​Asymmetry has been on several lists of Best Book in 2018.  The most striking thing about the novel is the structure.  Initially it appears to be three disconnected stories, each dealing with asymmetrical power structures, but somehow I felt that explanation was not enough. The first is the story of an affair between a very old famous writer (rumored to be modeled on Phillip Roth), and a young woman who wants to be a writer (something like the author).  Throughout this story there are well-concealed clues as to the connection with the second story.  Islamophobia is central to the second story of an Iraqi man dealing with the bureaucracy at Heathrow as he tries to pass through that airport on his way Istanbul.  The final section again gives us clues as to how the three stories fit together to form a novel.
 
The Alice in Wonderland motif that opens the novel and carries it along is part of an attention to the relationship between texts.  Where the original Alice saw no point in books without pictures, this Alice sees no point in books without quotation marks.  It isn’t entirely clear to me on two readings what each of the sections taken from other books/novels tells us about this one, but that would be a fun project to work out.
 
And of course it is fun to solve the puzzle, and the writing carried me along pretty well.  There are some wonderful images, as in the one where a train track ends suddenly, because it really isn’t going anywhere.  That stands for the relationship between the young woman and the famous old writer.
 
From here, you could see all the way across the water to the North Fork, where the train from the city came to its slow, inexorable halt—its tracks ending abruptly, surrounded on three sides  by grass, as though the men whose job it was to lay them down a century and a half earlier had looked up one day and saw they could go no farther…
 
At least one critic condemned the book for being overly concerned  with form, as, he said, so many books of the twenty-first century appear to be.  I agree that it is nice to read novels like Salvage the Bones, (Jesmyn Ward) where the form is not out in front of the story, though the language is gorgeous.  Still, there is great pleasure in solving the mysteries in novels like this one and NW, Zadie Smith’s enjoyable/challenging novel.  I’ll take some of each. - SQ
 

By: Anita Desai; Houghton Mifflin Co., 2011.

​These three novellas explore the legacy, or residue, of British colonialism in India.  In the first novella,” The Museum of Final Journeys,” a junior functionary takes on the role of the departed English Foreign Service, takes on the attributes of the oppressor without questioning that role.  His father has been a civil servant, rising through the ranks to a position of prestige, and he aspires to rise through the ranks as his father did.  An ancient family servant to a once great and wealthy Indian prince convinces the functionary to visit the abandoned, decaying mansion.  He walks through room after room of long decayed art treasures, collected by the son of the once owners of the property, and then finally is taken to see an elephant on the verge of starvation.  The old servant asks him to save the elephant, but he concludes that he cannot do anything to help the elephant, and gets on with his life. Like his father, he rises to position and relative wealth, but he is troubled by recurring dreams about the elephant. He never allows himself to know that the continuing colonial power of which he is a part is starving the elephant, which is to say, not only India, but his Indian self. The dreams are eruptions of his repressed Indian self.
 
Other critics have said that windows open briefly, but Desai’s characters fail to seize the day.  I think Desai is after more than that.  This is a critique of colonialism, but what makes her writing so effective is that she is able to locate such a huge historical and political moment within a quite simple story of a man denying what he sees.
 
The second story, “Translator Translated,” takes up the problem of writing the colonized experience in the language of the colonizer.  The point of view character, Prema, an English teacher, whose life is less than meaningful, begins to find meaning as a translator of short stories she has grown up with and loved, written in an indigenous language, and apparently quite familiar to all the people who speak that language.  Her translation is a success and she is happy for the first time in her life.  The author proves to be a recluse who doesn’t really want to make much time for her, does not connect with Prema’s fantasy of a warm friendship between writer and translator, where they might even become almost coequal in the production.  She prevails upon the author to write a novel.  But when she gets the novel she is disappointed.  She finds none of the vividness and charm of the short stories.  As a teacher of Jane Austin and George Elliot, Prema knows what a novel should be.  So she revises as she translates, to bring the novel up to her standards.  The novel is less than successful, but worse, a relative of the author comes to claim that it is badly translated, and at a reading, a voice in the crowd scolds Prema for translating the story into the language of the colonizer.  The author chooses not to continue writing—she is busy developing schools in the poor districts from which her short stories were drawn.  And Prema is forced back into the dreary life she had hoped to escape—riding the coattails of Austin and Eliot.
 
