is all the more disturbing because it has its basis in truth. Beresford, Lucy. “Village of the Damned.” Rev. of Animal’s People, by Indra Sinha. New Statesman (1996) 26 Feb. 2007: 67+. This review explains how Sinha used the internet as a medium to help tell his story, through the use of a website for the fictional Khaufpur that he created in conjunction with the novel. “‘The Govt Must Stop Obstructing Justice.’” Times of India, 22 June 2008. Details Indra Sinha’s real-world efforts to help the survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster.
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Indra Sinha’s blog includes informative postings on his travels and his culture at http://www.indrasinha.com There is a detailed biography and critical essay about Sinha’s work, along with a full bibliography and list of awards at http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/? p=auth519F079C191fb20F5CkXPTF00D99 For Further Reading
D’Silva, Themistocles. The Black Box of Bhopal: A Closer Look at the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster. Victoria: Trafford Publishing, 2006. Print. This study of the disaster includes documents related to the plant’s operation and construction, as well as to the inner workings of the company that ran it. It also includes in-depth analysis of the Indian government’s response to the disaster, as well as to its investigation. Fortun, Kim. Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 2001. Print. Analyzes the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster and how it has inspired human rights advocacy in ensuing years. Hanna, Bridget; Ward Morehouse; and Satinath Sarangi, eds. The Bhopal Reader. New York: Apex, 2005. Print. This anthology of information includes testimonies, analysis, debates, scientific and legal commentary and evidence, as well as archival documentation about the disaster. Lapierre, Dominique, and Javier Moro. Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster. New York: Warner Books, 2002. Print. Written by a journalist from France and a writer from Spain, this book is both a recounting of the disaster and a history of how the factory came to be built in the first place. Morehouse, Ward, and M. Arun Subramaniam. The Bhopal Tragedy: What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and Communities at Risk. New York: Apex, 1986. Print. This early analysis of the Bhopal disaster also contains warnings for how similar disasters can occur in the future, should corporate greed continue to influence precautionary policies. Robert Berg TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Armies By Evelio Rosero
W Introduction Set in war-torn rural Colombia, Evelio Rosero’s novel The Armies is the story of a fictional valley town under attack by several rival military groups and drug traffickers that inhabit the surrounding mountain forests. For years these factions have been swooping into San José without warning to kidnap its wealthiest citizens and to inflict violence on the rest of the inhabitants, who have long since resigned themselves to this menace. At the heart of the story is Ismael Pasos, a seventy-year-old retired professor whose search for his missing wife exposes him to the suffering of nearly everyone in town. Over the course of the novel, Ismael gradually loses his sanity as his neighbors either flee or are brutally murdered. The Armies has been praised for its relentlessly unsentimental examination of Colombia’s drug wars and focus on the personal aspects of the crisis rather than attending to larger questions of politics and social reform. It won the Tusquets International Prize in 2006 and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2009.
W Literary and Historical Context
Rural Colombia has experienced nearly continuous violence since the late 1940s, when a period known as “La Violencia” erupted after the conservative government’s return to power in 1946 and the 1948 assassination of charismatic liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala. These two events led many conservative peasants to steal land from those who supported the liberal government; a chain reaction of violence ensued that lasted through the mid-1950s. After a brief respite, tension returned with the rise of several Marxist parties in the 1960s and continued with the development of
drug cartels in the 1970s and ’80s. As markets for cocaine grew, rural Colombia’s vast swathes of coca plants became coveted and disputed territory. All of this made the average citizen in these towns easy prey for the numerous cartels and guerrilla organizations that were competing for resources. Many of these groups, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), were more powerful than the national government, making law enforcement in the region nearly impossible. The Armies, which is set in present-day Colombia, does not identify any particular Colombian fighting force but rather portrays the violence as a permanent and ubiquitous threat coming from anonymous military forces that strike the citizens of San José at unpredictable times. From 1960 to 1967, as war spread throughout much of Latin America, there was a literature boom that featured two distinct types of writing. The more famous of these was made up of writers such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jorge Luis Borges. Together this group developed a new literary style called magic realism, in which fantastic, decidedly unrealistic elements are woven into otherwise realistic stories. The other collection of more traditional writers featured the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Although Rosero is a great admirer of Márquez, he clearly is a descendant of the latter group. The Armies focuses exclusively on the stark realities of civilians coping with war, such as loved ones waiting for spouses and mothers tending to traumatized children.
W Themes Rosero introduces the themes of voyeurism and indifference in the novel’s opening scene, in which Ismael picks oranges and looks over a wall at his neighbor Geraldina, who is sunbathing in the nude. As Ismael dawdles and
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The Armies
MAJOR CHARACTERS GERALDINA ALMIDA is Ismael’s neighbor. Her husband and son are kidnapped when the armies invade San José. Her son is eventually returned, but the trauma has left him mute. CHEPE is a café owner whose wife is pregnant. She is kidnapped, and one day the optimistic, good-natured Chepe receives a parcel containing several of her and their daughter’s fingers. HORTENSIA GALINDO is the wife of Marcos Saldarriaga, who was kidnapped years before the action of the novel unfolds. Every year she hosts a party on the anniversary of her husband’s disappearance. Because she insists that there be dancing at the party, it is not clear whether she is mourning or celebrating his disappearance. “HEY” is the empanada seller who earns his moniker for the one-word shout he uses to advertise his wares as he pushes his cart through town. Ismael continues to hear the famous “heeey” after the peddler has been assassinated. OTILIA DEL SAGRARIO ALDANA OCAMPO, age sixty, is Ismael’s wife. Early in the novel, in their only protracted scene together, she scolds her husband for his voyeurism and sends him to a priest. Ismael goes to a bar and to a doctor instead and misses a party he was supposed to attend with Otilia. The two share only one brief conversation after this before she disappears. ISMAEL PASOS is the seventy-year-old hero and narrator of the novel. An incorrigible Peeping Tom, Ismael enjoys picking oranges from the trees that line his property so he can peer over the wall at Geraldina, who sunbathes naked. One morning Ismael wakes up early and takes a walk in the countryside. The first of the armies attacks while he is gone, and his wife disappears. Ismael spends the better part of the novel looking for her as his mental health deteriorates.
gawks, Geraldina and her husband, Eusebio, who is clothed, relax as if they do not know Ismael is there. Eventually, Eusebio approaches the wall and says to Ismael, “Your oranges are round, but my wife must be more rounded, no?” The two men continue to have a circumspect, jocular conversation, and Geraldina eventually joins them. The scene exemplifies the manner in which the novel’s characters ignore what is happening around them and then dismiss the violation when it is brought to light. Rosero develops these themes in a broader social context at a party given by Hortensia, whose husband, Marcos, disappeared four years ago. Each year Hortensia throws an unusual gathering to acknowledge the anniversary of Marcos’s disappearance.
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Even as partygoers recall the horror of the kidnapping, they look forward to the gathering as an opportunity to dance and gossip. Ismael skips the event and goes instead to a café, where he ogles the waitresses. All of this foreshadows how the townspeople deal with the armies that invade the day after the party. No one protests; instead, they continue with their lives, resigning themselves to despair. As the guerrillas and paramilitaries continue to draw blood and make demands, Rosero introduces another theme, something akin to loyalty but that could also be regarded as a stubbornness bordering on madness. Ismael refuses to leave town, even after months have passed and all signs indicate that his wife has died. Near the end of the story, he receives several letters from his daughter, urging him to leave San José and live with her and her husband. Ismael refuses and eventually will not even read the missives. At the novel’s conclusion, Ismael visits a dying man named Celmiro, who has locked himself in his home. As Ismael pounds at the door, it is revealed that for days Celmiro’s sons have tried to get him to leave with them, but he prefers to die alone in San José.
W Style The Armies is an example of literary realism, which is an attempt to depict contemporary life as it is. As noted in Maya Jaggi’s article in the Guardian, more than 100,000 Colombian citizens were either killed or disappeared in the last twenty years, according to an Amnesty International report from 2008. To re-create the horror and resignation of rural Colombia during the drug wars of the second half of the twentieth century, the novel contains a litany of atrocities, including an officer firing into an unarmed crowd of civilians, a doctor stuffing money and narcotics into cadavers to help guerrillas transport their contraband, and a group of soldiers killing and then raping a woman. Rosero chose San José (an extremely common city name in Colombia) for the name of the novel’s setting in order to represent any rural Colombian town. “I took everyday life, idyllic as it seemed, and sabotaged it as violence came in,” Rosero comments in the Guardian article. The novel’s realism extends to the interior life of its main character, and the language Rosero uses to narrate the story reflects Ismael’s failing mental health. Ismael suffers from emotional exhaustion and becomes forgetful, nearly demented, the longer he goes without seeing his wife. As his mental health deteriorates, the storyline likewise breaks down. For example, during one point late in the novel, when it seems as if a week has gone by, Ismael says that the armies have been in town for several months. He then starts introducing new characters and talks about them as if they have been present in the novel from the beginning. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Armies
W Critical Reception Although the English translation of Rosero’s novel has not yet been widely reviewed, critics who have studied the work have responded positively. Perhaps the most favorable among these is Boyd Tonkin’s notice in the Belfast Telegraph, which states, “If our age of cyclical terror and counter-terror needs its own answer to All Quiet on the Western Front, here it is.” Most of the reviews commend Rosero for managing the escalation of violence in the text without sentiment or remorse. For example, writing in the Independent, Daniel Hahn claims, “The violence is momentary but often shocking, shown in brief, grim pictures; the building despair is finely controlled and oppressive; but The Armies is a swift and engaging piece of prose.” Miranda France in the Telegraph concurs, commenting that “the horror of the villagers’ plight is always powerfully conveyed.” However, Tommy Wallach, writing for the World, recognizes that the relentless violence may put off many readers: “The only thing that can really be said against Rosero’s novel is either irrelevant or a deal breaker: it isn’t particularly fun to read. When the darkness falls over Ismael, it is never to rise again. Nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse. The manager of a local café receives the index fingers of his kidnapped wife and daughter in order
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Evelio Rosero was born on March 20, 1958, in Bogotá, Colombia. He began writing in earnest in his late teens, and since that time has published novels, poetry, short stories, novellas, journalism, young adult fiction, and flash fiction to great acclaim. Famous for riding his bike through Bogotá for exercise and for running errands, Rosero is otherwise known for leading the reclusive life of a tireless writer. He makes a point of not attending literary functions. Over the course of his career, Rosero has won several major awards, including Colombia’s Premio Nacional de Cuento (national short story award) at age twenty-one in 1979 for “Ausentes” (The departed) and Spain’s Premio Internacional de Novela Breve (international award for short fiction) for Papá es santo y sabio (Dad is holy and wise) in 1982. In 2006 he was awarded Colombia’s Premio Nacional de Literatura (national literature prize) for his body of work.
to extract a higher ransom. The city’s empanada vendor’s severed head is found in his grease boiler. One woman watches her son die, then is killed and raped (in that order) by a group of soldiers.”
The Armies takes place in the midst of a brutal Colombian drug war. ª Bill Gentile/Corbis TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Reviewers have also praised Rosero for focusing on the private lives of the villagers rather than delving into Colombian politics. In Quarterly Conversation, Travis Godsoe argues that despite its varied influences, among them the many Latin American novels that came before it and the dystopian works of Samuel Beckett, “The Armies stands well on its own as an engrossing tale and needs no reference or interpretation beyond one’s own emotions and sense of justice. . . . Perhaps this is because the book is an antiwar novel without politics, one that only concerns itself with consequences and is all the more moving for it.” Hahn echoes Godsoe’s remarks: “The war is not about politics for these characters, not about rival factions fighting for control. It is about personal tragedies, the loss of a wife, struggles with physical ailments, sensations of pain, heat, thirst, hope and hopelessness. And Evelio Rosero’s book is all the more powerful for it.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
France, Miranda. Rev. of The Armies, by Evelio Rosero. Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 26 Nov. 2008. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. Godsoe, Travis. Rev. of The Armies, by Evelio Rosero. Quarterly Conversation. N.p., 4 Jan. 2010. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. Grant, Linda, Boyd Tonkin, and Maya Jaggi. “Witness to War: Evelio Rosero on Fiction That Fights for Truth.” Independent [London]. Independent Print Limited, 15 May 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Hahn, Daniel. Rev. of The Armies, by Evelio Rosero. Independent [London]. Independent Print Limited, 16 Jan. 2009. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. Rosero, Evelio. The Armies. Trans. Anne McLean. New York: New Directions, 2009. Print. Tonkin, Boyd. Rev. of The Armies, by Evelio Rosero. Belfast Telegraph. Independent News and Media Limited, 19 Feb. 2010. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. Wallach, Tommy. “Of Violence and Beauty.” PRI’s The World. PRI’s The World, 9 Sept. 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Ehrenreich, Ben. “After Macando: On Evelio Rosero.” Nation. The Nation Company, 7 Jan. 2010. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. Praises the author for his unsparing representation of the violence and desolation the warring armies have brought to Colombia in the past half century. Ehrenreich also argues that Rosero’s narrative implicates readers, creating in them a perverse desire to bear witness to the destruction that is wrought on the page.
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Bomb Magazine features an interview with Rosero in which he speaks about his experiences being educated by priests and the place they occupy in his work, as well as the books that have most influenced him. http://bombsite.com/issues/110/articles/3364 The Web site Booktrust includes an interview with the author in which he discusses the difference between the way rural and urban Colombians understand the violence that has been ravaging the countryside since the late 1940s. http://www.translatedfiction.org. uk/show/feature/Translation-Evelio-Rosero For Further Reading
Camus, Albert. The Plague. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print. Set in the 1940s in Algeria, the novel documents a group of people who, much like the citizens of San José, resign themselves to their despair when a deadly communicable disease spreads through town. The Plague has been read as an allegory of the French resistance to the Nazi invasion during the 1940s. Durnan, Michael, and Mark Peceny. “The FARC’s Best Friend: U.S. Antidrug Policies and the Deepening of Colombia’s Civil War in the 1990s.” Latin American Politics and Society 40.2 (2006): 95-116. Print. This article claims that the success of U.S. antidrug policies in Colombia, such as the dismantling of drug cartels and the aerial fumigation of coca crops, pushed coca cultivation exclusively into areas dominated by the FARC insurgents and thus weakened the central government and exacerbated the civil wars in areas like Rosero’s San José. Erlick, June Carolyn. A Gringa in Bogotá: Living Colombia’s Invisible War. Austin: U of Texas P, 2010. Print. In this memoir Erlick gives an account of how urban Colombians lived during the same time period covered in The Armies. She examines both the signs of “convivencia”—the Colombians’ desire to live in peace despite the civil war—and the subtle ways in which the sense of war is present, even in the face of all of the acts of kindness the author witnesses there. García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Print. Many reviewers of The Armies have identified Rosero’s fictional San José as a literary counterpoint to Macondo, the fictional Colombian village in García Márquez’s masterpiece. Both places endure relentless civil war, but García Márquez’s fabulations and stylistic flourishes relieve the horror, while Rosero’s realism and stark prose amplify it. Green, W. John. “Guerrillas, Soldiers, Paramilitaries, Assassins, Narcos, and Gringos: The Unhappy Prospects for Peace and Democracy in Colombia.” Latin American Research Review 40.2 (2005): 137-49. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Armies
Print. Gives a comprehensive overview of the political, economic, and military climate that has existed in Colombia since the 1950s. Leech, Garry M. Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia. Boston: Beacon, 2010. Print. A combination of journal entries and news reports, Leech recounts the eleven hours he spent incarcerated by FARC and documents his meetings with the leaders vying for power in Panama’s and Colombia’s drug wars. The book also reviews the effectiveness of U.S. antidrug measures in Latin America.
Web. 24 Sept. 2010. This article reports on measures undertaken by current Colombian government to resolve the land problems and reduce the sort of guerrilla and paramilitary activity depicted in Rosero’s novel. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Feast of the Goat. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Picador, 2002. Print. Rosero cites Vargas Llosa’s realist work as one of his primary influences. The novel recounts the assassination of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, ruler of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961.
“This Land Is Our Land: At Last the Government Tries to Reverse a Violent Agrarian ‘Counter-Reform.’” Economist. The Economist Group, 16 Sept. 2010.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Joseph Campana
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Arthur & George By Julian Barnes
W Introduction Julian Barnes’s biographical novel Arthur & George (2005) tells the story of two men, one famous, the other not, whose lives intersect because of a miscarriage of justice. Based on a historical case, the novel develops the separate lives of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and George Edalji, an English-born Anglo-Indian solicitor. First, Barnes develops the separate story lines in chapters identified by one or the other character’s name, and then he tells the story of how Conan Doyle helped George in chapters some of which bear the two names together. As Barnes tells the story and as he describes Conan Doyle investigating and interpreting the events, it seems that the brown-skinned myopic George Edalji is likely the victim of racial prejudice, though Edalji never believes he is. The novel is a re-creation of events, fictional except in its verbatim use of newspaper reports, certain letters, and other legal documents. An “Author’s Note” appears at the end of the novel that explains what happened to the historical persons on whom this fictional account is based.
W Literary and Historical Context
The decades of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century provide the time frame for this novel. The famous case of George Edalji was tried in 1903, Edalji was incarcerated for three years and then released, and in 1907, Edalji contacted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, asking for his assistance in an effort to restore Edalji’s good name and his license to practice law. Heralded in the West and in the United States for its history of common law, England at this time did not have an appeals procedure. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Home Office decided what cases to lay before the Court of Crown
Cases Reserved, an entity that reviewed only points of law. Largely as a result of Conan Doyle’s efforts to bring public attention to this case and an earlier one involving Adolf Beck, the Court of Criminal Appeals was established by the Criminal Appeal Act of 1907. This court was designed to review matters of law and fact and gave defense lawyers an appeal process whereby negative judgments could be reevaluated. It had the additional effect of curbing certain tactics of prosecutors. The growing agnosticism of George Edalji and Conan Doyle’s disinterest in established religion and increased interest in spiritualism reflect the fin-de-siécle erosion of traditional Christian faith. During the nineteenth century, various branches of scientific investigation developed and garnered public attention through lecture and public debate and challenged establish church teaching. Charles Lyell, in his Principles of Geology (1830-1833), suggested that the earth was shaped by forces acting over millions of years. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) suggested how distinct species descend from common ancestors. Scientific investigation linked with intellectual fervor both undermined bedrock religious tenets and encouraged a hope that in the twentieth century people would be able to know for certain how life began and what lies beyond the grave. Arthur & George alludes to other contextual matters as well. One of these is the prevalence of what was called “galloping consumption” (67) and later termed tuberculosis, the pulmonary infection that afflicts Conan Doyle’s first wife and even in the early 2000s can be fatal in some cases. In the scenes describing George’s imprisonment, readers learn about the prison at Portland Bill, part of an island off the south shore of England near Weymouth. Barnes describes the iron cells, like dog kennels, the lack of fresh air, the prison regimen, and the unlikely possibility of escape. A persistently relevant contextual element is the impact of newspaper coverage on any celebrated legal case and how word choice reveals interpretation and can be inflammatory.
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Arthur & George
MAJOR CHARACTERS GEORGE AUGUSTUS ANSON, chief constable, was prejudiced against Parsees and likely encouraged his police officers to suspect George Edalji of mutilating the horses. SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, tries to assist George Edalji in solving the crime of which he was charged. LOUISA HAWKINS DOYLE, called Touie, is the first wife of Conan Doyle. CHARLOTTE STONEHAM EDALJI is George’s Scottish mother. GEORGE EDALJI is an English-born Anglo-Indian who becomes a Birmingham solicitor and is falsely accused and found guilty of a crime. HORACE EDALJI, George’s brother, moves to Manchester and thus escapes the difficulties the Edalji family experience at the vicarage in Great Wyrley. MAUD EDALJI, George’s sister, provides him with strength during the trial and after his release shares a home with him until she dies.
Portrait of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes and is one of the main characters in Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George. ª Classic Image / Alamy
W Themes An important theme in Arthur & George is presented first in connection with Conan Doyle’s method for writing his Sherlock Holmes mysteries: His method is to begin with the ending and, once it is understood, to trace the inevitable path back to the beginning, thus unfolding the plot in its entirety. The idea that knowledge of the ending determines the path or journey one must take from the beginning is related to the interest of George Edalji in trains and in the law. George admires the English rail service and writes a book about the laws that govern it. He admires how trains arrive at scheduled times at each town between the beginning and ending of a business commute or pleasure excursion. Railroad linearity and the logic that determines rail service can also be seen in the law, which George distinguishes from and privately holds above the Articles of Faith of the Church of England. The novel examines the notion of linear, logical progression from an ending back to the point of origin and challenges its obvious assumptions. The law is not exact; in exercise, it is subject to prejudice, to misinterpretation, and to malicious or ignorant miscarriages of justice. A detective can investigate a crime, working back
SHAPURJI EDALJI, George’s father, was born in Bombay where he converted to Christianity. He later becomes a priest in the Church of England and serves for over twenty years as the vicar of Great Wyrley. CONNIE CONAN DOYLE HORNUNG is the sister of Arthur Conan Doyle who objects to the author’s friendship with Jean Leckie. ERNEST WILLIAM HORNUNG, called Willie, is the husband of Connie. Willie tries to explain to Arthur why his relationship to Jean Leckie is reckless and in bad taste. JEAN LECKIE is the second wife of Conan Doyle. ALFRED WOOD is Conan Doyle’s personal assistant and secretary and plays a Watson-type role in the crime investigation on behalf of George Edalji.
from the crime scene to events and individuals related to that outcome and yet not arrive at the truth. George’s ideals about the English legal system are challenged by his own experience. Arthur Conan Doyle can use his celebrity status and writing expertise to fuel public opinion on George’s behalf and yet still not correctly identify the perpetrators of the crime or their motives. In these ways, Barnes makes of this early twentieth-century case a modern parable about how criminals may go unpunished and how investigations can be swayed by prejudice and public sentiment. As well meaning as many individuals in the legal system may be, various factors can subvert the justice system, causing the innocent to pay and the guilty to escape with impunity.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Arthur & George
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born January 19, 1946, in Leicester, England, Julian Barnes received his BA from Magdalen College, Oxford University, in 1968. He worked as a freelance writer and lexicographer, beginning in the early 1970s and then went on to be a television critic and a literary editor for the Sunday Times (London) and later a correspondent for the New Yorker magazine. In the 1980s he wrote several books, the fourth one of which, Flaubert’s Parrot (1986) being a particular success. He has written several detective novels, two of which under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, and three collections of essays, two short story collections and a translation of the memoirs of Alphonse Daudet, the nineteenth-century French writer. Arthur & George was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. As of 2010, he lived in London with his wife, Pat Kavanagh.
W Style Barnes’s style is ironic and humorous. The plot undermines the assumption early asserted by George Edalji that virtue is its own reward. As the novel demonstrates, one may feel self-satisfaction in being law abiding, but that does not protect a person from malicious others who are intent on mischief and who do not care whom they hurt in the process. Also disproved is the notion that the law allows for no ambiguity such as one finds in Christian beliefs. Indeed, ambiguity and obfuscation cloak police investigation, as prejudice can occlude legal proceedings. The law is putty, subject to innuendo, inference, and slander. The ironies in this novel would be dark indeed were it not for the humor, which is often conveyed by Barnes’s appropriation of Edwardian prose style and as often delivered through the funny lines given to Conan Doyle. Barnes’s handling of tense, which Terrence Rafferty noted was “terribly cunning,” is skillfully related to plot development. George’s story is in present tense until his life stops with his imprisonment at which time it is told in past tense. Conan Doyle’s story is in past tense until he meets Jean Leckie, at which point it unfolds in present tense. Thus, the handling of tense marks the progression or obstruction of progression in the lives of these two protagonists.
W Critical Reception Arthur & George was generally well received but did not escape negative criticism. Andre Bernard praised the novel, noting that Barnes had written “with mesmerizing skill, a remarkably tense and exciting drama.” Terrence Rafferty agreed, labeling it
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an “extraordinary novel” and finding the portrait of Conan Doyle “generous and plausible.” Also enthusiastic was the evaluation of Andre Bernard, who wrote: “If you like Sherlock Holmes— and who doesn’t?—you’ll be plunged immediately into a marvelously readable account, written as fiction but entirely based on fact, of how Conan Doyle becomes involved in a great judicial injustice, and how he tries to solve a great mystery, Holmes-style.” Robert Winder agreed, writing that this “classic post-Victorian miscarriage of justice with a racist/imperialist undertow” allowed Barnes to write “a double biography,” one in which Conan Doyle allowed himself to play Holmes. Winder also noted that Barnes’s novel appeared “on the centenary of Edalji’s incarceration.” About Barnes’s total accomplishment, Bernard wrote: “reminiscent of the better English novels of the nineteenth century, it covers a great deal of territory while galloping at enormous speed, and yet is also loving in its minute details of village and city life, in its revelations of the oppressive truths of a rural environment and a suffocating Victorian moral sensibility, and in its examination of the sins of Empire. Not quite a mystery, nor yet a novel of ideas, it is simply terrific reading.” Rafferty stated this as the novelist’s achievement: “The beauty of the book lies in the restrained, level-eyed respect Barnes maintains for even his characters’ most desperate mental stratagems to keep confusion at bay.” On the negative side, certain critics faulted Barnes for trying to write like the great Victorian novelists. Winder asserted that Barnes uses “gentle archaisms and circumlocutions designed to suggest the fin-de-siécle atmosphere” and used “period detail . . . to create a sense of antiquity,” even when it was inaccurate to do so. In this point, Sebastian Smee agreed. Smee also faulted the ending, noting that the “urgent momentum of Barnes’s crime story leaves us feeling almost cheated by the absence of a culprit.” But Smee ended his review on a positive note, praising the novel for providing a “sprightly and acute . . . biography of Doyle, and as touching a sketch of the persecuted Edalji.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Barnes, Julian. Arthur & George. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print. Bernard, Andre. “Arthur and George.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. Kenyon Review 29.2 (2007): 2. Print. Rafferty, Terrence. “The Game’s Afoot.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. New York Times Book Review 15 Jan. 2006: 1(L). Print. Smee, Sebastian. “The Curious Case of the Slashed Horse.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. Spectator 9 July 2005: 34. Print. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Arthur & George
Winder, Robert. “Bumps in the Night.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. New Statesman 11 July 2005: 49+. Print.
Gale Resources
Additional Resources
Open Web Sources
Criticism and Reviews
Julian Barnes maintains a Web site at http://www. julianbarnes.com, which gives information on his other publications, interviews, biography, and current activities.
Ayers, Jeff. “Do the Time, Read the Crime.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. Library Journal 1 Sept. 2007: 184. Print. Points out how novelists are inspired by real-life cases. Hammer, Joshua. “Sherlock Holmes’ London.” Smithsonian 40.10 (2010): 56-65. Print. Identifies favorite spots in London of the detective and his creator. Mullen, Alexandra. “Sleuthing Conan Doyle.” New Criterion 26.10 (2008): 25-29. Print. Reviews recent biography on Doyle and the publication of his letters. Rasmussen, R. Kent. “Barnes, Julian. Arthur and George.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. Library Journal 1 Feb. 2007: 104. Print. Praises the lively character study but faults the novel’s beginning as too slow. Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. “An Unlikely Convergence.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. New Leader 88.6 (Nov.-Dec. 2005): 42-44. Print. A review that describes Barnes’s work as a restitching of the tattered Victorian story. Seaman, Donna. “Barnes, Julian. Arthur & George.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. Booklist 1 Jan. 2006: 22. Print. Asserts novel is brilliant inquiry “into the nature of delusion and hope” and explains how case was a catalyst for establishing the Court of Criminal Appeal. Watman, Max. “Ever-Present Human Hint of Yellow.” New Criterion 24.9 (2006): 58-65. Print. Reviews several British novels, including Arthur & George.
“Julian Barnes.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010.
For Further Reading
Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print. Tells the story of an English doctor who investigates some details concerning the life of Gustave Flaubert, the French nineteenth-century novelist. Doyle, Arthur Conan. Memories and Adventures. Intro. by David Stuart Davies. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2007. Print. One of several editions of this autobiography by the novelist. Lycett, Andrew. The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Free Press-Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print. Comprehensive retelling of Doyle’s life by the biographer of Kipling and Dylan Thomas. Weaver, Gordon. Conan Doyle and the Parson’s Son: The George Edalji Case. Lahore, Pakistan: Vanguard Books, 2006. Print. Provides the history that is the major source for Barnes’s novel. Whittington-Egan, Richard, and Molly WhittingtonEgan, eds. The Story of Mr. George Edalji, by Arthur Conan Doyle. London: Camille Wolff Grey House Books, 1985. Print. Presents Doyle’s version of the story, first published in 1907. Melodie Monahan
Whittington-Egan, Richard. “Conan Doyle.” Contemporary Review 289 (Winter 2007): 518-19. Print. Reviews recent biography and other works on the famous author.
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The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing By M. T. Anderson
W Introduction In the first volume of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, The Pox Party, a black youth named Octavian is raised and educated by a group of Boston philosophers as part of an experiment to determine whether Africans are as intelligent as Europeans. After his mother dies as the result of another experiment (the “pox party” of the subtitle), Octavian runs away and joins the Patriot army fighting the British. He is soon recaptured and returned to Boston, where he is bound and forced to wear an iron mask. At the end of the volume, Octavian escapes with the aid of one of his instructors, Dr. Trefusis. In the second volume, The Kingdom on the Waves, Octavian and Dr. Trefusis head to Virginia, where the colony’s governor, Lord Dunmore, has issued a proclamation offering freedom to any slave owned by an American rebel who enlists to fight with the British. As part of the Royal Ethiopian Regiment, Octavian learns more about his African ancestry and the larger slave experience. M. T. Anderson is known for writing young adult novels that challenge readers to look at the world in new ways. In The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, he creates an alternative history of the American Revolution by presenting British Loyalists as sympathetic characters and emphasizing the paradox of freedom-loving slave owners. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing won several major awards, including the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2006 and the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature from the American Library Association in 2007 and 2009.
W Literary and Historical Context
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is a historical novel set during the period of the American Revolution.
Much of the book is based on the role of slaves during the Revolution. The first African slaves in North America arrived in Jamestown in 1623. By 1750 there were roughly 300,000 slaves in the thirteen American colonies, making up about one-fifth of the population. Most had been born in the colonies and knew of Africa only through the stories of others. When the rift between Great Britain and the colonies began to develop in the years after the French and Indian Wars, slaves adopted the rhetoric of dissent in their own appeals for freedom. In 1775, when the long-simmering resentments between Britain and the colonies erupted into war, many slaves chose which side to fight for based on which army would offer them freedom. At first, George Washington refused to accept black soldiers in the Continental Army, though black freemen fought with their white counterparts at Lexington and Bunker Hill. By contrast, the governor of Virginia offered to emancipate any slave owned by Patriot masters who joined the Loyalist forces. Some 800 escaped slaves joined Dunmore’s Royal Ethiopian Regiment. Thousands more joined the British army in exchange for the promise of freedom. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly, published in 1819, is generally considered the first true historical novel. Although some historical novels, such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934), deal with actual historical figures, most follow Scott’s basic formula, in which the story of a fictional character is told against the backdrop of an accurately rendered historical period. Anderson uses the conventions of the historical novel to turn the standard story of the American Revolution on its head. His characters are never directly involved in the best-known incidents of the war. In the first volume, the reader sees the beginnings of the war only at arm’s length through the concerns of the Novanglian College of Lucidity. In the second volume, Anderson focuses on the war experience of the escaped slaves who made up Lord Dunmore’s Royal Ethiopian Regiment. The result is what Kathleen Horning, writing in School Library Journal, says is “historical fiction as it’s never been written for teens.”
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The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing
MAJOR CHARACTERS CASSIOPEIA, Octavian’s mother, is an African princess from the Oyo kingdom in West Africa who was captured and sold into slavery while pregnant with Octavian. Her death in the first volume as the result of smallpox inoculation triggers Octavian’s first attempt to escape from the Novanglian College of Lucidity. MR. GITNEY is the leader of the Novanglian College of Lucidity and Octavian’s chief guardian. OCTAVIAN is a young African prince who is raised and educated by a group of philosophers in an experiment to determine whether Africans have the same intellectual capacity as Europeans. Much of the story is told through “documents” purporting to be his written testimony. PRO BONO is Mr. Gitney’s valet, who introduces Octavian to the realities of slavery and provides him with the information he needs to escape from the College of Lucidity. He reappears in the second volume as Private William Williams in the Royal Ethiopian Regiment. MR. SHARPE is sent by the trustees to repair the finances at the College of Lucidity after the death of the institution’s primary patron. He represents a group of slave owners who want the experiment to fail as a means of justifying the practice of slavery.
Portrait of M. T. Anderson, author of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. ª Rick Friedman/Corbis
W Themes In The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Anderson uses the history of slave participation in the American Revolution to consider the fundamental irony of slave owners fighting for freedom. In an interview with Farai Chideya on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Anderson contrasts the Patriots’ battle for liberty with that of the American slaves who “are creating a revolution at their own level. They are almost two interlocking revolutions going on at the same time.” Anderson provides the reader with a clue to the central theme of the book in its subtitle, Traitor to the Nation. The reader inevitably wonders how a slave can be a traitor to a nation that does not recognize him as a citizen. At the end of the first volume, Anderson provides the answer. Both Octavian and Dr. Trefusis must flee to avoid being hanged. Dr. Trefusis is legally guilty of theft because he has helped Octavian escape. Octavian is technically a traitor to the nation for having attempted to kill his master, because such a murder is considered an attack on the concept of sovereignty.
DR. TREFUSIS is the oldest and most accomplished of Octavian’s tutors. At the end of the first volume, he helps Octavian escape at the risk of being arrested for theft. In the second volume, he accompanies Octavian to Virginia.
Anderson raises the prickly questions of liberty and slavery in the early chapters of the first volume. When Octavian first hears about the Patriots’ struggle “for liberty from oppression and from bondage,” he assumes that “soon, the bondage I but little understood that encompassed Bono and my mother and so many others of my acquaintance should melt away,” until he learns that his freedom is not included in the cause. Thereafter, Octavian’s choices are driven by a search for liberty as carefully reasoned as that of a Jefferson or a Franklin. At different points in the novel, he fights for both the Americans and the British, and he ultimately rejects both sides in favor of “a new route which should secure us from the ire and indifference of both England and Colony.”
W Style Stylistically, Anderson goes to great lengths to evoke the feel of the eighteenth century, both in his language and in the novel’s structure. Critics often praise the author for
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The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Matthew Tobin (M. T.) Anderson grew up in Stow, Massachusetts, a small town near Boston. Because of a distant family connection, he was encouraged to read Mark Twain when he was nine or ten. Hooked on Twain’s satire, he moved on to read other American satirists, including James Thurber, Woody Allen, and S. J. Perelman. After high school, Anderson spent a year in a British boarding school, where he discovered the British satirists, including Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh. He attended Harvard for a semester and then transferred to Cambridge University, where he completed his BA in 1991. After college, he worked for three years as an editorial assistant at Candlewick Press. He left Candlewick to begin graduate work at Syracuse University, receiving an MFA in 1998. Anderson sold his first novel, Thirsty, to Candlewick in 1996, but his career as a writer for children and young adults did not take off until the publication of his picture-book biography of the composer George Frideric Handel in 2001. He began writing full time in 2005.
creating not just one, but a whole series of authentic colonial-era voices that vary according to the social standing and ethnicity of the characters. In an interview with Julie Prince in Teacher Librarian, Anderson described the process. He read eighteenth-century literature extensively, looking for the “ways in which eighteenth-century grammar and vocabulary varied from our own—words they tended to use, unusual syntactical tics, and so on.” According to Anderson, first-generation African American speech presented a special challenge. There are few records of actual speech, and the transcriptions that exist were often made by people focused on denigrating the African speaker. Anderson’s solution was to work with a friend who speaks Yoruba to understand “the ways in which African syntactical patterns may have translated into English. . . . What became obvious is that many of the features that were recorded by white observers actually had their roots in West African American.” Anderson reinforces the period feel of the book by employing a device often used in novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most notably Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). In these works, the author poses as the reporter of an actual incident, presenting his story in the form of a series of documents, most often letters, diaries, and sworn statements, that he has collected as evidence. The title page of Anderson’s work declares that the story of Octavian Nothing is “taken from accounts by his own hand and other sundry sources collected by Mr. M. T. Anderson of Boston.” The bulk of the story is told in Octavian’s own words, first as “drawn from the
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Manuscript Testimony of Octavian Gitney” and later “from the nautical diary of Private Octavian Nothing.” Octavian’s accounts of his story are interspersed with newspaper clippings, scientific articles, letters written by various characters, and historical documents—all of which allow Anderson to show different perspectives on events in the narrative. At the end of the novel, Octavian wrests control of his life story from both the narrator and his former owners by returning to Boston and replacing Mr. Gitney’s elaborate records of Octavian’s childhood with his own narrative account.
W Critical Reception The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is regularly praised for Anderson’s skillful evocation of the novel’s historical setting, believable reconstruction of eighteenthcentury language, and startling reversal of our assumptions about the American Revolution. Reviewers acknowledge that the novel may be challenging for the young adult audience at which it is aimed but are almost unanimous in declaring it worth the effort. Vicky Smith, writing in the Horn Book Magazine, praises Anderson’s work as “a brilliantly complex interrogation of our basic American assumptions. Anderson has created an alternative narrative of our national mythology, one that fascinates, appalls, condemns—and enthralls.” Julie Roach, also writing in the Horn Book Magazine, agrees: “M. T. Anderson’s beautifully written and elegantly structured novel immerses readers in the period using traditional eighteenth century language that resonates with the timeless struggle of being young in a cruel and unjust world. This brilliant and horrifying tale underlines the fact that within every well-known story there are others to be told.” Sharon Rawlins reports in the School Library Journal that “Anderson’s use of factual information to convey the time and place is powerfully done.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Anderson, M. T. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Volume I: The Pox Party. Cambridge: Candlewick, 2006. ———. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves. Cambridge: Candlewick, 2008. ———. “Author M. T. Anderson on Octavian Nothing.” Interview by Farai Chideya. Morning Edition 25 Jan. 2007. General OneFile. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Horning, Kathleen. “Patriot Games: Yes, Indeed, the British Are Coming! But M. T. Anderson’s Revolutionary War Novel Is Unlike Anything You’ve Ever TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing
Read.” School Library Journal 52.11 (2006): 40+. General OneFile. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Prince, Julie. “Giving Readers What They Want: An Interview with M. T. Anderson.” Teacher Librarian 37.1 (2009): 62+. General OneFile. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Rawlins, Sharon. Rev. of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. I: The Pox Party, by M. T. Anderson. School Library Journal 52.10 (2006): 147. General OneFile. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Roach, Julie. Rev. of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. I: The Pox Party, by M. T. Anderson. Horn Book Magazine 84.1 (2008): 27+. General OneFile. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Smith, Vicky. Rev. of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. I: The Pox Party, by M. T. Anderson. Horn Book Magazine 82.5 (2006): 573+. General OneFile. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
“African-American History Comes to Life for Young Readers.” Rev. of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, by M. T. Anderson. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 18 Jan. 2009: F9. InfoTrac Custom Newspapers. Web. 26 Sept. 2010. This review compares Octavian Nothing to two other novels based on African American history. Anderson, M. T. “Printz Award Honor Speech.” Young Adult Library Services 6.1 (2007): 20+. Academic OneFile. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. In his thank-you speech for the 2007 Printz Award, Anderson discusses what historical novels can teach us. Bazelon, Emily. “A Pox on Pox Party.” Rev. of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. I: The Pox Party, by M. T. Anderson. Slate.com 20 Nov. 2006. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. A rare negative review that gives thoughtful consideration to the prevalence of message books in young adult fiction. Griswold, Jerry. “The War for Independence.” Rev. of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, by M. T. Anderson. New York Times Book Review 9 Nov. 2008: 20(L). General OneFile. Web. 26 Sept. 2010. Griswold compares The Amazing Life of Octavian Nothing to both Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick. “Octavian Nothing Duo Has Everything for Questing Minds.” Rev. of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. II: The Kingdom on the Waves, by M. T. Anderson. Toronto Star 23 Nov. 2008: ID04. InfoTrac Custom Newspapers. Web. 26 Sept. 2010. This review of the second volume of the Octavian Nothing books looks at Anderson’s use of Enlightenment philosophy.
Gale Resources
“Anderson, M. T.” Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Vol. 60. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. “Anderson, M. T. 1968– (Matthew Tobin Anderson).” Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series. Vol. 167. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. “Anderson, M. T. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.” Literary Newsmakers for Students. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Open Web Sources
M. T. Anderson’s personal Web site has a biography and several essays discussing his novels. http:// mt-anderson.com/ The Web site of the Historical Novel Society includes links to several important essays on the genre. http:// www.historicalnovelsociety.org/definition.htm Part of Canada’s Digital Collection, the Web site Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People tells the story of the Black Loyalists who fought with the British and their experiences in Canada after the end of the Revolutionary War. http://www.blackloyalist.com/ canadiandigitalcollection/index.htm For Further Reading
Anderson, Laurie Halse. Chains. New York: Simon, 2008. Print. A mid-grade novel about two young slaves in the Revolutionary War that shares many themes with The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. Bober, Natalie S. Countdown to Independence. New York: Simon Pulse, 2007. Print. A balanced account of the events that led to the American Revolution. Collier, James Lincoln, and Christopher Collier. My Brother Sam Is Dead. New York: Four Winds, 1974. Print. A Newbery Honor novel that tells the story of a family torn apart when brothers choose to fight on opposite sides in the American Revolution. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom. New York: Norton, 1996. Print. An excellent account of the Enlightenment scholars and ideas parodied by Anderson as the College of Lucidity. Schama, Simon. Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British and the American Revolution. London: BBC, 2005. Print. A historical account of the British proclamation of emancipation for slaves who fought for Britain during the American Revolution.
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Pamela Toler
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The Athenian Murders By José Carlos Somoza
W Introduction The Athenian Murders (2002) is the sixth novel by popular Spanish writer José Carlos Somoza and the first to be published in an English translation. The multilayered narrative interweaves two stories. One is told in the text of an ancient manuscript (itself called The Athenian Murders): A “decipherer of enigmas” investigates the murders of several young philosophy students from Plato’s Academy. The other story unfolds in the footnotes created by the Translator, an unnamed protagonist who is preparing the first modern translation of the manuscript. The footnotes reveal the Translator’s gradual realization that he is working with an eidetic text (one employing repeated words and phrases to create an image in the reader’s mind) that may contain a secret message. Parts of the message seem to be directed at the Translator. He finds himself drawn into a third plot layer involving another modern character, Montalo, who is obsessed with discovering the ultimate meaning of the manuscript. All the layers revolve around philosophical speculation, and in the end they come together in a surprising twist. The Athenian Murders was well received by most critics and won the 2002 Macallan Gold Dagger awarded by the Crime Writers’ Association.
W Literary and Historical Context
The events of the ancient narrative take place in Athens during the time when the famed philosopher Plato (c 428-347 BCE) taught at the Academy, a school he founded around 387 BCE. The Academy operated until 86 BCE, when the grounds were destroyed (along with much of Athens) in the First Mithridatic War. While the school was under Plato’s direction, there was
no set curriculum. Most instruction was conducted through discussions of philosophical questions. Participants included both older scholars and young men, such as the ephebes (adolescents) who are killed in the plotline of the ancient Athenian Murders. In the course of that narrative, the characters explore other aspects of Athenian culture, including mystery cults (which taught certain doctrines to initiates by means of ritual experiences and ecstatic visions) and numerous philosophical factions. The story also alludes to the sexual mores of ancient Greek culture, such as the acceptance of sexual relationships between older men and young boys. The modern plotline occurs in an unspecified time and place.
W Themes The original Spanish title of Somoza’s novel, La caverna de las ideas (The cave of ideas), a reference to Plato, emphasizes the central thematic role of philosophical inquiry. Although the early Academy probably did not teach a specific doctrine, discussions undoubtedly reflected Plato’s own views. Plato recorded his beliefs in the form of dramatized dialogues between Socrates (his teacher) and various other philosophers. The most important of the dialogues, The Republic, contains a story now known as the Allegory of the Cave. In it, Plato suggests that the material world perceived by the senses is only a shadow of the real forms of things, which exist as ideas; therefore, reality can only be apprehended by the intellect. In The Athenian Murders the nature of reality (that is, the question of whether ideas have an independent existence, separate from the phenomenal world) is a continuing subject of inquiry, both in the ancient manuscript and in the story told by the Translator. As the Translator and Montalo pursue philosophical answers, they focus on the role that language plays in either depicting an existing reality or creating an independent reality.
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The Athenian Murders
MAJOR CHARACTERS DIAGORAS is a tutor at Plato’s Academy who suspects that a young student was murdered and appeals to Pontor for help. He assists in the investigation and discusses philosophy with Pontor. MONTALO, a character in the modern story, was the first to copy the ancient text from papyrus. He kidnaps the Translator in his quest to prove his theory about the manuscript. PLATO is a historical character, a philosopher and teacher who appears only briefly in the ancient story. His Academy, students, and ideas are at the center of both the plot of the ancient text and the themes of the modern story. HERACLES PONTOR is the main character of the story in the ancient manuscript. He is the “decipherer of enigmas” summoned to investigate the murders of the young students of Plato’s Academy. THE TRANSLATOR is the unnamed protagonist of the modern story that unfolds in the footnotes to his translation. As he works on the ancient manuscript, he notices that a secret is concealed in the text, and eventually he becomes involved in a real-life mystery concerning the ancient manuscript and its meaning.
Greek philosopher Plato. In The Athenian Murders, a translator works on an ancient manuscript about the murder of several students from Plato’s Academy. Nick Pavlakis/Shutterstock.com
W Style Plato presented the precepts of his philosophy in the form of dialogues between characters with different ideas. In a similar way, Somoza creates a virtual discussion between Heracles Pontor, the protagonist of the ancient narrative, and the Translator, the main character of the modern narrative. The Translator comments on the original story in his footnotes, and as The Athenian Murders progresses, it begins to seem as if the original text is talking back to him. Another dialogue takes shape between the Translator and Montalo. Both men believe that eidetic imagery is incorporated into the style of the ancient manuscript. The eidetic message, which relates to the question of whether language creates reality, turns out to be a crucial element in the modern plotline. In this manner Somoza weaves the philosophical concepts explored in The Athenian Murders into the style and structure of the novel.
W Critical Reception The majority of critics have praised the conceptual inventiveness of The Athenian Murders and consider the novel strong overall. Publishers Weekly calls it “a highly original and literary approach to crime fiction.” Pedro Ponce, writing for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, observes that “the thrill of this novel comes from both its ingeniously structured mystery plot and the larger questions it raises about what constitutes knowledge and experience.” A review in the London Times declares that Somoza “weaves suspense, gore, a particular corner of Plato’s philosophy and layer upon layer of tantalizing reflexivity with ease and obvious relish.” Not all reviewers were convinced of the book’s merit, however. Kirkus Reviews concludes that “the plot’s deliberate obscurities both intrigue and annoy,” though “the rich, elegant writing will please all comers.” The reviewer cautions, “Mystery fans should be warned that Somoza is more interested in metaphysical questions and literary subtleties than traditional storytelling.” At the negative end of the spectrum, Michael D. Langan writes in the Buffalo News, “It’s hard to know whether the book is a gussied-up sexual escapade or a serious work of philosophical discourse.”
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The Athenian Murders
ABOUT THE AUTHOR José Carlos Somoza was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1959, just a few months after Fidel Castro came to power. The following year Somoza’s family left everything behind and moved to Spain. He is now a Spanish citizen. Somoza has lived in Madrid and Cordoba, where he studied medicine and earned a degree in psychiatry in 1994. The same year, his first novel was accepted for publication, and he decided to become a writer. The Athenian Murders is his sixth novel and the first to appear in an English translation. Since then, two more of his novels have been translated into English: The Art of Murder (2004; Clara y la penumbra, 2001) and Zig Zag (2007; Zig Zag, 2006). Somoza’s novels have won several international awards, including (for his 2007 novel La Llave del Abismo) the Premio de Novela Ciudad de Torrevieja.
Thomas, Christine. “A Translator Solves Two Puzzles Shrouded in Mystery.” San Francisco Chronicle 16 June 2002: RV6. Print. This enthusiastic review points out some of the conceptual aspects of the novel. Gale Resources
“José Carlos Somoza.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Sept. 2010. Open Web Sources
The author’s official Web site is mainly in Spanish, but some material is translated into English. The site also provides photos of the author and a look at the colorful covers of his many Spanish publications. http://www.josecarlossomoza.com/ For Further Reading
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Rev. of The Athenian Murders, by José Carlos Somoza. Kirkus Reviews 1 Apr. 2002: 459. Print. Rev. of The Athenian Murders, by José Carlos Somoza. Publishers Weekly 6 May 2002: 33. Print. Rev. of The Athenian Murders, by José Carlos Somoza. Times [London] 6 Feb. 2002: 12. Print. Langan, Michael D. “Grecian Formula.” Rev. of The Athenian Murders, by José Carlos Somoza. Buffalo News 25 Aug. 2002: F5. Print. Ponce, Pedro. Rev. of The Athenian Murders, by José Carlos Somoza. Review of Contemporary Fiction 23.1 (2003): 150+. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Gerling, David Ross. Rev. of The Athenian Murders, by José Carlos Somoza. World Literature Today 77.3/4 (2003): 148+. Print. Gerling notes the relationship of Somoza’s novel to several other Spanish works and points out influences from the author’s background as a psychiatrist. Miller, Laura. Rev. of The Athenian Murders, by José Carlos Somoza. Salon 20 June 2002. Web. 12 Sept. 2010. Miller’s appreciative review effectively represents the tone and style of the novel. Pye, Michael. “Gripping Like a Crossword Puzzle, but Not Quite a Thriller.” Scotsman [Edinburgh] 14 Jan. 2002: 15. Print. This review compares The Athenian Murders unfavorably to Umberto Eco’s historical murder-mystery The Name of the Rose.
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Schifino, Martin. Rev. of The Athenian Murders, by José Carlos Somoza. Times Literary Supplement [London] 5 Apr. 2002: 28. Print. Schifino cites interesting aspects of the work but ultimately finds it unsuccessful.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Everyman’s, 2006. Print. Set in a medieval monastery, Eco’s intricate mystery novel became a best seller and inspired a number of other postmodern mysteries. The Athenian Murders is frequently compared to it. Murdoch, Iris. The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. New York: Viking, 1990. Print. In this nonfiction study of Plato’s cave allegory, novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch explores some of the same questions and ideas that arise in The Athenian Murders. Santas, Gerasimos X., ed. The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. Print. This collection of essays examines the cultural, literary, and philosophical backgrounds of The Republic. Written for the general reader, it provides a helpful understanding of concepts discussed in The Athenian Murders. Somoza, José Carlos. Zig Zag. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print. The third of Somoza’s novels to be published in English, Zig Zag is a mixture of science fiction, horror, and suspense. Centering on a project that allows physicists to view the past, it offers a different approach to the author’s vision of temporal interactions. Wechsler, Robert. Performing without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation. North Haven: Catbird, 1998. Print. Wechsler’s book, which introduces the processes and problems associated with translating works of poetry and fiction, presents an interesting context in which to understand the unnamed Translator’s role in The Athenian Murders. Cynthia Giles
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Atonement By Ian McEwan
W Introduction Atonement presents a novel within a novel, supposedly written by its protagonist, Briony Tallis, a woman who spends her life searching for forgiveness for her past lies. The story is based on one fateful night when, as a thirteen-yearold girl, Briony’s accusation dooms the life of an innocent man. The book is divided into four sections: the first details the events that lead to Briony’s crime, while the final three demonstrate its long-term effects from various perspectives. The novel deals with betrayal, the toll that betrayal exacts on the psyches of both perpetrator and victim, and the horrors of war. The novel is perhaps most notable for its metafictional framework, which allows Ian McEwan to explore the nature of writing and, in particular, stories, and the god-like relationship between author and creation. Atonement questions whether a reader should ever trust an author, and examines how easily perceptions can be misconstrued and manipulated. Atonement was a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the W. H. Smith Literary Award, among others. It was named Book of the Year by many major newspapers, and Time magazine included it on their list of 100 greatest novels ever written.
W Literary and Historical Context
The first section of Atonement occurs in a stately manor home in the English countryside, in 1935. McEwan uses this idyllic, old-fashioned setting as a counterpoint to the horrors of the war that eventually overtake the country, while hinting that the roots of these later occurrences rest underneath the gentle façade of the opening portion. Additionally, the first section references the works of Jane
Austen, whose writing style and settings are reflected in the quaint country estate setting and the intricacies of social interactions and class distinctions explored by McEwan in this section. In the second section, the famous Battle of Dunkirk is used to illustrate the brutality of war. Despite the fact that the Battle of Dunkirk was considered a success, McEwan highlights the fate of the thousands of men who died there. After suffering one of the worst defeats in the history of the British army, British and French forces retreated to Dunkirk, where they were able to build a line of defense and evacuate over 330,000 Allied forces. This was deemed a “miracle” by the dean of St. Paul’s Church in England (Anderson). The combination of hope and despair surrounding this event beautifully parallels Briony’s fantasy that Robbie survived the battle, as well as the crushing revelation that he did not. The third section details the life of a nurse in London during the evacuations. Fearing that London would be destroyed by German bombings—known as the Blitz— millions of civilians were relocated to rural areas in England. Atonement includes fascinating information about the exodus, including such facts as the removal of street signs in hopes that it would confuse potential invading forces. Ironically, this added to the chaotic, confusing atmosphere of this frightening time. Over 40,000 people ultimately died in the bombings, including Briony’s sister, Cecilia, who is struck down while trying to save wounded men.
W Themes Atonement centers on the themes of morality, interpretation, loss, and a quest for redemption through literature. In McEwan’s words, “empathy . . . to feel what it is to be someone else . . . [is] the cornerstone of a moral system” (Childs). When Briony is a young girl at the start of the novel, she experiences an epiphany: “Was everyone else really as alive as she was? . . . Was being [her sister] Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony” (34)? While
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MAJOR CHARACTERS LOLA MARSHALL, at the start of the novel, is a haughty fifteenyear-old girl who is raped by the much older Paul Marshall while staying at the home of her aunt and uncle. When her cousin, Briony, assumes that the culprit is Robbie Turner, Lola remains silent, thus conspiring in a lie that sends Robbie to jail. Years later, she marries Paul. PAUL MARSHALL is the inventor of “Army Amo” chocolate bars, perfect for soldiers’ rations because they do not melt. While visiting the family home of his friend, Leon Tallis, he rapes fifteen-year-old Lola. The crime is blamed on Robbie Turner, and years later Paul marries Lola, thus forever burying their secret. BRIONY TALLIS, protagonist of the novel, is thirteen when the book opens and she accuses Robbie of assaulting Lola. As the book progresses, the narrative follows Briony’s experiences as a nurse during World War II, and then as a novelist in the book’s epilogue. CECILIA TALLIS is Briony’s older sister. She is in love with Robbie Turner, her family housekeeper’s brilliant son. Their burgeoning romance is thwarted, first by Briony’s lies, and then by World War II, when she becomes a nurse. EMILY TALLIS is mother to Briony, Cecilia, and Leon. For years, she uses her migraines as an excuse to distance herself from her children. LEON TALLIS is Briony and Cecelia’s loving older brother, who both girls idealize. He invites his friend, Paul Marshall, home with him, thus leading to the event that will ruin Robbie, Cecilia, Lola, and Briony. ROBBIE TURNER is an extremely intelligent young man, whose mother works as a housekeeper in the Tallis home. Robbie falls in love with Cecilia, but Briony blames him for Lola’s rape. He is sent to jail for three years, following which he dies of an infection received on the battlefields of France in World War II.
this is an incredibly profound realization for a child, Briony has a limited point of view. As Pilar Hidalgo explains it, her “perception is distorted by literature and an imperfect knowledge of the world.” She is unable to deciper events clearly, leading her to misinterpret Robbie’s letter to Cecilia. As a result, Briony labels Robbie a rapist, an erroneous conclusion that ruins the lives of Robbie, Cecilia, and Briony herself. As an adult, Briony attempts to atone for her crime by writing a novel in which she places herself in Robbie’s and Cecilia’s shoes and attempts to see events from their perspective. The irony, of course, is that no one can truly know what it is to be someone else. Ultimately the only “real” character of the book is Briony herself, who, on a meta level, is also fictional.
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W Style Atonement weaves a seemingly straightforward, old-fashioned narrative with a metatextual framework that does not fully reveal itself until the end. According to Peter Mathews, the way McEwan structures the novel, each successive part “forces the reader to revise his or her understanding of what was revealed earlier, sowing seeds of doubt that make the text blossom into a set of irreconcilable uncertainties.” The first section, the only one divided into traditional chapters, combines a plot and setting reminiscent of a Jane Austen novel, along with psychological examination and technique redolent of Virginia Woolf’s writings. Woolf’s style involved the exploration of the sensations and perceptions of the human mind, often employing a technique referred to as stream-of-consciousness. At the end of Atonement, we learn that the first three parts of the novel comprise a book that Briony has written. In hindsight, it is apparent that McEwan hides clues about the structure of the book within the text. For example, in Part Three, Briony receives a rejection letter from an editor regarding a novella she has written. The editor explains that she has misused Woolf’s technique by following the style but neglecting to add plot or meaning to the work. Only later do we realize that the first section of Atonement is in fact the revised draft of Briony’s novella, including the changes suggested by her editor. The coda also reveals that the two lovers, Robbie and Cecilia, rather than being reunited, as depicted in Part Three, actually died in the war. Briony’s action is foreshadowed at the beginning of the book, in which, as a child, she writes a melodramatic play about lovers torn apart by tragedy and circumstance. Her play, The Trials of Arabella, can be seen as the entirety of Atonement in microcosm—Briony, the author, putting her characters through hell and finally bestowing a happy ending upon them.
W Critical Reception Upon its release, Atonement received near universal acclaim. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Whitbread Book Award. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, the Boeke Prize, and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel. Additionally, it was selected as Best Book of the Year by Time, the Washington Post Book World, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic Monthly, and Seattle Times, and as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Entertainment Weekly ranked the book on a list of 100 best books of the past 25 years, and both Time and the Observer included it on their lists of 100 best novels ever written. Tom Shone of the New York Times declared Atonement “McEwan’s most complete and compassionate work to date,” while the Observer praised it for the fascinating TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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questions it raises regarding the relationship between author and text: “If fiction is . . . a way of ordering the universe in which the writer is away in her—or his—thoughts, then is it a form of escapism, lacking all moral force?” Some critics took issue with McEwan’s metatextual framework. As Brian Finney explains, these people “criticize what they understand to be an essentially realist novel that at the end inappropriately resorts to a modish self-referentiality.” According to the critic, this interpretation ignores the nuance that McEwan has woven throughout the work from the start,that Briony isanauthor. Atonement, he argues,is“a work of fiction . . . concerned with the making of fiction. . . . Brought up on a diet of imaginative literature, [Briony] is too young to understand the dangers that can ensue from modeling one’s conduct on such an artificial world. . . . [Later, she] attempts to use fiction to correct the errors that fiction caused her to commit.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Anderson, Duncan. “Spinning Dunkirk.” World Wars In-Depth. BBC, 5 Nov. 2009. Web. 15 July 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Aldershot, England, Ian McEwan is one of Britain’s most famous and celebrated living authors. He is known for the experimental nature of his writing, as well as his career-long focus on subject matter that is sometimes regarded as amoral or unsavory. His early books, such as First Love, Last Rites, were often dubbed “literature of shock.” Over the years, McEwan’s work has been re-evaluated, and critics now agree that his writing is not devoid of morality but instead explores gray areas in order to define “ethical limits” (Childs 4-5). Most of his novels, from The Child in Time to his most acclaimed, Atonement, focus on “couples and families in . . . claustrophobic situations” (3). He uses literary, historical, and meta textual references to examine “individual reactions to moments of crisis” and to present “the tenderness and brutality of relationships without sentimentality” (6). Among his many awards, McEwan was short-listed six times for the Man Booker Prize, which he won for Amsterdam in 1998.
Refugees flee from the ruins of Dunkirk, France, following a Nazi bombardment. Some parts of Atonement take place in France during World War II. ª Bettmann/Corbis TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Childs, Peter. “Introduction.” The Fiction of Ian McEwan: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Ed. Peter Childs. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 1-7. Print. Finney, Brian. “Briony’s Stand against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004): 68+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 15 July 2010. Hidalgo, Pilar. “Memory and Storytelling in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46.2 (2005): 82+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 15 July 2010. Lee, Hermione. “If Your Memories Serve You Well: Little Wonder Ian McEwan’s Engrossing, Deep Novel Has Been Shortlisted for the Booker. This Highly Literary Family Saga Is His Best Yet.” Rev of Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Observer [London] 23 Sept. 2001: 16. Print. InfoTrac Custom Newspapers. Web. 17 July 2010. Mathews, Peter. “The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” English Studies in Canada 32.1 (2006): 147+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 15 July 2010. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York: Anchor, 2001. Print. Shone, Tom. “White Lies.” Rev. of Atonement, by Ian McEwan. New York Times 10 Mar. 2002: n.p. NYTimes.com. Web. 17 July 2010.
Child in Time,’ ‘Black Dogs,’ ‘Enduring Love,’ and ‘Atonement.’ New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Print. This book analyzes characters throughout McEwan’s work, focusing on the ways in which they define their own worlds and narratives, and by so doing, try to become at peace with themselves. Stovel, Nora Foster. “Ian McEwan: Atonement.” International Fiction Review 31.1-2 (2004): 114+. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 July 2010. An extremely positive review of Atonement that discusses the relation between its form and function as a narrative. Wells, Juliette. “Shades of Austen in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 30 (2008): 101+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 15 July 2010. This essay examines the links between Jane Austen’s writing and Atonement, revealing some less obvious connections, as well as the parallels between Briony and Austen. Gale Resources
Fletcher, John. “Ian Russell McEwan.” British Novelists since 1960. Ed. Jay L. Halio. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. Print. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 14. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 July 2010. “Overview: Atonement.” Novels for Students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 32. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 July 2010. Open Web Sources
Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Crosthwaite, Paul. “Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Cultural Politics 3.1 (2007): 51+. Print. Academic OneFile. Web. 15 July 2010. This essay examines posttraumatic stress and how it relates to the characters and events of Atonement. D’Angelo, Kathleen. “‘To Make a Novel’: The Construction of a Critical Readership in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Studies in the Novel 41.1 (2009): 88+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 14 July 2010. This fascinating essay explores how the literary references that McEwan weaves throughout Atonement help the perceptive reader unlock the text’s mysteries, and demonstrates how the structure of the work strengthens and echoes its themes.
Ian McEwan’s official website contains a wealth of information about McEwan, including biography, published works, and perhaps most useful, books about McEwan and his work, from various countries and in various languages. http://www.ianmcewan. com ContemporaryWriters.com features a page on Ian McEwan, including a comprehensive biography, list of awards, quotes from McEwan, and critical perspective on his writings. http://www.contempor arywriters.com/authors/?p=auth70 The BBC’s official site has an animated map illustrating the events that led up to the Battle of Dunkirk at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/ wwtwo/launch_ani_fall_france_campaign.shtml For Further Reading
Impastato, David. “Secular Sabbath: Unbelief in Ian McEwan’s Fiction.” Commonweal 136.18 (2009): 14+. Print. General OneFile. Web. 14 July 2010. This essay examines McEwan’s writings through the lens of New Atheism, a movement of which he is a part.
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. London, 1817. Print. The first portion of Atonement is, in large part, an homage to this posthumously published novel by Jane Austen. Atonement opens with a quote from this book.
Schemberg, Claudia. Achieving ‘At-One-Ment’: Storytelling and the Concept of the Self in Ian McEwan’s ‘The
McEwan, Ian. First Love, Last Rites. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print. McEwan’s first published book, this set
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of short stories helped earn him the nickname “Ian Macabre,” due to the stories’ preoccupation with shocking moments. Many of McEwan’s later works derive from themes explored in this collection. ———. Saturday. New York: Anchor, 2005. Print. Though a thriller, McEwan’s famous novel, Saturday, deals with similar issues of morality that drive Atonement and was acclaimed as being a powerful, post-September 11th story. Sebag-Montefore, Hugh. Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008. Print. This book is an incisive examination of the fateful Battle of Dunkirk, with which Part Two of Atonement is concerned. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925. Print. Briony’s writing style is largely
informed by Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway, one of Woolf’s seminal works, demonstrates the author’s deft use of stream-of-consciousness, peering into her characters’ psyches to tell the story. Adaptations
Atonement. Dir. Joe Wright. Perf. Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, and Brenda Blethyn. Focus Features, 2007. Film. Released in 2007, the film version of Atonement won the Best Film of the Year award at the 61st British Academy Film Awards and was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning one for Best Original Score. General critical response was positive, though many argued that the film was too literal a translation of the book. Robert Berg
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Austerlitz By W. G. Sebald
W Introduction Published in the year of the author’s death, Austerlitz (2001) is the last of W. G. Sebald’s four experimental novels. At the heart of the tale is a lonely scholar’s return to his origins in Czechoslovakia, where he learns the fate of his birth parents after the German occupation of Prague in 1938. Austerlitz won the 2001 National Book Critics Award, among many other honors. Like its three predecessors, Austerlitz has been praised for its formal innovation and the dreamlike quality of its meditations on the horrors of Nazi aggression. The story unfolds through a series of chance encounters between the scholar—Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian—and an unnamed narrator. The pair first meet in the 1960s, in a train station in Antwerp, Belgium. They continue to run into each other through the mid-1970s before losing touch for twenty years. When they cross paths in 1996, Austerlitz is recovering from a nervous breakdown. He complains of a deepening sense of isolation, so the narrator records his friend’s life story, which occupies the majority of the novel. By tracing the free associations of Austerlitz’s imagination and following his exhaustive digressions, Sebald examines the workings of memory and the joys and sorrows—mostly the sorrows—of recovering one’s lost history.
W Literary and Historical Context
The broad sweep of Austerlitz takes into account the full range of the devastation World War II visited on Europe. Of all the subjects considered in the protagonist’s myriad ruminations, the one given the most attention is the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938. On September 29, 1938, Adolf Hitler called the leaders of France, Italy, and the United Kingdom to a meeting in Munich.
Without inviting or consulting Czechoslovakia, the participants ordered that the Sudetenland—the northeastern part of the country and home to many ethnic Germans—be ceded to Germany. The Czech government capitulated the following day. These events occurred six months after the Anschluss, when Hitler’s army violated the Treaty of Versailles and crossed the Austrian border. The occupiers were greeted by riotous ovations as they marched through the streets of Vienna. Sebald never mentions the Anschluss or the Munich Conference directly, but in the early part of the story, Austerlitz’s father, Maximilian Aychenwald, anticipates the escalation of the Nazi threat. On a business trip to Munich, he watches a film of a party rally “which confirmed his suspicions that, out of the humiliation from which the Germans had never recovered, they were now developing an image of themselves as a people chosen to evangelize the world.” In response to what he has seen, Aychenwald arranges to have his four-year-old son taken into foster care in the United Kingdom. Austerlitz’s parents enlist the Kindertransport program to send him by train out of Czechoslovakia. Also known as the Refugee Children Movement, this rescue mission transported nearly 10,000 Jewish children out of Nazi Germany. Most of the children survived, but few ever saw their parents again. Shortly after seeing her child off, Austerlitz’s mother is sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic that the Nazis reserved for prominent Jews. The site served as a showcase for visiting foreign diplomats and was intended to counteract rumors that Jewish people were suffering and dying in forced labor camps.
W Themes Austerlitz is an intricate meditation on how individual identity is constructed and how the external world works to overwhelm it. Austerlitz grows up thinking his name is
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Dafydd Elias, the name given him by his adoptive Welsh parents, who never mention his past. Although he is old enough to recall the solitary train ride to the United Kingdom and his time with his birth parents, Austerlitz has suppressed these memories; they return to him only during bouts of depression in adult life. Shortly after his secondary school headmaster tells him his real name, Austerlitz encounters the name in the historical record, which both excites and confuses him. He first learns of Napoleon’s victory over a much larger Russo-Austrian army at the Battle of Austerlitz and later discovers the name in more obscure contexts. For example, he finds out that Fred Astaire’s real name was Austerlitz, that the rabbi who circumcised Franz Kafka’s nephew was also named Austerlitz, and that a woman named Laura Austerlitz witnessed a crime in Trieste in 1944 and made a public statement about it over twenty years later. The connection to Napoleon bestows on the adolescent Austerlitz a grand sense of himself, but the other discoveries puzzle and disorient him, giving him a sense of being adrift in time. On many occasions Austerlitz ponders the idea of being lost, and often he cannot decide which is worse: feeling alone and cut off from the world or being unable to separate himself from it, doomed always to return to the familiar. One night he considers the habits of the moths that cling to his walls. He is amazed that if he does not put them back outside they will die. He speculates that they know they have lost their way and that they are paralyzed by fear. Austerlitz also marvels at carrier pigeons, who, he learns, will find their way back to their original homes even if they are set to flying in the dead of night during a snowstorm at sea. Such musings fill Austerlitz with a sense of wonder, but they also cause despair; he concludes that though humans always return to their past, they are not capable of understanding what they discover there. Regarding the human fascination with history, Austerlitz tells the narrator that “our concern is with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere.”
MAJOR CHARACTERS JACQUES AUSTERLITZ is an architecture historian living in England who, after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1992, becomes obsessed with long-suppressed childhood memories. AGATA AUSTERLITZOVA, Austerlitz’s mother, is a talented Jewish opera singer. Soon after putting her young son on a train bound for the United Kingdom, she is sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp billed by the Gestapo as an artists’ colony. MAXIMILIAN AYCHENWALD, Austerlitz’s father, is a businessman and a prominent official in the Czech Social Democratic Party. Recognizing the danger that the rising tide of Nazism poses for Jews, he flees to Paris after sending his son to Britain. GWENDOLYN ELIAS and her husband adopt Austerlitz when he is four years old and raise the boy as Dafydd Elias in their home in Bala. Gwendolyn keeps house meticulously until she becomes ill; the house gradually falls into disarray, and Austerlitz is sent to boarding school. REVEREND ELIAS, Austerlitz’s adoptive father, is a grim Welsh minister famous among his congregation for his fire-andbrimstone sermons. After Gwendolyn dies, Reverend Elias loses his sanity and is sent to an asylum. GERALD FITZPATRICK is a younger student at Stower Grange; Austerlitz is supposed to haze the boy and instead befriends him. The two remain close well into adulthood, but Fitzpatrick, an astrophysicist and amateur pilot, dies in a plane crash. ANDRE HILARY is Austerlitz’s history teacher and the first person to discover his intellectual promise. Shortly after the headmaster at Stower Grange tells Dafydd Elias that his real name is Jacques Austerlitz, Hilary, by coincidence, delivers an animated and thorough lecture on Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Austerlitz. The revelation of his true name and the lecture transform Austerlitz’s sense of identity. THE NARRATOR, unnamed in the novel, shares many traits with Austerlitz, most notably a fascination with architecture and a penchant for meandering, highly intellectual reflection.
W Style Amalgams of novel, essay, and memoir, Sebald’s fictional works defy classification. The author himself called his writing “prose of uncertain form”—a phrase that is quoted often in treatments of his work. Among the most obvious aspects of Sebald’s style are long paragraphs and the photographs he inserts in his texts. The first paragraph of Austerlitz is twenty-five pages long; others run over forty pages. A sentence in the middle of the book extends for seven pages. In these protracted constructions Austerlitz’s digressive meditations move seamlessly over such topics as his favorite history teacher, the architecture of labor camps, the movement of billiard balls, and the sudden death of a dear friend. In the
VERA RYSANOVA is Austerlitz’s nanny in Prague. She recognizes the middle-aged Austerlitz immediately when he visits her home. Now an elderly spinster, Vera tells Austerlitz who his parents were and what she knows of their fate. MARIE DE VERNEUIL is an architectural historian who travels with Austerlitz on some of his visits to Prague. She eventually leaves Austerlitz because she cannot cope with his remoteness.
Spectator magazine Anita Brookner writes, “Sebald’s method, somewhat frightening in itself, is to trace a development through a series of surreal but lucid
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A group of war refugees arrive in London. In Austerlitz, an unnamed narrator recalls the life of Jacques Austerlitz, a scholar and a friend who endured personal tragedy doing World War II. ª Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
digressions, each one spiraling out of the last, until a conclusion of some sort is reached.” Instead of using paragraph and chapter breaks and dialogue, Sebald punctuates his narrative with a haunting collection of black-and-white photographs of doorways, vast ceilings, furniture, people with unfathomable expressions, ledgers, stamps, schedules, and a multitude of other articles from daily life. Rather than enhancing the meaning of the elegant, philosophically rich prose, however, the mundane articles in the photos add to the dreamlike quality of the book. For example, following Austerlitz’s remarks on billiard balls, Sebald inserts a twopage photo with a dark ball on the left and the cue ball on the right. Even though it is an accurate visual representation of what has just been described, the photo is tangential to the corresponding thought. The combined effect of the prose and photographs is to locate Austerlitz and Sebald’s other works somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. While his previous books
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have a more conspicuous autobiographical quality (they include pictures of the author and use his name in the text), Austerlitz is nevertheless grounded in the historical record. Mirela Roncevic notes in the Library Journal that “the black-and-white photographs scattered throughout do not add to the depth of the story, but they do add to its genuineness, serving to validate the events and reconstruct the novel as a tangible historical document. Ultimately, the narrative transcends fiction and becomes history.”
