NovelWorld

Unfeeling is not a problem in this harrowing novel. You’ll be feeling quite a bit, thanks – in your nightmares. It’s a book I couldn’t put down until the last screaming detail and whiplash surprise. It’s ridiculously well-written, and such a complete, double-sided vision of Africa it practically sings its passionate love while documenting horrors I hope I can forget someday.

For a reader who wants to understand Africa, the real, complex Africa, this book has it all. And that’s just one of its pluses – as a first novel, this is a terrifying joy.

The narrative technique is that same one Garcia Marquez employs in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. We know the ending. That’s the first sentence. Then we begin circling the horror that we know, and finding out more every chapter, but in reverse order, until we find out the beginning wasn’t what we thought.

The reader beginning the novel knows a mind-stretching atrocity has happened at Edenfields, the most glorious Dutch farm of them all, huge and prosperous and thriving, in a country that looks and feels a lot like Zimbabwe. In an early scene the reader knows the eight farm dogs are discovered mutilated and dead and dying. The dogs being put out of their misery is a wrenching scene. BUT a couple chapters later we have a scene in which those same frolicksome, delightful dogs get a good, soapy bath. This reader came unglued.

This is the story of Davey Baker, a good-looking, sixteen-year-old farmboy who alone survives an attack in which he loses his parents under hellish circumstances that deepen and darken the farther you wade into this unraveling, gasp-filled tale. Part One sets up what’s happened and what he’s done. It gets him into the care of Aunt Marsha, one of the book’s joys. Part Two is Davey’s solitary, brutal journey across country to reclaim his farm – a visionary road trip, and go ahead and hope, but you won’t be spared anything. Anything. This is Cormac McCarthy country, expect the worst, it’s just much better written than McCarthy with real women characters. Part Three is the local farmers’ night mission of revenge. It’s pure horror story as they go back to the creepy farm of death, the value of farming the one thing all four of these at-risk men have believed in all their lives.

Author Holding is a 29-year-old schoolteacher in Harare, Zimbabwe, and I would be fearful for my life if I’d written his brave, beautiful book. He’s a fire for us all.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

It’s the rare family memoir – and this extraordinary new one by Edwidge Danticat is one of them – that transcends the individual lives of its characters and becomes a testament to the mystery of relatedness.

When an opportunity to escape to the United States presents itself to the author’s parents, they leave Edwidge and her brother with Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise, who are always ready to take in another parentless child into their ever-growing brood. This becomes the children’s second family, until the confusing time comes to re-join their real parents. Hence Danticat is lucky enough to be raised by two wonderful fathers, Haitian brothers, one a twenty-five-year gypsy cab driver in New York, one a preacher with a houseful of adopted kids in dangerous, gang-and-revolution-torn Bel Air.

Indeed, at bottom, this book is about family love that transcends blood, and what people will do for the simple pleasure of living with their own. The two brothers hoard every brief moment of togetherness that’s given to them, and they don’t get much, with an ocean between them. So it isn’t fond memories that hold them together, it’s something deeper and stronger.

Uncle Joseph is the heart of the book. He’s got something to say about everything until he has to have a tracheotomy and loses the power of speech. Not even that can silence him. Soon a voice box held to Uncle Joseph’s neck provides a robotic imitation of a voice, for this no-holds-barred loving man risking his life again and again to protect his family and parishioners in wartorn Haiti.

Danticat’s memoir records a climactic moment in her family history, when the cab driver with his body-wracking cough lay dying in the hospital, and the preacher had entered the hell of U.S. Immigration, and Edwidge had just discovered that, somewhat ahead of plan, she was pregnant.

Told in spare, understated prose, it’s a loving chunk of interrelated family lives, slowly evolving into a survival story as the Danticats are thrust through a gauntlet of revolutionary terrors, before the story’s final stretch as a harrowing immigration horror story. Throughout, Danticat keeps it cool and in control, an emotional rollercoaster told with the wisdom of acceptance and everyday simplicity.

Lara Santoro would like to drag you into the heart of the African AIDS crisis, and she does so in her hilarious, harrowing new novel, MERCY (Other Press, $23.95).

It’s a passionate book, with intense characters who have intense feelings. No one whispers. Everyone is shouting. The novel is noisy with arguments and vocal explosions, mostly due to the alcoholic narrator, Anna, a twenty-nine-year-old Italian news correspondent in Africa. Anna’s got more handsome, interesting boyfriends than she knows what to do with, most of whom she betrays and treats terribly, and she isn’t much easier on her long-suffering editor back in Rome. Of course, she is Italian, which explains some of the hot-headedness, but even this Italian reader became exhausted by all of her angry emotionalism.

But that’s being picky. In spite of occasional excesses, the novel is vibrantly alive and two characters, in particular, are so moving and funny they practically burst out of the plot.

