NovelWorld

Dalia Sofer is the new face on the international scene, and the first novel of this young Iranian-American is another heartwrenching story of fundamentalist brutality, imprisonment, and a family attempting to escape. Though the genre is becoming familiar, and this novel contains all the expected elements, Sofer certainly knows what she’s talking about. At the age of ten, in 1982, she escaped from Iran with her family. Unfortunately, there must be five new novels and memoirs of escaping repressive regimes in bookstores right now.

What sets Sofer apart, and what I didn’t expect, is that she can write. Her style is simple, sophisticated and restrained. Though her tale is a potboiler of desperate scenes, she doesn’t go for melodrama. She always knows what to leave out, letting your anxiety pump the story full of adrenalin and do most of the work. She never goes poetic, never milks a scene, tells just enough.

Though the prison scenes can be harrowing, you soon find yourself in a morally gray world where even the revolutionaries have a point of view and a story – including the terrifying prison investigator, Mohsen.

The story unfolds in forty-seven short chapters, in Tehran, 1981, and is seen through three points of view: Isaac Amin, a thirty-five-year-old Jewish gemologist arrested at the very beginning of the story in his jewelry shop by revolutionaries with guns; his wife of twenty-five years, Farnaz, estranged from her husband but still in love with him, forced to face the house-inspecting soldiers and office looters alone; and nine-year-old Shirin, their daughter, who discovers files in her playmate’s basement that would lead to the arrest of her uncle.

An alternate story, not quite as successful, takes place in Brooklyn, told from a fourth point of view: Parviz, Isaac’s eighteen-year-old son, and covers his adoption by Hassidic Jews and his repressed romance with his landlord’s religious daughter. The two stories don’t quite intersect enough to be satisfying.

But the book abounds in great character moments, mistress/housekeeper confrontations, boss/employee face-offs, and Isaac’s terrifying interrogations by the man with the missing finger. I slowed down my reading hugely during the last hundred pages, not wanting to leave the characters, worrying that something bad would happen to my favorites right up to the last page.

The book’s title is a nostalgic reflection on the long-ago Septembers when Isaac and Farnaz first met at college in the romantic city of Shiraz, when their love was strong and real. Sofer’s novel is melancholic and tender, with the elegance of a sad tale told with judgment and discrimination.

(as originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

Imagine a remote, superstition-gripped village in the mountains of Albania clinging to such a steep slope that when drunks fall off the sidewalk, they land on someone’s roof.

That’s the setting of Ismail Kadare’s CHRONICLE IN STONE ($25), newly updated, revised, re-assembled and published complete for the first time in English by Arcade/Hachette. The wonder-filled little town is based on Kadare’s Balkan childhood home, Gjirokaster. It’s a world where witchcraft is a practical concern, eyeglasses are considered shocking, and the severed arm of an English pilot can become a sacred relic.

Now under Italian rule, now Greek rule, now German rule, the characters in this little village loom as mythic figures in the eyes of the near-sighted boy narrator, whose whimsical imagination struggles to understand a world of resistance fighting and Allied bombing, a world where a girl who kisses a boy in public can disappear forever.

Kadare is a world-class novelist, now 70, a Nobel Prize candidate and winner of the first Booker International prize. This loving tribute to his childhood is like nothing I’ve ever read before. It’s a polished, many-faceted autobiographical jewel laced with horror and humor, compassion and a goofy childhood imagination. It’s a whole new world within book covers. Welcome to Albania.

At first glance, the character names look Aztec. You feel like you’ve stumbled into a science fiction novel. This is because Albanian is unrelated to any language spoken in modern Europe.

Language isn’t the only thing that seems alien at first in this isolated Balkan world, but that only increases the humanity of the delightful characters you grow to love: Selfixhe, the matriarch grandmother who foretells the coming war from chicken bones, Kako Pino, the bridal makeup artist (“People never stop getting married”), Llukan the Jailbird who protests the opening of the jail and freeing of the prisoners, Argjir Argjiri, half-man and half-woman, who scandalizes the town by getting married, and Dino Cico, the mad inventor, with his fuel-less wooden airplane that will save Albania.

