Micronesia – Nauru
by Christina S
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After a small hiatus, we return on our exploration of the literature of the World. We go to some remote areas this week that may not be familiar to you. I confess that I had to educate myself on Nauru. That is the wonderful thing about intellectual exercises like this. It is an opportunity to discover and expand your understanding of what is beyond your individual knowledge.
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Micronesia
The People in the Trees: a novel by Hanya Yanagihara
It is 1950 when Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Perina uncovers their secret and returns with it to America, where he soon finds great success. But his discovery has come at a terrible cost, not only for the islanders, but for Perina himself.
Navigating CHamoru Poetry: indigeneity, aesthetics, and decolonization by Craig Santos Perez
This book shows that CHamoru poetry has been an inspiring and empowering act of protest, resistance, and testimony in the decolonization, demilitarization, and environmental justice movements of Guåhan. Perez roots his intersectional cultural and literary analyses within the fields of CHamoru studies, Pacific Islands studies, Native American studies, and decolonial studies, using his research to assert that new CHamoru literature has been—and continues to be—a crucial vessel for expressing the continuities and resilience of CHamoru identities.
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Moldova
The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov
A group of adventurous villagers attempt to escape Moldova for Italy in this novel of poverty and hope in Eastern Europe. The Moldovian village of Larga is depressed in more ways than one and its remaining citizens long for a better life. Meanwhile, just over the border in Italy, the economy is booming. But when a group of Largans decide to take fate into their own hands and attempt to cross the border, their efforts result in a tragicomic romp of post-Soviet shenanigans. An Orthodox priest is deserted by his wife for an art-dealing atheist; a mechanic redesigns his tractor for travel by air and sea; thousands of villagers take to the road on a modern-day religious crusade to make it to the promised land of Italy; meanwhile, politicians remain politicians.
Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks
It doesn’t take much- “£100 is usually sufficient” -to persuade Tony Hawks to take off on notoriously bizarre and hilarious adventures in response to a bet. And so it is, a pointless argument with a friend concludes in a bet- that Tony can’t beat all eleven members of the Moldovan soccer team at tennis. And, with the loser of the bet agreeing to strip naked on Balham High Road and sing the Moldovan national anthem, this one was just too good to resist.
The ensuing unpredictable and often hilarious adventure sees him being taken in by Moldovan gypsies and narrowly avoid kidnap in Transnistria. It sees him smuggle his way on to the Moldovan National Team coach in Coleraine and witness (almost) divine intervention in the Holy Land.
In this inspiring and exceptionally funny book, Tony Hawks has done it again, proving against all odds that there is no reason in the world why you can’t do something a bit stupid and prove all of your doubters wrong. Or at least that was the idea…
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Monaco
Meet Me in Monaco: a novel of Grace Kelly’s royal wedding by Hazel Gaynor
Movie stars and paparazzi flock to Cannes for the glamorous film festival, but Grace Kelly, the biggest star of all, wants only to escape from the flash-bulbs. When struggling perfumer Sophie Duval shelters Miss Kelly in her boutique to fend off a persistent British press photographer, James Henderson, a bond is forged between the two women and sets in motion a chain of events that stretches across thirty years of friendship, love, and tragedy.
White Truffles in Winter: a novel by N. M. Kelby
White Truffles in Winter imagines the world of the remarkable French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935), who changed how we eat through his legendary restaurants at the Savoy and the Ritz. A man of contradictions―kind yet imperious, food-obsessed yet rarely hungry―Escoffier was also torn between two women: the famous, beautiful, and reckless actress Sarah Bernhardt and his wife, the independent and sublime poet Delphine Daffis, who refused ever to leave Monte Carlo. In the last year of Escoffier’s life, in the middle of writing his memoirs, he has returned to Delphine, who requests a dish in her name as he has honored Bernhardt, Queen Victoria, and many others. How does one define the complexity of love on a single plate?
