Each of these books is either
focused on or has as a substantial element some culture that is not a part of
our 21st Century suburban American context. There is a wide variety of literary types
represented here from the thriller to the romance and everywhere in
between. Thanks to the members of the
LFHS English Department who suggested many of these titles.
Brick Lane—Monica Ali
A captivating read from a debut novelist, Brick
Lane brings the immigrant milieu of East London to vibrant life. With great
poignancy, Ali illuminates a foreign world; her well-developed characters pull
readers along on a deeply psychological, almost spiritual journey. Through the
eyes of two Bangladeshi sisters -- the plain Nazneen and the prettier Hasina --
we see the divergent paths of the contemporary descendants of an ancient
culture. Hasina elopes to a "love marriage," and young Nazneen, in an
arranged marriage, is pledged to a much older man living in London.
In the Time
of the Butterflies—Julia Alvarez
It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of
three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked
Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican
Republic. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an
accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain
that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Raphael Leonidas
Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everyone knows of Las Mariposas -
"The Butterflies." Now, three decades later, Julia Alvarez, also a
daughter of the Dominican Republic and long haunted by these sisters, immerses
us in a tangled and dangerous moment in Hispanic Caribbean history to tell
their story in the only way it can truly be understood - through fiction. In
this brilliantly characterized novel, the voices of all four sisters - Minerva,
Patria, Maria Teresa, and Dede - speak across the decades, to tell their own
stories - from hair ribbons to gunrunning to prison torture - and to describe
the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule. The Butterflies were
extraordinary women. Minerva, once the object of the dictator's desire, had
dared to publicly slap his face. Devout Patria found her calling to the
uprising through the church. Alluring - and vain - Maria Teresa joined in
pursuit of romance. Only Dede, the practical one, the most diligent in her duty
to family and tradition, kept apart. And only she survived to see that their
names were remembered. Now, through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's
imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again. And Dede joins them as a
heroine of equal courage.
Alias Grace—Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
takes us back in time and into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic
and notorious women of the nineteenth century. Grace Marks has been convicted
for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, the wealthy Thomas
Kinnear, and of Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe
Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence
after a stint in Toronto's lunatic asylum, Grace herself claims to have no memory
of the murders. Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning
field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists
who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story, from her family's
difficult passage out of Ireland into Canada, to her time as a maid in Thomas
Kinnear's household. As he brings Grace closer and closer to the day she cannot
remember, he hears of the turbulent relationship between Kinnear and Nancy
Montgomery, and of the alarming behavior of Grace's fellow servant, James
McDermott. Jordan is drawn to Grace, but he is also baffled by her. What will
he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace a female fiend, a
bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she a victim of circumstances?
The Copper Beech—Maeve Binchy
Carved on the trunk
of the mighty copper beech that embraces the school yard in Shancarrig are
declarations of love, hope, and identity - the youthful dreams of the children
who played there. Now grown, yet shaped by their years in the schoolhouse, they
lead different lives. The Copper Beech is about eight of these dreamers.
From Ryan's Hotel to Barna Woods, where the gypsies came each year, from Nellie
Dunne's sweet shop to Father Gunn's church, the tenor of life in this small
Irish village is outwardly placid and uneventful. Some, like Nessa Ryan, in
search of passion, would say deadly dull. But behind the calm exterior,
serenity fades into unexpected drama: Maddy Ross has a secret love; Eddie
Barton, a surprising friendship; and the Darcys, the glamorous newcomers, find
a curious partner in poor Maura Brennan. In Shancarrig, where the river runs
around the great rock for which the town is named, human life flows in all its
variety. Lives intertwine just as names crisscross on the trunk of the copper
beech. At the cottages where the Dunnes live in poverty; the grand house of Leo
Murphy; the Kellys', near the school; Dr. Jims's, on The Terrace - nothing is
as it seems. With humor, warmth, and a ruthless eye for the ironies of
self-delusion, Maeve Binchy uncovers the secrets hidden in each person's heart,
showing us that extraordinary stories can be found anywhere, if only one knows
where to look.
