"Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro treats us lucky readers to yet another take on a dystopian future in Klara and the Sun. And once again, as in Never Let Me Go (2005) he approaches his subject obliquely. He withholds details of world events and resulting dislocations, giving only quick, almost throwaway indications here and there. The main indicator is that Klara, the first-person narrator of the title, is an AF, or Artificial Friend, a very life-like robot blessed with an AI-like ability to learn. But more to the point, Klara can provide companionship to humans. This is a haunting, understated read, the kind we have come to expect from Ishiguro. It is also a brilliant, accomplished fiction, which again, is no surprise, given the author.

Klara’s story leads off with her experience at the store, where she is available for sale to a discriminating teen. In Klara’s case the discriminating teen is Josie, a youngster dealing with an unnamed illness. In these early pages we also learn of Klara’s unusual cognitive abilities: she observes keenly, and from what she sees, makes nuanced and surprisingly sophisticated conclusions about human behavior and desire. In fact, Klara’s narrative reflects her unusual intellect and ranks as one of Ishiguro’s great achievements here.

I came to treasure Klara’s insightful storytelling, and her polite conversation. It’s the slightest bit stilted, coming from a machine, but clearly reflects Klara’s ability to observe, reason, and advise. Putting Klara in the first person is a bold stroke for Ishiguro, and yet it comes across as the only way to present this story. Teenagers are a mystery, and would make unreliable narrators: at some point parents have to decide whether to “lift” their pubescent young, a procedure which alters their genes and marks out the child as privileged—eligible for university training and a professional career—but also carries vague risks. These risks threaten Josie, and her illness lies at the root of the decision to buy Klara.

Humans occupy a central place in Ishiguro’s bleak future: addle-pated, lonely, crushed by circumstance, they struggle with the world they have made. They form up into warring clans again, harkening back a thousand years into a violent past; they try to fix things for themselves by buying artificial companions for their despairing children; they  grasp and grapple in a world obviously resisting any kind of sense or control. Of course Klara had to tell this story. In the author’s world, we could depend on no one else.

I felt this to be somewhat a companion-piece to Never Let Me Go. Its future is just as bleak, and the unfeeling, murderous, greedy, and exclusionary solutions people find to correct their own incompetence are almost as horrifying. As two separate treatments of current trends in the world, these two books are as chilling as they are masterful. Take up Klara and learn!

 

 
 

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"How to Disappear" by Bruna Gomes

Bruna Gomes takes a plunge into the deep end of the pool with her debut work, How to Disappear. Her approach will take an adjustment on the part of readers, but once your adjustments are in place, there are rewards for you here, rewards that promise a bright future for Gomes.

The author does a superb job engaging her readers in the heroine’s stream-of-consciousness internal dialogue. This half clear-eyed, half delusional narrative carries all aspects of the story with it. In fact, while Gomes focusses rightly on her main character’s mental state, in my view her story would benefit from a baby step back from it, to open up a small space for exposition of concrete outside events. Are we sure what happened to her best friend Winnie? There’s room for doubt about whether onetime boyfriend Alejandro is as guilty as assumed. And how does Cille find our protagonist while she’s knocking around in rural Spain? And what of the sister Naomi, who almost inexplicably accepts our hero’s sudden offer of a paid vacation, is shunted off to an exclusive New York apartment and never heard from again?

These may be quibbles, but they strained my suspension of disbelief.

These weaknesses, though, flow from the great strength of the novel. We encounter, up close and personal, a troubled young woman’s journey in which she’s endlessly on the run, a literal outlaw on the lam. Her point of departure seems to be her mother’s untimely death and the resulting deterioration of her relationship with Naomi. But other demons press this young woman into flight and larceny and worse. That we believe and accept these sometimes shocking crimes is clearly a testament to Gomes’s skill in rendering her protagonist’s mental state and motivation.

In fact, I look forward to Bruna Gomes’s future output. She has a grand skill in describing a character’s internal conflict, up to and including a convincingly shaky mental health. She can also describe a physical locale effectively and economically, and the whole sets a mood for the reader quite well. This beginning promises good things to come.

 

 
 

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"My Year Abroad" by Chang-Rae Lee

 

Two thirds of the way through Chang-Rae Lee’s thrill ride of a novel, “My Year Abroad,” protagonist Tiller Bardmon, midway through his college years, leads off a chapter this way: “Question: What happens to you when you’ve gone way too far? Not just off trail, not even bushwhacking, but venturing into a region where it turns out the usual physics don’t much apply. … To look back at myself during my stay at Drum Kappagoda’s lodge is to slough off every notion of whatever made me me.”