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Mongolia
Live From Mongolia: from Wall Street banker to Mongolian news anchor by Patricia Sexton
In 2006, author Patricia Sexton set out on a journey most of us have only fantasized about. She quit her job to pursue her dream. Thirty years old and a rising star at a Wall Street investment bank, Patricia wanted nothing more than to work as a foreign correspondent. So, that’s just what she did, moving to Mongolia after landing an internship at the country’s national TV station. Live from Mongolia follows Patricia’s unlikely journey from Wall Street to Ulan Bator. Not only does Patricia manage to get promoted to anchor of the Mongolian news, she also meets some unusual people following unusual dreams of their own.
The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag
In the high Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, a young shepherd boy comes of age, tending his family’s flocks on the mountain steppes and knowing little of the world beyond the surrounding peaks. But his nomadic way of life is increasingly disrupted by modernity. This confrontation comes in stages. First, his older siblings leave the family yurt to attend a distant boarding school. Then the boy’s grandmother dies, and with her his connection to the old ways. But perhaps the greatest tragedy strikes when his dog, Arsylang—“all that was left to me”—ingests poison set out by the boy’s father to protect his herd from wolves. “Why is it so?” Dshurukawaa cries out in despair to the Heavenly Blue Sky, to be answered only by the wind.
Wolf Totem: a novel by Jiang Rong
Part period epic, part fable for modern days, Wolf Totem depicts the dying culture of the Mongols–the ancestors of the Mongol hordes who at one time terrorized the world–and the parallel extinction of the animal they believe to be sacred: the fierce and otherworldly Mongolian wolf. Beautifully translated by Howard Goldblatt, the foremost translator of Chinese fiction, this extraordinary novel is finally available in English.
When I’m Gone, Look for me in the East: a novel by Quan Barry
A novel that moves across a windswept Mongolia, as a pair of estranged twin brothers make a journey of duty, conflict, and renewed understanding. Tasked with finding the reincarnation of a great lama somewhere in the vast Mongolian landscape, the young monk Chuluun seeks the help of his identical twin, Mun, who was recognized as a reincarnation himself as a child, but has since renounced their once shared monastic life. Harking back to her vivid and magical first novel set in Vietnam, Quan Barry carries us across a landscape as unforgiving as it is beautiful and culturally varied, from the stark Gobi Desert to the ancient capital of Chinggis Khan. As their country stretches before them, questions of the immortal soul, along with more earthly matters of love, sex, and brotherhood, haunt the twins, who can hear each other’s thoughts. Are our lives our own, or do we belong to something larger? When I’m Gone is a stunningly far-flung examination of our individual struggle to retain faith and discover meaning in a fast-changing world, and a paean to Buddhist acceptance of what simply is
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Montenegro
Catherine the Great and the Small by Olja Knezevic
Catharine’s trajectory in life is accompanied by failures in love, family traumas and an incredible romance with handsome Sinisa. The novel takes us through turbulent times in the Balkan region, from the eighties to the present day, portraying growing up in the twilight of communism, and giving intimate insights into all that happened to the region after that. A powerful female voice seeking her place within her family, among friends, in the cities she lives in, and constructing her unique identity as a daughter, granddaughter, friend, mistress, wife and a mother. The very first novel in English by Montenegrin author Olja Knežević
Building can be seen as a master metaphor for modernity, which some great irresistible force, be it fascism or communism or capitalism, is always busy building anew, and Houses is a book about a man, Arseniev Negoyan, who has devoted his life and his dreams to building. Bon vivant, Francophile, visionary, Negoyan spent the first half of his life building houses he loved and even gave names to—Juliana, Christina, Agatha—making his hometown of Belgrade into a modern city to be proud of. The second half of his life, after World War II and the Nazi occupation, he has spent in one of those houses, being looked after by his wife and a nurse, in hiding. Now, on the last day of his life, Negoyan has decided to go out at last to see what he has wrought.
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Morocco
Raised by his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki has always had big dreams of living another life in another world. Suddenly his dreams are within reach when he discovers that his father-whom he’d been led to believe was dead-is very much alive. A wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him back to the streets and his childhood friends. Trapped once again by his class and painfully aware of the limitations of his prospects, he becomes easy prey for a fringe Islamic group. In the spirit of The Inheritance of Loss and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Laila Lalami’s debut novel looks at the struggle for identity, the need for love and family, and the desperation that grips ordinary lives in a world divided by class, politics, and religion.
