Recent Reviews
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on March 4, 2020
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/apeirogon-looks-at-middle-east-with-empathy/
Apeirogon is a mind-bending and momentous new novel by Colum McCann. On one level, it is the story of two men, Rami Elhanan, an Israeli and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian. Their lives converge after their young daughters are murdered in separate acts of political violence. In the wake of their misery, the two grieving fathers develop an unlikely friendship and begin to work together for peace. But like the book’s title (an apeirogon is “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides”), this book is so much more.
With the permission of these two real-life fathers, McCann imagines the lives of the two families while weaving their realities into the infinite complexities of the region. McGann’s intelligence and empathy permeate the book. He clearly listened with compassion as he learned about these men and the painful pasts of their people. For Rami, the fear of “dangerous Palestinians” and the memory of the Holocaust haunted his days. For Bassam, his time in an Israeli jail and the indignities of living in the West Bank tormented him.
In 1997, Rami’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, is killed by three Palestinian suicide bombers as she walks with her friends on a busy Jerusalem street. In 2007, Bassam Aramin’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, is killed by an Israeli border policeman as she walks out of a candy store near her school in Anata in the West Bank.
Both families are traumatized by the violent deaths of these young girls. Each father ponders revenge. Each, though, eventually joins the Parents Circle, a support group for Jews and Arabs whose children have been killed in the conflict. What drives the narrative is how the two bereft fathers learn to lean on each other. They become friends, begin to call each other brother and speak about their experience around the world. They come to believe that there is potential for peace if they (and eventually others) can comprehend the history of one another. “Bassam and Rami gradually came to understand that they would use the force of their grief as a weapon.”
It is hard to do justice to the multi-layered nature of McCann’s storytelling. The novel is comprised of 1001 chapters, echoing ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, a collection of Middle East folk tales. Some chapters are a single sentence; some several pages. He incorporates numerous non-fiction facts that shed light on the area’s complicated and painful history. These facts add to the richness of this hybrid novel as we learn of the complex quagmire that is the Middle East. He includes details about David and Goliath, the Crusades, the Holocaust, the War for Independence, the Occupation, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Wailing Wall, Theresienstadt and Buchenwald. Also included are anecdotes about Freud, Spielberg, Mahmood Darwish, John Kerry, Arafat, Jesus, the Qur’an and the Torah. He explores the etymology of words, the history of towns and the artists, writers, musicians, mathematicians and scientists whose contributions have impacted both these communities.
McCann points out the paradoxes, ironies and tragic limitations of people to resolve their differences and overcome the persistent cycle of violence. Sorrow hovers in the pages of ‘Apeirogon,’ but McGann’s book does offer hope. As Bassam states, “We were killing each other, over and over and over. There will be security for everyone when we have justice for everyone. It’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can’t be.” The bumper sticker affixed to Rami’s motorbike states, “It will not be over until we talk.” These statements capture the novel’s powerful themes. Despite criticism from their respective communities for collaborating, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin move forward with courage and leadership. Thanks to McCann’s groundbreaking book, the rest of us can better know their world and try to emulate their example of listening to others with empathy.
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In 2016 I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. In this letter to his son, Coates describes the painful burdens that African Americans carry from slavery to the present. Coates’s seeks to warn him of our country’s history of enslavement and warn him about the scourge of racism that he will soon navigate.
While Between the World and Me is a polemic, Coates’s first novel, The Water Dancer allows him to write in a freer form. The book illuminates the excruciating emotional toll slaves endured as their families were separated and sold. This painful but liberating story is narrated by Hiram Walker, who was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation called Lockless. The estate is owned by his inept and feckless white father, Howell Walker. When Hiram was young, Howell cruelly sold Hiram’s mother Rose. This trauma haunts Hiram. Realizing that Hiram is curious and capable, Hiram’s father insists that Hiram take care of his lazy white older brother Maynard (repeating the pattern of slaves taking care of their masters). His father says to Hiram, “I have made it known how high you sit in my esteem. It is not fair, I know it, none of it is fair. You have to save Maynard, son. You have to protect him.”
When Maynard drowns in a carriage accident, Hiram’s father needs Hiram to assist with the plantation. His father arranges for a tutor. Since Hiram is intellectually gifted, he learns to read and write quickly. Hiram still lives in the slave quarters and understands that he will always be considered property. Hiram is alone. He soon gains insight into the limited capabilities of Virginia plantation owners. Many slave owners are unskilled farmers who are neither smart nor capable and thus rely on the expertise and experience of their slaves. Hiram states, “The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them – we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them, it was the whole ambition of their lives.”
