Category Archives: European
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker, translated by Kevin Wiliarty
I think I will forever remember this book, perhaps not so much for the story, but for a single word: a blind young man sitting in the dark with hands running across the pages answers when asked what he’s doing … “Traveling.”
That, I believe, is a perfect literary moment.
But to get the full experience, you should, of course, read the entire debut novel. Long an international bestseller, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats arrives in English translation a whole decade after its native German publication. The title’s arduous journey Stateside as told by author Jan-Philipp Sendker, who was both American and Asian correspondent for the German newsmagazine Stern, is well worth a read.
Heartbeats begins with Julia, a young hapa Burmese American woman from New York, who arrives on the other side of the world in search of news about her father, a wealthy, powerful lawyer who disappeared four years ago without a word to his family. A single, unfinished letter has brought her to this remote Burmese village, to a local teahouse where she is surprised by an older man, U Ba, who seems to know far too much about her, who dares to ask, “‘Do you believe in love?’”
Over the following days, U Ba tells Julia a haunting story about a young boy, Tin Win, who is abandoned by his mother and raised by a caring neighbor. He loses his eyesight, but through his other senses gains a whole new world. Sent to the nearby monastery to study, he meets the young daughter of one of the temple staff, a girl whose crippled legs have never stopped her from living her life fully, whose beautiful heartbeat Tin Win recognizes immediately. The two are fated for eternity, even as their lives take separate paths.
For Julia to reunite with her estranged father, she must come to understand her relationship to this lovers’ tale, and to recognize the many different kinds of love – all true, sincere, lasting – that bind heartbeats together forever.
With Valentine’s Day just looming, this ‘little-novel-that-could-and-did’ is poised to hit bestseller lists sooner than later. The story’s simple (dare I say … blind?!) trust in the everlasting power of love guarantees Heartbeats‘ sweetness will last far longer than the empty calories of even the very best heart-shaped confections.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, Burmese, European, Hapa
Tesoro by Natsume Ono, translated by Joe Yamazaki
More and more, I’ve noticed book cover flaps yielding important tidbits (which makes me a bit concerned about such covers going astray, especially for picture books handled by so many little hands!). But worry aside, how fitting to find this on the front flap about Tesoro: “In Italian, it means: • Treasure, a treasured thing • Something or someone precious.”
Precious treasure is exactly right: Tesoro offers 15 diverse vignettes – gathered and translated for the first time into English – from manga powerhouse Natsume Ono. “These may be clumsy stories, but they’ve become memorable and important to me,” Ono writes in a closing note. “It’s like a treasure to me.” Nice to know we’re in synch!
Ono’s signature simple style with the oversized, most soulful eyes is bookended here with stylized bears (the front cover offers a sneak peek) that show a sharply different genre from her human creations. As adorable as her little bears are (check out her graffiti-ed trashcan when she “had an office job,” hee hee ho ho!), I remain mesmerized by the eyes … and myriad of instantaneous expressions those eyes define: relief in “Inside Out” when a husband learns of his wife’s impending return; everyday love in “Moyashi Couple” between a “bean sprout” elderly husband and wife; gratitude in “Three Stories About Bento 1/3″ over an unexpected lunch delivery, poignant joy in “Three Stories About Bento 3/3″ as a father speaks to his late wife through his son’s full round belly (wept over that one!); heartbreak in “senza titolo #1″ as a father looks on at his too-young dying son; disappointment in “Christmas Morning” in both father and son over a missing present; and tearful adoration in “senza titolo #6″ over “the best man in the world, Dad.”
Ono has earned her international chops for her manga-turned-anime series Gente (and its related single volume Ristorante Paradiso) and House of Five Leaves, but my personal favorites remain her smaller efforts, especially not simple, and now the tesoros in her Tesoro.
For all of Natsume Ono’s titles posted on BookDragon, please click here.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 (United States)
TESORO - ONO NATSUME SHOKI TANPENSHU © Natsume Ono
Original Japanese edition published by Shogakukan Inc. Continue reading
Irena’s Jars of Secrets by Marcia Vaughan, illustrated by Ron Mazellan
On his deathbed, Irena Sendler‘s father taught her the lesson that would guide her life. At age 7, she internalized his dying words: “… if she ever saw someone drowning, she must jump in and try to save that person, even if she could not swim.” By 1940, Hitler had ravaged Poland and 400,000 Jews were corralled into the Warsaw Ghetto. Sendler, a Catholic social worker, realized “The Jewish people are drowning“; she donned a nurse’s uniform and talked her way into the “nightmare” ghetto, providing food, clothing, and medicine as best as she could.