The
Tortilla Curtain— T. Coraghessan Boyle
Men and women with brown faces and strong
backs who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade the American
Dream are the Okies of the 1990s. Two of them, Candido and America Rincon, have
come to Southern California and are living in a makeshift camp deep in a
ravine, fighting off starvation. At the top of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles
liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling
existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she
an obsessive realtor. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and
Delaney into intimate contact, the two couples and their opposing worlds
gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and
misunderstanding.
My Antonia—Willa Cather
Willa Cather's My
Antonia is considered one of the most significant American novels of the
twentieth century. Set during the great migration west to settle the plains of
the North American continent, the narrative follows Antonia Shimerda, a pioneer
who comes to Nebraska as a child and grows with the country, inspiring a
childhood friend, Jim Burden, to write her life story. The novel is important
both for its literary aesthetic and as a portrayal of important aspects of
American social ideals and history, particularly the centrality of migration to
American culture.
The Awakening—Kate Chopin
Novelist and short
story writer Kate Chopin (1851-1904) was the first American woman to deal with
women's roles as wives and mothers. The Awakening (1899), her most famous
novel, concerns a woman, dissatisfied with her indifferent husband, who gives
in to her desire for other men and commits adultery. This is a searing
depiction of the religious and social pressures brought to bear on women who
transgress restrictive Victorian codes of behavior.
Red Tent—Anita Diamante
Few stories can
evoke a time and place as vividly as Anita Diamant's compelling tale sprung
from the pages of the Old Testament. The Red Tent is the story of
Jacob's daughter, Dinah, and Jacob's four wives, who all served as Dinah's
mother at some point in time. Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah all bring their
own unique gifts and influences to bear on Dinah's life. As Diamant explores
the trials and triumphs of ancient women, she brings a foreign yet beautiful
world to life as seen through the emotional filter of Dinah's eyes. This lush,
evocative tale transcends time and brings new life to the Old Testament,
lending a feminine touch to the mighty word of God.
Foucault's
Pendulum—Umberto Eco
This complex psychological thriller
chronicles the development of a literary joke that plunges its perpetrators
into deadly peril. The narrator, Casaubon, an expert on the medieval Knights
Templars, and two editors working in a branch of a vanity press publishing
house in Milan, are told about a purported coded message revealing a secret
plan set in motion by the Knights Templars centuries ago when the society was
forced underground. As a lark, the three decide to invent a history of the
occult tying a variety of phenomena to the mysterious machinations of the
Order. Feeding their inspirations into a computer, they become obsessed with
their story, dreaming up links between the Templars and just about every occult
manifestation throughout history, and predicting that culmination of the
Templars' scheme to take over the world is close at hand. The plan becomes real
to them--and eventually to the mysterious They, who want the information the
trio has ``discovered.'' Dense, packed with meaning, often startlingly
provocative, the novel is a mixture of metaphysical meditation, detective
story, computer handbook, introduction to physics and philosophy, historical
survey, mathematical puzzle, compendium of religious and cultural mythology,
guide to the Torah (Hebrew, rather than Latin contributes to the puzzle here,
but is restricted mainly to chapter headings), reference manual to the occult,
the hermetic mysteries, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Freemasons-- ad
infinitum . The narrative eventually becomes heavy with the accumulated weight
of data and supposition, and overwrought with implication, and its climax may
leave readers underwhelmed. Until that point, however, this is an intriguing
cerebral exercise in which Eco slyly suggests that intellectual arrogance can
come to no good end.
Name of the
Rose—Umberto Eco
Name of the Rose, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, is
an experimental medieval whodunit set in a monastic library. In 1327, Brother
William of Baskerville arrives to investigate heresy among the monks in an
Italian abbey; a series of bizarre murders overshadows the mission. Within the
mystery is a tale of books, librarians, patrons, censorship, and the search for
truth in a period of tension between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. The
book became a hit despite some obscure passages and allusions. This deftly
abridged version, ably performed by Theodore Bikel, retains the genius of the
original but is far more accessible. Foucault's Pendulum, Eco's second novel,
is a bit irritating. The plot consists of three Milan editors who concoct a
series on the occult for an unscrupulous publishing house that Eco ridicules mercilessly.
