This week: the latest from Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich, plus the world's most coveted fish.
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl), a Ukrainian-born Belarusian writer and winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, documents the last days of the Soviet Union and the transition to capitalism in a soul-wrenching “oral history” that reveals the very different sides of the Russian experience. Revealing the interior life of “Homo sovieticus” and giving horror-laden reports of life under capitalist oligarchy, Alexievich’s work turns Solzhenitsyn inside out and overpowers recent journalistic accounts of the era. Readers must possess steely nerves and a strong desire to get inside the Soviet psyche in order to handle the blood, gore, and raw emotion. For more than 30 years Alexievich has interviewed then-Soviets and ex-Soviets for this and previous books, encountering her subjects on public squares, in lines, on trains, and in their kitchens over tea. She spends hours recording conversations, sometimes returning years later, and always trying to go beyond the battered and distrusted communal pravda to seek the truths hidden within individuals.
The City of Mirrors
This conclusion to bestseller Cronin’s apocalyptic thriller trilogy ends with all of the heartbreak, joy, and unexpected twists of fate that events in The Passage and The Twelve foreordained. It’s nearly a century after the release of the Easter Virus that decimated humanity and several years since the last of the infected people known as virals were seen. The citizens of Kerrville, Tex., one of the last human enclaves, are just beginning to feel confident enough to settle outside the borders of their protected community. But when pets, and then people, begin disappearing mysteriously, it becomes horrifyingly evident that virals are on the rampage again—and that this time there may be no stopping them. As in the two previous novels, Cronin skillfully manages a large cast of characters, all of whom he has endowed with fully developed personalities that engage the reader emotionally. Although its plot is understandably heavily dependent on events in the first two books, this novel is a superb capstone to a modern horror thriller epic.
Sweetbitter
This debut is a quintessential coming-of-age story set in a remorseless, unusual city. Time and place are superbly established: the setting is the behind-the-scenes milieu of a celebrated restaurant in 2006 Manhattan. Propelled by “unbridled, unfocused desire” but still essentially naive, 22-year-old Tess has fled an empty life in the Midwest and landed a coveted job as a server in a restaurant that strongly resembles the famous Union Square Café. At first crushingly lonely and exhausted by the arduous routine, Tess is mentored by longtime senior server Simone. Despite warnings to avoid falling for bartender Jake, and willfully blind to the strange relationship between Jake and Simone, Tess begins a passionate affair with him. Meanwhile, she becomes an accepted member of a select society of overworked, terminally tense and bone-tired wait staff. Throughout, Danler evokes Tess’s voice—intimate, confiding, wonderstruck, depressed—with deft skill. This novel is a treat, sure to find a big following.
Mayday
Harrington (Sure Signs of Crazy) again focuses on the young survivor of a horrific situation, crafting a compelling exploration of life after a disaster. The death of Wayne Kovok’s uncle, a soldier fighting overseas, feels like enough tragedy for the 12-year-old (previously seen in Courage for Beginners), but after he and his divorced mother survive a plane crash returning from the funeral, new challenges join his grief: the temporary loss of his voice and left eyebrow, replaced by facial bruises, stitches, and a large scar, as well as coping with his dictatorial grandfather, now living with Wayne and his mother. A self-described nerd, Wayne is obsessed with sharing random facts; his voicelessness forces him to rethink his identity and his relationships. Harrington deftly depicts the delicate dance of family and friends trying to handle the aftermath of near tragedy, their efforts further complicated once Wayne uncovers an important secret his grandfather is keeping. Wayne is an appealing protagonist with a strong voice who develops believably over the difficult months, as do the other characters.
The Safest Lies
Miranda (Soulprint) explores the traumatic effects of fear conditioning while offering chills aplenty in this frightening thriller. Kelsey Thomas lives in a beautiful home with her mother, Amanda, who hasn’t left for 17 years, since Kelsey was born. The house is a fortress meant to keep any threat at bay. When Kelsey is involved in a car accident and rescued by volunteer fireman and classmate Ryan Baker, it kicks off a series of events that bring to light the horror that her mother suffered all those years ago. Then Kelsey’s mother disappears. Someone has Kelsey in his or her sights, and it’s surely connected to her mother’s past. Desperate to find her mother, Kelsey, with Ryan’s help, begins sifting through clues about her mother’s abduction and discovers that nothing is what it seems. Writing from Kelsey’s first-person perspective, Miranda expertly builds a sense of dread, leaving readers to uncover the truth right alongside Kelsey.
