When Embers was published in English in 2001, it ignited the career of a Hungarian author little known outside his native country. Embers was declared a lost masterpiece, the book topped bestseller lists both in Europe and the United States, and turned the world’s literary attentions to the life and work of novelist Sándor Márai. Márai had published 46 books, mostly fiction, before leaving Hungary in 1948. He lived in Paris, Rome, New York and San Diego where he died in the late 1980s, alone and largely forgotten. Since the success of Embers, his novels are being translated into English, the most recent being Portraits of a Marriage, a startlingly honest dissection of a romantic triangle set against a dying society.
The story itself is a simple one of love: requited, sought after and betrayed. Peter is married first to Ilona, a woman of his own class, and then Judit, a servant from his mother’s house. Both marriages end in divorce. For Ilona, marriage was about achieving perfection—the ideal house, the right friends, though her love for Peter was sincere. For Judit, marriage was a step to personal and financial freedom, and Peter’s desire for her simply means to her end. Behind this threesome floats the enigmatic figure of the writer Lázár, to whom all three characters turn in their romantic quest. Much of the action takes place in the relatively peaceful years between the two wars, though over the course of the novel, the aftermath of the World War II and the Soviet invasion of Hungary push each character to his or her ultimate destinations.
The story is told in three sections from the point of view of each of the main characters—Ilona, Peter and Judit—with a brief coda from Judit’s unnamed lover, settled in the New York of the 1950s. Because each monologue is written as if the character were actually speaking to another person, the effect is one of listening to a close friend confide intimate details about their personal life. Ilona’s despair at her crumbling marriage, Peter’s dense philosophical inquiries, and Judit’s fierce ambition drive each narratives, but only the reader can put all the facts together and see past the purely subjective truths each character offers.
Beyond the personal stories is the sense of the world crumbling, the invasion of Hungary first by the Nazis and then the Soviets and the destruction of cultural values that could not be replaced. This loss is most visible in the character of Lázár, the writer who stops writing after the war and spends the end of his life reading Hungarian dictionaries, relishing the words that describe a world that no longer exists. Lázár, who never speaks for himself but is seen and described through others’ eyes, may be a stand-in for the author. Márai also vowed to stop writing after the Germans marched into Hungary—a vow that, luckily for his readers, he did not keep.
Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.
When Embers was published in English in 2001, it ignited the career of a Hungarian author little known outside his native country. Embers was declared a lost masterpiece, the book topped bestseller lists both in Europe and the United States, and turned the world’s literary attentions to the life and work of novelist Sándor Márai. […]
What would lead an 18-year-old from an upper-middle-class, secular background to embrace a life of religious orthodoxy and political radicalism? Pearl Abraham’s new novel American Taliban asks just this question. Though there are obvious parallels to the life of John Walker Lindh, Abraham does more than merely borrow the facts. Her thoughtful approach to the characters and honest appraisal of the events make what could have been merely provocative into a challenging and effective novel.
Supported by open-minded—if indulgent—parents, John Jude Parrish is spending a carefree gap year surfing and skateboarding in the Outer Banks and reading extensively. His widely cast intellectual net encompasses Dylan, Rumi, the Tao and Walt Whitman, and he is eager to share ideas with new friends in online chat rooms. When a skateboarding accident puts him out of commission, he throws his considerable energies into learning Sufi poetry and decides to pursue an Arabic language program in Brooklyn. There he becomes more interested in Islam, and when a fellow student suggests he go abroad for further study, John travels to Pakistan. The immersion into Muslim culture cements his decision to convert to Islam.
One of John’s inspirations is the great 19th-century traveler-scholar Richard Burton, and his plan is to create a similarly Romantic expedition for himself. But the 21st century, with the attacks of September 11 a mere month away, proves an inhospitable time for this kind of excursion.
Although each action leads John closer to a treasonous radicalism, the novel clearly illustrates that the individual steps of his spiritual and intellectual journey are perfectly plausible. John’s personal quest forces him to open up to new ideas about religion and sexuality as well as to acknowledge his desire to be part of “a larger undefinable truth” while still retaining his individuality. But even Abraham’s considerable skill as a novelist does not fully illuminate John’s ultimate decision to move from philosopher to extremist.