In 1942 when the Nazis began the mass removal of Warsaw Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp, Sendler joined the underground resistance organization Zegota and became the head of the children’s section. She helped smuggle the youngest victims out of the ghetto, and provided each with false identity documents before sending them to orphanages, convents, and non-Jewish foster homes. In the havoc and panic – not to mention the extreme danger – Sendler had the foresight to keep careful records of each child’s true and false information so that each might be reunited with their families after the war. Those records she buried in jars under an apple tree in a friend’s garden.
Sendler miraculously survived the war, including being captured and tortured. She returned to the garden, and dug up the names of some 2,500 children she had helped to save …
In 2007 when Sendler was reported to have been nominated (a closed, secret process) for the Nobel Peace Prize (Al Gore won that year to the very public disappointment of the International Federation of Social Workers), people saw her photo in newspapers and began to call: “‘I remember your face … It was you who took me out of the ghetto.’” In her final years (she lived to be 98!), Sendler’s caretaker was a woman who had been a Warsaw Ghetto baby carried out in a carpenter’s box under a load of bricks.
Discovering new heroes is surely one of the very best gifts of the holiday season. Author Marcia Vaughan’s words presented just right for younger readers, together with Ron Mazellan‘s deeply textured illustrations, offer a gentle way to share this courageous story with your ready readers, to inspire and teach them how a single, determined person can indeed save the lives of thousands.
Readers: Children, Middle Grade
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann
In early 1940s wartime Berlin, an official letter arrives for Otto and Anna Quangel with the unbearable news that their only son is dead. Anna immediately rejects “‘those common lies … [t]hat he died a hero’s death for Führer and Fatherland’” – and in that instant, the Quangels’ lives are changed forever. Their overwhelming grief will eventually manifest into brave acts of civil disobedience that will both provide the couple a reason to live, but also lead to violent death.
Otto, a quiet factory foreman bewildered by the growing inhumanity all around him, realizes he can’t overthrow the Nazi regime alone, but he can – and will – protest in his own small way. “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son,” his first postcard screams. And, as a petrified Anna bears witness and waits, Otto drops the traitorous card in the stairwell of a public building and walks away. His fervent hope – that his message will resonate, protests might multiply and, sooner than later, topple the evil Führer forever.
Over the two years that Otto and Anna secretly continue their postcard-protests, life devolves into terror. While some neighbors become brutally abusive Nazis, others hope to save the persecuted. Still others are willing to bargain, bribe, betray their friends and colleagues without a second thought. For far too many, survival during one of the worst periods of history comes at too high a price.
As stunningly epic as this novel is, the story surrounding its publication is equally striking, and is included in a 30 page-appendix at book’s end. Otto and Anna are based on the real lives of Otto and Elise Hampel, whose official Gestapo file – complete with police reports, signed statements, photos, and even some of the notorious postcards – was given to Hans Fallada, post-war, by a well-connected friend.
Hans Fallada was a pseudonym (taken from two Grimm’s Fairy Tales, “Hans in Luck” and “The Goose Girl” which features a horse named Falada) for prolific German writer Rudolf Ditzen. His troubled personal history included unintended murder, insane asylums, drug and alcohol addiction, and imprisonment. He wrote Every Man in just 24 days, but did not live to see the book published in 1947. It was then one of the first anti-Nazi titles ever. Another six decades-plus passed before it was translated into English, in 2009, when it became an unexpected international bestselling phenomenon thanks to the renegade indie publisher Melville House.
Yes, the novel is an agonizing record of the failure of humanity … but it also proves to be a necessary reminder that among the masses are always, always, the heroes who somehow have the unwavering strength to just say ‘no.’
Readers: Adult
Published: 1947 (Germany); 2009 (United States; in the United Kingdom as Alone in Berlin) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, European
The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje
With utter certainty, I can claim that I’ve never ever been remotely disappointed by a Michael Ondaatje title. Until now, alas. Here’s my very best advice to you about this, his long-awaited new title, The Cat’s Table: read it page by page for yourself only; do not choose the audible option, even as the venerable Ondaatje himself narrates. Really. At least with this work, Ondaatje’s voice unfortunately expresses a sense of detachment so visceral that bonding with the book’s protagonist proves difficult at best …
Perhaps his distance might be explained in the “Author’s Note” at title’s end, in which Ondaatje insists, “Although the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional – from the captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat down to the narrator.” That narrator, ironically, is also named Michael, also born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), also moved to England at the age of 11, and also grew up to be a writer with a Canadian address. As if to downplay those similarities (but why?), Ondaatje’s voice unintentionally results in a disengaged, aloof narration.
