Books Reviews
~ Cont. ~
In the Shadow of the Banyan, Vaddey Ratner (2012)
In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) is a fictional account of the horrors experienced by a Cambodian girl, Raami, and her family under the murderous communist dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. It is based on author Vaddey Ratner’s own childhood experiences as well as years of research.
The novel does have a few rookie missteps, such as an overabundance of similes (e.g., four on page two), and readers must accept that the main character sometimes evinces insight and wisdom beyond her years. However, those minor flaws are far outweighed by the book’s deeply felt writing, strong story and characters, and the importance of its topic.
The story opens on the eve of the Khmer New Year in April 1975. The narrator is seven-year-old Raami, who wears a leg brace and walks with a limp due to a bout of infant polio. She lives in the capital of Phnom Penh with her father, Ayuravann, a poet and minor prince, her mother, Aana, her toddler sister, Radana, her senile grandmother, and two paternal aunts.
The Communist Khmer Rouge bombs and soon occupies the capital, overthrowing the military dictatorship of Lon Nol. Relief that the war is over is soon replaced by anxiety when Raami’s family are ordered to join thousands evacuating the city. Pol Pot’s regime sought to establish swiftly and violently a rural utopia against the perceived decadence of modern urban life.
The streets are jammed with people, animals, and vehicles, and littered with piles of burning books and papers. The Revolutionary soldiers, often teens or children, are dressed in black and wave guns to hurry the crowd. Raami sees a racially mixed couple separated and an old man shot and killed by a girl soldier. Loudspeakers blast: “THE ORGANIZATION AWAITS YOU! THE ORGANIZATION WILL WATCH OVER YOU!” (p. 40, The Organization = Khmer Rouge)
Outside the city, the family meets her father’s younger brother, Arun (Big Uncle), his wife, and their four-year-old twin boys. In response to Papa’s bafflement at
the emptying of the city, Big Uncle replies, “Chaos. It’s the foundation of all revolutions.” (p. 49) The soldiers tell them they are starting a new life; there’s no going back. A soldier throws away Raami’s leg brace, declaring “The Organization will cure her!” (p. 57)
The family is taken down the Mekong River, then via a dilapidated truck to a small village in a dense forest. At a deserted Buddhist temple, its sweeper says the monks were ordered to defrock and be reeducated. Those who did not comply were killed, along with nurses and orphans.
The Organization demands to know family backgrounds and occupations, allegedly so all can contribute to the Revolution. Underneath “the coded rhetoric of solidarity and brotherly love … [was] a deeply indoctrinated belief that anyone could be an enemy.” (p. 143)
Raami is tricked into revealing her Papa’s full name, which indicates his royal heritage, and he is soon removed from the village. Before departing, he tells Raami he would sacrifice himself so she can live. When she shakes her head “no,” he replies that she will fly for him. She is his “one single star” who is always in his heart. (p. 138)
Raami, now eight, along with her mother and sister, are separated from the rest of the family and relocated to another village. Raami won’t look her mother in the eyes. “I didn’t want to witness her devastation—I could hardly bear my own.” (p. 155) She envies Mama and Radana’s connection. But “my aloneness, this solitude, would be my strength.” (p. 156)
They are housed with an elderly Buddhist peasant couple, Pok and Mae, who, being childless, are joyful to host children. It is a brief respite of compassion before personal tragedy and brutal oppression return.
The Revolution had banned religious holidays, but Mae observes the Buddhist festival commemorating the dead (Pchum Ben). At the midnight offering, Aana includes her husband’s name. Raami resents her mother “for luring him from the safety where I’d hidden him—the sky, the moon, the secret sphere of my hope and imaging—back to this awful, aching hole in my heart.” (p. 185)
The Organization’s rules were always changing, its “volatility … and … predilection for chaos, [was] as if calm was suspect, itself an enemy.” (p. 186) A flood from a monsoon causes a blight on the rice planted, at the Revolution’s insistence, in the flood plain, which spreads to other paddies.
Revolutionary leaders communalize the harvested rice, “sugarcoating their malevolence with fanciful words.” (p. 184) Each family received one weekly ration based on its number of members, but Radana was too small to count. As people grew thinner and weaker, the leaders remained plump and healthy.
Soon relocated, they are reunited briefly with Big Uncle. He tells of being put in a bamboo cage when accused of being a CIA spy and eventually reveals the horrifying fate of his family. He and Aana are made part of a large, forced-labor group, working “[d]ay and night … the same monotonous rotation…” building a massive embankment where no river was in sight. (p. 278)
Raami works in the field, sometimes as a scarecrow, furtively swallowing handfuls of raw rice or water bugs as she becomes more emaciated. The children seemed like “[l]ittle old people with their distended bellies and skeletal limbs.” (p. 278)
It is not until 1979 when Vietnam and Cambodia are at war that the opportunity arises for a difficult escape across the border to Thailand.
