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 effective, and rivets the reader to the page.
Our narrating Moor Mustapha tells the unvarnished truth about the brutal treatment meted out by the Spaniards to the natives. Led on and addled by the thirst for gold, the explorers treat the natives with murderous efficiency. Alongside the bigotry and brutality, the Europeans display an utter lack of common sense as events, natural and social, conspire against them. Through it all Mustapha hopes for eventual manumission—his servitude extends well past its original end date—and he occasionally imagines he sees positive signs where there truly are none. He marries a charismatic, self-assured native woman and becomes a renowned healer who unfortunately attracts a large following. To learn why this is unfortunate, give yourself the blessing of reading the book.
The magisterial judgments we make these days about injustice and iniquity about Europeans’ behavior in the New World, Mustapha makes for us. There are moments when he compares the Spaniards’ actions with those of contemporaneous Mohammedan caliphs and sultans, and the Europeans always come out worse.
This review became a retelling of the sins of white European explorers, but this book is a lot more than that. Mustapha’s travels, his concern over feeding his mother and brothers, his flexibility and resourcefulness, and his eventual crossing the goal line make him an unforgettable character, and this a truly well-crafted novel.
Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli.
The first in the Sicily-set Inspector Montalbano series,The Shape of Waterestablishes 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, regardless of the legal niceties that may be involved.
The book has twists and turns, a highly sympathetic lead detective, colorful local types, and politics and hostility in high places. Well put-together, entertaining, unorthodox. It might be possible that a different, more nuanced translation would serve it better.
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, he finds that his credentials, proving he is who he says he is, have been stolen.
Greene tries for realism, certainly, and, with moderate success, achieves it. More important to the author, though, is the sinking spiral in which his hero falls for the first half of the book. D. lives in fear, the only possible outcome for someone who has been imprisoned by the Spanish fascist rebels. He cannot get past the accidental death of his wife; he can’t stand physical confrontation because he has no idea how to defend himself. He is constantly on his guard about his person and his documentation. Rare indeed is the character he feels he can trust.
A series of reversals would likely have been fatal, at least for his mission, if it weren’t for Rose, a woman he meets on his first night in England. An attractive blonde who cannot resist what she calls “melodrama”—which is what she calls D.’s predicament after she begins to believe him—Rose as a surprising knack for knowing what to say to whom in any given situation, and rescues D. on several occasions. D.’s and Rose’s developing love didn’t convince me; it could be Greene was too British to do any more than suggest and imply on that aspect.
The Confidential Agent charges along at a good pace. It has enough plot twists to satisfy anyone, but don’t expect a lot of physical action. Having accompanied a man to the man’s apartment building, D. shoots at him but misses, although the man does die of heart failure a few minutes later. Only a few times do we encounter any sense of real physical danger for the hero; no, what endangers his life is going back home and joining in the actual war itself.
This book entertains in the skulduggery genre, but its strengths lie is its treatment of the larger questions of life, loyalty, betrayal, wartime morality, and the shifting ideologies of a fraught moment in history.
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 the strongest influence over world political and social deeds and misdeeds through the millennia.
Frankopan sticks closely to his chosen scope. However, owing I’m sure to the relative abundance or scarcity of written material, the detail of political exigency and economic flow burgeons as we go, so that 20th Century events are treated in much greater detail than anything that went before. The author treats each major trend and era in sufficient detail to help the reader comprehend the roots of each: I found the early central Asia administrative system ensuring the safety of cargo and traveler especially intriguing.
Broad-ranging trade evolution, which shifted focus from the Middle East to Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, the economic foundation for building empire, and the conflict between regional and global powers all receive treatment here. I found as I read into more current periods that my energy began to flag from the snowballing detail. The concluding chapter went to even more wordiness, and I will confess to the cardinal sin of skimming it. It just ran to such length, and I had gotten what I wanted already.
Frankopan is his own man; he doesn’t blink when citing the constantly American policies and short-sightedness in dealing with the Middle East, and is especially harsh when dealing with the brutish and bigoted practices of his own country, Britain. He is always authoritative and always well-grounded in his research and views. What more could a reader want in a historian?
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 debilitating, background to rise to the height of admired novelist and university professor. Here she engages with ex-husband William, whose own wife has left him with a half-empty apartment and a sense of devastation. They have other family news of a disturbing kind, and together they travel to Maine to make sense of it all. Through it all, we are treated to Lucy’s inner dialogue, delivered so pitch-perfectly.
The novel flows on Lucy Barton’s memories and current dilemmas, not on a substantial plot. This design—the constant flow of Lucy’s doubts and affirmations, the jumping-around in Lucy’s memories—requires other-worldly skill in my opinion. How did Strout get these thoughts and impressions in such perfect order? How did she deploy them so they come to us at such a pace, lined up in the proper sequence, to build Lucy’s consciousness and decision process? Strout’s a marvel, everybody knows that. This novel is simply further proof.
Space doesn’t allow a discussion of all the rewarding ways the author deals with the issues raised. Lucy thinks she’s invisible, but it’s proven otherwise to her over and over. William needs to be told the truth about his emotional detachment from the women in his lives, but Lucy skirts the issue, since being his ex, she feels no responsibility any more. The story concludes with an odd invitation from William to revisit another scene from their shared past, and we are left to guess why.
Oh William! proves again Strout’s mastery of this voice and this design of storytelling. Very highly recommended, as is everything I encounter of hers.
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