W Critical Reception Austerlitz has received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Many critics assigned the book a place at the head of the canon of Holocaust literature almost immediately after its publication. Richard Eder remarks in the New York Times Book Review that the author “stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust.” Writing in the New TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Republic, John Banville describes the book as “nothing less than a chronicle of the end of a civilization. Europe, Sebald is telling us, committed suicide in the first half of the twentieth century, and what remains is, for all the carefully applied cosmetics, a lifeless object of desperate veneration and uneasy nostalgia.” Many critics also consider Austerlitz to be the finest work in Sebald’s oeuvre. Brookner, for instance, calls it “the most accomplished of Sebald’s works,” praising in particular the novel’s “sense of displacement” and “blend of conscious and unconscious memory and observation.” Gabriele Annan concurs, observing in the New York Review of Books that “It’s not the story so much that takes hold of the reader: it’s the descriptions and the meditations, which can be hallucinatory in their effect. This is true of all his books, but in Austerlitz the proportion of rumination and evocation to narrative is larger than ever.” Praise for the quality of the translation has also been uniformly high. Banville asserts that Sebald’s new translator, Anthea Bell, outdoes her predecessor Michael Hulse (whose translations of Sebald were also well received): “Austerlitz, in Bell’s pristine translation, strikes a more profound and more moving note than that sounded in the earlier books.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Annan, Gabriele. “Ghost Story.” New York Review of Books 1 Nov. 2001: 26-27. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 194. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Banville, John. “The Rubble Artist.” New Republic 26 Nov. 2001: 35-38. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 194. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Brookner, Anita. Rev. of Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald. Spectator 6 Oct. 2001: 64. Eder, Richard. “Excavating a Life.” New York Times Book Review 28 Oct. 2001: 10. Roncevic, Mirela. Rev. of Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald. Library Journal 15 Oct. 2001: 110. Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Brockmeier, Jens. “Austerlitz’s Memory.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6.2 (2008): 347-67. Web. 11 Sept. 2010. In an examination of Sebald’s treatment of time and memory, Brockmeier argues that in the novel, all moments exist simultaneously. The result is that human memory cannot reconstruct a knowable past and is therefore in perpetual disarray.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR W(infried) G(eorg) Sebald was born on May 18, 1944, in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany. He died in a car accident near his home in Norwich, England, on December 14, 2001; he was fifty-seven and at the height of his literary powers. Sebald was a professor of European literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich from 1970 to his death. An accomplished scholar, he did not begin publishing fiction until he was in his midforties. He produced four autobiographical novels to widespread critical acclaim. Raised in post-World War II Germany, Sebald grew up confounded by the lingering horrors of the Holocaust and the Allied firebombing of urban Germany. Claiming he found the writing and research therapeutic, he revisits this period of his life in his major works, combining memory, historical accounts, old pictures, and photocopies of documents into a haunting meditation on the aftermath of war. Aside from Austerlitz, the works on which Sebald’s reputation rests are Schwindel (1990; Vertigo, 1999), Die Ausgewanderten (1992; The Emigrants, 1996), and Die Ringe des Saturn (1995; The Rings of Saturn, 1998).
Byatt, A. S. “Only Connect.” New Statesman 15 Oct. 2001: 52. Byatt’s analysis focuses on the moment Austerlitz discovers his true surname and the connections he then makes between his name and events and people from history. Lewis, Tess. “W. G. Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” New Criterion 20.4 (2001): 85+. Lewis contends that of the signature aspects of Sebald’s fiction—including his formal innovations, his blending of literary genres, and the free associations of his digressive narratives—the most important is the manner in which his narrator remembers the dead as guides through history. Madden, Patrick. “W. G. Sebald: Where Essay Meets Fiction.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 10.2 (2008): 169-75. Web. 11 Sept. 2010. Madden offers cogent summaries of Sebald’s four major novels, comparing the ways in which each straddles the divide between fiction and nonfiction. Pane, Samuel. “Trauma Obscura: Photographic Media in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Mosaic 38.1 (2005): 37+. This analysis maintains that the apparently benign photographs of everyday objects placed throughout the novel emphasize the horror of the narrative, making the Nazi aggression, by comparison, even more incomprehensible. Zilcosky, John. “Lost and Found: Disorientation, Nostalgia, and Holocaust Melodrama in Sebald’s Austerlitz.” MLN 121.3 (2006): 679-98. Web. 11 Sept. 2010. Zilcosky draws a distinction between
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Austerlitz and Sebald’s three previous works of fiction, arguing that Austerlitz is the closest in structure and content to a traditional novel. Gale Resources
Landon, Philip. Rev. of Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald. Review of Contemporary Fiction 21.3 (2001): 196. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 194. Detroit: Gale, 2005. “W(infried) G(eorg) Sebald.” Contemporary Authors Online.CengageGale,2005. Biography Resource Center. Web. 31 Aug. 2010. “W. G. Sebald (1944-2001).” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 194. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 253-348. Literature Criticism Online. Web. 31 Aug. 2010. Open Web Sources
The blog Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W. G. Sebald reprints an interview with Sebald conducted by Jens Mühling. It was originally published in the journal Pretext in 2003. In the interview Sebald speaks about teaching creative writing, why he avoids contemporary literature, and how he copes with writer’s block. http://sebald.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/ the-permanent-exile-of-wg-sebald-part-1 Maya Jaggi’s September 2001 interview with Sebald at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall was the author’s last public appearance in Britain. He discusses several of his sources for Austerlitz, including the three people on whom the character Jacques Austerlitz is based. The Guardian’s Web site offers an edited transcript of the conversation. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/ 2001/dec/21/artsandhumanities.highereducation The blog Writer Unboxed presents an interview with Anthea Bell, the translator of Austerlitz. Although much of the conversation is about Bell’s work translating young adult writers, she gives a detailed account of her effort to preserve the sound and style of Sebald’s German. http://writerunboxed.com/ 2006/08/18/interview-anthea-bell-part-1 University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor Douglas O. Linder’s Web site Famous Trials includes detailed information on the Nuremberg Trials. Linder provides links to transcripts from the proceedings against Nazi war criminals, images of the courtroom, and profiles of the defendants. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/ projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nuremberg.htm For Further Reading
Allen, William Sheridan. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1945. Danbury: Children’s, 1984. Print. Allen’s detailed account of the workings of the Nazi propaganda machine chronicles how the people of Northeim, Germany, became convinced that the Nazi Party
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could lead Germany out of its economic recession and back to greatness. Appelfeld, Aharon. Badenheim 1939. Trans. Dalya Bilu. New York: Quartet, 1997. Print. Aharon Appelfeld is a concentration camp survivor and one of Israel’s foremost living writers in Hebrew. His novel, set in an idyllic resort town in Austria in the months before the outbreak of World War II, portrays Jewish visitors who ignore rumors of the deportation of fellow Jews to labor camps. Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum. New York: Vintage, 2005. Print. German Nobel Prize-winner Günter Grass’s masterpiece recounts the life of Oscar Matzerath, a three-foot-tall drummer boy who willfully stalls his growth at the age of three and travels through warravaged Germany and Poland recording the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. Jacobson, Dan. Heshel’s Kingdom. Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1999. Print. Jacobson’s autobiographical work describes a quest similar to that of Sebald’s character Austerlitz. Researching the life of his grandfather Rabbi Yisrael Yehoshua Melamed, Jacobson travels from his home in South Africa to Lithuania, where his grandfather died soon after World War I. At the conclusion of Austerlitz, the narrator begins reading this book, which Austerlitz had given him at one of their early meetings. Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Everyman, 2000. Print. Italian chemist and novelist Primo Levi’s account of the ten months he spent in Auschwitz is regarded by critics and many fellow writers as among the most profound memoirs of the Holocaust. Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998. Print. After having been hospitalized following a mental collapse, Sebald’s unnamed narrator in The Rings of Saturn begins a walking tour of Suffolk County, England. He finds patterns of destruction and loss in nearly everything he sees. His thoughts move back and forth between the landscape and human history as he contemplates such topics as China’s opium wars, the novelist Joseph Conrad’s suffering, the herring industry, and floundering economies in seaside towns. Troller, Norbert. Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews. Ed. Joel Shatzky. Raleigh: U of North Carolina P, 2004. Print. Troller’s memoir covers his two years in Theresienstadt. Many Jewish artists and performers went voluntarily to the supposed model ghetto rich in cultural life. Troller was deported to Auschwitz when he was discovered smuggling art out of the camp that depicted the true conditions under which the inhabitants lived. Joe Campana
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Await Your Reply By Dan Chaon
W Introduction
W Literary and Historical
Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply (2009) contains a complex plot that revolves around characters assuming different identities. Diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager, Hayden Cheshire leaves his twin brother in Ohio and travels the world assuming different identities. As George Orson, Hayden leaves Ohio with his student Lucy Lattimore and heads to a deserted motel in Nebraska. Promising Lucy a life of travel and wealth, George obtains a large sum of money, two new identities, Brooke and David Fremden, and two plane tickets to Africa. After a few days, Lucy encounters men in the hotel lobby who are looking for George, whom, they claim, ripped them off with a money scam. Another identity Hayden assumes is that of Jay Kozelek, father to Ryan Schulyer who lives in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Jay contacts Ryan and persuades him to leave his adopted parents and come to rural Michigan. Jay concocts a scheme that involves Ryan’s assuming various identities that allow him to travel and transport money. This, too, ends badly as two men find Jay. One of the men cuts off Ryan’s hand after Jay refuses to tell him where the real Jay is located. Chaon alternates these chapters with the story of Miles Cheshire, Hayden’s brother in Ohio. Miles has spent years searching for Hayden, and it is through Miles’s recollections that readers uncover details about Hayden’s multiple identities. Miles resumes his search after receiving a letter from Hayden indicating that he is in Inuvik, Canada. Miles travels to Canada and meets up with Lydia Barrie. Lydia’s sister, Rachel Barrie, has taken off with her fiancé, Miles Spady, who Lydia determines is Hayden.
Chaon’s haunting story is reminiscent of authors such as Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, and J. R. Tolkien. Starting the story with unclear plot connections, Chaon, much like King and Jackson, leads readers through plot twists to reveal the connections between the characters. Writer Ray Bradbury, Chaon’s mentor, also influenced Chaon’s writing style. Well-known for his fantasy, horror, and science fiction novels, such as Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury incorporated imaginative science fiction scenes and suspense in his novels. Paralleling the efforts of his mentor, Chaon weaves together three suspenseful plots that keep his readers guessing about how plot components connect. Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, and Thomas Tyron, author of The Other, a classic story of scary twins, also influenced Chaon in his use of twins and elusive identities. Most of Chaon’s novel is set in Ohio and Michigan. Another location is the LightHouse Motel in Nebraska, where the story of George and Lucy takes place. Chaon’s interest in this location stems childhood memories at Lake McConaughy in Nebraska. As a result of reservoirs and dams, several towns were flooded and once the lakes dried up, the communities became ghost towns. Chaon also relies on the Internet as a historical context for his story. Chaon takes his title from a 1980s Nigerian Internet money scam, known as a 419, which refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code. The scam involved unemployed university students assuming different identities to targeting companies in the West for money. Copycat scams followed with e-mails posted from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe requesting that receivers send money.
Context
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Await Your Reply
MAJOR CHARACTERS HAYDEN CHESHIRE grows up with his twin brother Miles in Cleveland, Ohio. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Hayden leaves Ohio and assumes different identities, including George Orson and Jay Kozelek. MILES CHESHIRE, Hayden’s twin brother, follows in his father’s footsteps and works in a magic store in Cleveland. LUCY LATTIMORE, an eighteen-year-old orphan who lives in Pompey, Ohio, with her sister, takes off with George, her high school history teacher, for the Lighthouse Motel in Nebraska, where he finds them new identities and a large amount of cash. RYAN SCHULYER, who was adopted in Council Bluffs, Iowa, discovers that his biological father Ryan is his adopted mother’s brother.
W Themes In Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon constructs an unsettling story to suggest that the ability to create virtual identities online dehumanizes people. Chaon uses a twin, an orphan, and an adopted person to explore the nature of identity and how it has changed with advancements in technology. Growing up, Hayden and Miles are close as twins, but after Hayden is diagnosed with schizophrenia, Hayden begins to shift in and out of realty and leaves home. In this storyline, Chaon explores how a mentally ill twin dominates the other twin’s existence, and as a result, the healthy twin is also at risk for not being able to establish his separate identity. Lucy also has a hard time figuring out who she is. Her parents die in a car accident, so Lucy lives with her older sister. Realizing that Pompey is not in her future, Lucy leaves town with George, who was her history teacher in high school. George promises Lucy a new life full of money and travel, but it involves their leaving the country on the run with new identities. Lucy struggles with her decision to give up her identity and abandon her old life. Ryan’s story also involves issues of identity. Feeling his life has been a fraud after he finds out that his adoptive mother’s brother, Jay, is his biological father, Ryan leaves to go and work for Jay without telling anyone. His family and friends conclude he drowned; Ryan follows funeral news and tributes to him on the Internet and decides to stay and work for Jay by assuming a different identity. Chaon intertwines the stories of Miles, Lucy, and Ryan with that of the presence of Hayden, who to some degree never exists as Hayden after the first few chapters.
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For years, Hayden slips into people’s lives by pretending to be different people in order to try on different identities. Once things change or go badly, Hayden simply buys a new identity and moves onto a different life. Through the character of Hayden, Chaon suggests that one negative effect of technology is the isolation it can create. With the isolation comes the ability to create new identities through online avatars and personas.
W Style Much like his mentor and his favorite authors, Chaon creates a plot full of inconclusive connections between several storylines. These gaps in the plot allow Chaon to build suspense by withholding the true identities of some characters. To emphasize the isolation of his characters, Chaon minimizes the emotional connections between characters. However, Chaon chooses certain moments for expression of emotion by using eloquent phrasing. For example, Lucy feels “a wavering shadow passing over her once again, all the different people she herself had wanted to become, all the sadness and anxiety that she had been trying not to think about now shifting above her like an iceberg.”
W Critical Reception With great success surrounding his early novels Among the Missing and You Remind Me of Me, critics were prepared to appreciate Dan Chaon’s use of plot twists and characters in Await Your Reply. Steven Almond in the Los Angeles Times noted that Chaon’s novel contains eloquently worded phrasing, such as “the faint scent of some mildly floral businesslike perfume” that sets the novel apart from works by other horror and science fiction writers. However, Almond decided that the early chapters are “too calculated” and that withholding the basic facts actually takes away from the story rather than enhances it. Alexander Cuadros of the Boston Globe concurred with Almond and suggested the Await Your Reply is “a fast, careless novel” because of Chaon’s use of thriller conventions to attract readers. Lucinda Rosenfeld of the New York Times disagreed with Cuadros’s charge that Chaon’s plot is weak. She argued that Chaon’s use of “intricate and suspenseful plotting” is a credit to Chaon’s ability to craft a suspenseful novel. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Almond, Steve. “Await Your Reply: A Novel by Dan Chaon.” Rev. of Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon. latimes.com. Los Angeles Times 23 Aug. 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Chaon, Dan. Await Your Reply. New York: BallantineRandom House, 2009. Print. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Await Your Reply
Cuadros, Alexander. “Reply Goes for Cheap Thrill.” Rev. of Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon. boston.com. Boston Globe 10 Oct. 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Rosenfeld, Lucinda. “Multiple Lives.” Rev. of Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon. nytimes.com. New York Times 20 Aug. 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Maslin, Janet. “Who Are These People? Well, That Depends.” Rev. of Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon. nytimes.com. New York Times 19 Aug. 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Explores Chaon’s use of characters and plot to create suspense. Nawotak, Edward. “Novel Boots Up Intrigue with 3 Storylines.” Rev. of Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon. Statesmen.com. Statesmen 23 Aug. 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Critiques Chaon’s use of plot to propel his three storylines. Tsong, Nicole. “Await Your Reply: Dan Chaon’s Novel of Shifting Identity.” Rev. of Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon. seattletimes.nwsource.com. Seattle Times 11 Oct. 2009. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Addresses Chaon’s recasting of his characters’ identities.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 11, 1964, Dan Chaon received his BA in 1986 from Northwestern University and his MA from Syracuse University in 1990. Prior to the publication of Await Your Reply, Chaon published three other books: the collections Fitting Ends and Other Stories and Among the Missing and the novel You Remind Me of Me. Chaon was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction in 2002 and 2007. As of 2010, Chaon taught at Oberlin College.
Gale Resources
“Dan Chaon.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Sept. 2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? &id=GALE%7CH1000149004& v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w Open Web Sources
Dan Chaon’s personal homepage, available at http:// www.danchaon.com, includes information about Chaon’s books and events.
Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply. Ulf Andersen/Getty Images TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Await Your Reply
National Public Radio, available at http://www.npr. org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112292650, includes Maureen Corrigan’s interview with Chaon about plot twists in Await Your Reply.
Morris, Chris. The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2002. Print. Includes insight into Hitchcock’s filming techniques.
PBS News Hour, available at http://www.pbs.org/ newshour/art/blog/2009/08/secrets-and-lies-inawait-your-reply.html, includes an interview of Chaon in which he discusses family, plot, and cinematic influences on his writing.
Snyder, Kurt. Me, Myself, and Them. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Provides insight into schizophrenia.
For Further Reading
Browder, Laura. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. Print. Examines books presented as autobiographies written by people who are not who they claim to be.
Stickley, Jim. The Truth about Identity Theft. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2009. Print. Covers such topics as phishing and vishing, no-tech identity theft, trash as a means for identity theft, and identity theft in plain view. Wood, Andrew F., and Matthew J. Smith. Online Communication: Linking Technology, Identity, and Culture. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2005. Print. Addresses the social implications of technology.
Klein, Barbara. Not All Twins Are Alike: Psychological Profiles of Twinship. Westport: Praeger, 2003. Print. Written by an identical twin with personal experience and research combined.
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Rachel V. Smydra
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Ballad of Desmond Kale By Roger McDonald
W Introduction Roger McDonald’s ninth novel, The Ballad of Desmond Kale (2005), is a long historical novel about the first settlement efforts of the Australian Outback in the 1830s. The sheep farmers who ventured into this unknown territory turned their wool into gold and attracted expansion from the coastal cities into the wilderness. McDonald tells the story with characters of all classes and stations, both in Australia and England, depicting the early social and economic history of Sydney while spinning a captivating tale of adventure and romance. Central to this story is the pursuit of an escaped convict and expert sheep breeder, Desmond Kale, by an abusive missionary parson and magistrate, Matthew Stanton, who is obsessed with the idea of owning massive amounts of land and huge numbers of prize sheep. Everyone else in the book is either related to or working with these two figures. Rumors of Kale thriving in the Outback with a valuable flock of sheep turn into a mythical ballad sung by Irish colonists who admire his rebellion and are inspired by his success. The Stanton character is based on Samuel Marsden, prominent in Australian history as a profligate missionary, magistrate, and sheep breeder. Greed, hypocritical behavior, cunning, daring, and the pursuit of love and dreams are thematically sewn into a story that includes shipwrecks, prisons, colonial politics, and British society, and extensive information about sheep. The Ballad of Desmond Kale won the Miles Franklin Award in 2006 and the Adelaide Festival Prize for Fiction in 2008.
W Literary and Historical Context
In 1788 the Australian governor brought sheep to the new colony to supply meat, and some others followed,
but they were not suited to the Australian environment and soon died out. In 1797, at the Cape of Good Hope, captains Henry Waterhouse and William Kent each bought thirteen merino sheep, a breed known for its heavy fleece and fine wool that had thrived in Spain for two thousand years. These animals were likely descended from the king of Spain’s flock. Kent’s sheep were lost, but in Sydney, Waterhouse distributed his sheep to Kent, John Macarthur, Captain Rowley, and the infamous Samuel Marsden. Macarthur crossed his six merinos with the Bengal flock he had started in 1794 and learned that proper breeding could produce fine wool, so he procured more merinos. Macarthur, Waterhouse, Marsden, and William Cox thereafter pioneered fine-wool production in New South Wales with Macarthur promoting their product in London. Macarthur’s work was later honored with his picture on the two-dollar bill. By 1810 there were nearly 33,000 sheep of varying mixes in Australia. Explorers crossing the Blue Mountain in 1813 found good pastures and rivers to the west. Therefore, in 1815, Cox built a railroad across the mountains allowing settlers to expand sheep raising northward into Queensland, arriving in Adelaide in 1838. Other territorial expansions resulted in the sheep industry being established in every colony by the 1830s. Despite a drought that killed more than 200,000 sheep in 1843 and 1844, by 1879 there were a million sheep in Western Australia alone. Seventyfive percent of modern Australian sheep are classed as a separate breed of Australian merinos. Although wool production in the early 2000s is no longer the leading industry, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of wool, including most of the fine apparel wools.
W Themes McDonald titled his novel after the ballad that forms the structure of his book and establishes the theme of opposition to authority and rebellion against oppression
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The Ballad of Desmond Kale
MAJOR CHARACTERS BLAISE CRIBBE, Tom’s stepbrother, is the sickly top wool expert in England who was once romantically involved with Dolly Stanton. DESMOND KALE, convict and master sheep breeder, escapes with Stanton’s prize sire and takes Rankine’s sheep into the Outback, becoming a legend in the process. MEG INCHCAPE, Desmond’s beautiful, kindly daughter, is a laundress for the military and Tom’s love interest. WARREN INCHCAPE, Meg’s son by the man who explored the Outback with Kale, has inherited his grandfather’s talent with sheep and is apprenticed to Stanton. PAOLO MORENO, called Paul Lorenze, is a Spanish shepherd who helped Rankine bring sheep from Spain, aided Kale’s escape, and becomes overseer during Stanton’s absence. TOM RANKINE, called Ugly Tom, is a tough, wily, and romantic New South Wales Ranger, juggling his favored position with the governor and conniving with Kale. DOLLY PRINGLE STANTON is the parson’s independent, cunning wife who loves Titus, hates Warren, dotes on Ivy, and remains loyal to Matthew. IVY STANTON is Dolly and Matthew’s headstrong daughter and Titus’s friend who encounters trouble with a naval officer on the voyage to England. MATTHEW STANTON is the arrogant, pious, ambitious “flogging parson” and magistrate who is obsessed with having the best sheep and finding Kale. TITUS STANTON is the aboriginal boy adopted by the Stantons, who is Warren’s close friend and is loved by Dolly and Ivy, but abused by the parson.
as expressed in a traditional Irish ballad. Kale’s ballad is an underground boast celebrating the triumph of a renegade and giving hope to the downtrodden while irritating those in power. Dreams and ambition are also important themes in the book. These ideas are connected to Kale’s dream of a new life of freedom and prosperity. In contrast, Stanton and his ilk have ambitions of great wealth and power. Australia was a whole new continent offering opportunities to those who were willing to endure the hardships. Even though the first colonists were convicts, they had a chance to set off eventually on their own. Succcess was unlikely because of the nearly insurmountable competition from the wealthy and powerful, at least until Kale came along. Until then, few dared to wander more than a few miles from Parramatta because the land seemed so forbidding, but Kale showed that there were vast
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expanses where people and sheep could thrive. Once the trail was blazed, multitudes followed, and an enormous Australian sheep industry was born. The endeavor took good men and women capable of cunning and determination such as those exemplified by the characters in McDonald’s story. The hypocrisy of Christian endeavors is another theme of the novel. Instead of bringing love and redemption to the convicts and aborigines, Stanton used his mission ministry as a cover for his true ambitions as a sheep farmer. He preached to the convict laborers on Sunday but brutalized and exploited them during the week. Dolly adopted Titus, an aboriginal boy, to save him from savagery and perdition but did not extend the same Christian attitude to Warren.
W Style The framework of The Ballad of Desmond Kale is the novel’s most noticeable stylistic choice. Kale is not part of the main narrative except in a very few appearances at the beginning and the end of the book, yet the rest of the story involves all those who are connected to Kale and his sheep and his legend. This legend is told throughout the colony by means of an Irish ballad, and McDonald uses the titles of the eight verses or choruses to introduce each section of this epic tale. McDonald also makes the break in setting between Australia and England exactly halfway through the choruses. Concurrent to Kale, the narrative stems from Parson Stanton and his multilevel relationships with various entities in Australia and England. McDonald’s language is an impediment as well as a triumph. While the nineteenth-century style, vocabulary, and local idioms make for difficult reading, McDonald’s ability to replicate this form of language as if he had lived during those times and foreshadow the Gaelic, Spanish, Yiddish, and aboriginal influences on Australian English is impressive. This authentic language from the 1830s makes the already well-developed characters more authentic even though dialogue is sparse. McDonald incorporates a number of subplots into the narrative. These include Tom and Meg’s love story, a feud between stepbrothers Tom and Blaise, an unwed pregnancy, a shipwreck, the role of the Josephs family, the adventures of Titus and Warren, and government intrigues. In addition, McDonald provides extensive details about wool and sheep breeding.
W Critical Reception Comments from the critics about The Ballad of Desmond Kale tended to repeat certain observations; for example, reviewers have lauded the clever way that the novel is all about Kale yet not about Kale. A common complaint TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Ballad of Desmond Kale
concerned McDonald’s portrayal of the aborigines—that they are stereotypical and only background figures, except for Titus who lives in both worlds. A further complaint by reviewers was that the nineteenth-century language and Australian idioms make the novel difficult to read. Beyond these two negatives, the critics otherwise raved about the novel’s vividly drawn characters who become involved in greed, duplicity, redemption, and a compelling love story. In fact, Luise Toma, in an article published by M/C Reviews, declared that McDonald had become “the king of historical fiction and a supreme genius of creating landscapes so powerful you can smell the dust and wave away flies whilst you’re reading.” Katherine England, in her review in the Adelaide Advertiser, agreed, asserting that the book is “vibrant in its portrayal of the fascinating but unforgiving Australian bush that imprisons all but the most intrepid.” Luke Beesley, in a review that appeared in the Brisbane Courier Mail, stated that “[t]hirst for the reunion of separated characters, and the fate of Kale’s movements, spices the narrative tension.” Beesley concluded: “It’s a great yarn, craftily written, superbly edited for pace and humour and full of insight.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born on June 23, 1941, in Young, New South Wales, Roger McDonald was the middle son of a Presbyterian minister, Hugh Fraser McDonald, and the historian Lorna McDonald. After a childhood in small towns, McDonald earned a BA in education in 1962 from the University of Sydney. He taught briefly, then worked as an educational radio/television producer and as an editor with the University of Queensland Press. His first two books were collections of poetry, but between 1975 and 2010, he published no poetry. Instead, with the help of a Literature Board fellowship, he worked part time as a poetry editor (1976-1980) and in 1979 completed his first novel, 1915, which won several awards and was made into a seven-part ABC television series in 1982. He also wrote various nonfiction works and screenplays. Between 1980 and 2010, McDonald lived mostly near Braidwood with stints in Sydney and New Zealand.
A herd of sheep moves to a new pasture. The Ballad of Desmond Kale is a fictionalized story about the early settlement of the Australian Outback by sheep farmers in the 1930s. Lee Torrens/Shutterstock.com
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The Ballad of Desmond Kale BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Beesley, Luke. “Perfect Pitch in this Wild Colonial Yarn.” Rev. of The Ballad of Desmond Kale, by Roger McDonald. Brisbane Courier 26 Nov. 2005: M05. Print. England, Katherine. “History Comes Alive.” Rev. of The Ballad of Desmond Kale, by Roger McDonald. Adelaide Advertiser 3 Dec. 2005: W12. Print. McDonald, Roger. The Ballad of Desmond Kale. New York: Random House, 2007. Print. Toma, Luise. “Literature: The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald.” Rev. of The Ballad of Desmond Kale, by Roger McDonald. media-culture.org. M/C Media & Culture 15 Sept. 2006. Web. 23 Aug. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Bode, Katherine. “‘Opportunistic Transpositions and Elisions’: Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale; or, the Fiction Question: Who Owns Stories?” Antipodes 22.2 (2008): 89. Print. Argues that McDonald idealizes equality and freedom but conceals aggression and rejection of women and minorities in Australian history. Boomert. “The Ballad of Desmond Kale, by Roger McDonald.” Rev. of The Ballad of Desmond Kale, by Roger McDonald. Boomerangbooks.com.au. Boomerang Books 7 Jan. 2010, Web. 4 Sept. 2010. Praises McDonald’s many excellent character portrayals but finds the language pretentious. Jacobson, Michael. “A Wooly Tale of Early Australia.” Rev. of The Ballad of Desmond Kale, by Roger McDonald. Gold Coast Bulletin 24 Dec. 2005: 016. Print. Lists the topics and types of characters in the novel then focuses on Tom Rankine’s role and McDonald’s research on colonial Australia. Myers, Seth. “Sheep and Contradiction Define Colonial Australia.” Antipodes 20.2 (2006): 204. Print. Focuses on the themes within the novel and comments about the roles of the characters.
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Pierce, Peter. “The Ballad of Desmond Kale.” Rev. of The Ballad of Desmond Kale, by Roger McDonald. theage. com.au. Age 12 Nov. 2005. Print. Summarizes the book and discusses its language, metaphors, subplots, and emigrant stories. Open Web Sources
The First Tuesday Book Club, sponsored by ABC television, has a review on its Web site at www.abc. net.au/tx/firsttuesday/s/68431.htm concerning The Ballad of Desmond Kale and Roger McDonald. For Further Reading
Flanagan, Richard. Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish. New York: Grove Press, 2002. Print. A magical realism novel about a convict on Van Dieman’s Island, Australia, in the 1830s, who records events and paints fish. Keneally, Thomas. Bring Larks and Heroes. New York: Penguin, 1989. Print. Set in a British penal colony in 1790s Australia, bleakly depicts one Irish corporal’s struggle of conscience amid corruption and deprivation. Kingsley, Henry. The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlin. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2010. Print. Written in 1859 by an upcoming novelist, a firsthand account of life in the Australian Outback with bushrangers, forest fires, and drought. Marsden, J. B. Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, of Paramatta, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: And of His Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti. Charleston: Nabu Press, 2010. Print. Memoirs of the real 1800s “flogging parson,” magistrate, and sheep farmer upon whom McDonald based the Stanton character in The Ballad of Desmond Kale. McDonald, Roger. Mr. Darwin’s Shooter: A Novel. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Print. Award-winning fiction about a young sailor who helped Charles Darwin collect specimens for seven years, later confronting issues of friendship and faith. Lois Kerschen
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Baudolino By Umberto Eco
W Introduction Originally published in Italian in 2000, Baudolino (translated to English in 2002) is a novel by the scholar and writer Umberto Eco. The story begins in 1204, when sixty-year-old Baudolino recounts his life to the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates. In this narrative within a narrative, the boy Baudolino is taken from his parents’ farm in northern Italy in 1155 by the German king and Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa; he is raised as Frederick’s adopted son. As a young man he hatches a plan to overawe Frederick’s European opponents by forming an alliance with a fabled Christian ruler in the East known as Prester John. Baudolino and his friends forge a friendly letter from Prester John to Frederick, which contains a description of John’s amazing empire, conceived in its entirety by the young forgers. Once “leaked” to Frederick’s enemies, the letter is expected to make them more cooperative. Baudolino and his friends come to believe that the kingdom they have imagined is real. Finally, in 1190 they set off to find Prester John. They return to Constantinople in 1204, largely convinced that John and his kingdom do not exist. Baudolino, though, still believes, and at the end of the novel he sets off to look one last time.
W Literary and Historical Context
Eco’s narratives are typically densely interwoven with ideas from the world in which they are set, and Baudolino is no exception. Central to the novel are the myths of Prester John and the Grasal (also Grail, or Graal), which were widely current in medieval Western Europe. Prester John was said to rule over a vast empire in Asia, an ideal Christian community possessed of unheard-of wealth. The myth likely originated in accounts of early Christian
communities in India, including Saint Thomas the Apostle’s ministry there. In 1165 a forged letter from Prester John was sent to the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus and other rulers, including Frederick. The letter helped spur Europeans’ interest in exploring East Asia. In the early thirteenth century, the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach linked Prester John with the myth of the Holy Grail. In his epic poem Parzival, von Eschenbach made John a Grail-bearer and the son of a knight. The Grail was most often depicted as a serving vessel used at the Last Supper. Von Eschenbach based his description of the Grail on the authority of the (possibly fictional) French poet Kyot the Provençal, who appears as a character in Baudolino. Another French poet, Robert de Boron, wrote in his Joseph d’Aramithie of the Grail being used to collect the spilled blood of Christ (Boron also figures in Eco’s novel). The Grail thus became the most sought-after of holy relics. In Eco’s tale, the mythical vessel is given physical reality by the resourceful Baudolino, who identifies his dead father’s wooden wine bowl as the Grasal. He plans to give it to Prester John but is forced to return with it to Europe.
W Themes The grand theme of Baudolino concerns the power of faith in determining reality. As a boy Baudolino tells an impressive story of an imaginary encounter with a saint. In it the holy figure declares Frederick the one and only lord of Lombardy. The child’s tale promptly causes Frederick’s Italian foes to surrender. Much later Baudolino says to Choniates, “The kingdom of [Prester John] is real because I and my companions have devoted twothirds of our life to seeking it,” implying that good stories compel belief. In giving Baudolino a hand in everything from the canonization of Charlemagne to the counterfeited discovery of what becomes the Holy Grail in the novel,
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Baudolino
MAJOR CHARACTERS ABDUL, who befriends Baudolino at the University of Paris, writes songs for a princess he believes he once saw. He joins the quest to find Prester John’s kingdom in the hope that he will encounter her on his journey. BAUDOLINO, the adopted son of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, conceives of an alliance with the legendary Christian ruler Prester John as a way to help Frederick consolidate his empire. Baudolino spends the rest of his life seeking the kingdom he imagined into being. KYOT is a young traveler who tells Baudolino and his friends that the Grasal is in Prester John’s castle. His character is based on the thirteenth-century poet Kyot the Provençal, who may have been merely a character invented by Wolfram von Eschenbach in Parzival. THE POET, Baudolino’s roommate at the University of Paris, becomes a court poet on the strength of poems written by Baudolino. He joins the quest for the power that finding Prester John’s kingdom will bring him. ZOSIMOS is a treacherous priest who claims to possess a map of the route to Prester John’s kingdom. He tries to steal the Grasal from Baudolino. FREDERICK BARBAROSSA, Holy Roman emperor, finds his energies consumed by destructive rivalries between Italian cities over which he has nominal rule. He wants to believe in Baudolino’s grand plan involving Prester John but dies before the quest gets under way. ROBERT DE BORON is a poet who joins in Baudolino’s search for Prester John. At the end of the quest he says he plans to write about his experiences. Joseph d’Aramithie, written by the real-life poet Robert de Boron in the late twelfth century, helped popularize the Grasal myth. NIKETAS CHONIATES is a Byzantine Greek historian to whom Baudolino tells his life story. Niketas’s character is also based on a historical figure. At the end of the novel, he remains undecided about whether to record what Baudolino has told him. SOLOMON OF GERONA is a Jewish rabbi. He joins the quest for the kingdom of Prester John hoping to find the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Eco calls into question not only the sources but also the truth of history. Brooke Allen notes in her Atlantic review of the book, “History, as we have to acknowledge, is no more than a generally accepted combination of facts, invention, propaganda, and wishful thinking, and Baudolino’s career illustrates the ways in which history is created and authorized.” In Baudolino’s hair-splitting religious disputes with fantastical monsters he encounters in his search for Prester John, Eco highlights the
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Much of Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino takes place during the Fourth Crusade, depicted here in a painting. ª Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy
arguments’ airy lack of substance. Their impact on the Western and Eastern Christian churches, however, has been definitive. Like Prester John, historical truth is hopelessly elusive; the most compelling tale attracts believers. As Baudolino’s friend Boron says of the Grasal, it only acquires “the power of moving men” when it is believed to be lost.
W Style Eco’s novel opens with Baudolino’s first-person record of his initial meeting with Frederick Barbarossa, which the boy writes on parchment stolen from his mentor at court. In the second chapter, the narration changes to the third person and uses an omniscient viewpoint. This shift allows the inclusion of more narrative threads, giving the author greater opportunity to engage in his trademark elaboration of the story’s historical and cultural contexts. Baudolino’s tale of his personal history is a story within a story. The encompassing narrative revolves around his 1204 rescue of Niketas Choniates when Constantinople is sacked during the Fourth Crusade. Baudolino tells his story as he helps Niketas escape to Selymbria on the Sea of Marmara. Finally Baudolino leaves Selymbria to return to what is most real to him: the quest for the kingdom of Prester John. In Eco’s first novel, The Name of the Rose, a medieval murder investigation structures and directs the plot. Baudolino, however, is first and foremost a novel of ideas. Ideas overshadow characters and plot. The first part of the novel describes Frederick’s imperial frustrations in Italy and relates the myths of the Grasal and Prester John; it provides the motivation for Baudolino’s quest to find John’s kingdom. The quest itself forms the central part of the novel. It is an extended fantasy involving extreme TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Baudolino
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Umberto Eco was born on January 5, 1932, in Alessandria, Italy. He studied medieval philosophy and literature at the University of Turin, where he received a PhD in 1954. In the late 1950s he served as cultural programming editor for Radiotelevisione Italiana and began lecturing at the University of Turin. From 1959 to 1975 he worked as an editor for Casa Editore Bompiani. He has been a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna since 1975. Eco has written about language, literature, art, politics, and culture for numerous publications. His first novel, Il Nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose, 1983), was an international best seller and won the 1981 Strega Prize, Italy’s highest literary honor. His works typically involve an investigation of a mystery, through which he explores the nature of interpretive processes, bringing to bear his vast erudition on questions relevant to religion, philosophy, science, and art.
Portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the adoptive father of the main character in Baudolino. ª Classic Image/Alamy
landscapes, exotic monsters, and bizarre rituals. Quests typically inspire transformations in character, but Baudolino’s voyage instead produces alterations in ideas and objects. After all the suffering he and his friends endure for the sake of Baudolino’s father’s wine bowl, it really does become a precious Grasal; when it is threatened or lost, it has “the power to move men.” The historical poets de Boron and Kyot the Provençal helped transform the Grasal into the most sacred of objects. Eco’s fiction supplies a decidedly irreverent backstory to their poetic visions.
W Critical Reception The critical response to Baudolino has been mixed. Most reviewers acknowledge that the novel abounds with historical detail and period authenticity. “Eco is good at evoking life in medieval Italy and at recreating the intellectual horizon of the period,” Thomas Wright asserts in the Spectator. Peter Green of the New York Times Book Review admires the novel’s “richly variegated haul of medieval treasures,” which makes it “compulsively readable.” In a Guardian review, A. S. Byatt argues that, as in his previous novels, Eco uses Baudolino to explore the ways in which humans find and create meaning: “It is an examination of the deep need for explanatory
stories . . . and works in codes and layers that resemble the medieval methods of biblical interpretation as much as modern semiotics.” Some critics have found the novel’s intellectual fireworks sufficient for its success. In his Booklist review Brad Hooper writes that Baudolino “beautifully mixes the elements of an adventure story with intellectual discussions of theology, government, language, geography, and politics.” Others, however, have felt that the novel’s intellectual preoccupations do not cohere well with the plot or the characters. Despite finding in the work a “brilliant conceit,” Byatt’s review concludes, “It is a peculiar kind of novel where the difficult ideas are more interesting than the swashbuckling, or the sex, or the death, or the gruesome objects. . . . It is a paradox that Eco’s most readable tale is also his least satisfactory.” Wright concurs: “While the debates and intellectual digressions in The Name of the Rose were an essential part of the narrative, here they aren’t successfully dramatised within the plot. The characters, too, are merely mouthpieces for ideas.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Allen, Brooke. “Barbarossa’s Boy.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Atlantic Oct. 2002: 160. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Byatt, A. S. “Here Be Monsters.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Guardian [London]. Guardian News and Media 19 Oct. 2002. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Eco, Umberto. Baudolino: A Novel. Trans. William Weaver. Orlando: Harcourt, 2002. Print. Green, Peter. “For Sale: Head of John the Baptist. Box of 7.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. New York
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Times Book Review 3 Nov. 2002: 14+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Hooper, Brad. Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Booklist July 2002: 1794. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Wright, Thomas. “Too Mediaeval by Half.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Spectator 2 Nov. 2002: 70. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Kirkus Reviews 1 Aug. 2002: 1059. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Argues that the author burdens his story with lengthy philosophical discussions which further weaken an uninspired plot. Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Publishers Weekly 1 July 2002: 44. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Posits that readers overwhelmed by Eco’s earlier novels may find Baudolino more engaging and accessible because it features a better balance between fiction and intellectual discussion. Bernstein, Richard. “Of Unicorns and Satyrs and Things with No Knees.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. nytimes.com. New York Times 16 Oct. 2002. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Acknowledges the scholarship of the novel but faults the narrative for being aimless. Cobb, Gerald T. “A Quest of His Own.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. America 11 Nov. 2002: 37. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Provides a detailed overview of the novel and praises the author’s deft marshaling of historical data in telling Baudolino’s tale. Francese, Joseph. “Romancing the Family: Umberto Eco’s Baudolino.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 65.3 (2005): 261+. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Explores family relationships in Eco’s novel from a psychoanalytic perspective. Hoffert, Barbara. Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Library Journal July 2002: 116. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Finds the novel worthwhile but not as scintillating as Eco’s previous novels. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. “Medieval Monsters Inc.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Sunday Times [London] 13 Oct. 2002: 47. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Praises the novel’s ambition, its capacity to entertain, and the energy of Eco’s writing. Lacayo, Richard. “The Good Liar.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Time 4 Nov. 2002: 86. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Appreciates the ideas behind Baudolino but argues that the novel is too long and is inundated by tall tales.
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Langer, Adam. “Italian Hero.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Book Sept.-Oct. 2002: 62+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Highlights the novel’s playfulness. “Making Up Is Never Easy to Do.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Economist 12 Oct. 2002. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Maintains that the weight of too much learning in the novel proves lethal to the story Eco is trying to tell. Mars-Jones, Adam. “You Couldn’t Make It Up.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. Guardian [London]. Guardian News and Media 27 Oct. 2002. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Criticizes the novel’s narrative structure and its valuation of inventiveness over artistry. Stock, Jennifer. “Eco Chamber.” Rev. of Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. yalereviewofbooks.com. Yale Review of Books Spring 2003. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Lauds the wealth of historical detail and learned asides in the text but contends that these cannot substitute for character development. Gale Resources
Friend, Bill. “Umberto Eco.” Twentieth-Century European Cultural Theorists, 1st series. Ed. Paul Hansom. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 242. Literature Resource Center. 17 Oct. 2010. Rubino, Carl. “Umberto Eco.” Italian Novelists since World War II, 1965-1995. Ed. Augustus Pallotta. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 196. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. “Umberto Eco.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. “Umberto Eco.” Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. Open Web Sources
Eco’s home page features information about the author’s life and career, interviews, lectures, summaries of his many books, and links to other sources. http:// www.umbertoeco.com/en Fordham University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook includes an excerpt from the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville in which the author, whose identity remains in doubt, describes the kingdom of Prester John. http://www.fordham .edu/halsall/source/mandeville.html For Further Reading
Boron, Robert de. Joseph of Arimathea: A Romance of the Grail. Trans. Jean Rogers. 1971. London: Steiner, 1990. Print. The medieval French poet describes the Grail as a vessel used at the Last Supper; Boron TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Baudolino
pictures Joseph of Arimathea later collecting the blood flowing from the side of the crucified Christ. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. Orlando: Harcourt, 1974. Print. In Calvino’s novel Kublai Khan listens to Marco Polo’s brief, fantastical descriptions of the cities he has visited. In Eco’s novel the audience Niketas Choniates grants Baudolino is similar. Like Eco, Calvino explores the ways in which individual interpretation affects meaning. Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum. Trans. William Weaver. Orlando: Harcourt, 1989. Print. In Eco’s second novel a scholar and his colleagues make up a history of the Knights Templar. Their game brings them into contact with a thrilling and dangerous reality. ———. Interview. “Eco Returns.” Europe Oct. 2002: 46+. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. This brief interview touches on highlights of Eco’s career. He describes the idea that led him to write about the forged letter of Prester John.
———. Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. Trans. William Weaver. Orlando: Harcourt, 1998. Print. In this volume of essays, Eco explores the outcomes of linguistic mistakes, misinterpretations, and hoaxes; he addresses the letter supposedly written by Prester John that inspired European explorations of Asia. “In Search of an Upside-Down World.” Bookseller 5 July 2002: 33. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. This article features Eco’s descriptions of the character of Baudolino and of the real historical artifacts and actions that are attributed to him in the novel. It includes a brief account of San Baudolino, the patron saint of Eco’s native city, Alessandria. von Eschenbach, Wolfram. Parzival. Trans. A. T. Hatto. London: Penguin, 1980. Print. Von Eschenbach’s Arthurian romance describes the trials encountered by the knight Parzival in his long search for the Grail.
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Janet Moredock
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Beasts of No Nation By Uzodinma Iweala
W Introduction Uzodinma Iweala’s debut novel, Beasts of No Nation (2005), is a graphic depiction of the military experience of a child soldier in an unnamed West Africa country. Told exclusively from the child’s point of view in what may be called Nigerian English, this story gives an in-depth look at the mayhem, violence, and sexual abuse experienced by the protagonist, a pubescent boy named Agu. The novel begins with Agu hiding. He has seen his mother and sister flee with other females from his village; he has seen his father murdered. He is discovered by rebel fighters, beaten up by a child among them, and pulled into their ragtag group. All he knows at the start is that war has come to his village, and he has no choice but to be a soldier. His story then follows this marauding band of rebels as they plunder, rape, and burn their way through several villages. Over the course of these events, the guerrilla fighters suffer starvation, injury, and death. Agu and Strika, another young boy among the soldiers, are repeatedly sodomized by the commander. Though this novel has been labeled a young-adult book, it is not for the faint of heart and may be unsuitable for some young readers. In 2005 Iweala, a recent graduate of Harvard University, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best work of literature by a young writer for his novel.
W Literary and Historical Context
The literary context in the West for a novel such as Beasts of No Nation is the bildungsroman, the story of maturation. In this genre, the story is about how a child, the protagonist, grows to adulthood, a coming-of-age story. The trajectory of the bildungsroman typically moves from the childhood home of the protagonist into distant places and through various adventures that lead
the central character toward adulthood and perhaps to reconnection with family and childhood friends. In the nineteenth century, the bildungsroman tended to resolve happily, as in the case of David Copperfield (1850), but often during the twentieth century, the ending was more inconclusive, as is the case, for example, in Catcher in the Rye (1951). The historical context for Beasts of No Nation is the increasing prevalence during the late twentieth century of children being enlisted as soldiers in civil wars in African countries. In Africa, beginning in Mozambique in the 1980s, conscription of children (by various criminal means) as guerrilla soldiers was widespread. Jeffrey Gettleman, in a 2007 New York Times article, stated: “The Mozambicans learned that children were the perfect weapon: easily manipulated, intensely loyal, fearless and, most important, in endless supply.” Rebel forces and warlords caught on to this resource, and the use of children in tribal conflicts and civil wars spread elsewhere, as in Somalia, Congo, and Uganda. Warlords and renegade gangs, whose aim is often mainly to plunder local villages, have difficulty enlisting adults but can manipulate children with magic (Beah). These children may be told, for example, that their captors come from the stars or that oil rubbed into their bodies will protect them from harm. Persuaded or coerced, the children participate in brutal attacks on local people, burning villages and murdering babies with sticks. They are controlled by fear, for they witness how children who resist are maimed or killed (Beah). In the 1990s, when human rights organizations such as Amnesty International learned that child soldiers were being forced to eat their victims in Congo, under the pretext that it would make them stronger, the issue came before the United Nations, and concerned groups advocated a mandate that soldiers worldwide be at least eighteen years of age. Only the United Kingdom and the United States refused to sign (Gettleman). Such human rights organizations as the Coalition to Stop the Use of
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Beasts of No Nation
Child Soldiers seek to prevent the enlistment of children in military groups and to work for the demobilization and rehabilitation of children who have been conscripted. In 2007 human rights organizations noted that using children in military action had spread worldwide, and an estimated 300,000 children were at that time actively involved in civil wars (Gettleman).
MAJOR CHARACTERS AGU, the narrator and protagonist, is a pubescent boy abducted into the ragtag troop of guerrilla soldiers led by a local thug. COMMANDANT is the unnamed leader of the guerrilla troop, a sadistic child molester and thug.
W Themes The all-encompassing theme of Beasts of No Nation concerns how warfare dehumanizes people and how children in particular are traumatized by participating in guerrilla warfare. The novel dramatizes how these children are forced into following the warlord, how they cannot think of escaping, how they are physically and sexually abused, and how drugs are poured into them to mobilize them to commit brutal obscene acts. Inhabiting a nightmare from which they cannot awake, these children develop symptoms of ego disintegration, dissociation, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Starvation causes hallucination. A second theme pertains to the role played by Western missionary and aid workers. One indication is the presence of the Bible in Agu’s family home and among the guerrilla soldiers. Agu remembers fondly his mother reading from the Old Testament violent stories of Cain and Abel and of Abraham and Isaac; he remembers the magical story of Jonah and the fish. In his eyes, this primary text foretells violence as a way of life. In the final pages of the novel, where Agu describes being cared for in a coastal facility of some sort, Father Festus speaks to him about “Confession and Forgiveness and Resurrection” (139), but Agu admits he does not understand these words. What he understands is that he misses Strika, the mute boy who kicked him into submission when Agu was abducted and then slept next to him on the ground. What Agu understands is missing his friend, Strika. But when Agu begins to tell his story to the aid worker Amy, he sees her eyes fill with tears. He may not understand the priest’s theological terms, but he understands what he sees in her eyes.
W Style The most outstanding aspect of style in this novel is the narrative voice. The little boy Agu speaks in Nigerian English, mostly using the present progressive tense; typically using the singular noun and verb, even when speaking about a plural subject; and tending to omit the terminal -s. For example, Agu reports in the opening scene, “My head is just starting to tingle right between my eye”; “I want to be moving, but my whole bone is paining me and my muscle is paining me like fire ant is just biting me” (1). It is clear his assailant is already
DIKE is Agu’s best friend in his school days who flees with his family before the local warfare begins. MISTRESS GLORIA is the head teacher in the school Agu attends briefly. GRIOT is a child soldier who tells stories late at night, replaying the hanging of his mother, which he witnessed in a marketplace. LUFTENANT is second in command of the guerrilla troop; he is killed by a young prostitute. RAMBO is an older child soldier who figures out he and Agu can leave the Commandant and wakes Agu to tell him so. STRIKA is the mute child soldier who discovers Agu hiding and beats him up; later, Agu thinks of Strika as his only friend.
starving: Strika is described as “short dark body with one big belly and leg thin like spider’s own,” and “His neck is just struggling too much to hold up his big head” (2). The world of Beasts of No Nation is compressed by this voice, which causes the reader to see through the narrowing aperture of Agu’s eyes the “lacerating” pain of his experience (Burns and Hoffert). Agu’s figures of speech reveal the brutality of his existence. One of these links violence and sex. The connection comes from the commander’s repeatedly equating murder with falling in love, the ecstasy of killing. The pubescent Agu uses the word soldier as the name for penis; an erect penis is a soldier standing at attention. His sexual arousal during attacks on villagers is sometime drug-induced. Then, too, the boy conceptualizes intercourse as anal rape, which is perpetrated on him repeatedly by his commander. At the same moment when the lieutenant is knifed by a prostitute, Agu is waiting outside the brothel, masturbating. In another scene, Agu describes how the soldiers hiding at night are more like a family than an army; he stumbles over their bodies, searching for Strika and not finding him. Agu’s terror contrasts with his memory of the darkness of being hugged by his mother, “This kind of dark is making me to feel like I am turning inside out, so all of my thought is floating outside of me and all of my clothe is inside of me. I am walking with my hand stretching out in front of me because I am trying to catch all of those thought that is
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Beasts of No Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Uzodinma Iweala was born in 1982 in Washington, D.C., the son of two Nigerian immigrants, his father a physician, his mother a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and the former finance minister and foreign minister of Nigeria. Iweala graduated from Harvard University where he was a Mellon Mays Scholar. His first novel, Beasts of No Nation (2005), was based on his undergraduate thesis. After graduation, he decided to couple his writing career with the pursuit of a degree in medicine from Columbia University. In 2005 Beasts of No Nation won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best work of literature by a young writer.
floating around me so I can make sure no part of me is missing” (106).
W Critical Reception Describing the reception of Beasts of No Nation, Ann Burns and Barbara Hoffert wrote in Library Journal that the novel got “uniformly glowing reviews.” Apparently
the critics were most impressed with the voice that narrates this story. A review in Publishers Weekly (PW) also remarked on “the extraordinary voice.” Identifying the “odd singsong cadence and twisted use of tense” in the “harrowing read,” the PW reviewer stated: “The impressionistic narration by a boy constantly struggling to understand the incomprehensible is always breathless, often breathtaking and sometimes heartbreaking.” Benedicte Page agreed: “The first thing you notice about the novel is the voice and its immediacy.” Simon Baker further explained Iweala’s handling of voice: Iweala “gives his hero a voice that is unliterary yet poetic, sometimes sliding into the present tense when describing the past: ‘They are giving me one room for myself’; ‘It is starting like this.’ At moments of high excitement, though, Agu finds himself in a kind of lexical blizzard, snatching desperately at words in his quest for expression: ‘Then they are angrying too much and just kicking so the whole of this place is shaking and the roof is falling apart small small.’” At first surprising and perhaps off-putting, this African English soon convinces readers that it is the only voice for this particular story, a voice that does not explain but only describes, juxtaposing contradictions and inexplicable, even surreal scenes without framing or distancing the reader from the impact of the action.
Nigerian refugees in Owerri, Nigeria. In Beasts of No Nation, a young boy from an unidentified West African country tells his story of losing his family and being forced into a group of rebel fighters. ª Bettmann/Corbis
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Beasts of No Nation
One effect of the voice is in how it conveys the speaker’s character. Baker applauded Iweala’s portrait of this child: “The acute characterization, the adroit mixture of color and restraint, and the horrific emotional force of the narrative are impressive. Still more impressive is Iweala’s ability to maintain not only our sympathy but our affection for his central character.” A review in the New Yorker observed that Beasts of No Nation depicts “war as a mesh of bestial pleasures and pain.” The reviewer admired Agu’s “primitive drive that enables him to survive his descent into hell . . . and keep hold of something resembling optimism.” This faith Agu has in education and his own ability to become something more than a soldier makes him, for the New Yorker, reviewer “a haunting narrator.” The Web site African Success explained how Iweala’s novel transforms its subject matter: “The novel is testament to the profound ability of literature to show horror, dismantle it and identify its parts, and arrive in the silent ether of the aftermath with something utterly unforgettable and, most importantly, worth cherishing.” In cautioning that readers “will come away feeling shattered by this haunting, original story,” Gillian Engberg summed up Iweala’s accomplishment: “Iweala distills his story to the most urgent and visceral atrocities, and the scenes of bloodshed and rape are made more excruciating by the lyrical, rhythmic language. In the narrator’s memories of village life, biblical stories, and creation myths, Iweala explores the mutable separation between human and beast and a child’s struggle to rediscover his own humanity after war.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
African Success: People Changing the Face of Africa, http://www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php? id=626&lang=en. Web. 4 Sept. 2010. Baker, Simon. “A Boy Soldier’s Heart of Darkness.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. New York Times Book Review 4 Dec. 2005: 70(L). Print. Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print. “Beasts of No Nation.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. Publishers Weekly 29 Aug. 2005: 29. Print. “Briefly Noted.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. New Yorker 14 Nov. 2005: 95. Print. Burns, Ann, and Barbara Hoffert. “All New, All Distinct.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. Library Journal 15 Mar. 2006: 48+. Print. Engberg, Gillian. “Iweala, Uzodinma. Beasts of No Nation.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. Booklist 1 Sept. 2005: 64. Print.
Gettleman, Jeffrey. “The Perfect Weapon for the Meanest War.” nytimes.com. New York Times 29 April 2007. Web. 4 Sept. 2010. Iweala, Uzodinma. Beasts of No Nation. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print. Page, Benedicte. “Agu’s Hard Lessons in Killing.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. Bookseller 22 Apr. 2005: 27. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Barnes, Tania. “When War Is Child’s Play.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. Library Journal 1 Sept. 2005: 42. Print. Examines briefly the dilemma of an author writing about a world and experience he knows nothing about directly. “Iweala, Uzodinma: Beasts of No Nation.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. Kirkus Reviews 15 July 2005: 756. Print. Explains that while the civil war is horrific, the battle for Agu’s soul is what matters most. Mnubi, Godfrey M., and John H. Hoover. “Review of Beasts of No Nation and A Long Way Gone.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. Reclaiming Children and Youth 22 Sept. 2008. Print. Explains how Iweala’s depiction of the acculturation of Agu to becoming dangerous boy soldier contradicts the age-old tribal rituals that bring a boy to respected and productive manhood. Okorafor-Mbachu, Nnedi. “Beasts of No Nation (Book review).” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. Black Issues Book Review 1 May 2006. Print. Compares the broken English used in the novel to other works by African authors. Stone, Misha. “Iweala, Uzodinma. Beasts of No Nation.” Rev. of Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala. Library Journal 1 Sept. 2005: 131. Print. Explains that the simple declarative voice of Agu makes the story all the more horrific. Gale Resources
“Uzodinma Iweala.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Sept. 2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i. do?&id=GALE%7CH1000164888&v=2.1&u= itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w Open Web Sources
African Success: People Changing the Face of Africa, at http//www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php? id=626&lang=en, has biographical information about Uzodinma Iweala. Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, at http//www. child-soldiers.org, provides information about efforts
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to stop the recruitment of children as soldiers and to provide for the rehabilitation of children who have been recruited. For Further Reading
Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print. Firsthand report of child soldier in Sierra Leone who states that ideology gets lost quickly in a bloodbath. Honwana, Alcinda. Child Soldiers in Africa (The Ethnography of Political Violence). Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. Print. Describes the recruitment, war experiences, and coping measures as reported by children in Mozambique and Angola.
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Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. Pueblo: Passeggiata P, 1986. Print. Describes the enlistment of a naive young man into the army to fight in the Nigerian civil war and how his idealistic hopes turn to disillusionment with his experience. Singer, P. W. Children at War. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006. Print. Thorough study of child soldiery written by a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Tutuola, Amos. The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. New York: Grove P, 1993. Print. Two novels from the 1950s, in one binding, by the famous African author and drawing from Yoruba folktale traditions. Melodie Monahan
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Beijing Coma By Ma Jian
W Introduction
W Literary and Historical
In this historical novel by dissident Chinese author Ma Jian, Dai Wei, the narrator, lies in a coma after being hit by a stray bullet at the 1989 student protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese government fired at demonstrators. Dai, comatose for ten years, only intermittently aware of his surroundings, is consumed by memories from his childhood and from his years as a student organizer. He becomes increasingly aware of the circumstances surrounding his body, including visits from his girlfriend and medical personnel, as well as his mother’s struggles to care for herself and to meet his medical needs. His memories and his growing awareness construct a bleak and compelling portrait of Chinese society from the days of the Cultural Revolution through the democracy movement of the 1980s and the economic revival of the 1990s, during which China became an increasingly important part of the global economy. Beijing Coma, the first major novel about Tiananmen Square, is a powerful critique of twentieth-century Chinese government from one of its foremost dissident writers. This harsh, often humorous account of Dai’s struggle with his burgeoning sexuality under the strictures of the Cultural Revolution—as well as the history of his father’s political persecution under the Maoist regime and his mother’s desperate attempts to survive in the capitalist 1990s—is intended to prevent the forgetfulness Ma sees as endemic in Chinese culture. The novel was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. It won the T. R. Fyvel Index on Censorship Award, was short-listed for the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and was on the long list for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Beijing Coma is set in the Chinese city of Beijing during the last two decades of the twentieth century, covering the years up to and following the 1989 student protests at Tiananmen Square. The protests were sparked by the death on April 15, 1989, of Hu Yaobang, a former government official who openly criticized the violence that characterized the regime of Mao Zedong and urged Deng Xiaoping’s government to further loosen the economic, cultural, and social controls of the Maoist regime. The protests began as a wave of public mourning for a beloved leader but escalated when a number of political groups arguing for political reforms seized the occasion as an opportunity for a large-scale demonstration. Thousands of students gathered on April 17, presenting the government with a list of demands to further Hu Yaobang’s reform agenda. When police responded to the demonstrators with force, the situation drew national and international media coverage and an outpouring of support for the protests. Over the next several weeks, hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, students, and dissidents gathered in Tiananmen Square. In other Chinese cities solidarity protests were held. Following a boycott of Beijing’s universities and a hunger strike by more than a thousand students, the Chinese government declared a state of martial law, but with thousands of people in the streets of Beijing, troops were unable to enter the city. Finally, on June 1, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (the governmental forces) pushed their way into the city and fired on the protesters. There is some question about the number of victims at Tiananmen Square (estimates vary between several hundred and several thousand), but the Chinese government’s actions have become emblematic of the oppressive behavior of authoritative governments and a reminder of the way that the repressions of the Communist era remain strongly in place.
Context
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Beijing Coma
MAJOR CHARACTERS A-MEI is Dai Wei’s second girlfriend and his first love, who ends their relationship when she moves to Hong Kong. LULU is Dai Wei’s childhood girlfriend. During the years of Dai Wei and Lulu’s childhood, sexual and romantic liaisons are forbidden, and his first traumatic encounter with members of the cultural police occurs when they are caught together, arrested, and harshly interrogated. CHEN HUIZHEN is Dai Wei’s mother and Dai Changjie’s wife. She is Dai Wei’s primary caretaker when he is comatose. She allows pharmacists access to Dai Wei’s body and sells his urine and his left kidney to fund special treatment from Master Yao, a member of the outlawed Falun Gong sect. During a government crackdown Master Yao is arrested, and Dai Wei’s mother, who has fallen in love with him, loses her mind. DAI CHANGJIE is Dai Wei’s father. An accomplished violinist, he lived and worked in America before returning to China to raise his family. He was a “member of the Five Black Categories” forbidden under Mao Zedong and spent twenty-two years in a labor camp. Branded a “rightist” for his resistance to Mao’s brutal Communist regime, he maintained dissident views for which his family was shunned. DAI WEI is the protagonist of Beijing Coma. Injured by a stray bullet during the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square, he lies in a coma for ten years, alternately remembering his childhood and the years leading up to the protests. Viscerally aware of his body as it functions and slowly wakes up, as well as intermittently conscious of visitors and activities outside his room, Dai Wei is both the narrator of the novel and a metaphor for China’s own sluggish awareness of its history. TIAN YI is Dai Wei’s girlfriend during the years leading up to Tiananmen Square. A psychology undergraduate at Beijing University, where Dai Wei is enrolled as a graduate student in biology, she is one of his few frequent visitors while he is in a coma.
Ma, who lives in exile, extends his critique to the current Chinese government, and his books are banned in China. The final image of the novel, in which Dai and his mother’s building is demolished around them by order of one of Dai’s old girlfriends, now a real estate mogul, registers the cruel spirit of the Deng Xiaoping era and its obsession with wealth. As Jess Row of the New York Times and others point out, Ma’s detailed portraits of individual moments of resistance compound the political criticism of the book and are particularly pointed since the book came out just before the 2008 Olympic games.
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W Themes Beijing Coma, as Row observes, “takes as a given Stephen Dedalus’s dictum [from James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man], ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up.’” The major theme of the novel, which connects Ma to such dissident writers as Milan Kundera of the former Czechoslovakia, is the way that individuals fit into historical events. Beijing Coma describes the organization and planning that led to the protests at Tiananmen Square in excruciating detail (the factional conflicts and power struggles that initiated the student movement make up the bulk of the novel’s pages), and Ma does so as part of an attempt to counter the encroachment of cultural amnesia. “No one,” Dai comments, “talks about the Tiananmen protests anymore.” While Tiananmen Square is the central event in Dai’s (and Ma Jian’s) life, the novel makes it clear that the loss of memory or the refusal to remember a traumatic past is also characteristic of twentieth-century Chinese history. The book focuses not only on political structures but also on the way that national government policies affect individuals, their lives, and their beliefs. These implications are most clearly articulated through the lengthy debates between Dai and his fellow student leaders as they argue about politics, about the relative benefits of different forms of protest, and when the protests would be most effectively implemented. The most compelling example of the long-term results of living under an authoritarian government is reflected in the changing views of Dai’s mother. During his childhood Dai’s mother, a former opera singer, shows only contempt for his father’s “rightist” views, which led to his imprisonment and to the ostracism of his family. After Dai is injured at Tiananmen Square, she finds herself similarly ostracized and left caring for him on her own. Their financial situation worsens, even in the thriving Chinese economy of the 1990s, and the government fails to accept any responsibility for Dai’s condition. Slowly she takes increasingly desperate measures to survive and to save her son and grows increasingly critical of the government she once believed in. The insanity that strikes her at the end of the novel is indicative of the longterm stress of living in fear of persecution and of being Dai’s sole caregiver. Beijing Coma is also a meditation on the role that literature, the arts, and the aesthetic experience in general can play in the midst of historical events. The image of a sparrow alighting on Dai’s chest, the experience that finally brings him back to consciousness, stands for a fragile beauty that is not strictly useful but that is nonetheless necessary. The sparrow, ordinary yet delicate, was marked for extermination in Maoist China, and the novel makes it clear that, while China has moved away from a strictly authoritarian government, the recovery will not be complete until there is room for this kind of simple pleasure. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Beijing Coma
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ma Jian, a London-based author of novels and short stories, was born in 1953 in the city of Qingdao, China. He worked as a watch repairman and a painter of propaganda boards until he was assigned a job as a photojournalist for a state-run magazine. In 1982 he quit his job as a photojournalist under political pressure and traveled around China (he later wrote about his travels in the 2002 memoir Red Dust). He moved to Hong Kong in 1987 when his collection of short stories about Tibet, Stick Out Your Tongue, was banned by the government, but he continued to travel in China. He missed the protests in Tiananmen Square only because his brother was injured in an accident that put him in a coma, an experience that inspired the narrator’s injuries in Beijing Coma. Ma lived in Germany between 1997 and 1999 and then moved to London with his wife, Flora Drew, who is a noted translator from the Chinese and translates Ma’s works in English. Ma has been allowed to travel in China, but his writings are banned, and he is forbidden from making any public or political statements. Ma was described by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian as “one of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature.” In addition to Beijing Coma, Red Dust (which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 2002), and Stick Out Your Tongue, Ma is the author of The Noodle Maker (2004) a finalist for a PEN literary award for a novel in translation.
Ma Jian, author of Beijing Coma. Getty Images
W Style Melissa Holbrook Pierson, in the Nation, refers to Ma as a “satiric playwright” who “pens scenes of madcap irony.” This ironic edge in Beijing Coma is widely noted by critics. Ma’s language can be lyrical, as in the passages remembering Dai’s old girlfriends, but history permeates every detail of Dai’s life, and the novel recounts the past and chronicles the present in excruciating, often unsparing detail. This attention to detail, which pushes the novel to over five hundred pages, is a powerful documentary tool that acts as a reminder that the brutal humor Ma displays originates in the events themselves rather than stemming from his stylistic choices. Beijing Coma has the length, sweep, and detailed renderings of an epic novel, but the structure is piecemeal, comprising three narrative strands: Dai’s memories, his current surroundings, and his descriptions of his slow physical recovery. The latter, italicized passages, scattered throughout the text, are full of the terminology—neurons awaken, ducts open up, fluids begin to move—one would expect from a medical student, but they are also exceedingly slow and lyrical, providing a contrast to his frenetic mental energy.
W Critical Reception Beijing Coma has received overwhelmingly positive reviews in the Western press. It was reviewed in nearly all the major book reviews and newspapers and unanimously declared an important book, one that not only details the years leading up to a major historical event of the late twentieth century but also provides an important meditation on the way that history is written or, in this case, forgotten. Ma’s sense of ironic humor is mentioned by almost all readers of the novel, who variously refer to it as a “tragicomedy” (Tash Aw), “blackly funny” (James Lasdun), “horror mixed with laughter” (Chandrahas Choudhury), and a mix of “gritty realism” and “absurdist satire” (Pankaj Mishra). Despite the bleak subject matter, however, critics see a powerful message of hope. The title of the novel in Chinese translates as “Land of Flesh,” and Ma explicitly connects Dai’s coma with the state of the Chinese people. Row quotes the preface to the Chinese edition of the novel: “Inside Dai Wei, there is a strong, resilient person who remembers, and only memory can help people regain the brightness of freedom.” Boyd Tonkin compares the novel to the sparrow it describes, saying it “is destined to be an eagle whose wings will cross the world. In Beijing [where the novel will not be published], powerful heads will hear them beat, and worry.”
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Beijing Coma BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Aw, Tash. “A Story of Tiananmen Square.” Telegraph [London] 26 Apr. 2008: n. pag. Print. Choudhury, Chandrahas. “Testament to an Unquiet Brain.” Observer [London] 20 Apr. 2008: n. pag. Print. Lasdun, James. “Children of the Revolution.” Guardian [London] 3 May 2008: n. pag. Print. Mishra, Pankaj. “Tiananmen’s Wake: A Novel of Hope and Cynicism.” New Yorker 30 July 2008: n. pag. Print. Pearson, Melissa Holbrook. “A Powerful Novel about Tiananmen Square.” Nation 4 Aug. 2008: n. pag. Print. Row, Jess. “Circling the Square.” New York Times 13 July 2008: n. pag. Print. Tonkin, Boyd. “Ma Jian: Slaughter and Forgetting.” Rev. of Beijing Coma, by Ma Jian. Independent [London] 2 May 2008: n. pag. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Fenby, Jonathan. “Beijing Coma.” Times [London] 9 May 2008: n. pag. Print. Fenby lauds Ma Jian for a “huge achievement,” calling Beijing Coma “both intimate and sweeping.” Prose, Francine. “Casting a Lifeline.” Rev. of Beijing Coma, by Ma Jian. New York Review of Books 26 June 2008: n. pag. Print. Well-known novelist Francine Prose gives a helpful, detailed narrative summary of Beijing Coma’s complicated plot. Smallwood, Christine. “Cage of Bones.” Los Angeles Times 24 May 2008: n. pag. Print. Smallwood’s article provides a short positive review and multiple excerpts from an interview with Ma Jian and his partner and translator, Flora Drew. Yang, Belle. “Nightmare on Tiananmen Square.” Rev. of Beijing Coma, by Ma Jian. Washington Post 25 May 2008: n. pag. Print. Yang’s short, positive review calls Beijing Coma “an avenue through which [the Chinese people can] retrieve their souls and emerge from their collective coma.”
complex politics, including the political and cultural policies of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. http// academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/ chinhist.html Scholar Richard R. Wertz maintains this comprehensive portal to Web sites documenting Chinese history and culture. Frequently updated, it includes current newsfeeds as well as stable links to a range of helpful sites. http//www.ibiblio.org/chinesehistory/ This collection of Web resources on Asia, maintained by Robert Y. Eng, includes chapters from seminal history texts and sections devoted to each of China’s major political figures. http//newton.uor.edu/Depart ments&Programs/AsianStudiesDept/china-history. html For Further Reading
Dillon, Michael, ed. China: A Cultural and Historical Dictionary. Durham East Asia Collection. Surrey: Curzon, 1998. This guidebook, arranged alphabetically, provides definitions for and explanations of a large array of keywords from China’s history and culture, a helpful resource for understanding the complicated historical background of Beijing Coma. Kim, Mikyoung, and Barry Schwartz, eds. Northeast Asia’s Difficult Past. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print. This collection of essays on remembrance and history in China, Japan, and Korea is part of the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Series, a series of volumes about the politics and aesthetics of memory in the modern era. Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Knopf, 1980. Print. Kundera’s novel, banned under the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, chronicles life under that regime and is often compared to Beijing Coma. Ma Jian. The Noodle Maker. London: Chatto, 2004. Print. Ma’s first novel, The Noodle Maker, which was excerpted in the New Yorker, relays the conversation between a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor who meet for dinner every week. The novel uses one of these dinners as the framework for a group of stories about the absurdities and cruelties of life in post-Tiananmen Square China.
Open Web Sources
———. Stick Out Your Tongue. London: Chatto, 2006. Print. This book of loosely autobiographical short fiction about a Chinese journalist traveling in Tibet was published in Chinese in 1997 and subsequently banned by the Chinese government for “harming the fraternal solidarity of the national minorities.”
A condensed history of China from its ancient roots through the modern era, this site provides a concise account of twentieth-century Chinese history and its
Pong, David. An Encyclopedia of Modern China. Scribner’s World History. Detroit: Scribner/Gale, 2009. Print. An engaging and up-to-date resource on
Gale Resources
“Ma Jian.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 Oct. 2010.
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Beijing Coma
Chinese history and culture from the eighteenth century through the present day, this two-thousandpage work, available in both print and electronic editions, contains articles from well-known scholars and academics, comprehensive bibliographies for further study, and an appendix of primary source material. Adaptations
Farewell: A Fantastical Contemplation on America’s Relationship with China. Dir. and chor. Donald Byrd. Score by Byron Au Yong. Spectrum Dance Theater (Seattle Theater Group), Seattle. 2010. Performance.
Farewell was produced in 2010 for the second year of Spectrum Dance Theater’s “Beyond Dance: Promoting Awareness and Mutual Understanding (PAMU).” According to Spectrum, the goal of PAMU is to bring collaborators together from all over the world to create works that “examine issues relating to personal liberty, freedom, security and social justice.” Part I, “Considering Beijing Coma,” was inspired by the work of Ma Jian, who served as an adviser.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Jenny Ludwig
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Bel Canto By Ann Patchett
W Introduction A detailed portrait of the human need for connection, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto won both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Set in the vice presidential palace of an unspecified South American country, the opening of the novel depicts a world of wealth and power, where an internationally renowned American opera singer has been invited to perform at a party given for a Japanese businessman whom the South American nation is hoping to woo. As the lights go down at the end of the performance, the home is taken over by terrorists, its occupants becoming hostages. The rest of the novel, based loosely on a real-life incident in Peru in the 1990s, traces the development of the bonds that form between the hostages and their captors in a period lasting over four months. Unfortunately for those individuals inside the home who have formed friendships and romances, the situation began as an act of terrorism and cannot end peacefully. Suspense and romance are features of the novel that contributed to its best-selling status.