Between one and two million Cambodians, a quarter to a third of the nation’s population, died as the result of Khmer Rouge atrocities. In the Shadow of the Banyan brings an understanding of the individual perspective of that human suffering. Yet, for all the brutality, death, and oppression depicted, the novel ends on an optimistic note: “Mama was right. Love hides in all sorts of places, in the most sorrowful corner of your heart, in the darkest and most hopeless situation.” (p. 229)
Author Vaddey Ratner explains that “Raami’s story is, in essence, my own.” (p. 317) The writer was five years old when the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh. Her father was a great grandson of King Sisonah, the nation’s ruler in the early-20th century when Cambodia was a French protectorate. In 1989, she moved to the United States, where she graduated as her high school class valedictorian and then summa cum laude from Cornell University. She returned to Southeast Asia
for nine years to research and write In the Shadow of the Banyan, which has been translated into seventeen languages
The Homeless (1900), Stefan Żeromski, trans. Stephanie Kraft (2024)
Introduction by Jennifer Croft and Boris Dralyuk
Polish writer Stefan Żeromski (1864-1925) received four Nobel Prize nominations but is not well known outside of his homeland. Four of his novels have been translated into English, including Stephanie Kraft’s magnificent translation of Żeromski’s The Homeless, published by Paul Dry Books in 2024.
Tomasz Judym, the main character, is a young Polish physician torn between his idealism and class aspiration, between romance and self-denial. More broadly, the novel explores the environmental, economic, and social effects of rapid industrialization in fin de siècle Europe.
A chromatic passage tinged with foreboding opens the novel as Dr. Judym is strolling in Paris: “A rosy dust hung over the buildings … a fine powder that was beginning to eat like rust even into the lovely pale green spring leaves… The fragrance of acacia seemed to float from all sides. Its white flowers with reddish centers lay … around the trunks … in the gutters, as if bloodied by a fatal stab. They, too, were sprinkled imperceptibly with the merciless dust.” (p. 3)
Tomasz spontaneously decides to visit the Louvre to gaze at the mysterious beauty of Venus de Milo, pure and wise, representing “a sinless natural life for a free spirit … the keen power of sensual delight not yet blunted by work or worry; those unhappy sisters.” (p. 5)
In the gallery, he notices four women, speaking Polish, and introduces himself. The older woman is Mrs. Niewadzka, with her two teenage granddaughters, Natalia and Wanda Orszeňska, and their tutor, Joanna Podborska, the “beautiful, graceful brunette with blue eyes.” (p. 7) Judym, the son of a poor cobbler from Warsaw, is their social inferior but as a doctor has potential to rise. So, despite some class tension, he is asked to accompany them to Versailles. It is Natalia who first attracts his interest. He “felt cold fangs of pleasure sink into him … on her lips … lay a smile full of venom and wantonness.” (p. 20)
A year later, Tomasz Judym returns to Warsaw, where his brother Wiktor and his family live. The brothers had been separated in youth, with Tomasz raised by an aunt who provided him with an education and privileges Wiktor wasn’t given. Entering the Jewish section, Tomasz sees children in dirty rags, some with rickets, and experiences “a depressing feeling of unwanted shame” as he nears the family home. His time in Paris made the contrast more painful. At their apartment building: “The walls were full of shadows and sadness, like the boards that make a coffin.” (p. 28)
With his brother not at home, Tomasz visits the cigar factory where his sister-in-law, Teosia, works. She weeps joyfully upon seeing him. Reacting to the terrible working conditions, Tomasz envisions an invention to improve lives: “Warsaw … [with] no more basements or garrets, where tuberculosis, smallpox, and typhoid would be eradicated.” (p. 37) Yet, when he leaves and sees from a hilltop people moving as if “swarms of maggots” he vows not “[t]o mingle with the rabble…” and goes to a posh restaurant instead of returning as promised to see his brother. (p. 38)
Tomasz does visit his brother early the next morning, but, as they walk to Wiktor’s factory, their conversation is interspersed with uneasy silences. Tomasz says Wiktor’s wife shouldn’t work in a cigar factory, but Wiktor says it is her choice after he lost his previous job (arguing with the boss). Wiktor says he’s happy his brother is now a gentleman but claims their aunt (a prostitute) selected Tomasz to raise because he was better looking. Tomasz responds that he was worked like a servant and sometimes beaten by the aunt or her subletters. Wiktor laughs: “That’s our aunt for you.” (p. 43) The brothers continue walking in silence.
The factories’ ill effects on the city’s environment and people are graphically described: “The wild, hard, stifled roar of engines, trembling as if from some insatiable passion for speed, seemed to find a visible embodiment in the great clots of grayish-brown smoke that wheeled in constant, rapid semicircles… like gangrene in the expanse of clean sky… and spilled onto the streets in which the forms of houses … and people grew indistinct.” [p. 43]
Tomasz begins attending a weekly salon for the medical profession at which he presents a paper about what medical science had done to promote hygiene among the disadvantaged. When his examples shift from Paris to Warsaw’s Jewish Quarter, he critically observes that “the only remedy offered for it all is antisemitism.” (p. 53) He then faults physicians for catering to the rich. “We doctors have every authority to destroy cellars unfit for human habitation, to make factories and filthy homes healthy …” (p. 56)
Since his youth, Tomasz had “the drive to be a man of the people …” Yet, for all his idealistic self-image and rhetoric, he realizes his thoughts were those “…of a person not born to privilege who [is] … standing at the door of the palace of culture … [and] camouflaged as love for the poor, was a personal rapacious envy of other people’s wealth … manifest[ed] as … an immense, profound sense of grievance.” (pp. 67-68) He sadly felt his youthful dreams dying. Then, he sees in a carriage the three young women he had met in Paris. Joanna’s “smile flitted before his eyes like a flash of light, then slowly receded into nothingness.” (p. 69)
Since his lecture, Tomasz had no standing in the medical community. He worked mornings as a hospital surgical assistant and saw patients at his home in the early evenings. Money from his late aunt had run out, debts were mounting, and he is unable to assist his brother’s family financially.
