Books: The International List

When TONI MORRISON speaks, the world listens—and when she speaks, she roars. The Nobel Laureate’s latest, GOD HELP THE CHILD (Chatto & Windus, 184 pages), is one of the most anticipated literary events of the year, a slim volume belying the turmoil within. ‘I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it,’ says its troubled heroine Bride, once Lula Ann. Three decades after that spectacular ghost Beloved (of the eponymous Pulitzer-winning 1987 novel) was felled by her own mother, we have left the tragic mulatta behind but her wounds are as vital. Our heroine, a beautiful, ebony ‘panther in snow’, grew up hard but she is now a successful businesswoman in the American plutocracy. Her problems with mysterious lover Booker stem from their childhood hurts and confrontations with sexual predators; child abuse is the leitmotif, as much as racial prejudice is the lifeblood of all works by ‘America’s Conscience’. Yet, when Booker leaves abruptly and Bride visits a former teacher she once testified against, she crumples. The teacher, a sexual predator released after a 15-year sentence, beats her up and soon she is literally on her way—pubic hair vanishing, breasts leaching away—back to that scared little Black girl who crossed the street to avoid the White boys. She sets out in search of Booker, meeting a slippery little girl called Rain en route, yet another child who has been sexually abused and abandoned by parents.

Morrison’s vision of contemporary Black America is California- current, in tune with both the world of Empire—this year’s blingy hit TV series about a rapstar-mogul—and the reality of the race debate in an America struggling to move on from Ferguson. Bride’s company is called You, Girl, inspired by an image consultant who tells her: “Black sells. It’s the hottest commodity in the civilised world.” She is coveted by men who give her a ‘Diet Coke’ version of a love life; envied for her hooded ‘alien eyes’ and sexual prowess by Brooklyn, her treacherous, dreadlock- sporting blonde bestie; and stared at for the right reasons at last. She wears only white to preserve her look because ‘black is the new black’, discovering the many shades of white: ‘ivory, oyster, alabaster, paper white, snow, cream, ecru, Champagne, ghost, bone’. Bride’s mother Sweetness is light enough to pass, and tried tough love to prepare Bride for a world unable to handle her degree of blackness—she wonders, ‘Can you imagine how many white folks have Negro blood running and hiding in their veins?’ Twenty per cent is what she has heard.

Morrison speaks to the heart as always in her lush, balletic prose and in multiple narratives—particularly wonderful as a sexy young woman, even if her world is too slight for this heavyweight novelist. Odd moments— Bride ‘shaves’ with the brush jettisoned by the lover who left her—turn sensual when she titillates her body with its boar bristles. Yet, there is something off-kilter about this mix of combustible elements— making it inevitable that we end with a conflagration. The problematising of beauty is nicely muddy here, but Morrison does not seem to have allowed herself room for nuance. She reminds us overly of Bride’s looks, just as her litany of child abuse is terribly real but approaches overkill. The Bluest Eye (1970) took her to similar areas of abuse and insecurity over colour; Tar Baby (1981), about a Sorbonne-educated model and her deep, drifter boyfriend, is familiar too, and both are far more substantial. Still, you have to applaud a novel which ends with a wicked warning about the perils of parenting: ‘If you think mothering is all cooing, booties and diapers you’re in for a big shock.’ Morrison, like all great writers, may have to struggle to surpass her best works, but she’s still got it.

‘Maybe, in my heart of hearts, I wished this man were mine.’ Hayat, a young novelist surviving a loveless marriage to a powerful officer busy with his climb, has her fantasies. It is inevitable that she escape into the world she calls up, which is given to us in between parallel chapters from her life. Soon, her creation has walked out of her book and into her life as seductive Khaled, a dangerous liaison full of lines like ‘Squandering life is also a part of life’, as political problems explode all around her in an already broken city. It is the classic conflict of personal and political, Hayat ‘wanting to keep those sweet sensations in a safe, closed place’. This is never really possible, of course. ‘Homeland? How could we have called it a homeland when its every grave harboured a crime, and every piece of news involved tragedy and loss?’ she exclaims. CHAOS OF THE SENSES (Bloomsbury, 320 pages) is the sort of romantic novel set in the Middle East which is coveted by publishers today. Algerian novelist and poet AHLAM MOSTEGHANEMI holds the position of the highest selling female author in the Arab world, and has been ranked among the top ten most influential women in the Middle East (Forbes, 2006). Her The Bridges of Constantine has been adapted into a television series and her work is popular but it is not terribly satisfying within this genre. And the political message of this tale, translated from Arabic by NANCY ROBERTS, sometimes feels tacked on within this narrative, though less burdensome than the long passages on the craft of writing.

The nine stories in SNOW IN MAY (HarperCollins, 280 pages) are careful miniatures straight out of its gorgeous cover, which details a wintry Russian scene turned upside down; just as snow startles us in May, as in the first story—Love, Italian Style, or in Line for Bananas—furniture is splayed on the street. Set in Magadan, once the entrance to Stalin’s infamous Gulag networks and now a bustling port town in northeast Russia, these stories-inside-stories explore the lives of the former Party workers and hopeful new Russians. We begin in 1975, where the classic Soviet stage of deprivation and politics is set, in the eras of lines for everything from snowsuits to bananas—moving to 2012, where two Anatolys, one successful and one a failure, reminisce about the glory days and an old fracture that changed everything, in Riga (Closed Fracture). In the heartbreaking Strawberry Lipstick, set in 1958, young Olya is jilted and wonders, ‘For what was life without love? A never-ending shift at a factory assembly line.’ She marries an officer and moves to a distant town, alive to the magic of rural Russia; its volcanoes and secret atomic submarines bases, the hot springs and mud cauldrons of Kamchatka with bears in its rivers and swans by its lakes. She is aware that she may be ‘a selfish Soviet citizen’ in the eyes of people like her older sister Zoya, rediscovering sensation, but her awakening is shortlived in any case; she is, sadly, ‘up to her elbows in marriage’ and her husband is a drunken gambler: she and her sisters may not find anything of lasting satisfaction in their lives, like so many. Several stories are less memorable, but the final one, Our Upstairs Neighbor, is a sombre, compelling account of a celebration of the ninetieth birthday of a famous Soviet tenor, Vadim Makin, rounding off this understated but at times revelatory debut by KSENIYA MELNIK.

If you liked DAVID NICHOLLS’ One Day—which revisits a man and woman on the same day over the span of their lives—you’ll love the adorable and surprisingly thoughtful commercial romp US (Hachette India, 416 pages). Nerdy biochemist Douglas is shocked when long-time wife Connie, an art-loving bon vivant, informs him that she loves him but must leave him, late one night. Not before they go on a long-planned European summer holiday together, however; a coming-of-rage ritual planned for their teenage son, grumpy would-be musician Albie. Connie comes across as a bit of a torturer, clinging to the comforts of marriage against the break she has called into motion, but such is marriage—and she has her reasons. Douglas, helplessly controlling, must try to win her back—and of course what follows is a series of misadventures. What one doesn’t anticipate are the raw, honest bits: Connie’s early affair and the awful, shuddering progress of a reconciliation; Douglas realising that ‘grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost’; his knowledge that he ‘offered [his] wife a way out of a lifestyle she could no longer sustain’ and that he has managed to damage his son. Whether in lockup in Italy or crying over spicy Vietnamese soup, we learn what it is actually like to be alone and drifting at the sunset of your life. A lovely, nuanced ending shows us that things may never really be as bad as they seem.

(A monthly roundup of the best of international publishing)

Ahlam MosteghanemiDavid NichollsKseniya MelnikToni Morrison