Country Focus: Netherlands (Nederland in Dutch).  The name Holland is often used interchangeably with the Netherlands, but Holland is technically only a small region in the western part of  country.

The Dinner
By Herman Koch
Translated by Sam Garrett
Originally published in the Netherlands as Het Diner by Ambo Anthos, 2009.
My edition: Hogarth, 2012.
292 pgs.

Genre: Fiction
Time period: Contemporary

World Lit Up Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, with 1 book = turned off and 5 books = lit up)

I’m dying to tell you about every plot twist in Herman Koch’s riveting novel The Dinner, but you’d kill me for being a spoiler.  Koch booby-trapped his plot so thoroughly that by page twenty I was already reeling.  Here’s the barest of introductions:

Two couples, Paul and Claire and Serge and Babette, have arranged to have dinner at a ritzy restaurant.  Paul, the snarky narrator, dreads the impending get-together but feels compelled to go through with the dinner date.   He and Claire linger at a cafe, delaying the inevitable meeting.  Paul savors his wife’s closeness and worries that after tonight they and their son Michel may no longer be a happy family.

Right from the beginning, I had so many questions (only a few of which I can mention so that I don’t give anything away): What is the relationship of these couples?  Why do Paul and Claire show them such contempt?  What have their teenage sons done?

I will say this: The Dinner is one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time.  Fans of Chuck Palahniuk, American author of the subversive and violent Fight Club, might find a kindred spirit in Koch.  The Dinner never loses momentum, Paul mesmerizes with his wise-ass prattle, and the ending doesn’t disappoint.  Read it at the same time as friend so you can dish about each increasingly dark revelation.

Quote:

Every year, Serge and Babette went to their house in the Dordogne with the children.  They belonged to that class of Dutch people who think everything French is “great”: from the croissants to French bread with Camembert, from French cars (they themselves drove one of the top-end Peugeots) to French chansons and French films.  At the same time, they failed to see that the local French population of the Dordogne fairly retched at the sight of Dutch people.  Anti-Dutch slogans had been scrawled on the walls of many résidences secondaires, but according to [Serge], this was the work of “a tiny minority” – after all, wasn’t everyone nice to you when you went to a shop or a restaurant?

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Country Focus: Iraq (Al Iraq / Eraq in Arabic)

Zubaida’s Window: A Novel of Iraqi Exile
By Iqbal Al-Qazwini
Translated by Azza El Kholy and Amira Nowaira
Afterword by Nadje Al-Ali
Originally published in Arabic as Mamarrat as-Sukoon by Azminah, 2006.
My edition: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2008.
137 pgs.

Genre: Fiction
Time period: 2003

World Lit Up Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, with 1 book = turned off and 5 books = lit up)

I chose Zubaida’s Window because I anticipated that it would provide a unique perspective – what does it feel like to see a war fought against your own country on the boob tube, especially when you’re culturally isolated?

Zubaida lives alone in an apartment building in Berlin; before German reunification she had lived in the communist, East German side.  She mentions only two friends:  a fellow unhappy exile and a long-dead East German writer.  She gains no pleasure from her work and the cold weather depresses her.

Now she watches America invade Iraq live on television, sees Baghdad’s buildings and landmarks destroyed, and her fellow citizens killed.  She can’t help but rehash where in its history Iraq went wrong.  Did the downward spiral happen after the murder of King Faisal II or the assassination of rebel leader Abdel Karim Qassem?

The war brings grim memories to the surface: the forcing out of the Jews, murdered politicians, hangings in the square.  Insomnia plagues her. As an exile, she had resigned herself to the loss of her country, but now the war has shown her the loss of her dreams.  Longing for sun and Arabic voices, she visits Amman, Jordan, but even this  Baghdad substitute can’t break her out of her depression.  Coffee is her only comfort.

To have all of these memories and emotions and have so few people around to commiserate with must be quite overwhelming and therapy-inducing.  But Zubaida has no spark to her; she is as dreary as the Berlin winters she complains about.  Her unrelenting funk almost seems to have less to do with the war and more with an intrinsic melancholy.  The burgeoning war might be a plausible excuse if her mood had darkened since the invasion, but her misery and loneliness in Berlin goes back 30 years!

