The five stories of “Music and Nightfall” contained in Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro display Ishiguro’s virtuosity in creating fiction that is both illuminating and pleasurable. Reading his works is always an experience of multiple satisfactions — characters, landscape, plot — and the themes he explores are consistently brought to a new place of examination and understanding.  My favorite story in the collection was “Crooner”, with its narrator both innocent and wise, its underlying themes of regret and passage, and its conclusion that music (and the comfort that it gives, no matter what its motivation or how unintentionally given) is on the highest plane of human endeavor.  Writing — when it is as good as these stories are — is also on that plane, and Ishiguro gives great comfort, pleasure, and insight with these stories.

Ishiguro never takes the easy way out in his fiction; he doesn’t write stories with a  clear demarcation of right and wrong, light and dark, and yet he does insist on a  line of human decency.  His characters yearn for what is best not only for themselves but also as a reaching outward for someone or something else. Even when they fail, miserably or, as demonstrated to great affect in two of the stories, humorously, they are trying to do the right thing; Ishiguro’s characters want to be the right person for the job, to answer the needs of the people (acquaintances, wives, agents, friends, memory of a mother) making demands all around them, and to bring some gratification, some pleasure, somewhere.  Rarely do they please themselves, but that is life, both in Ishiguro’s stories and in the real world. Learning to live with dreams that have not quite come true, with loves that do not answer all needs, with the injustice of how life’s rewards and punishments are meted out, is learning to live, period. And in Ishiguro’s stories, the lesson is learned through moments of pain, of grace, and of laugh-out-loud chaos.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch at www.readallday.org

Published by Knopf - Hardcover - 240 pages - $16.50

The Child In Time might just be Ian McEwan’s least-read, but perhaps best novel.  In it, children’s book author Stephen must come to terms with his three-year old daughter’s abduction and, presumably, her death while ironically being assigned to serve on a Parliamentary commission on child care.  Complicating this heart-breaking situation is Stephen’s wife, a classical musician named Julie, who has hermited herself away in the countryside.  In addition is the fascinating and surreal parallel stories of Stephen’s own childhood, and that of his best friends—his publisher Charles and his wife Thelma.

Though the subject matter might seem obviously grim, McEwan handles it with a forthright and reflective approach, allowing the reader to explore and analyze, rather than wallow in, the disaster’s effects on Stephen and Julie.  That is not to say that the book reads cold or unemotional which, owing to McEwan’s careful craft, it does not.

Cleverly, Stephen’s publisher Charles is married to a practical but nurturing physicist who is exploring the notion of time, and it is Thelma who seems to stabilize Stephen’s life as he moves through the world in a kind of hazy but detached mourning.  The twist in the book comes not with the obvious mystery of the disappearance of Stephen’s child but instead within the subplot of Charles and Thelma.  Subsequently, what at first seems a somewhat dry recounting of Stephen’s stagnant existence turns dramatically and fascinatingly on end, altering the reader’s perspective of all events and personalities in the book.

“The child in time” is not merely a title or a play-on-words, but also describes the seemingly shifting forces of time and experience itself, while illustrating how one child lost in time might shift the timeframe of the lives of others.  Says Charles, “Stephen, talk to a ten-year old in midsummer about Christmas… For children, childhood is timeless.  It’s always in the present… Of course time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end.  But they don’t feel it.  Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up…’ there’s always an edge of disbelief.”

Beautifully concise, perfectly worded, heart-wrenching, subtle, avalanching and, at last, imbued with hope, The Child in Time is perhaps the work that first marks McEwan’s celebrated later novelistic style of Atonement and Saturday.

Reviewed by Erica-Lynn Huberty, www.ericalynnhuberty.com

Published by Anchor – Paperback – 272 Pages - $10.00

If Henry James and Margaret Attwood could have a literary child, it might be Hilary Thayer Hamann.  Evoking James’ Portrait of a Lady or Daisy Miller, and Atwood’s Surfacing, Hamann’s debut novel Anthropology of an American Girl poetically, and brutally, follows the seemingly ordinary but at once riveting life of narrator and protagonist Evaline with obsessive detail and powerful insight.  It is a modern coming-of-age epic which brings to light this complex and artistic young woman, and it is very much (as the promotion for the book reads) “not for girls.”

