Translated from the Albanian by Arshi Pipa and David Bellos
Never has an adult written so convincingly in the voice of a child than Ismail Kadare in Chronicle in Stone. Set in a small crossroads town in southern Albania that closely resembles Kadare’s home town, Chronicle follows a dreamy juvenile boy who imagines the relationships between houses, between and among streets, between clouds and the sky. World War II air raids force the unnamed boy and his fellow townspeople out of their homes and into the citadel. Not even these visits to the dank, maze-like fortress can ground this boy’s flights of fancy. The whole novel is riveting, atmospheric, and utterly convincing.
The boy predictably idolizes the aircraft occupying the newly constructed airfield across the river, until a monstrous, silver behemoth arrives and asserts itself as alpha. He spends much of the novel in the company of his neighborhood’s old women, who are a funny combination of superstitious and worldly wise. In particular, his grandmother knows and understands much about the real world, and condemns a good portion of it. He watches the occupying armies come and go: Greek, then Italian, two and three times each, and they all anticipate the ultimate monstrous German forces.
He’s acquainted with two young terrorists in their twenties, partisans, as they’re called, who encourage and belittle him by turns. Their leader, another young man from the same town, called Enver Hoxha, has left to study abroad. His specific inclusion in the book has been seen as a sop to Albanian authorities to allow publication, but shadowy veiled references that hint at his rumored unorthodox sexual orientation have been cited as well.
Chronicle in Stone was first published in Albania in 1971. Its English translation wasn’t released until 1987. It balances the daydreams of a young boy with the horrific events of political and wartime violence. This balance makes it possible to view the bloody events of the novel from something of a distance; this lens also perfectly catches the modern anarchic political machinations while acknowledging Albania’s remoteness and inward—and backward—focus. It’s an intriguing construct, very rewarding, very balanced, and very strong. And the point of view gives the novel an enchanted quality. For these reasons, it won the International Booker Prize in 2005.
This extravagant book has an extravagant subtitle: Or: A Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects. Told by the Dead, supplemented by the Author, drawing from a range of Books. and aided by Imagination, the which being the greatest natural Gift of any person. That the Wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots Reflect, laypersons gain some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment.
Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.
Lengthy, and freighted with endless details, Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob tells the story of the 18th-Century Messianic figure Jacob Frank. And it tells it with such scrupulous care that nothing of any bearing on the story is omitted. At 961 pages, and consisting of seven books within its covers, this is truly an epic effort on the parts of the author and her translator.
Jacob Frank was born Yankiele Leybowicz bar Yehuda in 1726, in western Ukraine, at a time when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. He fraternizes while in his 20s with a group of learned and disputatious rabbis. They congregate in the evenings and interrupt one another, raising their voices to try to gain ascendancy on the doctrinal or philosophical point at issue. During these disputes they try for eloquence and erudition, to out-speak and out-argue all others, vying for attention and victory in their endless debates. Never mind that they always focus on some minor, arcane prescriptive point in the Talmud or the Old Testament. From time to time these discourses actually bear on larger matters of legitimate human concern. Most of the time, not.
In this milieu, young Yankiele begins to have startling visions and to make enigmatic pronouncements on Hebrew beliefs, and uses his charisma and self-effacing approach to become the center of attention. His learning cannot match that of the rabbis, but his down-home observations and his magnetic personality win him a following. He espouses a schism from the Hebrew faith, a complete break, in which Moses is exposed as a fraud and his law repudiated. The group travels to Turkey, where Yankiele takes the name Jacob, and is given the surname Frank, which is the generic Ottoman term for a European.
He converts to Islam briefly while in Turkish territory but soon his sect gains notoriety as an anti-Talmudist group of Jews which seeks baptism into the Catholic faith. This gains them both friends and enemies in high places, and after nearly interminable machinations on all sides, Jacob is imprisoned in Częstochowa, and takes on an air of martyrdom.
Tokarczuk focuses her weighty narrative on Jacob’s family, his beliefs, his close associates, and the cause célèbre of this curious and unorthodox sect. She has done so much research that she admits she can’t include all the notes that would be necessary in such an exhaustive work. I do honor the labor because the characters always reflect the truth of human nature, which is an unerring focus throughout. Readers will get the real benefit of a deep insight into 18th-Century Europe, seen through the surprising superstitions of the time, which in large part flow from religious beliefs.
I wanted to read The Books of Jacob because of Tokarczuk’s 2017 novel Flights, and because (as I’ve seen written) it was a prime reason she won the 2018 Nobel Prize. It seems to me that Jacob is a stupendous achievement, and reflects the impressive energy and honorable motives of its author. It also confirms for me that the Nobel committee confers its Literature prize on writing hewing to a theme of outrage at human suffering, and the effects of intolerant societies.
If you wish to work through 961 pages based on these things, or it you have a particular interest in Jacob Frank, then take up The Books of Jacob.
A South African family disintegrates in Damon Galgut’s The Promise, and this disintegration occurs concurrently with the collapse of Apartheid. This family never functions well: each of the three siblings grow up with their own particular debilitating neurosis, and collectively they learn how not to love, keep promises, or reach their potential. The ‘promise’ of the title represents a bequest to a Black character in the novel, but on the wider scale it’s the promise South African society makes to its Black citizens. But it inevitably comes to nothing, or less than nothing: a bungled—nay, wrong—attempt to make reparation for decades of hatred and degradation.