W Literary and Historical Context
Patchett published her novel Bel Canto in a world in which the lines between literary fiction and genre fiction have become increasingly blurred. Bel Canto won literary awards in both the United Kingdom (the Orange Prize) and the United States (the PEN/Faulkner award), attesting to the idea that it is regarded as a work of literary fiction. Increasingly, literary novels such as Bel Canto are often becoming best sellers as well. In the months immediately following Bel Canto’s publication, a debate was waged in such papers and journals as the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Observer regarding literary and popular fiction and the boundaries of these
categories. The genesis of this debate was a controversial article penned by B. R. Myers in a July 2001 article for the Atlantic, in which Myers rails against the merging of literary and popular fiction in vehement tones. Judith Shulevitz responds directly to Myers’s attack on the current state of literary fiction. While Shulevitz admits that Myers makes some valid points, particularly in identifying literary prizewinners whose prose is overwrought, Shulevitz concludes “Myers doesn’t have a sure grasp of the world he’s attacking.” The same summer, Robert McCrum, in the Observer, comments that some critics have begun to regard literary fiction as a genre unto itself. Others have gone further, McCrum notes, and argue that the literary label “could simply be a way of describing a novel that places style before content, puts prose before plot and subordinates character and narrative to nebulous aesthetic concerns.” McCrum discusses Myers’s article as well, suggesting that while the tone of the piece is perhaps a bit vitriolic, there may be some truth to Myers’s view that literary fiction has become something much different, something much less, than it used to be. The historical event that inspired Patchett’s literary novel took place at the residence of the Japanese ambassador, near Lima, Peru. In December 1996 prominent political figures and business executives mingled to celebrate the Japanese emperor’s birthday. The party was attacked by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Over five hundred hostages, along with the guerrilla forces who had captured them, were crowded into the residence. Negotiations eventually collapsed in March. Over the course of the standoff, all but seventy-two hostages were released. In April 1997 Peruvian military forces stormed the compound, killing fourteen rebels. One of the remaining hostages and two Peruvian soldiers were also killed.
W Themes In Bel Canto, Patchett offers an examination of human relationships and the intrinsic human need for
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Bel Canto
connection. The vice presidential residence, once it is taken over by the terrorists, becomes an incubator for an array of new relationships, bonds which are formed and maintained in a vacuum. This unique environment is a void in which the personal and political pasts of captives and captors fall away. Social barriers such as wealth and power disintegrate. Patchett creates a scenario in which the individuals involved begin to regard each other truly as individuals. They are still products of their environment, but the demands of the external world cease to exist. In this new world, sophisticated, elite Roxane can nurture a talent that the uneducated soldier Cesar was unaware he possessed. Another young soldier, Ishamel, can observe a few games of chess and absorb the intricacies of the game. He can further inspire the paternal love of the vice president. The Japanese translator Gen finds in the South American guerrilla soldier Carmen a willing and able student of language, and a woman he can love. Bridges are formed between soldiers and hostages, paths to relationships that could not exist outside of the captured vice presidential compound. In allowing such relationships to blossom in this environment, Patchett attacks the socioeconomic and political barriers that divide people, that cut off the possibility of connection, that prevent the unity that manages to exist inside the compound. Yet the insulated world is breached when the government forces attack the compound, kill the terrorists, and rescue the hostages. Forcibly the government army injects back into the insular world the violence, struggle, and despair of the outside world. Notably, many of the company inside the residence seem to welcome the opportunity to forget the constraints associated with the world outside during their captivity. They pursue relationships that are obviously doomed, not tracing the logical course of possible outcomes. Forgetting families and obligations, the hostages make plans to enmesh their lives with those of their assailants, to marry, to adopt, to mentor careers. The willingness of Roxane, Gen, and Ruben, for example, to become involved in long term ways with individuals—Cesar, Carmen, Ishamel—whom the rest of the world can only see as criminals, rebels, and killers, demonstrates the intensity of their desire for meaningful emotional connections. All of their desires are thwarted with the deaths of the soldiers, and of Hosokowa. In the end, the marriage of Gen and Roxane appears as another example of the desperation to hold on to an elusive sense of connection. Gen and Roxane wed themselves to the past, and to the sense of community they enjoyed while held as hostages, as they join their individual lives in marriage at the end of the novel.
W Style Bel Canto is written in the third person from the point of view of an omniscient narrator. This allows Patchett the
MAJOR CHARACTERS THE UNNAMED ACCOMPANIST, a pianist, travels with Roxane Coss in order to perform at Mr. Hosokawa’s birthday celebration in South America. In the opening scene, the pianist kisses Roxane at the end of the performance. A diabetic, and deprived of insulin, he is the first hostage to die. BEATRIZ, a female soldier who remains undisguised and displays masculine traits. She is less involved with the captives than some of her companions, and is killed in the siege that ends the standoff. CARMEN is a female terrorist who is disguised as a man for part of the novel. She falls in love with Gen Watanabe as he tutors her. CESAR is a young terrorist soldier who displays a musical talent that impresses Roxane. She intends to train him after the hostage crisis has ended. ROXANE COSS is a famous American opera singer who is tempted, against her better judgment, to sing at a party held in a South American locale. The government there wishes to persuade Hosokawa to build a factory in their country, and they use Roxane, whom Hosokawa is known to greatly admire, to encourage him. Although she allows herself to be used as a pawn, Roxane stands up to the terrorists initially, attempting to escape and refusing some of their demands. She and Hosokawa fall in love over the course of their confinement. KATSUMI HOSOKAWA is the Japanese businessman whom the South American government officials are courting, in the hopes that Hosokawa will decide to build a factory in their country. His love for opera is well known, and the government persuade Roxane Coss to perform at a party held in Hosokawa’s honor. He falls in love with Roxane and in many ways forgets about his former life. RUBEN IGLESIAS is the vice president of the South American country in which the novel is set. Throughout the standoff, Ruben continues to play the role of the host, just as he did at the party. He grows fond of Ishamel and plans to adopt him when the crisis is over, but Ishamel is killed in the siege. ISHAMEL is another young terrorist who becomes well liked by many of the hostages. He learns to play chess by watching Hosokawa. He is killed in the government siege of the compound. JOACHIM MESSNER is a Red Cross worker who is called in to serve as a hostage negotiator. The terrorists fail to recognize Messner’s indications that a military rescue siege is imminent. SIMON THIBAULT, a French ambassador, clings to the memory of his wife and the scarf she has left him after she is released but he is kept as a hostage. GEN WATANABE serves as Hosokawa’s translator, but, during the ensuing months, his ability to translate in a number of languages makes him an instrumental figure in the communications between the terrorists, the other hostages, and the Red Cross worker Messner.
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Bel Canto
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, California. After her parents divorced, Patchett and her mother and sister moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where Patchett grew up. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, graduating with a bachelor’s of arts degree in 1984, and earning an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop in 1987. In 1992 Patchett published her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. A grant then led Patchett to the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College in 1993. Following a divorce, Patchett returned to Nashville and pursued her writing career, supporting herself as a waitress. She published two more novels before Bel Canto appeared in 2001. She married Karl VanDevender in 2005. Patchett has continued to publish critically acclaimed novels, including Run, in 2007.
distance from which she can offer a detached view of her large cast of characters, but it still provides some sense of intimacy between the characters and the reader as it allows Patchett glimpses into the thoughts of various individuals. In an interview with David Podgurski in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (as referenced in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series), Patchett states that she sought to write from the omniscient, third-person viewpoint in order to portray the drama of the story in the same manner that the original, historical event was broadcast on television. The story unfolds slowly, gradually, over the course of several months. The suspense built is of the emotional kind, as feelings among the characters grow and evolve, rather than a suspense rooted in violent action. Bel Canto contains this variety of suspense as well, but it is not the basis upon which Patchett builds her complex plot. Additionally, the language of the novel is controlled and precise, mirroring the distance of the narrator. From the novel’s opening scene, though, the prose can also reflect the emotion and passion of the novel’s characters. As they witness the accompanist reaching toward Roxane’s face to kiss her they collectively imagine a kiss that they do not see, as the lights are suddenly extinguished. Projecting their own desire for connection, the onlookers “assumed she continued her kiss” (Patchett 2). Using an omniscient third-person voice, Patchett lets her story unfold at arm’s length, yet also uses this voice to reflect her theme of the human longing for connection.
W Critical Reception
Author Ann Patchett wins the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2002 for Bel Canto. ª Rune Hellestad/Corbis
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As a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Bel Canto can only be regarded as a critical success. Wanda H. Giles, in a 2009 essay on Patchett for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, describes the novel as a “tour de force, a mix of realism, magic, and profound love and sorrow.” Giles goes on to characterize the critical reception of the novel in positive terms. Yet some reviewers found areas to criticize. Ruth Scurr, in a 2001 review for New Statesman, maintains, “the best parts of this uneven novel are the most hammed-up and comically implausible.” Nancy Poesy’s 2003 assessment for English Journal is more favorable. The critic explores Patchett’s thematic approach, stating, “the real beauty of Patchett’s story lies in the role that music and language play in the lives of her characters.” Poesy goes on to describe the way Patchett “artfully draws readers into the temporary, artificial world she creates.” Patchett’s use of the omniscient third-person voice comes under scrutiny by John Mullan in a 2002 essay for the Guardian. Mullan describes Patchett’s use of this voice, identifying the unusual way she employs it, noting that its efficacy is buoyed by a plot in which nothing really happens. Patchett risks the reader’s disbelief, Mullan contends, when her characters’ thoughts differ from their “official selves” TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Bel Canto
only in ways that are perpetually sympathetic. Patchett’s characterization is also the subject of some scrutiny, as James Polk in a 2001 review for the New York Times Book Review finds that “Patchett strains a bit too hard” to flesh out the revolutionaries as fully as she has the captives. Yet Polk also praises Patchett’s ability to provide “fine insights into the various ways in which human connections can be forged, whatever pressures the world may place upon them. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
“1 Hostage Killed in Daring Peru Rescue.” CNN World News 22 Apr. 1997. Web. 30 July 2010. Giles, Wanda H., and J. W. Bonner. “Ann Patchett.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 350. TwentyFirst Century American Novelists: Second Series. Ed. Wanda H. Giles and James R. Giles. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Print. McCrum, Robert. “The End of Literary Fiction.” Observer [London] 5 Aug. 2001. guardian.co.uk. Web. 30 July 2010. Mullan, John. “A Sense of Perspectives.” Guardian (13 July 2002): 33. Rpt. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale. Print. Myers, B. R. “A Reader’s Manifesto.” Atlantic July/Aug. 2001. the atlantic.com. Web. 30 July 2010. Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Print. “Patchett, Ann.” Contemporary Authors New Revision Series. Ed. Amanda D. Sams. Vol. 167. Detroit: Gale, 2008. 339-42. Print. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 30 July 2010. Poesy, Nancy. “Review of Bel Canto.” English Journal 92.6 (July 2003): 92-93. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Print. Polk, James. “Captive Audience.” New York Times Book Review 106.23 (10 June 2001): 37. Print. Scurr, Ruth. “Novel of the Week: Bel Canto.” New Statesman 130.4548 (30 July 2001). Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Print. Shulevitz, Judith. “The Close Reader: Fiction and ‘Literary’ Fiction.” New York Times 9 Sept. 2001. Web. 30 July 2010. Sims, Calvin. “A Nightmare in Lima: Hostages in Squalor.” New York Times 21 Dec. 1996. nytimes. com. Web. 30 July 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Clark, Alex. “Dangerous Arias.” Guardian 14 July 2001. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Print. Admires Patchett’s
ability to draw clearly defined portraits of such a wide range of characters and demonstrates parallels between the world of opera—a world in which one of Patchett’s characters is immersed—and Patchett’s novel. Foster, Aisling. “Martyrs to a Cause.” Times Literary Supplement 5230 (27 June 2003). Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Print. Praises the psychological complexities of Patchett’s characterization in Bel Canto. Miller, Laura. “Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.” Salon 22 June 2001. salon.com. Web. 30 July 2010. Maintains that despite lapses in realism in the plotting, Patchett’s novel is filled with carefully drawn, realistic characters. Zaleski, Jeff. “Review of Bel Canto.” Publishers Weekly. 248.16 (16 Apr. 2001): 42. Rpt. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Print. Assesses Patchett’s narration in Bel Canto, maintaining that the detached perspective is reflective of the characters’ varied cathartic experiences. Gale Resources
“Ann Patchett.” Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of American Literature. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 2009. 1282-85. Print. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 30 July 2010. “Bel Canto.” Novels for Students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 30. Detroit: Gale, 2010. 45-65. Print. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 30 July 2010. Open Web Sources
Ann Patchett’s author website provides an overview of her literary career and includes information about her upcoming work and appearances. http//www .annpatchett.com/ PBS NewsHour features an interview between Gwen Ifill and Ann Patchett in which the two discuss Bel Canto. The exchange includes an examination of the Stockholm Syndrome, the psychological syndrome in which captives develop emotional attachments to their captors. http//www.pbs.org/ newshour/conversation/july-dec02/patchett_ 7-02.html The Orange Prize for Fiction’s website includes a synopsis of Bel Canto, a brief author biography, an interview with Ann Patchett, and a review of the novel. http// www.orangeprize.co.uk/show/feature/orange-belcanto The BBC News on This Day feature provides an overview and the historical context of the hostage crisis in Lima, Peru, in 1996. http//news.bbc.co.uk/onthis day/hi/dates/stories/january/13/ newsid_3330000/3330127.stm
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Bel Canto For Further Reading
Fitzpatrick, Laura. “Stockholm Syndrome.” Time (31 Aug. 2009). Time.com. Web. 30 July 2010. Offers a brief summary of the psychological condition known as the Stockholm Syndrome, in which captives develop strong emotional connections to their captors, citing several famous instances, such as the Patty Hearst case. Patchett refers to the Patty Hearst case within the context of a discussion about Stockholm Syndrome, in an interview with Gwen Ifill about Bel Canto. Giampietri, Luis. 41 Seconds to Freedom: An Insider’s Account of the Lima Hostage Crisis, 1996-1997. New York: Presidio Press, 2007. Print. An account of the Lima hostage crisis written by one of the hostages, who happened to have once served as a field
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commander of special operation forces. Giampietri describes how he aided the government in the siege that eventually ended the crisis. Patchett, Ann. Run. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print. A best-selling and well-reviewed novel concerned with the relationships and the inner workings of a political family in Boston. ———. Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print. A memoir in which Patchett details the contours of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, a fellow author, who died of cancer in 2002 at the age of thirty-nine. Catherine Dominic
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Bitter Fruit By Achmat Dangor
W Introduction
W Literary and Historical
A finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Bitter Fruit is an important contribution to the literature of apartheid. Set in South Africa during the closing months of Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1999, Bitter Fruit explores the enduring ramifications of the apartheid system at both the private and public level through the story of one family’s difficult struggle coming to terms with a painful past of violent racism. The events of the novel begin to unfold when Silas Ali, a veteran of the antiapartheid struggle and now a lawyer for the famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), recognizes a man in a grocery store as the white security officer, François Du Boise, who arrested him twenty years earlier for his involvement in the African National Congress. Handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police van, Ali was forced to listen as Du Boise brutally raped his wife, Lydia, who like Silas, was classified as “colored” under the apartheid system. The couple has consciously avoided the subject of the rape for all these years. When Silas tells Lydia of the chance encounter, the long-kept secret incites tension between the two, in the end finally fracturing their strained and loveless marriage and causing a violent transformation in their son, a nineteen-year-old college student named Mikey who now discovers that he is the product of the assault. As each of the three Alis reacts completely differently to the disclosure and to the news that Du Boise is seeking amnesty through the TRC, Achmat Dangor questions the fidelity of the new government to the heroic ideals of the resistance movement and broaches important questions of historical memory that bear on themes of identity, truth, and authenticity.
Context
Bitter Fruit is to some degree autobiographical. Dangor was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1948, at the start of apartheid, the legally sanctioned system of racial segregation enforced in South Africa until 1994 with the transition to democracy and the presidency of Nelson Mandela. Apartheid made racial segregation an official government policy, classifying residents into groups— white, black, colored (mixed race), and Asian—as a means of maintaining the minority rule of whites of European descent. Like his protagonist, Silas Ali, Dangor was classified as colored and suffered under the “resettlement” programs that forced people out of their homes into designated group areas. Also like his protagonist, Dangor was active in the antiapartheid resistance of the African National Congress (ANC) and participated in an official capacity in the new government. In the novel, Silas serves as a lawyer and liaison for the TRC, the agency headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu designed as a courtlike forum for victims of racial abuse to air their grievances. The commission’s purpose was one of reconciliation and restoration, not retribution, as part of the negotiated settlement for democratic rule. Therefore, while perpetrators of the crimes were required to admit their acts in public, they were often granted amnesty for full confessions. Critic Ana Miller explains: “The new democratic South African Constitution and the TRC were products of a negotiated settlement with the apartheid regime. . . . The ensuing compromise limited the ANC’s constitutional ability to dismantle the economic and social legacy of apartheid and set substantial limits to the legal opportunities to prosecute against apartheid crimes.” Silas Ali’s involvement with the TRC, combined with Du Boise’s confession to Lydia’s rape and related crimes, leads to the
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Bitter Fruit
MAJOR CHARACTERS LYDIA ALI is of mixed race, the wife of Silas Ali and the mother of their nineteen-year-old son, Mikey. Lydia was raped by an Afrikaner police officer in 1978 as part of her husband’s punishment for subversive involvement in the African National Congress. More than twenty years later, the rape is still a taboo subject in the Alis’ crumbling marriage. MIKEY ALI is the biological son of Lydia Ali and François Du Boise, the white man who raped Lydia in 1978. When Mikey learns of his true parentage as a college student, he determines to seek vengeance against Du Boise. SILAS ALI is of mixed race, a former activist against apartheid, now a liaison for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the new democratic government of Nelson Mandela. Silas and his wife, Lydia, disagree on how best to grieve the past and punish François Du Boise for raping her twenty years earlier. FRANÇOIS DU BOISE is the white police officer who arrested Silas Ali in 1978 for his activities in the African National Congress. Du Boise is guilty of raping Lydia Ali, an assault that resulted in the birth of Mikey Ali. Du Boise seeks amnesty for his crimes through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The plot of Bitter Fruit revolves around the South African policy of apartheid. Anke van Wyk/Shutterstock.com
encounter. This private record, and her self-imposed silence, contrast with the court of public record, the TRC, which, while generally considered successful at effecting a peaceful transition to democracy, has been faulted for rewriting history in a manner unsatisfactory to the victims’ concerns for justice. The strategies Lydia and Silas use to reckon with the past foreground the collision of
complete breakdown of the Alis’ marriage. Ali wants Lydia to tell her story to the TRC, recommending some type of healing at the public level, but Lydia refuses, convinced that her very personal trauma will be swallowed up and forgotten in the homogenized collective trauma of the nation. Lydia and Silas remain unable to connect emotionally because they cannot share the pain of the racially motivated assault.
W Themes Lydia’s devotion to silence and Silas’s preference for rationalizing the rape appear alongside Mikey’s obsessive drive to punish Du Boise, whom he kills at the end of the novel before escaping to India to claim his rightful Muslim heritage. All three methods of confronting and comprehending the past reveal the poisonous effects of the apartheid system on the present. In addition, all three methods pose questions about the nature of historical memory and its methods of articulation, with important ramifications for individual and national identity, the healing of personal and collective trauma, and the truth of innocence and guilt. As Ronit Frenkel noted, “Bitter Fruit is a text that opens history’s processes in order to narrate its ambiguities.” Since the day of her assault, Lydia had kept a diary documenting her feelings and her mind’s inability to separate both Mikey and Silas from the violent
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Photograph of Achmat Dangor, author of Bitter Fruit. Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Mission US
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Bitter Fruit
new freedoms with the practical realities of government, suggesting that individual catharsis is subjugated in the interest of compromise and historical containment. Even Silas is cynical about the new government’s compromises. He observes that personal principles have also taken a backseat to the demands of bureaucracy: “Being in government is different from fighting for freedom. Things have to be managed now” (qtd. in Miller). For Mikey, on the other hand, personal and historic memories collide in what critic Shomit Dutta describes as a “radical destabilization of his sense of self.” His sense of alienation is first played out in a series of unemotional sexual encounters with older women. He then turns to vengeance and radical Islam as a means of ordering the chaos that has reconfigured his life, including the revelation that his maternal grandfather, a Muslim in India, had executed the British officer who raped his sister. Mikey’s murder of Du Boise, therefore, “links the colonial histories of India and South Africa through the racial and sexual violence of rape in both settings. . . . Mikey’s uninvited birthright haunts the family and is experienced as traumatic by Mikey, Lydia, and Silas” (Miller).
W Style Added to this shame of miscegenation is the shame attached by apartheid to the stigma of being “colored.” Lydia, Mikey, and Silas experience the evils of racial discrimination in different ways. Dangor portrays the psychological effects of racist ideologies through a thirdperson omniscient narration that explores the individual racial subjectivities of his characters. The novel is structured in three parts—Memory, Confession, and Retribution—that show the progressive development of the characters’ thoughts. These three parts—the personal response to trauma—are contrasted with the three elements of the public response to trauma as outlined by the TRC: Speak, Grieve, Heal. “But the story,” Barbara Trapido writes, “for all its political context, is stronger for keeping its focus on the evolving family drama, which it does through a series of interior sequences devoted in turn to Silas, to his wife Lydia, and to their meltingly beautiful but troubled and somewhat oedipal son, Mikey.”
W Critical Reception Reviewers of Bitter Fruit have frequently addressed the novel’s juxtaposition of the political realities of liberation with the ideals of the antiapartheid movement and with the need for victims of the system to finally heal old wounds. Critics have suggested that Mikey’s behavior bears some resemblance to the spirit of rebellion of his parents’ generation, which has now been replaced by an
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Johannesburg in 1948 at the beginning of white apartheid rule, Achmat Dangor became a tireless antiapartheid campaigner and was under government surveillance during the old regime. Since the transition to democracy, Dangor has written stories and poems describing firsthand the brutal racism of the apartheid years, the often violent struggle for freedom, and the negotiated peace that led to democratic rule. He is best known for the novella Kafka’s Curse (1997), set against the backdrop of Nelson Mandela’s 1994 election, and the novel Bitter Fruit (2001), a Man Booker and International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award finalist describing postapartheid disillusionment. Dangor has worked for the new government in a variety of capacities. He is currently the CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
institutional framework that rationalizes away the horrors of the apartheid system. A notice for Bitter Fruit in Kirkus Reviews averred that the novel “embodies . . . a sober, measured account of former revolutionaries adjusting to their new roles as pragmatic administrators.” Writing for the Guardian, Gabriel Gbadamosi observed, “A seed of contempt germinates in Mikey as he reflects on the failings of his parents’ generation: ‘The struggle sowed the seeds of bright hopes and burning ideals, but look at what they are harvesting: an ordinariness.’ Mikey’s response to these levels of deception and self-deception is an insistence on ‘nowness’, a determination to keep his own identity open to change as he goes in murderous search of his biological father.” At the other extreme is Lydia’s internalization of her trauma, which she considers superior to the whitewashed truth of victim and perpetrator testimony issued by the TRC. Through Lydia’s silence, Miller argues, Dangor “problematizes oversimplified, generalized, and politicized notions of healing and foregrounds the need to pay attention to the individual contexts of traumatization.” Critic Judith Chettle also remarked on Dangor’s disillusionment with the negotiated settlement to democracy and the constraints placed on the TRC: “And though public confessions of past evils are cathartic and admirable, Mr. Dangor suggests they are not enough. Apartheid was so profoundly destructive of society that forgiveness and forgetting are inadequate response to such a massive psychic injury.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Rev. of Bitter Fruit, by Achmat Dangor. Kirkus Reviews 73.2 (15 Jan. 2005): 68. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Chettle, Judith. “Apartheid’s Evils Described in Metaphor, but Ineptly.” Washington Times [DC] 17 Apr.
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Bitter Fruit
2005. Print. NewsBankinc. Access World News. Web. 30 Aug. 2010. Dutta, Shomit. “An Insurrection of the Loin.” Telegraph [London] 22 Dec. 2003. Print. Web. 27 Aug. 2010. Frenkel, Ronit. “Performing Race, Reconsidering History: Achmat Dangor’s Recent Fiction.” Research in African Literatures 39.1 (2008): 149-65. Print. WilsonSelectPlus. Web. 30 Aug. 2010. Gbadamosi, Gabriel. “Clouds over the Rainbow Nation.” Guardian 12 Dec. 2003. Print. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Miller, Ana. “The Past in the Present: Personal and Collective Trauma in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit.” Studies in the Novel 40.1-2 (2008): 146. Print. Trapido, Barbara. “Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor: Tainted by the Poison of South Africa’s Past.” Independent [London] 12 Dec. 2003. Print. Web. 30 Aug. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
“Bitter Fruit.” Publishers Weekly 252.9 (28 Feb. 2005): 41. Print. Suggests that Dangor cautions against placing too much faith in the power of forgiveness to heal the wounds of apartheid. Heltzel, Ellen Emry. “Memory, Retribution in PostApartheid South Africa.” Seattle Times 22 May 2005. Print. NewsBankinc. Access World News. Web. 28 Aug. 2010. Contrasts the private pain of the Alis with the public trauma of the South African nation postapartheid. Price, Melissa. “A State’s Brutality Leaves Hearts Calloused.” San Francisco Chronicle 1 May 2005. Print. SFGate.com. Web. 30 Aug. 2010. Contrasts the suffering of Silas Ali and his wife, Lydia, and discusses their inability to connect on an emotional level. Rochman, Hazel. Rev. of Bitter Fruit, by Achmat Dangor. Booklist 101.11 (1 Feb. 2005): 941. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Concludes from a reading of Bitter Fruit that neither silence nor truth about the evils of apartheid can heal old wounds in South Africa. Stuhr, Rebecca. Rev. of Bitter Fruit, by Achmat Dangor. Library Journal 130.2 (1 Feb. 2005): 67. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Notes that the reality of democracy in South Africa has not lived up to the dream of antiapartheid activists. Wigston, Nancy. “The Elite’s Favourite Dish—A Family Declines in the New South Africa with Nary a Character Worth Cheering For.” Toronto Star 12 Dec. 2004. Print. NewsBankinc. Access World News. Web. 30 Aug. 2010. Negative review finding little in the book to merit its short-listing for the Man Booker Prize.
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Gale Resources
“Achmat Dangor.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Also covered in Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, vol. 163. Open Web Sources
Michigan State University offers an online eight-unit study guide chronicling the rise of apartheid in South Africa and the struggle for freedom, including interviews with activists, archival footage of mass resistance and police repression, and other firsthand accounts and artifacts. The media collections are complemented by essays and a variety of curricular materials arranged in chronological fashion. The study guide is titled South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid, Building Democracy. The PBS video Post-Apartheid South Africa describes South Africa sixteen years after democracy. The piece contrasts employment prospects for blacks and whites in the new economy and interviews Archbishop Desmond Tutu about the country’s future. Tutu was the leader of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, widely credited with effecting the peaceful transition to the new government. For Further Reading
Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000. Print. Explores continuing racial tension in postapartheid South Africa through the story of a college professor’s midlife crisis. Disgrace earned Coetzee an unprecedented second Man Booker Prize; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. Gordimer, Nadine. Burger’s Daughter. New York: Penguin, 1980. Print. Widely praised story of a young white woman’s struggle to come to terms with the legacy of her activist parents who were martyred in the fight against apartheid. Gordimer, for most of her life a resident of Johannesburg, was herself prominent in the cause for freedom. She earned the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. ———. The House Gun. New York: Penguin, 1999. Print. Novel about relationships between blacks and whites in postapartheid South Africa and the politicization of personal lives. Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. Print. Story of a Zulu pastor and his disintegrating family, set amid the racial strife of 1940s Johannesburg. The novel, which first appeared in 1948, was considered a landmark publication for destroying any myths about the happy condition of blacks in South Africa. Still popular, Cry, the Beloved Country was one of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club selections. Janet Mullane
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Blacklist By Sara Paretsky
W Introduction With Blacklist, Sara Paretsky added another installment to her successful series of detective fiction featuring private eye V. I. Warshawski. In this volume, the twelfth in the series, Warshawski is hired to investigate unusual sightings at the uninhabited mansion of an elderly woman in a wealthy suburb of Chicago. While casing the grounds, she discovers, in the swimming pool, the dead body of an African American journalist who appears to have been murdered. When she begins to look into his death, she finds connections that go back to the House Un-American Activities Committee and the “red scare” of McCarthy-era 1950s America, finding eerie parallels between it and the post-9/11 world of legalized torture and the Patriot Act. Critics have applauded Blacklist as a worthy successor to Paretsky’s earlier V. I. Warshawski novels, noting in particular the way she ties the contemporary political climate to McCarthyism.
W Literary and Historical Context
Blacklist begins in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, when members of the Afghanistan-based militant Islamist group al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, executed a series of suicide missions on U.S. ground for the first time in history, killing nearly 3,000 people. With the entire country in a state of shock and intense fear, then-president George W. Bush and the sitting Congress declared war on Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, with the aid of an international coalition of troops. U.S.-led forces initially were able to drive the oppressive Taliban regime from power; most al-Qaeda operatives were dispersed to other countries, mostly Pakistan. Within the United States, the government enacted a series of antiterrorism measures, including the October
26, 2001, Patriot Act, which vastly expanded the power of government and law enforcement authorities to access individuals’ telephone calls, e-mail messages, and financial and medical records for information on possible terrorist activity. Because of the apparently arbitrary nature of the expansion of power allowed by the Patriot Act, it was greatly controversial and is the subject of much criticism in Blacklist. The war in Afghanistan is also a source of anxiety for V. I. Warshawski, as her boyfriend in the book is on assignment there as a war correspondent. When Warshawski begins investigating the death of the journalist in the swimming pool, she is taken back four decades to the events the journalist was researching at the time of his murder: an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of members of the Federal Negro Theater Project. HUAC was formed in 1938 as an investigative arm of the U.S. House of Representatives. Its primary purpose was always to curtail possible Communist activity in the United States, but this function reached fever pitch in the late 1940s, when the group opened hearings on the political activities of people involved in the film industry in Hollywood. As a result of the hearings, hundreds of actors, screenwriters, directors, and others were placed on a blacklist for allegedly being Communist sympathizers. In most cases this was never proven, and of those accused, most had their careers ruined. Meanwhile, in 1950, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy began making broad accusations about Communists and Soviet spies infiltrating the government. The era of McCarthy’s “witch hunts” became emblematic of a culture of paranoia and fear.
W Themes Critics have long noted that Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski series takes detective fiction in a new and unusual direction—most notably with a strongly feminist lead character in a genre that has been dominated by machismo. Reviewing the book for the Washington Post,
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MAJOR CHARACTERS KYLIE BALLANTINE is the African American performer with the Federal Negro Theater Project whose career was ruined when she was accused of Communist activities by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Her story is being researched by contemporary journalist Marc Whitby. CALVIN BAYARD is a publishing magnate and free-speech advocate in the 1950s. CATHERINE BAYARD, the granddaughter of Calvin Bayard, hampers Warshawski’s investigation and may have been involved in Whitby’s murder. DARRAUGH GRAHAM is the son of Geraldine Graham and a client of Warshawski. GERALDINE GRAHAM is the elderly matriarch of the wealthy Chicago family that owns Larchmont Hall. She aids Warshawski in her investigation. V. I. WARSHAWSKI is a private detective in Chicago, Illinois. MARCUS WHITBY is the African American journalist whose dead body Warshawski stumbles upon in the pool of Larchmont Hall.
Maureen Corrigan notes that the social and political commentary that runs through the Warshawski books has earned Paretsky the scorn of critics who prefer more traditional male private detectives. Corrigan asserts, however, that “Blacklist delves into the Red Scare of the 1950s and makes pointed connections between McCarthyism and present-day threats to civil liberties in post-Sept. 11 America. Blacklist is a thoughtful, hightension mystery that’s unafraid of making (still more) enemies for the Warshawski series.” Ann Hellmuth, writing for the Orlando Sentinel, said, “Paretsky doesn’t spare the punches in tracking how the increase in federal powers since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has encroached on personal freedoms.” The story, Hellmuth writes, “contains subtle warnings about the loss of freedoms and is a reminder of how absolute power can corrupt and destroy the freedoms it is meant to protect.” Additionally, Warshawski becomes involved in the case of a young Egyptian man in the United States on a work visa who has been accused—probably wrongly—of terrorism.
W Style Blacklist is a multilayered novel, with a narrative that moves back and forth from contemporary Chicago to mid-century Washington, D.C., in addition to periodic ruminations on Afghanistan and the Middle East. It is densely packed with characters and historical references,
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as well as with the trademark social commentary of the V. I. Warshawski books. As with other volumes in the series, Blacklist foregrounds the character of Warshawski herself as a hard-bitten, cynical, and tough-talking private eye—all qualities that would be not only expected but applauded in a male private detective, but are often considered abrasive and disconcerting in a female investigator.
W Critical Reception While earlier volumes in the Warshawski series examined social issues, Blacklist was widely viewed as Paretsky’s first overtly political novel. Most critics found her historical references and criticism of the state of contemporary civil liberties in the United States, as well as her story, compelling. Marilyn Stasio notes in a brief review in the New York Times the irony of the very vocal and frequently offensive Warshawski coming up against efforts to curtail her freedom of speech. Maureen Corrigan finds the novel one of the finest in the series, which she says overall have “grown richer and more ambitious with age.” But Corrigan also points to the political divide in the United States between those who support tougher national security measures regardless of their effects on civil liberties and those who oppose them—a difference that also divided critics and readers of Blacklist. Dorothy Blackman laments in her review for Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, “[W]ith so much sermonizing, Blacklist comes across mostly as a medium for expressing Paretsky’s own socio-political views. This turns an otherwise intriguing whodunit into a diatribe on civil liberties, and that is unfortunate.” Paretsky herself expressed surprise in an interview with Bob Cornwell on the Web site Tangled Web UK that Blacklist had been singled out as her only “political” work, maintaining that much of her work, and especially the V. I. Warshawski series, is inherently political. Not all the negative reviews of Blacklist had to do with its politics, though. Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Connie Fletcher describes the book as “weak, flailing, and often nonsensical. . . . With its murky plot, surprisingly ditzy heroine and multitudinous goofy moments, Blacklist may be the black sheep of the Warshawski series.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Blackman, Dorothy. “Author’s Politics No Mystery in Blacklist.” Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service 19 Nov. 2003. Print. Corrigan, Maureen. “Scoundrel Time; A Private Eye Uncovers Powerful Betrayals and Political Secrets.” Washington Post 30 Nov. 2003. Print. Fletcher, Connie. “V. I. Comes a Cropper; Sara Paretsky’s Newest Mystery a Rare Stumble in Renowned Series.” Chicago Sun-Times 5 Oct. 2003. Print. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Hellmuth, Ann. “Mystery Tied to McCarthy Era Draws Parallels with Patriot Act.” Orlando Sentinel 12 Jan. 2004. Print. Stasio, Marilyn. “Muzzling V. I.” New York Times 19 Oct. 2003. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Six, Beverly G. “Breaking the Silence: Sara Paretsky’s Seizure of Ideology and Discourse in Blacklist.” South Central Review 27:1-2 (2010): 144-58. Print. Argues that Paretsky turns the detective fiction paradigm on its head by focusing on corruption and conspiracy within state apparatuses, using the ideology of culture and politics. Gale Resources
Dempsey, Peter. “Sara Paretsky.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 306: American Mystery and Detective Writers. Ed. George Parker Anderson. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Print. Klein, Kathleen Gregory. “Sara Paretsky: Overview.” St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers. Ed. Jay P. Pederson. 4th ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. Print.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sara Paretsky was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1947 and was raised in Kansas. She holds a BA in political science from the University of Kansas, an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, and a PhD in history from the University of Chicago. She worked with the poor on Chicago’s South Side in 1966 and moved there permanently in 1968. Paretsky’s works are strongly informed by her young adult experiences in the women’s and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Wyrick, Laura. “Sara Paretsky: Overview.” Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Print. Open Web Sources
Cornwell, Bob. “‘Anger Is a Very Bad Place to Start,’ Says Sara Paretsky.” Tangled Web UK. Web. 9 Aug. 2010. Gigstad, Judy. Rev. of Blacklist, by Sara Paretsky. Bookreporter.com. Web. 9 Aug. 2010.
In Blacklist, private eye V. I. Warshawski conducts an investigation at a Chicago mansion. Joseph Squillante TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Blacklist For Further Reading
Bentley, Eric, and Frank Rich, eds. Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts on Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. New York: Nation Books, 2001. Print. Presents and discusses testimony given before HUAC by people working in the film and theater industries from 1938 to 1968. Ceplair, Larry. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960. Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P 2003. Print. Focuses on the effects of the HUAC investigations on those working in Hollywood.
Paretsky, Sara. Writing in an Age of Silence. New York: Verso, 2009. Print. Memoir in which Paretsky discusses the effects of her formative experiences in the social justice movement of the 1960s and 1970s on her worldview and her fiction. Adaptations
V. I. Warshawski. Dir. Jeff Kanew. Perf. Kathleen Turner, Jay O. Sanders, and Charles Durning. Hollywood Pictures, 1991. Film adaption of Deadlock, one of the books in Paretsky’s Warshawski series. Received mixed reviews.
Hoffman, Jan. “Nancy Drew’s Granddaughters.” New York Times 7 July 2009. Print. Discusses the legacy of the famous girl detective and quotes Paretsky on Nancy Drew.
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Nancy Dziedzic
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A Blessed Child By Linn Ullmann
W Introduction Linn Ullmann’s A Blessed Child, published in Norwegian in 2005 and then in English in 2009, consists mainly of the flashback memories of Isak Lövenstad’s three daughters, as they undertake a rare visit in 2005 to their father’s retirement home on the island where they vacationed as children between 1972 and 1979. Now Isak is eighty-four, in what he calls the “epilogue” (31) of his life, and he invites the eldest, Erica, to come for a winter visit. Ill at ease about driving, especially in bad weather, Erica urges her sister Laura to come along and do the driving, and when that fails, she urges her to pick up their third sister Molly and follow along separately for a reunion. For various reasons, each daughter has ambivalence about such a visit. It is during the journey toward the island home that the flashbacks occur, each daughter’s separate memories of the summer vacations elicited by the current trip. The major flashbacks revolve around the last summer they went to the island. That year, 1979, was the hottest summer on record since 1874; Erica and her intimate but clandestine friend Ragnar turned fourteen on the same day; Laura was eleven; and Molly was seven. During this summer of pubescent sexual initiation, the teens on the island entertain themselves with pornographic magazines and hurtful game-playing that escalates from bullying and psychological abuse to physical abuse under the influence of the cruel ringleader, Marion Bodström. Ostracized Ragnar is betrayed by only friend Erica, and on the night of her birthday party, her party guests, her sisters, and she take off after him, ultimately causing what is later called a “deliberate accident” (251), a stoning that leads to his drowning. This tragedy brings to an end the summer island visits, but its legacy variously affects Erica and Laura in later years, less so their younger sister. As they travel back to the
island in 2005, they revisit in memory the summers they shared as children, though they are less able to discern how those memories cast their shadows across their adult lives. A Blessed Child was long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and short-listed for Norway’s Brage Prize.
W Literary and Historical Context
In some ways, A Blessed Child is an example of postmodern fiction, in which multiple points of view are presented, each limited and somewhat unreliable. This handling of the perspective through which the action is viewed undermines the single all-encompassing authority that shapes third-person omniscient point of view. Somewhat in the tradition of her father, filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, Linn Ullmann defines the present time in this novel, the three daughters’ winter journey to Hammarsö in 2005, by the surfacing memories of island summers from 1972 to 1979. These remembered experiences are as present in the present time as the present journey is. Postmodernism privileges this subjective sense of time, the way the past insinuates itself in the present, and for a novel whose immediate timeframe is a two-day car trip, it is a fitting way to arrange the plot. As the daughters return after a hiatus of more than twentyfive years, their separate memories of those summers surface and are in a sense relived. Several points of historical context are provided in the novel, first of which, perhaps, is the fact that Isak Lövenstad is said to have made his professional reputation as one of the pioneers of ultrasound. Sonar and other underwater detection systems were beginning to be studied in the nineteenth century, and sonar was used to navigate submarines, particularly after the Titanic sank in 1912 and during World War I. Beginning in the 1940s in Europe, the medical diagnostic possibilities of ultrasound
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MAJOR CHARACTERS MARION BODSTRÖM, Erica’s peer, who develops into the abusive ringleader of a group of teens who vacation on the island. ERIKA LÖVENSTAD, eldest daughter of Isak and his first wife, Elisabet, becomes emotionally involved with Ragnar and is sexually molested by Marion. ISAK LÖVENSTAD, a Swedish gynecologist and womanizer, has three daughters by three different women, two his wives, and untold other affairs. Isak retires to Hammarsö permanently after his second wife dies. LAURA LÖVENSTAD, daughter of Isak and his second wife, Rosa, tends to feel responsible for helpless or vulnerable others. ROSA LÖVENSTAD is Isak’s second wife, who threatens to leave Isak when his mistress Ruth gives birth to his third daughter, Molly. MOLLY is the daughter of Isak and his mistress Ruth. Ten and seven years younger than her two half-sisters, Molly practically never sees Isak after she is five years old. After her mother dies, Molly is raised by her maternal grandmother. ALFRED PAAHP is the old man living in the Colony, a subdivision in Oslo where Laura lives with her husband and two children. Grieving over the death of his brother and lonely, Paahp whiles away his days making beaded bracelets that he gives to the local little girls, much to the consternation of some neighbors. PALLE QUIST is the frustrated author who lives on Hammarsö and writes and directs the Hammarsö Pageant, which is performed each summer between July and August. RAGNAR, born on the same day and year as Erica, is the island outcast, who develops an intimate secret relationship with Erica and hides out in his hut in the woods, where he feels safe from the other teenagers. SIMONA is Isak’s island housekeeper from the 1970s into the early 2000s. During the twelve years when he does not use his house, she maintains the place and enjoys brief stays there away from her busy home and family life.
techniques were explored and developed in research centers around the world (Woo). By the late 1950s, fetal images were being captured that provided new information for obstetricians to use in treating their patients. Late 1950s research conducted in Lund, Sweden, promoted the obstetrical applications of the diagnostic tool. Akf Sjovall and Bertil Sunden were among a group of medical researchers who contributed to the advancement of ultrasound in perinatal medical treatment.
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As for a cultural context, the novel indicates that in the 1970s, Sweden and Swedish language were dominant in Scandinavia. It is noted that in Sweden no one spoke Norwegian or watched Norwegian television, but in Norway, people typically spoke both Norwegian and Swedish, and in their homes, both Norwegian and Swedish television programs were available. The multinational character of the Lövenstad blended family and certain tensions between its members reflect this cultural imbalance.
W Themes The central theme in A Blessed Child encompasses various subjects having to do with group membership and community and the kinds of pressure that are exerted on members and against excluded others. One related subject explores how the family unit is defined, especially regarding offspring from multiple marriages and extramarital relationships. Laura thinks of herself as the full sister and Erika, from Isak’s first marriage, and Molly, from his extramarital affair, as half-sisters. Laura takes them in, especially bonding with the much younger Molly, for whom Laura feels responsible from their first meeting. Related to the idea of family structure and membership is the idea of community, one instance of which is given in the Colony, a subdivision of homes in Oslo where Laura lives with her husband and two children. The Colony community response to Alfred Paahp, the elderly Dane who makes beaded bracelets for the neighborhood girls and allows his property to deteriorate, illustrates how a social group works to protect itself and exclude individuals who are different and seem to pose a threat or erode economic investment by their habits. While Paahp spends his time stringing his beads and making bracelets for the children, the community association is holding its meetings to figure out how to get him to move away. Consulted lawyers say there are no grounds for his removal, but narrow-minded and suspicious parents want the man out of the area. The idea of group membership and the exclusion of isolated others is played out with fatal results by the island teens who are controlled by Marion, the alpha-female. In addition to subjects pertaining to solidarity and ostracism are those associated with compassion and kindred feeling. Examples occur in the novel regarding the family’s responses to birds: the injured bird on the lawn that makes Laura sit down and cry; the bird that flies into the study that frightens Molly who calls it toward the open window; and the elaborate funeral the family enacts for the sparrow. Linked to these instances is the scene in which Laura goes to Paahp’s house and holds his hand while prompting him to not answer the door when the committee comes to call. Laura, called “a love child” (141) by her father, is the one who stretches to include TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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others. She takes up crying Molly when the adults are out of hearing range, she holds hands with Paahp, and “her arms were long enough” (147) to embrace her husband and children.
W Style Told in limited omniscient third-person point of view, the novel is divided into five sections, each of which contains smaller sections, juxtaposed like fragments from a larger design, with remnants from the past surfacing but suitably not in chronological order. The current story is the 2005 winter trek to the island, extended by detours both literal and psychological. Within that overarching narrative are the flashbacks that surface in each sister’s thoughts as she travels toward her now elderly father. Another feature of Ullmann’s style is the way it changes to match the age of the sisters in the flashback being remembered. One instance occurs in 1975 when Laura is seven and discovers three-year-old Molly left in a carriage at Isak’s front door. Laura thinks, “It wasn’t a newborn because it was quite big and could sit up by itself” (113). Laura reasons that Erika and Rosa are away, and Isak cannot be disturbed for any reason. An
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and film director Ingmar Bergman, Linn Ullmann was born on August 9, 1966, in Oslo, Norway. She obtained a BA in English literature from New York University in 1988, began a graduate program there, and then left without completing it to return to Oslo and pursue a career in journalism. She writes on political and cultural subjects, her work often appearing in Aftenposten, a widely circulated Norwegian newspaper. Her novel, A Blessed Child (published in English in 2009) was long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and short-listed for Norway’s Brage Prize. Before that work, Ullmann published three novels: Before You Sleep (1998), Stella Descending (2001), and Grace (2002). As of 2010, Ullmann lived in Oslo with her husband, Niels Fredrik Dahl, a Norwegian novelist and dramatist.
abandoned baby does not make for an exception. Laura is alone to resolve the problem and she does; she takes the baby for a ride in the carriage.
A Scandinavian island. A Blessed Child follows the three daughters of Isak Lövenstad as they visit him at his retirement home, which is located on the same Norwegian island where the girls spent many childhood vacations. Andrey Starostin/Shutterstock.com TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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A Blessed Child
W Critical Reception
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Certain reviews of A Blessed Child began with identifying Ullmann’s parents and perhaps linking this novel to the author’s biography. Another response was to appreciate the writing, the lack of chronological order to the events, and the skillful translation by Sarah Death, but to criticize the ending for its lack of resolution, its failure to assign blame and responsibility. Representative of both these approaches is the review by Stacey D’Erasmo, who began by pointing out autobiographical details in the novel. About its backward glancing narrative, D’Erasmo wrote: “Tenderness . . . can convey an illusion of connection. . . . Desire and memory tangle and dissolve in melancholy.” During that “pivotal summer of 1979,” D’Erasmo asserted, “the savage adolescent culture” forces Erika “to choose between power and the heart.” The failure of the novel, according to D’Erasmo, is that Ullmann “shies away from hammering home . . . Isak’s deep moral failure” and that she leaves the past “more vivid than the present,” which is not true to life. Many reviewers praised Ullmann’s writing style; for example, Elizabeth Dickie lauded Ullmann for her “impressive voice” and her “facility with language.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly described the book as an “arresting and well-observed saga,” but it cautioned that the novel’s “tonal coolness won’t be for everyone.” That coolness might have been on the mind of a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews who praised the novel’s “stark beauty” but went on to observe how the story “leaves moral issues tantalizingly open.” In a review that placed Ullmann’s novel in a larger literary context, Jennifer Vanderbes explained how A Blessed Child offers a “fresh change” from the dominant “pattern of bad boys and female victims,” calling Ullmann’s book “a rare literary foray into [the] dark realm” of “psychological warfare and silent cruelty that often pass for female friendship.” But according to Vanderbes, Ullmann commits a serious mistake. In this novel, which according to Vanderbes makes Lord of the Flies “look almost prudish,” Ullmann “seems unsure in the end who, exactly is guilty.” The charge from Vanderbes is: “Having bravely portrayed a world where girls behave wickedly, Ullmann curiously reverts to painting them as victims, not culprits.” Also commenting on the autobiographical elements and praising the translation, Boyd Tonkin identified the central subject: “Conformism shows its savage streak among the island’s pubescent girls,” who are “led by hyper-sexual teen queen Marion.” Ullmann has psychological insight, according to Tonkin, showing how “loneliness clings like a burr to all of Isak’s girls.” In all, these reviewers found much to admire in A Blessed Child, but most seemed to expect that the ones who commit crimes will be identified and punished in the end, and such critics bulked at punishment being the means of group solidarity, a new social adhesive, rather than a means of justice.
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Works Cited
D’Erasmo, Stacey. “Girls of Summer.” Rev. of A Blessed Child, by Linn Ullmann. New York Times Book Review 17 Aug. 2008: 6(L). Print. Dickie, Elizabeth. “A Blessed Child.” Rev. of A Blessed Child, by Linn Ullmann. Booklist 1 Aug. 2008: 33. Print. “Growing Up Is Hard to Do.” Rev. of A Blessed Child, by Linn Ullmann. Publishers Weekly 12 May 2008: 34. Print. Tonkin, Boyd. “Cries and Whispers on the Chilling Baltic Breeze.” Rev. of A Blessed Child, by Linn Ullmann. Independent [London] 5 Sept. 2008. Print. “Ullmann, Linn: A BLESSED CHILD.” Rev. of A Blessed Child, by Linn Ullmann. Kirkus Reviews 15 June 2008. Print. Vanderbes, Jennifer. “Girls Behaving Badly.” Rev. of A Blessed Child, by Linn Ullmann. Washington Post 10 Dec. 2008. Print. Woo, Joseph. “A Short History of the Development of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology.” http://www .ob-ultrasound.net/history1.html, n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Jeffrey, Ben. “A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann.” Rev. of A Blessed Child, by Linn Ullmann. www.guardian.co. uk. Guardian 5 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. Admires the translation, sees parallels to Lord of the Flies in the fateful summer of 1979, and finds the lack of resolution at the end insufficient for the rise in action. Gale Resources
“Linn Ullmann.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. http//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? &id=GALE%7CH1000135537&v=2.1&u =itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w Open Web Sources
Leserglede provides information on Ullmann, including an interview and reviews, at http//www.leserglede. com/norwegian-author/linn-ullman.html For Further Reading
Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds. Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton, 1997. Print. Post–World War II innovations in American fiction writing, compiled and analyzed. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. The 1954 novel portraying boys on an TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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island who become feral, to which A Blessed Child is compared by some reviewers.
lary novel in which a father tells his life story to the daughter he abandoned.
King, Lily. Father of the Rain. New York: Atlantic Monthly P-Grove/Atlantic, 2010. Print. Set against the Nixon resignation, a story of polarized children in the wake of their parents’ divorce.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print. The 1939 novel about a mentally challenged strong man and the man who tries without success to protect him.
Norman, Howard. What Is Left the Daughter. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. Print. An episto-
Melodie Monahan
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The Blind Assassin By Margaret Atwood
W Introduction Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) is an intricately structured story of two sisters who grow up in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, between the two world wars. The narrative contains the main story, told in the first person by Iris Chase Griffen, the surviving sister. Interspersed with her story of their lives are newspaper clippings and parts of a novel, apparently written by Laura Chase, that contains a science fiction story. The novel opens with Iris’s announcement that soon after the end of World War II, Laura drove Iris’s car off of a bridge and drowned. Iris struggles to remember and record the details in her narrative that lead up to the tragedy. She includes stories of the decline of her once prosperous family led by her industrialist father Benjamin Chase, her subsequent marriage to the wealthy businessman Richard Griffen, Laura’s confinement in a mental institution, and the sisters’ relationship with Alex Thomas, a leftist revolutionary who is on the run from governmental officials. Iris hopes that her estranged granddaughter, Sabrina, will eventually read her account of their family history. The important parallels between the various narrative threads eventually emerge in the novel’s working out of its complex themes, including the difficulties inherent in telling the truth about the past.
W Literary and Historical Context
The important historical contexts in The Blind Assassin are the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s and the treatment of women during that decade. Canada was particularly hard hit during the Depression. One of the major causes of the economic hardships Canada faced was the collapse of world trade, which generated
approximately one-third of the country’s gross national income. The resulting loss of jobs was compounded by cutbacks on goods and services at home. When Benjamin Chase is forced to close his button factory, he determines that the only way he can protect his daughters is to arrange a marriage between Iris and Richard. The economic hardships Canadian workers endure prompt Alex to become a union organizer, which eventually leads to his participation in illegal activities. Women had limited choices in Canada and in other Western countries during the first half of the twentieth century. At an early age, girls were trained to take on the traditional roles of wife and mother. Women who tried to venture outside the home and establish careers were denounced as a threat to family stability, especially during the Depression when it was difficult for men to find work. Instead, women were encouraged to focus on supporting their husbands’ careers and to sublimate their own ambitions. It took three more decades for women to begin to gain any measure of social and economic advancement. Iris suffers from this oppressive environment, which causes her to sacrifice herself for the economic security of herself and her sister. Her father forces her into marriage with a man she does not love and eventually grows to revile. Laura also becomes caught in this web of oppression. When she tries to rebel, Richard has her confined in a mental institution.
W Themes The Blind Assassin examines how difficult it can be to tell the truth about one’s past, especially when it involves the collapse of a family. Iris claims that she is trying to write an accurate account of her and Laura’s experience, but she often is an unreliable narrator, neglecting to provide all the details. One such detail that she does not include is the reason that she told Laura about her own relationship with Alex—information that contributes to Laura’s
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death. She avoids anything in her narrative that may point to her negligence and culpability in her sister’s tragedy. She also suggests the motive behind such omissions when she admits that she wants to memorialize herself, to assert her existence, especially to her estranged granddaughter. Another related theme involves the sacrifices Iris was forced to make to protect her sister as well as herself. When she chronicles the soul-deadening life she endures with Richard, admitting that her father coerced her into the marriage to save what was left of the family, she hints at her bitterness over the responsibilities she had to take on, which compounds her anguish. This bitterness appears to have led her to acts of vengeance and subsequent feelings of guilt, which she refuses to acknowledge in an act of self-preservation.
MAJOR CHARACTERS BENJAMIN CHASE is the sisters’ distant father. When he loses his fortune, he arranges Iris’s marriage to Richard. He eventually drinks himself to death. LAURA CHASE is Iris’s naive, fragile sister. She commits suicide after she learns of Iris’s relationship with Alex. IRIS CHASE GRIFFEN is the octogenarian narrator of the central story. She tries to piece together the truth about her and her sister’s past, but her sense of pragmatism conflicts with her feelings of guilt, and as a result, her narrative remains inconclusive. RICHARD GRIFFEN, Iris’s cold, ambitious husband, tries to maintain control of Laura as well as Iris.
W Style Atwood constructs a complex interplay among the four fragmented narratives in the novel. The newspaper clippings provide some of the facts, including the deaths of the family members as well as historical accounts of the Depression and World War II. Iris’s narrative provides only glimpses of the details that lead up to the collapse of her family. The novel published under Laura’s name that Iris includes in her narrative provides clues to the missing pieces in her own story. The tale of the lovers who construct a science fiction narrative that centers on the sacrifice of virgins echoes her feelings of oppression and sacrifice. The title of this narrative, “The Blind Assassin,” hints at Iris’s role in her sister’s tragedy. Her word choice here implies, or at least tries to convince readers, that while she in a sense was her sister’s assassin, she was blind to what she was doing. Ironically, Iris has a keen eye for historical detail, as her name suggests, especially those that help document her life in high society during the Depression and World War II. She arranges her narrative into chapters with titles that call attention to her world—names of places like “The Imperial Room” and The Arcadian Court” or clothing items such as “Red brocade,” The eggshell hat,” or “The houndstooth suit.” Other chapter titles such as “The Weary Soldier” and “Loaf Givers” reflect the realities of war and poverty.
W Critical Reception The critical reception for The Blind Assassin was overwhelmingly positive, with reviewers citing its welltold story, vivid detail, and compelling characters. Many critics noted that the intricate narrative construction was at times difficult to follow yet ultimately rewarding. B. A. Andrews’s review of the novel for World Literature Today commented on Atwood’s postmodern narrative technique: “the writing defines ‘play’ as only great novelists
WINIFRED GRIFFEN PRIOR, Richard’s sister, runs Richard’s household in an effort to ensure that Iris and Laura meet the social standards she has set for all of them. REENIE, Benjamin Chase’s good-hearted housekeeper, looks after the two sisters as they are growing up. ALEX THOMAS is a leftist revolutionary who becomes involved with Iris and Laura.
understand the word: it is precise, mischievous, deft, educated, mysterious, stratified, ambitious, allusive, confounding, spirited, maddening, and clarifying.” Andrews concluded that the novel, while “demanding,” is “dependably entertaining.” Lorrie Moore, in her review for the New Yorker, claimed that The Blind Assassin “is the best example of the kind of narrative pastiche at which [Atwood] excels.” In her review of the novel for Americas, Barbara Mujica insisted it is “like a funhouse hall of mirrors—full of strange twists, false leads, misleading reflections, and labyrinthine trails that weave in and out of one another in the most intriguing way.” Laurie Selwyn, in her review for the Library Journal, found the narrative “compelling,” offering “many different layers of interpretation.” Critics also praise Atwood’s use of language. For example, Mujica commented, “in spite of her intricate plot, her prose flows effortlessly” in this “brilliant and beautiful novel, a veritable tour de force.” She added: “Atwood uses language so deftly. Her metaphors are often astonishing in the way they join together unrelated notions. Yet they never seem intrusive or contrived.” Elizabeth Templeman, in an article for Southern Humanities Review, pointed out Atwood’s “piercing wit, in truncated phrases strung together sometimes relentlessly.” She also praised Atwood’s “meticulous and lustrous” historical detail, which in her view adds to the story’s power.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Margaret Atwood began writing when she was six years old and decided less than a decade later to be a writer. She has written several volumes of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, short stories, and children’s books and has been published in more than twentyfive countries. Atwood has received popular and critical acclaim for her writing along with several awards, including Le Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. In 2000 she was awarded the Man Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin. Among her most critically acclaimed works besides The Blind Assassin are The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Alias Grace (1996). As of 2010, Atwood lived in Toronto.
Atwood’s characterizations, however, generated some disagreement among critics. Templeman praised Atwood’s characters, who, she argued, are “forcefully
drawn, demanding both interest in their plights, and sympathy.” Andrews, however, asserted that Atwood’s characters “are rarely likable . . . [o]r even ethical,” including those in The Blind Assassin. Yet, she conceded, readers bring their own compassion to the novel and are ultimately entranced by Atwood’s “mesmerizing way with a story, even a story as maddening and complex as this one.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Atwood. Margaret. The Blind Assassin. New York: Random House, 2000. Print. Moore, Lorrie. “BIOPERVERSITY.” New Yorker 19 May 2003: 88. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 July 2010. Mujica, Barbara. “The Blind Assassin.” Rev. of The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. Americas (English Edition) 53.1 (2001): 61. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 July 2010. St. Andrews, B. A. “Review of The Blind Assassin.” World Literature Today 76.1 (2002). Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 246. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 July 2010. Selwyn, Laurie. “The Blind Assassin.” Rev. of The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. Library Journal 125.20 (2000): 212. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 July 2010. Templeman, Elizabeth. “Review of The Blind Assassin.” Southern Humanities Review 36.1 (2002): 91-93. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 246. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 July 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Bouson, J. Brooks. “‘A Commemoration of Wounds Endured and Resented’: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Feminist Memoir.” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44.3 (2003): 251+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 July 2010. Analyzes the politics of gender relations in the novel and claims that the victimization of women links the narratives. Dancygier, Barbara. “Narrative Anchors and the Processes of Story Construction: The Case of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Style 41.2 (2007): 133+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 July 2010. Introduces the concept of narrative anchors, which link the novel’s various substories. One such anchor is the specific language used in the novel’s first sentence relating Laura’s death. Photograph of Margaret Atwood, author of The Blind Assassin. ª BERND THISSEN/epa/Corbis
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Dumars, Denise. “Out of This World: SF for Novices.” Rev. of The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Library Journal 126.13 (2001): 196. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 July 2010. Explains how Atwood’s works, including The Blind Assassin, fit the genre of science fiction. Hite, Molly. “Tongueless in Toronto.” Women’s Review of Books 18.6 (2001): 1. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 246. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 July 2010. Focuses on how Atwood shapes the novel’s narrative, which reinforces its focus on the problems inherent in trying to tell the truth about the past. Ingersoll, Earl. “Waiting for the End: Closure in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Studies in the Novel 35.4 (2003): 543+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 July 2010. Examines the novel as a mystery, but one without a traditional closure. Gale Resources
Thompson, Lee Briscoe. “Margaret (Eleanor) Atwood.” Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers. Ed. Douglas Ivison. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 251. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 July 2010. http//go. galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE&%7 CH1200010390&v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r& p=LitRC&sw=w Open Web Sources
upcoming publications, her blog, a biography, and resources for writers, among others. For Further Reading
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996. Print. Based on the sensational murder trial in 1843 of Grace Marks, a Canadian teenager who worked as a maid for the husband and wife she was accused of murdering. ———. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985. Print. Dystopia of the near future, made more frightening by its parallels to the political machinations of the early twenty-first century. Cooke, N. Margaret Atwood: A Biography. Toronto: ECW Press, 1998. Print. Contains several excerpts from Atwood’s letters. Kröller, Eva-Marie. The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. Examines works by various Canadian writers. Reid, Robin Ann. Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Westport: Greenwood, 2008. Print. Essays that focus on British and American science fiction and fantasy in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, film, and art, and explores how women are presented in these works. Adaptations
In 2002, Icon Entertainment International made the film The Blind Assassin in Canada.
Margaret Atwood’s own Web site, at http//margaretat wood.ca, has links to her speaking engagements,
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Blindsight By Maurice Gee
W Introduction
W Literary and Historical
Maurice Gee’s Blindsight (2005) is the story of a sister and brother, Alice and Gordon Ferry, of their unusual closeness and how their lives move in divergent directions. The first-person narrator, Alice looks back at the age of seventythree to describe the Ferry family and the schooling and teen years she shared with her brother. Then she traces the divergent life paths Gordon and she took. While Alice flourished as a scientist, Gordon was drawn to helping others, first as a teacher and later in low-level hospital work. The possessive and devoted Alice sought to control Gordon’s choices, and this effort included an action Gee does not reveal until the final pages. While Alice manages to find a harmonious mate and make a name for herself in research, Gordon veers off into anonymity and homelessness. The present action of the novel covers the appearance of Adrian Moore and his developing relationship to Alice, his biological great-aunt. It seems Gordon impregnated a young woman who subsequently gave the baby up for adoption. That child was Adrian’s father who on his deathbed asked Adrian to locate his biological grandfather and reach out to him. Adrian finds the published Alice Ferry easily, but discovering the truth about Gordon is a greater challenge, made more difficult by Alice’s efforts to mislead Adrian. Blindsight is an exploration of sibling relationships and bonding and the kinds of factors that can propel siblings along their separate life paths. Told from the point of view of the seemingly totally reliable narrator, Alice, the story slowly unearths the degree of her obsession with her brother and the lengths she was willing to go to keep him to herself.
Context
One literary context for Blindsight consists of those works that use an unreliable narrator, a device that provides ways to explore the psychology of the narrator and to withhold information from or mislead the reader for any of various reasons. Robert Browning, the nineteenthcentury English poet, used unreliable narrators in his Madhouse Cells, one of which is the so-called lover in “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836). J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is narrated by teenager Holden Caulfield, and only at the end of the novel do readers learn that Holden is now in a mental institution, and his narration of the events of one weekend when he dropped out of school may be part of a therapy session. Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is narrated by the schizophrenic Chief Bromden who reports through the delusional maze of his symptoms on life in a mental institution. In these examples, the authors draw the reader into the narrator’s reality, and however skewed that perspective is, the reader gets the opportunity to see things in an unusual way. If the author handles the point of view skillfully, then the reader feels increased suspense and intrigue as fissures or inconsistencies in the narrator’s story are noted. By the conclusion, the reader is likely asked to reinterpret events in light of what is ultimately revealed about the narrator. Gee uses this device for his own purposes, giving hints along the way that pique the reader’s curiosity about how the plot is ultimately resolved. Various references provide an historical context for Blindsight. The story begins in the 1940s during World War II, and references are made to Mary Ferry’s fear that her son Gordon may be drawn into military service. Luckily, the war will end before he is old enough to serve. Alice describes the late 1950s and early 1960s when she
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and Gordon are dating. She recalls Eddie Fisher’s “Dungaree Doll” (1956) and Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” (1958) and the rage of the horror movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), all of which have thematic significance for the novel in its focus on sexual pairing and how individuals measure one another in their efforts to find and choose a mate. Other references are made to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the self-help recovery program that in the early 2000s is worldwide, but which had its origins in the United States in the early 1930s with the work of Bill Wilson. By the 1960s and 1970s, AA was well established in New Zealand and helping down-and-out alcoholics take charge of their lives again. Finally, a specific historical seed for the novel was explained by Iain Sharp in his review. Sharp described the “mild-mannered tramp Rob Jones,” who was well known in Wellington, New Zealand. Called “the Bucket Man because he carried his few possessions in a plastic bucket,” Jones also slept in a hiding place on the Tinakori Hills. Sharp listed several characteristics Jones and Gordon shared, “including the bucket, rough Tinakori abode, perpetually downcast gaze, quietness and shuffling route around inner Wellington.” Jones gained even more notoriety when an estimated six hundred people attended his funeral. The physical condition called blindsight refers to a level of perception that may occur in people who are totally blind as a result of injury to the part of the brain that is responsible for vision. In this condition, individuals who are blind in certain parts of their visual field can, nonetheless, respond to certain visual stimuli. Such individuals may not be able to recognize objects, for example, but be able to anticipate movement of objects.
W Themes The novel begins and ends with the same sentence: “Father taught us how not to love” (5, 192). This statement explicitly tags the model set by Earl Ferry as an explanation for how Alice and Gordon develop. Their radically different lives are explained by Alice this way: “I mean Father’s greediness in love, his benevolence and appetite, which started Gordon and me on our divergent ways” (5). If by “taught,” Alice means “by his example,” then Earl showed his children both exceptional benevolence and a heightened sexuality or sensual response to others. These responses in Earl are mixed rather than mutually exclusive. While Alice suggests that Gordon took the path of benevolence and she the path of appetite, the matter is more complicated than that. The thematic point seems to be that as children grow into adulthood they apply something of the lessons they learned in watching their parents and these serve as momentum in shaping the children’s lives.
MAJOR CHARACTERS ALICE FERRY, the narrator, is a seventy-three-year-old widow and retired mycologist. EARL FERRY, Alice’s father, is a chemist like his father, a sentimental man and a sensualist. GORDON FERRY, Alice’s younger brother, is a kind-hearted compassionate man who cannot tolerate cruelty and seeks to help others. CYRIL HANDY is a poor alcoholic friend of Gordon who comes by Gordon’s place for handouts. JOSEPHINE IMRIE is a highly sexed beautician who gets involved in abusive relationships and has a brief affair with Alice’s father. NEVILLE KITE is Alice’s kindly husband, a man older than her father and without academic degrees but brilliant in his field. ADRIAN MOORE, Alice’s great nephew and Gordon’s biological grandson, lives with Alice and tries to discover what became of Gordon. ADRIAN MOORE, biological grandson of Gordon, comes to live with Alice and discover the truth about his biological roots.
The title refers to a medical condition: the ability of an otherwise totally blind person to perceive the location of objects and their movement. In a literal sense, this condition might be used to describe how Gordon walks around town, head down, avoiding eye contact, he shuffles along not seeing those around him and yet aware of them enough to avoid hitting pedestrians who share the sidewalk with him. Considered figuratively, the condition becomes a metaphor for how individuals see the world around them, taking the part they see for the whole when in fact they are blind to most of what exists. In this sense, the term becomes a description of the limits of any particular point of view. This theme is played out in several of the characters. Alice tells part of the story but lies about or omits other parts. She reveals part and she withholds part. She knows and loves her brother intimately and long term, but he disappears from her view, and when he reappears she only sees him in part. This process of trying to see what one is blind to or trying to uncover what is hidden from view or lost can be said to describe much of the novel’s action and indeed the narrative style. Adrian Moore wants to discover his biological grandfather; he relies on what Alice tells him, at first innocently accepting her fiction as truth. But the research efforts of his girlfriend reveal Alice’s lies and omissions, and in a sense, that revelation helps Adrian see more and also causes him
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Blindsight
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born August 22, 1931, in Whakatane, New Zealand, Maurice Gee grew up in Henderson, a suburb of Auckland, and received his BA and MA from the University of Auckland. Highly prolific and touted as New Zealand’s finest writer, Gee produced numerous collections of short stories through the 1950s and 1960s and nearly thirty novels by the time Blindsight appeared in 2005. After that he published Salt (2007), Gool (2008), and Access Road (2009). In 2004 the University of Auckland awarded him an honorary doctorate in literature. In 2006 Blindsight won the Montana New Zealand Readers’ Choice award and Book award for fiction and the Deutz Medal for Fiction. As of 2010, Gee lived in Wellington, New Zealand.
to question what he has been told. Ultimately, the novel is about the mystery of a homeless person that haunts his relatives who love him. The question of what makes a person go off so entirely from human connection, even when others want to connect with him, remains only partially answered. Incestuous love may be a driving
force, murder may be another, and other determining factors (at least in this novel) remain undiscovered.
W Style Blindsight begins with the elderly Alice observing Gordon, the vagrant, shuffling along the inner-city streets of Wellington. This is their present time. Alice then goes back to their childhood, early family life, and to two important events in Gordon’s life that show his empathy for others and natural inclination to help others feel better. Her reflection on the more distant past is disrupted by the arrival of Adrian Moore who is intent on finding his biological grandfather and has only had luck in identifying his published great-aunt, Alice. The rest of the novel traces Adrian’s efforts, both to assist Alice and to work through her lies to the truth. Another feature of the style is the self-consciousness Alice expresses as the author of her own story. Her intention is to resurrect Gordon, who “stepped into the world with such innocence and goodwill” (7) and at the start showed so much more promise than she did and who has been lost to her for years. She is eager to see “beyond our fire” (7) and yet ambivalent regarding what
Photo of New Zealand author Maurice Gee with his daughter, Emily. Maurice Gee is the author of the novel Blindsight. ª Tim Cuff / Alamy
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a widening vision may require of her. This ambivalence shows itself in deliberately checking her speed. For example, at one point she says before she goes on she needs to describe a certain day more fully (45); at another point she remarks, “I’d like to describe my life as Dr Ferry and Mrs Kite but have a bridge to cross before I reach it” (118). A third place she remarks, “I’m shuffling twenty years like playing cards” (138). Added to these stylistic features are the remarkable metaphorical patterns used by Gee throughout the novel, one of which has to do with stitching as a figure for connection, the other with gravitational pull. Faced with her father’s infidelity and unable to soothe his feelings, Alice notes that “the stitching between us was undone” (41). Adrian describes the role of his double bass in the band as “more like stitching. . . . It fastens things together” (62), not unlike Adrian’s role himself regarding Alice and Gordon. Later Alice realizes she and Gordon “circle each other like binary stars . . . together and apart” and others “made no gravitational pull” (82). Their relationship is who they are, made from the same cloth, connected and yet not connected as binary stars.
W Critical Reception Blindsight was well received but not widely reviewed. David Larsen described Gee’s novel as “a remarkable and memorable read.” He also affirmed that the characters “are worth the effort it takes to get to know them.” The novel’s human interest also appealed to Patricia Soper, who pointed out that the story is about “every attribute that makes us human.” Soper concluded: “Gee never disappoints.” Iain Sharp wrote a longer review of Blindsight. Sharp analyzed “high achiever” Alice as the narrator: “Because she initially seems so sane and perceptive, and because she addresses us with Gee’s crystalline lucidity, it takes a while to realise she is not a narrator to be trusted. Her jealousy, possessiveness, snobbery and capacity for frightening rage stand in contrast to Gordon’s easy-going compassion.” Sharp also expounded on the significance of the title for both Gordon and Alice: “Gordon in his later years, trudging the same path through Wellington day after day without lifting his head or meeting anyone’s gaze, is an example of one kind of blindsight. But the subtler forms of impairment that afflict Alice are more disquieting.” Sharp concluded that the book is both a quick read and delivers lasting effect: “Blindsight is a book you can whiz through in a couple of sittings. But its skilfully managed implications will haunt you for weeks to come. It is, without a doubt, one of the year’s best local novels.”
Larsen, David. “Maurice Gee: Blindsight.” Rev. of Blindsight, by Maurice Gee. www.nzherald.co.nz. New Zealand Herald, n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2010. Sharp, Iain. “Great Fiction from Bleak Street-Truths.” Rev. of Blindsight, by Maurice Gee. Sunday StarTimes 9 Oct. 2005. Print. Soper, Patricia. “Gee Whiz: What a Book.” Rev. of Blindsight, by Maurice Gee. Southland Times 17 Dec. 2005. Print. “Two Minutes with Maurice Gee.” Press [New Zealand] 29 July 2006. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Moore, Christopher. “Playing God Joins the Platinum List.” Press [New Zealand], 14 Oct. 2006. Print. Along with other titles that have sold well, mentions that Gee’s novel Blindsight sold ten thousand copies in its first year. ———. “Worthy of the Award.” Press [New Zealand] 26 July 2006. Print. A description of New Zealand’s Montana New Zealand Book Awards with praise for Maurice Gee for winning it. Gale Resources
“Maurice Gee.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Oct. 2010. http//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? &id=GALE%7CH1000035790&v=2.1&u=itsbtria l&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w For Further Reading
Flagg, Fannie. I Still Dream about You. New York: Random House, 2010. Print. Reflections on the secets people hide combined with a murder mystery. Gee, Maurice. Salt. Orca Books, 2009. Print. One of a trilogy for young adult readers concerning colonialism and radioactive weaponry. Hopper, Kim. Reckoning with Homelessness. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Print. By an anthropologist and about types of homeless shelters, including almshouses, flophouses, shelters, and airports. Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964. Print. Narrated by elderly woman who resists adult son’s efforts to place her in a retirement home. Sarton, May. As We Are Now. New York: Norton, 1992. Print. The 1973 novel narrated by an elderly woman in rural old-folks’ home who insists she is not insane.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Melodie Monahan
Works Cited
Gee, Maurice. Blindsight. Auckland: Penguin Group (NZ), 2005. Print. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Blood from Stone By Frances Fyfield
W Introduction Frances Fyfield’s novel Blood from Stone begins when Marianne Shearer—a wealthy and successful, but not very well-liked—criminal defense attorney, leaps to her death from the balcony of a London hotel. Her death leaves many questions unanswered: Why did she kill herself? Why are all her belongings missing? And why did she die wearing such a fantastic skirt? The secrets are wrapped up in Shearer’s final trial, where the successful exoneration of the violent criminal Rick Boyd comes at the cost of his victim, a key witness who commits suicide halfway through the trial. Blood from Stone won the prestigious Dagger Award in 2008, and was hailed by the judges as “a subtly and elegantly written exploration of contemporary themes” (“Frances Fyfield Wins”). Fyfield’s experience as a criminal prosecutor lends her narratives “a believability that her novelist-by-day-novelist-by-night peers often lack” (“Interview: Frances Fyfield”). David Sexton contends she has “emerged as one of the most intriguing and original crime writers in the generation since P. D. James and Ruth Rendell.”
