More Books…

I know all of you have been waiting breathlessly to learn what new books I’ve been reading and which I recommend. You may rejoice, because that day has come!

We’ve been waiting a long time – 48 years – for this third novel from this Nobel Prize winning writer. I, along with many of us, was fascinated by his 2006 memoir, ‘You Must Set Forth at Dawn’ which chronicled his exile from his home country of Nigeria and subsequent adventures. As a political activist, the 87-year-old Nobel Prize winner has never stopped intervening in our public conversation, whether to defend freedom of expression, condemn religious fundamentalism or destroy his American green card after the election of Donald Trump. Now he produces this great giant of a novel full of amazing characters, a complicated plot and lots of satire.

“Chronicles” is many things at once: a caustic political satire, a murder mystery, a conspiracy story and a deeply felt lament for the spirit of a nation. The plot — convoluted, obscure at times, often tying itself in too many knots — turns on the aptly named Human Resources, a sinister online business that sells human body parts for private use in rituals and superstitions. As often happens in satire, the outrageousness of the fictional premise comes from its proximity to the truth: The belief that human organs have magical properties, leading to business success and political power, has been known to lead to ritual murders in Nigeria, and Soyinka even quotes a real-life national headline verbatim in the text: “Thirteen-Member Ritualist Gang Broken Up.”

Duyole Pitan-Payne, an engineer and bon vivant, and a surgeon named Kighare Menka — whose “ancient” friendship is the most moving story line in the novel. As young students in England, they and two other Nigerians formed the “Gong of Four,” a kind of tongue-in-cheek secret society complete with code language and a common dream: to return to Nigeria and try to give something back to their country — or, in their own words, “Get back and make a difference!” It was an abstract mission, but it took a more concrete shape in Menka’s project to build a hospital in his small, underprivileged hometown. Decades later, one member of the group has disappeared without a trace, another has been in prison for money laundering, and Duyole is leaving the country for New York as a representative to the United Nations.

Dr. Kighare Menka is an award-winning surgeon, famous for his work with mutilated victims of the Boko Haram militant group. There is a moment where Menka suspects the attack on his friend and Pitan-Payne’s family’s subsequent, adamant refusal to follow Nigerian funeral customs may be related.

Menka knows there is a black market for human body parts — an underground business gruesomely known as Human Resources — that seems to be connected to the country’s most visible leaders. It’s a lucrative business that thrives on the people’s cultural belief system that human organs have properties to aid in charms used to gain success and power, or bring about an enemy’s downfall. All superstition — but powerful enough to birth such a business venture.

Menka comments on how fortunate his friend Duyole is, not having to see these images anymore in America. Although “they have their equivalents over there,” Menka says. “Ask the Black population.” Duyole disagrees: “Not like this. Occasionally, yes, there does erupt a Rodney King scenario. Or a fascistic spree of ‘I can’t breathe.’ America is a product of slave culture, prosperity as the reward for racist cruelty. This is different. This, let me confess, reaches into … a word I would rather avoid but can’t — soul. It challenges the collective notion of soul. Something is broken. Beyond race. Outside color or history. Something has cracked. Can’t be put back together.”

It seems to me that it’s a profoundly pessimistic novel. Those of us who have worked in Africa have always tried to keep a sense of optimism – there’s so much potential. But stories like this expose the reality of corruption and violence that sometimes seem to undo everything we have gained.

We all come from ancestors whose lives, suffering, accomplishments, work and hopes have enabled us to live the lives we lead. In Sahota’s book we see how the narrator, living in the current period, slowly discovers the lives of his ancestors and the discovery helps him to face his own life.

The occasional narrator of Sahota’s third novel, China Room, is also alienated and isolated, though his response is to turn his violent unhappiness inward; at 18, he is in the throes of heroin addiction. His account of a summer spent in rural Punjab is interspersed with the more substantial third-person story of a young woman in 1929, whom we later learn was his great-grandmother.

The narrator takes up an opportunity to combat his addiction by visiting an uncle in Punjab before he starts at a London university; he goes armed only with whisky and a selection of books “all by or about people who had already taken their leave”.

But it is the story of Mehar, a 16-year-old bride who finds herself living in the “china room” – a cramped, hitherto seldom used building on a farm, its nickname derived from the willow-pattern plates that adorn it, which once formed part of a dowry – that looms largest in the novel.

Mehar, just 16 years old and promised to the family as a small child, must leave her beloved brother, never to see him again, when she marries one of the brothers. She proves a compelling character — precociously aware of her suffocating circumstances and helplessness. As Sahota describes, Mehar is “used to this life, to this small world of hers.”

Yet Mehar still grasps at the miserly offerings of joy around her. She enjoys the affection she shares with her new “sisters” and notes the simple beauty of her rural surroundings — how the moon “on the ground glimmers brokenly like a shoal of ghostly fish.” She is curious, wise, and courageous, and I found myself as besotted with her as are the two brothers who vie for her affection.

Though married to the oldest brother, Mehar falls in love with one of the younger ones, originally matched to her but switched at the last minute. This central conflict upends the family and reverberates three generations forward when the drug-addled narrator arrives at the village.

It is a dramatically hushed novel, unlike Sahota’s second, the Booker-shortlisted exploration of illegal immigration The Year of the Runaways, which teemed with voices and activity. Here, events are glanced at, elaborated in fragments and elliptically, the reader left to draw a line leading from the earlier story to the life that the narrator has lived in the north of England, complete with its painful incidents of exclusion, racism both covert and explicit.

