“Samuel knew that he was living through dangerous times – this was not the moment to simply sniffle and weep. He had left Hamburg just in the knick of time – Kristallnacht had happened just nine months earlier – the “party” in Europe […] had already begun. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederick Knabe  (SEP 29, 2011)

Samuel Berkow, at thirty-eight, stands at the crossroads: In 1938, life in Germany is fast becoming dangerous for Jews. At the urging of his concerned uncle, he agrees to leave Hamburg and emigrate to Guatemala, where his cousin is expected to help him settle. In The Price of Escape, David Unger explores his hero’s self-conscious and stumbling efforts to put his German existence out of his mind as he prepares for a new one that carries promise but is also full of uncertainty.

The narrative quickly moves on to Samuel’s travel on the ship en route to the port town of Puerto Barrios and then focuses on his first three days on land. Guatemalan-American Unger, recognized as one of Guatemala’s prominent writers today, convincingly portrays his hero’s sense of utter confusion and helplessness as he enters, totally unprepared, a foreign world that bears no resemblance to his own. He contrasts Samuel’s former lifestyle, his self-confidence, based mostly on physical appearance and family wealth, with the poverty-ridden, appalling and at times dangerous conditions in Puerto Barrios. Thus, Unger not only builds an affecting portrait of one refugee’s complete dislocation in an unfamiliar environment and his awareness that he must cope somehow, he paints at the same time a colourful, vivid picture of a community in decline, abandoned by a corrupt political system that allows private company interests to control people’s lives and basis for existence.

As the novel unfolds, Samuel encounters a wide range of odd characters, starting with American Alfred Lewis, the dubious captain of the “tramp steamer” that brings Samuel into port. He turns out to be one of the manipulating representatives of the sinister United Fruit Company, the big corporation that has made of Puerto Barrios a “company town” but recently downgraded it to a mere reloading point for banana shipments. While Lewis warns Samuel not to linger in town and to get on the train to Guatemala City as soon as possible, he does everything to add to Samuel’s bewilderment and delay. Every time Samuel is set to make a move to leave, something or somebody interferes: the dwarf, Mr. Price, who offers himself as a guide to the one and only “International Hotel,” his bare room there, or George, the hotel clerk/manager who appears to be one of the more helpful people. Others are added to the colourful mix: a defrocked priest, the station master, an old prostitute, or various odd assemblies of people in the streets or cafes/bars… None of these may in fact behave in any way threatening, however, in his mind, Samuel cannot extricate himself from their influence so that he can get to the train station in time.

Unger creates an atmosphere of suspicion, of hidden and open threats that intermingle in Samuel’s mind with images from his past life, thereby escalating not only his uneasiness but also resulting in his own increasingly strange behaviour towards the people he meets. Personal memories from his past life, especially his short-lived disastrous marriage, still haunt him, more so than any of the recent dangerous political changes in Germany. People come at him with either sugary, even creepy, friendliness or with sarcastic comments and aggressive, even violent, behaviour, one can turn into the other without warning. Samuel appears to be caught in a vicious circle. With only basic Spanish, his communication is fraught with misunderstandings. Who is there to talk to openly and, above all, whose advice can he trust?

Unger illustrates Samuel’s increasing disorientation with scenarios and encounters that recall in some ways Kafkaesque hopeless labyrinthine struggles. Yet, here, the protagonist is responsible for much of the precarious situations he finds himself in: His fashion-conscious clothing make him a laughing stock among the locals; his inability to extricate himself safely and in time from several brewing conflicts puts him into physical danger. His reluctance to eat the local food and even drink the water results in stages of temporary mental confusion, even delirium, that make him act totally irrationally. Afterwards, he has no memory of what he said or did or why, for example, he ends up in the muddy water near the harbour, totally wet and soiled, crawling on all fours, searching for his passport…

Will Samuel manage to escape or will he be completely taken over by the locality? What is “the price” of escape – both from Germany and from Puerto Barrios? The novel’s conclusion answers these questions aptly, coincidences not withstanding. Over the course of the three-day story, Unger creates a continuous narrative tension that keeps us as readers engaged. We never quite know, what accident or confrontation awaits the protagonist next. Despite his sympathetic and expansive characterization of Samuel Berkow, I found him less than a likeable protagonist, at times arbitrarily overdrawn and his behaviour somewhat exaggerated. Readers who anticipate – given various publicity materials – that considerable attention in the novel is given to the historical situation in Germany in the nineteen thirties, will be disappointed. Unger’s primary concern is Guatemala.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Akashic Books; 1 edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Unger
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Fame: A Novel In Nine Episodes by Daniel Kehlmann Banana by Daniel Koppel