The final segment of American Taliban takes place in the fall of 2001. John has disappeared, travel to Pakistan has been halted, and John’s mother is obsessed with John Walker Lindh, the young American found fighting alongside the Taliban. The abrupt shift in the conclusion feels rushed and almost derails the balanced tone and well-considered plot. But a novel like this encourages the reader to pay attention to the world and to ponder complex issues, and for that, despite its flaws, American Taliban should be a must-read for anyone interested in current events.
What would lead an 18-year-old from an upper-middle-class, secular background to embrace a life of religious orthodoxy and political radicalism? Pearl Abraham’s new novel American Taliban asks just this question. Though there are obvious parallels to the life of John Walker Lindh, Abraham does more than merely borrow the facts. Her thoughtful approach to the […]
Lauren Groff’s fourth novel, her highly anticipated follow-up to Fates and Furies (2015), takes place almost 800 years ago, yet it feels both current and timely. Set in a small convent in 12th-century England, Matrix looks back in time to comment astutely on the world as we now know it, exploring big ideas about faith, gender, community and individualism.
Abbess Marie is based in part on Marie de France, France’s earliest known female poet and one of the country’s most well-regarded literary stylists. As a teenager, Groff’s fictional Marie is banished from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court and sent to molder in an impoverished abbey. Marie soon rises to the senior position of abbess, and she transforms the convent into a thriving estate.
Marie’s modifications to the abbey are guided by visions that draw imagery from the real Marie de France’s tales of courtly love. These visions are the motivation and impetus for many of Marie’s boldest innovations: the successful scriptorium where gorgeous new manuscripts are produced; the abbess house where Marie offers comfort and privacy; and the impenetrable labyrinth that girds the abbey, protecting the women who live inside.
Groff brings a bold originality to Matrix and a compassion for her characters, no matter how prickly some of them may be. This is a heartening story of one woman’s vision and creativity, unthwarted and flourishing, despite all odds.
A 12th-century abbess deserves to be your next literary hero. Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies, shares how she found refuge in her latest novel’s community of nuns.
Lauren Groff’s fourth novel, Matrix, is a mesmerizing portrait of a remarkable nun in 12th-century England who oversees an abbey in a rapidly changing and sometimes hostile environment. After Groff’s previous books, which have explored small towns, utopian communities and Floridian flora and fauna, my most pressing questions for the author can be boiled down to, why a novel about nuns? And why now?
“Those are the questions,” Groff says with a laugh, speaking by video call from a writer’s retreat in Italy. She traces the novel’s genesis back to three years ago, when she was at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, working on a very different novel, one she hopes that at some point will come into the world. “I was surrounded by artists and scholars that were doing things that were so far beyond my ken,” she recalls. “Every day was like a mini-explosion in my brain.”
She attended a lecture on medieval nuns by Dr. Katie Bugyis, who has researched the lives of nuns based on the liturgy they produced and used. “It was as if she had opened up my brain and threw her light in,” Groff says. “I knew it was the next thing I was going to write.”
“Awe is the most powerful emotion I know, because within awe, there is fear, there is love, there is wonder.”
Marie, the nun protagonist of Matrix, is banished from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court at age 17 and sent to live in a penurious abbey. Awkward and miserable, Marie makes the best of her situation and soon rises to the senior position of abbess. Bit by bit she transforms the tumbledown, muddy convent into a prosperous estate with verdant fields, healthy flocks and a successful scriptorium, protected by a forest labyrinth and Marie’s shrewd awareness of shifting political winds. Along the way, she is inspired by spiritual visions and memories of her mother’s family, whom she accompanied on the early Crusades.
Marie’s story is based on that of Marie de France, considered to be one of France’s most important writers and the country’s first acknowledged female poet. So little is known about Marie that her biography is merely outline; Groff describes trying to research her as “being handed a poetic form.”
But we do know some things about her, Groff says. “We know approximately when she lived and where. We know she was a noble or gentlewoman because she was able to write in several languages. She was educated at a time when most women were not. And most importantly, we know what she wrote: fables and lais,” or narrative poems of courtly love.
Elements from Marie’s lais appear throughout Matrix, which is rich with furled rosebuds, blooming trees and enclosed gardens. “It was a joyous experience to go back to the lais, which I knew from college, and to create her life from the work,” Groff says. “I know it’s the opposite of what scholars do, but I’m not a scholar, I’m a fiction writer.”
