“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 21, 2014)

“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.” For four friends, that line was crossed during their late teenage years, when one of them was poisoned, perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally, lingering in a physical limbo state until she finally dies years later.  The young man, Boyang, remains in China; the two young women, Ruyu and Moran, move to the United States. Each ends up living in what the author describes as a “life-long quarantine against love and life.”

Kinder than Solitude is not primarily a mystery of a poisoned woman nor is it an “immigrant experience” book, although it is being hailed as both. Rather, it’s a deep and insightful exploration about the human condition – how one’s past can affect one’s future, how innocence can be easily lost, and how challenging it is to get in touch with – let alone salvage – one’s better self.

“To have an identity – to be known – required one to possess an ego, yet so much more, too: a collection of people, a traceable track lining one place to another – all these had to be added to that ego or one to have any kind of identity,” Yiyun Li writes.

In the case of Moran, who married and divorced an older man she still cares for, what she called her life “…was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.” Riyu, the most enigmatic and detached of the characters, is an empty vessel, unable to connect or to experience much pleasure or pain, who strives to receive an “exemption from participating in life.” And Boyang, a successful entrepreneur with a cynical sense of the world, has discovered that “love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity.”

This is a deeply philosophical book, one that delves into its characters, with an ambling narrative that shifts from the shared Chinese past to the present –China, San Francisco, the Midwest. It is not for everyone – certainly not for readers who are anticipating an action-packed, page-turning suspense novel. But for those who seek insights into the human condition and love strong character-based novels, Kinder Than Solitude offers rich rewards.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Yiyun Li
EXTRAS:	Q&A and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pen/O’Henry Prize Stories 2010 edited by Laura Furman

Bibliography:

• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (2005)
• The Vagrants (2009)
• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories (2010)
• Kinder Than Solitude (February 2014)

“I had thirteen names. Each name was from a different generation, beginning with Father and going back from him. I was the first one in our village to have thirteen names. Our family was considered blessed to have such a history.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 13, 2014)

Mengestu’s third book—another about the immigrant experience—is his most accomplished and soulful, in my opinion. He returns again to the pain of exile and the quest for identity, as well as the need for a foreigner from a poor and developing country to reinvent himself. In addition, he alternates the landscape of post-colonial Uganda with the racially tense Midwest of the 1970s, and demonstrates that the feeling of exile can also exist in an American living in her own hometown. The cultural contrast of both countries, with a narrative that alternates back and forth, intensifies the sense of tenuous hope mixed with shattered illusions.

“I gave up all the names my parents gave me,” says the young African man, who moves to Kampala in order to be around literary university students. He has left his family in one country to seek his idealism in another. He meets a young revolutionary, an anti-government charismatic young man, who starts a “paper revolution” at the university. Neither is a student; both seek to realize their ideals. They become friends, and eventually, cross the line into danger and confusion.

The alternating chapters concern Helen, a white social worker in Missouri, who has never traveled far, not even to Chicago. One of the young African men, named Isaac on his passport, travels to the US, allegedly as an exchange student. Helen is his caseworker. Isaac’s file is thin, and Helen knows nothing about his history. They embark on a relationship that becomes more intimate, but yet creates an elusive distance. Mengestu explores the hurdles they face, as well as examining how these obstacles relate to Isaac’s past.

The restrained, artless prose penetrates with its somber tone, and the emotional weight of the story and characters surge from the spaces between the words. Mengestu’s talent for nuance was evident when, days after I finished the book, it continued to move me.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (March 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Dinaw Mengestu
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: How to Read the Air

Bibliography:

• The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)
• How to Read The Air (2010)
• All Our Names (March 2014)

“I wondered how the wife I had known when Daniela was first born— the quiet, sunken woman who read the Czech newspapers in the library every morning and then wrote long letters to her mother in Prague,  letters Katka had known would be swallowed by security— could have become this confident voice on the line.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (FEB 21, 2014)

A title such as The UnAmericans begs this question: what is an American? Or more specifically, what is an unAmerican in Molly Antopol’s world?