The book begins with Eveline’s high school days in East Hampton, Long Island.  Not the “Hamptons” of current gossip columns and Hollywood films, this is remote, Eastern Long Island in the 1970s:  the population a mix of working-class locals, rich weekenders, pot-smoking children of hippies, and oddball bohemians.  What Rick Moody described of suburban Connecticut in the ‘70s in The Ice Storm, Hamann expands on and makes her own.

Through descriptive vignettes that shift, non-linear, between Eveline’s last two years of high school, we learn of her powerful connection to her best friend’s mother, a French woman whom Eveline calls Maman, who dies of cancer (“Though my mother had hoped to soothe me, her voice did not soothe me.  Maman’s voice rolled like currents beneath the sea.  You were diving, you were rising.”).  Also brought to light is Eveline’s humiliating rape by a group of male friends from high school.

There are several men who enter into Eveline’s life: as lovers, as reflectors, as shoulders to lean on.  Yet even they, and the obvious importance of them to her, do not overpower her strong and centered voice, her unique view of the world.  In another author’s hands Anthropology of an American Girl could have been another chick-lit forum for wise-cracking or weary, post-feminist musing.  In the hands of Hamann it is a mesmeric and intelligent work of literature.

Hamman’s examination of moral character, and the intimate relationships through which power is exercised well or badly, is the centerpiece around which the convincing, though at times terrifyingly commonplace, plot revolves.  Eveline’s voice is almost impossibly and authentically observant, resonant and driven; her nuanced phrasing and painstaking scrutiny propelling the reader through thickly-woven segments of memory and experience, consciousness and perception; through the loss of love, the degradation of violence, and, in the end, the essence of hope through the human universal need for connection.

Reviewed by Erica-Lynn Huberty, www.ericalynnhuberty.com

Published by Spiegel & Grau – Hardcover – 624 pages - $25.00

Three Days Before the Shooting, The Unfinished Second Novel by Ralph Ellison is magnificent. It is magnificent for its plot and characters, for its words, and for Ellison’s fearless grappling with themes of race, identity, fate, responsibility, and the promise of the American dream. This edition put out by Random House and edited by John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley encompasses forty years of Ellison’s working on and reworking of the novel and includes Ellison’s multiple variations of chapters and the notes he made to himself while writing (which are simply captivating: “Nota bene: Remember the sound of your machine, typewriter or computer, helps you work! Start it going, even if at random!”) The editorial comments offered by Callahan and Bradley help enormously in understanding the layers of narrative and meanings that Ellison balanced along a continuum of action, reaction, and observation.

Three Days Before the Shooting is the story of Hickman, bluesman, preacher, and foster father; Bliss, an abandoned child who grows up to become Sunraider, racist senator; and Severen, another abandoned child who grows up to become an assassin. A white child is given to a black man amidst a cacophony of lynching and birthing; the child is his to raise, a gift in exchange for lives lost. The child is raised with all the hope of the black community behind him and a belief that racial identification can be transcended. But the child grows up and leaves his people, betrays those who have cared for him, and tries to publicly flog them for their race, their status, and their dreams. Sunraider’s rejection of his upbringing will wreak its own judgment hard upon his head: another white child will long for the blackness denied him, and render judgment from on high.

The multitude of characters in Three Days Before the Shooting, Hickman, Bliss/Sunraider, Severen, Janey, Lee Willie Minifees, Jessie Rockmore, Lavatrice, McIntyre, the cross-eyed woman, and the rest, have such blood and bone truth in their presentations that the book could be a documentary about life in 1950s. Much as the blues music of the 1950s reflected life of the Black populations, the characters in this novel reflect both the segregated and integrated realities of 1950s America.