Bibliography (English only):

• Life in the Damn Tropics (2004)
• The Price of Escape (April 2011)

“Sometimes, as I remember, my voice is that of the ten-year-old boy I was then; sometimes the voice of the seventy-year-old man I am yet to be; sometimes it is my voice, at the age I am now… or the age I think I am. Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JUL 11, 2011)

He calls himself “Harry” now, after his new hero, the famous escape artist, Harry Houdini, hoping that one day he, too, will be a successful escape artist. Discovering a book about Houdini, hidden in the room that will now serve as his bedroom, the ten-year-old boy finds a new source of inspiration. Only the day before, and without warning, his family had to leave their comfortable house in Buenos Aires with nothing but the bare essentials. An abandoned country house has to serve as their temporary shelter. Harry already misses school, his friends and his board game Risk. With his routines disrupted, his sense of dislocation is further heightened when papá tells him and his little brother that they all have to take on new names and forget their former ones: it is too dangerous. Set in 1976, against the backdrop of what has become known as Argentina’s “Dirty War,” that left thousands of people as desaparecidos – disappeared without a trace -, Marcelo Figueras takes us on a moving and intricate journey, through hope, devotion and betrayal, through human frailty and strength, through loss and perseverance.

By concentrating on the life of one family, in hiding and on the run, Figueras opens a narrow, intimate window into this traumatic reality. Young Harry, the primary voice in the novel, while trying to cope with the day-to-day challenges the family faces, is also living in a colourfully imagined world full of heroes and battles, and preparing for his own, Houdini-like, “escapes” from the dangers he senses around him. His depiction of his surroundings, descriptions of his encounters with the toads in the pool… are lively and endearing. These and others feel immediate and richly drawn; the voice of the child is totally convincing as it fluctuates between innocently funny to wisely inquisitive.

The novel opens with a decisive moment in time, before it rolls back to the beginning, prior to the events unfolding that led up to this point: Harry and his grandpa say goodbye to his beloved parents: “The last thing papá said to me, the last word from his lips, was ‘Kamchatka.'” Harry will never forget his father’s last word. In his mind, it is like a code word between father and son, a promise, a sign of eventual victory. Kamchatka, for him is a safe place, from where a temporary retreat changes into fighting back, moving forward to winning. Kamchatka is one of the “remotest territories waiting to be conquered” on the Risk board, the game he loves to play with his papá. He is a curious child, fascinated not only by Superman and famous battles and their historical heroes. His interests in the ancient philosophers, in biology, astronomy, and geography are just as strong. For as long as he can remember, he knows, for example, that the board game Kamchatka resembles – in its remoteness and its physical profile – the actual one in the north eastern tip of what was then the Soviet Union: “a frozen peninsula, which is also the most active volcanic region on Earth. A horizon ringed by towering inaccessible peaks shrouded in sulphurous vapors.” In his imagination the fictional and the real Kamchatka merge into one, a safe and beautiful place where he will travel to when the time comes…

The adult Harry is a constant companion voice to that of the ten-year-old, recalling vivid memories, filling in what his younger self didn’t know or couldn’t conceive and trying to make some sort sense of his life by reflecting on the games played by memory and time. “Time is weird,” he muses. ” That much is obvious. Sometimes I think everything happens at once, which is anything but obvious and even weirder.” Between the two voices the novel contains much more than the story of a young boy who desperately tries to maintain his playful childhood, his study, and his new-found friendship with the mysterious Lucas, while at the same time hoping to support his parents by “playing his role” in the family. He observes, more than he understands, and yet senses why the “uncles” have disappeared one after the other, why his adored and adoring mamá does no longer behave like the “rock” of the family, why the psychological stresses show on his parents’ faces. With great apprehension he watches them in their constant challenge to demonstrate the emotional strength needed to keep the family together as long as possible and to provide for Harry and his young brother the sense of safety and normalcy in a dangerous period of history. Yet, he does not dare to ask…