Liberty or Death: The French Revolution
McPhee (Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life), emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, skillfully and with consummate clarity recounts one of the most complex events in modern history. It is difficult to see another single-volume history of the French Revolution surpassing this one. The work of a top-notch scholar, it avoids all the snares that have for so long encumbered accounts of the subject. McPhee moves majestically along his narrative path with balance, comprehensiveness, and grace. He also brings specific developments brilliantly alive with relevant anecdotes, illustrations, and quotations. Covering (as any such volume must) the revolution’s political, institutional, and military events, the book also puts changing ideas, social attitudes, and cultural norms in the foreground. Best of all, McPhee makes clear the extent to which chance determined the course of history from before 1789 until Napoleon Bonaparte effectively ended the French Revolution around 1800.
Sea Change
Twelve-year-old Eliot Dionisi’s mother is sending him away for the summer to stay with relatives in the Nova Scotia fishing village of Point Aconi. “Sounds like the name of a sharp object to me,” he grouses. At first, his gloomy expectations are borne out. His Uncle Earl, a laconic lobster fisherman, wakes him before dawn each day, the food is appalling, and town bully Donnie threatens him with a baseball bat. But gradually Eliot’s horizons widen. Uncle Earl has an unexpected love for literature; Timmy, a younger boy with a speech impediment, shows him what courage looks like; and the bruises on his friend Mary Beth’s arms assume more than casual importance. Although there are some cloying moments (“I think he just needs another chance, sir,” Eliot tells his uncle about Donnie), Viva’s (Outstanding in the Rain) small-town characterizations ring true. More illustrated novel than graphic novel, the story combines drawings with playful typography, which warps and bends around the images, even forming faces, à la concrete poetry, at times. Moving from picture books into fiction can be a stretch; Viva makes it look easy.
The Dragon Behind the Glass: A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World’s Most Coveted Fish
The Asian arowana, also known as the dragon fish, ranks among the world’s most expensive aquarium fish, and in this engaging tale of obsession and perseverance, journalist Voigt chronicles her effort to study and understand its appeal. The fish is a symbol of luck and status in Asia, where one albino specimen fetched $150,000 in 2002. Its place on the endangered list makes it illegal to traffic or own in the U.S. Voigt calls it “the most dramatic example of a uniquely modern paradox—the mass-produced endangered species.” Voigt’s travels take her deep into Borneo and Myanmar, where she interacts with colorful, capricious characters such as Heiko Bleher, the “Indiana Jones of the tropical fish industry,” and renowned ichthyologist Tyson Roberts. Through Voigt initially just wants to see the elusive arowana in the wild, she succumbs to the lure of the unknown and thrill of the hunt. Attempting to track down a previously unstudied species, she “began to suspect that [her] relationship with the arowana was not 100 percent healthy.” Voigt’s passion in pursuing her subject is infectious, as is the self-depreciating humor she injects into her enthralling look at the intersection of science, commercialism, and conservationism.
Jane Doe January: My Twenty-Year Search for Truth and Justice
With remarkable emotional insight and precision, mystery writer Winslow (The Red House) turns to memoir to narrate the long-delayed prosecution of the man who raped her two decades ago. When her case is reopened in 2013 by a DNA match in another case, Winslow navigates a bureaucratic nightmare of delays, observing that “waiting isn’t a sea that gradually approaches a beach; it’s a wet pit with vertical walls.” She probes the depths of rape victimhood and its social connotations, comparing expectations to “be a perfect little broken princess” with the reality of her situation. As a writer obsessed with details, Winslow researches her attacker, finding his dating site profiles and his sister’s Facebook page and noting that with each discovery he “keeps getting smaller... piece by piece.” Faced with reticent friends for whom there is “my world... and the world they live in, in which [the aftermath of the rape] isn’t happening at all,” she develops surprisingly strong bonds with the detectives and legal team representing her case. When a personal tragedy is followed by a bombshell development in the case, Winslow must face dual griefs and seek out a new vision for closure. Her story is profoundly troubling, but the legitimate care and consideration of Winslow’s legal support system is powerfully redemptive. Her account bravely illuminates a process many survivors of rape must endure.
Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball
Inner-city youth turn to hoops to find hope and healing in this vivid ethnography of street basketball in Boston. Viewing street basketball as an urban “lived religion”—where the principal problems and structural sins of inner-city life are ritualized, renegotiated, and reimagined—Woodbine interprets the games as religious performances and practices where young men exorcise their metaphorical demons through dancing, exercising, and dunking. This narrative is more than academic prose; it is a deeply personal and poetic travel through the author’s own story of racial struggle and the survival tactics of the players he befriends. The composition drips with Woodbine’s passion for the game as he weaves street-court scenes of damnation and redemption with richly textured biographies of the young men who play to fight off the specters of racism, violence, and drug addiction. In this majestic study of basketball as ritual, religion, and culture, Woodbine plunges into the courts of Boston with an insider’s savvy to catalogue the urban sport’s pulsating (and potentially transcendent) dialogue.