What is most magnificent about Three Days Before the Shooting is Ellison’s command and use of words. This novel is rich and deep and thick with words. Open the book to any page and you will become immersed in the movement and play of monologues, observations, recollections, letters, speeches, and sermons. The novel reads like music, a baroque rendition of the blues with layers of sounds, rhythms, and meaning communicating hopes and heartbreak, the painful smack of reality and the endurance of just getting on with it all. People talk “white” or talk “black”, and tell the truth of what they’ve seen as they see the truth to be. These variations together build the story of Hickman, Bliss, and Severen, but most importantly, the words build towards a crescendo of truth about race and identity in America.

The way in which Ellison constructed his novel — how he uses words to both illuminate and obfuscate the truth behind his story of a white child raised by a black man — is a deliberate deployment of what Ellison sees as a legacy of slavery: “the way we talk… you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there’s no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they’re apt to leave their true subject unstated so you’ll have to supply the missing meaning.” Ellison uses the linking narratives of his many characters to circle around and around the novel’s underlying truth. At times the different layers are dizzying. The novel becomes a maze of differing points of view and of tangents gone off on and then returned from; we are returned back to the main story but from a different angle, and we see everything in a new way.

Hickman warns Bliss of the power of words: “Words are everything and don’t you forget it, ever.” Bliss takes the advice but he abandons the positive and life-affirming use of words that Hickman has tried to instill and instead resorts to life-negating rhetoric of hate and prejudice. A son rejects his father with words but the greater rejection is the wordless abandonment of a son by his true father. Ellison uses the words of one of the most powerful phrases, “Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” to represent both the disbelief and the despair caused by such abandonment. Sunraider calls those words out when the assassin’s bullets strike; Hickman instructs Bliss as a child to recite those words during a dramatization of rebirth through Christ; and Ellison returns us again and again to the lamentation. It is not only the cry of Bliss and of Severen, neither to ever know their fathers. But more, much more, it is the plea of an entire population. The words evoke the abandonment of the Black slaves, set free by Lincoln but then left uncared for and undone. There is a marvelous scene of Black pilgrims visiting the Lincoln Memorial and reflecting on the promise of the man and the failure of a nation.

The breadth and bravery of Ellison’s writing is demonstrated by how he tackles his themes of what it means to be black in America, what it means to be white, and the promise and failure of the American Dream. It is a great pity that Ellison never finished this magnificent novel. Perhaps the novel could not be finished because Three Days Before the Shooting raises the issue of what race has to do with our identity as Americans and resolution of that question — who are we? — is far from being realized. We are still a nation divided by racial identity, more than forty years after Ellison began his novel. One hundred and forty years after the Juneteenth declaration that all Americans, black and white, are equal in the pursuit of and entitlement to happiness, liberty, and respect, we are still struggling with what these words - Black, White, American — mean. Ralph Ellison in Three Days Before the Shooting offers a vision that transcends race, recording both the common ground and the individual experiences that define who we are: Americans.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch at www.readallday.org

Published by Modern Library (Random House) - Hardcover - 1136 pages - $50.00

Hold Love Strong by Matthew Aaron Goodman is an extraordinary novel for its voice, its vision, and its promise.  The voice is that of Abraham Singleton, born to a thirteen-year old girl and an absent twenty-year old father; the year is 1982 America and the place is the projects, Ever Park building in Queens, New York.  The vision is Goodman’s Singleton family, a realistic, full, and inspiring portrayal of what it takes to be a family and hold love strong amidst an environment that is relentless in its hopelessness, merciless in its dispensation of pain, and isolated behind walls of ignorance — not the ignorance of the inhabitants but of those on the outside, all those who live beyond the world of Ever Park and have no clue of what really goes on in the inner city, and even worse, do not really seem to care. The promise is that there are boys and girls who can survive places like Ever Park, through luck, through someone watching out for them, and through someone on the outside taking an interest in what goes on inside the neighborhood, and inside the hearts and minds of its inhabitants.

