The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai

The battle raged. The hornets harried and charged him from every direction. Some tried to slip through the folds of his suit to reach his flesh, others violently flung themselves against his helmet, and he saw their eyes up close--red, as if injected with blood. Their stingers pierced the stitches of his garment and the veil of his helmet, narrowly missing him. But Sidi had always been incredibly dexterous. He was the son of the mountains and the hills, accustomed to its animals and insects. His mind and movements were still sharp, protected from the weight of his years by the nectar produced by his girls. They were watching over him the same way he watched over them.

Sidi is a beekeeper in North Africa who produces some of the region's best honey. His secret is love: he calls his bees "his girls" and watches over them with an intense fervor. But his girls, and his livelihood, are threatened by the arrival of a new predator, the giant Chinese hornet, which can tear an entire hive apart in a matter of minutes. At the same time, Sidi's unnamed country is dealing with a predatory upheaval of its own. Having just cleared the way for its first-ever elections, the polls are led by a group of religious fundamentalists who wear all black. The fundamentalists are intent on winning the election, whether that means providing food and clothing to potential voters, or rounding up apostates in the desert and cutting off their heads. 

I fear there's not much to say about Tunisian author Yamen Manai's The Ardent Swarm. It is no more or less than this obvious metaphor: the fundamentalists in black are the hornets who have arrived with the threat of violence and destruction. (There might be something said, however, about the way the novel analogizes the fundamentalists to a threat from "outside," as something that has been imported from somewhere else--not a homegrown danger, even as it presents one local character who is seduced by the fundamentalists to join them.) It's a nice touch that Sidi, who lives in the hills like something of a wild man, is and remains more or less ignorant of the fundamentalist threat. Sidi and his allies are taken up instead with their solution to the hornet problem: a trip to Japan to carry home Japanese queens. These bees are the only ones to have invented a strategy to defeat the hornets; they surround them in a ball and basically smother, or overheat, them to death. This is "the ardent swarm," and what it suggests is that if the citizens band together, perhaps at the ballot box, they can defeat the threat of a fundamentalist takeover. The novel wisely lets that remain to be seen, though it's curtains for the hornets.

With the addition of Tunisia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 119!

Crazy Genie by Ines Cagnati

I told her about her, of what the grandfather had told me, that before she had me she would laugh and sing day and night, and that later, once she was expecting me, she never wanted to say who my father was, and the grandmother, who is a bad woman, had gone into a fury because she didn't wand bad things like that to happen in her family, which was the most respectable in the village. Then she had moved into the shack under the crazy willows that talk at night, and she had never gone back to her home, and she worked at people's houses to be fed, and they called her Crazy Genie because she never talked, but she wasn't crazy, she simply didn't talk and didn't laugh.

Marie's mother is known in her village as "Crazy Genie." Despite coming from a respected family, she takes on odd jobs to survive: milking cows, threshing wheat, husking corn. She's not really crazy--the word is a tool that the people of the village use to place her beyond their sympathy and understanding. If Genie has fallen in the world, it must be her own fault--as Marie's grandmother, still incensed about Genie's becoming pregnant out of wedlock, believes--or, more likely, there's just something wrong with her that can't be helped. Marie spends much of her childhood trying to make sense of this dynamic, while trying without success to become closer to her mother, whose material sacrifices we can see clearly are meant to protect and care for Marie, but who is extremely sparing with words or gestures of maternal love. The only things that Genie says to Marie for much of the book are commands: "Go home," "Don't bother me," etc., etc.

It's a dangerous world out there for girls, as Marie finds when the town mason, Ernest, is lying in wait for her en route from a job back to her home under the "crazy willows that talk at night." We learn later--spoiler alert--that this Ernest is Marie's father, and that he has raped his own daughter just as he raped Genie many years before. In this way, Crazy Genie becomes a book about the way that male cruelty can have resounding effects well past the moment of violence: Ernest's deeds ripple throughout Genie's life as well as Marie's, and his rape of her, which is presented rather elliptically in the text, is perhaps only a more severe manifestation of the general ruin he has brought upon her. And yet, Ernest is a distant figure from the narrative, appearing only a few times in the shadows. Men, of course, get to walk away. But there are others who collaborate in this violence and ruining: the grandmother, of course, and the townspeople, whose incurious nature prevents them from seeing the injustice that lies behind Genie's tough exterior.

It's easy to see what Crazy Genie has in common with Free Day, the Ines Cagnati book that NYRB translated and published a few years ago. Both are about young girls living in difficult circumstances in the French countryside, trying to scrabble out an existence in the face of disadvantageous circumstances. But they're incredibly different stylistically. Marie's language is much simpler, more systematic, as might fit a more rational and less emotional child who is trying to make sense of the world around her. The simplicity of the language emphasizes, too, the repetitiveness and routine of the life that Marie lives with Genie. It's a style that works, but it's not as good as Free Day, a book where anxiety and dread leak through the language in a much more interesting way. That said, Crazy Genie moves toward a climactic ending that is as difficult and tragic as anything in Free Day, and which elevated the book for me--because I always appreciate a real bummer.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

If I know anything about Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, I know that it contains a scene where Hemingway reassures F. Scott Fitzgerald in the bathroom of a bar that the size of his penis is perfectly ordinary. A Moveable Feast wasn't published until the 1960's, a few years after the death of Hemingway, and perhaps it's best that it much after the death of Fitzgerald, as well, who, as Hemingway depicts him here, was an anxious hypochondriac, tortured by his wife, who probably had enough anxiety to deal with in his life. The penis story is just one of many--there's a long tale about Fitzgerald's hypochondria absolutely derailing a boys' trip to the city of Lyon--and one of the charms of A Moveable Feast is the peek inside the lives of some of the great artists who were trawling around Paris at the time. Fitzgerald gets out better, perhaps, than Gertrude Stein, who's depicted as something of a stubborn battleaxe who hides petty resentments behind a thin veil of principle. That's too harsh: as with Fitzgerald, Hemingway's depiction of Stein is ultimately a loving one, because his depiction of Paris, and those years of his life, is a loving one as well.

But the most interesting depiction of any artist is, I think, the book's depiction of Hemingway himself. Hemingway's writing about a time before he's published any novel at all, and his work is all in short stories, and so the larger-than-life bullfighter and hunter who would be known as "Papa" isn't really present here. The Hemingway of A Moveable Feast is a rather vulnerable creature, battling the uncertainty of writer's block, cultivating a style of simplicity not out of masculine bravado but the need to put down on paper "one true sentence." This Hemingway marvels at his friend Fitzgerald not because his book is so good (when they first meet, he hasn't yet read Gatsby) but because he had the ability to write a novel at all. I thought A Moveable Feast was an interesting counterbalance to the popular image of Hemingway as an icon of machismo. Certainly the vulnerability and the incertitude of Hemingway here involves a lot of self-fashioning, but isn't "self-fashioning" the complaint that people level against Hemingway in the other direction? All of which is to say again that I think those who resent Hemingway for his masculinity haven't read him, or haven't read him closely enough.

It's impossible, I feel, not to respond to what Hemingway can do with a sentence. His sentences seem simple enough, but then, if they're so simple, why are they so moving? I was moved in that way often during A Moveable Feast, though I don't quite agree with those who thinks it's among his greatest works. It has the kind of muddy incoherence of something that feels unfinished, as if it were something he might have knocked into a more recognizable shape, if he'd published it during his own life time. Still, it's remarkable in the way it manages to turn real people--the Steins, the Fitzgeralds, the Pounds, and Papa himself--into Hemingway characters, so vibrant and real even though they are so lightly sketched, touched with a kind of authorial grace.