UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction at the UGA Libraries, Oct 26

Consolation by Anna Gavalda
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson.
PQ2667.A97472 C66713 2010

Consolation (La Consolante*) was the bestselling French novel in 2008, with sales of over half a million copies and translations into thirty-two languages. Darker and more complex than Hunting and Gathering (Ensemble, c’est tout), but just as dazzling, the second novel by the enchantress Anna Gavalda tells a heartbreaking, unusual story about one man, two remarkable women and an unforgettable transvestite. A 47-year-old successful architect hears about the death of a woman, whom he once loved – Anouk, the tragically big-hearted mother of a childhood friend – and his life starts to unravel. Charles seems to have everything, but turns his back on the present to go in search of her past and his childhood, falling a long way down. One day he finds himself on a Paris pavement covered in his own blood. But, as the title suggests, fate holds out a final chance of consolation – when, far from his Parisian milieu, he meets Kate, an enchanting young woman, herself damaged but fearless and in love with life. Alive with wit and vivid observation, sparkling dialogue and brilliant characters, this is a triumphant, spellbinding, finally consoling novel about life, love and second chances.

(*The French title is what players of boules call the consolation play-off match between the losers).

The Fall of the Pagoda by Eileen Chang
PS3553.H27187 F35 2010

Eileen Chang is now recognized as one of the greatest modern Chinese writers, though she was completely erased from official histories in mainland China. Her semi-autobiographical novels depict in gripping detail her childhood years in Tianjin and Shanghai, as well as her student days in Hong Kong during World War II, and shed light on the construction of selfhood in her other novels.

Fall of the Pagoda introduces a young girl growing up in Shanghai amid many family entanglements with her divorced mother and spinster aunt during the 1930s, when the International Settlement in Shanghai was known as the “lonely isle” and relatively safe from the invading Japanese army. The Book of Change narrates her experience as a student at the University of Victoria in Hong Kong, including the fall of Hong Kong after Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941. The novels contain lengthy discussions of the relationship between a fictionalized Chang and her selfishly demanding mother, as well as of intricate dynamics in the extended families who emerged from aristocratic households of the late Qing Dynasty. While the main characters belong to the new Republican period, their worldviews and everyday life are still haunted by the shadows of the past.

This previously unpublished work is essential to any scholar or loyal fan of Eileen Chang.

Three Delays: A Novel by Charlie Smith
PS3569.M5163 T7 2010

Billy Brent and Alice Stephens are star-crossed like all great lovers. Their need for each other drives them from Istanbul to Miami, Venice to Mexico. After years of encounters and escapes, they lose themselves deep in a desert wilderness, searching for a way forward, only to learn that sometimes the trail simply forks. From Charlie Smith, author of three New York Times Notable Books, comes his long-awaited new novel, his first in more than a decade. An exploration of the true particulars of obsession, Three Delays is a book of the spirit, of how broken people love and persist from darkness to darkness.

Double Happiness: Stories by Mary-Beth Hughes
PS3608.U34 D68 2010

Best-selling author Mary-Beth Hughes delivers a seductive, deeply human, and sophisticated collection about the universal need to be loved, and the complicated imperfections that jeopardize the ties that bind us.

The stories in Double Happiness are extraordinary portrayals of the ordinariness of life. By pinpointing those moments of discord when personal needs and morality clash with circumstances beyond our control, Hughes challenges our concepts of responsibility, trust, resilience, and betrayal. In “Pelican Song,” a thirty-year-old modern dancer who moonlights as a movie–ticket taker visits her parent’s picturesque home to discover that her stepfather has begun mistreating her too-accommodating mother; “Horse” follows maladjusted honeymooners in Atlantic City whose romantic weekend is saved from emotional catastrophe by a horse that refuses to dive from its pedestal into the ocean; and a holiday in New York City turns from shopping sprees to a young girl’s sharp discovery of her father’s secret life in “Rome.”

With an elegant blend of humor and pathos, Hughes captures the turning points in relationships that make us wonder how well we really know those we love. Double Happiness is a revealing meditation on the fragility of contentment and the lengths we must go to in order to sustain it.

A Good High Place by L.E. Kimball
PS3611.I4573 G66 2010

Epic and nonlinear in nature, A Good High Place chronicles the lives of two women—Luella and Kachina—who, like the orbit of the sun and the moon, both attract and repel each other. Luella’s suspicion that her younger sister—who supposedly died at birth—is being raised as the sister of Kachina sets her on a path of self-discovery that generates more questions than answers. The Native American Kachina is an enigma, a person with a special healing touch who, it is rumored, never ages, leaves no footprints, and might never die. Her goal is to help her people, the Aninshinaabek, remain on the Red Path and resist being absorbed by white culture. To do this, she takes guidance from what she refers to as The Day, guidance Luella assumes can be “nothing less than the murmured confidences of God pouring from the sky.” Ultimately, Kachina and Luella find friendship among the conflicts of culture, duty, and even loving the same man. Set during the years prior to World War I in Elk Rapids, Michigan, A Good High Place addresses familial struggles and those of a nation moving inexorably toward the age of the automobile. The sometimes painful adaptations of a faster-paced age are embodied, in part, in the struggles of Luella’s father who, already troubled by the death of his wife, wrestles with the realization that his livelihood as a steamboat captain is becoming obsolete.