The Promise contains multifarious riches for the reader: the theme of the grudging and at times malicious shift away from state-run racial persecution; the emblematic deterioration and eventual eradication of the family at the heart of the novel; the conflicted and ineffective care offered by priests at critical life moments; the addled self-absorption of nearly everyone. The youngest of the three, however, survives to nearly forty, her siblings both dead from unnatural causes, and she at length keeps the promise made to the family’s long-suffering Black maid, now in her 70s. But keeping the promise might actually plunge the poor elderly woman into yet deeper difficulty.
Galgut takes economy of language further than I have seen before. A thought in one scene immediately becomes the bulwark of the next, in so few words, it’s striking. I didn’t think it was something that he could sustain, but it gains momentum and becomes normal as the book goes on. I didn’t find it jarring, but it was new to me. I have not read his other work to see if he uses it there; it’s a worthy project, and I do have In a Strange Room in my possession.
This book won the 2021 Booker Prize and I begin as I review it to get over my mild surprise at that. It’s extremely proficient work, it deals with weighty eternal problems, its characters achieve their proper actualization throughout, and psychologically, these stories are spot-on. Fairly certainly this will become required reading, as are all Booker winners, really, but I felt less of the normal thrill I get when finishing a fine novel. It could be the pessimistic tone and message, but that wouldn’t normally affect me that way. Put it down to an off-moment for your reviewer. I do recommend it; it should definitely be part of you and your consciousness.
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women ranks among the American classics of fiction. It covers the tribulations of the young March family of sisters as they come of age and begin to navigate the adult world. The young ladies’ father, John March, returns toward the end of the novel from fighting in the Civil War. He is a deeply wounded individual emotionally. At first he struggles even to speak amid the joyous holiday uproar which celebrates and surrounds him.
One can’t say, really, how much demand there might have been for the story of John March. We are all extremely lucky Geraldine Brooks felt the lack, because her brilliant, compendious, and utterly convincing March fills it for all time.
March tracks the progress of John March’s ghastly, harrowing, nearly fatal, journey to the front lines in 1861 Virginia. He sets off as a highly idealistic chaplain, who quickly learns he doesn’t understand the men in his charge, and who in turn do not trust him and ridicule him. He transfers to a plantation which has been converted to a refugee camp for slaves who have been liberated. The central, the searing, episodes of John March’s war experience occur here.
But can such wrenching, epochal events in a man’s life be told without telling their effects on his adoring wife? His self-centered idealism combines with his lack of quotidian skills to force Marmee—on her own—to maintain a home, hold off creditors, raise five daughters during critical years of their lives, and cope with the poverty John’s idealism has plunged them into. When she travels to Washington to try to nurse him to health after his grievous wounds, she learns things about his life—secrets—which astonish and infuriate her.
Which brings us to Grace Clement, the gracious, soft-spoken slave whose father was a plantation owner. She shows both John and Marmee the path to postwar life: one must hew it with love, light it with understanding, and smooth it with forgiveness. Her presence provides the book with a beacon; her very name provides hope.
A book so full of brilliances: the gracious 19th-Century diction which never gets in the way; the appalling treatment of slaves by both sides; the insight that abolitionists probably made up similar percentages of combatants in each opposing army; the kindness and wisdom flowing from an unexpected quarter; the chaos, callousness, and contagion of war. Its central power, as in all excellent, brilliant fiction, flows from the foolish hopes and then the grace under fire of transformed human beings. Superb.
As we read through Claire Oshetsky’s Chouette, we dwell in a confusing landscape of fantasy on the one hand, and hardpan reality on the other. Tiny, a diminutive virtuoso cellist, becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby owl. She knows it’s an owl-baby from the moment of conception: there’s an imagined scene in which her owl lover, a female, sleeps with her in a place cryptically called “the Gloaming,” in a tender, sensual scene, and during which Tiny conceives. The author then lets hardpan reality dominate, and result is a unique, quirky flight of fancy requiring agility on the part of the reader.
Chouette, Tiny’s daughter owl, proves a challenge from the get-go, even before she’s born. Tiny has a relatively difficult pregnancy, what with talons and a beak inside her, and the birth causes very predictable consternation on everyone but her. The delivering doctor tries to forget what he’s seen, and succeeds rather too quickly. Her husband, at first thrilled with her pregnancy, is repelled by his infant daughter, and never stops trying to turn her into something a little, or a lot, more human. Her husband’s family does its best to repudiate Tiny and Chouette, eventually ostracizing them completely. Tiny’s husband goes along with it.
Readers can take Chouette as a very typical example of how a child can be pulled in opposite directions by parents who apparently want very different things for their child. The conflict between Tiny and her once-doting husband rings honest and true, and he sides with his family, alienating Tiny, and making her ever more protective of Chouette. Her husband’s family of five tall brothers and their opinionated wives come through as a single unit of suspicion and rejection. The medical profession fares poorly in this book, too. The doctors are self-absorbed, greedy, dismissive, brusque, and hostile. A woman doesn’t have to give birth to a baby owl to experience any of this.
Chouette is spare, well-paced and suspenseful, and contains characters you wish well. It builds with anticipated gloom and failure, and yet does not yield to run-of-the-mill expectation. It will surprise you every time. It does stretch one’s willingness to suspend disbelief, but once you’re on board with the fantasy, its other virtues come to the fore. For me, it’s really a study on one young mother’s struggle to love her baby against odds, and can stand for thousands, or millions, of other mothers in the same boat.
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 case revolves around the death—by natural causes—of the town's charismatic lead politician and civic booster. He is found in suspicious circumstances, at a place he had no apparent reason to be. The dogged detective must juggle two beautiful young women—neither of whom is the Inspector's Milan-based fiancée—a medical examiner who never met a secret he couldn't blab, and a police force more concerned with thwarting the investigation than pursuing it properly.
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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