Carys Davies, Clear ***

An impoverished Scottish minister travels to a remote northern island to evict its sole resident. He is seriously injured, and as the resident nurses him back to health the two men develop a bond.

Clear takes place against a rich historical background: the minister "became a poor man by throwing in his lot with the Free Church of Scotland"; the island resident Ivar is being evicted as part of the Scottish Clearances; Ivar is the last speaker of the language of Norn. Most of this context is window-dressing for a straightforward tale about a growing friendship.

Clear is a short novel that probably could have been a short story. It lacked the layering of themes that I expect from a novel. Its narrative beats were predictable via the principle of Checkov's gun.

Elias Canetti, I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole ** 1/2

This collection of writings from the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti opens with selections from his memoirs about his childhood in pre-WWI Bulgaria. They were excellent, vividly capturing his experiences and noting how they shaped his future development. I was particularly intrigued by a couple of his observations about language: he first heard Balkan folk tales from his Bulgarian nannies but remembers them in German, how and when did the translation take place; his parents spoke German to each other so he associates the language with love and secrecy.

Unfortunately I didn't find any of the other selections compelling. The modernist novel Auto-da-Fé lacked characters I could care about, the treatise Crowds and Power makes questionable leaps in its arguments, and the later Aufzeichnungen (briefs) felt like personal notes that Canetti never developed further ("I would love to study the faces in heaven. Otherwise I'd know of no reason to want to show up there. The faces in hell I already know well, as I wear them all at various times myself.").

Richard J. King, Sailing Alone: A History ***

The preface states clearly that Sailing Alone is not a typical adventure book:

My own solo crossing was not an exceptional feat of seamanship. ... I'm quite proud of the voyage in terms of endurance, and my will and energy to make the whole adventure happen, but the passage across the Atlantic took longer than projected, I did not sail efficiently, and the skills that I lacked the most were exposed in embarrassing fashion. ... This book is not the story of individual excellence, nor is it a compendium of sailing records or a practical manual on how to do it if you are considering a solo voyage yourself.

King includes stories about prominent solo sailors such as Joshua Slocum, but he talks about their motivations (which he calls their why go) more than about their adventures. He describes mundane details about day-to-day life alone on a boat while eliding storms and dismastings. The overall effect is pleasantly conversational and tones down the heroic aura surrounding single-handed sailors. It's amazing how ill-prepared the early circumnavigators were!

 

 

Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season *** 1/2

A village witch is found murdered in rural Mexico. Their death is not particularly surprising given their clandestine role in many of the villagers' vices.

Hurricane Season is not a whodunit—we learn who killed the Witch fairly early—bur a whydunit. We learn about the events leading up to the murder from a handful of narrators, each of whom is caught up in the sex and violence of the local culture of macho poverty. Melchor uses the incident as a case study in the misogynist brutality of the society. It is intense and provides realistically insightful psychologies for its characters.

Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here ***

This book provides a history of US immigration policy since the 1970s, along with the contemporaneous history of the violent politics in the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). The flow of migration and counterflow of deportation ties the stories together.

I knew the broad strokes of the story. Blitzer does a nice job of filling in the details. He relates the history from the point of view of a handful of immigrants, so his opinions are clear even though he doesn't editorialize. I wish he had editorialized: as it stands, the book doesn't offer any ideas about how to handle the complicated politics and ethics of immigration.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time ** 1/2

The Ministry of Time is a science fiction romance that involves time travel. The narrator is a (roughly) contemporary English woman who falls in love with the Victorian-era polar explorer she has been assigned to help transition to the twenty-first century. The Ministry also needs to keep an eye on the "expats" to see whether they survive the time travel.

The story prioritizes the budding romance over the sci-fi elements (until the final chapter), which is fine except that Bradley isn't a very good writer. Evelyn and I took turns reading aloud while the other person washed dishes, and both of us stumbled over confusing similes and awkward sentence construction. Evelyn frequently complained about the narrator's immaturity, and I found the characters' motivations confusing.

Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires **** 1/2

You Dreamed of Empires is a historical novel about the day in 1519 when Hernán Cortés arrived at Tenochtitlán and met Moctezuma. It tells the story from the point of view of several characters both Spanish and Aztecan, each one of them unsure about whether things are going well or very, very badly. Moctezuma welcomed the Spaniards into the city: does he consider them honored guests or is he planning an ambush? Is he a brilliant strategist or is he losing his touch?

Enrigue has an entertaining writing style that mixes historical detail with modern-seeming characters. He loves to deploy Nahuatl words for their interesting sound. The story often has a hallucinatory feel, which is appropriate given Moctezuma's penchant for mushrooms.

I loved everything about the book until the later sections where postmodernist trickery starts to intrude. I wasn't entirely satisfied with the conclusion, which (spoiler alert) is an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge-type situation except that all of subsequent history, up to an including my reading of the novel, is part of the reverie.