Molly Antopol’s characters are mostly Jewish or Eastern Europeans and they are mostly alienated – from spouse or kids, from past ideology and beliefs, and often, from their most authentic selves. Each story is a little gem unto itself.

In one story, we meet an American actor of Russian ancestry who has eschewed his Russian past, only to leverage it in order win a part with a leftist film director. Fingered during the McCarthy era, he goes to prison in support of beliefs that aren’t even truly his. Upon release, he spends a weekend with his admiring 10-year-old son and comes face-to-face with his hypocrisy.

In one of my favorites, “A Difficult Phase,” a downsized Israeli journalist –floundering in her life – begins to question her life choices when she meets an attractive widower and his young teenage daughter. “This is what she was good at: being the blank, understanding face across the table; putting people so at ease they revealed the things they didn’t want to share with anyone, the things they wished didn’t exist at all.”

Another story, “The Old World,” focuses on a middle-aged tailor who meets and marries a Ukrainian widow, and travels with her back to her hometown, only to discover that he is a poor substitute for her dead husband. He reflects on his grown daughter who is a “born-again Jew:”

“Maybe in religion, Beth really had discovered a way never to be alone. Maybe I am the lost one, wandering the streets of Kiev, competing with a dead man.”

Other stories are equally well-crafted and psychologically acute: a decorated Israeli solder comes home and suffers a fluke accident, which sets in play some poignant dynamics between him and his brother. A political dissident in Russia discovers that his neglected daughter has written an autobiographical play with himself as a key character. A young American woman and her Israeli husband must face the reality of their marriage, which is “so scary and real it required an entirely different language, new and strange and yet to be invented.”

Psychologically astute, subtlety crafted and haunted, this is a confident and poised debut, which may very well end up on my Top Ten of 2014 list. There is not one mediocre story in this whole remarkable collection. It’s one of the best debut story collections in years.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (February 3, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Molly Antopol
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Foreign Brides by Elena Lappin Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

Bibliography:

• The UnAmericans (February 2014)

“Happiness is like water…We’re always trying to grab onto it, but it’s always slipping between our fingers.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JAN 12, 2014)

Chinelo Okparanta came to my attention after her story, America, was a finalist for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. It tells the touching story of a very special friendship between two young women that challenges Nigerian traditions and social conventions… America has been published as one of ten stories in this, her first collection, Happiness, like Water. Okparanta is without a doubt becoming a promising representative of the new generation of Nigerian and African writers who are giving growing prominence to the field of African short fiction writing.

Chinelo Okparanta’s engaging stories in this book, some set in Nigeria, some among Nigerian immigrants in the US, explore a wide range of topical subjects and concerns. Mostly told through the eyes of a first person protagonist, she writes with confidence and sensitivity, her language is subtle, yet also lucid and powerful. Despite the short fiction format, her characters are realistically drawn and we can comprehend the challenges of their various circumstances. While her stories are rooted in her Nigerian background (she moved with her parents from Nigeria to the US at the age of 10) she addresses such issues as love, longing and betrayal, faith and doubt, and inner-family and inter-generational tensions and violence in such a way that they move beyond the specific and become stories of human struggle and survival. Yes, there is happiness too – fleeting moments that need to be savoured, hope for a future where it can establish itself…

Do I have favourites among the stories? Maybe I do, but each reader will find those that feel closer to home or that affect us individually more deeply than others. Fortunately, I don’t have to choose.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; 1 edition (August 13, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Granta page on Chinelo Okparanta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another collection of short stories: That Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Bibliography:

• Happiness, Like Water (August 2013)

“We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me. We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction, even though Mother would kill me dead if she found out; we are just going. There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I’d rather die for guavas. We didn’t eat this morning and my stomach feels like somebody just took a shovel and dug everything out.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe (JAN 5, 2014)

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, is the story of Darling, a young Zimbabwean girl living in a shantytown called Paradise. She is feisty ten-year old, an astute observer of her surroundings and the people in her life. Bulawayo structures her novel more like a series of linked stories, written in episodic chapters, told loosely chronologically than in one integrated whole. In fact, the short story “Hitting Budapest,” that became in some form an important chapter in this “novel,” won the prestigious 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.