W Literary and Historical Context
Frances Fyfield says, “I hate novels being used as social criticism—it’s like being whacked over the head. . . . Better for that sort of perspective to emerge as a natural result of the story you’re trying to tell” (qtd. in de Villiers). That is not to say that Fyfield’s novels do not have social relevance. The author “has a knack for picking a troubling episode from the news and transforming it to fit into her imaginative world” (Wheatley). While writing Blood from Stone, Fyfield was inspired by the story of Katherine Ward, a British lawyer who leaped to her death from the window of a
London hotel. Fyfield wanted to explore why a successful, attractive woman might do such a thing. “My interest is in the aftermath of crime, and the things that lead up to it,” says the author (qtd. in Coren). “I am not really interested in writing a ‘whodunit.’ I am much more interested in the ‘why’” (qtd. in Wickens). Fyfield’s vast experience working as a lawyer has given her “incredible insight into the best and worst of humanity” (What’s Your Motive?) In her line of work, she would frequently be sent into the worst parts of London, which she says gave her a “fascinating knowledge” (“Seedy Underbelly”). “It instills . . . an ice-chip in the heart which helps you be objective—a great advantage. It acquaints you with all sorts of nasty human behavior” (qtd. in de Villiers). Fyfield talks of the distress felt when “you are no longer surprised by man’s inhumanity to man” and the “sense of relief when you are surprised, but also the cut-off point when you don’t want to know any more. That’s the point at which I begin to write” (qtd. in Dougary).
W Themes Peter Guttridge writes, “Frances Fyfield is all about psychological exploration.” This exploration often proves very dark, and Fyfield has been accused of writing only about “damaged people.” But this, Fyfield says, “makes her work more powerful. The characters are not normal heroes with happy lives and strong roots but must rise above a handicap to become heroic” (Deziel). Not all of Fyfield’s damaged characters are heroes; the theme of the violent serial predator appears in many of her books. Like Rick Boyd in Blood from Stone, her “monsters are very often men who perpetrate the most appalling violence against women” (“Law Meets High Fashion”). Another recurring theme in Fyfield’s writing is the damaged psychology of the battered woman, as her narratives often “bristle with wounding insights into the pathology of women who conspire in their own manipulation” (“Frances Hegarty”). Laura Wilson has said, “[W]hen it
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comes to the dissection of the human spirit, [Fyfield] is the most efficiently brutal scalpel-wielder we have.” Another theme of Blood from Stone is that of “baggage, both emotional and physical, whether clung to, discarded, or simply stashed away and forgotten” (Wilson). One of the characters, Mr. Joyce, runs a selfstorage unit, and Fyfield skillfully employs this as a metaphor for the unearthing of buried secrets in the narrative. “Storage is magic,” Fyfield writes. “Nothing will perish in here” (248). Mr. Joyce comments that most of what people store is rubbish they can’t bear to get rid of, but it’s “rubbish with attitude and meaning” (251). Finally, Fyfield writes about redemption. Blood from Stone may be dark, “but there are also bright flourishes of hope and a surprising and even uplifting conclusion” (Turnbull). The author says, “What I want to say in all my books is that people can suffer terrible abuse and survive” (qtd. in Sexton).
MAJOR CHARACTERS RICK BOYD is the serial predator represented by Marianne Shearer. He mentally and physically abuses his victims, and cons them for their money. PETER FRIEL is a young lawyer who was on the defense team for Rick Boyd. After the case shatters his belief in the system, he becomes determined to find out why Marianne Shearer killed herself. ANGEL JOYCE is Rick Boyd’s victim. She kills herself halfway through his trial rather than endure the trial and continue to be questioned by Marianne Shearer. HENRIETTA JOYCE is Angel’s older sister, and the one who rescued Angel from Rick Boyd and encouraged her to prosecute. Henrietta, a clothes-restoration and preservation expert, runs the business FrockServe.com.
W Style
MR. JOYCE is Angel and Henrietta’s father, and the proprietor of WJ Storage, a successful self-storage facility.
Fyfield is known for her skillful, elegant prose, and Blood from Stone is no exception. “Her descriptions of the colours and textures of clothing and artifacts are, as always, lyrical and lush” (Wilson). The contrast between Fyfield’s “fluid, almost poetic” prose and the grittiness of her subject matter combine for a “compelling, hypnotic effect” (Low). Fyfield writes, “She was admiring herself, hands splayed on the wood, when I took off the first digit. The blood went in the soup and salt went in the wound. She slept very well, I assure you” (6). Fyfield eschews the traditional “cosiness of so much old-fashioned detective fiction” and instead imbues her work with a melancholic, “haunting, slightly surreal quality” (Sexton). Marcel Berlins, writing for the London Times describes Blood from Stone as unfolding “subtly and absorbingly” in “typically Fyfieldian manner.” Indeed, this slow burn is common in many of the author’s works, as she quietly pulls the reader deeper into the story. “The use of the trial transcripts and the slow pace of the storytelling” give “Fyfield plenty of time to delve into the protagonists’ psyche” (Croll). The author is known for writing stories where plot is a function of character, and the action is driven by the “skillful, creepy psychological” portraits and “penetrating characterization” (Scrivener). Says Fyfield, “I like to explore a situation, not be led by a plot” (qtd. in Coren). In Blood from Stone, that situation is why the lawyer, Marianne Shearer, jumps to her death, and “the explanation . . . is a perfect example of Fyfield’s work: beautifully written, cold, and emotionally brutal” (Wheatley).
MRS. ELLEN JOYCE is Angel and Henrietta’s mother.
W Critical Reception The British press has “gone wild in its praise” of Frances Fyfield, “calling her the ‘new queen of crime’ and the
THE LOVER was Marianne Shearer’s lover for many years. Married with children, he always kept his affair with Marianne secret. THOMAS NOBLE is the lawyer Marianne Shearer left in charge of sorting out her estate after her death. Unfortunately, Noble cannot seem to locate a will or any of Ms. Shearer’s belongings. FRANK SHEARER is Marianne Shearer’s broke and underachieving younger brother, and stands to inherit her money and apartment. MARIANNE SHEARER is the highly successful criminal defense attorney who, for reasons unknown, kills herself after her client Rick Boyd’s exoneration.
‘mistress of menace’” (Scrivener). She is known as “the crime writer’s crime writer,” a statement that appears to ring true: P. D. James, with whom the author is often compared, is reported to have told Fyfield’s Canadian publisher, “you’ll be all right with this one, dear” (Sexton, qtd. in Scrivener). Blood from Stone proved overwhelmingly popular with critics, though a few have taken issue with the plausibility of some of its plot points. A reviewer for the London Independent calls attorney Marianne Shearer’s battering of the witnesses “excessive” and questions whether such behavior would be permitted in an English courtroom (“Law Meets High Fashion”). Some critics find the reasoning behind Shearer’s suicide “highly unlikely” (Croll), but others admit that though “Fyfield’s plot hinges on a whopping coincidence . . . it is acceptable because of her gift for creating characters who seem like real people” (Kerridge).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Frances Fyfield was born in 1948 in rural Derbyshire, England. Her parents, whom she describes as eccentric, raised animals with no real knowledge of animal husbandry. As a result, pigs escaped, and chickens roamed indoors. “I thought everyone lived like this,” Fyfield says (qtd. in Scrivener). After receiving her BA in English from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Fyfield admits she took some time to find her career, taking various jobs from teaching English to working as a sales assistant, until she decided to study law (qtd. in Dougary). After working for the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, Fyfield published her first novel at age thirty-nine. Since then, the author has published nearly twenty-five crime novels—three under her birth name Frances Hegarty—including two series, and has been nominated for an Edgar Award and won two Dagger Awards. Often compared to the work of Ruth Rendell and P. D. James, her novels are known for their chilling psychological profiles, and A. N. Wilson calls Fyfield “the best crime writer alive” (qtd. in Coren).
However, not all reviewers appreciate highly realistic characters; one such critic found the majority of them “entirely unappealing” and professed “it is extremely difficult for the reader to develop any form of empathy with them” (Croll). Most critics, though, praise Fyfield’s fascinating characters. “They’re all off-kilter, of course— one of Fyfield’s pleasurable trademarks” (Guttridge). Sue Turnbull says, “Fyfield has a talent for capturing the quiet despair of ordinary people trapped by circumstance,” and Shelley Orchard calls one of the protagonists, Henrietta, “clever, cutting, and courageous.” Critics also praise Fyfield’s “ingenious plotting,” and comment that the complex set-up of Blood from Stone “takes Fyfield just ten pages of precise and polished prose to establish” (Turnbull). The narrative is complex; after its initial start the story unfolds slowly and “takes time to work through, but is all the more satisfying and thoughtprovoking for that” (Clements). BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Berlins, Marcel. “Lingering Shivers.” Review of Blood from Stone by Frances Fyfield. Times [London] 15 March 2008. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010 Clements, Toby. “GENRE.” Review of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Daily Telegraph [London] 5 April 2008. InfoTrac Newsstand. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Coren, Giles. “What Makes the Perfect Crime Writer?” Times [London] 5 Aug. 1995. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Croll, Luke. Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Reviewing the Evidence Feb. 2008. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. de Villiers, Melissa. “True to Crime.” Sunday Times [South Africa] 3 Aug. 2008. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Deziel, Shanda. “Strange and Neurotic.” Maclean’s 29 Apr. 2002: 115-17. Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Dougary, Ginny. “Tales from Humanity’s Underbelly: Ginny Dougary Meets a Lawyer Who Copes with the Distress of Gruesome Crime Cases by Writing Novels.” Independent [London] 27 Nov. 1989. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. “Frances Fyfield Wins the 2008 CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger.” The Crime Writers’ Association. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. “Frances Hegarty.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Fyfield, Frances. Blood from Stone. Great Britain: Sphere, 2008. Print. Frances Fyfield, author of Blood from Stone. ª Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/ Corbis
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Guttridge, Peter. “Review: Crime Round-Up: On the Way from Hope to Despair: Jack Reacher Drifts into TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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High-Octane Trouble in Colorado, While Elsewhere Blood and Body Parts Abound . . . ” Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Observer [London] 6 April 2008. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. “Interview: Frances Fyfield.” Book Reporter 20 Apr. 2001. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Kerridge, Jake. “CRIME; CHICK LIT; Not Just Mindless Violence; Jake Kerridge Tracks Down Dastardly Plots with Emotional Power.” Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Daily Telegraph [London] 6 Dec. 2008. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. “Law Meets High Fashion in Investigation into WellDressed Barrister’s Death.” Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Independent [London] 27 Mar. 2008. Print. InfoTrac Newsstand. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Low, Shari. “Staying In: Book Group.” Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Daily Record [Glasgow] 29 Mar. 2008. Highbeam Research. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Orchard, Shelley. “This Week’s Selections.” Review of Blood from Stone by Frances Fyfield. Advertiser [Sydney] 24 May 2008. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Scrivener, Leslie. “A Prosecutor Turns to Crime.” Toronto Star 16 May 1993. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. “Seedy Underbelly of the Metropolis.” Herald [Glasgow] 20 Mar. 2000. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Sexton, David. “London by Fright.” Evening Standard [London] 2 Jan. 1998. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Turnbull, Sue. “Plot, Pasta, and Plenty of Claret; Review of the Week.” Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Sydney Morning Herald 28 June 2008. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. “What’s Your Motive?” Publishers Weekly 247.43 (23 Oct. 2000): 243. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Aug. 2010. Wheatley, Jane. “Beyond the Grave, Voices that Still Linger: Books.” Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Times [London] 31 May 2008: 9. InfoTrac Newsstand. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Wickens, Barbara. “Wondering Why Crime Happens.” Maclean’s 108.22 (29 May 1995): 26. Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Wilson, Laura. “Review: Crime: Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield.” Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances
Fyfield. Guardian [London] 16 Feb. 2008. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
“Frances Fyfield: The Lawyer and Crime Writer on Her New Novel, Blood from Stone.” Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Book Show Web. 11 Aug. 2010. A review of Blood from Stone, and short interview with the author. Sutton, Henry. “Books: New Releases.” Review of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Mirror 7 Mar. 2008. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. A short, positive review of Blood from Stone. Taylor, Andrew. “Recent Crime Novels.” Rev. of Blood from Stone, by Frances Fyfield. Spectator 3 May 2008: 37. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Aug. 2010. A positive review of Blood from Stone, focusing on the strength of the narrative. Gale Resources
“Frances Fyfield.” St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, 4th ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. Rpt. in Biography Resource Center. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Open Web Sources
Frances Fyfield’s official website at http//www.frances fyfield.co.uk includes biographical information about the author and her novels and awards. Visitors to the website can also listen to a series of short stories by Fyfield, called “A Dark and Stormy Night,” read by various voice-over artists and first broadcast on BBC Radio in 2006. Track six is Fyfield’s interview with Jenny Murray on Women’s Hour on July 5, 2006, after the publication of Fyfield’s novel The Art of Drowning. The website for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards, at http//www.thecwa.co.uk/index.php gives information about the award, past winners, and author events. There is also information about National Crime Fiction Week, and the Young Crime Writers’ Competition, organized by the Crime Writers’ Association. For Further Reading
Adilman, Sid. “Former U.K. Prosecutor Hunts Fictional Criminals.” Toronto Star 9 Apr. 2002. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. Fyfield discusses her original desire to write romance, but suggests her “weird and dark imagination” eventually drove her to write crime fiction. Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley. New York: Coward-McCann, 1955. Print. The story of the young sociopath Tom Ripley and his quest to trade
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his banal existence for a life of wealth and sophistication, at all costs. Highsmith, like Fyfield, is known for her searing psychological portraits, causing the reader to sympathize with Tom even when his actions become completely amoral. James, P. D. Cover Her Face. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. Print. In P. D. James’s debut novel, she introduces detective Adam Dalgliesh, who must investigate the murder of a beautiful young social climber. This novel marks the beginning of the Adam Dalgliesh series, with over a dozen novels. Murphy, Rachel. “Interview: Frances Fyfield—How Amanda Brought; Amanda Burton’s Thrilling New Crime Series Is Based on the Life of Author and Solicitor Frances Fyfield.” Mirror [London] 11 May 2002. InfoTrac Newsstand. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. An interview with Fyfield about three of her Helen West novels that have been adapted for television. The character of Helen West is loosely based on Fyfield’s experiences as a prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service.
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Rendell, Ruth. Tigerlily’s Orchids. London: Hutchinson, 2010. Print. In this novel by esteemed crime writer Ruth Rendell, young, naive Stuart Font throws a housewarming party with terrible consequences when he invites his young, beautiful Asian neighbor, whom he has dubbed “Tigerlily.” Richardson, Anna. “Fyfield Snatches Dagger.” Bookseller 18 July 2008: 48. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Aug. 2010. A short article detailing Frances Fyfield’s 2008 Dagger Award for Blood from Stone. Selway, Jennifer. “Books: Kind Hearts and Chloroform— Jennifer Selway Talks to Frances Fyfield about Kittens, Crime, and Evil in Court.” Observer [London] 22 Sept. 1991. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 11 Aug. 2010. The author discusses recurring themes in her writing, her schedule, and how her law career and divorce influenced her work. Bisanne Masoud
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Blooms of Darkness By Aharon Appelfeld
W Introduction Set in an unnamed Ukrainian village during World War II, Blooms of Darkness (2006) is the story of a preadolescent Jewish boy who comes of age in a brothel under the care of a Catholic prostitute. Hugo Mansfeld spends most of his time hiding in a closet listening to Mariana conduct business with male clients, who sometimes beat her when she refuses their demands. Over the course of the novel, Mariana increases her drinking and needs Hugo’s tenderness to obtain relief from the depression caused by her work. The two eventually become lovers. When the brothel closes they attempt to make a life together living off the land in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, but they are apprehended by the Russian army and separated. Blooms of Darkness has been praised for its spare, evocative prose and, in a series of carefully sketched love scenes, for striking a note of optimism without lapsing into sentimentality. Kind, but also willful and erratic, Mariana cares for Hugo as a protective mother would, but she grows dependent on him as she confides her troubles and discovers that he listens to her without judging her. With the constant threat of Nazi search parties in the background, Aharon Appelfeld shows how love grows out of vulnerability and mutual trust, regardless of the age of the lovers.
W Literary and Historical Context
Blooms of Darkness takes place between 1942 and 1944 in an unnamed village in what is today Ukraine, a country that lies between Poland and Russia. During World War II, the village of the novel was located in territory that was fought over by Germans and Soviet armies. Initially, when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union entered into an agreement in which
they each took control of areas that lay between their countries. On June 22, 1941, however, Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, and its army advanced eastward across Ukraine. The allegiance of Ukrainians was split, with the majority of Ukrainians siding with the Soviets. Those Ukrainians who welcomed the Nazis as liberators discovered that the German army had little interest in enlisting their support against the Soviets. Appelfeld makes no mention of how the Nazis administered the parts of Ukraine that they occupied but notes that German soldiers conducted regular searches for Jews. In 1944 the Soviet army started pushing the Germans out of Ukraine. The brothel in Blooms of Darkness provides services to German soldiers who are stationed away from the front. As the Russians advance through Ukraine, the women execute the prostitutes they find because the service they provided to German soldiers was considered to have been aiding the enemy. An estimated five million to eight million Ukrainians died in World War II, including up to 500,000 Jews who were killed by the Germans.
W Themes As the novel’s title suggests, one of the main themes in Blooms of Darkness is the idea that something beautiful or hopeful can emerge from even the most desperate situation. Appelfeld introduces this theme when Hugo flees with his mother through a sewer toward the brothel where Mariana works. When the stench becomes unbearable the young boy faints. He awakes lying on grass, unable to remember most of the journey. Appelfeld writes, “Hugo will think a great deal about that dark night, trying to tie the details together, and he will wonder again and again how his mother had managed to pull him out of the sewer and restore him to life.” At the end of the novel, when Hugo and Mariana wander penniless while evading the Russian army, they find hope and beauty in the Psalms from the Bible, even though Hugo is an atheist and to Mariana the verse is
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MAJOR CHARACTERS MARIANA is the prostitute who cares for Hugo in his mother’s stead but eventually falls in love with him and initiates him into the rites of sex. Mariana is Catholic, and she often tries to convert Hugo, who is Jewish but has been raised as an atheist. VICTORIA is the cook at the brothel who reluctantly watches over Hugo when Mariana abandons him for short spells, either to drink or to look after her own mother. Hugo fears that Victoria will turn him over to the authorities. HUGO MANSFELD is a well-educated eleven-year-old boy whose parents are pharmacists. After Nazi soldiers send Hugo’s father to a concentration camp, Hugo’s mother leaves her son in the care of Mariana, a childhood friend who is now a prostitute. Soft-spoken but observant, Hugo comes of age in the brothel listening from his hiding place in Mariana’s closet to her interactions with her clients, and he eventually becomes her lover. JULIA MANSFELD is Hugo’s mother, who carries her son at night through a sewer to evade the Nazi soldiers who are searching neighborhood homes for Jews. After a number of her contacts vanish, Julia is forced to leave her son at a brothel and find her own place to hide.
incomprehensible. Mariana says to him, “Read, honey, you have a marvelous voice. I don’t understand the poems but they exalt my soul.” The novel also offers a strident argument against fear and pessimism. Early in the novel, before Hugo escapes with his mother, one of the boys from the neighborhood circulates fearsome rumors about what awaits them with the arrival of the Nazis. Hearing the rumors, Hugo thinks to himself, “You mustn’t be so pessimistic. Pessimism weakens you. You have to be strong and encourage your mother.” Mariana says much the same to Hugo when he expresses doubt that they will survive: “Don’t fear. Fear debases us. A debased person isn’t worthy of living. If you’re going to live, then live in freedom. That simple thing was what I didn’t know. All my life I lived a debased life.”
W Style In Blooms of Darkness Appelfeld uses a literary technique called understatement to convey the menacing threat with which people fleeing a murdering army must live. Characters in the novel often speak in terms that are considerably less harsh or severe than the circumstances seem to warrant. For example, when Hugo wakes on the grass and tells his mother that he does not
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remember anything from after having been carried through the sewer, she responds, “There’s nothing to remember.” The mother betrays no further emotion and the narrative picks up without haste: “But meanwhile, it’s dangerous to linger in the open field. They make their way, hunched over, to a nearby grove of trees. Every few minutes they stop, kneel, and listen.” Both the mother’s dismissive response and the steady pace of the following sentences may seem incongruous with their flight from the Nazis and impending separation, but the contrast between the style of the language and the action of the plot emphasizes rather than diminishes the danger. Appelfeld also uses a limited third-person point of view to emphasize the injustices that many of the characters suffer. The reader sees and hears only what the narrator is able to see and hear. The reader may understand the reported events differently from the narrator, however. In this case, for example, the narrator is an eleven-year-old boy completely unfamiliar with sex who is hiding in a closet of a brothel, and when he gives an account of the noises he hears he does not know that he is describing a sexual act, much less an exceptionally crude one. Likewise, when he hears men leaving in a huff because Mariana has refused one of their demands, he is not aware that she is putting her job—and his safety—in jeopardy. The tenseness of this situation is heightened by the fact that Mariana is entertaining and then rebuffing the very persons who are hunting Hugo during the day. Hugo’s blindness to his danger makes that danger more palpable to the reader.
W Critical Reception Blooms of Darkness has received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with critics citing the allure of Mariana’s character and the simple, evocative language of the novel as its greatest virtues. The reviewer for Publishers Weekly calls Mariana “an exhilarating tragicomic heroine” and claims that Appelfeld’s “lean, spare prose does not shy away from harsh realities.” Also entranced by Mariana, David Leavitt raves in the New York Times Book Review that she is an “astonishing creation” who “sets the novel on fire the moment she enters it.” Focusing on Appelfeld’s language, a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews observes that Blooms of Darkness is “a beautiful read” that “achieves its powerful emotive effects through simplicity and understatement.” Leah Strauss writes in Booklist that the novel is “a haunting tale of love and loss with a conclusion that is both grim and elegantly hopeful.” Some critics rank the novel with Elie Wiesel’s Night and The Diary of Anne Frank, two of the most critically acclaimed and widely read works on Nazi occupation that are told from the point of view of a young person. Writing in the Library Journal, Henry L. Carrigan Jr. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Blooms of Darkness
German soldiers enter a Ukrainian city like the one that serves as the setting for the novel Blooms of Darkness. Roger Viollet/Getty Images
claims, “This latest from Israeli novelist Appelfeld joins classics such as Elie Wiesel’s Night in depicting the struggles of a young man to come to terms with the loneliness and despair of a world falling apart.” Leavitt strikes a similar chord, noting that “like Anne Frank’s diary—a work to which it will draw justified comparison—Blooms of Darkness records a brutal process of education.”
Leavitt, David. “The Whore’s Secret.” Rev. of Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appelfeld. New York Times Book Review 21 Mar. 2010: 16(L). Print
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buruma, Ian. “What Is There to Say?” Rev. of Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appelfeld. New York Review of Books 57.7 (2010). Web. 20 Oct. 2010. Asserts that Appelfeld treats being Jewish as an affliction and that the author could be read as being insensitive to assimilated Jews.
Works Cited
Appelfeld, Aharon. Blooms of Darkness. New York: Schocken, 2010. Print. Rev. of Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appelfeld. Kirkus Reviews 15 Feb. 2010. Print. Rev. of Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appelfeld. Publishers Weekly 4 Jan. 2010: 28. Print. Carrigan, Henry L., Jr. Rev. of Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appelfeld. Library Journal 1 Apr. 2010: 66. Print.
Strauss, Leah. Rev. of Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appelfeld. Booklist 15 Mar. 2010: 18+. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Cooper, David. Rev. of Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appelfeld. New York Journal of Books. New York Journal of Books, LLC, 9 Mar. 2010. Web. 20 Oct. 2010. Argues that a central theme in Blooms of Darkness and other novels by Appelfeld is a sense of sadness and loss among the Gentiles who
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The events of Blooms of Darkness take place during the struggle to fight off invading German forces. S. Khoroshko/Slava Katamidze Collection/Getty Images
attempt to shield Appelfeld’s Jewish characters from persecution. Glinter, Ezra. Rev. of Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appelfeld. National Post [Toronto]. National Post Inc., 13 Mar. 2010. Web. 20 Oct. 2010. Examines how Appelfeld evokes the tragedy and horror of the Holocaust without referring specifically to concentration camps, in part by focusing on private situations in remote corners of the war zone. Margolin, Elaine. “Men from Boys.” Rev. of Blooms of Darkness, by Aharon Appelfeld. Jerusalem Post 4 Apr. 2010. Print. Provides an autobiographical reading of Blooms of Darkness and speculates that Appelfeld writes to reunite with his mother, who was killed by Nazi soldiers when Appelfeld was nine years old. Gale Resources
“Aharon Appelfeld.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Gale Biography in Context. Web. 20 Oct. 2010. “Aharon Appelfeld.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. Gale Biography in Context. Web. 20 Oct. 2010.
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“Aharon Appelfeld.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Gale Biography in Context. Web. 20 Oct. 2010. Open Web Sources
In an online interview with Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, Appelfeld discusses his escape from a German concentration camp in 1941 and the various ways he accesses memories when he prepares to write about his past. http//www.haaretz.com/culture/ books/questions-answers-a-conversation-withaharon-appelfeld-1.283933 At writerscast.com, a Web site that features interviews with contemporary writers, Aharon Appelfeld discusses with David Wilks how he works with translators, about the languages he spoke in his home, and why Blooms of Darkness is a work of fiction despite its many autobiographical elements. http//www .writerscast.com/aharon-appelfeld-blooms-of-dark ness/ The Web site Roland Collection of Films on Art provides a video interview with Aharon Appelfeld in which he discusses his arrival in Israel and his decision to become a writer. http//www.rolandcollection.com/ films/?prm=a20-b116-c1662-d2-e0 TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Blooms of Darkness For Further Reading
Appelfeld, Aharon. The Story of a Life: A Memoir. New York: Schocken, 2004. Print. Memoir chronicling a period of more than seventy years covers Appelfeld’s escape from a concentration camp, his resettlement in Palestine at age fourteen, his university studies, and his writing career. Appelfeld also reflects on what it means to be Jewish and why one should write about the subject without sentimentality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. Ed. Otto H. Frank. Trans. Susan Massotty. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2010. Print. New edition of the diary contains 30 percent more material than the original version (1947) and recasts Anne Frank to be more sarcastic and rebellious than the sensitive, vulnerable child of the original version.
Aharon Appelfeld was born on February 16, 1932, in Zhadova, a village in what is now Ukraine. When he was eight years old, Nazi soldiers raided his home, murdered his mother, and deported him and his father to a concentration camp in the Romanian-occupied district of Transnistria. The boy escaped from the camp and lived in the woods for three years before he was captured by the Russian army and forced to work as a cook. After the war, Appelfeld lived briefly in a displacedpersons camp in Italy and then immigrated to Palestine in 1946. He now lives in Israel. The author of more than forty books, Appelfeld is considered one of the leading writers who publishes in Hebrew. Appelfeld draws heavily on his past in much of his fiction but rarely makes explicit reference to his experience in a concentration camp, focusing instead on private, isolated situations in remote areas away from the battlefields and the camps. Although he was raised speaking German, Appelfeld writes in Hebrew, which he began studying at age thirteen, because he believes it would be repugnant to tell the story of the Jewish experience during World War II in the language of those who persecuted Jewish people.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, Rpt. ed., 2009. Print. Like Mariana and Hugo, who trudge through the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in the waning days of World War II, the father and son in McCarthy’s novel wander alone through a world in the aftermath of its devastation, scavenging for food and seeking shelter from murdering bands of thugs.
II recounts the author’s return with her mother to their native soil in 1991. Savage visits personal friends of her mother as well as historical markers such as the excavation of a mass grave that honors victims of Stalin’s purges.
Carell, Paul. Scorched Earth: The Russian-German War, 1943-1944. Atglen: Schiffer, 1994. Print. Regarded by many historians as the definitive account of the German defeat in eastern Europe by the Russian army, this volume contains hundreds of photographs, military campaign maps, and an extensive bibliography.
Roth, Philip. Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. New York: Vintage, 2002. Print. Roth’s collection of interviews with fellow writers contains a chapter in which Appelfeld discusses his decision to write in Hebrew rather than in German. Savage, Ania. Return to Ukraine. College Station: Texas AM UP (TAMU Press), 2000. Print. Memoir by a Ukrainian-born journalist who fled during World War
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill Wang, 2006. Print. Memoir chronicles author’s experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps with his father and includes an account of Wiesel’s loss of faith in God and his disgust with himself for at times wishing he could be free of his ailing father.
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Joseph Campana
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Blue Heaven By C. J. Box
W Introduction Blue Heaven is a thriller set in the gorgeous ranch country of northern Idaho, where retired Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers come to retire—an area known as “Blue Heaven.” When a twelve-year-old girl, Annie, and her younger brother, William, witness an execution-style murder perpetrated by four retired police officers, they flee for their lives. The killers, however, volunteer to lead the search for the missing children and the unsuspecting local sheriff agrees. With no one to trust, Annie and William meet Jess Rawlins, a old-school rancher with a stubborn streak who is determined to protect the children and serve justice on the killers looking for them. Meanwhile, a retired LAPD detective, Eduardo Villatoro, comes to town to investigate a decade-old robbery-and-murder case that has been unsolved too long and becomes embroiled in the chase. Told over a tense, action-packed forty-eight-hour period, Blue Heaven explores themes of greed, betrayal, trust, justice, and the power of redemption. Upon its publication, the novel quickly became a best seller. In 2009 it received the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel of 2008. As critic Margaret Cannon states in her review of the book, “Blue Heaven is [C. J.] Box’s seventh novel, and it’s as good as a psychological/action thriller gets.”
W Literary and Historical Context
Blue Heaven is regarded as one of the best examples of the thriller genre published in 2008. To be successful, thrillers use suspense and excitement through a variety of narrative techniques, including cliffhangers, plot twists, and red herrings, and by creating an atmosphere of danger by implied or real violence, crime, chase scenes, and mysterious or menacing characters. In Blue Heaven, the action takes place over a very short time and is
intensified by the reader’s concern for the threatened characters: two scrappy but vulnerable children, Annie and William, who are being chased by four experienced and heartless ex-cops who are determined to kill them. The thriller genre can be traced back to ancient epic poems, like Homer’s Odyssey, and One Thousand and One Nights, which use plot twists and elements of detective fiction. Thrillers have been a popular genre throughout history; whether through stories told around a campfire or in medieval castles or in isolated homes in the wilderness, some of the most popular stories were thrillers because they are entertaining, exciting, and appealed to the human instinct for justice and survival. There are several subgenres of thrillers, such as spy novels, crime fiction, mystery fiction, and legal thrillers. Today thrillers are one of the most successful genres of popular fiction. Blue Heaven also touches on a cultural issue that has garnered debate and controversy in recent years: the conflict between outsiders and longtime residents of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and similar areas because of land development. As outsiders buy up land to build mini-ranches and swoop in for long vacations, longtime residents resent the ostentatious homes and estates of these newcomers. There is a clash of lifestyles and values—and economics. Newcomers are often very wealthy, while many old-time ranchers are not. Although their influx of cash into county coffers and local businesses are welcomed, their lifestyles and culture often are not.
W Themes Betrayal is a recurring theme in Blue Heaven. As the novel opens, Annie and William feel betrayed by their mom because of her boyfriend, and they escape to go fishing— only to witness a murder by four ex-cops. They are then pursued by the killers, who are supposed to follow the law and protect them, not kill them. They are also inadvertently betrayed by the townspeople, who have
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been fooled by the ex-cops. With the killers heading the search for Annie and William, the kids do not have anyone to trust until they meet Jess Rawlins. As in most crime thrillers, justice is also a central theme in Blue Heaven. Jess realizes he has to protect Annie and William, even at the risk of his own life. Eduardo comes to Idaho to solve a decade-old crime because the victim’s family deserves justice. In the process, both men find redemption: Jess, battered by romantic and financial problems and feeling like a failure, is redeemed by doing the right thing for Annie and William; and Eduardo will finally solve a crime that has haunted his conscience for years. Box also touches on a sociocultural theme that has affected the west since the first settlers came out to build ranches and cities in a pristine natural environment: the conflict between new arrivals and those already on the land. Newcomers represent change—sometimes unwelcome change. In Blue Heaven, the new arrivals are the retired LAPD cops who are trying to escape their own haunted pasts. “Box deftly weaves in another important issue that faces the ‘new’ West—depressed rural communities being invaded by ‘transplants’ who move there for the area’s character and then turn around and try to change everything,” Leslie Doran writes in a review of the novel. “Among the many new residents in Idaho are the retired West Coast cops. Some try to fit in and join the community; others stay by themselves and follow unknown pursuits, showing little respect for their neighbors.”
W Style In reviews of Blue Heaven, critics maintain that Box fully uses his rural Idaho setting not only to create suspense in the novel, but also to add richness and texture to the story. Leslie Doran observes that “Box uses the rich Idaho landscape to good effect, setting much of the action outdoors. The rugged wilderness provides a welcome haven for the children, offering many places for hiding while at the same time threatening their chances of survival. Early-spring weather is treacherous, and wildlife abounds, but the most dangerous threat comes from the men chasing them.” Reviewer Hallie Ephron concurs and applauds Box’s ability to engage the reader through setting and by exploiting the characteristics of a suspense novel. “The ranch setting, combined with a rich, complex story, gives the novel the flavor of a Western saga,” she states in her review of Blue Heaven. “Cliffhanger scene shifts, a ticking clock, and escalating danger lend it all the trappings of a suspense novel, but with characters that make the reader care.” Leslie Doran also comments on Box’s use of the ticking clock technique in the novel. “The proverbial ticking clock drives the sometimes-frantic pace of Blue Heaven, with a majority of the novel taking place over a two-day period,” Doran notes.
MAJOR CHARACTERS JESS RAWLINS is a rancher in the North Idaho area known as “Blue Heaven.” When Annie and William Taylor show up in trouble and in need of an ally, Jess helps them at risk to himself. With a failing ranch on the cusp of foreclosure and abandoned by his family, Jess is determined to redeem himself by protecting Annie and William. ANNIE TAYLOR is a twelve-year-old girl who sees a murder while fishing with her little brother, William. The two siblings escape into the woods and find protection from a local rancher, Jess Rawlins. MONICA TAYLOR is Annie and William’s lonely and scared mother. A heartbreaker, she has a knack for getting involved with the wrong men. WILLIAM TAYLOR is Annie Taylor’s younger brother. While fishing one day, they witness an execution-style murder and must go on the run to escape the killers. EDUARDO VILLATORO is a retired LAPD detective who comes to Idaho to investigate an old robbery case and becomes involved in protecting Annie and William.
Analysis of Box’s narrative style also extends to his prose and exposition. Margaret Cannon finds that “his prose is as spare and elegant as James Lee Burke’s, and his loving exposition of the western American landscape is excellent, as good as anything Hollywood ever put on film.” Reviewers also examine the depth and realism of the characters in Blue Heaven, arguing that Box succeeds in crafting complicated, believable characters facing convincing problems and issues. “One of the more attractive features of any Box novel is the memorable characters he creates,” Leslie Doran argues. “They display the welcome familiarity of the old West while facing the challenges of the new West. His characters are sympathetic, with fully realized depth and complexities.”
W Critical Reception Blue Heaven spent four weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list and received the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel in 2008. Critics praised the novel as a suspenseful, action-packed read. In her Globe and Mail review, Margaret Cannon maintains that “this is a terrific suspense novel, with superb characters and a satisfying plot. You’ll be hooked.” Chris Rubich also commends the sense of high drama and tension in Blue Heaven. “It’s four days of high tension and high action. And Box delivers surprises until the final page,” he states in his review of the novel. Another reviewer, Leslie Doran, finds that the novel “crackles with electric tension and action,
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Blue Heaven
ABOUT THE AUTHOR C. J. Box was born in Casper, Wyoming, and attended college at the University of Denver in Colorado. After graduating in 1981, he worked briefly as a ranch hand, exploration surveycrew member, fishing guide, and newspaper reporter and editor. Box is also the former manager of travel development for the Wyoming Travel Commission. In recent years, he founded the Rocky Mountain International Corporation, which promotes tourism to Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Idaho from Europe. He is currently the CEO and president of the company. In 2001 his first novel, Open Season, introduced the character of Joe Pickett, a crimesolving game warden in Wyoming. Box’s Joe Pickett series has proven to be very popular and the novels have been translated into 24 languages. In 2007 he was honored as Writer of the Year by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. He lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
while the characters plumb the depths of human emotions, including greed, corruption, callous disregard of human suffering and, on the other hand, love, honor and compassion.” Some reviewers, however, criticized narrative strategies that counteracted the carefully constructed suspense. A review in Publishers Weekly found fault with one of the storylines in the novel and unfavorably compared Blue Heaven with Box’s wildly popular Joe Pickett series. “A subplot involving a retired California detective pursuing the original robbery case adds too many extra characters and undercuts the suspense,” the review states. “Readers expecting the same brisk story lines as the author’s Joe Pickett crime novels (Free Fire, etc.) will be disappointed.” Chris Rubich assesses Box’s complicated and authentic characters as one of the best aspects of the novel. “Box excels in capturing the personalities and lifestyles of the inland Northwest,” Rubich asserts. “He also masterfully peels away the layers of lives to reveal secrets that influence folks’ decisions across decades.” Focusing on Rawlins, the protagonist of Blue Heaven, Rubich finds that there are similarities between the hard-knocked Rawlins and Box’s most famous character, Joe Pickett. “Fans of Joe Pickett will find the tortured good-guy values in Rawlins, too,” he adds. “And the added focus of the children struggling just to get home and erase the dangers makes the stakes higher.” Most critics found Blue Heaven to be a rich, fastpaced thriller. “Against a backdrop of wilderness, rich with the scent of pine and cattle, there are strong elements of classic tragedy here as well, as yearning propels all of the characters, good and bad, into mortal peril,” Hallie Ephron concluded in her review. “Blue Heaven is my favorite kind of thriller—one with a heart.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Rev. of Blue Heaven, by C. J. Box. Publishers Weekly 254.41 (15 Oct. 2007). Print. Cannon, Margaret. Rev. of Blue Heaven, by C. J. Box. Globe and Mail 5 Feb. 2008. Web. 10 Aug. 2010. Doran, Leslie. “Kids Flee Killers in Idaho Panhandle: C. J. Box Enters Thriller Territory with Plight of Siblings Who Witness a Murder.” Denver Post 24 Feb. 2008. Print. Ephron, Hallie. “Sleuths Bearing Wrenches, and Old Wounds.” Boston Globe 27 Jan. 2008. Web. 10 Aug. 2010. Rubich, Chris. “Betrayals Mount in Box’s New Novel.” Billings Gazette 26 Jan. 2008. Web. 10 Aug. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Portrait of C. J. Box, author of Blue Heaven. Matthew Peyton/Getty Images
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Blundell, Graeme. “Long-Running Arm of the Law.” Australian 10 May 2008. Finds Blue Heaven to be TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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“as classy, elegiac and as affecting as any of those wonderful Joe Pickett stories.” Graff, Keir. Rev. of Blue Heaven, by C. J. Box. Booklist 104.3 (1 Oct. 2007). Commends Box’s ability to build suspense in Blue Heaven, and calls the novel a true page-turner. Hartlaub, Joe. Rev. of Blue Heaven, by C. J. Box. Bookreporter.com 2008. Web 10 Aug. 2010. Favorable review of the novel that praises Box’s distinctive twist on the crime thriller genre. Gale Resources
“C. J. Box.” Contemporary Authors Online. Farmington Hills: Gale, 2010. Open Web Sources
C. J. Box’s website, www.cjbox.net, features synopses of his books, his blog, a reader forum and polls, and a photo gallery. It posts updated information on his upcoming appearances and other events. Fans can also sign up for Box’s newsletter. Similar information on Box, his books, and critical reviews of his novels can be found on the Macmillan website, found at www.us.macmillan.com. Tourism information about Idaho, the setting of Blue Heaven, can be found at the Idaho Tourism Bureau website, at www.visitidaho.org. Peruse maps and photographs, sign up for an e-newsletter, and learn about all the events and activities happening in the state. The National Park Service website for Yellowstone Park, at www.nps.gov/yell, features video and photos of the gorgeous national park. You can also view the Old Faithful webcam, which streams the geyser eruptions live.
For Further Reading
Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller. New York: Random House, 2007. Print. Explicates the long-standing popularity of the thriller genre and considers some of its most important figures, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Dennis Lehane. Ascari, Maurizio. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Traces the evolution of crime fiction from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century, exploring how the genre developed and differentiated itself from detective fiction. Box, C. J. Nowhere to Run. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010. Print. In this novel, Joe Pickett is working in his last week as the temporary game warden in the isolated town of Baggs, Wyoming. When strange things start happening in the surrounding mountains, he is compelled to investigate. James, P. D. Talking about Detective Fiction. New York: Knopf, 2009. Print. James is regarded as one of the world’s top writers of detective fiction. In this literary history, she investigates the origins of the genre and considers the long-lasting appeal of detective novels. Parker, T. Jefferson. Iron River. New York: Dutton, 2010. Print. Parker’s 2010 novel is the third in the series featuring Los Angeles Sheriff Deputy Charlie Hood. In this book, Hood joins Operation Blowdown, a law enforcement attempt to stop the massive flow of guns and money across the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Margaret Haerens
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The Boat to Redemption By Su Tong
W Introduction Set in Milltown, a fictional city along the Golden Sparrow River in China, The Boat to Redemption (2009) chronicles eleven years (1966-1977) in the life of Ku Dongliang, the son of Communist Party enthusiasts. Following his parents’ divorce, Dongliang comes of age among barge workers in a river community. Over the course of the novel, Dongliang, who narrates the story, copes with his father’s disgrace, his mother’s strident loyalty to the Communist Party, and his own frustrated sexual longings by nursing an obsession for Huixian, an orphan who grows into a beauty and becomes a favorite of party leaders. The Boat to Redemption has been praised for its realistic portrayal of the relationships between small-time party members and disenfranchised citizens during China’s Cultural Revolution. The people of Milltown do their best to follow Communist doctrine to the letter, often quoting slogans in their everyday speech, while looking with scorn on the barge workers, who do not concern themselves at all with politics. The story highlights the extremes of behavior to which people resort when forced to live under intense government scrutiny and to vie for political favor. Su Tong’s novel won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009.
W Literary and Historical Context
The Boat to Redemption is set during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which began on August 8, 1966, when the Communist Party of China (CCP) passed the “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” and ended on September 9, 1976, with the death of the CCP chairman Mao Zedong. Under the supervision of Chairman Mao,
the Cultural Revolution affected the lives of almost every Chinese citizen. The decade was marked by famine, violence, the destruction of antiques and cultural artifacts, and a comprehensive dissemination of propaganda. Mao made his primary appeal to the youth of China, who responded by forming the Red Guards, associations of young paramilitaries who were encouraged by the CCP to terrorize anyone whose devotion to party ideals was deemed questionable. Local authorities were instructed to disregard the actions of these ruffians. Mao spread his ideals by circulating a red book, known in the West as “The Little Red Book,” which was filled with his quotations, and by subsidizing operas and films that celebrated party ideals. He posted his portrait throughout the country and commissioned posters illustrating various aspects of the party’s vision. On June 27, 1981, five years after Mao’s death, the CCP issued an official judgment on the Cultural Revolution, distancing itself from Mao’s actions during that infamous decade but at the same time honoring his contribution to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. China’s government discourages independent research on this period of its history. In writing about this subject while resident in China, Su Tong risks being labeled a dissident by the Chinese government. The Boat to Redemption contains no explicitly derogatory remarks about Mao Zedong or the CCP.
W Themes Martyrdom and celebrity are central themes in The Boat to Redemption. The novel opens with an account of Deng Shaoxiang, a revolutionary martyr who stored guns and ammunition in coffins for retrieval by the Communist army. According to legend, Deng’s activities were discovered when she changed her routine by storing pistols in a baby basket. Before her execution, she set the baby, rumored to be her son, afloat on the Golden
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Sparrow River in his basket. Officially recognized as the child in the basket, Ku Wenxuan lives a life of privilege until middle age. The CCP then revokes his birthright, declaring that the fish-shaped birthmark on his buttocks, which marks him as Deng’s progeny, is fraudulent. Immediately afterward he loses his position as Milltown’s party secretary. The novel’s two central female characters, Qiao Limin and Huixian, pursue honor by auditioning for roles in the party-endorsed operas that tour the country. Neither achieves national fame but both become local celebrities, Qiao as a radio broadcaster, and Huixian for her reenactments of Li Tiemei, the central character in The Legend of the Red Lantern, a famous opera from the period. Aside from its political concerns, The Boat to Redemption focuses on Dongliang’s struggle to escape his father’s tyrannical rule. Shamed by public knowledge of his philandering, Ku Wenxuan will not so much as permit Dongliang to have an erection, even after the latter has grown well into his twenties. Dongliang steadfastly defies his father but cannot summon the courage to move away.
W Style Su Tong’s works have often deviated from conventional modes of storytelling, and the author is also known for crafting lavish, elegant sentences that violate standard rules of grammar. The Boat to Redemption, however, is a traditional, linear novel written in simple, grammatically sound sentences. The action of the novel unfolds in chronological sequence, with the characters often speaking in the stilted language of Communist party doctrine. For example, when a group of barge workers gathers to dissuade Ku Wenxuan from punishing his son for his pursuit of Huixian, Wenxuan tells them, “Go ahead, stir up plenty of trouble and break all the rules. I won’t need to use family law; I’ll let national laws do their job. Sooner or later you’ll be handed over to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Satirical in his philandering days Ku Wenxuan would seduce a woman by telling her that “your body emanates the spirit of revolutionary romanticism.” During Wenxuan’s stint as party secretary, women felt honored when he told them that they appeared to be living in accord with the revolution’s ideals of hard work and selflessness. Su Tong’s writing in these passages can be read as satirical. In the instances cited above, Su is likely criticizing the leaders of the CCP, who imposed such stilted language on ordinary citizens. He may also be making fun of people who internalize the language to such an extent that they use it when discussing romantic love and such private family matters as disciplining children.
MAJOR CHARACTERS BIANJIN, the town idiot, is declared the rightful son of Deng Shaoxiang, based on the identification of a fish-shaped birthmark on his buttocks. HUIXIAN is the object of Ku Dongliang’s obsession. The two first meet as children, when the abandoned Huixian is adopted by the barge workers in the river community. When she grows into a beautiful young woman, the party casts her as Li Tiemei, the heroine from a famous opera popular during the Cultural Revolution, in its parades. Huixian fails to become an actress and loses her party privileges as a result of her willfulness. KU DONGLIANG, who is fifteen when the story begins, is the narrator of the novel. After his parents’ divorce he moves with his father onto a barge. He falls in love with Huixian, an orphaned girl adopted by the river community. When Huixian moves to Milltown, Dongliang stalks her until the party’s security officers threaten his life. KU WENXUAN grows up believing that he is the son of Deng Shaoxiang, a martyred revolutionary heroine. When investigators declare instead that he is the son of a fisherman and a prostitute, Wenxuan loses his prestigious government post, and his wife divorces him. Wenxuan spends the rest of his life petitioning the government to recognize his birthright. QIAO LIMIN is Dongliang’s mother, a factory worker, and a radio broadcaster. She divorces Ku Wenxuan after he loses his birthright and confesses his extramarital affairs to party officials. Qiao refuses to share custody of Dongliang and forces him to choose to live either with her or with Wenxuan. ZHAO CHUNTANG assumes Wenxuan’s position as party secretary in Milltown. He recruits Huixian by giving her a prominent role in the party’s parades but later demotes her when she refuses to live at his beck and call.
W Critical Reception The Boat to Redemption has received mostly positive reviews. Critics who praise the novel point to the narrator’s charisma and the accuracy of the author’s depiction of life during China’s Cultural Revolution, which Su leavens with bawdy humor that exposes the absurdity of the government’s preoccupations. In the London Daily Mail, Eithne Farry claims that the author “paints Dongliang’s erratic behaviour with broad brush-strokes and the humour is rough, raw and irreverent, but there is genuine sympathy for the maverick
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Su Tong is the pen name of Zhong Gui Tong, who was born on January 23, 1963, in Su Zhou, a city of six million people located along the Yangtze River. He has published several novels and more than two hundred short stories and is among the most widely admired of contemporary Chinese writers. He achieved international fame when a film version of Raise the Red Lantern, a novella from Wives and Concubines (1990), earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film in 1992. A leading figure among China’s avant-garde writers, Su Tong has a reputation for elegant prose and formal experimentation. A traditional realist novel, The Boat to Redemption is recognized as a departure from his previous work.
whose impetuous behaviour can only bring trouble in a prescriptive, claustrophobic world.” SH Lim of Time Out Kuala Lumpur notes that Su successfully portrays the
extremes of behavior characteristic of those who live under intense government scrutiny. “What the novel captures is a kind of life where the frantic impulse to survive—to have enough to fill the stomach and quench the throat—overwhelms and precipitates ridiculous behavior,” Lim writes. Likewise, Shabhano Bilgrami argues in the Asian Review of Books that the balance Su strikes between “painful, gut-wrenching incidents” and “a passion, which is tempered by humor” make the novel “not only bearable but mesmerizing to read.” Critics who fault the novel claim that Su undermines its plot by devoting too much of the second part of the book to Huixian. Lim calls Huixian’s misadventures “a detour that leads nowhere.” Hugo Barnacle of the London Sunday Times argues that the second part of The Boat to Redemption “breaks one of the basic rules of narrative”: Dongliang, a first-person narrator, cannot possibly know about Huixan’s experiences on land because he is not present. One notable exception to this view is Christine Williams’s review in the Sunday Express, which asserts that, when Huixian becomes the focus of the narrative, “more twists, turns and tragedies hold the reader’s attention right to the end.”
In The Boat to Redemption, the main character lives with his father on a barge in China. ª Horizon International Images Limited/Alamy
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The Boat to Redemption BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Barnacle, Hugo. Rev. of The Boat to Redemption, by Su Tong. Sunday Times. Times Newspapers Ltd, 12 Feb. 2010. Web. 13 Oct. 2010. Bilgrami, Shabhano. Rev. of The Boat to Redemption, by Su Tong. Asian Review of Books. Image Alpha (Holdings) Ltd, 4 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Oct. 2010. Farry, Eithne. Rev. of The Boat to Redemption, by Su Tong. Mail Online. Associated Newspapers Ltd, 1 Feb. 2010. Web. 13 Oct. 2010.
community and concludes that the novel’s central concern is with how corrupt politics exile a person from his or her potential. “The Boat to Redemption a Winning Perspective on the Past.” People’s Daily Online. People’s Daily Online, 7 Dec. 2009. Web. 13 Oct. 2010. Distinguishes The Boat to Redemption from other novels and short stories by Chinese writers on the Cultural Revolution, which, the reviewer notes, typically have adult rather than adolescent protagonists. Gale Resources
Lim, SH. Rev. of The Boat to Redemption, by Su Tong. Time Out Kuala Lumpur. Time Out Group Ltd, May 2010. Web. 13 Oct. 2010.
“Zhong Gui Tong.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Gale Biography in Context. Web. 12 Oct. 2010.
Su Tong. The Boat to Redemption. Trans. Howard Goldblatt. London: Random House, 2010. Print.
Open Web Sources
Williams, Christine. Rev. of The Boat to Redemption, by Su Tong. Express.co.uk. Northern and Shell Media Publications, 4 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Oct. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Hill, Justin. Rev. of The Boat to Redemption, by Su Tong. Independent [London]. Independent Print Ltd, 29 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Oct. 2010. Speculates that English-speaking readers are likely to find the humor and the violence in the novel juvenile and overwrought but that Chinese readers will regard the novel’s melodrama as an accurate representation of life during the Cultural Revolution. Li, Yiyun. Rev. of The Boat to Redemption, by Su Tong. Guardian [London]. Guardian News and Media Ltd, 9 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Oct. 2010. Notes that, on the strength of his previous, more experimental works, Su Tong had established himself as a leader in China’s avant-garde, but that The Boat to Redemption marks a shift in Su’s style from exotic, labyrinthine sentences to the more prosaic, familiar language of a realistic novel. Mirsky, Jonathan. “Fear Hovers in China.” Rev. of The Boat to Redemption, by Su Tong. Spectator 16 Jan. 2010: 36+. Print. Contains anecdotes from some of Su Tong’s colleagues, who lived through the Cultural Revolution, and gives specific examples of the privileges high-ranking party members enjoyed, including greater access to their personal files and permission to add details to the most flattering aspects of the files. Mukherjee, Neel. Rev. of The Boat to Redemption, by Su Tong. Neelmukherjee.com. Neel Mukherjee, 5 Feb. 2010. Web. 13 Oct. 2010. Contrasts the proper lives of the party members living on land with the bawdy, slapstick existence of the people in the barge
Su Tong discusses reading habits in modern China and corruption in the Chinese publishing industry in an interview with China Daily, an English-language national newspaper published by the Chinese government. http//www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/ 2003-08/24/content_257750.htm China the Beautiful—a cultural heritage Web site with links to pictures and information on Chinese classics, art, history, literature, poetry, calligraphy, and paintings—has recordings of several of the arias from The Legend of the Red Lantern, the opera frequently referenced in The Boat to Redemption. http//www .chinapage.com/xwang/aria.html#list Morning Sun, a Web site that documents the origins and history of the Cultural Revolution in China, has video footage of The East Is Red, a government-sponsored, epic song-and-dance film celebrating the virtues of Communism. http//www.morningsun.org/east/eir. html Morning Sun also features slides of government forms documenting the resettlement of people and the confiscation of goods. http//www.morningsun.org/ living/personnelFiles/index.html Chineseposters.net, a Web site maintained by Dr. Stefan R. Landsberger, a sinologist trained at Leiden University in the Netherlands, showcases one of the largest private collections of Chinese propaganda posters in the world. Spanning the period from 1925 to 2006, the collection is arranged by date and theme. http// chineseposters.net/gallery/ The Mao Tse Tung Internet Archive houses a collection of quotations from Chairman Mao arranged in thirty-three categories, including “Youth,” “Women,” “Culture and Art,” “Correcting Mistaken Ideas,” and “Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle.” http// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/ red-book/
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The Boat to Redemption For Further Reading
Gao Yuan. Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987. Print. Gao’s memoir covers the period from 1966 to 1969, when he was in middle school and joined the Red Guards. As a student Gao zealously backed the Cultural Revolution in China, despite the fact that his father was a target of the Communist Party. Jin, Ha. A Free Life. New York: Vintage, 2009. Print. This story of a Chinese couple who immigrate to the United States after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 contrasts the immigrant experience with the upheavals of revolution. Like The Boat to Redemption, Ha Jin’s novel traces the dissolution of a single-child family.
the 1930s in rural China, this novel focuses on how large-scale historical events, like the Second SinoJapanese War (1937-1945), disrupt family life and create intolerable conditions in communities. Like Su Tong and Raise the Red Lantern, Mo Yan became famous in the United States when a film adaptation of Red Sorghum was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988. Su Tong. Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas. Trans. Michael S. Duke. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Print. Initially published as Wives and Concubines, this collection of novellas secured Su’s reputation when a film adaptation of Raise the Red Lantern was nominated for the 1992 Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film. Like Ku Wenxuan, the heroine of the title story suffers chronic humiliation and takes refuge in increasingly bizarre behavior.
Li, Yiyun. The Vagrants. New York: Random House, 2010. Print. Set in rural China during the Cultural Revolution, this novel centers on the execution of a former Red Guard member accused by the Communist Party of being a counterrevolutionary. Like Su Tong, Li focuses on how the politics of the era affects romantic and familial relationships.
Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life. New York: Grove Press, 2000. Print. This memoir chronicles the writer’s coming-of-age in the aftermath of his parents’ divorce. Wolff lives with his mother, but like Dongliang, spends much time reflecting on the unfair choices the divorce forces him to make.
Mo Yan. Red Sorghum: A Novel of China. Trans. Howard Goldblatt. New York: Penguin, 1994. Print. Set in
Joseph Campana
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Bold as Love By Gwyneth Jones
W Introduction Winner of the 2002 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the United Kingdom’s premiere prize for novels in the science fiction category, Bold as Love is the first book in Gwyneth Jones’s pentology about a group of rock musicians at the helm of a near-future England on the brink of imminent collapse. As this first installment opens, the British royal family has quit and what is left of Parliament has declared Dissolution Year, breaking its ties with the other countries in the United Kingdom just as the European Commonwealth is itself fragmenting wholesale. England’s Home Secretary decides to bolster public morale by establishing a Counter Cultural Think Tank, a sort of shadow government composed primarily of rock stars. But an Ozzie Osbourne-type figure, Pigsty Liver, envisions a different scenario, staging a violent coup d’état at a Cabinet meeting that claims the lives of the Home Secretary and many of the rockers assigned to the Think Tank. The story pits Pigsty in a battle for control of England with surviving rockers Ax Preston, Sage Pender, and Fiorinda Slater, friends modeled on the legendary figures of King Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere. The updated Arthurian triumvirate prevails, now confronted with the seemingly insurmountable task of transitioning England out of its turmoil. Bold as Love has been praised for its vivid characterizations of its three main protagonists as well as for its thoughtful meditations on current social, political, and environmental issues extrapolated to some of their more unfortunate consequences. In an interview with LOCUSonline (“Gwyneth Jones: Magical Science”), Jones offered a synopsis of the series: “People argue over whether the ‘Bold as Love’ books are fantasy or science fiction. I call them fantasy, because the story is a romance. It’s set in the future, but it’s about a good prince, a fairy princess, and a perfect Champion (rock stars being the knights and princesses of
our culture). On the other hand it’s set in the future, in a time of profound change. It’s about a global social and scientific revolution, and it involves plenty of high-tech extrapolation from the possibilities of the present day. So maybe it’s fantasy and science fiction.”
W Literary and Historical Context
Bold as Love takes its name from the title of a 1967 Jimmie Hendrix album, Axis; Bold as Love. Indeed, the novel as a whole owes much to the countercultural movement of the 1960s and early 1970s and the notion that rock musicians had political sensibilities worth taking seriously. As Francis Spufford explains, “The salient oddity of Bold as Love is that its achievement is rooted not in the festival scene of 2001, but in the world of 1971. It substantiates the dreams not of present-day apocalypse-minded teenagers, but of their counterparts 30 years ago, who read Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels and relished the fantasy of the Rolling Stones playing gigs in the rubble of liberated cities.” But, as Jones’s comments in an interview with Andrew M. Butler indicate, the novel is even more broadly indebted to history, both personal and political: “You can think of the ‘Bold as Love’ sequence as being based on my life and times: including the formative influence of my parents’ struggle against Fascism in the thirties, the Gravity’s Rainbow story of the Second World War and the rocket science that came out of that, the austerity of the fifties, the psychedelic sixties, Vietnam, Civil Rights, molecular biology, neuroscience, environmental disaster, the lot. It’s all in there, all the fashions and customs and history that I’ve been exposed to, all mixed up together.” Bold as Love is also much indebted to the mythology surrounding King Arthur. The relationships among Ax, Sage, and Fiorinda is drawn on the famous love triangle
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MAJOR CHARACTERS PIGSTY LIVER is a drug-addled and destructive rocker who is thwarted is his attempt to overthrow the government of the Counter Culturals. SAGE PENDER, as the Lancelot figure, is Ax Preston’s right-hand man. He is the visionary behind the band AOXOMOXOA and THE HEADS and a techno-wizard capable of transforming his face with holographic images of skulls. AX PRESTON is the King Arthur figure in the novel, the rocker who directs England’s restoration. He is the lead guitarist of the band THE CHOSEN FEW, armed with heroic ideals and a database implant. FIORINDA SLATER is the Guinevere figure in the triumvirate of friends who attempt to rebuild England. She is a daughter of rock-and-roll royalty, singer for the band DARK, and possibly possessed of magical powers.
of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere. Accordingly, there is the familiar three-way political and sexual intrigue. But Jones rewrites the myth with a twist so that, instead of Fiorinda disrupting the bond between the two men—Ax,
the King Arthur figure, and his trusted ally, Sage, as Lancelot—all three remain partners and friends. The camaraderie of King Arthur’s Round Table remains intact, and there is the suggestion that a peaceful England-cum-Camelot will be restored out of the maelstrom.
W Themes Jones is herself a product of the counterculturalism movement of the 1960s. Thus, the major themes in the novel grow out of her well-developed social consciousness. Bold as Love is antiestablishment in the sense that it foresees a world transformed by the rock anthems of the 1960s, using countercultural poetics as a curative to social, political, and environmental crises. The world inherited by Ax, Sage, and Fiorinda is bleak and chaotic: England has no allies and no central government; a virus has nearly obliterated the Internet; electricity reserves are shrinking; uncontained diseases are at epidemic levels; a conflict with Islamic separatists in Yorkshire verges on an ethnic bloodbath; and pollution and global warming are serious threats as well. The three friends discover their hidden talents as they attempt to restore England’s infrastructure and economy and crusade on behalf of Green causes. Ax, Sage, and Fiorinda shift their attention
Photo of Gwyneth Jones, author of the novel Bold a Love. ª Jeff Morgan 03/Alamy
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from one calamity to another and devote their sparse free time to giving free public concerts aimed at national solidarity. The novel deconstructs contemporary power struggles in England using what Jones calls the “Matter of Britain” to explore what truly is the matter with Britain (qtd. in Forshaw). But Jones has also insisted that the novel is not so much nationalistic as it is suspicious of entrenched power structures in general and political apparatuses that have long since outlived their usefulness.
W Style The style of Bold as Love is informed by a musical consciousness. In fact, the website for the series includes a list of the fictional band members who comprise Jones’s cast of characters as well as a musical playlist for each chapter with songs that express its thematic concerns. References to actual song titles, lyrics, and rock performers abound in Bold as Love. Combined with Jones’s staging of concerts as the sites of political maneuvering, these allusions add to the novel’s spirit of youthful energy. Analogous to some of the rock lyrics Jones references, Spufford described Jones’s prose as “elegant in a disheveled way.”
W Critical Reception Results of a 1993 survey conducted by the journal Science-Fiction Studies counted Jones among the most unjustly neglected writers of the genre (Weinbaum). Writing for a Femspec symposium in 2004, Batya Weinbaum recorded no change in Jones’s critical stature despite her winning of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Weinbaum called for a critical reassessment, noting, “Every sf academic I know admires and respects Jones’s work. The complex imbrications of hard scientific and ethical speculations, the fiercely insightful feminist, leftist, and green politics, and the intense critiques of gender, ethnicity, and colonialism we find in her fiction cry out for the kind of attention that Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy have received.” Bold as Love attracted largely positive, if slight, critical notice. Reviewers were impressed by Jones’s inventive use of rock-and-roll and Arthurian motifs applied to a future political landscape. They were unanimous in their admiration for Jones’s well-drawn characterizations of Ax, Sage, and Fiorinda and the loyal relationship that develops among them. Though the novel is bleakly pessimistic in some of its future prognostications, critics found it to be ultimately infused with a sense of hope due to the idealism of the rock musicians. Suzanne Keen, for one, commented, “Normally, serious literary fiction flirts with sci-fi only in the form of dystopia, but Bold as Love puts the question positively: What would it take to build a
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alongside more than twenty fantasy novels for young adults, Gwyneth Jones has produced a considerable body of science fiction for adult readers, including a trilogy published in the 1990s about an Aleutian invasion of the earth and a pentology published the following decade about a trio of 1960s-inspired rock stars who assume control of a near-future England just as it threatens to deconstruct into Dark Ages chaos. Many times short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Britain’s most prestigious prize for writers of science fiction, Jones finally won in 2002 for Bold as Love, the first volume in her series of stories dedicated to the countercultural idealism of the 1960s.
Utopia, and who would you put in the seats of that Round Table?” Asked about the novel’s optimism by Sandy Auden for the SF Site, Jones responded, “I didn’t make that decision, the music did. That’s what music does, if it works, whether it’s Chopin or Blink 182. It excites, raises your spirits, arouses, gets people going.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Auden, Sandy, and Gwyneth Jones. “Winning with a Bold Streak: An Interview with Gwyneth Jones.” SF Site. Web. 27 July 2010. Butler, Andrew M., and Gwyneth Jones. “Going Uphill: An Interview with Gwyneth Jones.” Femspec 31 Dec. 2004. HighBeam Research, Gale. Web. 26 July 2010. Forshaw, Barry. “Books: Biography of Gwyneth Jones: The Music of the Future.” Independent [London] 12 Dec. 2003. NewsBank, Access World News. Web. 26 July 2010. “Gwyneth Jones: Magical Science.” LOCUSonline Jan. 2004. Web. 24 July 2010. Keen, Suzanne. “Christmas Critics, Novel, Book Reviews.” Commonweal 5 Dec. 2008. HighBeam Research, Gale. Web. 26 July 2010. Spufford, Francis. “Visons of Albion: Francis Spufford Celebrates a Rock ‘n’ Roll Pastoral.” Guardian [London] 25 Aug. 2001: 8. Print. Weinbaum, Batya. “Jones: An Introduction.” Femspec 31 Dec. 2004. HighBeam Research, Gale. Web. 26 July 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Bartholomew, Kathleen. Rev. of Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones. Green Man Review. Web. 24 July 2010.
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Issues high praise for the “larger than life” trio of Ax, Fiorinda, and Sage and the novel’s well detailed, if less mythic, minor characters. However, Bartholomew notes that the English specificity of the novel may prove an obstacle to American readers. “Bold as Love: Publisher and Industry Reviews.” Waterstones.com. Web. 25 July 2010. Reprints a Kirkus review that calls Bold as Love “a gripping evocation of what happens when the ideals and protests of popular music are played out for real with guns rather than guitars.” Rev. of Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones. Publishers Weekly 252.36 (12 Sept. 2005): 48(1). Student Resource Center - College Edition Expanded. Web. 23 July 2010. Describes the premise of Bold as Love. Butler, Chris. Rev. of Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones. infinityplus: sf, fantasy, horror. Web. 24 July 2010. Finds little in the way of escapism in the novel, wishing for more of the scenes in which Ax, Sage, and Fiorinda find a few moments of relaxation away from all of England’s troubles. Schroeder, Regina. Rev. of Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones. Booklist 102.3 (1 Oct. 2005): 43(1). Student Resource Center-College Edition Expanded. Detroit: Gale. Web. 23 July 2010. Calls Bold as Love a “satisfying blend” of rock-and-roll idealism and Arthurian legend. Skoya, David. Rev. of Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones. the SF Site. 2001. Web. 24 July 2010. Considers the novel’s premise hard to believe but nonetheless judges Bold as Love a worthwhile read because of its finely drawn characters. Gale Resources
“Gwyneth A(nn) Jones (1952-).” Something about the Author. Vol. 159. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 113-16. Something about the Author Online. Web. 28 July 2010.
250-52. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 23 July 2010. Open Web Sources
Suzanne Keen described the website for the “Bold as Love” series of novels, http//www.boldaslove.co. uk/The%20Bands%20Framed.html, as “a multime dia work of art in its own right.” The site prioritizes a cast list identifying the members of the rock bands fictionalized in the novels and provides a playlist representative of thematic concerns for each of the chapters in each of the novels in the series. Jones’s own homepage, http//homepage.ntlworld. com/gwynethann/, provides biography and personal anecdotes and access to the author’s blog and the “Bold as Love” webpage. For Further Reading
Jones, Gwyneth. Band of Gypsies. London: Victor Gollancz, 2005. Print. The fourth novel in the “Bold as Love” sequence. ———. Castles Made of Sand. London: Victor Gollancz, 2002. Print. The second novel in the “Bold as Love” sequence. ———. Midnight Lamp. London: Victor Gollancz, 2003. Print. The third novel in the “Bold as Love” pentology. ———. Rainbow Bridge. London: Victor Gollancz, 2006. Print. The final novel in the “Bold as Love” series. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le morte d’Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table. New York: Signet, 2001. Print. A concise rendering of Malory’s famous chronicles of the legendary King Arthur and the knights of his Round Table, written in the fifteenth century. Janet Mullane
“Jones, Gwyneth A(nn) 1952-.” Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series. Vol. 123. Detroit: Gale, 2004.
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The Bonesetter’s Daughter By Amy Tan
W Introduction The Bonesetter’s Daughter addresses Amy Tan’s concerns with memory, writing, and the tension between mothers and daughters. Written in three parts, the novel tells the stories of multiple generations of women in one Chinese American family, beginning with Ruth, a middle-aged American-born editor and ghostwriter living with her boyfriend and his children in San Francisco. Ruth is experiencing an identity crisis in her relationships with her boyfriend and her mother, LuLing, a Chinese immigrant who has always been a figure of unwelcome dominance in her daughter’s life. But when Ruth begins to see signs of dementia in LuLing, she realizes that she risks losing her only link to her family’s history. The second part of the book is a first-person telling of LuLing’s story, which she wrote down in Chinese calligraphy when she began losing her memory. Ruth has her mother’s memoirs translated and, as she reads the astonishing story, she discovers shocking revelations about her family history. In the book’s third part, Ruth decides what to do with the information she has, leading her to make major life changes and finally find her own voice. Reviewers were largely impressed with Tan’s handling of her multiple storylines and numerous characters, although many asserted that Tan concluded the story too abruptly.
W Literary and Historical Context
In the novel, LuLing is born in a village called Immortal Heart near Peking (Beijing) in 1915, and her story in the second part of The Bonesetter’s Daughter ends at the dawn of World War II, when she immigrates to the United States. In the twenty-odd years of LuLing’s life that are recounted, China underwent some of the most profound social and political changes in its history. The Revolution
of 1911 resulted in the 1912 founding of the Republic of China, moving the country away from the imperial rulers who had controlled it for thousands of years. A constitution was passed in 1913, and the provisional senate and president began instituting reforms intended to create a balance of powers. The effort to move the country toward democracy was short-lived, however, as the permanent president, Yuan Shih-kai, attempted to reinstitute imperialism and declared himself emperor. Additionally, the country was still largely controlled by regional warlords and a feudal system. Even after it agreed to play a role in World War I on the Allied side— under the condition that all German-held regions of China be returned to Chinese control—the country continued to be subjected to foreign imperialism, which the Chinese deeply resented. The awarding of the formerly German-held Shandong Province not to China but instead to Japan was a particularly sore point, and a wave of Chinese nationalism was sparked. On May 4, 1919, thousands of students organized a massive protest and strike, issuing a list of demands. Businesspeople and workers around the country also went on strike to show their solidarity with the May 4 Movement. It was out of this movement that Chinese Communism emerged. In 1921 the Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded. The Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) had been established as China’s first political party in 1912, and the two originally worked together to remove the warlords from power in the provinces. A violent split occurred between the parties, however, and during the 1927 Shanghai Massacre, Kuomintang leaders purged their party of Communists in a series of arrests and executions. The Kuomintang then formed the central government of China for the next ten years. Nonetheless, the representatives of the CPC set up encampments in rural provinces, establishing these as the Soviet Republic of China. One of the leaders of this movement was Mao Zedong, the future leader of the People’s Republic of China. In the meantime, China was engaged in
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MAJOR CHARACTERS LULING YOUNG is Ruth Young’s elderly mother. Born in a village in China, LuLing has never fully adjusted to life in the United States. As she feels her memory beginning to fail, she writes her memoirs so that her middle-aged daughter might read them and finally understand her and the family’s past. RUTH YOUNG is a Chinese American editor in San Francisco who ghostwrites self-help books and has a contentious relationship with her elderly mother, LuLing. PRECIOUS AUNTIE is LuLing’s mute, disfigured nursemaid in China. Her story is equal in importance to LuLing’s, for at the end of LuLing’s story, Precious Auntie is revealed to be the girl’s real mother.
intermittent battles with Japan over the latter’s attempts to colonize China. In 1937 the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, with Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States all providing support to China. Allegiances shifted when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, drawing the United States into World War II, and broadening the conflict between China and Japan into the second front, known as the Pacific War. It was at this time that many Chinese fled the country, settling in the United States, like LuLing in The Bonesetter’s Daughter.
ª Marc Brasz/Corbis
W Themes As in much of Tan’s work, intergenerational conflict, especially between mothers and daughters, is a hallmark theme of The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Additionally, the novel confronts the lack of understanding between Chinese-born elders and their American-born offspring, as well as the secrets and misunderstandings both between generations of women and within the self. In Ruth’s case, for example, an annual case of mutism every August brings up questions of self-censorship and the problem of finding one’s voice. Similarly, in the second part of the book, LuLing’s nursemaid, known to the child as Precious Auntie, is disfigured and missing her tongue and communicates only with LuLing, through a secret sign language. Written language holds equal symbolic significance in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Ruth’s career as a ghostwriter—a writer who pens works that are attributed to others—again leads to questions about her own “voice.” That she cannot read LuLing’s calligraphy, but must have her mother’s story translated so that she can understand it, also speaks to the fundamental lack of understanding between mother and daughter. Likewise, LuLing reveals in her own story that Precious Auntie was
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Amy Tan, author of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, at a book signing.
the daughter of the “bonesetter” of the book’s title—and both she and her father had an uncanny ability to “read” meaning into the mysterious dragon bones found in the caves near their home. Later, when Ruth is a child, LuLing believes her own daughter is able to communicate with the dead by writing messages in the sand tray used to practice Chinese calligraphy. In this sense, Ruth is quite literally a ghostwriter. And the ghosts from LuLing’s past—as they exist in her memory and as they existed in reality—are essential to Tan’s narrative, for Tan demonstrates that personal and family history can affect families for generations. Writing for the New York Times, Nancy Willard explained, “For Tan, the true keeper of memory is language, and so the novel is layered with stories that have been written down—by mothers for their daughters, passing along secrets that cannot be said out loud but must not be forgotten.”
