My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley

I tried the same tack. I read out the dinner choices as Griff had done. I tried to use her newspaper, too, to talk to her. 'Isn't this dreadful?' I said, about a headline, or 'Do you know who that is?' about a picture of a soap star. I read out a Quick Crossword clue and she tried to answer. Or rather--as in a game of charades--she would communicate that she knew the answer, and then it was down to me to make suggestions, and for her to shake her head and frown, or nod and urge me on, until I guessed it right. If she let me know that she was drawing a blank then it was me who did the mimes and the gurning, until she said 'Oh! Oh!' to let me know she'd got it. There were some words she could say. She said 'yellow' for lemon and 'big doors' for wardrobe. She couldn't manage more than three or four words at a time.

Bridget and her mother Helen--Hen--have a relationship at arms' length. They see each other once a year, on Helen's birthday, going to the same ratty tavern, and though Hen seems to resent that she is not more included in her daughter's life, any attempt at change in a way that might bring them closer leads to more misunderstanding, more resentment. As Bridget's boyfriend John observes--when Hen finally meets him after years and years--Bridget's mother seems to have a preconceived notion about how any interaction ought to go, and the way it actually goes fails to reach her perception. In the meantime, she is desperately lonely, throwing herself into clubs and cruises and activities, searching for a man who will could become her third husband, but without the capacity for change or accommodation that such love would require.

My Phantoms is a book that's so small in conception, so confined to the everyday miseries of mothering and daughtering that you find yourself wondering if, despite the protagonist not sharing a name with author Gwendoline Riley, you're reading some of that autofiction you keep hearing is everywhere these days. But what it does, it does well: Riley captures exactly the feelings of stagnation and standoffishness that characterize only familial relationships. The way in which the need for change is glaringly obvious, but the person in front of you is too familiar for either of you to change--you know each other too well, which is why you don't know each other at all. At times I found it a little too small, feeling that, even though Hen is quite specifically evoked and alive-seeming, the familiarity of the narrative made it an odd subject for a novel.

In the novel's final movement, Hen develops a brain tumor. (This does provide a little melodrama, but then again, that's an ordinary kind of story, too: such medical ends are awaiting all of us.) In her diminished form, unable to speak coherently, Hen is not so different than she always was. What's different is that the possibility of change, of drawing closer or resolving the small barriers of family bitterness, has been precluded. Hen, spoiler alert, dies, but in a way her death is prefigured by the death of these possibilities. In the end, Bridget understands her mother, pities her, but never reaches her.

Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul

As he had been talking to Jane and Roche, as they had let him run on, he had begun to feel unsupported by his words, and then separate from his words; and he had a vision of darkness, of the world lost forever, and his own life ending on that bit of wasteland. After they had gone he allowed himself to sink into that darkness, keeping the memory of the afternoon close: the memory of Jane who, by her presence, manner, and talk, had suggested that darkness reserved for himself alone. Yet at the same time, in his fantasy, she washed away the darkness; he carried the picture of her standing outside the hut on the bare, bright earth, nervous, tremulous in her flared trousers.

Peter Roche is a South African, come to this unnamed island in the Caribbean to distance himself from political imprisonment and torture in his native country. Ostensibly, he has come to assist with various left-wing political projects, but the job he's taken is with a firm connected to global resource extractors. His girlfriend, Jane, is an American with little in the way of a political worldview; the Caribbean seems to be a kind of adventure for her, but one that has quickly soured, along with their relationship. Roche introduces Jane to Jimmy Ahmed, a local activist who has recently returned home (or been kicked out of) England, and who is trying to build an agricultural commune. Though Roche puts little stock in rumors, some say the commune is a front for guerrillas who threaten the island's political stability.

