“When Raoni’s father was a boy, the tribe had numbered more than a hundred, but that was before a white man’s disease had reduced them by half.  In the years that followed, one girl after another had been born, but the girls didn’t stay; they married and moved on. It was the way of the Awana, the way of all the tribes. If the spirits saw fit to give them boys, the tribe grew; if girls, the tribe shrank. If it shrank too much, it died.
The Awana were doomed, they all knew it, but for the end to have come so suddenly was a horrible and unexpected blow.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (JAN 26, 2014)

Leighton Gage, who spent a great deal of his time in Brazil, used his extensive knowledge of the country’s political, economic, and social climate to create an outstanding series of police procedurals. His latest, The Ways of Evil Men, published posthumously, opens with a heartbreaking scene. Anati, a member of the Awana tribe who live in the rainforest, goes hunting with his eight-year-old son, Raoni. When the two return to their village they discover that all thirty-nine members of their tribe are dead. Who killed these men, women, and children? Jade Calmon, an employee of the federal government’s National Indian Foundation, will not stop asking questions until she learns the truth. Since the local law enforcement authorities have no love for the Awana, Jade is forced to pull strings in order to bring in the big guns: Mario Silva, Chief Inspector of the Brazilian Federal Police, Arnaldo Nunes, Silva’s partner, and a support team that includes other agents and an assistant medical examiner.

Why can’t the locals investigate this crime? The nearest town, Azevedo, is run by the Big Six, corrupt landowners (including the mayor) who have contempt for the Indians and covet their land. To insure that no one gets in their way, they have the parish priest, the head of the local police, and a so-called environmental watchdog on their payroll. Only incorruptible law enforcement professionals like Mario Silva can be trusted to apprehend the guilty parties. Silva travels to Azevedo, where he and his colleagues interview Osvaldo Neto and his wife, Amanda, the owners of the town’s only bar, restaurant, and hotel. Osvaldo is part Indian and has disdain for the bigots, liars, thieves, adulterers, and murderers who patronize his establishment. Fortunately, Silva is a tenacious detective who relishes a challenge. He will need to be clever, devious, and lucky to solve what will turn out to be a complex and ugly case.

The Ways of Evil Men is a hard-hitting and engrossing novel that lives up to its title. The villains (both male and female) are utterly vile. They frame the innocent, bribe people to turn a blind eye to their transgressions, and enrich themselves through legal and illegal means. Another person who takes an interest in these outrageous goings-on ia a fearless female reporter named Maura Mandel; she risks her life, expecting to make headlines with what she hopes will be a sensational story. This is a compelling, gritty, and atmospheric tale with lively descriptive writing, dark humor, and sharply-crafted dialogue. Readers will admire Silva and his associates, who are determined to prove that no one–no matter how wealthy, influential, and arrogant–is above the law.

Those of us who admire Leighton Gage’s talent, creativity, and integrity will miss him greatly.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soho Crime (January 21, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Leighton Gage
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Dying Gasp Every Bitter Thing Buried Strangers our interview with Leighton Gage

Bibliography:

• Blood of the Wicked (2008)
• Buried Strangers (2009)
• Dying Gasp (2010)
• Every Bitter Thing (2010)
• A Vine in the Blood (2011)
• Perfect Hatred (2013)
• The Ways of Evil Men (January 2014)

“During the final days of the occupation, there was an American woman in Haiti, a photojournalist — blonde, young, infuriating — and she became Thomas Harrington’s obsession.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman (JAN 3, 2014)

You don’t need to know much about Haitian, Croatian or Turkish politics to fully appreciate The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, but it helps. It also helps to surrender to the journey – a journey that spans over 700 pages – because immediate answers will not be forthcoming.

This is a big book in every sense of the word: big in breadth, in ideas, in audacity. You will lose your heart to it and end up shaking your head in awe and admiration. And along the way, you will learn something about the shadowy world of politics and espionage, the hypocrisy of religion, and the lengths that the players go to keep their sense of identity – their very soul – from fragmenting.

So what IS it about? That’s not an easy question to tackle. The eponymous woman of the title is Dottie Chambers, the hypnotic and damaged daughter of the elite spy Steven Chambers – surely one of the most screwed up characters in contemporary literature. As a young boy, Steven witnessed the atrocities of Tito’s Muslim partisans against his own father, and he came to age with a zeal to right the wrongs…eventually pulling Dottie into his malignant orbit.