Zubaida’s Window is a work of fiction, but like her title character, Iraqi author Al- Qazwini has also lived in exile in Berlin since the late 1970s.  I can only hope that Al- Qazwini has adapted and persevered more successfully than Zubaida.

Nadje Al-Ali’s informative “Afterword” serves as both Cliff Notes and an Iraqi history lesson and far outshines the novel.  I recommend trying out one of the books in Further Reading rather than hanging with gloomy Zubaida.

Quote:

After she takes her third bitter sip [of coffee], she glances at the black television screen and read the blackness as Baghdad, a city shut off, its image gone.  She feels suddenly terrified.  The coffee cup trembles, spilling a few drops onto the blanket.  She gets up and cleans the blanket with warm water.  Seated again, she wraps her trembling body with the blanket once more.  She is no longer able to drink the rest of the coffee, feeling sickened by the empty television screen, which, she is convinced, is her only window to Iraq.  For almost a year now, it has transmitted nothing but images of Iraq and especially Baghdad, drowning in a sea of expectations and possibilities: death, annihilation, destruction, burning oil, the smell of gunpowder, the remains of dead bodies, and the wolves coming from the border deserts to devour corpses of soldiers and non-soldiers alike.  She cannot bear to look at pictures of Baghdad burning, and is equally terrified by the image of Baghdad dead and still.  She presses the “on” button on the remote control, which lights the screen, showing an area of debris and a man wearing a grey dishdasha saying, “They bombed our homes and our neighbor here is dead, his kids injured.  This side of my house has collapsed.  No government officials were here.”

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Country Focus: Mozambique (Mocambique in Portuguese)

Sleepwalking Land
By Mia Couto
Translated by David Brookshaw
Originally published in Portugal as Terra Sonâmbula by Editorial Caminho, 1992.
My edition: Serpent’s Tail, 2006.
213 pgs.

Genre: Fiction
Time period: unclear, but sometime during Mozambique’s Civil War, which lasted from 1977-1992.

World Lit Up Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, with 1 book = turned off and 5 books = lit up)

Named one of the twelve best African books of the 20th century, Sleepwalking Land was Mozambican author Mia Couto’s first novel.  He opens the story with two unlikely companions: Tuahir, a bony old man, and Muidinga, a limping young boy.  Their country has been warped by civil war.  Walking along a road, they come across a burned-out bus and decide to turn it into a shelter.  Muidinga finds a pile of notebooks inside the suitcase of a dead man, and he begins to read them aloud to Tuahir to pass the time.

Tuahir and Muidinga rapidly grow enthralled with the life story of Kindzu, the author of the notebooks.  Kindzu leaves home to join up with the naparamas, mystical warriors who fight for peace, but instead he ends up falling in love with a woman who has isolated herself on a foundered supply ship, and subsequently searches for her long-lost son.

Couto alternates the contents of each of Kindzu’s eleven notebooks with brief chapters about Tuahir and Muidinga’s daily struggles.  The pair’s relationship grows more intimate.  They role play, with Muidinga acting as Kindzu and Tuahir taking the role of his father, Taimo.   Reality and the contents of the notebooks become intertwined, and they notice that the landscape around the bus changes from day to day.

Both Kindzu’s notebooks and Tuahir and Muidinga’s lives include elements of the fantastic,  like Xipocos – ghosts that enjoy schadenfreude, Tchoti – dwarfs who fall out of the sky, and the Mampfana, a bird that ends journeys.   The cast of characters is equally bizarre.  There’s Juney, a boy whose family turns him into a chicken;  Skellington, an insane one-eyed villager; Nhamataca, a man who attempts to dig a river; Juliana, a blind prostitute; and Romão, a corpse who bargains with a city official to get his old business back.

Along with the mind-bending amount of characters and plot lines, Couto tosses in digs at corrupt officials, Portuguese colonialists, the primitive practices of African tribes, and the black majority’s prejudice towards Indians.  Sleepwalking Land is nothing if not “thinky”, and quite overwhelmed me.