W Style The Bonesetter’s Daughter is told in three separate narrative parts. The first is Ruth’s story in contemporary TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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San Francisco, up to her discovery and the translation of her mother’s memoirs. The second part is told in the firstperson by LuLing, and it recalls her childhood and young adulthood in China. The third part returns to Ruth’s life in San Francisco and the decisions she makes based upon what she learns from LuLing’s story. Tan’s work has garnered praise for her unique writing style, which interweaves narratives from different generations and geographical elements into one cohesive story. Her poetic use of language and the complexity of her narrative as the story moves from Ruth’s childhood to LuLing’s life in China has been lauded for its poetic and evocative quality.
W Critical Reception The Bonesetter’s Daughter was well-received by critics and readers, who noted almost unanimously Tan’s ability to weave a complex mystery with great skill. According to Maria Russo, who reviewed the book for Salon.com, “The Bonesetter’s Daughter comes into its own in the flashbacks to Ruth’s childhood, which give an adept and pungent account of the mortifications of a certain type of immigrant childhood: on the one hand overly sheltered and on the other completely without guidance in the navigation of everything from sex to school bureaucracies. And when Tan writes in LuLing’s voice, the effect is nothing short of haunting.” In fact, most critics found Tan’s writing in Ruth’s voice to be strained and only mildly interesting, noting that her storytelling skills do not really come to the fore in The Bonesetter’s Daughter until she leaves Ruth’s voice and begins writing in LuLing’s. Many critics found the book’s third section to be overly simplistic. Helene Lorber, reviewing the novel for the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, wrote: “The book falters at the end, when it switches back to modern-day San Francisco. Having read the family history, Ruth still must deal with LuLing’s illness. She and her partner hatch a scheme to get LuLing into a utopian assisted-living facility that’s more appropriate for a second-rate sitcom than a thoughtful book. There’s even a surprise Schwab account to pay for it all. But the world of memory needs no such gimmicks.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Lorber, Helene. Rev. of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan. Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. Tribune Company. 2001. HighBeam Research. Web. 30 Sept. 2010. Russo, Maria. “The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan.” Salon.com 21 Feb. 2001. Web. 29 Sept. 2010. Willard, Nancy. “Talking to Ghosts.” New York Times 18 Feb. 2001. NYTimes.com. Web. 30 Sept. 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, an American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants. She received bachelor and master’s degrees from San Jose State University. Known for her lyrical prose, many of Tan’s stories focus on the emotional and cultural conflicts between Chinese American mothers and daughters, sisters, or friends who struggle to understand each other across a generational and cultural divide. Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club, was an international best seller and was adapted into a popular film in 1993. Subsequent works by Tan include The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, and a children’s book titled The Moon Lady. Tan’s work has been universally critically acclaimed, and she has won numerous awards for her fiction. She resides in Sausalito, California, with her husband.
Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Hull, Akasha. “Uncommon Language.” Women’s Review of Books 18.9 (June 2001): 13. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Sept. 2010. Brief summary of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, theorizing that this work is “essentially about writing and the act of writing.” Lui, Cynthia W. “Tracing the Life of the Bonesetter’s Daughter.” International Examiner 2 Oct. 2001. Highbeam Research. 30 Sept. 2010. Reviews The Bonesetter’s Daughter from a Chinese American perspective, discussing especially Tan’s focus in all her novels on mothers and daughters. Moxley, Melody A. Rev. of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan. Kliatt 37.3 (May 2003): 22. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Sept. 2010. Brief, positive review of The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Gale Resources
“Amy (Ruth) Tan.” Contemporary Popular Writers. Ed. Dave Mote. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Sept. 2010. “Amy Tan.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Sept. 2010. Champion, Laurie. “Amy (Ruth) Tan.” Asian American Writers. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Print. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 312. Dunick, Lisa M. S. “The Silencing Effect of Canonicity: Authorship and the Written Word in Amy Tan’s Novels.” MELUS 31, no. 2 (2006): 3-20. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 257. Detroit: Gale, 2008.
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The Bonesetter’s Daughter For Further Reading
Jones, Vanessa E. “Secrets and Lives in Writing Her New Book, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Amy Tan Reconciles Loss, Memories, and Family Ghosts.” Boston Globe 1 Mar. 2001. Print. Interview in which Tan recounts the revelations she and her siblings had after their mother’s death and the ways in which this affected her writing of The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print. This book comprises a series of autobiographical vignettes, and is often described by critics as a powerful memoir by Kingston of her experiences growing up as a first-generation Chinese American woman who struggles to find her identity.
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Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1989. Print. Tan’s first and best-selling novel, focusing on four Chinese American immigrant families living in California, the book is framed within the narrative of the mahjong game that allows three mothers and four daughters to share stories about their lives. ———. The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print. This is Tan’s second novel, and one where she once again focuses on a mother-daughter relationship. The novel tells the story of Winnie’s past in war-torn China during the 1940s, as she works to establish a relationship with her daughter, Pearl. Nancy Dziedzic
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The Book of Chameleons By José Eduardo Agualusa
W Introduction Set in post–civil war Angola, José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel The Book of Chameleons (2004) is the story of Félix Ventura, a self-conscious albino who invents distinguished family histories for the nouveaux riche of Angola seeking to secure their positions in the turbulent nation. One of his clients, an unnamed former war photojournalist whom Ventura dubs José Buchmann, embarks on a quest to meet the mother Ventura has created for him. Buchmann’s journey leads him to face a crisis from his real past that threatens Ventura’s love affair with a photographer named Angela Lucia. The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007. Agualusa has been praised for his ability to use the technique of magic realism, a style of writing used by Latin American writers that blends fantastical elements with realistic portrayals of everyday events. The Book of Chameleons is narrated by a gecko named Eulálio, who in the novel is a reincarnation of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer believed to be among the chief contributors to the development of magic realism.
W Literary and Historical Context
The Book of Chameleons is set sometime between 1992 and 1994, during a lull in what up to that point had been a seventeen-year civil war in Angola. This civil war had, in turn, followed a fourteen-year war for independence from Portugal. The Portuguese landed in Angola in 1575 and ruled the territory as a colony from 1655 to 1951, when the area was declared an overseas province. Begun in 1961 as an uprising against forced cotton harvesting, the Angolan War for Independence was not concluded until 1975, shortly after a leftist coup in Lisbon overthrew the
authoritarian regime in Portugal. Upon gaining independence the three leading factions in Angola—the Communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the anti-Communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, and an association of separatist movements called FLEC—waged a twentyseven-year war for control of the new republic. The war finally ended in 2002. Much of the fighting was funded by the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which saw Angola as a crucial ally in the Cold War. According to most estimates more than 500,000 people died in the conflict. The early 1990s was a period of political and economic optimism in Angola. The ruling Communist Party made concessions to rival factions, bringing a lull in the fighting, and a series of discoveries of new petroleum reserves turned Angola into one of the richest countries in Africa. Fortunes were made overnight. However, the newly wealthy had to fight for social acceptance from the landed Portuguese-speaking aristocracy. To obtain prestige and often to protect themselves, these people sought the services of men like Ventura, who invented aristocratic bloodlines for their clients. Agualusa re-creates the tensions in Angola of the early 1990s by using a technique called magic realism, which was developed by the Latin American writers he grew up reading, namely Jorge Amado, Gabriel García Márquez, and Borges. In this method of writing, elements of magic are woven into a realistic universe in order to give readers a deeper understanding of that universe. The narrator in The Book of Chameleons, a reincarnation of Borges as a highly articulate gecko, is the most conspicuous of the magical elements in the book.
W Themes Identity construction is the central theme of The Book of Chameleons. Agualusa considers the essential characteristics of a person and explores whether it is possible for
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MAJOR CHARACTERS EULÁLIO is the gecko that narrates the story. The events of its life, which are revealed in a series of dreams interspersed throughout the book, are based on the life of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. EDMUNDO BARATA DOS REIS is a vagabond who strikes Buchmann as an interesting subject for a photo essay. As the former journalist tries to capture him on film, his curiosity grows, until one day he visits Barata’s underground home when he thinks the vagabond will be away. When Barata returns earlier than anticipated, he catches Buchmann rummaging through his belongings, and the two men recognize each other from earlier days of the civil war. JOSÉ BUCHMANN is the appellation Ventura gives to a nameless photojournalist who seeks his services. Enamored of the family history Ventura has created for him, Buchmann embarks on a labyrinthine search for his fictional ancestors. However, as he delves into his fictional past, he comes into contact with Edmundo Barata dos Reis, a man from his past. ANGELA LUCIA is a dreamy, somewhat intellectual photographer. She travels the world trying to take pictures that match her ideals for form and color. Ventura falls in love with her because she does not react self-consciously, as most others do, to his skin color. EVA MILLER is Buchmann’s fictional mother, who in Ventura’s yarn disappears under mysterious circumstances. Buchmann embarks on a search for her that takes him halfway around the globe and ultimately returns him to his real past. FÉLIX VENTURA is an albino who creates respectable histories—complete with documents and family portraits—for the nouveaux riche of Angola who require such legacies to secure their prestige and protect their wealth.
people to reinvent themselves by changing one aspect of their identity. In the novel the first marker of each character’s identity is his or her past. The unnamed war journalist in the story, who never discloses why he requires Ventura’s services, attempts to change his present self by purchasing a new past from Ventura, thus becoming José Buchmann. Once given a new name and a new lineage, Buchmann feels free of old burdens and tries to embody his new identity by traveling to the memorials of the forebears Ventura has created for him. While this idea may seem fantastic, Agualusa notes in an interview appended to the novel that in a war-torn country like Angola, many people need new pasts in order to make
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their futures more secure. In Buchmann’s case, as with many real Angolans protecting their new petroleum fortunes, enemies are looking for him, and he is ashamed of something he has done in his past. A new name with documents and pictures of relatives will help throw adversaries off his trail and perhaps allow him to forget what nags his conscience. In The Book of Chameleons Agualusa examines the extent to which the journalist’s new past makes him a new person. He concludes that ultimately a person cannot transform himself or herself in the way Buchmann has tried. In the novel’s climactic scene, a man from Buchmann’s past, and the source of his shame, appears and threatens to disrupt not only Buchmann’s peace of mind but also Ventura and Lucia’s thriving relationship. On the other hand, Agualusa proposes that people can reinvent themselves by falling in love. By showing a character such as Buchmann flourish, even briefly, under a new, distinguished name, Agualusa suggests that part of a person’s identity is often based in how others regard him or her, or how the person senses he or she is regarded by others. At the beginning of the novel, Ventura is convinced that his albino skin makes him unlovable. He brings home prostitutes who eye him with disgust before going to bed with him. For company he enlists the friendship of a pet gecko, to which he speaks after listening to Brazilian love songs. One night he says to the gecko, “You’ve really got terrible skin, you know that? We must be related.” However, when the photographer Angela Lucia shows interest in Ventura, his selfconsciousness gradually evaporates, and he is reborn in their romantic relationship—less eccentric, more affable, and undeniably happy.
W Style Composed in thirty-two short chapters, The Book of Chameleons reads like a set of independently presented vignettes held together by two thinly sketched plotlines— Buchmann’s search for his invented mother and Ventura’s romance with Angela Lucia—as well as by the gecko’s ruminations on love and dreams. Each of chapters has its own title page, with no print on the reverse side, suggesting that what follows is not so much part of a unified novel but an entity unto itself—perhaps a short story or a poem in a collection. At the same time, however, there is a discernible pattern to the book’s arrangement. Six times in the novel, at semiregular intervals, the gecko recounts a dream. Titled “Dream No. 1,” “Dream No. 2,” and so forth, these highly impressionistic pieces comment on the book’s plotlines and themes. For example, in the first dream the gecko walks through a crowd, trying to shake people’s hands, but is ignored—a reverie that speaks to Ventura’s isolation. In “Dream No. 2,” the chapter that precedes Lucia’s arrival in the story, the gecko hears a man’s voice from TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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underground while at the same time a dog appears with a radio around its neck. The man’s voice and the sounds from the radio intermingle, and the gecko recalls the final image from the dream in this confused way: “‘The worst of sins is not to fall in love,’ said God, with the soft voice of a tango-singer: ‘This broadcast has been sponsored by the Marimba Union Bakeries.’” Books that contain such formal eccentricities have been labeled metafiction, which is a form of storytelling that does two things at once: it exists as any regular narrative does, with characters, a plot, complications, and a resolution; and it questions what a story is and if a story can ever be something else. For example, at the very end of the climactic scene in The Book of Chameleons, Agualusa breaks out of traditional narrative form and finishes the scene in a twelve-line visual poem. In addition to resolving the plot, the style of writing used at this point questions the nature of the book of itself. After 180 pages of prose with paragraphs and chapter breaks Agualusa appears to be writing a novel, but twelve lines of verse near the end may suggest that he classifies the work as a poem as well.
W Critical Reception Reviews of The Book of Chameleons have focused primarily on Agualusa’s surprising narrator and on the competence with which the author, in such a slender volume, manages an intricate plot while experimenting with several postmodern tropes. Most of the notices have been positive. Regarding Agualusa’s narrator, perhaps the most positive of the reviews comes from Amanda Hopkinson. Writing in the Independent, she claims, “Not since Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis have we had such a convincing non-human narrator.” Although considerably less effusive, Nicholas Lezard’s review in the Guardian agrees that the book’s narrator is a first-rate storyteller: “To tell the truth, I am not confidently sure why the narrator is a lizard. If there is a symbolic point, it eludes me. But that is actually a strength of the novel, its not being shackled to an interpretation. From a storytelling perspective, it’s very useful: Ventura treats him as a pet, and confides in him; and, being able to climb over any surface, even inverted ones, the gecko can observe anything he wishes. In short, an ideal narrator.” Publishers Weekly calls Eulálio “a lovable narrator, alternately sardonic and wistful.” A review of the novel in African Business, although positive, refuses to overlook the oddness of the choice: “The Book of Chameleons is populated with stories whose characters never quite settle. It is some pages in before you realize that the narrator—rather charming, witty as he is—is a lizard. A very articulate and very friendly lizard, and—like all Agualusa’s narrators—unusually perceptive. But a lizard nonetheless.” Critiques of the book’s plot and the philosophical ground it attempts to cover have been somewhat more
ABOUT THE AUTHOR José Eduardo Agualusa was born Alves da Cunha on December 13, 1960, in Huambo, Angola. He grew up reading Latin American writers Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jorge Amado, whose fictional universes reminded Agualusa of the Angola where he came of age. After graduating from college, where he studied agronomy and forestry, Agualusa split his time between Angola, Brazil, and Portugal. He began working as a journalist for the Portuguese magazine LER and the Angolan newspaper A Capital, as well as writing novels, poetry, and plays. Several of his books have had their beginnings in his newspaper columns, which the writer regards as notebooks to record stories, characters, and phrases that might one day grow into larger works. A Stranger in Goa (2000), for example, began as a newspaper piece about unusual names that seem to represent their owner’s destiny. His 1997 novel Creole, about a Portuguese adventurer who falls in love with a slave woman, won the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature and was a bestseller in seven countries. In 2007 The Book of Chameleons was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, making Agualusa the first African-born writer to receive the honor. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
varied. Among those who praise Agualusa is James Crossley, who, in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, observes, “In description, the novel may come across as a bizarre and confusing mix of the horrific, comical, political, sexual and intertextual, but in the reading, all these elements blend naturally, with subtle and supple results.” Likewise, the New Internationalist finds that Agualusa handles complex material deftly: “It is entirely fitting, in a book dealing with the mutability of truth and ambiguity of identity that the plot morphs effortlessly across genre boundaries, from the dreamscapes of magical realism to a gripping political thriller and even, in the unexpected but wholly satisfying climax, a murder mystery.” Other reviewers, however, were unsatisfied with the ending and found Agualusa’s formal innovations derivative. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Stephen Henighan claims that “the story’s final twists feel imposed.” Village Voice reviewer Alexis Soloski compares Agualusa to the writer he has chosen to emulate and finds the former wanting: “Like Borges, Agualusa (in Daniel Hahn’s translation) writes relatively straightforward prose embellished by vivid visual details. Unlike Borges, Agualusa has a tendency toward the precious—a woman who Polaroids rainbows, a chortling lizard. Agualusa’s novel is gentler than Borges’s fictions, but less intricate and arresting.”
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Gale Resources
Works Cited
“José Eduardo Agualusa.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Gale Biography in Context. Web. 16 Sept. 2010.
Agualusa, José Eduardo. The Book of Chameleons. Trans. Daniel Hahn. New York: Simon, 2008. Print. Rev. of The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa. African Business Jan. 2007: 64. Gale Biography in Context. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. Rev. of The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa. New Internationalist Magazine. 1 Dec. 2006. Web. 19 Sept. 2010. Rev. of The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa. Publishers Weekly 7 Apr. 2008: 41. Gale Biography in Context. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. Crossley, James. Rev. of The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa. Review of Contemporary Fiction 28.3 (2008): 186. Gale Biography in Context. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. Henighan, Stephen. Times Literary Supplement. 23 Sept. 2005: n. pag. Complete Review. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. Hopkinson, Amanda. “Truth Hangs by a Lizard Tale.” Independent. Independent Print Limited, 24 Nov. 2006. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. Lezard, Nicholas. “The View from Upside Down.” Guardian. 30 June 2007. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. Soloski, Alexis. Rev. of The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa. Village Voice. 13 May 2008. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Guterres, Maria. “History and Fiction in José Eduardo Agualusa’s Novels.” Fiction in the PortugueseSpeaking World. Ed. Charles M. Kelley. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2000. 117-38. Print. Explores how Agualusa deploys the trope of magic realism to blur the line between history and fiction. Mabe, Chauncey. “Literary Effects Grow Tiresome.” Rev. of The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa. Sun Sentinel. 8 June 2008. Web. 18 Sept. 2010. Argues that Agualusa leans too heavily on other writers, such as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, and that the novel lacks surprises. Whatley, Daniel. Rev. of The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa. Quarterly Conversation, n.d. Web. 18 Sept. 2010. Considers the various literary influences on Agualusa’s work and cites the namedropping of writers as one of the book’s chief weaknesses. Ultimately, Whatley calls the novel a success because, though its antecedents are obvious, the book “is not precisely like any novel you’ve ever read.”
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Open Web Sources
José Eduardo Agualusa’s Web site contains an author biography, links to descriptions of his books, and a set of photos of the author taken during his travels through Namibia and Angola. http//www.agualusa. info/ The BBC’s Africa Beyond Web site features an interview with Agualusa from 2007, shortly after The Book of Chameleons was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The author discusses the porous boundary between reality and fiction in Angola and the effect his dreams have had on his creative work. http//www.bbc.co.uk/africabeyond/africanarts/ 19126.shtml In an interview on the Web site Words without Borders, Agualusa speaks about the Angolan and Latin writers who have influenced his work, his role as a critic of the contemporary politics of Angola, and how an individual’s construction of his or her past directs the person’s future. http//wordswithoutborders.org/ar ticle/an-interview-with-jos-eduardo-agualusa/ For Further Reading
Agualusa, José Eduardo. Creole. Trans. Daniel Hahn. London: Arcadia, 2002. Print. Written as a series of letters by a wealthy adventurer, Creole examines the triangular slave trade between interior Portugal, Angola, and Brazil. Amado, Jorge. Dona Flora and Her Two Husbands. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print. The story of a widow who remarries and later welcomes the ghost of her dead husband back into her bed, this novel is widely regarded as Amado’s masterwork. According to Agualusa, the Brazilian writer is among the first writers in Portuguese to use Brazilians of African origin as main characters in his work. Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1999. Print. This volume contains all of Borges’s published short fiction, offering an exhaustive look at the stories from which Agualusa drew much of his inspiration for The Book of Chameleons. Hodges, Tony. Angola: The Anatomy of an Oil State. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. Print. This nonfiction work examines the corrupt system of patronage in Angola that has widened the rift between the rich and the poor in a country that, Hodges claims, should be able to use its vast oil and diamond reserves to create a prosperous society. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Maier, Karl. Angola: Promises and Lies. London: Serif, 2007. Print. American journalist Maier reshapes his dispatches to the Independent and the Washington Post into a compelling narrative of the civil war in Angola. Pepetela. Mayombe. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1996. Print. Mayombe is a novel by Pepetela, a white Angolan who is recognized as one of the country’s most important writers. It examines the racial, emotional, and ideological tensions among the members of the MPLA, who won independence for Angola from Portugal after a waging a guerrilla war between 1961 and 1975.
Spillman, Rob, ed. Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. This anthology includes an excerpt from Agualusa’s Book of Chameleons as well as writings by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and other leading African writers. Williamson, Edwin. Borges: A Life. New York: Viking, 2004. Print. This biography examines Jorge Luis Borges through a Freudian lens and offers insight into the writer’s private life, particularly the frustrations and anxieties of his love life.
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Joseph Campana
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The Book of Dead Birds By Gayle Brandeis
W Introduction Gayle Brandeis’s The Book of Dead Birds (2003) tells the story of Ava Sing Lo, a young woman of mixed African American and Korean ethnicity, and her mother, Helen, a former prostitute from Korea who was impregnated by an African American G.I. in the early 1970s. The novel chronicles Ava’s struggle to connect with her mother and to overcome her own feelings of sexual repression. As a young child Ava accidentally killed many of her mother’s beloved pet birds. Years later, in an act of redemption, Ava travels to the Salton Sea to assist in the effort to save birds that have been exposed to agricultural poisoning. The main text is interspersed with flashbacks to Helen’s life in Korea, excerpts from Helen’s journal, and the notebooks of famed naturalist John James Audubon. Critics have admired Brandeis’s first novel for its wellresearched details and its poetic qualities. In 2002 The Book of Dead Birds won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, an award that supports literature of social change.
W Literary and Historical Context
During the mid-1990s, the period in which the main action of The Book of Dead Birds takes place, agricultural poisoning led to the massacre of birds in the Salton Sea in California’s border region. Thousands of birds, including more than fourteen hundred endangered California brown pelicans, died of avian botulism. In the novel, as Ava joins the effort to save these birds, the horrors of the worst bird die-off in U.S. history are described in vivid detail. Korea serves as a secondary setting of the novel. Flashbacks take the reader to Korea during the 1960s, when Ava’s mother was coming of age. Poverty and the exploitation of women were widespread in Korean
society, and many young women were lured into prostitution. The young Helen hopes for a better life than the one she endures as a sea diver, and she naively leaves home to seek her fortune. Soon she and her friend, Sun, are drawn into prostitution, and Helen eventually becomes pregnant by an anonymous African American soldier. Her plight highlights the difficulties that women of her era faced in a society that did not value women and that turned a blind eye to abuse and exploitation.
W Themes The Book of Dead Birds centers on the protagonist’s efforts to connect with her mother. Helen is unable to discuss her painful and brutal past with her daughter. Instead Ava learns her mother’s story through a pansori, a traditional Korean music form in which a long story is told through song. As Helen sings her pansori she incorporates the details of her past with traditional lyrics. Ava accompanies her mother on the chang’go, a Korean drum, and then writes down everything her mother sings about. Ava also makes discoveries about her mother by reading Helen’s journal—what Ava calls her “book of dead birds.” Helen’s entries include obituaries she has written about her dead birds, bits of feathers and eggshell, and newspaper articles related to birds or other topics of interest to Helen. Ava and Helen grow closer when Helen joins her daughter in the bird rescue operation at the Salton Sea. Birds clearly figure heavily in the novel, serving as metaphors for Helen’s inability to escape her past and Ava’s failed efforts to communicate with her mother. Birds both divide and unite mother and daughter. Throughout her life Ava repeatedly kills her mother’s pet birds by accident, and Helen has carefully recorded these events in her book of dead birds. The two women find a semblance of redemption in their efforts to save the birds dying near the Salton Sea, as Ava gains selfconfidence and a greater understanding of her mother.
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W Style The main action of The Book of Dead Birds takes place during the late twentieth century, with the bulk of the story narrated in the first person by Ava. Some parts of the novel are presented in the third person, describing the life of brutality and prostitution Ava’s mother endured in her native Korea in the 1960s. However, rather than providing the gruesome details of Helen’s past all at once, Brandeis reveals the stories bit by bit, interrupting Ava’s narrative with flashbacks that describe Helen’s young adulthood. The author also pauses from time to time to offer entries from the journal Helen has kept as an adult, excerpts from writings by noted ornithologist John James Audubon, and descriptions of the protagonist’s dreams. The text of each of these digressions is set in a font different from that of the novel’s primary text, signaling a shift in time or speaker, away from the main plot. A poet as well as a novelist, Brandeis has been praised for the lyric quality of her prose. Her sensitivity to word choice is evident, for example, in her protagonist’s name. At first glance the choice of “Ava” as the name of the protagonist might seem cliché in its association with birds, but the protagonist explains that her mother drew a different connection to her love of birds when she selected the name: “My mother named me Ava because she liked how the English letters looked—the big A a beak pointed upward, the v a sharp slash of wings, the small a round and flat as a parrot’s eye.” David Abrams, reviewing the novel for January Magazine, comments that “poetry abounds on every page and graces every sentence” and that “Brandeis has a poet’s ear for the music of language.”
W Critical Reception Critical reception of The Book of Dead Birds has been mixed. Commentators count among the novel’s strengths the poetic qualities of Brandeis’s writing. Joanne Wilkinson, in a review for Booklist, argues that Brandeis “is at her best in her lyrical descriptions of nature and in the finely detailed portrait of the emotional tug-of-war between mother and child.” Critics have also appreciated the author’s attention to detail and historical accuracy. In writing about The Book of Dead Birds for Library Journal, Eleanor J. Bader lauds the work as being “poignant and well researched.” Brandeis receives high marks for her well-developed, sympathetic characters. On the other hand, some reviewers have suggested that the author attempts to tackle too many weighty subjects at once. Wilkinson, for example, complains that “Brandeis’ novel suffers, at times, from overly fraught symbolism and an awkwardly tacked-on subplot.” A Kirkus reviewer observes that “too many elements . . . fight for ascendancy and resolution: murdered prostitutes washed up on the shores of the Salton Sea; the sorrowful, desperate
MAJOR CHARACTERS AVA SING LO is the novel’s protagonist. Ava struggles with identity and sexual repression because of her mixed racial background and the fact she has never met her father. She distances herself from men, and is initially cautious with Darryl. HELEN SING LO (originally Hye-yang), Ava’s mother, is a Korean woman and a former prostitute. An American soldier marries her, effectively rescuing her from prostitution; however, he abandons her after she gives birth to another man’s child. She struggles to provide for Ava and continues to be haunted by her past. DARRYL STERNBERG is Ava’s love interest and the director of the bird rescue operation at the Salton Sea. SUN is Helen’s childhood friend, whom she follows into a life of prostitution.
history of Helen’s and Sun’s lives as G.I. prostitutes; and the early massacre at Cheju-do in 1948.” Bader likewise suggests that “Brandeis’s writing is at times heavyhanded.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Abrams, David. “Fledgling Flight.” Rev. of The Book of Dead Birds, by Gayle Brandeis. January Magazine Oct. 2003. Web. 23 Aug. 2010. Bader, Eleanor J. Rev. of The Book of Dead Birds, by Gayle Brandeis. Library Journal 1 May 2003: 153. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Aug. 2010. Rev. of The Book of Dead Birds, by Gayle Brandeis. Kirkus Reviews 1 Apr. 2003: 489+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Aug. 2010. Brandeis, Gayle. The Book of Dead Birds. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Print. Wilkinson, Joanne. Rev. of The Book of Dead Birds, by Gayle Brandeis. Booklist 15 May 2003: 1642. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Aug. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Dieter, William. “Death Yields Tenderness, Redemption in Birds.” Rocky Mountain News Online 2 May 2003. Web. 23 Aug. 2010. A lengthy assessment that admires the novel’s plot and lauds Brandeis’s effort as a first-time novelist. Mahoney, Blair. Rev. of The Book of Dead Birds, by Gayle Brandeis. Modern Word 30 Jan. 2004. Web. 23 Aug. 2010. A generally positive review that discusses the
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gayle Brandeis was born in 1964 in Chicago, Illinois, and spent her childhood in the Chicago area. She began writing poetry as a young child, and her poetry and other writings have been featured in such publications as the Nation and the Mississippi Review. Brandeis completed an individualized learning program at the University of Redlands in California in which she earned a BA in “Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation and Healing.” She then studied at Antioch University, completing an MFA in creative writing. Her first book-length publication was the nonfiction work Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (2001), a guide for aspiring women writers. In addition to The Book of Dead Birds, Brandeis has written three other novels: Self Storage (2007); Delta Girls (2010); and My Life with the Lincolns (2010), her first novel for young readers. The author and her family live in Riverside, California.
novel’s theme of sexual repression and references to various books, including Audubon’s Birds of America. Pearl, Nancy. “California, Here I Come.” Rev. of The Book of Dead Birds, by Gayle Brandeis. Library Journal 1 Apr. 2004: 144. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Aug. 2010. A brief review that provides an overview of the novel. Pelland, Alice. “When a Daughter Takes Flight.” BookPage 10 Nov. 2003. Web. 19 Aug. 2010. An analysis that focuses on the relationship of the protagonist and her mother. Wolff, Carlo. “Healing at Heart of Sensitive MotherDaughter.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 4 May 2003: E6. Print. A review that praises the insightful nature of Brandeis’s writing. Gale Resources
“Gayle Brandeis.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Aug. 2010.
In the story, Ava’s desire to help the endangered birds is prompted by childhood incidents in which she accidentally killed her mother’s pet birds. SpicStock/Shutterstock.com
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In The Book of Dead Birds, Ava Sing Lo goes to the Salton Sea in California to help rescue birds that have come in contact with agricultural poisons. Brent Stirton/Getty Images
Open Web Sources
Gayle Brandeis’s official Web site offers a brief biography, links to the author’s blogs, excerpts from her novels, and information about her inspiration for The Book of Dead Birds. http//www.gaylebrandeis.com/ HarperCollins, publisher of The Book of Dead Birds, furnishes a reading guide for the novel, with a synopsis of the book, discussion questions, and a brief author biography. http//www.harpercollins.com/author/ authorExtra.aspx?isbn13=9780060528041& displayType=readingGuide The Audubon Society presents information about current bird conservation efforts. http//www.Audubon.org/ The Web site for the Bellwether Prize for Fiction features a press release that was issued upon Brandeis’s winning the award in 2002. http//www.bellwether prize.org/
Durrow, Heidi W. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2010. Print. The daughter of a Danish woman and an African American G.I. is the focus of Durrow’s novel. Junghyo, Anh. Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea. New York: Soho Press, 1990. Print. Set in a small village in Korea during the Korean War, Silver Stallion provides a frank and revealing portrait of how Koreans were affected by the war. Keller, Nora Okja. Fox Girl. New York: Viking, 2002. Print. Fox Girl, which takes place just after the Korean War, concerns the search for Korean American identity as well as the tragic culture surrounding Korean prostitution. Silver, Marisa. The God of War: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print. Silver’s work traces the struggles of a family living near the Salton Sea in 1978.
For Further Reading
Choi, Sook Nyul. Echoes of the White Giraffe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Print. Choi’s novel for young readers offers insight into the role of women in Korean society. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Harrabeth Haidusek
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The Book of Negroes By Lawrence Hill
W Introduction
W Literary and Historical
Drawing from the historical document called The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill has created a novel with the same title—a fictionalized account of Aminata Diallo, captured by slave traders from her village in West Africa. The novel was published as The Book of Negroes in Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, and India, and as Someone Knows My Name in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Aminata, an eleven-year-old freeborn Muslim, survives the forced overland march of the coffle (chained line of prisoners) to slave ships headed for South Carolina indigo plantations. During the sea voyage, Aminata insists on calling out the names of the captives to affirm their humanity. Among the named fellow villagers is Chekura, a young man sold by his uncle to slavers, whom she later marries. Aminata uses her skills as translator to work as a baby catcher (midwife). Raped by the ship’s doctor, she gives birth to her first child, who is destined for bondage. On Robinson Appleby’s indigo plantation, Aminata, or Meena as she was known, marries Chekura, though they must live apart, and she learns to read and write from Mamed, the trusted Negro overseer. Later she is sold to Solomon Lindo, a Jewish inspector, but she escapes Charles Town toward the end of the American Revolution and gets to Nova Scotia, where the British have offered freedom to those whose names were recorded in The Book of Negroes. Hill includes historic figures, such as Sam Fraunces, the black owner of a New York tavern, and the Birchtown preacher, Blind Moses Wilkinson, as he describes how Aminata travels to Nova Scotia and then to Freetown in Sierra Leone, and finally to London, England. Despite its realistic depiction of slavery, Hill’s narrative describes kind strangers, the promise of freedom, individual dignity, and the reward of accomplishment.
Context
The historical document called The Book of Negroes records the names of three thousand black people who pledged their service to the British during the Revolutionary War in exchange for freedom and their passage to and settlement in British colonies. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 made illegal the business of transporting and selling slaves; it was followed in 1833 by the Slavery Abolition Act, which outlawed the institution itself. The United States abolished slave trade in 1808, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery in 1865. Black loyalists, like the white loyalists faithful to King George during the Revolution, were offered their freedom in British colonies as a reward for their service behind lines. Bleak conditions, including poor housing and lack of provisions and jobs, revived racial tensions and led to the first race riot. Nearly twelve hundred black loyalists sailed from Halifax back to Africa and settled at Freetown in Sierra Leone in 1792. Moses Lindo, a Sephardic Jew from England, eventually became an inspector after his arrival in South Carolina in 1756; however, Hill’s depiction of this character is otherwise fictional. John Clarkston founded Freetown in 1792, along with freed American slaves who sailed from Nova Scotia. Hill places him in Sierra Leone longer than his actual sojourn. The historical Thomas Peters (1738-1792), known as Black Moses, died shortly after landing in Freetown from malaria, not at the hands of slavers as in the novel.
W Themes The Book of Negroes, published in the United States and Australia as Someone Knows My Name, is about freedom
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and identity, both literal and figurative. Aminata is born free, and thus very aware of the loss of her personal liberty. But she is also intellectually free and able to cultivate her skills despite being in bondage. Assisted by diverse characters, Hill’s protagonist uses her fierce sense of identity to outwit her captors, but it is her proficiency in speaking and writing that insures her survival and ultimate victory. The theme of language is also important. Hill suggests that the fictional slave narrative by Aminata Diallo sheds more light on the institution of slavery. Her skill at articulating events and relationships underscores the value of the storyteller as a witness to history.
W Style Hill’s style is both gritty and eloquent, particularly in the voice of his protagonist, Aminata Diallo. Peppering the narrative and dialogue with colloquialisms of Fulfulde and Bamanankan, as well as English, Hill produces different voices, that are distinguished by such words as woloso, toubabu, and buckra. In addition, Hill mimics the Djeli art of preserving elements of oral tradition, with compound metaphors similar to the kennings of Old English, such as “baby catcher” or “firestick.” He uses fresh images to describe objects, calling the slave ship, for example, “an animal in water,” and he puns effectively, such as with the word Guinea for a geographical place, a unit of currency, and modifier of the epithet for a wench. Hill implicates language at every turn, showing how it has the power to kill or conquer, and he suggests cultural assumptions in the rules governing usage, which, for example, prohibited slaves from using the word “white” or whites from using the name “Mary” for a female slave whose real name was not known. Distinctions between slave and servant collapse first in context, then in actuality. In the tradition of a bildungsroman, Aminata’s tale is one of development, as she is dislocated from her homeland and besieged by obstacles as she travels across three continents. Hill’s spry heroine comes of age by her wit, her ability to read and write, her skill as a negotiator, and her indefatigable virtue.
W Critical Reception Lawrence Hill’s third novel, The Book of Negroes, enjoyed critical acclaim because of its fine storytelling. Already an established Canadian author, Hill turned to an overlooked historical document with the eponymous title of his novel and created a memorable protagonist, whom Stephen Kimber described as both lifelike and larger than life. Sarah Johnson offered similar praise for Hill’s depiction of Aminata as a quintessential unconquerable heroine. Stressing another feature, Tahmima Anam
MAJOR CHARACTERS ROBINSON APPLEBY is a tyrannical indigo plantation owner who abuses Aminata and eventually sells her to Solomon Lindo. CHEKURA, sold by his uncle to slavers, is Aminata’s village companion and later her husband and the father of May. AMINATA (MEENA) DIALLO, the narrator, recounts her life story as an old woman. MAMADU DIALLO, jeweler by trade, is Aminata’s Muslim father who teaches her to write in Arabic. He is murdered by the Toubab slavers. FANTA, the youngest wife of the village chief, is mean to everybody but relies on Aminata to catch her baby on board the slave ship. FOMBA, a gentle hunter, is among those in the coffle who survive the trip to a South Carolina indigo plantation with Aminata. SIRA KULIBARI, the village midwife, is Aminata’s mother. She teaches her daughter to “catch babies,” but she is also slain by slavers. SOLOMON LINDO, an indigo inspector, makes a deal to purchase Aminata from Appleby, on the condition that he can sell her firstborn son. Using his Jewish identity to strike a common chord in Aminata as an outsider, he treats her as a servant, teaches her bookkeeping, and allows her to hire out as a midwife in Charles Town. He manumits her long after she has escaped his servitude. MAMED, the black overseer on the Appleby plantation, teaches Aminata to read and write. MAY, the daughter of Aminata and Chekura, is kidnapped by the Witherspoons but later reunited with her mother in London. TOM, the medicine man on the slave ship, misleads Aminata with his occasional generosity and then rapes her. LIEUTENANT MALCOLM WATERS, a British officer, arranges for Aminata to participate in compiling the ledger known as The Book of Negroes.
credited the protagonist with language skills that play a role in transforming her fate. Many critics agreed that Hill’s own use of language and his development of characters give The Book of Negroes its major strengths. Johnson, writing in Booklist, called the novel “a masterful example of historical storytelling,” The epic style and vivid characters earned the novel the Best Regional Book award for Canada and the Caribbean, the Overall Commonwealth Best Book, and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1957, to a black father and white mother, Lawrence Hill explores themes of racial identity and social justice in his work. He received his BA from Université Laval in Quebec City, Quebec, in 1980, and his MA from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1992. Hill has worked as a reporter, freelance writer and researcher, and teacher. His publications include the novel, Any Known Blood (1997); the autobiography, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (2001); and (with Joshua Key), the biography, The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq (2007). As of 2010, Hill lived with his wife and children in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Ruth Scurr called Hill’s novel “an imaginative response to the real historical document.” Kimber agreed that Hill’s slave narrative weaves history and fiction so deftly that it is possible to confuse the two and imagine the author’s inventions are historical events. But he was quick to add that he did not impugn Hill for irresponsible handling of the facts. Rather he commended the author for his “seductive power as a storyteller.” Sarah Churchill
pointed out in her review in the Guardian that Hill observes the slave narrative tradition of Olaudah Equiano, and she added that his “textured and nuanced grasp” is reinforced by his historical research. Others, such as Luanne Gaines, applauded Hill for telling Aminata’s story, lest readers forget her. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Anam, Tahmima. “Reading for Pleasure: The Author of a Golden Age Admires a Fictional Narrative Told by a Female Slave.” Rev. of The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. Bookseller 6 June 2008: 22. Print. Churchill, Sarah. “Bought and Sold.” Rev. of The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. Guardian.co.uk. Guardian 24 Jan. 2009. Web. 30 July 2010. Gaines, Luanne. Rev. of Someone Knows My Name, by Lawrence Hill. curledup.com. Curled up with a Good Book 2007. Web. 23 July 2010. Hill, Lawrence. The Book of Negroes. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print. Johnson, Sarah. “Someone Knows My Name.” Rev. of The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. Booklist 15 Oct. 2007: 33+. Print. Kimber, Stephen. “The Lived Truth of Slavery: Fiction So Powerful It Stumped an Historian.” Rev. of The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. Literary Review of Canada 15.5 (2007): 19. Print. Scurr, Ruth. “The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill.” Rev. of The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. entertainment.timesonline.co.uk. Times [London] 16 Jan. 2009. Web. 30 July 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Hill, Lawrence. “Freedom Bound.” Beaver: Exploring Canada’s History 1 Feb. 2007. Print. Details about the historical document recorded by the British, including entries of freed slaves. Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. “A Slave’s Great Journey.” Rev. of The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. washingtonpost.com. Washington Post 26 Feb. 2008. Web. 18 July 2010. Explains use of female North-American slave narratives in portraying Aminata Diallo. Kavanagh, Afra. “Slavery’s Painful Stories.” Rev. of The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. Canadian Literature 197 (2008): 141-43. Print. Describes Aminata’s indictment of everyone who contributed to the institution of slavery. The Book of Negroes tells the story of Aminata Diallo, a young girl who is captured by slave traders in West Africa. ª North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy
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Kline, Nancy. “From Slavery to Freedom.” Rev. of The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. newyorktimes.com. New York Times 20 Jan. 2008. Web. 18 July 2010. Applauds Aminata Diallo, Hill’s protagonist, who TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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writes a slave narrative that exposes the horrors and ironies of slavery. Gale Resources
“Lawrence Hill.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 26 July 2010. http//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id =GALE%7CH1000045561&v=2.1&u=itsbtrial& it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w Open Web Sources
Jane Finch interviewed Lawrence Hill on January 19, 2010, a transcript of which is provided at her Web site at http//www.jane-finch.com/interviews/ lawrencehill.htm as a podcast. The Lawrence Hill Web site, at http//www.lawrencehill. com, includes information on the author and his works. For Further Reading
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself. New York: Bedford-St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Print. Classic autobiography and slave narrative, which affirms the importance of literacy.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. Print. Recounts personal experiences as a slave and later as respected member of the antislavery movement. Greene, Jack P. Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina’s Plantation Society. Columbia: U of South Carolina Press, 2001. Print. Explores the slave economy in South Carolina and discusses gender issues such as reproductive abilities of female slaves and trade skills of male slaves. Mitchell, Faith. Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies. Port Carling: Summerhouse Press, 1999. Print. Describes African American folk culture preserved by slaves and their descendants, particularly in the South Carolina Sea Islands. Schneider, Dorothy, and Carl J. Schneider. Slavery in America. New York: Checkmark Books, 2006. Print. Emphasizes various aspects of slavery using primary materials.
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The Book of Night Women By Marlon James
W Introduction Marlon James’s second novel, The Book of Night Women, traces the life of Lilith, a mixed-race slave on a Jamaican sugarcane plantation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The green-eyed Lilith is the product of a union between a black teenage slave and her white overseer. She feels that her white ancestry elevates her above her fellow slaves, and she is reluctant to join a group of her half-sisters, the “Night Women,” in planning a slave uprising. Lilith eventually becomes involved with Robert Quinn, a white overseer who previously supervised her regular beatings. Lilith and Quinn have a daughter, and at the end of the novel the daughter reveals herself as the narrator of her mother’s story. The Book of Night Women catalogs the horrors of slave life and the complex hierarchies that existed among both enslaved and free peoples during that time. Critical reception of the novel was varied, with many reviews noting the book’s graphic, often shocking depictions of violence. The Book of Night Women was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
W Literary and Historical Context
Jamaica came under British rule during the midseventeenth century and remained so for more than 150 years. Enslaved Africans were brought to the island via the Atlantic slave trade. Sugarcane and coffee were cultivated in Jamaica, and slave labor was employed to work the plantations, providing a lucrative enterprise for the British Empire. These slaves were often treated brutally by their white overseers, who whipped, raped, and even murdered them. Many female slaves, often barely beyond childhood themselves, bore children as a result of the sexual abuses of white overseers. Lilith, the protagonist of The Book
of Night Women, is the product of such an encounter. Her teenage mother’s death in childbirth is described early in the novel. The Book of Night Women graphically depicts the horrors of life on a typical Jamaican sugarcane plantation in the late eighteenth century and details the difficulties and dangers associated with any act of resistance. With more than twenty slaves for every white master, Jamaica saw numerous uprisings and slave conspiracies during the eighteenth century. In James’s novel, a group of six slave half-sisters, all daughters of the same white overseer, form a secret society called the Night Women. Together they plan an uprising, which ultimately fails with devastating results. Slavery was officially abolished in the British Empire on August 1, 1834. The Book of Night Women follows in the tradition of West Indian literature, which began to develop in the mid-twentieth century. Much of West Indian literature deals in some way with issues and concerns associated with Caribbean history, including language, ethnicity, and national and colonial identity. Like Lilith in The Book of Night Women, many Caribbeans claim a mixed-race heritage and identify with more than one culture, among them African, English, Spanish, and even American.
W Themes Although The Book of Night Women portrays the torture and cruelty that were common in Jamaican society during the late eighteenth century, its central concern is the theme of power versus powerlessness. Throughout the novel the narrator repeatedly declares, “Every Negro walk in a circle.” Gail Lumet Buckley, in her analysis of the novel for the Washington Post, interprets the phrase as a simple, succinct summary of the brutal world of West Indian slavery. “It seems to mean,” says Buckley, “that black life in the Americas was a vicious circle, full of the terrible things that whites did to blacks and that blacks did to whites and to blacks because of whites.” Slaves vastly outnumber whites, and the constant threat of
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rebellion seems to make for an environment even more horrific than that of some other neighboring slave cultures. Sexual and other forms of physical abuse become vehicles for power and control. Susan Straight, writing in the Los Angeles Times, points out that “sex is a weapon, a method, a shackle. An act of violence and power.” Straight notes that some of the slave women’s bodies are “the living chronicle of rape and power.” Indeed, Lilith’s torso is so scarred from whippings that she appears to have a “quilt on her back.” Murder and mysticism also empower slaves as they attempt to resist their vicious oppressors. When a black enforcer, or “Johnny-jumper,” tries to rape the fourteenyear-old Lilith, she resists him and kills him with his own sword. This murder gives Lilith a glimpse of power, and she goes on to murder others, desperately trying to gain some control over her own life. Arifa Akbar, reviewing the novel in the Independent, observes that Lilith is “both exhilarated by this demonic energy within her” and at times “consumed by self-loathing and guilt.” Akbar also notes that “James uses the imagery of witchcraft and African shamanism inventively, as a metaphor for political resistance.” Homer, the leader of the Night Women, has mastered the art of African potion making, using her lotions to heal victims of violence and also to “send the masters and their wives into deranged states of mind as a form of revenge.” Class distinction is closely related to the struggle for power. The lives of blacks are considered expendable, since black slaves are cheap and are easily acquired. The hierarchy is not limited merely to blacks and whites, however. “House slaves” who serve the family of the master are valued above other slaves. Lilith believes that she is better than other slaves because her green eyes are proof of her white heritage. In addition, black Johnnyjumpers abuse other slaves. Class distinction exists among whites as well. Robert Quinn, for example, is disdained by British authorities simply because he is Irish. Nevertheless, he is considered superior to slaves. His affair with Lilith illustrates their society’s insuperable barriers inherent in a relationship that crosses class and racial lines, since the scars on Lilith’s back serve as a reminder that she has been brutalized at Robert’s command. Rayyan AlShawaf, writing in the Miami Herald, suggests that “the intrinsic dichotomy between Lilith and Quinn dooms their relationship. . . . So thorough and consuming is destructiveness that even love doesn’t stand a chance.”
W Style The most distinctive stylistic feature of The Book of Night Women is James’s use of Jamaican patois. This Englishbased dialect developed among the slave populations of the seventeenth century and blends British English, Hiberno-English (Irish English), and Lowlands Scots with west African influences. In her review in the Independent, Akbar observes that the “narration is one
MAJOR CHARACTERS HOMER is the leader of the Night Women, a group of six halfsisters who plan a slave rebellion. Homer is skilled with herbs and lotions, using her powers both to heal and to inflict cruelty on her enemies. LILITH, the novel’s protagonist, is the daughter of the white overseer Jack Wilkins and a teenage slave girl, who dies when Lilith is born. The green-eyed Lilith works on the Montpelier plantation as a house slave. The Night Women attempt to recruit her in an effort to further their plans for a slave uprising. Lilith becomes the mistress of Robert Quinn, an Irish overseer, with whom she eventually has a child. LOVEY QUINN is the daughter of Lilith and Robert Quinn. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that Lovey is the narrator of the story. ROBERT QUINN is an Irish overseer who initially supervises regular whippings of Lilith. He falls in love with Lilith, and she becomes his mistress. The two are never fully able to overcome the cultural restrictions that prevent them from having a relationship as equals. JACK WILKINS is a white overseer on the Montpelier plantation. He rapes young slave girls, fathering a number of children, including the members of the group that calls itself the Night Women.
of the novel’s strongest features, written in the vernacular and carrying its own drum-like rhythm which is as lyrical as it is hypnotic, even in the most violent passages.” In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Susan Straight calls the book “a chant, using repetition and verse.” Both the narration and the dialogue within the novel are written in patois. Dialogue is distinguished from narration with dashes rather than quotation marks. To indicate who is speaking, the narrator uses simple dialogue tags, such as “Homer say” or “Homer ask.” The story is told by a third-person narrator whose identity is revealed only at the end of the novel. It is Lilith and Robert Quinn’s daughter, whom Lilith names Lovey Quinn, who narrates her mother’s story. Lilith taught her daughter to read and write, and Lovey tells the reader that writing is a liberating experience for her—what she writes in the darkness “is as free as free can be, even if it never come to light and go free for real.” In the last lines of the book, Lovey explains that she began writing about her mother in 1819, several years after the action in the story takes place. She begins each chapter with either a brief description of an event or a philosophical observation, such as “White man is white man is white man, but not every nigger be the same nigger,” or “Every Negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in 1970 in Kingston, Jamaica, Marlon James earned a BA in literature from the University of the West Indies (1991) and an MA in creative writing from Wilkes University (2006). While studying at Wilkes, James received Norman Mailer’s Norris Church Mailer Scholarship for Creative Writing. The author’s work has been published in several anthologies, including Iron Balloons (2006; edited by Colin Channer), Bronx Noir (2007; edited by S. J. Rozan), and Silent Voices (2007; edited by Peter A. Balaskas), and in the Caribbean Review of Books. John Crow’s Devil (2005), James’s debut novel, was a finalist for both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. An essayist as well as a novelist, James is a professor of literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has also taught at the Calabash International Literary Festival Workshop in Kingston and the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City.
W Critical Reception Critics have offered mixed reviews of The Book of Night Women. Praise for the novel generally focuses on James’s vivid depictions of the cruel, violent conditions and helpless circumstances that slaves endured in late
eighteenth-century Jamaica. A Bookmarks reviewer calls the novel “a stunning testament to the dynamics of ultimate power and powerlessness.” Kaiama Glover, writing in the New York Times, offers a similar assessment, declaring that “James has conducted an experiment in how to write the unspeakable—even the unthinkable. And the results of that experiment are an undeniable success.” Reviewers have also acknowledged James’s ability to capture the complex class struggles that exist in both black and white societies. On the other hand, Jim Hannan, reviewing the novel for World Literature Today, concludes that the novel is “flawed,” finding fault with James’s “superficial” characterization and suggesting that “his patois is plodding and unimaginative” compared to that of other Caribbean writers. Some critics have complained about the excessive—and perhaps sometimes gratuitous— violence in the novel. For example, Rayyan Al-Shawaf, a reviewer for the Miami Herald, argues that the author’s “preoccupation with detailing the history and methods of slave punishment in his native Jamaica sometimes interferes with the story. Describing the violence meted out to a character, he might segue to listing other sorts of torture historically inflicted on slaves.” In addition to its consideration for a National Book Critics Circle Award, The Book of Night Women was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award and the Minnesota Book Award. The novel was also named the third-best book of 2009 by New York magazine.
Jamaican slaves on a sugar plantation. In the story, Lilith, the daughter of a slave and a white overseer, becomes involved in a romantic relationship with her own overseer. English School
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Jamaican slaves are set free. The Book of Night Women chronicles the story of Lilith, a biracial Jamaican slave. Thomas Picken BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Akbar, Arifa. Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. Independent [London]. Independent Print Ltd, 28 Aug. 2009. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. Al-Shawaf, Rayyan. “The Author Portrays Strong Female Characters in This Tale Set in 19th Century BritishRuled Jamaica.” Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. Miami Herald 4 Mar. 2009. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. Buckley, Gail Lumet. “Vengeance Is Theirs.” Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. Washington Post 17 Feb. 2009. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. Glover, Kaiama L. “Womanchild in the Oppressive Land.” Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. New York Times Book Review 1 Mar. 2009: 7L. Print. Hannon, Jim. Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. World Literature Today 84.1 (2010): 66. Print. James, Marlon. The Book of Night Women. New York: Riverhead, 2009. Print.
Straight, Susan. Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. Los Angeles Times 8 Mar. 2009. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. Bookmarks May-June 2009: 32. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. Provides an overview of critical reception of the novel as well as a critical summary of the book. Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. Jamaican Book Review. Jamaicans.com, 31 Mar. 2009. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. Favorable review that includes biographical information about the author as well as links to additional book reviews. Reed, Troy. “Editors’ Choice Novels for May 2009.” Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. Historical Novel Society. Historical Novel Society, May 2009. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. Positive review that praises the novel’s realistic dialect and James’s character portrayal.
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St. John, Edward B. Rev. of The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James. Library Journal 15 Feb. 2009: 14. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. Brief review that discusses point of view in the novel as well as the complexities of nineteenth-century Jamaican society. Smith, Candace. Rev. of The Book of Night Women. Booklist 15 Apr. 2009: 58. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. Audiobook review that admires the poetic quality of James’s prose. Open Web Sources
On his Web site, Marlon James provides a brief biography, an overview of his writings, and a blog. http//marlonjames.com Macalester College offers online information about the author’s life, writings, and teaching career. http// www.macalester.edu/english/james.html Listeners can access an audio recording of James’s March 2009 interview with Tom Ashbrook for National Public Radio’s On Point, in which James discusses The Book of Night Women. http//www.onpointradio. org/2009/03/jamaicas-night-women
refers to the brutal task of working in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. The book centers on the massacre of Haitian workers in the 1930s and the potentially devastating consequences of racism. Diptee, Audra. From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775-1807. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2010. Print. This scholarly work details the history of slavery in Jamaica and slavery’s impact on Jamaican society. James, Marlon. John Crow’s Devil. New York: Akashic Books, 2005. Print. Like The Book of Night Women, James’s first novel is set in Jamaica. During the midtwentieth century, a Jamaican village deals with religious conflict and suggestions of witchcraft. Levy, Andrea. The Long Song. London: Headline Review, 2010. Print. Levy’s novel takes the form of a memoir written by an elderly Jamaican woman named July, who is a former slave. The story is set on a sugarcane plantation in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print. Morrison’s celebrated novel chronicles the life an escaped slave and her daughter.
For Further Reading
Harrabeth Haidusek
Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Soho, 1998. Print. The title of Danticat’s novel
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The Book of Not By Tsitsi Dangarembga
W Introduction The Book of Not is Tsitsi Dangarembga’s sequel to her 1988 semi-autobiographical novel Nervous Conditions, in which she detailed the efforts of a young Zimbabwean girl named Tambudzai, or Tambu, to acquire an education despite the difficulties she faced, including extreme poverty, misogyny, and colonialism. Dangarembga traces Tambu’s journey in Nervous Conditions and then in The Book of Not. In the first novel, Tambu develops a pragmatism that allows her to see her brother’s death as an event in her favor. For example, because he was the only male in the family, his death allowed Tambu to attend school. Similarly, in The Book of Not, Tambu learns to come to terms with her sister’s dismemberment, which occurs during the Zimbabwean war for independence. Tambu’s primary concern in The Book of Not is to leave her village and attend the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart, a missionary school to which she has won a scholarship. What Tambu does not understand is that Sacred Heart is a relic of European colonialism, a place where she will encounter the same kind of patronizing racial assumptions she is trying to escape. Dangarembga makes it clear that Tambu’s overidentification with the whites at the school is just another consequence of colonialism, and that colonized peoples suffer long-term effects from their subjugation.
W Literary and Historical Context
Until 1980 Zimbabwe was variously called either Southern Rhodesia or simply Rhodesia, named after the Englishborn South African explorer Cecil Rhodes. By 1889 Rhodes held a monopoly on the world diamond trade and later cofounded the DeBeers Mining Company, which
continues to trade in diamonds into the twenty-first century. Hoping to make a name for himself, Rhodes began acquiring mining rights in central and southern Africa by forging treaties with chieftains. In 1889 he was granted a charter by Queen Victoria to form the British South Africa Company (BSAC), which was modeled on the highly successful British East India Company. Several thousand white settlers followed Rhodes to the region, hoping to capitalize on the mining opportunities. Instead, with protection from the BSAC’s private army, the settlers took over much of the fertile land. They also ignited tensions between tribal leaders, only some of whom had signed treaties with Rhodes. The First Matabele War broke out in 1893, in which the Ndebele king, Lobengula, and his tribesmen fought the BSAC and British troops, who used the most advanced weaponry available at the time. The war ended the following year, with the death of Lobengula, the loss of all the Ndebele territory, and establishment of the country of Southern Rhodesia. A Second Matabele War began in 1896 and is known in Zimbabwe as the First War of Independence. It, too, ended in defeat for the Ndebele, as well as the Shona, and cemented the BSAC’s control of the region. From the start, Rhodes and his settlers wanted as much independence as possible from British colonial interference. With the BSAC’s charter set to expire in 1914, Rhodes requested a ten-year extension to avoid having the colony overtaken by South Africa. In 1923 the white population of Southern Rhodesia voted to establish itself as a self-governing colony, and it remained so until 1953, when it entered a federation with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now the countries of Zambia and Malawi, respectively). But while Southern Rhodesia had no African suffrage or legislative representation, Northern Rhodesia, with a much smaller white population, allowed for three, and later five, seats for Africans in its assembly. The movement for African independence that was taking hold across the continent during the first half of the twentieth century resulted in growing concerns in
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MAJOR CHARACTERS NTOMBI is an African classmate of Tambu’s at Sacred Heart. She has a more well-rounded approach to life and is contrasted favorably with Tambu. NYASHA is Tambu’s cousin, who was partly raised and educated in England before returning to Zimbabwe. She plays a smaller role in The Book of Not than in Nervous Conditions, where her own “nervous condition” is a major plot point. TAMBUDZAI, more commonly called Tambu, is a young woman coming of age during Zimbabwe’s war for independence from colonial rule during the 1960s and 1970s. TAMBU’S MOTHER has become embittered by poverty, racism, and marriage to a tyrannical husband. She is skeptical of Tambu’s ambitions.
Southern Rhodesia about the increasing number of Africans serving in Northern Rhodesia’s government. Thus, all three colonies petitioned the British government to dissolve the federation in 1963. Shortly thereafter Africans gained a majority in the governments of both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Southern Rhodesia, now calling itself simply Rhodesia, rejected the trend of majority rule sweeping the African colonies and instead voted to continue its white-minority rule through the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Great Britain in 1965. The British considered the UDI an act of rebellion and requested that the United Nations (UN) enact economic sanctions against Rhodesia. In the meantime, two pro-democracy parties were formed in Rhodesia. In 1961 Joshua Nkomo formed the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU); his colleagues in the group were Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe. Internal tensions reached a peak among the three in 1963, when Sithole and Mugabe left ZAPU and formed a rival pro-independence group, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). Although a new constitution was passed in 1962 that allowed for some African representation in the country’s parliament, a new, white supremacist party, the Rhodesian Front, was formed by Ian Smith, and it easily won in the elections of 1962. Winston Field was installed as prime minister and Smith was his deputy. In 1964 Smith succeeded Field as prime minister and had Nkomo and Mugabe, followed by Sithole, arrested and imprisoned until 1974. Smith issued the UDI in 1965, but UN sanctions were not instituted until 1968. Meanwhile, guerrilla fighting took hold of the country, led by the competing ZAPU and ZANU. Lasting from 1964 to 1979, the fighting is known as the Rhodesian Bush War, or Zimbabwe War of Liberation. In 1976 Nkomo and Mugabe reconciled and formed the
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black-nationalist Patriotic Front. With his government on the brink of collapse, Smith agreed to negotiations in 1978, during which he made concessions that allowed the moderate African leader of United African National Council (UANC), Bishop Abel Muzorewa, to be elected prime minister. In 1979 Zimbabwe-Rhodesia was created, with a new constitution that ended white minority rule and the institution of a land reform program. In 1980 the old rivalry between Nkomo and Mugabe was revived when the two faced off against each other in the general election, which Mugabe won. Now officially independent of colonial rule, the new nation was renamed Zimbabwe. Although he initially gave Nkomo a role in the new government, Mugabe dismissed him in 1982, igniting tribal violence that lasted until 1987. At that point, Mugabe and Nkomo tried to reconcile their differences by coming together in a single party and amending the constitution so that Mugabe would serve as executive president and Nkomo as vice president. The country’s brief flirtation with democracy ended. Under Mugabe’s leadership, which had begun with great promise, Zimbabwe suffered economically and socially. Life expectancy dropped dramatically, hunger and poverty increased, HIV/AIDS reached epidemic rates, and the country experienced numerous humanitarian crises. As of 2010, Mugabe remained president.
W Themes According to Rosanne Kennedy, in an essay in Studies in the Novel, “Dangarembga innovatively uses irony, humor, and farce to dramatize the absurdities of racism in a colonial society and the impediments to witnessing it, thereby bringing into visibility what is unspeakable in (post)colonial Zimbabwe. The novel dramatizes the narrator’s struggle to break out of a repetition compulsion, manifested in her obsessive desire for recognition, which continually leaves her deflated and depressed.” In Nervous Conditions Tambu watches as her English-educated cousin Nyasha crumbles under the weight of racial and cultural confusion and suffers a breakdown. In The Book of Not it is Tambu who loses her sense of self when she tries to assimilate into white culture through educational achievement at a white-run academy. Kennedy continues: “In narrating Tambu’s struggles to become someone, and the undoing of her subjectivity, the novel dramatizes ordinary, everyday acts of racism in a gendered colonial context. By locating the story in the context of a colonial war in which the colonized are not unified against the white minority, the novel reflects on the psychological and political effects of witnessing traumatic events in a culture in which no one is supposed to remember what they saw.” Helon Habila, reviewing the book for the Guardian, writes, “The novel’s irony—and irony is the armature on which this whole story hangs—is that Tambu doesn’t see how false and unachievable her goal is. In a sense, this is the same old TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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story of being black in a far too white world, even though here—more irony—the white world is actually in Africa.” Having been raised and educated partly in England, Dangarembga herself experienced the fractured existence of living in two cultures—one of which had historically exploited the other. In The Book of Not, Tambu becomes so invested in achieving success in the white world that she begins to betray her own culture, at one point taking part in a volunteer effort to aid white Rhodesian soldiers in the war for independence in order to comfort two white classmates whose parents were killed by guerrilla fighters. Despite her commitment to success, and despite Zimbabwe’s winning independence in 1980, Tambu repeatedly experiences the same forms of racism. At school she watches silently as a white student accepts an award that should have gone to her. And later, while working at a white-owned advertising agency, a white male colleague takes credit for Tambu’s work and wins an award for that as well. Conditioned by racism and misogyny to hold her tongue, Tambu is unable to defend herself in both cases.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Mutoko, Rhodesia, in 1959, but moved with her parents, who were continuing their educations, to England when she was two years old. The family returned to the colony when Dangarembga was six. She attended a missionary school in Mutare, returning to England as a young adult to study medicine at Cambridge University. Homesickness took her back to Africa just prior to Zimbabwean independence in 1980, and she entered the University of Harare to study psychology. She became involved in theater, writing and directing plays, and also began writing fiction. Her first novel, Nervous Conditions, was the first English-language novel published by a Zimbabwean woman and won a prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize. Dangarembga next studied film in Berlin and began writing and directing highly acclaimed motion pictures.
In The Book of Not, Tambudzai is a young Zimbabwean girl determined to obtain an education in spite of the challenges she faces. ª Aladdin Color, Inc./Aladdin Color, Inc./Corbis
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The Book of Not
W Style The Book of Not is written entirely from Tambu’s point of view. As such, it provides no other perspective but hers, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to remember that Tambu’s perspective is more and more warped as the story moves forward. As Tambu repeatedly explains, she is entirely focused on herself and her own achievement, to the exclusion of everything else. Ironically, though, the more she focuses on herself, the less she engages with her culture and her family, risking losing a fundamental part of her identity.
W Critical Reception Nervous Conditions is considered a classic of twentiethcentury African literature and has been hailed as one of the most significant works written by an African woman. Critics noted that the novel provides a rare glimpse into the experiences of a broad spectrum of Zimbabwean women, including Tambu’s mother, embittered by poverty and low expectations and resentful of her daughter’s opportunities, and her cousin Nyasha, who suffers from anorexia and other emotional problems because she cannot reconcile her feelings about Africa and England. These characters reappear in The Book of Not, but reviewers of the sequel found their roles reduced because of Tambu’s intensified focus on her own development. Helon Habila explained in her review that “[t]he whole novel is an examination of Tambu’s increasingly warped perspective, achieved through a focused, almost claustrophobic first-person point of view and a masterly deployment of flashbacks.” Heather Margolis, reviewing The Book of Not for the Journal of Asian and African Studies, also commented on Tambu’s gradual loss of connections: “Throughout [Tambu’s] struggle, the realm of the other expands to envelope much more than those who do not look like her or speak her native language. As the vast other builds a cold cement around her heart, Tambu labors ever more intensely and erratically to establish connections through the narrowing gaps. This personal isolation is the acknowledged but silent tragedy.” Some critics compared The Book of Not unfavorably with Nervous Conditions, maintaining that Tambu’s relentless refusal to protest the wrongs done to her made her seem more a martyr than a heroine. Most, however, agreed that Dangarembga narrates the story with such deft irony and sardonic humor that Tambu remains a likeable figure in spite of her flaws.
Kennedy, Rosanne. “Mortgaged Futures: Trauma, Subjectivity, and the Legacies of Colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not.” Studies in the Novel 40.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2008): 86-107. Print. Margolis, Heather. Rev. of The Book of Not, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Journal of Asian and African Studies 42, no. 6 (Dec. 2007): 578-79. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Mustafa, Fawzia. “Reading Development and Writing Africa: UNFPA, Nervous Conditions, and The Book of Not.” Comparative Literature Studies 46.2 (2009): 379-406. Print. Examines Dangarembga’s novels in the context of the literal and figurative concept of “human” in the postcolonial world. Wanner, Zukisma. Rev. of The Book of Not, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. African Writing Online, June-Aug., 2007. Web. 4 Oct. 2010. Review that takes into account the role of Zimbabwe’s colonial history in the formation of Tambu’s character. Gale Resources
“Dangarembga, Tsitsi.” Black Literature Criticism: Classic and Emerging Authors since 1950. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 11 Nov. 2010. ————. Contemporary Authors Online. Web. 11 Nov. 2010. Mabura, Lily G. N. “Black Women Walking Zimbabwe: Refuge and Prospect in the Landscapes of Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Its Sequel, The Book of Not.” Research in African Literatures 41.3 (2010): 88+. Print. For Further Reading
Barclay, Philip. Zimbabwe: Years of Hope and Despair. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2010. Print. Journalistic account of Zimbabwe’s election of 2008, which Robert Mugabe won despite predictions to the contrary. Fuller, Alexandra. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. New York: Random House, 2003. Print. Memoir of the author’s childhood in colonial Rhodesia. Rogers, Douglas. The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe. New York: Crown, 2009. Print. Memoir of life in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nancy Dziedzic
Works Cited
Habila, Helon. “In Time of War.” Guardian [London], 4 Nov. 2006. Web. 3 Oct. 2010.
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The Book Thief By Markus Zusak
W Introduction
W Literary and Historical
Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief takes place during World War II, in the town of Molching, in Germany. Narrated by Death, the work explores the life of a young girl, Liesel Meminger, and her efforts to adjust to life with her new foster family. As the reader learns over the course of the novel, Liesel’s own family was splintered when her father, accused of being a Communist, disappeared. Her mother struggled to raise Liesel and her brother, but fearing for her family’s safety as Hitler gains power, Liesel’s mother decides her children will be safer in the hands of a German family not scarred by labels and accusations. In the course of the journey, Liesel’s brother, Werner, dies. At his grave site, Liesel picks up a book the young grave digger has dropped. This becomes the first incident in Liesel’s long history of book thievery. Throughout the novel, Liesel grows to love her foster parents, particularly, her foster Papa, Hans Hubermann. She makes friends, notably with Rudy Steiner. Liesel’s Papa, however, has a dangerous association in his past. His life was saved by another German soldier in World War I, a German who happened also to be Jewish. Now, as the Nazis have targeted Jews as the enemies of Germany, Hans’s dead friend’s son has come to Hans for help. Max Vanderburg is subsequently hidden in the Hubermanns’ basement. Eventually, a tender friendship grows between Max and Liesel. The war wages on. Max must leave when Hans’s kindness to a Jewish man being marched to a concentration camp is observed by Nazi authorities. Hans himself is forced into service in the Nazi army. He returns safely however, but Liesel’s joy in her father’s return is shortlived. Soon, her street is bombed by Allied forces. Writing in her basement during the night of the bombing, Liesel alone of all her loved ones survives.
Set during World War II, Zusak’s novel is told from a modern, or rather, timeless perspective. Narrated by Death, the work is contemporary in terms of Zusak’s experimentation with nonlinear narration and in terms of his choice of the mythic character of Death as the commentator on the novel’s characters and action. While Death is clearly looking back on events that have already occurred, the story itself unfolds within the time frame of the war, and the characters—unlike Death—do not speak in the present-day vernacular. The action of the book takes place almost entirely within the German town of Molching, beginning in 1939. Himmel Street becomes a microcosm for the tensions playing out in larger German cities and all over the country. Adolf Hitler had risen to power in the aftermath of World War I, advocating a strongly nationalistic philosophy as the only means of rebuilding a strong Germany. He sought to restore territories lost during World War I. In 1938 he invaded Austria, and in 1939 Czechoslovakia. After signing a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union regarding Poland, Hitler proceeded to invade Poland, an act that brought Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand into the war. Throughout the war, the Nazi government transported enemies of the state to various concentration camps. Forced labor camps established in the early 1930s detained Communists and other political dissidents, as well as those deemed socially “deviant,” including homosexuals. Later, following the invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, the Nazis imprisoned and murdered Jews from Germany and all its newly occupied regions. As the war wore on, prisoners of war were also incarcerated. If not outright murdered, many of these individuals died of mistreatment, exposure, disease, or starvation. According to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Context
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MAJOR CHARACTERS DEATH is the omniscient, first-person narrator of The Book Thief. He shows himself to be gentle, scooping up souls when their bodies expire and transporting them to their eternity. He sees much of the world in terms of color, and describes his impressions in a highly poetic manner, although his style of narration is rather conversational. Death is attracted to Liesel’s story, and although he does not explicitly state why, his commentary suggests that he is drawn to Liesel not just because of her goodness, but because her goodness stands in such stark contrast, and eventually in such blatant opposition to Hitler’s evilness. Death is as moved to despair by Hitler’s treatment of the Jews as any modern reader. Thinking of the souls he collects, of the countless Jewish people who have died in concentration camps, Death describes how he tries to “de-realize” what has happened. He observes the way he mentions the name of God “in a futile attempt to understand.” In the end, Death’s perspective on the human race is that he remains “haunted by humans.” ILSA HERMANN is the wife of the mayor of Molching. Ilsa witnesses Liesel rescuing a book from the pile of Jewish books being burned in a Nazi book-burning rally. Ilsa later, however mutely, shares with Liesel her secret library. HANS HUBERMANN is Liesel’s foster father. Where his wife Rosa is harsh, Hans is gentle. He tenderly coaxes Liesel out of her shell of grief after she loses both her brother (to death) and her mother (after being abandoned by her). Hans teaches Liesel to read from her stolen books and comforts her when she wakes from her nightmares. He is compelled by a sense of duty and guilt to shelter the son of the man who saved his life in World War I. After an act of compassion for a Jewish man being made to parade through the streets of Molching with his fellows, Hans is subsequently sent off to war. He returns home with only a broken leg, but is killed shortly afterward when Himmel Street is bombed. ROSA HUBERMANN is Liesel’s foster mother. She is also the mother of a son and a daughter who are older and
documentation, between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany created twenty thousand concentration camps and incarcerated millions of individuals. Approximately three million Jews were killed in camps specifically constructed for their extermination. In 1945 the Allied forces liberated the prisoners in concentration camps, yet many were too ill or weakened by disease or starvation to survive.
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make only brief appearances in the story. Despite her rough and sometimes cruel treatment of Liesel, Rosa loves her, and this emotion is brought to the fore after the Hubermanns begin hiding Max Vanderburg in their basement. LIESEL MEMINGER is the story’s protagonist. Given up by her mother, Liesel is forced into a foster home with her brother, yet her brother does not survive the journey there. Liesel is welcomed by Hans Hubermann and, less affectionately, his wife. In contemplating her life and the state of affairs in Germany, Liesel grows increasingly defiant. As she begins to devote herself to Max Vanderburg’s safety, consoling him and helping him in any way she can, Liesel begins to hate Hitler and what he has done to Germany and to the people she loves. Liesel is comforted by words and books, and stealing books for her becomes a way to soothe the emotional trauma she continues to suffer. PAULA MEMINGER is Liesel’s mother. It is suggested in the course of the novel that her poverty, combined with her status as the wife of a suspected Communist, compels her to seek a foster family to care for her two children. WERNER MEMINGER is Liesel’s brother. His death and subsequent burial haunt Liesel for years, and also inspire her first act of book thievery. RUDY STEINER is a young boy who befriends Liesel shortly after she moves in with the Hubermanns. He becomes her accomplice on many occasions as they steal food or books. MAX VANDENBURG is the son of the man who saved Hans Hubermann’s life in World War I. When being Jewish becomes a dangerous thing in Germany, Max is aided by a friend who hides him and helps him reach Hans. Hans, indebted to Max’s father, welcomes Max into the Hubermann home, where life alters drastically as the family attempts to hide their secret and to help Max as best they can at the same time.
