The Past Ahead

Rawandan Gatore, in his debut, attempts to come to terms with genocide in his homeland by focusing on two characters, each coping with a buried past. One morning, Isaro, a student living in France, hears a radio report describing a massacre in her native country. Sickened by her comfortable European existence and her adoptive parents' lifelong efforts to shield her from her background, Isaro resolves to return to her birthplace and record the stories of both the survivors and the perpetrators of the violence. But when she arrives, she finds that the grant money she had secured for her project has been withheld due to disagreement amongst committee members. Throughout his novel, Gatore weaves a story Isaro is writing about Niko, a mute outcast who's living on a deserted island with a troop of monkeys as he tries to reckon with his involvement in the genocide. Gatore's prose is lucid and introspective, but the cumbersome device of using Niko as a stand-in for Isaro, and Isaro as a stand-in for Gatore, undermines the novel's poignancy. (Oct.)