Kindzu’s final notebook, a recount of his dream of witch doctor’s rallying speech against war (part of which is excerpted below) is the highlight of the novel and Couto goes on to wrap up the story surprisingly well.  If I was an African literature professor looking for a short novel to keep my students occupied for an entire semester, I’d have hit the bullseye.

Quote:

Do you weep for the present?  Well, know that the days to come will be worse still.  That’s why they made this war, to poison the womb of time, so that the present would give birth to monsters instead of hope.  Don’t seek your relatives any more, those who have left for other lands in search of peace.  Even if you find them again, they will not recognize you.  You have turned into beasts of the wild, without family, without a nation.   For this war was not made to take you away from your country, but to take the country away from within you.  Now, weapons are your only soul.  They have stolen so much from you that not even your dreams are your own, nothing of your land belongs to you, and even the sky and seas will be the property of outsiders.

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Country Focus: Germany

The Hangman’s Daughter
By Oliver Pötzsche
Translated by Lee Chadeayne
Originally published as Die Henkerstochter in Germany by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, 2008.
My edition: Mariner Books, 2011.
435 pgs.

Genre: Fiction
Time period:  1659

World Lit Up Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, with 1 book = turned off and 5 books = lit up)

Author Simon Pötzsch’s ancestors, the Kuisls, rank as “one of Bavaria’s leading dynasties of  executioners.”  History books claim that one Kuisl paterfamilias  killed at least sixty people during the 1589 Schongau Witch Trials.  Pötzsch grew up hearing stories about these unusual relatives.  He delved into his own genealogy and Germany’s executioner lore and from that research wrote The Hangman’s Daughter, a fictional account of family members Johann Jakob Kuisl, his wife Anna and their three children Magdalena, Georg and Barbara.

The tale begins with a dead boy who has been fished out the Lech River by several raftsmen.  Physician Simon Fronweiser arrives on the scene and inspects the body.  Along with multiple stab wounds, he sees a purple mark – a short cross with a circle on top  – beneath the boy’s shoulder blade.  In the year 1659,  strange dark symbols found on dead bodies point to witchcraft, and the onlookers freak out.  The boy’s father accuses midwife Martha Stechlin, the last person seen with his son, of the murder.

Word spreads quickly.  Town hangman Jakob Kuisl locates Martha and rushes her off to the keep before the bloodthirsty mob can get to her.  He has a soft spot for Martha, who had delivered all three of his own children.

In the meantime, Simon brings the boy’s body to the hangman’s house to ask for Jakob’s opinion.  Simon has grown fond of both Jakob’s extensive medical library and his eldest daughter Magdalena and visits the family often despite disapproval from his father and the community.  Fraternizing with hangmen and their families is considered taboo.

Neither men suspect Martha of the crime, but both are concerned that the tattoo is indeed a “witches’ mark”, and that the dead boy’s father bears a grudge against Martha for not being able to save his wife during labor.

In a matter of days, another child dies and one goes missing.  The townspeople demand Martha’s torture, confession and execution, and Jakob is forced to begin his brutal work.  In secret, he, Simon and Magdalena investigate several possibilities:  Could Augsburgers from the north, disgruntled over a commerce dispute, be responsible?  Did the children see or overhear something they shouldn’t have about the controversial home for lepers being built just outside of town?  Or are they being murdered by itinerant soldiers, like one that some people call “the devil” and has a hand made only of bones?

Pötzsch unravels an amusing, fast-paced historical mystery that slips in fascinating period details.  I learned that hangmen doubled as city garbagemen and earned money under the table as black market healers.

My main gripe lies with the title, which points to Magdalena as a vital character.  Although she plays a role in the sleuthing and as Simon’s love interest, I thought that her underdeveloped character paled in comparison to both the formidable hangman with a heart of gold and metrosexual, coffee-loving Simon.

According to Pötzsch, 17th century hangman and their families were pariahs; associating with them brought bad luck.  Good thing it’s not 1659 anymore.  Jakob Kuisl and Simon Fronweiser, if not Magdalena, are characters worthy of a series and Pötzsch has followed his international bestseller with a series of Hangman’s Daughter Tales, including The Dark Monk, The Beggar King and, coming in July 2013, The Poisoned Pilgrim.