In addition to Darling, the stories introduce her gang of close friends. They are vividly and realistically drawn and we can easily imagine them as they roam free in their neighbourhood and also secretly walk into “Budapest,” a near-by district of the well-off… One of their goals is to get a glimpse how the other side lives, but primarily to find food and anything useful to trade. They enjoy climbing over walls, peeking into gardens and houses, and heaving themselves into trees to get their fill of guava, a fruit that can temporarily lull their constant feeling of hunger… but with unpleasant consequences.

Darling’s story is bitter-sweet: her father has left the family for the mines in South Africa and her mother ekes out a living, trading in the border region. Darling is left in the care of her grandmother, Mother of Bones. They all had a better life once, and Darling went to school then, but the family was expelled from their “real” house during an earlier political unrest in the country. In the first half of the book, the backdrop is Zimbabwe in the early years of independence and issues of poverty and inequality, violence and suppression of human rights, disappointment with the lack of democracy, are touched upon without breaking the flow of the young protagonist’s authentic voice. Consistently, Bulawayo stays with voice of her young protagonist whose natural curiosity helps her to make sense of the things she doesn’t quite understand. She expresses her views in often comical ways in a mix of unusual imagery and associations, as astute descriptions of life as she sees and understands it from her limited experience that is mingled with her witty interpretation of stories she hears from adults. Her language can be crude and raw, but also gentle and sensitive. I very much enjoyed the vibrant fresh voice of Bulawayo’s young protagonist.

Darling has an aunt in the USA and she often tells her friends of her and that she will move to America to live with her aunt and to experience everything that goes with wealth and comfort: her American dream. It is not surprising, however, that life, when she has arrived in Michigan, is quite different from what she imagined it to be. Still told in episodic chapters, Darling appears to lose her vibrant and innocent voice; it becomes more mature and even, but also flatter. Also, the stories are no longer as closely connected as they were in the first part. While giving insights into her daily life and that of her close family, we lose the astute and wittily critical observer we have come to like and engage with.

Darling’s life follows more or less the usual paths of young (or older) people arriving on visitors’ visas and staying on under the radar. Darling makes every effort to “fit in” and to adapt to the realities she encounters. She adopts an American accent that her mother and her friends on the phone have difficulty understanding… Darling still thinks of “home,” her mother and her close friends, but… with nostalgia as well as resignation into the impracticality of such a visit. In the chapter, “How They Lived,” written in a voice that is not Darling’s, Bulawayo generalizes the experience of immigration and the efforts immigrants from all over the world put into sounding happier than they are, not telling friends and family back home honestly how their lives have turned out in order not to sound discouraging and ungrateful. A strong story in its own right, but will Darling be able to draw any lessons from it?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 139 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books (May 21, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	NoViolet Bulawayo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini

Bibliography:

• We Need New Names (May 2013)

“The sun struck his body at an angle that reduced him to a thin black shadow lined in molton gold and yet when he looked back at me I could make out his smile. It was electric. He motioned for me to follow, but I refused, preferring to sit on a nearby rock, the tide splashing against me as he rushed into the surf. Watching him disappear and reappear in the water, I squinted against the twinkling light that reflected off the water until my sight was infrared. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 3, 2011)

In her debut novel, Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran tells the story of one happy-unhappy family, seen through the eyes of Meena, the youngest of six sisters. Set against the backdrop of suburban British Columbia, Basran paints a richly coloured portrait of a close-knit Punjabi community, caught between the traditions of “home” in India and their Canadian home, where their community is surrounded by a predominantly white, rather laid-back English-speaking society. With an impressively confident approach to a complex subject matter and a lively and engaging writing style, the young Indian-Canadian author explores the emotional turmoil, faced by a girl/young woman like Meena, experiencing the two cultures intimately. Traditional family values are assessed against the young heroine’s need for independence and emotional fulfillment.

