April-June 2016: Writers At Risk

Hi All,

The quarterly theme read subject for the second quarter (which is approaching fast!) is:

Writers at Risk - Authors who are or were refugees, exiles or political prisoners and wrote about it

I will be your host for this theme read, which is a bit ironic since so far I haven't managed reading even a single book in line with the theme within the allotted period. But I'll do my best here. And after all, I don't have to actually read them, do I? Just start the discussion :-)

I have created a list to go with this theme, and you can also add your own comments and suggestions to it: http://www.librarything.com/list/10695/all/Writers-at-Risk

Most of the books below I haven't read (yet?). I found them using LT searches, snatched them from recent reviews on Reading Globally or Club Read (I'm sure you will recognize some of them), or remembered them as "books I should read some day". This is far from a comprehensive list, and I'm sure it reflects my blind spots, so please don't hesitate to add your own suggestions in this thread and/or in the list.

REFUGEES

There are many reasons for people to become refugees or exiles. War is one of the most important, as is persecution for political, religious or racial/ethnical reasons. Poverty is another powerful driver, and so are natural disasters. Unfortunately I could find very few books on the former, and none on the latter.

Fleeing war and persecution
WWII features heavily in this list. Although all wars create refugees, the systematic nature of the persecution of Jews and other minorities and political opponents by nazi Germany has generated more literature than other wars. Or maybe I didn't look in the right places? Please feel free to correct me.

Anne Frank's Journal is a classic I haven't read, but I'm pretty sure it belongs in this list.

Magda Denes - Castles burning : a child's life in war is her memoir of fleeing nazi persecution with her family in occupied Hungary.

Christine Arnothy - J'ai quinze ans et je ne veux pas mourir (I am fifteen and I don't want to die) - Also about a young girl's experience of WWII in Hungary. Not sure how good this book is but it was a minor best seller in France I believe.

Aleksander Wat - Mój Wiek (My Century) - Memoir of his life as a Polish Jew persecuted and imprisoned both by the nazis and soviets.

Art Spiegelman - Maus - This is slightly off-topic as it's a second-hand account, and it may be more about being the child of holocaust survivors, and the child of a difficult and aging father, than about the holocaust itself. Still, I feel it's important enough to include in the list.

Tian - L'année du lièvre (The Year of the Hare, apparently only available in French) - OK, this is another borderline case. The author was born in Cambodia in 1975, 3 days after the Red Khmers took power, and he arrived in France with his family in 1980, so it's not really a first hand account. Egoistically, I'm putting it here as a reminder to look for this at the library.

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis - Memoir of the Iranian revolution, and being sent alone to Europe by her parents to flee it.

Qais Akbar Omar - A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story - As the title says, the story of an Afghan family trying to survive the civil war.

Poverty
I'm pretty sure this is the main cause of exile, at least since the 19th century, but poor people rarely get to write their story, so this part of the list is rather light.

Frank McCourt - Angela's Ashes - Memoir of his childhood in Ireland. The sequel, 'Tis, is probably more in line with the theme as it tells of his life in America, but probably not as good (based on the reviews I saw, since I didn't read it).

Immigrants
I would have loved to list here books about what happens to immigrants once they have reached a (supposedly) safer ground. Unfortunately, apart from the already mentioned 'Tis, I found only one, which I haven't read but added to my wishlist:

Edwige Danticat - Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work - An essay on what it means to be a refugee from Haiti and an artist.

PRISONERS
This part of the list is even more frustrating than the first one. I expected to find a lot of books but didn't. Again, feel free to add yours.

Concentration camps
Only one book here, but it's a classic (another one I haven't read!):
Primo Levi Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz)

Political prisoners
Obviously this is the exclusive specialty of Russia, both before, during and after the Soviet era. Well, probably not but these were all I could find:

Fyodor Dostoievsky Записки из мертвого дома (The House of the Dead) - A fictionalized account of the time Dostoievsky spend in a Siberia camp.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Архипелаг ГУЛАГ (The Gulag Archipelago) - An account of the Soviet repression
Один день Ивана Денисовича (One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) - A novel about life in a camp

Slavery
While researching for this theme, I discovered that there was apparently a thriving genre of slave memoirs in North America during the 19th century. I couldn't find an equivalent in Europe. I suppose that slavery, being hidden far away in the colonies, was less of a burning issue for Europeans than it was for Americans. Anyway, this might be bending the scope as defined above, but I decided to include a few. Literary value was obviously not the main selling point here, but I tried to select the best ones (again based on reviews, as I haven't read any of those).

