Hotel Silence by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

First published in Iceland in 2018; published in translation by Grove Atlantic/Black Cat on February 13, 2018

Here’s some good advice from Jónas’ mom: “Instead of putting an end to your existence, can’t you put an end to being you and just become someone else?” The question in Hotel Silence is whether Jónas will listen to his mother.

Jónas kept a diary of his sexual experiences. Reading it, he remembers how Gudrún told him that she was pregnant, a revelation that led to marriage. They named the baby Waterlily. Only later did Gudrún tell Jónas that she was pregnant by another man. Jónas and Gudrún have been divorced (and Jónas has been celibate) for eight years, but he has nevertheless had a water lily tattooed over his heart.

Jónas visits his mother regularly, but she doesn’t always remember the visits. He has become obsessed with celebrity suicides and is considering how to take his own life in a way that won’t burden Waterlily with his empty flesh.

Jónas decides to do the deed at Hotel Silence in a remote country that has been devastated by war. Iceland hasn’t had a war in centuries, leaving Jónas unprepared for a city where nearly all the stores are closed and the hotel clerk warns him of the places where land mines and unexploded bombs make walking treacherous. Fifi and his sister May are running the hotel by default, the owner having fled to a less dangerous place. The only other regular occupant is May’s son, who was born in the basement as bombs fell.

Jónas gives himself a week to live. He has taken a drill and some tools with him and finds himself making small repairs so that his room will be more comfortable, although (as he repeatedly tells May) he isn’t a carpenter or a plumber — his skill is furniture restoration. Eventually he’s pressed into making repairs elsewhere in the hotel, and later in other buildings. His neighbor asks him if he plans to fix the whole country with his little drill, but it seems obvious to the reader that Jónas is really trying to fix himself, to find a reason to live another day.

Despite his desire for death, Jónas repeatedly encounters people who are surrounded by death but persist in living. He realizes early on that “in the land of death there isn’t the same urgency to die.” The novel’s central question is whether and when Jónas will end his life. Will staying in a country that needs to reinvent itself inspire him to reinvent himself?

Hotel Silence is a rumination on war and ruin. At the same time, it’s a very personal story of a man who imagines himself ruined and his journey of rediscovery. Some of the themes might be obvious, particularly the importance of finding purpose in life as an incentive to keep living, but the more subtle theme involves the struggle to make sense of life when it doesn’t go the way one imagined it would. The juxtaposition of Jónas’ emotional suffering with the more intense suffering of women who lost everything in a war brings home the point that misfortune is arbitrary, that it is unrelated to one’s value as a person, and that persevering in the face of adversity is based on the power of hope for a better future, even if “better” is nothing more than making a connection with another person.

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s prose is effortless and economical. Her focus on a small, slice-of-life story makes it possible to illuminate big themes. As the title implies, this is a quiet story — the silence that follows a war, the voices that are not yet ready to speak — but the story suggests that “Silence saves the world.” I don’t know if that’s true, but the silence between sentences in this masterful story speaks volumes.

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Feast Days by Ian Mackenzie

Published by Little, Brown and Company on March 13, 2018

A married couple moved to São Paulo, a city “hairy with crime,” for the husband’s job. The wife, having no opportunity for Brazilian employment, is an observer. Emma narrates her observations of local politics and protests, the contrast between wealth and poverty in Brazil, expensive meals (unlike her husband, she would rather eat food than discuss it), her first experience as a robbery victim, the difficulty of mastering Portuguese, the lure of invented cognates, the glassy apartment buildings that resemble aquariums, and the country’s never-ending social obligations.

Feast Days is a detached account of Emma’s external observations mixed with more personal but still detached observations of her own life. Emma is not terribly satisfied with her lot, but at least while she’s in Brazil, she doesn’t seem inclined to make any changes to enhance her happiness, or even to voice her concerns, perhaps because she doesn’t know what changes she might desire or whether true happiness is attainable.

An affair is on offer, but it hardly seems worth the effort. Emma seems to think that sticking to marriage creates a history, and marriage is nothing more than a shared history of being married. A dull marriage, she thinks, is better than starting over, because nothing is more dull than revealing yourself in each new relationship, telling the same stories, getting fucked in the pretty much the same way by each new boyfriend.

Emma likes to talk, not because she has anything important to say, but because she enjoys “the lapidary construction of sentences,” syntax more important than content. Having no particular skills beyond an affinity for English grammar, Emma resentfully keeps the home and occasionally tutors prosperous Brazilians for cash. She also does volunteer work, helping Haitian refugees while marveling that the Brazilian government treats them well, having a more compassionate attitude about “shithole countries” than American politicians.

