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Book Review: Almost Everything Very Fast

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 22, 2016.

There are two parallel narratives running through Almost Everything Very Fast, German author Christopher Kloeble’s first novel to be translated into English. The connections between the storylines reveal themselves gradually, and it takes almost the entire book before they fully intersect. But we know they will eventually, and the journey to bring them together is a compelling one.

It’s tempting to describe this book as charming, which is surprising given that it describes murder and other violent deaths, rampant incest, Nazi brutality, and a host of lesser ugliness. Credit Kloeble’s unshowy, matter-of-fact — even tender — delivery for bringing in the light.

The primary narrative belongs to Albert, a 19-year-old who has spent the last 16 years in St. Helena’s orphanage, outside his hometown of Königsdorf. Albert is not actually an orphan, though: while he is desperate to know who his mother was, his father, Fred Driajes, is still alive. Unfortunately, Fred has the mental capacity of a young child — a six-and-a half-foot-tall, happy, enthusiastic child whose favorite word is “ambrosial” — and Albert has served as the parent in their relationship for many years.

The lone stable adult in Albert’s childhood is St Helena’s steely headmistress, Sister Alfonsa, with whom he has a close but complicated relationship. She recognizes his intellect, teaches him to play chess, and is obviously fond of him, but also levies his punishment each time Albert runs away to Fred, convinced that this time he can forge a real connection with his “Papaa.”

It never happens, of course. Through years of summer vacations, Fred’s primary occupations are reading entries in the encyclopedia and counting green cars each day from the town’s bus stop. Albert cannot glean any information from him. “Trying to hold a conversation with Fred, one that actually amounted to anything, was the most terrible, Sisyphean labor he knew.” But when a cardiologist callously waves five fingers at them to indicate how many months Fred has left to live, Albert makes up his mind to move in with Fred in a last-ditch effort to discover who his mother is.

The second narrative belongs to Julian, who serves as our link to a difficult past. Readers meet him in the prologue, a sharp old man with painful memories. He starts his story from a tiny Bavarian hamlet called Segendorf, a village so remote that the inhabitants don’t hear about World War I until after it’s already been lost.

Segendorf is so small that a significant amount of inbreeding mars the village: “It frequently happened that somebody’s brother was also his cousin, or somebody’s daughter also her sister. Quite a few local families had produced a ‘Klöble’ — a ‘clumsy, stupid fellow.’ Mothers of such children were spat upon.” (Kloeble seems to have made up this definition for his own name.)

Thus, the characters Jasfe and Josfer Habom are not just sister and brother, they are also mother and father to Julian and his sister, Anni. Tragedy ensues when 11-year-old Julian discovers the truth of that dual relationship, and thereafter he leaves the village and his beloved sister behind.

Though he lives a rich life with his savior and mentor, the undertaker Wickenhauser, he is drawn back to Segendorf for love of Anni, and arrives the night before she marries the one foreigner who has ever survived stumbling into the village, a Pole named Arkadiusz Driajes.

While Julian bides his time and stews over the interloper, he fathers a child with Mina, the Klöble who loves him, who helped him to abscond years before. His child and Anni’s are born days apart. And if the Great War bypassed Segendorf, the Nazis do not, and they perform their own brand of “housecleaning,” rebranding the village as “Königsdorf.”

At its heart, this is a novel about absent parents. Some characters try to spin that absence into a positive. Fred’s next-door neighbor Klondi, who fully understands her own stunning failure as a parent, comforts a young Albert by saying, “Mothers are overrated, Albert. If you ask me, you can count yourself lucky that you grew up without one.” Wickenhauser makes the same point to Julian: “We’re all better off without our parents.”

But, of course, that’s not really true. The void is always too large to fill, though it doesn’t stop any of the parentless characters from trying. Even Fred stalks the sewers of Königsdorf in search of his father, while Albert continues his detective work into the identity of his mother. All he has is a single photograph and a compact that contains two strands of hair that are just as red as his own. And Sister Alfonsa, firmly believing that Albert and Fred should be staying at St. Helena’s in Fred’s last few months, knows exactly the way to lure her favorite back: “I could show you who your mother is.”

Sister Alfonsa has never before hinted that she knows this truth, and her bait does the trick. Albert, Fred, Klondi, and Albert’s old girlfriend Violet pile into Violet’s Volkswagen for the road trip back to Sister Alfonsa and the answers to their many questions.

Ultimately, these answers may not be very satisfying, because, truly, what can ever make up for a lifetime of absence? Perhaps Fred has the answer to this question when he remarks, “We are all Most Beloved Possessions” of those to whom we are most present.

Book Review: The Cabaret of Plants

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This book review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 10, 2016.

An orchid that flowers entirely underground. A rainforest vine that closely mimics the leaves of each tree it encounters, changing leaf shape, size, and color within the space of a few yards on the same vine. Passionflowers that have developed a back-and-forth competition with the zebra longwing butterfly to outsmart the other, with the current advantage going to the passionflower, which produces growths on its leaves that resemble butterfly eggs in a botanical “No Vacancy” sign.

We are treated to these wonders and many more in The Cabaret of Plants. Its subtitle, Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination, perfectly sums up this gorgeous and engaging book from British naturalist/author Richard Mabey. A prolific writer, Mabey specializes in delivering accessible, thought-provoking discussions of plant life as it intersects with humanity, as he did in his 2011 book, Weeds.

In Cabaret, Mabey muses that we humans cannot think of plants without using ourselves as a frame of reference. While many people regard animals as beings in their own right, worthy of compassion and respect, there is little of that impulse toward flora.

Mabey worries that modern thinking considers plants purely in terms of their economic value, “defining plants as a biological proletariat, working solely for the benefit of our species, without granting them any a priori importance.”

The author isn’t here to scold his readers, but hopes to make us think “about plants as authors of their own lives,” and tells us, “Most of my own personal encounters with plants…have confirmed this conviction that plants have agendas of their own.”

