Two recent reviews from Bookmunch:
Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home (2011/3)
Chile, 1985: as the neighbourhood gathers to shelter from an earthquake, a nine-year-old boy strikes up a sort of friendship with Claudia, the twelve-year-old niece of his neighbour Raúl. Claudia asks the boy to keep an eye on her uncle, and so he does – soon discovering that Raúl has frequent rendezvous with a mysterious woman. But no sooner has the boy prepared to reveal all to Claudia than she relieves him of his duties, and moves away.
This narrative then breaks off, and we meet a (similarly nameless) writer in the present day, who is apparently writing the noel we have been reading. He’s struggling to find his place in life, beset by a nagging feeling that his parents wrote the novel of the world, leaving his generation as “secondary characters”. The doubts and tensions raised by this feeling work their way into the writer’s novel, and this project becomes his focus – if he can get the novel right, maybe life will follow. We then return to the ‘fiction’ as, twenty years on, the boy-turned-man meets Claudia once more, and learns the truth.
Alejandro Zambra’s third novel (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) thus sets up a parallel between its two storylines. The young boy’s inability to grasp the realities behind adult interactions is nicely handled (as in the scene where he sees his father and Raúl talking about what he assumes to be “solitude”, but is presumably “solidarity”), as is his older self’s reaction to learning what was really going on in his childhood. But the two sides of the novel don’t quite seem to gel: the writer storyline doesn’t reach as far into its themes, which unbalances the book as a whole.
Any Cop? It’s a mixed bag. One half of the novel is good, but the other doesn’t quite match up to it.
Sayed Kashua, Exposure (2010/2)
Exposure is the story (translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg) of two unnamed Arab citizens of Israel, both living in Jerusalem. One is a successful lawyer, who has made his wealth working on behalf of resident Arabs who are not citizens; his status gives him an informal, but valuable authority:
Without [Israeli Arab professionals]who would represent the residents of east Jerusalem and the surrounding villages in the Hebrew-speaking courts and tax authorities…Many of the locals preferred to be represented by someone who was a citizen of the state of Israel… Somehow, in the eyes of the locals, the Arab citizens of Israel were considered to be half-Jewish.
One day, on a whim, he buys a novel from the second-hand book store, and finds tucked inside it a love letter, unmistakably in his wife’s handwriting. The volume is inscribed “Yonatan”, and the lawyer becomes consumed with the question of who this unknown suitor might be.
Sayed Kashua’s second protagonist has been rather less lucky in life: he’s a social worker, whom we first meet as he’s burying the 28-year-old Yonatan. We discover that Yonatan had been in a coma, and the social worker had taken on the job of minding him at night – a thankless task, but also a relatively straightforward source of income that the social worker welcomed. Looking after Yonatan also gave him something else: the opportunity to assume the Jewish man’s identity when registering on a photography course.
Exposure works best as a study of identity, and how it may be used and abused. Both protagonists operate at the boundary between Arab and Jewish identities: the lawyer acts as an intermediary between the two; the social worker becomes able to cross from one to the other. The comatose Yonatan becomes an anonymous canvas on which both men can project an identity: the lawyer creates a target for his jealous hatred, while social worker reinvents himself.
Kashua’s novel is not quite so successful in terms of plot, though. There are a couple of coincidences too many for it to satisfy as a mystery; and when the two men’s stories finally converge, it doesn’t seem to add much. Whatever the destination, though, the journey is worth it.
Any Cop?: As a study of character and issues, certainly; as a mystery story, less so.
The thing about choice is, there are so many variables. In the future of Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion, there is a “free and social market” to give people a hand with all that choice. As the protagonist’s MP explains:
Johnson wrote that “telling stories is telling lies”, and that feeling is embodied time and again in his work. Albert Angelo (1964; the earliest of the reissues, but actually Johnson’s second published novel) is a great snarl of frustration at the form’s limitations. Johnson tells of Albert, a trained architect who has been forced to make ends meet by working as a supply teacher. Albert is thwarted in his ambitions to be a professional architect, still dwelling on an old relationship, and hated by the children he teaches. And the novel is as ill-at-ease as Albert, with Johnson constantly switching technique: first-, second- and third-person; a two-column format, with speech on one side and thoughts in another ; there’s even a hole cut in a couple of pages to recontextualise a few lines.
House Mother Normal (1971) – my favourite of these novels – consists of eight 21-page sections, each the monologue of a resident of an old people’s home, followed by a concluding section narrated by the House Mother. Each monologue tells of the same events, but the cognitive functioning of the residents grows progressively weaker, until we end up with a chapter which consists largely of nonsensical syllables scattered across the page – apart from harrowing moments of lucidity:
Today, Strange Horizons publish my 
Colonel Vance Peterson and colleagues are stranded on their moon base, trying to find a way home. Well, not ‘home’ exactly, because the Earth they knew has been destroyed in nuclear war. Rather, the crew of Falcon Base are using a piece of mysterious Nazi technology to reveal alternate versions of Earth from branching points in history, in the hope that one will be hospitable – and that they’ll be able to travel there.
Svevo Romano would seem to have it all, for a given value of ‘all’ – looks, money, career success, the pick of attractive women to string along or use for one night stands. It may not be commendable behaviour, but it suits Svevo just fine, thank you very much. And then he starts to experience mysterious jumps in time: he’ll miss important work meetings when a couple of hours pass in a moment; or his sleep will be disrupted when morning comes too early. Svevo addresses his story to Father Time, as he tries to find a way out of this spiral.