Quote:

Jakob Kuisl longed for his pipe.  He would have loved to clear the room of evil thoughts with its smoke.  He was fully aware of the aldermen’s prejudice against midwives.  Martha Stechlin was the first midwife whom the town had officially appointed.  These women with their feminine wisdom had always been suspect to men.  They knew potions and herbs; they touched women in indecent spots; and they knew how to get rid of the fruit of the womb, that gift of God.  Many midwives had been burned as witches by men.  Jakob Kuisl, too, knew all about potions and was suspected of sorcery.  But he was a man.  And he was the executioner.

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Country Focus: South Africa

Agaat
By Marlene Van Niekerk
Translated by Michiel Heyns
Originally published in Afrikaans by Tafelberg Publishers, 2004.
My edition: Tin House Books, 2010.
576 pgs.

Genre: Fiction
Time period: 1953-1996

World Lit Up Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, with 1 book = turned off and 5 books = lit up)

Milla De Wet lies paralyzed in her bed on her South African farm.  Her husband died years ago, her son lives in Canada, and she refuses care from anyone other than her steadfast servant, Agaat.  She communicates with Agaat by blinking; only her eyelids have eluded paralysis.  Despite her own disability – a shrunken, deformed right hand – Agaat skillfully and dutifully attends to her white Ounooi‘s every need.

Much to Milla’s consternation, Agaat has found her diaries from decades ago and begun reading them aloud.  The entries evoke a past that Milla is none too happy to revisit, including memories of her resentful husband Jak, her distant relationship with her son Jakkie, and a whirl of complex emotions involving Agaat.

The crux of Van Niekerks’ novel is this:  How did Agaat come to live on the De Wet farm and garner so much attention from Milla?  Milla’s concern and devotion to her black housegirl defies convention in apartheid-era South Africa.  Her behavior confuses and offends her husband and neighbors, all strong adherents to their country’s system of racial segregation.

By weaving Milla’s diary entries around her narration of her bed-bound present, her silent reminiscences of as far back as 1953, and some stream-of-consciousness indicative of her oncoming mental meltdown, Van Niekert gradually coaxes Agaat’s mysterious past out of Milla.  The story’s climax is as upsetting as it is satisfying and stands as a testament to the evils of apartheid.

Milla is an astoundingly complex creation.  She plays the victim as readily as she victimizes others.  Agaat elicits a whirlwind of emotions from her: cruelty, awe, jealousy, suspicion, detachment and protection.   A guarded pride in Agaat suffuses Milla’s thoughts; the abilities she attributes to the girl make Agaat seem superhuman.

If only Van Niekerk could have more ruthlessly edited the Milla’s tedious descriptions of bathtime, bed pan emptying, and lung clearing.  These portions of the novel could do double duty as an invalid care nursing handbook.  These medical details may testify to Agaat’s competence and devotion to Milla, but I thought they bogged down an otherwise compelling read.

Quote:

27 May 1955
Jak says we must make A. [Agaat] move in with Dawid and them and accustom her to her own people.  The sooner the better he says, the child will grow up messed-up, she has no playmates.  As if he cared one scrap about that.  But he is right when he says the white children who come here don’t know any better, they think she’s farm stock & then they snub her.
I protest!  She’s an exceptional somebody & she’s developed from the grimmest misery out of just about nothing.  Every day I have reason to believe that all my trouble and dedication were not in vain & that the faith I had in the matter and every drop of sweat and tears that I put into her has now started bearing fruit.  Everything has a purpose, I say to Jak, she’s been given to me to learn something about myself.  To learn what it is that really matters in this life.  Jak says I sound like a Jehovah’s Witness on Eau de Cologne.  He says he thought I’d achieved total illumination some time ago and it’s not a matter of A. because all I can talk about is myself & I can really spare him my sickly sentimental stories they give him a pain because all he sees in front of him is the worst case of megalomania & control freakery south of the Sahara.

