Recent Reviews
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
Whenever I am about to embark on a trip, I thoroughly enjoy searching for stories set in the city of my destination. Earlier this month, my husband and I traveled to Lisbon, Portugal. In our luggage, we packed Lisbon books that we relished reading in the city’s cafés.
My favorite novel was Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon written in 2004. The book follows the midlife journey of Raimund Gregorius a 57-year-old divorced classics professor living in Bern, Switzerland. After years in the same routine, he is open to change. He knows his life is half over and feels envy toward his students, “How much life they still have before them; how open their future still is; how much can still happen to them; how much they can still experience.”
While walking to his school one morning in the pouring rain, he notices a woman leaning over the edge of a bridge reading a letter. It appears that she might jump, but doesn’t. They speak briefly and Gregorius learns one fact about her: she is Portuguese. The encounter shakes him. Rather than teach his class, he walks to a nearby hotel and has a cup of tea. He has taken the first step to change his life.
Then at his local bookstore, Gregorius coincidently discovers a book by a Portuguese man named Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado. The book is titled A Goldsmith of Words. The introduction strikes a chord with Gregorius. Prado writes of wanting to become the ‘archeologist of his soul’ to understand the choices of his life. “Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us –what happens with the rest?” These two Portuguese connected events inspire him. Within a couple of days, he makes an uncharacteristic decision and boards a train to Lisbon. He hopes to learn more about Amadeu Prado.
The novel follows Gregorius as he wanders through the streets of Lisbon learning about the complex life of Amadeus Prado and the book Prado wrote thirty years ago. When Prado and his friends were young, they had been part of the resistance against the right wing dictator António Salazar who ruled Portugal for 36 years. Like a John Le Carré or Dan Brown novel, the story follows Gregorius as he slowly pieces together what happened to Prado and his fellow fighters leading up to the Portuguese revolution of 1974. The book is not about the politics of Portugal. Rather the novel focuses on the now middle age resistance members who Gregorius meets. They each look back at the group’s complicated dynamics and the life and death choices they made during that terrifying time. Gregorius has empathy for each person’s plight and feels invigorated as he grasps each person’s perspective. The novel contains Prado’s plaintive philosophical and psychological musings about parents, love, religion and the meaning of life.
This novel was engaging, enjoyable and stimulating. Even if you are not in Lisbon, Night Train to Lisbon is a wonderful ride.
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Just like our country, the house that stands at the center of Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel Unsheltered, feels like it is on the verge of collapse. Though Kingsolver does not mention any specific names, her novel explores the deleterious effects of shortsighted social policies and the belief that scientific facts are malleable and partisan. Her novel is complex, rich and frightening, yet leaves her readers with shreds of hope.
Unsheltered is the tale of two families living 150 years apart in the same spot: the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey. Willa Knox, her husband, two kids and her xenophobic, dying father-in-law have played by the rules and are struggling in the midst of the 2016 presidential election. Willa is a journalist whose magazine has folded. Her husband is a college professor whose college has gone bankrupt. Her son has $100,000 of debt from Harvard Business School and her daughter has just returned from Cuba extolling the virtues of a socialist system that provides shelter, health care and education for its people. Meanwhile, Willa relentlessly navigates our convoluted health care system to ease her conservative father-in-law Nick’s pain. Nick embraces candidate Trump “because rich white guys are supposed to be running the world.” He doesn’t understand “how black and brown people get to have nice stuff, be in charge of things? Or women, God forbid. When Nick didn’t get his turn yet?” Desperate for a way out of their financial crisis, Willa researches their eligibility for grants under a historic home preservation program.
In 1861, Charles Landis was a famous real estate mogul who bought 20,000 acres for $500 in Vineland, New Jersey. Seeking to create his version of a utopian community, Landis required all residents to abide by his rules. Kingsolver notes the parallels between the life of our current leader and Charles Landis. (Landis did, in fact, shoot someone and suffered no consequences!)
