LITERARY COMMENTARY FOR THE URBAN READER

LITERARY COMMENTARY FOR THE URBAN READER

by Heidi Johnson-Wright

Five books that changed my life:

1. The First Circle by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

2. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

3. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

4. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

5. Watership Down by Richard Adams

Other favorites:

Snakelust is a collection of short stories by Kenji Nakagami, translated by Andrew Rankin (Kodansha International, $23)

In this collection of seven short stories, Japanese author Kenji Nakagami has written about restless, tortured souls, men and women who feel doomed by uncontrollable, unchangeable circumstances. Nakagami, who died of cancer in 1992 at age 46, had a gift for creating works of stark, fragile beauty. Perhaps the most moving – and disturbing -- story in the book is Gravity’s Capital. Incredibly beautiful and profoundly sad, powerfully erotic and mystically spiritual, it’s a tale that will leave only the most jaded reader unmoved.

Sputnik Sweetheart is a novel by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Knopf, $23)

Japanese author Haruki Murakami has been quoted as saying: “I like ‘stories of abnormal things happening to normal people.’”
That statement perfectly encapsulates Sputnik Sweetheart. Murakami ’s seventh novel to be translated into English, it’s the tale of three people, seemingly normal on the surface, their lives intertwined through friendship, business and love.

The book begins as a smartly-written realistic tale of relationships, people and life’s complexities, then morphs into a story of suspense laden with metaphysical and psychological implications

Sultry Moon is by Mempo Giardinelli, translated from the Spanish by Patricia J. Duncan (Latin American Literary Review Press, $13.95, trade paperback)

In Sultry Moon, Giardinelli expertly explores the darker side of human nature with this tale of a man who walked the straight path all his life, then leapt into the void in the course of one evening. As the novel unfolds, it becomes an origami flower made of human skin – expertly crafted and terrifyingly beautiful.

The Intuitionist is a novel by Colson Whitehead (Anchor/Doubleday, $19.95)
Cops, private detectives and spies make great protagonist since adventure and entanglements seem built in to their occupations.
Add elevator inspectors to the list.

In his brilliant debut novel, The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead turns the decidedly unsexy world of shafts, overspeed governors and buffers into a vortex of intrigue and a microcosm of good vs. evil.

Still more must reads from Latin America to Manhattan:

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa
Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende
Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

First Love & Look for My Obituary: Two Novellas, by Elena Garro; translated from the Spanish by David Unger

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante
From Amazon.com editorial review:
”There are very few classics in the field of pop culture--the academic stuff tends to be too dry and the fun stuff is too quickly dated. This book by Luc Sante is the exception--in fluid prose liberally sprinkled with astute metaphors, Sante tells the story of New York's Lower East Side, circa 1840-1920. The personal histories of criminals, prostitutes, losers, and swindlers bring to life the social and statistical history that the author has meticulously researched.”

Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
From Amazon.com editorial review:
”One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen’s most defiant and uninhibited work. The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk saint.
By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.”