In the not too distant future the city of Kolkata in India is besieged with floods and famine. Ma, her elderly father, and two year old daughter are preparing to emigrate to the US where her husband has a good professional job. This is one of the families in the story. The other is a poor family from the Sundarban struggling to stay alive while the oldest son, Boomba, has gone to Kolkata to try to earn enough to save his family.
In the two weeks time of this novel, Boomba, driven to desperation and holding a secret about Ma, breaks into Ma’s house and steals her purse which contains the passports for her, her father, and her child. Both her actions previous to his, her current actions, and Boomba’s lead both down paths they could never have previously dreamed with dire consequences for all.
Due to the flooding and famine, everyone in the city is desperate except for the one billionaire who has stayed. Their desperation leads some to behave in undesirable ways, but the main “lesson” of this novel illustrates how just one action by one person can lead to dire consequences for two entire families and possibly others as well–actions have consequences you can never begin to imagine. Be careful.
The inside of the front cover informs the potential reader that this is a novel about a world steeped in mythology and violence, set in a small town in rural southeastern Mexico. The violence part is extreme, the kind of violence that only sometimes pervades a lot of small, rural, poverty ridden towns everywhere in the world. Written in a style reminiscent of Faulkner (I read a translation from the Spanish), each chapter tells the main story from a different perspective, the story leading up to and the death of the Witch who is found floating in the water of a canal. She is called the Witch but no one for sure seems to know her gender, where she attained the money to build such a huge house, and how she manages to entertain with lavish abandon. People both avoid her and are drawn to her.
There is the grandmother who thinks her wayward grandson can do no wrong while blaming her daughter ( the child’s mother) for everything and anything, there is his friend whom he both loves and hates, their is the poor girl he aids and loves who has been groomed and impregnated by her stepfather and has run away because of it, the engineer who loves boys and men, the woman who makes her living as a fancy prostitute to support her disabled husband and on and on it goes–people harming each other out of anger and frustration with their dire circumstances. For some of the characters, the writing is first person so the reader learns the interworkings of those mentally harmed by their life’s poverty and environment from which there appears to be no escape.
When I was in the eighth grade, I asked my parents for two books for Christmas, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. I am sure even then there was a more modern version but they chose Dryden’s translation which was basically 17th century British. It took me a while, but I read them both even though I often had to resort to using the dictionary to learn all the words I had never seen before. My favorite then and now is “The Iliad”, the story of Achilles and the Trojan War. Since then, I have read more books than I can count about Achilles and the war, including this one and three recently by Pat Barker, which I wrote about on this blog.
David Malouf focuses on two characters, Achilles and Priam and one singular event, Priam’s decision to disguise himself as an ordinary person, hire an ordinary man with an ordinary cart, and go to the Greek camp and beg Achilles for Hector’s body. The only other main character in the book is the cart driver who likes to talk and share. From him Priam sees another view of life and experiences some new simple things, like cooling your feet in a stream, eating ordinary food. Priam suddenly realizes he has missed much of life’s meaning since, as king, he has been shielded from the lives of most people. The book includes Priam’s thoughts, those of the cart driver, and Achilles’. This is not an action thriller novel. It is the story of three people and their thoughts and reactions to this one event.
Aaliya Saleh, 72, lives alone in an apartment in Beirut. Her obsession is reading books and translating books into Arabic. Every January she starts a new translation. Upon completion, she stores the translation in a box and puts it in the spare bedroom. No one ever sees them or reads them. Her family members envy her large apartment because she is divorced and has no children–her brothers think they should have it because they are married and have children. Her mother is a difficult woman and has become stricken with mild dementia. Written in first person, Aaliya relates her life as she sees it. Her impotent husband walks out and she is fine with this because he is a difficult person. Living alone she is able to defy norms and customs and lives as she chooses, a reclusive life for the most part except for her decades long job running a small bookstore. During her telling in the novel she is now retired with some relatively minor aches and pains. She has managed to live as she chooses in spite of the Civil War, repeated bombing by the Israelis, and other difficulties. Toward the end, an unthinkable disaster occurs that threatens what she views as her life’s purpose.
This character’s prodigious reading and knowledge of literature and authors inspired me to look up authors I had not read, learn more about them, and go to the bookstore and library in search of some of the books she discusses in the novel. It also made me think more about how societies see women as unnecessary (or worse) if they fail to comply with societal norms. This novel’s setting may be Beirut, but it could be anywhere in the world in terms of the price women often pay when they defy cultural norms and live as they choose.