At that point, a sympathetic Jewish doctor connects Tomasz with Dr. Węglichouwki, who is hiring an assistant for his clinic in Cisy, a village in northcentral Poland famous for its spas. Reluctant to leave Warsaw, Tomasz accepts the lucrative offer and is surprised to learn there is a small hospital on the property of Madam Niewadzka, the elder lady he met in Paris.
When Tomasz arrives, he feels ready to do great work helping the masses, experiencing a deep joy and sense of anticipation of “something astonishing new to him.” (p. 116)
At Cisy, as elsewhere in the novel, nature is limned with exuberance: “The storm had passed. …Glistening water flowed ceaselessly along the swollen paths … Little lakes full of glassy bubbles … Above, between huge clusters of treetops, was a dazzling fragment of sky with a golden background … feathery violet clouds streamed over it…”
But also present is the duality of its strength and fragility: “an acacia with a thick black trunk and branches … seemed to be made of twisted iron. The monstrous limbs jostled a cover of pale, delicate leaves … [which] swayed in the warm, moist air in drowsy harmonies like music that had lost its voice and … died away.” (p. 116)
Joanna now becomes a fully developed character in the novel, with several chapters presented from her point of view, including diary entries. We learn of her struggle to sustain herself tutoring: “A governess, as a stranger in her environment and usually socially inferior, is constantly under something like censorship.” (p. 122) She also is burdened with concern for a wayward brother. “Worry and poverty teach us to feel peace as happiness.” (p. 130)
Widely read, Joanna laments that women poets are not allowed to express their personalities. In literature, few women are shown seeking personal happiness with strength of spirit and intellectual ability. Although she extols Ibsen as the “immortal truthteller,” she admits that even he prioritizes masculine sentiment. (p. 124) While believing the spread of higher culture will lead to greater gender equality, she worries that women might abuse liberty as men have done. That, however, is no reason to surrender the effort, she concludes.
Joanna visits her parents’ graves in their hometown of Kielce, although she no longer has family there. “The human nest endures as long as a spider’s.” (p. 158) Along the way, she visits country relatives, initially seeing them as healthy and openhearted. However, she is soon bored and realizes she has changed but they have not. What had been comforting in the beginning is now irritable. “I can’t stand backwardness. I can’t breathe in its atmosphere.” (p. 167)
Disillusionment descends on Tomasz, too. The health resort in Cisy caters mainly to the wealthy worried well and the living conditions in the villages are squalid. His strenuous suggestions for sanitary improvements are met with resistance by those in charge, ultimately resulting in his dismissal. However, having renewed his acquaintance with Joanna, the two fall in love and she accepts Tomasz’s proposal of marriage before he leaves.
Meanwhile, with money from Tomasz, Wiktor, having been fired again, leaves Warsaw seeking employment. As his family walks to the train station in a driving snowstorm, Teosia has to carry the children. “Like an animal. An animal. All the world knew: the father could go away and she could not. She was a mother.” (p. 205) She asks Wiktor not to desert her. He says he’ll write when he gets work.
Months later, a letter arrives telling Teosia to join him in Switzerland, where he’s employed in a factory. Never having traveled abroad and not understanding German, it is a harrowing trip for her. This section of the story conveys well the anxiety, even terror, a person would feel not being able to communicate in an unknown land. After arriving, Teosia will face more disappointment and shocks.
Back at Cisy, Tomasz leaves to take a train to Warsaw and an uncertain future. “For a fleeting instant, something stood by him like his own shadow, something so familiar … as near as a coffin: loneliness.” (p. 249) At the train station, he is filled with fears and superstitions. “They seemed to wait in the depth with clenched claws … constantly on the watch for the person overcome with despair.” (p. 250)
Once again when it seemed darkest, the light of hope returns. Tomasz is recognized by an engineer acquaintance, Korzecki, who tells him of a physician’s vacancy in the factory town where he works. With trepidation, Dr. Judym accepts the offer.
When they arrive, Tomasz sees deep holes of contaminated water near the factories. “The sight of these pits filled Judym with a sadness beyond words.” Nearby, slag heaps were high as hills, where coal dust and shale mix smoldered “like fiery, bloody tumors on that sick and mistreated land.” (p. 256) As the two men head for the mine, in his heart Tomasz “wept for this land.” (p. 257) When he sees people standing outside the clinic, he is repelled by both their suffering and that he will treat them.
