Mossad, the PLO, and a young Palestinian refugee in a spy story set in London and Berlin

A review of Shake Off, by Mischa Hiller

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Ever wonder how publishers decide how to market books? For example, how to decide whether to feature a book as a “thriller” instead of, say, a “deeply moving novel of love and loss”? Mischa Hiller’s novel, Shake Off, raised questions like that in my mind.

Michel Khoury, a bright young man with a rare gift for languages, is recruited from a foster home at the age of 15 to be educated and trained in the USSR by the PLO. It is now the late 1980s, with the Soviet empire crumbling and Yasser Arafat holding on to power in the Palestinian diaspora. For some years now, Michel has been serving as a courier, an accomplished polyglot shuttling from Berlin to London to Geneva to Athens and Istanbul under the control of an older man named Abu Leila (“Father of Leila”), a surrogate father figure. Living in what the English call a “bed-sit,” a single room sans kitchen down the hall from a bathroom, Michel masquerades as a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, taking language courses he doesn’t need. When he meets Rachel, a beautiful young doctoral student in anthropology living next door, he finds himself increasingly drawn to her just as disaster strikes a courier he has enlisted in London. Soon, Michel finds himself the subject of interest by intelligence agencies of indeterminate origin — possibly more than one of them, and probably including Mossad — and is forced to dodge the increasingly familiar figures who are following him.

As a novel written by a Palestinian whose protagonist is a survivor of the 1982 Israeli-Phalangist massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, Shake Off does a decent job conveying the profound sense of loss and the lingering terror that live on in Michel Khoury. However, the book was marketed as a “spy thriller.” Thrilling it wasn’t. The story hangs on a question of identity that waas resolved to my satisfaction about one-third of the way through the novel, so the twists and turns in its plot held no magic for me. I kept reading despite the slow unfolding of the plot because I found it intriguing to see the world through the eyes of a Palestinian refugee (albeit one with an extensive knowledge of Jewish history and Israeli attitudes). It’s worth reading for that reason alone.

Louise Erdrich’s haunting new novel of a brutal crime on the reservation

A review of The Round House, by Louise Erdrich

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

At its best, fiction transports us to places we’ve never been, immersing us in the lives of people we would never meet. The most powerful fiction leaves behind indelible memories, endowing its characters with meaning more vivid than life.  Louise Erdrich received the National Book Award for The Round House, which is powerful beyond measure and achieved all this and more.

Erdrich centers her tale on a bright 13-year-old boy named Joe Coutts. When we first encounter Joe, we think we may have met him before. He’s the nice kid who lives down the block or around the corner, riding his bike, usually with his friends, through a middle-class suburb, getting into mischief. His father’s a judge, his mother a civil servant. How could his life be all that interesting?

But Joe’s parents aren’t really like our neighbors, and they don’t live in a middle-class suburb or a prosperous urban neighborhood. Though well-educated and well-off by local standards, they are members of the tightly interwoven Chippewa community confined to a reservation in a barren stretch of North Dakota or Minnesota. And The Round House is a tale of a brutal crime that afflicts the Coutts family and lays bare the deep fault lines in their community.

As we get to know the Couttses and the many members of their extended family, we gradually become acquainted with the cruel legacy of racism that constrains their lives to this day. Sometimes we laugh along with them at the humor, marvel at the beauty of their story-telling, sigh with despair at the loss of the old ways. But we are never unaware of the uniquely disadvantaged circumstances they and their neighbors find themselves in.

The Round House is Louise Erdrich’s 14th novel. She is an enrolled (i.e., official) member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Nation whose grandfather was tribal chairman around the time of her birth in the 1950s. For three decades, she has been writing highly acclaimed works about her Native American heritage and the interaction of Native and majority communities. (Her father was German-American.)

An extended account of Erdrich’s life and career appears on Wikipedia, with numerous details about her long, tragic marriage to anthropologist Michael Dorris, whom she met as a student at Dartmouth College in the 1970s. Knowing some of the details of her life, it’s easy to understand how Erdrich can write of the pain her characters suffer.

Dave Eggers goes to Saudi Arabia and finds a desert

A review of A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Dave Eggers is a phenomenon. Author of 17 books and two screenplays, including fiction, nonfiction, and a memoir, several of them best-sellers; founder of McSweeney’s publishing company; and co-founder of the celebrated literacy project 826 Valencia, the man is only 42 at this writing. I’m envious and a little in awe. (Well, maybe a lot in awe.)