When Roche and Jane leave Jimmy's compound, he sits down and begins to write a letter: "Ever since I arrived here I have been hearing about the man they call Jimmy." One quickly realizes that what he's doing is writing as if he is Jane, describing himself in admiring and enigmatic terms. It's one of those brilliant touches that only Naipaul, who wrote about the inferiority complex of the post-colonial subject, could write. The island of Guerrillas, which is specifically not, but is inspired by, Naipaul's Trinidad, is a minor and disordered place. His long descriptions of the countryside focus on the accumulation of garbage, the desolation of wildfires. Even its revolutionaries are degenerate: Jimmy names his commune Thrushcross Grange, as if to borrow a little English respectability from Wuthering Heights, but he's sexually abusing the wayward young boys who come to work the land.

Guerrillas is a strangely oblique book. I don't know if I quite understood it. The instability, when it does come, happens off screen, while the white characters wait it out in their houses among the wealthier residents on the ridge outside of town. Though men like Jimmy and Roche should, by light of their fame, be important actors in these events, Naipaul makes it clear that they are mostly at the mercy of powerful figures never seen, some of the island, but also including the American bauxite extractors who arrive on the island carrying their stashes of explicit pornography. Guerrillas is a novel of waiting, of simmering tensions, until it finally does explode at the very end, in an act of sexual violence so grotesque and unpleasant (based on the real life murder conviction of Trinidadian activist Michael X) it's hard to think about the book as containing anything else.

When he wanted to, Naipaul could have a light touch; books like Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas cover similar themes with a lot of humor and irony. But Guerrillas is a dark, mean book, which makes you wonder what anyone could ever find funny about the state of the post-colonial world. It might be said that Guerrillas better reflects the violent dysfunctions of that world, but it's no mystery why it doesn't make anybody's best-of lists.

Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand by Gioconda Belli

"If we hadn't eaten the fruit," she said, looking Adam in the eye, "I would never have tasted a fig, or an oyster. I wouldn't have seen the Phoenix rise form its ashes. I wouldn't have known night. I wouldn't have learned that I feel alone when you leave me, and I wouldn't have felt how my body--so cold, even in the heart of the fire--filled with warmth when I heard you calling me. I would have gone on seeing you naked without being disturbed. I would never have known how much I like it when like a fish you slip inside me to invent the ocean."

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Well, maybe you've heard that part of the story. On the sixth day he made man, and then he made woman--although maybe that's pretty well-worn territory, too. But what that story doesn't tell you is that Adam and Eve had not only sons, but daughters, written out of the Creation story in favor of their twin brothers Cain and Abel. Gioconda Belli's Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand is a retelling of the Adam and Eve story with a feminist slant, a version of Genesis in which the woman is responsible for the Fall, but for the regeneration, too, of mankind.

Belli's God, called Elokim, is distant and mercurial, rarely speaking to his creations directly. Instead, he leaves it up to the Serpent to interpret his will for him. The Serpent, who describes herself as a kind of Eve to Elokim's Adam--his long-suffering companion--describes a God that barely understands his own motivations in making humankind, a God who suffers from a great loneliness but also piques of stubborn jealousy. From speaking to the Serpent, and through her own visions, Eve comes to understand that it is Elokim's will that, after the fall, humankind makes its way back to the state of grace from which it was expelled. In her role as mother, Eve shares with Elokim a capacity for creation, a capacity which evokes awe and jealousy from Adam, and which brings forth the lineage of humankind Belli calls history. What Eve comes to understand through her difficult post-Eden life is that the very gifts for which she forsook Eden by eating the apple will be the gifts that lead her, and by extension us, back to grace: knowledge and freedom. For Milton, the Fall was the origin of all the bad things in the world, but for Belli, the Fall ushers it its own resolution and points toward a possible world in which human beings have knowledge and freedom as well as peace and prosperity.

In the meantime, Belli's Adam and Eve must make their way together in a world for which neither has any guidance. Adam, used to animals eating from the palm of his hand, is nearly mauled to death by a bear. Pregnant Eve, having no idea what awaits her, imagines monsters bursting from her exploded body. When night falls for the first time, neither knows whether the sun will return. When winter comes, there is no guarantee that spring arrive again. Together they face the world's first ethical quandaries--Adam is driven to kill and cook meat to ensure his partner's survival; Eve finds it wrong.

