Tag: fiction

Lost Souls of Leningrad: A Novel by Suzanne Parry

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Lost Souls of Leningrad: A Novel
by Suzanne Parry

Lost Souls of Leningrad is a rare novel about the Russian civilian experience of World War II. Even rarer, its primary protagonist — and the character through whose eyes this experience is filtered — is a late-middle aged woman, a widow. (I am not a fan of romantic WWII novels that involve beautiful young women who all wear red lipstick, have perfectly coiffed hair, and fabulous clothes in the middle of wartime. Hello? Rations? I mean, COME ON.)

Parry’s novel possesses a more realistic portrayal of wartime. Its setting is Russia, a nation besieged by Nazis. There is a tightrope tension, drawn even tauter by dwindling supplies of food and medicine. Lost Souls of Leningrad does not romanticize war; events and experiences that other novels paint in sepia tone, Parry swathes in a more authentic grey. The sense of loss, a grieving for the world that was, is palpable in Lost Souls of Leningrad in a way that makes it refreshing as a novel of WWII.

The story revolves around an aging, widowed violinist and her teenaged granddaughter. But the novel is not about them alone. Lost Souls of Leningrad is a landscape of a European city at war. Parry reveals to the reader the swift and terrible death and decay of an urban place and its people when the trappings of civilization are ripped off by war. Food and the lack of it, water and the lack of it, the stench and the unavoidable abundance of it. Fear from all the dark corners, lives cast into darkness in the absence of street lights, electricity, law and order. The other characters are Russian soldiers, mothers, wives, and orphaned children. All of them are the lost souls of the title, each of them has lost something, whether a loved one or a parent, or simply their sense of security in ordered society that they once had, even if imperfect. Loss and grief, not only as a result of war, but through political upheaval, are themes that imbue the book. The novel draws a line between the time before and the time after, the time of war, and afterwards, even when war is over, there remains a division of before and after.

While the novel does not romanticize war, there are romantic threads in its storylines. There is love in this novel in various forms: nurturing and mothering love, parental love, innocent and childish love, romantic love, the kind of love that is weathered by life. While a defeating hopelessness pervades the novel (it is war, after all), there is also an uplift via its characters’ resilience. This strength manifests in many forms but most prominently through love and kindness.

As a historical fiction, it portrays a more social version of history than a military or political one. Readers should not expect dates or events, but an overall texture of life in wartime Russia. This is not a historical fiction that relies heavily on the facts of history, though the timeline of events does follow authentically in line with actual history; this is a novel about the human experience of war, lived and sensed through the skin, the eyes, the nose, the tongue.

This a beautifully written novel about surviving loss of different kinds and the love we need to do so.

The Wintering Place by Kevin McCarthy

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The Wintering Place by Kevin McCarthy

Five words or phrases to describe McCarthy’s The Wintering Place: Raw, Disturbing, Visceral, Emotionally Invasive, Riveting. This is a novel for fans of Donald Ray Pollock and Cormac McCarthy, readers who enjoy (perhaps with grimacing faces) the feel of dirt under the character’s nails, an odor of decaying blood lingering and fetid, the kind of novel that settles a deep chill in your bones and in your soul. The Wintering Place is a novel about resilience and survival and the cost of that survival on the human soul.

The novel is set in the 1840s on the American plains, in the rural hills and the long stretches of lonely woods. It revolves around two brothers, Irish immigrants, who have fought and lived according to a primal form of justice. They are army deserters, fugitives in more ways than one. Blood and death are on their hands, rightly or wrongly. A woman, the bride of one of the brothers, accompanies them — and together they are a kind of family, dependent on each other for their survival and security. There is a bond of love between, the kind that is weathered by the harshness of life, silent, sullen, and not always kind. The woman is like the brothers: alone in the world, a survivor of a place and time that beats women out of their dignity, power, and softness.

The three of them seek a wintering place. A place to hole up for the dark season. They need only to survive the weather — that is, until they encounter animals of their own kind who threaten them. Humanity is the evil that lurks in the shadows of the forest. The snow, wolves, and frost kill too, but humans pose the most danger.

The three of them encounter ruffians like themselves, Native Americans, officers of the law, traders and merchants who hold the power of life or death over all who dare to traverse the plains in winter. Everyone is seeking a safe wintering place in some way or another.

My description sounds stark, but McCarthy’s prose and the way he unpicks the fabric of the story and lets it unravel into its bare parts, is captivating. I read this novel compulsively, wanting always to know what happens next. Do they survive another day? Will one of them perish in the effort?