W Themes The Book Thief is a thematically rich novel in which Zusak explores a variety of war-related topics. One of the most salient themes of the work is summed up in the novel’s last line, when Death observes, “I am haunted by humans.” Much of the novel is devoted to the depiction of the inhumane treatment of human beings by fellow TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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human beings. Hitler’s large-scale oppression of the Jews is only one example. Zusak takes pains to also depict a German citizenry sometimes reluctant and often vigorously opposed to Hitler’s beliefs and aims. The Nazis’ cruelty to anyone who hesitates to subscribe to Hitler’s message is seen in the way both Liesel’s and Rudy’s fathers are taken from their families, and in the way both Liesel and her father are whipped and beaten for approaching and helping Jewish prisoners as they are marched through town. Death, however, is equally mystified by the way human goodness manages to exist in a world that can also create a Hitler. Acts of goodness and sacrifice abound in the novel, beginning with the way Liesel’s mother is prepared to sacrifice her own ties to her children in order to protect them. Hans sacrifices his family’s safety to protect another man’s son, in acknowledgment of the way that man saved Hans’s own life. Liesel’s selflessness is revealed in her generosity and love toward Max, a man to whom she owes nothing, but with whom she feels a sense of shared pain and victimization. The mayor’s wife, plagued by her own
sorrows, climbs out of her grief to befriend Liesel and share with her a love of books and language. Liesel in turn shares this love of reading with her neighbors, comforting them in the darkness of the basement during air raids. The power of words is another of The Book Thief ’s main themes. Before Liesel can even read the words in a book, she is comforted by the very existence of the book itself. Learning to read is a journey she takes under Hans’s guidance, and consequently the act of reading is forever imprinted with a sense of comfort for Liesel. Through Max, Liesel learns that Hitler has used words to further his malevolent plans; Death also emphasizes the fact that Hitler has crafted Nazi Germany and the myth of German superiority through words. Words, therefore, reflect the dual nature of humanity, their inherent capacity for good and for evil inherent in humans—a nature that haunts Death.
W Style In The Book Thief, a novel acknowledged as a work intended for teens, Zusak employs a unique, omniscient first-person narrator: Death. Death tells Liesel’s story, and snippets of the stories of other characters as well. As a commentator on the action, Death additionally interrupts the narrative to make observations, or sometimes to tell the reader about the future events of a particular character’s life. Occasionally, Death will relate events involving a character’s death, but outside of the otherwise linear narrative of The Book Thief; Death then revisits the events leading up to the point already revealed. As the story continues, Death gradually conveys that much of what he is relating has been taken directly from the story Liesel will eventually write herself, The Book Thief. Furthermore, Death retains the habit of talking to the reader in a casual, conversational style, placing the superstructure of the narrative outside of the story’s historical context. Despite the obvious nature of the work as historical fiction, Zusak’s unconventional narrative style reaches out to its intended audience as it approaches a horrific period of world history in a voice that is both modern and sympathetic.
W Critical Reception
Set during World War II, The Book Thief follows a young German girl who develops a penchant for stealing books. Ksenia Palimski/ Shutterstock.com
The Book Thief, winner of numerous literary awards, was well received by critics upon its publication. Its style and careful yet ambitious treatment of its tragic subject matter are the focus of many assessments of the work. John Green in a 2006 review for the New York Times Book Review observes that in Australia, the book was marketed to adults, while in the United States it has been aimed at a teenage audience. Arguing that the work is appropriate for young adult readers, Green states that while some teenagers may find that the story begins sluggishly, it is a book with the potential to be “life-changing.” He finds that young readers need to be exposed to “alternatives to
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Markus Zusak was born in Sydney, Australia in 1975 to workingclass immigrant parents, his mother being German and his father Austrian. Having worked as a janitor and a high school English teacher, Zusak published his first novel, The Underdog, in Australia in 1999. Subsequent works gradually received increasing critical attention. His 2002 novel, I Am the Messenger, published in the United States in 2005, won Zusak a Michael L. Printz Honor. The work was additionally nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His most commercially and critically successful work to date, The Book Thief was published in 2006. Zusak’s next novel is a coming-of-age story titled Bridge of Clay, slated for a 2011 release by Knopf.
ideological rigidity” and to “explorations of how stories matter.” Hazel Rochman, in a 2006 review for Booklist, maintains that despite the excessive shifting from the past to the present in the story’s narration, the work is a “powerful story.” In an unsigned 2006 Kirkus Reviews assessment, the critic describes Zusak’s writing as “elegant, philosophical and moving.” Claire Rosser, in a 2007 review of The Book Thief for the journal Kliatt, comments on the ways in which Zusak’s novel challenges the boundaries within which young adult novels are typically inscribed. In assessing The Book Thief for a 2007 review for the Guardian, Philip Ardagh comments on the way the book has been marketed in some countries as a teen novel, and in others as a work for adults. Ardagh finds it appropriate for both audiences, and he praises Zusak’s adroit characterization and story telling. Ardagh finds the work “a novel of breathtaking scope, masterfully told.”
“Zusak, Markus: The Book Thief.” Kirkus Reviews 74.2 (15 Jan. 2006): 91. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Rev. of The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Coventry Evening Telegraph 30 Dec. 2006: 33. Print. The critic praises Zusak’s novel for its thematic complexity and the “elegant, haunting” quality of Zusak’s writing. Brace, Marianne. “Forget the Scythe: Death Needs a Mop.” Independent on Sunday 31 Dec. 2006. HighBeam Research. Web. 28 Sept. 2010. Brace applauds Zusak’s characterization, particularly his depiction of Liesel and Death, and commends the work as a whole. Humphreys, Simon. Rev. of The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Mail on Sunday 4 Mar. 2007: 73. Print. Humphreys offers a largely favorable review of Zusak’s novel, praising the author’s prose and ability to move the reader, while faulting the narrator (Death) for a tone that is sometimes grating. Gale Resources
“The Book Thief.” Literary Newsmakers for Students. Ed. Anne Marie Hacht. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 2009: 41-63. Print. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 28 Sept. 2010. “Markus Zusak.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Also covered in Contemporary Authors. Vol. 223. Detroit: Gale, 2004: 451-52. Print. Open Web Sources
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Ardagh, Philip. “It’s a Steal.” Guardian 6 Jan. 2007. guardian.co.uk. Web. 28 Sept. 2010. Green, John. “Fighting for Their Lives.” New York Times Book Review 14 May 2006: 26. Print. “Holocaust Encyclopedia.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web. 28 Sept. 2010. Print. Maughan, Shannon. “It’s a Wonderful (Sales) Life: The Staying Power of The Book Thief.” Publishers Weekly 257.34 (30 Aug. 2010): 16. Print. Rochman, Hazel. “Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief.” Booklist 102.9-10 (1 Jan. 2006): 88. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 Sept. 2010. Rosser, Claire. “Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief.” Kliatt 40.2 (Mar. 2006): 19. High Beam Research. Web. 28 Sept. 2010.
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“Zusak, Markus.” Contemporary Authors New Revision Series. Ed. Amanda D. Sams. Vol. 163. Detroit: Gale, 2008: 420-23. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 28 Sept. 2010.
Random House’s author website for Markus Zusak features information about the author, reviews, bibliography, and discussion forums. http//www. randomhouse.com/features/markuszusak/ The BBC covers the history of the world wars on its website and features a section on the Holocaust. Included is an interactive timeline, interactive maps, and links to essays on various related topics. http// www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/ For Further Reading
Nees, Greg. Germany: Unraveling the Enigma. Boston: Intercultural Press, 1999. Print. After reviewing modern German history, Nees analyzes German cultural themes and stereotypes, exploring such topics as the German sense of duty and responsibility, and the German desire for order and security TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Spinelli, Jerry. Milkweed. New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2003. Print. Spinelli’s novel is, like The Book Thief, a young adult novel focused on World War II. It takes place in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and is told from the point of view of a poor young boy uncertain of his heritage. Wistrich, Robert Solomon. Hitler and the Holocaust. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print. Wistrich, a professor of modern Jewish history, explores the forces contributing to the anti-Semitism that
Hitler capitalized on in the years leading up to World War II. The author then goes on to trace the history of the Holocaust during the war years. Zusak, Markus. I Am the Messenger. New York: Knopf, 2005. Print. Originally published in Australia in 2002, Zusak’s young adult novel centers around a nineteenyear-old cab driver whose life alters completely after he stops a bank robbery.
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Catherine Dominic
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The Bottoms By Joe R. Lansdale
W Introduction The Bottoms (2000) is a work of literary detective fiction by the noted mystery and science fiction writer Joe R. Lansdale. The story is narrated in the present day by the elderly Harry Collins, who describes a chain of traumatic happenings from his childhood in East Texas in the 1930s. The series of events unfolds when Harry and his sister Thomasina, (known as Tom), discover the mutilated body of an African American prostitute in the woods near their home. Their father, the community’s constable, investigates the crime, motivated by a desire for justice. His investigation is impeded by citizens who feel that African American deaths are not worth investigating and by Ku Klux Klan members who brand him a “nigger lover” and threaten his family. As the murders continue, Harry is forced to come to terms with the brutality and injustice of the world in which he lives. The work has been praised for its re-creation of the dialect and racial politics of 1930s, Texas, as well as for its coming-of-age narrative. It won the 2001 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel and helped to bring Lansdale to the attention of a broader readership.
W Literary and Historical Context
The central story of The Bottoms takes place in East Texas during the Great Depression, a period of economic strife that gripped the country beginning in 1929. During this era unemployment reached a record high, while incomes and prices fell dramatically. Many people were forced to turn to soup kitchens and breadlines for food. Others traveled the country with their families, desperately seeking work. While the national economy began to show signs of improvement by 1933, it did not fully recover for more than a decade. The novel opens with Harry’s reflection on the period: “I suppose there was
some back then had money, but we weren’t among them. The Depression was on.” Later in the novel, Harry’s grandmother arrives from North Texas with stories of the Dust Bowl, the brutal dust storms that destroyed farmland in Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond, compounding the problems of the Depression by destroying the crops and livelihood of farmers and farmworkers. Lansdale’s novel also dramatizes the racial bigotry and violence that were prevalent in the South during the 1930s. The Ku Klux Klan, which had died out shortly after the Civil War, remerged in 1915, with membership reaching a peak in the 1920s. It was during this second wave of popularity that the Klan adopted the burning cross as a symbol. Although membership was beginning to die out nationally in the 1930s, when Lansdale’s story takes place, the Klan was still active around the country, particularly in the Midwest and the South. In the novel members of the Klan attempt to dissuade Harry’s father from investigating the murders of black prostitutes. Later they burn a cross in the Collins’s yard and lynch an innocent, elderly African American man for the crimes.
W Themes Racial injustice permeates the fictional world of The Bottoms and is the central theme of the novel. While characters such as Harry’s father and grandmother have developed progressive views that lead them to view African Americans as equals, the majority of people in their community seek to keep the two races segregated, threatening abuse or death to those who cross racial boundaries. The white mill manager, Pappy Treesome, is repeatedly attacked by the Ku Klux Klan because he has married an African American woman, and his mentally handicapped son is castrated and burned to death for exposing himself to a white woman. When Jacob begins to investigate the murders of African American prostitutes, he is warned off by his former friend, Red Woodrow, who tells him, “It’s known far and wide all
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over this country you’re a nigger lover, and you ain’t careful you’re gonna bring up another generation of them nigger lovers, and some folks around here have all the nigger lovin’ they want.” Lost innocence is another prevalent theme in The Bottoms. At the beginning of the novel, Harry’s biggest concerns are that his wounded dog might have to be put down or that the Goat Man, a monstrous creature from an old wives’ tale, haunts the woods near his home. He and his sister feel comfortable roaming the woods and befriending all of their neighbors, black and white, without any fear of repercussions. Over the course of the novel, however, Harry and Tom are changed indelibly by events in their community. Toward the end of the narrative, Harry reflects on his former innocence: “Just a short time before I had been a happy kid with no worries. I didn’t even know it was the Depression, let alone that there were murderers outside of the magazines that I read down at the barbershop.” Within a relatively short time, however, the boy is awakened to the realities of hatred and cruelty as he finds a murder victim and witnesses, in rapid succession, an autopsy, a lynching, and an assault on his young sister.
W Style The Bottoms is narrated in the first person by Harry Collins, who is looking back on the events of his childhood more than seventy years later. His voice re-creates the dialect of his childhood (“I just soon I didn’t see nothing like it again, and I sure hate Harry and Tom seen it.”). The most extreme example of this dialect comes from the toothless Pappy Treesome (“Dey zay ooo god u ded gul in duh eyezouse, cozdabull.”). Lansdale also plays with figurative language, creating colorful metaphors that reflect Southern life. As Steve Jelbert notes in his Times review of the novel, the author is “never afraid to stretch a curious metaphor to within an inch of its cotton-picking life.” Largely because of its similar treatment of racial violence, Lansdale’s novel has frequently been compared to Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Also set during the Great Depression, Lee’s novel is the story of a young brother and sister whose father is appointed to defend an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman. The novel includes a near lynching and a wrongful conviction. Like Lee’s novel, The Bottoms is a bildingsroman, or a novel that traces a character’s coming-of-age. Traditionally the protagonists of such novels mature through emotionally painful experiences that force them to seek a better understanding of the world. In Lansdale’s novel Harry must grapple with the trauma of discovering a body and the racial violence that ensues. He is forced to give up his childhood belief in a fictitious monster, the Goat Man, and come to terms instead with the capacity of his fellow human beings for
MAJOR CHARACTERS GRANDMA is Harry and Tom’s maternal grandmother. She comes to live with the family after the death of her husband and helps to investigate the murders. MISS MAGGIE is an elderly African American woman who is known as the longtime companion of Red Woodrow’s father. She is later revealed to be Red’s mother. She is murdered by Red after he learns the truth of his parentage. MOSE is an elderly black man who briefly falls under suspicion in the murders. After he is lynched, his innocence is proven. Known to have had some white blood, he is revealed to be the biological father of Red Woodrow. TELLY is Mose’s mentally handicapped son. He has been living in the woods and is mistaken by the children for the Goat Man. He witnesses Cecil abducting Tom and leads Harry to her. He is killed rescuing the children, but he kills Cecil in the process. CECIL CHAMBERS is a World War I veteran and barber who works for Harry’s father. After he kidnaps and abuses Tom, he is revealed to be the serial killer. He is killed by Telly. HARRY COLLINS is the narrator of the story. He helps to investigate the murders after his father sinks into depression and alcoholism. JACOB COLLINS is the father of Harry and Tom. He is a farmer and barber and the local constable. He falls into depression and alcoholism after he cannot prevent the lynching of Mose. After a popular white woman is murdered, proving Mose’s innocence, Jacob vows to give up alcohol. THOMASINA “TOM” COLLINS is Harry’s younger sister. She is kidnapped and molested by Cecil Chambers, but she is rescued after Telly witnesses the abduction and warns Harry. RED WOODROW is an old friend of Jacob. The men’s friendship ended in rivalry for Harry’s mother. A staunch racist, Red is unable to handle the knowledge that both of his biological parents were of African American descent. After carving the word nigger in his chest, he covers himself in tar and hangs himself.
monstrosity. Over the course of the novel, he receives an education in sexual perversion, bigotry, and violence and discovers that even his parents have secrets. “I had learned too,” he explains, “that the people I knew, or thought I knew, had problems and lives. Mama and Daddy had a past.” These discoveries are so earthshattering, he reveals, that “I wouldn’t have been surprised right then to discover the moon could be reached by climbing to the top of the highest tree, and with a good pair of scissors you could snip it in half.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joe R. Lansdale was born on October 28, 1951, in Gladewater, Texas. After studying at the University of Texas at Austin and at Stephen F. Austin State University, he held a number of jobs that included stints as a factory worker and ditch digger before devoting himself full time to writing beginning in 1981. His first mystery novel, Act of Love, was published that same year. Over the next two decades Lansdale published more than thirty books, including a popular mystery series featuring the detectives Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, and several volumes of short fiction. In addition to the Edgar Award for The Bottoms, Lansdale’s work has garnered six Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers of America, and an American Mystery Award. During the 1990s Lansdale wrote screenplays for Batman: The Animated Series. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, where he continues to write novels in the mystery, horror, and science fiction genres.
W Critical Reception Upon its publication in 2000, The Bottoms was met with critical accolades. In addition to receiving the Edgar Award, the book was nominated for a Dashiell Hammett Award for Best Novel and for the Mystery Readers International’s 2001 Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel. While these awards recognized Lansdale’s achievements in the mystery genre, many reviewers have noted that the power of the novel’s social commentary and the literary quality of its prose elevate it beyond the confines of the mystery genre, making it appealing to a wider audience of readers. In his Booklist review of The Bottoms, Les Lukowsky praises the novel by noting, “Effectively combining mystery and family history, it offers a vivid, multifaceted glimpse back to a simpler, but not necessarily better, time.” He goes on to suggest that the novel represents Lansdale’s transcendence of the mystery genre, asserting that “if any author ever deserved a breakthrough book, it’s Lansdale. This should be it.”
An aging narrator, Harry Collins, recalls a childhood story of racial violence and the Ku Klux Klan in The Bottoms. Popperfoto/Getty Images
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Not all assessments of the novel have been wholly positive, however. In his review of the novel in the London Times, Edward Clark comments that “while Lansdale’s depiction of life in America’s Deep South during the Thirties is compelling, he often lapses into cliche, sentimentality and a certain unintentional burlesque.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Clark, Edward. “New Paperbacks.” Rev. of The Bottoms, by Joe R. Lansdale. Times [London] 25 Nov. 2000: n. pag. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 15 Aug. 2010. Jelbert, Steve. “Fiction.” Rev. of The Bottoms, by Joe R. Lansdale. Times [London] 11 Aug. 2001: n. pag. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 15 Aug. 2010. Lansdale, Joe R. The Bottoms. New York: Mysterious Press, 2000. Print. Lukowsky, Les. Rev. of The Bottoms, by Joe R. Lansdale. Booklist 1 June 2000: 1798. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
De Lint, Charles. Rev. of The Bottoms, by Joe R. Lansdale. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Jan. 2001: 24. Offers an overview of The Bottoms and compares it to Lansdale’s earlier novel The Boar (1998). Julian, Janet. Rev. of The Bottoms, by Joe R. Lansdale. Kliatt July 2002: 49. Recommends Lansdale’s novel for its strong narration and its treatment of sensitive social issues. Knight, Bill. Rev. of The Bottoms, by Joe R. Lansdale. Magill Book Reviews (2001): n. pag. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 15 Aug. 2010. Praises Lansdale for his attention to detail and his development of the novel’s characters. Lunn, Bob. Rev. of The Bottoms, by Joe R. Lansdale. Library Journal Aug. 2000: 158. Likens The Bottoms to works by William Faulkner and Harper Lee. Stasio, Marilyn. Rev. of The Bottoms, by Joe R. Lansdale. New York Times 24 Sept. 2000: 29. Print. Favorably reviews the novel, emphasizing its outlook on Southern life and race relations. Gale Resources
Group, 2000. 79-82. Gale, Cengage Learning Trial Site. Gale. Something about the Author Online. 13 Aug. 2010. Open Web Sources
The author’s official Web site includes a biography, a bibliography of his work, and the full text of select short stories. http//www.joerlansdale.com/ The Web site of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law brings together information about lynching in the United States, providing historical context and statistics. http//www.law.umkc.edu/ faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchstats.html For Further Reading
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Print. This collection of essays examines lynching from sociological and historical perspectives. Lansdale, Joe R. A Fine Dark Line. New York: Mysterious Press, 2003. Print. Set in 1958, Lansdale’s follow-up to The Bottoms tells the story of a thirteenyear-old boy who stumbles on a box of love letters tied to an unsolved double murder. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960. Print. The Bottoms has been compared to Lee’s classic coming-of-age novel about racial injustice. MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print. MacLean chronicles the post-World War I resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print. This book examines the Great Depression, emphasizing economics and politics as well as individuals’ experiences. Vronsky, Peter. Serial Killers: The Method and the Madness of Monsters. New York: Berkeley Books, 2004. Print. Vronsky investigates the phenomenon of serial killing in its historical, psychological, and cultural contexts.
“Joe R. Lansdale.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2009.
Greta Gard
“Joe R(ichard) Lansdale (1951-).” Something about the Author. Ed. Alan Hedblad. Vol. 116. Detroit: Gale
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The Boy Next Door By Irene Sabatini
W Introduction The Boy Next Door is a story of forbidden love set in Zimbabwe in the chaotic days following the country’s 1980 independence from British rule. As the book follows the relationship between a white man and a “colored” woman over the course of almost twenty years, The Boy Next Door also chronicles the racial, ethnic, and political turmoil that descended upon the country following the heady days of excitement that greeted black majority rule and Robert Mugabe’s appointment as prime minister. The main characters of The Boy Next Door are Ian McKenzie, a seventeen-year-old white “Rhodie” of British descent recently convicted of setting his stepmother on fire, and his naive and studious fourteen-year-old neighbor, Lindiwe Bishop, who becomes obsessed with the facts of the crime—and with Ian, following his mysterious release from prison some eighteen months later. Warned by her upwardly mobile parents, a black mother and white father, to stay away from Ian, Lindiwe nevertheless develops a secret bond with him that matures into love as their lives are taken in many different directions by the turbulent political situation in Zimbabwe. The Boy Next Door received the Orange Prize for New Writers, an important international prize for women’s fiction. In conferring the honor on the novel, Di Spiers, the chair of judges, remarked, “At heart a love story, it is also so much more as, through the experiences of its charismatic protagonists, it charts the first two decades of the emerging Zimbabwe with honesty, humour and humanity” (author’s website).
W Literary and Historical Context
The Boy Next Door recalls the Zimbabwe of author Irene Sabatini’s youth. She was raised in southern Zimbabwe in the country’s second-largest city, Bulawayo, the setting of
much of the novel. In an interview with Belinda Otas, Sabatini explained that the novel originated in the conflux of two circumstances: her publisher’s request for a memoir about Zimbabwe in the time of independence and a phone call from her father, still living in her childhood home in Bulawayo, telling her that the house next door had burned. Then, about a year after this phone call, Sabatini told Otas, the first line of the novel came to her, “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.” The Boy Next Door is divided into four parts which chronicle the developing relationship of Lindiwe and Ian as well as the deterioration of Zimbabwe, once heralded as a model of African democracy. Part 1 occurs in the 1980s as the country attempts to adjust to the transformation to black majority rule. Lindiwe and her family are the first blacks to settle in their Bulawayo neighborhood after integration. Her parents’ mixed marriage would have been forbidden in the former Rhodesia. Lindiwe is light-skinned but considered “colored.” She is an excellent student but is taunted by racial slurs at the mostly white school her parents insist she attend. Ian, on the other hand, is a brash and bold high school dropout, still possessed of the elitist attitude of the white ruling class, though the McKenzies are the last remaining whites on the street. The two protagonists develop a friendship against a backdrop of widespread terror as Matabeleland (southern Zimbabwe) is occupied by a brigade of North Korean soldiers sent to crush any rebellion from ethnic Ndebele opposing the nationalist government of Robert Mugabe, who is backed by the Shona majority in the north. The succeeding parts of the novel find Ian and Lindiwe separated for many years as Lindiwe attends school—as did the author—in the northern city of Harare, and Ian takes his photojournalism career to South Africa. In the years before and after they reunite, the government of Mugabe further disintegrates with ethnic and racial riots, corruption among political leaders
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and the military, and economic devastation. Terror reigns as thousands are killed in violence that erupts between warring black factions and between whites and blacks, and as Mugabe’s plan to redistribute the land owned by the whites comes to involve intimidation and murder. Additionally, South African rebels seek to destabilize the new democracy.
W Themes Amy Virshup wrote in the New York Times of Lindiwe and Ian, “Their shared status as outsiders brings them together in this novel about love, family, and what it means to be African.” These themes—love, family, and identity—emanate from the intersection of private lives and public events. In a video interview on the author’s website, Sabatini described the plot as hinging on the threatened love affair of Ian and Lindiwe: “The question throughout the novel, that the novel asks, is, will they manage to keep this connection despite all the trauma and drama that is happening all around them?” The “trauma and drama” is political as well as personal. Aside from their difference in color, complicated by the everwidening racial divide that accompanies Mugabe’s rule, there are their diverse family backgrounds and the continuing threat posed by Lindiwe’s parents to their union. Added to that are the killings and torture of innocent people happening almost daily around them as Mugabe’s regime becomes increasingly dictatorial. Because of the volatility of the situation, a writer for Kirkus Reviews noted, Sabatini “never manages to convince us of the durability of the lovers’ relationship, which is key.” Sabatini said in the interview with Otas that she also hoped to show the affirmative side of independence in the form of the influx of people from all over the world into Zimbabwe just after liberation: “I guess one of the most important stories that I wanted to convey . . . is just how multicultural it was. There was such a heady mix of nationalities: young people, full of energy and good will . . . to help this new nation find its feet. Zimbabwe was going to be a socialist paradise. . . . There was Black, White, Coloured, Asian, Shona, Ndebele . . . and the rest of the world, all squashed up against each other in this (previously) isolated land-locked country.” But Sabatini also admitted that this spirit of optimism existed mostly in the north and drew international attention away from the brutal massacres occurring to the south in Matabeleland.
W Style In her interview with Otas, Sabatini described the style of The Boy Next Door as “stripped down,” designed to highlight the emotional intensity of the story unburdened by excessive description. The dialogue is colorful, consisting of a pastiche of untranslated Shona, Ndebele,
MAJOR CHARACTERS DADDY BISHOP is Lindiwe’s father, a white man who works in the Telecommunications Department of the post office. He is married to a black woman, Lindiwe’s mother, but is unfaithful, conducting an affair with their adopted daughter, Rosanna. LINDIWE BISHOP is one of two main characters. At the start of the novel, she is a shy fourteen-year-old girl fascinated by a crime that occurred at her neighbor’s house. As the novel progresses, she becomes romantically involved with the person accused of the crime, the young white boy who lives next door. Their love is threatened by family circumstance and deteriorating political conditions in Zimbabwe. MUMMY BISHOP is Lindiwe’s mother. At time goes on, she is trapped in a loveless marriage to Lindiwe’s white father. She is desperately opposed to Lindiwe’s involvement with Ian. DAVID MCKENZIE is the son of Lindiwe and Ian. IAN MCKENZIE is the other main character. He is the object of Lindiwe’s love, forced to confess to the crime of setting his stepmother on fire, imprisoned and then released. He has aspirations as a photojournalist and travels to South Africa when Lindiwe is away at school in the north of Zimbabwe. ROSANNA is the adopted daughter of Mummy and Daddy. Daddy fathers a child by her.
British English, Afrikaans (South African), and Zimbabwean street slang. The meaning of the language reveals itself slowly, just as Sabatini unveils the many secrets of the plot in gradual fashion, including Lindiwe’s admission to Ian after several years’ separation that they are the parents of a son, David. Other family secrets mysteriously unravel as well—the involvement of Ian’s father in the military campaign against independence, the mental illness of Ian’s stepmother, the fractured marriage of Lindiwe’s parents, and her father’s child by their adopted daughter, Rosanna. This personal drama seems disturbingly real because it is played out against a sharply realized historical backdrop Sabatini experienced firsthand.
W Critical Reception The Boy Next Door was published in several editions, including separate releases in the United States, Germany, Sweden, and Norway. Amanda Craig described its appeal for the London Independent: “What makes this novel so interesting is that it is a story about the difficulties of first love drawn against a vivid background of political change. We all know something of the sufferings of Zimbabweans, black and white, under
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
United States, where it was greeted with limited, though mostly positive, reviews. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Irene Sabatini won the Orange Award for New Writers with her debut novel, The Boy Next Door (2009), which chronicles the secret love of a white man and a mixed-race woman set against the backdrop of Zimbabwe’s crumbling democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. Sabatini writes from firsthand experience in The Boy Next Door, having grown up in Bulawayo, in the south of Zimbabwe, where much of the novel takes place. She subsequently studied and traveled widely, in Colombia, the Caribbean, and Europe. She currently resides in Geneva, Switzerland.
Mugabe, but Sabatini shows the gradual collapse of her ‘country of eternal optimists’ with a hundred swift, sure touches and a rich cast of characters, heightening tension and mystery.” Elsewhere, Craig included The Boy Next Door among a list of deserving novels that had received almost no publicity in the United Kingdom (New Statesman). The situation was similar in the
Works Cited
Craig, Amanda. “Booked Up.” New Statesman 139.5008 (5 July 2010): 6. Literature Resource Center. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. ———. Rev. of The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini. Independent (London) 29 June 2010. Web. 19 Sept. 2010. Otas, Belinda, and Irene Sabatini. “Irene Sabatini: My Interviews. In Conversation (June 2010).” Author website. Web. 19 Sept. 2010. “Sabatini, Irene: The Boy Next Door.” Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2009. Print. Spiers, Di. “Irene Sabatini: The Boy Next Door.” Author website. Web. 19 Sept. 2010. Virshup, Amy. Rev. of The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini. New York Times 16 Sept. 2009. Web. 19 Sept. 2010.
Pedestrians walk through a busy intersection in Zimbabwe, the setting of the novel The Boy Next Door. ª Robert Fried / Alamy
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For Further Reading
Criticism and Reviews
Rev. of The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini. Publishers Weekly 256.30 (27 July 2009): 39. Print. Provides a concise plot summary. Bush, Vanessa. “The Boy Next Door.” Booklist 106.2 (15 Sept. 2009): 28. Plot synopsis of what Bush calls a “beautifully written first novel.” McKay, Carla. “Out Now in Paperback.” Daily Mail [London] 2 July 2010. HighBeam Research. Web. 18 Sept. 2010. High praise for Sabatini, “a born writer,” and her debut novel, “a completely engrossing story.” Otas, Belinda. Rev. of The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini. New African Woman no. 4 (2010): 98. Ethnic NewsWatch. ProQuest. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Mostly favorable review commending the accuracy of Sabatini’s historical details and the book’s picture of a multicultural Zimbabwe in the early years of independence. Open Web Sources
The author’s website, http//www.irenesabatini.com/, includes biography, a reading guide to The Boy Next Door, print and audio interviews with the author, links to published and reader reviews, and a photo gallery of Bulawayo and other parts of Zimbabwe.
Barclay, Philip. Zimbabwe: Years of Hope and Despair. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Print. Diplomat Barclay records his three-year stint in Zimbabwe working for the British Embassy. Barclay witnessed the scandal of the 2008 election, when Robert Mugabe used death squads to cling to power after he was voted out. Meldrum, Andrew. Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe. London: Murray, 2004. Print. A journalist’s account of Zimbabwe’s failed promise chronicling the food riots, fuel shortages, inflation, and racial violence that followed independence. Meldrum was expelled from Zimbabwe after twenty years of exposing the corruption and terror of Robert Mugabe’s regime. Rogers, Douglas. The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe. New York: Harmony Books, 2009. Print. A narrative of Zimbabwe by a journalist and travel writer who grew up there during the declining democracy of Robert Mugabe and his attempts to take over the land of the white people, including that of Rogers’s family.
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Brandenburg Gate By Henry Porter
W Introduction
W Literary and Historical
Henry Porter’s novel Brandenburg (published in the United States as Brandenburg Gate) is the third in his series featuring the British secret service agent Robert Harland. Set in the weeks just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this adventure is set in East Germany, where a former Stasi (East German secret police) agent has been called into service once again. Harland is the handler for the former Stasi agent, Rudolf Rosenharte, who is now working as an art historian in Dresden. They are asked to make contact with Rosenharte’s former lover, whom the Stasi believe has important intelligence. In order to ensure Rosenharte’s cooperation, the Stasi have taken Rosenharte’s twin brother Konrad prisoner. Although Rosenharte knows his lover is dead, he plays along with the Stasi’s plan to meet her in Italy, in order to buy his brother time. In Italy, Rosenharte is approached by British and American intelligence agents, who seek to place him back in East Germany as a double agent. The Westerners believe Rosenharte can help identify Islamic terrorists operating in East Germany. Rosenharte is aided by Ulrike Klaar, an anticommunist dissident with her own political agenda. Through the course of the novel, Rosenharte and Ulrike fall in love. Although Rosenharte’s prime objective is to free his brother from prison and protect his brother’s family, he is only marginally successful. His brother dies in prison, although his sister-in-law and nephews are safely relocated. At the novel’s conclusion, Rosenharte and Ulrike escape Stasi pursuers as the Brandenburg Gate opens and the Berlin Wall ceases to be an obstacle closing off East Germany from West Germany.
The Brandenburg Gate, built in the eighteenth century, became, along with the Berlin Wall, a postwar symbol of the division of Germany into two countries, East and West Germany. Germany and the city of Berlin were divided into two sectors at the end of World War II by the Allied powers—one portion was occupied by the United States, Great Britain, and France, and the other portion by the Soviet Union. In the postwar years, the relationship between the Soviets and the Western nations began to erode. The year 1949 saw a further reorganization of Germany. The zones occupied by the United States, Great Britain, and France united to form the Federal Republic of West Germany, while the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. Although Berlin was entirely within the Soviet zone, as part of the peace negotiation, the city, like the country, had to be divided among the Allied forces. West Berlin retained the democratic nature of its occupying forces, while East Berlin was under Communist rule. The economies of the two Germanies developed along radically different paths—capitalist versus communist—and by the 1950s, many East Germans were fleeing to the more prosperous West Germany. The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 to stem this flow, although communist East Germany claimed the wall was erected as a means of protecting the East Germans from Western influence. The Brandenburg Gate was in the Soviet sector of what was now East Berlin and was incorporated into the Berlin Wall. In 1961, the Brandenburg Gate, once a point of passage, was closed, and heavily guarded, to prevent any East Germans from leaving the country via that route. Escape attempts often ended in death. In the late 1980s, Soviet,
Context
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MAJOR CHARACTERS COLONEL OTTO BIERMEIER works for the Stasi Main Directorate for foreign intelligence, and is Rosenharte’s direct contact to the Stasi for much of the novel. Biermeier and Ulrike work together to draw Rosenharte back into the Stasi’s web. KURT BLAST, who later reveals his former name to have been Hans-Joseph Huch, is an East German who helps Rosenharte rescue Ulrike from prison. ROBERT HARLAND is the British agent who seeks Rosenharte’s cooperation in obtaining information about an Arab terrorist. He is Porter’s recurring character. Depicted as intelligent and sympathetic, Harland aids Rosenharte, Ulrike, and Kurt in their escape from the Stasi at the novel’s end. JESSIE is the name of the British agent who becomes the second Annalise Schering. Although purportedly working to gather information from Ulrike Klaar for the British, she and Ulrike are both members of the peace movement. ULRIKE KLAAR is an East German agent, known to the British agents as Kafka, who is passing information about the East Germans to the West. She also possesses ties to an Arab terrorist, and is a committed member of the peace movement. Her conflicting loyalties become the subject of the increasing fascination of Rosenharte, with whom Ulrike falls in love. Ulrike explains to Rosenharte that she and Biermeier used Konrad as a pawn, getting him imprisoned, in
Eastern bloc nations began to lose their powerful grip on the region. Civil unrest in Poland and Hungary contributed to the decision of the East German government to lift restrictions on travel between East and West Germany in 1989. The Brandenburg Gate was opened, and soon the Berlin Wall was dismantled. East and West Germany were officially reunited in 1990.
W Themes Organized around the theme of the failure of communism, Porter’s novel is focused on the political intrigue generated by the shifting balance of power in Europe. Although the story centers sympathetically on the East German Rosenharte, Porter’s approach is clearly biased toward the West, and Western values. Although Rosenharte was once a Stasi agent himself, he becomes a pawn of his government, and a victim in the sense that his own life is at risk, as are the lives of his family members. His brother’s death comes at the hands of his Stasi captors. Some critics have commented on Porter’s obvious favoring of the British
order to involve Rosenharte, claiming that Rosenharte was needed as a reliable “intermediary” who could get the information to the West about the Arab terrorist movements. KONRAD ROSENHARTE is Rudolf Rosenharte’s brother. He is described as a filmmaker, and a political dissident. Imprisoned ostensibly for his radical behavior, he in fact is being used by Klaar and Biermeier, and the Stasi, in order to manipulate Rosenharte. RUDOLF ROSENHARTE is the story’s protagonist. A former Stasi agent, Rosenharte has extricated himself from the world of espionage and has become an art historian, living in Dresden. The Stasi, however, have another job for Rosenharte, and they have imprisoned his dissident filmmaker brother, Konrad, to encourage Rosenharte to do their bidding. ANNALISE SCHERING is Rosenharte’s former lover, whom he believes to be dead, but is said to be in Trieste, Italy, where Rosenharte is to meet her and gather the intelligence she is believed to possess. The woman he meets is someone who has adopted Annalise’s identity; later her identity as a British agent named Jessie is uncovered. COLONEL ZANK is the Stasi agent who pursues Rosenharte and Ulrike when it becomes clear they are a threat to German Democratic Republic. Zank is portrayed as cruel, and his character is a reflection of the oppression the East German regime.
in the novel. Phil Jacobson in a 2005 review for the Daily Mail states that Porter’s British agents are “onedimensional” but are shown to be “thoroughly decent types serving a noble cause.” Jacobson goes on to lament the lack of “moral ambivalence” regarding espionage that one is more likely to find in the novels of John le Carré. Likewise, Max Hastings, in a 2005 article for the Observer, states that Porter never doubts who “the good guys” are, and that while John le Carré’s novels are permeated with “a sense of moral equivalence between the two sides’ spies, Porter plainly admires Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.” The failure of communism in the Eastern bloc countries, then, is set against the superiority of Western, and specifically, British politics and government. Rosenharte’s interest in Ulrike Klaar, who is aiding the British through her own espionage, underscores Porter’s themes. Ulrike is an outspoken dissident, a critic of the regime that rules East Germany, and an agitator who fuels the public outcry against the government. Rosenharte’s attraction to a resistance figure such as Ulrike clearly posits him on the democratic, Western side of the struggle that Porter depicts.
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The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany. The events of Brandenburg Gate take place in Berlin just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jeremy Reddington/Shutterstock.com
W Style Porter’s Brandenburg Gate, set in the recent past, is a tale of espionage and intrigue, a work placed within the genre of the political espionage thriller. A complex plot typical of the genre is layered with historical details surrounding the crumbling of the Soviet power in Eastern Europe. Porter’s novel is part of a trend observed by critic Andrew Taylor, in a 2005 review for Spectator. Taylor observes, “[T]he modern thriller has developed a retrogressive tendency and often looks for its inspiration to the past.” Brandenburg Gate is an example of this tendency to capitalize on the richness of the history of the Cold War era in order to craft a thriller with a suitable quantity of intrigue and villainy. As Porter explores the intricacies of espionage and counterespionage during this particular time and place, his straightforward prose provides the reader with the sense that while dense and intricate, the plot, with twists and turns provided by characters with a variety of motivations, may be unwound, deciphered. Porter’s style reflects his experience as a journalist. The third-person narrating voice conveys a deceptive aura of objectivity, yet Porter doles out the information needed to trace the
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varying loyalties in the plot at his leisure in this work of over four hundred pages.
W Critical Reception Winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for 2005, Porter’s Brandenburg Gate has been widely praised a solid work of genre fiction. Matthew Lewin, in a 2005 review of Brandenburg Gate for the Guardian finds that Porter enriches the typical “tale of intrigue and deception, betrayal and retribution,” with a deeper examination of individual responses to such experiences. Lewin praises Porter’s exploration of how people “cope with the demands on their lives” wrought by such circumstances. Additionally, Lewin commends Porter’s “fascinating switchback rollercoaster of a plot.” In a 2006 review of Brandenburg Gate for the Observer, upon the occasion of the paperback version of the work being published, Sarah Hughes appreciates both the plotting and characterization, noting that “Porter spins a merry web involving British, American, Russia and East German spies in an ever more complicated dance, where no one, least of all TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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the reader, is aware of who is really pulling the strings.” Hughes further comments that the East German characters’ complexities of emotion are also well detailed, as they balance their own “anti-west” socialism against the fact that “they rejected their own socialist state.” Other critics have harsher views of the characterization and style Porter uses. Philip Jacobson, in a 2005 review for the Daily Mail finds that the novel’s “main weakness lies in its generally unconvincing supporting cast.” The dialogue is also found to be occasionally inferior, according to Jacobson. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Burgan, Michael. The Berlin Wall: Barrier to Freedom. Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2008. Print. Hastings, Max. “A Brandenburg Concerto for Our Times.” Observer [London] 26 June 2005: 17. Print. guardian.co.uk. Web. 24 Aug. 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Henry Porter was born in 1953, in Worcestershire, England. A political columnist for the Observer, Porter focuses his journalism on the issues of civil liberties and rights in Britain. In 1990 Porter married Liz Elliot; they have two daughters. Porter published his first novel, Remembrance Day, in 2000. This work was followed with the first in what has become a series of works featuring the British agent Robert Harland, A Spy’s Life, published in 2001. Two additional novels in this series have followed, including Brandenburg Gate, in 2005. In addition to publishing spy novels set in the past, Porter’s recent work, such as the 2009 The Dying Light, published in the United States in 2010 as The Bell Ringers, explores the England of the near future. Porter also works as the London editor of the New Yorkbased magazine Vanity Fair.
“Henry Porter.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2008.
Jacobson, Philip. “A Spy Goes Back into the Cold.” Daily Mail 8 July 2005: 58. Print. Questia. Web. 24 Aug. 2010.
Hughes, Sarah. “Paperback of the Week.” Observer [London] 12 Feb. 2006, Review Section: 27. Print. guardian.co.uk. Web. 24 Aug. 2010.
Lewin, Matthew. “After the Fall.” Guardian [London] 9 July 2005, Review Section: 27. Print. guardian.co.uk. Web. 24 Aug. 2010.
Germans flood through the recently fallen Berlin Wall. Brandenburg Gate is a spy thriller set in Germany that begins just weeks before the fall of the wall. ª Regis Bossu/Sygma/Corbis TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Porter, Henry. Brandenburg Gate. London: Orion, 2005. Print. Taylor, Andrew. “In Search of Fresh Villains.” Spectator 298.9233 (23 July 2005): 39. Print.
Open Web Sources
Henry Porter’s author website offers biographical information, news on new releases, and a bibliography of Porter’s works. httpwww.henry-porter.com
Criticism and Reviews
Porter’s British publisher, Orion, offers a synopsis of Porter’s novel Brandenburg Gate. http//www.orion books.co.uk/books/brandenburg-paperback
Robson, David. “Double-Crossing Double Agents.” Sunday Telegraph 3 July 2005. Print. Telegraph.co.uk. Web. 24 Aug. 2010. Robson provides a brief but favorable review, commenting on the novel’s complex plot and large cast of duplicitous characters.
In its coverage of world history, the BBC contains the section “Mapping the Fall of Communism,” on its website. Text and graphics offer an overview of the pivotal events in Eastern Europe leading to the fall of Communism. http//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8347035.stm
Additional Resources
Sutton, Henry. “High Spy.” Mirror 17 June 2005. Print. HighBeam Research. Web. 24 Aug. 2010. Sutton praises Porter’s Brandenburg Gate for its intricacies, and delights in Porter’s choice in setting the novel in Europe during the Cold War. Terpening, Ronnie H. Rev. of Brandenburg Gate, by Henry Porter. Library Journal 131.4 (1 Mar. 2006): 79. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Sept. 2010. Terpening commends the well-researched nature of Brandenburg Gate and praises the richness of Porter’s characterizations. Wright, David. Rev. of Brandenburg Gate, by Henry Porter. Booklist 102.13 (1 Mar. 2006): 74. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Sept. 2010. Wright suggests that while Brandenburg Gate could be characterized as overly complex, the plot is intriguing. Gale Resources
“Porter, Henry.” Contemporary Authors. Ed. Amy Elisabeth Fuller. Vol. 273. Detroit: Gale, 2008: 32224. Print. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 24 Aug. 2010.
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For Further Reading
Funder, Anna. Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall. London: Granta Books, 2003. Print. In this collection of stories, Funder relates from the perspective of East German citizens the challenges and sufferings endured by those who lived inside the oppressive republic. Greenstreet, Rosanna. “Q & A: Henry Porter, Writer and Journalist.” Guardian [London] 29 Aug. 2009, Weekend Section: 11. Print. guardian.co.uk. Web. 24 Aug. 2010. Greenstreet provides a brief interview with Porter about his interests and personal life. Porter, Henry. The Dying Light. London: Orion, 2009. Print. Published in the U.S. as The Bell Ringers by Atlantic Monthly Press in 2010, Porter’s novel is set in the near future in an England envisioned by Porter as a police state. ———. “Why I Write about the Surveillance State.” Independent [London] 7 Aug. 2009. independent.co. uk. Web. 24 Aug. 2010. Porter discusses his exploration of the world of espionage in his fiction, and the way his work as a journalist has provided insights into this world. Catherine Dominic
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Breath By Tim Winton
W Introduction Tim Winton’s eighth novel, Breath (2008), is a coming-ofage story. The plot follows the narrator, Bruce Pike, from age twelve to fifteen. His friend, Loonie, is a year older and considerably wilder. Pike’s parents are in the dark about his activities, and Loonie’s bar-owning father does not care. Together, the boys discover surfing and a famous but aging expert, Sando, who tutors them in the sport. They compete for Sando’s attention and take on increasingly dangerous challenges. Eventually, Loonie and Sando go off on a surfing trip, leaving Pike to become sexually entangled with Sando’s wife and needing to make a decision about where his life is headed. Winton is considered by many to be Australia’s most popular novelist. His themes for this short novel are concerned with addictive behaviors, philosophical issues about escaping the ordinary, and the lessons learned in youth that can affect one’s whole life. Set in Western Australia, the novel is written with clear but highly descriptive language that helps the reader understand the thrills and art of surfing.
W Literary and Historical Context
Surfing developed among the Polynesian nations. The ancient Hawaiians named it he’e nalu or “wave sliding.” Both a sport but a training exercise for leaders, the chief was the best rider with the best board. Kahunas (priests) prayed for good waves, and competitions settled conflicts among the upper class. However, the dissipation of the Hawaiian culture with the coming of westerners almost extinguished the practice of surfing until its revival in the early twentieth century. In 1907 George Freeth, an IrishHawaiian, brought the sport to California; in 1912 Jim
Jordan and his oversized board made Virginia Beach the surfing capital of the East Coast; in 1915 Duke Kahanamoku, a surfing legend, introduced surfing to Australia. Advances in the 1920s in technology, materials, and surfboard design made the sport more accessible to the general public, and the first major surfing competition was held in 1928. Adding fins to the boards made surfboarding easier to learn and allowed for more trick maneuvers. Over the years, the boards became lighter and more manageable with the use of Styrofoam and fiberglass rather than woods. The invention of the wet suit in the 1950s also allowed surfers to catch waves in colder water and weather. The sport’s first major promoter was Dale Veazy, a manufacturer of surfboards who used advertising endorsements. Then interest exploded after Hollywood started making surf or beach party movies such as Gidget (1959) and the documentary The Endless Summer (1966). In the 1960s, boards were shortened from ten to six feet, and surfing became commercialized and culturally influential in clothes styles, music, and surfing magazines. In the 1970s, Australia became the center of the surfing world, which includes professional surfers, a number of supporting businesses, and fans around the world.
W Themes Addiction is a major theme of Breath: addiction to surfing, to danger, to pushing the limits and facing fear; Bruce’s addiction to Eva; Eva’s addiction to autoerotic asphyxiation, all of which in rebellion against the natural human compulsion to breathe. Surfing, its art, physicality, and danger serve in the novel as a stark contrast to the dreaded state of being ordinary, of living in a dull mining town like Sawyer. For Pikelet and Loonie, surfing gives meaning and intensity to their lives and makes them special. In addition, surfing is a way for these teens to prove their masculinity as measured by strength and daring.
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MAJOR CHARACTERS IVAN LOON (Loonie) is Bruce Pike’s danger-addicted, mouthy, surfing buddy who lives neglected at his father’s pub until he is caught up in the surfing world. BRUCE PIKE (Pikelet), the narrator, is a loner with older, unaware parents, who uses surfing to combat boredom, but discovers other excitements and their dangers, too. BILL SANDERSON (Sando), is a 36-year-old former surfing champion who surfs all over the world, has cosmopolitan tastes, and becomes a guru to Pikelet and Loonie. EVA SANDERSON, Bill’s difficult wife, was a free-style skier until a mangled knee causes her to find her thrills elsewhere, including an affair with Pikelet.
The title makes it obvious that breath is a theme of the novel. The importance of taking a breath, or not being able to, is laced throughout the narrative: One needs breath to play the didjeridu; Bruce’s father stops breathing because of sleep apnea; as children Bruce and Loonie
compete to see who can hold their breath the longest while playing in the river; surfers need sixty-seconds worth of breath to survive when submerged by a wave; Eva fights for breath during autoerotic asphyxiation. Another theme concerns the effects of the past upon the middle aged, especially men. Surfing may provide an escape mechanism as well as new spiritual and aesthetic experiences, but where does it lead? Bruce’s spirits soar when he surfs, and he feels that he is doing something as graceful as dancing, but the letdown when not surfing causes him to seek other highs, other dangers that leave him with long-term emotional damage and a continuing battle to find balance in his life as a whole rather than just on the surfboard.
W Style Winton structured Breath as a story about Bruce Pike as a youth framed by Pike as a middle-aged paramedic. The frame is quite brief, only seven pages at the beginning of the book and sixteen pages at the end, but it is sufficient to set up the scenario of the older Pike reflecting on the most daring period of his life. As a paramedic, Pike is called to a suicide that he is able to recognize is an accidental death
The plot of Breath revolves around the exploits of a group of Australian surfers. Stephanie Swartz/Shutterstock.com
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due to autoerotic asphyxiation because of his own teenage experiences with this dangerous practice. Inside this frame is a first-person story with just four main characters. The short novel has vivid images of the oceans and surfing. Within his spare prose, Winton uses lively action verbs that help the reader to understand the thrill of surfing. His language is also quite lyrical, and there are passages in which he interrupts the action of the story with effective descriptions that enable readers to get inside the characters’ emotions and feel their intensity. Winton’s practice in planning a novel is to first decide on the setting because the location and its landscape, the feelings he gets about the people in a certain place, are what give him inspiration. Almost always, the setting is in Western Australia, as in Breath, because that is Winton’s home, the area and people he knows well. In conjunction with the setting, his habit is to emphasize Australian English, using colloquialism to convey local characters.
W Critical Reception According to the critics, there are a number of flaws in Breath. Russell Celyn Jones, as published by the Times, provided a summary: Winton sometimes rushes, reverts to empty phrases and posturing, and ends the book badly. However, Jones concluded, when it comes to describing surfing, Breath is “as good as it gets.” Jennifer Schuessler, in the New York Times Book Review, agreed on its strength: “The freeze-frame descriptions of surfing . . . are gripping.” Barbara Hoffert, in a review for the Library Journal, concurred but added that the reasons Bruce gives for a derailed life are “not entirely convincing.” However, the novelist excels at his subject matter. Hoffert wrote: “Winton is pitch perfect in capturing (but not exploiting adolescent angst), and he describes surfing and the sea so thrillingly that even non-swimmers will want to plunge right in.” Philip Hensher agreed with Hoffert: Winton can “make us see, while sitting in our armchairs, exactly what it would be like to stand on a bit of hardboard while a 30-foot wave defeats our attempts to float on it.” Hensher explained Winton’s “virtuosity” in Breath as the ability “to move seamlessly from Pikelet’s honest speech into an elevated but absolutely direct account of what it is like to fling yourself at these great waves.” David Maine, in his Publishers Weekly review, praised Winton’s style: “Winton’s language, often terse, never showy, hovers convincingly between a teenager’s inarticulateness and the staccato delivery of a grown man.” Adding a note about the theme of the novel, a review in the New Yorker concluded that Breath “is both a hymn to the beauty of flying on water and a sober assessment of the costs of losing one’s balance, in every sense of the word.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Karrinyup, Western Australia, in 1960, Tim Winton attended Curtin University and Western Australia Institute of Technology. He has written novels, nonfiction, and short stories, receiving numerous awards and becoming one of Australia’s premier authors. His books include the Lockie Leonard children’s series, which has been adapted as a TV series. One of these books and his novels Cloudstreet and That Eye, the Sky have been adapted for the stage, and his novels That Eye, the Sky and In the Winter Dark have been adapted for film. Winton likes to cook, dive, fish, and surf. He belongs to the Australian Marine Conservation Society and the Stop the Toad Foundation as a patron and has established the Tim Winton Award for Young Writers. Married to a nurse and administrator, Denise, Winton has three children—two sons and a daughter. As of 2010, they lived in Western Australia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
“Breath.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. New Yorker 84.20 (2008): 95. Print. Hensher, Philip. “Ruling the Waves.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. Spectator 307.9375 (2008): 36. Print. Hoffert, Barbara. “Winton, Tim. Breath.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. Library Journal 133.7 (2008): 78. Print. Jones, Russell Celyn. “Breath by Tim Winton: The Times review.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. timesonline. co.uk. Times [London] 25 April 2008. Web. 23 Aug. 2010. Maine, David. “Breath.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. Publishers Weekly 225.14 (2008): 40. Print. Schuessler, Jennifer. “Beach Boys.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. New York Times Book Review 8 June 2008: 17(L). Print. Winton, Tom. Breath. New York: Picador-Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
“Breath.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. bookmarksmagazine.com. Bookmarks Sept.-Oct. 2008. Web. 23 Aug. 2010. Comments on surfing as the center of the story and includes a critical summary and excerpts from other reviews. Ness, Patrick. “The Seventh Wave.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. guardian.co.uk. Guardian 10 May 2008.
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Web. 23 Aug. 2010. Summarizes the story then comments on Winton’s prose and the theme of fear. O’Reilly, Nathanael. “Testing the Limits of Endurance.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. Antipodes 22.2 (2008): 169. Print. Reviews Winton’s career, provides a story summary, and comments on Winton’s descriptions and tone. Ratcliffe, Sophie. “New Fiction.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. Daily Mail 9 May 2008: 68. Print. Briefly discusses the framework of the novel and its philosophical message about the value of surfing. “Winton, Tim: BREATH.” Rev. of Breath, by Tim Winton. Kirkus Reviews 1 Apr. 2008. Print. Examines the language and characters and remarks on Winton’s handling of youth and lessons learned. Gale Resources
“Tim Winton.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Aug. 2010. http//galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ GLD/hits?r=d&origSearch=true&o=DataTy pe&n=10&l=d&c=1&locID=itsbtrial&secondary= false&u=CA&t=KW&s=2&NA=Tim+Winton
biography and links to several interviews and other information. For Further Reading
Ben-Messahel, Salhia. Mind the Country: Tim Winton’s Fiction. Perth: U of Western Australia P, 2006. Print. The first book-length study of Winton’s fiction, divided into four thematic sections. Carey, Peter. Oscar and Lucinda. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print. Australian novel about a minister and an heiress who love gambling and each other. Hawkins, Christopher. The Water’s End. Bloomington: Trafford, 2006. Print. Hawkins’s first novel about a Jersey boy and his complicated romance on the beaches of Mexico. Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of Surfing. New York: Mariner Books, 2005. Print. Covers the history, mythology, statistics, and other facts about surfing. Winton, Tim. Cloudstreet: A Novel. New York: Scribner’s, 2002. Print. Tells the story of two very different families who share a house for twenty years. Lois Kerschen
Open Web Sources
Winton maintains a Web site for Breath at http//breath. timwinton.com.au, which lists awards and includes a
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao By Junot Díaz
W Introduction In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Junot Díaz intertwines the stories of Dominican Republic political figures with the stories of the Cabral and de Leon families to amplify Oscar de Leone’s struggle with his identity, culture, and quest for love. Living with his mother Beli and his sister Lola, Oscar, nicknamed Oscar Wao by some bullies who liken him to Oscar Wilde, stays at home to write stories, read science fiction, watch cartoons, enjoy role-playing games, and dream about finding love and becoming a wellknown author. Lola narrates a chapter, but it is Yunior, Lola’s occasional boyfriend, who narrates the story of Oscar, his family, and their bad luck, resulting from a curse (fukú) with a history of its own. Díaz’s lengthy first section tells the history of the fukú and Oscar’s adolescence, then Lola narrates her own story. From this point, Díaz moves the narrative to the Dominican Republic and back in time to tell Beli’s story. The setting reverts to Oscar and his collegial experiences at Rutgers University, where Oscar’s bad luck continues to prevail as he continues to seek relationships with unattainable women. Díaz changes the setting to the Dominican Republic in the second section for Abelard Cabral’s story, in which the history of the curse becomes clearer as Díaz reveals Abelard’s encounter with Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. The narrative shifts to Oscar as an adult and describes Beli, Oscar, and Lola’s return to the Dominican Republic to visit La Inca. While there, Oscar meets his grandmother’s neighbor, Ybon, a semiretired prostitute. Even though she is involved with a Dominican police officer, Oscar falls in love with her. The third portion describes the encounter between Oscar and Ybon. The encounter ends badly for Oscar, who is eventually beaten and then killed by the police officer’s goons. The story ends with Yunior reading a letter from
Oscar, in which Oscar describes his last encounter with Ybon.
W Literary and Historical Context
Frequently alternating time and place in The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz’s narrative jumps from New York, New Jersey, and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and in and out of different decades of the twentieth century. The story of Oscar and the family curse is set during the time when Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961) was in power, from 1930 to 1938 and from 1942 to 1952. As commander of the National Army, Trujillo established his power by 1930 by harassing and intimidating voters for the presidential elections. Winning 95 percent of the vote, Trujillo took over a stunned nation and began his feudalistic-like reign, which lasted until 1952. During this period, Trujillo ruled with complete authority, maintaining a secret police force and establishing monopolies over all state enterprises. Ironically, life got better for most Dominicans during Trujillo’s reign, but Trujillo’s fascist ideals put many citizens in great fear and peril (Haggerty). Díaz also weaves in a footnote about Trujillo’s protégé, Joaquín Balaguer (1906-2002). After Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, Balaguer was accused of fixing elections and intimidating voters. He won the election and ruled “with a sometimes ruthless manner for 22 years and six presidential terms” (Kershaw).
W Themes In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz illustrates the struggles and costs that are associated with the pursuit of love. Díaz uses Oscar, a social outsider, to show that
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MAJOR CHARACTERS ABELARD CABRAL, Beli’s father and Oscar and Lola’s grandfather, dies at the hands of Trujillo’s regime. BELI (BELICIA) CABRAL DE LEON is the mother of Lola and Oscar and the niece of La Inca. YUNIOR DE LAS CASAS is Oscar’s roommate, occasional boyfriend of Lola, and the narrator of most of the novel. LA INCA is Oscar and Lola’s grandmother and Beli’s aunt. She raises Beli after the tragic death of Beli’s parents. LOLA DE LEON is Oscar’s older sister and Yunior’s intermittent girlfriend. OSCAR DE LEON, the protagonist of the story, is an overweight, Dominican American nerd. He spends his time writing, reading science fiction, and searching for love and a bit of good luck. YBON PIMENTEL is a semiretired prostitute who becomes Oscar’s love interest.
even though love can endure, it does not have the power to transform a person into the person he wants to be; the power has to come from the person himself. Unfortunately, Oscar never realizes he has the power and authority to make these changes happen. Díaz includes stories of Oscar’s family members to show how love cannot save individuals even though they make great sacrifices in order to love and be loved. Lola and Yunior sacrifice their love for each other in order learn how to construct independent lives since their love is not enough to bind them together. The relationship between Abelard and his daughter serves as another example of the cost of love. Abelard sacrifices his freedom for his daughter, but in the end, the sacrifice goes unrewarded as his daughter drowns. A second theme that appears in the novel is that of cultural identity. Díaz connects the history of the Dominican Republic with the histories of Oscar, Lola, and Yunior to show that their own histories and the histories of their country are inseparable. How to merge these histories, however, is what confronts Lola and Yunior. Lola runs away from her past, and Yunior has a series of infidelities in order to gloss over his past. In the end, both characters resolve how to accept their Dominican heritage rather than reject it. Oscar, who refuses to confront who he is, remains a displaced person who never fits in. As a result, Oscar comes to mirror people, especially immigrants, who struggle to fit in because they either will not or cannot blend their past and present cultural heritages.
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Set in the Dominican Republic, some of the events in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao take place during the reign of President Rafael Trujillo. ª Bettmann/Corbis
A third theme in the novel is that of politics, power, and authority. In combining Oscar’s story with that of Abelard, Díaz documents the history of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Díaz uses Trujillo to explore how one man can rise to power and once he is in control, how horrifying it is when that solitary voice comes to be the voice a nation.
W Style Díaz successfully constructs a plot in which readers have to unravel the characters’ stories and their connections to each other. By juxtaposing not only characters—Lola and Beli, Oscar and Yunior, and Abelard and Trujillo—along with the past and present, and the setting of the United States and Dominican Republic, Díaz manages to throw readers into the same quandary as some of his characters, giving them a sense of displacement. The style of this novel is heavily infused with Spanish and English idioms and dialects from New TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Jersey in the 1980s and Santo Domingo in different decades. Díaz uses intermittent exchanges between Oscar’s story and the chapters laced with family member accounts to bounce readers back and forth in time and place. Consequently, readers encounter chapters spliced into Oscar’s story. Because of the erratic change in time and place, the text itself moves swiftly to focus on different characters as the voice swings from third person (Yunior) to first person, (Lola). Díaz uses Yunior as the primary narrator to offset the tragedy with comedy and to interject a sense of style and voice that manages to connect readers to the prose. With street-smart references, vulgar language, and a sense of lightness and humor, Yunior manages to reveal his own complicated history while telling the story of Oscar and his family.
W Critical Reception Díaz’s Drown, a collection of short stories published in 1996, was well received; however, it took Díaz eleven years to publish his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Praised for his handling of the protagonistnarrator, intermingling of historical footnotes, and engaging prose, Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in addition to several other awards and accolades. Much of the novel’s success is attributed to Díaz’s use of setting. According to Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, Díaz successfully uses setting to fuse the stories of past and present, combining Dominican history with that of a fat Dominican ghetto kid from Paterson, New Jersey, who is looking to lose his virginity. Kakutani indicated that Díaz successfully “fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves.” She argued that this book “establishes him as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.” A few reviewers noted the strength of the historical footnotes and the narrative, which moves readers into the past. For example, Alice O’Keefe in the New Statesmen praised Díaz for the book’s portions that focus on Dominican history and the story of Abelard and Beli as the sections that “drive the narrative.” Despite the rave reviews from some reviewers, a few others, however, noted some weaknesses in Díaz’s use of language. James Wood in the New Republic argued that Díaz does not do anything new with language, and as a result, his text does little to connect readers to characters. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carlin Romano critiqued Díaz for his “sprinkles sci-fi/comic book/fantasy references, and Spanish and Spanglish phrases, with abandon and no explanation, as if smugly unconcerned for any reader of the ‘universal’ sort he’s said he hopes to attract.” However, Romano stated that there is value in the read as the novel “grows on you because Díaz slowly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on December 31, 1968, Junot Díaz immigrated with his family in 1974 to Parlin, New Jersey, to reunite with his father, who immigrated earlier. Raised in New Jersey, Díaz received his BA from Rutgers University and his MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. From 1997 to 2002, Díaz taught in the MFA program at Syracuse University, and in 2003 he became associate professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Díaz is the author of Drown (1996), a short story collection that received wide recognition, and editor of The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures. Díaz won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
convinces us that Oscar, the sad sack Díaz might have become, is real and matters.” A. O. Scott from the New York Times stressed that Díaz’s success lies in his use of his narrator Yunior. Even though Yunior’s street-savvy persona is in direct conflict with his authoritative use of language in the telling of Oscar’s story and in the footnote accounts, Scott saw the conflict Yunior’s narrative voice creates as part of the appeal and the voice that holds the text together. John Lingan in the Quarterly Review indicated that Yunior is “a breathless and colloquial storyteller” and that, over the course of the book, Yunior’s contribution is an essential ingredient in the success of the story. Susan Straight in the Los Angeles Times agreed with Scott. She noted that Díaz took a risk in choosing Yunior, who is “unconcerned about whether his language is accessible.” O’Keefe, however, disagreed with both Scott and Straight; she argued that Yunior is “an inconsistent character” because he is an unreliable narrator and, therefore, distances the reader. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
“Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Isak’s Blog 4 June 2010. Web. 10 July 2010. Haggerty, Richard A., ed. “The Era of Trujillo.” Dominican Republic: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1989. Print. Kakutani, Michiko. “Travails of an Outcast.” Rev. of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. nytimes.com. New York Times 4 Sept. 2007. Web. 25 July 2010. Kershaw, Sarah. “Joaquin Balaguer; 95, Dies; Dominated Dominican Life.” NYtimes.com. New York Times 15 July 2002. Web. 13 July 2010.
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Lingan, John. Rev. of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. quarterlyconversation.com. Quarterly Conversation, n.d. Web. 25 July 2010.
Library. Web. 28 July 2010. http//go.galegroup. com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CCX2285700052& v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w
Romano, Carlin. “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: It’s Hard Going but Stay with It.” Rev. of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. Philadelphia Inquirer.com. Philadelphia Inquirer 7 Sept. 2007. Web. 26 July 2010.
“Junot Díaz.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 July 2010. http//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id= GALE%7CH1000124825&v=2.1&u= itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w
Scott, A. O. “Dreaming in Spanglish.” Rev. of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. nytimes. com. New York Times Sunday Book Review 30 Sept. 2007. Web. 1 July 2010.
“Junot Díaz.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 258. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 July 2010. http//go.galegroup.com/ps/ i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1121130000&v=2.1&u =itsbtrial&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w
Straight, Susan. “A Love Supreme.” Rev. of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. Latimes. com. Los Angeles Times 9 Sept. 2007. Web. 20 July 2010. Wood, James. “Call It Sleep.” Rev. of Drown, by Junot Díaz. New Republic 215.25 (1996): 39-42.
“Selected Websites on Junot Díaz’s Life and Works.” Gale Online Encyclopedia. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 July 2010. http//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE %7CH1440124825&v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r& p=LitRC&sw=w
Additional Resources Open Web Sources
Criticism and Reviews
Díaz, Junot, and Juleyka Lantigua. “Junot Díaz.” Progressive 70.9 (2007): 33-36. Print. Discusses social outcasting, the Internet generation, immigrant status, and the writing process. Hannan, Jim. “Junot Díaz. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” World Literature Today 82.2 (2008): 65+. Print. Describes effective use of grim humor contrasted with the horror of the Trujillo regime to unravel the story of Oscar and the curse. Stetler, Carrie. “A Decade of Writer’s Block Over, Díaz Publishes His Novel.” Newhouse News Service. 29 Aug. 2007. Web. 1 July 2010. Discusses the role of Yunior as character and narrator. ———. “From ‘Ghetto Nerd’ to MIT: Writer Junot Díaz.” Newhouse News Service 20 Oct. 2005. Web. 1 July 2010. Explores the role of Oscar as protagonist in relation to Díaz’s childhood. Thompson, Bob. “The Outsider Is In: An Immigrant’s Stories.” Washington Post.com. Washington Post 20 Sept. 2007. Web. 25 July 2010. Addresses the theme of self-identity. “The Yale Literary Magazine Interviews Junot Díaz.” Yale Literary Magazine 20.1 (2008): 26+. Print. Explores the connection Díaz has to Yunior, the narrator in two of his works, his literary influences, and his role as a writer representing a different culture. Gale Resources
“Díaz, Junot 1968-.” Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series. Ed. Amy Elisabeth Fuller. Vol. 183. Detroit: Gale, 2009. 145-49. Gale Virtual Reference
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“Díaz’s First Novel Details a Wondrous Life,” posted on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, available at http//www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=14004835, includes Alan Cheuse reviewing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. “First Novel Examines ‘Dominican-American Sci-Fi Geek,’” posted on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, available at http// www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php? storyId=15271108, is a podcast of Andrea Seabrook interviewing Junot Díaz on the stereotypes in his work, Dominican themes, mashing of cultures, and making life choices. Facebook page dedicated to Junot Díaz, available at http//facebook.com/pages/Junot-Diaz/ 111850538834522 includes posts about his writing, books, and interviews. “Junot Díaz Discusses His ‘Wondrous’ Debut Novel” posted on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, available at http//www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php? storyId=90111248, includes a podcast of Terry Gross interviewing Díaz his childhood, writing experiences, family history, and influences. Junot Díaz’s Web site, available at http://www.junot diaz.com, includes information about lectures and work in progress. For Further Reading
Brown, Isabel Zakrewski. Culture and Customs of the Dominican Republic. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. Print. Highlights the land, people, customs, religion, performing arts, and literature of the Dominican Republic. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Céspedes, Diógenes, and Silvio Torres-Saillant. “Fiction Is the Poor Man’s Cinema: An Interview with Junot Díaz.” Callaloo 23.3 (2000): 892-907. Print. Focuses on Díaz’s childhood experiences, creative process, and the intermingling of cultural references into his texts.
Pons, Frank Maya. The Dominican Republic: A National History. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1998. Print. Offers a comprehensive overview of the history of the Dominican Republic.
Diederich, Bernard. Trujillo: The Death of a Dictator. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2000. Print. Chronicles the dictatorship of Trujillo after thirty-one years of ruling the Dominican Republic.
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The Broken Shore By Peter Temple
W Introduction Published in Australia in 2005 and in the United States in 2007, Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore is a detective novel written in a literary style. A departure from Temple’s popular Jack Irish series, the book follows Joe Cashin, a Melbourne homicide detective who takes a position in Port Monro, a small rural town on the Victorian coast, after he is seriously injured on the job. There he becomes involved in a murder investigation that forces him to confront police corruption and racial bigotry. He also has to face his awkward relationship with his mother and brother. Set in contemporary Australia, The Broken Shore employs distinctly Australian dialogue, to the extent that the North American edition of the book includes a glossary defining more than sixty terms. The novel addresses a number of social concerns, from class and racial tensions to homophobia and pedophilia. It won the British Crime Writers’ Association’s 2007 Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award (formerly the Gold Dagger Award) for the year’s best work of detective fiction.
W Literary and Historical Context
Much of the plot of The Broken Shore relies on tensions between Australia’s white majority and Indigenous Australians, or Aborigines. Historically, these tensions date back to the arrival of Europeans on the Australian continent in the late eighteenth century. Under British colonial rule, Australia’s indigenous population was decimated by disease. It has been estimated that the indigenous population of the continent precontact was more than 300,000; by 1900 it had dwindled to fewer than 100,000. Over the next century, Indigenous Australians struggled to overcome racial bigotry, win
suffrage and representation, and reclaim land. Although they won the right to vote in 1962 and gained limited rights to their land in 1972, indigenous people remain underrepresented in Australian politics and are often isolated in poverty-stricken settlements. In the novel, Aboriginal characters live primarily in “the Daunt,” an economically depressed indigenous settlement. Cashin recalls the taunting that his cousin, whose mother was Aboriginal, endured during their youth. As the novel unfolds, people of indigenous descent remain the subject of derision among the white police force, who refer to them in pejorative terms such as “Daunt dickheads,” “coons,” “niggers,” and “boongs.”
W Themes Power and its abuses are central themes in Temple’s novel. The book illuminates a number of important inequalities between those who have power and those who do not. The murdered Charles Bourgoyne is the novel’s most obvious representative of the abuses of power. His wealth puts him at the top of the class structure, a position he takes advantage of in order to abuse disadvantaged children while paying officials to look the other way. Bourgoyne’s death highlights the disparities in power and credibility between the community’s white majority and its indigenous minority. Before it is eventually revealed that Bourgoyne was killed by his stepson, a victim of his abuse, the combination of racial prejudice and a police cover-up leads to the senseless deaths of three young Aboriginal men who are suspected of the crime. Temple is quick to point out, however, that bigotry extends beyond lines of race and class. Cashin frequents a restaurant owned by Leon Gadney, who relocated to the area after his male lover was murdered, either by antigay zealots or by equally bigoted police officers. Later, Cashin learns that the successful brother he has long resented is struggling with his own homosexuality. The brother,
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MAJOR CHARACTERS CHARLES BOURGOYNE is a prominent citizen whose murder sets off the chain of events that dominate the plot. As the detective Cashin investigates, he discovers that Bourgoyne and his friends had been sexually abusing and likely murdering children for many years through the guise of a charity camp. Bourgoyne is murdered by his stepson, Jamie, in retaliation for the abuse. JOE CASHIN is a homicide detective who has been relocated to a small town on Australia’s southern coast. While investigating a murder case, he uncovers corruption that implicates local police. MICHAEL CASHIN is Joe’s successful brother. Though the two have never been close, they are brought together after Michael attempts suicide and confesses that he has been forced out of his high-powered job after he was photographed kissing a man. HELEN CASTLEMAN is a defense attorney and Cashin’s love interest. She is defending Donny Coulter, the young Aborigine accused in Bourgoyne’s death, and uncovers evidence that helps Cashin unravel the truth about Charles Bourgoyne’s death.
Detectives follow a lead about two teenagers trying to sell a missing watch at a pawn shop in the book The Broken Shore. Linda Armstrong/ Shutterstock.com
Michael Cashin, loses his job after he is photographed kissing his male lover. As a result the lover, who is married and has children, commits suicide. Michael subsequently also attempts suicide. While these revelations bring Cashin and his brother closer together, Temple makes it clear that homophobia does real and lasting harm to families and communities. The relationship between the past and the present is also a central theme in The Broken Shore. Characters such as Bourgoyne’s stepson, Jamie, and the drifter Dave Reb are haunted by the abuse they suffered at the hands of Bourgoyne and his friends. The abuse turns Jamie into a sadistic killer and is ostensibly responsible for Reb’s life of poverty and isolation. Cashin is also haunted by events from his past, including his father’s suicide, his mother’s careless parenting style, and what he perceives to be his own responsibility for the death of a fellow cop. Both he and Reb are seen to gain some strength from their joint effort to rebuild the ruined home of Cashin’s ancestor, an act that symbolizes their determination to come to terms with the past and create a new future.
DETECTIVE HOPGOOD is a senior police detective and an obvious racist who is investigating the attack on Charles Bourgoyne. Cashin becomes suspicious of Hopgood’s insistence on the guilt of three young Aborigines, and Hopgood is later revealed to have turned a blind eye to Bourgoyne’s crimes. DAVE REB is an itinerant worker, or “swaggie,” whom Cashin discovers sleeping in a shed. Touched by the man’s circumstances and apparent honesty, he offers him a job. The two men develop a friendship. Dave eventually reveals that he attended Bourgoyne’s charity camp as a child.