Groff did a tremendous amount of research for Matrix, including visiting a small Benedictine convent in Connecticut where she was struck by the strong ties of kinship and community. “I was profoundly moved by the way the older nuns, who are not far from death, are cared for by the people who love them so deeply,” she says. “It’s a definition of family that is not often represented in the outside world.”
Groff drew from this idyllic setting to create her fictional community of sisters. Marie’s convent is a place of female friendships and love affairs, scholarship and learning. It’s a refuge for outsider women and those with untapped talents, ranging from engineering to calligraphy to animal husbandry. “I wanted to live in a world of women,” Groff says. “I wanted to hear women’s voices, experience only a female gaze.”
Examining the balance of community and the individual is nothing new for Groff, whose novels The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia also examined small-town life and intentional communities. Even Fates and Furies depicts a closed community of two people whose insular marriage makes it difficult for anyone else to penetrate their intense bond.
“You know,” Groff remarks ruefully, “I keep thinking I’m writing a brand-new book, but maybe I’m writing the same thing every time. I was raised in the small town of Cooperstown, New York, and I was utterly fascinated by the way individuals acted within a tight and closed community. It was early training for storytelling to be among growing, living stories of other people that you could watch out of the corner of your eye. A small place in the middle of nowhere was a real petri dish for understanding human behavior.”
“It was such an exciting feeling, like an electrical charge, to see biblical stories echoing in literature.”
Even though the world of Matrix could not seem further away from 21st-century America, Groff is well aware of how current affairs informed the writing of her new novel—and indeed, all of her work. “It’s very much in our national DNA to insist on the importance of the individual,” she says. “But a country cannot be a country without the collective, and right now the pressure points between these two courses are rising. My work struggles with this paradox and explores how Americans are choosing to live.”
At several points in the novel, Marie experiences striking visions that she does not share with the other nuns but rather keeps in a series of private notebooks. These visions draw imagery and language from the Bible, a seminal book in Groff’s upbringing and an early step to her lifelong love of literature.
Groff was raised in the Presbyterian church, where her father was a deacon, and she remembers the church of her childhood as a vaulted, soaring space, “like the inside of a whale.” The experience of being in communion with others while singing or praying had a meaningful aesthetic impact. But it was the stories from the Bible that hooked her.
“Stories are the thing that made me a person,” she says. “I was the kind of kid who was filled with religious fervor. I had a beautiful little Bible with fine tissue pages and gilt edges. I would sit and read it at night, just trying to get through all the begats and the thous, and just be filled with this unappeasable longing for the stories. And then I started seeing the stories reflected back at me from the other things I was reading. It was such an exciting feeling, like an electrical charge, to see biblical stories echoing in literature.”
Over time, Groff explains, literature took the place of religion. “I’ve become a secular believer, if that makes sense. I believe in the goodness of humanity. I am moved by the natural world in a way that is akin to the kinds of things I experienced as a child. When I am writing, I try to give the reader a few of those moments of wonder and awe. Awe is the most powerful emotion I know, because within awe, there is fear, there is love, there is wonder.”
The awe-filled moments in Matrix are too many to count, whether in the poetry of Marie’s visions, her longing for friends who are far away or the vivid descriptions of the creation of the labyrinth, a structure associated with religious contemplation that in Groff’s hands becomes a symbol, a weapon and a line of defense.
Marie conceives of the labyrinth less as a place for the nuns to find peace and more as an instrument to separate themselves from the outside world, which she perceives as dangerous and threatening. For Groff, the symbol of the labyrinth goes even deeper. She read about ancient ruins in England that had been buried underground over centuries and were now re-emerging. “Because of climate change and the wet ground drying out, the impressions of these ruins are literally coming up from the earth and becoming apparent,” she says. “I loved that idea of a hidden structure that only through trauma could be revealed. The novel is structured around the shape of a labyrinth, although it’s deeply embedded and I’m not sure anyone can see it. But it’s there.”
Matrix tells a tale of the astounding ingenuity, strength and female companionship that flourished during an era of intense patriarchal oppression. Matrix is the Latin word for mother, but additional definitions include a plant whose seeds were used for producing other plants, a grid, an organizational structure and, perhaps most significantly, “the bedrock in geology in which you find gems.”