And that barely skims the surface. From the teacher who steals local cats for dissection to the boy who searches neighborhood wells for the body of the girl he was caught kissing, you’re swept up in a fascinating, alien world living by its own laws. Consider the terrors of your cistern overflowing from heavy rains, when the cistern is on the roof of your house.

Kadare has written over fifty books, many of which are available in French (he now lives in France), only a few in English. Some of them look politically complicated and historical and symbolic. This one isn’t. It’s a narrative banquet, a chain of one brilliant, warm-hearting scene after another, all linked together, told by a shy, bright kid who’s fallen in love with Macbeth. It’s in the tradition of Marjane Satrapi (PERSEPOLIS) and David Mitchell (BLACK SWAN GREEN), a childhood world re-created in literature so completely it becomes an entire little universe the reader can return to again and again.

Quibbling commentators make a big deal about Kadare’s political affiliations. Sure, in a Communist country, he gave communism some lip service. Kadare simply wanted to remain a living writer. He didn’t exactly have an option. An author says as much as he can get away with and still stay alive to write more.

“The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship,” says Kadare, and as you’ll see in this simple, honest, child’s view of a war-torn mountain town, no one side is completely right. Collaborators and partisans, revolutionaries and reactionaries, even the hated occupying Italians, all get a compassionate word from this superbly ironic commentator on the human comedy, Albanian-style.

My only previous encounter with Michael Ondaatje, in the popular film version of The English Patient, was baffling. I’m a crier. Everybody else was crying. I wasn’t. Not even a sniffle. Gorgeous music, gorgeous cinematography, Ralph Fiennes suffering.

Elements were there. Somehow, just not quite enough of them.

That’s what I’m left with after reading Ondaatje’s new novel, DIVISADERO. Many great moments, but no cumulative impact. The title refers to the famous street in San Francisco – which is a funny name for a novel that mostly takes place in Petaluma, Tahoe, and nineteenth-century France, but hey, the book has gorgeous writing, a very smart man at the wheel, some mind-blowing mythic moments and a multi-generational, continent-spanning, Babel-like plot.

But does it add up to a satisfying story? Not exactly.

The initial set-up is far more interesting than anything that comes after. The Coopers, a neighboring family, are murdered by a hired hand, all except the four-year-old who hides. Coop is adopted by the narrator’s family as – what else? – the hired hand, helping the widowed father take care of his two girls, Anna and Claire. To make things more complicated, only one of the girls – at first you don’t know which one – is really his daughter. The other girl is the daughter of a woman who died in the hospital at the same time his own wife died.

How’s that for a combustible set-up? All the possibilities for a Greek tragedy. And it all certainly blows up in a scene that had me leaping horrified out of my chair. Hair-raising violence occurs, and the three protagonists set off into three different plots.

The next sequence is almost self-contained, a Nevada gambling crime noir, and for a while what comes after seems to be a continuation of the same, following Coop on his adventures as a card sharp. That’s where the plot seems to be moving, particularly when – just at a critical moment – Coop’s plotline intersects with one of the girl’s. But such is not the case. Coop falls out of the story, as does Claire, who now works as a lawyer’s research assistant in San Francisco, not far from Divisadero Street.

Which leaves us with Anna in France, studying the life of the poet Lucien Segura while actually renting the dead writer’s house. Oddly enough, the whole second half of the novel becomes the story of Lucien, one-eyed recluse and romantic adventure-writer. Are the string of biographical vignettes about Lucien that compose the second half of the novel what Anna is writing while she lives in the poet’s house? We never know.

DIVISADERO is really, then, two novels, joined at the middle like Siamese twins: Coop dominates the first half, and Lucien the second half. What do the two have in common? Well, both heroes get mutilated in the course of the story. Um, anything else? Not that this reader could find.

