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Listed below are the novels that we will explore in the class. Please choose three in order of priority that would interest you. To help you choose, please investigate the text more in depth by visiting amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com. ***Each of the above summaries was taken from amazon.com reviews.
China- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie The Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao Zedong altered Chinese history in the 1960s and '70s, forcibly sending hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals to peasant villages for "re-education." This moving, often wrenching short novel by a writer who was himself re-educated in the '70s tells how two young men weather years of banishment, emphasizing the power of literature to free the mind. Sijie's unnamed 17-year-old protagonist and his best friend, Luo, are bourgeois doctors' sons, and so condemned to serve four years in a remote mountain village, carrying pails of excrement daily up a hill. Only their ingenuity helps them to survive. The two friends are good at storytelling, and the village headman commands them to put on "oral cinema shows" for the villagers, reciting the plots and dialogue of movies. When another city boy leaves the mountains, the friends steal a suitcase full of forbidden books he has been hiding, knowing he will be afraid to call the authorities. Enchanted by the prose of a host of European writers, they dare to tell the story of The Count of Monte Cristo to the village tailor and to read Balzac to his shy and beautiful young daughter. Luo, who adores the Little Seamstress, dreams of transforming her from a simple country girl into a sophisticated lover with his foreign tales. He succeeds beyond his expectations, but the result is not what he might have hoped for and leads to an unexpected, droll and poignant conclusion. The warmth and humor of Sijie's prose and the clarity of Rilke's translation distinguish this slim first novel, a wonderfully human tale. Sijie's debut was a best-seller and prize winner in France in 2000, and rights have been sold in 19 countries; it is also scheduled to be made into a film. Its charm translates admirably strong sales can be expected on this side of the Atlantic.
Africa - A Dry White Season by Andre Brink Brinks sketches the life of a idealistic man - Ben du Toit who lives his life in Apartheid South Africa on the brink of normalcy until the mysterious death of a black American friend and his son points to government involvement. As du Toit becomes obsessed with discovering the truth, he becomes the symbol of Afrikaner conscience struggling to cope with the conflict and alienation that this crusade against Apartheid causes. With Apartheid being woven into the Afrikaner concept of nationhood and religion, Ben finds himself not only in conflict with his family and the government but with his own history and ultimately with his own identity and even his soul. du Toit becomes a classical Afrikaner in his stubborn steadfast refusal to sway from his course, irrespective of the consequences, that he believes to be the only just and morally acceptable one. He painfully exposes the moral vacuum of Apartheid and how it alienates not just du Toit from himself and his family but ultimately the Afrikaner from their fellow South Africans, as well as their own ideas of justice and morality. The original Afrikaans language edition packs a powerful punch and is
beautiful to read. English translation loses a bit of impact and fails to
capture the finesse of the master writer in his mother tongue but is never the
less worth burning the midnight oil for. It should however be noted that the
story is dated and not a balanced portrayal of South Africa, Afrikaners or
Apartheid. Good fiction but not a historical treatise of Apartheid as some reviewers
seem to think.
Oe, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, was just 23 in 1958, when he published this wrenching first novel in Japan. From the opening paragraph's description of a river "bearing away at tremendous speed the corpses of dogs, rats, and cats," it is clear that this is a story of innocents? or at least relative innocents? carried violently by forces beyond their control. In the waning days of WWII, a group of Japanese reform-school boys are evacuated to a remote village in a densely wooded valley. The villagers treat the teenagers horribly, making them bury a mountain of animal corpses, locking them into a shed for the night and feeding them raw potatoes. The unnamed narrator one of the group's leaders? discovers that a plague is ravaging the valley. When a couple of people are infected by the disease, the villagers panic. Believing the boys to be infected, the villagers remove themselves to the other side of the valley and block the only road out of town. At first, the boys can think only of escape, but then, like the boys in Lord of the Flies, they start to make the village their own: they bury the dead humans and perform a sort of sacrament; they care for an abandoned, infirm girl; they hold a hunting festival to ensure continued abundance. The narrator becomes the girl's lover; his younger brother adopts a stray pup; an unexpected snowfall sparks a midwinter celebration. But each pleasant turn, every apparently liberating step away from unremitting brutality, serves to make the characters' inevitable future suffering even more painful. The end arrives with the suddenness and fury of a tornado, as disease and war catch up to the boys. Oe is considered by many to be Japan's greatest postwar novelist. It's easy to see why. Here, his writing is crisp and lovely and gruesomely perfect. First serial to Grand Street.
Portugal --The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago I encourage everyone to read this book. The Stone Raft has left me a very strong impression, above all for the author's style: his very particular punctuation produces a very lively reading. The story just blooms in one's mind, and the author's rhythm - his very breathing - takes control of the reader, which can't help but following the characters' trip through a deriving Iberian Peninsula. Arriving at the end of the last page is like awakening from a dream: I couldn't tell the story of the novel then, just as I'm unable to do it now. Still, I find this quite significant to point out: The Stone Raft, which is about the Iberian Peninsula separating from Europe, was published in 1986, the year when Portugal and Spain joined the European Community. Separating us from Europe in the moment we were achieving to join it, indeed creating a new "us" that has been thoroughly refused for centuries, could not have been the fruit of hazard. Indeed, this was not the most evident way of inventing a disoriented world where people who didn't know each other met on the road, gathered by a unnatural experience. I feel here that, unlike most novels, the background itself is of an utmost importance - not only a pretext to a story - and the "conclusions" of the novel are intimately linked to the pertinence of that imagined reality. Was Saramago doing his part of "Velho do Restelo" (Luís de Camões' skeptic character who tries to persuade Portuguese navigators of the dangers of their enterprise)? Likely so, but let us not condemn too quickly the Velhos do Restelo of all times, and acknowledge what Saramago, maybe involuntarily, reveals: skepticism about the ways of our time is simultaneously a reactionary attitude and a revolutionary virtue, for time doesn't go backwards, and in 1986, only a geographical revolution - or an imaginary one - could keep things as they were for Portugal and Spain.
Antigua –The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid Autobiography of My Mother is a powerful, mesmerizing, and other-worldly tale of Xuela, a woman of Dominica, West Indies, who is a worthy subject for Kincaid's musical cadences and rapturous prose. Boy, can this woman write - and she infuses all her prose with the lilting voices of her compatriots. There's no way to read her work aloud without finding yourself lapsing into the patois, sing-songy style of speech that comes thru so clearly in her writing. This book is a painful tale, the recounting of a difficult life without much love shown to the girl as she grows from motherless infant to strong and bitter young woman who aborts her pregnancy and remains defiant the rest of her life. Raised motherless herself, she determines never to mother others. Taken on a metaphorical level, the woman's story could be the story of Dominica, torn by suffering, racism, power, and the unbreakable bonds that bind them together.
Mexico – Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros
Timelines -- Book Group -- Research II -- Presentations -- Book Choices
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