In A Hologram for the King, Eggers inserts himself into the psyche of Alan Clay, a latter-day Willy Loman, a long-time salesman for the late lamented Schwinn Bicycle Company who has been retained by an IBM-like global firm to sell a huge package of IT services to the octogenarian King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Alan stands in for the millions of white-collar, middle-class Americans displaced by globalization, automation, and a world that’s moving too fast for comfort. He has a daughter in college, an abusive ex-wife, a best friend who literally went off the deep end and died, an unpayable mound of debts to his friends, and an excessive liking for alcohol. He also possesses a large lump on his neck that he’s convinced is cancerous and responsible for all his recent clumsiness and erratic behavior. In other words, Alan is a mess. I found it hard to sympathize for the man.

However, Eggers writes beautifully. His descriptions of the Saudi environment and the close-up look he offers from time to time about Saudi life are fascinating. His smoothly flowing prose draws you seamlessly from one scene to the next, shifting between flashbacks to Alan’s life before his current assignment and his frustrating weeks in Saudi Arabia. But the story Eggers tells is far from uplifting or enlightening. Alan demonstrates his inability to relate to others in sustained relationships, first with the young Saudi man who drives him around, then with a young Danish consultant who wants sex from him he can’t give her, and finally with the female Saudi doctor who surgically removes the lump on his neck. All this unfolds while Alan is waiting for the King to show up for him and his young team to demonstrate the holographic communication system they’re certain will close the big deal and right all the wrongs in Alan’s life.

In other words, not much happens in A Hologram for the King. I believe it was Joseph Heller who defined a novel as a book in which something happens. (It was probably somebody else, but Heller wrote one under that title.) Maybe it’s silly of me, but I prefer novels where stuff happens.

To date I’ve read only two of Eggers’ previous books, both of which I thought far superior to this one: What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a fictionalized account of a very real South Sudanese child soldier, and Zeitoun, a nonfiction treatment of the travails of a Syrian-American family caught up in the chaos of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. You can read my review of Zeitoun by clicking on the title in this sentence.

A glorious new novel from Michael Chabon, set in my neighborhood

A review of Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you’re thinking that this is the story of Berkeley in the 60s, when Telegraph Avenue entered the national consciousness with marijuana and teargas, you’ll soon find that your expectations are off by several decades and a couple of miles. Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue is set farther south, on a less familiar stretch of the eponymous street that straddles South Berkeley and North Oakland, and the events in the book transpire in 2004, even though they have roots in the 70s.

The most notable aspect of this comic novel is Chabon’s showmanship with words, which cascade down the page in glorious profusion, evoking image after image. I’ve never before seen so many similes and metaphors crammed onto a single page, but again and again — and Chabon isn’t showing off, he’s conveying an intense reality in spectacular Technicolor and 3-D. (Well, maybe he was showing off a little with one run-on sentence, a whole chapter, that rivals anything in Faulkner or Joyce.) Though Telegraph Avenue is packed with humor, I found myself marveling at the language instead of laughing, and I come away from reading the book with vivid images of Chabon’s unforgettable characters and a smile on my face rather than memories of laughing out loud.

The themes in Telegraph Avenue include birth and death, loss and betrayal, the glories of fatherhood, teenage angst, the continuing challenges of interracial relationships, and the intensely present power of music in the lives of so many Americans. Chabon lays bare these themes in the lives of four forty-something residents of the Telegraph Avenue corridor: two Caucasians, Nat Jaffe (jazz fanatic and co-owner of Brokeland Records, which sells old vinyl) and his wife Aviva Roth-Jaffe (dean of Berkeley midwives); and two African-Americans, the on-again off-again couple of Archy Stallings (co-owner of Brokeland Records) and Gwen Shanks (Aviva’s partner in Berkeley Birth Partners). In the ups and downs (mostly downs) of these four interconnected lives, and a full cast of extraordinary secondary characters who surround them (including Barack Obama as a State Senator), Chabon explores his themes with a sure hand.

Telegraph Avenue works for me on every level. Once again, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Michael Chabon has proven himself to be one of the most extraordinary storytellers and wordsmiths at work on Planet Earth today.

Chabon’s work has been enthusiastically received from the very start of his career with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in 1988. His previous novels also include The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007). Of Chabon’s seven novels, I’ve now read those three as well as Telegraph Avenue, and all were outstanding. And I’m proud to say that Michael Chabon is my landsman (as my grandfathers would say), a fellow Berkeleyite.

An unsparing tale of life in the living hell of North Korea

A review of The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Three years ago Barbara Demick’s penetrating journalistic skills revealed the ever-present desperation of North Korean life in Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. Now comes Adam Johnson with an equally brilliant book, a novel, that digs beneath the artificial veneer of life in North Korea to examine the mindless lives of its people, from the lowliest convict to the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, himself.

