The Winemaker by Noah Gordon

Published in Spanish in 2007; digitally published in translation by Barcelona eBooks on June 5, 2012 (distributed by Open Road Media); print edition scheduled for publication in September 2012

The intersection of wine and literature is a fine place to rest. The Winemaker will appeal to those who like a good story and to those who appreciate a good glass of wine. Those who love both wine and literature might place The Winemaker on their annual list of favorite reads. It will certainly be on mine.

After four years working in the vineyard and barrel room of a vintner in Languedoc, Josep Alvarez has developed an appreciation of fine wine that he could never have imagined growing up on his father's farm in Catalonia, where grapes are grown to produce vinegar and wine that tastes like horse piss. When he learns that his father has died, Josep decides to return home, hoping that he is not being pursued by the Spanish authorities. Initially, we know only that Josep joined the Carlist militia in 1870 and that he later left Spain, but we don't know why. Returning to his village, he discovers that his brother, Donat, is living in Barcelona and wants to sell the farm. Josep buys it and settles in, content to own "a slice of Spain," to use the knowledge he acquired in France to revitalize the neglected vineyard. Climbing a hill on the property and discovering hundred year old Garnacha vines, he begins to wonder whether it might be possible to produce grapes suitable for something more palatable than vinegar.

Part two tells how Josep became a soldier for lack of other options. In part three, having discovered that his duties as a soldier were other than what he expected, Josep struggles to make his way into the world. Part four returns to the present (1874) as Josep pursues his new life as a winemaker. Part five (beginning in 1876) completes a journey of self-discovery as Josep learns to embrace the pleasures of a simple life while resisting his neighbors' urges to be satisfied with its limitations.

While there is satisfying drama in the growing of grapes, Noah Gordon finds things for Josep to do that heighten the story's tension, from chasing a wild boar to the odd but dangerous sport of castell-building. Josep owes a debt to his brother that creates family discord. Even the mysterious relationship between Josep's neighboring farmer and the village priest adds dramatic interest to the story. When Josep's brief militia experience comes back to threaten him toward the novel's end, the story gains a layer of political intrigue without devolving into a cheap thriller. It also becomes a tale of turmoil as Josep realizes that he was manipulated by a friend.

The Winemaker is a novel of relationships and personal growth rather than action and suspense. Gordon also wedges in a love story, as Josep pursues romance (and/or sex) in a village where options are severely limited. As the story unfolds, the reader wonders about Josep's feelings for Teresa Gallego, the girl he left behind when he entered the militia, whose life he fears was ruined by his failure to return to her.

Gordon captures the place and time in his vibrant descriptions of mills and barrel makers and horse-drawn carts. He convincingly recreates sleepy, gossipy village life. The Winemaker treats readers to a brief history of Spanish land reform and civil strife during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of greater significance to wine lovers, the novel provides a unique glimpse of winemaking on a small nineteenth century Spanish farm. Gordon writes lovingly of the hardships of winemakers who are at the mercy of weather, pests, rotting vats and fickle soils. The description of the final stages of wine production -- the experimentation required to produce the perfect blend of varietals -- is fascinating. Wine lovers will certainly admire this novel, but I think most fans of character-driven fiction will enjoy it as well.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abé

First published in Japanese in 1962; first published in English by Vintage in 1964

Sand takes on a life of its own in Kobo Abé's disturbing novel, The Woman in the Dunes. An entomologist spends his vacation scouring remote sand dunes in the hope that he will find a previously unknown beetle. As night falls, he accepts an invitation to stay in a villager's home. Since each village home is built at the bottom of a bowl that has been dug from the sand, the man must climb down a rope ladder to meet the woman who will be his host. The woman spends the night (as she does every night) shoveling sand from the home's perimeter; if she does not, the home will become engulfed in falling sand. In the morning, the rope ladder is gone, and the man realizes he has been trapped, forced to join the woman in her endless labor.

Notably, the man's absence is not quickly noticed. Given his lonely and judgmental nature, he has no friends. "He longs so much for freedom and action that he can only hate people." In the hole, he has exchanged one empty existence for another. Although the man plots (and attempts) various schemes to escape, we learn in the first pages that the man is declared missing after a seven year absence from his home and job.

The Woman in the Dunes is strange but compelling fiction. The man (we never learn his name) experiences the range of emotions associated with death, from denial through acceptance, as he endures his years in the hole. The woman explains that the sand never stops falling. Each night brings the Sisyphean task of shoveling sand into buckets that village employees will lift from the bowl on ropes. The next night the shoveling must start anew. "But this means you exist only for the purpose of clearing away the sand," the man observes. If ever there was a pointless existence, the man has stumbled into it.

Yet his new life may not be as bad as it might seem. Interestingly, the man comes to value pointless work; it is a tool that makes self-denial possible. The man's relationship with the woman changes over the years, from revulsion (he initially sees her as "an old tube that has been squeezed dry of all sex") to -- if not love -- at least understanding and empathy. Perhaps this is a manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome, although the novel predates that term. The psychological and philosophical implications of the novel are fascinating.