Orange Blossom & Honey: magical Moroccan recipes from the Souks to the Sahara by John Gregory-Smith
Orange Blossom & Honey takes you on a culinary journey across Morocco, from the souks of Marrakesh, through the Sahara, and onto the wind-swept shores of the Atlantic. In researching this book, John travelled into the heart of the High Atlas Mountains to learn the secrets of traditional lamb barbecue, then journeyed north, through the city of Fes, where the rich dishes of the Imperial Courts are still prepared in many homes. From here he continued on to the Rif Mountains, where rustic recipes are made with the freshest seasonal produce.
Dreams of Trespass: tales of a harem girlhood by Fatima Mernissi
A feminist in the Muslim world weaves her own memories with dreams of women who surround her in the courtyard of her childhood.
Relates the story of a woman born in a harem in Morocco, growing up with wise, funny, individualistic women, and creating a fantasy world from sheer imagination because the outside world was inaccessible.
Overview: “I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco …” So begins Fatima Mernissi in this exotic and rich narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth-women who, deprived of access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. Dreams of Trespass is the provocative story of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex in the recent Muslim world. In a book as evocative as anything found in A Thousand and One Nights, Mernissi, who was born in a harem in 1940 in Morocco, writes with great wit and color of the politics of seductions, of the harem as a metaphor, and of the world beyond–every woman’s inaccessible obsession.
The Almond by Nedjma
An autobiographical erotic novel written by an observant Muslim woman in contemporary North Africa, The Almond is an extraordinary and pioneering literary work, a truly unforgettable journey into the sexual undercurrents of a world that is, outwardly and to Western eyes, puritanical. Badra is a young Muslim widow who flees the small town of Imchouk to take refuge with her Uncle Slimane’s iconoclastic ex-wife. In Imchouk, it was expected that Badra’s life should be limited by her husband’s wishes, but at Aunt Selma’s, Badra begins to think about how she wants to live from now on. She recalls her youthful curiosity about sex — what other girls’ and women’s bodies were like, her first attempts to spy on men, her fascination with the two beautiful prostitute sisters who lived outside Imchouk. When she develops a passionate, consuming relationship with a wealthy doctor, Badra remembers and rediscovers her own sexual being, in scenes that are erotic, revelatory, and sometimes bittersweet.
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Mozambique
The First Wife: a tale of polygamy by Paulina Chiziane
After twenty years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband has been living a double—or rather, a quintuple—life. Tony, a senior police officer in Maputo, has apparently been supporting four other families for many years. Rami remains calm in the face of her husband’s duplicity and plots to make an honest man out of him. After Tony is forced to marry the four other women—as well as an additional lover—according to polygamist custom, the rival lovers join together to declare their voices and demand their rights. In this brilliantly funny and feverishly scathing critique, a major work from Mozambique’s first published female novelist, Paulina Chiziane explores her country’s traditional culture, its values and hypocrisy, and the subjection of women the world over.
Sea Loves Me: selected stories by Mia Couto
Covering the entire arc of Couto’s career, this collection displays the Mozambican author’s inventiveness, sensitivity, and social range with greater richness than any previous collection, including early stories that reflect the harshness of life under Portuguese colonialism; magical tales of rural Africa; and contemporary fables of the slipperiness of race and gender, environmental disaster and the clash between the countryside and the city. The title novella, long acclaimed as one of Couto’s best works but never before made available in English, caps this collection with the lyrical story of a search for a lost father that leads to unexpected love.
Neighbours: the story of a murder by Lília Momplé
On the eve of Eid al-Fitr, three families quietly prepare for the night’s celebrations, preoccupied with their own separate lives.
Narguiss cooks food with her daughters, anxiously waiting for her husband to come home.
Leia and Januário take joy in the fact they finally have a roof over their heads, especially after the birth of their young daughter.
And Mena overhears her husband plotting murder…
Told through a series of narrative snapshots, Neighbours is a gripping tale of secret conspiracies and revolt in Mozambique.
