Category: Modern Fiction

The Leavers

By Lisa Ko

Published 2017

Read Dec 2018

The author tells her story through the voices of the two major characters via a number of flash-backs and flash-forwards. 

Deming Guo is 6 when his mother, Polly, disappears mysteriously.  His sections tells his perception of the story:  his last day with his mother; living in the Bronx with Polly, his boyfriend Leon, his sister Vivian and Vivian’s son Michael;  early days with adoptive parents Peter and Kay Wilkerson; and present time (age 22) as he struggles to gain a footing in the music scene with high school friend Roland after he has dropped out of college.  Deming is renamed Daniel Wilkerson when he is adopted and moved to a small town six hours from New York City.  He is continually conflicted about his feelings towards his American parents while missing his Chinese mother and especially by not knowing why she left.  He can’t follow, with conviction, Kay and Peter’s preferred path for him to be a college graduate although he makes some stumbling steps along that road.  Deming/Daniel is contacted by his boyhood friend, Michael, and he slowly and painfully finds a path to his mother, now in China, while wrestling with his feelings for Kay and Peter and while wandering into his future.  

Polly’s sections are written as though she is talking to Deming.  Through her voice we learn that Peilan Guo was born and raised in a small village outside Fuzhou, China.  She left her village as a teenager to work in the city of Fuzhou.  A boyfriend from the village eventually went there as well and Peilan became pregnant.  To avoid marriage she left, with financing from a money lender, and entered New York City illegally.  She lived in Chinatown in a makeshift dormitory with other Chinese immigrants seeking to pay-off their debt to a moneylender.  After the baby was born, she eventually turned to a common practice for immigrants from China and sent her son to China to be raised by his grandfather until he is was ready for school.  Deming returned to Polly in Chinatown when he was five and his grandfather died. After Polly met Leon, another undocumented Chinese, she and Deming left their dormitory in Chinatown to live in the Bronx with him, his sister, Vivian, and her son, Michael.   Polly wanted to leave NYC to go to a job in Orlando, Florida but both Leon and Deming object.  Near the end of the novel we learn from Polly what happened the day she disappeared and how she accidentally became so completely separated from her son.

 Through this engaging story Ko exposes us to some reasons why people are willing to risk much to enter the US, what they are willing to endure to stay here, and the consequences they face when things go wrong.   The picture she paints of Peter and Kay is somewhat unflattering, but it does cause the reader to consider the child involved in a foster care turned adoption situation and the special issues associated with cross-cultural adoptions.  Deming/Daniel and Polly’s stories come to some resolution by the end of the novel but their next steps remain somewhat ambiguous which was appreciated by this reader.    Ko offers much for discussion and the book should be a welcomed addition to a book discussion group. 

The Vegetarian

By Han Yang

Published in Korean 2007

Translated by Deborah Smith

Published in English 2015

Read Dec 2018

I thought that my first experience with Han Yang (and also translated by Deborah Smith), Human Acts, would prepare me for Yang’s unusual choice of topics and feeling seared by her treatment of it.  Not so.

 The Vegetarian  is composed of three parts, each part from a different person’s perspective and with their voice.   In the first, Yeong-hye’s husband, self-described as always taking the “middle course in life”, describes his life with his seemingly bland wife and its disruption when she decides to become a vegetarian.  “I had a dream” is her only response to his question “why?” We are introduced to her sister and brother-in-law and to her parents who are all mystified by her behavior.  Her father strikes her and tries to force her to eat meat.  He fails and she hurts herself and ends up hospitalized.  Throughout this section, the Yeong-hye’s husband only considers his wife’s change as an inconvenience to himself.  He initially is dismissive and, after she apparently tells him about the dream that caused her to become a vegetarian, he doesn’t want to hear more from her about her dreams which are clearly becoming more consuming and difficult for her.

The second part is told by the brother-in-law about his extraordinary interactions with Yeong-hye after she has been released from a hospital and after her husband has divorced her.  This male relative also is focused on himself and his unusual desire to create a film with her in it with little regard for Yeong-hye.   His final encounter with Yeong-hye causes her to be hospitalized again and precipitates the end of his marriage.