Cabaret is organized into sections by subject or theme, and each of these has multiple chapters. Every one of them is fascinating. Mabey mixes history, science, and anecdote in roughly equal parts to compulsively readable effect.

The chapter “The Challenge of Carnivorous Plants: The Tipitiwitchet,” for example, describes the early investigations into the why and how of carnivorous plants such as the Venus flytrap and the sundew, but spends as much time on the search for the name’s origin. Rather than being Native American, as first thought, tipitiwitchet is a bit of ribaldry, likening open “flytrap leaves — a pair of moist, red semicircles fringed by hairs, which remorselessly gripped their hapless prey” to female genitalia. A glance at the accompanying color plate, painted in 1847, makes that association hard to refute.

Though the book is wide ranging, it spends most of its time in the Europe and America of the 18th and 19th centuries, eras in which scientific discovery, romantic ideals, and the inculcated Judeo-Christian beliefs in the proper order of things mixed in a heady, disorienting brew.

It’s worth being reminded of the simple, everyday tools that people like Joseph Priestly, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton — all of whom Mabey accurately describes as “pre-professional scientists…the last non-specialists” — used in making their discoveries, the most important of which was close observation.

“Unravelling the process of photosynthesis in plants was arguably the most important development in the history of biology,” and Priestly did it with a bell jar, a bowl of water, and a mint sprig.

When it came to having a general fascination with plants, no one beat the Victorians. These folks had the deep and abiding curiosity about plants that Mabey would like to see reignited in modern-day thought, but that curiosity led to rapacious demand to possess the plants that most excited them, much to the detriment of the plants themselves.

It is painful to read about the plunder caused by the Victorians’ love affair with ferns and orchids, in which huge trees were felled to get at the epiphytes living high in the canopy, orchid varieties were purposely destroyed in order to keep supply low and prices high, and most plants didn’t survive anyway because the orchid hunters didn’t bother to note the particulars of the native environment in which the plants grew.

Not everyone loved orchids, however. Darwin in particular found them frustratingly inefficient. In the endlessly inventive reproductive methods plants have evolved to overcome their immobility, few can compete with the jaw-dropping variety of orchids, many of which use insects’ sex drives to help themselves along.

Darwin shook his head at, as Mabey describes, the “extraordinary mechanical contrivances which orchids employ to ensure cross-pollination — rocket launchers, pistons, trap doors, levers, triggers,” as an overly complicated expense of energy.

But even Darwin couldn’t argue with success. When he found a Madagascan orchid with an exceedingly deep well in which it held its nectar, Darwin intuited that there must be a Madagascan insect, probably a moth, with a tongue long enough to get at the nectar and serve as the orchid’s cross-pollinator. Finally found after Darwin’s death, the moth, with its 12-inch-long tongue, was dubbed in his honor “the predicted one.”

There are so many delights to be found in Cabaret — from the hunt for the elusive Amazonian moonflower, to the wonder of self-rejuvenating yews that defy efforts to determine their age, to the sprouting of an extinct Judean palm from a 2,000-year-old excavated seed — and Mabey keeps us enthralled from first to last.

He leaves us with a description of the fallen Queen Beech of Hertfordshire, which tumbled in a 2014 storm after dominating its site for 400 years. He muses, “Trees are used to catastrophes, big and small. They have been tacking around them for millions of years.” The message is clear: Plants in no way depend on us to survive and thrive; we would do well to remember that we depend on them.

Book Review: The Loss of All Lost Things

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This book review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on January 27, 2016.

Consider all the loss it is possible to endure: lost wages, lost opportunities, lost objects, lost youth, lost hope, lost minds, lost innocence, lost loves, lost loved ones, the loss of a child. Consider all the ways that we endure that loss, or don’t endure. That, very simply and eloquently, is what Amina Gautier does in her latest story collection, The Loss of All Lost Things.

This is Gautier’s third collection of short stories, after At-Risk and Now We Will Be Happy. Her first won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and her second won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Clearly, her work speaks to readers, and now here is Loss, adding its haunting voice to the others, speaking quietly, powerfully, of the large and small losses in all of our lives.

The collection opens with what is perhaps the most searing of the stories, “Lost and Found,” which is told from the point of view of a young boy who has been kidnapped, snatched up off the street in the brief walk between the school-bus stop and home. The boy thinks of his captor only as “Thisman,” and we are spared all but the barest allusions to how Thisman uses him. What is perhaps more painful is seeing how easily Thisman is able to convince the boy that no one wanted him in the first place and that no one is looking for him. Still, the boy tries to think of himself as lost instead of taken. “Things that are taken are never given back. Things that are lost can be found,” he thinks, and wishes, “If only he could find the Lost and Found and turn his own self in.”

This story is bookended by “The Loss of All Lost Things,” in which we experience this horror from the parents’ perspective. The boy’s sense that his parents were distractedly living above and around him is borne out here, his absence garnering their focus as his presence never could. Then, beyond the misery of helpless waiting and speculating comes the brutal realization that, eventually, life continues on for everyone else.

“Their friends, relatives, and loved ones who wanted them to remain hopeful now want them to admit the worst has come.” And though “they hate each other for their weakness, for the living that muscles through,” the husband and wife only have each other. No one else can possibly understand.

Unexpectedly, the two stories that focus on the parents of kidnapped children are perhaps the most hopeful in the whole collection. In “Cicero Waiting,” the husband and wife already know their 3-year-old daughter isn’t coming back after she disappears in an instant out of his gaze at Target. Though he is unwilling to be forgiven, his wife stubbornly refuses to blame him and continues to reach out to him.

“Could it be that simple?” he wonders. Yes, it could.

Many of the other stories are of more typical losses. For example, a more universal experience of losing a child — that is, of losing the wonderful, loving child you once knew to the ravages of adolescence — is the subject of both “What’s Best for You” and “What Matters Most,” in which a mother tells herself, “It is your fault that you raised a daughter whom you love with a desperation bordering on insanity but with whom you cannot have a civil conversation.” To say that Gautier’s subjects are common or typical, however, does not in any way diminish the power of her stories.