Beyond the child’s story, Kamchatka is also the adult’s multifaceted meditation on history, on learning about life and the universe, on time and memory. Figueras, in fact, structures his novel along the lines of school periods: Biology, Geography, Astronomy, Language and History.  In each section, young Harry learns at a child’s level and through observations and practical experiences what the older Harry then places into the respective context. The two voices are so intricately intertwined that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which voice is speaking to the reader and affording young Harry maturity he cannot have had. As Harry later describes himself: “Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other.” For me, some of these “scientific excursions,” while interesting and valuable in their own right, can take the reader too far away from the essence of the story. They tend to turn, at times, the political and personal story more into a subtext than may be warranted given the overall direction of the narrative.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat; (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederikie Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Marcelo Figueras
EXTRAS:	Publisher page
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

Bibliography (translated only):

• Kamchatka (2003; September 2010 in US)

“So, without precise coordinates, deprived of places and dates, I began to exist. The imprecision extended to my name; and to keep from boring the reader again with the narrative cliché of identity problems, the facile what’s-in-a-name, I’ll simply say that I was baptized — yes, with a splash of holy water and everything: my mother might be a convinced iconoclast, but she didn’t want her only son ending up in limbo on her account — as José Beckman, son of the crazy Gringo who killed himself out of homesickness before the arrival of his descendant.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 18, 2011)

When Joseph Conrad was working on Nostromo in the early 1900s, and setting it in the fictional Latin American country of Costaguana, he found that his first-hand knowledge of the region, based on a couple of brief shore visits a quarter-century earlier, was insufficient. He therefore consulted friends who had spent greater time in northern South America and constructed a setting that is entirely believable, not only in its composite geography but also in its way of life and political turmoil. Now Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez imagines that Conrad might have had one further contact, José Altamirano, born in Colombia but recently arrived in London as an exile from Panama, following the province’s secession from Colombia in the revolution of 1903. Writing now in 1924, the year of Conrad’s death, Altamirano believes that the novelist has stolen his life story and that of his country to make a fiction of his own, utterly obliterating him in the process.

Altamirano writes in a voice that is immediately attractive. Witty, knowing, speaking directly to his readers, and making hay with narrative and historical conventions, he is an engaging travel companion and tour guide to the past century of Colombian history. Kudos to the translator Anne McLean for maintaining especially the humor of this voice, as when General Rafael Uribe Uribe dies “with an ax embedded in his skull and the weight of several civil wars on his shoulders,” or a group of envious conspirators break in on Simón Bolívar in bed with his mistress, “determined that this coitus shall be interruptus.” Altamirano’s story begins with the birth of his father in 1820, a Renaissance man who is simultaneously a lawyer, a doctor, and a writer, until exiled from the capital as a liberal and unbeliever. José himself is born in 1855, and remains in ignorance of his father until his late teens, when he goes off to Panama — at this time still a Colombian province — to find him. Coincidentally, a young seaman named Józef Konrad Korzeniowski makes his one visit to Panama at about the same time, gun-running with a French ship. The two do not meet.

It is probably going to be difficult for a foreign reader to keep up with the changing political situation in Colombia itself, but it would be worth Googling the history of Panama, especially the difficult building of the railway across the isthmus, the failed French plan to cut a sea-level canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the horrendous loss of life to yellow fever and loss of capital to fraudulent speculation, and the American involvement in securing a sovereign zone in a newly-independent country where the canal would ultimately be built. All these form the background to Altamirano’s personal story, which has more than its share of danger, love, and loss. Vásquez loses none of his narrative virtuosity, but halfway through his book begins to pall, partly because the mixture of personal and political no longer seems to gel, and partly because he also begins to tell the parallel story of Conrad in Europe and Africa. Though interesting enough in itself, the parallels seem forced and both stories get diluted. For that matter, the similarities between Altamirano’s story and Nostromo are not really that close at all, and good though Vásquez’ sense of place may be, Conrad’s is even better. The moral climax of the book depends entirely upon which side one backs in the Panamanian revolution, and while Altamirano clearly feels deeply, it is difficult for a Gringo to have any horse in that race at all, making it hard to sympathize with the author’s crippling guilt.