 The third part is told by Yeong-hye’s sister who is trying to help her while she is a patient in a mental hospital and falling farther into an unreachable state.  The sister is devoted to Yeong-hye, visiting her monthly and then weekly after Yeong-hye had disappeared into the woods during an unsupervised walk.  It was “a miracle” she had been found as she was standing so still and silently while the rained poured down on her.  The sister has a dream herself in which Yeong-hye communicates she is becoming a tree.  Only the sister is self-reflective and reveals she is trying to understand her sister.  She recalls their childhood and changes in Yeong-hye which she hadn’t previously noticed.  She tries to understand her own motivations for marrying her husband, who, she considers, never really loved her and who has also been as quiet as Yeong-hye had become.  She blames herself for not understanding earlier that Yeong-hye was fully withdrawing into herself.  She tries to continue managing her business, be a (now) single mother, and stave off the consequences of insomnia she herself is experiencing now.  When Yeong-hye is admitted to the latest hospital, “the reason she gave the doctor, was this worry about a possible relapse.” Yeong-hye stops eating completely, and tells her sister she is becoming a tree and only needs water; she asks her sister “Why, is it a bad thing to die?”.   The sister realizes “Now she was able to admit to herself  what had really been going on.  She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminds her of.  She been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner.  And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.”

Yang leaves us many questions including:  Why did Yeong-hye marry her husband?  What are Yeong-hye’s dreams about and why did they start? What role does Yeong-hye’s father play in her slow then quickening descent? Her husband?  Why are food and clothing the things Yeong-hye avoids?   Why is Yeong-hye’s husband the only one of the three narrators who isn’t impacted by her mental state/breakdown?  Why are Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law and sister so impacted by her situation and what will become of them? Will the sister be able to hang on for the sake of her child at least or will she cross the boundary Yeong-hye (and her husband?) had?  

What is Han Yang trying to tell us about mental health issues—about “the patient”, about those who love them, about those who are charged with caring for them? What is it that keeps any of us from slipping across that boundary?   I anticipate much discussion will spring from these and other questions.    Yang forces us to face questions regarding mental health and provides us no answers. Likely because there are no simple answers but avoiding the questions isn’t the answer either.

 

There, There

By Tommy Orange

Published 2017

Read Nov 2018

This debut novel is really quite impressive.  Orange opens the book with a Prologue that gets and keeps your attention.  It is a powerful indictment of the White Man for his intended impact on the Native population.   I use the word intended here because it’s hard not to when the US uses the term “Indian Termination Policy” to describe its policy regarding Native Americans in the 1940s through mid-1960s.  A “positive” attribute of the policy was to grant Native Americans the rights and privileges associated with US citizenship (something denied anyone with more than 50% Native blood since the 1600’s).  But it also meant that the US ended its recognition of the sovereignty of tribes.  The intent was that Native Americans abandon their traditional lives, become civilized, and just plain assimilate.    In the Prologue and Interlude later in the book Orange writes a number of short essays informing the reader of facts and figures that are difficult to digest and to which you want to hide.  We also learn that Urban Native is a term describing Natives that have been born in urban environments vs those that were moved there or moved there themselves.

This book is about 13 characters who live in Oakland, CA, whose varied paths take them to the Big Oakland Powwow, and what happens to them at that fictional event.  The characters are rather diverse.  Single mothers; offspring of single mothers with various degrees of problems; offspring of two parent households with a variety of issues; a daughter of two Natives who is given up for adoption and raised White while knowing she isn’t; offspring from one Native and one White parent; offspring of wholly Native or part-Native who have some connection with some of their Native customs; offspring of wholly Native or part-Natives whose parents or grandparents have suppressed their connection to their Native background; significant others of Natives.  Some of the characters are family members.  Some of the characters meet through their involvement in planning the Big Oakland Powwow.  Some of the characters know each other through drug dealing or using.  There are many interesting characters with a range of connections and a range of experiences.

Each chapter is titled for a character and is told by or tells about that specific character and some part of the overall plot.  Each character has at least one and usually several chapters titled for them but many appear in other chapters as well.   The point of view in these character titled chapters is not constant.  For instance Tony Loneman’s first chapter is in in first person but a later Tony Loneman chapter is in future tense told by a third person.  One chapter has a long email written by the title person to his brother, another significant character who never has his own titled chapter.   The language is straightforward and it’s clear who the chapter is discussing and what is happening in that chapter.  What takes a bit of work understanding  the various connections between characters and the interleaving circumstances.  I eventually succumbed to re-reading and taking notes to which I could refer to more fully tease out  he various characters’ situations and  interleaving story lines that all press them towards the day of the Big Oakland Powwow.

