Book Review: You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik

Title: You Deserve Nothing
Author: Alexander Maksik
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 978-1609450489
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 336
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 4/5

You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik is based on a true story and I just came to know of it while I was writing the review. It then may be changes the entire tone of the book for me (but obviously) and goes on to becoming more than just a read which I enjoyed to some extent. However, when the reader knows of the story having its roots in what happened for real then the entire perception changes. Especially in a story like this one – of an affair – between a teacher and his student.

Alexander Maksik worked as a teacher for the senior English class at the American School of Paris for five years before he was expelled for having an affair with one of the students. The book opens with three perspectives – of one teacher and two students, who have now aged and reflect on the year of their school life that changed everything. Will (the teacher) is now thirty-eight and his students, Gilad and Marie are twenty-four and twenty-five respectively. The book deals with not only the affair, but also the meaning of life. What does it take to life? What does literature mean to people? What can be made of literature and relate it to life?

The story starts when Gilad and Marie are students at an International School in Paris, the IFS (the name was changed). They are from privileged backgrounds – living life in the fast lane (some of the students) and Will Silver is a popular tenth grade English teacher. Marie is not Will’s student and cannot help but flirt with him and be enamored by his existence. Gilad on the other hand is his student of existential literature and wants to impress him at any cost. Both Marie and Gilad are in love with Will or may be the idea of what Will represents – confidence, charm, intelligence and the drive to live than just survive. Will then has an affair with Marie and things start spiraling down to another level. That is what the book chronicles – literature, life, art and an affair.

The writing is told from three perspectives, so the tone changes with every character. The setting does as well, most of the time. What I liked about the writing was that it did not take sides, considering it would have been easier to do so. What I didn’t like was the fact that there should have been more detailing to characters. For instance, something more about Marie’s background than just cardboard cut outs for parents. At the same time, the biggest plus of reading this book was the fact that literature was so seamlessly merged into it. Will’s passion for teaching and literature were made evident and also were metaphorical to some extent – choices such as “The Stranger” by Camus and “As I Lay Dying” by Faulkner convey Will’s state of mind in an effective manner. At some point though, while writing this review I am compelled to think of the girl (Marie) and what came of her after the affair and the expulsion of the author. However that may be is not for me to decide or draw an assumption on. Gilad’s voice on the other hand is real and honest and about coming to terms with how he feels for his teacher.

I would recommend this book to readers who love a little literature in their books and who want to know something more beyond what lies on the surface. You Deserve Nothing may be a true story, but I like how it has transformed itself on paper as a work of fiction.

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Book Review: The Homecoming Party by Carmine Abate

Title: The Homecoming Party
Author: Carmine Abate
Publisher: Europa Editions
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 978-1933372839
Pages: 192
Price: $15.00
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

The book is about a family that lives in an Albanian village in southern Italy. The author comes from Calabria. He knows the milieu and the traditions he is describing. He grew up there, and you feel this. I hadn’t known that there are several Albanian villages in southern Italy, but that is not so surprising because Albania is just on the other side of the Adriatic Sea! There is quite a bit of Albanian text, but all is translated.

The story is about one family in the small village called Hora. The problem, well one of them, is that there are few employment possibilities. You simply cannot provide for a family with the pay from those jobs that are available. So the father spends months every year working in a coal mine, or building roads, most often in France. These are hard labor jobs. The oldest daughter, Elisa, is at college. Then there is Marco, who is ten years old.

This book is a coming-of-age story about him and really his older siter Elisa too. La Piccola is the youngest daughter. It is Marco and his father who alternately tell the story. When the father speaks it is always at the Christmas bonfire, the most important event of the Christmas season in the village. The father always returns before Christmas, always laden with splendid toys, always playing a pivotal position in the village festivities, and he always he takes every opportunity to be with his kids. He is a great father. Ok, he is gone most of the time but when he is home he is the central figure. All the kids adore him. You see it and feel it and end up loving this little family. But you also see the hardships caused by the need for this father to be out of the country for months on end due to the lack of sufficient employment. When he must leave not only the kids and the mother are torn, but so is the reader. His experiences in a coal mine are vividly depicted. I do not want to work in a coal mine. Never has such been made so real to me.

But there is more. This is a family. As in all families, where we love eachother, we get emotionally ripped up over issues and then arguments explode! You have this here too. And you have sorrow. You have sexual awakening. You have the weight of learning to keep a promise. Yes, everything that we all experience are in this teeny little book of 171 pages. Oh, and there is a dog, Spertina!!! God I love Spertina. The things that happen, the things she does.