Hiram witnesses the many ways his father steals from his slaves. Hiram eventually runs away, is captured, escapes captivity, lives as a free man in Philadelphia and becomes part of the Underground Railroad. Besides his ability to forge papers and convey information, Hiram has extraordinary powers, like Harriet Tubman, who appears in this novel. Coates endows them with a magical realism gift called Conduction. Using the power of memory, Hiram, like Harriet Tubman, can transport slaves to freedom.
The novel calls out the pathology of the white plantation owners who project their own fears and desires onto their slaves. Hypocrisy is rampant across many domains. For example, white people propagate the myth that black men want to rape white women, but in reality, those myths are projections. It is slave owners like Hiram’s father who assault black women like Hiram’s mother. As Hiram gets older, he comes to love a woman named Sophie. Sophie is not required to do farm work because she is Hiram’s Uncle Nathaniel’s girl. Nathaniel calls for Sophie whenever he wants. Hiram writes, “This ‘arrangement’ was not unusual, was indeed the custom of the men of ‘quality’. And like the dumbwaiters and secret passages that the quality employed to mask their theft, Nathaniel too employed means to take as though not taking and transfigure robbery into charity.”
Though The Water Dancer meanders at times Coates is a wise and talented writer. What makes this book unique is his insight into the mindset of the mediocre white oppressors who, in attempting to erase the humanity of their slaves, reveal their dishonor and debasement. As Hiram says, “For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors, as guardians at the gate, staving off African savagery when it is, they themselves who are savages."
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on January 31, 2020
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/allende-masterfully-illuminates-refugee-experience/
Isabel Allende’s new novel could not be timelier. With refugees dominating the news, ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ poignantly reminds us of a lesson we can’t seem to learn. People typically leave home, not because they want to, but because they have to.
This book brings to life the plight of one refugee family shattered by Spain’s Civil War in the 1930s. The story follows them as they escape Spain in an odyssey first to a refugee camp in France and then to Chile. Allende’s writing is lush and lyrical. As in many of her novels, she gives us an engaging way to understand how historical forces shape the lives of ordinary people. Here the historical event is the July 1936 military uprising led by General Francisco Franco. His reactionary forces overthrow Spain’s democratically elected government, causing a civil war that leads to immense loss of life.
We get to know Allende’s characters in the ensuing maelstrom. Two brothers, Victor and Guillem Dalmau, take up the fight against Franco. Victor is a medic, Guillem, a soldier. Before the war, the young brothers had lived peaceful lives with their parents and a young woman named Roser, whom their parents had adopted and Guillem had grown to love. Guillem dies in battle, never knowing that Roser is pregnant with their child.
No one in the Dalmau family wants to leave their beloved Barcelona. But in January of 1939, when it becomes clear the vindictive pro-Franco forces will prevail, the family flees. They hike over the Pyrenees in freezing temperatures with little food and no possessions, only to arrive at a French internment camp where thousands of refugees are being held.
In August of 1939, the Chilean poet-diplomat Pablo Neruda charters a freight boat, the Winnipeg, to transport Spanish immigrants from France to Chile, which he calls “a long petal of sea and wine and snow.” Families receive priority, so Victor makes a dramatic choice. He marries Roser and affirms that baby Marcel is his son. Victor, Roser and Marcel board the boat and leave for Chile.
After suffering through persistent hunger, lack of sleep and poor sanitation, they feel relieved to leave France but fearful about Chile. They had heard Chileans “considered them to be a mob of Reds, atheists, and possibly criminals.” By luck, they meet Felipe del Solar, son of a wealthy, conservative and Catholic Chilean family. While Felipe’s father opposes the resettlement of the Spanish refugees, Felipe feels empathetic. He invites Roser and Victor to live with him until they find jobs.
Victor and Roser still hope to return to Spain. But they start their life as spouses while stopping short of a romantic relationship. Victor enrolls at the School of Medicine and Roser teaches music and performs piano. They both adore Marcel. This novel beautifully explores Victor and Roser’s evolving and deepening love. Over time, their complicated feelings about Victor’s brother ease and their love for one another intensifies into a real marriage.
But history repeats. In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet leads a right-wing military coup, which results in the murder of Chile’s democratically elected President Salvador Allende (Isabel’s father’s first cousin). Having known Allende socially, Victor is imprisoned and tortured. When Victor finally gets paroled, the family must make another difficult decision: stay in Chile or escape again.
Allende’s powerful novel shows how war and conflict crush families, forcing them to flee their homes to survive. Currently, millions of refugees have fled from Syria, Guatemala and Mexico as a result of conflict and economic desperation. ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ helps us to imagine the human stories behind the headlines. Allende has written an epic saga about one family’s experience of unwanted exile. Her admiration and empathy for the resilience of refugees find expression in this heartbreaking yet inspiring story.
