Suicide in Nazi Germany Beowulf & Grendel movie
Christian Goeschel
Oxford University Press, 2009

In a 1933 speech, Chancellor Hitler, denouncing the economic depravities of the Weimar Republic (which he saw as imposed by the Treaty of Versailles), rightly said those conditions had driven large numbers of Germans to suicide: “Since the signing of this treaty … 224,000 people, men, women, elderly people, and children have voluntarily taken their lives almost exclusively because of misery and deprivation!”

As Christian Goeschel points out in this remarkable and unsettling little coda of a book, Hitler’s figures were mostly accurate. They would also turn out to be deeply invidious, since his own Nazi era ushered in a new and far greater epidemic of suicide — including his own. Goeschel’s book is a pertinent reminder that the Nazis waged an internal war as well as an external one; their racial and social purity doctrines drove increasing numbers of Germans to suicide, especially as the Second World War wore on an German victory looked less and less likely. As Goeschel writes, “Between April and September 1943, there were at least 6,898 suicides within the army” — and the numbers were correspondingly high among the civilian population (indeed, one of the many tragedies of life under Nazi rule is that after 1943, there were few meaningful distinctions between the two populations, in terms of suffering).

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This is a brief book (166 pages, not including extensive notes and graphs and a note thanking virtually every scholar of Nazi Germany alive today), but it traffics dolorously in that most arresting and depressing of all literary forms, the suicide note. From the teenager who left a note in his pocket saying “my father is to blame for my death, to a great extent” to the long, rambling manifestos rehashing every grievance and reliving every harebrained hope, the whole gamut of the suicide note is encapsulated in these pages, and that should serve as a caution for potential readers not already cautioned by a title like Suicide in Nazi Germany: this is concentrated, disturbing stuff. It’s extremely well done (Goeschel shows universal restraint and considerable rhetorical ability throughout), but even so, it’s good that it’s not longer.

– Steve Donoghue

Belisarius: The Last Roman General
Ian Hughes
Westholme Publishing, 2009

When the scheming, devious, brilliant, fearless, neurotic emperor Justinian I came to power in 527, he confronted his own paltry and fractured inheritance with his eyes wide open. The entirety of the old sprawling Roman Empire, of which he was the nominal head, had fallen onto evil times since the bright days of Trajan and Hadrian centuries before. Successive waves of foreign invasion had battered the once-magnificent ramparts of Roman invincibility, and faction had long since been bitterly codified at court. Supplicants kissed the earth as they approached Justinian’s throne, but the earth no longer belonged to Rome, as it once had.

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Justinian devised a mad course to change that; he set out to re-conquer lost Roman lands in North Africa and Italy. No amount of money or manpower would have seen this accomplished if Justinian hadn’t also had the right man for the job. He did have that man, his famous general Belisarius, and through skillful maneuvering, careful coalition-building, and, incidentally, large amounts of tactical and strategic brilliance, Belisarius actually managed to rekindle the light of lost Roman triumphs in virtually every theater where his forces operated. Ian Hughes, in his new book, refers to Belisarius as “the last Roman general” – he was certainly the last great Roman general.

It’s an incredible story, lure for historians, moralists, and novelists over the centuries (not even Robert Graves could make it dull, though his Count Belisarius gives it the old college try), and Hughes prosecutes it with the thoroughness of a municipal pipe-layer. No square foot is left untouched, everything is systematically addressed, and there is not an ounce of panache anywhere on the premises.

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Belisarius historians almost reflexively assume this stenographer’s approach, probably because their main source, Procopius, balanced his own sober public account of the great general with his Secret History, a wildly scandalous collection of anecdotes about Justinian, Belisarius, and their wives that’s still compulsively fun reading.

Nobody could call Belisarius: The Last Roman General compulsively fun reading. Hughes is instructively thorough, mind you – as a comprehensive introduction to Belisarius and his world, this book would be hard to beat. But Hughes spends a lot of time warning and re-warning his readers about Procopius, that scamp:

What is clear is Procopius’ dislike of Antonina [the general’s wife], and this should be remembered when reading his account of her; throughout Anekdota [that’s what classicists call The Secret History] she is ridiculed, especially concerning her nature, her reckless personal life, and her origins. For her grandfather and father were charioteers in the Hippodrome. Although as such they could be famous, and possibly rather well-off, they would not be acceptable in polite society.

