Month: October 2003

A whisper in your ear: Canadian author Itani’s debut novel, Deafening, is a true joy, a moving and observant story of love, sorrow, and survival during the days of World War I. It’s made up of three entwining stories: a girl named Grania (inspired by Itani’s grandmother) learning how to cope with profound deafness in a world designed for the hearing; how she falls in love with a hearing man named Jim; and Jim’s hellish experiences in the bloody cacophony of the European trenches. Deafening is clearly a labor of love-Itani spent six years researching deaf schools and the Great War, and even became fluent in sign language. She’s a perceptive, sensitive prose stylist who’s gone the extra mile and more to really live in her characters’ skin and breathe the air of their time. That care comes through on every page.
Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com

As a playwright, Ann-Marie MacDonald is best known for the lighthearted Shakespeare parody Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), but her novels travel a considerably darker emotional terrain. In her Oprah-blessed debut Fall on Your Knees, she detailed the corrosive secrets and lies destroying a dysfunctional Nova Scotian family. Her followup, The Way the Crow Flies, uses its setting in the early sixties as a backdrop for two shattering losses of innocence: Canadian Air Force desk jockey Jack McCarthy, who’s about to be caught up in the machinations of the Cold War; and, perhaps more heartbreaking, his eight-year-old daughter Madeleine, whose idyllic world is shattered when a classmate is found strangled in a nearby meadow, and whose teacher hides an abusive side from the community. A portrait of a family who struggles to figure out how to do what’s right in the face of harsh and confusing reality, this is heavy stuff, but MacDonald has a talent for drawing characters that pull you into the story all the way to the end.
Bound to Be Read, 870 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 646-2665, www.boundtoberead.com

Like his previous novels, Snow Falling on Cedars and East of the Mountains, David Guterson’s latest, Our Lady of the Forest, follows another band of confused, rain-chilled characters battling tragic pasts and uncertain futures. In the sodden forests of North Fork, Washington, a homeless and asthmatic teenage pothead named Ann Holmes claims to be visited by the Virgin Mary. Word spreads across the weary logging town and Ann quickly garners a cult of followers, bringing the believer, the cynic, the hopeful, and the wounded out of the woodwork; among them an eye-rolling, misanthropic fellow mushroom picker, and a trailer-dwelling priest with a nagging attraction to the reverent waif. While Guterson’s story has all the ingredients for a predictable, maudlin piece of religious mumbo-jumbo, he stays wry yet sympathetic to his characters as they explore the complexities of modern faith.
Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com

Often considered Holland’s best hope to win the Nobel Prize, Harry Mulisch has built a reputation chiefly on two powerhouse novels-his World War II epic The Assault, and his sky-spanningly surreal The Discovery of Heaven, an ambitious work in the Umberto Eco vein. Mulisch’s aim in his latest, Siegfried, is pretty ambitious as well-an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the enigmatic evil that drove Adolf Hitler, via a fictional what-if tale involving der FŸhrer’s secret bastard son. It’s only partially successful. Many pages are wasted on a witty but ultimately self-indulgent bookend section concerning a Mulisch-like novelist, but the big problem is one that Mulisch himself takes pains to point out: It would be nearly impossible to create a fictional story more horrible that what the Nazis did in real life. And the sorrows of young Siegfried, while tragic, just don’t measure up. That weakness of the novel in turn makes the final one-third of the book fall apart into nonsense.

Already the only writer to win the Booker Prize twice, South African novelist Coetzee nabbed an even bigger honor in October in this year’s Nobel. He certainly didn’t net such accolades by avoiding controversial topics-consider 1999’s Disgrace, a complex story about animal rights, racism, and his homeland’s iniquitous history and uncertain future. He’s notoriously enigmatic, rarely grants interviews, and once gave a lecture at Princeton not as himself, but in character as a fictional novelist speaking at a fictional college. His new novel expands that last premise into a fully fleshed-out book, an odd duck that’s not exactly fiction and not exactly a collection of essays. Elizabeth Costello’s titular heroine is a renowned Australian writer whose career is resonantly similar to Coetzee’s own; just how much we’re meant to correlate the two is one of the book’s sources of mystery. Structured as a series of eight public lectures that obliquely function as Costello’s autobiography, it’s a work with next to no traditional plot, but much in the way of thought-provoking and even deliberately confrontational ideas. This is writing intended to draw blood. There is certainly some self-observation taking place when Coetzee, in the book’s opening chapter, wonders why the public adores Costello even though “she is by no means a comforting writer. She is even cruel.”