“You’ll understand one day, her mother had said at the bus station. When you find a man of your own, you’ll know why you’ll run toward him.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 28, 2011)

What do you see in the dark? Well, that partly depends on your perspective. In Munoz’s stylistic mise-en-scène novel, the second-person point of view frames the watchful eye and disguises the wary teller. Reading this story is like peering through Hitchcock’s lens—the camera as observer’s tool and observer as camera–with light and shadow and space concentrated and dispersed frame by frame, sentence by sentence.

Munoz applied the famous director’s noir techniques to create a story about murder, madness, and longing amid the desire and antipathy of a working-class California town. Lives intersect, scenes juxtapose, and shades of gray color the landscape of the novel. Scenes of tenderness dovetail with acts of menace, plaintive music integrates with the rattling of chains, dark interiors annex the stark white heat of day.

In the hushed and dusty working-class town of Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950’s, the locals jealously watch the fresh and guarded romance of Dan and Teresa. Dan is the rugged bartender/guitarist and sexy son of Arlene, a bitter waitress at the downtown café and the abandoned wife of a motel owner out on the changing Highway 99. Teresa, a shoe saleswoman and aspiring singer, is the willowy Mexican-American daughter of a mother who left her to chase dreams of love in Texas. The narrow-minded prejudices of the town encroach upon the open bud of romance, and the ill-fated romance takes an ineluctable bloody turn. We know from the start that that someone dies, but it is the why and how and where that sustains the tension of the story.

At the height of Dan and Teresa’s love story, the glitter and fantasy of Hollywood comes to Bakersfield as the crew arrives to shoot select scenes of the iconic movie we know today as PSYCHO. The unnamed Actress and Director reveal themselves implicitly through details of the unnamed film-in-progress. It was evident when they scouted exterior shots for the motel, and during the illustrious shower scene. The interior monologues of the Actress and the frame by frame shoot of that most renowned scene in movie history is worth the price of admission alone. It felt as if Munoz had been standing next to Hitchcock. The author’s interpretation of historical data are transposed with polished clarity into film as words, and the searing silences that Hitchcock is so famous for lands on the page in the spaces between passages.

There are superbly captured details and Hitchcockian motifs that add subtlety to the story and incite the reader’s suspense, such as stairwells, keys, mothers, blondes, confined spaces, as well as loss of identity and optical symbols. The plate glass window of the café serves up a film frame metaphor (and the lens of a camera). Moral ambiguity, mirrors, bars and grills, and kisses, and of course—the MacGuffin, are all woven in with care and control.

My primary criticism is that the narrative is dry and cerebral. I was academically stimulated by the author’s style and complexity of techniques, but occasionally it felt studied and detached. The muted coolness kept me at a distance; I wasn’t emotionally engaged, but I was intellectually absorbed. The frequent jump-cuts were its strength, but also its drawback.

So what do you see in the dark? The eyes, said Hitchcock, the eyes said it all.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Manuel Muñoz
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Psycho: Point Omega by Don Delillo

Bibliography:

• Zigzagger: Stories (2003)
• The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue: Stories (2007)
• What You See in the Dark (2010)

“The shah comes with tanks and armies of horses and men. Keep a careful lookout for them. They will be of a frightening size, but do not scare, run to give us warning and all will be well. This is our land and the gods of it are on our side.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (SEP 20, 2009)

A young Kurdish boy, living in the Zagros Mountains in 1921, has always felt loved and protected, despite his family’s “poverty.” He enjoys “flying” from the roof of the family’s hut, experiencing the soaring feelings of earth and heaven at the same time, and identifying with the falcons. “With his chest opened upward, he pushes his face deeper into the beam of sun and wishes for his thin bones and narrow shoulders to aspire among the chaotic open-aired thrash of wings, to fly high and above the hemmed land and sweep aloft the delineations marked out of him, on him, into him” as a Kurd. In gorgeous and poetic language, author Laleh Khadivi, recreates the “gloried ground” to which the boy is connected by birth and culture.