In a nod to writing what you know, Gautier, who teaches at the University of Miami, peoples her stories with professors and graduate students, denizens of the oh-so-insular university universe. She pokes self-aware fun at the world of grad students who “took themselves too seriously” and are trained to think of their world as the only one of any import. When, in “Directory Assistance,” Caroline drops out of that life and winds up training with the phone company, she and her mother celebrate that she finally has a “‘real’ job.”

There is only one story here that doesn’t belong. While the themes of “Disturbance” are squarely in keeping with the rest of the collection, its tone is not. Gautier puts us into another world, describing a group of people that has separated from the rest of society and formed its own small town, Togetherness. This would have been a fine story in a different collection, but here it is a jarring anomaly. Putting the readers’ focus on the unfamiliar mechanics of life in a small, closed community, with its parallels to Shirley Jackson’s classic “The Lottery,” takes us away from the simple details of normal daily living, which by themselves are painful enough.

One of her characters makes this point in “Resident Lover,” in considering his ex-wife’s “weird children poems…they were children meant to make one cry because the poetry could not.” Instead, he feels that “the common pain of childhood — of wanting to be older than you were sooner than you ever could be, of feeling vulnerable and dependent, of waiting for everything, of being devalued — any and all of this was enough, hard enough, good enough for a slew of poems.” It is this capturing of the pain and loss common to everyday living at which Gautier excels.

E. A. Aymar, Author of the DEAD Trilogy, Talks Noir and Sympathy

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The following interview originally appeared on the blog Late Last Night Books, for which I am a contributor.

E.A. Aymar is a noir kind of guy. He hosts D.C.’s “Noir at the Bar”, and just finished up hosting the expanded version, “Noir on the Air” on 11 January, in which nine noted thriller writers read their work on the Global Radio Network. His short story “The Line” appeared this month in Out of the Gutter, a lit mag known for its dark, edgy content. He’s also the managing editor of The Thrill Begins, the online resource for beginning and debut thriller writers from the International Thriller Writers Organization. Aymar is best known as the author of the Dead Trilogy (Black Opal Books), the first two entries of which are I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead and You’re as Good as Dead. Fans eagerly awaiting the final installment can get their fix of Aymar’s signature deadpan humor and general take on things in his monthly column “Decisions and Revisions” in the Washington Independent Review of Books. I met Ed through my own participation with the Independent, and asked him to chat with me here about his writing.

Q: Did you always plan to write Dead as a trilogy, or did that concept develop as you wrote?

A: I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead was written as a standalone, but I loved the idea of recurring characters. Part of that is because I’ve always admired series writers, but felt that the concept was too constraining; I imagined having to revisit a creative well that had long run dry. But the idea for a trilogy hit me after the first book was completed, and I went with it. I wish it had occurred to me before that time, because the first book is pretty much self-contained. Kind of like how the first Star Wars movie worked on its own, and a sequel wasn’t truly necessary.

I’m sorry. Everything with me is Star Wars right now. That’s how I’m seeing the world. It’s not productive.

So, yeah, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have defined these books as part of a trilogy. Part of that comes from a marketing realization—no one reads the second book without reading the first, even though I think You’re As Good As Dead is a much better book than the first. Plus it’s easier to write another book that stays in the same world, but doesn’t have to adhere to the same parameters (for example, the first book was told from one perspective, the second from multiple). I dunno. That’s all after-the-fact stuff I didn’t realize when I was writing the book. I just enjoyed the story.

Q: How do you keep characters, plot points, timelines, and small details straight across multiple books?

A: The good thing about writing thriller is that you can kill off characters and, voila, one less timeline! But, in seriousness, I did find myself going back to Book One when writing Book Two for some things. I’m good at remembering certain details, like the makeup of a house or apartment, but terrible at others. Like ages. I constantly have to remind myself how old Tom and Julie (his daughter) are. It’s annoying. I guess someone has to die.

I think you get so immersed in the world you’re creating, especially when you revisit it on a constant basis, that it becomes intimately familiar. Or, at least, that happens when you’re writing well, and it’s a lovely moment in creation—that point where you look around and everything is sort of bleary.

Of course, my novels are set in the present day, so I have it easy. I would hate the burden that Up the Hill to Home must have placed on you. Determining the accuracy behind historical details seems really hard. I avoid hard work.

Q: Your protagonist, Tom Starks, is not always a sympathetic character. Was it challenging to find the balance between taking him to the edge (sometimes even taking him over the edge) and keeping him sympathetic enough that the reader is still pulling for him?

A: I’m a terrible judge of a reader’s empathy. Sometimes a character does something I agree with, and it’s loathsome, and I don’t realize how much that can bother readers. I read an interview with Phillip Roth, and the interviewer asked if Roth failed to realize how shocking his characters can act. Roth was irritated by the question, but I get it. I think Ellis had the same issue in the feminist backlash to American Psycho.

I wonder, sometimes, if this problem is more prevalent among male writers. I don’t think that men, as writers or readers, are terribly empathetic toward characters, and we rarely form relationships or identify with them. That’s somewhat at the brunt of Rebecca Solnit’s irritation in this essay (http://lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me/), particularly with the character of Lolita. If you accept that male readers are typically less empathetic than their female counterparts, then those men may fail to understand the f—ing horror of what’s happening to Lolita, or realize exactly how terrible Humbert is (that said, I think Nabokov understood).

That’s one approach. But I want to use a specific example for the second. Tom was a prick to Julie in the first book (particularly in one conversation) and, even though that book was partially about his acceptance of fatherhood, it rubbed a lot of readers the wrong way. Not necessarily because of what he said, but because of how it made her feel. Given the chance to rewrite it, I would. Not because Tom said anything false, and certainly nothing worse than what parents have said to their kids, but because it was too rough for readers. I stubbornly feel that conversation is real, and true, but I should have softened it.