W Style The Broken Shore is stylistically notable for its terse dialogue, which is marked by coarse language, slang, and racial slurs. Typical of such dialogue is Detective Hopgood’s warning against arresting the young Aboriginal suspects at home: “You don’t go into the f—ing Daunt at night and arrest people. It’s Indian territory. Excellent chance we end up being attacked by the whole f—ing street, the whole f—ing Daunt, hundreds of coons off their f—ing faces.” At the same time, the book’s narrative passages are full of visual details described in language that borders on the poetic (“Cashin went for a walk, bought cigarettes, another surrender. A cold night, rain in the west wind, the last of the leaves flirting with bits of paper in the streetlights.”).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Peter Temple was born in South Africa in 1946. He immigrated to Australia in 1980, seeking to distance himself from the repressive and racist system of apartheid in his native country. Living in Sydney, Temple established himself as a well-respected journalist, writing for both newspapers and magazines. In 1995 he began to focus full time on fiction writing. In 1996 he published his first novel, Bad Debts. The work introduced attorney Jack Irish, a character who would feature prominently in a series of subsequent novels. Bad Debts won the prestigious Ned Kelly Award for crime fiction and helped establish Temple’s reputation as a favorite Australian crime writer. Temple produced eight more novels over the next decade, including The Broken Shore. Like his other works, The Broken Shore depicts the life and landscape of Australia. It garnered Temple his fifth Ned Kelly Award. His 2009 novel Truth revisits some of the characters introduced in The Broken Shore.
Commentators have pointed to such prose when arguing that Temple’s novel, while clearly rooted in the detective fiction tradition, transcends the genre with its
literary style. Writing in the Washington Post, for example, Patrick Anderson described The Broken Shore as “an exceptional blending of first-rate crime fiction and a literary sensibility.”
W Critical Reception When it was first published in Australia in 2005, The Broken Shore was an immediate critical success. In addition to winning the 2006 Ned Kelly Award for Best Novel, it garnered the 2005 Colin Roderick Award, which honors the best Australian literary work representing life in that country. With its publication outside of Australia, the book drew international praise for its treatment of sensitive social issues as well as for its writing style. Commentators were especially drawn to Temple’s gift for description and his ability to depict numerous different characters and situations with an even hand. Susanna Yager noted in the Sunday Telegraph that “This is a very fine book. Characterisation, dialogue and the quality of the prose are all top-class,” while Anderson praised Temple for his character development, writing that the novel “presents sophisticated portraits of at least a dozen of Port Monro’s citizens—the rich and the poor,
The novel The Broken Shore is set in a small, rural Australian town, much like the one shown in this photo. ª sam oakes / Alamy
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the honest and the corrupt—all seen with compassion and without illusion.” The Broken Shore has even been the subject of some scholarly analysis. For example, in an article in the journal Antipodes, William Sayers examines Temple’s use of Australian slang, noting in particular how characters are marked by the language they use. “Temple’s long career as a journalist,” he writes, “has given him a fine ear for popular speech and its reflection of ethnic and class selfidentification. His protagonist, Joe Cashin, uses none of the terms reviewed here, which qualifies him to get the killers and the girl. On the other hand, his detective counterpart from a neighboring jurisdiction, Hopgood, who is eventually shown to be corrupt and implicated in some of the crimes, delivers the most offensive characterization of the Aboriginal community, aware that Cashin has in-laws there.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Anderson, Patrick. “Brutal Eloquence.” Washington Post 18 June 2007: C03. Print. Sayers, William. “Hoon, Coon, and Boong in Peter Temple’s Detective Fiction.” Antipodes 22.2 (2008): 165+. Print. Temple, Peter. The Broken Shore. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2005. Print. Yager, Susanna. “Crime Fiction.” Sunday Telegraph [London] 9 July 2006: 49. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Rev. of The Broken Shore, by Peter Temple. Kirkus Reviews 15 Apr. 2007: 363. Print. Offers an overview of the novel’s plot and praises its psychological insight. Rev. of The Broken Shore, by Peter Temple. Publishers Weekly 2 Apr. 2007: 38. Print. Emphasizes the novel’s attention to character development and setting. Graff, Keir. Rev. of The Broken Shore, by Peter Temple. Booklist 15 Mar. 2007: 30. Print. A favorable review that likens Temple’s Australia to the American West. Ott, Bill. “The Year’s Best Crime Novels.” Booklist 1 May 2007: 6+. Print. Praises the intelligence of Temple’s novel. Williams, Wilda. Rev. of The Broken Shore, by Peter Temple. Library Journal 15 May 2007: 85. Print.
Lauds the author’s prose style and his insight into racial and class politics. Gale Resources
“Peter Temple.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Open Web Sources
The Australian Crime Fiction Database offers an online bibliography of Temple’s work. http//www.crime downunder.com/petertemple.html The Web site Tangled Web UK includes an interview with Temple by Bob Cornwell in which the author discusses his work. http//www.twbooks.co.uk/crimescene/Pe ter-Temple-talks-to-Bob-Cornwell.htm The January Magazine Web site offers an overview of Temple’s career through 2002 and notably includes the writer’s reflections on his craft and publishing. http//www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/ptem ple.html Reading Group Guides offers an introduction to the novel and questions to guide discussion of the book. http// www.readinggroupguides.com/guides_B/broken_ shore1.asp For Further Reading
Flood, Josephine. The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2006. Print. Provides a history of Australia’s indigenous people and their culture. Karl, Roland F., et al. Australia: Continent of Contrasts. Munich: C.J. Bucher, 2007. Print. Presents an imagerich introduction to the continent of Australia. Kuhns, Joseph B., and Johannes Knutsson. Police Use of Force: A Global Perspective. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010. Print. Explores the use of force in its myriad forms by police officers around the world. Rowe, Kerrin P. Wordbook of Australian Idiom—Aussie Slang: No Worries! She’s Apples! Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2005. Print. Offers an overview of slang terms and idioms in Australian English. Temple, Peter. Truth. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2009. Print. A mystery that features Inspector Stephen Villani, who appears in The Broken Shore.
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Greta Gard
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Brooklyn By Colm Tóibín
W Introduction Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn is a story about twentiethcentury immigration. The heroine, Eilis (pronounced EYElish) Lacey, is the youngest and least important daughter in the Lacey family. Her mother has been widowed and her three brothers have all left Ireland for jobs in England. Eilis’s older sister, Rose, is a bookkeeper who supports their widowed mother with her wages. Employment and husbands are in short supply in the small town of Enniscorthy, where the girls and their mother live. Rose asks a visiting priest, Father Flood, to help Eilis immigrate to the United States. Father Flood finds Eilis a job and a place to stay and watches over her as she settles into her new life in Brooklyn. Eilis is one of several Irish girls living in Mrs. Kehoe’s boardinghouse. She finds a job working for Bartocci’s department store, under the watchful eye of Miss Fortini, her supervisor. To help Eilis cope with her loneliness and homesickness, Father Flood arranges for Eilis to enroll at Brooklyn College, where she can complete the requirements for a bookkeeper’s certificate in two years. At Brooklyn College, Eilis’s professor, a Holocaust survivor, encourages her to continue her studies. Eilis attends Friday night dances at Father Flood’s church and also helps him serve Christmas dinner to the homeless. All of these activities help Eilis to feel more connected to her new home in Brooklyn. At one of the dances, Eilis meets Tony, a young Italian American, who soon becomes her boyfriend. Tony falls in love with Eilis and begins pressing her to marry him. He loves baseball and takes her to Ebbets Field to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play. When Rose dies suddenly, it is Tony and his family who offer Eilis the most comfort. None of Eilis’s brothers is willing to move back to Ireland and care for their mother. One of the brothers writes and tells Eilis that her mother needs her. When she decides to return for a
one-month visit, Tony insists that they marry secretly. He is afraid that Eilis will not return to Brooklyn unless they are married. The visit to her mother does stretch beyond the month, and Eilis is tempted to stay by Jim, a local Irish man, who courts her. In the novel’s concluding paragraphs, however, Eilis chooses to leave Ireland and return to Tony and the life they have planned together.
W Literary and Historical Context
In Brooklyn, the owner of Bartocci’s department store says that “Brooklyn changes every day” (61). During the 1950s, the predominately Jewish and Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn gave way to new immigrants from the Caribbean and to an influx of African Americans from the southern United States. The Brooklyn Dodgers drew huge crowds to Ebbets Field in the 1950s. Although Brooklyn residents had diverse backgrounds, they were united in their worship of the Dodgers and their belief that the team would eventually win a World Series, which they finally did in 1955. However, just as the Jews and Italians were leaving Brooklyn for the suburbs, so too did the Dodgers, who left Brooklyn in 1958 for Los Angeles. Coney Island is a favorite date destination for Brooklyn’s Eilis and Tony during the summer months. In the 1950s, Coney Island was a favorite location for New Yorkers wanting to escape the city heat. More than one million bathers would cram onto the beach at Coney Island. The three miles of boardwalk included more than nine hundred different shops, restaurants, games, and rides. The amusement park contained the Cyclone, one of the largest roller coasters in the United States, as well as the Wonder Wheel, an exceptionally large Ferris wheel. These rides and many others began to disappear by the mid-1950s, as more people moved to the suburbs and land in Brooklyn became more valuable when used for residences than for amusement.
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In Brooklyn, Tony’s family purchases land on Long Island and begins planning for the family’s move out of Brooklyn. The desire to escape Brooklyn for Long Island was felt by many people in the 1950s. In Brooklyn, people were crowded into apartments or in multiple-family houses. With little open land and no yards, children played in the streets. Many people wanted to build in outlying areas. This market supported the work of Levitt and Sons, the real-estate developer that spearheaded the construction of suburbia and built more than seventeen thousand homes for families trying to escape urban congestion.
W Themes For the first few weeks that Eilis is in Brooklyn, she refuses to think about Ireland and her family. Homesickness does not appear in Brooklyn until Eilis receives letters from home. Before the letters arrive, she thinks about Ireland, especially her mother and sister and she thinks about the town. With the arrival of the letters, Eilis suddenly thinks about her life in Enniscorthy, especially her bedroom, her clothes, and even the food her mother cooked. Her homesickness is not centered on people, although she clearly misses Rose. Instead, Eilis misses the ways in which she defined her own life in Ireland. In Brooklyn, she dresses differently and eats different food. The changed personal and intimate parts of her life cause her to be homesick. Social stratification in Brooklyn is depicted in the relationships between the other boarders at Mrs. Kehoe’s. Working at a desk job is considered superior to working in a store as a clerk. Working as a domestic servant has the lowest form of social status. Eilis is immune to this stratification, but her fellow tenants are especially condemning. When a new boarder arrives, the other tenants ostracize her because she cleans the house instead of paying rent. The women who perform office work also earn the highest salary, and so there is a clear correlation between social stratification and economic reward. Brooklyn is the story of exile. Eilis has no choice about moving to Brooklyn. Her sister Rose makes the arrangements and informs Eilis that she is to leave and dictates when the departure will occur. In Brooklyn, Eilis is under the care and supervision of Father Flood, who recreates Ireland in his small part of Brooklyn. As a result, Eilis remains an exile, even when living in Brooklyn, where she sees herself as a ghost, with no friends or family to sustain her. Her only venture outside her Irish Brooklyn community occurs late in the novel, when she goes to visit her Italian boyfriend’s family. Her isolation even permeates her letters home, in which she writes about people generally but not about how she feels or about Tony, whom she loves.
W Style Brooklyn is told from the point of view of Eilis. This perspective is especially effectively for a character like Eilis
MAJOR CHARACTERS JIM FARRELL is the Irish man whose marriage proposal tempts, and nearly convinces, Eilis to divorce Tony and remain in Ireland. TONY FIORELLO is Eilis’s Brooklyn boyfriend. He becomes her fiancé and, by the end of the novel, her husband. Although Eilis is warned about the lasciviousness of Italian men, Tony is kind, generous, and devoted to Eilis. FATHER FLOOD is the priest for the area in Brooklyn where Eilis lives. He sponsors her immigration and provides support when she needs it most. MADGE KEHOE is the proprietor of the boardinghouse where Eilis lives in Brooklyn. Madge is judgmental and controlling but also protective of the young women living in her house. MRS. LACY, a widow, favors her older daughter Rose over her other daughter, Eilis. EILIS LACEY, a young Irish woman, immigrates to the United States and finds her home and work in Brooklyn. ROSE LACEY, Eilis’s older sister, is beautiful, athletic, gregarious, and much admired by everyone. She arranges for Eilis to leave Ireland and find a fresh start in Brooklyn.
who thinks one thing but does something completely different. In her actions, Eilis is restrained, oftentimes an observer of her own life. She thinks about rebellion, but quickly rejects the possibility. Instead, she obeys as a dutiful daughter, sister, employee, tenant, and girlfriend. It is clear that she often wishes she could do something entirely different than what is expected of her. The heroine of Brooklyn is defined by her passivity. Tóibín characterizes Eilis by her emotional state rather than by her actions. Throughout Brooklyn, she is restrained, cautious, and obedient without objection. And yet while she acquiesces to the demands of those around her, her mind is in turmoil and nearly always ready to do rebel. When Miss Fortini tells Eilis not to bother using a changing room to try on several bathing suits, Eilis is upset, since no one had seen her naked before (161). In spite of her distress, Eilis tries on the bathing suits in front of Miss Fortini and can only escape after all four suits have been fitted. Her thoughts during this scene show her to be a woman who is tortured by her inability to act according to her own desire. Tóibín did not create a back story for his characters. Nothing of the past is explained. The novel moves forward telling Eilis’s story but does not reveal her family’s life before the start of the novel. Tóibín tells readers nothing about Rose or that in 1950s Ireland it was customary for one of the daughters to remain
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1955. He worked as a journalist and as a teacher. Tóibín has published several nonfiction books, including travel books about living in Spain, Homage to Barcelona (1990) and Walking along the Border (1987), which focuses on the boundary between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Tóibín’s fifth novel, The Master (2004), was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004 and was selected by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2004. Brooklyn, Tóibín’s sixth novel, was awarded the Costa Novel of the Year Award in 2010. As of 2010, Tóibín had homes in Ireland, Spain, and New York and often stayed in these locations.
unmarried and care for an aging parent. No information is provided about Eilis prior to the start of the novel. Readers know virtually nothing about Tony’s life or that of his family, except that they are Italian. As a result, readers must pay careful attention to Eilis’s narration to know these characters and understand their motivations. There is no information to distract, and more importantly, there is no information that readers might use to predict behaviors. Instead, clues are provided by dialogue or by what Eilis thinks or observes.
W Critical Reception Reviews of Brooklyn were almost uniformly positive. Many reviews were similar to one written by Peter Kemp for the London Sunday Times, who praised Tóibín’s novel as “elating” and “brilliant.” Kemp also admired
The Brooklyn Bridge in New York. In Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey is a young Irish girl who immigrates to Brooklyn, New York. H. Armstrong Roberts
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One of the few complaints about Brooklyn pertained to the depiction of Eilis, who is so readily compliant to demanding others. In her review for the Christian Science Monitor, Yvonne Zipp complained that Tóibín’s heroine is a “doormat,” who “is almost a parody of 1950s femininity.” Zipp described Eilis as a heroine who is “sweet,” “curvy,” “attractive but not alarming so,” “good at school but not ambitious,” and “above all, biddable.” Although Zipp thought that Eilis could use some backbone, she also found that there is much to admire in Brooklyn. Tóibín’s attention to small details is especially effective in relating his heroine’s life. In the end, Zipp celebrated Brooklyn as “a masterpiece of quiet reflection, bringing up deep emotions submerged under the placid exterior and giving the novel an ache that will linger for days.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Goring, Rosemary. “Brooklyn Calling.” Rev. of Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. heraldscotland.com. Sunday Herald 17 May 2009. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. Kemp, Peter. Rev. of Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. thesundaytimes.co.uk. Sunday Times 19 April 2009. Wed. 4 Aug. 2010. St. Mark’s Catholic Church in Brooklyn, New York. In the story, Eilis meets a handsome young Italian man named Tony at a church dance. Vladimir Korostyshevskiy/Shutterstock.com
Tóibín’s ability to create “a fresh dimension of humane warmth” in a novel that also remains so lucid in its depiction of Eilis’s life. Kemp enjoyed Tóibín’s ability to create a novel that is stylistically straightforward and without unneeded digressions. This “pared-down style” is not so bare, though, that it eliminates comedy, and as a result, Kemp asserts, Tóibín created “a novel that stands out as remarkable even among Ireland’s distinguished roll of fiction about home and exile.” In her review of Brooklyn for the Sunday Herald, Rosemary Goring was similarly complimentary of Tóibín’s talents, pointing out that although the novel might initially seem a bit “dreamy,” it soon becomes clear that Brooklyn is an “exquisitely observed story.” Goring’s review celebrated Tóibín’s narrow focus on Eilis’s life, which reveals itself through many small details. Brooklyn, suggested Goring, is “a profoundly moving, deceptively artless creation whose brilliance lies in its restraint.” Bernard O’Donoghue’s review of Brooklyn for the Irish Times also focused on Tóibín’s restraint in creating scenes that are “unsensational” and “delicately described.” According to O’Donoghue, Brooklyn has “not a sentence or a thought out of place.” This is high praise, indeed, for a novel that many reviewers judge to be Tóibín’s finest work.
O’Donoghue, Bernard. “The Clear Voice of a Master.” Rev. of Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. irishtimes.com. Irish Times 25 April 2009. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. Tóibín, Colm. Brooklyn. New York: Scribner’s, 2009. Print. Zipp, Yvonne. “Brooklyn: The Quiet, Contemplative Story of a Young Woman Leaving Ireland for a New Life in the Brooklyn of the 1950s.” Rev. of Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. csmonitor.com. Christian Science Monitor 8 May 2009. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Bracken, Claire. “Brooklyn.” Journal of Irish Studies 5 (2010): 166. Print. Analyzes the objectification of Eilis Lacey as Irish property, the visible material of society and social life. Knox, Malcolm. “An Irish Face in Brooklyn: Interview with Colm Tóibín.” theage.com.au. Age 15 May 2010. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. Suggests that Tóibín draws connections between immigration to the United States and the recent increase of immigration to Ireland, of those who come with no history or connection to the land but with the desire to start over. McCrum, Robert. “You Can Take the Man Out of Ireland: Interview with Colm Tóibín.” observer. guardian.co.uk. Observer 26 Apr. 2009. Web.
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4 Aug. 2010. Explains the mechanics of writing and his enjoyment of teaching. O’Kelly, Emer. “Delicate Portrait of a Soul Triumphs in Tóibín’s Tale.” Rev. of Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. independent.ie. Sunday Independent 3 May 2009. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. Claims that Brooklyn reveals the dreariness of a life held in check, where longings for escape are only tentative for a heroine who is bound by duty. Ross, Michael. “The Soul Trader.” Rev. of Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. thesundaytimes.com.uk. Sunday Times 26 Apr. 2009. Web 4 Aug. 2010. Links Tóibín’s childhood experience in Ireland with the experiences of the heroine in his novel. Schillinger, Liesl. “The Reluctant Emigrant.” Rev. of Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. nytimes.com. New York Times 3 May 2009. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. Discusses the heroine of Brooklyn, who never complains, even when complaining would serve her well. Taylor, Christopher, “The Country Girl.” Rev. of Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. guardian.co.uk. Guardian 9 May 2009. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. Explains that Tóibín uses humor and not sentimentality to describe the immigrant experience. Witchel, Alex. “His Irish Diaspora.” Rev. of Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. nytimes.com. New York Times 3 May 2009. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. Explores Tóibín’s childhood and influences on his writing, including a story he heard about Brooklyn many years earlier. Gale Resources
“Colm Toibin.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. http//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GA LE%7CH1000114647&v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r& p=LitRC&sw=w “Colm Toibin.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 285. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. http//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE% 7CH1107500000&v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r& p=LitRC&sw=w Middleton, Tim. “Colm Toibin.” British and Irish Novelists since 1960. Ed. Merritt Moseley. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 271. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Aug. 2010. http//go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE% 7CH1200011139&v=2.1&u=itsbtrial&it=r& p=LitRC&sw=w
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Open Web Sources
Tóibín maintains a Web site at: http//www.colmtoibin. com, which contains information about his novels and book signings. An interview with Tóibín on National Public Radio, in which he discusses characterization and immigration and the dynamics of family life in Brooklyn, can be found at http//www.npr.org/templates/story/sto ry.php?storyId=103761998 For Further Reading
Almeida, Linda Dowling. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. Print. A survey focusing on the role of economics and social change as an indicator of Irish identity among recent Irish immigrants to New York City. Frommer, Harvey, and Myrna Katz Frommer. It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. New York: State U of New York, 2009. Print. A collection of anecdotal memories culled from many interviews with Brooklyn residents. Hamburger, Eric. The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City’s History. New York: Holt, 2005. Print. An illustrated history of New York City, including the five boroughs. Martinez, Ruben, and Joseph Rodriguez. The New Americans. New York: New Press, 2004. Print. Companion book to the PBS series tracing the stories of seven immigrant families. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print. A social history that relies on primary source documents, such as letters and diaries, as well as historical documents to provide a history of the Irish immigration experience. Reiss, Marcia. Brooklyn Then and Now. San Diego: Thunder Bay Press, 2002. Print. A photographic history of Brooklyn, with oversized photos of historical Brooklyn, including then and now photos of Brooklyn landmarks. Tóibín, Colm. The Master. New York: Scribner’s, 2004. Print. A fictionalized study of Henry James. Sheri Karmiol
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Bruised Hibiscus By Elizabeth Nunez
W Introduction Set in 1950s Trinidad, Bruised Hibiscus (1994) is a novel about a friendship between two women that transcends class and racial barriers. When a fisherman recovers the body of a white woman from the sea, the rage and frustration that results leads to the reunion of two childhood friends, each haunted by a brutal crime they had witnessed years ago. Now reunited, the two women reestablish their bond and find the courage to face their own unhappy marriages. By confronting their complicated pasts and unhappy present, they then try to find fulfillment and happiness in their lives. Bruised Hibiscus also explores themes of colonialism, domestic violence and sexual oppression, and class and racial differences in colonial Trinidad. Upon its publication, Bruised Hibiscus was a commercial and critical success, receiving the American Book Award in 2001. As Sandra Adell maintains in her review, “In this novel [Elizabeth] Nunez weaves such a rich and well-crafted tapestry of legend, myth, and history that one cannot help comparing her to Toni Morrison, whose Song of Solomon stands out as a masterpiece among novels of the African diaspora.”
W Literary and Historical Context
Bruised Hibiscus is set in 1954 on the small Caribbean island of Trinidad, which for years has been grouped with its sister island, Tobago, and known as Trinidad and Tobago. Both islands were originally settled by Amerindians and encountered by Christopher Columbus in 1498. Trinidad was eventually colonized by the Spanish, but settled by the French, who developed the lucrative sugarcane industry. The Spanish surrendered Trinidad to the British in 1797. The British abolished slavery, which left a dearth of workers for the large sugarcane plantations
and the burgeoning cacao industry. In 1830s the British began a campaign to attract workers from China, West Africa, and India. Racial resentments between the different groups festered, and sometimes exploded into violence. The presence of workers from various nations also created class and racial barriers, which are explored in Bruised Hibiscus. Trinidad received its independence from the British Empire in 1962. The island nation became a republic in 1976. Elizabeth Nunez’s novel is set at the point at which British colonialism was beginning to loosen its grip on Trinidad. Although the ownership of most of the lucrative sugarcane business was in the hands of white colonialists, other immigrant groups were starting to gain economic and political power. Class and racial stratification were still entrenched, but the institutional structure that kept them in place was starting to show cracks. The real-life inspiration for the book can be found in the “Author’s Notes” at the close of the book. “On April 7, 1954, Dr. Dalip Singh, a Trinidadian physician, strangled his German wife, Paula Inge, removed her intestines, sutured her abdomen, ferried her body in a pirogue to the middle of the Gulf of Paria and dumped it there. The next morning her body floated up on the beach at Freeman’s Bay in Otahiti.” This horrific murder is fictionalized at the opening of Bruised Hibiscus, and acts as the catalyst for the reunion of two childhood friends, Rosa and Zuela.
W Themes Class, racial, and gender differences play a major role in Bruised Hibiscus. Many of the relationships in the novel are affected by the prejudices and discrimination found in Trinidadian society. For example, Cedric is haunted by feelings of inferiority because of his race and takes out his revenge on his white wife and other women. The Chinaman keeps Zuela under his control, a virtual prisoner in the family’s stores. The friendship between
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Bruised Hibiscus
MAJOR CHARACTERS CEDRIC is Rosa’s husband. The headmaster of a local secondary school, he has always felt inferior to whites despite his intellect. His marriage to Rosa has gone cold, and he often accuses her of infidelity. His increasingly menacing behavior leads Rosa to embark on her pilgrimage and her renewed friendship with Zuela. ROSA is a white Trinidadian, the youngest daughter of a British plantation owner and his mistreated wife. Rosa is suffering in a stifling marriage to Cedric, a black headmaster whom she suspects of unspeakable acts. When on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, she runs into her old friend, Zuela, and renews her friendship with her. With Zuela’s help, she begins to confront her past. ZUELA is a black Trinidadian worn out from her terrible marriage to an opium-addicted Chinaman. After marriage at fourteen, bearing ten children, and being treated like a prisoner in her own house, she is ready to escape her dreadful marriage and begins a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, where she encounters a childhood friend, Rosa. Trying to help her old friend, she sends Rosa to a healer, Mary Christophe. Zuela finally finds the courage and resourcefulness to escape her marriage and find fulfillment and love.
Rosa, a wealthy white woman, and Zuela, a poor black one, is shadowed by class and racial issues. Yet both Rosa and Zuela are able to transcend those class and racial barriers to rekindle their childhood friendship and find the courage to try to address their past and move toward a better future. Another key theme in the novel centers on violence against women. With the story turning on an incident based on the true story of a husband’s brutal murder of his wife, Bruised Hibiscus documents the emotional and physical brutality of men toward women. As children, Rosa and Zuela witness a man’s vicious sexual assault of a young woman behind a bush, which bonds them together and yet tears their friendship apart. Cedric berates and demeans his wife, Rosa. The Chinaman maintains an iron grip on Zuela, keeping her pregnant and isolated from the greater community. It is only through Rosa and Zuela’s renewed friendship and a growing sisterhood that the two women are able to take steps to change their circumstances.
W Style When discussing the style of Bruised Hibiscus, most critics describe it as lyrical in quality. Some single out Nunez’s use of an authentic, rhythmic Trinidadian dialect, which
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adds to the lyrical nature of the story. Other reviewers, like Sandra Adell, underscore the author’s use of symbolism and imagery. “The image of the young girl behind the hibiscus bush is one of several recurring images that contribute to the lyrical, almost incantatory quality of Bruised Hibiscus,” Adell states in her review in the African American Review. “They are disturbing images: images of a notorious gangster, Boysie Singh, who the islanders believe murders and cuts out the hearts of young women to rub on the hooves of his racehorses to make them run faster; of two pigs devouring the butchered body of a woman named Melda; of the opiumaddicted Chinaman’s recurring nightmares of his wife and daughter being slaughtered back in China; of Zelda, not much older than the ‘girl-child’ behind the hibiscus bush, being bargained over by her father and the Chinaman who came to her village in Venezuela ‘to buy alpagats [sandals] for his store and took her, too.’” Jessica Opad finds that Nunez’s lyrical style takes some time to find its legs, noting that the beginning of the novel is stilted and difficult. “Although Nunez’ poetic style helps set the tone of the novel, the first few chapters feel as if she tries too hard to be poetic, as her lengthy sentences can be hard to follow,” she maintains. “Once she introduces both of the main characters, however, she seems to become more comfortable with her narrative voice and abandons unnecessary lengthiness without losing the poetic flow of the novel.”
W Critical Reception Bruised Hibiscus received critical praise, earning an American Book Award in 2001. Critics commend Nunez for crafting a vivid and haunting story of horrible violence and a redemptive friendship between two damaged women. As reviewer Zakia comments, “Nunez is a gifted writer. She employs the brevity and repetition of poetry in her work. She writes unpretentiously, deftly inserting sex, murder and cruelty into a story that also speaks truth to friendship, love and a miracle or two. She is able to create a telling story that is not cheapened by the oftenexploited aforementioned themes. Her writing is like the sway in the walk of a confident woman. Buy it. Read it. It’s good.” In her review in the African American Review, Sandra Adell lauds Nunez’s ability to create a suspenseful novel. “She keeps her distance and lets her imagination and beautiful writing prevail,” Adell states. “The result is a stunning and often chilling work of fiction that one will find hard to put down or to forget.” Adell also reflects on Nunez’s position in black literature. “It is evident from her novels that Elizabeth Nunez’s imagination is likewise a storehouse of stories, legends, and myths,” she argues. “She is an accomplished writer who is creating a memorable space for herself in African diaspora literature. She is one of those rare novelists who must be read.” TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Bruised Hibiscus
Author Elizabeth Nunez’s Bruised Hibiscus is set on the Caribbean island of Trinidad; pictured here is Trinidad's Maracas Bay. PHB.cz (Richard Semik)/Shutterstock.com
New York Times reviewer Jana Giles does find flaws in the novel. “Nunez’s shrewd employment of native dialect enlivens the narrative, but without efficiently enhancing plot or character,” she states. “She fails to handle suspense well, frequently revealing just enough of what will happen next to diminish your desire to actually read about it. And she interrupts what could have been a fluid fictional dream with too much commentary and too many descriptive passages. It’s as if she never quite comes to see her characters as more than vehicles for conveying ideas.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Adell, Sandra. Rev. of Bruised Hibiscus, by Elizabeth Nunez. African American Review 35 (2001). Print. BNET. Web. 13 Sept. 2010. Giles, Jana. “Trouble in Paradise.” New York Times Book Review 105.15 (9 Apr. 2000). Print. General OneFile. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. Opad, Jessica. Rev. of Bruised Hibiscus, by Elizabeth Nunez. Voices from the Gap (17 June 2009). Web. 13 Sept. 2010. Zakia. Rev. of Bruised Hibiscus, by Elizabeth Nunez. ColoredGirls.com (2002). Web. 13 Sept. 2010.
Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Rev. of Bruised Hibiscus, by Elizabeth Nunez. Publishers Weekly 241. 41 (10 Oct. 1994): 62. Print. Deems Bruised Hibiscus to be a “thoughtful critique of race, gender, and class relations” in Trinidad in the midtwentieth century. Rev. of Bruised Hibiscus, by Elizabeth Nunez. Publishers Weekly 247.9 (28 Feb. 2000): 59. Print. Classifies Bruised Hibiscus as a work of Caribbean Gothic and praises Nunez’s deft use of authentic Trinidadian dialect. Nussbaum, Lisa S. Rev. of Bruised Hibiscus, by Elizabeth Nunez. Library Journal 125.5 (15 Mar. 2000): 128. Print. Recommends Bruised Hibiscus as a beautifully written novel with well-drawn and sympathetic characters. Gale Resources
“Elizabeth Nunez.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 11 Sept. 2010. “Elizabeth Nunez.” Black Literature Criticism: Classic and Emerging Authors Since 1950, Vol. 3, 2nd ed. 147-58. Print. From Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 23 Sept. 2010.
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Bruised Hibiscus
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elizabeth Nunez was born on February 18, 1944, in Cocorite, Trinidad. Her father, Waldo, was an oil company executive and labor commissioner for the government, and Elizabeth grew up in comfortable circumstances. At the age of nine, she won a children’s writing competition in the Trinidad Guardian, which spurred her interest in fiction writing. After graduating from high school, she worked briefly for Shell Oil Company. In 1963 she traveled to Wisconsin to enroll in Marian College, a small Catholic women’s college. There she experienced widespread racism and hostility as one of the few black students at the college during the turbulent years of the civil rights struggle. In 1967 she graduated with a BA in English and returned to Trinidad, intent on becoming a teacher. When she was consistently turned down in favor of Canadian candidates, Nunez became an outspoken activist against the prejudicial hiring practices of her homeland. She immigrated to the United States, settling in New York City in 1968. Nunez earned her MA in English from New York University in 1971 and became an instructor at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. In 1977 she earned her PhD from New York University. Her first novel, When Rocks Dance, was published in 1986. Nunez formed the National Black Writers Conference with her friend, the author John Oliver Killens, and served as director from 1986 through 2000. She has edited anthologies of Caribbean writing and has published essays and book reviews. In 2001 she was awarded an American Book Award for her novel, Bruised Hibiscus.
Open Web Sources
The website for the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College is a resource for students to study the literature of the African Diaspora. It also links to the latest information for The National Black Writers’ Conference, lists recent publications, and has a photo gallery of the group’s events. http//www.centerfor blackliterature.org/
about the show is available at the Black Writers in America website. http//www.cuny.tv/series/bwa/ index.lasso The official website of Trinidad and Tobago, http://www. ttconnect.gov.tt/gortt/portal/ttconnect, provides links to government ministries, such as the Ministry of Tourism. Research, statistics on tourism, pictures, video, and maps of Trinidad are available. For Further Reading
Allen-Agostini, Lisa, and Jeanne, Mason, eds. Trinidad Noir. New York: Akashic Books, 2008. Print. A noir anthology comprising eighteen stories set in the sunny locale of Trinidad and Tobago. Written by different authors, the stories use the beauty of the natural environment and juxtapose it with the violence, political corruption, poverty, and drug culture found on the island. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik! Krak! New York: Soho Press, 1995. Print. A collection of autobiographical stories that illuminate Danticat’s sorrow at leaving her tyrannized country of Haiti and her difficulty adjusting to a new land. Several of the stories explore the immigrant experience. Neptune, Harvey R. Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. Print. In this informative history, Neptune chronicles the installation and operation of U.S. military bases on Trinidad and Tobago during World War II and the uneasy relationship between the two countries in the postwar years. Nunez, Elizabeth. Beyond the Limbo Silence. Seattle: Seal Press, 1998. Print. In this autobiographical novel, a young Trinidadian woman receives a scholarship to a small Catholic women’s college in Wisconsin. Alienated from her privileged white classmates, she finds purpose in the burgeoning civil rights movement and a passionate relationship with a driven black activist.
Nunez’s PBS series on black writers, Black Writers in America, premiered in 2003. More information
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Margaret Haerens
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Bullet Collection By Patricia Sarrafian Ward
W Introduction The Bullet Collection is an account of two troubled girls growing up in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War (19751991), told from the perspective of exile in the United States. The story is narrated by the younger of the two sisters, seventeen-year-old Marianna, whose memories move back and forth in time and space between her ravaged homeland and her difficult new life in America. The novel records a childhood in which regular daily activities—going to school, preparing meals, meeting boys—take place amid routine sniper fire, air raids, and shelling attacks, the debris from which is retrieved by the older sister, Alaine, in a failed effort to objectify the daily brutality and forms the collection of war relics of the title. Both girls suffer crippling depression from their inability to process the violence and the inexplicable unwillingness of the older generation to speak of it. The Bullet Collection is modeled on the personal experiences of the author. Like her protagonist, Patricia Sarrafian Ward was raised in war-torn Beirut by an American father and Lebanese Armenian mother. Her family, too, resolved to escape the bloodshed and fled to the United States in 1987. Although the Lebanese Civil War has inspired many works of fiction, in English as well as Arabic, The Bullet Collection is distinguished by its adolescent narrator and its disturbing portrayal of the psychological effects of war on children too young to understand it.
W Literary and Historical Context
In a 2005 essay, Syrine C. Hout drew attention to a recent corpus of Lebanese exilic writing that included The Bullet Collection. Hout noted, “The last decade has seen the rise of Anglophone and Francophone novels by
Lebanese-born first-time authors who spent their childhood and adolescence, fully or partially, in war-torn Lebanon between 1975 and 1991.” Hout went on to describe some typical features of this literature of exile, written not only from the vantage point of geographic dislocation but also in hindsight, giving the authors some critical distance from the immediacy of the violence that forced their relocation. The Lebanese Civil War caused an estimated one million people to flee the country; more than 100,000 people were killed, many of them civilians, and approximately 17,000 people went missing. The conflict largely developed along Muslim and Christian lines and was exacerbated by the presence of Palestinian guerrillas. Early in the strife, battles between Christian Phalangists and Muslims from the Lebanese National Movement destroyed much of Beirut and led to the establishment of a “green line” separating Muslim West Beirut and Christian East Beirut. The city remained divided until the end of the conflict. Various foreign influences, including troops from Israel, Syria, France, and the United States, complicated the struggle, as did the increasing illegitimacy of certain home militias involved in criminal activities. The war caused the collapse of administrative and other public services in Beirut and disintegration of the infrastructure. It was amid this atmosphere that Ward—and the family in her book—left Lebanon for safety in the United States.
W Themes In her essay on Lebanese literature of exile, Hout identified several themes common to the genre: expatriation, memory, and identity. The idea of identity in The Bullet Collection takes on layered significance as it invokes Marianna’s premature coming of age, as well as her divided loyalty to her country. Throughout the story, Ward develops contrasting identities of the sisters. Marianna, fair and blue-eyed like her father, looks like
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The Bullet Collection
MAJOR CHARACTERS ALAINE is the sister of the narrator, Marianna, two years older and obsessed with visiting battle sites in Beirut. Her war souvenirs—bullets, grenades, shrapnel—form the collection mentioned in the title of the novel. She is severely damaged by the war psychologically but recovers in the United States. DADDY is the father of Alaine and Marianna. A respected historian in Beirut, he applies for a job at a supermarket in the United States. MARIANNA is the seventeen-year-old narrator who revisits wartorn Beirut in her disjointed memories. Once the stronger of the two sisters, she adjusts poorly to life in the United States while Alaine thrives. MUMMY is the mother of Alaine and Marianna. She suffers in silence or tears and is traumatized by the war’s effect on her family. UNCLE BERNIE is a member of the family, mysteriously kidnapped and then shot.
an outsider in her home country, while Alaine possesses the dark eyes and hair of Middle Easterners. In Beirut, it is Marianna who struggles to understand Alaine’s desperation but, once they arrive in the United States, Alaine adjusts well to their strange circumstances while Marianna begins skipping school and abusing drugs. It is now Marianna who becomes obsessed with cataloging images of war, which for her exist alongside reflections on the more idyllic Beirut of her earliest memories. Marianna is nostalgic and insists on maintaining a vital connection to Lebanon, but she is frustrated in her efforts to resuscitate this past by her family’s denial of all that came before. Ward frequently juxtaposes images of the United States and Lebanon to further explore Marianna’s conflicted loyalties to an America that has given her family safe shelter and to a Lebanon “that insists on being remembered even after forcing us to leave” (qtd. on DePauw University English Department website).
W Style The text of The Bullet Collection is divided into three seasons—autumn, summer, and winter—but Marianna’s
In the story, Alaine collects bullet casings and other debris left behind after battles in the Lebanese Civil War as a means by which to objectify the everyday violence. David Maska/Shutterstock.com
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The Bullet Collection
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, during the time of the civil war (1975-1991) that devastated the city, Patricia Sarrafian Ward and her family fled to the United States in 1987. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and then received an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for an early version of her highly praised debut novel, The Bullet Collection (2003). The Bullet Collection describes the impact of the civil war on a Beirut family from the perspective of a teenage refugee in the United States determined to maintain a connection with her homeland. Ward’s short stories have appeared in numerous publications. She has currently changed directions in her career, devoting her time to book arts, including printing and miniatures.
The Bullet Collection follows the story of two young sisters during the Lebanese Civil War, a conflict in which Yasser Arafat, pictured on the left, played an important role. ª Bettmann/Corbis
memories move freely back and forth between the past and the present in a manner some critics say evokes the disjointed thoughts of a child unable to comprehend her chaotic surroundings. The language of The Bullet Collection has been described as “sensual” (Salem) and “lyrical, dreamlike” (Armenian Reporter International). A writer for Kirkus Reviews referred to the style of the novel as “densely impressionist,” adding, “Ward orders her circuitous tale only by seasons, backtracking years behind, then fast-forwarding to the family’s sad, listless exile in America in what is perhaps an imitation of the erratic workings of childhood memory.”
W Critical Reception The Bullet Collection received the Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center at Columbia University as well as prizes recognizing talented new writers from the Hala Maksoud Foundation and the Great Lakes College Association. The novel has been frequently praised for its insight into the psychological effects of war, especially the sisters’ self-destructive tendencies as substitution for a repressed emotional response to violence. Susannah Tarbush remarked, for example, “The girls’ psychological breakdown could be seen as a sane response to a world that has gone mad.” The depth of the characterizations has been considered all the more impressive in a novel that vividly documents the experience of war. Elise Salem
remarked on the balance achieved in The Bullet Collection: “I was especially pleased that Ward was able to maintain a plotline and a host of engaging characters while, at the same time, narrating the complex emotional dimensions of the war. Many other ‘war novels’ have drowned in the war itself.” Hout devoted a second essay entirely to The Bullet Collection as a representation of trauma theory. Donna Seaman also remarked on the book’s broader implications: “In Ward’s powerful debut novel, two sisters and their Beirut family serve as a microcosm for all the resiliency and magic of that war-torn city and all the tragedy of the endless bloodshed in the Middle East.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Rev. of The Bullet Collection, by Patricia Sarrafian Ward. Kirkus Reviews 71.3 (1 Feb. 2003): 179. Print. Hout, Syrine C. “Memory, Home, and Exile in Contemporary Anglophone Lebanese Fiction.” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46.3 (2005): 219. Print. ———. “Revisiting Lebanon: Testimony, Trauma, and Transition in Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection.” Middle Eastern Literatures 12.3 (2009): 271-88. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. “Patricia Sarrafian Ward.” DePauw University English Department Visiting Writers, Fall 2004. Web. 22 Sept. 2010. “Patricia Sarrafian Ward Wins GLCA’s New Writers Award.” Armenian Reporter International 36.44 (14 Aug. 2004): 22. Ethnic NewsWatch, ProQuest. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Salem, Elise. “Patricia Sarrafian Ward, The Bullet Collection.” Literary Review 46.4 (2003): 769. Print.
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The Bullet Collection
Seaman, Donna. “Ward, Patricia Sarrafian. The Bullet Collection.” Booklist 99.13 (1 Mar. 2003): 1143. Print. Tarbush, Susannah. “Patricia Sarrafian Ward and Her Novel The Bullet Collection.” Dar Al-Hayat [Saudi Arabia] 18 Sept. 2003. Author website. Web. 22 Sept. 2010.
For Further Reading
Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Chadwell, Faye A. “The Bullet Collection.” Library Journal 128.5 (15 Mar. 2003): 118. Print. Complimentary synopsis concluding that Ward is a “writer to watch.” “Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection.” Armenian Reporter 5 Jan. 2008: C19. Ethnic NewsWatch, ProQuest. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Praises Ward for bringing to light a story that will ring true to the thousands afflicted by the civil war in Lebanon. Gale Resources
Rev. of The Bullet Collection, by Patricia Sarrafian Ward. Publishers Weekly 250.16 (21 Apr. 2003): 40. Plot summary emphasizing the well-developed contrast between Lebanon and the United States and the inversion of the girls’ roles. “Ward, Patricia Sarrafian 1969-.” Contemporary Authors. Vol. 224. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 19 Sept. 2010. Open Web Sources
The author’s website provides links to Ward’s biography, a list of her publications, and reviews of The Bullet Collection available online. http//www.patriciasarra fianward.com/Publications.html
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The website for Ward’s publisher, Graywolf Press, offers an excerpt from The Bullet Collection, highlights from reviews of the book, and discussion topics critical to the story. http//www.graywolfpress.org/Related_ Content/Discussion_Topics/Discussion_Topics_ Bullet_Collection/ Alameddine, Rabih. The Perv: Stories. New York: Picador, 1999. Print. Eight short stories describing the alienating effects of the diaspora on people caught up in the Lebanese Civil War. Al-Shaykh, Hanan. Beirut Blues. New York: Anchor, 1996. Print. Novel told in the form of letters written by a woman trying to make sense of her life in a warravaged Beirut. ———. The Story of Zahra. New York: Anchor, 1996. Print. Records the devastating psychological effects of the Lebanese Civil War on a directionless young misfit mistreated by men, including a boyfriend who may or may not be a rooftop sniper in Beirut. This novel was banned in several Arab countries as giving a false impression of Arab culture. Jarrar, Nada Awar. Dreams of Water. New York: Harper, 2007. Print. Novel in which the author records her own exile from Beirut in the form of a story about a Lebanese family whose son goes missing in the civil war. ———. A Good Land. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Print. Considers the effect of Israel’s 2006 bombing of Beirut on several characters from different generations, all connected by the same city block and their displacement in the earlier civil war. Janet Mullane
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Camouflage By Joe Haldeman
W Introduction Camouflage, written in 2004 by Joe Haldeman, tells the story of a strange vessel that crashed to Earth millions of years ago and the evolution of the two beings who presumably came from it. The novel switches among three points of view, as two serial flashbacks follow the two shape-changers, named The Changeling and The Chameleon, through history, while a third narrative charts the discovery of the artifact in 2019 and researchers’ subsequent attempts to open it. Like many of Haldeman’s novels, Camouflage deals with what it means to be human, the ways in which we evolve and learn to love, and the struggle to build and maintain a personal moral code. Haldeman has been called “one of the most important science fiction writers of our time,” and Camouflage adds to his list of successes, having won the James Tiptree Award for Science Fiction in 2004, and the Nebula, awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in 2005 (Graham).
W Literary and Historical Context
Joe Haldeman believes that “the science fiction writers are some of the few people who are trying to understand what the true drivers of our times were” (“Science Fiction”). Science fiction writing “tells a ripping yarn while also asking serious questions about mankind, about mankind’s place in the universe, about the universe itself” (Sallis). Haldeman’s time in Vietnam greatly influences his writing, and Camouflage is no exception. The author uses the Changeling’s evolution to explore the theme of war, and the “necessity of maintaining a strict moral code in opposition to humanity’s predominant amorality” (“Joe Haldeman 1943-”). The creature contends “the gulf between the two sides was so large it was as if they were two different species.” The Changeling wishes it “had an
opportunity to observe other cultures than American without the complication of war.” Even when the war ends, it observes, “It looked as if there might be just one World War, with breathing spaces for rearming, that would last until somebody won” (129). Cecilia Tan, one of the jurors for the James Tiptree Award, said of Camouflage, “This book explores the human condition as thoroughly as any literary work, with understanding of gender at the crux of that understanding” (James Tiptree Award website). The Changeling comes ashore in 1931, an “ageless, sexless entity,” (Le Guin, qtd. in “Camouflage, Joe Haldeman”) but after assuming many identities, both male and female, it finally settles, in 2021, on a female identity. “As it grows more human, the choice becomes more important to it; it ends up a woman by preference. If gender isn’t the central concern of this novel, it’s near the center, and the handling of it is skillful, subtle, and finely unpredictable” (Le Guin).
W Themes As James Sallis writes in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Camouflage seeks an answer to the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Haldeman’s writing frequently features characters who “attain selfawareness as a result of their moral opposition to the corrupt and uncaring systems they purportedly represent” (“Joe Haldeman 1943-”). As the Changeling makes its way through history, it becomes, at one point, a prisoner on the Bataan Death March. After watching several Japanese soldiers encourage a group of American soldiers to drink water from a stagnant pool, and then shoot them for it, the Changeling realizes it is “having difficulty trying to generalize about human nature” (109). Haldeman grapples with the problem of evil, the ways in which we learn, and the foundations of ethics, as the Changeling not only realizes “it had seen enough killing in the Pacific to reserve it as a course of last resort”
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MAJOR CHARACTERS THE CHAMELEON is a shape-changer of unknown origin, come to Earth before the time of Jesus Christ. The Chameleon can instantly adopt any human shape, delights in destruction and killing, and is seemingly immortal. THE CHANGELING, a shape-changer from the globular cluster Messier 22, landed on Earth in a vessel that crashed into the Pacific Ocean more than one million years ago. Eventually forgetting its origins, the creature has taken various forms, eventually coming ashore as a human in 1931. The Changeling, unlike the Chameleon, can assume both organic and nonorganic forms. JAN DAGMAR is an exobiologist brought in by NASA to head up the artifact research team. JACK HALLIBURTON is the scientist and ex-military man who approaches Russell Sutton with a proposal to explore the artifact. RUSSELL SUTTON, the researcher who famously raised the Titanic, is the head of Poseiden Projects, an organization devoted to marine resource management and exploration. After the discovery of a strange vessel in the TongaKermadec Trench off the coast of Samoa, Sutton leads a team in their efforts to bring the artifact ashore and attempt to open it.
but also eventually learns to love a human (Sallis). The creature comments that she knows not only love, but “human nature, darling, maybe better than you do. And outsider with almost a century of observation. . . . I know xenophobia, too. I’ve been black and Asian and Hispanic in America . . . a white prisoner on the Bataan Death March. . . . There’s nobody on this planet more ‘different’ than me” (275). Haldeman says “of course I hope that the world will read my books and renounce war and prejudice and bad food,” but that in the end, “all anybody reasonable can hope for is that the world has a little more meaning or complexity or love because you were in it” (qtd. in “Joe Haldeman, Contemporary Authors Online).
Journal, cites the author’s “customary economy of words,” and Cecilia Tan, one of the jurors for the Tiptree Award, compares Haldeman’s style to the minimalist prose of Ernest Hemingway. Haldeman himself has said that the rhythm of his writing is almost as important as the story itself. “I’ll say a line over and over until it sounds right, and then write it down. I go over it . . . once backwards, so I don’t pay attention to the text, but rather to the patterns of words. I know that one error I always make is repetition, so I’m on the lookout for individual words repeated, and rhetorical patterns as well” (“Joe Haldeman,” Contemporary Authors Online). Camouflage also reflects the writer’s typically dry sense of humor: When the Chameleon, an immortal shape-shifter, hears of Jesus, Haldeman writes, “It was as a Parthian that he heard the story of Jesus Christ, which interested him. Killed in public and then resurrected, he was evidently a relative. He would keep an eye out for him” (66).
W Critical Reception
W Style As Gregory Feeley points out in the Washington Post, Haldeman’s skillful development of the plot helps the reader accept its more implausible details. Yet, Feeley continues, while “Haldeman’s adept plotting, strong pacing, and sense of grim stoicism have won him wide acclaim, . . . for me the great virtue in his fiction lies in its style. His prose is laconic, compact, seemingly offhand but quite precise.” Jackie Cassada, writing for Library
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The novel Camouflage is based on the arrival and evolution of two alien beings that most likely emerged from an unidentified spacecraft millions of years ago. Yellowj/Shutterstock.com
Most reviewers of Camouflage agree with Cecilia Tan, juror for the Tiptree Award, who called it “one of the best science fiction books I have read in years” (Tan, qtd. in “Camouflage, Joe Haldeman”). According to Carl Hays of Booklist, “Haldeman proves as engaging a storyteller as ever, especially given this book’s irresistible premise and page-turning action.” Many praise the skill with which Haldeman handles the complexity of the novel’s three story lines. “Haldeman handles this TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Camouflage
complicated scheme effortlessly, and the ending is satisfying whether or not you have figured out who is who” (Jonas). The only bone of contention seems to be the ending, which some found unsatisfying. “Wellconstructed and intriguingly set up,” commented a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews, “but ultimately a disagreeable surprise: the story slips away, and you’re left holding an empty coat.” However, most called the climax “stunning,” and Gregory Feeley, writing for the Washington Post, states, “That it does not push the envelope doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.” James Sallis contends that it is our attachment to Haldeman’s characters that makes his novels so ultimately satisfying, regardless of any issue taken with the ending. “And that is of course what makes Joe Haldeman a first-rate novelist . . . his characters are forever real to us, forever authentic. They choke up, and we find ourselves clearing our throats.” Roland Green, writing in Booklist, noted, “Haldeman couldn’t write a bad book to win a bet” (qtd. in “Joe Haldeman,” Contemporary Authors Online).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joseph William Haldeman was born in 1943 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and earned his BS from the University of Maryland in 1967. He wanted to be an astronaut, but he was drafted into the U.S. Army that same year and was badly injured in Vietnam when, as he describes it, he “stood too close to a booby-trap when a booby set it off” (qtd. in Hicks). After returning home, Haldeman sold two science fiction stories he’d written while taking an undergraduate creative writing course. He eventually earned his MFA. in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1975. The winner of numerous science fiction awards, Haldeman has published more than twenty novels and a half dozen short story collections and has also received the Rhysling Award, for science fiction poetry. Haldeman is an adjunct professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1983.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Rev. of Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. Kirkus Reviews 15 May 2004: 477. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Aug. 2010.
“Joe Haldeman.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 July 2010.
“Camouflage, Joe Haldeman.” The Official Website of The James Tiptree, Jr., Literary Award Council. Web. 4 Aug. 2010.
“Joe Haldeman 1943-.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz, Cathy Falk, and Mary K. Gillis. Vol. 61. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. 168-87. Print. Literature Criticism Online. Web. 30 July 2010.
Cassada, Jackie. “Haldeman, Joe. Camouflage.” Review of Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. Library Journal Aug. 2004: 72. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Aug. 2010. Feeley, Gregory. “From a Gathering of Lost Pilgrims to a Nation’s Capital of the Future-Four Forays into the Magical.” Review of Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. Washington Post 3 Oct. 2004. Print. Highbeam Research. Web. 30 July 2010. Graham, Mark. “Books at a Glance.” Rev. of Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. Rocky Mountain News 17 Sept. 2004. Print. Highbeam Research. Web. 30 July 2010.
Jonas, Gerald. “Science Fiction.” Rev. of Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. New York Times Book Review 18 July 2004: 19. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 July 2010. Sallis, James. “Life.” Rev. of Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Dec. 2005: 38. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Aug. 2010. “Science Fiction.” Media in Transition website. 29 Aug. 1998. Web. 2 Aug. 2010.
Haldeman, Joe. Camouflage. New York: Penguin Group, 2004. Print.
Additional Resources
Hays, Carl. Rev. of Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. Booklist Aug. 2004: 1913. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Aug. 2010.
“Ace Books.” Rev. of Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. Library Bookwatch 1 Sept. 2004. Print. Highbeam Research. Web. 30 July 2010. A short review of Camouflage.
Hicks, James Scott. “Joe (William) Haldeman.” TwentiethCentury American Science-Fiction Writers. Ed. David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer. Detroit: Gale Research, 1981. Print. Also covered in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 8. Detroit: Gale Research, 1981. 198-201. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 July 2010.
Criticism and Reviews
“SF/Fantasy/Horror Notes.” Rev. of Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. Publishers Weekly 26 July 2004: 42+. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Aug. 2010. A short, mixed review of Camouflage, with a focus on the novel’s problematic ending.
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Camouflage Gale Resources
“Joe Haldeman.” Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 38. Gale Group, 2001. Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills: Gale, 2010. Web. 30 July 2010. “Joe W. Haldeman.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Aug. 2010. “Joe (William) Haldeman.” St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. Biography Resource Center. Web. 30 July 2010. Stableford, Brian. “Joe Haldeman.” Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. Ed. Everett Franklin Bleiler. New York: Scribner’s, 1982. Print. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 July 2010. Open Web Sources
Joe Haldeman’s official website at http://home.earth link.net/˜haldeman includes biographical information about the author, as well as an autobiographical essay, interesting FAQs, information about Haldeman’s books, his hobbies, the courses he teaches at MIT, and his travel and cumulative diaries. Haldeman’s blog on Live Journal, http://joe-haldeman. livejournal.com/ has new entries nearly every day, with comments from readers. The website for the James Tiptree Award, http://tiptree. org/, includes information about the award—an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores the understanding of gender—as well as information about current and past winners. The website for the Nebula Awards, http://www .nebulaawards.com/, managed by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, has information
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about past winners, as well as interviews and links to guest blogs. For Further Reading
Clement, Hal. Needle. New York: Avon, 1976. Print. In Clement’s science fiction classic, an alien detective on the trail of a murderer of the same species crashes to Earth on an isolated island. Requiring a host, the detective, called The Hunter, takes up residence in a fifteen year-old boy to track his quarry. Also published as From Outer Space, Needle is out of print but used copies are available on Amazon, as well as an audio version. Haldeman, Joe. The Forever War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974. Print. In Haldeman’s story of an interstellar war between humans and an alien race called the Taurans, special ships called collapsars are used to travel to enemy planets. Among the many difficulties the soldiers must face, one of the most difficult is that because time in space passes at a different rate, the soldiers return home to find that they have aged only a year in the passing of three decades on Earth. “Sci-fi Fans Embrace Worlds Beyond.” Gazette 23 Jan. 2005. Print. Highbeam Research. Web. 30 July 2010. A short article about the annual COSine Science Fiction Convention, which Joe Haldeman attends every year with his wife. Westerfeld, Scott. Polymorph. New York: Roc, 1997. Print. In Westerfeld’s novel, a young shape-shifter makes her way through a futuristic New York City, changing her appearance at will. She believes she is the only one of her kind, until she meets another, older shape-shifter with evil intentions, and must stop him. Bisanne Masoud
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Captain of the Sleepers By Mayra Montero
W Introduction Originally published in Spanish as El capitán de los dormidos (2002), Captain of the Sleepers (2005) is Mayra Montero’s story of traumatic events that haunt two men for more than five decades. At the opening of the novel, J. T. Bunker, an eighty-three-year-old former pilot, is dying of cancer. Seeking peace, he asks Andrés Yasín, the son of his former lover, to meet him on St. Croix; he wants to discuss a dramatic incident from their shared past. As the two men enter into uneasy conversation, their memories take them back in time to Vieques, Puerto Rico, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The two men take turns narrating as their shared history unfolds and glimpses of the truth of the central mystery emerge. Set against the backdrop of the failed struggle for Puerto Rican independence, Captain of the Sleepers traces the aftereffects of both personal and national traumas. It has been praised for its portrayal of lost innocence and political strife.
W Literary and Historical Context
Much of Montero’s novel is set on Vieques, a small island that is part of Puerto Rico. In 1898, with the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico fell under American control. During World War II the United States began to use the islands as a naval base. Many of the country’s agricultural workers, already suffering from the decline of the sugar industry, were evicted from the lands they had occupied. In the novel, Andrés’s mother makes frequent trips to a camp of dispossessed islanders, delivering food and old clothing. The residents must also deal with navy bombing
maneuvers and the constant stench of the fish killed by the bombs. The Puerto Rican independence movement is another focus of the novel. Puerto Rico has a lengthy colonial history, first under Spain and then under the United States. During the 1930s and 1940s, several attempts to gain independence from American rule failed. On October 30, 1950, nationalists launched attacks on American targets throughout Puerto Rico. In Captain of the Sleepers, Andrés’s father, Frank Yasín, is committed to the nationalist cause and recruits J. T. to smuggle weapons in his plane. The novel is dedicated to the memory of two historical figures who appear in the story as friends of the Yasín family: Roberto Acevedo, a nationalist who was killed in the uprising, and Vidal Santiago, a barber who served a lengthy prison sentence for his role in the uprising.
W Themes Questions of Puerto Rican nationalism, cultural identity, and relations with the United States are central to Captain of the Sleepers. Montero also explores the lifelong effects of childhood trauma. The pivotal crisis of the novel occurred some fifty years in the past, when twelve-year-old Andrés saw (or thought he saw) J. T. perform an act of sexual violence so taboo and grotesque that, as Andrés explains, “I turned into a half-crazed boy, staring at the wall and talking to imaginary lights.” J. T. insists that Andrés misunderstood what he saw. Equally haunted by that moment, J. T. avows: “My life ended that day, Andrés. I got sick too. A sickness that’s lasted fifty years.” Sexual violence is tied to another of the novel’s thematic concerns: political oppression and the displacement of Puerto Rican people by American forces. In the narrative, a young woman who makes money offering herself sexually to American soldiers is brutally murdered. The servicemen responsible are never brought to
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Captain of the Sleepers
MAJOR CHARACTERS SANTA makes money selling sexual favors to American servicemen. She also provides Andrés with his earliest sexual experiences, allowing him to touch and kiss her naked body. She is later murdered by servicemen. ROBERTO ACEVEDO, a historical figure, was killed in the October 30, 1950, uprisings in Puerto Rico. In the novel, he is Estela Yasín’s lover. JOHN TIMOTHY (J. T.) BUNKER, an American pilot, is one of the novel’s narrators. The titular Captain of the Sleepers, he gained his nickname ferrying dead bodies from one island to another for burial. In the 1940s he was in love with Andrés’s mother. In the present-day narrative, he is eightythree years old. Suffering from terminal cancer, he meets with Andrés and attempts to explain the events that unfolded many years earlier. VIDAL SANTIAGO, a barber and nationalist revolutionary, is also a historical figure. In the story, he is a frequent guest at Andrés’s father’s hotel. ANDRÉS YASÍN, the other narrator, is a sixty-two-year-old Columbia University-educated former district attorney who comes to St. Croix to meet with J. T. Bunker at the older man’s request. He has been haunted throughout his life by his mother’s suicide and by what he believed he witnessed afterward. ESTELA YASÍN is the wife of Frank and the mother of Andrés. She has a brief affair with J. T. Bunker before turning her affections to her childhood friend, the nationalist revolutionary Roberto Acevedo. The two plan to run away. After Roberto is killed, she commits suicide. The events surrounding her death have haunted Andrés for fifty years. FRANK YASÍN is Estela’s husband and Andrés’s father. The owner of a hotel on the island of Vieques, he becomes involved in revolutionary activity. He is close friends with J. T. Bunker, whose help he enlists in smuggling arms for the nationalist cause.
justice, though their identities are widely known. A review by the Nation’s Kate Levin suggests that this murder “reveals one of the novel’s great strengths: Montero’s ability to convey how people viscerally experience the depredations of colonialism.”
W Style Captain of the Sleepers is in part a historical novel, drawing on real-life events and figures. Montero, who has been active in calling for Puerto Rican independence,
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sympathetically depicts the plight of the people of Vieques, demonstrating how they have been dispossessed by the American military presence. In bringing to life Roberto Acevedo and Vidal Santiago, she humanizes the nationalist movement. The work also reads as a mystery novel. The plot opens with Andrés’s mention of the central traumatic incident, but the details are not revealed until much later in the novel. As the narrative alternates between Andrés’s present-day confrontation with J. T. and the late 1940s and 1950s, the events that shaped both men’s lives come to light. The often rapid shifts between the two time periods emphasize how deeply the past affects the present. Hilda Lloréns writes in the Women’s Review of Books, “Montero tells a brilliant story, skillfully using the past to narrate a tale of the present. With delicate and forceful prose, she evokes feelings of heartbreak and rage.” While Andrés recounts most of the story in the first person, the narration is occasionally assumed by J. T. Through him, the reader learns details that Andrés could not have known and others that, as a child, he could not have understood. Often, events that Andrés remembers are later recounted by J. T., who gives them a new layer of meaning. The interplay between the two narratives further develops the themes of truth, subjectivity, and history.
W Critical Reception When El capitán de los dormidos was published in 2002, Montero’s earlier works had already made her popular with Spanish-speaking readers. The 2005 publication of the novel’s critically acclaimed English translation earned Montero international recognition. Readers and critics alike have been captivated by the book’s suspenseful plot. Kirkus Reviews attributes to Montero “a wizard’s ability to transfix readers’ attention as she peels away successive, deceptive layers of plot and meaning.” In addition, the author has been widely praised for her sensitive treatment of childhood trauma and its aftereffects; and her elegant writing and storytelling powers have drawn admiration. Publishers Weekly raves, “Montero’s atmospheric, minimal prose beautifully conjures the sensitivity, ardor and craving for normality that define adolescence.” Cherie Thiessen’s review for January Magazine describes the work as “an evocative, haunting story, as fatalistic, moody and inevitable as a Greek tragedy.” Edith Grossman (best known for her translations of Gabriel García Márquez) has been lauded for the grace of her English translation. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Captain of the Sleepers BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Rev. of Captain of the Sleepers, by Mayra Montero. Kirkus Reviews 15 June 2005: 660. Rev. of Captain of the Sleepers, by Mayra Montero. Publishers Weekly 25 July 2005: 42. Levin, Kate. “All about My Mother.” Rev. of Captain of the Sleepers, by Mayra Montero. Nation 5 Dec. 2005: 34-38. Print. Lloréns, Hilda. “The Power of Secrets.” Rev. of Captain of the Sleepers, by Mayra Montero. Women’s Review of Books 23.2 (2006): 28-29. Print. Montero, Mayra. Captain of the Sleepers. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, 2005. Print. Thiessen, Cherie. “Sleeping Sickness.” Rev. of Captain of the Sleepers, by Mayra Montero. January Magazine Sept. 2005. Web. 5 October 2010. Additional Resources
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mayra Montero was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1952 and grew up in Puerto Rico. She studied journalism in Mexico and Puerto Rico. While continuing her career as a journalist, she established herself as a noted fiction writer. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled Veintitrés y una tortuga, was published in 1981. She gained a larger audience with the publication of her first novel, La trenza de la hermosa luna, in 1987. The volume was short-listed for Spain’s prestigious Herralde Award. Over the next two decades, she produced eight more novels, including La última noche que pasé contigo (1991; The Last Night I Spent with You, 2001) and Son de Almendra (2005; Dancing to “Almendra,” 2007), Montero became famous for her storytelling abilities and the often sexually explicit character of her work. She is also known as a political activist who has lent her voice to the cause of Puerto Rican independence.
Criticism and Reviews
“Chatting with Mayra Montero.” Criticas 2.4 (2002): 8. Print. An interview in which Montero discusses her novel and its English translation.
Grossman, Edith, and Mayra Montero. “A PrizeWinning Translator and a Distinguished Cuban Novelist Share Ideas on How They Work.” Washington Post
Puerto Rican soldiers guard a group of Nationalists. Much of Captain of the Sleepers is based on the unsuccessful fight for Puerto Rican independence in the 1940s and 1950s. ª Bettmann/Corbis TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Captain of the Sleepers
A large portion of Captain of the Sleepers is set on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. kai hecker/Shutterstock.com
25 Dec. 2005: T10. Print. A conversation between Montero and Grossman, who translated the book into English. Lopez, Adriana. “Captain of the Translators: PW talks with Edith Grossman.” Publishers Weekly 25 July 2005: 43. Lopez briefly interviews the translator of Captain of the Sleepers, who discusses the novel and its eroticism. Seaman, Donna. Rev. of Captain of the Sleepers, by Mayra Montero. Booklist 1 Sept. 2005: 66. A brief review that focuses on the work’s treatment of the haunting effects of both sex and death. Shreve, Jack. Rev. of Captain of the Sleepers, by Mayra Montero. Library Journal 1 Aug. 2005: 70. The author praises the novel, calling for more widespread recognition of Montero among English-speaking readers.
Open Web Sources
The Web site of HarperCollins Publishers offers a brief biographical sketch of Montero and information about her novels. http://www.harpercollins.com/ author/index.aspx?authorid=6842 The educational Web site WorldAtlas provides facts about Puerto Rico and its history. It also features a map of Puerto Rico that is helpful in visualizing the locales of Montero’s novel and the trips that the characters make between Vieques and the Puerto Rican mainland. http://www .worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/namerica/ caribb/pr.htm For Further Reading
Gale Resources
Barreto, Amílcar Antonio. Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2002. Print. This nonfiction volume analyzes recent developments in the relationship between the U.S. Navy and the community of Vieques, where protests against American forces escalated in 1999.
“Mayra Montero.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007.
Montero, Mayra. In the Palm of Darkness. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Harper, 1997. Print. The first
Taylor, Ihsan. “Paperback Row.” New York Times Book Review 18 Feb. 2007: 28(L). Taylor provides a brief overview of the novel’s plot.
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of Montero’s novels to be translated into English, In the Palm of Darkness is the story of an American scientist searching for a rare species of frog in Haiti and the native guide who aids him in his quest. Negron-Muntaner, Frances. Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Print. This collection of essays attempts to find alternatives to the opposition between the colonialist and nationalist positions in the debate over Puerto Rico.
Rigau, Jorge. Puerto Rico Then and Now. San Diego: Thunder Bay, 2009. Print. Rigau’s text and photographs introduce Puerto Rico and provide useful context for Montero’s novel. Rodengen, Jeffrey L. The Legend of Cessna. Ft. Lauderdale: Write Stuff, 1998. Print. The nonfiction work offers a history of Cessna aircraft, the type of plane flown by J. T. Bunker in the novel.
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Greta Gard
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Carpentaria By Alexis Wright
W Introduction Focusing on a conflict concerning land rights in the Carpentaria Gulf region of Australia, Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria (2006), depicts the layers of disharmony between the Aboriginal and white residents of the fictional mining town of Desperance, and within the indigenous community itself. The work traces the interactions of the varied Aboriginal groups that exist on the outskirts of Desperance with the residents of Uptown, the white portion of town. The story explores, on the surface, the debate over the land rights to the mine. On a deeper level, Carpentaria examines the sources of racial conflict, reveals the sense of spiritual interconnectedness with the land felt by the indigenous people, and fleshes out the despair and discord within the Aboriginal communities. Several features of the story, including character names that suggest larger, archetypical meaning, and the references to the spiritual beliefs of the Aboriginal people, combine to lend Carpentaria a mythical, fable-like quality. Praised for its blend of mysticism and reality, the novel won a number of Australian literary awards and became an international best seller.
W Literary and Historical Context
As a member of the Aboriginal Waanyi nation, and an activist dedicated to Aboriginal rights, Wright drew on the realties of white and Aboriginal conflict for her novel Carpentaria. She writes at a time when debates over rights to land and land use, as well as Aboriginal human rights issues, are in the forefront of Australian politics. According to Sandy Wood’s 1999 article for American University’s Human Rights Brief, the Native Title Amendment Act of 1998 was designed to aid in settling disputes regarding land rights, but aboriginal rights
activists found much in the act to criticize. Wood further contends that many politicians and a “substantial portion of the public” do not support native title rights. There continues to be much discussion regarding the breadth of legal implications concerning native title rights. A 2009 Native Title Amendment Act continues to be debated, and 2010 reform discussions are underway. Other sources of conflict between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, informs Tara Ravens in a 2007 article for AAP General News (Australia), involve the Australian government’s attempts to purge the child abuse of indigenous children on Aboriginal lands by banning alcohol use on indigenous lands and removing the need for non-Aboriginals to have a permit to access the land of indigenous people. Ravens reports that Wright herself spoke out against the government’s approach. Other activists supported the government’s intentions of controlling the plague of child abuse, but questioned the actions designed to support the measures. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of Australian historians and writers are addressing Australia’s treatment of its indigenous people, both historically and in contemporary society. Wright lends her voice to that of other Aboriginal and nonAboriginal writers who seek to address in their writing the reality of Australia, past and present. As Margaret Allen indicates in a 2001 essay for Hecate, many nonAboriginal Australians are rousing themselves “from what has been termed the ‘great Australian silence’ about Aboriginal history in Australia.” In addition to Wright, other Australian writers who address the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal history of conflict in some way include Kim Mahood, Kenny Laughton, Sally Morgan, and Nicholas Jose.
W Themes Among the major themes Wright treats in Carpentaria is the conflict between the Aboriginal community and
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MAJOR CHARACTERS STAN BRUISER is the corrupt mayor of Desperance. Bruiser is also considered the ring leader of the part of town known as Uptown, and its white mob. ANGEL DAY is Normal Phantom’s wife, and has fashioned her home out of the rubbish heap near which the family lives. Often described as beautiful, and as the queen of the rubbish pile, she leaves her husband for Mozzie Fishman, and leaves Desperance behind. MOZZIE FISHMAN is depicted as a religious zealot or evangelist who periodically appears in town with his followers, some of whom inhabit the spirit world. They travel through the country seeking the spiritual resting places of their ancestors. HOPE is an Eastender and Joseph Midnight’s granddaughter. She falls in love with Will Phantom and bears his child, Bala. Stranded with Normal and Bala at the end of the novel, Hope leaves her son with his grandfather in order to search for Will.
Carpentaria is based on an Australian land dispute between white Australians and Aboriginals. ª Bettmann/Corbis
non-Aboriginals concerning the mining land at the heart of the story. The complete segregation of the town of Desperance that Wright depicts establishes a thematic structure by which all things may be viewed as a dichotomy: home versus despair, white versus black, for example. Yet Wright’s treatment of such conflicts is more complex than this binary approach initially suggests. As Frances Devlin-Glass observes in a 2007 review of Carpentaria for Antipodes, Wright possesses an insider’s understanding of the political machinations of the small, segregated towns that Desperance represents. Her “long history of working in Aboriginal bureaucracies” has generated “a fine contempt for self-serving small-town mindsets” that makes its way into her novel. Such a background allows Wright the ability to view the conflicts she explores from the inside out; her characters are all imbued with human frailties and shortcomings, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike. Wright also explores the relationship between the Aboriginal sense of spirituality and their worldview. Connected by their ancestral and spiritual beliefs to the land, the Aboriginal community is surprised to learn that the white community of Uptown lacks a history filled with heroes, and is devoid of holy ground. Such discoveries diminish, in the eyes of the Aboriginal community, the rights of the whites to the land, land that was once their own. In tracing the Aboriginal connection to their own history and their spiritualism,
JOSEPH MIDNIGHT is regarded as the leader of the Eastside mob, or the group of Aboriginals who live on the east side of Desperance. They claim to be the true inhabitants of the area. Midnight allowed the mine to be established and was paid for his agreeing to this use of the land. He is considered the enemy of Normal Phantom and the Westenders. BALA PHANTOM is the son of Will and Hope Phantom. NORMAL PHANTOM is the narrating character of Carpentaria. A onetime fisherman, Normal, also known as Norm, is married to Angel Day, who later leaves him for Mozzie Fishman. Norm and his family belong to the Westside mob, or the group of Aboriginals who live on the west side of Desperance; they are also known as the Pricklebush people. The larger Aboriginal community to which the Westenders and the Eastenders once belonged became fractured, in part due to Joseph Midnight’s agreement with the mining company. Some of Pricklebush people are known to travel in a land of ghosts and gather the stories of the elderly. Norm and his family are at the center of the novel’s narrative. Following the cyclone at the end of the novel, Norm is adrift at sea for forty days with Hope and his grandson Bala. After Hope disappears to look for Will, Norm and Bala return to the wreckage of Desperance. WILL PHANTOM is the son of Normal Phantom and Angel Day. Will becomes involved in the dispute for land rights and he takes a stand against the mine, seeking its violent destruction. Will falls in love with an enemy to the Westenders, the Eastender, Hope. The couple has a son together, Bala. After the town is decimated by a cyclone at the end of the novel, Will drifts alone on an island composed of floating detritus.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born on November 25, 1950, Alexis Wright is a member of Australia’s Waanyi nation. Wright’s father was a white cattleman who died when Wright was five years old. After his death, she was raised by her Waanyi mother and grandmother in Cloncurry, Queensland. She has worked as an indigenous researcher, administrator, and educator, and as an activist for Aboriginal rights. Prior to her publication of Carpentaria in 2006, Wright wrote the nonfiction study of alcoholism and alcohol legislation in Aboriginal communities, Grog War in 1997, and the novel Plains of Promise, also in 1997. Carpentaria won a number of literary awards, including, among others, the Miles Franklin Award, the Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, all 2007.