That is all I intend to say about the plot, which spans five decades, many countries, and a wide range of themes. The novel consists of five separate books, some short, some long, a catalog-of-sorts of 20th century atrocities and the loss of not only the individual soul, but our collective soul as well. Mr. Shacochis has choreographed a spellbinder, with hints (depending on where you are in the book) of David Mitchell, John Le Carre, Ernest Hemingway, and others…while keeping the narrative distinctly his.

The themes this author tackles go right to the heart of identity and destiny. “We choose the lies in which we participate and in choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time,” he writes at one point. In other passage, we are first introduced to Steven with these words: {Steven would be} “introduced in the most indelible fashion to his destiny, the spiritual map that guides each person finally to the door of the cage that contains his soul, and in his hand a key that will turn the lock, or the wrong key, or no key at all.”

The questions he asks are universal: how do you change back if your former self no longer interlocks cleanly with the shape you have assumed? What happens when you become an actor in a theater without walls or boundaries or audiences? Where is the thin wall of separation between “patriotism and hatred, love and violence, ideology and facts, judgment and passion, intellect and emotion, duty and zealotry, hope and certainty, confidence and hubris, power and fury…” And when do we have the right to challenge and to reclaim our own souls before it’s too late?

This is an amazing book, a true Magnus opus, a story of who we are and how we came to be that way. Yet at its epicenter, Dottie and the two men who love her – her unhealthy father and the book’s moral core, Green Beret Evelle Burnette – who, in their own way, battle for her very soul.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 63 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Bob Shacochis
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Zoet by David Mitchell

Bibliography:

• Easy in the Islands (1985)
• The Next New World (1990)
• Swimming in the Volcano (1993)
• The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (September 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Drinking, Smoking and Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times (1994)
• Domesticity: A Gastronomic Interpretation of Love (1994;2013)
• The Immaculate Invasion (1999)

“How can anyone who does not know their history truly know who they are.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (DEC 29, 2013)

Oscar Kortico might be living in the slums of Havana now but the story he narrates is one of voluptuous plenty — populated by a vast array of colorful characters in a seemingly idyllic setting. “In the 1800s Pata de Puerco was just one small corner of a sweeping plain with a few scattered shacks between the Sierra Maestra mountains of Santiago de Cuba and the copper mines of El Cobre,” Kortico says, as he describes the Cuban village where his grandparents settled. Oscar has never actually been to Pata de Puerco (translated as Pig’s Foot) but instead relies on memories handed down over generations to paint a picture of the town and the events that eventually lead to his beaten down existence in a shantytown. Nostalgia invariably wears rose-colored glasses so it is that the small town with its slow pace of daily life casts a delightful shadow and creates a sense of longing — even if the events that transpired there were often riven by violence and vengeance.

The author Carlos Acosta, is a world-famous dancer, and in fact bears a great deal of resemblance to the polymath, Melecio, in the book, one of Oscar’s relatives. Acosta nimbly weaves threads of magic realism in his novel and the able translation makes the story come alive. The old-fashioned “once upon a time” narration dispenses with gimmicks (at least in the beginning) and makes for an arresting and page-turning read.

Acosta sets his story from the early 1800s and sprinkles peeks into the country’s history as he goes along. We get brief (very brief) glimpses into the war of independence in 1868; the USS Maine incident in Havana harbor (in 1898) all the way to more contemporary times. An occasional jab at Cuba’s political climate is thrown around: “An island the size of a sardine can’t govern itself, that one way or another it is dependent on the whale in order to thrive,” but Acosta doesn’t really stray too far from the script. Sometimes one wishes for a more intimate working of these political events into the story but perhaps Acosta’s point is precisely that political events often serve only as a backdrop against which the theater of life unfolds.

