1) "The Harmony Silk Factory" by Tash Aw
A sultry first novel of betrayal, with an exotic setting (Malaya) and a WWII link. Could it be another English Patient? As a literary creation, no way; as raw material for a movie, maybe.
Who is Johnny Lim? Aw gives us three versions of the Chinese businessman, from three different narrators. To his son Jasper, he’s a monster, and not just because he’s a drug kingpin, the richest man in Malaya’s Kinta Valley. Item: Johnny murdered his first patron, Tiger Tan, to get his textile business. Item: Johnny replaced his father-in-law as the valley’s chief power-broker by injuring him in a fire he set himself. Item: In 1942, Johnny, a secret Communist commander, betrayed his fellow commanders, who were then massacred by the occupying Japanese. Curiously, we learn little about Johnny’s competence as a father, but we do know that Jasper’s mother, Snow, died giving birth to him. This young woman, a great beauty, is the second narrator. In 1941, she’s steeling herself to leave Johnny after only a year’s marriage; she finds him alien and unknowable, the qualities that originally attracted her. But Snow’s Johnny is no monster. The child of laborers, he’s in awe of the highborn Snow and barely touches her. The heart of her story is an ill-fated expedition the two make to the mysterious islands Seven Maidens. They’re accompanied by two Englishmen (one is Peter, an epicene aesthete and Johnny’s only friend) and a Japanese man, Mamoru, who will achieve his own notoriety as the Valley’s eventual administrator. Snow’s account is as evasive as Jasper’s was explicit. The third narrator is Peter. For him, Johnny is an innocent child, worried that he’ll lose Snow to Peter’s superior charms. Peter himself is far from innocent, a bitter, poisonous man who will indeed betray Johnny, though the friendship has been implausible from the get-go.
Atmospherics substitute for credible characterization in this Malaysian writer’s sluggish, awkward account of a man’s many selves.
2) "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith
An academic comedy of multicultural manners finds Smith recapturing the sparkle of White Teeth (2000).
Following her sophomore slump with The Autograph Man (2002), the British author returns to biting, frequently hilarious form with a novel that concerns two professors who are intellectual enemies but whose families become intertwined. Radical theorist Howard Belsey, a British art historian married to the African-American Kiki, detests the cultural conservatism of Monty Kipps, a Caribbean scholar based in England. Kipps apparently has the best of their rivalry, having raised his profile with a well-received book on Rembrandt that stands in stark contrast to Belsey’s attempts to complete a counter-argument manuscript. Through a series of unlikely coincidences, Belsey’s son becomes engaged to Kipps’s irresistibly beautiful daughter, Kipps accepts an invitation to become guest lecturer at the Massachusetts college where Belsey is struggling for tenure and the wives of the two discover that they are soul mates. As Smith details the generation-spanning interactions of various minorities within a predominantly white, liberal community, she finds shades of meaning in shades of skin tone, probing the prickly issues of affirmative action, race relations and cultural imperialism while skewering the political correctness that masks emotional honesty. As the author acknowledges in an afterword, her story’s structure pays homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End, recasting the epistolary beginning of that book as a series of e-mails, while incorporating all sorts of contemporary cultural allusions to hip-hop, academic theory and the political climate in the wake of 9/11. Though much of the plot concerns the hypocrisies and occasional buffoonery of the professors, along with the romantic entanglements and social crises of their offspring, the heart and soul of the novel is Kiki Belsey, who must decide whether to continue to nurture a husband who doesn’t deserve her. While some characters receive scant development, the personality that shines through the narrative most strongly is that of Smith.
In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty’s only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone.
3) "Vandal Love" by Deni Y. Bechard
Even better than his simultaneously published memoir (Cures for Hunger), Béchard’s haunting first novel follows three generations that can’t find a home in this world.
