Fiction

09-4-0356

Bounyavong, Outhine. Mother’s Beloved: Stories from Laos. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2000. 173 pp. ISBN 0-295-97736-1, $14.95 (pb).

According to the editor, this is the "first collection of contemporary fiction from Laos published in English in the United States." Written in a purposeful "simple style" and presented by the Laotian Department of Literature, the stories are offered in a bilingual edition in order "to make a bridge between older and younger generations in America." The small collection was originally published in Vientiane in 1991, where Bounyavong is a noted journalist. These stories first appeared in newspapers and magazines in Laos. Given the political regime in control, writers seem compelled to serve a political role in the country, and, indeed, most work for government-controlled presses, where writing fiction is often a part of the job description.

This groundbreaking collection thus possesses more sociological than literary value. The stories reveal the local color of contemporary Laos, often an admixture of old-time tradition and custom contrasting with Western-influenced modernity. The stories themselves are virtually anecdotes. There is little real plot and character; rather, they are often homiletic lessons, didactic pieces of instruction. Moreover, they tend to rely on sentimental endings and other romantic trappings of similar journalistic prose. In "Fifty Kip," a little boy is given 100 Kip to buy two ice creams for himself and his uncle, but he pockets his share so that he can give it to his mother to buy medicine. It is a typical story: sketchy plot line leading to a moralistic conclusion.

Having said all this, however, another observation is still appropriate: The stories often have a simplistic charm, especially those that employ Lao folklore. Occasionally the random inclusion of village lore, or the sudden plot mechanism that recalls a local Lao custom, turns the story from a slight piece of fiction into a small window on an unknown culture. For that reason, the collection has value.

—Ed Ifkovic
Tunxis Community-Technical College

09-4-0357

Colicchio, Joseph. High Gate Health and Beauty. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts Book Company, 2000. 361 pp. ISBN 0-88739-251-2, $14.95 (pb).

High Gate Health and Beauty, formerly the High Gate Pharmacy, is emblematic of the Jersey City Heights neighborhood where Colicchio’s novel is set. The pharmacy, having lost its license, is in rapid decline, and so is the surrounding area, a mecca for immigrants that has attracted a wide range of ethnic and racial groups. Joey Scadutto, the book’s 15-year-old narrator, comments that "there were so many newcomers—Indians, Arabs, Asians, a couple of blacks—that they almost made the hispanics seem like us."

Scadutto himself comes from a highly dysfunctional working-class, third generation Italian-American family. The cast of characters, from Uncle Vic and Uncle Mike to Aunt Pat and Mom, provoke both tears and laughter, while the High Gate neighborhood, with its multicultural population, sleazy discount stores, greasy diners, gentrified Arts Development housing, and seedy Bowers Street Park, is lovingly examined in microscopic detail.

Colicchio’s novel defies easy classification. It is a murder mystery and also a coming-of-age story, but more importantly it’s a book in which character and place take precedence over plot or action. What Sarah Orne Jewett did for her corner of Maine, Colicchio certainly does for Jersey City. High Gate Health and Beauty is a multifaceted slice of local color and a fine first novel; I am already looking forward to his next book.

—Elaine Dunphy Foster
Hudson County (N.J.) Community College

09-4-0358

Dalby, Liza. The Tale of Murasaki. New York: Doubleday, 2000. 426 pp. ISBN 0-385-49794-6, $24.95.

Lady Murasaki’s novel, The Tale of Genji, written almost 1,000 years ago, is one of the foundations of Japanese literature: a series of romantic adventures told with such subtle sense of character and the passing of time that modern readers have compared the author to Proust and Henry James. Now Dalby has written a fictive autobiography of Murasaki, incorporating fragments of the writer’s actual diary and all of her poems. Dalby has impressive credentials for her task, beyond fluency in Japanese. As an anthropologist she has studied and written about the life of the geisha—in fact, she was the first American practitioner—and the significance of the kimono; she has also done a great deal of research on the imperial court of Murasaki’s day, including its rituals and dynastic intrigues. The result is a beautiful weave of fact and fiction.