So other than an entertaining and swashbuckling yarn, what is the novel about? Any light it casts on Conrad and his Nostromo is relatively trivial; this does not even have the relevance that, say, Jean Rhys’ High Wind in Jamaica has to Jane Eyre. But in a less specific sense, it is a fascinating exploration of history and fiction. When Altamirano complains to Conrad “It’s not the story of my country,” the novelist replies: “Of course not. It’s the story of MY country. It’s the story of Costaguana.” Fact has become fiction. But the whole book is about the reshaping of fact. As each regime takes over from the other, it’s justifies its aims in the reframing of history and the writing of bad but patriotic poetry. The senior Altamirano practices a form of “refractive journalism” in Panama, bending the truth, and is paid by the Canal Company to write copy that will keep investors coming up with the money. His son uses every narrative trick at his disposal to present or conceal facts as he sees fit. And even the author plays the game by including among his solemn list of works cited an entirely fictitious history written by a fictitious character invented by Conrad for his Nostromo!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (June 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Guardian article on Juan Gabriel Vásquez
EXTRAS:	Wikipedia page on Nostromo
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Bibliography:

• Los Amantes de Todos Los Santos (2001)
• The Informers (2004)
• The Secret History of Costaguana (2007; 2011 in US)
• The Sound of Things Falling (August 2013)

“Bai, in Guyana it have pandit and it have bandit and sometimes it hard to tell the two apart.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (MAY 22, 2011)

First, a quick background about Indian (specifically Bengali) cinema: The great Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, was from the state of West Bengal and is one of Bengal’s most revered sons and cultural icons. It stands to reason that years after Ray’s death, the incredibly talented Rahul Bhattacharya (a fellow Bengali) would use Ray’s famous bildungsroman, Pather Panchali, as the inspiration for his debut novel.

At its most basic essence, Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People Who Care is also a bildungsroman—it traces the growth and coming of age of its protagonist in a country far away from home, Guyana. The protagonist in the novel seems to be modeled after Bhattacharya himself. Like Bhattacharya, the protagonist is a cricket reporter who decides to take an extended yearlong vacation in Guyana. Gooroo, as the protagonist is referred to by others, has “a one year visa—to reinvent one’s living, to escape the deadness of the life one was accustomed to…to be hungry for the world one saw.”

While in Guyana, the protagonist travels to many places and tries his hand at many jobs. One of these exotic jobs is that of a porknocker, prospecting for diamonds with a local bandit called Baby. Gooroo soon tires of this and moves on. He watches Pather Panchali at a local cultural center and remembers what one of the characters in the movie says: “If you stay too long in a place, you become petty. It has happened to me.”

Towards the end of the book, the protagonist is mesmerized by a woman he meets, Jan (short for the Indian Jankee). He is so taken by her that he invites her to travel with him to destinations unknown—they eventually end up in Venezuela. This portion of the book, the interaction between Gooroo and Jan, is easily one of the most nuanced descriptions of a romantic relationship I have read in a long time. The slow tempo with which the relationship rises and eventually falls is just superb and in a sense, mirrors the languid surroundings that always haunt the book.

Gooroo eventually knows he has to stop wandering and find some ballast to his life: “One escapes one’s life seeking adventure, and with enough dheel and some luck, that happens. But the thread is anchored. You can only go so far. The impulse must change. Instead of adventure one seeks understanding,” Bhattacharya writes.

The author incorporates a lot of Guyanese history into the novel and this serves to explain just how and why such an ethnically diverse set of people are described within the pages of Sly. Guyana was once a Dutch colony and waves of indentured laborers, including Africans, Indians and even Chinese, helped settle this South American country. The title for the novel comes from a book Gooroo spots at a small local library. It was a book about the Dutch West India Company and someone had written a single word on one page, possibly in an attempt to describe the colonial power: Sly. In the margin, a sentence had been started: “They think like they care.”

If there’s a problem with this novel, it is that Bhattacharya’s spectator view of Guyana is too rosy, too often—a tourist’s adoring gaze, if you will. The book is also less of a novel and more of a travelogue, even if the overall arc of the story—that of the protagonist rediscovering himself—becomes clearer at the end.

Yet these are extremely minor drawbacks in a debut fiction work that will be long remembered for its voice and for its superb sense of place. Bhattacharya has said that voice is one of the most important elements in fiction and that he devoted a lot of care in making sure that the voice in Sly really came to life. This attention has paid off beautifully in his debut novel. Sly teems with rich voices everywhere and they together create a beautiful tapestry.

The country of Guyana comes alive in these pages (“Our days passed slow and voluptuous”). It wouldn’t be too much of an overstatement to say that you can almost feel the humid air and the mosquitoes swarming around, when you read this book. Between the voice and the passages describing the gorgeous countryside, the reader is completely transported. And isn’t that after all, the central thesis of fiction?