As the story moves back and forth in time, we learn that each of them is holding back a secret, something that involves the older man with whom Elisa has had an affair. As the night progresses, we move closer and closer to understanding that secret and to understanding the maturing relationship between father and son. The dénouement of the story is tender and joyous, and I closed the book slowly, wanting to remain with the family and their village.

Once again, Europa Editions has published an astonishing novel that deserves to be read by an international audience. Sprinkled with Arbëresh words, the novel’s setting is distinctly foreign, but the familial relationships, Marco’s love for his dog, and the childish pranks are all familiar. I heartily recommend The Homecoming Party, and I look forward to reading another of Abate’s novels that has been published by Europa Editions, Between Two Seas.

Book Review: Rondo by Kazimierz Brandys

Title: Rondo
Author: Kazimierz Brandys
Publisher: Europa Editions
Genre: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 978-1609450045
Pages: 400
Price: $16.00
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

What is truth and what is illusion. Kazimierz Brandys looks for answers through the story of Tom – a young man in Warsaw during WWII. From the remove of cold war Poland, Tom sends a rebuttal to an article written in a magazine by Professor Janota. Tom wishes to explain the true origin of a WWII Polish resistance group called Rondo. What follows is a tale of unrequited love amongst the secret world of a city held captive. This looks at WWII from a point of view unlike most other literature about that era. Nazis, Allies and Holocaust victims are acknowledged but this is not their story. Ultimately Tom reveals that even in the dark circumstances of Warsaw in the 1940s people proceeded along paths their nature dictated. Tom loves a volatile actress, Tola Mohoczy. Tola loves the brilliant actor Cesar who is married to a most unlikeable actress. After Poland surrenders to Germany, Tom worries that the passionate Tola will become involved with dangerous underground movements. To keep her safe he invents a resistance group of his own – Rondo. He sends Tola on assignments carrying newspaper stuffed packets to imaginary connections. He succeeds fairly well until the ruse transforms into reality.

Indeed, one of themes of this novel is the line between fact and fantasy – what is it that is “real” and what is invented is blurred. What, “Tom” wonders, was his real motivation for creating Rondo? “Perhaps I was craving fiction, looking for something higher than everyday life, for a more complete composition and more harmonious rhyme. Existence was not enough for me,” he muses. He considers his passion for Tola, the actress who has become famous since he first met her. “Wasn’t it, all along, my self-creation? Sometimes it occurs to me that I invented the affair only to measure myself against it.” It’s a story about emotional growth and maturity, of “Tom” moving slowly but steadily from a rather aimless drifting through life (motivated purely by his love for Tola) to a state where that emotion becomes the catalyst for other kinds of commitment. But above all, this is a novel about memory; rapidly, it becomes clear that “Tom’s” reason for writing what turns into a prolonged response to the article about Rondo has less to do with setting the record straight in the public eye, and a lot more with trying to recapture the facts of the matter and set them in order in his own mind. “Perhaps the need to reminisce has been with me for a long time?” And, of course, there are no easy answers – hence the length and complexity of his recollections, and their scattershot nature.

The narrative can be tricky to follow. The narrator has little regard for chronology,skipping about from pre-war to post war events with the heaviest focus on the actual war years. He frequently makes allusions to people not yet introduced, promising to explain later. In the end it assumes the structure of all memory – bits and pieces flowing together to create a complete story. The author has a deep regard and compelling ability to comment on the underlying emotions and motivations of the diverse group of characters he creates. All in all one good romp of a read. A must read again.

Book Review: The Proof of Honey by Salwa Al Neimi

Title: The Proof of the Honey
Author: Salwa Al Neimi
Publisher: Europa Editions
Genre: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9781933372686
Pages: 160
Price: $15.00
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

This is a sliim, beguiling novel that reads like a memoir. The author, an Arab woman living in Paris, writes about an Arab woman living in Paris who is reflecting on her relationships with men and with sex itself. The story draws on ancient erotic Arabic literary texts as a context in which the narrator views herself and her encounters.

The reader, by the way, is never quite sure which of those adventures are real and which imagined. But drawing a distinction when it comes to sex between “the real” and “the imagined” is one of the things this novel challenges: “He was just as my words had shaped him. The image belongs to me; it has nothing to do with him” (p138). No writer I have read blends so successfully sexual frankness, human insight, and poetic delicacy. Moreover this remarkable sensitivity, Al Neimi argues, derives from an extraordinary tradition of Arabic erotica that leads to, rather than away from, that God who both creates and blesses our desires.