The characters were fleshy, real, and irresistible; the stink of their unwashed bodies and the smell of blood permeated the safety of my apartment as I read this book. It was as if I could sense them in the room with me. McCarthy uses an epistolary delivery, bringing the characters into dialogue with the reader directly; it is almost like having a conversation with them.

At the end of the novel, this reader even felt a little lost — as if there was a little death in the finishing of this book.

I must add one more word to the description: Haunting.

Before Your Memory Fades: A Novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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Before the Coffee Gets Cold #3

Before Your Memory Fades: A Novel
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before Your Memory Fades is the third installment of the Before The Coffee Gets Cold series. It picks up directly where the second novel, Tales From The Café leaves off. I thoroughly enjoyed the first novel and loved how the second one tied up loose ends; this third novel follows with the same pace, cadence, and story. For those who love the way the past and present and future intertwines and the mythology of the series, Before Your Memory Fades will feel like a warm welcome in an old and familiar place (the Cafe Funiculi Funicula, of course!)

For me, personally, Before Your Memory Fades made less of an impression on me than I expected. I think I had tired of the story; indeed, there was nothing necessarily new in this novel that the previous two had not delivered. The emotional payoff for me was spent, but this does not lessen the potential payoff of the novel for a fan of the series: There is a ghost, albeit a new one, in The Seat in the café and there are new eager patrons who come to use the time traveling device to correct some wrong they have committed in the past or have yet to commit in the future. Then there is the same terrible lesson they learn: that love and obligation are on the same sides of the coin and that they cannot change the events fated to them, but the knowledge they learn in the past or future can change their hearts and souls in their present.

We are reintroduced to familiar, new, and newish characters, Nagare and Kei’s now teenaged daughter, Miki, and a new employee, Reiji, who works at another café in the “family”, Café Donna Donna, which also has its own time-bending seat, its own ghost, and its own crew of café regulars, Nanako and Dr Saki Muraoka, There are familiar characters: Nagare and Kazu. There is also Kazu’s daughter, Sachi, who is the newest Tokita woman to wield the power of the coffee and time travel. There are new patrons who arrive at the Café Donna Donna to rewrite their pasts: a daughter who seeks out her parents and a way to manifest her vengeance, a comedic celebrity who needs to tell his wife something important, and others.

All in all, Before Your Memory Fades delivers on its promise. It is a fantastic addition to the existing two novels. It continues the tradition of the Café Funiculi Funicula, giving the reader more of what they fell in love with in the first novel.

A History of Fear: A Novel by Luke Dumas

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A History of Fear: A Novel
by Luke Dumas

By page three, I was hooked. The ending comes to a perfect, organic conclusion — but I readily admit that if Dumas writes a sequel, I’m all in.

A History of Fear unfolds like Stoker’s Dracula, adopting an epistolary approach, delivering the story via journal entries, letters, official reports from doctors, prison officials, and newspaper articles. The novel dives deep into the most disturbing parts of human psychosis reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It delivers gothic horror too, in the manner of Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the end, the reader can’t be entirely sure of who is the monster, if demons are real, if evil is more human than we comfortable with. A History of Fear is a horror fan’s feast: gore and psychological terror stride side-by-side, the paranormal and the divine and the mundane intertwine to create a world the reader is never entirely sure is real. Illusion may very well be reality… or worse.

But the story is not fantasy; there is a real history embedded in this novel — and a commentary on a history of monstrous bodies, sexuality, religion, and intergenerational trauma. There is a reality underlying the one Dumas weaves for us. This is what makes the novel so appealing; there is a real horror here, one that we can recognize. This history is one that might be so common as to be truly terrifying because it might actually exist within ourselves. Or someone we know.

A History of Fear follows the main character’s slow descent into madness — or his ascent into clarity, depending on your interpretation. There is a true mystery here and this drives the story forward. The reader needs to discover what the main character also seeks: some sense of closure and parental acceptance. The main character is driven by a need to know themselves and their past. This is a genealogy of a family and the homophobic culture of the West. Dumas focuses on the psychological damage inflicted on those who deviated from the dominant norm and those who dared to question their place in it. The novel travels between the past and the present, each part of the jigsaw puzzle adds to the image of the whole of time, allowing the reader to witness the unraveling of the man’s mind and the suffering caused by intergenerational trauma.

The novel opens with the main character’s eventual, inevitable fate; this is the mystery. We know what happens to him. The mystery is why and how. The horror is the long arm of intergenerational trauma.

A wonderful book to have read in October, the Halloween month, but really, a fantastic gothic horror for any time of the year.

