NovelWorld

Animal’s People should have won the Booker Prize.

It towers over the other shortlisted novels, entertainment on a grand scale, hugely ambitious, brilliantly written in slang-laced language that’s a pleasure to savor aloud, and teeming with unforgettable characters. (Can you remember even one character from The Gathering?) There’s Animal himself, a nineteen-year-old with a spinal deformity who runs on all fours and is narrating the story into a tape recorder, Elli, the bold, no-nonsense American woman doctor who has come to open her own free health clinic, Zafar, the beloved leader of the poor who would starve for his cause of justice, Ma Franci, the crazy French nun awaiting the Apocalypse, and Somraj, internationally famous Hindu singer with a damaged throat who now hears music in all the sounds around him. And that’s just a few of them.

The novel takes place nineteen years after a nightmarish industrial gas leak in the American factory that dominates the town. This backstory is clearly inspired by the very real industrial disaster at Bhopal, India, on December 3, 1984 when a Union Carbide pesticide plant had a chemical gas leak resulting in over three thousand deaths, deformed births, contaminated food, and polluted water.

As a stylist author Sinha falls somewhere between Rohinton Mistry and Yann Martel, but his classic passion for social justice links him more with Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, and his host of characters verges on Dickensian in numbers, memorability, and sheer delight. Sinha clearly loves these characters passionately (Take a look at the incredible lifesize statue by Eleanor Stride which the author commissioned of the novel’s central character, Animal) and tortures the reader with worries over their various fates, as a hunger strike in the deadly hot season and a huge protest movement by the poor veer angrily out of control and erupt into city-wide violence.

Here’s a hefty slice of the human comedy, served up with generous portions of every pleasure fiction can offer: language, character, plot, suspense, surprise, and wisdom. Go ahead, start with the first sentence. “I used to be human once.”

Pat Barker’s new novel is the Booker Prize-winning master at her best. Life Class is her tribute to the art world of pre-War London, following the careers of three young art students encountering the horrors of an unimaginable war, and asking – how should art respond to a world erupting into violence and aggression? Turn away and have nothing to do with it? Or plunge into the battlefield and re-create it?

Paul Tarrant is doomed to a life of working in the ironworks, but comes to London on his grandmother’s legacy to pursue his real dream: painting. Kit Neville is the son of a successful war correspondent, and already becoming famous for his aggressive, noisy modern canvases. He’s desperately in love with Elinor Brooke, from the landed world of privilege, who has won a scholarship to the Slade, the legendary art school in London where they all meet. There Paul falls in love with Teresa, an art school model with a violent stalker of a husband. And Elinor begins to fall in love with Paul. Each remains true to their own talent in their own way, as they’re pulled apart and flung together by the war that engulfs them all.

Intermingled with the fictional characters are the real-life womanizing painter Augustus John, the eccentric Lady Ottoline Morrell, the greatest aristocratic hostess of her time, and Dr Henry Tonks, the Victorian surgeon who became an artist and helped pioneer techniques of plastic surgery on the disfigured young soldiers returning from the horrors of the trenches.

In her usual clear, clean, effortless prose, Pat Barker tells a compelling story that never lets up momentum, avoids sentimentality and predictability, and concludes in an extremely satisfying manner, while asking powerful questions about the role of war in art, unanswered questions with plenty of ammo for all sides. She creates characters with passions and values you believe in, talented young people you care about in a world where art and war and love converge.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

The most thoughtful and entertaining novel to come out of Europe in a decade is Night Train to Lisbon, written by Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri under the pseudonym of Pascal Mercier. It’s a smart, heartfelt, thoroughly enjoyable novel written for thinking adults, and the most recent incarnation, from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf right down to Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, of that potent, ever-popular myth, the book that changes your life.

That’s exactly what 57-year-old Raimund Gregorius finds in a secondhand bookshop. That little book, along with a young Portuguese woman about to jump off a bridge, cause this set-in-his-ways professor of dead languages to walk out of the school where he has taught for thirty years, out of his rigid life of habits in Bern, and get on a train to Lisbon to find out everything he can about the little book’s Portuguese author, Amadeu de Prado.

The novel expertly tells two stories at the same time with two very different, very endearing heroes. One is Gregorius, the old academic suffering from dizzy spells, who boldly decides to live the part of his life he’s never dared. From being a stuffy old stickler the faculty call Papyrus, he is slowly humanized and changed in Lisbon by piecing together the troubled saga of the little book’s author.

