"The Wizard of The Crow"

Written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is both a cleverly written political critique and a quick-paced tale about Kamiti, who arrives in a large city friendless and alone.

The city to which Kamiti has come is "Abruria" (since Thiong'o is from Kenya, one can assume Nairobi or Mombasa is the intended city). Kamiti has just finished his college education in India and has come home to find work. However, he soon discovers that finding work is not so easy despite his qualifications. Kamiti soon meets Grace, an educated and gainfully employed young woman with whom he falls in love.

Abruria is the capital from where "the Ruler," governs. He has been in power as long as anyone can remember. He has recently been thwarted by the "Global bank" which will not fund his "Marching to heaven - tower of Babel" project. The thinly veiled references to development projects and political machinations are hilarious. Unfortunately the Ruler and his wife fall sick with a wasting illness - "white ache," which as its name implies, makes them wish to be white people.

Kamiti discovers that to protect himself it is necessary to disguise himself as "the Wizard of the Crow" and in so doing complicates his life. Eventually this assumed role becomes less of a shield and more of a magnet for attention as Kamiti's healing skills become known throughout Abruria.

This is a suspenseful, magical tale where the identities of the characters are constantly evolving. It will make you laugh, but not cry.

"Train to Pakistan"

This 1956 novel by Khushwant Singh is a tragic love story. Juggut Singh, a Sikh, is in love with Noorm, a Muslim, and they hope to marry. Their village is a mixture of Sikhs and Muslims, and portrayed as quiet and peaceful. Then the intellectual, Iqbal Singh, arrives. As the Partition of India and Pakistan begins he hopes to spread revolutionary ideas.

The Muslims are given the choice to leave while they can, or face mounting violence and persecution in the time ahead. Muslims in the region have been getting on trains and leaving, and Sikhs have been arriving from future Pakistan. However, when a trainful of dead Sikhs arrives, the question is, "will the Sikhs will take revenge on their Muslim neighbors?" Whether Noorm escapes to Pakistan rests in the hands of Juggut Singh, who loves her, and Iqbal Singh, who loves his ideology.

This is an excellent, well-written, short novel. The central romance is heart-wrenching and makes the violent and chaotic events of the Partition more understandable. Not being knowledgeable about the Partition of India this novel provides an overview of what happened. I highly recommend it.

"Hanna's Daughters"

Hanna's Daughters: A Novel of Three Generations is the type of book that one would expect to be on Oprah's book club list, due to its focus on women's histories and lives. Beginning in 1871 and ending in 1986 the lives of Hanna, Johanna, and Anna are traced through personal and social history. Hanna's story is told in a narrative story form, but Johanna and Anna speak from the first person. There is a thread of magic running through the book which never quite solidifies, but maybe that is required in Swedish writing.

The book starts at Hanna's family's farm in Dalsland. After a traumatic rape and pregnancy when only thirteen, Hanna's life assumes a more hopeful trajectory when she is married to a gentleman-miller. As a miller's wife, hunger which had killed four of her siblings, becomes a worry of the past, and Hanna is able to increase her children's fortunes and social status. Due to the geographical proximity to Norway, the threat of war between Norway and Sweden in 1905 was a significant regional catastrophe for the family. The mill, unfortunately dependent upon the region's farmers, falters as the farmers depart en masse for the cities forcing the family to also move. The culture shock experienced by Hanna and her family in Göteborg is intense and exceeded only by the economic shock. The events in these individual's lives mirror those of the larger society in its trend at that time for greater urbanization, greater opportunity and as a result disruption of the social fabric.

So, it is not surprising that Johanna grows up to reject her mother's sense of social order and becomes a socialist. By gaining the education that her mother lacked she also gains the ability to be independent. Despite that Johanna is the most dependant of the characters, thus showing that women's happiness revolves around the men in their life.

Anna provides the framework for this history in that she is writing a book about Hanna and Johanna. As a “modern woman,” who has two daughters of her own, she is attempting to heal her own emotional scars by examining those of her mothers. Beginning and concluding the novel, Anna is the shaper of the narrative and is the most lost of the women because she is the one who must make her own choices without family or society dictating to her.

All in all, this is an excellent book to read on a weekend. One small problem I had with it was the fact that Hanna did not tell her own story. Instead it was told from an omniscient point of view. Though this may have been Marianne Fredriksson's deliberate choice, to show that women have gained more control over the narratives of their lives, Hanna seems to be inordinately slighted in the retelling of her story.

"Stories of Five Decades"

Hermann Hesse's Stories of Five Decades is a collection of twenty-three short stories originally written between 1899 and 1948. Many of the stories have as their subject a young man's learning about life and love. The town of Gerbersau is the location of many of the stories and is alternately a pleasant, or stultifying environment for the characters.

“The Latin Scholar” is a typical story in this collection. Karl Bauer, a sixteen-year-old student who is boarding in a large town, is at a formative age. Due to the meager portions he is given as a boarder he has taken to filching snacks from the larder and it seems clear that his honest character is in danger of deforming without some moral intervention. Luckily the housekeeper, Babette, becomes aware of Karl's need for both food and guidance and provides both. When Karl falls in love with a maid and must deal with unrequited love he learns more than he has during his academic studies.