The end is intentionally ambiguous — one wonders whether it is meant to cast a shadow over the verity of the narrated events or to question the place of history in our lives. “My grandfather said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that for all its faults Cuba was much better today than it had been, that young people these days knew nothing about history and spent their lives complaining, not realizing how much worse things used to be,” Oscar says towards the end. It seems for all the talk of history, not much is easily remembered or its lessons at least, seem to be appropriately diluted, ready for easy consumption. It is perhaps true, Acosta seems to say in his compelling novel, that as Napoleon once said, history is but a set of lies people have agreed upon.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carlos Acosta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Cuba: Adios, Happy Homeland by Ana Menendez

Bibliography:

• Pig’s Foot (January 2014)

Nonfiction:

• No Way Home: A Dancer’s Journey from the Streets of Havana to the Stages of the World (2008)

Related:

• The Reluctant Dancer by Margaret Willis (2011)

“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Devil’s Highway Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction

Bibliography:

• In Search of Snow (1994)
• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction (2002)
• The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005)
• Mr Mendoza’s Paintbrush (2009)
• Into the Beautiful North (2009)
• Queen of America (December 2011)

The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

• Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993)
• By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996)
• Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998)

More Nonfiction:

• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004)

“The last time Ramiro Areyzaga was in Mexico was so long ago it was more like a fairy tale. . . A place of lush green shade, both a forest of trees and a jungle of huge waxy palm leaves, and a zocalo of marionettes and dancers, musicians and painters, with toys and balloons for the little ones and shawls for his grandparents. And of course the church, like none he’d ever seen, all the cool stone space, and God – which he never got over, so much so it stayed inside him, quietly, the rest of his life, like it was the word Mexico itself.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (NOV 9, 2011)

Dagoberto Gilb’s latest book, Before the End, After the Beginning, although a slight collection, is loaded with insight and humor. It’s a book about identity, about the tension between limiting factors outside our control– our race, our class, our gender – and our complexity as individuals.

The collection opens with a disorienting story, “please, thank you,” about a Mexican-American man struggling to regain control of his body after a stroke. Uncomfortably dependent on the hospital staff, forced to face his physical vulnerabilities with tasks as mundane as taking a shower or balancing a checkbook, his psychological vulnerabilities also come to the fore. All he sees around him are minorities persecuted by a white majority trying to keep them down. Everyone from his adult children to the hospital staff shake their head, bemused by his racial conspiracy theories, but as his body heals, so do the lifelong wounds of prejudice, at least enough that he can advise Erlinda, a Mexican janitor, to rise above the ignorance around her so that the wounds she endures on account of her race won’t fester and leave deep and putrid scars.

While sometimes, an illness forces us to recede into ourselves, often times, it’s through our relationship with others that we struggle with undesirable aspects of our identity. “The Last Time I saw Junior,” a hot-headed Mexican must face his former self when an old buddy comes around and manipulates him (once again) into helping him. In “Cheap,” a Mexican musician is forced to face both his fiscal and emotional frugality when the pursuit of an unfairly low bid by a local contractor causes him to face the exploitation of other Mexicans, who he tries to help.

“Willows Village,” explores the other side of help – dependency. When Guillermo moves from El Paso to Santa Ana in search of a job that will support his young family, he has little choice but to stay with his aunt, his mother’s sister, Maggy, who, according to his mother, was “an all-spoiled this and did-all-bad-that” who got away with murder on account of her looks. Maggy lives in a tract housing development, called Willows Village, with a kitchen “loaded up like a mall gourmet store” and a bedroom as “beautiful as any hotel.”  Her husband is gone for weeks at a time on business and so Maggy manages her loneliness by keeping an unfortunate friend, Lorena. In exchange for room and board, Lorena does the errands Maggy doesn’t want to do and accepts Maggy’s capricious generosity with a smile and appropriate gratitude. While Guillermo pounds the pavement in search of a job, his dependency on Maggy and his mother, on Gabe, the man who employs him for a time, frustrates him, and with the wine always flowing at the house, it’s inevitable that tensions and resentments will come to a head, exposing the line between need and reliance.

Gilb explores the fraught dynamics of attractive women financially dependent on men through the eyes of the males who actually love them. In “Blessing,” a young man sets out to visit his high-school sweetheart, now married to a much-older man. Sexually unsatisfied, she visits him during the night, which prompts him to flee her house in the morning, putting him in the wrong place at the wrong time. In “Uncle Rock,” a young boy deals with having a mother who is beautiful enough to attract restaurant owners and engineers, but not white enough to be marriageable. With a precocious understanding of the sexual marketplace, he deflects a professional baseball player’s advances in favor of a man with modest means who worships the ground his mother walks on.