Living Room: A Novel by Rachel Sherman
PS3619.H466 L584 2009

The follow-up to her highly praised debut story collection, The First Hurt, Rachel Sherman’s Living Room is a beautiful and disarmingly direct portrait of a family in trouble. With the tone of a modern-day Jewish The Ice Storm set in Long Island, imbued with Alice Munro’s fascination with personal history, Living Room is a deep exploration of the ripple effects of mental illness on a family, as well as a look at generational differences in mating and marriage, and a wry, wise look at suburban angst.

Meet Me under the Ceiba by Silvio Sirias
PS3619.I75 M44 2009

”I’m not afraid of that old man,” Adela once told her niece. But everyone in the small town of La Curva, Nicaragua, knew that the wealthy land owner, Don Roque Ramírez, wanted Adela Rugama dead. And on Christmas Day, Adela disappeared. It was two months before her murdered body was found.

An American professor of Nicaraguan descent spending the summer in his parents’ homeland learns of Adela’s murder and vows to unravel the threads of the mystery. He begins the painstaking process of interviewing the townspeople, and it quickly becomes apparent that Adela a hard-working campesina who never learned to read and write and Don Roque had one thing in common: the beautiful Ixelia Cruz. The love of Adela’s life, Ixelia was one of Don Roque’s many possessions until Adela lured her away.

The interviews with Adela’s family, neighbors, and former lovers shed light on the circumstances of her death and reveal the lively community left reeling by her brutal murder, including: her older sister Mariela and her four children, who spent Christmas morning with their beloved aunt, excitedly unwrapping the gifts she brought them that fateful day; her neighbor and friend, Lizbeth Hodgson, the beautiful mulata who rejected Adela’s passionate advances early in their relationship; Padre Uriel, who did not welcome Adela to mass because she loved women (though he has no qualms about his lengthy affair with a married woman); her former lover Gloria, the town’s midwife, who is forever destined to beg her charges to name their newborn daughters Adela.

Through stories and gossip that expose jealousies, scandals, and misfortunes, Sirias lovingly portrays the community of La Curva, Nicaragua, in all its evil and goodness. The winner of the Chicano / Latino Literary Prize, this spellbinding novel captures the essence of a world rarely seen in American literature.

The Hole We’re In: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin
PS3626.E95 H65 2010

Meet the Pomeroys: a church-going family of five living in a too-red house in a Texas college town. Roger, the patriarch, has impulsively decided to go back to school, only to find his future ambitions at odds with the temptations of the present. His wife Georgia, is trying to keep things afloat on the home front, though she’s been feeding the bill drawer with unopened envelopes for months, and can never find the right moment to confront its scary, swelling contents.

In an attempt to climb out of the holes they’ve dug, Roger and Georgia make a series of choices that will have catastrophic consequences for their three children – especially for Patsy, the youngest, who will spend most of her life fighting to overcome them. Though flawed and at times infuriating, Zevin’s characters are so human and relatable, it is difficult not to cheer them on as they fumble towards understanding each other, and in some cases, even themselves.

In The Hole We’re In, Gabrielle Zevin shines a spotlight on some of the most relevant issues of our day-over-reliance on credit, gender and class politics, the war in Iraq; but it is her deft exploration of the fragile economy of family life – emotional, financial, and psychological – that makes this a book for the ages.

Not Art: A Novel by Péter Esterházy
Translated by Judith Sollosy.
PH3241.E85 S4513 2010

More than two decades have passed since Peter Esterhazy ended his book Helping Verbs of the Heart with the sentence, ‘I will write about all that in more detail later’. In this luminous novel, he finally makes the meaning of this literary mystery clear. Not Art is the story of a mother whose defining communication with the world is in the language of football, a vocabulary that eclipses not only her son, but everything else. Football, in the author’s next to the last book a stage and a medium for private historiography, now acts as a filter through which the world is seen, and is the root of his relationship to his mother and his mother tongue: a mother’s language complex. Readers will discover ‘family stories’, subtly written and rounded, filled with irony, beauty, history, the Magnificent Magyars, father, grandmother, aunt, uncle, mother, life and death. There is emotion-platonic love, marital love, and a son’s love for his parents. And there is the Esterhazyesque auto-reflexive textual world (Where does the author begin and end?). Old world glamour meets fractured post-war reality in a tale that touches on many aspects of life and philosophy relevant to us today – while centering on a son’s relationship to his mother and the game of football that they love. The author received the following international awards: Vilenica Prize, Slovenia (1988, 1998) Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France (1992, 1994, 2003) Prize of the Literary Festival in Rome, Italy (1993) Bjornson Prize, Norway (1995) Austrian State Prize, Austria (1999) Herder Prize, Austria (2002) Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at Frankfurt Book Fair (2004). He has also received nearly 20 awards in his native country.