To think that the immensely talented Bhattacharya is only 31! Still plenty of time for the New Yorker to sit up and pay attention. It wouldn’t be too much of a wild call to predict that this immensely talented author will soon make the magazine’s prestigious “20 Under 40” list.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Guardian article on Rahul Bhattacharya
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More fiction about travel: In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut Away by Amy Bloom

Bibliography:

• The Sly Company of People Who Care (April 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Pundits from Pakistan (2004)

“The issue finally wasn’t that he wanted to be rich, per se, but that he wanted to be done with so much WANTING.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (APR 12, 2011)

If for nothing else, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism will be remembered as a clear-eyed, unsentimental look at money and our complicated relationship with it. The protagonist in Peter Mountford’s debut novel is a young biracial man, Gabriel de Boya, who is on assignment for The Calloway Group, a New York hedge fund. He finds himself in La Paz in Bolivia—where the novel is set—on the eve of the election that would usher in Evo Morales as President.

Gabriel’s assignment is to predict first the outcome of the election, and subsequently its effect on the Bolivian gas industry. Gabriel’s boss in New York, the aggressive Priya Singh, would essentially like to speculate about whether Morales would nationalize the Bolivian gas industry right away, as he promised. To obtain such sensitive information, Gabriel works incognito in the city passing off as a freelance reporter on assignment.

It is as a reporter that Gabriel meets, and subsequently falls in love with, Lenka Villarobles—Morales’s press liaison. As their relationship progresses, Gabriel reveals his clandestine operations to Lenka, hoping that she will provide vital pieces of information he will need to keep the ever-demanding boss happy back home. When, at great risk to her job, Lenka does share crucial information with Gabriel, he must decide how to play it so as to maximize his own personal profit in the high stakes world of money markets. As he does so, he must also face up to the moral dilemmas attendant with such manipulations. Gabriel’s mother, an émigré to California from Chile and hardcore liberal, serves as a mirror to his moral conscience. About halfway through the novel, when she makes a sudden appearance in La Paz, Gabriel finds it increasingly hard to keep from lying to mom (thus far she thinks he works for a telephone company). Greed eventually wins and it remains to be seen whether Gabriel’s workings will have him emerge a winner.

Mountford does a wonderful job painting the city of La Paz—the reader gets a real pulse of what it is like to be there. Also well done is the history of the country, as outlined in brief asides, yet seamlessly incorporated into the overall narrative.

YMG is not without its negatives however. For one thing, the key events in the book seem to turn on rather big coincidences or at least chance occurrences. Gabriel’s first meeting with Lenka is one such example. Later on, Gabriel runs into the future finance minster outside a crowded church on Christmas Eve and the minister too shares vital information. It is hard to shake the slight implausibility with which these events occur.

Gabriel too is a frustratingly obtuse character. Mountford has tried to paint him as interestingly complex and at least when it comes to his view of money, he is. “Money, in general—the plain and unassailable acts of acquiring and spending it—had turned out to occupy a more important role in adulthood than he’d expected,” Mountford writes of Gabriel. “The issue finally wasn’t that he wanted to be rich, per se, but that he wanted to be done with so much wanting. It was a feedback loop, and the only way out was deeper in: he needed to have enough money to be done with the issue of money forever.”

But Gabriel ultimately turns out to be a mixed bag of contradictions. He seems too passive initially—just coasting along until Lenka is ready to drop some information and this passivity doesn’t match his later ambitious side.

The gradual buildup to his final high-stakes decisions is too mechanical, based more on game theory (one of the author’s favorite subjects is economics, he has said) rather than on any real human impulses. The same is true of his mother, who when she finds out the true shenanigans of her son, reacts in a rather extreme fashion. And as Mountford himself writes in the novel: “Real people’s motivations [are] too complex and flawed to be fathomed by any mathematics.” In other words, Gabriel comes across as too clinical to be real.

