Julian Gallo

I’d raised a few eyebrows among other writers I know when I said that I didn’t find the “genius” in Raymond Carver’s short stories. Of course, they took that to mean that I didn’t like him. On the contrary: I liked his stories a lot. I just didn’t see what the “big deal” was about them. But I tried. Believe me, I tried — just about read all of them at this point. I do love his minimalist style and some of his stories were absolutely outstanding. Others...well.... after a while many of them seemed the same to me. Carver, known best for his short fiction, began his career as a poet and this collection, All Of Us, is an anthology of all his published poetry plus some (then) unpublished work.

It was a wonderful read and I found his poetry to be much better than his fiction to be honest. While there may have been some personal and autobiographical elements to his fiction, I felt his poetry gives more of a glimpse of who Raymond Carver the man was. A lot of these poems are deeply personal and they do give insight into the way he viewed the world and especially those around him: his wives, his children, his parents, friends and neighbors, not to mention the environment in which he lived.

Born and raised in the pacific northwest, many of these poems beautifully describe the landscape that surrounded him. Despite this idyllic landscape, many of these poems deal with his struggle with alcoholism and they often reflect the loneliness he felt throughout most of his adult life. They also reflect the existential crises of those around him as well. But not all these poems are dour and bleak. There are some more romantic and lyrical works here.

While most of the poems read like his short fiction in miniature, there were some absolutely amazingly lyrical poems within the mix — those that reflect his love for his wife Tess, his travels, and especially his love for fishing (there many poems about fishing and being out in the wilderness).

I enjoyed these poems very much. Not every one of them worked for me, of course (in a collection this large, there are bound to be some that won’t resonate with every reader) but that didn’t take away from the overall effect of these poems, their style, approach and what they had to say to the reader. For anyone out there who had never read any of Carver’s works, I would recommend starting with this collection of poetry, then move on to his fiction. A highly recommended read.

A very interesting collection of poetry from Greek surrealist Miltos Sachtouris. Admittedly a poet I had never heard of before (he is renowned in his native Greece) this was a “stumble upon” purchase and once I read the first two poems in the collection I knew I had to read the rest. Sachtouris relies heavily on surrealist imagery and there are many reoccurring images such as birds, a broken/bloody/fractured moon, severed hands/fingers, nails, blood but these are no gratuitous images; for they reflect what Sachtouris saw all around him while writing these poems: the occupation of Greece by the Nazis, civil war and the eventual military dictatorship that took hold in the late 1960s through the mid-1970s.

Poems such as The Forgotten Woman makes use of these intriguing and disturbing images:

The forgotten woman opens the window

opens her eyes trucks pass below

with women in black who show

their naked sex and one-eyed drivers

who curse her christ and her holy virgin

the women in black wish evil on her

though they throw her bloody carnations

from the rolling garden of their bliss from

the car exhaust into the cloud of smoke

the drivers tear through the cloud and call her a whore

Poems such as Height Of February also makes use of surrealist imagery:

Bad mother with your pinned-on eyes your wide nailed-on mouth

and your seven fingers you grab your baby

and caress it then stretch your white arms before you

and the sky burns them with its golden rain

Some of these poems can be a bit of a ‘heavy’ read considering the subject matter they address while some can be very obscure, clothed in surrealist imagery and metaphor which perhaps may take more than one reading in order to decipher its meaning. However these are very powerful works, reflecting three differing tumultuous times in the nation’s history. Definitely recommended, especially for those who like surrealist poetry.

This is especially for the Bolaño completists. Chilean author Roberto Bolaño is better known for his novels and short fiction but he always considered himself a poet first and foremost (he only took up writing fiction after the birth of his son when he was 40). Since his death, a steady stream of his work has been published in translation and has placed him at the top of the literary ladder the world over.

This book is a mammoth collection of all of Bolaños poetry. Clocking in at over 800 pages, it’s quite a read and his poetry is just as powerful as his prose. Many of these poems are deeply personal, often recalling his youth while still living in Mexico as well as his early days in Barcelona before finally ending up in Blanes off the Mediterranean coast, where he lived until the end of his life.

The poems reflect his deep love for literature and poetry, especially poets such as Nicanor Parra, Cesar Vallejo and Gilberto Owen. The style of most of these poems could be described as “post-Beat” and there is a Beat influence on a lot of this work. His style is free form, sometimes experimental, sometimes highly lyrical. The more experimental prose poems such as People Walking Away (later published as Antwerp) recalls William S. Boroughs and concerns itself with a time he worked as a watchman at a campground in the suburbs of Barcelona. There are poems about love, sex, death, literature, life, all written with his own unique style that the world has eventually come to know and love.

It was a pleasure reading these poems because they give a little insight into who Roberto Bolaño the man was rather than just a highly respected literary figure. Sometimes the poems veer off into surrealist territory (ala Nicanor Parra) while other times they are very touching (as are the poems written to his then four year old son). The later poems — particularly those to his son — were written while Bolaño was ill as he worried that he wouldn’t be around much longer to watch his son grow up. Touching and sad and very powerful work.

If you’ve read all the fiction (which I am still working my way through) you can’t go wrong here. The Unknown University shows another side to Bolaño’s literary output, which was prolific and immense. A must for fans of his work as well as any admirer of the more experimental and less traditional poetry. A true giant who left this world much too early.

Books ‘on writing‘ are a dime a dozen, especially books on writing by famous authors and poets. I’ve read many of them over the course of time and I find a lot of them interesting. The problem with many of these books are that they only reveal that one particular author’s working methods. Perhaps they offer some insight to a writer who is just beginning, or even the seasoned veteran, or even perhaps someone who is intrigued by their favorite author’s approach, but for the most part, they tend to be very subjective.