Tom and Julie’s difficulties in the second book are more easily and better handled but, then again, the second book is better than the first.

Q: In both books, you use the classic novels that Tom teaches as a parallel to the themes you’re developing. How did you choose which classics to use? Were they favorites of yours in school?

A: I’d only read The Count of Monte Cristo just before I started I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, mainly because I wanted to study the elements of a classic revenge story. And Monte Cristo was so enjoyable that I ended up incorporating it into my own book, and having Tom’s class echo my own thoughts as I studied Dumas’s work.

I really liked doing that for the first book, and I wanted to do it again in the second (I love giving shout outs to things that inspire me, which is why I also mentioned the musicians Sara Jones and Abby Mott in the first book). I had a lot of influential books to choose from, but I felt that For Whom the Bell Tolls fit the theme of You’re As Good As Dead in several ways, some overt, some subtle. And I just loved Hemingway’s book. I know he falls in and out of favor and style, but that book was so powerful it literally changed the way I saw the world. The ending lines felt like the end of some great orchestral piece, sudden and dominant and reverberating.

If someone reads my book, and then decides to read Hemingway or Dumas, or listen to Sara Jones or Abby Mott, then I’m happy.

Q: You are a funny, open, laid-back guy—or at least you pretend really well!—but you write about some pretty dark stuff. Where does that come from?

A: That’s nice of you to say. My wife doesn’t think I’m funny, but she’s seen my shtick for a long time and is pretty tired of it. I get that. It’d be awful to live with me.

Anyway, I once dated this woman who had been horribly abused—sexually, physically—by an ex-boyfriend. She’d never really healed, and part of that was because she didn’t have anyone to talk to. The people she did open up to (a hard thing in itself) told her that the brutality was too much to listen to. She even told me about this one guy she’d been dating, a hopeful poet, and the guy once interrupted one of her stories and said, “I’m sorry, I just can’t listen to this. It’s too hard.”

Part of me understands that. I heard all her stories, about the rapes and burns and torture this woman underwent, and I get how hard it is to listen to this stuff.

But when you’re a writer, it’s your duty. You have to look deep into the terrible things men and women (mostly men) do. You can’t risk being artificial. That’s not to say you need to walk down those dark alleys, but you have to know what’s happening in them if you’re going to portray them truthfully.

F—ing poets.

Q: How do you fill out the details and backstory of your characters to understand what they would do in a given situation? Did Tom ever surprise you with something that he did? (I can think of a scene in a basement in You’re as Good as Dead that was pretty surprising.)

A: Oh, thanks! I really like that scene and wanted it to hit right. I’m glad it had a good effect on you.

That particular scene did surprise me. It’s weird when that happens, because even if you don’t exactly know what’s going to happen, the scene is somewhere inside of you. And it occurs to you, and you know it’s right, but it’s one of those things you write that continues to surprise you long after its written. That’s rare.

My main characters don’t always have that effect on me. I think it’s because they’re close to me—emotionally—and they sort of echo me. It’s actually the other characters (Diane in the first book, Switch in the second) who really surprise me. I feel more freedom with them. And in some ways, those characters outshine Tom. Readers liked Tom, to an extent, but he’s a pretty typical guy (aside from the killing). Diane and Switch are more unique, I think.

Q: Like so many other writers these days, this is not your full-time job. How do you fit your writing in with everything else?

A: I’m wildly fortunate in a couple of ways. My day job doesn’t stray outside of 9-5 hours. So I don’t have to bring work home, go in early, or work on weekends. And I have a supportive spouse. I waited a long time to get married, and even longer to have a kid. And I did both with the explicit understanding that I need time to write every day. My wife is really terrific about that, and that’s huge. I dated women before her who were less understanding. To be fair to them, it’s not easy. I mean, if you’re dating an Olympic athlete, then you understand that they need time to train, and they’ll have to hoard that time selfishly. When you’re dating some guy who wants to write a novel, then it’s less obvious that they need the same amount of time.

You know?

It’s hard for people to consider something that you’re not doing professionally as anything less than a hobby. But if you do it enough, then you don’t need to convince them. They see it’s part of you.

Q: When can we expect the finale to the Dead trilogy? Any teasers you’d care to share?

A: I’m actually putting off the end of the trilogy to work on something else. And I hope to announce that something else soon. (JBY note: Ed shared some of the subject matter he’s been working on in his latest Independent column, Tough Research.)

Q: What is the question that you wish someone would ask you but they never do? You get to answer it now.

A: Ha! Good question. But I don’t really have a question I’ve always wanted. I guess probably something like, “How do you feel now that you’ve won the lottery, and you’re famous, and you can live anywhere in the world?”

Unfortunately for Ed, it doesn’t look like anyone’s asking him that question again this week.

Book Review: A General Theory of Oblivion

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This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on January 5, 2016.

For American readers not already familiar with author José Eduardo Agualusa, and whose understanding of Portuguese colonialism is perhaps somewhat vague, A General Theory of Oblivion is a sneaky bit of a history lesson.

Portugal, which was comparable to England in the scope and length of its colonial reach, landed in what is now the southwest coastal African country of Angola in 1483 and didn’t cede control until 1975. Hence, it really shouldn’t be surprising that Agualusa is a white, native Angolan who writes in Portuguese.

That he writes with such an empathetic, race-neutral view of the struggle for Angolan independence won’t be surprising to those who have read some of his earlier works, such as The Book of Chameleons or Rainy Season.

At the center of Theory is Ludovica Fernandes Mano — Ludo — a native of Portugal with longstanding agoraphobia. “When still only a little girl, she was horrified by open spaces. She felt, upon leaving the house, fragile and vulnerable, like a turtle whose shell had been torn off.” An incident she thinks of simply as “The Accident” cements her unwillingness to venture outdoors.

After their parents die, she lives with her sister Odette. When Orlando, a visiting Angolan mining engineer, falls in love with Odette, he realizes it is a package deal. He brings both sisters with him to live in the Angolan capital of Luanda, in a huge luxury apartment with a private rooftop veranda and a vast library.