Native soil for the Hervé family is Gaspésie, Québec, but the lure of les States draws away many despite the contempt of flinty patriarch Hervé Hervé. Life is just too hard in a land where fish stocks are falling and farmland is returning to forest. Besides, it’s difficult to feel secure in a family where “children were born alternately brutes or runts,” and Hervé Hervé makes a habit of giving away the runts to neighbors. Soon only his grandchildren, giant Jude and tiny Isa-Marie, remain, and after she dies in 1961, Jude takes to the road and winds up boxing in Georgia. This launches an odyssey that spans 45 years and ranges across the North American continent, as Hervé Hervé’s descendants struggle to maintain connections with the people they love but generally end up taking to the road again. Their connection with the natural world is more sustained and sparks Béchard’s most beautiful prose, whether he’s describing a stream in a Virginia wood, a desert landscape in New Mexico or the windswept riverside communities of Québec. Magical realism is the facile way to describe a narrative style that abruptly drops its characters into professions and relationships. Yet the meticulous details and painfully recognizable feelings forestall the fey quality that often mars novels by gringo admirers of Latin American fiction. Béchard has a voice and a vision all his own, both tough-minded and passionately emotional: It feels just as right when a father goads his son to become a fugitive from the law as it does when another father begs his wander-minded daughter, “Wait…Just a little longer. Wait.”
Reportedly at work on a book about conservation in the Congolese rainforest, the author clearly has ambitions as big as his talent, but readers of this lyrical novel will hope he gets back to fiction soon.
4) "A Golden Age" by Tahmima Anam
This remarkably moving and assured debut, the first in a planned trilogy, tells the story of Bangladesh’s 1971 war for independence through the eyes of a widow who will do anything to ensure her children’s survival.
The widow Rehana has remade her life more than once. With her once wealthy Muslim family, she was forced to leave Calcutta for Karachi during Partition; after an arranged marriage she moved to Dhaka with her husband; when her husband died, she temporarily lost her children to her wealthy brother-in-law back in Karachi, until she found the financial means—how and where is her shameful secret—to bring them back a year later. Ten years later, Rehana lives contentedly with her son Sohail and daughter Maya, both politically active students at the local university. Then civil war breaks out and her children sweep Rehana into political events. Sohail, who has always been a pacifist, joins the resistance fighters. Maya, whose best friend has been raped and murdered by the Pakistanis, becomes a resistance spokeswoman. Anam keeps Rehana grounded in a daily routine—there are evocative scenes of cooking, of sewing blankets out of saris, of going to market—that brings Bangladesh to life amid the chaos and carnage of the war. Soon Rehana is hiding not only supplies and armaments on her property, but also a wounded resistance officer. At first she resents him for his role in endangering her son’s life, but growing to love him, as years earlier she grew to love her husband, she confides the secret theft that gave her financial survival and her guilt at losing her children even temporarily. Ultimately, she must make a final horrendous sacrifice to keep them safe again. Rehana is a memorable literary achievement, exemplifying motherhood in all its complexity and intensity. That her relationships with her children are difficult, often prickly, only makes her maternal passion that much more believable and heartrending.
Panoramic in its sense of history, intensely personal in its sense of drama—a wonderfully sad yet joyous read.
5) "The End of the Alphabet" by C.S. Richardson
This lim debut novel distills the essence of life and love, once a British husband and wife learn that he has a month or less to live.
Imagine Erich Segal’s Love Story rewritten by Nicholson Baker and transplanted to England. The protagonists are sort of an Everycouple, with nothing very exceptional about themselves, their lives or their fate. An advertising man who is creative but not deeply reflective, Ambrose Zephyr learns as he approaches 50 that he has a fatal, incurable and unnamed disease. His wife, Zappora “Zipper” Ashkenazi, who writes about books for a semi-popular fashion magazine, complements him emotionally as well as alphabetically. The two have no children and apparently need nothing beyond each other and their routines to make their lives full. Ambrose’s diagnosis seems to hit Zipper harder than it does him. He knows that he must readjust, to deal with “days that until moments before had been assumed would stretch to years. With luck, to decades. Not shrink to weeks.” He immediately devises a plan for those dwindling days. Obsessed with the alphabet since childhood, he will use it to plan an itinerary, a letter per day: Amsterdam, Berlin, Chartres. Zipper agrees, anticipating Paris and Venice, yet driven to distraction or denial by her husband’s impending death. After the scene-setting, the novel threatens to become a little too rote, a little too alphabetically cute. Yet Richardson’s prose is precise and often poetic, devoid of sentimental treacle, and the narrative deepens thematically as the couple discovers that it is as hard to plan neatly for death as it is for life. A climactic twist casts new light on the preceding narrative, and some might be tempted to start the novel all over again upon finishing.
A novel that can be read in a single sitting of less than two hours might continue to resonate with readers for weeks, months, even years.