Abraham’s narration is genuine and clear; he is a boy we watch turn into a man and the process is painful, frustrating, awkward, and beautiful.  Abraham’s voice is one of conflicting emotions, uncertain status, threatened identity, and in turns hopeful and hopeless.  Paragraphs of questions underscore the uncertainty of Abraham’s life — “Who was she?  Who was this woman who so loved me while I slept yet was so uninterested in me when I was awake?  And which Abraham was I, the one my mother saw or the one my grandma knew; the one who needed to be scolded and coddled or the one who was deemed a man, albeit prematurely and without warrant?”; the questions that just keep coming, more and more questioning as Abraham grows from childhood into adulthood, questions that demonstrate the level of insecurity in terms of present needs (like food and medical care) and of future prospects (employment, health, family): “what chance do I have?”  Abraham wants to be a man but a man unlike the men he sees around him causing so much pain:”I had witnessed the damage other men caused and I didn’t want any part of being like the others, not their presence or absence.”

The most harrowing question posed, again and again, by Abraham and by the people of his community, is “What are the living supposed to do?….Should I cry out?…Should I demand to know why?  Do I plea for justice and peace?…I don’t know.” How to go on, when there is no future that can promise peace, sufficiency, stability?  Survival is through family (bonds of love), church (bonds of faith), or sadly, through escape via drugs that while destroying life, provide a buffer from pain and hopelessness that have become intolerable, or via mental illness, as seen in the character of Lindbergh, veteran of the Vietnam war and creator of magical helicopters to fly up and out of Ever Park.

Goodman creates a moving and unique relationship between Abraham and Donnell, the cousin who, although just five years older than Abraham, becomes his care giver, his protector, his touchstone, and his most faithful, believing, and exacting friend.  It is Donnell who must grow too soon into a man, and who skirts the line between what is legal and what is required for his family to survive; in the end, Donnell will be the one who blows his anger and frustration out in a game of basketball that is really a proclamation of worth, a manifestation of will, and a desperate bid for respect: “You leave it here.  Everything.  All the blood, sweat, tears.  Ain’t nothing that can stop you.”  When Abraham has to take stock of what his life has been and what he wants it to become, he recognizes the debt he owes to Donnell and the strength of the love he bears for him: it is a love that sustains Abraham as much as it sustains Donnell.

That is the strength of the hold of family love: it gives back as much as is given out. Love is the only lasting definite in the lives of the Singleton family, their existence  rife with transience (anyone could be shot dead at any time or hauled off to jail or just disappear into drugs) and uncertainty (lives, wasted and wasting, surround them).  But alongside the harrowing realities of daily life, love is the constant, whether it is the love of Donnell, protective and demanding; the love of Nice, so powerful that he cuts off all contact with his family when his own pain is too much for them to bear; the love of the grandmother, who does whatever it takes to keep the apartment and its inhabitants safe; the love of Aunt Rhonda, with her affectionate and obstinate pride in her family; or the love of Abraham’s mother, demonstrated through the care she takes of Abraham though she is still a child herself.  Love is a circle enveloping the Singleton family, even through its darkest hours of sorrow, hate, pain, and hopelessness.

Hold Love Strong is a powerful novel about one boy’s epic journey of survival against all odds.  That communities of insidious hopelessness, nonexistent opportunities, and failed political and civic promises exist is well-known and Hold Love Strong makes its truth a condemnation: communities of plenty are failing communities of need.  But Hold Love Strong is much more than a social commentary on failures of our society: it is a testament to the will to survive and to surpass. The book is fiction but every word of it rings true: in following its cycles of misery and possibility, of abandonment and connection, of loneliness and of brotherhood, we are all made witness to the enduring possibility — and our shared responsibility to foster that possibility — that any child can find wings and fly.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch, www.readallday.org

Published by Simon and Schuster - hardcover - 368 pages - $24.95

I have always thought of Summer Brenner as a poet who sometimes writes fiction, so I was surprised to see in the front matter to I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex, that Brenner has published six novels to just two volumes of verse, and that she hasn’t published a book of poems in 32 years. Having now read – and completely enjoyed – I-5, I still think Summer Brenner is a poet, but one with notable narrative skills & a deep commitment both to her characters & to justice. I-5 is an effective novel, tho certainly not perfect, and one that would translate easily to the big screen. It has all the elements: a tough-as-nails hooker heroine who is also the protagonist & very much the “good guy,” plus a variety of secondary characters, minor Russian mafia wannabes, other prostitutes, a trucker with an illicit cargo, prison guards with their own demons & secrets, and a villainous capitalist trying to control everyone in his orbit. It has an ending that is both very much what the reader will be hoping for & yet almost entirely a surprise.