From a young age Meena is an astute observer of her surroundings, expressing her thoughts and feelings more easily to her private notebooks than to any one person. Her subdued, hard-working mother, a widow since Meena’s early childhood, appears to be in a state of permanent mourning. The traditional customs and rituals that sustain her physically and mentally, also provide her justification for her strict treatment of her daughters. Speaking little English herself, she insists on Punjabi spoken; she demands of her daughters the traditional obedient behaviour that makes them acceptable as future wives and her constant concern is to find “good” husbands for her daughters, meaning that they are somebody with a good income and, very important, a professional designation, such as a lawyer or a doctor. Love? That may come later, or not.

By the time we share Meena’s intimate musings on her life, all sisters, except one, have or are about to be married according to the traditions. Harj, her favourite sister, was expelled from the family after being falsely accused of misbehaving by one of the many “aunties.”

The aunties, a kind of informal morality police, assume the responsibility of monitoring the young people’s behaviour in public, reporting without delay, when they observe, for example, when a girl alone is talking to a boy. Meena and Harj used to make fun of these aunties, whether related or not, referring to them as the IIA – the Indian Intelligence Agency. With a few evocative sentences, Basran expressively captures the characteristics of different aunties and others in the community: some speak deliberate “Bombay British” (showing off), others are FOBS (Fresh Off the Boat) or DIPs (Dumb Indian Punjabs)… Her sense of humour and irony is conspicuous, revealing an attractive mix of intimate knowledge of and critical distance to such reality. For example, one so-called auntie, claims to visit India every year, “to look for the latest fashion”…”Our styles here,” she explains, “are a year behind.” Nonetheless, while India in her mind is “very progressive,” she prefers to “keep the customs and traditions of Hindustan, of our India” here in Canada. This somewhat twisted logic that may well contribute to undermining any adaptation of Punjabi customs to those of their chosen home country, creates fundamental problems for Meena.

While the young people are not allowed to voice an opinion at extended family gatherings, they realize that they are left with few options as regards balancing the old and the new. Some rebel and are expelled from the comfort and security of the community, others pay half-heartedly lip service and play the “obediency game” at a superficial level, yet, others submit and suffer quietly… Meena, watching her mother’s seemingly unending grief, but also her sisters’ marriages, is increasingly questioning the meaning of love, marriage and family:

“I hated the ritual of belated mourning. We existed between past dreams and present realities, never able to do anything but wait. For what, I didn’t know…”

In her other reality, that of school, university and later in professional life, Meena encounters much ignorance and insensitivity vis-à-vis her and her background. Being reticent herself, she cannot easily explain her life and is usually treated as an outsider. As can be expected, she finds it easier to open up, emotionally and intellectually, to young people, who, for whatever reasons, also feel like outcasts in their respective communities. Liam, one of her classmates, is one person, who can “pull her out of herself.”  Wandering the countryside and beaches around Vancouver, their developing friendship is touching in its innocence, fragility and complexity. Having to resort to secrets and lies at home, she feels pushed into a dual existence. And there is Kal, her gentle childhood friend…

Whether, over time, she can detach herself from the strictures of her traditional upbringing and how she will handle any future decisions for her life, moves the narrative forward in very affecting and, at times, surprising ways. As we accompany Meena’s exploration of a rainbow of emotions – from love, physical intimacy and happiness to loss and pain. Basran’s expressive language takes on additional lyrical qualities when she expresses her heroine’s deep feelings. In the end, what are family values? Can they adapt?

Not wanting to give any spoilers, suffice to say that I was captivated by Meenas’ voice in conveying her reality, her life between two worlds, the growth beyond victimhood. One could quibble over small details, such as lacking clarification of some Punjabi terms and, possibly, the brevity with an element of stereotyping when describing the non-Punjabi environment. Yet, these are not serious flaws. Basran, is without doubt a new author to watch. With Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran was a semi-finalist in Amazon’s 2008 Breakthrough Novel Award and the winner of the 2010 Search for the Great BC Novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mother Tongue Publishing (October 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gurjinder Basran
EXTRAS:	Interview on YouTube
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Namesake by Jumpa Lahiri

Bibliography:

• Everything Was Goodbye (October 2010)