The novel continues with vivid descriptions of the mines and the suffering of workers—" those black lumps that in life dwell in a grave…” (p. 270)—and the land—"The green of grassy spaces was covered with something like a funeral shroud.” (p. 276) There is a subplot about the emotional toll the work and environs have already taken on Korzecki, who suffers insomnia. “There is too great a gulf between truth and this vale of tears...” (p. 265)
When Tomasz attends a country woman who is dying of consumption, he is invited to dine with her family. He sees the bedridden woman praying. “For the first time in his life, Judym was listening intensely to a human silence like the silence of the field and forest.” (p. 297)
Joanna arrives and, after a tour of the mine, enthusiastically proposes that they could build a hospital and she would be his medical assistant. “We’ll create a source of beauty here.” (p. 308) Will Tomasz accept her offer of being a helpmate in life? Will their plans harmonize for a better future?
The Homeless deserves a wide readership and should be considered among the great literary works of the long-nineteenth century. With sympathy for the plight of the poor, women, and the natural environment, the novel honestly presents the conflicted nature of the two main characters in penetratingly observant, often beautiful, prose.
Born in 1864 into a poor gentry family in Poland (then in the Russian Empire), Stefan Żeromski initially studied veterinary medicine but was expelled for his role in student patriotic (i.e., Polish) activities. He then earned a living as a tutor and assistant librarian, while beginning his writing career. He was arrested twice by Russian authorities, in 1905 in connection with the (failed) Polish uprising and in 1908, likely related to his activities promoting educational reforms. He later lived in Paris (1909-12) before settling in Warsaw until his death in 1925.
Żeromski published his first short stories in 1895 and two years later his first novel, Sisyphean Labors (Syzfowe prace), concerning the Russification imposed on Polish schoolchildren. Following publication of The Homeless (or Homeless People) in 1900, came his three-volume epic of the Napoleonic Wars, Ashes (Popioly, 1904), which secured his literary reputation. His final novel, Early Spring (or The Coming of Spring, Przedwiośnie, 1925) explores the political and social problems of a newly independent Poland after World War One. Several of his novels were subsequently filmed. Żeromski was also a leading playwright. His drama A Quail Has Escaped Me (1924) set a standard in Polish theater.
For more information on Żeromski and the English translation of his novel The Coming of Spring (Bill Johnston, 2012), see Steve Moyer’s article, “Żeromski the Magnificent.”
A King Alone (1947), Jean Giono, trans. Alyson Waters (2019)
Jean Giono’s novel A King Alone (1947) is centered on brutal serial killings in an isolated French village in the mid-1840s. The violence is “off stage” in the early part of the book but the symbolism of blood permeates the story. The theme of isolation is present in the book’s title, last line, and first epigram from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées: “Let us leave a king alone to reflect on himself quite at leisure, without any gratification of the senses, without any care in his mind, without society; and we will see that a king without diversion is a man full of wretchedness.” (trans. W.F. Trotter)
The unnamed narrator recounts events decades later from the reported words of participants. Beautifully translated (2019) by Alyson Waters, the story has multiple mysteries never definitively resolved, particularly the motivations of the murderer, Monsieur V, and of the police investigator, Langlois. “You never see the whole picture.” (p. 66)
The story begins with the narrator revisiting the scene of the crimes, “the Apollo Chitharoedus of beech trees … so beautiful a color … flawless build … perfect proportions, with such nobility, grace, and eternal youth … both beautiful and simple … it knows itself and judges itself. How can such perfection not have a consciousness, when all it takes is a puff of north wind, an unfortunate shift of evening light, an odd tilt to its leaves for its beauty, defeated, to lose all its power to awe?” (p. 7)
In December 1843, the atmosphere is ominous on the eve of the first disappearance. The sky is “dark and dense” and when it snows “everything is covered, everything is erased, there is no world, no sound, nothing.” (p. 11) A young woman goes missing after walking to the family shed. Shortly after, a young man is nearly abducted, and a pig is found sliced to death. The abductor’s bloody tracks are lost in the mountain clouds. The next winter, a poacher disappears, having interrupted his meal to venture outside. That the new victim was strong, clever, and brave, terrifies the villagers.
The disappearance of another man leaves police inspector Langlois baffled because the victims share no apparent characteristics. He will later say the murderer is “not a monster. He’s a man like all the others.” (p. 36) It is a villager, Frédéric, who finds the body of the latest victim and doggedly follows the killer over the mountain to his home. After reporting his findings, Frédéric leads Langlois and two gendarmes to the house, where Langlois confronts Monsieur V in an unexpected way.
An analogue to the quest for the killer is the hunt for a wolf that’s mutilating livestock. “The dark time of snow, cold, and vague apprehensions returned.” (p. 72) Langlois, now a police commander, has two captains of the Wolf-Hunting Corps appointed to the village, Urbain Timothée and his Creole wife, known as Madame Tim. The search for the wolf, referred to as “our Gentleman,” (p. 90) is an elaborate affair intricately coordinated by Langlois with torches and bugles.
