Fictional Worlds: 2008

SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM by Uwem Akpan (Little, Brown)

Uwem Akpan first came to the attention of American readers in a New Yorker Special Fiction issue. A Jesuit priest from Nigeria, Akpan writes about life in western Africa in eloquent prose; his ability to make the reader stay with stories of sadness, deprivation, and terror, many of them witnessed through the eyes of children, is matchless.

Ex-Mas Feast is especially poignant reading at the holiday season, as we listen to the child narrator watch his dream of attending school sacrificed to his family's need to buy food. Jigana's twelve year-old sister Maisha earns the family's livelihood by prostitution, but it is cannot stretch far enough to pay for school books. In Luxurious Hearses a Muslim boy finds, after being attacked by his neighbors, that the only people who will help him are of another faith, in this faith-torn country. The title story makes out of the unimaginable horror of the Rwandan genocide a searing work of fiction about a girl and her little brother whose parents are forced into unspeakable choices. Say You're One Of Them makes other fiction seem pale and pointless by comparison.

THE NIGHTGALES OF TROY by Alice Fulton (W.W. Norton)

For many readers, Alice Fulton's linked stories about a family living through the 20th century in Troy, New York may seem like messengers from another country. Set in a once wealthy Northeastern city, home to scientific innovations that made the 'American Century' possible, the setting has a down-at-heel, ready made poignancy. Fulton's fictional Garrahans are buffeted by the currents of large events, their lives bobbing up and then down. Mamie, her sister Kitty, and her three daughters, Charlotte, Edna and Dorothy, and granddaughter Ruth, are neither as confident nor pristine as they appear to be.

When Dorothy locks her sister out on the roof of their house, Edna intuits the uncertainties in store for them, caught between fright and shame to be rescued by the neighbors. Dorothy is a schizophrenic, repeatedly hospitalized and subjected to the latest treatments and medications ("Sunnyside"). Ruth, a professor, becomes an expert on Herman Melville, himself a onetime resident of the 'Collar City' and a sometime depressive. Fulton brings a poet's carefulness with words to her first collected stories.

MOUNTAINS PAINTED WITH TURMERIC by Lila Bahadura Chettri, translated by Michael J. Hutt, New York, Columbia University: 2008 (1957) FIC KSH

"The sun's yellow rays fell on the next range of mountains, and they looked as if some artist had painted them with turmeric."

A modern novel made in the antique form of the pastoral, Mountains Painted With Turmeric is a tale of life in the isolated, mountainous state of Nepal, beautifully rendered in English, it arrives with additional materials that help situate its time and place for western readers. Its story is famous among Chettri's countrymen: Dhane struggles to make a life for his family, but poverty leads to calamity and the family is finally banished from their village If this were all, it would be a bleakly realistic novel but the pastoral form, though inclined toward the romantic, frees the author to express the poetry of ordinary existence, as in his descriptions of natural surroundings; "the autumn could not bear to see the moon smiling like this, unveiled." Later, Chettri describes winter as "determined to ruin the whole lovely garden that autumn had prepared." This beautiful work may be difficult for us to read, with our assumptions of individual power over events, but it is the mark of the author's achievement that, in spite of our biases, his characters live for us.

ONE MORE YEAR by Sana Krasnikov (Spiegel & Grau)

Nominated for the National Book Award, One More Year is also a story collection, this one about recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. One of the characters, Ilona, tells another, "To make it here, you have to want to be here." Krasnikov's characters have come here out of desperation; what they really want is to go home. In the opening story, Maia in Yonkers, a woman whose husband was murdered back home, is reviled by her teenage son for trying to make a new life somewhere else. Better Half, through the character of Anna, a waitress, dramatizes this tension, too. Anna marries an American man in order to obtain a green card, yet even after he hits her and she brings charges against him, Anna takes him back. Just as we find no resolution for the character of Anna, the cumulative effect of these stories brings no final clarity

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH by Jhumpa Lahiri (Alfred A. Knopf)

Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book (also a collection of stories) Interpreter of Maladies. To say that this new collection is something different is no criticism of either book. Although Lahiri has written about Bengali immigrants (she is one herself), in this new collection she turns her pen to characters who find themselves oddly at home in their adopted New England. Lahiri's immigrants are among the successful ones, well-educated and prosperous, yet a certain pessimism permeates the lives of people who long for another culture. Only Goodness, a novella really, is pre-eminent among these stories. Sudha, a happily married graduate student welcomes her beloved brother Rahul, a dropout from Cornell University, into her home, but his downward emotional spiral endangers her marriage and, ultimately, threatens the life of her baby son. For Rahul, the coexistence of the new ways and the old is irreconcilable.

THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE by Salmon Rushdie (Random House)

Other times and other places are familiar to readers of Salmon Rushdie's fiction, and so they are here in this delightful fable of 16th century Florence. It is long, but its structure is more coherent than some of Rushdie's other novels. Whether the reader accepts the author's rather facile definitions of Eastern and Western culture depends on a willing suspension of belief. If you can imagine a story encompassing the Mughal Empire and Renaissance Florence, pirates and princesses, Eros and commerce, then dive in. Rushdie, the presenter of ideas, makes a case for the existence of two very different versions of the Renaissance; Rushdie, the novelist, creates not one but two enchantresses. The plot is impossible to summarize in a short space and those who prefer verisimilitude in fiction will put the book aside long before Machiavelli or the Medici clan make their appearances here.