I-5 follows the path of Anya, a young Russian woman kidnapped into the world of involuntary sex traffic, shuttled from brothel to brothel in the United States. The premise of the book is that she’s being moved from Southern California to Oakland where Mr. Kupkin, her “owner” very much in the tradition of slavery everywhere, plans to expand his empire of young women, duped or stolen mostly from Eastern Europe. To get there entails a ride up I-5, the great (albeit boring) north-south highway of the West Coast. As they proceed north, Anya, her immediate boss & pimp Marty, a comic thug alternately called Pedro & the Tarantula & a nameless young woman who will be delivered to a new owner along the way, they get caught in the Central Valley’s infamous tule fog as well as the valley’s one growing-like-gangbusters industry, prisons. Things happen, people get separated & we get to see Anya’s complex (and ambivalent) relationship to her own slavery. More things happen & Anya & Marty reach Oakland, though not as they’d intended. More things happen still.

This is one of those books where you know from page 2, if not page 1, what Anya’s fate holds in store, though certainly not the what & how of it. Publishing the novel in a deeply noir format – Roderick Constance’s cover image is ironic without being comical – underscores what is predictable here, which is actually part of the fun of the book (how will Anya do it?). And Anya is the character here to whom Brenner is committed. To some degree, every other character in I-5 is defined by her, or at least by their function in her story.

If there are any weaknesses here, they’re relatively minor. Brenner gives us what amounts to a lesson in the history & meteorology of the Central Valley, setting up both the fog & the scene at the prison. This isn’t something Anya knows or understands, any more than she understands the back story of the young guard or of what Kupkin’s life is like in Atlantaguard stick—three days of carving for nothing.” Jaya thought of the designs she might have made on that ivory: kiwi vine and curved daggers. “They should make room for us. It’s time for new masters, new ideas. “If the court doesn’t come down soon, they will go,” said Hool. “It’s hot as a baker’s kitchen by the bridge. Brenner tells us all this & more because she wants us to know and in these postmodern times, nobody is worrying all that much about ontological or narrative consistency. If anything, Brenner makes great use of indeterminacy in the later chapters to reveal not just what happens but what can happen. But reading of the nature of tule fog or of the expansion of California’s prison system¹ feels disruptive – it was the one moment in the book where I could imagine becoming dislodged from the story itself.

Years ago, when she was writing the book that turned into The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Kathy Acker & I had a long conversation about the nature of character. The great trick of narrative or figurative literature, of course, is that the language on the page integrates syntactically not into a greater argument or expository structure, but instead to a displacement, an invocation of a referred world. A character represents a particular configuration of this referred world, and the difficulty of this displacement is such that we commonly acknowledge that the highest compliment one can pay to a character is that he or she is “believable.” Anya certainly is believable, but she also is a cipher, a symbol of the thousands – millions, if we think of sex traffic on its worldwide scale – of young women who submit to rape everyday. Brenner wants us to see this world through the eyes of one woman, someone young enough still to remember what hope is, even if old enough now in experience to understand just how difficult this is. I-5 is in this sense a political novel, though Brenner never lets this obstruct our view of her character. Anya is someone you will never forget.

¹ In my work in the prison movement, 1972-77, I was the lobbyist responsible for stopping funding for new prisons and was successful in each of those years. But it was already evident that the Department of Corrections, the guard’s union and far right rural legislators were bringing together the unholy alliance that would see the system explode from the nine joints I had to deal with in the 1970s to the 33 of today. The Department of Corrections is now the second largest police agency in the United States, second only to NYPD.