Hughes, on the other hand, is always acceptable in polite society. And if that functions as a warning to you in reading his book, so be it.

–Steve Donoghue

Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs
Ellen Kennedy
Muumuu House, 2009

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“I want to have sex with you.”

“Thank you. I want to have sex with you also.”

These opening lines to Kennedy’s “I Like Every Time We Have Sex” represent one side of the dichotomy that Kennedy sets up throughout Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs between a private and public ethics. In personal or private moments, like the one above, Kennedy’s speakers relentlessly exhibit a kind of binary—ones and zeros—type honesty. They actually have the kinds of conversations we only have in our heads. For this reason, at least under Kennedy’s spell, Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs feels like one of the purest examples of how to be good to one another, a contemporary collection of first-person parables.

While Kennedy’s speakers are as honest and sympathetic in public moments, in a social context, their honesty and sympathy appears anarchic, as if the world isn’t set up to handle this kind of pure goodness. “I am glad you would have sex with in me in public. I agree that it doesn’t hurt anyone. I wanted to have sex with you in the handicapped bathroom at EPCOT when we shoplifted the Alice in Wonderland dress.” And it’s true, or at least it feels true in this book. It wouldn’t hurt anyone. But in order to be good to one another, to give each other the things we want to when we want to, Kennedy convincingly makes it seem that we have to disregard social mores.

There are no real consequences in Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, at least not for those who, say, break the law. For a certain kind of reader, I would imagine, this could seem too idealistic or childish. For them, the book might not contain enough of the real world, even though the things of the real world pervade—smoothies, weed, grocery stores, the subway, grandmothers, etc. But if you are won over by Kennedy and her contagious syntax, as I was, the book is a moving lament of the disconnect between how we want to treat each other and how the world wants us to treat each other.

— Chris Tonelli

Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Wave Books, 2009

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets starts with its worst sentence: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” I am suspicious of this sentence; I find it contrived. Everything else about the book I love.

Bluets, which is a prose-poetry hybrid (or, arguably, an essay), is written as a series of numbered “propositions,” like a treatise, and draws heavily from a list of sources cited in the back, including Wittgenstein and Goethe. (Nelson’s work may appeal to fans of Jenny Boully.) The book has three main subjects or themes: the philosophy of color; the analysis of a past romantic relationship; and the ostensible love affair (an emotional affair? unrequited?) with the color blue.

The third is often foregrounded, but it’s the least interesting of the three, or perhaps I should say the most annoying. But one can get around that by rejecting that first line as disingenuous and taking the “love” object for what it really is—an object of obsession. Or, more properly, displaced obsession, since the speaker increasingly seems to be focusing on blue as a way of avoiding the more difficult subjects of depression and loss. (I say “speaker” in deference to the common wisdom that the “narrator” of a poem is not identical to its author, but the speaker in this book does make frequent reference to the act of authoring it.)

The path toward this recognition—that the speaker-author is afraid that if she writes about her real subject, the words will supersede her actual experience, the way a childhood photo “replaces the memory it aimed to preserve”—is both fascinating and beautiful. It’s an inquiry into the very nature of color—a purely subjective experience that nonetheless falls under the purview of science—as well as a catalogue of the cultural uses of blue, in books, in pornography, in music. Nelson can write a lovely lyric line (“a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette”; “an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire”) but doesn’t stake her claim in metaphors and images. Bluets is built from ideas and questions: Why has so little been made of the “female gaze”? How long is one permitted to be “blue” before they must admit their life is simply ruined? (The consensus among her friends is seven years.)

These ideas and references serve as a string of jumping-off points for self-reflection and realization:

177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

I never feel satisfied with poetry that is wholly cerebral or wholly emotional, so I love that Maggie Nelson’s writing gives me a philosophy fix along with a hit of the Romantic sublime.

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Christiad
Marco Girolamo Vida
James Gardner translation
I Tatti Renaissance Library
Harvard University Press, 20009

Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad, the life of Jesus told in a Virgilian epic poem, is exactly the sort of now-forgotten masterpiece Harvard’s sedately brilliant I Tatti Renaissance Library is ideally suited to rescue. Vida’s poem was commissioned by Pope Leo X no less, and even before it was published in 1535, its samizdat renown had led Leo’s successor, Pope Clement VII, to shower Vida with offices and honors and cash. The work was a huge success in its own day and was subsequently translated into virtually every language in Christendom, but it’s unknown today outside of scholarly circles.