The greatest change Belli makes to the story of Genesis is probably the introduction of the two daughters. Cain and Abel are both twins: Cain to the beautiful Luluwa, Abel to the homely Aklia. Elokim commands Adam and Eve to mate Cain with Aklia and Abel to Luluwa, which evokes Cain's anger. The first murder, then, is not about a sacrifice--or not only--but about Cain's jealousy and possessiveness toward a woman he considers his property. Toxic masculinity is baked into the very beginning of the human world. (There is an essentialism to Belli's ideas about gender that seems a little outre today.) Luluwa follows Cain to Nod and is written out of history, but Aklia's fate is stranger: she is drawn to the apes of the forest and follows them, becoming the first ancestor in human evolution. It's a clever way of uniting myth and modern knowledge, but it's also a representation of Belli's circular model of creation: Eve turns out to be the last human, not the first, the end stage toward which all of Aklia's descendants move.

With the addition of Nicaragua, my "countries read" list is now up to 72!

This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

That is a Minke now different from all his friends, different from everybody else--his situation was exposed in court, wasn't it? While the others weren't? And the judge and prosecutor didn't expose themselves either?

What I was feeling then, such very depressed feelings, my ancestors called nelangsa--feeling completely alone, still living among one's fellows but no longer the same; the heat of the sun is borne by all, but the heat in one's heart is borne alone. The only way to obtain relief was communion with the hearts of those of a similar fate, similar values, similar ties, with the same burdens: Nyay Ontosoroh, Annelies, Jean Marais, Darsam.

Minke is the only fully Native student in his class at a prestigious school in Jakarta. The Indonesia in which Minke lives is one governed by strict racial hierarchies: at the top, the "Pure" Dutch and other Europeans, then the Indos, who are of mixed race, and Natives like Minke at the bottom. Still, being at the school is a rare honor, and Minke is an apt student. The school inculcates in him a respect for Europeans and their civilization; his first crush is on the Netherlands' Princess Wilhelmina. But Minke's life is transformed when he makes the acquaintance of Annelies Mellema, an Indo girl of otherworldly beauty, and her mother, Nyai Ontosoroh. "Nyai" is a title given to the Native concubines of European men, but Nyai is more than a kept woman: she has kept her rich master's business going while his brain turns to oatmeal, thanks to the syphilis he's contracted from a nearby brothel.

Everyone in This Earth of Mankind wants to teach Minke. There are his teachers at school, mostly racists, but also a Dutch radical named Madga Peters who recognizes the potential in Minke. There's his father, a powerful "bupati" in the service of the Dutch, and his traditionalist mother. There are a pair of Dutch girls with reformist ideas who strike up a correspondence with Minke, and many other "Pures" besides. But it is the elegant and headstrong Nyai Ontosoroh who, more than anyone else, becomes Minke's instructor. He is surprised to find that, despite any formal education, she has a worldly wisdom that can only be gained through hard experience, and it is through her care that Minke begins to understand for the first time the truth about the relationship between the "Dutch Indies" and their rapacious colonizers.

I came to understand the strange circumstances of the Mellema family as a kind of metonym for that relationship. Syphilitic Herman Mellema has never legally wed his Nyai, nor legally recognized his daughter Annelies or her brother Robert. Whereas Annelies rejects her father and embraces her mother, renouncing her European blood, Robert runs the other direction, despising his Nativeness and even plotting the death of Minke, whom he sees as a Native interloper after his inheritance. In this way the two siblings represent different approaches to the psychic problem of being mixed-race, running towards binaries because there is no legal or social model for how to remain in that middle space. When Herman's murdered body is found at the brothel, suspicion falls on Annelies, Minke, and Nyai Ontosoroh. They are innocent, of course, but the story tells itself: the abandoned colonial child who takes revenge on the absent European father. Europe keeps its reputation intact by being selective about whom and what it claims as its heirs. And it can always change its mind: the climax of the book comes when Herman Mellema's legitimate son, halfway around the world in the Netherlands, asserts a legal right over Annelies' guardianship and calls her away to a country she's never visited.