The Theocrat by Bensalem Himmich
Translated by Roger Allen.
PJ7832.I445 M3513 2009

The Theocrat takes as its subject one of Arab and Islamic history’s most perplexing figures, al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah (“the ruler by order of God”), the Fatimid caliph who ruled Egypt during the tenth century and whose career was a direct reflection of both the tensions within the Islamic dominions as a whole and of the conflicts within his own mind. In this remarkable novel Bensalem Himmich explores these tensions and conflicts and their disastrous consequences on an individual ruler and on his people. Himmich does not spare his readers the full horror and tragedy of al-Hakim’s reign, but in employing a variety of textual styles – including quotations from some of the best known medieval Arab historians; vivid historical narratives; a series of extraordinary decrees issued by the caliph; and, most remarkably, the inspirational utterances of al-Hakim during his ecstatic visions, recorded by his devotees and subsequently a basis for the foundation of the Druze community – he succeeds brilliantly in painting a portrait of a character whose sheer unpredictability throws into relief the qualities of those who find themselves forced to cajole, confront, or oppose him.

Being Abbas el Abd by Ahmed Alaidy
Translated by Humphrey Davies.
PJ7914.Y54 A7612 2009

What is madness? asks the narrator of Ahmed Alaidy’s jittery, funny, and angry novel. Assuring readers that they are about to find out, the narrator takes us on a journey through the insanity of present-day Cairo – in and out of minibuses, malls, and crash pads, navigating the city’s pinball machine of social life with tolerable efficiency.

But lurking under the rocks in his grouchy, chain-smoking, pharmaceutically-oriented, twenty-something life are characters like his elusive psychiatrist uncle with a disturbing interest in phobias.

And then there’s Abbas, the narrator’s best friend who surfaces at critical moments to drive our hero into uncontrollably multiplying difficulties. For instance, there’s the ticklish situation with the simultaneous blind-dates Abbas has set up for him on different levels of a coffee-shop in a Cairo mall with two girls both called Hind. With friends like Abbas, what paranoiac needs enemies?

Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea
Translated by Rajaa Alsanea and Marilyn Booth.
PJ7962.A55 B3613 2008

A bold new voice from Saudi Arabia spins a fascinating tale of four young women attempting to navigate the narrow straits between love, desire, fulfillment, and Islamic tradition

In her debut novel Rajaa Alsanea reveals the social, romantic, and sexual tribulations of four young women from the elite classes of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Originally released in Arabic in 2005, it was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia because of the controversial and inflammatory content, while black-market copies of the novel were widely circulated. The daring originality of Girls of Riyadh continues to create a firestorm all over the Arab world, and the excitement has spread far beyond the Middle East-to date, rights to this novel have already been sold in eleven countries.

The novel unfolds as every week after Friday prayers, the anonymous narrator sends an e-mail to the female subscribers of her online chat group. In fifty such e-mails over the course of a year, we witness the tragicomic reality of four university students-Qamra, Michelle, Sadim, and Lamis-negotiating their love lives, their professional success, and their rebellions, large and small, against their cultural traditions. The world these women inhabit is a modern one that contains “Sex and the City,” dating, and sneaking out of their parents’ houses, and this affluent, contemporary existence causes the girls to collide endlessly with the ancient customs of their society. The never-ending cultural conflicts underscore the tumult of being an educated modern woman growing up in the twenty-first century amid a culture firmly rooted in an ancient way of life.

While this novel offers a distinctly Arab voice, it also represents the mongrel culture and language of a globalized world, reflecting the way in which the Arab world is being changed by new economic and political realities. Riyadh is the larger setting of the novel, but the characters travel all over the world shedding traditional garb as they literally and figuratively cross over into Western society. These women understand the Western worldview and experiment with reconciling pieces of it with their own. But this groundbreaking novel might be the very first that opens up their world to us-their culture, their struggles, their frustrations, their hopes, and their beliefs. With Girls of Riyadh, Rajaa Alsanea gives us a rare and unforgettable insight into the complicated lives of these young Saudi women whose amazing stories are unfolding in a culture so very different from our own.