Reviewed by Ron Silliman - Silliman’s Blog

Published by PM Press - 256 pages - paperback - $15.95

Ralph Truitt has lead a hard life with a father who is more interested in raising an heir to his fortune than a son and a mother is a religious zealot who makes it clear that she does not love him. Nothing since then has served to make him a happier person. So, as this story begins, he is waiting for the arrive of a woman who has answered his ad for a reliable wife. He has long since given up on finding love in his life, but he needs a wife to help him bring his estranged son home. Catherine Land, who is responding to his ad, is a devious woman, motivated by greed and with a dark past. She is coming to Wisconsin to marry Ralph, slowly poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. But Ralph is a more compassionate man than Catherine was expecting and Catherine begins to bring out feelings in Ralph that he had thought he was incapable of having any longer.

The story is unique, Goolrick’s writing terse but descriptive. As Ralph is waiting for Catherine’s train, I could feel the cold wind stinging his cheeks. It’s easy to envision the people of Truitt, WI, Catherine’s clothing, Truitt’s homes.
After reading several books recently that I didn’t enjoy, in part because I didn’t like any of the characters, Goolrick reminded me here that liking the characters is not a requisite for liking the book. Goolrick gives his characters fully fleshed out backgrounds that help the reader to understand their actions even as you are appalled by them. Because of this, the reader is able to hold onto a hope for the characters to become better people, to make better lives for themselves.

Despite the bitter winter setting, this is a story of lust and passions. As such, there is a great deal of description of the fulfillment of these passions that some readers may find uncomfortable to read. I wasn’t uncomfortable with it, but I did feel like there was too much of it. Likewise, Goolrick could become repetitive and often ran on too long in his descriptions of motives, feelings and thoughts. All of that I was able to overlook because thought the story was wonderful. There were twists and turns I didn’t see coming and I had no idea how this book was going to end until the final paragraph. I read this book as part of a book club and, honestly, was not sure that I would like it. Having lower expectations made my enjoyment of the book a very pleasant surprise.

Reviewed by Lisa Sheppard - http://litandlife.blogspot.com/

Published by Algonquin Books - Hardcover - 978-1565125964 - $23.95

Ruins by Achy Obejas is a beautifully written novel, an incredibly humanistic portrayal of one man’s life in Cuba. Born before the Cuban revolution, and named after the U.S. Navy ships his mother can see from shore close to Guantanamo (a U.S. base already there since 1898), Usnavy is destined to live a life under shadow of the United States, both its lure and its warning.  He never waivers from being a true believer in Cuba, and in all that Che Guevara promised the revolution would bring for the downtrodden of Cuba, but present times are testing his faith.  Set in 1994, Usnavy reveals details of his life before the revolution, a life of degradation and hopelessness.  His consequent embracing of the Revolution makes perfect sense:  “It was because of the Revolution..that he could participate as a responsible member of society, as good as anyone else.  It was because of the Revolution, he believed, that he wasn’t dismissed as some hick from the hills.  It was because of the Revolution that the lifeline on his hand had been rerouted, that he was born every day a New Man.”

But Usnavy’s life is very hard. He works every day at a bodega, fulfilling the ration cards of the people who line up for goods: “soap was scarce, coffee rare; no one could remember the last time there was meat.  Sometimes all he had was rice, or worse, those detestable peas used to supplement beans, or when ground up, used as a coffee substitute.”  He lives in one room with his beloved wife and daughter, a room without windows and with a floor always wet with leaks. The communal bathroom of the tenement is found by the swarm of flies that envelop it, and with every rainfall the danger of the entire building collapsing threatens. Every day more and more Cubans take to the sea, escaping to America.  When good friends leave, Usnavy becomes fearful that his own daughter will be next, drawn by the good fortunes of those who made it the ninety miles across the sea, and repelled by her father’s own “salao”, bad luck.

Usnavy owns a magnificent lamp, huge and glowing with varied colors of light from its many panels of decorative glass. Left to him as the only legacy from his mother, the lamp reminds Usnavy of all that is beautiful and possible in his world, and it connects him to the past, his mother and his Jamaican father (long ago disappeared at sea).  But one day Usnavy makes a discovery that connects him and his lamp to the history of Cuba itself.  Keeping the lamp and himself whole becomes a parable for the future of Cuba as Che dreamed of it: will the need for dollars overwhelm Usnavy or will the lifeblood of the lamp sustain him in his faith?