The irony of this is that Bukowski, in many of these collected letters, had much disdain about the idea of “teaching writing” and more than one of these letters he makes his feelings well known. What separates this book from the rest of the pack is that Bukowski offers absolutely no specifics on the art of writing. Instead what you have here are a collection of letters to various writers, publishers, fans, etc about his thoughts on writing, his favorite authors, favorite books, and the occasional rant on what he hates about the insular world of literature. Not that these letters can’t offer any insight to the burgeoning writer. Taken as a whole, the message is a positive one: do your own thing and don’t get mixed up with the literary crowd. The best way to learn how to write is to sit down and write.

Ranging from the 1940s to shortly before his death, there are some gems here, letters to Henry Miller, John Fante, Harold Norse, and others; they are full of the Bukowski wit and many of these letters showcase how great a writer he actually was. Bukowski considered correspondence as an equal to his poems, novels and short stories and none of these letters are tossed off missives but written with care and as much thought as his other writing.

There are some wonderful insights to take away from this, regardless of the fact that he offers absolutely no advice on technique. It’s all about his approach, what drove him to write and why one should be writing. He also shines a light on the insular and incestuous nature of the so-called “literary world”. It is interesting to note, for instance, that he claims to have only made $47 in his first 20 years as a writer. Fans of Bukowski will love this. For me, the book brought me back to a time and place and has inspired me to again perhaps “throw my hat into the ring” with regard to writing poetry (which I haven’t done in years).

Taken together, it is a celebration for those who are compelled to put down the word. Bukowski, no matter what you think of his work, was one of those rare writers who actually loved writing for the sake of writing. Fame and celebrity (which would come later) meant nothing to him. What was most important to him was sitting down and getting it down — and in his own way. For that a lone, this collection is wort the read for every writer, aspiring or otherwise. As a long time fan of his work, I couldn’t get enough of it. I think it would do a lot of today’s writers a lot of good. It dispenses with all that is least important and zeroes in on what one should focus on more than anything else: the work. Highly recommended.

Published in 1969, The Scorpion by Tunisian author Albert Memmi is one of those novels that were common among the postmodern literature wave that was taking place at the time. Although very different, this novel sort of reminds me a little of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. A highly experimental narrative, Memmi employs a highly metafictional structure here. If late 1960s postmodern experimental fiction is your thing, this is the book for you, although it’s not that easy to get a hold of in English translation these days (my copy is a very old edition I happened to stumble on in a local bookstore).

The story — as much as there is one — is about a well known, socially engaged Tunisian author, also named Memmi, who has gone missing and his younger brother, an ophthalmologist, discovers his brother’s papers in his desk drawer. But what is it that he finds? An unfinished novel? A journal? Random scraps of paper with notes for a novel? Perhaps all of these things. To add to the confusion, each section is written in different colored ink (Albert Memmi had originally wanted the novel published this way but logistics made that impossible. Instead the novel uses differing fonts in order to distinguish the different writings). Memmi’s brother sits down and tries to sort through this mess of paper in order to make sense of it all and perhaps pull it all together as a complete manuscript.

As he reads it all, he discovers Memmi’s musings on childhood, life, death and marriage; his genealogy and his Jewish origins (as well as how his family split into both Jewish and Islamic branches); his interaction with other artists and writers; his conversations with his intellectual uncle; an almost verbatim conversation with one of Memmi’s former students; side notes, musings, quotes, photographs — everything is disjointed and scattered. While the reader reads the book, the reader is also privy to Memmi’s brother’s musings and commentary on what he had read (and in a way, adding to the manuscript itself). He corrects what he feels is inaccurate but sometimes he can’t tell what is deliberate fabrication and what is simply literary license. At first, the writings are about childhood in Tunisia under French colonial rule. Then things become much darker as the nation moves towards independence.

As Memmi’s brother reaches the last of the papers, he takes it upon himself to complete it, offering his own commentary and ideas trying to pull all this work together. Overall, the novel is about a nation and its people trying to discover its identity. There are historical musings which are highly interesting to me personally (being that my great-grandparents had lived in Tunis for some years and my grandfather was born there), as well as heavy existential explorations into the meaning of life and death. This is not a linear narrative. There is no plot to speak of. However it does not bore you and the writing is fresh and engaging enough to keep you turning the pages to try to figure out what it’s all supposed to mean, forcing the reader to engage with the text as much as its protagonist does. I love novels like this because they are such a rarity these days since much Literary Fiction has become very conservative, eschewing these narrative experiments.

No relation to the other Murakami (as far as I know). However, this Murakami — of the same generation as his contemporary — shows a distinctly American/Western influence on his writing. Whereas Haruki Murakami dips his toes into surrealism and magical realism, Ryu Murakami is pure noir, at least with this effort. In The Miso Soup is a highly dark and disturbing novel — part thriller, part noir-ish crime story.

Twenty year old Kenji is a guide to Tokyo’s sex industry, often taking tourists to the well known red light districts for a fee. He’s barely out of high school, a tad naive, has a girlfriend a couple of years his junior. The story begins when an American tourist named Frank contacts Kenji to guide him through Tokyo’s more lurid side. Upon meeting Frank, Kenji can already tell that there is something unusual about him. At first he chalks it up to cultural differences (those differences, between what’s “typically Japanese” and “typically American” are spelled out throughout the novel) but as he gets to know him on their first sojourn together, the more leery and afraid of Frank Kenji becomes. There has been a rash of killings in the red light district, particularly one young sex worker who was found dismembered. Kenji’s gut tells him that perhaps Frank is the murderer.