When, at age seven, he is suddenly taken by the men of his village on a journey to a cave, where he is initiated into manhood, he sees his simple life anew: “Boy once, now man, now Kurd, now Kurdish man, to reign over Kurdish land; the young suzerain, kingly after a simple cut.” His devoted mother, a victim of violence which killed her entire family when she was only five, considers him doomed to relive the horrors of warfare. Soon after his initiation, he accompanies the village men to a mountain lookout, where they wait for the shah’s troops to arrive. Determined to protect land which has been theirs for thousands of years, the men believe “We are the children of Mount Cudi, where Noah’s ark rested after the flood, and our families are born of the animals and gardens of the survived, of God’s chosen.”

Armed as they are with sabers, knives, and some rusty guns which they do not know how to use effectively, the Kurdish tribesmen, though fierce, are unprepared for the kind of military machine they face. The army’s arrival leads to a massacre, and the boy is orphaned, leaving the battlefield with the army, without a backward glance. Though in his first days as a conscript “the mind of the boy turned to madness,” he is ultimately consoled by the fact that he will be getting boots, a whole new “family,” and a new way of life.

Throughout the novel Laleh Khadivi, a highly accomplished writer, alternates points of view among the various characters, and, in the beginning of the novel, she even personifies nature—a tree, a falcon—in passages of great lyricism. With their echoing refrains and musical repetitions, some of these sections sound like psalms, a striking contrast to the brutality, bloodshed, and horrific rapes which follow.

Named Reza, for the shah, and Khourdi for his heritage, the boy grows up as a conscript soldier, becoming a favorite of the captain for his hard work, though he is often scorned by the city boys for his Kurdish background and the fact that he is singled out for praise. Though he usually behaves as the unthinking automaton he has been trained to be, he occasionally has moments in which his past overwhelms his present. Sent at fifteen to a Kurdish village, he recognizes, instinctively, the patterns of the fields, the animal pens, and especially the scent of burning sage, and as the army tries to capture two Kurdish commanders, they engage in terrifying brutality. Reza, to prove that he is one of the shah’s men, rather than a “dirty Kurd,” engages in some of the most brutal acts of all.

As the action moves from the 1930s and into the period of 1940 – the 1970s, Khadivi shows Reza Khourdi continuing to be the perfect soldier, marrying, and representing the wishes of the shah, but still suffering the inner conflicts of a brainwashed orphan. Khadivi’s portrait of this man is intimate and carefully drawn, and she creates great empathy for him in his plight, despite his actions. His assignment to Kermanshah, a Kurdish city, in 1940, and his long residence there, bring his personal conflicts to a head.

Much as been said on other sites about the brutality and violence in this book, especially in the treatment of women—and there is violence–but it is not overwhelming, and it is certainly not gratuitous. (Nor, for that matter, is it any worse than what finds on the evening news.) The novel is primarily a story of character, not plot, and any inhumanity is integrated as part of the author’s thematic progression as “Reza” moves from an innocent childhood, through his attempts to find “family” within the killing machine of the army, his attempts to find love (though his only memory of it is through his mother), and his final assessment of his own life. Reza’s character is well drawn and complete, despite his personal limitations.

I cannot speak to the accuracy of the picture Khadivi gives of Kurdish life or her use of non-Kurdish terminology (which one Amazon reader noted), but as an analysis of a person who represents many of the conflicts we read about in the present day—specifically, the conflicts between Iran and the Kurds and between Turkey and the Kurds—the novel is enlightening and absorbing. Khadivi also includes broader themes, touching on the use of boy soldiers (no matter what part of the world is involved), the brainwashing that takes place, and the reasons these boy soldiers are sometimes more brutal than their elders. She is a serious writer dealing with serious issues, and though her novel is not easy reading for people who live safe and comfortable lives, she opens such a world to examination and analysis.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (March 3, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	The Age of Orphans
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Laleh Khadivi
EXTRAS:	BookSlut review of The Age of Orphans Whiting Award winner
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More: Snow by Orhan Pamuk In the Walled Gardens by Anahia Friouz The Weight of All Things by Sandra Benitez

Bibliography:

• The Age of Orphans (March 2009)
• The Walking