6) "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" by Mohammed Hanif
Journalist Hanif’s first novel is a darkly witty imagining of the circumstances surrounding the mysterious plane crash that killed Pakistan’s military ruler, General Zia, in August 1988.
The central figure is a young military officer named Ali Shigri whose much-decorated father was found hanging from a ceiling fan, an alleged suicide. Ali knows, however, that his father’s death was something more sinister, and he sets out first to identify the responsible party, Zia, and then—by way of a loopy plan involving swordsmanship and obscure pharmacology—to exact revenge. The book’s omniscient narrator gets into the heads of multiple characters, including that of the General himself; his ambitious second-in-command, General Akhtar; a smooth torturer named Major Kiyani; a communist street sweeper who for a time occupies a prison cell near Ali’s; a blind rape victim who has been imprisoned for fornication; and a wayward and sugar-drunk crow. Even Osama bin Laden has a cameo, at a Fourth of July bash. But plot summary misleads; the novel has less in common with the sober literature of fact than it does with Latin American magical realism (especially novels about mythic dictators such as Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch) and absurdist military comedy (like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22). Hanif adopts a playful, exuberant voice that’s almost a parody of old-fashioned omniscience, as competing theories and assassination plots are ingeniously combined and overlaid. Uneasy rests the head that wears the General’s famous twirled mustache—everybody’s out to get him.
A sure-footed, inventive debut that deftly undercuts its moral rage with comedy and deepens its comedy with moral rage.
7) "Good to a Fault" by Marina Endicott
Suddenly a surrogate mother of three, spinsterish Clara discovers love and meaning in a Anne Tyler–esque domestic drama.
Although lacking sufficient bitterness to counteract its saintly sweetness, Endicott’s second novel (Open Arms, 2001) is narrated with such lambent detail and compassion that it succeeds in casting a spell. A car crash kick-starts the story, mashing together middle-aged, divorced insurance worker Clara Purdy and the Clampett-esque Gage family: parents Clayton and Lorraine, their three children and grumpy grandmother. No one is hurt, but a hospital checkup reveals Lorraine has advanced cancer, and when Clayton disappears, Clara is left holding the babies and the grandmother. For her, however, this is a wonderful opportunity to render her previously empty life worthwhile, caring for the homeless family while supporting Lorraine. Help is also on hand from Lorraine’s wandering brother, the larger community of neighbors, friends and relatives and the local priest Paul, whose shrewish wife has just left him. Clara, a remarkable fount of previously untapped generosity, begins to assume the children are hers. But a successful stem cell transfer restores Lorraine’s health, Clayton returns and the children are ripped from her care. Depressed and angry, she breaks off her relationship with Paul, but in a story devoted to ideas of loss and restoration, a happier conclusion can be expected.
A limpid, witty, humane talent to watch.
8) "I Do Not Come to You by Chance" by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
Thwarted in his ambition to become an engineer, a young Nigerian is lured by his charismatic uncle into a lucrative empire of e-mail scams.
Kingsley is the eldest child of parents who worship learning and play by the rules. But his father’s failing health and resulting retirement have landed the family in genteel poverty, and when Kingsley emerges from the university he feels obliged to support them. Engineering jobs are scarce and elusive, alas, and first novelist Nwaubani ratchets up the pressure: Kingsley’s fiancée cuts him loose, and his father Paulinus suffers a stroke. In a harrowing scene, the family rushes from hospital to hospital, looking for one that will admit Paulinus, comatose and still internally bleeding, without cash payment up front; when, finally, they call upon a distant relative’s influence to secure help, they’re issued a list of items to buy that includes IV bags and syringes. Desperate, Kingsley calls upon rich Uncle Boniface, aka “Cash Daddy,” a successful and extravagant “419er” (after the section in Nigeria’s penal code that he runs roughshod over). He imagines he’s just getting a loan from his uncle, but before long the would-be engineer finds himself enmeshed in the work of finding “mugus” (suckers) from the developed world, luxuriating in the lavish perks that come from that work—and, of course, headed for a final reckoning. The prose is merely functional, the plotting a little schematic, but Cash Daddy is a charming scapegrace, and Kingsley’s moral dilemma has real interest. Nwaubani’s portrait of contemporary Nigeria and her account of the financial and ethical convolutions of the developing world compel the reader’s attention.
Not perfect, but an entertaining and promising debut from a Nigerian native.
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