“An Evening with Dr. Faust” is a short and humorous story of looking into the future. Dr. Eisenbart and Dr. Faust listen in on the future with the help of a specially modified gramophone. What they hear is both shocking and disturbing to them. Considering that Dr. Faust is such a willing disciple of the devil it is amusing that it is possible to shock him with “evil.”

“Walter Kömpff” is one of the lengthier stories (35pgs.) and follows Walter from cradle to grave. The story begins with a description of Walter's pious mother and shopkeeper father and the deathbed promise extracted from the twelve year old that he would take on the family business. Unfortunately, Walter neither wants to be a shopkeeper, nor has any other career in mind, and spends his life uselessly struggling without knowing what he does want.

The story which I found most appealing was “Tragic.” Johannes an elderly compositor (a typesetter) is meeting with the newspaper's editor-in-chief and when asked, rhetorically, if his work is going well, he launches into a mournful monologue concerning the devolution of grammar. Johannes says, “Just as in Borneo and all those other islands they have extirpated the bird of paradise, the elephant, and the king tiger, they have destroyed and abolished all the lovely sentences, all the inversions, all the delicate play and shading of our dear language” (p. 272). The complaint of Johannes is interesting not only because it is poetic in its form, but also because it shows that linguistic customs are constantly changing. Insisting that a language conforms to outmoded grammar rules is unrewarding, but seemingly unavoidable.

These stories are quite good and well worth reading. Some are too parable-like (“The Island Dream”), but most deal with psychological and emotional growth which are just as relevant now as when the stories were first written.

magical aphorisms

In the magical realism tradition of Milan Kundera, and Gabriel García Márquez, Milorad Pavić's writing is absurd, amusing, and fantastical. It is also poetical and aphoristic, “Some women cannot manage a house and theirs are always in disarray. Others cannot manage their own souls and these are in disarray. Things have to be straightened up at the right time; afterward is too late. Because any similarity between the house and the soul ceases in that afterward. Vitacha obviously did not know that” (p. 164). Vitacha, the heroine of Landscape Painted with Tea, has a very tumultuous life in East Central Europe. The stories of Vitacha and her second husband Atanas Svilar, later Atanas Razin, form the backbone of this book. But what is most engaging for the reader about this , and perhaps all of Pavić's writing is the format. Book One is a mostly continuous story. Book Two is “A Novel for Crossword Fans.” Two small crossword puzzles are given with clues. Each of the following chapters are entitled by number and direction according to the crossword puzzle. The solution to the crossword puzzle corresponds to the words composing the index (reordered of course). Due to the structure of the novel the reader is free to read in a variety of orders, and as with choose your own adventure stories, the ending is entirely dependent on the reader!

First published in Serbian in 1990, Landscape Painted with Tea, was translated into English the same year. For an author interested in exploring the potentials of storytelling, the internet is an amazing system and Pavić's latest work is published online: D A M A S C E N E: A Tale for Computer and Compasses.

"The Historian"

The Historian by Elisabeth Kostova is a suspenseful historical journey to find the burial site of Vlad Ţepeş, more commonly known as Dracula. The narrator, who remains nameless throughout the first half of the book is a 16 year old girl living in Amsterdam, with her diplomat father, Paul. The story unfolds in letters spanning from the 1930-1950's written by Paul, and his college advisor about their search to discover the truth about Dracula. Beginning with how Paul was drawn into the hunt not by inclination, but by the appearance of a blank book bearing the name Dracula, of unknown provenance, in the library one day; the letters document his subsequent research into the dark mystery. The search takes Paul from Oxford to Turkey, Belgrada, Budapest, and Sofia with a mysterious and beautiful Romanian anthropologist.

The suspense is maintained throughout the book by the interweaving of the letters documenting the past search for Dracula and the present day narrator's attempts to rescue her father from Dracula's minions. A brief excerpt will show how Kostova heightens the reader's anxiety: "The man behind the newspaper was so still that I began to tremble in spite of myself. After a while I realized what was frightening me. I had been awake for many long minutes by now, but during all the time I had been watching and listening, he had not turned a single page of his newspaper" (p. 228). At this point the story jumps back to Paul's letters and the reader must keep reading about the past in order to learn what will happen in the present.

I recommend this book for the engaging quality of the writing. The merging of the European and Turkish accounts of Dracula fact and legends in a quasi-academic way makes for entertaining reading. The journeys through Central-Eastern Europe illuminate the history if those states, but of course in a somewhat fantastical way.

"An Academic Question"

An Academic Question a novel by Barbara Pym is a rigidly light-hearted portrayal of a woman, Caroline, trying to figure out what she should be doing. Married to an academic, and dissatisfied with being a housewife she attempts to fill her time by reading to residents at a retirement home. Her husband becomes very interested in the individual that Caroline is reading to, and steals a manuscript to further his research.

The cynical disrespect and disregard that Caroline, her husband, and all the characters exhibit for ethics or pretense of social feeling is no doubt intended to amuse. Since her best friend is a hedgehog-fancier one cannot help but imagine that this is supposed to be a comedic story. Perhaps it is the distance in time (the book was published posthumously in 1986), but rather than humorous the characters are repellent, the plot depressing, the racism irritating. This is the type of book that might be interesting when published, but is quickly outmoded.