Wright emphasizes the link to the past possessed by the indigenous people, but also a curiosity about the white world. Through the exploration of this interplay between the two cultures, Teresa Podemska-Abt maintains, in a 2010 article for Kultura—Historia—Globalizacja (Culture—History—Global Studies) “Carpentaria pushes readers to realize that Indigenous cultures and societies are in a constant progress.” Modern indigenous communities, as Wright demonstrates, evolve in part based on their interactions with other, non-Aboriginal individuals and groups. At the end of the novel, the survival of Normal Phantom and some of his family members, and their return to the area that was once their home suggests the ability of Aboriginal communities to adapt, survive, and maintain their connection to their land as well.
W Style Incorporating supernatural and realistic elements, Carpentaria is often described as a work of magical realism. The term was first used in 1925 in relation to visual arts, and in 1949 in association with fiction, and includes any work that synthesizes elements of the supernatural, absurd, fantastic, or mystical with a story that is otherwise rooted in realism. Throughout the novel, Wright fuses the Aboriginal myths with her narrative, making the supernatural an integral part of the reality of the story. As the story opens, for example, the natural landscape of the area is described in terms of indigenous myth, as the “ancestral serpent” carves a channel from the sea into the land and back again, creating in its wake the tidal rivers of the region. In one of these rivers, the reader learns, the “up-to-no-good Mission-bred kids accidentally hanged Cry-baby Sally.” The reference to a contemporary event, the death of Cry-baby Sally, is incorporated into the ongoing tale of the river serpent, whose breath is
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mentioned a beat later. The interconnection between myth and reality is an integral part of the Aboriginal community Wright describes, and of the narrative itself. Carpentaria fuses the magical with the realistic through the figure of Normal Phantom, an elder of the indigenous community, who also serves as the point-ofview narrating character. Phantom lends the story the air of an oral tale, and breathes life into the supernatural-filled stories and legends—both ancient and contemporary—of his people. The supernatural is already a part of Normal Phantom’s reality. His narration is as much infused with the spiritual and mystical as it is with the mundane and commonplace. Through Phantom, Wright allows her complex novel its moments of levity and humor. As a narrator, Phantom has his own biases, and the reader must embrace the overlay of his attitudes and sense of mysticism or attempt to see through it.
W Critical Reception It is often noted that Wright’s Carpentaria, which eventually became an international best seller, was not initially well received by Australian audiences, despite the early critical acclaim it received from Australian reviewers. Jane Perlez, in her 2007 New York Times Book Review assessment, cites the “highly laudatory reviews” that failed to translate into sales. Perlez attributes the initial failure of the novel to the fact that Australian independent bookstores are operated “by political liberals, who have often expressed embarrassment at the sorry treatment of Australia’s indigenous people,” and consequently were unwilling to promote the novel. The novel’s style—its blending of the mystical or supernatural with the realistic—has been a source of much discussion among other critics. Ross Chambers, in a 2008 article for Australian Literary Studies, comments on the way the surrealism or magical realism of Carpentaria may be regarded as an example of the postcolonial appropriation of the surrealist mode. Similarly, Frances Devlin-Glass, in a 2007 review of the novel for Antipodes, explores the work’s “hybridized genres,” questioning whether it is a work of “social realism, magic realism, Aboriginal traditional stories straight or fictionalized.” Devlin-Glass goes on to suggest like Chambers that the novel’s approach is ultimately postcolonial in its appropriation of these genres. Katy Guest, in her assessment of the novel in a 2008 review for the Independent, praises the work as a “massive achievement” but is unable to determine whether it is to be taken as magical realism, an old man’s stories, or simply, a dream. Guest describes the plotting as “absurd” and the narrative as scattered, but also states that the novel is a “monstrous work of genius.” Paul Sharrad evaluates Carpentaria in a 2009 essay for Australian Literary Studies. He states that Wright’s narrative challenges mainstream audiences by “asserting cultural difference from white society” and TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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“speaking through communal, senior and oral voices rather than focusing on an individual tale of selfdevelopment.” In assessing the style of Carpentaria, Sharrad likens Wright’s work to that of Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie—others known for their use of magical realism—and states that like Marquez and Rushdie, Wright transforms “didactic data into symbolic figures that fit with the social practices and narrative devices of the novel.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Allen, Margaret. “The Brothers Up North and the Sisters Down South: The Mackay Family and the Frontier.” Hecate. 1 October 2001. Web. HighBeam Research. 26 July 2010. Chambers, Ross. “‘Isn’t There a Poem about This, Mr. DeMille?’ On Quotation Camp and Colonial Distancing.” Australian Literary Studies 23.4 (2008) 377+. Print. Questia. Web. 27 July 2010. Devlin-Glass, Frances. “Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.” Antipodes 21.1 (June 2007): 82. Print. Guest, Katy. “Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright.” Independent [London]. 25 April 2008. Web. 27 July 2010. “Native Title Reform.” Australian Government: Attorney-General’s Department. Web. 27 July 2010. Perlez, Jane. “Aboriginal Lit.” New York Times Book Review 18 Nov. 2007. Book Review Desk: 31(L). Print. Podemska-Abt, Teresa. “Anti-Nativism in Australian Indigenous Literature.” Kultura—Historia— Globalizacja, no. 7 (2010). Web. 27 July 2010. Ravens, Tara. “NT: Skepticism and Distrust Greets Aboriginal Reforms.” AAP General News (Australia) 22 June 2007. Web. HighBeam Research. 27 Jul. 2010. Sharrad, Paul. “Beyond Capricornia: Ambiguous Promise in Alexis Wright.” Australian Literary Studies 24.1 (Apr. 2009): 52+. Print. Vernay, Jean-Francois. “An Interview with Alexis Wright.” Antipodes 18.2 (Dec. 2004): 119. Print. Wood, Sandy. “Aboriginal Land Rights in Australia.” Human Rights Brief 6.3 (Spring 1999). Web. 27 July 2010. Wyndham, Susan. “Gulf Country’s Voice Shines in Australian Epic.” Sydney Morning Herald 22 June 2007. Web. 27 July 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Devlin-Glass, Frances. “A Politics of the Dreamtime: Destructive and Regenerative Rainbows in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.” Australian Literary Studies
23.4 (2008): 392+. Print. Examines the symbolism and the elements of magical realism in Carpentaria. Joseph, Laura. “Opening the Gates of Hell: Regional Emergences in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter.” Southerly 69.2 (Summer 2009): 66+. Print. Explores the way Wright and Elizabeth Knox, from Australia and New Zealand, respectively, emphasize in their work the transcendence of the regional over the national. Lake, Ed. “Carpentaria: A Mother Load of Mystery.” Telegraph.co.uk 19 Apr. 2008. Web. 27 July 2010. Provides a brief review of Carpentaria in which the work is compared with James Joyce’s Ulysses in terms of its status as a national epic and in the way it employs the particular details of regional space and the habits of regional expression. Gale Resources
“Alexis Wright.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Open Web Sources
The National Native Title Tribunal website is a resource that aids in explaining the issue of native land rights in Australia. The site provides links to pertinent legislation and resources for Aboriginal Australians. http:// www.nntt.gov.au/What-Is-Native-Title/Pages/ Approaches-to-Native-Title.aspx Alexis Wright’s American publisher, Simon and Schuster, provides an author biography, bibliography, and updates regarding the author’s upcoming works. http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Alexis Wright/47814863 The Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade provides a brief overview of the history of indigenous Australians and their relationship with European settlers. http://www.dfat.gov. au/aib/history.html For Further Reading
Heiss, Anita and Peter Minter, eds. Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Allen & Unwin Australia, 2008. Print. The first anthology of Aboriginal Australian literature, Heiss and Minter’s collection spans two centuries of Aboriginal writing. Mahood, Kim. Craft for a Dry Lake. Anchor, 2000. Print. Mahood’s memoir delineates the transformation of her relationship to her Aboriginal ancestry and her sense of connection to the land of the Tanami region, which was her childhood home. Wright, Alexis. “Embracing the Indigenous Vision: Novelist and Artist Alexis Wright Proclaims the Need for Complete Self-Determination by Aboriginal Peoples in Framing and Administering Policies for
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Their Futures.” Meanjin 65.1 (Mar. 2006): 104+. Print. Wright discusses her work with indigenous communities and the challenges they face as they seek to maintain their sovereign rights within Australia.
Aboriginal communities and their conflict with the Europeans who colonized their land. The tensions between Aboriginal spirituality and the Christianity of the colonists is a main focus of the novel.
———. Plains of Promise. U of Queensland P, 1997. Print. Wright’s first novel, this work is concerned with
Catherine Dominic
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Carry Me Down By M. J. Hyland
W Introduction M. J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down, published in 2006, is a firstperson narrative written in the present tense from the perspective of John Egan, an eleven-year-old boy growing up in Ireland in 1971. At nearly six feet, John is unusually tall for his age. Although he has the body of an adult, he still has the mind of a child, something that unsettles his parents, who no longer know quite how to relate to him. Meanwhile, John becomes obsessed with discerning the difference between lies and truth. In part this obsession stems from his own traumatic life, including the pressures of living in poverty and his parents’ marital troubles. John eventually comes to regard himself as a sort of human lie detector, but because he is still very young and literal-minded he lacks the maturity to understand adult nuances and the ability to process his own complex emotions, both of which lead to significant troubles over the course of the novel. Carry Me Down was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, as well as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Eurasia Region). It won the Encore Award for Best Second Book and the Hawthornden Prize for Best Work of Literature.
W Literary and Historical Context
Carry Me Down is written as a coming-of-age novel, and employs a stream of conscious style of narration, using the voice and cadence of a young male narrator. Focusing on the thought processes of eleven-year-old John Egan, the narrative voice in Carry Me Down is very reminiscent of the writing style used by J. D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye. This is particularly true of Hyland’s use of an episodic narrative structure relating a number of mundane, seemingly unconnected events. John Egan’s
narrative voice is also reminiscent of Christopher John Francis Boone, the young protagonist of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime. Similar to other stream-of-consciousness novels, Carry Me Down does not emphasize the context in which the story is set. The reader is aware that the novel is set in Ireland, in the 1970s, but Hyland does not focus on providing situational detail in the novel. In fact, Hyland mentioned in an interview with Andrew Lawless for Three Monkeys Online that she was not “particularly concerned … with time and place” for this book. She insists that she did not “set out to say anything about Irish culture—nothing.” Despite her stated intent, Lawless opined that Carry Me Down provides a “keen psychological profile” of Ireland in the 1970s. Ireland was rife with religious and political conflict during the 1960s and 1970s. After centuries of being a British dominion state, Ireland had split in two during the 1950s. Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland remained under British rule while the rest of the Irish counties declared themselves a republic in 1948. Sentiment for a united Ireland remained strong, however, and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) sponsored years of violent, terrorist attacks on Northern Ireland during the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, in an effort to break ties between the north and England. Despite the violence that characterized Irish history during this time, Ireland’s economy grew significantly during the 1960s and 1970s. Ireland became part of the European Community in 1973. As noted earlier, Hyland does not draw significantly on the social and cultural milieu of 1970s Ireland in Carry Me Down. Her decision to focus closely on the musings of her narrator has been compared unfavorably to similar works set in contemporary Ireland, most notably Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Butcher Boy, by Patrick McCabe (Thompson). While Thompson faults Hyland’s novel for a meandering plot and other shortcomings, she does assert that Carry Me Down “introduces some interesting themes. There are Oedipal
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MAJOR CHARACTERS BRENDAN is John Egan’s best friend, but their relationship breaks down over the course of the book. JOHN EGAN, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, is an abnormally tall, poor, introspective, eleven-year-old boy who becomes obsessed with determining the difference between truth and lies, and thinks of himself as a human lie detector. MR. EGAN, John’s father, is a rough, violent man who drinks too much and cheats on his wife while telling his family that he is studying in order to get a job. John is under the impression that his father does not love him. MRS. EGAN, John’s mother, loves her son, but is frightened by him and does not know how to relate to him. MR. ROCHE is a teacher who serves as an inspiration to John, despite the fact that he is physically violent with some of his other students.
undercurrents when John succeeds in getting his father removed from the flat and moves into his mother’s bed. There is a concern, very relevant today, about the effects upon a child when he is taken into the confidence of adults and told more about family relationships than he is mature enough to understand.” These themes, along with Hyland’s portrayal of adolescence and difficult family life in the novel, have been praised by other reviewers.
W Themes Carry Me Down is a novel that explores the dichotomy between honesty and dishonesty and the impact of telling lies on others. The lies depicted in the novel have thematic resonance, hiding the truth about the relationships in the book. For example, John’s father kills an entire litter of kittens before his wife can return home and discover that her cat has given birth. When John vomits at the sight of this grisly scene, he claims that his reaction is not related to the killing. The truth is, John is appalled because Mr. Egan has told him that he was not bothered by the idea of killing the cats. John is extremely sensitive to lies and throughout the novel, he feels sickened when others lie to him. He is so literal-minded, however, that he has trouble distinguishing between serious lies and white lies, and uses the distinction between “lies” and “truth” as his emotional road map. Late in the novel, his father makes up a story about a pair of socks that he presents to John, and although the intent is to delight John, the action angers him instead. Similarly, John misinterprets other actions throughout the story, and he is not emotionally or intellectually
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mature enough to understand the full implication of people’s actions. Ironically, one of the times his intuition is on target occurs when he realizes that his “Da” is cheating on his mother. Unfortunatly, the truth simply makes his mother furious at John. Hyland also introduces the subtle irony that, no matter how much John claims to hate lying, he habitually lies to cover his tracks. As Mrs. Egan bitterly scoffs, “An eleven-year-old in the body of a grown man who insists on the ridiculous truth and has got into a bad habit of lying” (275).
W Style Carry Me Down is written in first-person present tense, a method that serves to place the reader directly inside the protagonist’s mind, experiencing the events in John’s life, both mundane and traumatic, at the same time that he does, without giving readers any type of buffer. Writing from this vantage point injects readers into the immediate situation with the character, not allowing them any reassurances that the storyteller has ultimately survived the experience at hand. Hyland’s writing style, sparse and direct, additionally serves to enhance the immediacy, the claustrophobia, and the tension within John’s life experiences. Hyland also makes use of the “unreliable narrator”— a literary device common in many postmodern works, in which the narrator is not to be trusted and may even be directly lying to the audience. Besides being a tool by which an author is able to misdirect a reader, the “unreliable narrator” also speaks to the idea that there can never be such a thing as complete truth, because everyone has a different perspective. Because of his youth and inexperience, John thinks he is telling the truth. However, Hyland anticipates that perceptive readers will take John’s words with a grain of salt, being fully aware that John is a young boy who makes certain leaps in judgment. Thus, using the “unreliable narrator” allows Hyland to convey to his readers a fuller picture of what is actually happening. This is particularly true of John’s mental state. From his own point of view, John is completely normal. However, when he attacks his mother, readers will comprehend the full extent of his mental instability, while John remains confused about the reasons and consequences for his actions.
W Critical Reception Carry Me Down met with overwhelming praise upon its release and subsequently won a number of prestigious literary awards. It was also nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Charlotte Moore, in the Spectator, praised Hyland for exploring the “frightening and unsavoury frontier land between childhood and adulthood with unswerving TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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sympathy and clear-sightedness.” Meanwhile, the New Statesman’s Simon Baker was impressed with Hyland’s knack for conveying “a sense of horror even when describing everyday life. She presents us with a family in which weakness and brutality coexist, and portrays a troubled childhood with accuracy and style.” In Booklist, Hazel Rochman declared, “the child’s naïve first-person . . . narrative brings achingly close his helplessness in a powerful adult world.” She went on to applaud the novel for dealing with a complex philosophical issue, that of “pain . . . [being] harder than ignorance. Who needs the truth?” Publishers Weekly called the novel a “piercing testimony to the bewilderment and resiliency of youth.” Its reviewer found John, as a narrator, to be “singular and powerful throughout. . . . By the subtle, satisfying denouement, one is . . . saving a space for . . . [John] among the year’s memorable characters.” Some critics faulted Hyland for a lack of narrative cohesiveness. For example, Entertainment Weekly’s Michelle Kung felt that “Hyland fails to instill . . . [John] and his family with enough empathy for us to be invested in their fates.” A critic in the London Observer wrote,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR M. J. Hyland was born in London to Irish parents. The family moved from Australia to Dublin and back again. Hyland endured an unhappy childhood, with an abusive, alcoholic father and her childhood experiences often inform her work. According to the London Observer, “Hyland specialises in characters fatally out of step, misfits struggling with self-pity and deceit, caught in an undertow of violence and sexual menace.” Her novels are also known for their dense, precise detail. This atmosphere, described by reviewers as almost “claustrophobic,” reverberates throughout her novels, including How the Light Gets In, Carry Me Down, and This Is How. Hyland’s work has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award. She has won several awards, including the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelist Award, the Encore Award for Best Second Book, and the Hawthornden Prize for Best Work of Literature.
This photo shows the demolition of a residential tower in Dublin, Ireland, the setting of the novel Carry Me Down. ª George Carter / Alamy
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“John never quite rings true as a narrator, failing to elicit the suspension of disbelief so vital for a book of this kind.” Furthermore, Guardian reviewer Kate Thompson criticized the narrative for being slow paced and “somewhat meandering, with many repetitive and redundant scenes. . . . A mild, ghoulish curiosity kept me turning the pages, but the novel’s tidy resolution left me with more questions than answers.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Baker, Simon. “Light and Dark.” Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. New Statesman [1996] 135.4791 (8 May 2006): 56+. Print. Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. Publishers Weekly 253.3 (2006): 38. Print. Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. Observer [London] 25 Feb. 2007: 25. Print. Hyland, M. J. Carry Me Down. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006. Print. Kung, Michelle. “Carry Me Down.” Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. Entertainment Weekly 869 (24 Mar. 2006): 74. Print. Lawless, Andrew. “Carry Me Down—M. J. Hyland in Interview.” Three Monkeys Online, May 2007. Web. 30 Nov. 2010. Moore, Charlotte. “The Trouble with Being a LieDetector.” Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. Spectator 29 July 2006. Print. Rochman, Hazel. “Hyland, M. J., Carry Me Down.” Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. Booklist 102.12 (15 Feb. 2006): 44. Print. Thompson, Kate. “Helping Hands: Kate Thompson on a Tale of Disturbed Adolescence: Carry Me Down by M. J. Hyland.” Guardian [London] 22 Apr. 2006: 16. Print. General Reference Center Gold. Web. 1 Sept. 2010. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
“A Boy against the World.” Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. Europe Intelligence Wire 8 Apr. 2006. This review discusses how M. J. Hyland’s troubled childhood informs the narrative of Carry Me Down, and the character development of the protagonist, John, in particular. “Hyland Games.” Scotsman [Edinburgh, Scotland] 11 July 2009: 9. Print. InfoTrac Custom Newspapers. Web. 1 Sept. 2010. This in-depth interview with M. J. Hyland was held when This Is How was released, but its discussion of Hyland’s background and influences is equally applicable to Carry Me Down.
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“I’m a Human Lie Detector, Honest: An Enthralling Novel Tells the Story of a Boy Who Thinks He Has Special Powers.” Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. Observer [London] 23 Apr. 2006: 24. Print. This review analyzes how Carry Me Down functions as a potent and effective character study. “Listening to the Child Within; Fiction.” Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. Times [London] 8 Apr. 2006: 14. Print. This review places Carry Me Down into the context of the coming-of-age novel tradition, discussing the evolution of the child narrator. Scurr, Ruth. “‘You Vomited at the Sight of the Dead Kittens.’” Rev. of Carry Me Down, by M. J. Hyland. Daily Telegraph [London] 22 Apr. 2006: 10. Print. This review focuses on the disturbing imagery in Carry Me Down, exploring how the traumatic events influence John’s obsessions. Gale Resources
“Hyland, M. J. (1968-).” Student Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 2009. From Student Resource CenterCollege Edition Expanded. Web. 30 Aug. 2010. Open Web Sources
M. J. Hyland’s official site includes a significant amount of information, including news, reviews for all of her books, blog postings, and more at http://www. mjhyland.com A comprehensive biography, bibliography, list of awards, and a critical essay on M. J. Hyland can be found online at the British Council Contemporary Writers website. http://www.contemporarywriters.com/ authors/?p=auth5181C8790ebf71D73DjLq2A B4EE9 For Further Reading
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. New York: Vintage, 2003. Print. This forerunner to Carry Me Down is also written in the first-person, told from the perspective of a young boy who has a learning disability. Hyland, M. J. How the Light Gets In. New York: Canongate, 2004. Print. This earlier novel by Hyland deals with themes similar to those presented in Carry Me Down, this time through the character of a sixteen-year-old girl trying to overcome the trauma of having grown up in an unsupportive, verbally abusive family. ———. This Is How. New York: Black Cat, 2009. Print. This Is How reads as a thematic sequel to Carry Me Down, telling the story of a troubled young man who undergoes a mental breakdown at TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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the age of fourteen, and becomes obsessed with mechanics. McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes. New York: Touchstone, 1999. Print. A memoir of a poor boy growing up impoverished in Ireland.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown, 1951. Print. This seminal coming-of-age classic focuses on a troubled young male protagonist struggling to understand the intricacies of the adult world around him. Robert Berg
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Celestial Harmonies By Péter Esterházy
W Introduction Celestial Harmonies (2003) is the title of the English translation of the Hungarian novel Harmonia Caelestis (2000) by the noted postmodernist Péter Esterházy. The complex and often challenging 800-page work is an account of the author’s aristocratic Hungarian family, but it is not a conventional historical narrative. The first of its two parts is an inventive, allusive reflection on all the “fathers” (real and fantastic) of the Esterházy lineage from its rise in seventeenth-century Hungary through its extraordinarily powerful position in European affairs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to its decline in the changing social conditions of the twentieth century. The second part is a more personal account of the author, his father, Mátyás Esterházy, and their life under Communist rule in postwar Hungary. Harmonia Caelestis received the Hungarian Literature Prize and the Sándor Márai Prize, as well as the Premio Circeo in Italy and the Herder Prize in Germany. The English translation by Judith Sollosy was well received by critics and brought Esterházy to the attention of a wider audience.
W Literary and Historical Context
The two parts of Celestial Harmonies deal with history very differently. Part 1, titled “Numbered Sentences from the Lives of the Esterházy Family,” contains 371 passages set in many different times and places. Each passage is organized around an allegorical “father,” who may in any given instance be a mythic figure or a real member of the Esterházy family. The Esterházy line descended from Paul, Fürst Esterházy von Galantha (1635-1713), who was elected regent of Hungary in 1681 and who established the family’s importance by regaining Hungary from the Ottomans. His grandson began the family’s
illustrious patronage of music and the arts, appointing Franz Joseph Haydn to his court in 1761. Haydn went on to become one of the greatest composers of the time while in the service of the Esterházys. During the nineteenth century the immensely wealthy family continued amassing political power and position in Hungary, Austria, and Germany. Count Móric Esterházy, the author’s grandfather, served briefly as prime minister of Hungary during World War I before a series of revolutions destabilized the country. Following World War II, Hungary came under Communist rule, and Péter Esterházy’s family was impoverished. Part 2 of Celestial Harmonies, “The Confessions of an Esterházy Family,” focuses on the difficult life of his father, Mátyás, who was detained as an enemy of the state, beaten, and forced into agricultural labor.
W Themes Julian Evans observes in his Guardian review of the novel that “there are other themes to Celestial Harmonies, questions of homeland, dictatorship, history and how to face it, but Esterházy’s overwhelming business here is with his father.” In part 1, Evans continues, “this father is plural, encompassing all the narrator’s fathers, back to the dynasty’s beginnings.” The plural father is variously depicted as good and bad, real and fantastic, lofty and ridiculous, loving and destructive. He is shown in many different times and places, under circumstances ranging from the ordinary to the extreme. Through the juxtaposition of several hundred passages about “my father,” Esterházy creates a thematic resonance that reveals the universal nature of fatherhood as expressed through the men of one diverse, historic European family. In part 2 the “real” father and the relationship between father and son take over the narrative, serving as the central figures in Esterházy’s exploration of family and depiction of life in a totalitarian regime. Although his
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parents endured hardship and fear during most of the author’s early life, the family is shown to be close and often surprisingly happy. As one commentator, writing in Kirkus Reviews, puts it, “rather than a lament about how the mighty have fallen, the story is a more rueful tale of how the mighty coped.” In this sense Celestial Harmonies is a tribute to the endurance of the Esterházy family, not only through the upheavals of Hungarian history over many centuries but also in its eventual transition from great importance to complete powerlessness.
W Style Barbara Hoffert, in a review for Library Journal, characterizes Celestial Harmonies as “not exactly a novel but more like an extended prose poem on family, nation, and history.” This assessment applies particularly to part 1, which depends almost entirely on allusions, imagery, and inventive language, providing very little in the way of conventional narrative or structural coherence. The 371 passages vary in length (ranging from a few words to several pages), point of view, and tone. Throughout, Esterházy uses material from a wide variety of sources, frequently weaving quotations into the text without direct reference or reworking phrases and sentences drawn from other works of literature. This technique (sometimes referred to as “intertextuality”) is characteristic of Esterházy’s writing in particular and postmodern writing in general. In a concluding section of Celestial Harmonies, the author lists many of the sources from which material was borrowed or incorporated, but he does not provide their location in the text. By this means he creates a kind of identification game for the reader, reflecting the idea that literature is a shared product of human culture. As Marianna Birnbaum observes in World Literature Today, “Esterházy is a magician of the word: each of his sentences may incorporate archaisms, political and street jargon, puns, and his own neologisms.” Although part 2 takes a more conventional approach to storytelling than part 1, it too challenges the reader’s expectations and relies as much on style as on substance. The 201 “chapters” of part 2 move unpredictably through the different times in his father’s life and show events from different perspectives, building up a multilayered view not only of Esterházy’s father but also of their relationship and of the world in which they lived.
MAJOR CHARACTERS MÁTYÁS ESTERHÁZY is the author’s actual father. Born into one of Europe’s most famous and powerful aristocratic families, and later stripped of his wealth and title, Mátyás Esterházy worked in a variety of menial jobs to care for his wife and children. “MY FATHER” is a recurring character in part 1 of the novel. Esterházy applies the characterization to many different men, both real and imagined, in order to create a composite image of the Esterházy patrimony and of the universal qualities of fatherhood. “MY FATHER’S SON” is a recurring characterization that refers to the author, Péter Esterházy.
W Critical Reception
Images
Despite its challenging style, Celestial Harmonies has been admired by most critics. In a starred review Kirkus describes the novel as “daunting at first, then richly rewarding,” calling it “a major achievement.” Publishers Weekly also stars the work, asserting that “Esterhazy has
created a vast anti-epic splicing the fine-grained nostalgia of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory with the anarchic spirit of Looney Toons.” The broad range of interpretations applied to the novel is demonstrated by James Crossley’s
Péter Esterházy, author of Celestial Harmonies. Ulf Andersen/Getty
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Celestial Harmonies
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Péter Esterházy was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1950, shortly after Hungary had effectively become a client state of the Soviet Union. He finished secondary school in 1968 and then studied mathematics at the Eötvös Loránd University, in Budapest, where he graduated with a BS degree in 1974. For the next four years he worked as a mathematician in the Informatics Institute of the Ministry of Furnaces and Heavy Machinery, but during this period he also began writing. His work was soon published in literary journals, and by 1978 he began writing full time. His inventive, personalized version of postmodernism soon became admired in Europe, but his work was not published in English until the 1990s. Esterházy and Gitti Reen, an artist, were married in 1973 and have three children. Esterházy had believed all his life that his father, Mátyás, was an opponent of the Communist regime and that he had been punished for his resistance. Shortly after completing Celestial Harmonies, however, Esterházy learned from the release of previously secret government documents that his father had been a Communist informant. In 2002 Esterházy published Avitott Kiadás (Corrected edition), which he called an “appendix” to Celestial Harmonies. In the new volume he combines extracts from his father’s reports to the government with his own comments and an account of the process by which he came to terms with this unexpected revelation. Although Esterházy is unsparing in his assessment of Mátyás’s double life, his account retains affection and a measure of understanding.
assessment in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which focuses on the novel’s narrative scope. Crossley contends that “the two parts of the novel . . . seem to address all the aspects of human endeavor, which means that the most appropriate adjective to employ in describing this novel is epic.” The Guardian reviewer Julian Evans acknowledges both the epic and the antic qualities of the work, noting that its “expansive, deeply coloured, visionary picture” is enhanced by “Esterházy’s always flickering lightness and humour.” A few commentators, however, feel that Celestial Harmonies takes on too much and does not fully succeed. A brief review in the New Yorker, for example, concludes that “ultimately, Esterházy’s attempt to explode epic until it resembles the shards and mirrors of his own style doesn’t quite live up to its ambition, though it yields many extraordinary moments.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works Cited
Birnbaum, Marianna D. Rev. of Harmonia Caelestis, by Péter Esterházy. World Literature Today 74.3 (2000): 611-12. Print.
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Rev. of Celestial Harmonies, by Péter Esterházy. Kirkus Reviews 15 Dec. 2003: 1412. Print. Rev. of Celestial Harmonies, by Péter Esterházy. New Yorker. Condé Nast Digital, 10 May 2004. Web. 15 Oct. 2010. Rev. of Celestial Harmonies, by Péter Esterházy. Publishers Weekly 2 Feb. 2004: 58. Print. Crossley, James. Rev. of Celestial Harmonies, by Péter Esterházy. Review of Contemporary Fiction 24.3 (2004): 132+. Print. Evans, Julian. Rev. of Celestial Harmonies, by Péter Esterházy. Guardian [London] 12 June 2004: 27. Print. Hoffert, Barbara. Rev. of Celestial Harmonies, by Péter Esterházy. Library Journal 15 March 2004: 104. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
Bazsányi, Sándor. “A Literary Approach towards Aristocratism.” Hungarian Literature Online. Hlo.hu, 1 Feb. 2006. Web. 15 Oct. 2010. This thoughtful analysis provides a Hungarian view of the novel. Bermel, Neil. “Fathers and Sons.” Rev. of Celestial Harmonies, by Péter Esterházy. New York Times Book Review 30 May 2004: 13. Print. Bermel’s extended review, which focuses on Esterházy’s postmodernism, is positive, on balance. Bernstein, Michael André. “Dynasty.” New Republic 12 April 2004: 42-45. Print. In a long and serious essay, Bernstein argues that Celestial Harmonies and Avitott Kiadás (Corrected edition), must be read together. Kavenna, Joanna. “The Giant My Father: Péter Esterházy’s Flotsam and Jetsam of Family Memoirs.” Times Literary Supplement 30 Apr. 2004: 21-22. Print. Kavenna’s thorough consideration of the text finds both messiness and splendor, resulting in a mixed verdict. Zamoyski, Adam. “Voyage round My Fathers.” Rev. of Celestial Harmonies, by Péter Esterházy. Spectator 8 May 2004: 45. Print. In a generally positive assessment, Zamoyski finds the novel both enthralling and difficult. Gale Resources
Kappanyos, András. “Péter Esterházy.” TwentiethCentury Eastern European Writers: Third Series. Ed. Steven Serafin. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 232. “Péter Esterházy.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2005. “Péter Esterházy.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 251. Detroit: Gale, 2008. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Celestial Harmonies Open Web Sources
An interview with the author is available at Words without Borders. http://wordswithoutborders.org Hungarian Literature Online offers excerpts from the novel. http://www.hlo.hu A video of Péter Esterházy talking with the poet Wayne Koestenbaum can be viewed at the New York Public Library’s Web site. http://www.nypl.org For Further Reading
Aczel, Richard. “Hungary.” Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing. Ed. John Sturrock. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996: 194-202. Print. This chapter discusses the broad outlines of Hungarian literature during the latter half of the twentieth century and places Esterházy’s writing in context.
societies provides a helpful background for understanding Esterházy’s work. Esterházy, Péter. Helping Verbs of the Heart. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. Print. The first of Esterházy’s works to be widely available in English, this avant-garde novella revolves around his mother’s death. Land, Thomas. “Beaten into Betrayal?” Times Literary Supplement 13 Sept. 2002: 24. Print. Land’s review discusses Avitott Kiadás (Corrected edition), in which Esterházy documents the discovery that his father had been an informant. Molnár, Miklós. A Concise History of Hungary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. The complex political, geographic, and social history of Hungary is well explained in this accessible volume.
Boyers, Robert. The Dictator’s Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Print. Boyers’s examination of fiction in totalitarian
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The Changeling By Kenzaburo Oe
W Introduction The Changeling (2010), originally published in Japan in 2000 as Torikae ko, chronicles the friendship between two Japanese men over five decades. The narrator, Kogito, is a successful writer married to the sister of his friend Goro, a famous filmmaker. Goro has developed the habit of sending Kogito recordings of his reflections on their shared experiences. When Goro unexpectedly commits suicide, Kogito returns to the tapes, reviewing them obsessively in an effort to understand his friend’s life and death. As he listens to the recordings Kogito is drawn back into the years following World War II, during which he and Goro became involved in a charismatic leader’s attempt to launch a symbolic suicide attack on the occupying forces. Trying to understand Goro’s suicide forces him to revisit and attempt to come to terms with those traumatic events from long ago. The novel is set in present-day Japan and Germany, with flashbacks to Kogito’s and Goro’s youth. Drawing heavily on author Kenzaburo Oe’s life, The Changeling explores issues such as artistic production, death, friendship, and change. The novel has been praised for its meditative qualities and its blurring of the boundaries between life and art.
W Literary and Historical Context
Although The Changeling is set primarily in twenty-firstcentury Japan, Kogito’s memories carry him back to the years following Japan’s defeat in World War II. With the occupation of the Allied forces came the restructuring of the Japanese government and the transfer of power away from the emperor, whose role became purely symbolic. During this time democratic principles, such as universal suffrage, were also introduced. In the novel, as the
occupation winds to a close, Goro and Kogito become involved with a group of rebels planning an attack on the unchallenged American occupiers. They are aided by an American soldier named Peter, who is motivated by his desire for Goro. In what turns out to be one of the defining moments in both of their lives, Goro and Kogito learn that some of the rebels want to turn on Peter, knowing they can use his desire for Goro to lure him to his death. is an accomplished student of world literature, Oe and his novel includes references to numerous works of literature and translation. Goro and Kogito engage in extended discussions of Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), a French poet known for his experiments with language and poetic form. Near the close of the novel Kogito discovers Goro’s rendering of their discussion of Rimbaud’s “Adieu” in his unfinished screenplay and interprets it as an admission of his friend’s planned suicide. The work’s governing allusion, however, surfaces only at the novel’s end. Kogito returns from Germany, where he has spent one hundred days “quarantining” himself from Goro’s tapes, with a copy of Maurice Sendak’s Outside over There. The book tells the story of a girl named Ida whose baby sister is stolen away by goblins while in her care. After Ida discovers that her sister has been replaced with a goblin changeling, she undertakes a dangerous quest to free her sibling. The changeling appeals to Goro’s sister and Kogito’s wife, Chikashi, as a metaphor for her brother’s postwar transformation, and “outside over there” becomes a metaphor for the dark world of trauma that Goro experienced among the rebels in his youth.
W Themes Death is one of the foremost themes of Oe’s novel. While Goro’s suicide is the most visible instance of this subject in the work, discussions of suicide and death pervade many of the conversations that take place
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MAJOR CHARACTERS DAIO is a former disciple of Kogito’s father and a charismatic leader determined to carry out a symbolic attack against the occupying forces aimed at raising Japanese anger against the occupiers. PETER is an American soldier who aids Daio’s cause, apparently out of his desire for Goro. Although his fate is never discovered, one of the two endings to Goro’s screenplay suggests that he was brutally murdered by the rebels. TAGAME is the personified recording device that connects Kogito to his deceased friend Goro. Named after a species of water beetle that its headphones resemble, the device becomes Kogito’s constant companion, frustrating his wife and frightening his son. AKARI CHOKO is Kogito’s son. Although a birth defect left him cognitively challenged, Akari shows considerable musical talent. CHIKASHI CHOKO is Kogito’s wife, who is known for her straightforward, no-nonsense approach to life. At the end of the novel she clarifies many points that her husband had not been able to see. KOGITO CHOKO is the narrator of Oe’s novel, whose experiences roughly parallel the author’s own. The character’s name is derived from the French philosopher René Descartes’s famous line, “cogito ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am.” In The Changeling, the character of Goro is based on Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami, the real-life brother-in-law of author Kenzabur o Oe. ª TWPhoto/Corbis
between the characters both before and after Goro’s suicide. Kogito witnesses the tragedy of his friend’s slow decline from cancer and feels the composer’s pain at having to scale back his artistic endeavors in creating an “Abridged Composition Plan for the Remainder of My Life.” It is also revealed at critical times during the novel that those around Kogito have feared that he would commit suicide, even before the death of his friend. After Goro’s death Chikashi, begging her husband to end his obsession with Goro’s recordings, comments that “it isn’t that I think you’re doing these late-night séances as a way of gearing up for your own journey to the Other Side, but still . . . ” Later she associates Goro’s death with the dark trauma of “outside over there,” understanding that such a place holds power over Kogito as well. Kogito, on the other hand, clings to the belief that the “other side” referenced by Goro in his final tapes is a positive state through which the two might continue to communicate. Tied into the theme of death is the metaphor of the changeling. At the end of the novel Chikashi explains
GORO HANAWA is the brother of Chikashi and the close friend of Kogito. Before committing suicide he records a number of cassette tapes for Kogito that reflect on his memories of their relationship as well as events from his own life. He leaves behind the storyboards for the film he never made, and his notes suggest the truth of the trauma he experienced.
the breakthrough she experienced when first encountering Outside over There, immediately relating to the protagonist’s feelings of responsibility for her stolen sibling. She realizes that Goro was himself a changeling, forever altered by his postwar experiences. She explains that she hoped that in giving birth to her first child, she would be giving birth to Goro as he once was—a desire that deepened her depression when her child was born disabled. At the end of the novel Chikashi encounters a young woman named Ura, with whom Goro had shared a highly erotic but unconsummated relationship in Berlin. When she finds out the woman is pregnant and has been abandoned by the child’s father and her parents, Chikashi offers to help support her because Ura, like Chikashi, believes the child will bring new life to Goro.
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The Changeling
ABOUT THE AUTHOR was born on January 31, 1935, in the small Oe Kenzaburo village of Ose, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, where he was raised with the stories of his ancestors and the history of his birthplace. These stories deeply affected his later career as a was exposed to writer. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, Oe the democratic principles of the new Japan, which inspired him to leave his village for Tokyo. There he studied French literature and began to write. His first novel, Memushiri kouchi (Budnippng, lamb shooting), was published in 1958 and depicts the continued to write devastation of war on young people. Oe novels, short stories, and essays, and his work came to the attention of international audiences. In 1994 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Changeling shares with Oe’s many other works an interest in history and philosophy and a reliance on autobiographical elements.
In the story, Goro commits suicide by jumping off the roof of an office building. Sincere Image
W Style The Changeling is told in the third person, with the narrator’s focus remaining almost exclusively on Kogito until Chikashi takes over in the novel’s concluding chapters. This unexpected shift contrasts the different styles and approaches to life of husband and wife, shedding light on their clearly troubled relationship while adding important information to the story. In several concise chapters Chikashi outlines a version of Goro’s life and experiences that makes clear the limits of Kogito’s knowledge and interpretation. Several critics have noted that her version is much more enlightening than the many chapters devoted to her husband’s memories and philosophical reflections. The novel is, in part, a work of fictional biography that draws heavily on the author’s own life, depicting characters and events that would have been familiar to like his protagonist Kogito, is a Japanese readers. Oe, well-known novelist, and many of the events that Kogito describes are based on the writer’s own experiences. Goro is also clearly based on a real person—Oe’s brother-in-law, the Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami, who killed himself in 1997. Furthermore, Oe’s oldest son, Hikari, was born with a birth defect that left him cognitively impaired. Like Hikari, Akari, the son of Kogito, develops a talent for music that transcends his disabilities. The Changeling is also a philosophical novel, or novel of ideas. In philosophical fiction issues more commonly raised in philosophical texts are central to the narrative. Notable works in this tradition, which can be traced back as early as the fourth century, include Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-1834), Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus
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Spoke Zarathustra (originally published in German as Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883-1885), and Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea (first released in French as La Nausée, 1938). The Changeling’s defining philosophical issues include the meaning of death and the importance of art.
W Critical Reception Upon its English publication The Changeling was praised by commentators for its intricacy and philosophical style. Many lauded the book for its concluding shift to Chikashi’s consciousness. Akshita Nanda’s review of the novel in the Straits Times, praises its understated complexity, describing the work as “surprisingly light yet multi-layered.” Peter Pierce’s review in the Sydney Morning Herald calls the book “an illuminating study of art, friendship, and identity” that ultimately achieves “a kind of serenity and optimism.” Not all critics reacted positively to The Changeling, however. Many were bothered by the book’s many unresolved problems and unanswered questions. Writing in the Washington Post, for example, Michael Dirda suggests that the book “sadly lacks a clear and compelling narrative line” and that it “isn’t only long, it feels long.” Others found fault with the obscurity of the book’s allusions, particularly for English-speaking readers. In a related critique some commentators have suggested that the novel suffers from an awkward translation. Christopher Tayler’s review of the novel in the Guardian, for example, critiques Deborah Boliver Boehm’s translation, TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Changeling
particularly her attempts to explain Japanese culture to an English-speaking audience. Tayler suggests that Boehm “often appears to be clumsily incorporating footnote-type information into the text.” This criticism is echoed by Nanda, who notes that “a few chunks of explanatory text would have been better placed as footnotes.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kenzabur ——— “Oe o.” Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature, Part 3. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 331. (1935-).” Contemporary Literary “Kenzabur o Oe Criticism. Ed. Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 187. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 149-283. Literature Criticism Online. Web. 28 Aug. 2010.
Works Cited
Open Web Sources
Bares All.” Dirda, Michael. “Through a Thin Veil, Oe Washington Post 25 Mar. 2010: C10. Print.
The online magazine Bookslut offers a review of the novel that describes it as a complex, difficult read full of obscure allusions but praises it as worth the effort. http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/ 2010_04_015958.php page on Grove/Atlantic’s Web site The Kenzabur o Oe provides a biographical sketch and bibliography, an overview of the author’s major works and awards, and study guides for some of his better-known works. http://www.groveatlantic.com/grove/bin/wc.dll? groveproc˜genauth˜571˜0
Nanda, Akshita. “Till Death Do Us Part.” Rev. of The Straits Times [SingaChangeling, by Kenzabur o Oe. pore] 4 July 2010: n. pag. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 28 Aug. 2010. Kenzabur Oe, o. The Changeling. Trans. Deborah Boliver Boehm. New York: Grove, 2010. Print. Pierce, Peter. “Reflections on a Life Revisited.” Sydney Morning Herald 14 Aug. 2010: 32. Print. Tayler, Christopher. Rev. of The Changeling, by Guardian [London] 12 June 2010: Kenzabur o Oe. 10. Print. Additional Resources
The official Web Site of the Nobel Prize features brief and his work. http://nobel information about Oe prize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1994/ oe-bio.html
Criticism and Reviews
For Further Reading
Carrigan, Henry L., Jr. Rev. of The Changeling, by Library Journal 1 Apr. 2010: 69+. Kenzabur o Oe. Lauds the novel for its exploration of the relationship between the past and present, and likens it to works by Czech writer Milan Kundera and German author Günter Grass. New Yorker Rev. of The Changeling, by Kenzabur o Oe. 29 Mar. 2010: 101. Notes favorably the novel’s autobiographical qualities. Publishers Rev. of The Changeling, by Kenzabur o Oe. Weekly 30 Nov. 2009: 26. Offers incidents from the author’s life as context for the novel.
Keene, Donald. The Pleasure of Japanese Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Print. Developed from his lectures on the same topic, Keene’s book explores the origins and aesthetics of Japanese literature. Oe, Kenzabur o. The Silent Cry: A Novel. Trans. John Bester. New York: Harper, 1974. Print. This earlier focuses on the relationship between two novel by Oe adult brothers whose lives take different paths.
McCulloch, Alison. “Fiction Chronicle.” Rev. of The New York Times Book Changeling, by Kenzabur o Oe. Review 16 May 2010: 28(L). Praises the contemplative nature of the novel. Olson, Ray. Rev. of The Changeling, by Kenzabur o Oe. Booklist 1 Mar. 2010: 48. Commends the novel’s merging of elements of the autobiographical novel and the roman à clef. Gale Resources
Kenzabur Hirano, Hidehisa. “Oe o.” Japanese Fiction Writers since World War II. Ed. Van C. Gessel. Detroit: Gale, 1997. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 182.
Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2001. Print. This nonfiction volume provides a history of Japanese cinema, examining popular films and prominent Japanese directors, including Oe’s brother-in-law Juzo Itami, on whom the character of Goro was based. Toland, John. The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. New York: Random, 1970. Print. Toland’s work of nonfiction chronicles Japanese history in the years leading up to and during World War II. Williamson, Kate T. A Year in Japan. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2006. Williamson’s journal of her year in Japan offers insight into the people and culture of the country in which The Changeling is set.
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Greta Gard
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Child 44 By Tom Rob Smith
W Introduction A murder mystery set in the 1950s in the Stalinist Soviet Union, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 (2008) has been regarded as a work more complex and literary than the typical novel in this genre. The novel centers around MGB (state security police) officer Leo Demidov, an ideologue who investigates what he is told to investigate and dutifully hides whatever he is told to make disappear. Demidov adheres to the Soviet notion that crime, except for that related to political challenges to the State, does not exist in the workers’ paradise that is the socialist republic. In the course of pressuring the father of a dead boy to rescind his insistence that the child has been murdered, Demidov is drawn into the perplexing mystery of the child’s death. Forced to investigate his own wife in order to prove his loyalty to the State, Demidov refuses to implicate her in any wrongdoing. His insubordination, which would normally have severe consequences, is punished in the aftermath of Stalin’s death, and consequently results only in a demotion and relocation from Moscow to a remote village. He resumes his investigation into what he now believes is a string of serial, ritualized killings of children, while continuing to struggle against the interference of Vasili Nikitin, an MGB agent investigating Demidov and his wife. At the novel’s conclusion, Demidov is revealed to be one of the two boys in the 1930s vignette with which the novel opens, the older brother of the boy who grew up to be the serial killer Demidov has been chasing.
W Literary and Historical Context
Although Tom Rob Smith’s novel is set in the 1950s, the historical figure upon which the story is loosely based was a Russian serial killer who murdered over fifty people in the
1970s and 1980s. Andrei Chikatilo, who became known as the Ripper of Rostov, murdered and cannibalized women and children. Chikatilo was later tried and executed for the crimes. Smith takes the notion of this type of killer and situates him in the Stalinist Soviet Union during a time period in which violent crimes were ignored by the State. To admit that such crime existed in what was ostensibly a worker’s paradise, an ideal communal state of existence, would be to admit that Soviet socialism was a failure. In Smith’s novel, then, the government that allows such crimes to occur and instead punishes innocents who speak out against the government, becomes the true villain. Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Following Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin, then the general secretary of the Communist Party, portrayed himself as Lenin’s heir and gradually consolidated power. Under his leadership, the people of the Soviet Union suffered many abuses. He forced the collectivization of agriculture and oversaw the rapid industrialization of the country. In the 1930s, during what became known as the Great Terror, Stalin purged the Communist Party of its so-called enemies—a move that led to execution or exile to labor camps for countless citizens. Despite the emaciated state of the Red Army and his lack of preparedness for Adolf Hitler’s invasion in 1941, Stalin led the Soviet Union to victory over the Nazis, but at a huge cost. In 2010, on the anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany, a day known as Victory Day, Russian President Medvedev offered harsh criticism of the Soviet Union, Communism, and particularly Stalin, an attack that stood in sharp contrast to the more positive assessment offered by Medvedev’s predecessor, the former president and now prime minister Vladimir Putin. According to a 2010 article by Tony Halpin in the United Kingdom’s online journal the Times, “Mr. Medvedev said that Stalin had committed unforgivable crimes regardless of any progress made by the Soviet Union under his rule.” Medvedev further condemns the “mass crimes against the people” for which Stalin was responsible.
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Child 44
MAJOR CHARACTERS ANDREI is introduced to readers as a young boy. He avoids contemplating the horrors his village is experiencing— starvation, disease—by hiding in his room with a deck of cards given to him by his father. Andrei perpetually waits for his older brother, Pavel, to play with him, but Pavel is always busy. Andrei is perceived as clumsy and stupid, but in reality he simply needs glasses. Throughout the course of the novel, messages are sent to Pavel in the form of victims of a serial killer, who is in fact Andrei. As Andrei tells Pavel, his goal in life is to make Pavel regret abandoning Andrei during their childhood. ARKADY is the little boy who eventually becomes known in Demidov and Nesterov’s investigation as Child 44, or the 44th victim of the serial killer Demidov pursues. LEO DEMIDOV/PAVEL is the protagonist of the novel. Attacked and later raised by the man who would have murdered him, Leo begins a new life when he is taken to Moscow. After growing up in fear, he becomes a soldier, and eventually a war hero. Promoted to the rank of officer for the secret State police, Demidov arrests anyone who is suspected of questioning the government or threatening the illusions the government wishes to sustain, and he does so knowing that horrible fates—in prisons, work camps, or at the hands of torturers or executioners—will meet those he has arrested. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin with a young girl. Child 44 is a murder mystery novel that takes place in the Stalinist Soviet Union of the 1950s. Henry Guttmann/Getty Images
W Themes In Child 44, Smith intertwines the theme of personal redemption with that of government corruption. The protagonist’s loyalty to a corrupt state is not defended, but portrayed bluntly. Demidov knows that the fear he fuels is an effective means of controlling the people. Yet he seems to believe in the notion of a greater good; he views himself as serving a higher cause, one that ultimately benefits the society in which he lives. However, faced with the murder of a child, along with having to investigate his own wife, Demidov’s feelings about justice and truth begin to change. The mechanism through which this personal transformation happens is the State itself, combined with Demidov’s growing understanding of its corrupt nature. Under Stalin’s rule, Demidov likely would have been executed, but Stalin’s death provides a reprieve for Demidov, and the agents responsible for his punishment send him into exile with his wife instead of a work camp or ordering his immediate death. In the small town to which he has been sent, Demidov discovers that another child has died, and that this murder has been covered up as well. As the political corruption he faces becomes undeniable,
RAISA DEMIDOV is Leo’s wife. Her relationship with her husband evolves as the novel progresses. She admits to having married him out of fear; through the course of the novel, she becomes an object of Leo’s investigation, as he is forced to prove his loyalty to the state by implicating Raisa in political misdeeds. While he suspects her of infidelity, the State suspects her of espionage. At the end of the novel, she and Leo seek to adopt two children whose parents were killed as a result of Leo’s actions. GENERAL NESTEROV is a militia officer with whom Leo Demidov works to solve the murders, although their cooperative relationship takes time to develop. Nesterov enables Demidov to continue the investigation by helping Demidov and Raisa escape, when the nature of the investigation—that it is focusing on a serial killer, and that there are no firm suspects—makes it dangerous to pursue. VASILI NIKITIN, an MGB agent, is Demidov’s rival and enemy, and charges Raisa Demidov with espionage. Demidov is tasked by Nikitin to verify this claim. Once Leo and Raisa become enemies of the state, Nikitin doggedly hunts them, following their trail to Andrei’s home. As Nikitin is about to shoot them, Andrei stabs and kills Nikitin.
Demidov’s road to personal redemption becomes clearer. While pursuing the case puts him and his wife in danger, Demidov is driven by a desire to arrive at the truth, rather
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Child 44
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born on February 19, 1979, in London to a Swedish mother and an English father, both antique dealers, Tom Rob Smith was raised in London. He graduated from Cambridge University in 2001, and spent a scholarship-funded year writing. He worked as television assistant storyliner before landing a position that sent him to Cambodia, as a British Broadcasting Corporation writer on a local soap opera. After publishing Child 44 in 2008, Smith sold the film rights to director Ridley Scott. He published his second novel, The Secret Speech, in 2009.
than the fabrications of the State. He seeks to stop the killer before more children are killed. The focus of the novel, the stolen innocence of children, is another thematic thread that is woven throughout the work. In the vignette with which the novel opens, the two impoverished boys are forced to learn about loss, hunger, and death at a very young age. The older boy, Pavel, has had to take on the role of the man of the house following his father’s death, while the younger boy, Andrei, idolizes his older brother. While he is hunting a cat for food, Pavel is caught, beaten and taken away, himself destined to become food for a couple’s starving son. When Pavel’s would-be murderer discovers that his own son has died, he and his wife raise Pavel as their own child. Andrei is left with a grieving mother, who blames her younger son for Pavel’s disappearance. Andrei grows up to become the serial child killer whom Leo/Pavel, is hunting. The lives of forty-four children are cut short, ended torturously, as Andrei tries to get the attention of his brother, whom he strongly suspects works for the MGB. Smith indicts the State for this tragic loss of innocence—if the Soviet government had allowed for the notion that crime exists, Andrei would have been arrested years before he killed so many innocent people.
goes beyond the scope of a typical murder mystery. The personal transformation of Demidov, from a Stalinist automaton to a thinking, caring individual, is the primary feature that allows the novel to transcend the traditional boundaries of the genre. From the omniscient narrator point-of-view, Smith explores the emotional conflicts not only of Demidov, but of other, often minor characters as well, fleshing out details often lost in the hurried pace of many genre mysteries. Such a narrative strategy lends the story emotional weight and highlights Smith’s central theme of the brutality of the State.
W Critical Reception Long-listed for the Man Booker prize in 2008, Smith’s Child 44 has been praised by some critics as a genre novel with literary overtones. Critics such as Barry Forshaw, in a 2008 article for the Independent, find that despite its status as a “crime novel,” the work “has the texture of more serious writing.” Janet Maslin, in a 2008 New York Times review, describes Smith’s novel as “tightly woven,” and goes on to praise the work’s complexities and plot twists, although the critic does fault Smith’s prose as “slightly ponderous.” Similarly, Marilyn Stasio, in a 2008 piece for the New York Times Book Review, states that some portions of the novel suffer from a “static and wordy” style. Stasio, however, praises the tightening of the prose as the novel’s plot advances. In these later sections of the book, Smith’s style becomes “more fluid and cinematic,” Stasio argues. Smith’s plot development is a source of commendation among critics as well. Thomas Gaughan, in a 2008 review for Booklist, finds the pace of the plot to be “relentless,” while Henry Sutton in a 2008 article for the Mirror, describes the work as “tense, atmospheric, inventive, and surprisingly timely.” Commenting on the deeper thematic concerns of the novel, Andrew Nagorski, in a 2008 Newsweek article characterizes Smith’s work “as a penetrating deconstruction of the myths of what passed for justice in the Soviet Union.” BIBLIOGRAPHY
W Style
Works Cited
Although Smith’s work is ostensibly a work of genre fiction—a murder mystery—its prose style, in combination with some of its themes, has led to it being regarded as a literary novel as well. The work is written from the perspective of an omniscient, third-person narrator, providing Smith with access to the thoughts of all his characters. In focusing on the crisis of conscience the protagonist endures, Smith’s novel shares “the preoccupation, in fact, of many a literary novel,” states Barry Forshaw in a 2008 review of Child 44 for the Independent. The fact that the novel also made the long list for the Man Booker prize is indicative that the novel
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Forshaw, Barry. “Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith.” Independent [London] 14 Apr. 2008. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. Gaughan, Thomas. Rev. of Child 44. Booklist 104.11 (1 Feb. 2008): 4. Print. Halpin, Tony. “Medvedev Denounces Stalin for ‘Mass Crimes against the Russian People.’” Times [London] 8 May 2010. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. “Joseph Stalin.” BBC History: Historic Figures. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. Maslin, Janet. “Forget It, Comrade. This Is Moscow.” New York Times 8 May 2008. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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Child 44
Nagorski, Andrew. “When a Hunter Gets Captured by the Game.” Newsweek 2 May 2008. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. Smith, Tom Rob. Child 44. London: Simon and Schuster, 2008. Print. Stasio, Marilyn. “Forbidden Questions.” New York Times Book Review 4 May 2008: 26(L). Print. Sutton, Henry. “Books: Red Menace; Book of the Week, Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith.” Mirror 29 Feb. 2008: 11. Print. Questia. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. Additional Resources
Open Web Sources
The Biography Channel’s Web site, at www.biography. com, offers a brief biography of the serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, the murderer upon whom Smith loosely based his novel. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, at www. soviethistory.org, explores critical events in the history of the Soviet Union, including detailed coverage of Stalin’s rule. Tom Rob Smith’s Web site offers biographical information, news of upcoming events, and a complete bibliography of Smith’s works. http://www. tomrobsmith.com
Criticism and Reviews
Rev. of Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith. Kirkus Reviews 1 Mar. 2008. Contends that despite the unlikely coincidences in the novel, Child 44 is commendable for its exciting pace and fascinating setting. Rev. of Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith. Publishers Weekly 255.9 (3 Mar. 2008): 29. Print. Favorable review of Smith’s Child 44 in which the anonymous critic praises Smith’s plot, characterization, and historical detail. Conaty, Barbara. Rev. of Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith. Library Journal 133.5 (15 Mar. 2008): 63. Print. Offers a brief overview of Smith’s novel and praises the pace and plotting of the story. Geard, Amanda. “Thriller Set against Sinister Backdrop of Stalin’s Russia.” Cape Times 5 Dec. 2008. HighBeam Research. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. Review of Child 44 in which Smith’s thorough research is applauded. Guttridge, Peter. “In Pursuit of a Russian Ripper.” Observer [London] 2 Mar. 2008. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. Commends Smith’s novel as an exciting, complex thriller, and provides a brief interview with the author. Gale Resources
“Tom Rob Smith.” Contemporary Authors. Ed. Elisabeth Fuller. Vol. 282. Detroit: Gale, 2009: 387-89. Print. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 21 Aug. 2010.
For Further Reading
McCauley, Martin. Stalin and Stalinism. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 2003. Print. Originally published in 1982, McCauley’s work studies the way Stalin transformed the Soviet Union and its interpretation of socialism. McCauley examines both the advances made in the realm of industrialization and the brutality of Stalin’s regime. Pridemore, William Alex. Ruling Russia: Law, Crime, and Justice in a Changing Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Print. Pridemore explores the way the dramatic changes in Russian society, in terms of culture, politics, and economics, shaped the evolution of its legal and criminal justice systems. Smith, Martin Cruz. Gorky Park. New York: Random House, 1981. Print. Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 has been compared to this novel by Martin Cruz Smith, in which homicide investigator Arkady Renko faces threats from the KGB and other sources as he pursues the perpetrator of a triple homicide in Moscow. Like Child 44, Gorky Park is the first novel in a series of thrillers featuring a recurring investigatorprotagonist. Smith, Tom Rob. The Secret Speech. London: Simon and Schuster, 2009. Print. Smith’s second thriller resumes the story of Leo Demidov, the protagonist of Child 44, and his family, who once again find themselves at the center of a web of crime and political intrigue. Catherine Dominic
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The Children’s Book By A. S. Byatt
W Introduction A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009) is an intricate portrait of several families living through a time of profound social change, from the last few years of the Victorian era to the end of World War I. Byatt, a prolific author who won the Man Booker Prize for her immensely popular novel Possession (1990), took several years to complete The Children’s Book. The result pleased many reviewers but disappointed some, who found the work overly didactic. The main character, Olive Wellwood, is a successful writer of fairy tales, a social idealist, and the mother of a large family. She is also the center of a complicated social network that becomes part of the narrative. Through this large cast of characters, Byatt depicts aesthetic and political movements of the time and explores the complexities of creative life. As destructive secrets chip away at the seemingly enlightened existence of the Wellwoods, the families become increasingly entangled. In the end the events of World War I eclipse the domestic and artistic dramas created by the characters. The Children’s Book was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2009.
W Literary and Historical Context
The Children’s Book begins in 1895, during Britain’s transition from the late Victorian tradition of repression to the social ferment of the Edwardian era (1901–1910), and ends by portraying the impact of World War I (1914–1918) on the lives of the characters. Several cultural developments of the period are critical components of the novel, in particular the Arts and Crafts movement and Fabianism, both of which reached their peak of influence between 1880 and 1910. The Arts and Crafts movement promoted a return to simpler principles
of design and a more authentic approach to workmanship. It had a strong impact on aesthetic trends not only in Britain but also internationally. Many of its proponents opposed industrialization, emphasizing the social value of handwork, and some pursued such utopian ideas as the formation of craft communities for artisans. In this respect the Arts and Crafts movement shared common ground with socialist groups such as the Fabian Society. Founded in 1884, the society advocated gradual economic reform and social transformation rather than revolution. Among its members were literary notables George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf. The novel also addresses the era’s changing view of women and children. A romanticized ideal of childhood innocence emerged during this period, but at the same time, children were often neglected—left to the care of nannies and boarding schools or exploited through child labor. Women began to seek higher education and to campaign for the right to vote, establishing the foundations of the feminist movement in England. A historical figure who was engaged with many of these social developments, children’s author and Fabianist Edith Nesbit, served as an inspiration for the character of Olive Wellwood.
W Themes An ambitious work, The Children’s Book explores the tensions between men and women, parents and children, art and life, conformity and individuality, and appearance and reality. By structuring the novel around four households—those of Olive and Humphry Wellwood, Humphry’s brother Basil, the Fludds, and Major Prosper—Byatt illuminates her varied themes from four different vantage points. The thematic strands of the novel are woven together most dramatically in the story of Olive and her family, whose apparently idyllic life at Todefright (their picturesque country home) conceals secrets and darker realities. The self-indulgence of Olive
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The Children’s Book
MAJOR CHARACTERS BENEDICT FLUDD is a brilliant but unstable ceramicist who abuses his daughters while his laudanum-addicted wife neglects them. PHILIP WARREN, a poor but gifted boy, is rescued by Olive’s circle of friends after he is found hiding in a museum. He is apprenticed to Benedict Fludd and becomes a successful potter. DOROTHY WELLWOOD is the most sensible of the Wellwood children. She wants to become a physician and is determined to find out who her actual parents are. HUMPHRY WELLWOOD, Olive’s upper-class husband, is a womanizer who turns from banking to social activism. Like Olive, he is more concerned with his personal interests than with the children. OLIVE WELLWOOD is a successful writer of fairy stories and the matriarch of a large family. Having escaped from the poverty of her childhood, she pursues a variety of utopian ideas and creative explorations while leaving much of the household management to her sister. TOM WELLWOOD is the eldest Wellwood son and Olive’s favorite. He prefers nature to society, is mistreated at boarding school, and ultimately feels betrayed by his mother. Portrait of A. S. Byatt, author of The Children's Book. ª ANDY RAIN/ epa/Corbis
and her husband results in a house full of ambiguously related children, and Olive finds it difficult to separate her creative role as a writer from her practical role as a mother. Her seemingly benign exploitation of the children—whom she uses to feed her imagination—has tragic consequences. The gap between appearance and reality is even more sinister at Purchase House, where the deranged Benedict Fludd memorializes the sexual abuse of his daughters in hidden works of art. As the story unfolds, all of the characters are shaken by unexpected and unalterable realities, from the suicide of Olive’s favored son, Tom, to the terrible toll of World War I.
W Style The Children’s Book depicts a great variety of personalities and relationships while also creating an involved portrait of a social setting and a historical era. Byatt accomplishes her objective by building an intricate yet logical network of associations around a charismatic central character. She employs the arrival of an outsider, Philip Warren, to reveal this network and to set off a chain of events that forms the essential outline of the novel. Tom discovers
young Philip in the museum where Olive’s friend Prosper Caine holds an important position. The two adults make the boy into something of a protégé. He is first presented to Olive’s diverse, eccentric social circle at an annual midsummer party where most of the many characters are assembled. Then he is apprenticed to Benedict Fludd, whose derangement eventually affects everyone’s fate. As the narrative structure develops, some of the characters introduced at the party disappear, while others become unexpectedly important. In addition, the political alignments and aesthetic ideals defined early in the novel provide motivation and background for the many activities of the characters, such as a visit to the dazzling 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Byatt uses a third-person omniscient narrator. This strategy and the structure of the novel enable her to manage a large cast of characters engaged in complex, overlapping plotlines. She uses the device of children’s books to provide a more intimate view into Olive’s relationships with her children, especially Tom. The larger narrative is interspersed with excerpts from the special stories Olive writes for each of the children. The reader gradually realizes that these are more than imaginative tales; they are psychological documents that Olive uses to define her visions of the children.
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The Children’s Book
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
characterisation and narrative drive” but contends that it succeeds as a novel of ideas. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Antonia Susan (Drabble) Byatt was born on August 24, 1936, in Sheffield, England, to parents John Frederick and Kathleen Marie Drabble. She earned a BA from Newnham College, Oxford, in 1957 and took graduate courses at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and at Somerville College, Oxford, before marrying economist Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959. The couple divorced in 1969. Byatt married Peter John Duffy the same year. She had two children in her first marriage and two in her second. From 1962 to 1983, she taught literature at several institutions. A prolific writer, Byatt is best known for her 1990 novel Possession, which won the Man Booker Prize (1990), the Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize (1990), and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in the Eurasia Region (1991). Her 1992 novella Morpho Eugenia served as the basis for the film Angels and Insects (1995). Byatt, who has also written a critical biography of Iris Murdoch and has edited several anthologies, was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1999.
Works Cited
“Byatt’s a Winner: Critics Full of Praise for The Children’s Book.” Bookseller 15 May 2009: 40. Print. Rev. of The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt. Kirkus Reviews 15 June 2009: 620. Print. Dunmore, Helen. Rev. of The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt. Times [London] 24 Apr. 2009: n. pag. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. Hoffert, Barbara. Rev. of The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt. Library Journal 134.13 (2009): 64. Print. Jones, Radhika. “Mother Grimm: A. S. Byatt’s Latest Novel.” Time 19 Oct. 2009: 62. Print. Rubin, Martin. Rev. of The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt. San Francisco Chronicle 25 Oct. 2009: F1. Print. Schuessler, Jennifer. “Dangerous Fancies.” New York Times Book Review 11 Oct. 2009: BR10. Print. Additional Resources Criticism and Reviews
W Critical Reception Bookseller reports that The Children’s Book “attracted a wealth of reviews, finally becoming the most reviewed title” on the weekend following its publication. The majority of assessments have been positive. Kirkus Reviews calls the novel “ambitious, accomplished and intelligent,” noting that “Byatt’s concern is the vast area where utopian visions collide with human nature.” Writing for Library Journal, Barbara Hoffert describes The Children’s Book as “pitch perfect, stately, told with breathtakingly matter-of-fact acuteness.” A Time magazine review by Radhika Jones concludes that although Byatt’s latest novel is not the equal of Possession, it is still “a rich and ambitious work, steeped in ideas and capped with a lacerating final act.” In his appraisal in the San Francisco Chronicle, Martin Rubin lauds Byatt’s “imaginative capacity to transmogrify what she has studied into something truly felt.” Some reviewers were less patient with Byatt’s informational excursions, and several found the novel too long and sprawling. Jennifer Scheussler, for example, comments in the New York Times Book Review that “so much is stuffed into The Children’s Book that it can be hard to see the magic forest for all the historical lumber—let alone the light at the end of the narrative tunnel.” However, even reviewers who acknowledge flaws in the book typically take a balanced view. Writing in the London Times, Helen Dunmore notes that “the panoramic quality of The Children’s Book is achieved at some cost to brilliance of
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Clark, Alex. “Her Dark Materials.” Guardian [London] 9 May 2009: 6. Print. Clark’s appreciative review focuses on Byatt’s dark vision of artistic creation in The Children’s Book. Lowry, Elizabeth. “Repossessed by A. S. Byatt.” Times Literary Supplement [London] 13 May 2009: n. pag. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. This review examines the Edwardian view of childhood as a context for Byatt’s novel. Tillinghast, Richard. “An English Saga.” New Criterion 28.9 (2010): 73+. Print. A positive assessment that focuses on the novel’s historical setting. Walden, George. “Period Pains.” New Statesman 27 Apr. 2009: 48+. Print. Walden suggests that Byatt’s novel possesses certain characteristics of the late Victorian era that is its subject. Wood, James. “Bristling with Diligence.” London Review of Books 31.19 (2009): 6-8. Print. Wood provides a thoughtful overview of style and themes in The Children’s Book and a mixed opinion of the novel’s merits. Gale Resources
“A. S. Byatt.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Sept. 2010. Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine. “A. S. Byatt (24 August 1936-).” British and Irish Short-Fiction Writers, 1945–2000. Ed. Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 319. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE
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The Children’s Book
Detroit: Gale, 2005. 39-47. Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online. Web. 18 Sept. 2010. Musil, Caryn McTighe. “A. S. Byatt (24 August 1936-).” British Novelists since 1960, 1st series. Ed. Jay L. Halio. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 14. Detroit: Gale, 1983. 194-205. Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online. Web. 18 Sept. 2010. Parris, P. B., and Caryn McTighe Musil. “A. S. Byatt (24 August 1936-).” British Novelists since 1960, 2nd series. Ed. Merritt Moseley. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 194. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 82-97. Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online. Web. 18 Sept. 2010. Open Web Sources
The author’s official Web site provides a biography, a lengthy bibliography, and interviews, including a link to a radio discussion of The Children’s Book with Diane Rehm. http://www.asbyatt.com and http:// thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2009-10-05/byattchildrens-book-knopf For Further Reading
Briggs, Julia. Edith Nesbit: A Woman of Passion. Stroud: Tempus, 2007. Print. Author of such famous stories as The Railway Children, Nesbit was also a noted social activist. Byatt’s interest in Nesbit influenced her creation of Olive Wellwood, the matriarch in The Children’s Book.
Cambridge UP, 1982. Print. This detailed examination focuses on the time period covered in The Children’s Book, illuminating political and aesthetic trends that affect Byatt’s characters. Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage, 2002. Print. Published in 1990, Byatt’s novel intertwines a modern love story with a parallel tale that explores art and life in the Victorian era. Through both similarities and differences, this earlier novel provides an interesting counterpoint to The Children’s Book. Harries, Elizabeth W. Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Print. Examining a feminine style of storytelling in the context of fairy-tale traditions, Harries presents useful background for understanding the character of Olive Wellwood. She also discusses Byatt and several of the author’s earlier works. Kelly, Kathleen C. A. S. Byatt. New York: Twayne, 1996. Print. Kelly surveys Byatt’s work and examines the author’s relationship to postmodernism. Von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Boston: Shambhala, 1996. Print. Von Franz, a Jungian analyst, explores some of the fairy tale’s psychological aspects, including shadow symbolism and the role of evil. Her views provide insight into the function of fairy stories for the Wellwood family.
Britain, Ian. Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts c. 1884-1918. Cambridge:
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Citizen Vince By Jess Walter
W Introduction A crime novel by a highly respected journalist, Citizen Vince won the 2006 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel from the Mystery Writers of America. Author Jess Walter has been praised for writing complex characters inhabiting the crime world, as well as for his gritty, realistic dialogue. Citizen Vince begins by introducing the reader to Vince Camden, who is working as a baker in a Spokane, Washington, doughnut shop. It is soon clear that Vince is not a law-abiding citizen; he also steals credit card numbers and runs another side business in which he hides marijuana in souvenir jars of volcanic ash from Mount Saint Helens as a way of using tourists as unwitting drug distributors. Vince has a long criminal history, and his previous dealings with credit cards landed him in the witness protection program after he testified in court against several organized crime bosses. No longer Marty Hagen of New York, he gets a new start as Vince Camden. Vince finds the daily routine of working at Donut Make You Hungry to actually be refreshing, but he cannot seem to avoid the allure of the criminal activities. He dreams of a life where he enjoys a modest home, wife, and children, so he saves the money he earns from selling stolen credit card numbers and marijuana. Receiving a voter registration card under his new name also inspires visions of becoming a citizen participating in American democracy, something he could not do as Marty Hagen. Vince’s old habits catch up with him when Lenny and Doug, the men with whom he works in the credit card scheme, begin to suspect that Vince is hoarding more than his share of the profits. Lenny brings in a mob hit man named Spike from New York. Recognizing Spike from his days back East, Vince suspects that his past is catching up
with him and that the mob has somehow figured out he is really Marty Hagen. Going back to his old stomping grounds in New York, Vince finds the mob boss who put the hit out on him in an effort to pay him back. His plan goes awry, however, and Vince is sent back to Spokane to become a hit man himself. This leads to a confrontation with Spike and a surprise climax.
W Literary and Historical Context
Citizen Vince is set in the days just before the 1980 U.S. presidential election in which incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter lost to Republican Ronald Reagan. Vince becomes intrigued by the politics of the day both because of his recently received voter’s registration card and because he is attracted to a woman named Kelly, a regular visitor to his doughnut shop who is also campaigning for her attorney boss, Aaron Grebbe, who wants to become a state senator. The mood at the time is a desire for change. President Carter’s administration has been politically damaged by a long-standing hostage crisis in Iran. In 1979 the U.S.-supported shah of Iran was overthrown during an Islamic fundamentalist revolution led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In November 1979, the U.S. embassy in Tehran was stormed by young rev