Normalcy begins to erode as the long-simmering conflict for Angolan independence comes to a boil. Odette wants to join the many well-off Angolans who decide that Brazil or Portugal is more to their liking, but the day that Orlando finally agrees, he and Odette never return home from a farewell party.

Three things happen in quick succession: armed fighting breaks out in the streets below; a phone caller demands “the stones” in return for her sister; and Ludo accidentally kills one young man in a group of scavengers about to break into the apartment. After that, she methodically builds a brick wall outside her door that cuts the apartment off from the rest of the building and Ludo from the rest of the world.

From the foreword and acknowledgements, we learn that Ludo was a real person who bricked herself into her apartment for 28 years, writing diaries in notebooks until she ran out of paper and began to write on the apartment walls.

The book’s title comes from something the fictional Ludo writes: “If I still had the space, charcoal, and available walls, I could compose a great work about forgetting: a general theory of oblivion.” But the book might also have been named for one of the chapters, “The Subtle Architecture of Chance,” because at the heart of this story is the concept that chance choreographs so much of what our lives become.

Ludo peeks out at the world around and below her, watching incidents unfold that we see closer up and so make better sense of. Her world shrinks along with her food supply and eventually her vision. Survival comes to depend on burning books and furniture for cooking and heating, raising crops and collecting rainwater in the rooftop gardens, and learning to trap pigeons.

This last is made easier when Ludo finally finds the cache of diamonds hidden in the apartment and realizes the sparkle is just the thing to lure in the birds. Thus, in Ludo’s world, are pigeons worth far more than diamonds.

Interspersed with what sometimes feels like a fever dream of Ludo’s survival inside her castle walls are the swirling stories of the people and events in the streets and halls just outside. The tales may seem random and disconnected, but Agualusa is a master storyteller who doesn’t bother to introduce a character or mention an incident unless it has a larger role to play.

In one small instance, Ludo releases one of the captured pigeons, even though it has swallowed some of the diamonds, because it carries a love note in a cylinder on its leg. That act affects the lives of many of the characters we meet.

And those characters are never cardboard. For example, Jeremias Carrasco (which means executioner), a Portuguese mercenary with a taste for torture, squares off against Magno Mireira Monte, an intelligence officer of the communist MPLA faction who does his own share of inflicting pain, and yet each man eventually reveals a measure of humanity that lifts him out of simple villainy.

Agualusa originally wrote this story as a screenplay, and the novel retains that sense of immediacy. Certainly his economy of words heightens its impact. (The page count is deceptive: this is a tiny book with lots of white space, easily consumed in one long sitting.)

It’s a tribute to Agualusa’s storytelling that the bittersweet redemption found by his characters feels authentic; he and they have earned it.

Book Review: Like Family

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This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on December 30, 2015.

If you’re familiar with Paolo Giordano because of either of his first two novels, The Solitude of Prime Numbers or The Human Body, be aware that Like Family has little in common with them — little besides the fact that Giordano is the author, and that’s reason enough for his fans to pick this one up, too.

Unlike his previous novels, fraught as they were, this is a slender, tender volume, easily consumed in a single afternoon, possibly while you’re wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa with a mug of tea.

Giordano admits at the outset that this, generally, is a true story, with names and a few salient points changed, but the sentiment he feels for these people is real. It’s also a bit of a giveaway that the first-person narrator is a Ph.D. in particle physics, a characteristic he shares with the author.

This is the story of a young husband and wife who, it is easy to see, are a bit of a mismatch: Nora is creative, messy, and outgoing, while our unnamed narrator is mathematical, precise, introverted, and somewhat pessimistic. His current position is chronically at risk, but she’s unenthusiastic about moving from Italy to Switzerland so that he can accept a prestigious research grant. Then, when Nora’s pregnancy turns high-risk and she is confined to months of bed rest, Mrs. A. enters their lives.

At first they are a bit put-upon by the way she takes over operations, but it isn’t long before they come to depend upon her.

“By the time Emanuele was born, we were too spoiled to give up her attentions. Mrs. A. went from being Nora’s nurse to being our son’s nanny, as if there were a natural continuity between the two occupations, and although she had not cared for a newborn baby before that, she immediately proved to have very clear ideas — much clearer than ours — on what to do and what not to do.”

Mrs. A. has a primary hand in raising Emanuele. She is often mistaken for his grandmother, and the two dote upon each other. He imitates his parents in calling Mrs. A. “Babette,” after the title character from the Karen Blixen story “Babette’s Feast,” because of how central food is to her place in the family. When, after eight years, Mrs. A. suddenly announces her plan to stop coming each day simply because she is tired, the household goes into a tailspin.

The story begins at the end, with Mrs. A’s death, but from there goes forward and back to reveal the physical and emotional details that allow us to see deeply into these lives. In Like Family, Giordano gives in to a tendency to tell rather than to show, but the telling is often so lovely that it’s hard to complain. For example: “In the long run, every love needs someone to witness and acknowledge it, to validate it, or it may turn out to be just a mirage. Without her gaze we felt at risk.”

And, as he gazes on his sleeping wife: “In the end we are almost never happy or unhappy because of what happens to us; we are one or the other depending on the humor that flows inside us, and hers is molten silver: the whitest of metals, the best conductor, and the most merciless reflector. The consolation of knowing that she is so strong mixes with the fear of not being truly indispensable to her, with the suspicion that I might be sucking the life out of her, like a kind of gigantic parasite.”

It seems unfair, to those of us with a smaller talent set, that a guy with a Ph.D. in something as arcane as particle physics could write as beautifully, as tenderly as Giordano often does. On the other hand, we can just be grateful and keep reading.

Book Review: The Big Green Tent

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 12 November 2015.