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Country Focus: Uganda

Tropical Fish
By Doreen Baingana
Originally published by University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.
My edition: Harlem Moon, 2005.
177 pgs.

Genre: Short Stories
Time period: Contemporary

World Lit Up Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, with 1 book = turned off and 5 books = lit up)

Doreen Baingana’s three fictional Ugandan sisters, Christine, Patti and Rosa Mugisha, may be growing up in a country still reeling from ex-president Idi Amin’s 1971-1979 terrifying rule, but they still face issues that will resonate with most non-Ugandan women:

• In “Green Stones,” Christine’s changing perceptions of her mother’s jewelry signal her transition from innocence to adulthood.
• Patti has a revelation after suffering from “Hunger” at boarding school.
• Is fourteen-year-old Christine ready to go beyond a  “First Kiss” with a fast-moving eighteen-year-old?
• Rosa experiments with traditional tribal juju to see if she can inspire “Passion” in her English teacher.
• Years later, Rosa writes “A Thank-You Note” to her ex-lover David, who gave her AIDS.  (In the 1980s, over 30% of Ugandans were infected with HIV, which explains why Rosa and so many of her friends were dying.  That rate has since dropped to 6.5%, but makes “A Thank-You Note” no less chilling.)
• Christine’s interracial relationship with an Englishman who exports “Tropical Fish” has her wondering what exactly foreign whites expect from Africans and vice versa.
• Christine emigrates to America.  Rather than hunker down with fellow Ugandans, she engages her new community and discovers that even some Americans are no less “Lost in Los Angeles.”
• “Questions of Home” describes Christine’s return to Entebbe after spending eight years in the states.  Ironically, she is just as much a fish out of water in her hometown as she was in L.A.

A native Ugandan, Baingana liberally sprinkles indigenous food and vocabulary throughout Tropical Fish.   However, her depictions of Kampala and Entebbe are given short shrift; Baingana chose to focus on the emotional lives of her characters.

In the final story, Christine says that her move back to Uganda was partly instigated by the president’s call to expatriot Ugandans to return home and help rebuild their country.  Baingana herself left Uganda for America.  She and Christine could be likened to the exported tropical fish in the titular story.  This metaphor left me pondering the implications of a country abandoned by its unique and brightest denizens.  Every one of Baingana’s stories are intelligent and thought-provoking; she is the fish who got away from the Ugandan publishing industry.

Quote:

My eldest sister, Patti, might have heard about Peter from someone.  She was a born-again Christian, like I once was.  “Saved,” with too clear and rigid a sense of right and wrong.  But she wouldn’t say, “Stop seeing that white man.”  Instead, she told me of a dream she’d had: that I was given drugs by some whites.  “They only want to use you,” she said.  I didn’t answer.  What could I say, that it actually was okay?  Her self-righteousness made me want to go right back to Peter’s.

For some reason, I told him Patti’s dream.  He laughed at me.  I heard “superstitious, ignorant blacks” in his laugh.  Maybe not, but like with most things between us, I wasn’t going to try and explain it, what one can see or read in dreams.  I don’t mean that they’re true.  But we couldn’t climb over that laugh to some sort of understanding.  Or didn’t want to try.

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Keep Reading!

• Check out the list of books up for grabs.  There is only one copy of each book available (I am giving away my used copy of each book).
• If you see one you want, comment on this page.  Your comment must include the name of the book you want, and at least a word or two about the country that the book concerns.  First person to comment gets the book.
• I’ll mail the book out to you (at no cost you you whatsoever) if you have an address within the continental United States.  The book will ship out at book rate, which means it might take ten or more days to reach you.
• Keep in mind that most of the time I buy my books used, which means they may be marked up, covers bent, etc.  Book condition will be variable.

Here’s the current round of books up for grabs:

Country Focus: Rwanda

The Antelope’s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide
By Jean Hatzfeld
Translated by Linda Coverdale
Originally published in French as La Stratégie des antilopes by Editions du Seuil, 2007.
My edition: Picador, 2010.
242 pgs.