In Colombo late at night, Michael, the 11-year-old narrator here, boards the big ship Oronsay alone: “… it was explained to me that after I’d crossed the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, and gone through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, I would arrive one morning on a small pier in England and my mother would meet me there.”
As the ship begins its journey, Michael is placed at Table 76 for his meals, also known as ‘the cat’s table’ – “the least privileged place,” he quickly learns. His tablemates include “two other boys roughly my age,” who become his adventurous companions throughout the voyage and beyond. One friendship will last a lifetime; the other will remain a spectral presence. Michael’s three-week passage will include other memorable characters – his beguiling distant cousin Emily, a mysterious criminal about whose offenses no one seems to be quite sure, late-night gambling bunkmates, and a young deaf girl who is magic on a trampoline. In between “Departure” and “Arrival,” Michael intersperses fragments from his adult life, fluidly passing from past, present, future, and back again, offering elliptical details of what followed that pivotal multi-sea crossing.
All my favorite literary elements are here: non-linear time, sparse but profound writing, characters with mysteries to be solved (or not), fateful reunions, etc. etc. If only had known to read, not listen; the iPod failed me for sure this time! So perhaps as I impatiently anticipate Ondaatje’s next book, I’ll have the time to re-read, re-discover. re-imagine Cat’s Table all for myself …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
With the gushing acknowledgement of her debut novel – 2011 Orange Prize, 2011 National Book Award finalist, enthusiastic thumbs up from the New Yorker, New York Times, and too many starred reviews to count – Téa Obreht is already a renowned wunderkind.
Always curious about that level of fuss, I finally picked up the novel, and stuck it into my ears (narrated by veteran audible regulars Susan Duerden and Robin Sachs). Perhaps that’s where I went wrong … perhaps this is fiction meant only to be read, not listened to. Still, I’m compelled to out myself as quite possibly the only person on the planet who thinks the overwhelming hype surrounding Tiger’s Wife is more hyperbole than substance.
Here’s the story – three, actually, to be more precise: 1. Young Dr. Natalia takes a detour from her work at an orphanage across the border to collect the few belongings of her beloved grandfather who has unexpectedly died far from home; 2. Natalia’s grandfather shares his memories of “the deathless man,” a mysterious stranger who never aged and, no matter what, could never die; and 3. Natalia uncovers her grandfather’s childhood tale of the abused, deaf, mute woman known as ‘the tiger’s wife.’
So here’s what I ultimately got from the cleverly intertwining narrative strands: wunderkind Obreht (born in 1985, making her barely in her mid-20s) has no problem putting together gorgeous, mellifluous sentences. She will, without a shadow of a doubt, write even more amazing, more accomplished books in the years to come. But my bottom line … in spite of the gorgeous prose and the epic stories, Tiger’s Wife in the end, just didn’t move me.
No characters stood out as spectacular, in spite of the spectacular things that happened to many of them. The remembrances of things past – especially of war and the price of survival – felt too distanced and detached to resonate. Natalia’s grandmother is too shrill, her mother strangely absent, Natalia too self-absorbed in her endless ruminations about what might or might not be happening. Even the mythic characters of her grandfather’s childhood – the eponymous tiger’s wife, her desperately abusive husband, the legendary bear man, the wandering apothecary – hardly lived up to their potential uniqueness.
Perhaps three stories in one were too much for one novel. Which only proves Obreht must have the imagination for many more. My current disappointment aside, for now the waiting begins for what is surely to come …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, European
On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe
Four women, living together in a house in Antwerp, Belgium, are “[t]hrown together by a conspiracy of fate and a loud man called Dele.” They have escaped their lives in Africa, but only at the cost of their freedom; Dele, who orchestrated their immigration, now controls their bodies which each must sell over and over again in order to repay their enormous debts.
By page 30, one of the four women is dead and her murderer is bluntly revealed. Her death – ironically and tragically – is the impetus that binds the remaining three together beyond their shared address, their shared customers, their owners and handlers. Efe and the better life she will make for the young son she left behind, Ama and the hypocritical man of God who was supposed to be her father, and Joyce and her nightmarish memories of death, destruction, and desertion, will each survive. Only Sisi, unwilling to accept her unexciting life with her disappointed aging parents and her less-than-ambitious boyfriend, has paid for her dreams with her violent demise.