This I Tatti volume aims to rectify that, at least in part. It sports a lively Introduction, very extensive notes, and a fascinating study of the work’s long reception (reception studies being de rigueur in all corners of the Renaissance field, it seems). And at the center is James Gardner’s prose translation of Vida’s poem itself. Gardner tries hard to capture the way Vida is trying hard to capture Virgil; the elaborate faux-classical periods are reproduced, as are the requisite elaborate similes, and there are plenty of florid set-piece speeches, as when Pontius Pilate is trying to talk sense into a crowd of bloodthirsty Jews:

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With one argument after another, he repeatedly tried to restrain their cruel spirit and unforgiving heart, but to no avail, and he vainly opposed them with fruitless efforts. The more he tried to reason with them, now in calm in pleading tones, now in sharp and threatening ones, the more he angered their insensate souls. Finally he said, “According to the vain and ancient superstition of your forefathers at the high holidays, I have been in the habit of liberating one of the many men who are imprisoned, of freeing him from his tight bonds. Will you not bid me free this innocent man to you? For whom should I rather release? Already there has been enough punishment and savagery. Either I release him, or you go on and lead him hence, and, as you wish, condemn this undeserving man to a harsh death without my aid.

You can tell several things about the Christiad from that passage. For instance, Vida imbibed the full measure of his culture’s anti-Semitism . And he’s fairly adept at conveying personalities (his Jesus is by turns confiding and almost hilariously prickly). And most of all, Gardner has rendered Vida’s epic poem in prose. This last decision is certainly predictable (I Tatti’s much older sister-series, the Loeb Classical Library, always renders its verse in prose), but I can’t help but think something’s been lost in the choice. Still, a gorgeously-produced and meticulously-edited Christiad is modern-day miracle enough for one season -– I’m content to wait patiently for somebody to attempt the versification.

—Ignazio de Vega

Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered
Peter S. Wells
Norton, 2009

The concept of the ‘Dark Ages’ is particularly attractive to rulers and nations billing themselves as spearheading some kind of rebirth, and dates for these elusive ages wander all over the timeline. As Peter Wells points out in his well-grounded, engaging new popular study, Barbarians to Angels, there are several popular candidates for the date when everything started going to Hell –- there’s A.D. 410, for example, when Alaric sacked Rome, or there’s A. D. 565, when Justinian’s death brought to an end the last attempt to retake the old Western half of the empire.

Wells’ main point is that when we read about such dates – and when we think of such things as the Dark Ages – we tend to think in Roman terms. As he demonstrates over and over in his slim, packed book, by the 5th century Rome was no longer the center of the world but rather one town among many:

While Roman rule was gradually disintegrating in Italy, throughout the Mediterranean basin, and in the provinces beyond the Alps, the peoples of Europe living in the former lands of the Empire and farther north beyond the old imperial frontiers were thriving.

One such place was the city of Lundeborg, on the Danish island of Fryn -– a place it’s safe to say most people have never heard of, and yet by the 5th century it was a thriving and wealthy place, full of commerce, craft, and artwork. Three miles to west of Lundeborg, the settlement of Gudme was a center for religious and political power -– the remains of a great hall (and large amounts of gold and coins) have been found there, mute testimony to the huge amounts of enterprising human activity that went on there.

That ‘mute’ is the problem besetting all of Well’s examples – although it’s only a problem for us, and for our historians. These people who are the focus of Wells’ studies, these tribes and settlements living at the outskirts of what had been the old Roman Empire, didn’t leave copious written records – in fact, most of them left no written records at all. Virtually no record of the songs they sung about themselves comes down to us, but ample (and always increasing) archeological evidence shows they were hustling and bustling for all that.

Barbarians to Angels is a charming and intentionally slight book, less a full-blown ideological campaign of reform, more a well-argued after-dinner case that we stop using such simple science fiction constructions as ‘Dark Ages’ and start paying attention to the light our own studies are constantly throwing on that long period between the 4th and the late 9th centuries. Those ages weren’t dark to their inhabitants, Wells gently but tenaciously insists, and they shouldn’t be to us, either.