Madame Tim and “Sausage,” the café owner and former brothel madam, wear fancy dresses, at Langlois’ request, as they accompany the hunt in a horse-drawn sleigh. Langlois’s ultimate interaction with the wolf mirrors that with Monsieur V, leaving Sausage and Madame Tim shaken. Sausage later explains, “on the evening of the wolf hunt I saw that Langlois was not coming to terms with certain things …” (p. 102)
Five months later, Langlois takes Sausage and Madame Tim on a carriage ride over the mountain to a village, where he asks if either needs an embroiderer who makes lace. Astonished by the question but thrilled by the opportunity, they respond, “Of course!” (p. 104) He wants them to make an order while he gets an understanding of the house from inside. The meeting goes well at first, as Madame Tim talks fast and nonstop, but soon the woman seems suspicious. Madame Tim, however, salvages the situation and the woman, “panting … [like] a hunted doe … became calmer…” (p. 110) Though unstated, readers will realize, as Sausage and Madame Tim did, who the woman and her young son are.
The final hunt is when Langlois, aged 56, tells Sausage he intends to marry and wants her to select his bride. After interviewing several women, Sausage chooses Delphine, a young woman who fits Langlois’ desired qualities in a wife. After the marriage and Langlois’ dramatic death, the two women lived together like a cat
and dog, often fighting “tooth and nail.” (p. 93) The villagers always hoped that “something would suddenly explain to us what had never been explained.” (p. 94)
Gripping in drama, delightful in description, and rich in mystery and metaphor, A King Alone is an evocative story of a man without diversion.
Jean Giono (1895-1970) was a near-lifelong resident of Monosque in the Provence region of southeastern France. At age 16, he began work as a bank clerk, then at age 20 was drafted into the French army during World War One. He saw action at Verdun and other sites on the horrific Western Front, where he suffered a poison gas attack. He published his first novel, The Hill, in 1929.
Giono’s experience in World War One made him a passionate pacifist, which, after France was liberated in 1944 during World War Two, led to blacklisting and imprisonment on false charges of Nazi collaboration. In fact, he had sheltered several from Nazi persecution.
After his acquittal, Giono wrote A King Alone, in which the parallel with the senseless, indiscriminate slaughter of the Western Front and its continuing impact is implicit. The New York Review of Books Classics edition has an excellent introduction by Princton humanities professor and poet Susan Stewart, but it is best read after finishing the novel.
Among Giono’s other notable works are Regain (1930), The Song of the World (1934), Joy of Man’s Desiring (1936), Melville (1941), Fragments of Paradise (1948), The Open Road (1951), The Horseman on the Roof (1951), and The Man Who Planted Trees (1953).
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), by Brian Moore
Set in Belfast, Ireland, in the 1950s, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is the story of a plain, middle-aged woman who longs for marriage, indeed, for love at all. We meet her when she is unpacking her few belongings in the boarding house of Mrs. Henry Rice. Miss Hearne’s two prized possessions are a silver-framed photograph of her stern aunt, who had raised her and whom she had nursed for years after a stroke, and a Sacred Heart of Jesus, “His eyes kindly yet accusing…” (p. 7) We learn later that she has moved several times in only a few years, and the secret reason why.
Author Brian Moore has wonderful, almost Dickensian descriptions of the characters. “Mrs. Henry Rice, informative, drooped her huge bosom over the table like a bag of washing.” (pp. 25-26) Her son, Bernie, is fat and horrid looking, “like some monstrous baby swelled to man size.” When they first meet, Bernie stares at Judy, “rejecting her as all males had before him.” (pp. 9-10) Seeing himself as a genius, he dropped out of Queen’s University to write great poetry.
Boarders include Miss Friel, a brusque schoolteacher who wears a Total Abstinence pin, and Mr. Lenahan, a clerk, his “thin mouth curving into a sickled smile.” (p. 23) It is Mrs. Henry Rice’s brother, James Madden, large, handsome, manly, and recently returned from America, who captivates Miss Hearne’s heart.
After dinner, Judy Hearne sits in her room “waiting like a prisoner for the long night hours.” (p. 34) While weekdays ticked slowly, “Sunday was the great day of the week” because of Mass, in which “everyone was doing the same thing,” and “the big event,” her afternoon visits to the O’Neills, which had “the pleasures of home.” (p. 70) The mother, Moira, was a friend from youth, and Judy considered herself “a sort of unofficial aunt” to the O’Neill children. (p. 53)
During the week, she prepares for the visit by collecting interesting stories to recount, finding them “where other people would find only dullness. [It was] … a gift which was one of the great rewards of a solitary life.” It was necessary for a single woman. Married women had other things to discuss, but no one wanted to know how a single woman managed. (p. 12)
For the O’Neills, however, visits by “the Great Bore” were something to be endured. The father, Owen, a professor, flees to his study, and the children go various ways as soon as their mother allows, making fun of Miss Hearne’s expressions repeated weekly. Even Moira falls asleep while Judy is talking.
At the boarding house, Madden boasts about his life in New York City, where he says he was in the hotel business. Judy is the only one who shows interest, reading about New York at the library to ask better questions. Thus begins a relationship built on misunderstanding. Madden assumes she has wealth and will become his business partner, while she thinks he is a prosperous businessman who will eventually marry her.