Emma is unenthused about the prospect of having a child, a source of largely unspoken conflict with her husband. Emma wonders why men are incapable of talking about anything but their work, and occasionally asks questions like “Is there a market for that?” to make herself understood. She ruminates on the phrase “the disaster of heterosexuality” as a possible explanation for being dissatisfied with her life.

Emma encounters a fair amount of sexism in Brazil, but it might not be as obnoxious as the sexism she endured at a Las Vegas engagement party hosted by her in-laws, where all of the gated community residents wanted to know about her wedding plans and how many children she would have. Nobody asked her whether she had a life; they assumed her job was getting married.

Collateral characters play their roles, but Feast Days is very much Emma’s story. She refers to her husband not by name but as “my husband” or, in flashbacks, “the man who would become my husband.” We learn a bit about Emma’s past from those flashbacks, and a brief chapter gives us a snapshot of her future, but the story’s focus is on Emma’s cabined life in Brazil. Unfortunately, that portion of her life is so uneventful that I would have preferred to read more about her past or future.

Emma loves words and so, I must assume, does Ian Makenzie. His use of words is more interesting than Emma, who is such an uninvolved observer that I found it difficult to warm up to her. She doesn’t seem to feel anything (other than ennui which isn’t really a feeling); she holds no fundamental beliefs that aren’t rooted in etymology. Feast Days appeals to the intellect, not the heart, but I’m recommending it for its prose and for the occasional insights it offers into a life of a woman who has been thrust into a role for which she is ill-suited.

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The Deceivers by John Berenson

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 6, 2018

I didn’t think much of Alex Berenson’s first John Wells novel, but I’ve found his recent books to be surprisingly entertaining. The notion of a former Ranger who converted to Islam assures that the protagonist will stand out from the crowd of ex-Rangers who populate thrillers. The way the conversion came about is credible, and the character illustrates the truth that any religion can be used as a pretext for committing evil acts. A right-wing senator in The Deceivers who rails against Islam is uncomfortably familiar with his America First rhetoric, and just as much of a blowhard as all the ideologues who have kick-started their political careers by stirring up hatred and anger.

Gamal al-Masry has never done anything to suggest his interest in carrying out terrorist actions, other than to make Facebook comments that condemn America’s action in bombing his homeland. Gamal is radicalized by his cousin Shakir, a drug dealer who has little interest in politics or religion. Fearing that he is about to be sent to prison, Shakir agrees to set up Gamal in what he assumes will be an arrest prior to the execution of a bogus terrorist plot. The terrorist attack in Dallas that follows is not at all what Shakir expected.

Shakir isn’t the only person who is deceived. The villains in the story are not Islamic terrorists but manipulative Russians who are trying to divide America by stirring up hatred against Islam. That seems plausible in light of news stories about Russian deception and Russian attempts to sow chaos in American democracy that have dominated headlines over the past year. A Russian woman who pretends to love an unwanted veteran is instrumental in the second aspect of the Russian scheme. The veteran happens to be a skilled sniper.

Wells is tasked with getting to the bottom of the Dallas attack. To that end, he pursues leads to Ecuador, Columbia, and Mexico before he turns his attention to Montana and Texas. He’s joined by a CIA buddy and former Marine who made an appearance in The Prisoner. A certain amount of bureaucratic in-fighting involving Wells’ current and former CIA handlers adds another level of realism to the story.

The plot is clever and reasonably original. The Deceivers incorporates traditional spy novel intrigue into the plot, including an American mole who is passing valuable information to Russia, while adding intrigue in the Kremlin, taking the form of a power struggle. Russian President Fedin could easily be based on Putin. American President Duto, a former CIA agent, stands up to Russia, and is clearly not based on Trump. Berenson takes the time to create all of the important characters in full.

The story moves quickly, as a thriller should, but not mindlessly. Berenson brings enough depth to the subject matter to make The Deceivers a worthy entry in a series that keeps getting better.

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The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa

First published in Spain in 2016; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 27, 2018

The Neighborhood is set in Peru during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori. Noted for corruption and human rights abuses (but also for improving the Peruvian economy and waging war on terror, which accounted for his popularity), Fujimori is a tangential character in The Neighborhood, lurking but never seen.

Two couples who are good friends occupy a good part of the story. Marisa is married to the engineer Enrique Cárdenas. Luciano, Enrique’s friend and lawyer, is married to Chabela.