So this is a book with a simple structure that is actually a fairly complex product which is about complex characters that represent a very complex situation of Urban Natives which is but one type of Natives in this very complex and complicated county that has always dealt poorly with how to interact with people of different blood (even when everyone is “All White”).

This book demands you work at reading it and listening to the many kinds of things it is sharing with you.  It is well worth all the energy required to take it in. You will be changed.

Pachinko

By Min Jin Lee

Published 2017

Read Oct 2017

Lee gives us an engaging saga of a family and their friends over several generations and about 80 years.  The setting being Korea and Japan provides an opportunity to learn about the challenges faced by working class families in this area of the world during this period of dramatic change.

Pachinko is a gambling game in Japan found in Pachinko parlors which are run nearly exclusively by Koreans.  We don’t start learning about Pachinko until about half way through into this novel that follows an extended Korean family.  We slowly learn that Koreans in Japan have very few opportunities for rising above a poverty or poor working class level.  Pachinko is a primary path for actually running a business and developing some wealth.  Through this book we learn or are reminded that Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and lost it through WWII.  A new learning for me was that Japan has maintained a policy that Koreans can never attain Japanese citizenship, even if they are the second or third or more generation born in Japan.    Further, social standing for an entire family, even among Japanese, can be lost through a shameful act by a family member, making it impossible for them to marry well or find good employment.

Lee slowly reels out the story of the various family members and their friends and how they deal with the limited options available to fishing village working class Koreans in Korea and Koreans in general in Japan.   For much of the story, the strength, daily hard labor, and resourcefulness of women members of the family (the widowed mother, her daughter and her daughter’s sister-in-law) are essential to the families’ survival.  The story shifts to the daughter’s sons and their families and friends and how they make their way through life as non-citizens of Japan and having no real country that’s theirs.   The sons rise above the manual labor lives of their parents through education for one son and through hard work in a business setting for the other son.  Both end up working in the Pachinko business but from totally different paths.  A grandson seems to have an a chance at breaking out of the confined opportunities for Koreans with a US based education and a US born girlfriend but in the end finds himself limited by his Korean background.

Lee uses a universal narrator approach so we are told the thoughts and feelings of the character being discussed at the time.  This is effective in telling us what the author wants us to know but seems a weakness at the same time as Lee leaves us little to figure out for ourselves about the characters.   The dialog and some responses to challenges seemed a little “modern” and “western” to me at times.

However, Lee does help readers in the USA appreciate the precious treasure of a policy that confers citizenship to all those born here and that this is not a world-wide policy.   She directly reveals the unfair challenges of being a non-citizen in Japan if you descend from Koreans even if your family has been there literally for generations.  She also expands our consideration, though not directly, of the plight of other peoples who aren’t considered citizens of a particular country, defined by current political borders, either because they have migrated to it, usually driven by man-made reasons for fleeing their native country, or because they aren’t members of the ethnic (defined by bloodline, race, region, etc) majority of the current political country.  She quietly provides us the opportunity to think about how groups treat other groups that are different, how hard and fast that line of differentiation can remain,  and the resulting human barriers raised against being simply human.

Sycamore

By Bryn Chancellor

Published 2017

Read July 2018

Jess is a newcomer to a small town in Arizona, moving there with her newly divorced mother from Phoenix.  They are both processing, in private, their loss of father/husband after he chose a younger woman and baby daughter issuing from that relationship instead of them.

Laura Drenna is a newcomer to the same small town in 2009, 18 years after Jess goes missing.  She too is mourning the loss of her husband to another woman.  While on one of her many walks to forget and think she finds the skeleton in a crevice.  Is this the remains of Jess who went missing 18 years earlier?

Chancellor spins her story via two parallel paths.

One part of the weave is Jess’s story in in 1991—her loneliness as a new high school girl from the “big city” in a small town she didn’t choose, making one good friend who drops her for unknown reasons, making a second good friend, and beginning to find her way… for awhile…    This story line is fairly straightforward and progresses through the year ending with the night she goes missing.  The interesting element of this storyline is that the reader learns about what’s happening to Jess during the year and that final night, but the other characters are privy to very little of her life or thoughts and are not at all aware of what happens the final night of her life.