Lee spends almost 500 pages sloughing off every notion of what makes Tiller Tiller in “My Year Abroad.”

The basics, broadly: a wealthy Chinese-American entrepreneur takes Tiller under his wing and after a very short acquaintance flies him from his home in New Jersey to the Far East, pushing him into a key spokesperson’s role for a new health drink he’s hoping to bring to market. Everything they do, every time they consume anything, all is over-indulgence—food, drink, drugs (taken both voluntarily and involuntarily)—and any kind of physical recreation. Gobs and gobs of money are invested, traded, made, or speculated about. Our heroes nearly drown in the surf off Oahu, pay a surprise visit to a brothel, and wind up at a secluded lodge outside of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, in China. The owner of the lodge is hosting a competition for Yoga masters.

Tiller bears few illusions about himself: his mother fled the scene when he was barely in grade school, and while he’s friendly and intelligent enough, Tiller has a strong tendency to latch on—and not let go—to anyone who treats him well. The quote leading this review off appears before things really get weird for the young man.

So there’s nothing ordinary about the plot of “My Year Abroad.” We travel to some exotic locales, indulge in mind-boggling (at least for me) pastimes, run across some truly tough customers, and become imprisoned in a ruthless businessman’s workshop. All the while Tiller’s dad, Clark, thinks Tiller’s in Western Europe on the cheap, seeing the sights, dallying with young ladies, and pretending to study lit. The story is told in two threads: one contains the events I’ve described here, and the other occurs afterward, when Tiller has returned to the States, to an unidentified, unremarkable town.

Lee focuses us on the themes of race, slave exploitation (perpetrated by Asian businessmen), and shady modern business practices. Most of all, though, we have the painful growth of Tiller, with its chaotic, threatening nature. After he is drugged and … explored … by the oddly laconic daughter of a Far Eastern millionaire, he would look back on the experience, and utter the quote above, about sloughing off his old identity. Ultimately, one of the Yoga masters, a friendly if atypical practitioner, tells him to keep inviting the sublime that’s flowing around him.
 
Then she quotes the great Swami Sivananda: “‘This world is your body. This world is a great school. This world is your silent teacher.’”

Tiller says, “I loved hearing her say that, and as unsilently as she did. I loved, too, the idea of learning from the world, this world that was also only you. Was this the secret circularity? That belonged to you as much as it did to anyone? Yes and yes. The most pressing question, I suppose … was whether you belonged first to somebody else.”

This is a fine novel to experience. Everyone who loves a fun read will love “My Year Abroad.” The locations, the cultures, the action, the characters, the mystery, the tension in both narrative threads—all these prove Lee’s mastery and his vision. 

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"Gods, Nukes, and a Whole Lot of Nonsense" by Shirani Rajapakse

Having previously turned her keen eye to the ravages of Sri Lankan civil war (Fallen Leaves, 2020) and raised her voice to shout the too-often silent pleas of oppressed women everywhere (Chant of a Million Women, 2017), multiple award-winning poet and writer Shirani Rajapakse focuses here on a few ineluctable features of modern India. Among them: the deep spirituality that casts its shadow and dictates so many daily practices; the entrenched and pervasive bureaucracy that depends on a network of cronies at the expense of merit; and perhaps most markedly, the bewildering face India presents to foreign tourists trying for a unique experience there.

Taken together, these stories show an assured balance and depth of emotion, an eye for the telling detail, and a worldly sense of the human similarities lurking below cultural differences. It’s a striking collection, a highly sophisticated achievement and shows the steady evolution of this already-accomplished writer.

“Prophet of the Thar,” the first story grouped in this collection, combines a couple of Rajapakse’s topoi: India’s spirituality and its sometimes all-too-human origins. A teenage goatherd who chafes under his father’s authority longs for something different. He gets it when he somehow becomes a celebrated holy man leading disciples through the Thar desert. This story’s delight resides in the observation of how easily the human faith response is triggered and how arbitrarily are its talismans chosen.