Perhaps our most poignant search for identity is in the face of death. In “Hacia Teotitlan,” a dying man journeys home to a Mexico that he remembers as a fairy tale with glorious churches. He rents a room that is too small for his body, and vows to discontinue his medication, resigning himself to dying with the same resignation of a stray dog. While he may not have found what he was looking for, he walks away with new ways of expressing his innermost desire – to be well.

Each of these stories is a wonderful meditation on identity and the pain we endure in the struggle to create ourselves. In 2009, Dagoberto Gilb suffered a stroke; these stories are the product of his recovery. Although judging from the simple power of this book, I’d say it definitely marks a return to form.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dagoberto Gilb
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our short  review of: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña And if you like this one, try: The Madonna’s of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse

Bibliography:

• Winners on the Pass Line (1985)
• The Magic of Blood (1993) 
• The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1995)
• Woodcuts of Women: Stories (2001)
• The Flowers (2008)
• Before the End, After the Beginning (November 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Gritos: Essays (2003)

Other:

• Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature (2006)

“There were too many people here now, a crush of bodies on the sidewalks and too many cars on the highways, people crowded into houses and apartment buildings in Santa Ana, in Anaheim, cities that used to be good places to live. The landmarks of Scott’s youth, the burger stands and the diners, were now covered with the grimy stains of time and something else, an alien presence.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (OCT 17, 2011)

From the looks of it you could never tell that the beautiful Torres-Thompson home in fancy Laguna Rancho Estates, is on the cusp of unraveling. But look closely and you can see the edges of the tropical garden coming undone, the lawn not done just right; and these are merely the symptoms of greater troubles. For the couple Scott Torres and Maureen Thompson the country’s financial crisis has come knocking, even in their ritzy Los Angeles neighborhood.

Scott Torres once spearheaded a booming software company that went broke in the software bust. As the book opens, he is reduced to doing mundane work for a new software firm. The family is beset with enough financial insecurities that Scott and Maureen let go of two staff members in their hired help team—the gardener, Pepe, and the babysitter, Lupe. 

The one maid left standing, Araceli Ramirez, once only held cooking and cleaning responsibilities but now finds herself, much to her annoyance, occasionally watching the boys, Brandon and Keenan and the baby, Samantha.

As Araceli cleans and cooks, she silently watches the dynamics of the family unfold. One day, Maureen, tired of cutting corners from the lavish lifestyle she once knew, decides she will splurge on a new desert garden—one that will replace the decaying tropical one that gardener Pepe once so lovingly tended. The astronomical sum she spends on the landscaping is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Scott and Maureen have a heated altercation, witnessed by Araceli. The next morning, Araceli wakes up to find both her jefe and jefa (there’s a little Spanish left untranslated in the book, some of which can’t be made out just by context) gone with the baby. The boys are home alone with her. As it happens, Maureen and Scott leave independently each one assuming, through a set of coincidences, that the other spouse will be around to take care of the boys. Neither is; the boys are left completely alone for three whole days.

At the end of the third day, at her wit’s end, Araceli decides she will bring the boys to Los Angeles where she is sure their Mexican grandfather (Scott’s Dad) lives. The three set off on an adventure to find grandpa. Predictably they never do.

In the meantime, Maureen and Scott have returned home only to find the boys and the housekeeper missing. They immediately jump to the conclusion that the boys have been kidnapped. The police are called in and all hell breaks loose.

The fact that Araceli is an illegal immigrant complicates the situation tenfold and soon the case makes national headlines. After a series of adventures, the boys are reunited with their parents. But the case has by now developed a life of its own. Scott and Maureen for their part become the stand-in for rich, privileged folks who get constantly shown up as the poster children for bad parenting.

Then there’s Araceli. On the one hand she is worshipped by fellow Mexicans as the exploited, underprivileged Mexicana—someone who represents all the collective immigrant angst in the United States. On the other hand, there’s the flag-waving crowd—members of whom insist that Araceli needs to be deported if not permanently jailed for her crimes. As the book makes its way through to the end, Araceli decides to take some of these matters in her own hands.