Olaudah Equiano - The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano
Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave
Josiah Henson - The Life of Josiah Henson: Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada
Booker T. Washington - Up From Slavery

Well, that's it. Again, please feel free to add your own suggestions!

Great start! I've had a walk around my shelves and added a few things to the list - I don't know if all of them are appropriate.

There's a lot about writers currently at risk on the PEN International (http://www.pen-international.org) and Amnesty International (https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/freedom-of-expression/) sites that might give us some more ideas.

Thank you for coming to the rescue! I felt my list was thoroughly inadequate, and it looks much better now :-)

My Century is one of my favorite books, and I can add Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary to the list. He was born in exile, died in exile, and was jailed twice by the French and once by the Soviets.

It must be from your review that I took it, Rebecca. And I should have remembered Victor Serge too!

Great list with lots to really think about. I'm a real fan of City of Angels, or The Overcoat of Dr Freud, so happy to see it here along with so many other great books. I've added How it All Began to the list, the doomed Bukharin in prison, and then Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number for another prisoner.

Another link to artists in general at risk, with maps: https://www.indexoncensorship.org/

One of the great things about many of the authors here is how they roll so well into other upcoming themes, so if they don't get finished this quarter, there's no reason for them to languish on the shelves, there is all year to read them.

Thanks for the list!

I've added a few works to the list, feel free to tell me if you feel they don't belong.

I was wondering, would you consider that La promesse de l'Aube bye Romain Gary belong in the Immigrants category?

>7 chlorine: I have to confess, I never read it, but I think La promesse de l'aube sounds like a great addition to the Immigrants category.

Thanks for making a start on this (sadly) potentially huge topic. Browsing the authors mentioned on the PEN site is quite sobering: so many authors being persecuted because they had the courage to write something controversial. And I fear many of them are unknown/unlikely to be available to Western readers because their writing has been suppressed. So part of the challenge of this quarter may be finding books by contemporary writers at risk in the first place...

Browsing my bookshelves, I have a few names to add to the list who may or may not be familiar (this is going to be German and Russian heavy, due to the bias of my general reading choices):
Andrei Sinyavsky (aka Abram Tertz)
Daniil Kharms
Both are Soviet writers who ended up imprisoned/on trial for their writing, but aren't as well known as, say, Mandelstam or Pasternak. These are both personal recommendations -- I have a particular fondness for Sinyavsky -- and I'm hoping, now that I've finally tracked down copies of some of their work in Russian, to slowly work through their writing in the original.

Paul Celan has to be mentioned here, as the poet whose work perhaps most vividly reflects the experiences of the Holocaust. (And if we're on the subject of poetry, I suppose Anna Akhmatova has to be mentioned.)
Edgar Hilsenrath doesn't seem terribly well known, but he has an interesting approach to writing about persecution and genocide and victims and perpetrators.

Satirists also often seem to draw the ire of their respective countries upon their heads, although the level of persecution may vary. Spontaneously, besides Mikhail Bulgakov, his countryman Mikhail Zoshchenko comes to mind. Also the Germans Heinrich Heine and Kurt Tucholsky, who, though never imprisoned, both had their writing banned at various times and ended their lives in exile in France.

If we want to go way back in history, Ovid (exiled in the year 8 AD) surely qualifies here.

There's another group of authors that I don't think has been mentioned specifically yet: authors from the Islamic world, who in the last few decades have been increasingly subject to either persecution by various governments or have suffered from the wars breaking out in this region. Salman Rushdie is undoubtably the most prominent representative of this, but there is a younger generation, e.g., writers like Abbas Khider who grew up in Irak under Saddam Hussein (on my reading list primarily because he writes in German; I'm not sure if any of his novels have been translated into English and there are doubtless others who write in English).