Arthur Golden has cited Dalby’s Geisha as an important source for his Memoirs of a Geisha. In both Golden’s novel and The Tale of Murasaki, a Japanese woman narrates her life story, with meticulous but seldom fussy attention to such matters as clothing, houses, and intricate social structures and interactions. Dalby works with what is known about the life of Murasaki, including her unusually scholarly education for a woman of her day, her travels with her father to his political appointment in a remote province, her marriage to an older man, and her life as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, while writing the series of tales that coalesced into Genji and were hugely popular in her own lifetime. Dalby imagines Murasaki as a woman both critical of others and self-doubting, fascinated and bored by courtly life, finding love with both women and men, identifying with her active and amorous hero but increasingly wrestling with depression, and tempted by the contemplative life of a Buddhist nun. The narrative is clear and often poetic, modern in language and yet plausible for its era.

—Joseph Milicia
University of Wisconsin, Sheboygan

09-4-0359

Dickey, Eric Jerome. Liar’s Game. New York: Dutton, 2000. 330 pp. ISBN 0-525-94483-4, $23.95.

Dickey’s new book represents a shift in the black renaissance movement that began in the 1960s. Contemporary black literature began as a tool in the fight for civil rights. Liar’s Game shows how this emphasis has changed.

In Dickey’s work, the individual is central, representing a shift in the tradition in which the individual was merely a symbol for the larger collective, as in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Today’s black protagonist, such as Dickey’s characters Vincent and Dana, resonate more on an individual level than in the particularity of some unique cultural experience. The "me" generation of the eighties has produced writers of these "Brotha and Sista" novels where the plot and the characters exist in a vacuum with no notion of the historical matrix that is driving the conflict between the characters. So, in works by Dickey and his counterparts, Terry McMillan, E. Lynn Harris, and Omar Tyree, the conflicts between black men and women seem to be caused by some innate, negative disposition of black people and are not examined in historical or cultural context.

What keeps his readers returning is Dickey’s spin on the modern romance novel. He is a mystery writer who uses the romance as his medium. What holds his readers’ attention are the twists and turns of his plot, his strong/ hip narrative voice, and his surprise endings. Liar’s Game represents a new generation of post-civil-rights children who have embraced integration and capitalism. Losing sight of their roots, the characters wade aimlessly through life, unable to anchor themselves in stable relationships.

—C. Liegh McInnis
Jackson State University

09-4-0360

Due, Tananarive. The Black Rose. New York: Ballantine/One World, 2000. 384 pp. ISBN 0-345-43960-0, $25.95.

Madame C. J. Walker was not just a self-made millionaire; she was a self-made black female millionaire at a time—the early twentieth century—when this was unthinkable. From her early days as a cotton picker and then laundress, Sarah McWilliams (née Breedlove) transformed herself into a pioneering, and ultimately very financially successful, purveyor of personal care products for black women. Along the way she became Madame C. J. Walker, a reincarnation due to both marriage and a keen insight about how to create respect when respect was not readily given. Early in this historically based novel, Sarah learns from a mentor that a person can demand to be called by something other than her first name or "Auntie" if she creates a name that commands respect rather than being an indication of a slave owner’s proprietorship.

Due’s novel, rooted in historical fact, is bound by the limits this genre requires. The lives of historical characters, particularly positive role models, do not always lend themselves to the excitement that fiction demands. Individuals who overcome what seem like insurmountable obstacles do so at a slogging, persevering pace. To base a story on factual events using a fictional context does not permit the literary license that pure fiction allows. But Due succeeds admirably in putting life into a story of chronological progression and achievement. This work will catch the attention of those who are unfamiliar with the Madame C. J. Walker story. It will also appeal to the initiated who recognize that she was a woman of her times: consummate seller of consumer products and consummate consumer herself.

This novel has appeal to both casual readers and those looking for historical context for an under-recognized prominent figure of the black, female, and business community of pre-Roaring Twenties society.

—Catherine E. Welsh
Siena College

09-4-0361

Highway, Tomson. Kiss of the Fur Queen. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2000. 320 pp. ISBN 0-8061-3236-1, $24.95.

Cree author Highway has a well-established reputation with his plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. He ventures into fiction with this novel and spins a wonderful tale of Cree traditions, whimsy, suffering, and triumph. The novel begins in the far reaches of Cree country and lays a foundation of First Nation tribal context. The focus shifts to the lives of two brothers who experience the horrors of Catholic residential schools. Their musical and dancing talents eventually take them beyond the provinces of Canada, yet they return to embrace their origins.