Where A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism does succeed in a big way is in capturing the role money plays in our lives. While most of us consider rampant greed a morally bankrupt concept, it is to Mountford’s immense credit that many a reader will relate to Gabriel’s views about money. So his subsequent actions fueled by greed, become extremely believable, even if they are inexcusable. As Edith Wharton once famously said: “The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.” Gabriel—and many a reader—would definitely agree.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; 1 edition (April 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Peter Mountford
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More money stories: The Financial Lives of Poets by Jesse Walter Das Kapital: a novel of love and money markets by Viken Berberian

Bibliography:

• A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (April 2011)

“She told him stories, too, sprawling ones…about a baby girl who disappeared from a home that did not want her, that had not given her a name, and who survived mysteriously until she was discovered, wild, birdlike, alone in the crown of a tree, and soared from there, or fell, depending on whom you asked and when you asked him. She told him about another woman, who, legend had it, met her future husband while she was his patient, in a wheelchair and a dull hospital gown, seducing him with her sheer intensity of spirit…”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 9, 2010)

The Invisible Mountain is a gem of a novel, grounded in actual history, with a dollop of magical realism, a splash of Dickensian coincidence, with some forbidden romance and political intrigue added to the mix.

The novel opens at the turn of the 20th century in a remote Uruguayan village, when a baby is spirited away and then reappears, a year later, unharmed in the branches of a tree. The young one is named Pajarita – translated to little bird – and the narrative, divided into three sections, sequentially focuses on her, her daughter Eva, and her granddaughter Salome.

All three are strong, impassioned women, who are capable of making bold choices in order to remain authentic and true to themselves. As the century opens up with more options for women, the choices become increasingly bolder. One of the beauties of The Invisible Mountain is that the prose accurately mirrors the country of Uruguay – from a time when gentle magic lit it from within to the near-present, when the country struggled under the harsh light of despotic politics.

Each woman is named fortuitously and fulfills the destiny of her name. Each in turn, embraces passion, poetry, and politics and becomes a vessel into which De Robertis pours decades of Uruguayan and Argentinian culture and family dynamics. The magical lyricism (think: Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez) is replaced with the intense and painful down-to-earth images of a country that has veered from its destiny and imprisoned those with the courage to speak out.

De Robertis writes: “This Uruguay: less innocent, smaller somehow, dwarfed by the looming world, more wounded, bleeding people out through its wounds, mourning the lost blood of the exiled and the dead and also those who simply shrugged and flew away, but also stronger for its wounds, mature, tenacious, wiser about what it can withstand, with a heart that beats and people who pulse through its pathways.” She could be speaking of her characters who also mature with their hearts joyfully beating despite their wounds.

In many ways, this is a love song to Uruguay: “El Rio de la Plata’s curving motion a woman weeping against a balcony rail, the red aroma of beef roasting at las brasas at the corner bar…Montevideo’s sleepy beauties and its daily return into her skin.” In equally powerful ways, it’s a celebration of women, particularly mother-daughter relationships and how they evolve and endure.

If there is a flaw in this novel, it is in the depiction of the male characters. The author was, at one time, a rape crisis counselor; perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the vast majority of men are depicted as abusive, inebriated, unfaithful, and downright violent. There is one notable exception, but that character’s story is told inorganically; from both an economic and psychological perspective, the character’s decision – and the results stemming from that decision – would be highly unlikely in the real world.

But as I closed the pages, I was left with the feeling that this multi-generational saga is assuredly destined to stand among the finest debut works, with a tone that is often elegiac and a theme that is truly of the ages.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 40 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; 1 Reprint edition (August 10, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carolina de Robertis
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Classic Latin American Magical Realism: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

Bibliography:

• The Invisible Mountain (August 2009)

“Watching roads can be a way to look at history, to measure human progress and limitation.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (FEB 15, 2010)

Ted Conover won a National Book Critics Circle award for his last work of non-fiction, Newjack, a narrative about the Sing Sing prison. One can imagine that after such an endeavor he went after freedom—the essence of it personified by a wide stretch of empty road.

In his new book, The Routes of Man, Conover takes a look at different roads all across the world and takes us along for the ride.

The book is fascinating not just because of the diversity of places represented but because each chapter so beautifully depicts a road’s role in one of the many of the problems facing humanity today: war, disease, pollution, rampant development.

Our first expedition traces the path of mahogany from New York to its origin in the rainforests of Peru. Most of it is set in Peru where Conover takes a precarious ride along small roads through the Andes mountains to a logging camp deep in the forest. Conover shows how the country’s residents stand to both lose and gain from a more permanent, wider road that would cut through the forest and facilitate more commerce between Peru and its economic powerhouse neighbor, Brazil.