The Balkan is another region that has recently produced many writers marked by war and persecution and immigration. Nothing currently either read or on my shelf, but Aleksandar Hemon seems worth checking out.

>9 spiphany: Your mention of satirists reminds me of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. The quarter from July - September is Soviet and Post Soviet Writers, so some of the authors mentioned above would fit well there as well.

I think I can squeeze a journalist into this theme, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and specifically her book Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War.

>1 FlorenceArt: Thank you for getting us started!

I have Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt in my tbr pile, so I may read along with that one.

I recommend Pussy Riot!: A Punk Prayer For Freedom by Pussy Riot. It's a short book about Pussy Riot's protest against Putin, their subsequent arrest for singing a protest song, and the current political climate in Russia. (written from prison)

Going through my books, I've added My Happy Days in Hell to the list as the author escaped from the Nazis only to be imprisoned for his role in the Free Hungary movement.

>1 FlorenceArt: What an excellent introduction; thanks for framing the theme so clearly.

I've added a few books from the 1001-book-list to the linked list in the first post, as appropriate:

Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard -- an autobiographical novel of his experiences as a young boy in a Japanese interment camp outside of Shanghai during WWII. The writing is excellent and the adaptation to the circumstances is...unsettling. I've often wondered how much these experiences influenced his life and writing.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski -- a collection of stories based on the author's experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. It's been a while, but I seem to remember the perspective being different than I expected.

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi -- a novel about the extreme difficulties of growing to womanhood in a repressive society. Although the novel was written many years before the author's own imprisonment for her outspoken feminism, in this case life, unfortunately, imitated some of the circumstances presented in her art

Half of Man is Woman by Xianliang Zhang -- the main character, like the author, is detained as a political prisoner during the Anti-Rightist Movement. In some ways it an odd novel about life in a Chinese labor camp, in some cases the prisoners are better off and able to avoid the worst of the political upheaval happening elsewhere, but the imprisonment is banally brutal and warps both the people and the culture at large.

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić -- publised in 1997, it is more like a collage than a novel; the fractured form exemplifies the shattered lives of exiles. The author was forced to leave Yugoslavia in 1993 due to her outspoken criticism of nationalism and the war.

Transit by Anna Segher -- a Kafkaesque tale of the narrator's waiting period in Marseille, as he attempts to get the necessary papers/visas/tickets to flee Nazi-occupied France. Apparently Segher's wrote the book during her flight to Mexico in the early 1940s (although I can't find where i read that tidbit, now....)

Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan -- the author was arrested in Liverpool at 16, with bomb-making materials in his possession and was given the maximum sentence for a juvenile offender, 3 years in a Borstal (youth prison in the United Kingdom). This book is the story of this period of his life.

I haven't read Cataract, but according to wiki he "was a Ukrainian journalist, poet, writer, and dissident....arrested for the second time in 1972. This time, he was sentenced to seven years of labour camp and three years of exile." I believe the book based on his experiences in prison.

I came across The History of Mary Prince when looking for titles set in the West Indies for the first quarter theme. Apparently, she was "the first black woman to escape from slavery in the British colonies and publish a record of her experiences".

Last, but not least, Salman Rushdie is probably the most famous writer at risk. I recently read, and loved, the controversy-causing The Satanic Verses but felt that the most appropriate book for this theme is his recent memoir about his years in hiding, Joseph Anton.

>14 ELiz_M: I loved Transit; in fact, it led me to buy another book of hers.

Wikipedia has a page listing memoirs of political prisoners https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_memoirs_of_political_prisoners

There seem to be one or two there we haven't mentioned yet, notably Gramsci, though I don't see anyone here volunteering to read the complete Prison notebooks!

Granny made me an anarchist by the Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie looks interesting, although he's arguably not primarily a writer, and definitely someone who created his own risk (travelling to Spain to assassinate Franco).

>16 thorold: I think I need that Christie book. Those Scottish grannies can set your course for life.