The other part of the weave consists of individual chapters focused on each of a dozen characters who play some role in Jess’s life including her mother, several friends, a couple of adults, and Laura who finds her.  These chapters often includes their perspectives of the happenings in 1991 as well as revealing more about the character either before or since Jess goes missing or both.  The form of each chapter is different.  The chapter about the father of the friend is a letter he writes.  The chapter about the mother of the friend, a professor of theater at the local college, is provided in the form of a script of a play.  Through this set of chapters, an overall picture of the backdrop of Jess’s story in 1991 and what happens to these characters thereafter slowly evolves.

Chancellor’s approach provides an interesting approach to consideration of a not uncommon situation:  an act by one causes pain to others, sometimes resulting in long-lasting damage that may never be undone.

Anything is Possible

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2017

Read June 2018

I keep reading Elizabeth Strout for the same reason her other readers do.  She provides us characters who have survived difficult to dreadful family situations as children or as adults and who become or remain real people who are living real lives and trying to make the best of it. She writes beautifully.  We believe her characters could be real—people really go through these trials and people really survive them although usually not fully intact—which is true for her characters.

Strout enjoys the format of short stories that have some connection with each other and through those connections we more deeply learn about the various characters she’s chosen to consider in this particular work without being told too directly.  Her previous novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, touched on some of these characters (she didn’t need to do this and in some ways the “gossip” the mother conveys about these characters is almost distracting in that book) and her readers aren’t surprised this novel follows so she can more deeply consider their stories.   Strout directly brings Lucy Barton back to her home town for one of the stories of this book while exploring more about her siblings and neighbors in other stories.

Strout’s stories are heavy.  Her characters are sad and struggling.  But we read them because they are well written and her characters are believable.  Strout gives us a little relief in the final story in which one “mature” (over 60) character strongly confronts another “mature” character.  In the final sentence of the story we do believe Strout’s character when he decides” Anything was possible for anyone.”

Nora Webster

By Colm Toibin

Published 2014

Read Feb 2018

This is a book about nearly nothing.  There is no major drama, no significant reckoning, no birth nor death happens during the course of the story.  It’s about nothing except a 44 year old woman who lost her husband of 20 years through a painful but not wholly revealed disease and who now has to figure out how to preserve her private self in a very small town where everyone knows much (too) about everyone else.  Her two daughters are in college and boarding school, both paid for by their aunt and uncle.  Her two sons, approximately 9 and 12, have returned home after spending several months with their widowed aunt while their mother focused on her dying husband.

Nora resents the smallness of the village.   She looks forward to the time when the residents stop coming by to offer her comfort for her loss.  She really just wants to be left alone.  She even considers leaving but economics don’t favor it  She’s challenged by needing to find employment as the Widow’s Pension is very small and she and her teacher husband had no savings.  She abruptly sells their summer cottage without consulting with or regard for any of her family to create some cash flow, and perhaps to seal off that part of their life, to a neighbor’s relative who now lives abroad but always wanted a coastal cottage.  Nora succumbs to a stern local nun’s urging to seek employment with her former employer, the rich factory owner in the small town.  She dreads returning to work there as her boss will be someone with whom she was a co-worker 20 years ago (whom she offended then and never liked) and because it will be returning to an existence that she had so happily escaped when she married Maurice.  She mourns her husband—his ability to engage in lively conversations while she enjoyed being in the background of those social engagements, and his deep love for being with her.  She also mourns that gone will be the freedom she had as a homemaker to define how she spent her day.

Our current views of parenthood can lead us to think she is not a very good parent.  She decides the boys can manage on their own after school for a few hours before she escapes the office at the factory.  When she had left the boys in the care of her aunt while she tended her sick husband, she never interacted with them at all during these months.  The older boy returned with a stutter and the younger boy started bed wetting but she has little demonstrated concern, expecting that these things will work themselves out.  She realizes she knows little of what they think or feel but makes no real effort to change this. She does however clearly care about them.  She takes them out of school for a day to go to Dublin where they can see their sister among other adventures.  She fights strongly for the younger boy to be returned to the “A” classroom when he’s moved to the “B” classroom.  She allows them to stay up late to watch movies with her—Gaslight and Lost Horizon—although she realizes evenutlaly that they could be disturbing to them.