Though not exactly a household name in the U.S., Ludmila Ulitskaya is perhaps the leading contemporary voice in Russian literature today, and her fiction has won a long list of prestigious awards in addition to racking up huge sales in her home country. She is a scientist by training, having worked in genetics and biochemistry before being fired in the 1960s for dissidence (a coworker reported her to the KGB for retyping a banned book).

Lucky for all of us that Ulitskaya came to writing late, and that she published her first works after the fall of the Soviet Union; her writing would certainly have gotten her in much the same life-shattering trouble with the Soviet authorities as the characters in her most recent novel, The Big Green Tent, a story focused on the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.

There are many, many characters under the Tent, all interconnected in one way or another. Readers need to pay attention to understand where in the chronology they might be at any point in the story, since the narrative shifts back, forth, sideways, and around. Minor characters crop up again in unexpected places, creating new connections. There seems at most one degree of separation between any two characters.

We meet the primary three when they are schoolboys in the early 1950s, drawn together by their shared place at the bottom of the school’s social hierarchy. There is Ilya, the tall, brash cut-up; tiny, well-dressed Sanya, already an accomplished pianist in primary school; and Mikha, the redheaded, nearsighted Jewish orphan who joins them in fifth grade.

Two people help them weather the storms of primary school: Sanya’s beloved and cultured grandmother, Anna Alexandrovna, and the new teacher, Victor Yulievich, a one-armed war veteran who recites poetry at the beginning of each class and inspires students to become the LORLs — Lovers of Russian Literature.

There is also Olga, naively unaware of how privileged she is as the daughter of two dutiful party functionaries blessed with a private apartment, a dacha, two chauffeurs, and plenty of food delivered to their door. Upright and honest to a fault, she believes that she is truly part of the collective until, at university, Ilya opens her eyes to the greater truth of Soviet life.

By this time, Ilya has turned an early talent for photography and personal networking into a dangerous career of chronic dissidence. He produces and distributes samizdat, underground literature painstakingly transcribed by hand or typewriter and passed person-to-person and often smuggled out to the West or, in the case of tamizdat, smuggled into the country from the West (transcribing tamizdat is what got Ulitskaya arrested and fired in real life). This kind of quiet, homegrown rebellion — as well as the courage it takes and the price it exacts — is at the heart of the story.

The power of Ulitskaya’s book comes from the accumulation of details that illustrates what happens to people living in a totalitarian society, of the daily humiliations, indignities, and outright nightmares they endure. There is a suffocatingly narrow path each citizen must hew to stay in the state’s good graces, and even that is not always enough.

As a Jew, Mikha has limited options available to him. Nonetheless, he finds happiness working at a school for the deaf, until he makes the slip of talking about the wrong books with the wrong person. Both his job and his opportunity for graduate school evaporate, and he becomes unemployable. After he starts working with some of Ilya’s samizdat friends to produce a magazine, Mikha is arrested and spends three years in prison. A subsequent misstep of helping an old friend means that he’ll be sent back to prison unless he leaves Russia, which to him is untenable.

This is what life becomes for the three friends: Ilya knows he must leave the country and so he does, though it destroys his family. Sanya is desperate to leave but, as a Russian, he isn’t allowed. Mikha is invited — then encouraged, then harangued — to leave but refuses. Eventually he realizes there is one final choice open to him.

Tent is an homage to 19th- and 20th-century Russian writers, all of whom suffered to a lesser or greater degree at the hands of the state, whether pre- or post-Revolution, for their work. It is also a damning indictment of life under the Soviet/KGB boot heel where, for example, “The Soviet authorities persecuted the unemployed, including those whom they themselves banned from official employment.”

Finally, it offers a portrait of how people learn to work within the constraints placed on their existence. Anna Alexandrovna practically creates a Paris salon, with a wide-ranging collection of books and music, a piano, artwork, and a crystal chandelier, all of which are held in the state-assigned apartment partitioned from a reception hall of a former mansion, where 28 residents share a single kitchen and one toilet.

Last year, Ulitskaya wrote an article in The Guardian decrying the ever-shrinking right to free speech under the current Russian regime. She was also profiled in The New Yorker, in which the article’s author, Masha Gessen, stated with certainty, “Soon enough, your books will be banned in [Russia],” and Ulitskaya agreed, saying, “I’ll be eaten before it’s all over,” then adds, “But maybe I won’t live long enough to see that happen.”

How chilling to know that Russia’s foremost author, known worldwide, has every expectation that she is destined either to live under that resurrected boot heel or die to avoid it. The Big Green Tent is not historical fiction, at all.

Book Review: The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories

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This review was originally published in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 30 October 2015.

What is it about the spare beauty of Anthony Marra’s prose that makes us want to laugh and cry at the same time? His sentences are so deceptively simple and yet so layered with meaning that a paragraph, and then a page, and then a story leave a reader somewhat breathless and a little shell-shocked. Stack the interleaving stories on top of each other and it’s almost too much to take in.

This was the revelatory experience so many of us had in discovering his debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and here is Marra again as he offers us the luminous, fully intertwined stories of his second book, The Tsar of Love and Techno. Each story is written to stand on its own, but the magic is revealed in how he has fitted them all together.

In Constellation, Marra introduced us to the bombed-out wreckage of Chechnya through two wars. Tsar bring us back again, in and around Grozny, designated by the United Nations as “the most devastated city on earth,” where reclaimed office doors from destroyed buildings are used to repave the streets because every cement truck is hijacked before it can reach a crater to fill it in.

There is also the frozen Arctic hinterland of Kirovsk, originally a forced-labor camp, which is chronically in the running for the title of world’s most-polluted city because of the Twelve Apostles — the dozen belching smokestacks of the nickel-smelting operation that blot out the sky — and Lake Mercury, “a man-made lake of industrial runoff whose silvered waters are so veined with exotic chemicals they lap against the gravel-pocked banks year-round, unfrozen even in February.”