The work details medieval phenomena including the Knights Templar, an ancient
order with a scheme to dominate the world. Unfortunately, few listeners will
make sense of this failed thriller. The Island of the Day Before is an
ingenious tale that begins with a shipwreck in 1643. Roberta della Griva
survives and boards another ship only to find himself trapped. Flashbacks give
us Renaissance battles, the French court, spies, intriguing love affairs, and
the attempt to solve the problem of longitude. It's a world of metaphors and
paradoxes created by an entertaining scholar.
Nine Hills
to Nambonkaha--Sarah Erdman
Erdman
fully absorbed the complex culture of the West African village to which she was
assigned, and in Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, she shares the gift of her
experience, enfolding readers in the place that challenged her, provoked her,
and transformed her in memorable ways. Erdman's prose is lucid and rhythmic,
her voice comfortable and insightful. Her storytelling? Poetic and superb.
Assigned to a village in
northern Côte d'Ivoire, Erdman longs to help the residents overcome the blight
of AIDS and poverty, to protect their women from female circumcision, and to
promote education to the suffering populace. But the villagers' culture stands
outside of time; the same word is used both for "today" and
"tomorrow." Into this place, Erdman injects a humble confidence, both
passionate yet teachable. With inner strength and honesty, her relationships
grow and deepen, and as the villagers struggle to adapt to an ever-encroaching
modernity, true friendship seeps warmly onto the page.
Tracks RI—Louise Erdrich
"We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall." So begins Nanapush, as he recalls the winter of 1912, when consumption, the last in a line of diseases brought by the Europeans, wiped out whole families of Ojibwa, unraveling tribes "like a coarse rope." By bearing witness to the story of his family's and people's disintegration, Nanapush, a tribal elder and sole survivor of his family, is intent on resisting death, on leaving tracks in the snow for those who come after to follow.
Like Water For Chocolate—Laura Esquivel
Earthy, magical, and
utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became
a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and
bittersweet wit. The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch,
as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her
final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be
weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid
the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon
becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares
special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the
story.
One
Thousand White Women—Jim Fergus
Long, brisk, charming first novel about an 1875 treaty between Ulysses S. Grant and Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, by the sports reporter and author of the memoir A Hunter's Road (1992). Little Wolf comes to Washington and suggests to President Grant that peace between the Whites and Cheyenne could be established if the Cheyenne were given white women as wives, and that the tribe would agree to raise the children from such unions. The thought of miscegenation naturally enough astounds Grant, but he sees a certain wisdom in trading 1,000 white women for 1,000 horses, and he secretly approves the Brides For Indians treaty. He recruits women from jails, penitentiaries, debtors' prisons, and mental institutions—offering full pardons or unconditional release. May Dodd, born to wealth in Chicago in 1850, had left home in her teens and become the mistress of her father's grain-elevator foreman. Her outraged father had her kidnapped, imprisoning her in a monstrous lunatic asylum. When Grant's offer arrives, she leaps at it and soon finds herself traveling west with hundreds of white and black would-be brides. All are indentured to the Cheyenne for two years, must produce children, and then will have the option of leaving. May, who keeps the journal we read, marries Little Wolf and lives in a crowded tipi with his two other wives, their children, and an old crone who enforces the rules. Reading about life among the Cheyenne is spellbinding, especially when the women show up the braves at arm-wrestling, foot-racing, bow-shooting, and gambling. Liquor raises its evil head, as it will, and reduces the braves to savagery. But the women recover, go out on the winter kill with their husbands, and accompany them to a trading post where they drive hard bargains and stop the usual cheating of the braves. Eventually, when the cavalry attacks the Cheyenne, mistakenly thinking they're Crazy Horse's Sioux, May is killed. An impressive historical, terse, convincing, and affecting.
Living to
Tell the Tale—Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
Like all his work, Living to Tell the Tale
is a magnificent piece of writing. It spans Gabriel García Márquez's life from
his birth in 1927 through the start of his career as a writer to the moment in
the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It has the
shape, the quality, and the vividness of a conversation with the reader—a tale
of people, places, and events as they occur to him: the colorful stories of his
eccentric family members; the great influence of his mother and maternal
grandfather; his consuming career in journalism, and the friends and mentors
who encouraged him; the myths and mysteries of his beloved Colombia; personal
details, undisclosed until now, that would appear later, transmuted and
transposed, in his fiction; and, above all, his fervent desire to become a
writer. And, as in his fiction, the narrator here is an inspired observer of
the physical world, able to make clear the emotions and passions that lie at
the heart of a life—in this instance, his own.