“In Search of a Miracle” is another tale illuminating the quotidian humanness behind much of religious faith. Here, however, no new gods or prophets rule the day; it’s  rampant commercialism and a touch of xenophobia that partially drives the action. The main thrust, however, comes from the eternal naiveté of foreign tourists who come to India’s spiritual capital in Varanasi to find what they think of as “experience,” but which barely allows them to leave with body and soul intact. This is the grittiest piece in the collection, and worth the price of admission by itself.

“Gods, Nukes, and a Whole Lot of Nonsense,” a kind of a fugue piece, excoriates the blind faith in technology and the rampant jingoism which hurtle modern countries toward developing atomic weapons. It ends, appropriately enough, with a plaintive and despairing plea defending the natural resources of the country, the most important of which is human.

It intrigues me that two of the stories, “Ram Satrap Sharma, IAS,” and “The Consultant” deal so directly with aspects of public service and the kind of racket engaged in by those in India who call bureaucracy home. They show clearly that it’s not what you know but whom you know—and how you can manipulate them into awarding you remunerative work even when it’s not necessary and especially when you’re not the least bit knowledgeable about the subject. Telling pieces, particularly since they come in a pair in Rajapakse’s collection.

The author occupies herself with travel to and tourism in India. I’ve already mentioned “In Search of a Miracle,” but “Postcard Swami: the Face of Indiaah” [sic], and “Meeting God” also highlight the interaction of outsiders with India’s traditions, attitudes, and modern commercialism.

If there’s any justice in the awards given to current titles from this region, “Gods, Nukes, and a Whole Lot of Nonsense” will surely gather laurels to itself and its author. These stories represent a rewarding and clear growth of Rajapakse’s heart, powers of observation, and skill in storytelling.

 

 

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"The Middle Ages" Edited by Edwin S. Grosvenor

 

The Middle Ages contains eleven essays covering salient topics from Europe’s so-called Middle Ages. This term comes from Petrarch, whose scheme held that history was divided into the Classical, the Middle, and current times (contemporaneous with Petrarch - the 14th Century). The eleven essays covering this 10 centuries:

1. The Barbarians, by Richard Winston
2. The Age of Charlemagne, by Régine Pernoud
3. Europe in the Year 1000, by Morris Bishop
4. When Moors Ruled Spain, by Gerald Brennan
5. When the Normans Invaded England, by Morris Bishop
6. The Byzantines, by Alfred Duggan
7. Richard and Saladin, by Alfred Duggan
8. The Knights Templar, by Morris Bishop
9. The Troubadours, by Frederic V. Grunfeld
10. Alfonso the Learned of Castile, by Frederic V. Grunfeld
11. The Black Death, by Philip Ziegler


I list the essays this way to give the reader exactly what the volume offers. This is not a comprehensive survey of this long, significant period in the West. It is a series of essays that combine some historical high points with certain nuggets of interest which sometimes border on gossip. They are useful in their way, but for a rigorous history or histories, I would direct readers elsewhere. If your grounding in Europe’s Middle Ages is relatively strong, this compendium might provide interesting color for certain events or trends. It was a diverting day-and-a-half for me.

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"Night Boat to Tangier" by Kevin Barry

In Night Boat to Tangier we encounter Maurice and Charlie, middle-aged Irish gangsters who together keep a vigil at the port in Algeciras, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Hard by the Rock of Gibraltar, in fact. Whenever a ferry unloads its passengers from Morocco, they go through the crowd, haranguing the tired-looking people for any news of Maurice’s 23 year-old daughter Dilly. They pass out photographs, or they try to, since most passengers want nothing to do with them or the pictures. The two men are fatigued themselves, with physical ailments, and emotionally less than stable.

The story covers salient points in their histories together, through their heyday of smuggling Moroccan hash and heroin through Spain into Europe, and in particular, to their native County Cork, Ireland. They manage somehow to stay alive and un-incarcerated through their various adventures, from renting powerful boats and their crews, to Charlie’s affair with Cynthia, Maurice’s wife, to winding up in the same room in a mental institution. The courtly, formal way they speak to one another is the result of long years of familiarity, derring do, and just personal history. We are treated to this highly economical language throughout Barry’s novel; it is part Irish patois, part a criminal shorthand, and it lets us in on the intimacy of the relationship these two share.

Less clear, though, are the reasons for some of the plot’s activities. We can accept that Dilly at last arrives in Algeciras, but she then confuses us by turning right around and boarding the next boat back to Tangier. We are not privy to any transactions she might have executed, except to skulk past the two gentlemen, if they may be so called, and decide to pass right by them undetected.