The landscape of Marra’s work is an indelible part of the stories he tells and in so many ways inseparable from the characters he creates. Here, though, a landscape is very literally part of the story: “Empty Pasture in Afternoon,” a landscape painted by Chechen artist Pyotr Zakharov in 1843, together with the physical landscape depicted in it, serve as two of the many threads binding together the stories of Tsar.

(It’s instructive to understand how much of the backdrop of these stories is nonfiction, and a glance at Marra’s list of references underscores the point. Many of Zakharov’s works were destroyed or badly damaged when the Grozny art museum was shelled, and work continues on their restoration.)

The opening tale, “The Leopard,” is set in 1937 Leningrad and thrusts us immediately into the through-the-looking-glass insanity of Stalin’s communist purification. His purges are in full frenzy, as we learn from lead artistic censor Roman Osipovich Markin, whose workload of erasing enemies of the state from photos and paintings is growing exponentially in a country where the slightest suspected infraction earns the accused a prison sentence, deportation, or death.

Markin is practicing his own quiet subversion by replacing the faces of those he expunges with that of his brother, Vaska, whose arrest and death Markin failed to forestall. What causes Markin’s eventual downfall is not his very first insertion of Vaska’s face into that same Zakharov painting, or any of the hundreds of subsequent images he paints of Vaska from boyhood to old age. Rather, it is his refusal to fully excise the image of a ballet dancer he does not even know.

If “The Leopard” sets the stage for everything that comes after, the second story, “Granddaughters,” serves as a kind of Greek chorus to bridge the space between then and now, to explain what we need to know, and to introduce, directly or indirectly, virtually every other character in the collection.

From it, we grasp that Markin’s dancer was the prima ballerina for the Kirov before her arrest and deportation to Kirovsk, but what’s important is that she becomes “Galina’s grandmother.” Galina — beautiful, shrewd, lucky enough to make it big — is at the center of everything, though we only ever see her reflected through the lens of other characters.

With Marra, every detail holds meaning. The only question is: For which of these characters will we most ache, for whose redemption most yearn? It might be Ruslan, the former deputy director of the destroyed art museum, whose home and family are part of Zakharov’s ruined landscape. Possibly it is Vaska’s grandson Sergei, whose mere existence is Markin’s great triumph, but who fails even at becoming a proper drug addict.

If we listened to that Greek chorus of six breezily disloyal lifelong friends bound together in the wasteland of Kirovsk, we’d be prepared to dismiss Galina’s sweetheart, Kolya, as a two-bit hoodlum/soldier on whom she’s squandering herself. Don’t be fooled. Kolya is the one.

In fact, almost every character holds surprising depth, even Kolya’s big, lunk-headed fellow soldier, Danilo, who is forced to confront the lie that has sustained him and his entire army unit for ages. “His red eyes radiate substratum pain, an ache so deep and unyielding that Kolya witnesses it as a geologic event.” Every one of these characters is fully human. They are pricked and they bleed.

It’s also somehow disconcerting to be reminded that not everyone sees Vladimir Putin as a bad guy. “When the KGB man won the presidency in 2000, we celebrated…When our children read aloud that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century we nodded and told them, ‘This is the truth.’”

Truth, as always, depends entirely on perspective, and — fortunately or unfortunately — each of us holds one uniquely our own. The truth here is that Anthony Marra has once again delivered us a gift of heartbreaking warmth, humor, and humanity. Accept this gift.

Book Review: Undermajordomo Minor

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 22 September 2015.

Anyone already familiar with Patrick DeWitt’s earlier fiction, like The Sisters Brothers, will immediately recognize his signature tone, which is easy to spot but hard to describe.

It’s sort of arch, breezy commentary, whether it’s coming from the thoughtful, well-spoken-but-naïve hired gun who narrates Sisters or from the third-person narrator of his latest novel, Undermajordomo Minor, which is as hard to categorize as his writing style.

The book jacket suggests it’s a fable, but a fable has a moral. This is more like a fairytale, something wispy and ephemeral, with a half-dreamy, half-nightmarish quality, and perhaps a bit of happily-ever-after thrown in.

Perhaps.

Like a fairytale, this story takes place in no definitive time or location. It has the feeling of someplace misty and Eastern European in the mid-19th century. We meet Lucien Minor — known as Lucy — on the day he is leaving home, for the first time, at age 17.

His mother isn’t sorry to see him go, since she blames him for somehow transferring his recent life-threatening illness to his father, who promptly dies. She’s not far wrong, since we see the mysterious visitor who shows up at Lucy’s bedside in the middle of the night, has a quiet conversation with him, and then — in a scene pulled directly from The Green Mile’s John Coffey playbook — inhales the illness out of Lucy and wanders off to deposit it in his father.

Lucy has told the visitor that what he wants from his life is for something to happen. He feels that he has more to offer than do the large, oafish peasants who surround him, a populace who cannot possibly appreciate his more refined, cerebral qualities. Unfortunately, he has no prospects.

Father Raymond, the parish priest who “followed the word of God to the letter and at night felt the Holy Spirit coursing through his body like bird flocks,” helps to find him a position by writing to all the surrounding castles. He receives a single answer from the majordomo of the Castle Von Aux, extending a job offer, which is how Lucy ends up becoming Undermajordomo Minor.

(With this book following The Sisters Brothers, it seems possible to imagine that DeWitt works by dreaming up a clever title and then writing a book to go with it. There are probably worse ways to come up with a subject.)

And so Lucy commences on his journey: Five minutes from home, he meets the man to whom his mother has already rented his bedroom; a delay at the train station gives his unfaithful girlfriend and her hulking new lover time to humiliate him in front of all his fellow passengers; and he watches in the dark train car as a shadowy man and boy methodically rob all the sleeping passengers, and then falls in with them without immediately realizing who they are.

The older man, Memel, and the boy, Mewe, live in the village of the Castle Von Aux. In short order, we meet Adolphus, the exceptionally handsome and charismatic leader of the local rebel army; Klara, Memel’s beautiful daughter to whom Adolphus believes he is betrothed; and some of the denizens of the lightly populated Castle Von Aux, like Agnes the cook and Mr. Olderglough, the self-titled majordomo who uses Lucy as an errand boy.

