Books
Latest Reviews are added at the bottom of this page.
Ama, by Manu Herbstein
Picador Africa, 2005. 374 pages.
To call Manu Herbstein’s Ama ambitious would be to belittle the fact that the author has, in many respects, succeeded in creating a grand narrative of the Atlantic slave trade that spans kingdoms, nations, and continents.
Read the full review here.
Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic.
Translated from the Bosnian by Stela Tomasevic.
Archipelago, 2004, 195 pages.
Sarajevo Marlboro is a phenomenal collection of short stories set in war time Bosnia. Delivered by a master storyteller, it is evident why this work won the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize upon publication. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) served as an enduring warning to war mongerers in its depiction of German soldiers in World War I. Jergovic’s work delves even more deeply into themes that touch us all, beyond a soundtrack of mortars and shell shock.
Click here for the full review.
Nonfiction, translated from the Dutch by Liz Walters
Grove Press, 2008. 296p.
A sign of a great author is the ability to represent the viewpoints of good guys and bad guys alike. A lesser author, the reasoning goes, would be unable to delve into the characters and would bring out a one-sided work. The journalist Lieve Joris is certainly of the first camp. The Rebels’ Hour painstakingly depicts general Assani, a troubled rebel leader from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo who leaves his life as a high plains cattle herder to become Vice President of a country the size of Western Europe.
Read the full review, here.
The Soccer War
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Translated from the Polish by William Brand
Vintage International, 1992
Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska
Knopf, 2007
This pair of books by the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski brims with the creativity and insight of great fiction. The Soccer War details the explorations of Poland’s sole reporter with a ‘third world’ beat, from African independence movements to Cold War flashpoints in Central America. Travels with Herodotus is Kapuscinski’s last work and is more of a meandering memoir about the shaping of a journalist who met dozens of world leaders and thrust himself into the middle of conflicts under the drudge of the pen.
Read the full review here.
Mafeking Road
by Herman Charles Bosman
Archipelago, 2008. 201 pages.
(First printed in 1947 by Herman & Rousseau)
For it is not the story that counts. What matters is the way you tell it. The important thing is to know just at what moment you must knock out your pipe on your veldskoen, and at what stage of the story you must start talking about the School Committee at Drogevlei. Another necessary thing is to know what part of the story to leave out… And you can never learn these things.
So begins “Mafeking Road”, the title story in a classic collection by the South African writer Herman Charles Bosman. The passage is at once a challenge to aspiring storytellers and a charming exposition of the author’s craft. It’s true, you can’t learn these things. Certainly not by imitation or force of will. But by reading Bosman you can get a whole lot closer. And you’ll do it laughing.
Read the full review here.
Twenty years after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa - an edict under Islamic law - against Salman Rushdie for publication of The Satanic Verses, the novel is being reevaluated. It continues to call into question issues of freedom of speech and the press. What is the role of a writer? Does freedom of speech trump the concerns of minorities?
The novel bears the honor of being the one of the most disparaged - and least read - books in modern history. The controversy began in Britain, when Muslims called for the suppression of the novel. After their complaints went unheeded, they arranged a very visible book burning ceremony. (The protesters only owned one copy, and the book needed gasoline to alight.) Media coverage fanned the flames of the conflagration and before long the book had been banned in eleven countries, including Rusdhie’s native India. Rushdie spent a decade in hiding from 1989 to 1998.
Read the full review here.
–Deji Olukotun
by
Michael Ondaatje
Picador, 1999, 311 pages.
The conflict in Sri Lanka rages on, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report, with over 2,000 civilians killed during the month of January 2009 alone. This calls for the exhumation of Michael Ondaatje’s 1999 novel Anil’s Ghost. Nearly a decade old, the book remains relevant and shines for its clear depiction of human rights issues. The disjointed writing is the only impediment that prevents the novel from being required reading for any serious human rights advocate.
Read the full review here here.
Inventing Human Rights
by Lynn Hunt. Non-fiction.
Norton, 2007. 272 pages.
Lynn Hunt’s book Inventing Human Rights has an ambitious objective, to chart the birth of human rights from the eighteenth century onwards. What distinguishes this text from others - and makes it important for us - is that Hunt explores cultural trends as well. Human rights did not emerge from a political vacuum, but were accompanied by new developments in the arts. The ability of novels to induce responses in their readers may well have helped abolish torture and create human rights as we know them today.