—Steve Donoghue

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By Ron Carlson
Viking, 2009

What I liked most about The Signal, Ron Carlson’s svelte and powerful new novel, is the way the Wind River Mountains are given the dimensions, even the breath, of a living presence. If you’ve traveled in high elevations you’ve felt how the thin air and capricious weather hone your senses and lend an enhanced feeling of peril and elation to ordinary doings. Carlson describes, in one of many instances, how the mountains impose upon his main characters Mack and Vonnie:

The shadows had thickened even as they stood and talked. The angle of light grew fragile; it made him want to hurry. It had always called to him, and now it hurt. You always felt time as a tangible heartbeat in the mountains. The days were short.

Mack and Vonnie are camping together in a last sad hurrah after a decade of marriage that ended with Mack, desperate for money to keep his family ranch, became a meth runner and eventually a convicted criminal. Now, out of prison, he gets a final trip with Vonnie before she returns to her new husband, a weekend he scurrilously (and self-loathingly) complicates in trying to locate an illegally manufactured war plane that has crashed somewhere in the mountains.

But all this makes the plot of The Signal sound more involved than it actually is. The weapons contraband, as well as a violent run-in with Mack’s former partners in meth-trafficking, are primarily catalysts of change in the real soul of The Signal, the relationships between Mack and Vonnie and between the two and the Wyoming mountains.

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Carlson is wonderfully alive to the parallels of those two bonds. Just as Mack knows he will never be so intimate with Vonnie again, he also knows that his age, his insolvency, and commercial development are conspiring to spoil the purity of the wilderness. There is a sore beauty in a simple afternoon of fishing that is connected to the knowledge that such an activity may never happen again:

Mack saw something and it was the fish’s shadow in the water and then the trout near the surface. “He’s too close.” Vonnie snugged the line and the fish responded, leaping and in that second seeing the world, the two people in the white snow, it twisted with every ounce of itself, and the fish swam away, the fine broken leader trailing from its mouth. They could see him race down, diving through the bladed sunlight of the lake water, and then stall and settle again as if nothing had happened.

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Vonnie looked at Mack, her face blank and then she saw the old smile emerge.

“Fish,” she said.

They were at the wild rough top of the world.

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Not everything in The Signal feels adequately wrapped-up by the conclusion – the subplot with the title’s homing signal seems especially unresolved. But in gorgeous flowing prose (Carlson has mastered the seamless run-on sentence, all chain-linked with ‘ands’) we get a poignant excavation of a broken marriage and the possibilities of rehabilitation. The persistent feelings of love and loss are sharpened by the mountain air, and Carlson endows each with a sense of wonder:

Mack had looked at [his father], sleeves rolled, lifting a cast out onto the blue-brown mystery of the lake surface, and that line marked the known world from the unknown, and Mack wondered how he understood the depth of this little bay, how he knew where the fish were, how he knew everything he knew. The wondering seemed to hurt Mack’s heart which he understood simply as love, the aching desire to measure up, to master the mathematics.

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An Expensive Education

By Nick McDonell
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009

Near the beginning of Nick McDonell’s third novel An Expensive Education, an Adonis-like Harvard-groomed intelligence operative named Michael Teak shares his strategy for getting through sticky situations:

13 Hours in a Warehouse film Teak had developed a trick in college for speaking with authority. When he decided to talk in class, he would often begin by saying something like “there are really three important points.” Even if he didn’t know what the points were, he’d come up with them. He believed that breaking his argument into numbers forced people to pay attention. How you said something could be more important than what you said.

The thoughts are meant to be revealing and ironic, because Teak is outwardly a bionic figure who singlehandedly exposes top-level conspiracy in the Horn of Africa, but they have dispiriting resonations for the reader. In this chic, disingenuous novel, McDonell spends a great amount of his energy impressively pretending to know what he’s talking about.

The biggest part of the put-on is the plot, which is triggered by an airstrike in a remote spot of Somalia against an anti-government militia leader named Hatashil. This Hatashil had previously enjoyed the tacit support of the United States, but now, for reasons only at first guessed, American sentiment has turned against him, and the attack is spun in the news as a massacre of innocents perpetrated by Hatashil himself. Embroiled in the change of allegiances are a number of people affiliated with Harvard, the focal point of McDonell’s attention: Susan Lowell is a Pulitzer Prize winning professor who wrote a book lionizing Hatashil as a freedom fighter; David Ayan is an ambitious underclassman who grew up in Hatashil’s corner of Africa; Jane Baker, as her deliciously WASPy name announces, is a Cybill Shepherd lookalike and crusading reporter for the Harvard Crimson; and Teak is a gifted alum who’s been selected from the campus talent pool to be a kind of black-op – and who happened to be present at the attack.