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü

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Translated by Aron Aji

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü

Sparse writing delivers more feeling sometimes, more than a hill of words. The Wounded Age defends that “less is more” adage more than adequately. Edgü is master of the cut, clipped prose; it is this brevity of language that paints a dark history of Turkish war and tragedy. The sense of nothingness is poignant here, deliberate, necessary to understand the effect of war on its subjects.

This collection of stories is marked by an unusual delivery via poetry. The stories unfold in lyric format; this does not mask the pain of ethnic refugees and the suffering of war that is its subject, but in fact highlights it and makes it more powerful. It is as if the Edgü or the reader would only be able to handle such pain if it were framed in poetry; the reality of war and of those mowed down in its path needs to be formatted in this way in order for the reader to see the war for its intimate effects.

The stories and poems themselves evoke a sense of fracture in Turkish life; there is a disjointedness that is purposeful, performative. These are not historical fictions; these are emotive accounts of the Turkish past.

Overall, a beautiful and dark landscape of Edgü’s world.

1794: The City Between the Bridges (A Novel) by Niklas Natt Och Dag

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1794: The City Between the Bridges (A Novel) by Niklas Natt Och Dag

1794 is a deliciously dark journey through the underbelly of 18th century Stockholm. It’s the second novel in Natt och Dag’s Cardell series; but, the novel stands on its own. I didn’t read 1793: The Wolf and the Watchman where the characters, Jean Mickel Cardell and Anna Stina Knapp first appear, but that did not preclude my enjoyment of 1794.

The novel begins with Eric Three Roses, the second and less-loved son of a minor nobleman. Eric’s journey to Sweden’s only tropical colony, Saint Barthélemy and the mysterious, scuzzy individuals he meets there are the mystery that seeds the rest of the novel. What happens to Eric is tragic. Cardell is called upon to discover the crime and the criminal — and bring them to justice. He seeks out Cecil Winge, encounters Anna Knapp again, and slithers through the shadowy and crime-infested underworld of Stockholm, sorting through those who are struggling to survive and those who prey on others to survive.

This is a crime novel, one which reveals a seedy and complex weaving of lives, fortunes, and terrible fates that not only delivers the tension of a mystery but also, and perhaps more appealing to me personally, the texture of 18th century European urban society. Classes collide, fates are intertwined, and motives are never simple. Relationships function on transaction, but the currency people must pay can run the range from gold to love, from silver to power. Murderers murder for the sake of a love of violence. Fathers overlook the transgressions of their daughters for the sake of a peaceful existence. Brothers blind themselves to the follies of their siblings. Sanity and madness are two sides of the same coin.

1794 is not a story with happy endings, neat narratives wrapped up by the end; this is a reflection of life under a harsh light. The mystery lies in how we survive it.

We Are A Haunting: A Novel by Tyriek White

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We Are A Haunting: A Novel by Tyriek White

We Are A Haunting is a poetic song, like a siren that lured me into its world. Through the eyes of three generations of a black family living in New York City: Colly, Key, and Audrey, and the unraveling of their lives in a world rife with systemic racism, poverty, violence, grief, loss, readers are treated to a story that flows seamlessly between decades and generations.

White’s novel toggles forward and back in time. Characters float — as ghosts — between the past and the present. As the space between these three generations contracts and expands, the reader’s construction of time and history is reshaped, no longer a linear thing but a fluid matrix in which they live, all together, simultaneously at once. As a historian, We Are A Haunting reminds me that the past is never past, the present is merely a locus in history’s path.

The language which binds all these moments and spirits together is history, emotion, and experience: suffering and longing, obligations and promises kept or broken, strength and compromise, the ability to survive and a sense of defeat under the unwavering boot of poverty and racism. This is a complicated world in which awful events — such as getting fired and losing one’s income — is a nonevent warranting no reaction because of how useless it is to express emotion over it. This is just how life is. But, at the same time, such events are also gateways, paths that lead elsewhere, to better futures.

The interactions of the main characters with others in their lives: friends, fathers, husbands, children, and the dead or dying create the bonds which constitute the community and are the paths along which history travels. Each generation seeks to identify for themselves who they are and what they want, but they are also inevitably bound to the previous generation. Just as the living and the dead move seamlessly between their worlds in this novel, birth and death are a window that lets light in and keeps out the wind. Key, in her community, serves as a kind of gateway for life, possessing the ability to see things others cannot and in the capacity of a doula.

We Are A Haunting is not just about the black community itself, as an insular, discrete object in a vacuum. Then novel situates these black histories and experiences within the context of American material culture and history. Colly, Key, and Audrey and those around them are embedded in a world that has and continues to be assaulted by colonial institutions and racist systems. The deaths — those both metaphorical and physical — in We Are A Haunting are caused by this abuse and indifference. Casual micro-aggressions are tiny cuts and death is caused by a thousand of them.

This is a complex novel. For all its historical meaning, this is not a historical fiction in an informative sense; the time-bending, paranormal elements and the focus on characters’ and their emotional lives make this a more literary work than a historical narrative. This is not a novel that brings all its narrative arcs to happy, organic closures; un-repaired relationships, unfulfilled desires, and falsehoods are part of its characters’ lives. Morose, resentful endings are, after all, part of the colonial experience (at least from the perspective of the colonized.) In no way is this a detraction; this honest harshness is an authentic portrayal of racialized America.

The prose is literary. It is singularly focused on its characters more than its plot, though the unfolding of events lead to the characters’ interactions that shape their experiences. The characters are tangible, flawed, and powerfully written in each their own voices. Readers will have access to their interiority, but this is not an easy read in that the characters are — as real people are — guarded, afraid, unwilling to be vulnerable. Readers should not expect to be told what to think; this reader had to work to understand the motives and meanings of their conversation, their actions. The work, however, is worth it.

Love and War in the Jewish Quarter: A Novel by Dora Levy Mossanen

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Love and War in the Jewish Quarter: A Novel by Dora Levy Mossanen

Set in Iran in the 1940s, Love and War in the Jewish Quarter captures Jewish life and culture as it existed in tense contest and precarious harmony with and within the majority, ruling Islamic community. On the fringes of World War II, but dangerously within the political reach of the Nazi regime and Soviet pressures, Iranian Jews must balance their interactions with Muslims even more carefully than they always had. The Allies are a distant factor; they are not a guarantee of safety as news of Hitler’s internment of Jews creeps ever closer.

[For those interested in the Jewish experience of WWII in this region of the world, One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and a search for a Lost World by Michael Frank is about Rhodes and its Jewish community before and during WWII.]

It is in this tension that Jewish dentist, Dr Soleiman Yaran, finds himself. He is trapped in the conflicting intersection between his Jewish community and roots, the powerful Iranian royal family and governors of the land, his family, and his personal desires. The novel revolves around his attempt to unravel and reconcile his responsibilities and his personal happiness. Embedded in these tensions are deeper, more global undercurrents: as a medical professional schooled in Paris, Yaran also finds himself — as an agent of a Westernized modernity — at odds with ethnic, religious traditions, Jewish and Muslim alike. The war is not the only conflict highlighted in this novel; friction also exists in culture between the traditional past and the modern present. There is a shedding of superstition and tradition in favor of new technologies and practices, beliefs about the roles of men and women in their communities. Gendered expectations, visible through the performances of wife, husband, child, lover, parent, elder, and filial piety, duty to one’s community, and duty to one’s self are strong themes throughout.

Mossanen delivers this internal and historical drama through a romantic storyline, but readers will be disappointed if they expect a historical romance, for a romance it is not. This is a love story about love in the real and brutal world, where individuals are buffeted by cultural and community expectations and traditions. Its realistic setting and story are the novel’s appeal; the unpredictability of life will keep you, Reader, on your toes throughout.

The characters too, are fascinating — multi-faceted and tangible — because they are reflections of real internal conflicts. They are flawed and spurred on to their actions by subjective logics, some which make little sense, except when viewed within the larger landscape of this history and cultural context. The villains in this novel are human in their cruelties. The heroes and heroines are human, unable to manifest impossible archetypes.

A worthy read for all fans of historical fiction of the 20th century.

Daughters of the New Year: A Novel by E.M. Tran

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Daughters of the New Year: A Novel by E.M. Tran

I am a sucker for a slow, immersive, multi-generational historical fiction. I love the unwinding of family secrets and histories. Families are spaces of ordinary and extraordinary trauma; intense love also breeds intense regret, jealousies, animosities. Tragedy binds and creates familial bonds stronger than blood. And, of course, as a historian I love getting a glimpse into a past where the reasons and logics behind piety, duty, and love are complex, sometimes contradictory, colored with personal suffering, traditions, and the institutions of humanity-at-large — as in this case, French colonialism and Confucian patriarchy.

That is the hinge around which Daughters of the New Year swivels. This novel is an honest portrait of the brutal historical and cultural complexities that shape familial love.

The reader is given a privileged view into the minds, hearts, and philosophies of several generations of Vietnamese women. It is a novel about why and how mothering, motherhood, and filial duty are never straightforward, why these acts of love are volatile constructions of history and culture. Time and place alter the modes by which we care for one another, show each other love. What is an expression of affection for one generation is manipulation to the next. What is piety to one generation is an empty gesture for another. The reasons why mothers do what they do, why sometimes their love crushes their daughters, are molded by forces beyond their control: war, racism, patriarchy. Yet, for all those differences, there is one motivation behind these acts: the desire to provide the next generation with more than what the previous had. This is the love embedded in families.

The reader is given a privileged view of an excavation of familial love through Vietnamese and American history. Through chapters narrated by a daughter of this family, daughters descended through a matriarchal bloodline, the reader gets an interior view of the characters’ minds. Each of them has a different voice in this novel. EM. Tran’s prose is a beautiful thread throughout, binding their stories together, but each of the characters speak with their own, unique voice. Each chapter reveals its narrator’s logic, their historical context; explains why they did the things they did — even perhaps knowing that those acts would somehow traumatize the next generation.

There is Nhi and her sisters, the American generation. There is their mother, Xuan; their aunt, Xuan’s sister; there is their grandmother; a line of women, as if holding hands, unbroken, their spirits resiliently swaying in the winds of change and time going all the way back to the epic and legendary Trung sisters. Daughters of the New Year is about these women.

Fans of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, or Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko will enjoy Tran’s Daughters of the New Year.

Peach Blossom Spring: A Novel by Melissa Fu

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Peach Blossom Spring: A Novel by Melissa Fu

I’ll be honest; the first 60 pages of this novel did not impress me. There was nothing wrong specifically, it’s just that nothing stood out to me in terms of character development or plot. But persistence paid off and by the end of the book I was in tears, ugly crying over the lifetime of grief, loss, and intergenerational trauma that history forced on the characters. This is a book I will never part with; I want my children and grand children to read this book.

The novel begins in the 1930s when China has been ravaged by European encroachments on its sovereignty; internal fractures between peasants, warlords, and the rising middle class; and the Japanese, who are gaining ground and support for their own imperializing campaigns. The Dao family are much like many others of their class: they own an antiques business, they are merchants living prosperous urban lives. Then the Japanese arrive and they are forced to flee. Meilin and her young, suddenly fatherless son, Renshu escape with her brother-in-law, her husband’s brother, Dao Longwei and his wife, Wenling and their two daughters. But the war continues and despite Longwei’s protection, Meilin and Renshu are separated from the other Dao family members.

The war with the Japanese slides into World War II and then into China’s Civil War. The seams between these conflicts are invisible to those like Meilin and Renshu who survive in the semi-peaceful interstices and spaces between them. The novel traces their journey across space and time, from China to the United States, and is marked by the people and things they lose along the way. This sense of loss — particularly of the loss of family, identity, and belonging — is the fulcrum around which the novel revolves.

Meilin, Renshu, and eventually Renshu’s daughter, Lily narrate their own and the Dao family story across several decades, three generations who experience the their subjective transnational, migration history and the larger, tragic events of Chinese history very differently. The reader is given a glimpse into living wounds of war, the kind that fester long after the battle has been lost, a world in which those who bear the brunt of war are not the combatants but the bystanders, even the truly innocent, those as yet unborn at the time of war. Like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (which I read, but did not review here), Mother of Strangers by Suad Amiry, and Moth by Melody Razak this is a story of the effects of war and politics on those who had little to do with battle.

Loss and the grief of never being able to “go back” to be again what you once were, to have what you once had, and the especially painful suffering of being a transnational person, an immigrant belonging to two places at once and never fully to any one of them is a key theme in the novel. This is embedded in the title of the novel, which is premised on a scroll that Meilin inherits from her husband and a story she draws from it and tells to her son. In each their own ways, Meilin, Renshu, and Lily can never truly be whole in the way they want. History imposes on them, forces them to be split, to grieve for something or some part of them they cannot have, cannot be.

In comparison to Moth and Mother of Strangers, Peach Blossom Spring is less literary in prose and style, but no less powerful or profound. Fu’s style and language is more accessible to the casual reader of historical fiction; it is succinct, but deeply emotionally evocative. Indeed, the emotional build up is slow and steady. I didn’t realize how attached I’d become to the characters until the end, when events forced me to confront the idea of losing them. Fu is a shrewd and talented writer, and the emotional cuts her words make leave tender scars.

Although those first 60 pages did leave me wondering where exactly events were heading… I now wonder if that lull was deliberate. Perhaps the explosion of my interest performative of the dramatic effect of war on the characters. The lull before the storm…