At first chalking it up to paranoia and coincidence, Kenji and Frank slowly get to know one another. Frank is an interesting and very strange character, an overweight, slovenly man who is kind of a cross between John Goodman and Philip Seymour Hoffman. He is talkative, brash, pushy, mysterious, and everything he says can’t be taken at face value. Kenji is also fairly sure that his name isn’t his true one. Just as Kenji begins to think that perhaps he is jumping to conclusions, an incident at a sex club proves him right after all. The scene is bloody and disturbing — and brutally violent. But Frank spares Kenji, considering him his “friend” as well as his guide. However, Kenji is now stuck with a moral dilemma. Should he turn him in or not? He witnessed him brutally murder more than a half a dozen people in the most psychotic way imaginable, yet he can’t get himself to call the police — thereby making him an accessory.

From this point forward the novel shifts focus toward what makes the mind of a psychopath tick. The more Frank discusses his childhood and life in America, the more Kenji begins to critique Japanese society, a lot of which goes through great effort to mimic it’s neighbor across the Pacific. They speak of Gods, post-war life, weighty existential issues, and so forth. What makes me a little curious about the plot is the fact that even after witnessing Frank commit such horrific acts of murder, Kenji, in a way, has some empathy for him and the two carry on as if nothing happened. Is a suspension of disbelief needed here?

All in all, not a bad book and there are some interesting elements to it, however there is a sort of drag on the story post-murders. For fans of horror/thriller/noir, it’s worth a read. For readers of more existential fiction, it’s worth exploring Murakami’s thoughts on post-World War II Japanese society and how — in some ways — it isn’t all that much different from their former enemy, perhaps implying the American influence on their society irrevocably transformed it.

A very strange, dark and beautifully written short novel by Icelandic author Sjón. The prose is simply beautiful and takes the reader right to the time and place in which the story unfolds — over ten days in the winter of 1883. The mood of the novel reminds me a lot of the American author Jack London (and in some ways Herman Melville) but London or Melville ever got this dark. (Just for the record, as to whether or not these two authors influenced Sjón is unknown). Throw in a touch of magical realism and you have here a story that not only examines the darker side of human nature but also treads into the territory of fable and myth.

The principal characters here are the naturalist Fridrik B. Fridjónsson, a man who studied natural history at the University of Copenhagen, who travels to Iceland in order to sell his parents‘ farm after their deaths. His plan is to return to Denmark but before he does he encounters a young woman named Hafdís Jónsdóttir (also known as “Abbas”). Hafdís has down syndrome and she was found aboard the remains of a shipwreck along the Icelandic shore. She had been sold to a group of sailors who then went on to sexually abuse her. Instead of selling his parents‘ farm, Fridrik decides to make a life there, taking in Hafdís as both servant and lover. When Hafdís dies, Fridrik pays a local priest, the Reverend Baldur Skuggason, to give Hafdís a funeral and burial. Skuggson’s servant Halfdan Atlason — who also suffers from Down’s Syndrome — arrives to pick up the coffin to bring back to the church for burial. After the burial, the priest sets off into the wilderness to hunt a blue fox, an animal said to have “mysterious” qualities. The fox more or less outwits the priest, at least initially, then an unexpected disaster occurs and the priest slowly begins to lose his humanity.

The story is a non-linear narrative, beginning with the priest’s hunt for the elusive blue fox, then doubling back to the story of the naturalist and his servant/lover’s death, then to the circumstances that befall the priest after the hunt is finished. It is the piecing together of these two seemingly unrelated narratives that make this novel the special one that it is. The reader is forced (in some ways) to put the puzzle pieces together and there is a lot unsaid, a lot between the lines. Some things aren’t, such as the history of infanticide in Iceland regarding children stricken with Down’s Syndrome, and how they were essentially treated as non-human. This is what makes the naturalist’s narrative so endearing, the idea that he was not one of these individuals, taking in the unfortunate Halfdís to live out her life with him, whereas the priest would not even allow any children with Down’s Syndrome into his church.

What’s not clear (to me) is why the priest set off on the fox hunt to begin with (perhaps financial reasons?) or perhaps here is where some Icelandic folklore comes in and could be lost on the average reader unfamiliar with the country’s myths and legends (Fridrik mentions a dream about a “blue vixen” in his letter to the reverend). It’s clear that the blue fox is representative of something involving the priest, possibly a transformative event in his life or being.

The scenes in which he pursues the fox are virtual poetry, allowing the reader to feel the air, snow, ice and cold; experience the Northern Lights as they appear in the sky. It is simultaneously beautiful and horrific. The beauty of life and the specter of death hovering just over one’s shoulder. This is no more apparent after the unforeseen event that occurs just as he completes the hunt. It is a dark, dense tale, with so much going on in just a few pages. A highly recommended read.

A love story of psychological and emotional depth. Italian author Andrea Canobbio weaves a fascinating tale here along with an interesting narrative framework. The story is told through the point of view of a son imagining his parents past in the years leading up to him being born. Being that the three years in which the story takes place is the recent past, the reader is under the assumption that the narrator is telling the story from his own middle aged years, well into the future.

Claudio and Cecilia are two doctors that work at the same hospital. Each day they meet for lunch at the hospital’s café and talk — mostly about work related things but sometimes they reveal a little about one another. Both Claudio and Cecilia are going through a rough patch in their lives. Claudio is divorced and still lives in the same building in which he grew up. His mother lives on a lower floor of the same building. Complicating matters, his ex-wife and her new husband also live in the same building. Claudio’s ex-wife is not out of his life entirely, often dropping in on Claudio’s mother who is in the beginning stages of dementia. Cecilia on the other hand is recently divorced and is trying to raise her young son and teenage daughter on her own.