The novel also includes insight into the origins of the addict’s misery and crafts a subtle parallel between it and Mehar’s life. The addict recalls the way his own parents shouldered the burden and daily assaults of immigrant life in a small, racist town in England. At one point, he asks, “Why had they come here, to this broken white town? Had things really been so bad?”

Like many of us immigrant children, he feels protective of his parents but helpless. And that helplessness foments his drug-fueled self-destruction.

The final pages of China Room feel like a slow punch in the chest. And Sahota includes an uncaptioned photograph at the end of the book — an old woman holding a baby, which I later learned is the author’s great-grandmother carrying him as an infant. He provides no further explanation, and none is necessary.

This is the first novel in English by the poet Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and I find it amazing and wonderful. Like many others I’ve read many novels about Vietnam mostly written by Americans and by Vietnamese refugees in America. This is the first that tells some of the story from a North Vietnamese perspective.

“The Mountains Sing” unfolds a narrative of 20th-century Vietnam — encompassing the land reforms of the ’50s as well as several turbulent decades before and after — through multiple generations of tenacious women in a single family. It begins in 2012, with Guava at an altar, invoking her grandmother, Dieu Lan, and remembering her own coming-of-age during the Vietnam War and its aftermath as her grandmother’s ward. Embedded within and alternating with these reminiscences are Dieu Lan’s flashbacks, in the form of the stories about her life that she tells her granddaughter.

It is a violent and heart-rending story including dispossession, colonization, foreign occupation and civil war. Some of the history is still largely unspoken within Vietnam. Around the middle of the book, Dieu Lan explains why she hasn’t before revealed that her husband and brother were murdered and her eldest son torn from her during the ruling regime’s land reform two decades earlier: “We’re forbidden to talk about events that relate to past mistakes or the wrongdoing of those in power, for they give themselves the right to rewrite history,” she tells her granddaughter, nicknamed Guava. “But you’re old enough to know that history will write itself in people’s memories, and as long as those memories live on, we can have faith that we can do better.”

Que Mai writes a lot about the land. The land is where Dieu Lan loses her father, decapitated by invading Japanese soldiers along the national highway. The land is where she loses her mother during the great famine of 1945, as the pair claw their way through a jungle in search of food. They find a cornfield, only to be confronted by its owner, who shackles Dieu Lan and beats her mother to death. It’s hard not to feel for Dieu Lan and her children, with their burdens (trauma from a battlefield rape; lost limbs; a baby born dead and deformed as a result of Agent Orange poisoning) and their alienation (their relationships strained by divided political loyalties). Just as Que Mai tells this taboo history askance, she devises oblique ways for her characters to navigate the unspeakable events that divide them: They communicate indirectly, through deathbed letters and diaries read surreptitiously. Forgiveness and reconciliation — within families, among Vietnamese and with foreign enemies — are recurring themes.

Guava reads a Vietnamese translation of Little House in the Big Woods and starts to understand America a bit more and sees herself in Laura Ingalls and sees some humanity in America despite the bombs and Agent Orange. At the same time, beauty does not exempt a culture from its inhumanity; at one point, Diệu Lan observes that an elegant haiku about a frog by the Japanese poet Basho could not save the Vietnamese from the brutality of their Japanese occupiers.

This is a wonderful book with a great romantic subplot and I urge you to read it. It’s a bit long but you will not regret the effort.

This book is so different from the ones before it but I still loved it. Anna North’s new novel, ‘Outlawed’ stirs up the typical western novel with a provocative blend of alt-history and feminist consciousness. The result is a thrilling tale eerily familiar but utterly transformed.

‘Outlawed’ is a Reese’s Book Club Pick, Instant NYT Bestseller, Belletrist Book Club Pick, Library Reads Selection, Amazon Editors’ Choice and a Washington Post Best of the Year selection. I liked it too!!

Imagine late 19th-century America, though not quite the Old West we know. In this version of our past, the Great Flu of the 1830s killed 90 percent of the U.S. population, snuffing out the Industrial Revolution and the federal government. A decimated nation was in no mood for Civil War; the few Black survivors of the plague escaped slavery on their own. And now, some 60 years later, the people remaining in the Dakotas have built a patriarchal Christian society centered on fertility.

In “Outlawed,” marriages are celebrated for their fecundity, and mothers of lots of children enjoy considerable social power. But with medical science stuck in its earliest stages, wives bear the full blame for infertility. Although popular opinion is in flux between biology and magic, miscarriages are widely believed to be the work of witches. And as in old Salem, that fear brings down hellish punishments on women who are difficult, smart or barren.

The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada’s life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

Even on the run, Ada devotes herself to dispelling the religious explanations of infertility and learning the forbidden secrets of gynecological medicine. She’s particularly skeptical of the conflation of misogyny, racism and quackery that is quickly becoming vogue across the country. Though she has only erratic access to scientific literature — and what exists is infected with speculation and superstition — she’s fearless and determined. “So I began my criminal career,” she confesses, “with a leaky pen instead of a pistol and books instead of silver for my reward.” Ada has heard tales of criminal men shooting their way across the Badlands, but the real outlaws in this society are women who are unwilling or unable to be mothers. Knowing this, Ada keeps running — pursued by a sheriff who will never give up.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women.

But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she’s willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

MORE TO COME!

I’m not yet caught up, but I’ll have another books post as soon as I can!