From torontoc's thread in Club Read 2016, I have added Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer before the Dark

I added:

Concentration Camps:
Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
I have lived a Thousand Years-Growing up in the Holocaust - Livia Bitton-Jackson
Inherit the Truth, 1939-1945 - Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

Political Prisoners
The Most Wanted Man in China - Fang Lizhi
Life and Death in Shanghai - Nien Cheng

Genocide
First They Killed My Father - Luong Ung

Does it sound facetious to add Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me? I haven't read it yet, but it's on my shelf.

I'll hopefully be starting The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi late next week. He was imprisoned for two years due to his writing.

I own these books, which I'll attempt to read for this theme:

J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, Missing Soluch (composed during the author's imprisonment in Iran, and written after his release)
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel (a novel about the persecution of Romanian Germans in Stalinist Russia, and their deportation to Soviet labor camps after World War II)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Devil on the Cross (written on toilet paper while Ngũgĩ was imprisoned, this novel describes the persecution of Kenyans after the country gained its independence)
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave

If possible, I'd like to read these two books as well:

Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero (I'm pretty sure that I own this, but it isn't in my LT library)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

>20 mabith: I really enjoyed The Colonel and also >21 kidzdoc: Long Walk to Freedom and Devil on the Cross. In fact, I bought Thirst: A Novel of the Iran-Iraq War after reading The Colonel. Going to add Hans Fallada's The Drinker to the list because he wrote it when he was imprisoned in a Nazi mental hospital for the criminally insane.

>21 kidzdoc: Thanks to Darryl for highlighting this thread over on the 75ers. There are some great books listed here already, and I will go look at the PEN list too.

I needed a push to read a couple of African prison memoirs, and was reminded by reading the (excellent, btw) The Book of Memory a fictional account of a Zimbabwean woman in prison. So I'll read at least one prison diary.

I had a look at the PEN updates and just found it horrifying. I should have known about some of it but...

Anyway, wikipedia lists some of the prizes given by the various PEN groups around the world. The Dutch award seems appropriate, to "recognize writers who have been persecuted for their work and continue working despite the consequences". Recent writers awarded a prize include:

Jesús Lemus Barajas (Mexico), journalist and writer

Samar Yazbek (Syria), writer and journalist

Enoh Meyomesse (Cameroon) Writer, activist

Busra Ersanli (Turkey), writer, academic

Razan al-Maghrabi (Libya), writer, journalist, and advocate of women’s rights

Abdelmoneim Rahama (Sudan), poet, writer and journalist

Taken from:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfam_Novib/PEN_Award

My Happy Days in Hell by György Faludy



What an amazing book! Faludy, a Hungarian poet, is a storyteller, who tells stories whether he is fleeing Hungary in advance of being arrested by the fascist government;escaping from Paris to Montaubon and then to Casablanca ahead of the Naizs; arriving in New York and enlisting in the US Army; returning to Hungary to live uneasily in the Soviet bloc; or arrested and thrown in jail and then sent to a forced-labor camp. I found some of the stories delightful and some absolutely horrifying. Throughout it all, Faludy discourses on philosophy, politics, literature, art, and poetry.

Faludy called this "my happy days in hell," and he maintains an eerily optimistic view of all that befalls him, even when he is being starved almost to death in the forced labor camp. Probably that stood him in good stead. Of course, being a poet, he writes, well, poetically. And he introduces various characters so that the reader feels he knows them too.

I can't itemize all the adventures, good and bad, that he had over the years this book covers, roughly 1938-1953, but I can quote him extensively.

While attempting to take a train to leave Paris.
"This relatively rapid progress was due to the determination of Lorsy, who pushed forward like a tank. When Bandi had warned him indignantly to keep his head, the historian replied that his head was in the right place: whatever, Bandi might think, it was the duty of every humanist to proceed with the maximal brutality in order to save himself, because in saving himself, he was saving the idea of humanism." p. 65