“The sunlight didn’t miss its chance, and as we approached the first high point of the ride, it moved in behind a brassy cloud high above the river, and then suddenly, like a very thunderstorm of light, dropped a cascade of brightness the size of Ireland down on the water, so that the river halved into brightness and brilliance, and you would half suspect that there was a more mysterious ticketman somewhere, from the mountains of heaven, pulling heavenly switches.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (SEP 18, 2011)

So here I was yesterday, pounding my treadmill, reading Sebastian Barry’s new novel, alternately sobbing and laughing aloud at the sheer magnificence of it, reveling in the exuberant brilliance of his writing. Admittedly, exertion at the gym calls forth such strong reactions, but the book had touched me quietly already with its first pages upon waking, and would retain its hold through the limpid ambiguity of its final paragraphs, read before going very late to bed. Yes, I finished it in a single day; I could not help myself. But there were many passages that I went back to reread more slowly and then more slowly still, just to savor the magic of Barry’s style.

The paragraph quoted above, coming almost halfway through the book, is the opening of a magnificent set piece, when Irish expatriate Lily Dunne and a fellow servant are taken by an admirer to ride their first-ever big dipper in Luna Park in Cleveland. “We poised, three beating hearts, three souls with all their stories so far in the course of ordinary lives, three mere pilgrims, brilliantly unknown, brilliantly anonymous, above a Cleveland fun park, with the wonderful catastrophe of the sunlight on the river, the capricious engineering of the tracks, the sudden happiness of knowing Joe…”. So begins a two-page paragraph, all in a single sentence, as the poise and the rush and the joy and the terror, laughing and crying all at the same time, becomes the pivot point for an entire life.

As indeed it is. “What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?” asks the second sentence in the book. Grief-stricken at the death of her grandson Bill, Lily wants only to write down her own memories, or make her confession as she calls it, before putting a quiet end to her own life too. Each chapter, headed simply “First Day without Bill” and so on, tells us a little bit about her present life and a lot about her past, until eventually the two meet up. She is living in the Hamptons, in a small cottage fixed up for her by her former employer for whom she worked as cook. Her memories take her back to the age of four, in the early years of the last century, when her father was a senior police officer in Dublin. Associated with the wrong side, unfortunately, for in the struggles for Irish independence, Lily and her fiancé are forced to flee to America with a price on their heads. The “Canaan’s Side” of the old hymn, the near bank of the Promised Land after the crossing of the Red Sea, is of course the USA, where Lily and her lover are forced to lead a fringe existence under assumed names. It will be long before she will feel herself truly American — the fun-park ride is a first hint of it — but she ends up surrounded by caring, tactful people who respect and even love her.

Here I get stuck. In revealing that the dead Bill was Lily’s grandson, I already anticipate something that Barry will reveal in his own good time, though only a dozen pages into the book. But his technique of adding facts only when truly important does make it very difficult to say any more about the plot. Suffice it to say that it will take Lily from the bloodshed of the Troubles in Ireland to an America moving from the heady Twenties through the Depression and several wars. All the men in Lily’s life will be touched by war, from the First World War that killed her beloved elder brother Willie to the First Gulf War that so affected her grandson Bill. The assassinations of the Sixties will also play a part, bringing to the surface issues of race that had been a dormant subtext from quite early on. I am not convinced that Barry can quite manage to sustain the story over such a long span; there are some chapters about two-thirds of the way through when the intensity flags somewhat, and a couple of revelations towards the end stretch credulity a little. But his ability to balance the epic with the intimate, as the book jacket rightly claims, is nonetheless amazing.

