After the Quake
other words, Murakami uses placid, pleasant language to describe a shattered world. In earlier novels, such as Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, his gentle, inven-tive touches were spread out across a larger canvas, but here the stories add up to less than the sum of their little shocks. And while you have to respect a work in which the most memorable character is a giant oracular frog, this supposedly haunted book doesn’t haunt. — Adam Novy
Odd that Akashic Books drops rabbit raisins like T. Cooper’s Some of the Parts and Sparrow Patterson’s Synthetic Bi Products–then whips out trump like Yongsoo Park’s bildungsroman BoyGenius. Most of its plot is allegorical, most of its feints coherent and deliberate. The hero narrates. Born a yokel in Korea, he’s declared a genius by the Most Honorable President Park, who makes him a TV star. Then the president’s wife gets assassinated, and a frame-up strips BoyGenius of fame and fortune, dumping him in a hideous rural village. He and his ignorant family escape to the U.S., where his parents are murdered. Convinced the blame’s half his own and half President Park’s, he spends the rest of his days galloping after revenge and getting kidnapped by whales. BoyGenius may be schizophrenic: the allegory ruptures when plot twists aren’t rationalized, and it’s hard not to read the events as mere unpleasant hallucinations–which makes you wonder whether the author, who claims he’s the great-grandson of a Manchurian warlord, is lucid. Then again, the hero’s self-deception adds ironic humor; whether he’s a lone soul in a mad world or just a nutcase, BoyGenius is such a paragon of foolish loyalty to the idea that he’s a genius that the only way you can feel sorry for him is genuinely. –Ann Sterzinger
The first 100 pages of Mick Connors’s debut novel describe a lewd middle-aged romp, as the nameless main character, his best friend, and two acquaintances head to Cuba for the “millions of horny young women.” Fortunately, when the main character starts smuggling cigars, the book switches from cliched sex adventure to entertaining con, peppered with vivid images of Cuba and its underworld. As the character becomes determined to smuggle more cigars, the stakes get higher, and he has to maneuver his way past back-stabbing amateurs, vindictive customs officials, and assassins. Cigar Runners can be crude and shallow at times, but Connors, who’s currently under house arrest in Skokie after being convicted of smuggling thousands of Cuban cigars into the U.S., has the voice of a buddy–half-bragging, half-sad. He insists that his book is fiction, albeit well researched. –Jeff Faye
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This slim novel by Afghan expatriate Atiq Rahimi, translated from the original Dari and published in Europe in 2000, might never have seen the light of day here if not for the war on terrorism. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the elderly Dastaguir sets off for the mine where his son Murad is working to tell him their village has been destroyed and many members of his family are dead, though Murad’s son, Yassin, has survived. Dastaguir not only must find a way to cross the harsh, war-torn landscape while caring for Yassin, who’s been made deaf by the bombs, but must face his own guilt at having survived, as well as Murad’s eventual reaction–“To him, blood is the only answer for blood,” he says. Rahimi, who was 22 when he fled Afghanistan for France in 1984, is now a documentary filmmaker, and it shows in his spare writing style. Scenes are brief yet full of repeated visual images–dust, fire, ashes–and nightmare sequences blend seamlessly with Dastaguir’s waking reality. For the most part Rahimi avoids a political stance, focusing instead on the hopelessness and helplessness of people under siege. More than once he writes, “The dead are more fortunate than the living.” –Jerome Ludwig
Dame Darcy’s restive imagination manifests itself in many ways: she’s the creator of Fantagraphics’ comic book Meat Cake, a doll maker, a silent-movie actress, a palm reader, a singing-saw player, and a reputed chronic boyfriend stealer. She lives in a vortex, whirling with the best and the worst of the Victorian and flapper eras along with doppelgangers, ghosts, and other riffraff of the spiritual world. Her first novel, Frightful Fairytales, includes hyperdetailed illustrations and stories of a bloodthirsty witch who makes herself a daughter out of quicksilver, cinnamon, sugar, and the ovaries of a little girl she’s murdered; a peaceful, lavish underwater kingdom of miniature shape-shifting creatures; a gold-digging grave digger; and a sorrowful chambermaid who longs to escape the evil elves she serves. In Dame Darcy’s magical world, every man is either a cur or a prince, every song a dirge or a seduction, every lady a greedy ne’er-do-well or a doe-eyed dreamer. Making black-and-white judgments isn’t her business; all that matters is that the characters she’s created, including herself, are happy and in love. She doesn’t like a yarn that doesn’t end in a kiss, and for that reason Frightful Fairytales isn’t all that frightful–unless you think every author should always be loftily literate and grammatically correct. –Liz Armstrong
