South American writers, though, recognize [...]]]> If someone mentions South America and Nazis, what comes to mind? For many, it’s the seemingly ubiquitous idea of Nazis escaping there after the war. While the concept has at least a few kernels of truth, it ignores or pushes aside events that swept up Latin America during the war.

South American writers, though, recognize that even if their nations were not combatants, they were not immune from the effects of Nazism and World War II. Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, in fact, created a fictional encyclopedia of ultra right-wing writers in North, Central and South America with his Nazi Literature in the Americas. More directly addressing the topic is The Informers, the first novel of Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez translated into English.

The Informers is inspired by a woman of German-Jewish origin Vásquez met in late 1999 who emigrated to Colombia with her family as a teenager in 1938. In Vásquez’s hands, she becomes Sara Guterman, the subject of a book written by Gabriel Santoro, a young Bogotá writer whose father of the same name is a nationally recognized and honored professor of rhetoric. Like her real life counterpart, Guterman’s family moves to Colombia in the 1930s as her German Jewish parents fled Nazism. She becomes a lifelong friend of the senior Santoro.

In telling Guterman’s story, Santoro fils also examines the impact of the “Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals,” a list announced by the U.S. Government of some 1,800 individuals and entities in Latin American “deemed to be acting for the benefit of Germany and Italy.” That list became the basis of blacklists in Colombia, with people informing on others, usually with German or Jewish backgrounds, for real or unfounded suspicion or out of self-interest. Many end up in internment camps in Colombia and, in fact, a number of Latin Americans were sent to the United States for internment. The senior Santoro tells his students there were “thousands of people who accused, who denounced, who informed.” He teaches that “the system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are a majority. That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment[.]”

Despite those comments and the fact he also teaches lawyers and judges, Santoro père disparages his son’s book in a published review. Not only does he downplay its discussion of the blacklist years, he calls the book a “failure” and says listing its shortcomings “would be as futile as it would be exhausting.” Father and son do not speak for three years after that.

The senior Santoro breaks the silence when he contacts his son to tell him he is facing a life-threatening health condition. The two begin to reconcile and when father survives the health scare, he views it as a new chance at life. While he at some point apologizes for the review, he never truly explains his reasons for it. After several months, though, the senior Santoro dies in a car accident. Before and after his father’s death, with information provided by Guterman and his father’s girlfriend (his own informers), Santoro begins to peel away layers of silence, misdirection and falsity to reveal a secret his father hid for decades and that explain his hostility to the book.

Anne McLean translates Vásquez’s generally artful prose, with the latter being an author who doesn’t indulge in trite metaphor. To the contrary, Santoro senior’s “breathing whistled like a paper kite” and “the notion of his past bothered him like a raspberry seed stuck in his teeth.” While the younger Santoro narrates the book, Vásquez is not tied to a single traditional narrative style. One part of The Informers is the first chapter of Sanotoro’s book about Guterman. Other parts are almost transcript-like versions of interviews and yet another is basically a recording of a conversation between the younger Santoro and Guterman, consisting of lengthy passages of Guterman’s recollection of events before and during the blacklist era. Some readers may see the changing formats format extending a slowly unfolding structure that is already intricate but it does not become a major distraction. Perhaps more noticeable is that the younger Santoro seems strangely aloof, as if viewing himself as a journalist requires him to approach the events and revelations that impact his life in that role.

The Informers, first published in translation in the U.S. in 2009 and now in a trade paper edition, doesn’t limit itself to Colombia’s World War II history. Electoral politics, internal armed conflict and terrorism, and the power of the drug cartels also come into play as Vásquez takes his story through some half century of Colombian history. Those items play a role in the author’s own life, as the violence and unrest caused by guerrilla movements and the drug lords led him to Europe, where he now lives and writes in Barcelona. (Interestingly, Bolaño lived on the Mediterranean coast in Spain less than 50 miles from Barcelona when he wrote most of his novels.)

With The Informers, Vásquez provides another example of how literary fiction and many of its most common themes can illuminate seemingly forgotten history and its consequences. Not only do these themes help animate the story, they help engage the reader. The fact the themes explored in The Informers, such as the relationship of father and son, family secrets and betrayal, are age-old doesn’t keep it from helping unfold 20th Century history.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Informers

In one — a challenge I came up with — I’ve only read one [...]]]> It looks like my reading challenge efforts are more than a little weak this year. If you take a gander at the list of them to the right, there’s two I’ve done nothing toward. And the others aren’t get much better.

In one — a challenge I came up with — I’ve only read one book (although I am reading another largely on my Blackberry during occasional down moments). When it comes to the Notable Books Challenge, I’ve only read two books. (Of course, that effort is hurt somewhat by the fact that I read more than a dozen of the eligible 2009 books before the various lists were announced but they don’t count toward my goal.) And while the Random Reading Challenge looks fairly good, it ends July 1 and only one-third of the books I’ve read toward it were this year.

I don’t have any good reasons excuses for my lack of diligence. It just seems that little of what I’m reading fits within the challenges. It also doesn’t help that the four or five books I’ve bought in the last couple weeks, the review copies I’ve received and the library holds probably aren’t going to fit either. In light of the shortcomings, don’t be surprised if a couple of the challenges disappear from the sidebar.

Samuel Johnson, quoted in
Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

I joined four reading challenges in 2009, two of which I completed by the middle of the year. I completed the third August 1 and [...]]]> There’s a few things I’m going to embark on for next year from both a personal and blog standpoint. One is reading challenges and the other deals with book reviews.

I joined four reading challenges in 2009, two of which I completed by the middle of the year. I completed the third August 1 and so started a new one. I’m halfway through it but it runs until July 31, 2010, so I’ve plenty of time.

