A Difficult Subject

It's not easy to read a book about torture. It's uncomfortable being confronted with cruelty and brutality, and in the wrong hands the story can make a reader feel exploited or dirty.

But in In The Company Of Angels Thomas Kennedy leaves the reader with feelings of respect and hope. His main character is Bernardo "Nardo" Greene, a Chilean teacher who was imprisoned and brutally tortured during the Pinochet regime for teaching political poetry, while his wife and children were”disappeared”. He now lives in Copenhagen where he is being treated by a psychiatrist at a torture rehabilitation center. Occasionally the novel, which is written in the third person, switches to first person as the psychiatrist, Dr. Kristensen, who has already helped Nardo regain the use of an arm paralyzed by psychic rather than physical injury, wonders how much more he can do to help this damaged man, but also questions whether he would be strong enough to endure torture, or whether he would be capable of inflicting it.  It is a question I ask myself as well.

One day Nardo sees a beautiful Danish women, and wonders if he will ever be capable of loving a woman again, either physically or emotionally. She is Michela Ibsen, and she too has been damaged. She has suffered through a marriage in which she was abused, and lost her teenage daughter to suicide. Her current boyfriend, ten years her junior, is immature and possessive. And to top it all off, she has two aging parents residing on separate floors of a nursing home, one suffering from dementia and the other from cancer, neither of them particularly grateful for the visits from their devoted daughter. Sounds pretty grim, doesn't it?

But eventually Nardo and Michela meet, and Kennedy does a masterful job of portraying the painstaking progress that each of them make toward healing and toward understanding. Both are survivors struggling to reclaim their lives, and Kennedy presents them with empathy but without sentimentality.

Note: Thomas Kennedy is a New Yorker who has lived in Copenhagen for many years. He has published more than 20 books, enjoys an international reputation and has received numerous literary awards and  honors.  But this is his first novel to be published in the United States.

A World of Difference

The biographical blurb about the author Jean Kwok on the jacket cover of her first novel Girl in Translation can just as easily serve as an abbreviated summary of the story: “Jean Kwok (read Kimberly Chang) was born in Hong Kong and as a child immigrated to Brooklyn, where she worked with her family in a sweatshop.” Kimberley and her mother arrive here when Kimberley is eleven expecting to be taken in by relatives already living in Brooklyn. But there is an old rivalry between Kimberley’s mother and her mother’s sister Aunt Paula. It is Paula’s opportunity to exact a measure of revenge by providing only a roach-infested slum apartment and a job in a sweat factory to her newly arrived sister.

For the next few years Kimberley is our eyes into the hidden world of these Chinese immigrants living in unimaginable poverty, working under deplorable conditions. It is all the more surprising because Aunt Paula and her husband own the sweat factory and are now living comfortably. I had never really thought about it but I guess it makes sense that the owner of the sweat factory would be Chinese in order to communicate with the workers in their own language. But the inhumanity of the conditions is startling.

Kimberley also has the world of school to negotiate - in a foreign language. Thank goodness for the language of mathematics at which she already excels. School by day; factory work helping her mother and then homework by night; inadequate food, clothing and shelter from the elements. What makes some children so resilient? When Kimberley wins a scholarship to a prestigious private high school, her problems are only compounded because now she has to lead a double life always finding excuses not to join in the activities after school lest she be expected to reciprocate. And of course a coming-of-age story would not be complete without a love interest – or two.

The final chapters of the book fast forward and cover a lot of years quickly tying up lose ends as many authors do. This is a work of fiction, but there is so much of Kwok’s own life story here that it could almost be a memoir. It will be interesting to see whether Kwok, in future works, stays close to home or wanders farther afield.

Lest we think that the days of sweatshops are over, read this.

Reporting from Rome

There's something almost voyeuristic about reading a novel that is set in a workplace. It's like getting a behind the scenes look at how people function and interact in their everyday lives. It's why I loved Johnathan Ferris' “Then We Came to the End” (see my blog). In some ways all workplaces are alike – big dysfunctional families. But when the workplace is an international newspaper headquartered in Rome, as it is in Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, it's especially fascinating.

Each chapter begins with a headline, a job description and a character name ; a particularly memorable one read: “Global Warming is Good for Ice Creams – Corrections Editor – Herman Cohen”. It may appear initially that the book is simply a collection of short stories about a people who share the same workspace. Some stories are humorous, others sad or bittersweet. But as they proceed the threads that weave them together become clear. We view characters from different angles in different stories, and emerge with a more nuanced understanding of them. They all share a grudging affection for the paper, and engage in gallows humor as circulation flags and jobs are cut.

Interspersed with the character chapters is a running history of the paper itself, from its founding in 1953 to its final days in 2007. Rachman worked for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and was an AP correspondent in Rome, and his writing captures the tones of humor, irony and poignancy that seem to permeate newspaper life.  It's an impressive, sure-handed first novel.

NB - I just read that Brad Pitt ha purchased the movie rights.  Be sure to follow Dorothea's advice and read the book first.

My Vote for the Man Booker Prize

The description of Cloud Atlas from fellow book group member Randy was so off-putting that I really hesitated; but the reviews of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet were so favorable – and uniformly emphasized that it was a “traditional narrative” (my words) – that I decided to give Thousand Autumns a try. And I am so glad that I did. It is a fascinating book.

The location is exotic: a tiny man-made island off the coast of Nagasaki called Dejima. I wasn’t even sure that it was a real place but Wikipedia now informs me that it is. The events of the novel take place between 1799 and 1817 when Dejima, occupied by the Dutch, was the sole point of trade between Japan and the outside world. How little we know even now of the hidden Oriental world of that period. Jacob de Zoet is a Dutch clerk who has come to Dejima to make his fortune so that he can return to Holland to wed his beloved Anna. He is our eyes and ears in this place.

There are other memorable characters as well. Orito Aibagawa is a samurai midwife whose forced residence for a time in a Shinto convent shows us a life and belief system that strain credulity. Ogawa Uzaemonis is a translator who introduces us to the hierarchies of rank and jealousies among translators and the difficulties of navigating between these two languages. The island physician, Dr. Marinus, has brought his harpsichord to the island and wishes nothing more than to publish his taxonomy of Japanese flora; but meanwhile he serves up the rudimentary treatments available for gall stones, appendicitis and other maladies in the best way that Western medicine in this remote outpost has to offer.

The language is breath-taking. I wish I had the space to reproduce some of Mitchell’s better descriptions. One of the very best takes a page and a half (pgs 451-452) to describe "gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight." It is eloquent testimony that “This world…contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.” But this book is also a masterpiece.

To read an interview with David Mitchell, click here; and for profiles of Mitchell, click here and here.