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Saturday Review: Paperbacks: Fiction

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  • Saturday Review: Paperbacks: Fiction

    Saturday Review: Paperbacks: Fiction
    ISOBEL MONTGOMERY AND DAVID JAYS

    The Guardian - United Kingdom
    Jun 05, 2004

    A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, by John Murray (Penguin, pounds
    7.99)

    A writer of short stories who has a medical background at once
    suggests comparisons to Chekhov, but in the case of John Murray
    they are worth drawing. The viewpoints in this collection are richer
    than one would expect in a debut and the stories have an austerity,
    almost a severity, born, one suspects, of Murray's experiences as a
    doctor in the developing world. Second-generation immigrants to the
    US, often of Indian parentage, crisis-raddled or simply confused,
    his characters struggle with what it means to be human. Murray grants
    them epiphanies in Indian cholera treatment centres or refugee camps
    on the Rwandan border; his stories are old-fashioned, yet refreshingly
    bold when so many writing-school graduates do not venture beyond the
    insular discontents of consumer culture. "What difference can any
    of us make?" is a question worth raising, and one that Murray forces
    his characters to face head on.

    Isobel Montgomery

    The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury, pounds 6.99)

    It is easy to see why Sam Mendes wants to film this wonderfully
    vivid debut, which sets a coming-of-age story against Afghanistan's
    recent history. Amir and Hassan are motherless boys growing up in
    Kabul just before the coup that deposed the last Afghan king. Amir
    is Pashtun, a Sunni and privileged, while Hassan is the son of the
    family servant, Shia and a member of the Hazara minority - making
    theirs a friendship that cannot survive childhood. Its climax is
    Kabul's yearly kite-fighting festival in which the pair's victory
    culminates in Amir's betrayal of Hassan. Amir is haunted by his
    cowardice throughout invasion, escape and exile in America, and it
    is only the fall of the Taliban that offers him an opportunity to
    redress the wrong he has done his best friend. Hosseini brilliantly
    personalises a place and a history for a western audience, but his
    eagerness to match political upheaval with emotional crisis makes
    the narrative over-determined. Isobel Montgomery

    Buddha Da, by Anne Donovan (Canongate, pounds 7.99)

    You can get used to anything . . . almost. But a dad who would "dae
    anythin for a laugh so he wid; went doon the shops wi a perra knickers
    on his heid" is much easier to cope with than one who announces "Ah'm
    gaun doon the Buddhist Centre for a couple of hours". Next thing he is
    chasing round Glasgow with a trio of monks trying to track down the
    reincarnation of a lama; then, before his family realises that this
    is more than one of his fads, he has swapped drink for meditation and
    is telling his wife he wants to practise celibacy. Told in a rich
    Glaswegian through the alternating voices of Jimmy, his wife and
    their 12-year-old daughter, Anne Donovan's portrayal of a Damascene
    conversion in an ordinary household is warm, if not always funny. She
    not only makes the practical problems of religious fervour central
    to the story, but within pages the dialect writing becomes something
    to savour rather than stumble over. Isobel Montgomery

    Gilgamesh, by Joan London (Atlantic Books, pounds 7.99)

    Nunderup only just makes it on to the map of Australia; there's nothing
    there but hard work and hard faces. When Edith's plump British cousin
    and his handsome Armenian friend visit, imaginative horizons open -
    and she gets pregnant. Armenia nags at her like a necessary dream,
    until she slips away, baby in one arm, suitcase in the other. Edith
    makes it to a dispiriting England and on to the Orient Express,
    defying the approaching war until she attains her fabled Armenia. She
    finds a disconcertingly real place, its hazy air laden with petrol
    and protest. The ancient epic Gilgamesh , about friends who travel
    the world and dare death together, haunts this book, even though
    Edith feels it's a Boys' Own legend. Nothing happens to women, she
    protests: "It's not their story . . . women get stuck." Her quest
    is none the less achingly brave, and in this beautiful first novel,
    the deceptively calm pages contain a turbulent, heroic longing.

    David Jays

    The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, by Paul Theroux (Penguin, pounds
    7.99)

    In the title tale of Theroux's collection, American artist Gil Mariner
    returns to a snooty hotel in Taormina. He remembers a Sicilian summer
    40 years earlier, when as a young traveller he was uncomfortably
    coopted by a wealthy German countess. Softened up by luxury and
    teased by the Countess's breast with its "lovely smooth snout", Gil
    became a bedroom flunkey, playing self-hating sexual games. Theroux is
    known for travel writing and fiction set abroad - other stories here
    visit South Africa, Vegas and Hawaii - but this novella is stained by
    grubby braggadocio. Better are the bewildering intimations of sexual
    knowledge in "A Judas Memoir". In four linked episodes, a Catholic boy
    stumbles towards queasy adult knowledge in small-town America. Guilt,
    disgust and betrayal snag his imagination, prompted by vicious nuns,
    stagnant holy water and a priest pawing his scout troop with scaly
    hands. David Jays

    Living Nowhere, by John Burnside (Vintage, pounds 7.99)

    Don't believe the death certificates, says Burnside - everyone
    in Corby dies of disappointment. The Northamptonshire town was
    hollowed out when its steel plant closed in the 80s, but this novel
    opens 20 years earlier, with the families who sought a new life
    there. Everyone comes from somewhere else, no one considers it home -
    not the Scottish Camerons nor the Latvian Ruckerts, each a family at
    sea, especially after the friendship between teenage Francis and Jan
    ends violently. The plant steeps the community in "a miasma of steel
    and carbon and ore", the smuts and stink staining even the snow. The
    characters maintain a conviction that home is somewhere in the past
    or future, but Burnside writes so forcefully about the pitiless town
    that you miss it when Francis does a bunk, wandering from Scotland
    to California. Writing with a poet's electric apprehension of the
    material world, Burnside puts the ghosts back into a town without
    history. David Jays
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