All of this is fun enough and would be inoffensively escapist, but as Teak goes on the safari of skullduggery so frequently trod by Ludlum and Le Carré, McDonell purports to reveal the geopolitical machinations engineered over drinks in Cambridge clubs and offices. On one hand, we get lots of silly spy-thriller boilerplate like this:

Alan Green had seen some evil in his life. He had seen murder, the quick departure of a man’s soul from his body (sweating, lashed to a splintered chair and beaten) before the ruined eyes of the man’s sister. He had never taken pleasure in being party to such departures, or the suffering that often preceded them, but he believed in their necessity.

But a page later, with po-faced Syriana solemnity, McDonell discloses how world events are really orchestrated by the best and the brightest of Harvard’s exclusive Porcellian club. The arch self-importance that overruns this books could only come from a Harvard graduate, and An Expensive Education

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is the sort of “exposé” that is actually meant to enhance the Harvard mystique.

But there won’t be much enhancing going on for McDonell’s reputation as a writer, as the prose here makes you yearn for the skillful hand of Robert Ludlum, to say nothing of John Le Carré. As An Expensive Education progresses it devolves into a flipbook of page-long scene breaks that bear an unholy resemblance to the fun-sized chapters in a James Patterson production, except without a trash novelist’s basic humility. And when McDonell feels sufficiently on a roll in his oh-so serious shtick to wax philosophical about death and grieving – “It may be that death is nothing, that it is merely another phase of disintegration, another pose for the ashes and dust on their return from two feet to space” – you want only to tell him, Jesus kid, time to grow up and quit the bullshitting.

–Sam Sacks

Marcelo in the Real World
Francisco X. Stork
Scholastic, 2009

In a way, it’s understandable that modern novelists –– especially novelists for the teen market –– would feel tempted to import an autistic character to their narratives. More than at any time in American history, even people in their early 20s feel a creeping certainty that today’s teenagers live in an entirely different world from themselves. Texting, tweeting, ripping, burning, IM-ing –– the contours of that alien world seem to be constantly shifting and deeply inimical to outsiders. Novelists are inherently explorers, but the inhabitants of this new world distrust age more thoroughly than any group of young people in history. Entreaties are rebuffed; testimony is mockingly falsified and then delivered with a straight face.

Some conveniently ‘light’ or ‘manageable’ form of autism seems to offer a solution –– a character who’s medically compelled to be both less complicated and more open. The best-selling modern sample of this is Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but other examples abound –– the latest being Francisco X. Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World, in which the teenaged title character has a vaguely autistic mental disorder, undiagnosed by the doctors his anxious, uncomprehending father has consulted. Marcelo hears snatches of music nobody else does, he speaks and thinks in a stilted, over-precise manner, and the brutish or sloppy people all around him routinely consider him retarded.

Marcelo’s father gets him a job in the mailroom of his law firm in a ham-handed but well-intentioned attempt to give the boy some experience with the real world, and Marcelo meets a cast of memorable characters, finds the first hints of love, learns about crime and fallibility (including, in a touchingly realized process, the fallibility of his father), accidentally stumbles upon evidence of a crime, and tries to follow his understanding of right and wrong. When a vicious co-worker confronts him with a scathing tirade, Marcelo responds:

“I think it is funny that in your anger you are treating me like a normal person. There is nothing you are telling me that you would not tell someone who was normal by your definition.”

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That kind of dialogue is entirely typical of Marcelo throughout the book, and it underscores the central problem with this particular novelistic tactic: it’s incredibly insulting, almost taunting, to anybody who’s ever actually known someone autistic. The characters in this type of book aren’t afflicted with anything –– they don’t blurt out nonsense, they don’t have any trouble understanding the cognitive reality of other people, they don’t have any trouble articulating their thoughts. They’re not damaged or struggling or desperate with frustration, they’re just intrinsically honest and certifiably, medically innocent, albeit uncomfortable with their own emotions. They aren’t truly autistic; they aren’t even Boo Radley. They’re high school Vulcans.