Groff has created a labyrinth of jewel-like moments, selected from an incredible woman’s life during a time ostensibly far away from our own, and transformed it into a novel that is perfect for right now.
Author photo by Eli Sinkus
Matrix author Lauren Groff shares how she found refuge in her latest novel’s community of nuns. “It’s a definition of family that is not often represented in the outside world.”
The author of several historical mysteries and a wild reworking of Jane Eyre (the Edgar Award-nominated Jane Steele), Lyndsay Faye brings considerable skills and irreverent humor to The King of Infinite Space, a contemporary reimagining of Hamlet set in and around a New York City theater.
Benjamin Dane is both fabulously wealthy and kept on just this side of sanity by a slew of medications. He is the son of Jackson and Trudy, owners of the prestigious New World’s Stage. After Jackson dies under mysterious circumstances, Trudy immediately marries her brother-in-law, Claude. In mourning and struggling with his suicidal impulses, Benjamin uncovers a videotape from a paranoid-seeming Jackson, who names Claude as his murderer.
Distraught, Benjamin reaches out to Horatio Patel, a friend from graduate school who left New York after the two men had a one-night stand. Horatio returns from England to console his friend and aid in Benjamin’s plan to denounce his mother and uncle at the theater’s annual fundraising gala. Benjamin’s ex-girlfriend, Lia Brahms, wants to help, but her job as a florist’s assistant keeps her too busy.
Faye’s knowledge of Shakespeare extends well past Hamlet, as The King of Infinite Space name-checks characters from several of the Bard’s plays, from Ariel, the all-knowing doorman at the New World; to the meddling event coordinator Robin Goodfellow; to the three weird sisters who manage the flower shop where Lia is employed and who specialize in bouquets that heal, cure and maybe even alter the future.
Lush and magical, thoughtful and provocative, The King of Infinite Space is a remarkable achievement, staying true to Shakespeare’s tragic play in ways that will surprise and delight while reveling in neurodivergence, queer attraction and quantum physics. Though the buildup is slow and Benjamin’s philosophical meanderings occasionally digressive, this is a novel to stick with for its rewards of a surprising plot and Faye’s delightful storytelling.
The King of Infinite Space is a remarkable achievement, staying true to Hamlet’s tragic plot in ways that will surprise and delight.
While Old Man Tucker is out collecting ginseng in the hills of eastern Kentucky, he discovers the dead body of local woman Nonnie Johnson. Newly promoted Sheriff Linda Hardin, hoping for a quick resolution to her first murder case, asks her brother, Mick, a military homicide investigator, to help find the killer. So begins Chris Offutt’s The Killing Hills.
A veteran of wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Mick returned home on personal leave to patch things up with his estranged pregnant wife. But now he’s AWOL and just barely managing to stay one step ahead of the military police. He spends most of his time camping out at his grandfather’s abandoned cabin, hiking the surrounding hills and drinking too much.
Despite having been away from home for more than a decade, Mick’s knowledge of the land and the community is still strong, thanks to his close observation and hard-won intimacies. Traveling from holler to holler, appraising the landscape and gaining the respect of his gun-toting neighbors, Mick is a valuable asset to Linda, who is mired in local politics and saddled with an incompetent assistant with ties to the area’s fading coal industry.
The Killing Hills has all the marks of a classic thriller, but its murder plot is secondary to the Appalachian setting. Offutt’s small-town Kentucky is a place of tightknit families, long-held grudges, chemical dependency and simmering violence. One of Offutt’s strengths is his familiarity with the area’s folkways, flora and people, a trait he shares with Mick and has demonstrated in his previous fiction, memoirs and work as a writer on television dramas such as “True Detective.”
A rural noir with attitude to spare, The Killing Hills moves as briskly as a well-constructed miniseries, right down to its unanswered questions that carry the hopeful possibility of a sequel.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this review incorrectly indicated that Offutt worked on “True Blood,” not “True Detective.”
A rural noir with attitude to spare, The Killing Hills moves as briskly as a well-constructed miniseries.
Radical thinker and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft died less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, a baby girl who would grow up to become the author of Frankenstein. Samantha Silva’s Love and Fury uses the last 11 days of Wollstonecraft’s life as a frame, allowing her to tell her life story to her infant daughter.