That's Amadeu de Prado, the other hero, a brilliant bad boy whose fiery graduation address scandalizes the Church, an honest young man who falls in love with the woman adored by his best friend. Amadeu is an obedient son who takes up medicine to please his pain-ridden, hunchbacked father. He becomes a saintly doctor who saves the life of the dictator’s cruelest henchman and becomes hated by the Resistance fighters he loves. Both tales are studded with dozens of great scenes and emotional payoffs.

It’s a story about putting together the pieces of a story. The characters are learned about in their tragic, romantic youth as legendary figures, then actually encountered as old people, when the drama is long over. The present-day action of the novel is built upon geriatric interviews with the survivors. You’ve never read a novel with this many eighty-year-old characters!

To top it off, hefty servings of Amadeu’s translated writings pepper the tale in meaty philosophical chunks. Go ahead and buy this one – believe me, you’ll want to read it more than once.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

This slender little volume of six novellas, five of which are related, is Japanese novelist Tetsuo Miura’s debut in English, and they’re simply astonishing, plain and straightforward in an artless way but packed with unusual twists and turns and told with a quiet urgency.

Both Miura’s unnamed narrator and Miura himself suffer from terror of their own genetic make-up. Miura and his narrator are both writers desperately trying to work out their demons, telling the same story over and over, the story of Miura’s real-life family. One sister threw herself into the sea. One sister took poison. One brother disappeared. One brother ran off with the family funds. And then there’s Miura. With the history of his brothers and sisters, he can only wonder in fear what will he do to shame his family. Does he not have the same blood?

There’s a startling moment when you start the second story and realize you’ve already covered this ground, that the tale of the narrator’s shattered family and his love for Shino is being told again, but differently this time. Each of the five tales takes a different moment in the same narrative. What is told in one sentence in the third story becomes the subject of the fourth story. As exasperated as the reader gets with the narrator, who refuses to work so that he can lock himself in his room and write stories that he can’t sell, the troubled little narratives that have resulted are his redemption and our joy. Slowly you learn more and more about Miura’s brave, tragic family, and the hair’s breadth difference between good luck and bad.

Fascinating minor characters abound – the idealistic bookseller who buys the narrator’s books, the cast-off girlfriend of a college buddy, kind neighbors and childhood friends, broom makers and house maids, the unnoticed, forgettable people of the world.

The last novella has nothing to do with the first five. Maybe this means Miura has worked out his demons, and can go on to tell another story beside his own. Its central image – a father swinging his daughter in a field, and becoming so exuberant he’s careless – captures Miura’s melancholy sense of the randomness of fate. Jaded readers will find that set-ups in Miura’s world seldom lead to the pay-offs we expect. What looks like a “dear John” letter can really be a proposal of marriage.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)

The Bad Girl has it all – delightful, lovable characters, a skillfully woven, satisfying story, swift, literate writing and the audacity of plot twists that go off like a string of firecrackers.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian literary master (who also ran for President of Peru in 1990, and who slugged Garcia Marquez in the eye for getting way too friendly with Mrs Vargas Llosa) is at the height of his storytelling powers, unraveling a spellbinding love story laced with plenty of comic shocks and unexpected reversals, populated by dozens of colorful supporting characters (the fat cook revolutionary, the adopted Vietnamese boy who won’t speak, the old man who communes with the ocean), and featuring two ferociously mismatched, constantly battling, star-crossed lovers to die for.

From an almost folkloric beginning in Miraflores, Peru, when the narrator at the age of fifteen first falls for the pretty, heartless new Chilean girl with the fascinating (fake) accent, each chapter moves forward in time, shifting location, deepening the characters, revealing more and more as the bad girl goes from one deception and betrayal to another.

Ricardo Somocurcio is a “good boy,” a translator and interpreter for UNESCO, and he’s head-over-heels in love with her. She’s a tricky chameleon who never tells the truth, repeatedly deceives him, cheats him, and nearly destroys him, but she has a weakness for Ricardo’s passionate professions of love, his sentimental talk from the soap operas.

Just like the bad girl herself, the novel is an irresistible seduction, a sexy tease filled with provocative clues and postponed promises. Ambitious in scope, it stretches from Cuba to Japan, with major sequences in France, England, Peru and Spain in a story that spans over thirty years.

Vargas Llosa loves his characters, loves his readers, and delights in yanking the rug out from under them again and again in a crafty plot that never goes quite where you think it will. The casually-revealed surprise that opens the last chapter alone is a head-spinner. And talk about a perfect ending – they don’t get any better! This is why we read, for sheer storytelling joy and an intimate emotional connection to the human comedy.

(and here's Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the black eye given to him by Mario Vargas Llosa)

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)