The Barbarian Nurseries starts out with a good premise but at every stage it moves so predictably that one can see the ending coming way before it actually arrives. The author, Hector Tobar, won a Pulitzer as part of a team at L.A. times covering the L.A. riots. Unfortunately his journalistic brio doesn’t translate well to fiction. The Barbarian Nurseries has one coincidence too many woven into the story until it totally strains credulity. For example, when Maureen leaves home with Samantha and goes to a spa, the delays that hold her there for three whole days are really difficult to swallow.

Tobar does have keen insight into the various segments of the California narrative—the ultra-rich millionaires, the hired help, the immigrant psyche—but he falls short of weaving these narratives into a compelling story. One would have loved to learn more about Araceli’s past in Mexico, or even about Maureen’s Midwestern roots for example. But too often Araceli and her owners fall into clichéd stereotypes, for what people like them should say and do. Even the media circus that attends the “kidnapping” case drags on way too long.

To his credit, Tobar successfully raises some essential questions: about the act of parenting in these intensely wired times and about the place of immigrants in our larger social fabric.

The Barbarian Nurseries has been billed as the great contemporary California novel and it certainly has all the elements for one. Unfortunately its somewhat predictable story has the book degenerating into precisely the thing it derides the most — a sound bite.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Héctor Tobar
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: My Hollywood by Mona Simpson

Bibliography:

• The Tattooed Soldier (2000)
• The Barbarian Nurseries (September 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States (2006)

“Samuel knew that he was living through dangerous times – this was not the moment to simply sniffle and weep. He had left Hamburg just in the knick of time – Kristallnacht had happened just nine months earlier – the “party” in Europe […] had already begun. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederick Knabe  (SEP 29, 2011)

Samuel Berkow, at thirty-eight, stands at the crossroads: In 1938, life in Germany is fast becoming dangerous for Jews. At the urging of his concerned uncle, he agrees to leave Hamburg and emigrate to Guatemala, where his cousin is expected to help him settle. In The Price of Escape, David Unger explores his hero’s self-conscious and stumbling efforts to put his German existence out of his mind as he prepares for a new one that carries promise but is also full of uncertainty.

The narrative quickly moves on to Samuel’s travel on the ship en route to the port town of Puerto Barrios and then focuses on his first three days on land. Guatemalan-American Unger, recognized as one of Guatemala’s prominent writers today, convincingly portrays his hero’s sense of utter confusion and helplessness as he enters, totally unprepared, a foreign world that bears no resemblance to his own. He contrasts Samuel’s former lifestyle, his self-confidence, based mostly on physical appearance and family wealth, with the poverty-ridden, appalling and at times dangerous conditions in Puerto Barrios. Thus, Unger not only builds an affecting portrait of one refugee’s complete dislocation in an unfamiliar environment and his awareness that he must cope somehow, he paints at the same time a colourful, vivid picture of a community in decline, abandoned by a corrupt political system that allows private company interests to control people’s lives and basis for existence.

As the novel unfolds, Samuel encounters a wide range of odd characters, starting with American Alfred Lewis, the dubious captain of the “tramp steamer” that brings Samuel into port. He turns out to be one of the manipulating representatives of the sinister United Fruit Company, the big corporation that has made of Puerto Barrios a “company town” but recently downgraded it to a mere reloading point for banana shipments. While Lewis warns Samuel not to linger in town and to get on the train to Guatemala City as soon as possible, he does everything to add to Samuel’s bewilderment and delay. Every time Samuel is set to make a move to leave, something or somebody interferes: the dwarf, Mr. Price, who offers himself as a guide to the one and only “International Hotel,” his bare room there, or George, the hotel clerk/manager who appears to be one of the more helpful people. Others are added to the colourful mix: a defrocked priest, the station master, an old prostitute, or various odd assemblies of people in the streets or cafes/bars… None of these may in fact behave in any way threatening, however, in his mind, Samuel cannot extricate himself from their influence so that he can get to the train station in time.

Unger creates an atmosphere of suspicion, of hidden and open threats that intermingle in Samuel’s mind with images from his past life, thereby escalating not only his uneasiness but also resulting in his own increasingly strange behaviour towards the people he meets. Personal memories from his past life, especially his short-lived disastrous marriage, still haunt him, more so than any of the recent dangerous political changes in Germany. People come at him with either sugary, even creepy, friendliness or with sarcastic comments and aggressive, even violent, behaviour, one can turn into the other without warning. Samuel appears to be caught in a vicious circle. With only basic Spanish, his communication is fraught with misunderstandings. Who is there to talk to openly and, above all, whose advice can he trust?