Claudio first meets Cecilia when Cecilia brings her young son to the hospital because he hasn’t been eating. Claudio decides to pop in and talk to the boy, focusing on the boy’s interests in order to distract him and make him eat the hospital food that was given to him. It is only after this meeting that Claudio realizes that Cecilia is also a doctor at the hospital and from this point forward they began their daily lunches together. The more they talked, the more Claudio begins to fall for Cecilia. Cecilia on the other hand doesn’t seem to be interested in him but the longer they meet the more the two become attracted to one another. It is only after an afternoon tryst during an afternoon drive that it becomes apparent that there is “something” between the two.

However each is struggling with their own personal demons and issues, forcing each of them to keep a distance from one another and not taking the relationship any further along. They each hold vital information from each other and try to continue on as before, only meeting for their daily lunches at the hospital café. Then one day, Claudio arrives to find that Cecilia had brought her eccentric sister Silvia along, introducing her to Claudio who is a bit put off by this “intruder” and by the fact that after a year or so of meeting one another on a daily basis, only finds out then that Cecilia even had a sister. For some reason (which is never really explained) Cecilia leaves to go back to work, leaving Claudio and Silvia together for the remainder of their lunch hour. Claudio merely puts up with the eccentric Silvia, who goes on and on and on, never allowing Claudio a word in edgewise, and constantly bothering him about a book she wants him to read. However, this meeting proves to be a catalyst which will complicate their lives even more.

The narrative shifts at this point, showing the same story from Cecilia’s point of view. It is then we learn the complicated issues surrounding her life and are clued into the reasons why she’s been keeping a distance from Claudio, who she does actually feel something for. Once we are privy to the events in Cecilia’s life, the more we empathize with her and realize that perhaps Claudio is being a little selfish with regard to his own feelings. He yearns for more experience in life but cannot seem to let go of his past. Cecelia can’t seem to move forward and wrestles with her feelings regarding Claudio, consciously trying to avoid the truth about how she actually feels. It is just when she decides to accept it and move forward towards a more genuine relationship with Claudio that fate steps in and has other plans.

It is the simple story about two divorced doctors who can’t seem to allow one another to move forward in their lives, framed by the ruminations of the son imagining the circumstances of his own birth that takes this story to a different level. We aren’t sure exactly how much of it is true to life and how much of it is the conjecture of the narrator. And while we do eventually find out what the complicated circumstances were regarding the narrator’s birth, it is ultimately a little ambiguous as to his own rearing, referring to the three main protagonists as his “three parents”.

There are times when the story drags a little and there are moments when the past and present become a little confused within the narrative so the reader has to keep on their toes a bit. But for a psychological portrait of two individuals who struggle with affairs of the heart, it is quite insightful and it points out the fact that one can never truly know what’s going on in another’s life unless the lines of communication are open and one is willing to step out from behind the emotional barriers in which they sometimes hide. It is also a cautionary tale: strike while the iron is hot or risk losing something that was meant to bring one true happiness. 

I’m having a hard time understanding why many critics had bad things to say about this novel. Kundera doesn’t break any new ground here, true; but the writing is as sharp and as witty as ever — his particular talent of bridging the gap between deadly serious and farce and satire. The title alone should clue the reader in on what they are about to read isn’t so “serious”. However, it is, in ways I think the critics of this novel have either overlooked (which isn’t likely) or they simply thought it was time to tear down a great novelist from his pedestal. (Which is more likely the case).

The Festival of Insignificance is a very very short novel, coming in at around 115 pages. It is more akin to his later period work such as Ignorance. All the Kundera trademarks are here: the humor, the seriousness of the subtext, the non-serious, playful narrative, the author interjecting himself into the novel, commenting on the characters; any fan of Kundera’s work will find nothing wrong with this latest effort. At 86, it is presumably his swan song (I hope not) and in a lot of ways this book can be looked at as the last chapter in an entire body of work, with this book coming full circle. As in his first novel The Joke, this novel also pivots around a joke — one which concerns Stalin and his inner circle — in which he tells a joke that no one understands. Afterwards, his inner circle retires to the bathroom and begin raging about the joke and about Stalin in particular, who listens outside the door, highly amused at their reaction to the joke. With this, Kundera begins to explore how the world can longer take a joke, that humor has vanished in the contemporary age. That people have forgotten how to laugh and not take things so seriously.

The main story revolves around a group of friends, all of whom are obsessed with trivial matters: Alain, who can’t stop contemplating a fashion trend in which young girls expose their navels; D’Ardelo, who after a doctor visit learns that he doesn’t have cancer, goes on to tell a friend that he does because he wanted to seem “heroic” in the face of it; Ramon, who loves the visual arts but obsesses over the long line at the museum to see a Chagall exhibit. He is also haunted by his mother, a woman who never wanted him and abandoned him at a young age (the brief interlude concerning Ramon’s mother figures heavily into the ultimate meaning of the novel); Caliban, an actor who goes to great pains to create his own language and speak it; and Charles, who works as a cocktail party organizer and dreams about a play for a marionette theater in which he never intends to actually write. D’Ardelo is planning to throw a birthday party for himself — with Charles handling the catering duties and the bulk of the action takes place at this party, where other minor characters weave in and out, contributing to the underlying meaning of the text.

The four friends talk about weighty themes: sex, death, existence, memory, identity, the usual themes that Kundera explores in his previous work. However, this time, rather than it being full of meaning and contemplation, the four talk and talk and talk about it without much seriousness, often revisiting their trivial obsessions. But underneath all this — as well as the recurring theme of Stalin and his joke — mask a very serious point the novel has under the surface: that of insignificance. The “festival” is life: over time they will be gone, no one will remember them, that no one was ever asked to be brought into the world in the first place, that history has a way of either being forgotten or rewritten, the relationship between will and power, how people are often weighed down by matters that are given so much importance but are ultimately meaningless and this doesn’t allow for one to just accept the insignificance of things in order to live a much happier life; those moments we overlook each day as we’re busy over thinking things that we ultimately can’t do anything about; the arbitrary nature of things, particularly decision making (as illustrated in the Stalin portion, where he renames a Russian city after one of his comrades because of his willingness to not interrupt while telling an overlong story so he could go to the bathroom, instead pissing in his pants).

There are moments of weight and moments of lightness and a lot is packed into these few pages, something that isn’t easy to accomplish. The themes under the surface will have the reader thinking about this book for a long time and I wonder — due to Kundera’s advanced age — if this is a rumination on his own life, looking back and finally coming to a realization about his own attitudes towards the subjects he often explored in his work.

A reader may not get the full weight of this book if they haven’t read the entire corpus of Kundera’s work (though it isn’t necessary). However, it would help, since he revisits familiar themes and seems to draw a very different conclusion than he had previously. This little book will give one food for thought. Ignore the critics and read this.

Italian author Paolo Giordano’s follow up to the excellent The Solitude of Prime Numbers. It is a novel of war — both militarily as well as emotionally and psychologically — which has drawn many comparisons to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.

The novel follows a battalion of Italian soldiers stationed at the Forward Operating Base in a remote and dangerous region of Afghanistan. For the most part, they don’t see much, if any, action and they deal with their boredom and fear in numerous ways. The bulk of the novel focuses on the interaction between the differing personalities, which range in everything from the most introverted to the most brash, Alpha-Male. The reader knows from the beginning that something terrible is going to happen and as we follow these characters as they bide their time during their tour of duty, the tension slowly builds, a slow burn towards a horrific and tragic event; and event that may not have had to happen at all.

The individual characters are brilliantly drawn, ultra realistic. There’s Iteri, a virgin who spent his last night in Italy sharing a hotel bed with his overprotective and overbearing mother; Cerdena, the requisite “Alpha-Male” who thrives on military life, hides his fear and his emotions through his swaggering ways and often picks on poor Iteri about his virginity; Giulia, the only female soldier in the unit, who tries to navigate the difficulties of being just that in a male dominated world (which she manages to easily do) but also finds herself the object of affection from two of her male comrades; and Egitto, a medical officer, who treats his tour of duty as a way to escape what he views as an even more dangerous situation at home.

Each and every one of these characters are brought to life as real, living people, devoid of the caricature that one might find in other war novels. Most of them are young, barely out of high school, who find themselves in a very unfamiliar world, very far from home. In essence, although together as a military unit, each one of them finds themselves to be terribly alone, dealing with personal issues at home or within their own psyches. Their loneliness is further amplified by their individual interactions with their friends and loved ones at home for whom the war barely registers on their radar. When the mission they are sent on goes horribly wrong, each of them must deal with the consequences and effects in their own way; and when some of them return home, they find they are no less alone in the world and do whatever they must in order to completely change their lives, to erase everything that had come before their harrowing experience.

What separates this novel from most other war novels is the focus on the human aspect of the characters. There’s plenty of military life explored here, in all its complexities and bureaucratic nonsense. It isn’t primarily a “shoot-em-up” novel (although the one sole act of violence is horrific to contemplate). It is a stark reminder that these brave men and women are your brothers, sisters, friends, loved ones, fathers, sons. It is the human aspect of this novel that strongly resonated with me and Giordano paints each character with such realism that you feel you know them. For they could be people you even know yourself.

One of the great tragedies of the now decade and a half long “War on Terror” is the complete disconnect between those serving and doing the fighting and the rest of us who carry on with our lives as if everything else is happening on a distant planet. Once you get inside these character’s heads, you will further understand the trouble many of them have while trying to reintegrate into civilian life.

Spanish author Andres Barba’s English language debut, brought to you by the amazing folks at Hispabooks Publishing (who are bringing previously untranslated contemporary Spanish authors for the English speaking reader — something I’ve been waiting for for some time now). In his native Spain, Barba is the author of about 12 books of literary fiction, non-fiction, photography, art and children’s books. In 2010 Granta included him in their Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.

It’s easy to see why after reading this collection of four novellas: Fatherhood, Guile, Fidelity, and Shopping. Each of the four novellas are connected thematically, each exploring various issues of human nature: death, love, sex, a fascination for the other, desire, fear, fatherhood and the one theme that links all of these stories: the sudden understanding of another person’s life. In Fatherhood, we follow a struggling musician who gets his girlfriend pregnant however his girlfriend doesn’t want him in her life and has since found someone else. However the musician does his best to be a father to his son but finds it isn’t as easy as he thought it would be. Guile follows a young woman who is watching her mother slowly disintegrate, both physically and mentally. She hires a young Colombian woman to act as caretaker and becomes slowly fascinated with her. Meanwhile, as her mother’s condition deteriorates, the young woman’s somewhat dysfunctional family dynamic only seems to complicate matters more. Fidelity is about a young woman who — while out being a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders — discovers her father out with another woman. She follows her father’s mistress and becomes fascinated with her (one could even say even a hint of sexual attraction) trying to learn about who this woman is and what it was about her that appealed to her father. Meanwhile, she’s having relationship problems of her own with her hapless boyfriend who can’t seem to get it together. As she tries to come to grips with the idea of her father being unfaithful, she begins to see her parents’ love life in a whole new way. Finally, Shopping, which follows a mother and daughter through one day of Christmas shopping as a light snow falls over Madrid and the complicated dynamic between them as they spend the day together.

Each of these stories are extremely well written and Barba has the unique talent of getting into his character’s heads in a way not seen by many novelists: complex and extremely realistic, insightful. His prose style is absolutely outstanding, literary without being Literary, often with unique metaphors which precisely pinpoint the emotion or feeling conveyed. An immense talent and well deserving of being included in Granta’s list. Now it’s only a matter of time to see whether or not the English speaking world will take to him as the Spanish speaking world already has. He will, in my view, without a doubt. A truly talented writer who is ready to find a worldwide audience.

Anna Gavalda’s Billie is truly a wonderful story. Basically a story about two misfits who find one another, it is Gavalda’s voice which makes this the enjoyable read that it is. 

The novel begins with both Billie and Franck at the bottom of a gorge, after falling during a hiking trip in a French national park. Franck is seemingly hurt badly and slips into unconsciousness. Billie on the other hand has only minor injuries and as she worries about Franck’s condition as well as their predicament, she begins to tell the story of their lives (seemingly aloud) to a star in the night sky that she fixes on. It is this approach that makes the narrative so spectacular. Billie “riffs” on their story, her story, how they met and what led to the situation they find themselves in.  

Billie (named after the Michael Jackson song Billie Jean by her parents) and her best friend Franck meet in middle school (interestingly, the Jacques Prevert Middle School). When she first notices him, she intuitively knows that she will be close to him, although at first, the two of them keep their distance. Franck keeps to himself, is quiet and bright, often menaced by those around him for his sexuality. The two become friends in French class and when the two of them are tasked to perform a scene from one of French writer Alfred de Musset’s short stories for the class, this is when their friendship truly begins to blossom. 

The two are from very similar backgrounds: Billie’s parents are alcoholic and abusive; Franck’s father is perpetually unemployed and flirting with Christian extremism while his mother is zonked out on antidepressants most of the time. While Billie does everything in her power to get as far away from her family as possible (including moving in with a string of low class boyfriends), Franck is more afraid to declare his independence. 

At some point the two are separated - with Franck going to a different school. Even with this distance, Franck keeps in touch, constantly sending her postcards, always letting Billie know that he was there thinking about her. While Franck is studying law (at the instance of his father) Billie is living a wild life - drinking, drugging, jumping from man to man (each one of them less than desirable), even going so far as to live in a trailer behind one of her boyfriend’s parents’ home, eating the family’s left overs (her boyfriend’s parents didn’t think she was “good enough” for their son and wouldn’t allow her in their house) so she would not have to deal with her own parents. Eventually Billie winds up with a real bastard of a man who one day tells her a story about how he and his friends took “that faggot” they knew from school and drove him out to the woods and abandoned him there covered in scent that attracts bears. Billie, knowing that he was referring to Franck, does something completely unexpected and this is the first clue that perhaps Billie isn’t exactly the “reliable narrator”. More on that in a bit. 

So they are reunited and Billie insists that the two of them move in together in Paris and begin to live their lives. She convinces him to follow his own desires (to design jewelry) rather than study law just because he didn’t want to disappoint his father, further convincing him that his father would never except him for who he was, especially with his extreme Christian-xenophobic views. In an interesting switch to the third person, these young adult years to their middle years are revealed, bringing the story up to the present, where each of them become mildly successful at their chosen careers and more or less getting their lives in order - all the while being at one another’s side through it all.  Then they decide to go on a hiking trip, along with others, and it is dealing with one family in particular - a crewcut wearing man with a wife and young son who manages to trigger all the horrible memories in Billie’s own life - where Billie once again shows her darker side; and this incident directly leads to the predicament they now find themselves in at the bottom of the gorge. 

It is Billie’s “riffing” as she tells the story - often going off on tangents, joking, stream of consciousness digressions, most of which seem to be a cover for her highly sensitive and emotional states at times - which can give the reader a sense that perhaps Billie, although telling the story, isn’t quite the reliable narrator. It mostly focuses on herself, her feelings, her observations, and even though she does tell Franck’s story, it seems more from a distance, which is strange considering how close these two actually are. Franck’s dialogue comes in spurts, giving clues to his personality but Billie’s is up front and center, in your face. You know who she is, whether or not there is some ducking and weaving going on as to her deepest feelings, which a lot of the time she goes through great pains to conceal. 

The situation they are in is resolved by the end of the novel but I won’t reveal what happens. Let’s just say that it makes sense in a lot of ways and it is a testament of love, friendship, companionship, and the strong bond that two people can have after knowing one another for a life time. The novel is a celebration of that bond and throughout the narrative you feel it, experience it, and can’t help but be moved by it. If anyone has someone that close to them in their life (which I do, which is probably why this novel spoke to me as much as it did), this will be a relationship you can relate to: with all it’s ups and downs, highs and lows, dramas, intimacies and intricacies and it is handled in a beautiful and highly whimsical way. It is the story of the power of love, friendship and loyalty, something seemingly missing in the world these days. 

Hamid Ismailov is a Kyrgyz born author who moved to Uzbekistan at a young age. In 1994 he was forced to move to the U.K due to “unacceptable democratic tendencies”. His novel The Dead Lake, set in the Kazakhstan steppes, is a magical realist fable in the vein of Salman Rushdie and Gunter Grass.

After World War II, between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union used Kazakhstan as a testing ground for it’s atomic bomb program where as many as 500 underground and atmospheric tests were conducted, despite being close to a region where many people lived. According to the book’s preface, these devices exceeded by a factor of 2,500 the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The time the novel is set is in the present. The unnamed narrator is riding a train through the Kazakh steppes - a long, monotonous trip which seems endless. The destination is not clear but along the way many Kazakh and gypsy women board the train and try to sell their wares to the passengers. At some point along the way, a young boy - Yerzhan - boards the train and begins husking by playing his violin for the passengers. The narrator is wildly impressed with this young boy who played with such virtuosity and he begins to converse with him. The boy, however, is not a boy, but a 27 year old man and proudly proclaims him as such. The narrator doesn’t believe him of course, and the boy belligerently shows his passport to prove it. Sure enough, according to the official document, Yerzhan is indeed 27 years old. Intrigued, the narrator continues to talk to Yerzhan and Yerzhan enters his cabin, sits down and begins to tell his story.