In doing so, Annelies is torn from the protection of her mother and from Minke, whom she has recently married. The case causes a nationwide scandal--for one, it angers the indigenous Javanese Muslims by declaring that the pair's marriage has no legal standing--and gives Minke an opportunity to exercise the voice he has been building as a popular journalist. This late section of the novel pushes into a realm that is perhaps too pointedly political. By contrast, the earliest parts of the novel, when Minke is still a humble student torn between devotions to his European teachers and his native country, often crackle with a low-level violence. I loved, for instance, Minke's sole conversation with Robert Mellema, in which the resentful Indo pretends to befriend Minke, inviting him to go hunting. Though they each keep a pretense of formality, both characters seem to understand that what Robert really intends is to wreak some violence upon Minke, or even kill him. This Earth of Mankind is full of such moments, where the truth of colonial violence threatens to break through the restraints of politesse that keep it bound.

Toer wrote This Earth of Mankind while in prison under the dictatorship of Suharto; this and three other novels make up the Buru Quartet, named for the prison. Though Minke is apparently based on the life of Indonesian journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo, it's not hard to see a vision of Toer's self in the young writer becoming disillusioned with the structure of a corrupt state, who is compelled to use his voice. The most lasting image of the novel, though, might be that of tender, fragile Annelies, being whisked away to her destruction by forces that are as all-powerful as they are capricious.

With the addition of Indonesia, my "countries read" list is up to 71!

A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

Up at her window, Mrs. Bracey sat in judgment. Guilt she saw, treachery and deceit and self-indulgence. She did not see, as God might have expected to, their sensations of shame and horror, their compulsion towards one another, for which they dearly paid, nor in what danger they so helplessly stood, now, in middle-age, not in any safe harbour, but thrust out to sea with none of the brave equipment of youth to buoy them up, no romance, no delight.

Newby is one of those coastal resort towns that dies out in the winter. A "New Town" some distance inland boasts a more stable population, but down at the harbor only a few remain, locked in their unchanging lives: biding their time in the closed shops, the same old crew at the local pub. Lily Wilson lingers idly in the apartment above the Waxworks, wishing someone would come to whisk her off her feet. Beth Cazabon goes on writing her novels, oblivious to the troubles of her daughters, teenage Prudence and young Stevie. But some things do change: Beth's husband, the town doctor Robert, strikes up a tempestuous affair with their neighbor, and Beth's friend, the beautiful divorcee Tory Foyle. Until now, the two have detested each other, but strong passions transform into other strong passions. Mrs. Bracey, the elderly gossip, is dying, but she wants to be lifted to the upper room of her house by her twin daughters before she goes, to see better what's going on. And into this turmoil, which has the outward look of stasis, even paralysis, walks in Bertram Foyle, an elderly but charismatic man determined to capture the harbor in a painting.

The affair between Tory and Robert might be described as the novel's "A-story." The bitter, resentful Prudence picks up on it immediately, as does Mrs. Bracey in her tower, but Robert's wife Beth remains oblivious, perhaps because she lives too much in her books. It may be, too, that she is simply a kinder person than her cynical husband or her desperate friend, that she sees what she wants or needs to see and no more. A View of the Harbour is, at heart, about what is visible to whom, and why. Only Bertram seems to really see all the way through the people of Newby, perhaps with the clarity of a stranger. But he's strangely unable to put what he sees on the canvas: his paintings turn out muddy, unsatisfactory. On another level, A View of the Harbour is about the artist's relationship to the world around them. How perceptive do you need to be? Is art a kind of noticing--or is it more accurately, like Beth's novels, a way of ignoring the world?

The life of Newby, as described by Elizabeth Taylor--not that one--is rich, subtle and comic, with intense emotions that lie under the surface and are never really, as in a pulpier novel, let boil up and over. The expected showdown, for example, between Beth and Tory never comes. But the novel suffers, I think, in comparison to the other book of Taylor's I read, Angel. There's no one as supremely weird here as Angel, the vain but talentless writer. Instead, the human qualities are all doled out piece by piece, into several characters. As a result, A View of the Harbour seems more true to life, less grotesque, but also less interesting.