There are both incredible and quiet details in Ruins about daily life in Cuba: his daughter’s dinner of a meat sandwich but it is only wool marinated in spices, “the texture of the wool had been transformed into what they all imagined steak was like, something tender and chewy”; Usnavy’s three pairs of underwear, one to wear, one to wash while bathing, and one to keep ironed and folded in his small drawer; Usnavy’s nightly domino games with his friends in the plaza; the constant shadow of the U.S., both in Cuban history (Hemingway and the U.S. love affair with everything Cuban), in products (the best appliances are U.S. made), and in politics (the embargo, of course, as well as the 1994 invasion of Haiti by the U.S.); young girls in lycra plying the streets at night for tourist dollars; outdoor dances and government parades; Socialist Committee-sponsored abuse of those Cubans waiting in line for visas to America; the constant gnaw of hunger; and Usnavy’s long bike rides  through the streets of Havana.

These details, woven around a compelling and surprising plot, make for a beautiful book. But this is much more than a great historical mystery set in Cuba or the compelling story of one man’s spiritual conflict: this is a book that exposes the sufferings of the Cuban people, both before and after the Revolution.  No matter what your politics, the book underscores both the brutality of life before Che and Castro (no romanticizing of the period when the Upper Classes lived like royalty and the lower classes were kept down like animals), and the sufferings and deprivations of life under Castro.  Only misery and complete loss of hope could drive people numbering in the thousands to take to the sea in less than seaworthy crafts, braving ninety miles of  sharks and storms, just to get away from Cuba.

Usnavy will never leave: he is in love with his country, bound up with its history, proud of its revolutionaries, and still holding hope for its future.  Despite all that he suffers, we understand his attachment, it all makes sense as part and parcel of the man Obejas has created for us.  Usnavy is a good man, he shares what little he has: “that was his way; whatever was available was for everyone equally.  That was what he knew and understood.”  He is a quiet man with pleasure found in the riding of his bike, the playing of dominoes, watching the sea at night, and hearing the breathing of his wife and daughter while they sleep. He is the last man we would ever want to see hardened or bitter: his faith is too true, his needs so minimal, his efforts so sincere.  He desires only to “die old and contented…in the soft dapple of a primal Antillean night.”

This novel is an incredible affirmation of life and of the power of the survival instinct.  We want Usnavy to find refuge from suffering and loss, and we fervently hope that he never sees himself betrayed by his Revolution but that he lives contented in a dream of it; that the huge lamp survives, its history and its power intact.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch on readallday.org

Published by Akashic Books - paperback - 978-1933354699 - $15.95

I devoured Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. I sat down and read it and did not get  up for anything. This book is great. Estep’s charming and down-dirty story about lucky and plucky Alice, her clumsy sister Eloise, and their dog-rescuing, ex-junkie mother, presents the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking ways people intertwine, overlap and just plain run over each other in the acts of love, friendship, sex, and gambling — and all other acts of resistance.

This book is wonderful because of its fabulous characters and delicious plot, all sprung from Estep’s original and uninhibited mind.  The people of this novel are maybe not wholly believable but I took them as mythical members of the wild and crazy New York universe and went willingly along on the spin-of-the-wheel ride of their lives.  Free will — and these women are wilful — meets those little flips of fate that round out into destiny, or sometimes just a one-night stand. The struggle facing our characters is the age-old mandate to connect (”just connect”) and the obstacles they face are the tried and true Guilt, Pleasure, and Duty.

The characters didn’t need the catalyst of the mother’s big secret to get moving.  They are never static and their movement brings change: forward marching, then retracting, then forward again, they  lurch on, rapacious and certain, then stop, regroup, become subdued and questioning.  All three of them face their own crisis of the heart and confrontation of the soul.  We admire them (I loved them) for being forced to look into the mirror and reacting so very honestly to what they see.