Chika Unigwe – whose debut novel, De Feniks, holds the distinction of being the first fiction title written by a Flemish writer of African origin – makes her Stateside debut with Black Sisters, originally published in Dutch as Fata Morgana. [Slight aside: Rather mysteriously, no translator is credited in the 2011 U.S. edition, although a note is added about a "slightly different" English translation which was published in the U.K. in 2009; no mention of a U.K. translator, either. Hmmm.] According to the enclosed PR materials, Unigwe, herself an immigrant from Nigeria, was so curious about the red-light district women in Antwerp that she donned “skimpy clothing and thigh-high boots” and spent two years researching these women’s lives, so different from her own middle-class Catholic upbringing.
With wide-open, unflinching eyes, Unigwe layers and weaves her experiences of being among the women. Beyond the unthinkable challenges the women face daily, Unigwe carefully reveals four individual, flawed, searching women who are far more than mere victims of the age-old oppressive sex trade. With their desperation, she finds small moments of peace. With their frustration and longing, she gives substance to the glimmers of hope for a different future. Unigwe finds and celebrates their humanity, even in a world so blindly determined on its very destruction.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, African, European
The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Dastardly Dames
Cleopatra: “Serpent of the Nile” by Mary Fisk Pack, illustrated by Peter Malone
Agrippina: “Atrocious and Ferocious” by Shirin Yim Bridges, illustrated by Peter Malone
Mary Tudor: “Bloody Mary” by Gretchen Maurer, illustrated by Peter Malone
Catherine de’ Medici: “The Black Queen” by Janie Havemeyer, illustrated by Peter Malone
Marie Antoinette: “Madame Deficit” by Liz Hockinson, illustrated by Peter Malone
Cixi: “The Dragon Empress” by Natasha Yim, illustrated by Peter Malone
From the publishers of last year’s fabulous The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Real Princesses comes the next sixsome of history-making, mold-breaking women who clearly made and lived by their own rules, judgments be cast aside. The lives of these dastardly dames are filled with so many surprises and shockers that even savvy adults will surely enjoy moments of ‘I didn’t know that …’
Although her Greek Ptolemy family had ruled Egypt for over 250 years, Cleopatra was the first Ptolemy to actually speak Egyptian, just one of the nine languages she spoke fluently. Her brilliance made her beautiful, in spite of what her contemporaries recorded as her “severe cheekbones, a hooked nose, and a jutting chin.” As fitting for Egyptian royalty at the time, Cleopatra’s first partner was her younger brother; she was 18, her brother 10 when their father died and left the siblings in charge.
Born almost a century later, Agrippina was distantly related by association to Cleopatra: Agrippina was the great-granddaughter of Rome’s first emperor, Octavian (aka Augustus), who was the grand-nephew and heir of Julius Caesar, who was Cleo’s lover (and father of her first child) between her brother/husband and dashing Mark Anthony. Got all that? Agrippina sure had wickedly royal intentions, but growing up and into all that court intrigue (she was the sister, wife, and even mother of three different Roman emperors), she surely learned (and survived as long as she could) by example!
And we thought religion-ignited terrorism was a modern invention! Mary Tudor had us beat by half a millennium, overseeing the burning, hacking, quartering of Protestants in an attempt to restore Catholicism to English borders. As the daughter of church-splitting Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon (the daughter of überCatholics Isabella and Ferdinand of Spanish Inquisition fame), Mary never got over Daddy’s divorce and even worse, his marrying non-Catholic Anne Boleyn without the Pope’s blessing. Amazingly, stepmama Anne was Catherine’s maid of honor!
Born three years after Bloody Mary, Catherine de’ Medici also spent her life fighting Protestantism, this time in her adopted France where the Florentine-born, grand-niece of Pope Clement VII married the would-be King Henry II (at age 14). Both the ruling Catholics and the growing French Protestants, called Huguenots, were downright evil to each other – all in the name of God, of course. Leading the most vicious, bloody charge was Queen Catherine (one of her trusted advisors was Nostradamus!), determined to keep her Catholic Medici line going, going, going … until they were finally gone, gone, gone.
Another foreign-born French royal, Marie Antoinette, didn’t actually say “Let them eat cake,” but she didn’t care too much about her common subjects. Pretty and spoiled, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the court (more or less illiterate, speaking only broken French), but then hubby Louis XVI was no prince charming either. She did bring croissants with her from her native Vienna, “created by Viennese bakers to celebrate a victory against the Turks”: crescent, Islam, Turkish flag, get it? So ‘let them eat croissants’ would have been more accurate.