Unger illustrates Samuel’s increasing disorientation with scenarios and encounters that recall in some ways Kafkaesque hopeless labyrinthine struggles. Yet, here, the protagonist is responsible for much of the precarious situations he finds himself in: His fashion-conscious clothing make him a laughing stock among the locals; his inability to extricate himself safely and in time from several brewing conflicts puts him into physical danger. His reluctance to eat the local food and even drink the water results in stages of temporary mental confusion, even delirium, that make him act totally irrationally. Afterwards, he has no memory of what he said or did or why, for example, he ends up in the muddy water near the harbour, totally wet and soiled, crawling on all fours, searching for his passport…

Will Samuel manage to escape or will he be completely taken over by the locality? What is “the price” of escape – both from Germany and from Puerto Barrios? The novel’s conclusion answers these questions aptly, coincidences not withstanding. Over the course of the three-day story, Unger creates a continuous narrative tension that keeps us as readers engaged. We never quite know, what accident or confrontation awaits the protagonist next. Despite his sympathetic and expansive characterization of Samuel Berkow, I found him less than a likeable protagonist, at times arbitrarily overdrawn and his behaviour somewhat exaggerated. Readers who anticipate – given various publicity materials – that considerable attention in the novel is given to the historical situation in Germany in the nineteen thirties, will be disappointed. Unger’s primary concern is Guatemala.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Akashic Books; 1 edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Unger
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Fame: A Novel In Nine Episodes by Daniel Kehlmann Banana by Daniel Koppel

Bibliography (English only):

• Life in the Damn Tropics (2004)
• The Price of Escape (April 2011)

“We’re never gonna escape this,” Paps said. “Never.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 22, 2011)

We The Animals in this wonderful debut novel refers to three brothers, close in age, growing up in upstate New York. They are the Three Musketeers bound strongly together not just because of geographical isolation but because of cultural separateness too. The brothers are born to a white mother and a Puerto Rican father—they are half-breeds confused about their identity and constrained by desperate and mind-numbing poverty.

This wild and ferocious debut is narrated by the youngest of the three, now grown, looking back on his childhood. It’s a coming-of-age story told in lyrical sentences that are exquisitely crafted. And while there are many moments of beauty in here, there are also ones of searing violence.

The boys can do nothing but stand back and watch as the intensely abusive relationship between the parents plays out everyday and it’s almost worse because the evidence creeps up after the fact. One day, Mom’s eyes are swollen shut and cheeks turned purple “He told us the dentist had been punching on her after she went under; he said that’s how they loosen up the teeth before they rip them out,” the narrator, barely aged seven, recalls. The severe abuse is compounded and made even more heartbreaking by the boys’ innocence and gullibility—they buy this lie and many others, whole.

The daily struggle for survival is heart wrenching yet without melodrama. “We stayed at the table for another forty-five minutes, running our fingers around our empty bowls, pressing our thumb tips into the cracker plate and licking the crumbs off,” Torres writes about one of the many evenings when one can of soup and a few crackers would have to make do for all of them. The boys don’t quite understand why their parents are seemingly happy one moment and why their mother slips into deep bouts of depression the next.

One of the many beautiful chapters in the book is one called “Night Watch” (each short chapter in this slim volume has a name). In it, the boys accompany Dad to work when he finds work at a night job. They have to sleep on the floor in sleeping bags in front of the vending machines, out of plain sight. They are here (and not home) because Mom is at her job working the night shift at a local brewery. The next morning, when a white man comes to relieve Dad of his duties, he spots the three musketeers and can guess at the situation. From the argument that follows, the boys already know that Dad has probably lost this job too. The family’s otherness, especially as perceived by the boys, is just beautifully rendered here.

As the boys enter adolescence, the narrator immediately knows he is separate and apart from his brothers. “They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent,” Torres writes. It wouldn’t be a reveal to say that the difference lies in the narrator’s sexuality, which can be glimpsed early on, if one pays close attention.