Desai is here writing in English, writing a novella –not a novel but close enough—about why Indians shouldn’t write novels in English.  In Desai’s biography there is no clear indication that she ever spoke a truly remote, indigenous language, but she did speak several of the more common languages: Urdu, etc.  I don’t quite see Desai herself as betraying her native language.  She grew up speaking German, but I do notice that the story is told primarily in the third person past tense, except for two sections in first person, one past tense and one present tense.  This breaks the traditional form of novels, at least, of the novels that Prema spends her life teaching—the nineteenth century British novel. Given the machinations of today’s young novel writers the challenge is hardly breathtaking, but it calls attention to the act of writing about the life of the colonized in a form that belongs to the colonizer. Desai tries to escape the novel.  As does Prema, in her dismal life.
 
 The story tells us the indigenous author could not write a novel.  The stories she had to tell didn’t survive the passage into novels.  They were pretty close to the anecdotes we tell each other every day about our lives, written in the language that community would tell its stories in.  The indigenous author is not dependent on literature for a life: she is engaged in the process of living, of helping other people.  But Prema is left, living an empty life on the margins of eighteenth and nineteenth century English novels.
 
The last story is less elegantly efficient than the first two, less elegantly shaped.  In “The Artist of Disappearance,” an upper caste Indian couple in love with the values of the British, spend their lives aping the ways of the rulers.  They travel in Europe, socialize with British neighbors. They have adopted an Indian son in whose welfare they are not at all interested.  The boy barely survives, and that only with the help of the servants. He relates to things in nature, not to people. The parent’s social life is interrupted by a racist incident, when an English man beats up the husband for dancing with his wife.  The boy is sent away to school, where he is miserable.  Eventually he goes home to share his life with blind old woman supposed to be his tutor, his parents having departed somewhere for good.  Somehow the old woman sets the house on fire and it burns up completely except for one room that still has walls and a roof, though black and smoked.  A villager brings food and a cot for the now grown man, who seems to spend his life sitting on what is left of the veranda.  And so he hardly survives as far as anyone knows.  But he has a secret project: he finds a pool hidden in the jungle and turns it into a work of art.  He drags trees and stones and arranges them all to make a beautiful space.
 
The western world shows up, in the form of documentary film makers from Delhi who wish to film the destruction of the jungle.  A fine irony.  They are not especially lucky in finding what they came for.  Much is made in the story of film crews coming to film the beautiful scenery in this area. At one point, one of them discovers the artist’s pond.  They succeed in filming the pond, but the villagers hide the artist, so they are never able to connect with him.  Looking at the film, they find that the footage seems flat and boring. One says that they needed the artist for this to come alive.  They pack up their cameras and leave, but the artist never goes back to his pond.
 
That is, the western world comes to see the scenery, not the people.  They almost figure out that they are missing the soul of the people, that there is a soul immanent in the art of the pond, but, like the civil servant in the first story, they have no idea what to do about that.
 
This novella has an unusual shape.  It seems to be two different short stories barely connected.  My guess is that Desai is again working out the problem of how to tell the story of the colonized in the language of the colonizer.
 
The epigraph quotes Jorge Luis Borges, “One thing alone does not exist—oblivion.” The Artist of Disappearance seems to be about the internalized project of completely colonizing the indigenous culture.  The project fails. - SQ

Author: Amor Towles
Review by: Judy Bobrow
Genre: Literary Fiction

​A Remarkable Gentleman Indeed!
 