The story has a surrealistic quality. Abé makes no attempt to explain why this village exists, yet I found it easy to accept the premise. While I am not usually a fan of the existential novel (like many people, I suspect existence is pointless but I find it comforting to pretend otherwise), The Woman in the Dunes is more than a commentary upon the futility of life. Yet as the man comes to terms with his plight -- as he ponders whether his enemies are the villagers who keep him captive, the woman who meekly shares his fate, or the sand itself -- the man is forced to reinvent himself. Much of the novel consists of his internal monologue, the moment-by-moment evolution of the man's reaction to his predicament and his constantly vacillating response (sometimes anger, sometimes desire, sometimes both at once) to the woman whose home (and body) he shares. The novel's ending is foreshadowed but, in the context of the story, it is perfect; no other resolution (if one could call it that) would be true to the events that preceded it.

In short, The Woman in the Dunes is a remarkable piece of fiction. It combines the qualities of a myth with the gritty realism of a suspense novel, all the while challenging the reader to make sense of the story's broader implications.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Coward's Tale by Vanessa Gebbie

First published in UK in 2011; published by Bloomsbury USA on February 28, 2012

When we take the time to look beneath the surface, people are not always what they seem to be.  Sometimes those who seem cowardly are not cowards at all.  Sometimes atonement is mistaken for guilt.  In her unapologetically humane novel, Vanessa Gebbie reminds us of the patience and effort that is required to understand another person, and of the rewards awaiting those who make the effort.

Eccentric doesn’t begin to describe the characters in The Coward’s Tale.  In Chaucer-like fashion, their stories are related by Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar, in exchange for coffee and toffee.  Some of the stories teach lessons; some are gossipy; some are funny and some are heartbreaking.  Occasionally it’s difficult to grasp the point of a particular story, but getting to know the peculiar characters is reason enough to read The Coward’s Tale.

Jenkins has a story about everyone in town, as well as their ancestors.  A few examples will give a flavor of Gebbie’s creations:  Icarus Evans, the shop teacher, is consumed by the challenge of making a wooden feather that will float on currents of air; he never stops trying to achieve the impossible.  Jimmy Half (for halfwit or half-alive) Harris, born dead and buried before coming to life, cannot speak, although he was born to be a poet.  Factual Philips, a deputy librarian who covers his walls with diagrams, maps, charts, and lists, with particular attention to the clues and deductions that lead Sherlock Holmes to the truth that lurks behind mystery, finally gets a chance to solve a mystery of his own.  Also obsessed by maps is the town undertaker, Tutt Bevan, who revisits his childhood as he walks through the town in a straight line.  Touching stories explain why the son of a man who died in a coal mine became a window washer, why the son of a thief sneaks into houses at night, why Ianto tells stories while others toil.

In addition to Ianto, a boy named Laddy Merridew furnishes a common thread to bind the stories together.  Laddy wanders about the town, observing and interacting with its inhabitants, feeling lost and unsettled, worrying about his divorcing parents and trying to decide where he should live, listening to Ianto’s stories and wondering whether they are true or just more lies told by an adult.  In many respects Laddy is a young version of Ianto, while Ianto sees his lost brother in Laddy.

As they progress, Ianto’s stories become more serious.  They begin to echo each other:  broken windows and shadows and reflections are recurring images.  The stories share and develop themes.  Maps are bad because “they stop us from finding new places” or they “make places different to how they are in our heads,” although a self-made map can help you confront fears and find your own path.  A nearby coal mine inaptly named the Kindly Light appears in many of the stories, eventually becoming the novel’s central focus.  It is the site of a disaster that worked unexpected changes upon the town and its people -- Ianto most of all.

Witty, wise, and charming, intense and powerful, The Coward’s Tale offers a remarkable blend of humor and pathos.  The novel illustrates the importance of storytelling as an instrument of healing and community bonding.  Ianto’s stories inspire hope even in their saddest moments.  They encourage forgiveness and understanding as they reveal the frailties and faults of the townspeople.  The sad but perfect ending is the final knot that ties the stories together.

Gebbie writes musically rhythmic prose, forming sentences as sharp and shimmery as broken glass.  Both in style and content, The Coward’s Tale is an outstanding novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Red Flags by Juris Jurevics

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 20, 2011

Solid writing, intense action, strong characters, and a vividly detailed setting make Red Flags a winning hybrid of war story and espionage thriller. The book also offers a nice history lesson in some lesser known aspects of America's involvement in Vietnam.

Erik Rider, an investigator with the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, is assigned to disrupt the manufacture, transportation, and sale of drugs that are used to finance the Viet Cong. Rider travels to Cheo Reo in his undercover role as a captain, where he meets the CO -- Lt. Col. Bennett -- and a CIA agent named John Ruchevsky. After Rider finds and destroys a marijuana field, there's a price on his head, but his real goal is take out the poppy fields. That goal proves to be unpopular with people in the money chain -- people who might be closer to him than he thinks. As Rider digs more deeply into the drug trade, Ruchevsky searches for the spy who is giving classified information to the North Vietnamese. The two investigations eventually become entangled.