The majority of the narrative from this point forward is Yerzhan’s story (with occasional interludes by the narrator in the present day). Yerzhan is 12 years old when the story begins and he tells of his childhood in a remote part of Soviet Kazakhstan, where two families live side by side the railway tracks. In this remote town, Yerzhan’s uncle Shaken is a brakeman for the nearby station. We learn of his upbringing, culture, his fondness for music, as well as his relatives obsession with “catching up to and exceeding the Americans” in all aspects of life. His uncle discovers the boy’s natural talent for music and Yerzhan begins taking violin lessons from a Bulgarian loner who somehow - for reasons unknown - wound up living in this remote part of Kazakhstan.

The one light in Yerzhan’s life is Aisulu, a young girl he is extremely fond of. Aisulu and Yerzhan spend a lot of time together and Aisulu often accompanies him on their outings as well as attends the same school as him. On one of these outings, they come upon an abandoned town, destroyed by the nuclear testing (which occur throughout the book as these two families try to live their simple lives). In this abandoned, radiated town, they come upon a contaminated lake. Yerzhan, wanting to impress Aisulu, jumps into the lake and begins splashing around to impress her. From that moment on, Yerzhan stops growing. As time passes, everyone else around him ages and grows while he remains a 12 year old boy.

Believing that he is cursed, his grandfather and grandmother begin a host of old Kazakh folk remedies in order to remove the curse and help him grow. Nothing works, and as his oldest relatives begin to pass away, much to his horror, his beloved Aisulu begins to grow into a beautiful woman. There comes a point where the line between what actually happened and what the narrator imagines what happened becomes blurred. While Yerzhan sleeps in the narrator’s cabin, the narrator tries to put the pieces together in order to finish this incomplete story. How much is fantasy and how much is reality isn’t clear. However, despite the sad, depressing tale, there is a sort of hopeful ending - and a surprise one as well. A lot of this reminded me of Salman Rushdie’s equally heartfelt fables but it is Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum that the premise immediately brings to mind. Like these novelists, Ismailov intertwines many ancient fables and stories as allegories throughout the narrative.

Aside from being something of a magical realist coming of age tale, it is also a statement on the horror of atomic testing in regions where people actually lived, giving no thought or care to that fact, all in an effort to surpass their lone superpower rival. I also can’t help but wonder that Yerzhan’s affliction is also a metaphor for what goes through a child’s mind once the innocence of childhood begins to wane: the acknowledgment of death (not only in his relatives but also, in once scene, a baby fox which the family dog devours, causing the fox’s mother to howl outside their house all night), watching his once robust family members become older, frailer; the changes taking place all around them as the world moves further into the twentieth century. In a lot of ways this is a very heartfelt story, sad, funny, witty and informative. Brilliantly written, at times highly poetic. A highly recommended read.

A very short novel by Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aïtmatov. Billed as a “love story”, which it most definitely is, it isn’t quite a romance. If anything, it’s a love story about Kyrgyzstan through the eyes of an artist looking back at his childhood during World War II. 

Seit is an artist looking back over his teenage years when most of the men in his village were off at the front, leaving the young and the women to take up the jobs that the men normally do. It is the beginning of the Soviet “collective farming” and Seit is employed transporting grain that is to be used for food for soldiers at the front. While Seit describes Kyrgyz life in the village he is more of an observer to the story being told more than he is a participant.  Seit’s brother is off at the front, wounded and in a hospital leaving him to work with and look after his sister-in-law Jamilia, who is the main focus of the narrative. Jamilia is an independent spirit: spurning the other village men’s advances, ordering Seit around, and driving the cart which transports the grain for the soldiers. Seit adores Jamilia and in some ways is secretly in love with her. Jamilia, however, feels spurned herself, by her husband, who, in his letters home from the front, relegates any communication with his wife to the post-script. Lonely and frustrated, she keeps to herself, focuses on the work that needs to be done. 

Then one day a soldier appears in the village - Daniyar. He is wounded and lives the life of a tramp, keeping to himself, living by the river. Jamilia puts him to work, helping them transport grain to the station. There is a connection between both the Daniyar and Jamilia, a connection that young Seit isn’t quite mature enough to figure out. Little by little the connection between Jamilia and Daniyar grows more complicated and she’s forced to make a moral choice. Will she remain and wait for her husband to return from the front or will she leave her husband and run off with the man she truly loves?  There is an interesting subtext to this short tale. At the time of its release, Aïtmatov was criticized for the novel’s “unpatriotic themes” and perhaps those criticisms (if you could actually call it that) had some merit. Beneath the love story is a message of freedom, to think for oneself, to be independent, to break away from tribal customs and societal mores; and perhaps the author was actually trying to make a statement about the Soviet system which dominated this ancient culture for most of the Twentieth Century. 

The writing is very old school literary, akin to the nineteenth century Russian novelists, but at the same time, sparse, but also written with an artist’s eye. The Kyrgyz landscape is described in almost painterly detail and there are a lot of interesting tidbits about Kyrgyz culture and mores, some dating back to the time when the invading Mongols had introduced them.  All in all, a good read. A simple yet warm, human story which will give the reader a glimpse of a culture in which many Western readers rarely get to see. Recommended. 