In fact, Madden is an unemployed doorman who received an insurance settlement after being hit by a bus. As he walks Belfast the “heavy depression of idleness set in” as “[t]he rain wept itself into a lashing rage…” (pp. 41 & 43) When he returns to find Bernie in bed with the young maid, Mary: “Righteous indignation filled him, flooding his brain with the near-ecstasy of power. The day’s futile drinking, the loneliness, the frustrations, all swam away and left this glorious rage in their stead.” Madden soon finds himself obsessed with Mary, attacking her “like a dog at meat.” (p. 104)
Bernie wants his uncle to move out of the boarding house so he can have peace again to write poetry and keep his relationship with Mary secret. Inspired by Machiavelli, Bernie reinforces Miss Hearne’s misperception, telling her his uncle is playing hard to get. Realizing she is an alcoholic Bernie uses her weakness to further his aims.
Judy is not particularly religious, though she never missed Sunday mass or daily prayers and is devoted to the Sacred Heart. “Religion was there: it was not something you thought about…” (p. 59) Events will test her faith, leading her to plead to God for a sign. At confession, the priest is rude and indifferent. Another priest will spout platitudes but later realize he failed her.
With pathos and wit, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne reveals the vulnerability of single women with limited options, the deception of others and self, and the prejudices, cruelty and, ultimately, compassion of human nature.
Raised in Belfast, author Brian Moore (1921-1999) served as a civilian for the British Army during World War II. Moving to Canada in 1948, he worked as a journalist and wrote pulp fiction anonymously, before moving to New York City a decade later. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) was his first serious novel published under his name, followed by 22 others, including The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), Black Robe (1985), and three short-listed for the Booker Prize: The Color of Blood (1987), Lies of Silence (1990), and The Magician’s Wife (1997). He wrote the screenplay for The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964) and co-wrote Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966). In 1967, he moved California, teaching creative writing at UCLA for 15 years.
The Land of Green Plums (1993) by Herta Müller, trans. Michael Hofmann (1998)
Author Herta Müller (b. 1953) is a Romanian of German descent who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Her novel The Land of Green Plums (1993) follows the vulnerable lives of a group of young Romanians to reveal the menace and mistrust manifested under the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu (r. 1965-1989): “...in this country, we had to walk, eat, sleep, and love in fear...” (p. 2)
The opening scenes effectively convey the amorality, privileges of authority, and deadly hazard of deviance from the oppressive conformity of the regime. Lola, a college student from a poor district, has sex with anonymous men she meets on the tram as well as with the college gym teacher, who reports her after she follows him home. Lola is soon found dead in her dorm room, hanging by a belt of a roommate, the unnamed narrator.
Lola’s photo is swiftly posted at the dormitory entrance with a statement condemning her crime (suicide), which “brought disgrace upon the whole country.” (p. 23) At a formal ceremony, Lola is called a deceiver and “ex-matriculated from the university” as hundreds applaud. A vote is taken by a show of hands to expel her from the Communist Party. The gym teacher raises his hand first, followed by the rest. They kept their hands raised until they were tired, fearing to lower them until the gym teacher said the vote was unanimous. (p. 28)
The narrator and her friends Edgar, Kurt, and Georg doubt Lola’s death was suicide. The narrator had found Lola’s notebook and gives it to the young men who hide notebooks and other restricted books in a summer house. Edgar and Georg’s poems and Kurt’s photos of prison bases were also hidden there. In doing so, “[t]hey had exchanged fear for insanity.” (p. 41)
Many Romanians wanted to go to East Germany, where blue jeans and other products were more readily available. “Everyone lived by thinking of flight.” (p. 47) Edgar says the secret police spread rumors of the leader’s illness to catch those fleeing or planning to. At first, the four young people don’t want to leave Romania. But when they undergo interrogation, being followed, and searches of their and their parents’ residences, they begin planning to escape separately.
The group meets daily, laughing to hide their fear. “But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice ... it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there. You can see it lying around on objects close by.” (pp. 74-75) Soon separated by different jobs, they cautiously communicate through coded letters and phone calls.
While working at a factory, the narrator develops a friendship with Tereza, whose refusal to join the Communist Party is allowed for a while because her father is a factory official. Worried the summer house will be searched, the narrator puts its secret cache in Tereza’s office. “Tereza took the parcel on trust, and I didn’t trust her.” (p. 114) Their friendship’s fragile foundation is indicative of the uncertainty of relationships engendered by the repressive regime. As the narrator realizes, “My distrust caused everything close to me to slide away.” (p. 131)
A sub-theme of the novel is the narrator’s troubled relationship with her family, which includes a senile grandmother who wanders into the fields at night. Rich in symbolism and excellently translated by Michael Hofmann, The Land of Green Plums is a powerful indictment of the criminality of Ceauşescu’s reign.
During World War Two, Herta Müller’s father had served in the Nazi army and later her mother, along with other Romanian Germans, spent five years of forced labor in the Soviet Union. Those examples instilled in young Herta Müller a recognition of the corrupting influence of ideology on individuals. While working as a translator at a factory, she befriended other writers opposed to the Ceauşescu dictatorship.