The author, through her narrator, propounds an extreme feminist view — with curious spears of male chauvinism protruding in some passages. Using this short volume as a barometer, the sexual revolution that shook the Western world in the 1960′s and ’70′s may be, for good or not, edging farther into the Muslim consciousness now.

The sensual cover suggests a novella of refined eroticism and lyricism. One cannot, upon finishing the book, be entirely satisfied, however, because the thin plot is really veneer for mini essays, the thoughts are often confused and partial, and, although sexual honey and seductive lower backs are embedded (pun intended) in certain passages, for the most part, one needn’t fan oneself from embarrassment. Much original English-language erotic literature is arguably far more developed and arousing than this translation.

“The Proof of the Honey” is an important book because it dispels cultural stereotypes while transcending the local to make all of us think more deeply about the realm of the senses. What her lover tells the heroine of this novel is what we might say of its author: “I love two things about you. Your free spirit and your Arabness”.

Book Review: A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse

Title: A Novel Bookstore
Author: Cosse, Laurence
ISBN: 13: 9781933372822
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Europa Editions
PP: 424 pages
Price: $15.00
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

The main thing about being a book geek is that I’m predisposed to like books about books, about reading books, holding books, and finding books. It’s almost cheating to write a book about a bookstore in which there are only good books. It’s like offering free chocolate upon entering a store.

The conceit of this book is what gets me. I spent too much time thinking about what I would list if asked to come up with 600 good novels, which are defined here as different from good reads or even great novels. That’s what captivated me about this book. The love stories, the triangle, the thriller aspects, were all less interesting than the writing about reading. This is what I mean:

We want necessary books, books we can read the day after the funeral, when we have no tears left from all our crying, when we can hardly stand for the pain; books that will be there like loved ones when we have tidied a dead child’s room and copied out her secret notes to have them with us, always[...].

We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please.

We have no time for those sloppy, hurried books[...].

We want books that are written for those of us who doubt everything, who cry over the least little thing, who are startled by the slightest noise.

We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer’s block, the author’s panic at the thought that he might be lost: his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure that he has taken.

How do you not love that? It’s this part that I’ve been thinking about for days. What is a good novel? How would I define it? I keep coming back to some sort of guide when lost in the wilderness, not so much a path or a person but a compass. It points in the right direction but you find your own way. I don’t want to be told or lead. I want to find my own way.

It can’t be any book. It is never going to be the cheap romance or comfort-food fantasy novel. There is something else about certain novels that make them good novels, in this sense. I acknowledge a subjective criteria and I know what are not among them. They do not include books that have the word “evocative” on the back. Prizes received because it’s the author’s turn. Publishers who only speak in hyperbole. Reviewers who think more about what the author will say about them when reviewing their books than what I might want to know.

I agree with Cossé that those sources have become suspect (maybe they always have been). They are suspect because their purpose is to sell books. It is their primary purpose, sometimes their sole purpose. The purpose that seems to be lost is to recognize good writers and good books, finding a way to support them so that more can be produced. I want more of those books. Every time a reader is sold a bad book, or even a mediocre book, because someone was just out to make money, the reader dies a little. She becomes more reluctant to pick up another book. She loses some of her trust, her faith, in the power of the written word. Remember how we used to believe in that power? Now it’s like believing in fairies; it gets harder all the time. The audience isn’t clapping very loudly; Tinker Bell’s days are numbered.

Now something about the book:

Ivan (Van) Georg, who manages a shop called The Good Novel, and Francesca Aldo-Valbelli, the heiress who is supporting it financially, have committed themselves to a shop which is not “an ordinary bookstore…[and] our customers [are not] ordinary customers.” A committee of eight writers, each representing different styles of novels selects the books for the shop, each member having a pen name so that no one, not even other committee members, knows their identities, and the book owners stock the shop with these “good” books. With a choice Parisian location near the famed Odeon Theatre, the shop opens to customers in August. The shop is mobbed from the outset. By Christmas, the shop is a huge success.

But success has come at a price. Large numbers of new customers have ordered pop novels, then failed to pick them up, leaving the shop to pay for them. Nasty comments appear on their internet forum, and a seemingly organized attack is mounted in the press, with accusations of elitism taking up whole pages, At one point the shop is described as a “totalitarian undertaking,” an attempt by a small group of elite to control the reading done by the public. Fascist accusations result. Demands are made that the shop’s financial backer be unmasked.

Eventually, three attempts to murder members of the secret selection committee, described in the opening pages of the novel, involve the police. Throughout the attacks, both physical and in print, the author raises questions of who benefits from the destruction of one small bookstore and its people. Resentful owners of other bookstores? A general public insulted by the shop’s cultural snobbery? Publishers of new novels which have not “made the cut” for inclusion at the shop? A cabal of disaffected authors whose books are not carried by the shop? When several new bookstores open adjacent to or across the street from The Good Novel, sales at The Good Novel plummet.