Wollstonecraft’s childhood was shaped by a dissolute father and a withholding mother. A young woman of remarkable intelligence and precociousness, she formed many of her theories about marriage and the evils of patriarchy early on. She set out to change opinions, first by running a small school with Fanny Blood, a botanical illustrator with whom she shared a passionate friendship, and then by writing, most significantly A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Wollstonecraft’s uncompromising romances with Swiss artist Henry Fuselli and American businessman Gilbert Imlay (father of Wollstonecraft’s first daughter, Fanny), though unsuccessful in the long run, led her to friendships with some of the 18th century’s most notable intellectuals and radicals, including Thomas Paine, William Blake and Abigail Adams.
Hers was a peripatetic life, spent traveling all over England with a short stint in Ireland as a governess. Living in Paris during the French Revolution inspired many of the ideas that found fruition in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In 1797, she married William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father, after a long friendship, though their relationship is barely alluded to in the novel.
After the birth, when it becomes clear that Wollstonecraft has a life-threatening infection due to a male doctor’s procedure for delivering the placenta, midwife Parthenia Blenkinsop is called to the house to tend to mother and daughter during their only days together. Love and Fury is told in a series of short chapters, alternating Wollstonecraft’s memories with Parthenia’s experience of caring for the ill woman and new baby. Silva’s attention to period detail creates a heartbreaking novel of compassion and grace, as well as an elegy to one of the world’s most influential thinkers.
Samantha Silva’s attention to period detail creates a worthy elegy to one of the world’s most influential feminist thinkers, Mary Wollstonecraft.
When Joe Tournier steps off a train from Glasgow in 1898 Londres, he can remember his name but very little else, and he barely recognizes his surroundings. He learns that the former British capital has been a colony of the French Republic ever since France won the Napoleonic Wars 90 years ago. So begins Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms, a deliciously transgressive work of steampunk speculative fiction.
Joe is diagnosed with “silent epilepsy,” the official name given to the visions and amnesia that sometimes afflict people in this world. Otherwise in good health, Joe is returned to the French family to whom he is enslaved and to his wife, Alice, none of whom he recalls. After several years and the birth of his daughter, Joe receives a postcard of a lighthouse in the Scottish islands with a message signed by “M.” Most mysteriously, the note arrives almost a century after it was written.
Joe is determined to get answers about his identity as well as that of the card’s sender. He returns to Glasgow, now the site of a simmering British rebellion, and then travels farther north where he discovers a portal that acts as a pass-through from one era to another. Finally, at the lighthouse, he meets Missouri Kite, a Royal Navy officer from 1807, and is drawn into a complicated plan to use technology such as telegraphs and steam engines to aid in the British fight against the French.
Along with a cast of characters that includes the real-life Admiral Lord Nelson, Joe and Kite race from Scotland to Spain, trying to sway the forces that led to France’s victory. The butterfly theory, which posits that complex changes often originate from minuscule actions, plays out as Joe ricochets from century to century, trying to help his friends and ensure his own future existence and that of his family.
Pulley balances the topsy-turvy nature of time travel by grounding her story in tidbits of naval history and a gradually unfolding queer love story.
Natasha Pulley balances the topsy-turvy nature of time travel by grounding her story in naval history and a gradually unfolding queer love story.
The challenges of balancing money and personal happiness wend their way through National Book Critics Circle Award winner Joan Silber’s Secrets of Happiness, which begins with a startling act of duplicity and ends with acceptance and reconciliation despite the characters’ changed circumstances.
The novel opens as Ethan, a gay lawyer in Manhattan, relates how his family was blown apart when his father, Gil, was named in a paternity suit by Nok, a woman he brought to New York from Thailand and with whom he had two sons. Gil’s wife, Abby, divorced him and journeyed to Bangkok to teach English, seeking serenity in the unfamiliar surroundings of Thailand, and Gil moved in with Nok after he had a debilitating stroke.
Meanwhile, Ethan’s new half brother, Joe, also travels to Thailand, hoping to bribe police to release his wastrel brother from prison. After Joe’s return to New York, he falls back into an awkward relationship with a high school girlfriend who was abruptly widowed and then swindled out of inheriting her husband’s estate by his greedy family.