After leaving Morocco for the USA
"The African euphoria, the picaresque life, was now over. My year of happiness in Morocco had fed on innumerable sources; the most important of which was that had, at last, found my one and only, made-to-measure environment, the environment that fitted my character like a glove. This was true of the desert where, between the two concave lenses of heaven and earth, on a stage without scenery, I stood in the birthplace of dualist religions and was compelled to ponder at length, though without result, on the great questions of life and death, being and not being, good and evil -- something I had always yearned for without having found the time for it amidst the duties, occupations and even pleasures of everyday life. But it was also true of the desert's opposite, the marketplace of Marrakesh, the busy squares of Tangier, the tohu-bohu of the tea houses after midnight where life was a medley of knifings, love-making, funerals, bargaining, quarrels, gossip, the strange exhibitionism of a world in which the beggars on the street corners conversed like philosophers and philosophers copulated in the street like dogs. It was true of my Arab friends, first of all Amar, but also of the robber prince Sidi Mohammed and the Sudanese merchants with the donkey, the storyteller in the marketplace and the slipper-maker from whom, after hours of anecdotizing, I bought a pair of sandals." p. 193

Anticipating his arrest in Hungary
". . . while I was thinking that it didn't matter at all if they hung me in a ragged shirt, while it mattered a great deal that my last dinner should be all a last dinner should be." p. 283

in the early days of the forced labor camp
"It soon became clear to me that I owed both my physical and spiritual resistance chiefly to this way of behaving, which was partly yogi-like, partly monkish and partly schizophrenic. . . . My day-dreams embraced the widest variety of subjects, some themes returned every hour, others I carefully avoided; the problems of my captivity and future, for instance, and memories from my past life. Mostly I restricted myself to the intensive but cool observation of the surrounding flora . . ." p. 376

In the later days of the forced labor camp
"I insisted on conversation in order to preserve a certain degree of human dignity while we were slowly starving to death; Egri, on the other hand, believed that our conversation would save us from starving to death." o, 432

Obviously, Faludy survived the forced labor camp, but barely. Relief came after Stalin died in 1953, and the camp eventually closed.

As I said at the beginning, this is a remarkable book -- for the events it describes, but even more for the emphasis on dignity and humanism, and its digressions which form an integral part of the memoir.

10 Great Novels of Exile and Dislocation: A Reading List

http://electricliterature.com/10-great-novels-of-exile-and-dislocation-a-reading...

>18 SassyLassy:
regarding Stefan Zweig , his the chess story is a fun read.

In addition it is a story of how a prisoner in solitary incarceration can survive and overcome humiliation and degradation.

Zweig, himself, was a victim of Nazi Germany. While he had the resources to escape the Europe he so loved and resettle in Brazil his sense of isolation and exile got led to the decision to end his life through suicide.

How narrowly should we be interpreting the theme?

Naguib Mahfouz was not imprisoned (though it was considered a very lucky break that he escaped that), but he was threatened by various groups and was seriously injured in an assassination attempt (he stood up for Salman Rushdie's right to free expression while criticizing his depiction of Islam, and was targeted for death particularly for his book Children of the Alley). The injury he suffered impeded his ability to write for the rest of his life (after a prolific writing life he only produced two books between the attack in 1994 and his death in 2006).

Anyone looking for accounts of Chinese political prisoners:
Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng
Red in Tooth and Claw: Twenty-Six Years in Communist Chinese Prisons
The Most Wanted Man in China by Fang Lizhi

>28 mabith: Hopefully we are interpreting broadly!! I am reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk and I think his qualifications are similar to Mahfouz's.

Thanks for the suggestion! I have been meaning to read Palace Walk, so if I get time maybe I will pick it up.

and >25 rebeccanyc: Rebecca, thanks for the review. That book is intriguing to me.

I finished Paradise of the blind by Thu Huong Duong (read it in French).

I picked up this book half by mistake, because I didn't realise that it was the same author as Itinerary of Childhood, for which I did not care much.

This is the story of a young woman, and before that, of her mother, who married a little before the advent of the communist regime. It was interesting to hear about life in this regime, and in particular I had never heard of the way the land reform was conducted, and of the compensation commission that followed.

The author was apparently imprisoned for this book, probably because of the way she describes the leaders of the reform, as opportunist people who were lazy and/or stupid, and generally not much respected individuals, who suddenlty became very important and turned oppressive.

I did not care much for this book as a novel. I thought it was poorly written (part of this may be due to translation), and the characters seemed a bit flat to me.