A combination of mystery, fantasy, philosophical analysis, and economic treatise on the book industry, A Novel Bookstore raises interesting questions within a unique story. The novel does have its problems, however. A love story involving manager Van and Anis, a wispy and only vaguely attentive young woman, is unsatisfying, and the mystery is not well integrated. The attempts at murder described in the beginning of the novel gain little attention for most of the novel as the ins and outs of book shop business and publishing dominate the “action.” In fact, some of the most interesting sections of the novel are those related to the decisions of what books to include on the shelves. Though the novel is obviously fiction, some readers will feel that the plot line and its consequences lack enough realism to provide the reader with significant new understandings of the real “book world.”

I can say that The Novel Bookstore is a good novel, despite the flaws, because it makes me think about what reading means to me, what novels mean to me, what writing means to me. It gives me a view into what a good novel might be. It reminds me of their importance in my life. It makes me think about what it’s like to read a good novel because another reader who I love and trust found the book important, moving, funny, dark, clever, ironic, well-written, compelling, or somehow a special experience. It bolsters what little faith I have left. Please don’t let that change

The Most Beautiful Book in the World: 8 Novellas by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

The Most Beautiful Book in the World: 8 Novellas is a collection of eight modern fairy tales. In each of the novellas, a sense of the fantastic intertwines with the mundane, sometimes enchantingly, sometimes crudely but still beguilingly.

The title story, for instance, transports the reader into the midst of a women’s gulag during Soviet rule. Tatyana and others who bunk together are determined to smuggle out messages to their children — all daughters, coincidentally or not. The women naturally worry about what they should write their children who are now most likely wards of the State. With a limit on the precious amount they may write, they agonize over what is most important. Then, the prisoner considered by the others to be “the most scatter-brained of them all, the most sentimental, the least headstrong” stuns everyone by being the first to get her message down. She is at utter peace with her choice of words. The others can’t help feeling jealous and very curious. What did she write?

“The Most Beautiful Book in the World” packs a nice emotional punch. The conclusion, in its Epilogue in the year 2005, imparts a fitting epiphany about how we human beings can communicate immensities with but a few choice words. It is a lovely comedy in the classic definition of the term: there is a triumph over adverse circumstances.

Immediately before the gulag folktale, the collection’s longest selection (thirty pages) has its turn. The title character in “Odette Toulemonde” has “a talent: joy.” Odette excitedly goes to a bookstore to buy the new book of her favorite author, Balthazar Balsan, and to have him autograph it for her. Odette, a lower middle class widow with two jobs gets so tongue-tied when she meets him that she can’t even speak her own name properly. Balsan’s books, she believes, showed her that ” ‘ in every life, no matter how miserable, there are reasons to be happy, to laugh, to love.’ ” Balthazar, a wealthy man with a troubled marriage and young son who is taking too much after his old man, goes through his own identity crisis soon after this book signing. In true fairy tale form, he and Odette meet again. But when their attachment may be going too far, Odette tells Balthazar, ” ‘Our paths may cross, but we can no longer meet each other.” Will that be the end of them, or are they destined for more?

“Odette Toulemonde” tries to point the way to balanced living. In “Every Reason to be Happy” a woman discovers her husband isn’t the man she thought and she has to decide how she will handle the startling revelations. In “The Forgery” the ability to trust is tested by two women with very different results. And what would any set of fairy tales be without “A Barefoot Princess” who may not be what she seems?

The leitmotif being forwarded in THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK IN THE WORLD by the author, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, is, arguably, that regardless of our histories, regardless of our economic status, regardless of our pettiness and self-centeredness, life often hands out teachable moments that can either make or break us. Truth, beauty, and especially happiness are ours if we possess the strength to see them everywhere.

Playwright, novelist, and short story/novella writer Schmitt, informs the reader in his Postscript, dated August 15, 2006, that he used free minutes between directing the screen version, Odette Toulemonde (original French ONLY Version No English Options)(for which he had also penned the screenplay), to write these stories. He explains that he’d been carrying them around in his “mind for a long time.” So, Schmitt didn’t have the luxury of endless hours in which to fine-tune his pacing or his prose. Although the plot ideas were pre-thought, his execution was impromptu. This unfinished quality accents each of the eight stories, and this insight about how these stories were written adds an intrinsic value to their recurrent “draft” feeling.