The Park and the People by Roy Rosenzwieg and Elizabeth Blackmar

On October 13, 1857, just two weeks after the park dwellers left their homes, the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park offered prizes of four hundred to two thousand dollars for the four best proposals for "laying out the park." This notice for the first important landscape design competition in the United States elicited thirty-three varied proposals, which revealed the influence of English and continental traditions of landscape design as well as more eclectic vernacular ideas about what would make this public place appealing. But when the commissioners opened the proposals six months later, they found one curious entry. Plan 2 by an anonymous contestant was nothing but a pyramid.

I love Central Park. For a while, I worked basically on its doorstep: two short blocks after work and I was at the beautiful Onassis reservoir. I'm a little farther away now, but a short subway ride in the afternoon takes me to one of many favorite spots: the Loch, a creek of still green water running through the North Woods, or the Ramble, a bird-filled jumble of looping paths designed to let you get lost. These are my spots, but what I've always loved about the park is how it is many things to many people. Someone else might gravitate toward the Great Lawn, or the Sheep Meadow, or the Harlem Meer, or the Bethesda Fountain, or the Nature Sanctuary, or one of the tennis courts of ballfields, or Belvedere Castle or Delacorte Theater, or the zoo, or one of the two world-class museums fit snugly inside of it: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. So varied is the immense park that it's almost a surprise to learn just how contested a space it has been since it's very conception, as historians Roy Rosenzwieg and Elizabeth Blackmar show in their history of Central Park, The Park and the People.

Rosenzwieg and Blackmar begin their history with the contentious political battle over the park's location and design. Central Park was very nearly not central at all: early politicos wanted a spot on the East River known as Jones Wood for the city's first park, going so far as snatching it from its wealthy owners by the force of legislative decree, but years of jockeying led to the abandonment of the Jones Wood site in favor of a truly "central" park, then located far uptown from the city center. The design contest that led to the selection of Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's Greensward plan is the stuff of legend, though Rosenzwieg and Blackmar note that Olmsted had been selected as the park's director before the contest had even begun, putting his thumb on the scale somewhat. Still, Olmsted was a young unknown at the time, and with the development of Central Park, he and his architect partner Vaux basically invented the field of landscape architecture.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the historians note, Olmsted's historical reputation has grown tremendously. And to be fair, much of what is so stunning about the park can be traced back to its original design: when walking through the Ramble, you are walking more or less through the park as it was first design, and the section first opened to the public, tracing history in a literal way. But the historians show how the contested nature of the park space can be traced back even to the rifts between Olmsted and Vaux. Olmsted put more pride in his position as the park's managing director than he did as its designer, and believed that a firm hand was needed in managing the public's use of the park, instituting a number of draconian rules, including a prohibition on walking on the park's grass. Vaux, for his part, had a more generous opinion of the public, and believed that a beautiful space like Central Park would inspire New Yorkers to be the most elevated versions of themselves.

It would be a little too neat to say that Olmsted was the avatar of future park stewards who felt it was their duty to defend the rustic nature of the park against the creep of recreational uses, or that Vaux was the avatar of those who imagined a changing park that reflected the value of public opinion. Both men rejected outright those designs that would turn the park into a popular "pleasure garden," a kind of pre-amusement park that was popular at the time. But Vaux's bohemian spirit seems to me in keeping with the best elements of Central Park, and it is undeniably true, though it really goes unsaid in the book, that Vaux doesn't get nearly enough credit for his contributions to the park's design: the Greensward plan is drawn in Vaux's hand after all, not Olmsted's. Even in his own era Vaux complained to Olmsted time and again that he wasn't being given the credit he deserved, and he seems to have been right.