I think it’s more the metaphor in the title. The two aging gangsters are stuck, through a combination of hard experience and a shying away from any more of the same, from making any more crossings. The unique, economical diction makes this book a great treat to read; beautifully does Barry yoke his idiom to his serve his plot. In the end, however, I feel as though the novel adds up to less than the sum if its parts.

 

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"Babylon" by Paul Kriwaczek

 

Subtitled “Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization”

By some quirk, many Westerners habitually think of the Nile Valley in Egypt as the birthplace of civilization. I may be projecting a little, but until not too long ago, I operated from that point of view. With only slightly more exposure to archeology, we learn that that honor belongs to Mesopotamia. In a highly readable, persuasive text, Paul Kriwaczek recounts the beginning of what’s called the Urban Revolution, through the multiple cultures and empires that arose between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to a final absorption by Cyrus the Great of Persia in about 323 BCE.

Near the shore of the Southern Sea, what we now call the Persian Gulf, many miles north of its current location, at some point prior to 4000 BCE, some people thought about the earth in a new way. Rather than try to adjust to seasonal and annual lotteries of rainfall, flood, and drought, they decided they would become the earth’s master, and improve it to further their own ends. So at a place called Eridu, they built a permanent edifice, visible above the sandy and windswept expanse of the surrounding steppe, a shrine to kingship which had descended from heaven. It was the first permanent signal of a modern human culture still alive in various ways and manifestations today.

Called the Urban Revolution, the making of cities was actually the least of this sea change in human affairs. As Kriwaczek says, 

With the city came the centralized state, the hierarchy of social classes, the division of labour, organized religion, monumental building, civil engineering, writing, literature, sculpture, art, music, education, mathematics and law, not to mention a vast array of new inventions and discoveries, from items as basic as wheeled vehicles and sailing boats to the potter’s kiln, metallurgy, and the creation of synthetic materials. And on top of all that was the huge collection of notions and ideas so fundamental to our way of looking at the world, like the concept of numbers, or weight, quite independent of actual items counted or weighed, that we have long forgotten that they had to be discovered or invented. Southern Mesopotamia was the place where all that was first achieved."

Kriwaczek provides his stamp on his history, asking us to update our understanding of ancient civilized humans—what they believed, what they aspired to, how they reacted to stresses. Much of his narrative is given over to successive empire builders, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, and the Assyrians, among others, and to who was skilled and who bungled archeological digs, and how Assyrian and Babylonian geopolitics is reflected in the various books of the Old Testament.

If you are interested in Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization, this is an excellent entry point. Written by a lay person for lay people, it is a very useful and concise recap of the fateful moment when people decided to socialize in permanent settlements, and the broad sweep of human history which followed. There are probably other, more detailed speculations about Babylon’s precincts, architecture, and plan, but they will be just that, speculations. As Kriwaczek laments, the truly glorious city was wiped away in a flood, and its foundations are lost to history.

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"The Swimmer" by Laury A. Egan

In The Swimmer we encounter Bess Lynch, a sixty-something psychotherapist, as she retreats to a cabin on Cape Cod, trying to disengage from the presences crowding her life. Her practice already handed off, she needs to make some important decisions about family, her will, and particularly her marriage. She’s on borrowed time. She has already survived much longer than a patient with Stage IV pancreatic cancer can normally expect.

As determined as Bess is to follow her plan, she’s caught up when a stunningly attractive man disrupts her solitude and proves a delightful - and desirable - distraction. As if that weren’t enough, her troubled and unreliable son crashes this groupe de deux with a surprise visit. The shock of this unannounced intrusion releases some pent-up acrimony and recrimination between mother and son. Stephen, the mysterious and handsome stranger stays (mostly) on the sideline as some long-stagnant air is cleared between Bess and her son.

The mystery of Stephen only deepens as Bess’s condition takes a sudden and nasty turn. He has knowledge of symptoms and conditions in extremis that is only vaguely explained. His solicitousness never flags, however; he is always there for Bess, doing his best to relieve her pain and her fears.

Laury Egan has delivered a touching and well-rounded performance. First, I must honor her for the skill and sharp professionalism with which she portrays her heroine. With a long career as a counselor, Bess’s observations are all expressed in terms which would be used by such a professional. She deals with two men in her lonely vigil, Stephen and her son, and she observes and interacts with them as would a doctor of psychology.