A curfew forces Chabela to spend the night at Marisa’s house, prompting the onset of erotic sensations when Marisa feels Chabela’s ankle pressed against her own. The two women have a passionate encounter, but Chabela leaves in the morning as if nothing happened. Was it a dream? Marisa isn’t sure, but she’s delighted when Chabela invites her to spend three days with her in Miami.

The curfew is a result of terrorism in Peru that lurks in the novel’s background. The MRTA is kidnapping anyone who might be worth a ransom. Terror instigated by Shining Path has caused many businessmen to flee from Lima, but Enrique has stayed. He has successfully avoided adversity until a reporter delivers disturbing photographs to Enrique of an orgy arranged by a Central European businessman a couple of years earlier. Enrique figures prominently in the photographs.

The reporter, Rolando Garro, makes his living by ruining lives with gossipy tabloid journalism. One life he ruined belongs to an aging artist known as Juan Peineta, a professional reciter of poetry who took a lucrative job on television (the enemy of poetry) as one of the Three Jokers, only to be scorned by Garro. Peineta has vowed revenge.

The three intertwined stories — Chabela’s affair with Marisa, Enrique’s blackmail woes, and Peineta’s anger at Garro — unfold in alternating chapters. One point of the story, as applicable to the US as to Peru, is that people love gossip, particularly when the gossip brings down high society. By being the great destroyer, gossip is the great equalizer.

But the greater point of the story is that power corrupts, and that the powerful control the powerless in ways that are both direct and indirect. In Peru as in other countries, wealth can lead to a corruption of the media when the people who control news outlets use them to advance their own ends.

A chapter near the end brings all the stories together in paragraphs that jump from one story to the next, giving the impression of lives unfolding simultaneously. Fortunately, Mario Vargas Llosa structures the chapter in a way that avoids undue confusion.

Entertaining characters provide comic relief while a fair amount of sex lightens what is in essence a dark story about political corruption that (as one of the characters observes) threatens to turn Peru into a stereotypical banana republic. The ending is satisfying and to the extent that the novel is historically accurate, the ending is historically true.

Yet the lightness, the feel-good nature of the story, also makes The Neighborhood less substantial than its subject matter. Llosa seems to be trying to condemn tabloid journalism while milking sexual entanglements for entertainment value — exactly what the tabloids do. And while Llosa condemns political corruption, he doesn’t give the reader a full sense of just how awful Fujimori was. I enjoyed The Neighborhood, but it is far from Llosa’s best work, and not a book that will sit on the top shelf of South American fiction.

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The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

Published by Tor.com on January 23, 2018

The Only Harmless Great Thing reimagines the history of the Radium Girls, factory workers who suffered from radiation poisoning after painting watch dials with a luminous paint made from powdered radium. In Brooke Bolander’s alternative version of the story, U.S. Radium responded to litigation by enlisting elephants to do the painting. Thus, the Radium Girls become Radium Elephants. Part of the novella is, in fact, narrated by elephants.

The novel also borrows Topsy from history, the elephant who was electrocuted at Coney Island in a spectacle for invited guests. As a circus elephant, Topsy killed at least one person, no doubt with good reason. Both moments of history remind us of how incredibly cruel the human race can be. Factory owners are cruel to workers; hunters and showmen are cruel to elephants.

The Only Harmless Great Thing links those two extremes of wickedness in a fantasy that gives elephants the ability to communicate with sign language. Two humans are important to the story. Regan, a Radium Girl who taught Topsy to paint, is dying of cancer caused by radium in the paint brushes she was instructed to “point” with her lips. She’s waiting for the insurance settlement that will be her legacy to her family, although her dying mother probably won’t benefit from it. In the meantime, she comes up with a plan to avenge her death and Topsy’s execution.

In the present, Kat is dealing with the problem of nuclear waste. She has hit upon a scheme to use glowing elephants as permanent markers to warn people away from disposal sites. The elephants, not necessarily keen on the idea of exposing themselves to radioactivity (again), have their own agenda.

The elephants in the story have their own folklore, and the novella acquaints the reader with some of it. The Only Harmless Great Thing is in part a celebration of storytelling, as an elephant tale reminds the reader that stories are meant to be told, not hoarded. The story can also be viewed as an allegory of motherhood. Females outsmart males every time (at least if they’re elephants); mothers pass down such wisdom to daughters. Elephant folklore teaches that women can be just as strong and cunning as men, and much more patient, but while bull elephants fight each other, mothers use their strength for a purpose: to educate, to preserve a sense of community, so that future generations will remember the lessons of the past.

Describing prose as lyrical is almost a cliché, but in this case the description is apt. The story is strange, but it works, in part because it is so beautifully told, and in part because the lessons it imparts are both timely and timeless.

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