I write reviews for books: literary fiction and nonfiction, international literature/works in translation, and collections of essays, poetry, and short stories.
My book reviews are now innumerable, but here are a representative three:
Love and Ruin
Paula McLain. Ballantine, $28 (400p) ISBN 978-1-101-96738-6
McLain (The Paris Wife) strikingly depicts Martha Gellhorn’s burgeoning career as a writer and war correspondent during the years of her affair with and marriage to Ernest Hemingway. The narrative begins when Gellhorn, who has garnered national recognition for her field reporting on the Great Depression, meets Hemingway and travels with him to cover the Spanish Civil War at his suggestion. The war both horrifies and inspires her to continue writing, particularly one traumatic moment when she witnesses a child being killed by a mortar. While in Spain, Gellhorn and Hemingway become romantically involved and then move to Cuba, set up house, and launch into a productive period of writing and publishing. Things go well for a few years, but Hemingway’s neediness and jealousy eventually poisons their happiness and forces Gellhorn to choose between her own career and indulging his desire for a devoted wife. Realizing her true passion comes from on-the-ground reporting, Gellhorn decides to cover D-Day by leaving Hemingway and stowing away on the first hospital ship to land at Normandy, wading ashore to become the “first journalist, male or female, to make it there and report back.” Gellhorn emerges as a fierce trailblazer every bit Hemingway’s equal in this thrilling book.
The Peace Process
Bruce Jay Friedman. Open Road, $16.99 trade paper (241p)
This collection of Friedman's madcap stories is replete with tricky plots, wacky traps, and characters who ensnare themselves in their own ridiculous choices. In "A Fan Is a Fan," the standout story, Nazi Reichminister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels phones up prominent Jewish satirist Max Winterman and attempts to commission a piece for the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party's newspaper. Winterman considers his options: "He hated every bone in the man's body, and the ground he stood on. Yet there was no denying the Reichminister's prominence." The prose-poem "Orange Shoes" is a much-needed moment of emotional resonance in the cheeky collection. Friedman's characters have plenty of personality. Tension built from racing between plot points occasionally creates a feeling of unmoored chaos, but even the most disorganized stories are funny, sometimes brutally so. In the novella "The Peace Process," which closes the collection, William Kleiner is visiting Jerusalem to scout film locations, and he ponders an actual move to the city. He has "few ties to the States—a fading career, a paper-thin marriage... Still, a move would mean a farewell to Scotty Pippin, not to mention Dan Rather, Puerto Ricans, and Kevin Spacey." The peace process involved in this novella, as Kleiner gets away from his assumptions and helps a local Arab man attend a family wedding and pursue a career in film, is life affirming. Each time hardship forces Kleiner into a difficult situation, he faces the issue and creates new, more purposeful life for himself, an idea that radiates throughout Friedman's entire collection.
Harvest of Skulls
Abdourahman Waberi, trans. from the French by Dominic Thomas.
Waberi (In the United States of Africa), professor of French and Francophone literature at George Washington University, places this short, intricate novel in 1998 Rwanda, four years after the genocide, weaving horrific memories and allusions to the atrocity into stories of dealing with the trauma. Divided into “Fictions” and “Stories,” the book is broadly categorized as fiction but maintains a heavy autobiographical bent. In his preface, Waberi asks, “How many bodies are we talking about? Falling, stumbling, caught by the ends of the hair, finished off, emasculated, defiled, raped, incinerated?” The novel’s fractured form lends the subject matter depth and scale; while the stories are each personal and intimate, the collective pain is vast. In the standout chapter “And the Dogs Feasted,” an old woman has renamed her dog Minuar, after the French name for the UN peacekeeping mission she says “failed to protect us.” She explains that her own dog “fattened up on human flesh during the genocide,” even feasting on the bodies of some of her family members: “We all know each other around here, so he probably did eat people he knew.” Though brief, the novel poses large questions and insinuates itself into an ongoing literary discussion about how to record the horrific acts of the genocide. From the first line, Waberi’s stunning book pays testimony to his delicate dilemma: “One almost feels like opening with an apology for the very existence of this work.”