In any case, both men (and especially Olmsted) remained in official positions at the park for most of the latter 19th century, defending their control, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, against the city's powerful Tammany Hall machine. In the 20th century, Olmsted's strong hand would be rivalled by Robert Moses, who opened up the park to playground and car traffic, and who ruled the city's parks department with an iron fist. In between Olmsted and Moses, the park remained in states of waxing and waning, of being well-funded and well-maintained, then underfunded and in disrepair. In either state, the park's use was always contested: should it host concerts? The Puerto Rican day parade? Political demonstrations? Presidential speeches? Museums? Restaurants? Ice skating and baseball? Horse-drawn carriages? Automobiles? And as Rosenzwieg and Blackmar show, these battles often emerged from larger, competing ideas of what the city should do and be. Even in its very beginning, one sees the specter of American political upheaval in the clearing out of poor New Yorkers (especially the black community of Seneca Village, only belatedly memorialized in the park) to build it.

The Park and the People was written in 1992. When it ends, the boathouse at Harlem Meer is still in disrepair. A shady businessman named Donald Trump has just swooped in to renovate the Wollman Rink. (Though the book mentions the Central Park jogger rape case, no mention is made of Trump's famous "Bring Back the Death Penalty" ad.) The historians wonder what the increasing prevalence of private partnerships for park maintenance will do to the park as a place for all people. (Yeah, how did the privatization push of the 80's and 90's work out for us?) The Central Park Conservancy is barely a decade old. How nice it would be to have an updated version that would trace the last thirty years of Central Park, which doubtless lies at the center of all our conflicts about gentrification and urban renewal. Of course, we might learn only what has always been true: that Central Park is the heart of New York City, for good and bad.

Mr. Beethoven by Paul Griffiths

We have come this far largely in silence. We have played the game. We have done our part. But we cannot go on keeping quiet when you continue to withhold what we most want to know, which is not the facts of the matter but the fiction. Is Beethoven really stalling? If so, why? Or has he in fact (as it were) almost finished the score? Or has he hit a block? Most of all, what is the supposed subject of this supposed oratorio? You must know. We have been patient long enough. Over to you. Get on with it.

Suppose that Beethoven did not die in 1827 but lived a few more years. And suppose that he came to the United States, where he spent six months in the vicinity of Boston, writing a brand new oratorio at the bequest of the Haydn and Handel Choral Society. Unable to speak with his benefactors--he's deaf, after all, in this timeline, too--he is introduced to a woman named Thankful, who teaches him the style of sign language that emerged in the 19th century on Martha's Vineyard. This is the story of Paul Griffiths' Mr. Beethoven, another of those novels that enters upon the life of a real historical person (feels like I've read a million of these this year, because I love them) but one that does it with more self-consciousness than most. Griffiths makes the artifice as much the subject of the novel as Beethoven himself, laying out the sources he draws from, building up scenes and then revising them, fretting over whether questions of what might really have been.

One of the book's central ironies, I think, is this: Mr. Beethoven is a novel about interpolation, the transmutation of historical fact into historical fiction. Griffiths, or the narrator who takes his place, broadcasts certain scruples about precision and accuracy. All of Beethoven's dialogue, for example, is taken directly from his real-life letters. But after introducing Thankful, who literally interpolates Beethoven's language by reporting his words in English, she becomes hidden, occluded: watch Beethoven, for example, carry on a flirtatious conversation with a widow. The dialogue looks like dialogue, and we forget that it's all really Thankful, expressing in sign language what Ms. Hill says to Beethoven, and in English (funnily, a language Beethoven does not speak) what Beethoven says to Ms. Hill. In this way, Mr. Beethoven is sort of a funny meditation on the mediating forces, sometimes visible and sometimes not, that lie between fact and interpretation.

All that is very interesting. But often I felt, as the imagined reader feels in the quoted passage above, that I wanted to know "not the facts of the matter but the fiction." The novel opens with incredible slowness, futzing around for a while with questions of sourcing and historical accuracy, while Beethoven the character does little more than sit in empty rooms, not writing an oratorio. Much more interesting, I thought, was the later novel, which has its metafictional tricks--a chapter made up of a single long sentence, for example--but which has a better story, the story of the composition and performance of the fictional oratorio, which is based on the Biblical story of Job.