Father Anselmo would be worth the price of admission alone. He’s a grizzled old priest who, to the horror of his religious order, leaves the monastery to live in the most wretched, violent slum of Nairobi. He’s been there twelve years, tending to the sick, the dying, the poor. His eloquent prayers, outrageous philosophies and visionary comments on the blindness of evil, or the relationship between God and time, make you want to grab a pen and jot them down. He’s a flinty old saint for our era, and delightfully comic – he doesn’t realize the tea he serves, made with contaminated slum water, gives everyone who drinks it violent bowels.

But the book belongs to the title character, Mercy Achungo, the heart of the story. She’s a product of the slum, where she had become the most powerful dealer of the poor man’s trash alcoholic drink, muratina. Now she’s reformed. She’s six-feet-tall, loud, feisty, and authoritarian, and she dresses like a disco queen going clubbing. She’s Anna’s housegirl and soon takes control of the house. It takes Mercy to teach Anna how to act like “the big people of the world.” Every scene she’s in is a joy.

Author Santoro comes at you two-fisted, but you’ve gotta love her for it, because like Mercy’s mission to demand affordable anti-retroviral drugs for the poor of Africa, Santoro and her larger-than-life character, Mercy, are in-your-face for the best of human reasons.

Santoro is a world journalist who has covered every aspect of the AIDS crisis. She’s seen hell, but she also knows the joy of African laughter, and her comprehensive portrait of a continent in crisis, her simmering anger and authority give this novel a bite and realistic vivacity that set it apart. You really owe it to yourself to meet Mercy.

As Mercy would say, “You! How are you making yourself useful?”

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

The new winner of the Giller Prize, Canada’s top literary honor, is a collection of twelve interrelated stories about four young medical students and their unfolding lives as doctors. The stories are meant to dazzle, and they do.

The young Toronto author, Vincent Lam, is not only a doctor himself but an unfairly talented writer as well, with a swift, honest style and a compelling sense of storytelling. Again and again he quickly takes the moral pulse of a character. Some of these stories are knockouts, spellbinding plots with all kinds of messy complications and unexpected resolutions. A possible poisoning that’s also a possible psychosis, a violent, mentally-unstable arrested man who may be the victim of police brutality, a harrowing pregnancy – these are the dramatic medical set-pieces against which the personal dramas unfold.

The first and third stories, “How to Get into Medical School, Parts I and II,” provide the narrative fulcrum for the other tales. They’re a two-part self-contained novella, a Proust-like narrative of obsessive love – the decades-spanning, sometimes one-sided passion of Fitzgerald for the cool, succeed-at-all-costs Ming.

Along with two of their classmates, Chen and Sri, these four students-become-doctors are each featured in one or more of the separate tales, weaving in and out of each other’s personal and professional lives as they go about loving and marrying each other, infecting each other with diseases, treating each other.

Lam presents the reader with the dizzying ambiguities that haunt physicians, making their lives a chain of educated guesses. How honest should a doctor be to a patient without hope? On an emergency, should a doctor run or walk down the hall? Is an elevator excusable when every second counts? What if the doctor suspects the police have gone a little too far? What if the doctor knows the anaesthesiologist won’t get there in time?

It’s a show-stopper of a debut, a pulse-pounding tribute to medicine and the complexity of human motivation, concluding with the terrifying introduction of SARS into the world. Heartfelt, human stuff. Then there’s one more tale.

Unfortunately, the last story is inexplicably negative, a chain of vignettes composing the frustrating, rage-filled day of a hair-trigger, whining, overworked doctor on the night shift. It comes off as self-pitying and mean-spirited, not to mention over-written. I can’t imagine why it’s included.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

Easily the most thrilling, gorgeous, complex and satisfying new graphic novel in years comes from Israel, written and illustrated by a woman whose storytelling skills and ability to capture emotional nuances in her characters are right up there at the top, on an equal with Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel, the two reigning goddesses of graphic storytelling.

The story is a grabber, and unfolds expertly. A woman serving her military duty tells our appealing hero, Koby, a young taxi-cab driver in Tel-Aviv, that she has good reason to think his estranged father was blown up in a recent bombing. (Let me mention right now that the entire novel, hinged on terrorist activity, contains not a single anti-Palestinian comment. The lack of hatred and blame in Modan’s world is part of the compassion that plays throughout the story.)

How she convinces Koby to help her find out what happened to his father, and what they discover, is Chinese boxes-within-boxes of secrets and lies. It’s a mystery, all right, and a superb one, full of false conclusions and theory-breakers wrecking each of your theories. It’s got two central characters who are both so likeable and complex – and constantly fighting – that they’re straight out of classic comedy, except that they feel utterly real and you ache for their confusion, played out against the tortured backdrop of Tel Aviv, a city constantly taking the lives of its own citizens in explosive bloodbaths.

Modan works in big, bold colors, wisely knows what to show instead of tell, and generates a sense of perpetual surprise, of rugs constantly being jerked out from under you. The volume is visually rich, handsomely produced by Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal, utterly unsentimental in tone, witty and heartbreaking and humane, with a jim-dandy ending.

Graphic novel doubters, here’s the one that will break your resistance.

(As originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)