Johnson’s Orwellian story surveys life in an orphanage; the experience of a tunnel rat, trained in hand-to-hand combat in the tunnels leading under the DMZ to South Korea; espionage and kidnapping trips to Japan in “fishing boats”; the life and lifestyle of the country’s elite military commanders and of the Dear Leader himself; the vain efforts of an official torturer to retain his humanity; and the semblance of life that is existence in a North Korean prison mine, where citizens who run afoul of officialdom are worked to death underground with picks and shovels.

Johnson’s themes are the loss of identity in a setting where every aspect of life is controlled from above; the disparity between truth and propaganda; and the struggle between love and loyalty.

The experience of reading this complex and wide-ranging tale is shattering. It took me twice as long to finish this book as it might ordinarily have done, because so very often I had to set it aside to catch my breath or stanch the tears that threatened to come. I was deeply moved by Barbara Demick’s book. Adam Johnson’s novel upended me, with its unsparing portrayal of the extremes of pain and degradation to which the North Korean people are subjected.

Adam Johnson is a San Francisco short story writer and novelist who teaches creative writing at Stanford. He spent three years researching this novel, including a trip to North Korea, where he visited several cities and learned first-hand what life is like under a truly totalitarian regime.

A wrenching portrait of the human cost of terrorism

A review of Incendiary, by Chris Cleave

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

This entirely original and deeply troubling first novel is written in the voice of an unnamed working class Englishwoman, bright but poorly educated. For starters, she doesn’t have a clue about commas, or just about any other punctuation, for that matter. At first, what seem to be her run-on sentences are jarring, even off-putting. But the story is powerful, and the language shortly becomes easier to take. Before you know it, you’re hooked.

Incendiary is structured as an open letter to Osama bin Laden from a devastated young mother whose husband and young son have died in a massive terrorist attack on a soccer game in London. The book’s four sections cover events in the spring, when the attack occurs, and in the succeeding summer, fall, and winter of one terrible year, perhaps the worst in London’s history. But here’s how the narrator puts it all in context:

“You’ve hurt London Osama but you haven’t finished it you never will. London’s like me it’s too piss poor and ignorant to know when it’s finished. That morning when I looked down at the sun rising through the docklands I knew it for sure. I am London Osama I am the whole world. Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.”

However, this statement comes early in the novel. D0n’t get the impression Incendiary is uplifting. It’s profoundly unsettling, both in its devastating impact on the narrator herself and on English society.

Incendiary appeared in bookstores the day of the terrorist attack on the London Underground. The book won numerous awards and was published in 20 countries.

After reading Incendiary, I was surprised to learn that Chris Cleave is a man. His protagonist is so quintessentially female that it’s difficult to understand anyone who pees standing up could have created her. It’s also notable that Cleave is a columnist for the Guardian (Manchester Guardian to us oldtimers), since journalism, and journalistic ethics, figure so crucially in this first novel.

A taut thriller about the world of multibillion-dollar hedge funds

A review of The Fear Index, by Robert Harris

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

We have yet to grasp more than a hint of the forces unleashed by the creation of the Internet and, more recently, the World Wide Web. The Fear Index dramatizes one possible chain of events that could upend human society.

This chilling novel is set in Geneva, home of CERN, the European scientific research center that houses the Large Hadron Collider and which spawned the World Wide Web in 1991. There, an extraordinarily brilliant and eccentric American physicist, Dr. Alexander Hoffmann, exercised his passion for artificial intelligence (AI) for several years until his experiments ran afoul of his superiors at the lab. Shortly afterward, Hoffmann entered into a partnership with Hugo Quarry, an English financier who volunteered to provide him with the virtually unlimited data needed to pursue his research. Their partnership, a hedge fund, is based on Hoffman’s evolving AI research. The fund quickly grew to multibillion-dollar proportions because of the accuracy of the securities-trading algorithms developed by Hoffmann and his band of eccentric young mathematical researchers.

Though this novel may come across as sheer fantasy, and Harris’ depiction of AI is off base in some respects, it’s grounded in reality. Many hedge funds do conduct automatic trading using algorithms to make decisions by the millisecond. And the events that dominate The Fear Index bear an unsettling resemblance to a very dark day in Wall Street’s recent history.

The action starts quickly in The Fear Index and builds steadily to a crescendo in a deply troubling conclusion. A synopsis of the action would make little sense. Read it yourself, and you’ll probably have trouble putting it down.

The Fear Index is British writer Robert Harris’ 14th book. His previous seven novels were Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, and The Ghost (released as a feature film under the title The Ghost Writer). If those titles seem familiar, it’s no accident: every one sold well, some were bestsellers, and several were adapted for film or television.