Müller lost her job in 1979 when she refused to spy for the secret police on workers and foreign visitors. The censored version of her first book, Nadirs, was published in 1982 in Romania and an uncensored version in Germany in 1984, which gained her recognition as a talented writer. Her criticism in the German press of the communist regime in Romania resulted in a publishing ban, interrogations, slanderous rumors, and death threats. She and her husband, writer Richard Wagner, emigrated to Germany in 1987. Her other works include Traveling on One Leg, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel, and The Passport. For more information, see her Nobel Prize biography.
Finger Bone (2014) by Hiroki Takahashi, trans. Takami Nieda (2023)
Set during World War Two, Finger Bone, is a fascinating novella about a Japanese soldier injured and sent to a field hospital in the mountains of Papua New Guinea. The title refers to the practice of medics cutting off a finger of the deceased, burning the flesh, and returning the bone to the soldier’s family in Japan. The unnamed narrator carries a finger bone of his schoolmate killed by “friendly fire” moments before his own injury. “His death nearly broke me.” (p. 44)
At the hospital, the narrator befriends Sanada, a 21-year-old private whose face is bandaged and Shimizu, an artist who lost his dominant left hand from grenade shrapnel but learned to draw with his right hand. His beautiful landscapes and camp scenes will decorate the hospital walls. The narrator and Sanada find a Kanaka village, where Sanaka agrees to teach the natives Japanese in return for shells to buy mangoes. He speculates that the Kanakas will use the Japanese language as tour guides after the war when Japan controls the island.
That assumption reflects the confidence held by the Japanese soldiers, reinforced by unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation. Ichimura, who oversees the POWs, is confident Japan will win because Americans are afraid of suicide. He compares a typical American soldier to “[a] tourist on a camping trip with his buddies.” (p. 38) The narrator and his fellow soldiers hear rumors of Japan’s conquest of Guadalcanal, the Imperial Navy’s “stunning victory” at Midway, air raids “over Oregon, and that the rest of the US mainland was being razed … by firebombs…” (p. 72)
Meanwhile, there are daily deaths of patients, many of them from malaria because the hospital ran out of medicine for it. “The empty beds grew conspicuous ... the sick and wounded had stopped arriving.” (p. 21) The narrator often woke in the middle of the night. “My nerves were always on alert ...” Once awake, if he couldn’t fall asleep again, he would sit on a tree stump and look at the stars, which “were exceptionally beautiful after the rain.” (p. 61)
One morning, emaciated Japanese soldiers arrive at the hospital with news that the Allies controlled the entire eastern coast. The hospital is evacuated of those able to walk and grenades for potential suicide are issued to all. The long march from the hospital is described in stark and powerful terms of the desperation, disorientation, despair, and death. “This too is war.” (p. 115)
The conclusion is foreshadowed at the beginning of the narrative:
I gazed at the husks of men shambling past. Hunched forward as if weighed down by a heavy burden, they dragged one foot, then the other, slowly across the yellow dirt, towing long shadows behind them. One shadow receded toward a pair of ankles, its owner listing forward. A thud. The human stirred no more. As the sun traced an arc across the sky, his shadow ticked around him like a sundial. (p. 7)
Finger Bone earned author Hiroki Takahashi the Shincho Prize for New Writers in 2014. The book is excellently translated into English (2023) by Takami Nieda, an award-winning translator and professor at Seattle Central College. In 2018, Hiroki Takahashi won the Akutagawa Prize for his novel Ceremonial Fire. I look forward to his other work being translated into English.
Closely Observed Trains (1965) by Bohumil Hrabal, trans. Edith Pargeter (1968)
The novella Closely Observed Trains (1965) by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal is set mainly in a Bohemian railway station as World War Two is ending in Europe in the spring of 1945. The station is small but important as a transport nexus for German troops and war matériel to and from the shifting Eastern front. Although ultimately a story of sacrificial heroism, humor softens the tragic trajectory.
The main character is Milǒs Hrma, a naïve 22-year- old railroad traffic controller, whose job it is to raise and lower the signals for trains. His family has a reputation for laziness based on the great-grandfather, a drummer boy wounded in 1848, who thereafter lived off a war pension. His gloating about it often provoked beatings, one of which caused his death in 1935.
Milǒs’s grandfather had been a circus hypnotist, which townspeople saw as “an ambitious bid to stroll his way through life as idly as possible.” (p. 11) When German troops passed through the town in 1939, the grandfather was the only one to confront them. But his attempt to hypnotize them was thwarted by a tank rolling over him. Milǒs’s father was a retired locomotive driver who collected rubbish and odd parts from dumps, resulting in their place looking like a scrapyard.
In flashbacks, we learn that Milǒs fell in love with a young woman, Masha, while they were painting opposite sides of a fence. Later, his anxiety prevents him from fulfilling the act of lovemaking and his subsequent humiliation leads him to slash his wrists. The unsuccessful suicide attempt is seen by townspeople as an attempt to avoid work.