We start having some sense of the time of the novel when Nora’s Widows Pension is increased and her sister becomes politically involved in what became known as The Troubles.  My quest for understanding more about the context of the novel led me to do a limited amount of research about Irish politics which helped establish the timing of the novel in the late 1960’s.  Knowing the timing helped reset my view of Nora’s world a bit.   I no longer expected Maurice to be treated with potent pain killers.  I no longer expected Nora to be anything close to a “helicopter” mother.  I had more compassion for Nora’s sorrow at having to return to a workplace where women workers were single—either before they married, were unmarriageable for some reason, or like herself, forced back into the workplace due to widowhood.  I developed much more compassion for Nora’s struggles in trying to find some kind of bearable life in the face of being a widow of limited means and while being an intensely private person, not understood well by her family nor understanding of her family members either. The good news for Nora is that she achieves a bit beyond that.  She creates a space to enjoy in her home and she fills it with music she is discovering with the help of others.

Apparently Toibin’s mother was widowed when he was about 12 and he grew up in a home where there was a “great deal of silence”.  Nora Webster may be somewhat modelled upon his mother and the stammering son upon him.  If this is the case I find the novel even more interesting.  He provides an extraordinarily non-judgmental view of Nora Webster.  She is cool but not icy or abusive.  She is appropriately frugal but generous when it matters for her children or herself.  She has strength but she’s only slowly discovering that to be the case.  She is an extremely private person and generally closed off to others, but she’s slowly discovering that she can choose to have connections with people beyond Maurice and it might be worth the effort.  She’s pragmatic about her situation and she is finding a way to make that situation an interesting one for herself.    While Nora Webster is not a character for whom you readily feel any warmth, when the novel ended I continued thinking about her and eventually decided that the feeling I have for her is respect.

American War:  A Novel

by Omar El Akkad

Published 2017

Read March 2017

This is a remarkable book.  I am having great difficulty separating myself from it to return it to the library although I most certainly want others to read it and be impacted by it as well.  This, however, is not a pleasant nor easy book.  It is frankly disturbing on a number of levels.  On one level, the story of the Chestnuts of Louisiana could become a successful 2 hour movie but if it is actually filmed, I hope it is in a long series so that the viewer can experience what the reader will experience—the other levels that Akkad explores in an engaging and powerful way that will leave you unsettled and, hopefully, thinking.

The book starts with a Prologue, written by an unidentified narrator who indicates he was born in Georgia but was transplanted to Alaska as a child and has spent his professional life as an academic.  He has studied many historical documents and has published about the Second American Civil War, including an account of the “infamous events of Reunification Day, when one of the South’s last remaining rebels managed to sneak into the Union capital and unleash the sickness that cast the country into a decade of death.  It is estimated that eleven million people died in the war, and almost ten times that number in the in the plague that followed.”  The narrator indicates he is now dying from cancer and is taking this time to “say what needs to be said”.  He refers to a mysterious “she” who he still loves.  He reveals the story he will provide isn’t about war, but rather about ruin.

Akkad tells the story of Sarat Chestnut in four sections:  Part I April 2075 in Louisiana; Part II July 2081 Iuka, Mississippi; Part III October, 2086 Lincolnton, GA; Part IV 2095 Lincolnton, GA.  Interspersed between and within these sections Akkad provides excerpts from various historical documents, books, and speeches that the narrator has used in his research.  These provide various kinds of views about the history of the war and the people who drove it.  They provide an interesting sort of context for Sarat’s story.  Sections I-III are told through a narrator in third person.     Section IV is told in first person by the narrator we met in the Prologue, as he is in this section but not the earlier ones.