All Barry’s books begin, at least in back-story, at roughly the same place, with the agonized birth of the Irish state; he seems to extend the story further in time and place with each one. A Long Way (about Lily’s brother) addresses the paradox of Irish soldiers fighting for their country in Flanders only to be treated as traitors at home (a point which Barry gently parallels to the plight of Vietnam veterans here). The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty and The Secret Scripture follow the legacy of those conflicted loyalties deeper into the twentieth century, as does Annie Dunne, about Lily’s sister in the Fifties. On Canaan’s Side extends the story across the Atlantic, though it turns out to be more about America than Ireland, except in the marvelous poetry of the Irish voice. The Secret Scripture showed Barry’s remarkable ability to get into the mind of a very old woman, and that is one of the true joys of this book too. For what might have turned into a despairing wail of grief becomes instead a tapestry of light and wonder. I will let Lily have the final word:

“And I notice again in the writing of this confession that there is nothing called long-ago after all. When things are summoned up, it is all present time, pure and simple. So that, much to my surprise, people I have loved are allowed to live again. What it is that allows them I don’t know. I have been happy now and then in the last two weeks, the special happiness that is offered from the hand of sorrow.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 68 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (September 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Sebastian Barry
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

Bibliography:

• Mackers Garden (1982)
• The Engine of Owl-Light (1987)
• The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998)
• Annie Dunn (2002)
• A Long Long Way (2005)
• The Secret Scripture (2008)
• On Canaan’s Side (2011)
• The Temporary Gentleman (May 2014)

“Who’d chook a boy just to get his Chicken Joe’s?”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 14, 2011)

Around ten years ago, a young Nigerian immigrant, 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, was beaten by boys barely older than him in Peckham, a district in South London. Damilola later bled to death. The incident sparked outrage in the United Kingdom and was subsequently pointed to as proof that the country’s youth had gone terribly astray.

The same incident seems to have also inspired a debut novel, Pigeon English, with 11-year-old Harri Opoku filling in for the voice of Damilola Taylor. As the book opens, Harri has recently emigrated from Ghana to London with his older sister and his mother. Dad and younger sister and the rest of the family are still in the native country and Harri is often brought back to his home country through extended phone calls exchanged between the two sides.

Like most children, Harri is not privy to the intricate goings-on in the lives around him. It’s a fact made worse by the displacement brought about by immigration. Harri must not just figure out the ways of the world, he must do so in a new place where the rules of the game are entirely unfamiliar. Even if life in the ghetto is painful and lived in extreme poverty, Harri finds plenty to keep him in good spirits. For one thing, he wants to try every kind of Haribo (candy) in the store close to him.

Even better he has struck a tentative friendship with a local boy, Dean. With Dean’s help, Harri is determined to solve a recent crime—one where a kid like himself is found brutally murdered in a struggle over a fast food meal. The devastating tragedy affects Harri deeply and he is determined (in a typical naïve and childish way) to find the killers. Unfortunately he gets too close to the real killers—people who might not appreciate interference from a bright-eyed curious kid.

Pigeon English is narrated through Harri’s voice so the English is broken and mixed in with special words whose meanings become apparent only after a few readings. “Bo-styles” for example, means very good while “Asweh” is the more readily understandable, “I swear.”

Harri’s musings and experiences can be funny at one moment and heartbreaking the next. Author Stephen Kelman has done a terrific job in capturing the boy’s voice. The problem with Pigeon English is that the same voice eventually becomes a distraction. It never becomes seamless enough so the reader can concentrate on what the boy is saying—you’re forever hung up on how he’s saying it. And of course there are times when he says too much: “I can make a fart like a woodpecker. Asweh, it’s true. The first time it happened was an accident. I was just walking along and I did one fart, but then it turned into lots of little farts all chasing it.” Did we really need to know that?

It was entirely a coincidence that I read this novel right around the time that the London riots made headline news around the world. As was reported by the New York Times and other news outlets, it was the youth who were the primary looters and criminals in these riots—an effect brought about by a “combination of economic despair, racial tension and thuggery.” The riots, the paper reported, “reflect the alienation and resentment of many young people in Britain.” Read at this particular moment in history, Pigeon English then seems much more than a fairly good read—it also comes across as an important one. One can’t help but wonder how much the timely relevance of its subject matter lead Pigeon English to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year.