The complex seesaw of love and finances, both offered and withheld, is explored throughout seven chapters and across four continents. Silber’s device—a secondary character from one chapter commanding the narrative in the next—is as effortless as a dragonfly skimming over a pond. The multiple perspectives bring an unexpected cohesion to the novel’s diverse cast, which includes Ethan’s boyfriend, who lives with his terminally ill former partner, and Gil’s old girlfriend, a free spirit who raises two daughters in Kathmandu, Nepal.
As more connections reveal themselves, the slim threads that bind these characters take on emotional weight, exposing the ways Gil’s infidelity has trickled out into the world. But Secrets of Happiness also explores the great generosity of love that exists in families, whether we’re born into them or choose them. Rarely is a novel of moral ideas so buoyant in spirit or so exquisitely crafted.
Rarely is a novel of moral ideas so buoyant in spirit or so exquisitely crafted.
Hala Alyan’s second novel, The Arsonists’ City, follows the members of the Nasr family as they debate the sale of the family home in Lebanon. Like the Yacoub family in Alyan’s debut novel, Salt Houses, the Nasrs are spread all over the globe, but when Idris, the family patriarch, decides to sell the ancestral home in Beirut after his own father’s death, his wife and children unite in their shared desire to stop him.
Though the house in Beirut has been a constant touchstone, the Nasrs’ lives are marked by the effects of political upheaval, migration and globalization. In 1978, Mazna met Idris through mutual friends while she was training to be an actor in her hometown of Damascus, and she began secretly visiting him in Beirut, though her romantic interest was initially sparked by Idris’ best friend. After the city was torn apart by civil war, Idris and Mazna married and immigrated to suburban Los Angeles, where Idris worked as a cardiologist. Mazna abandoned her dreams of being an actor, raised their three children and took a job in a small garden center.
Now their oldest daughter, Ava, lives in Brooklyn, and their middle son, Mimi, manages a restaurant in Austin, Texas, though most of his passion is thrown into a middling rock band. Mimi’s lack of fulfillment puts him at odds with his younger sister, Naj, whose music career took off internationally and who chose Beirut as her home, in part to keep her sex life far from the judgmental eyes of her parents.
Idris’ decision to sell the house brings the parents and adult children, with and without their life partners, to Beirut, where the safe distance that cushioned their complicated relationships is eliminated. Old passions, betrayals and bitter jealousies quickly arise.
Alyan, who is a family therapist as well as a poet and novelist, has a gift for depicting the knotty, messy but ultimately resilient bonds of family love. Though The Arsonists’ City lays bare how civil war and brutal violence impact a single family, it is the everyday, sometimes petty squabbles between husband and wife, brother and sister, parent and child that make this novel both memorable and relatable.
Hala Alyan, who is a family therapist as well as a poet and novelist, has a gift for depicting the knotty, messy but ultimately resilient bonds of family love.
Argentinian novelist Betina González’s English-language debut is a wild romp of aggressive deer, abandoned children and a cultish back-to-nature group of adults who have taken to the wilderness.
The story is told by three residents of an unnamed American city that’s barely survived some kind of economic or environmental apocalypse. Both Vik and his elderly co-worker, Beryl, are employees of the local natural history museum, though Beryl’s roots in the community date back to the 1970s, when she joined a commune of young people experimenting with mind-altering drugs. Beryl now leads her fellow senior citizens in an all-out armed war against the deer that have begun attacking people. (Note: There is some graphic animal cruelty here, so if you are sensitive to that, this is not your book.)
At the same time, Vik, a chronically ill taxidermist from the (fictional) Caribbean island of Colonna, realizes that an intruder has broken into his home and is living in his closet. Meanwhile, Berenice, the daughter of the town florist, uncovers ties to the old commune after her mother disappears.
The storylines gradually come together over the search for a plant that originated in Colonna called albaria. It’s so potent that one dose creates life-altering hallucinations and a lifelong addiction.
The lively pace and absurdity of American Delirium could easily go off the rails, but González keeps a tight control over each of her characters even as they navigate their ever-stranger adventures. The novel is well served by translator Heather Cleary’s light touch, which allows for a certain amount of zaniness without sacrificing the plot or the well-defined characters.