Brutal machinations know no borders, as the final dame moves us to China, where Cixi was born a commoner and rose from royal concubine to Imperial Consort by birthing the emperor’s only son. When that son eventually ascended the throne (at age 5), she named herself Dowager Empress and took tight control. Her greedy misuse of power would eventually earn her a historical place “as the woman who brought a dynasty crashing to its knees”: at her death at age 72, she had outlived three emperors, a 260-year dynasty, and 5,000 years of imperial rule.
With six different writers this time around – the Dames‘ series editor and Agrippina author Shirin Yim Bridges wrote the entire Real Princesses series herself! – the tone and structure here are understandably not as uniform: for example, two dames get a truth vs. reputation comparison that would have been appreciated for all six. That said, single illustrator Peter Malone uses photographs, paintings, historical documents, and his own artwork to give all six titles a definitive look and feel (gory blood splatters and all!).
Other minor quibbles: given how interrelated all the western royals were and continue to be, a family tree would surely have been appreciated; the dames’ timeline included in each book could have used both birth and death years; and, as with each of the Princesses, bibliographies would certainly have been appreciated.
Overall, though? These dastardly dames definitely deserve your attention. They might be examples of how not to be, but then, as Harvard history professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s award-winning, oft-quoted book title goes, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. True that!
Readers: Middle Grade
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Biography, .Nonfiction, Chinese, Egyptian, European
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Eight years have passed since Jeffrey Eugenides won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (as well as too many other accolades to list) for this, his second novel, and nine years since it was first published. Nine years later (pattern forming here? – his debut The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are also nine years apart), Eugenides’ longingly anticipated, much buzzed-about third, The Marriage Plot, is about to hit shelves in a couple of weeks (official pub date: October 11), and that anticipation is probably what finally prompted me to pick up Middlesex. The pressure, the pressure!
Clearly Middlesex holds one of fiction’s most memorable opening lines: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
At 41, Calliope Helen Stephanides by birth certificate is now simply Cal according to his current (German) driver’s license. But even before Cal’s inception, the family saga spans 250 prior years, complete with chromosomal mutations, fifth cousins who are also siblings, triple migrations (from Greece to Turkey to the United States), multiple wars and other conflagrations, and various saints and avid sinners who all play an active role in his creation, and his undefinable, unpredictable life. Cal’s own epic self-discovery, intricately interwoven through his ancestral tale, is a complex … dare I say … transformative journey.
Eugenides’ playful, seemingly effortless invention belies his fearsome erudition. Absolutely, without a doubt, Middlesex is not to be missed … and, as in my case, truly an enormously rewarding better-late-than-never read.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2002 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, European
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Regardless of what is actually happening on the page (even brutality, sometimes tragedy), Michael Ondaatje’s writing is something akin to a velvety, soothing dream. In a perfect world, reading (or better yet, listening to … in this case, to the lulling voice of actor Hope Davis) the Sri Lankan-born, Canadian-domiciled Ondaatje would be done in an uninterrupted flow …
Anna, Claire, and Cooper are three siblings unrelated by blood. Their widowed farmer father creates his family, taking in young Cooper at age 4 after his parents are murdered then bringing newly orphaned Claire home from the hospital with his birthdaughter Anna when he loses Anna’s mother in childbirth. Sixteen years later, the father will shatter that same family.
Almost two decades since the fateful storm that tore her family apart, Anna reappears in a remote French village, researching the life and work of late-19th century French poet and novelist Lucien Segura. Anna is living a “quiet and anonymous time” in Segura’s home, content to spend most of her waking hours at Segura’s own kitchen table … until she goes out one day to explore her surroundings and brings home a lover who has an intimate connection to Segura and this manoir home.
Back across the Pond and across the continent, Claire is working in San Francisco for a lawyer, her job having to do with a different kind of research. Most weekends, she travels back to the family farm to see their father in Petaluma; she is the only child who returns home. By chance, out on assignment, Claire meets Cooper who in his adulthood has become a professional gambler; she will once again need to save him.
Time, narrative, histories are all seemingly borderless in Ondaatje’s novel. From the 1970s to 1990s to the decades leading up to World War I, Ondaatje intricately weaves together fragments from two families – separated at the very least by thousands of miles and almost a century, and yet overlapping in so many intimate details of their very existence.
For readers to know so much more than the characters is almost aching knowledge … and still we can never know enough. With prose so beckoning, so addictive, finishing an Ondaatje novel always comes with both satisfaction and want.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2007 Continue reading
Facebook
Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