As a result, I’m looking for 2010 challenges. I think I’ll stay with the Notable Books Challenge as Wendy, the founder, said it would be a “perpetual challenge.” Because I enjoyed it and it led to some excellent reading, I’m in for another six books this year. New challenges on the current short list are:

• The Books To Read Before I Die Challenge, which requires picking and reading 10 to 20 books. I’ll need to make up my mind soon as the list of books has to be selected by Dec. 31.
• The Take Another Chance Challenge, because its “rules” are odd enough to pique my interest. If I enter, it will probably be at the small or moderate gamble level.
• The Social Justice Challenge, because it strikes the altruistic part of me.
• The 2010 topic from War Through the Generations is the Vietnam War Reading Challenge, so I may join in at a lower level as it is one of the signature nation-changing events of my lifetime.

Now I don’t need to be challenged to read a book. But I figure a couple of these will add a little flavor to the reading I do anyway and can even perhaps broaden what might otherwise end up in my hands. I’m not going to do all of them and will be keeping my eye out for other challenges between now and the end of the year.

Another sort of challenge deals with book reviews. As I mentioned last weekend, Kirkus Reviews is ceasing publication after more than 75 years. In reading various comments about the magazine, I saw that it limited reviews to no more than 350 words. That calls for some awful tight writing. As a result, I’m going to try to do occasional “microreviews” of 350 words or less of books I’ve read but which I’ve not been assigned to review. I figure it will not only provide an opportunity to work on my writing and editing skills but to also provide a bit more review material for the blog.

“Roland Hedley,” Doonesbury, Dec. 14, 2009

Notable Books Challenge [...]]]> As a follow up to this week’s Musing Mondays, I figured this would be a good time to check on how I’m doing on the reading challenges I adopted for the year. So far, more than so good. I’m actually one book shy of completing all three. Here’s the tally so far:

Notable Books Challenge — read six books from “notable book lists” from a variety of sources.

Books read: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust; The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, David Hajdu; Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories, Steven Millhauser; A Free Life, Ha Jin; and Breath, Tim Winton

Favorite: Dangerous Laughter.

Lost in Translation Reading Challenge — read six books in translation over the course of the year. (On this one, I kind of “overachieved.”)

Books reviewed: Yalo, Elias Khoury (Arabic); Every Man Dies Alone, Hans Fallada (German); Detective Story, Imre Kertész (Hungarian); The Unit, Ninni Holmqvist (Swedish); and God’s Mercy, Kerstin Ekman (Swedish).

Books read but not reviewed: Amerika: The Missing Person, Franz Kafka (German); The Drinker, Hans Fallada (German); Tranquility, Attila Bartis (Hungarian); and, The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz (Arabic).

Favorite: Every Man Dies Alone.

World Citizen Challenge — read five books about foreign countries from among three of the following categories: politics, economics, history, culture or anthropology/sociology, worldwide issues, and memoirs/autobiographies.

Books read: Commander of the Faithful: The Life and Times of Emir Abd el-Kader, John W. Kiser (history); Yalo, Elias Khory (worldwide issues – torture); Kidnapped: And Other Dispatches, Alan Johnston (memoirs); “Socialism Is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China, Lijia Zhang; (memoirs) and, To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan, Nicholas Schmidle (politics/worldwide issues/memoir).

Favorite: To Live or to Perish Forever

Perhaps I need to spend the Fourth looking for a new reading challenge or two.

S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

Breath may be built around surfing [...]]]> You could summarize Tim Winton’s Breath by saying it’s a novel about a two Australian teenagers who perfect their surfing skills under the tutelage of a reclusive mentor. Of course, that would be like saying Fight Club is a novel about young men in an illicit fighting club.

Breath may be built around surfing but the story, told from the viewpoint of Bruce “Pikelet” Pike, is about what the title says — breath, both as a life sustainer and as a metaphor. Pike’s story focuses on his relationship with his best friend, Ivan “Loonie” Loon, and how Bill “Sando” Sanderson, a star surfer, takes them under his wing and becomes their guru to the dismay and resigned acceptance of Sanderson’s wife, Eva. Breath serves to illustrate the routine of life and how the desire to challenge that routine can be, at the same time, exhilarating and dangerous to the point of deadly.

Within a moment of a newborn’s first “rude shock of respiration,” breathing becomes so routine we rarely give it another thought unless and until it is threatened. Thus, Pike wonders over the years whether the risks he took with Loonie, Sando and Eva “were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath.” While an adult might deplore risks they took when young, as a youth the sense is “that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others.”

This portrayal of breath appears at the outset of the novel, years after the main events. It is also a focus of Pikelet and the appropriately nicknamed Loonie as they rebel against the mundaneness of their life in a small town in relatively remote western Australia. It starts with challenging each other to see who can dive and hold their breath for the longest period of time, often pushing themselves to the point of blacking out. Their feats produce exhilaration even though fraught with disaster.

Pike and Loonie also become enthralled with surfing and come to meet and know Sando, a former world class surfer who, with his wife, has become essentially a hippie recluse. Sando sees in them a capacity to take on surfing challenges above and beyond ordinary mortals. Thus, not only does he take these barely teenaged boys to surf in shark-haunted waters, he teaches them how to analyze where storms will produce the biggest swells and takes them miles into the ocean to challenge huge waves only he has surfed.

Loonie and Pikelet encounter similar as well as differing coming of age challenges, some of which they will exult over, others of which will scar them for life. Throughout the book, there is an undercurrent of walking the line between acceptable risk and disaster. Breath doesn’t try to tell us where to find the appropriate ground among routine, challenge and jeopardy. Instead, breath becomes a vehicle by which to reflect upon adventure and addiction, courage and self-destruction.

Tim Winton, Breath