Finally, I've finished a book that fits into this theme...
Rebecca posted a great review of this a couple of years ago, and I've had it in my sights since then, but it took me a while to get there:

Transit (English, Spanish tr. 1944; German original 1948) by Anna Seghers (Germany/DDR 1900-1983)
  

Anna Seghers, who grew up in a Jewish family in Frankfurt, was one of the most distinguished of the left-wing German writers who were forced into exile during the Nazi period. After the war she lived in East Berlin. Among her well-known works is one of the first mainstream accounts of Nazi terror, Das siebte Kreuz (1936).

The ports of Southern Europe are filling up with desperate refugees. They are residents of bombed-out cities, members of persecuted ethnic groups, people who belong to the wrong political party, people who have fought on the wrong side in earlier conflicts, people who don't know where they live or which country they belong to any more. And they are stuck on the border, trying to jump through the bureaucratic hoops in the right sequence so that they will be allowed to move on to a new life in another country.

But they are all heading south, to Africa, the Americas, anywhere away from the horror of Europe.

If you didn't know better, you might think that this was an elaborate satire on the present refugee crisis. But of course it's 1940/1941, we are in Vichy France, and the terror that the refugees are escaping from is that of Nazi Germany.

Seghers wrote this book whilst she was en route into exile in Mexico, and it clearly draws heavily on her own experience of the atmosphere of wartime Marseilles and the absurdities of the visa process, but it isn't a straight autobiographical account. She explores what it means to be a refugee through a narrator who is so alienated that he doesn't even have a name any more, still less a clear idea of where he is going or what he is escaping from. He is just a random ordinary person who got drawn into a fight with an SA man and found himself in a concentration camp, escaped to France by swimming the Rhine, and doesn't want to fall into the hands of the Nazis. He has acquired some false papers in the name of Seidler, and he would be perfectly happy to carry on living on those somewhere in France, but he has also accidentally got entangled with the posthumous existence of a deceased novelist called Weidler, whose friends are trying to get him to Mexico and whose estranged wife can't get out of France without his help.

Things get more and more complicated, and the narrator gets drawn further and further into the complexities of the visa system, where you typically find you can't get document A before you have received document B, but document B depends on document C, which you can't get without A, and so on. As we follow him through the queues and consulates and the chance meetings with fellow-refugees in cafés along the way, we gradually learn more about what it might feel like to be stateless, detached from your identity and background.

(Incidentally, we also learn a good deal more about the intriguing flat bread topped with cheese and tomatoes that is the staple food of the transients in Southern Europe - this must surely be one of the earliest literary explorations of pizza-culture...)

Not an easy or a cheerful read, even if it is often very funny, but definitely still a book we can learn something from today.

Glad you liked Transit.

I've got Transit on my mental wishlist (probably on the LT wishlist too), but I didn't think it was a novel! I really must get to it, some day. But at the rate I'm reading now, it probably won't be in time for the theme.

I read Snow by Orhan Pamuk Here is my review:

The protagonist of this novel, Ka, is a Turkish poet who has been living in exile in Germany. He returns to Turkey, with the plan of writing an article about the "Head Scarf Girls"; a group of young women students, who refuse to go to school, and who kill themselves rather than remove their head scarfs. Ka interviews some of the girls, meets with an assortment of people on all sides of the political spectrum, and meets and falls in love with the beautiful Ipek. He starts to write poetry again after years of writers block. At first the book moves somewhat slowly. It seems that a lot of things happen, but nothing really changes. It occurred to me, while reading, that this must be what it is like to live in a country like Turkey.

As the book continues, the plot intensifies. Every character in the book acts for their own, complicated, reasons. Even people from the same political/religious factions, have very different motivations when you learn more about them. Not to give anything away, but it is a well-plotted book, with lots of twists and turns. The narrative style is interesting, it starts out told as a third person narrative, but as the book continues, the narrator becomes a character as well. Pamuk is an excellent writer, and I can see why he won the Nobel prize.