In the author’s afterword, González explains that she drew inspiration from an international array of news stories, and it’s clear that some of the strangest elements in the novel are taken directly from these real-life events. Perhaps one person’s magic is another person’s realism after all.
Argentinian novelist Betina González’s English-language debut is a wild romp of aggressive deer, abandoned children and a cultish back-to-nature group of adults who have taken to the wilderness.
The voice of North African novelist Meryem Alaoui is a welcome one. Her debut, Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, is a powerful character study of a lively young sex worker who meets a filmmaker seeking her expertise.
The fast-moving novel is told by quick-witted and resilient Jmiaa, who reflects on her life in a bustling working-class Casablanca neighborhood, including the small bars, the open-air markets and the women who spend their evenings alongside her, drinking and chatting as they wait for potential clients. As a prostitute, Jmiaa keeps her mother in the dark about her occupation while earning enough money to support both herself and her 7-year-old daughter. Jmiaa also pays her pimp, Houcine, for protection and helps her dead-beat ex-husband, Hamid, who forced her into sex work after his business failed.
Aspiring Dutch filmmaker Chadlia is visiting Casablanca to research a movie about Moroccan urban life, and she hires Jmiaa as a consultant to keep the plot and dialogue authentic. But when Chadlia has trouble casting the film, Jmiaa steps in to help, opening doors into a life that neither woman could have predicted.
Straight From the Horse’s Mouth follows a familiar rag-to-riches storyline, but Jmiaa’s unfaltering optimism will keep readers hooked. She is matter-of-fact about the day-to-day details of her profession, boasting of her ability to provide for her family and proudly defending the women who share the streets with her.
Alaoui is ably served by her translator, Emma Ramadan, who captures Jmiaa’s irreverent spirit and sass. A simple glossary at the end adds context to the shop names, local personalities and food that contribute to the richness of everyday details.
The voice of North African novelist Meryem Alaoui is a welcome one. Her debut, Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, is a powerful character study of a lively young sex worker who meets a filmmaker seeking her expertise.
Published in Italy in November 2019 (fans lined up outside bookstores to purchase their copies at the stroke of midnight), The Lying Life of Adults is the first novel from Elena Ferrante since the final installment of the Neapolitan quartet, the series that made her an international literary star, was published in 2016. Set in an upscale neighborhood in 1990s Naples, her new novel is a powerful coming-of-age story like no other.
Dutiful, bookish and sweet, Giovanna is on the cusp of puberty when she overhears her father comparing her to his ugly sister. Used to receiving compliments, Giovanna is alarmed but curious, and despite her parents’ concerns, she initiates a relationship with her tempestuous Aunt Vittoria. As Giovanna learns more about her father’s background, she begins to see how her parents’ lies and treachery have impacted their lives as well as hers.
Giovanna travels between areas of Naples so different, they might as well be opposing planets: from the comfortable, progressive household where she was raised with a secular education, including access to sex education, to her aunt’s working-class neighborhood, which is mired in violence, religion and superstitions, all expressed in the dialect that Giovanna’s parents forbade her to speak at home.
Ferrante’s ability to draw in her reader remains unparalleled, and the emotional story is well served by Ann Goldstein’s smooth and engaging translation. The novel simmers with overt rage toward parental deception, teachers’ expectations and society’s impossible ideals of beauty and behavior. For readers who are familiar with Ferrante’s work, there will be much that is recognizable: the belief that poverty can be transcended through education, the power of a talismanic object (in this case, a bracelet that may or may not have belonged to Giovanna’s paternal grandmother) and the absurd linkage of physical beauty with purity and goodness. There is even an unattainable man who holds the promise of escape.
But The Lying Life of Adults is very much its own story. Giovanna’s self-reliance and her efforts to become the kind of adult she has yet to meet will resonate with thoughtful readers.
The Lying Life of Adults is the first novel from Elena Ferrante since the final installment of the Neapolitan quartet, the series that made her an international literary star, was published in 2016. Set in an upscale neighborhood in 1990s Naples, her new novel is a powerful coming-of-age story like no other.
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Groff was raised in the Presbyterian church, where her father was a deacon, and she remembers the church of her childhood as a vaulted, soaring space, “like the inside of a whale.” The experience of being in communion with others while singing or praying had a meaningful aesthetic impact. But it was the stories from the Bible that hooked her.