Estep is adept with words.  Her sisters and their mother are each narrator of different chapters and they all speak with distinct cadences and linguistic choices: we know them as well as by their rhythms and words as by their actions. Estep’s physical descriptions are right on and perfect: “The sky over Aqueduct was the color of dead television.”  She is often hilarious: “Her eyes were bright and her big curly hair had, I swear, gotten bigger and curlier.  She was verging on looking like Malcolm Gladwell.”  Estep can write great one liners, real Oscar Wilde zingers, like my favorite: “She has led an unconventional life and it has agreed with her.”  I wouldn’t mind that as my epitaph.

Read this great book about sisters and mothers and friends and lovers, and sex, dogs, food, and gambling.  It will leave you reaching out and grabbing hold of someone or some dog or some idea.  You’ll bake yourself a cake with white icing, you’ll commit to skinny dipping at least once a summer, and you’ll never, ever bet on a race unless you’ve done the homework.  Alice Fantastic will inspire you to take the gamble of your life and run with it.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch on readallday.org

Published by Akashic Books - paperback  -978-1933354811 - $15.95

The Beauty of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is a great book.  This beautiful, moving, and occasionally very funny novel tells the story of an amazing woman and a startling young girl, and their parallel and eventually joined paths to recognition of beauty, in the self and in the world.

Renee is the concierge of a very upscale building in Paris, a supremely intelligent and grammatically exacting woman, and Paloma is one of her tenants , a 12-year old girl already fed up with the falseness of the adults around her and doubtful about life’s possibilities. Renee is acutely aware and appreciative of life’s moments of beauty and yet is unable to grasp the absolute beauty within herself.  Paloma is a French, intelligent, and female prepubescent version of Holden Caulfield, a confused and disillusioned but still young and therefore reachable rebel.  Her thoughts are presented to us through her two thoroughly engaging and at times heartbreaking journals; from Renee we get her inner thoughts and observations through first person narration.

This book is about finding a reason to live but it is absolutely un-American in its prescription: there is no easy path, life is full of difficulties, and you are on your own.  But if you are honest and intelligent and exacting, you will find and appreciate the beauty that exists in relationships and music and nature and books.  The book is about the pure beauty that is possible in moments of genuine expression, the fleeting moments that can still last forever in our minds because of their beauty and truth.

If we are lucky, many such moments occur in our lives and we are mindful enough to grasp the beauty.  One rainy afternoon I spent in a Barcelona Art Museum over twenty-five years ago, I was stopped short by a painting. I will always remember the beauty of that painting (although I can remember neither author nor title), and the painting has its same power to bring peace to me now as it did then.  It is a simple landscape of a dawning sky over a dark hillside, with a hermit just coming out of his cave in the hill.  Apricot-orange lines had been painted in beyond the darkened hermit and his burrow to show the dawning of day;  looking at the painting I felt the thawing wind of spring, the precious beat of living, the gratitude for another day granted.  Memories of mornings I’d spent in the country entwined with the experience of seeing the painting, creating layers of time to be stored and later savored.  The moment of seeing that painting and the moments of experiencing what was presented in that painting are moments that, when brought back by remembering, have sustained and comforted me.

Renee is also aware of the threaded memories of life, and of the beauty that endures to sustain and inspire us to continue on with the sometimes heavy burden of living; she tries to pass that knowledge to Paloma, not through lessons or lectures, but through sharing of ideas and thoughts.  It is the joy of conversation, of realizing a shared observation or enthusiasm or dis-enthusiasm, that brings Paloma around to a new commitment to living, even when faced very suddenly with death.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog offers us Renee’s beautiful but thoroughly realistic appraisal of life. When she herself must re-examine what she thought she knew about herself, the forced examination does not undercut her appraisal but serves to support it even more: we understand, as she does, that by living fully observant and appreciative of the beauty that appears fleetingly in actual time but permanently in our minds, we can survive and surpass the mundane and trivial and superficial.  We can make connections and stave off alienation; each moment caught by our flourishing minds only makes all the moments to come better and better. Young Paloma commits herself to finding those “moments of always within never” as a reason to live and that reason is good enough for me.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch - On the Read all Day blog, Nina blogs about one book a day.

Published by Europa Books - paperback - 978-1933372600 - $15.00