Conover is a master of narrative and this and other chapters in the book are full of wonderful descriptions and interesting asides. His talent is on full display here. Never to miss the smallest of details, he finds humor and irony in the most unexpected of places. For example, the monument to biodiversity in the state of Madre de Dios in Peru, he notes, is made of concrete.

Conover’s travels also take him into remote regions in other parts of the world. He visits Zanskar, a part of Ladakh—the eastern, Buddhist part of the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir. Zanskaris are cut off from the rest of the world from October to May when it snows but once the ice settles, young Zanskaris travel the frozen road called the chaddar and leave for higher studies at a set time every year. It’s a rite of passage described beautifully by Conover. Here too the Indian government has promised a more permanent road in to Zanskar—it’s of vital geopolitical importance to India, Zanskar being very close to the border with Pakistan.

The best chapter in The Routes of Man details the place of roads in war—a never-ending one. Conover visits the Israel-Palestine border and sees the situation through the eyes of both Israeli soldiers who have to staff checkpoints daily and the Palestinians who have to suffer these indignities every day. One hears news about the region practically every day but this impartial account of the war especially in its daily humdrum, is spectacular. The Routes of Man is worth reading just for this segment alone.

His description of a walk through an Israeli checkpoint is moving: “As I fell into step with the dozens of people heading past the guard tower, past concrete road dividers spray-painted with graffiti (“Israel Out”), past the cameras mounted atop poles, toward a low structure ahead with a corrugated roof, a red light next to the single lane for cars, and cyclone fencing and loops of razor wire on the sides, Fares’s reluctance to leave the town made more sense: this was starting to feel like prison.”

The road as vector for disease is described by Conover’s visit to Kenya—he travels the truck routes infamous as facilitating the rapid spread of AIDS in the country.

Each chapter in the book makes for great reading; Conover’s latest is a fascinating read.

The problem with The Routes of Man is its subtitle: “How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today.” It’s misleading and worse, promises a grander historical treatment of the subject than what we get. This is not to say that The Routes of Man is a mediocre read—it’s actually a fantastic one. But too often, some chapters feel like extremely good travelogues—and just that. It’s not quite what the subtitle promises. Conover does try in brief asides to inject some more heft into the book by discussing other road-related topics—like the history of Broadway Street in New York and the evolution of speed—but these don’t work. Their objective—to stitch the overall project together—is too transparent.

“One of the great challenges in writing a book about roads is to avoid the inadvertent use of road metaphors,” Conover writes. Yet you wish he would actually make these connections more evident. The last two chapters describe a driving expedition undertaken by nouveau riche in China and an ambulance driving around the roads of one of the starkest cities in the world—Lagos, Nigeria.

It is these two chapters, especially, that feel removed from the larger essence that Conover is trying to communicate. The chapter on China shows how money is turning the country around and how the disposable income many urban Chinese now have is giving them new kinds of opportunities for recreation—including a “self-driving” (as opposed to being driven by a chauffeur) trip. Yes, this chapter too takes place mostly on the road but the overall effect is disjointed—the lines between the new roads and the new China made out less clearly.

This same problem applies to the last chapter in Lagos, Nigeria. Again, it’s a compelling travelogue but exactly how the road is the central feature in the story—it’s hard to tell.

But The Routes of Man should be read for the wonderful narrative Conover injects into all his travels. The diversity of the places chosen makes it even more fun to go along for the ride.

Two yeas ago, our family decided to vacation in a small town at the foothills of the Himalayas—Mussoorie. Our hotel room was so high up in the mountains that it was regularly invaded by clouds that swept in when we left the doors open. On our way back down to the plains, we took a taxi down an extremely narrow, ribbon-like road that in most places didn’t have any barriers separating our tiny car from the steep vertical drops. I was convinced we were soon going to meet our end. As our crazy cabbie took one more sharp turn around one more precarious hairpin bend we suddenly came across a huge sign: “Speed Thrills but Kills.” The irony of the situation was not lost on any of us.

Looking back, I think the sign that Conover saw in Lagos, Nigeria, would have driven home the point better: Drive Soft—Life Get No Duplicate.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AMAZON PAGE:	The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ted Connover
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More “road” books: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford

Bibliography:

• Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes (1984)
• Coyote: : A Journey Across Borders With America’s Illegal Migrants (1987)
• Whiteout: Lost in Aspen (1991)
• Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000)
• The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today (February 2010)