During the 1870s, Thatcher Greenwood, a Vineland science teacher, his wife, two daughters and mother-in-law lived in the house at 6th and Plum. They, too, lacked the resources to maintain their house. The dominant political issue of their time is the controversial teachings of Charles Darwin. Greenwood understands science and is in awe of Darwin’s discoveries. He befriends his neighbor, scientist and historical figure Mary Treat who corresponds with Darwin and other scientists of that time. Landis disdains Darwin and believes that God directs the lives of human beings.Fearing the wrath of Landis and the Vineland community, Greenwood simply teaches his students the concept of evolution without mentioning Darwin. Community outrage is imminent.
Both families live during times when corrosive and divisive rhetoric permeate their communities. In the 1870s, Darwin deniers were vociferous and vicious. In our time climate change deniers are similar. Darwin’s theories were proven to be accurate. The facts of climate change have been scientifically verified. Yet, many of our current political leaders will not accept this paradigm shift. Kingsolver offers reasons why people embrace a president whose vision is narrow and self-serving. “When men fear is the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”
Kingsolver’s novel is ambitious, probably too ambitious. Only a writer of her skill could juggle so many topics, themes and characters. Yet, the characters (especially Willa Knox and her family) feel didactic and one-dimensional. Each character’s role is to illuminate one failing component of our current social policy.
Though the book is a denunciation of our political discourse and draconian public policies, it is also a humane account of hardworking people who adhere to the rules and are still failed by their government. Though these are difficult times, Unsheltered reminds us that America has endured uninformed self-serving leadership before and, with some luck, we will again.
When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the stories I remember from my childhood involved the Tanforan Race Track just south of San Francisco. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Americans of Japanese descent were held at this racetrack before they were forced on trains and sent to one of ten internment camps. My mother often recounts her father driving their family to Tanforan to bear witness to this wrong. My grandfather said to my mother and uncle, “ You should know that treating people this way is immoral.”
I recently told this story to a friend of mine who suggested I read Julie Otsuka’s 2002 novel, When The Emperor Was Divine. I highly recommend it.
The novel begins, “The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of the bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth’s. It hung by the entrance of the YMCA.” This seems like an intriguing and innocuous first few sentences. However, it is the spring of 1942 and the signs plastered around Berkeley order all Japanese-American families to report to the “Civil Control Station at the First Congregational Church on Channing Way.”
A nameless Japanese-American woman sees the signs around her neighborhood not far from the Berkeley campus. She begins to pack, buries valuables in her backyard, burns sacred family treasures and photos from their life in Japan and kills the family pets. She has already experienced first-hand the wave of anti-Japanese hysteria. The FBI had taken her husband in the middle night from their comfortable home and ended their simple life. He was now being held at a camp for enemy combatants.
By Chapter 2, it is September of 1942 and this unnamed woman, her elementary school age daughter and son are on a train to the Topaz internment camp in the Utah desert. Identification numbers are pinned to their clothing. Bricks are thrown at the train as it makes it way from the Bay Area to Utah. The mother warns her children to never say the Emperor’s name out loud in any context.
Life in the camp is monotonous and the living conditions appalling. The dust, wind, cold, and stress of not knowing when their confinement will end torment the family. The young boy lies awake wondering what horrible thing he had done that caused his family to be sent to this dreadful place. Some nights he remembers his bedroom at home. But most nights he replays the traumatic vision of his playful and poised father being placed in the back of the police car in his robe and slippers.
It’s a short novel, just 144 pages. In simple poetic prose, Otsuka transmits the strong emotions of indignity, shame and rage that each character feels. It is difficult to process this unfathomable alteration to their lives. By the time the family reunites in their Berkeley home 3 years and 5 months later; their sense of themselves and their place in the community has dissolved. They are psychically scarred. How could they not be? Julie Otsuka’s powerful novel bears witness to this horrific episode in our history.