I especially liked a scene, apparently based on a real life event, in which a Massachusett Indian elder is invited to observe the rehearsals for Beethoven's oratorio, but shows an interest only in the pipe organ, which she takes, quite correctly, to be a holy object in which spirits, after a fashion, live. I also liked the way that Griffiths fashions a very literal artistic lineage between the old world classicism of Beethoven and the art of the new world: an interview of Beethoven by a young Walt Whitman is very funny, and it is suggested that a young Emily Dickinson is in attendance for the oratorio's premiere, and that perhaps she even takes from its simple, honed language inspiration for her adult poetry. (The oratorio itself, printed in full, might be the novel's most inspired production.)

In the end, I thought Mr. Beethoven was more interesting than engaging. Maybe I'm just one of those impatient readers who wants the fiction, and not to be reminded of the facts.

Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga

"Gloriosa," said Imaculee, "do you think it's already time for you to give us one of your politician-type speeches? Like we were at a rally? Women's advancement, well let's talk about that! The reason most of us are here is for our family's advancement, not for our future but that of the clan. We were already fine merchandise, since nearly all of us are daughters of rich and powerful people, daughters of parents who know how to trade us for the highest price, and a diploma will inflate our worth even more. I know that a lot of girls here enjoy this game--it's the only game in town, after all--and it's even the source of their pride. But I no longer want to be a part of this marketplace."

"Just listen to her," jeered Gloriosa, "she's talking like a white girl in the movies, or in those books the French teacher makes us read. Where would you be, Imaculee, without your father and his money? Do you think a woman can survive in Rwanda without her family, first her father's then her husband's? You've just come from the gorillas. I suggest you go back there."

"Ah, good advice," said Immaculee. "Maybe I will."

Our Lady of the Nile is the most prestigious lycee in all of Rwanda. Perched high on a mountain, not far from the source of the Nile river, the lycee trains young Rwandan women--mostly Hutu, but with a couple Tutsi thrown in for quota purposes--to speak French, cultivate good manners, and be ashamed of the sin of menstruation. The students there are the daughters of some of the country's most prominent politicians and businessmen, and their education will contribute to making them marriageable. Inside the lycee, the girls do what girls do, sneaking off to ride their boyfriends' motorcycles, cutting pictures of the Beatles out of magazines, and getting in petty squabbles. But the lycee is not immune to the political instability emerging outside its doors. One girl in particular, a Hutu named Gloriosa, rules over the school's social scene by parroting the anti-Tutsi language that will soon lead to genocide.

Our Lady of the Nile is a kind of microcosm of Rwandan life: Hutu and Tutsi, living uneasily together, under the watchful eye of teachers and nuns, some Rwandan, but others white French or Belgian. When Queen Fabiola of Belgium comes to visit, the school puts on a great show, but no one is sure exactly how attentive they're supposed to be to the queen, who, after all, is no longer part of the new republic's political order. Our Lady of the Nile shows the cultural pressure white colonizers still have on the Rwandan imagination: Veronica, one of the school's two Tutsi girls, is summoned by a "crazy" Frenchman named Fontenaille, who believes her to be the reincarnation of an Egyptian queen. (Though the Hutus and Tutsis are ethnically very similar, European colonizers apparently spread the myth that the Tutsi are "Cushite" people with roots in northern Africa; these myths seem to have played a vital role in the cultural tensions that exploded in the 1990's.) But it's the other Tutsi girl, Virginia, who connects by dreams with the ancient African queen whose bones the Frenchman has disturbed--a touch of spiritual in an otherwise realist novel.

At first, Gloriosa's needling words seem to be without importance, the cruelty of a teenage girl, limited to verbal insults and humiliation. But as the book progresses, Gloriosa becomes more bold, breaking the icon of the Virgin Mary that gives the school its name and blaming it on Tutsi gangs. Her stories become larger and larger in scope, until they are taken up by the national press, and unleash a wave of anti-Tutsi violence that will not leave the school unscathed. What might be most shocking about Gloriosa is that at no point does she ever have the realization that things have gone too far, the violence is what she wants--she really does want to kill her schoolmates. While Our Lady of the Nile is a novel about a specific place, with a specific and unique history of ethnic bloodshed, there's something universally recognizable in it about the way that bullying and boasting escape the confines of sarcasm and irony to become true violence.