We meet Sarat when she is 6 in April 2075, about 18 months after the assignation of the President of the United States of America by a suicide bomber, now a famous martyr, and about 6 months after the Declaration of Independence by the MAG (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama), fueled in part by opposition to a law banning the use of fossil fuels.  We also learn that by 2075, climate and political forces discussed in 2018 have had substantial impact by 2075.  The geography of the United States has been vastly altered including the coasts having been substantially reduced (including the complete loss of Florida) driving immigrants from the coasts to the center of the country and the requiring relocation of the US capital from Washington, DC to Columbus, Ohio.  The scorched and parched southwest, including much of Texas, has been given over to Mexico.  Civil and inter-country wars in the Middle East have given way to a new Bouazzi Empire which, in conjunction with China, is sending aid to the MAG.   South Carolina isn’t part of the MAG primarily because a biological agent unleashed on it earlier has resulted in the need for a wall to keep it forever quarantined from the rest of the country.   In the opening chapters, Sarat loses her father as collateral damage in a guerrilla attack as he is seeking a work permit to go north and secure employment that will allow him to take his family north to a better life than they currently have.  The Chestnut family and their neighbors feel substantial pressure to leave the area as fighting just west of them is expected to envelop them soon.  The Chestnut family is allowed, although they are in a “blue/purple state” , and for substantial cost, to go to a refugee camp on the border of Mississippi and Tennessee.

In the subsequent sections we learn about Sarat at various time points in her life:  as a refugee in the camp that was the destination at the end of Section I, as a product of radicalization/recruitment by Albert Gaines, as a detainee following arrest for actions she undertakes for the war effort, and after release from this detention camp.  I won’t give away further aspects of the plot.

While reading the book, I pondered what life was like for other people in the United States and in the MAG at that time.  Since the book focuses on Sarat, we are limited in our understanding of these questions to what Sarat personally experiences.  This is an interesting aspect of the book.  As I write there are presently people who were born in a refugee camp, or fled one with their family at a very young age, and who are growing up in a refugee camp and have little or no idea of what life is like for anyone not in a refugee camp.  They have limited or filtered information about those on either side of the conflict that has driven them to be in the refugee camp and have unclear prospects for where or how they might live in the future.

I became aware that this book provokes the realization that our understanding of what war is really like for those living in the presence of war, whether in a refugee camp, in the cross-fire of the front, or in a rubble left after the fighting has moved on, is close to non-existent.

But the author provokes even more—why do we fight in wars?  Gaines tells Sarat “I sided with the Red because when a Southern tells you what they’re fighting for—be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness—can’t call it a lie.  When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather.  I’d had enough of all that.  You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind.  Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind.”  I was confronted by the reason Sarat’s driver, working for a coordinator of a group of Southern rebel groups, had for joining:  “I just wanted to be something.”  His desperation for meaning in his life is haunting, especially since he didn’t have much interest in the “cause” at all.  I wondered how many “recruits” have joined rebel groups, “terrorist” groups, or even the “official” military for this reason (whether living in a refugee camp, in an occupied territory, or even in “regular society”).  Sarat’s reason for her actions evolves over time and eventually echoes a reason for continuous conflict over the eons of human existence:  vengeance for wrong done to one’s family by others.

The author continues to keep us uncomfortable throughout the book.   Sarat’s story is very difficult to read at times.  We are reading about the United States of America being in the state of civil war—a situation that currently only happens “over there”.   But most of all, the author effectively holds a mirror up to the USA regarding the role it’s played in civil wars elsewhere.

Read this book to be uncomfortable.  Read this book to begin to confront what you know and think about war.  Read this book to begin to comprehend the drivers for desperate acts we brand “terrorist”.   Read this book and pass it on to others and talk about it and how it makes us feel.

 

All the Light We Cannot See

By Anthony Doerr

Published 2014

Read Jan 2018

This wildly successful book (100 weeks on the NY Times Bestseller List, Pulitzer Prize) is a somewhat puzzling book, evoking a range of disparate reactions from readers and reviewers.  I was compelled to read the book as part of my book club’s 2017-2018 season.  We waited for the clamor for the library copies to die down a bit and then launched into it.

The author provides three primary characters:  Marie-Laure LeBlanc, the only daughter of the widowed keeper of keys at the Museum of Natural History in Paris and who goes blind at age six; Werner Pfenning, an orphan who lives with his sister, Jutta, at an orphanage in Germany and exhibits great aptitude for engineering and building and repairing radios;  Von Rumpel, a German officer assigned to seek and obtain French treasures for the Reich.   The stories remain generally distinct until late in the novel.

The author tells the parallel stories of two children growing up in very different homes in very different circumstances.