What this whole free-flowing narrative amounts to is less a conventional novel and more simply tantalizing fragments of story tenuously strung together, centered around wisps of character that come brightly alive for a sequence or two and then fade. Even taking notes I got mixed up with who’s who. And it doesn’t help when the characters change names, and some characters don’t have names (the thief, the father, the wife), and everyone’s parents have an interesting story, too.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to discuss this book without discussing the plot – because part of the reading experience is figuring out what the plot is. That’s not always clear. What’s essential and what’s peripheral? The plot moves laterally and backward at whim. Background characters leap into life in the next chapter. A character ends up in prison long before you find out why. Chunks of plot are missing and appear later.

There’s often no continuity from chapter to chapter, and these chapters are three to five pages long, so that the story stops and starts over and over. It’s like a mosaic, but one that’s been dropped and jumped on.

Not that this narrative jungle isn’t littered with brilliant moments. This guy can write, don’t get me wrong. This is a poet’s idea of a novel, which throws out character and makes a mockery of plot, but has occasional lyrical moments that really work, a couple of horseback rides in particular are unforgetable.

But shaping is part of the author’s job, and DIVISADERO isn’t shaped. It’s a lovely torrent of language, one river flowing into another, with aspects of plot and moments of character – and yes, Ondaatje’s theory that life is just a collage is true, surely, we’re all just bits and pieces randomly stuck together, but in this case that doesn’t make a good novel.

Working-class Edward Mayhew and wealthy Florence Ponting have just been married, they’re in a Georgian inn having dinner, with an open door leading to the four-poster waiting for them. They both adore each other. They’re both virgins. It’s 1962. The student youth movement hasn’t started yet. Edward can hardly wait for their first night of sex. Florence is thoroughly repulsed by the whole idea, and dreading it.

Slowly, slowly, in one beautifully-wrought sentence after another, they will leave the dinner table and head for the bedroom as you learn about their lives. Halfway through the short novel, they’ll finally start to undress. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Flashback after flashback fill us in on their courtship. They’re both wonderful people. They deserve each other. They deserve to be happy.  

But the twisting in your gut tells you this is not going to end well.

And, after all, no one expects a happy ending in an Ian McEwan novel. Lost opportunities for happiness are what this author writes about. Most of his characters suffer for the rest of their lives over the slightest misunderstanding or bad timing.

Jon Banville, winner of the Booker Prize for THE SEA, became somewhat notorious for his trashing review of Ian McEwan’s masterpiece, SATURDAY. Banville scoffed that no married couple were as happy together as the good Dr Henry Perowne and his wife, Rosalind, and that marriage was universally a much more miserable affair.

Few people would scold Ian McEwan for not being miserable enough. SATURDAY is one of his very few novels with a happy ending. Personally I was cheering and felt the good neurosurgeon earned it. 

That doesn’t mean I defend everything McEwan has written. I hated my first McEwan experience, his Booker Prize-winning AMSTERDAM. It’s a nasty little tale about two nasty men who decide to murder each other and succeed. How it won the Booker Prize is anyone’s guess.

Then I read ATONEMENT. The first half is awesome, a perfect little stand-alone tragedy. Though the second half wanders a bit, through the soldier’s story and the nurse’s story, it’s all topped by one of the great endings of modern British lit. 

But for me, SATURDAY is his masterpiece. It all takes place on one day, obviously a Saturday, February 15, 2003, when all of London has been brought to a standstill by a massive, street-jamming anti-war protest, and two cars on a collision course will result in a final 70-page sequence so intense and terrifying I twice threw the book down, swearing I couldn’t go on. But it’s all luminous with inter-relatedness, it’s like a vision of the modern world in a day. Right from the first image, that mysterious burning airplane in the sky…

His new work, ON CHESIL BEACH, is smaller in scope and more universal, a sad, sophisticated little tale delivered with McEwan’s trademark civilized elegance of language, in this case focused specifically on the absurd anxieties of sex and how cultural fears wreck lives. 

Actually the little book constantly reminded me of Garcia Marquez – the novella length he uses so brilliantly in CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, the sexual frankness of MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES, the overview style of storytelling narration, and sentences so perfectly composed and achingly wise you gasp and pause to read them twice.