Among the book’s cast of colorful characters is stationmaster Lánský, a pigeon-breeder whose opulent office “left you with the feeling that it ought to be carried around on a palanquin, complete with the station-master in it ...” (p. 20)
Seeing his current situation as “casting my pearls before swine” he anticipates promotion to inspector. (p. 24)
The funniest part of the book is the scandal of lecherous dispatcher Hubička who imprinted telegrapher Virginia Svatá’s derriere with station stamps and photographed the result. The stationmaster, a member of the Society for Public Regeneration, is horrified and an official investigation ensues after Virginia’s mother reports the incident. When the traffic chief Slušný arrives, Lánský hurries back to his office, covered with pigeon droppings and “above whose face a feather … fluttered like a white question mark.” (p. 52)
Yet, for all the humor, the suffering caused by the war manifests through several vignettes: a neighbor who has lost her mind after four years of German imprisonment; dying animals transported from the front to the slaughterhouse; a medical train of wounded soldiers in agony; evacuees from Dresden arriving in their pajamas.
The story culminates in an attempt to blow up an ammunition train between stations, thus avoiding collateral damage. Devised by Hubička in collaboration with a German resistance agent, Victoria Freie, it is to be carried out by Milǒs. Before Milǒs leaves on the mission, Victoria awakens his manhood in another comic scene penultimate to the dramatic ending.
Author Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Brno, Moravia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later living in Prague. During World War II, he worked as a railroad dispatcher. He received a law degree in 1946 but never practiced law; instead, working in a serious of jobs, including stagehand, notary clerk, postal worker, insurance agent, and traveling salesman.
In 1962, Hrabal became a full-time writer, but Communist censorship meant that he often published underground or abroad. Closely Watched Trains [an alternative English title for this novella] was filmed by Czech New Wave director Jiří Menzel. It won the 1967 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and gained Hrabal international attention. Other major works include Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (1964), I Served the King of England (1973), and Too Loud a Solitude (1977).
His Only Son by Leopoldo Alas (1890), trans. Margaret Jull Costa (2016)
Leopoldo Alas (1852-1901) was late-19th-century Spain’s leading literary critic as well as a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and professor of law and political economy at the University of Oviedo. His thousands of published articles promoted literary naturalism, liberalism, and anticlericalism.
Alas’s most esteemed novels are La Regenta (1884-1885), often considered the Spanish Madame Bovary, and His Only Son (1890). In 2016, the New York Review of Books Classics published His Only Son along with the novella Doña Berta (1892) translated and with an introduction by the incomparable Margaret Jull Costa.
At the center of the story in His Only Son is the marriage of Emma Valcárcel, a spoiled, domineering, hypochondriacal heiress, and Bonifacio Reyes, a déclassé, romantic dreamer. A gentle, sentimental man, Bonifacio loves to play his flute. “The cloying, monotonous, meek, almost nasal timbre of that melancholy instrument … was completely in harmony with his character …” (p. 6)
Emma is not interested in his music and sees her handsome husband simply as “an ornament, entirely hollow and empty inside,” but good for provoking envy among the town’s ladies. (p. 8) She spends lavishly on clothes for Bonifacio and herself and supports numerous cadging cousins. The family finances are overseen by Emma’s uncle, Don Juan Nepomuceno, who terrifies Bonifacio and assumes wide discretionary control.
Often in bed with imaginary illnesses, Emma gives Bonifacio credit for his nimble massages. However, her foul temper is easily sparked, as in a hilarious scene when she complains of liver pain. Bonifacio points out her liver is on the other side of her body, but her sycophantic cousin Sebastián defends her, calling it “referred pain.” (p. 20)
The routine of the marriage and village life are disrupted with the arrival of an opera troupe, led by singer-impresario Mochi and his stars, the beautiful soprano, Serafina La Gorheggi (an Englishwoman posing as Italian), and the dashing baritone, Minghetti (a Spaniard posing as Italian). Bonifacio begins attending the daily rehearsals, where “one saw the artists as they really were …” He admired them for the “courage to trust [their] … living to a …” musical instrument of voice. (p. 30)
Bonifacio falls in love with Serafina and begins borrowing money from Don Juan and others to support her and Mochi’s opera. As the love affair blossoms and his debts mount, Bonifacio works hard to keep his fears and remorse at bay.
Meanwhile, Emma demands more time from Bonifacio as her supposed illnesses increase. His submissive saintliness makes her suspicious, but his smell of Serafina’s rice powder awakens Emma’s amorous desire for her husband. A rejuvenated Emma soon attends the opera, where she notices the handsome Minghetti, who becomes her piano teacher and, perhaps, lover.
The romantic relationships are further complicated when Emma learns she is pregnant. She is horrified, having had previous miscarriages and being frightened of a painful death: “the approaching catastrophe…” (p. 204)
Bonifacio is joyful. He did not believe in miracles, but he did in Providence. “He and Providence understood each other.” (p. 195) Filled with hope that he will finally have a son, Bonifacio quickly adopts a sober attitude of paternal responsibility.
For others, the impending birth raises the question of who the father is and Bonifacio’s belated attempt at fiscal management spawns concern and conflict.
His Only Son is a humorous, yet touching, story of colorful characters caught in the web of their fateful choices.