The back cover lauds Schmitt as “one of Europe’s most popular and best-selling authors.” Europa Editions is the first to publish short stories/novellas of his, translated by Alison Anderson. Schmitt’is fables — his fairy tales — give a tantalizing taste, but leave this reader wanting more. Some of his plays are available in English (Schmitt Plays: One (Contemporary Dramatists) (v. 1)), as is one other collection of novellas (Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran & Oscar and the Lady in Pink) but what about his novels and other short stories? Perhaps we’ll see more of this author very soon…

Most Beautiful Book in the World The: 8 Novellas; Schmitt, Eric-Emmanuel; Europa Editions; $15.00

From the Land of the Moon by Milena Agus

Setting her novel in Cagliari, Sardinia, author Milena Agus creates a story which spans three generations, focusing on women from two families who are joined through marriage. An unnamed contemporary speaker feels particularly connected to her paternal grandmother, and as the speaker pieces together this woman’s life from what she herself recalls about her and from the family lore which has survived through the memories of the rest of the family, she creates a woman who not only searches earnestly for love but is absolutely determined to experience it in all its splendor, believing that it is “the principal thing in life.”

The background to the story is simple and is simply presented. This grandmother is thirty in 1943, and unmarried–she has never had a real love. The local boys have always seemed to be attracted to her initially but then somehow are repelled within a few meetings with her, despite her beauty. Her eventual marriage, forced upon her by her father, who fears that her growing reputation of being mad will eliminate all future possibilities of marriage, is to an older man, a widower who has lost his family in the Allied bombing. Neither partner expects anything from the marriage, and she encourages her new husband to continue to visit the local brothels. When, after seven years and many miscarriages, her doctor advises her to go to a spa for treatment, her life changes, leading, nine months later to the birth of the speaker’s father. The speaker’s other grandmother, Lia, has had daughter at age eighteen with a local shepherd, who is married, and this daughter becomes the speaker’s mother.

As the speaker further develops the stories of these characters, the narrative swirls in time and place, and it is impossible to tell the extent to which the speaker may be embellishing them. Several story lines overlap, and the two grandmothers have similar experiences. Both grandmothers write poetry, and the deaths of true lovers (or those believed to be true lovers) seem to happen simultaneously. The reader does not know whether these are coincidence or if, memory being fallible, the speaker is confusing family lore and the family members who have experienced these events. Then again, she could be inventing everything, following in the tradition of her two writer grandparents.

Whatever the case, the novel deals beautifully with primal events and universal themes–the need to belong, the importance of ties to a community, the yearning for true love, the vagaries of chance or fate, the importance of memories, and the need to create. As the generations move forward from World War II to the present, each character must protect his/her memories against change in order to preserve a sense of selfhood. It is only the speaker who has the liberty to tinker with the past and/or the truth. When, in the conclusion, the speaker’s own life is brought up to date, the reasons for all these memories become clear, and her need to connect with the past poetically is understandable. Passion, in all its many forms, rules the lives of the characters here–and affects the reader, too

From the Land of the Moon; Agus, Milena; Europa Editions; $15.00

Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky

This short and yet heavy novel is Alina Bronsky’s debut novel. Originally published in German, it has been translated into English by Tim Mohr. Sasha Naimann is a teenage girl. She, her mother (Marina), stepfather Vadim, younger brother Anton and younger sister Alissa moved from Russia to Germany, where they settled into a Russian ghetto. Sasha, a brilliant woman, opens the book by saying that she plans to murder her stepfather because he murdered her mother and her mother’s new boyfriend.

Vadim is incarcerated, giving Sasha the belief that she has more time to plan his execution. Sasha takes care of her brother and sister with the assistance of Maria, also a Russian immigrant and Vadim’s cousin. Sasha struggles with the powerful desire to remain in the apartment that her mother was murdered in, in the housing project known as the “Emerald,” because her neighbors (also Russian immigrants), want her family to leave and take their bad luck with them. Sasha also feels like she doesn’t wholly belong because she refuses to participate in the drunken, drug driven parties that her peers engage in nearby Broken Glass Park – a park that literally has glass strewn about.

What I loved about Sasha is that she has great capacity for love, in spite of the harsh hand that life has been dealt her. She is very protective of her younger siblings and she even agrees to tutor a neighbor in order to help her pass her exams and not be left behind in school. However, her capacity for actually being kind most of the time is non-existent because of what she has suffered. The translation and the writing style along with the memorable Sasha made this book a wonderful and memorable read. It went by insanely fast. I think that I read it in about a day and a half, which is a record for me.

Broken Glass Park; Bronsky, Alina; Europa Editions; $15.00