“I made the choice, nobody forced me,” says Harri’s mother about the decision to move her kids to London from Ghana. “I did it for me, for these children. As long as I pay my debt they’re safe and sound. They grow up to reach further than I could ever carry them.” Pigeon English is a moving novel not just because it is a stark story about London’s ghettos, but because it reminds us that for many in the developing world, a move to this kind of a hell is actually a move up.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stephen Kelman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

Bibliography:

• Pigeon English (July 2011)

“We have an extra responsibility to play the game right.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 07, 2011)

The book jacket of the hard-bound edition is entrancingly deceptive. Printed on what feels like watercolor paper, it shows a colored vignette of men in white playing cricket on a village green watched by spectators relaxing in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree. It could well be the nineteenth century, except that the skyline in the background is Manhattan, and Joseph O’Neill’s novel is set in the first years of the present century.

Written in a style of such lucidity that it might almost be an autobiographical memoir, it is the narrative of three years or so in New York City. The protagonist Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born financial analyst, thirtyish and near the top of his profession, arrives there at the start of the millennium with Rachel, his English wife, herself a high-powered lawyer. But after the attacks of 9/11, Rachel returns to England with their infant son. Hans stays on.

On one level, this is a novel of displacement. Having already relocated to London from Holland, Hans makes the further move to New York, where both he and Rachel prosper. But they have to evacuate their loft apartment after the attacks, and move into temporary quarters in the Chelsea Hotel, which is portrayed as an almost-surreal world unto itself. So Hans is essentially rootless before the story truly starts. By sheer chance, he stumbles upon the fact that cricket is played in New York by scratch teams of immigrants from former British colonies: Indians, Pakistanis, Caribbeans. Hans, who learned the game at an exclusive school in Holland, becomes the only white member of a team formed of taxi-drivers, store-keepers, and small businessmen, who offer him a kind of camaraderie that he cannot find among his professional colleagues.

Although cricket is an important symbolic presence, it plays a relatively minor part in the action, and it is not necessary for the reader to know the game. At first, cricket is presented as a symbol of the immigrant subculture, the thing that both brings people together and emphasizes their differences from mainstream America. As a successful Wall Street banker, Hans might be expected to fit right into New York society — and indeed the author makes the point that, as a Dutchman, he is actually a member of the historic first tribe of New York. But in soul-crushing scenes at the DMV and INS that might have been penned by Kafka, but which any victim of American bureaucracy will recognize, O’Neill does not spare Hans some of the worst aspects of the immigrant experience. Hans spends the first part of the book in a cultural limbo; when he joins the team, he find that most of his old skills come back, but he cannot bring himself to modify his patrician batting form in order to hold his own with players who learned in dirt lots; by his final American cricket game, he is hitting out with reckless abandon.

The English have an expression, “It’s not cricket,” when something contravenes an unstated social law. Later in the book, Hans remarks: “I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice.” That “imagining” is important; O’Neill gently suggests that America’s image as the champion of justice has become tarnished in the last few years. But he is also framing the moral dichotomy of the novel.

The other major character in the story is a Trinidadian immigrant, Chuck Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who thinks big and maintains a finger in every pie. At the very beginning of the book (which is all told in flashbacks), Hans learns of Chuck’s death in what seems like a mob killing. But his first chronological appearance in the story is when, as the umpire for a cricket match, he defuses a potentially dangerous situation, and follows it up with a clubhouse speech that is both a defence of the highest ideals of cricket and a potential vision of America as the Promised Land. Chuck has grandiose plans to build an international cricket stadium in New York, and he enlists Hans into furthering his vision. But he also has shady activities on the side, whose nature only gradually becomes clear. In dealing with these two sides of Chuck’s character, Hans gradually comes to re-examine his own moral sense, identity, and priorities.

But Netherland is no mere novel of ideas; it is also an emotionally wrenching love-story. For most of the book, the marriage of Hans and Rachel is virtually non-existent. When she leaves him, it is clear that she needs to escape more than the physical dangers of the bombed city. Hans flies to London every two weeks to see his son, but his relations with Rachel are painfully distant. And yet the novel opens some years later, with the two of them back together again, and apparently happy. Amazingly, O’Neill makes the fact that “you know how it all comes out” into a source of more tension, not less. The days in New York between Rachel’s decision and her actual departure are agonizing and so so true. And even when Hans leaves America and returns to London for good, the story is far from over; there is love to be found, but it must be new-forged, and it does not come easily. At one point towards the end of his stay in America (in Las Vegas, no less), Hans talks of reaching absolute bottom. But it is not Hell that he has been through, rather a very special kind of Purgatory.