Marie-Laure is well loved and protected by her widowed father and a frequent and charming figure at the museum demonstrating great appreciation for the natural science on display at the museum.  Her father provides her Braille versions of books including Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea which stimulates her curiosity of the sea. He also makes a miniature version of the neighborhood to teach her how to navigate her surroundings.  Once Paris’s invasion is certain, Marie-Laure’s father is asked to transport a diamond of great value, The Sea of Flames, or one of three fakes made of it (he doesn’t know which he has).  The destination of father and daughter is in flames when they arrive so they are forced to continue to his brother’s home in St Malo on the sea.  The father builds another miniature of their new neighborhood for his daughter and is then summoned back to the museum.  Unfortunately he is arrested and never returns, although the pair somehow exchanges a few letters over time. Marie-Laure draws her uncle out of his shell a bit (he’s still suffering from shell-shock from the Great War) and enjoys a warm relationship with the housekeeper.

Werner and his sister are housed at an orphanage.  They find a broken wireless set which Werner repairs and they secretly listen to broadcasts at night including one from a French professor who discusses science.   Unfortunately Werner faces a life in the mines once he grows up so he jumps at the opportunity to compete for a place at the National Polital Institutes of Education in Essen.  He wins a spot and takes it despite his sister’s objections.  He attends the school and withstands the physical and emotional ordeal of the education, including the wounding of his friend, Frederick, after he refuses to participate in a brutal tradition.  At age 16 he is told that he is now 18 and begins conscription — seeking radio transmissions by enemy supporters starting in Russia.

Marie-Laure’s housekeeper forms a resistance effort and her uncle agrees to transmit information using his radio in the attic.  Thus the connection between Marie-Laure and Werner is made—-Werner discovers the transmissions and recognizes The Professor from his youth.  Von Rumpel’s story focuses on his attempt to find the Sea of Fire diamond.  The three stories eventually collide as St Malo is bombed in Aug 1944.

The author chooses a short to very-short chapter approach to keep us turning the pages to learn what happens next to the primary characters.  The short chapter approach is generally effective.  By usually revolving amongst the main characters and delivering short bursts of information, the author creates and seeks to maintain our engagement to see the story through.  The lush language sometimes got in the way for this reader who sometimes found the book dragging on a bit. The author also chooses a flash-forward, flash-back format to tell the story.   This choice is tolerable but not necessarily needed except that the form is perhaps expected in a novel written today.

The characters are variably engaging for this reader.  Werner’s story, aside from the precociousness of his sisters’ warning, is very compelling.  Werner’s expected fate is working in the mines which he truly wants to avoid; the special school seems his only route to education and stimulation of his engineering brain.  While he does learn and is put to work using his special talents, he, along with all of the other boys, suffers from a brutalization of the soul and the horrors of the German Reich as part (focus?) of their education. The character feels very real, genuinely engages, and for whom this reader feels much compassion.  The general demise of health and heart Werner experiences as he does his job to track down transmissions of the Resistance is well drawn and very believable as is his basically criminal reaction to the transmission he discovers in St Malo (which he doesn’t report).  We see his mind and body broken and cheer his small resistance and hope he can survive.

Von Rumpel is on a relentless mission to find the diamond for the glory of the Reich and which he hopes will somehow safe him from the cancer that is eating his body.  The device of the exotic diamond seemed a bit strained—was it really needed?  I would have been more engaged with Marie-Laure’s father carrying a valuable document to further then Resistance and Von Rumpel seeking to find that document.     Perhaps this device is to show that wars include those driven more by greed than policy.

This reader found the character of Marie-Laure to be the flattest.  She is blind but is beloved and cared for and seems to be in a bubble separate from the rest of reality.  The reason the author chose to make the character blind is not clear to me.  A non-blind 16-year old girl would have also been in distress at the climax and the interactions between her and Werner likely similar. While there would be no need for the miniature neighborhood to teach her bearings, the relationship with the father could have been as strong and a puzzle hiding place for the diamond still a possibility.

I understand the appeal of this book.  Despite my criticisms I agree it is a good book that highlights the kind of destruction that war can bring to property, body, and soul.

Exit West

By Mohsin Hamid

Published 2017

Read Jan 2018

Hamid’s use of language is remarkable.  He catches your breath nearly immediately: “It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class….but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.” His language is deceptively simple but charged with much food for thought.  In Chapter 1 we meet Saeed and Nadia, two young people in an unnamed city, as they meet and begin a relationship as their city is about to fall apart completely and the lives of all its inhabitants forever changed.