While this is a story of survival and adjustment, it is much more than a simple demonstration of clashing cultures. The characters are complex, their choices multilayered, and all are set within an interwoven trickster mythology and tribal community. Although the ending of the novel seems somewhat abrupt, it is a tender acknowledgment of life’s twists and turns. The writing is lyrical, and each section is designated with a musical direction for tempo and mood, underscoring the author’s own classical music background. The heart of the novel remains in the musicality of the Cree language (aided by a glossary) and sensibilities.

—P. Jane Hafen
University of Nevada–Las Vegas

09-4-0362

Hobson, Geary. The Last of the Ofos. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000. 114 pp. ISBN 0-8165-1958-7, $29.95 (cl); 0-8165-2959-5, $12.95 (pb).

This clever and important work of fiction masquerades as an as-told-to autobiography. In this genre, a common form of Native American literature, an Indian tells his or her life story to a researcher, who then edits and publishes the account.

In a twist full of subtle irony, Native writer Geary Hobson has created a fictional as-told-to autobiography. The Ofo, or, as they called themselves, the Mosopelea, were a small tribe living in the cypress and sweet gum bayous of the Mississippi River Delta. Hobson informs us in the book’s introduction that "Mrs. Rosa Pierrette of Marksville, Louisiana, was the last speaker of her tribe’s language, and the last actual Ofo. For the purposes of my story, however, I call on Thomas Darko, an Ofo of my imagination, to embody the enduring history of his and Mrs. Pierrette’s people."

Listening to Thomas Darko’s fascinating story, we gain important insight into the lives, culture, and history of an often overlooked group of Native Americans, those living in the South in the twentieth century. Darko’s tale is wonderful, and so convincing that I suspect many readers will forget it is fiction.

Geary Hobson (Cherokee-Quapaw/ Chickasaw) is a poet and English professor. He edited The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature.

—Tom Lynch
New Mexico State University

09-4-0363

Howard, David. The Last Gospel. Sarasota, Fla.: Disc-us Books, 2000. 203 pp. ISBN 1-58444-115-1, $22.95.

This engaging intellectual tour de force is a compelling narrative that alternately takes the reader back to the Jerusalem of 70 C.E. and to a futuristic America in the year 2021. In 2021 the Vatican is forced to release the long-hidden "Isaac of Jerusalem Scrolls," a series of controversial interviews with people who remembered Jesus of Nazareth. Published globally on the Internet, the Isaac Scrolls reveal that Jesus had an Indian lover and child and a disaffected brother, and they cast new light on Judas as alleged traitor. It is a startling revisionist view of "the Jesus phenomenon," an account of "living witnesses." Howard’s retelling of their stories—he is especially adept at creating the voices of Mary Magdalene and Rebekah the Adulteress—is a tapestry of inventiveness and creative scholarship.

What gives the novel its special appeal is the multicultural context that the futuristic story employs. Told by Rafaela Baruch da Costa, a Sephardic-American Jew at odds with her Hassidic parents and carrying the child of her expatriate African-American scholar/ lover, the story becomes a gripping page-turner when she learns that the scrolls she helped edit and publish contain hidden and alarming prophecies, mysteriously encoded by Isaac. With her life (and those connected with publication) in danger from fundamentalist Christian extremists, Rafaela works against time to avert the imminent catastrophe she has unearthed in the pages of the Isaac Scrolls. The last part of the novel is a fast-paced thriller centered in the global community of 2021, tempered by the abiding wisdom of Jesus’s last words.

The novel is a rich perspective of the various interfacing ethnic worlds of the near future, a society of increasingly blurred ethnic and racial lines, but a society still haunted by bias, discrimination, and fear. It may be an Internet-driven world, but, sadly, it still carries the old-guard baggage of small minds and ethnic injustice. A fascinating look into a world long gone and a world yet to come.

—Ed Ifkovic
Tunxis Community-Technical College

09-4-0364

Kelley, William. The Sweet Summer. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000. 218 pp. ISBN 0-664-22224-2, $19.95.

