Category: International Literature

In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that’s completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language. Arundhati Roy has written screenplays for two films and lives in New Delhi.

Edeet Ravel was born on an Israeli kibbutz and now lives in Canada. Lily is a young emigrant student exploring the wonders and terrors of her new land when she meets the man of her dreams. Ami, a former actor, is handsome, intelligent and exciting – but, like his beautiful, disintegrating country, he has a terrible flaw – he is an army interrogator.

Exerpt: “Fashila is an Arabic word meaning to fail, lose courage, despair, be disappointed, act in a cowardly way. In Hebrew slang, fashla means mess-up, snafu, an embarrassing or disastrous or humiliating mistake. You can use it for small things, like forgetting you had to meet someone, or you can use it for big things like the Yom Kippur War. A box-cell is a cell that is five feet by five feet by two and a half feet. The person can’t stand up or stretch out. You find box-cells in most Israeli prisons: they’re punishment cells, and nobody lasts very long in them – people start going mad fast and they don’t want to go back in once they’ve been let out.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Colombian born author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this first novel. It is described as the most influential literary work of our time, the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes (Chilean poet and Novel laureate Pablo Neruda).

It is a story that spans many generations and gives the reader a glimpse of history, culture, life with all the mythology, miracles  – stories first told by his grandmother. Marquez’s own story is a rags to riches saga, as this first book catapults him to international recognition.

From the book jacket: One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women.

An except from the novel:

“Poor great-great-grandmother,” Amaranta Ursula said. “She died of old age.”

Ursula was startled.

“I am alive!” she said.

“You can see,” Amaranta Ursula said, suppressing her laughter, “that she’s not even breathing.”

“I’m talking!” Ursula shouted.

“She can’t even talk,” Aureliano said. “She died like a little cricket.”

Then Ursula gave in the the evidence. “My God,” she exclaimed in a low voice. “So this is what it’s like to be dead.”

Another shorter book by the same author that was very interesting, Chronicles of a Death Foretold. A gentleman is ambushed by two local men, brothers of a recently married, then disgraced girl (apparently by the poor murdered chap), who is brutally stabbed in broad daylight. The book reads like a murder mystery where everyone in town seemed to know about what was going to happen except the murder victim. Humourous with a distinct Caribbean flavour, this is a good read.