In The Moor’s Account Laila Lalami offers the first-person narrative of a black Moorish slave who, after selling his freedom, sails with a Spanish explorer-plunderer to the Gulf Coast of Florida in 1527. The story is a sweeping, detailed account of the newcomers’ struggles with the natives, the weather, and the would-be conquistadores’ geographical blundering and amoral arrogance. Through her storyteller, the author simply lets the heinous and cataclysmic events unfold. It is highly skilled and...
December 29, 2021
"The Shape of Water" by Andrea Camilleri
Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli. The first in the Sicily-set Inspector Montalbano series, The Shape of Water establishes the good inspector in a jaded community on the southern coast of the Italian island. Always struggling against the scofflaw traditions of his home, Inspector Montalbano pushes through the local political and ecclesiastical objections to his investigation, but what he finds casts him into the role of maverick as he seeks justice for all involved,...
December 20, 2021
"The Confidential Agent" by Graham Greene
The Confidential Agent recounts the struggle of a man dispatched in the very late 1930s from an unnamed European country (Spain) to England to complete a mission for his side in a civil war. Things don’t go well for this guy, identified only as D. His passport photo is a few years old, and he’s aged a lot; the enemy tries to buy him off and his refusal ends in a beating; he is shot at in London, and even his bosses don’t trust him. At the climactic meeting where he will complete his mission,...
December 20, 2021
"The Silk Roads" by Peter Frankopan
I picked up The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan to get a historian’s read on the commercial basis for how people have behaved down through the ages. I thought it would focus on prehistoric and early literate-era trade, and how it allowed European and Levantine peoples to become familiar with China. I was not disappointed, but I learned as I went the author’s thesis: the vast swath of land from the east end of the Mediterranean to the Pacific has borne the lion’s share of commercial trade, and thus...
December 13, 2021
"Oh William!" by Elizabeth Strout
I’ve come to the point in reading Elizabeth Strout that all I can say is, ‘Well, she’s done it yet again.’ And I mean that she has made the most straightforward, plain language carry the freighted, unwieldy, insistent battle between personal doubt and self-worth, and charge it so perfectly full of emotion and redemption. And made it look easy and natural! Her latest, Oh William!, continues Strout’s captivating saga of Lucy Barton, the heroine who comes from such a modest, not to say...
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