The author Sebastian Barry, in a comment quoted on the back cover, writes: “The dominant sense is of aftermath, things flying off under the impulse of an unwanted explosion, and the human voice calling everything back.” Without that human voice, this story might merely be an offbeat curiosity. But O’Neill, with his clear moral compass and extraordinary power of writing from the heart, has created what may be the most moving book I have read in awhile.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 178 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (May 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Joseph O’Neill
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More cricket: The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya

Bibliography:

• This is Life (1991)
• The Breezes (1996)
• Netherland (2008) 

Nonfiction:

• Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (2001)

“They did not know that Vaclav and Lena would wander past the famous Coney Island Sideshow and see magic tricks and Heather Holliday and her golden fringed bikini for the first time. They could not know that this would be the beginning of everything.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 4, 2011)

Once upon a time, in the exotic land of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, a young boy named Vaclav – an aspiring magician – falls in love with a thin, skittish girl named Lena.  And, like any alchemy, the combustion is magical…and it endures.

There is a refreshing fairy tale quality about Vaclav & Lena, a lovely debut book by Haley Tanner.  Slowly but surely, I fell under the spellbinding tale of this would-be magician and his girl.  It’s an endearing tale that unfolds with gentle fireworks rather than major pyrotechnics – rather like the magic seen in the starlit sky on a summer’s night in Coney Island.

Vaclav is a young boy hero:  extremely bright, precocious, very loyal and good, and filled with innocent dreams of becoming a famous magician. Central to this goal is the assistance of Lena, a troubled and introverted girl who is imprisoned by her lack of an English vocabulary.  In the midst of their grand plans, Vaclav’s caring mother, Rasia, unearths a tragic secret about Lena’s home life with her negligent, drug-addicted aunt.  And overnight – for Vaclav – Lena vanishes into thin air, like a cruel magic trick.

Fast-forward seven years.  Vaclav is now a tall, handsome teenager, attending Brooklyn Tech, thoroughly assimilated into American culture, with a svelte American girlfriend.  It’s all come together with him with one exception:  he misses his childhood love.  Eventually, the reader is reacquainted with Lena and we learn what has happened to her in the interceding years and who she has become in the interim.

In a less capable writer’s hands, this book would simply be a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-regains-girl formula book, with the Russian émigré theme as a major overlay.  But Haley Tanner is more than “merely capable.” She writes a love story and like all real love stories, there’s a touch of magic that’s part-and-parcel with the theme. In one interview, she says, “Magicians are like story-tellers in that we know that the quarter does not disappear, that the woman is not sliced in half, but we suspend our disbelief for a time and allow ourselves to be carried away.  It is the same thing we do when we read a novel about a character we know to be fictional, but we cry and laugh and love along with them anyway.”

We believe in that magic.  There is inevitability in this book, a strong belief that love will eventually find its way and what’s meant to be will be.  “How did it happen,” Vaclav ponders, “that Lena went overnight from a yearning to an addiction? She seems to have planted herself into this life and sprouted, almost instantly, without his knowing, from a tiny seed into an entire jungle.” We become enchanted with the idea that Vaclav possesses the determination – and Lena possesses the will – to trick ordinary fate and prevail.  As a result, we are able to strip away the minor flaws in the plot and pacing (such as repetition) and surrender to the overall ambiance.

Vaclav & Lena crosses over to the YA category in the best way; as instruction on the distorted thinking of young and unaware children and the awkward diction and resulting problems of non-English-speaking immigrants. It has much to say about trauma and healing, the role of repressed memories, the assimilation of Russian immigrants, and the real magic we can perform through healing lies and unconditional love.  And, as a one-time Brooklynite, I felt the sense of place was excellently depicted.   Simply magical.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	The Dial Press (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Haley Tanner
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Seas by Samantha Hunt Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

Bibliography:

• Vaclav & Lena (May 2011)