Memoirs of a Geisha—Arthur Golden
Nitta Sayuri tells
the story of her life as a geisha. In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a
world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to
the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men;
and where love is scorned as illusion. Sayuri's story begins in a poor fishing
village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is
taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. Through
her eyes, we see the decadent heart of Gion - the geisha district of Kyoto -
with its marvelous teahouses and theaters, narrow back alleys, ornate temples,
and artists' streets. And we witness her transformation as she learns the
rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup
and hair; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money
that goes with it. But as World War II erupts and the geisha houses are forced
to close, Sayuri, with little money and even less food, must reinvent herself
all over again to find a rare kind of freedom on her own terms. Memoirs of a
Geisha is a book of nuance and vivid metaphor, of memorable characters
rendered with humor and pathos. And though the story is rich with detail and a
vast knowledge of history, it is the transparent, seductive voice of Sayuri
that the reader remembers.
Snow Falling on Cedars—David Guterson
On San Piedro, an
island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, a Japanese-American
fisherman stands trial for murder. Set in 1954 in the shadow of World War II,
Snow Falling on Cedars is a beautifully crafted courtroom drama, love
story, and war novel, illuminating the psychology of a community, the
ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and
the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and
circumstance.
Kite Runner—Khaled Hosseini
"I became what
I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of
1975." So begins The Kite Runner, a poignant tale of two motherless
boys growing up in Kabul, a city teetering on the brink of destruction at the
dawn of the Soviet invasion.
Despite
their class differences, Amir, the son of a wealthy businessman, and Hassan,
his devoted sidekick and the son of Amir's household servant, play together,
cause mischief together, and compete in the annual kite-fighting tournament --
Amir flying the kite, and Hassan running down the kites they fell. But one day,
Amir betrays Hassan, and his betrayal grows increasingly devastating as their
tale continues. Amir will spend much of his life coming to terms with his
initial and subsequent acts of cowardice, and finally seek to make reparations.
Hosseini's depiction
of the cruelty children suffer at the hands of their "friends" will
break your heart. And his descriptions of Afghanistan both before and after the
war will haunt readers long after they've read the last page. The Kite
Runner is a stunning reminder that the dark hearts of adults are made,
step-by-step, by the hatred they learn as children, and that all it takes for
evil to triumph is for a good man to stand back and do nothing.
Their Eyes Are Watching God—Zora Neale
Hurston
This novel about a
proud, independent black woman was first published in 1937 and generally
dismissed by reviewers. It was out of print for nearly 30 years when the
University of Illinois Press reissued it in 1978, at which time it was
instantly embraced by the literary establishment as one of the greatest works
in the canon of African-American fiction.
Mesmerizing in its immediacy and
haunting in its subtlety, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story
of Janie Crawford—fair-skinned, long-haired, dreamy woman—who comes of age
expecting better treatment than what she gets from her three husbands and
community. Then she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who captivates Janie's heart
and spirit, and offers her the chance to relish life without being one man's mule
or another man's adornment
Green Grass, Running Water—Thomas King
When
Medicine River was published in 1990, the New York Times said of Thomas King,
"He knows his territory. His first novel is economical, precise, and
elegant." Now King returns with his totally fresh voice - carefully
controlled, yet without artifice - to present a complex web of character, myth,
folklore, and contemporary and universal experience. Green Grass, Running Water
is the story of five Blackfoot Indians in the town of Blossom and its nearby
reserve, whose very different lives nevertheless continually cross. Alberta, a
university professor who wants a child but not a marriage, is involved with two
men who seem to represent opposite possibilities: Charlie, a flashy lawyer, and
Lionel, a self-effacing TV salesman. Latisha, Lionel's sister, runs the Dead
Dog Cafe, a local hangout and tourist trap. And then there's Eli, who moved to
the city and its white man's establishment, never intending to look back to
Blossom or the reservation's ancient way of life. All the while, four old
Indians, escapees from a mental institution, drift mysteriously and hilariously
in and out of time, from the beginnings of the universe to its undecided
future. Wildly combining Native American and Western spiritual traditions in
the stories they tell, they attempt to recreate and reorder the world. And the
trickster Coyote follows along, wreaking havoc as he prowls through the novel. This
is a rich tale, weaving subtle, magical humor, revisionist history, muted
nostalgia, and sacred humanity into one bright, whole cloth.