This book explains, in fine prose, why FictionthatMatters.org exists in the first place. Books can change the way we think — and the way we act.
Read the full review here.
A Drifting Life
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Drawn & Quarterly, 2009, 856 pages.
Anyone considering going to school in the fine arts should first read Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir A Drifting Life. This opus by a pioneer of the Japanese comic form manga is a masterclass in creativity and and the craft of storytelling. Written over ten years, the memoir traces Yoshihiro’s early development as a manga artist from the late 1940s to the late 60s.
This review picks up where my article about Tatsumi from the PEN World Voices Festival ended.
Taken together, A Drifting Life and The Push Man and Other Stories offer a rare window into the mind of a creative artist in his prime.
Shortcomings
by Adrian Tomine.
Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. 108 pages.
Adrian Tomine is not a bold new voice in comics. He has already arrived. He has met with success, drawing covers for The New Yorker and illustrations for Rolling Stone. He has also published the series Optic Nerve since he was in high school, and released two volumes of short stories. His longer narrative Shortcomings is a humorous culmination of meditations on race and relationships.
The story follows Ben Tenaka, a thirty-something Asian American who manages a movie theatre in Oakland. Ben’s relationship with his girlfriend Miko is on the rocks. He is cynical and complacent, and can’t control his temper. When Miko decides to fly to New York for an internship, Ben sifts through his troubles with the help of his friend Alice. Together they unearth disconcerting truths about Miko and discover that Ben’s problems are of his own making.
Shortcomings is a book full of awkward moments that are so rarely captured in other media, but which permeate our lives. Hesitation, hurt feelings, confusion, pauses to read body language — Tomine captures all of it in his comics with both wit and sensitivity. This makes his characters live and breathe on the page.
While Tomine has already arrived, he is on the crest of a new wave of creative artists called the Brooklyn School.
Click here to read the full review.
The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders
by Emmanuel Guibert (drawings), Didier Lefèvre (photographs), Frédéric Lemercier (layout / design)
Translated from the French by Alexis Siegel
FirstSecond Books, 2009. 267 pages.
After reading The Photographer you will want to become one of two things: (1) a doctor; or (2) a pacifist. You will not, in all likelihood, wish to become a photographer.
The Photographer chronicles the harrowing journey of a photojournalist who accompanies a group of doctors into Afghanistan. It is the mid-1980s, and the Soviet Union is engaged in a protracted war against Afghani resistance fighters in a hot zone of the Cold War. The U.S. is covertly funding the mujahideen to weaken the Soviet Union’s military. Humanitarian missions can only travel at their own risk.
Doctors Without Borders — then relatively unknown in the U.S. — hires photographer Didier Lefèvre to document the organization’s mission to establish field hospitals in the remote hamlets of Teshkan and Yeftal. To succeed, they must climb mountain passes teeming with wolves, hike through valleys controlled by drug runners, and navigate the fractious politics of Wahhabi fundamentalists. Somehow Lefèvre survives, and leaves yearning to do it all over again.
In the Afghanistan of the 1980s, if your horse collapses, you leave it to whinny in the canyons. Your body can be mutilated by shrapnel at any moment, and army helicopters buzz like raptors, ready to strafe your caravan with bullets. Survival is the ultimate goal in a climate that can stretch from 120 degrees Fahrenheit to raging snow storms.
Notes for a War Story
by Gipi
Translated from the Italian by Spectrum
First Second Books, 2007. 125 pages.
This gripping coming-of-age graphic novel warns us that the experience of mass trauma can erupt anywhere, anytime. The cause of this war isn’t revenge, however, it’s patriotism with its attendant voraciousness. And you don’t know how you’ll act until it happens to you.
Notes for a War Story follows three teenage boys through a fictional war torn country that looks and sounds a lot like Italy.
San Donato. San Giuliano. San Martino. Where we’re from, all the villages had saints’ names. When they bombed a village it felt like they had really hurt somebody. Not a village but a town, an individual person.
Giuliano is a runaway from a middle class family who joins up with two street kids, Christian and Little Killer. Together they scratch out a simple existence in bombed out buildings until they meet the gang lord Felix. Felix is a local tough who peddles illegal goods on the black market (we never learn what the mysterious items are.) The allure of easy money draws the boys deeper and deeper into Felix’s schemes. Soon the three friends must pit themselves against the Russian mafia, and eventually, the guns of war.
Read the full review here.
