Critics' choices for Christmas
Gunther, Clare Collins
Clare Collins Gunther Clare Collins Gunther is grants manager for the Arts and Cultural Council for Greater Rochester (New York). It is no easy task to narrow down to three a list of books for...
...Amid images of screaming insurgents and car bombings, if s easy to forget that Iraq has had a long, rich cultural heritage...
...After a period in jail, Al-Azzawi fled with his wife to East Germany...
...By the 1970s, though, the Baathists began to clamp down on dissenters, prohibiting their magazines and literary journals and imprisoning writers...
...Miracle Maker: The Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (BOA Editions, $14.95,140 pp...
...Short fable, meet sprawling epic...
...The setting is India in the early 1950s, a time of considerable turmoil for the newly independent nation...
...The poems in this collection mirror Al-Azzawi's journey from youthful, idealistic protestor to the despair, and ultimately, wise detachment of the exile...
...If Mehra can't yet accept her daughter's love for the dashing Hassan Khan, how can one expect the Indian government to reconcile Muslim-Hindu conflict in Kashmir...
...In his poem "The Opening," Al-Azzawi confesses: I do nothing well except write poems Because I came to sing of mankind and to write its sadness...
...should have been required reading for anyone planning to vote (or run for president) in November...
...Al-Azzawi is among the Arab world's leading experimental poets...
...It is no easy task to narrow down to three a list of books for holiday gift giving...
...Without the financial means to secure the best possible match for her daughter, Mehra must come to terms with diminished expectations...
...Suddenly, the re-educated become the educators, wooing the Little Seamstress with Balzac in an attempt to civilize this enticing little bumpkin...
...Because I'm less comfortable writing about poetry than about prose, I hesitated to include this stunning collection, except that I seem unable to stop myself from recommending it...
...is the story of two teenage city boys torn from their aristocratic families and banished to the countryside for re-education...
...the work they must perform-carrying buckets of excrement up terraced mountain slopes for use as fertilizer-disgusting...
...In a mere 184 pages, Sijie has written a fable that deftly describes the spiritual futility of the Cultural Revolution, and the redemptive power of love, art, and friendship...
...As love blossoms, the boys find respite from their drab surroundings...
...Al-Azzawi's poetry is at once technically beautiful, terrifying, and uplifting...
...Unrest swirls in the Mehra household as Mrs...
...Author Dai Sijie was born in China in 1954 and was himself "re-educated" between 1971 and 1974...
...They have never returned to Iraq...
...Despite the epic nature of this book, and a list of characters and plot twists to rival any Dickens novel, A Suitable Boy is amazingly easy to follow, even for someone, like myself, not well-versed in Indian history and geography...
...Mehra is not yet over the untimely death of her own husband, a mid-level employee of the Railway Service who apparently died of overwork...
...The surroundings are dismal...
...As recently as the 1970s, Kirkuk and Baghdad were home to a flourishing avant-garde movement...
...Set in a remote mountain village during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Anchor Books, $10,184 pp...
...Life takes a turn for the better when they discover a trunkful of banned Western classics in Chinese translation and encounter the daughter of the local tailor...
...The novel, which begins and ends with a wedding, centers around four families: the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis, all Hindu, and the Khans, whose son has stolen Lata's heart, and who are (gasp) Muslim...
...On one level, A Suitable Boy is a book about manners...
...As one of the founders of a group called the Sixties Generation of poets, he openly, and relatively freely, protested against the Iraqi government's antidemocratic stance...
...That he has done so, and continues to do so, is a blessing...
...I chose these because they are the ones I seem to recommend most frequently to friends and colleagues...
...But, in a broader sense, it is really about India itself (former Prime Minister Jawa-harlal Nehru is a cameo) and the tensions of a multiethnic nation working toward self-determination...
...Rupa Mehra attempts to find a suitable husband for her well-educated and independent-minded daughter, Lata...
...which I recommend any chance I get...
...Don't be put off by the page count of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (HarperPerennial, $21,1,474 pp...
...I had to refer only a few times to the four family trees that Seth provides-a tribute to his skill...
...The boys are lonely, tormented by peasants (who constantly remind them that they are now members of the proletariat), and fearful of what will become of their parents...
...Look to the book's introduction for invaluable historical and critical context...
Vol. 131 • December 2004 • No. 21