The saga of A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, begins in 1922 as the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was being created from the vast territory of the former northern Eurasian empire, stretching from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean. Amidst all the chaos of this event, Count Alexander Ilvich Rostov returns to his former home in Russia after a self-exile following a duel that ended badly, to attend the funeral of his beloved sister. As a member of the aristocracy, he is seen by those newly in power as a danger to the Communist Party, and the new republic.
 
The count is placed under house arrest at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and during his decades-long stay in a closet-sized room on the isolated 6th floor of the hotel, carves out a new life for himself, putting to good use all the varied skills acquired as an aristocrat. And through the telling of his complex life and the lives of the people he comes in contact with at the Metropol, Amor Towles took me on an adventure in reading that had me both laughing and weeping and at the end, totally satisfied.
 
This book engages on two levels:
 
First, we get to know a man, Count Rostov, who is placed in what would be for most, an impossibly difficult situation. His former way of life no longer exists. He is isolated from his entire support group of friends and family. There is nothing of his old life that remains. But he is undaunted. We see him not adapting to these new circumstances, not making the most of them, not complaining, not sad, not disillusioned. What we see instead is a man so completely comfortable with himself, that he continues to live as he always has, even in his limited circumstances. He becomes both teacher and student, endearing himself and making himself useful to the hotel workers as well as guests of the hotel – those in the upper class who have survived the revolution to take on positions of responsibility and power.
 
Second, we get to experience parallel worlds – the life inside the walls of the Metropol Hotel, within the count’s small quarters, and in the larger world surrounding the hotel, and within the newly formed republic. We are guided through these worlds with the skill, emotional depth and sheer artistry of Amor Towels. JB
 

Author: Jodi Picoult
Genre: Literary Fiction
​Review by: D.A. Henneman

​An amazing story that examines the delicate subject of racism with grace and empathy. Ruth’s story grabbed me from the start as she is put into an impossible situation by the hospital she works for. The choices she makes, and the story she decides to share, not only affects her life, but also the lives of the strangers she will come to know.

​Along the way, we get to know Turk. His strong beliefs prompt a decision to prevent Ruth from caring for his newborn child with devastating effects. We also see things from the point of view of Kennedy, the lawyer that defends Ruth in the lawsuit filed by the white supremist couple. As the story unfolds, the belief system for all three of them are challenged in a fundamental way.

This story is about prejudice and tolerance. It is also about how our perceptions can flavor the decisions we make every day as well as the truths we share with others. This story is very much about human nature, the good and the bad, and shows that the smallest choice can make a huge impact on the lives of others.

​Small Great Things was an amazing read and I also highly recommend reading the Author’s notes. They gave great insight as to the inspiration and evolution of the story. - DH

Author: D. A. Henneman
Genre: Romance/Fantasy
Review by: Madelyn March

​Winds of Change is a fantasy romance that you won’t want to put down. It’s a fast-paced book packed with magic and mayhem, an engaging plot, and strong female characters. D. A. Henneman’s fantasy world is stunningly beautiful and packed with unexpected characters and creatures. It’s the second in the series, The Power of Four.

Amie Petridis is a strong, capable, beautiful pilot. When she first meets Aleck Eyres, she’s setting an old fling straight who is reluctant to let her go. It doesn’t take long before the sparks fly between Amy and Aleck. Little do they know that their lives, their reality, is about to change.

This story seamlessly mixes romance with masterful fantasy. It takes place in current time on our earth, but the elements (of which Amie is one) have abilities to reach into another dimension. This new land, named Wisteria, is filled with treacherous dark forces that are working to destroy the elements. Amie will have to work with newfound friends to uncover the causes of deceit and evil. Then she will have to find a way to try to stop the dark powers before they destroy both worlds.

I highly recommend this book. You will not be disappointed. In fact, you’ll want to pick up the next one right away.

Happy Reading,
​Madelyn March