A Treacherous Paradise by Henning Mankell
Cold and poverty define Hanna Renstrom’s childhood in remote northern Sweden, and in 1905, at nineteen, she boards a ship for Australia in hope of a better life. But none of her hopes–or fears–prepares her for the life she will lead. After two brief marriages, she finds herself a widow twice over, and the owner of a bordello in Portuguese East Africa, a world where colonialism and white supremacy rule, where she is isolated within society by her profession and her sex, and, among the bordello’s black prostitutes, by her color. As Hanna’s story unfurls over the next several years, we watch her in this “treacherous paradise,” as she wrestles with a constant, wrenching loneliness and with the racism she’s meant to unthinkingly adopt. And as her life becomes increasingly intertwined with the prostitutes, she moves inexorably toward the moment when she will make a decision that defies every expectation society has of her, and, more important, those she has of herself.
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Myanmar
The River of Lost Footsteps: histories of Burma by Myint-U Thant
Thant tells the story of modern Burma, in part through a telling of his own family’s history, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic, and appalling. His maternal grandfather, U Thant, rose from being the schoolmaster of a small town in the Irrawaddy Delta to become the UN secretary-general in the 1960s. And on his father’s side, the author is descended from a long line of courtiers who served at Burma’s Court of Ava for nearly two centuries. Through their stories and others, he portrays Burma’s rise and decline in the modern world, from the time of Portuguese pirates and renegade Mughal princes through the decades of British colonialism, the devastation of World War II, and a sixty-year civil war that continues today and is the longest-running war anywhere in the world.
The Glass Palace: a novel by Amitav Ghosh
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls “a master storyteller.”
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Namibia
Embassy Wife: a novel by Katie Crouch
Meet Persephone Wilder, a displaced genius posing as the wife of an American diplomat in Namibia. Persephone takes her job as a representative of her country seriously, coming up with an intricate set of rules to survive the problems she encounters: how to dress in hundred-degree weather without showing too much skin, how not to look drunk at embassy functions, and how to eat roasted oryx with grace. She also suspects her husband is not actually the ambassador’s legal counsel but a secret agent in the CIA. The consummate embassy wife, she takes the newest trailing spouse, Amanda Evans, under her wing.
The Eternal Audience of One: a novel by Rémy Ngamije
Nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, not even the people in it. The most one can do is make some sort of start and then work toward some kind of ending.
One might as well start with Séraphin: playlist-maker, nerd-jock hybrid, self-appointed merchant of cool, Rwandan, stifled and living in Windhoek, Namibia. Soon he will leave the confines of his family life for the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town, in South Africa, where loyal friends, hormone-saturated parties, adventurous conquests, and race controversies await. More than that, his long-awaited final year in law school promises to deliver a crucial puzzle piece of the Great Plan immigrant: a degree from a prestigious university. But a year is more than the sum of its parts, and en route to the future, the present must be lived through and even the past must be survived.
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Nauru
On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu
Firuzeh and her brother Nour are children of fire, born in an Afghanistan fractured by war. When their parents, their Atay and Abay, decide to leave, they spin fairy tales of their destination, the mythical land and opportunities of Australia. As the family journeys from Pakistan to Indonesia to Nauru, heading toward a hope of home, they must rely on fragile and temporary shelters, strangers both mercenary and kind, and friends who vanish as quickly as they’re found.
After the Tampa: from Afghanistan to New Zealand by Abbas Nazari
When the Taliban were at the height of their power in 2001, Abbas Nazari’s parents were faced with a stay and face persecution in their homeland, or seek security for their young children elsewhere.The family’s desperate search for safety took them on a harrowing journey from the mountains of Afghanistan to a small fishing boat in the Indian Ocean, crammed with more than 400 other asylum seekers.When their boat started to sink, they were mercifully saved by a cargo ship, the Tampa. However, one of the largest maritime rescues in modern history quickly turned into an international stand-off, as Australia closed its doors to these asylum seekers. The Tampa had waded into the middle of Australia’s national election, sparking their hardline policy of offshore detention. While many of those rescued by the Tampa were the first inmates sent to the island of Nauru, Abbas and his family were some of the lucky few to be resettled in New Zealand.
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Booked Solid in Santa Fe 