This is a very readable and entertaining novel about a white man of Irish-American background in the mid-twentieth century. Cully Madden is the only white man on an Air Force boxing team otherwise composed of African Americans. Madden is the narrator of the episodes, which involve traveling and working together with the black boxers and learning about African-American culture. He also tells about the increasing prejudice encountered as the boxing team moves into the deep South.

Madden appears to be free of prejudice against African Americans, and he has no trouble working with his colleagues. When other whites show extreme prejudice, as indicated by hostile comments, Madden sometimes gets into fights with them and wins. These are entertaining, suspenseful encounters, but the use of violence to solve a problem—the prejudice of others in this case—reminds me of movies, where violence is often shown to be the proper solution. Other than this, the book is an excellent teacher of how people can work and play together despite cultural differences. The stories about the boxing matches and the unappetizing environments where they occur are excellent. For a boxing fan, these stories will be interesting and very believable. Especially good are the stories about how African-American friends and family take in the boxing team members, show them courtesy, and entertain them on the road. The book does an excellent job of showing how blacks survive in hostile circumstances and how a white man can get along well with people of different backgrounds.

—Russell Eisenman
University of Texas–Pan American

09-4-0365

Mokeddem, Malika. Of Dreams and Assassins. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000. 128 pp. ISBN 0-8139-1933-9, $49.50 (cl); 0-8139-1994-0, $16.95 (pb).

While Mokeddem, an Algerian of Bedouin ancestry, writes in French, her novel has been translated into English. As a woman living in self-imposed exile in France, she asserts her affinity for French, a language in which she is able to express her individuality. French, she says, allows her the versatility and intellectual room to voice her outrage at the repression of women by fundamentalist Islamic elements in Algeria.

The novel mirrors her personal travails in her mother country. Kenza, the heroine, has to flee Algeria in order to preserve her freedom and integrity as a woman. Having lost her mother at a tender age, she is subject to the tyranny of a disreputable father. Fortunately, she finds her escape in a boarding school; education and books become her path to salvation. When she secures employment at a university and refuses to return to the confines of her paternal home at the behest of her father, there is a scandal. However, she is able to bribe her greedy parent with a monthly payout from her salary. Her determination to live as a free and equal member of society results in death threats. Every day, friends and companions of hers are found murdered. She and her group of friends are continually compelled to seek different hideouts. Betrayed by her lover and unwilling to spend her life in the shadows, she flees to France.

In Montpellier she finds a support structure among other Algerians who understand her, having lived her story themselves. Here she finds the strength to face her past and come to terms with her mother’s tragic death. For the first time, the distant figure of her mother becomes real, and Kenza can cry for her.

Mokeddem’s novel is haunted by a sense of deep loss. Like other compatriots, she looks with longing toward that other shore to which she is unable to return. Stories of her Bedouin grandmother, who was compelled to live a solitary life, echo in her own isolation as an exile.

—Jaswinder Gundara
Coral Gables, Fla.

09-4-0366

Mori, Kyoko. Stone Field, True Arrow. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. 276 pp. ISBN 0-8050-4080-3, $23.00.

Realism in Mori’s novel, her first for adults, is balanced with an artist’s eye for imagery. The characters are realistically imperfect, including the main character, Maya Ishida (the title is a translation of her name). She has been taken from her gentle father in Japan and raised in Minneapolis by her cold and abusive mother, and her traumatic childhood leaves her unable to form close relationships.

Now in her mid-thirties, she is married but is so distant from her husband that she frequently spends the night at her weaving studio after work (one thing that she appreciates about her husband is that he respects her privacy). She rarely calls or visits her mother, and at one point, she deserts her at a restaurant, leaving her waiting for an hour. Learning that her father has recently died in Japan draws Maya further into an isolation that threatens the remaining threads of her marriage and her one lasting friendship.

Although her characters are believably flawed, even to the point of being depressing (we realize that they, like many people, have endured emotional trauma), readers may be tempted to want to shake some silliness out of them. But Mori leavens the depression with a gem of a metaphor on almost every page. Like delicate flowers in an exotic garden, most don’t take well to being transplanted from the context of her pages, but here is one: "She and Eric are caught in a small space of silence as if they are on the edge of rapidly changing weather."

—Al Hikida
Seattle Central Community College

09-4-0367

Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. New York: Knopf, 2000. 312 pp. ISBN 0-375-41053-8, $25.00.