Naturally, characters not lucky enough to have Marcelo’s sweetly benign version of autism get exasperated with his holy foolishness, most certainly including his father:

“Dammit, Marcelo! The world is not all black and white! There are rules you know nothing about. Rules I need to follow in order to survive. Those are the rules of this game I play, the system I live by! The system that puts food on the table and lets you live in a damn tree house and go to a special private school.”

Stork does at least a little work to complicate this familiar escape-route he’s taken, but Marcelo’s essential perfection is never really in doubt, and that’s irksome: it marks a kind of retreat. Reading Marcelo in the Real World, I kept trying to see a way the book would have been lessened if Marcelo had simply been an impractical bookworm –– but it wouldn’t have been. All teens have to discover the complexities of the adult world; the process is no less traumatic and thrilling for solid B students who use contractions when they talk. No, the thing that changes for this type of book if you remove the autism, semi-autism, and quasi-autism is the amount of work the author has to do. Anthropology is tougher than mythology, just like fiction is tougher than fantasy – but the rewards are greater too.

—Leah Lambrusco

The Hakawati
Rabih Alameddine
Anchor Books, 2009

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–– Osama travels home to Beirut to sit vigil at his dying grandfather’s bedside with the rest of his family –– is enough to send even bravehearted readers of contemporary multi-cultural fiction running for the nearest Dorothy Sayers

. The power of stories to validate the human heart –– nonsense like that.

Alameddine himself must know this as well as anybody, because he starts right away on the novel’s first page showing how much else he has in mind. “Let me tell you a story,” the narrative opens, about an emir in a distant land longs to have a son and consults an adviser on the matter:

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“Wise vizier,” he said, “I need your help. My lovely wife has been unable to deliver me a son, as you know. Each of my twelve girls is more beautiful than the other. They have milk-white skin as smooth as the finest silk from China. The glistening pearls from the Arabian Gulf pale next to their eyes. The luster of their hair outshines the black dyes from the land of Sind. The oldest has seventeen poets singing her praises. My daughters have given me much pleasure, much to be proud of. Yet I yearn to see an offspring with a little penis run around my courtyard, a boy to carry my name and my honor, a future leader of my clan.”

Evan Almighty move If your reading eye stopped dead on the same little word mine did, then you can guess the happy truth: The Hakawati is a wry, intelligent, boisterously modern spin on the Arabian Nights, and it will sweep you along as wonderfully and effortlessly as its literary progenitor. Osama’s grandfather is a hakawati, an official storyteller, and the novel bursts at the seams with tales of all kinds –– not just kings and viziers and peasant warriors and evil queens (although there are plenty of those too), but the endless interconnected stories that grow up around most families, especially the ones full of opinionated talkers –– which certainly describes Osama’s family, starting with his grandfather, who here dresses down Hovik, the handsome young doctor who became smitten with his granddaughter Salwa and sent her roses:

“Fool.” And my father told Hovik how he had won my mother, how much he loved her, how he had wooed her, how much he missed her. “Fool,” he repeated. “You tried to win Salwa with cliches? Who sends roses anymore? My granddaughter hates roses. It’s spring. Send her crocuses, hyacinths, and narcissi. Her favorite color is yellow. Daffodils. You’ll have to woo her with poetry –– not yours. Polish up your R’s, Rimbaud and Rilke – they’re her favorites. She hates movies. Don’t even try. And you’re too pretty. Get a bad haircut. Wear clothes that don’t match. And don’t, and I mean don’t ever, suggest a walk on the beach or a candlelit dinner. She would as soon slit your throat. Listen to her. Always listen to her.”

Quoting from a book as luminously refreshing as The Hakawati Brewster’s Millions ipod is an easy approach to telling you about it but a misleading one too –– because the book has a tremendous cumulative power as its hundreds of stories big and small interweave and multiply on themselves, and as the various members of Osama’s extended family grow more and more real to us through the stories they live and tell. The emotional payoff on the last page is an almost physical thing, in a way so many of today’s pallid multicultural novels would never attempt –– indeed, would feel beneath them. That’s fine for them and their tentative, porcelain readers, but you want a book that sits you down and tells you a full evening of great tales, don’t miss the The Hakawati. If you’re not careful, it might even validate your heart.

– Nidal Tizrah