Poisonwood Bible—Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible is the saga of the Price family, a rural
Georgia family wrestling with inner demons while living in the small African
village of Kilanga. It revolves around Nathan Price, an abusive southern
Baptist evangelical minister who forsakes his family on his quest to save the
souls of the natives. What begins as a church-sanctioned mission ends in a
dangerous battle of wills that separates the Price family forever. The action
is filtered primarily through Nathan's four daughters, à la As I Lay Dying,
with future-time flashbacks from the mother's point of view. It's through the
girls that we learn about Nathan's proclivity toward physical and mental abuse,
his lack of fear regarding growing political unrest, and his stubborn
insistence that the villagers be baptized in crocodile-infested waters. And
through their mother, Orleanna, we find out why Nathan lives with such a heavy
and hurtful God-fearing heart: In World War II his entire company died during
the Bataan Death March. Although Nathan was honorably discharged, survivor's
guilt led him to the jungles of Africa and did not permit him to retreat, no
matter what the cost. The price of this intractable attitude is disease, death,
and madness.
The
Namesake—Jumpha Lahari
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their
tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into
Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli
settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke
adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines
for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the
vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer
by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli
knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic
name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a
first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and
wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the
defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents,
but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define
ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon
elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply
felt novel of identity.
Life of Pi—Yann
Martell
Life of Pi is a masterful and utterly original novel that is at once the story of
a young castaway who faces immeasurable hardships on the high seas, and a
meditation on religion, faith, art and life that is as witty as it is profound.
Using the threads of all of our best stories, Yann Martel has woven a glorious
spiritual adventure that makes us question what it means to be alive, and to
believe.
Growing up in Pondicherry, India, Piscine
Molitor Patel -- known as Pi -- has a rich life. Bookish by nature, young Pi
acquires a broad knowledge of not only the great religious texts but of all
literature, and has a great curiosity about how the world works. His family
runs the local zoo, and he spends many of his days among goats, hippos, swans,
and bears, developing his own theories about the nature of animals and how
human nature conforms to it. Pi’s family life is quite happy, even though his
brother picks on him and his parents aren’t quite sure how to accept his
decision to simultaneously embrace and practice three religions -- Christianity,
Hinduism, and Islam.
But despite the lush and nurturing variety of Pi’s world, there are broad
political changes afoot in India, and when Pi is sixteen his parents decide
that the family needs to escape to a better life. Choosing to move to Canada,
they close the zoo, pack their belongings, and board a Japanese cargo ship
called the Tsimtsum. Travelling with them are many of their animals,
bound for zoos in North America. However, they have only just begun their
journey when the ship sinks, taking the dreams of the Patel family down with
it. Only Pi survives, cast adrift in a lifeboat with the unlikeliest of
travelling companions: a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a 450-pound Royal
Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
The Bluest Eye—Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel
written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is
the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America
whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who
prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people
will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the
nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Song of Solomon—Toni Morrison
Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes
in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a
roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the
snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as
another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman)
Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to
maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novel
is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the black experience in
America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family
saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is
also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art
of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of
human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch.
Plain Truth—Jodi Picoult
The discovery of a
dead infant in an Amish barn shakes Lancaster County to its core. But the
police investigation leads to a more shocking disclosure: circumstantial
evidence suggests that eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher, an unmarried Amish woman
believed to be the newborn's mother, took the child's life. When Ellie
Hathaway, a disillusioned big-city attorney, comes to Paradise, Pennsylvania,
to defend Katie, two cultures collide — and, for the first time in her
high-profile career, Ellie faces a system of justice very different from her
own. Delving deep inside the world of those who live "plain," Ellie
must find a way to reach Katie on her terms. And as she unravels a tangled
murder case, Ellie also looks deep within — to confront her own fears and desires
when a man from her past reenters her life.