Genre: Nonfiction
Time period: @2003-2007

World Lit Up Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, with 1 book = turned off and 5 books = lit up)

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 resulted in the slaughter of  roughly 800,000 people, primarily Tutsi, by a Hutu majority intent on purging Rwanda of its Tutsi inhabitants.

In The Antelope’s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide, Jean Hatzfeld catches up with the killers and survivors who he interviewed in his first two books, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak and Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak.  Hatzfeld’s interviewees reside in the town of Nyamata, whose Tutsi survivors employed the  “antelope’s strategy” – running and hiding together as a group and then scattering upon attack so that everyone had an equal chance to escape.  The Hutu killers wielded machetes as their primary weapons, hence the usage of the terms “cut” and “cut down” in reference to the slaughter and mutilations that occurred.

In 2003, President Paul Kagame authorized the conditional release of “average-Joe” killers who had confessed and served at least half of their prison sentences.  International humanitarian organizations conducted mandatory and intense reeducation programs for both killers and survivors, instructing them on how to interact with each other.  So less than ten years after the Hutus had pursued and cut down their Tutsi neighbors, they returned to live among them.

Never has there been a more uneasy but necessary peace.  Survivors are afraid and resentful.  Killers warily withhold aspects of their crimes; tell too much and survivors get too riled up, but telling too little is unacceptable.

These Rwandans exemplify the assertion that peace is not merely the absence of violence.  For many of them, peace demands an almost unbearable compromise and daily sacrifices.  Peace requires the Tutsis to put their country’s needs before their need for retribution, the Hutus to put humility before pride, and for both to sacrifice the emotions of this generation for the safety of the next.  Rwandans have submitted to a bold experiment, the long-term results of which won’t be known for decades: will a forced and heavily monitored peace eventually yield an easy-going tranquility?

Quote:

[Claudine Kayitesi, Tutsi survivor:]

But for me, the chance to become someone is over.  You will never hear answers from the real Claudine in response to your questions – because I’m no longer truly happy in my own skin.  I’ve known the defilement of a bestial existence, I’ve witnessed the ferocity of the hyena and even worse – since animals are never that wicked.  I was called a cockroach, as you know.  I was raped by a savage creature.  I was swept away to that place, out there, which no words of ours can ever match.  But the worst walks on ahead of me.  My heart will always look around suspiciously; I know so well now that destiny can break its simple promises.

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Country Focus: Austria (Öesterreich in German)

Brenner and God
By Wolf Haas
Translated by Annie Janusch
Originally published in German as Brenner und der liebe Gott by Hoffman und Campe Verlag, 2009.
My edition: Melville House, 2012.
215 pgs.

Genre: Fiction/Mystery
Time period: Contemporary

World Lit Up Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, with 1 book = turned off and 5 books = lit up)

Simon Brenner’s new job chauffeuring a toddler should be a relaxing change of pace from the detective work he used to do.  He ferries two-year-old Helena Kressdorf between her mother’s abortion clinic in Vienna, her father’s construction headquarters in Munich, and his cabin in Kitzbühel.

Brenner usually buys gas before picking up Helena, but today he notices the gauge hovering near Empty.  He pulls into the nearest station, pumps the fuel and decides to treat Helena to a chocolate bar.  When he exits the store, Helena is gone.

Who has taken her?  Does the woman who shows up on the the gas station surveillance camera know anything?  How about Sebastian Knoll, the threat-making leader of the right-to-lifers who are attempting to shut down Frau Kressdorf’s abortion clinic?  Or did an opponent of MegaLand, Herr Kressdorf’s controversial new building project that threatens Vienna’s beloved Prater Park, abscond with the girl?

The Kressdorfs promptly fire Brenner for his gross negligence, but his protective and detective instincts kick in…he will do everything he can to find his sweet little passenger, even if it means risking his own life.

That isn’t saying much.  Brenner is a pill-popping (we’re never told what pills he’s taking, but they weigh heavily on his mind and are a convenient excuse for whatever goes wrong in his life), Jimi Hendrix-loving, chronic bumbler.  Too bad Brenner and God’s  goofball humor suffers under Janusch’s awkward translation.  I often felt like Data, the android from Star Trek: The Next Generation who was unable to identify a joke.

Apparently Brenner and God is more enjoyable in its native language.  The German-speaking world loves Simon Brenner; the seven books in the series have spawned three popular movies and have won their author several prizes.  So look out, international mystery lovers – a translation of Haas’s The Bone Man is due out in 2013.  Like fellow Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wolf Haas can legitimately say: I’ll be back.

Quote:

Watch closely: believe it or not, there on the bottom of the cesspit Brenner met the good lord.  Of course it was a surprise, don’t even ask.  Well, for Brenner a surprise, not for the good lord of course.  He smiled benevolently from the other side of the cesspit, which seemed about as far away to Brenner now as the other end of a swimming pool.  But regardless, no doubt who the man was.  The very fact that he glowed.  Iridescent understatement!  You can’t even imagine what a Hello that was for Brenner.  Because first of all, he never really expected to meet the good lord even once – and if he did, then he expected a nice setting, with trumpets, with fanfare, withe candlelight, with menus, with virgins, and, and, and.  But no, Brenner thought – and he had to do a double take, he was so surprised to meet him in this unseemly place – in a cesspit, covered in seven feet of shit, I meet the good lord.

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Country Focus: New Zealand

Once Were Warriors
By Alan Duff
Originally published in New Zealand by Tandem Press, 1990.
My edition: University of Queensland Press,1998.
198 pgs.

Genre: Fiction
Time period: Contemporary

World Lit Up Rating:
(On a scale of 1-5, with 1 book = turned off and 5 books = lit up)

Once Were Warriors introduces the reader to a profoundly dysfunctional Maori family.  The Hekes – Jake, Beth and their brood of six children – subsist primarily on a diet of fear, violence, smokes and beer in their Pine Block slum.

Author Alan Duff ably switches points of view between Beth, Jake, their daughter Grace and son Nig, giving readers different perspectives of life on the bottom rung in New Zealand.  Duff is at his best when channeling Jake, whose character roars off the page with the line, “Man, I juss wake up wanting to punch somefuckin one.”

Filled with unchecked fury, Jake’s character makes an excellent vehicle for the question:  How does a Maori exemplify his or her warrior heritage in modern society?

Through violence.  Jake “the Muss” (short for muscle) Heke sees himself as a throwback, a warrior like the Maori of old.  He’ll enthusiastically attack anyone – a local, a stranger, a gang member and even his wife – if they show him even a hint of disrespect.

Through toughness.  Beth stoically endures her husband’s regular beatings.  She knows firsthand the Maori penchant for “beer and fists,” but also feels a fierce pride for her people.

Through tradition and respect for the old ways.  Fourteen-year-old Boogie, the son Jake despises for not being tough enough, learns tribal customs that give him direction and freedom.

Through becoming an outlaw.  Seventeen-year-old Nig is a prospect for the notorious Maori gang known as the Brown Fists.  He figures that the only occupation that’s available to a brown-skinned Pine Blocker like him is gangbanger.

Or is warriorhood moot?  When fourteen-year-old Grace looks at her people, she’s depressed by what she sees.  The phrase “The Lost Tribe” keeps running through her mind.  To escape, she sits in a tree overlooking the home of a neighboring wealthy white family, the Tramberts, who seem otherworldly in their splendor and kindness toward each other.

Love them or hate them, each of these characters and many of the supporting ones are imbued with a formidable amount of charisma.  Combined with Duff’s  casual, rhythmic and profane vernacular, Once Were Warriors makes for one intense read.

Quote:

No Maori I ever knew ever lusted after having things.  It’s here – Beth patted her heart area – it’s here where we want for ourselves.  Patted her belly.  And here.  Laughing.  Food.  We love our food.  Even when we know it’s bad for us, killing us early even.  We say what the hell, it don’t matter, it was sweet while it lasted.  What they call it?  Laid back, that’ s the term.  We’re a laid-back race.  Cept when we’re drunk.  Then we lay out.  Other people that is.  Lay em out as soon as look atem.  Half our trouble: beer and fists and having passion.  They don’t mix.

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