Mukasonga is one of those names being fashionably thrown out for the Nobel Prize in Literature; by tomorrow morning that will either look prescient or dated. But it's easy to see what makes her one of the most celebrated voices in modern African fiction: Our Lady of the Nile has elements of humor, magical realism, and the picaresque; at times it has fablelike qualities and at other times it seems frighteningly naturalistic. Ultimately, in the lycee, Mukasonga finds (what I can only assume is) a perfect symbol of a country stuck in a vise, where no one notices the screws turning until it's too late.

I miscounted before, but with the addition of Rwanda, my "countries read" list is up to 70!

A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley

What is the point, any point, in a return?

My filled days, he thinks ironically, my filled days. With walks along the front, a shambles to the pier and along it to the point where winds knot green swirl of sea and gull and fish and some crumbling other man casting his lines. Back to the figged park and the bottle-lollied picnic kiosk, and an hour or so beneath broad leaves pecking at book or paper. Barney Sweetman. The bastard, he says. And Buckmaster. Buckmaster and Sweetman. Knighted for milking God's earth. Knighted for handling the sugar strikes. Knighted for owning more acres of sweet grass in the north than any man had right to control. But not knighted for that noon at Mandarana--how the names come back now!--the virtue guards with rifles kicking their unwilling horses up the runty slopes while the natives scuttled like roos from bush to bush until the high plateau. Or after. The down-curve through hot air and the body whizzing.

Former schoolmaster Tom Dorahy is returning to The Taws, the town in Queensland, Australia he left twenty years ago. Dorahy left town because of an act of terrible violence: a vigilante group slaughtered six Aborigines they suspected of pilfering from their farms. A seventh, cornered by the men, threw herself from a cliffside, clutching her baby, who, unlike the mother, miraculously survived the fall. A sick old man was gunned down at the home of a white farmer trying to protect him; the farmer is tied to the dead body for a week, and loses a leg from a gangrenous infection. The men who committed acts never faced justice; in fact, they've prospered, becoming knights and elected officials. But Dorahy is intent on using the town's homecoming to expose them at last.

A Kindness Cup is a novel about colonial violence and willful ignorance. Everywhere Dorahy goes, irritated locals ask him, why not let it go? It was so long ago. But of course, this is how colonial violence works; if you escape justice in the aftermath--and of course you do--time springs up to indemnify you, and the murdered natives, those still suffering from expulsion and grief, are relegated behind the barriers of history. Dorahy has no strategy, as with the trial many years ago, whose scenes pepper the novel, he can't keep himself from exclaiming the truth. In this way he acts as a kind of guilty conscience, the heart battering from beneath the floorboards. Dorahy's forthrightness gathers allies, all mostly unwilling, like a local news editor. On the other hand, those who committed violence in the past prove all too willing to commit violence in order to keep the story from coming to light.

Astley is a strange writer. I don't know that I was prepared for The Acolyte, which I read last year. Her style is very elliptical, and her writing at times has that quality (which she shares with my Australian fave Patrick White) where you're not sure whether it's amazing prose or terrible prose. Maybe I just knew what I was getting into, but I thought that The Kindness Cup was a better use of that strangeness. The scenes of violence stand out vividly, though I felt at times that they overshadowed the "story proper" of Dorahy's return. And I wonder if it might have made better use of the victimized Aborigines, who are largely mute. (There's something unintentional about the way that Konawha, the suicide, is placed beyond the narrative by her death, while the white farmer Lunt remains to suffer for our sympathy.) Still, A Kindness Cup does with a cutting sharpness what it sets out to do: slice through the myths of Australian pioneerdom to show how, like all settler colonial myths, they are predicated on murder and enforced silence.