Rider has an interesting relationship with a female doctor -- interesting because Juris Jurevics avoids treating the reader to a clichéd combat romance. In fact, nothing about Red Flags is clichéd. The story is original, the characters genuine.

Clean, crisp, evocative prose sets this novel apart from most war thrillers. Jurevics crafts scenes of war that are poignant and heartfelt. The action scenes in Red Flags are written with adrenalin-pumping power. Although the novel moves at a brisk pace, there are only a few combat sequences. Rather, Jurjevics creates stark images of the fighting's aftermath: devastated landscapes, bloated corpses, haunted soldiers and grieving civilians. He also builds tension with anticipation: you know the shooting is coming but you don't know when. Jurjevics masterfully conveys a soldier's sense of waiting in dread, always living somewhere between boredom and terror.

As background to Rider's personal story, Red Flags captures the political complexity of Vietnam during the war era. The novel's focus on drug trafficking -- an instrument that financed both sides of the war -- isn't new, nor is its depiction of widespread corruption among the South Vietnamese leadership, but its emphasis on the role played by the Montagnard is something I haven't seen in other Vietnam fiction. Jurjevics manages to explain the conflicts between the different political, ethnic, and religious factions in South Vietnam without slowing the novel's pace.

The plot is well constructed and a critical event near the novel's end, although foreshadowed in the prologue, comes as a shock. The novel doesn't have a happy ending but neither did the war. The ending is nonetheless satisfying. The story as a whole conveys a feeling of reality seldom found in the shallow tales of heroism that too often characterize military fiction. This is one of the best military espionage thrillers I've encountered.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Spurious by Lars Iyer

Published by Melville House on January 25, 2011

If it weren't so funny, Spurious would be insanely depressing. W. and the novel's narrator, Lars, both know that, lacking the genius of Kafka, they will amount to nothing. They have been destroyed by literature; it has made them "vague and full of pathos." They are equally unskilled as philosophers. They would like to be intellectuals but they suffer from a deficiency of intellect. Drinking their way through Europe, they are overwhelmed by history that magnifies their own insignificance. A double suicide seems to be in order, but the logistics of accomplishing that task are beyond them. Yet even their deaths would be pointless because they are inconsequential parts of larger structure, easily replaced by others of no greater importance.

Paradoxically, the gloomy friends describe themselves as "joyful." They tell themselves that they are content with their idiocy. They are "celebrants of rivers"; a view of the sea from a passing train while holding cups full of gin is their definition of happiness. Contradiction is a constant in their lives; they never seem to be bothered by (or even to notice) their inconsistency. W. strives to puzzle out the meanings of primary sources written in languages he doesn't understand and to decipher mathematical concepts that are well beyond him. That he gains nothing productive from these efforts does not deter him; he is certain that his life will be spent in continual amazement at his utter lack of ability. Lars, on the other hand, is a capable administrator; he feels the need to earn a living, for which W. frequently belittles him. In fact, Lars is the constant recipient of W.'s insults (W. regards verbal abuse as "a sign of love"): Lars is (according to W.) obese, stupid, lazy, untalented, ill-mannered, incapable of love, and without any fashion sense.

The story careens between the philosophical and the frivolous (as when W. tries to persuade Lars that a "man bag" is preferable to a rucksack). One moment W. and Lars are discussing the relationship between God and mathematics, the next they're pondering the causes of the incurable dampness in Lars' flat or the merits of living in Canada, where residents presumably carry "bear-frightening devices" in their vehicles. There is a zany intelligence, an absurdist wit at work here (in that sense, Spurious reminded me of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). Lars Iyer takes two characters who are lost in existential angst -- indifferent to their fates, deliberately living meaningless lives, convinced they are powerless to change the hopelessness and suffering that surrounds them -- and exposes their vapid, self-indulgent natures. Iyer's satirical take on intellectualism is spot on. Anyone acquainted with a "serious thinker" who takes his or her thinking too seriously will smile with recognition while reading Spurious.

At the same time, intermingled with the silliness are bits of genuine philosophy, deep thought disguised as idle chatter. The book demands a second reading just to sift out the sense from the nonsense, assuming it's possible to tell one from the other. As W. moans, he can never be sure whether he is "at the summit of his creativity or the peak of his idiocy."

This isn't a book for readers who can't abide stories that have no plot. This is a novel of comedic conversation, an examination of two friends who travel together, who gaze at the sea and mull over their lives, confess their shortcomings, debate the meaning of friendship, discuss obscure filmmakers, mourn or welcome (depending on their mood) the coming apocalypse, and accomplish nothing. If you can appreciate the humor in that, and don't mind that nothing of consequence happens to the two characters, you'll probably enjoy Spurious. It's fresh, it's original, it's insightful, and above all, it's hilarious.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED