Jhumpa Lahiri and Edwidge Danticat

     One of the problems with downloading books to my I-Pad from the DC Public Library is that the 'holds' on the better books are often quite long, and you are discouraged when you see that there are seventy readers ahead of you. Of course, the Library is presumably licensed to provide more than one copy, so the numbers do come down reasonably quickly.
     But often when it is clear there is no book in the offing, I am forced to cast around a bit, and there is a form of "recommended for you" section that seems to recognize vaguely that I am into reasonably serious books, and these are often available immediately.
     Two such books recently were Jumpha Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth" and Edwidge Danticat's "The Dew Breaker." Coincidentally both are collections of short stories (some closer to novella length) dealing with immigrant experience in the United States--Danticat with Haitian immigrants and Lahiri with Indian, specifically Bengali, immigrants. Danticat's immigrants are way down in the social scale, and there are often back stories set in Haiti that illuminate their present situations in the United States. Jahiri's immigrants are eminently successful fathers (doctors, professors...) with wives--often from arranged marriages--who are deeply rooted in Bengali culture and children who want to grow up as American teenagers.
     So if you search the deluge of new, 'must read' books and find nothing available, I am sure that both these books sit on the shelves in your local library and both are well worth reading. I am, however, a little critical of some of the Lahiri stories that seem to me to stretch out further than the subject matter required--but you can always skip...

"Hot Milk," by Deborah Levy

 “Hot Milk” by Deborah Levy has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and it is a fascinating novel on many levels. We are examining and analyzing the mind of Sophia Papastergiadis, a woman in her early ‘twenties with a masters degree in anthropology, but who works in a London coffee bar and sleeps in a room above it. Her Greek father left her English mother, Rose, in her early childhood, and ever since then Sophia’s maturation has been overshadowed by trying to look after her mother, who in recent years has become paralysed (or is she?) and in chronic pain (psychosomatic?). Sophia researches her mother’s condition on the internet and comes up with the clinic of a Dr. Gomez (quack? charlatan?) on the southern coast of Spain, where they rent a small beach-side house in a rather run-down resort. Sophia and Rose have mortgaged her mother’s London house to pay the clinic’s fee. At the beach, the sea is generally full of Medusas--stinging jelly fish that attack Sophia on her first swim.

The novel begins very realistically with Sophia dropping her laptop in a bar and the screen shatters, somehow symbolizing Sophia’s state of mind as the novel progresses. And realism starts to mix with fantasy and the gyrations of Sohia's mind.

“My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else.”

And we are off on a strange story, as Sophia becomes strongly attracted and obsessed with Ingrid Bauer, a German seamstress who lives nearby, and she sleeps with Juan—the lifeguard who treats her jellyfish stings. And what of Dr. Gomez and his daughter: are they charlatans? Is there really any treatment offered to Rose, except to stop her taking all her medicines? And is it true that Rose sometimes actually walks?

Well, let’s not get into too much detail, I should just add that Sophia travels to Greece to meet her father and his new wife, who is some forty years younger than him and has a small baby that is being breast-fed…hot mother's milk.

Any novel short-listed for the Man Booker has been judged by the panel to be an exceptional work. That doesn’t mean you will like it, or like Sophia, but I found it a fascinating read and brilliantly written.

Here is a quote from a Guardian review by Erika Wagner:

“Hot Milk is a powerful novel of the interior life, which Levy creates with a vividness that recalls Virginia Woolf. The sense of Sofia’s life with her mother (or against her mother) is built through an accumulation of detail, a constellation of symbols and narrative bursts. But like a medusa, this novel has a transfixing gaze and a terrible sting that burns long after the final page is turned.”

 

 

Ferrante: " The Story of the Lost Child"

Not much I can say about this, the last of the four Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante, which brings us up to the date at which the first volume starts--when "my brilliant friend" has disappeared, and her son does not know where she is. All I can say is that the magnetic nature of these four novels is sustained until the end, and the four volumes constitute a terrific literary achievement. And great praise and credit must be given to the translator, who has done a superb job.
That's it--read them.

"Spring" by David Szalay

     I must admit that I had never heard of the English/Canadian writer David Szalay until I saw that he was on the short list for the Man Booker prize for his novel "All that Man Is," which is the subject of long analysis by James Wood in a recent New Yorker. It is, apparently, his fourth novel.


     My DC library had not yet got a copy of "All That Man Is", but it did have "Spring," an earlier novel, which was immediately available, and I read it with great interest. He is certainly a helluva good writer. To quote from Chris Cleave's glowing review in The Guardian (and Cleave is an excellent novelist himself)..."It would be easy to say that David Szalay, the author of London and the South East and The Innocent, is a rising star, and that Spring, his third novel, is a quiet triumph of understated realism, so let's say it straight away, and then get on with talking about how damned good the book is."
    
     But if you are looking for a strong story line, or plot development, or resolution, "Spring" may start to frustrate you: various things happen, various secondary story lines and characters appear and are pursued and described in detail, while developments between the two or three main characters, whose uncertain, on-again-off-again relationships are at the core of the novel, wander along unresolved. The main focus is on James, an entrepreneur and gambler, who made and lost a fortune with the dot-com boom and bust, and his sputtering relationship with Katherine, who cannot quite clear up her relationship with her husband Frazer, from whom she is separated.
     To quote from Cleave again: "Eschewing simplicity and closure on every page right through to this novel's heartbreakingly entropic end, he does readers the courtesy of presenting grown-up characters freighted with layered histories from which they cannot cleanly break, then trusts us to have the emotional bigness necessary to like them."
      Being a dictionary-lover (hard copy: OED Shorter: Random House Unabridged) I felt I needed to check up on "entropic," which is clearly Cleave showing off his vocabulary, while I admit to uncertainty about the word. So, for the OED--entropy is "lack of order or predictability, gradual decline into disorde

     And, of course, Cleave's quote raises the old question on which we may agree or disagree--do you have to like the characters in a novel?
  
      Bottom line: I enjoyed it, but with a smidgen of frustration as regards resolution..