Once, I got lost. I was six or seven. I got distracted, and all of a sudden I couldn’t see my parents anymore. I was scared, but I immediately found the way home and got there before they did. They kept looking for me, desperate, but I thought that they were lost. That I knew how to get home and they didn’t. “You went a different way,” my mother said later, angry, her eyes still swollen. You were the ones that went a different way, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

Chliean author Alejandro Zambra and fellow Chilean Roberto Bolaño are often mentioned in the same sentence but the fact that they are both from Chile is where the comparison ends. They write very differently although they both address Chile’s violent and repressive recent history in their novels. What sets them apart, aside from style, is their generation. Zambra was born two years after the September 11th coup which ousted and killed Salvador Allende and installed (with the U.S.’s help and blessing) the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. It is from this vastly different generational perspective that Zambra approaches his fiction and it is very apparent in this brilliant novel.

Like Zambra’s previous two works, this is a short novel, but never will you read so much depth in such few pages. Clocking in at around 140 pages, so much is being said and so much is going on, in which many novelists would need a much broader canvas in order to convey. This is what is remarkable about Zambra’s talent as a writer.

It is a meta-meta-fictional journey. The book is framed by a story about a young boy who befriends a neighborhood girl soon after the 1985 earthquake in Santiago. The girl, Claudia, asks him to spy on one of his neighbors and report back to her about his comings and goings as well as who his visitors are. We follow the unnamed protagonist as he takes on his “mission” as well as follow him through the normal childhood excursions, get to know his parents, and the vastly different effect the Pinochet years seemed to have on them. Once the second section of the novel begins, we learn that the first section is actually the novel the protagonist in the second section is writing. Now in his late 30s, separated from his wife, he struggles with the complexities and the nuances of the work at hand. We get a glimpse into his life and how his life serves as the raw material for the tale he is trying to write. He goes home, visits his parents, and they open up to him in ways that were unimaginable in his younger years - and he learns a lot about them, what they thought, and how the years of the dictatorship effected them. When the story returns to the novel the narrator is writing, we see what he uses from it in order to flesh out the characters and move the story along. Set twenty years later from the beginning of the story, the protagonist seeks out Claudia in order to reunite with her. A lot had changed since their childhood. We learn how differently certain families were effected by the dictatorship years. According to the story, the nameless narrator “never had anyone in his family die” whereas the man the boy was asked to spy on - thought to be Claudia’s uncle - was actually her father who went underground during those years. As the story unfolds, the complexity of their relationship grows as well as the chasm between them. Little by little we see the echoes of the author’s real life working its way into the story.

The novel ends with the more recent earthquake in Santiago (which killed many people) bringing everything around full circle (I’m not giving anything away by revealing this). It is a very complex structure but it is handled beautifully, with immense skill. The theme of “going home” weaves its way throughout both narratives: the visits to parents, finding one’s way home after being lost, through memories, and so on. It is also a story about the “generation after”, those who were brought up during the tumultuous times, and, as the author-narrator puts it, “learned to read and write while their parents were either victims or accomplices”. Highly recommended.

Peruvian-American author Daniel Alarcón has written a very interesting work here. It combines the best of the canon of Latin American fiction -  with it’s toying with and blurring the lines between reality and fable - and a first rate mystery. What intrigues me most about the novel more than anything else is its narrative approach. 

Nelson is a young aspiring actor/writer who is enamored with a absurdist playwright named Henry Nuñez who back in the 1980s had formed a radical theater troupe called “Diciembre”. This was during a civil war in an unnamed South American country (though it is presumably Peru) when the authorities were sure to squash any dissent and anything deemed “terrorist”. Henry’s play - “The Idiot President”, in the absurdist tradition of Ionesco - consisted of only three actors for three roles: The President, his son, and the President’s manservant, who is killed by the son at the end of the play. This way, as Henry put it as the play toured the more rural parts of the country, “that everyone can get a chance to serve the president”. After the play caught the attention of the authorities, Henry is jailed in one of Peru’s most notorious prisons called “The Collectors” (which is fictional but based on an actual prison) and labeled a “terrorist”. 

Enter Nelson, present day. A student at The Conservatory. His life is going nowhere. Caring for his widowed mother, the love of his life off with another man, and his brother off living in the United States, he feels essentially trapped by circumstances. His plan to join his brother in the Unites States was stymied once his father passed away and he was forced to remain behind to care for his mother, who he didn’t want to leave alone. He is also pining away for an ex-girlfriend who may or may not have the same feelings (and that relationship only gets even more complicated as the story slowly beings to reveal itself). Wanting to get his career off the ground, Nelson lands the staring role in Henry’s controversial play. Henry, now a shadow of his former self, has is own reasons for wanting to go back on the road and revive his old play.

Together with Nelson and his long time friend Patalarga, they again take the show on the road to town after town of baffled peasants. Once the tour begins, life on the road is not what Nelson thinks it will be and he finds himself becoming increasingly entangled in the group’s personal lives and eventually finding himself in a situation which mirrors the absurdist nature of the play itself.  Henry is haunted by his former cellmate and lover Rogelio and as the group goes from town to town without any real set plan, we learn that Henry has been guiding the troupe towards Rogelio’s hometown all along. It is while in this town - referred to only as “T----” - that Nelson becomes embroiled in the life of Rogelio’s family after Henry mistakenly reveals to Rogelio’s senile mother that her son had been killed in a prison riot years earlier. 

The narrative relies on a lot of foreshadowing and the reader knows from the beginning that “something terrible happens” and this is where the mystery element comes in, a slow burn to it’s eventual - and ambiguous - outcome. 

The reader also learns early on that the four main characters are more or less false protagonists. The narrator is the true protagonist here as the reader learns over the course of the novel who that narrator is and how - and why - he is telling this story. It’s approach reminded me a lot of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and there are some similarities between the two stories (those who have read and enjoyed Diaz’s novel will absolutely love this).  Lives bump into one another at seemingly random moments and simple decisions become more consequential than ever imagined and the complicated and interrelated nature of it all makes for very complex and intriguing storytelling.