In a recent interview, the author Justin Torres has said: “I think that everybody struggles with family in some way and I hope that they can come away realizing that you can go back to those experiences and find something beautiful in everything and that you can make art out of your experiences.” With We The Animals, Torres has crafted just that—a beautiful and memorable work of art. This slender novel packs a powerful punch.

Justin Torres proves you don’t have to pen a giant volume to write precociously about huge themes such as family, race, adolescence and sexuality. Of course Torres writes so beautifully that you almost wish that he did.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 49 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	An interview with Justin Torres
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Bibliography:

• We the Animals (August 2011)

“It’s hard to catch a lizard with your bare hands.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 23, 2011)

Burmese politics, including their political prison system, is harrowing and vicious. Not a lot has changed in the past fifty years or so, other than changing the name to Myanmar. Until very recently, they were under military rule and they are still one of the least developed nations in the world. Karen Connelly has not only written a striking and engaging tour de force about this area, but she has brought a country’s atrocities into focus that needs attention badly, and help from developed nations. However, she hasn’t forgotten the novelist’s rule of thumb to entertain. It doesn’t read like a diatribe or soapbox, it reads like an exquisite, dramatic story of friendship, endurance, compassion, love, and faith in the human condition.

Teza is a young man of (approximately) thirty who is revered by freedom fighters in Burma (Myanmar) for his political songs that expose the corrupt government, and give hope and spiritual fuel to the people. He is in solitary confinement in his seventh year of a twenty-year sentence for this “crime.” The conditions in this prison are something beyond harsh and cruel–absolutely appalling, savage–with lice, scurvy, rickets, bed bugs, and other illnesses invading the prison population. Also, the jailers frequently abuse the prisoners physically.

Teza has become adept at his Buddhist meditation practices and has a strange but beautiful relationship with the lizards, spiders, and ants that share his cell. The most desired item for prisoners, besides food–as he is practically starved by the warden and guards–is pen and paper. If caught with it, it adds another several years to your sentence. Teza is therefore in isolation with nothing but the creatures, a dirty mat, stinking water, inedible food, and his mind. He lives by the power of his heart and mind. Teza knows how to be free in this cage, and his subtle power over the jailers, a different kind of power, is fascinating to comprehend.

Little Brother is a twelve-year-old orphan whose father worked for the prison until he died. This young boy, who doesn’t read or write, knows nothing outside the prison, and has no desire to leave. He is afraid of the outside world. He spends his days running errands for the guards or helping the top-tier prisoners–the ones with lots of pull and power–get extras of food. He is beloved by the few that have half a heart, but generally treated as sewerage by those in power.

The story moves in graceful, gradual, lyrical strokes, bringing the world of the inmates and the jailers to a taut climax. The building relationship between Teza and Little Brother is the most weighty of all. It works brick by brick, like the building of a cell, layer upon layer, surging into an intense, suspenseful, atypical thriller. There are hints of Papillon,(although that story was non-fiction), but this is not a jailbreak thriller. But, like Papillon, it has much to do with the life inside the mind, and the cultivation of formidable inner strength, and the bonds between people who are seemingly so vastly different, and yet connected.

If you only read a handful of books this year, do read this one. Besides its presence as a quietly exciting, non-formulaic suspense thriller, it will invite and heighten interest in this culture and this country. You will thoroughly inhabit these characters and story, page by page; the quintessence of fine literature is actualized in the characters of Teza and Little Brother. Finally, this an unforgettable story that lives in, breaks, and mends the human heart.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (April 8, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Karen Connelly
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin

Bibliography:

• The Lizard Cage (2007) 

Nonfiction:

• Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journa (1994)
• The Dream of a Thousand Lives: A Sojourn in Thailand (2001)
• Grace and Poison (2001)
• Burmese Love Song: A Memoir (May 2010)

“Sometimes, as I remember, my voice is that of the ten-year-old boy I was then; sometimes the voice of the seventy-year-old man I am yet to be; sometimes it is my voice, at the age I am now… or the age I think I am. Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JUL 11, 2011)