In Lebanese, a hakawati is a traditional teller of legends, tales, all sorts of stories. Two basic sets of stories run parallel in this 500 plus page novel. One set is the family story of the narrator whose grandfather was a famous hakawati. This part of the novel portrays life in contemporary Lebanon and the life of the narrator who emigrated to the US to attend UCLA engineering school and stayed in the US. He tells about his family history and his growing up, the various invasions of Israel into Lebanon and how it affected his family and friends, and how his family deals with their blended ethnicities, e.g Druze, Maronite, Orthodox. The novel alternates between this family’s story and traditional Middle Eastern tales of military heroes, jinn, magic, the underworld, etc. That portion of the novel is a sort of more modern One Thousand and One Nights.
My favorite quote from the novel is this: “Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us.” I reread this several times and thought about how even in the same family, individuals remember an event totally differently. This novel is also a reminder that even though Lebanon is in a totally different part of the world, families everywhere are more similar than different–the likes and dislikes, the family feuds, the emotions–in this all families remain the same no matter where on Earth.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I read the second and third book of this trilogy first not realizing it was a trilogy until after I started the second one. Pat Barker won the Booker for another set of historical novels and this appears to be her preferred genre. Most stories about Achilles and the Trojan War focus on the viewpoint of the men fighting. This trilogy focuses on the women in and around Troy who have been captured by the Greeks and have become their slaves.
This novel’s voice is that of Briseis, who was once queen of one of Troy’s neighboring kingdoms before Achilles sacked it and murdered her husband and brothers. She is now Achilles’ slave, a battle prize. She realizes she must adapt in order to survive. She gets caught in a dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles’ with the former demanding to take her away from Achilles. Achilles refuses to fight, the Greeks start to lose, something has to be done or the Trojans will win.
Briseis is just one of thousands of women who are now the slaves of the Greeks. This is not only her story but that of all those other women who are now slaves, prostitutes, nurses, women who lay out the dead. This is their story as well as that of Achilles, Patroclus, and various other Greek men but from the viewpoint of Briseis.
This award winning author has a writing style all his own–both serious and very funny. How anyone can make serious topics so entertainingly funny is a unique gift. The setting of the first is the island of Lesbos when masses of Syrian and other refugees are landing and many NGOs go there to help the refugees. Mina Simpson is a Lebanese American doctor who goes on a two week trip there to help a friend who works for an NGO. Mina is a trans woman who has been rejected by all her Lebanese family except one brother with whom she is very close. He goes there to meet her. This is also the story of a refugee family, the mother of whom is dying from cancer, her small children, her husband, and the NGO people and others who do everything to help this family.
The second is his most recent novel and tells the life story of a philosophy teacher in Beirut. It starts in Beirut in 2023 then goes back to the Covid pandemic and the banking collapse in Lebanon from 2001 to 2021. Then it skips back to his childhood in 1960 to 1975, the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, and later to the port explosion that destroyed much of Beirut. This novel is Lebanese history from the viewpoint of this main character. We learn all about his mother, her best friend who seems to be some kind on international criminal gang leader, some of his students, classmates, and others. While much of it relates horrors of living in dire circumstances, it is also very funny. I found myself frequently laughing.
Note: I enjoyed these two books so much that I intend to read other novels by this author.
After getting started with the first one, I realized the other was a sequel. Later, I learned this is a trilogy but the library did not have the first book of it. This British author won the Booker Prize for another historical trilogy, “The Regeneration Trilogy.” These two books are obviously about the Trojan War. Although “The Women of Troy” begins with Achilles’ son stuck in the Trojan horse, young (16), scared and concerned about how he will live up to his father’s name, most of the book occurs after the Greeks have won the war, Troy is destroyed, most of the Trojan men and boys, including infants, have been killed and the Greeks have built a village below what is left of Troy because they cannot go home. The constant gale winds make it impossible for their fleet of ships to travel. They have been stuck there for years, have become restive, often violent, bored. The women of Troy, even the princesses and other noble women are now slaves to Greek leaders. Most of the book is told from the viewpoint of several women including, Briseis, who once belonged to Achilles and is pregnant with his child but now married to the leader Acinus. Cassandra, the murdered Trojan king’s daughter, has been forced to live with Agamemnon, She has vowed revenge and has prophesied than both of them will die once they reach his Greek kingdom. This novel centers on what life is like for these Trojan women who are the spoils of war, living as slaves in the Greek camp.