Additionally, Egan challenges herself to render a plot featuring very difficult subjects; requiring technical and emotional mastery. This is very accomplished work, of a deceptively difficult kind, and Laury Egan makes it look easy. The pacing, the exactitude of emotional tenor, and the mystery at its heart, all recommend this author, and this book very highly. Sterling work!

 

 

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"Some Tame Gazelle" by Barbara Pym

Jane Austen said of her novels concerned themselves with “two inches of ivory,” in which everything is so small that everything matters almost too much. Much the same can be said, and I’m sure has been said, about Barbara Pym’s novels. Setting them in rural England, Pym concerns herself with the lives of proper English women, who have lived to a riper age then Austen’s heroines, and who live lives closely circumscribed by faith and close-knit village society.

“Some Tame Gazelle,” which, when I started reading, I had no idea was the first of Pym’s published novels, illuminates the concerns of Belinda and Harriet Bede, sisters of a certain age. These sisters live near the village vicarage and its inhabitants - the dear Archdeacon Hoccleve and his wife, and the tender curate, just ordained and on his first assignment. The sisters have perhaps more offers of marriage than one might expect - certainly they don’t expect them. The touch is frequently arch, as we’re expected to be in on the joke when the sisters make fun of people, or react with shock to unexpected behavior. The contrast between the sisters is amusing and endearing; the narrative is given by Belinda, the older, less interesting and purportedly less attractive, of the two.

The surname Bede strikes me as a wink and a nudge. The resident archdeacon quotes too much literature from obscure English poets, delivers sermons based on obscure secular texts, and expects his parishioners to comprehend obscure points derived therefrom. Or says he does. Belinda herself, loving and loyal to the Archdeacon, is no stranger to English literature, and she knows the difference between a poet worthy of mention and other, less suitable poets.

So: men, suitable and unsuitable, arrive in the village and cause a stir among the sisters and the other women; some make unwelcome marriage proposals to one or the other sister, and these cause major shifts in emotion, outlook, memory, and mood, at least in Belinda. You will not find action or much mystery or any life or death here. I revere Pym for her humor, the style and substance of which she shares more than a little with Austen’s. As delightful as this is, I might suggest “Excellent Women” (1952), or “Quartet in Autumn” (1977) as more accomplished offerings, and perhaps more worth your while. I can assure you of a gentle touch, a little melancholy, wonderful, well-meaning characters, and the consistent charm of a wise storyteller who finds herself arching an eyebrow at the behavior she observes in the world.

 

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"Adventure by Chicken Bus" by Janet LoSole

 

Traveling the dicey, dangerous countries of Central America, Janet LoSole and her family undergo one harrowing adventure after another. Sometimes they literally defy death, and sometimes their efforts to stay healthy and in one piece fail, because of the ubiquity of toxins and other hazards. And one asks Why? Why would a Canadian couple - rational, by all outward signs - subject themselves and their two sweet daughters, still shy of their middle school years, to such misadventures?

LoSole provides a book-length answer. Janet and her husband Lloyd share a severe wanderlust, always agreeing on this point, and they couple this restlessness-on-steroids with a deep personal concern for the ecology of their home planet. The travel bug they feel has a conscience, too: they believe in and strongly advocate a responsible sort of travel that most effectively supports native families and cultures. They manage to perform well in this area; however, the reception they get from the natives ranges from open arms to surly to the downright fraudulent.

As travelogues go, this one is effective. It offers an honest and vivid look at an attempt to negotiate the challenging - and oftentimes dangerous - Central American tourism infrastructure. By some alchemy LoSole manages an expository piece on 19 months of intrepid Third World backpacking in some 220 pages. About three quarters of the way through I found myself fatigued by the pace and the ever-building litany of worry, illness, and baffling obstacle while navigating through the realm of unrelieved tropical heat and poverty.

They make it through, however, living to tell the tale, and tell it well. They satisfied their need to see an intriguing part of the world on their own terms. That is an accomplishment in itself. But the far greater accomplishment is this book: not only is it an impressive how-to - and more importantly, how-not-to - guide, but it is also an exhortation to pursue the sort of travel that treats local inhabitants and Mother Earth with equal respect and considered fairness.

If you are able and hankering for adventurous travel, take this book up first. It’s such an unblinking, thorough guide to engaging Central America on these terms, that it makes itself indispensable.

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