The Red Passport—Katherine Shonk
The unpredictable,
poignant, and often comic stories that make up Katherine Shonk's The Red
Passport portray the tumult, hopes, and setbacks of natives and foreigners
alike in post-Communist Russia. Many of the Russians in these stories are
strangers in their own country, learning to navigate a new landscape of Dunkin'
Donuts franchises that flourish where consumer culture was so recently
anathema; where the fall of the Soviet Union has not brought peace or
prosperity; and where people still find a way to reach out for love, despite
often disastrous results. "My Mother's Garden" is a parable of broken
promises -- an old woman living near Chernobyl does not understand why she can't
eat those lovely, robust onions, better than any she's grown. "Our
American" tells the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who watches with
fascination and dread as his older brother, a veteran of the Chechen war,
pursues the American girl next door. "The Young People of Moscow"
describes an extraordinary day in the life of an aging couple selling Soviet
poetry in an underground bazaar. A former American expatriate returns to Russia
in "The Conversion" and, like a bull in a china shop, makes a mess of
things with a young Russian couple who had once been his friends. In her
crystalline stories, Shonk finds both the nub of her characters' disappointment
and the truth of their good intentions. Describing a place that is at once
exotic and disconcertingly familiar, The Red Passport is a moving and startling
book that doles out amazement and delight in equal measure.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress—Dai Sijie
The power of books -- to excite, to enlighten, to inspire -- serves as the theme of this engaging gem by Chinese-born filmmaker Dai Sijie. The tale takes place in China during the harsh days of the Cultural Revolution, when millions of young people were sent to the countryside for "reeducation." That is, they were charged with manual labor and steeped in Communist propaganda. The two teenage boys in Sijie's novel fail to escape this fate, but lonely and frightened as they are in the rural mountain village to which they've been exiled, they find themselves transformed when they uncover a forbidden treasure trove: a suitcase filled with Western literary classics. Hugo, Stendhal, Dumas, Flaubert, Dickens, and especially Balzac become the boys' secret companions, firing their imaginations and giving their lives new meaning. The books become the motivation and the sweet reward for everything they do: They lead them into danger but also help them out of scrapes. And the books also become the vehicle by which one of the boys, Luo, woos a beautiful seamstress who lives on the other side of the mountain. Ultimately, the secret books become the catalyst for Sijie's provocative and unexpected ending.
Ethan Frome—Edith Wharton
Set against the
bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome tells the story of a poor
farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting
Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this short novel's powerful and engrossing
drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated
book. In its unyielding and shocking pessimism, its bleak demonstration of
tragic waste, it is a masterpiece of psychological and emotional realism. In
her introduction the distinguished critic Elaine Showalter discusses the
background to the novel's composition and the reasons for its enduring success.
Winter in the Blood—James Welch
James Welch is
probably Montana’s foremost Native American writer, and this wonderful novella
is evidence of considerable talent. Published 30 years ago (1974), it takes
place in the shadow that was cast by the nations approaching bicentennial.
While neither bitter nor angry, it manages anyway to portray a country that has
little to show for itself but "greed and stupidity." The values it
embraces are finally those available to every American, native or otherwise -
compassion and respect for life and the living.
The story concerns a few days in the life of a 32-year-old man, descendant of Indians and living in two worlds, his mothers home on the reservation and the dreary bars and hotels of nearby Havre and Malta, Montana. His days and nights blending together in an alcoholic haze, he meets a deranged white man, picks up women and gets punched in the nose. Meanwhile, he is haunted by a past that includes the death of an older brother and an injury to his knee that multiple operations have not remedied. Out of these unpromising circumstances, Welch finds the beginnings of a kind of personal salvation. By reaching back through the memory of a blind old mans act of charity, he restores the younger mans vision of himself
The Ginger Tree—Oswald Wynd
The best-known work of the Japanese-born Scot Oswald Wynd (1918 -1998), in which a naïve 20-year-old Scots girl at the turn of the century sails to China to marry a military attaché in Peking … only to get mixed up with a handsome young Japanese aristocrat and horrify the British community. The novel, which was the basis for a popular Masterpiece Theatre miniseries, follows Mary MacKenzie's adventures with love and life in early 20th Century China and Japan.