Themes in the book center on duality; Male/Female; East/West; Religion/Atheism; Life/Death; Poverty/ Wealth. Another primary issue, I think, is the role of the artist in society. There is discussion about the role of the writer in speaking for those who have been underrepresented, as in the poor in Turkey; and in bringing that voice to the west. This is seen as problematic, with one character insisting that it can't be done.

This book led me to think about my role as a reader, when I am reading books from different cultures.

>26 berthirsch: That's quite a list. Thanks for posting it.

>27 berthirsch: I read Chess Story in December and was really gripped by it. It would be an excellent book for this quarter.

>31 thorold: A really topical book, as you say. I also read it based on rebecca's review.

>34 banjo123: For some reason I've haven't had any luck reading Pamuk. I suspect I never pick up one of his books at the right time, as others with similar reading tastes seem to really appreciate him. I like your comment about this book making you think of your role as a reader. Maybe I should approach it from that perspective.

>35 SassyLassy:
A brief review on Chess Story

a fast moving novella about a chess match between 2 unlikely masters.

One is an idiot savant who has an innate ability to learn chess while being almost illiterate about all else. He becomes the world champion and soon develops an air of supremacy and conceit.

All is good for him until he takes a fateful ship cruise on its way to Buenos Aires. Aboard the ship is another chess master who learned the game while imprisoned in solitary confinement and all he had to maintain his sanity was a chess manual he memorized and the games within played out in his mind with no chess board nor pieces.

the ensuing match between these two is compelling, narrated quickly with good pace and characterization. this is the 1st Zweig piece i have read and i am sure to look at his other stories.

Finally read something else that's relevant for this thread:

Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (2012, All Russians love birch trees) by Olga Grjasnowa (USSR, Germany, 1984 - )
 

Olga Grjasnowa was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and moved to Germany with her parents as a young child. She writes in German. Der Russe... was her first novel and an immediate bestseller which won her various literary prizes; she has published one more novel since then.

Mascha, the narrator of the novel, is pretty much a model immigrant: young, intelligent, highly-educated, she seems very well integrated into German society. But she's still very conscious of her status as an exile. People are forever making assumptions about her, while her complicated background - displaced from the Caucasus but neither Moslem nor Armenian; Russian but not Russian-German; Jewish but fluent in Arabic; dependent on her boyfriends but not 100% heterosexual (etc., etc.) - means that those assumptions are not just insulting and patronising but also almost invariably based on incorrect data. Mascha's childhood experience of the ethnic violence that led her parents to leave Azerbaijan has also left its mark on her. She clearly feels uncomfortable in German society, and seeks out the companionship of other outsiders. When a new tragedy opens up in her life, she makes the rather surprising decision to go and work in Israel. Although she's repelled by Israeli attitudes and politics, there's an implication that she is subconsciously hoping to connect with her identity as a Jew and find some sort of roots, something that of course doesn't happen.

There are a lot of interesting, thought-provoking ideas floating around in this book, and Grjasnowa is clearly an articulate, strong-minded writer who can carry the reader along with her, but I wasn't quite won over. I found Mascha a bit too feeble: obviously this is meant to show us how her traumatic background has cut away her ability to trust others, but the way she keeps on flaking out and having to be rescued by men does get rather wearing after a while. There seemed to be too much disconnect between the narrator's actions and the very strong narrative voice, somehow. Of course, it's not fair to expect Grjasnowa to find a neat literary resolution for Mascha's problems, still less for the universal problems of exile and displacement, but I didn't really feel at the end of the book that I was much further along than I was at the beginning.

...and another quasi-autobiographical novel of exile, since I had some time in planes and airports to force me to read:

De reis van de lege flessen (1997, no English translation??) by Kader Abdolah (Iran, Netherlands, 1954 - )
  

Kader Abdolah (a pen-name he adopted in honour of two friends killed by Iranian state terror) was forced to leave Iran in the 1980s as a consequence of his political and journalistic activities in opposition to the regimes of the Shah and the Ayatollahs. He arrived in the Dutch town of Zwolle in 1988, and has built up a very successful career as a novelist and columnist in Dutch, having taught himself the language mostly by an intensive study of Dutch poetry. His best-known novel, widely-translated, is The house of the mosque (2005).