There are mysteries, like what actually happened to Lucy’s predecessor, poor Mr. Broom; why is Lucy told to lock himself into his room each night; and where is the castle’s owner? We finally meet the feral and practically subhuman specter of Baron Von Aux, a man thoroughly wrecked by his love for a heartless woman who happens to be his wife. When Lucy intervenes to send a note to the absent baroness, a host of unintended consequences naturally unspools.

The story is surprisingly straightforward and unadorned, though the prose oozes with that odd DeWitt charm that makes it compelling. Told from Lucy’s point of view, the tale has a clueless innocence that is both comical and sweet. Dialogue is clipped and formal, but the effect is often laugh-out-loud funny. At those moments when it’s tempting for a reader to conclude that Lucy is a complete idiot, it’s worth remembering that he is 17, an age at which everyone is a complete idiot.

If there is, in fact, a moral to this story, it’s a simple and universal one. When Lucy finds himself as undone by love as the baron, poor Mr. Broom, Memel, and Memel’s best friend, Tomas, he plummets into the underworld (literally) and fights an Odyssean path back to the surface to return to Klara.

When he later admits to his old benefactor, Father Raymond, that he is in love, the priest asks what it’s like, and Lucy tells him, “It is a glory and a torment.”

“Really? Would you not recommend it, then?”

“I would recommend it highly. Just to say that it is not for the faint of heart.”

Lucy is not such an idiot after all.

Book Review: In the Language of Miracles

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This review first appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books on 9 September 2015.

So much is conveyed in the first paragraph of Rajia Hassib’s eloquent debut novel, In the Language of Miracles: protagonist Khaled’s status as favorite of his devoutly Islamic grandmother, Ehsan; her disappointment in her daughter’s failure to follow the same devout traditions; and her firm belief that such lapses will lead to disaster for the beautiful boy, as evidenced by Khaled’s life-threatening illness, which has prompted Ehsan’s emergency visit from Egypt.

“His mother’s insistence on throwing him an elaborate birthday party a few weeks earlier must have been the last straw. ‘Why parade the boy around? Why invite people’s envy?’ Ehsan would repeatedly mumble as she tended to the sick child. They might as well have injected him with bacteria and saved the money spent on the inflatables.”

That peek at a sly sense of humor is deceptive, though, because the story that Hassib goes on to relate is heart-wrenching. Meet the Al-Menshawy family: physician father Samir, stay-at-home mother Nagla, eldest son Hosaam, middle child Khaled, and youngest Fatima, along with the frequently visiting Ehsan.

Samir and Nagla made the leap as newlyweds from Alexandria, Egypt, to the U.S., ending up finally in small, suburban Sommerset, N.J., where Samir starts his medical practice and the family grows to be best friends with their next-door neighbors, Jim, Cynthia, and Natalie Broadbent.

The crux of the story, though, is the horrific incident that took the lives of longtime sweethearts Hosaam and Natalie, the first anniversary of which is quickly approaching as chapter one opens. The tragedy hangs over everything and everyone, and has separated the Al-Menshawys from the community, from their former best friends, and from each other. Each of the surviving family members is wrapped in his or her own form of grief, and their lonely attempts to find a way through increasingly polarize and isolate them from each other.

There is so much going on in Language, so many quiet layers that build on each other, and Hassib guides us through the nuanced implications of culture, religion, community, gender, familial relationships, even birth order that together form the unique lens we all use to view one another and to experience the world around us.

Samir is fully committed to his adopted nation, believing in his and his family’s ability to assimilate and be accepted as true Americans, while also clinging to very traditional beliefs about his role as the head of the family and each member’s role in relation to his.

He is certain he understands the American character and way of thinking, yet he is utterly tone deaf in his dealings with the community he’s lived in for years. Even his unassimilated mother-in-law understands what a poor idea it is for the family to attend the inevitable memorial service for Natalie. That he wishes to speak at the service is a source of dread for all of us; a disaster is in the making.

While Khaled is at the book’s center as the ever-obedient middle child now living even more deeply in his dead brother’s shadow — the standard miseries of adolescence paling in the face of chronic physical and social-media harassment, the constant fear of being recognized in public, and the sense that his family has turned its back on him — it is Nagla who is the book’s heart.

Our view into her grief, guilt, and sense of helplessness as a mother makes her universally accessible, and demands we consider how we would act under similar untenable circumstances. Nagla suffers through the judgmental and conflicting advice that her friend Ameena and mother Ehsan, two highly observant Muslim women, heap upon her.

“Both her mother and Ameena had an uncanny ability to quote the Qur’an in support of their arguments, even if their views opposed each other, even, she now realized, using the same verse to support two different sides of an argument,” but both sides telling Nagla she is wrong. She and Samir can no longer speak to each other without shouting, but Ehsan sides with Samir, even though she doesn’t agree with him. Nagla is truly alone.

Hassib’s book invites the question of how this scenario would have played out if the families involved were both from the same white, suburban, middle-class, typical “American” background. The answer, perhaps, is not so much differently.

The cultural disparity here makes the situation more fraught — particularly in a post-9/11 America and a 24-hour “news” cycle that has elevated public defamation to a full-contact team sport — but with the exception of Cynthia’s bigoted sister Pat, the people of Sommerset aren’t ostracizing the Al-Menshawys for being Muslim, but for having taken something from them that they can never recover.

Hassib herself only moved to the U.S. when she was 23, and yet she has an impeccable ear for the twanging crosscurrents of American culture, xenophobic melting pot that it is. She heads many of her chapters with roughly equivalent English and Arabic sayings that highlight both similarities and differences in the cultures.

And Hassib weaves in snippets from the Qur’an that feature a number of figures prominent in the Old Testament, helping to remind non-Muslim readers of the tightly linked origins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It’s an empathetic reminder that our similarities are always larger than our differences.