A first novel from a brilliant nonfiction writer

A review of A Theory of Small Earthquakes, by Meredith Maran

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

It seems highly unlikely that I fit the profile of the intended readership for this first novel from Berkeley writer Meredith Maran. But I couldn’t resist, because (a) Meredith is a friend, (b) she’s also a former employee (who, by the way, once termed me her “least worst boss”), (c) the book is set largely in Berkeley, where I’ve lived for more than forty years, and (d) it spans much of the time I’ve lived here, so I was bound to enjoy the local color.

Meredith’s writing — she is the author of ten previous books, both memoir and nonfiction — is distinguished by painful emotional honesty. Ask anyone who knows Meredith: she tells it like it is. Or, to paraphrase one of the characters in this novel, Meredith doesn’t do nice. She does true. Her memoirs and journalistic efforts alike dig deeply into difficult issues that tend to hide behind headlines. A Theory of Small Earthquakes is no different. And, to my mind, the greatest virtue of good writing is honesty.

A Theory of Small Earthquakes centers on the decades-long love affair of Alison Rose, a writer with many similarities to Meredith herself, and Zoe, a trust-fund baby and artist given to outrageous clothing and hairstyles and large, disturbing canvases. Ambivalent about raising children with two mothers but determined to have children, Alison falls into a lustful relationship with Mark, one of her editors. She and Mark try to raise their son, Corey, in a household that’s just about as normal as it gets in Berkeley (which isn’t saying much). At length, though, Alison and Mark draw Zoe into the family as Corey’s babysitter. The ups and downs of this sometimes awkward foursome fill the remaining pages of the novel.

The action in A Theory of Small Earthquakes unfolds against the backdrop of the colorful reality of Berkeley, beginning in the 1970s and lasting until the near-present. Meredith’s descriptions of life in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco are pitch-perfect, and when she retells the story of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, I felt the ground shaking underneath me all over again.

So, though I hardly qualify as a lesbian, or even as a person of the female gender, I found A Theory of Small Earthquakes to be delightful, unsettling, suspenseful, challenging, and very well written. In other words, a damn good read.

How can you go wrong with a title like “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”?

A review of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, by Paul Torday

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

You know this, right? Yemen, previously called “The Yemen,” lies on the fringe of the Arabian Peninsula as is best known today as a world-class producer of sand, desert heat, and political violence. Salmon are, of course, cold-water fish that are challenging to catch with a rod and reel but taste all the better once caught. So, we’re on the same page, yes?

Now consider the chances of finding a novel that adroitly mixes not just Yemen and salmon fishing but also the British Parliament, Al Qaeda, a mystical sheikh, the art of public relations, a sad love story, and a journey of self-discovery. Before I read this book, I would have defied anyone to accomplish that seemingly impossible task. But Paul Torday has managed to do so, brilliantly, producing a satirical treatment of British politics that is alternately affecting and screamingly funny.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is the first of British author Paul Torday’s six novels to date. Written when he was 59 years old at the end of a successful business careeer, the book reportedly allowed him to write about what he knows best (as every teacher urges in Creative Writing 101). As you might guess, what Paul Torday appears to know best are salmon fishing and the Middle East, and the resulting novel is the unique expression of a genuine talent.

Thanks to reader Betty Taller for suggesting this book.

The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Throughout this peculiar novel, I found myself wondering “What’s the point?” When I finished reading it, I realized that question was the point.

A former reporter in Paris for the International Herald Tribune, Tom Rachman created a thinly disguised analog of that paper and placed it in Rome staffed exclusively by American ex-pats. However, I suspect that the publisher, editors, and staff of the IHT would take umbrage at the uniform pattern of neuroses, inadequacies, and generally annoying behavior of the characters in The Imperfectionists. I wonder if his former colleagues are still speaking to Rachman.

“The paper,” unnamed in the novel, is founded in the 1950s by a wealthy industrialist who hires his lover and her husband, and moves with them to Rome to run the paper, leaving his family behind in Atlanta. The whole gambit is suspicious from the start, and of course it is: nobody in The Imperfectionists seems to possess admirable motives even in the best of times.

This book, which is labeled a novel and seems to be accepted as such by most reviewers, is essentially a string of short stories about the people connected to the paper and, in many cases, to one another. It’s also a colorful picture of the declining fortunes of the newspaper industry over the past half-century, and that, to me, is its greatest strength.

English eccentrics have nothing on the characters in The Imperfectionists. From the young latter-day publisher who talks only to his dog, to the lowly staffer whose only ambition in life is to loaf on the job, to the impossibly incompetent would-be stringer in Cairo, these people are hard to take. From time to time I wondered whether this was all supposed to be funny. It wasn’t.

ISBN-10: 0385343663

ISBN-13: 978-0385343664

ASIN: B0036S49GE