De reis van de lege flessen (Lit: The journey of the empty bottles) was his first novel. Through the eyes of Bolfazl, a political refugee who is living with his wife and young son in a small community on the river IJssel, he explores the contrasts between his Iranian background, where everything was hidden and no-one could risk exposing his life to the neighbours, and the "half-naked society" he finds himself in. This is a book which is obviously meant to give settled people a feel for what it might mean to be transposed involuntarily to a different culture, but it's also a wry and affectionate account of the Dutchness of the Dutch (maybe for that reason it doesn't seem to have pushed as many buttons outside the Netherlands as The house of the mosque).

Whilst his wife launches herself enthusiastically into the community of the local mums, Bolfazl builds up a cautious half-friendship with his neighbour, René. He soon realises that, although he's using René as a handy expert on Dutch culture, his neighbour is even more of an outsider than he is. As Bolfazl gradually becomes more comfortable with his new surroundings, we see René's estrangement from the world increasing almost in parallel. Bolfazl of course doesn't know what is driving René along his self-destructive path, and he's frustrated to see that his own industrious efforts to make contact with Dutch culture are far less effective than the casual intimacy of coffee sessions after the school-run: there's clearly a lot more to this exile business than meets the eye.

A short, touching, and very rewarding novel, beautifully written and acutely observed.

>38 thorold: This sounds like a really interesting book, thanks for the review!
Apparently it has been translated to French. :)

>38 thorold: I agree with Chlorine, it sounds very interesting, and I'm glad to know there is a French translation.

>39 chlorine:, >40 FlorenceArt:
On LT the only languages are Dutch, French, Italian and Croatian, from Worldcat it looks as though you can get it in Spanish, Catalan, Bosnian, German and Turkish as well. But not in English or Farsi, apparently.

Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng

A long-time classic in the genre of 20th Century China memoirs. Perhaps one of the few by women that details a lengthy prison stay.

Cheng was doing all right in Mao's China until the Cultural Revolution threw everything into chaos. After her home was looted by Red Guards (multiple times), she was initially confined to house arrest and forbidden from seeing her daughter who was viewed as innocent at that early point. Soon Cheng was arrested, largely due to having worked for Shell, despite the fact that the Chinese government specifically allowed them to continue to operate in China.

Cheng refused to admit any guilt or wrong-doing, and was frequently interrogated during her prison stays. She was in prison for over 6 years, basically in solitary confinement. She went through a specific type of torture where handcuffs are applied extremely tightly and left on for extended periods. After an untrained doctor diagnosed her with uterine cancer and as the tide was turning way from the Cultural Revolution she was released, though still kept under surveillance (she did not have uterine cancer).

The book is extremely detailed, and rather addictive reading, even though the reader knows she was eventually released. As soon as she was able to get a passport she fled China, along with many others who were arrested during the Cultural Revolution, as they knew first hand that a similar movement could happen again and they would be the first under the bus.

Recommended, though I found it interesting that she didn't address some of the 'big' policy changes or events after she left prison, such as the one-child policy.

Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number by Jacobo Timerman

I read this book for the Global Reading theme of writers at risk. Timerman was a journalist in Argentina during the 70's and was imprisoned and tortured during the dirty war. He is a good writer, and the descriptions of his experiences are harrowing. He intersperses descriptions of his imprisonment with political critique, is critical of extremists on both the right and the left, and also of the moderates who didn't stand up to terror. It's pretty horrible to read about the imprisonment and torture and realize that these are still going on in various parts of the world, and, as in the case in Guantanamo, happening in our name.

He also talks about anti-semitism and how as a Jew and Zionist, he was singled out and given worse treatment, and how, for a variety of political reasons, the Jewish community in Argentina and in Israel did not address this. Some interesting thoughts about internalized oppression. "...the Holocaust teaches us the need to understand the Jewish silence and the Jewish incapacity to defend itself; it lies in the Jewish incapacity to confront the world with its own insanity, and with the significance of anti-Semitic insanity. The Holocaust will be understood not so much for the number of victims as for the magnitude of the silence. And what obsesses me most is the repetition of silence rather than the possibility of another Holocaust."