“The Voyage Home” centers on the trip from Troy back to Mycenae and the immediate aftermath of their arrival home. It is mostly told from the viewpoint of Ritsa, a healer who has been assigned to watch over Cassandra even though she belongs as a slave to another person, a doctor. Because of her assignment to Cassandra and healing abilities, she has higher status than many others. Part of the story is also told from the viewpoint of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, the queen who has been in charge of Mycenae during his ten year absence. For readers who know many of the different myths surrounding her, this novel has a totally different take. It is from the viewpoint of a woman still devastated by the death of her daughter with Agamemnon whom he killed because he was told the gods would give him and his soldiers a good wind to get to Troy if he sacrificed her. He deceived Clytemnestra to achieve this sacrifice and she has never recovered from this loss.
If you enjoy Greek mythes and the different retellings of them and want to experience a different perspective, mostly told from the viewpoint of female characters, you will enjoy these books. I read both in just a few day; I became so interested.
These are the first two books of his long career as a writer. Although the cover calls them novels, they are short and what I would call novellas. The most fascinating thing in this publication of the two novels together is his introduction which he wrote in 2014 and where he explains how he unexpectedly became a writer. He begins by explaining that most people in Japanese society follow a certain path–“graduate from school, then find work, then, after sometime has passed, get married.” He did not follow that path: he married, then found work, and finally graduated. He did not want to work for a company; the idea turned him off completely so he decided to open a business, a coffee shop where people could come, hangout, drink coffee, and listen to jazz. He and his wife did not have much money but did manage to put enough together and opened a small coffee shop in 1974. He brought his old piano from his parents’ house to the coffee shop and convinced young jazz musicians to play there for small amounts of money. Some went on to become famous musicians. He and his wife came across some money lying in the street and instead of turning it in to the police used it to pay debts. He spent his twenties running this shop, listening to the music there, making sandwiches, mixing cocktails, typical small restaurant stuff.
He also liked baseball and often went to see his favorite team which he admits was usually not very good and rarely won. Just when the team had a turn of events and seemed to be winning, he suddenly had this thought rush through his mind: “I think I can write a novel.” He claims he still can recall that exact moment and sensation. After the end of the game, he took the train to a store and bought a “sheaf of writing paper and a fountain pen.” Each night after he arrived home from the coffee shop, he went to work writing. It took him six months and a lot of work to write “Hear the Wind Sing”. He admits he had no clue how to write a novel, especially since his favorite novels were 19th century Russian novels and US detective stories. He struggled and almost gave up. He decided to try a new tactic and wrote it in English then translated it into Japanese. He says his English was very simple so that is how he wrote. He decided to submit it to a literary journal, not expecting much. He was shocked when he received a call that his novel had been short-listed for a new writers’ prize. This was a year after his attendance at the baseball game and he had just turned thirty. He had almost forgotten about even submitting the novel. An incident with an injured bird suddenly caused him to think that he was going to win the prize and go on to become a novelist. He wrote “Pinball, 1973” as a sequel. Shortly after, he decided to become a full-time writer and sold the business.
Reading this introduction enlightened me about some of his other works and certain repeating themes and especially settings. In all his novels I have read, music and coffee shops play a role. His novels have characters who know a lot about music; now I know how and why.
Categorized as science fiction, this novel relates a story so possible, it no longer seems like science fiction. Because it is so possible, I found it one of the most disturbing stories I have ever read. The first person narrator relates her personal story, the story of two of her best friends, and that of several other students at the boarding school where they have lived all their lives until they turn 16. Her feelings, her relationships with the other students and with the guardians who run the school are described in great detail and always from her point of view. At the age of 16, they are all sent to various places called Cottages where they experience their first interactions with anything beyond the perimeter of the boarding school where they have always lived and begin the training for the rest of their lives.
As I read this novel, I kept thinking of Epstein and his international ring which seemed to be out of the public eye until recently. If he could do this for decades without the general public knowing, I kept wondering if something like what occurs in this novel is actually occurring internationally and we just do not know it. I do know there is a black market for what occurs in the novel and that little to nothing is done about it. And given how little reaction officially overall has occurred regarding the Epstein files, would the general public accept what occurs in this novel if they felt it would benefit them personally. I do not want to say too much because it might ruin the novel for those who might want to read it and find out.
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