Ondaatje’s gentle reflective tone and quiet diction are the perfect vehicles to impart the stories of Anil, Sarath, Gamini, Palipana, and Ananda. Each is a marginalized person who enters history, a dream, a story, a mystery, or a landscape of the other(s) in Sri Lanka. All are nonpartisan: doctors, archaeologists, and artists, who are tenuously linked yet separate and isolated from people they have loved and lost. Whether communicating in nervous whispers, removing nails from the palms of a victim, touching the stone relics of years past, or describing the human bomb "R___," the protagonists are driven to complete their assignments with dignity.

Anil Tissera has returned home as a representative of a human rights group to investigate organized campaigns of murder during the continuous civil wars between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in the 1980s. She unlocks, then documents disturbing revelations through the bruises and breaks in the skeletons she examines. Ondaatje’s fascination resides with those who reassemble life, patch the pieces, and heal the survivors. There is simplicity and brevity in his writing that interweaves the contexts of the past and the present and provides hope for the future. The reader recognizes the truth in his stories: Anil’s desire to possess an appropriate name that she has selected, her anger when she believes that she has been betrayed by Sarath, Gamini’s need to create a story of a "happy" childhood, his obsessions. Memories and motivations are fused, enabling us to comprehend what moves us forward and holds us back—in spite of, or perhaps because of, the damage done by war.

—Patricia Goldblatt
Toronto, Ont.

09-4-0368

Shand, Rosa. The Gravity of Sunlight. New York: Soho Press, 2000. 244 pp. ISBN 1-56947-192-4, $24.00.

Early in Shand’s novel, there is the line, "You float on dreams in this country." It is an evocative sentence filled with promise. However, this promise is only partially fulfilled in the short commentaries that begin every chapter in which numerous details unfold to describe the African landscape, temperament, weather, and human relationships. The plot revolves around the unhappiness of Agnes, an American whose love for Wulf, a Polish professor and colleague of her husband’s, fills a void in her life. Uganda, its people, and Idi Amin’s takeover in the 1970s are only backdrops for Agnes’s shifting and sifting imagination. Agnes reveals deep affection for her children and friends and a talent for teaching, yet Shand never truly develops Agnes’s relationship with Prudence, an extremely talented Tutsi student who is given a chance to explore her artistic talent through Agnes’s tutelage. Rather, Prudence’s affair and public confession concerning John, Agnes’s dogmatic and uninteresting husband, and Prudence’s decision to become a born-again Christian do not surprise. We are merely titillated, not involved in Agnes’s story, wishing her brief discourses on language, books, and the texture and impact of words had occupied more of the novel instead of her forbidden trysts in traditional houses, cars, and gardens.

—Patricia Goldblatt
Toronto, Ont.

09-4-0369

Shono, Junzo. Evening Clouds. Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2000. 224 pp. Trans. from Japanese by Wayne P. Lammers. ISBN 1-880656-48-5, $12.95 (pb).

T. S. Eliot reacted strongly against writers who were too personal, but F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway became rich and famous by writing autobiographically. Evening Clouds is labeled a novel although it has no discernable plot. It is so close to autobiography that the demarcation from fiction blurs. However, it is not about extraordinary adventures and locales à la Fitzgerald or Hemingway. This is a celebration of the very ordinary.

In the 1960s, a writer, Oura, moves his family from Tokyo to a rural hilltop home. But within years, their prized seclusion falls victim to encroaching development. At first, the surrounding forests seem threatening, but the family becomes familiar with the setting and comes to enjoy the woods, only to have the farms and forests disappear under development.

To say that it lacks plot and is entirely mundane is not a criticism; rather, it is the book’s charm. We often notice how our thoughts digress and run in tangents, but Shono demonstrates this reality. In a chapter about the brief pear-apple season, Oura and his son both buy fruit from a stand at the train station. From there the writer reflects on the son’s approaching birthday and about the family’s traditions of gift giving, on to the son’s simple request for a birthday dinner, and then to the problem of hiding gifts in the small house.

Larger than life? No. Realistic view of realistic characters? Yes. If it seems that your attention is seldom caught by ordinary people and events, read this book and see if it changes your mind.

—Al Hikida
Seattle Central Community Colle