Saeed and Nadia are likely both Muslim, but only Saeed regularly prays.  Nadia does, however, wear a concealing long black robe.  When asked why, she responds “So men don’t fuck with me.”  We learn Nadia has left her family’s home and lives alone in a small apartment which she ferociously loves.  The robe helps her maintain a distance from others that is important to enabling her to live the life she wants.  Saeed lives with his parents.  His father takes his prayers fairly seriously and honored his son’s request to attend prayers with the other men at a fairly young age.  Saeed’s mother prays some but not with the same devotion as her husband. Saeed’s religion likely was a driver for his decision not to have sex with Nadia until they were married, surprising and somewhat annoying Nadia, although she accepted his position.  They found ways to be intimate within that constraint and as the city continues to fill with refugees and become less safe for all.

In short time, the war intensifies, internet and cell phone connectivity are cut off, and Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet.  Nadia stays at Saeed’s house the night of the funeral, to offer comfort and help, but never returns to her own apartment.  The young people begin investigating “the doors” they are hearing about and arrange passage for the three of them—Nadia, Saeed, and his father.  They hope their down payment isn’t just a scam.  When it’s clear they will be leaving, Saeed’s father refuses to go saying “Your mother is here.” With great discomfort Saeed agrees to leave without him.  Saeed’s father requests Nadia see Saeed through to safety and indicates he hopes that one day she will be the mother of his grandchildren.

We expect the next part of the novel to be the story of their struggle through various places on their way to someplace like Sweden.  It begins that way.  Saeed and Nadia are first in Mykonos and we experience their dislocation and struggle to find food and other essentials while their savings dwindle.

But the next “door” for which they pay passage drops them into a bedroom in a mansion in Kensington Gardens section of London.  Many of the currently un- or under-occupied mansions in the area (second or third homes for their owners) have doorways that have somehow opened up to thousands of immigrants.  New challenges abound for the “natives” vs “immigrants”.

With a stroke of the pen, Moshin Hamid creates a new set of questions about immigration and some new possibilities.

What if immigrants can cross boundaries through a simple “door”.  How do you protect your property?  How do you make the immigrants leave? Will you kill them if necessary?

While Saeed and Nadia are in London, electricity and water are shut off to the “immigrant community” in the toney Kennigston Garden section in an attempt to drive them out of rooms in which they “squat”.  War between the groups is poised to occur.  Saeed and Nadia realize they’ve left one war-torn city for another city about to become completely war-torn as well.  Fortunately that doesn’t happen: “Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done.  Or perhaps the sheer number of places where there were now doors had made it useless to fight in any one.”

So Hamid opens more questions:  What if the Atlantic and Pacific oceans don’t protect the USA from throngs of immigrants crowding through doors they hear about.  What if a wall isn’t enough to stop them?  What if you can’t stop them coming?

How do you allocate food?  How do you provide work?  How do you create basic infrastructure to provide water, sewers, and light to thousands of new people willing to work for their keep and simply seeking a better life than the one they’ve left behind.

Nadia and Saeed end up in Marin, CA.  They have a shanty with a corrugated metal roof and discarded packing crate sides.  They acquire a solar panel and battery set with a universal outlet and with the strong wireless signal everywhere they have connection needed in the modern world.  There were few natives in Marin, CA but then the concept of “nativeness” turns out to be relative as many others considered themselves to be native (although they clearly were descended from immigrants).

And why were people migrating in such vast numbers?  The reasons are likely due to calamity created by mankind:  war, famine due to climate change, war, rising waters flooding islands and coastline, war, war, war.  So many on the move for many reasons, with limited likelihood they would return “home”.

And who do you try to connect with when you are among the immigrants—people like you?  In what respect?  Color? Language? Religion? What matters now?

Hamid’s short novel (229 pages) fills the reader with these questions and many more.  He doesn’t provide us with answers but he did leave this reader with a sense of hope.  He provides Saeed and Nadia a graceful end to their relationship.  He shows us the building of communities by and for new settlers to areas once “owned” by the “natives”.  He shows us the city Saeed and Nadia left rebuilt and filled with young people that know only of the war they experienced through their history lessons.  He shows us things will continue but they will never be the same and that’s OK.    Once we’re OK with it.