He calls himself “Harry” now, after his new hero, the famous escape artist, Harry Houdini, hoping that one day he, too, will be a successful escape artist. Discovering a book about Houdini, hidden in the room that will now serve as his bedroom, the ten-year-old boy finds a new source of inspiration. Only the day before, and without warning, his family had to leave their comfortable house in Buenos Aires with nothing but the bare essentials. An abandoned country house has to serve as their temporary shelter. Harry already misses school, his friends and his board game Risk. With his routines disrupted, his sense of dislocation is further heightened when papá tells him and his little brother that they all have to take on new names and forget their former ones: it is too dangerous. Set in 1976, against the backdrop of what has become known as Argentina’s “Dirty War,” that left thousands of people as desaparecidos – disappeared without a trace -, Marcelo Figueras takes us on a moving and intricate journey, through hope, devotion and betrayal, through human frailty and strength, through loss and perseverance.

By concentrating on the life of one family, in hiding and on the run, Figueras opens a narrow, intimate window into this traumatic reality. Young Harry, the primary voice in the novel, while trying to cope with the day-to-day challenges the family faces, is also living in a colourfully imagined world full of heroes and battles, and preparing for his own, Houdini-like, “escapes” from the dangers he senses around him. His depiction of his surroundings, descriptions of his encounters with the toads in the pool… are lively and endearing. These and others feel immediate and richly drawn; the voice of the child is totally convincing as it fluctuates between innocently funny to wisely inquisitive.

The novel opens with a decisive moment in time, before it rolls back to the beginning, prior to the events unfolding that led up to this point: Harry and his grandpa say goodbye to his beloved parents: “The last thing papá said to me, the last word from his lips, was ‘Kamchatka.'” Harry will never forget his father’s last word. In his mind, it is like a code word between father and son, a promise, a sign of eventual victory. Kamchatka, for him is a safe place, from where a temporary retreat changes into fighting back, moving forward to winning. Kamchatka is one of the “remotest territories waiting to be conquered” on the Risk board, the game he loves to play with his papá. He is a curious child, fascinated not only by Superman and famous battles and their historical heroes. His interests in the ancient philosophers, in biology, astronomy, and geography are just as strong. For as long as he can remember, he knows, for example, that the board game Kamchatka resembles – in its remoteness and its physical profile – the actual one in the north eastern tip of what was then the Soviet Union: “a frozen peninsula, which is also the most active volcanic region on Earth. A horizon ringed by towering inaccessible peaks shrouded in sulphurous vapors.” In his imagination the fictional and the real Kamchatka merge into one, a safe and beautiful place where he will travel to when the time comes…

The adult Harry is a constant companion voice to that of the ten-year-old, recalling vivid memories, filling in what his younger self didn’t know or couldn’t conceive and trying to make some sort sense of his life by reflecting on the games played by memory and time. “Time is weird,” he muses. ” That much is obvious. Sometimes I think everything happens at once, which is anything but obvious and even weirder.” Between the two voices the novel contains much more than the story of a young boy who desperately tries to maintain his playful childhood, his study, and his new-found friendship with the mysterious Lucas, while at the same time hoping to support his parents by “playing his role” in the family. He observes, more than he understands, and yet senses why the “uncles” have disappeared one after the other, why his adored and adoring mamá does no longer behave like the “rock” of the family, why the psychological stresses show on his parents’ faces. With great apprehension he watches them in their constant challenge to demonstrate the emotional strength needed to keep the family together as long as possible and to provide for Harry and his young brother the sense of safety and normalcy in a dangerous period of history. Yet, he does not dare to ask…

Beyond the child’s story, Kamchatka is also the adult’s multifaceted meditation on history, on learning about life and the universe, on time and memory. Figueras, in fact, structures his novel along the lines of school periods: Biology, Geography, Astronomy, Language and History.  In each section, young Harry learns at a child’s level and through observations and practical experiences what the older Harry then places into the respective context. The two voices are so intricately intertwined that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which voice is speaking to the reader and affording young Harry maturity he cannot have had. As Harry later describes himself: “Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other.” For me, some of these “scientific excursions,” while interesting and valuable in their own right, can take the reader too far away from the essence of the story. They tend to turn, at times, the political and personal story more into a subtext than may be warranted given the overall direction of the narrative.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat; (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederikie Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Marcelo Figueras
EXTRAS:	Publisher page
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

Bibliography (translated only):

• Kamchatka (2003; September 2010 in US)