by Nancy Pearl
Adam Langer’s tale of Manhattan real estate, Ellington Boulevard: A Novel in A-Flat
Phillip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan and (as editor) Writing New York: A Literary Anthology, which includes both poetry and prose (fiction and nonfiction) about the city, written by a deliriously diverse mix of writers, including Sara Teasdale, Edgar Allan Poe, Langston Hughes, Jane Jacobs, William Burroughs, Dawn Powell, Lincoln Steffens, and Oscar Hijuelos. It’s much too bulky a tome to carry around with you, but perfect for getting into the spirit of Manhattan before you go.
Cheryl Mendelson’s Morningside Heights and sequels
Jan Morris’s Manhattan ’45
New York Stories: Landmark Writing from Four Decades of New York Magazine
The New York Times Book of New York: 549 Stories of the People, the Events, and the Life of the City—Past and Present
Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, with a fabulous assortment of illustrations by Markley Boyer, is too big to carry around, sadly, but is so interesting to browse through at home.
Russell Shorto’s detailed The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
NEWFOUNDLAND
I can’t imagine taking a trip to Newfoundland without reading
Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and Howard Norman’s The Bird Artist; both grace my own bookshelves. Try the books that follow as well.
Lisa Moore’s February is a fabulous novel that tells—in bewitchingly beautiful prose—the story of a woman left widowed by the historically violent storm on February 14, 1982, that killed all eighty-four crew members of the oil rig Ocean Ranger. Another of her novels set in Newfoundland is Alligator.
And these works of nonfiction:
All the time I was reading Robert Finch’s The Iambics of Newfoundland: Notes from an Unknown Shore I kept wishing I could have followed in Finch’s footsteps as he made his way—over a number of years—across the landscape of one of Canada’s most unusual provinces.What a lovely tribute to the flora and fauna (two-and four-legged), history, and culture of Newfoundland.
Farley Mowat is one of Canada’s best-known writers and conservationists. His books range from humorous (The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, which is set on the prairies of Saskatchewan) to more serious titles like his memoir Bay of Spirits, which not only describes how he met his wife, Claire, while traveling on a tramp steamer around the coast of Newfoundland, but also provides a picture of the people who live and work in the (much depleted) fishing industry. A good companion read for this book is Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.
NEWS FROM N’ORLEANS
Many, but not all, of the newer books on the city have to do with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Here are my favorites.
Tim Gautreaux takes us back to New Orleans in the years following World War I in The Missing, a novel I discovered at a time when I was despairing about ever finding anything good to read again. I find it odd but accurate to describe Gautreaux’s writing style as both spare and lyrical. But it is. When three-year-old Lily is kidnapped in the New Orleans department store where Sam Simoneaux works as an in-house detective, he makes it his mission to locate her. Much of the novel takes place on a riverboat—a four-deck, 300-foot stern-wheeler where Lily’s parents work as musicians. The novel moves as you might imagine the Mississippi itself does, slow, stately, and steady.You may have to consciously slow down to read it (I did)—much as you do with a nineteenth-century novel.All of our senses—smell, taste, sight, and sound—are engaged as we as we slowly turn the pages.
Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun is a biography-as-novel of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a New Orleans contractor born in Syria, who decides to send his wife and children out of the city as Hurricane Katrina approaches, but chooses to stay behind himself and ride out the storm. As a result of that decision, he’s caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare growing out of the flaws in crisis management and the domestic war on terror.
Other excellent choices include these:
Amanda Boyden’s Babylon Rolling, featuring a large cast of exquisitely drawn characters who face up to the imminent threat of Hurricane Ivan in 2004.
In Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans Dan Baum, a writer for The New Yorker, brackets his story of the city and its residents by two classic storms: Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Katrina in 2005. Through Baum’s descriptions, the people he profiles and their lives become intensely important to us.
An excellently readable nonfiction account of Katrina—putting it into historical context—is Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
NIAGARA FALLS
Even though it’s been done nearly to death, tourist-wise, Niagara Falls is still pretty spectacular, especially if you can approach it from the Canadian side. To get a taste for the place, try these books.
Nonfiction
Pierre Berton’s Niagara: A History of the Falls
Catherine Gildiner’s Too Close to the Falls: A Memoir
Ginger Strand’s Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies
Fiction
Lauren Belfer’s City of Light
Cathy Marie Buchanan’s The Day the Falls Stood Still
Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels
Joyce Carol Oates’s The Falls
Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool
NIGERIA
Any story set in Nigeria must contend with the country’s inherently dramatic setting: it’s a larger-than-life nation with a long and complex history, and myriad languages and cultures.
I would suggest beginning your reading with a few books by Chinua Achebe, especially his best known novel, Things Fall Apart. Originally published in 1958, it provides one of the best pictures of colonial Africa ever written. But also check out Anthills of the Savannah, which describes a country in post-colonial Africa clearly based on Achebe’s native Nigeria. The Education of a British-Protected Child is filled with thought-provoking essays, including one on racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, we are transported into the life of privileged teenager Kambili, as she and her older brother, JaJa, try to survive a violent religious-fanatic father inside their home and the dangerous sociopolitical situation engulfing the country. Kambili is a character who will remain with you long after the last page of this beautiful and heartrending novel is turned. Adichie is also the author of the novel Half of a Yellow Sun and The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of stories that are set in both the United States and her still politically volatile homeland.
Adimchinma Ibe’s Treachery in the Yard: A Nigerian Thriller introduces Detective Peterside to readers, and undoubtedly we’ll see much more of him in the years to come.
I’ve concluded that many of the best novels set in contemporary Nigeria by native Nigerian writers can best be described as being vivid (sometimes painfully so) and violent (also sometimes painfully so); two that I have not been able to forget (and probably never will) are Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel.
Other books set in Nigeria include I Do Not Come to You by Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, a humorous yet thought-provoking novel about Internet scammers in Nigeria; and Sefi Atta’s dynamic first novel, Everything Good Will Come, a bitingly funny take on two women’s attempts to figure out their roles in post-colonial Lagos.
An important part of the heart-tugging (but not sentimental) and unforgettable novel Little Bee by Chris Cleave is set in Nigeria. It’s the story of the relationship between an older British woman and a young Nigerian girl whom she and her husband meet on a beach during what is supposed to be an idyllic vacation for the British couple. This is an absolutely perfect choice for book groups.
NORTH AFRICAN NOTES
North Africa is that part of the world that is on the southern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, r
eaching from Egypt in the east to Tangier in the west. The best book covering the whole area that I’ve found is Michael Mewshaw’s Between Terror and Tourism: An Overland Journey Across North Africa. Not only is the first half of the title pretty neat, but since this inviting, chatty account is filled with fascinating bits of information and references to and quotations from other writers (Cavafy and Baudelaire, to name only two), I had to keep putting down the book and copying passages into the notebook I keep for such things. Books on Egypt, a major player in North Africa, can be found in its own self-titled section.
Algeria
Two important works of nonfiction on the history of Algeria and its long, awful fight to free itself from its colonial master, France, are Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 and Ted Morgan’s My Battle of Algiers: A Memoir.
Elizabeth Hawes’s Camus: A Romance combines biography (of French writer Albert Camus) with memoir. (Hawes became entranced with Camus when she was a college student.). Although there’s much here that takes place in France, there’s enough focus on Algiers (and, in particular, Camus’s childhood) to make it a necessary accompaniment to any reading for travel-to-Algeria purposes. Or just for the pleasure of encountering a man who had a fine mind and a noble spirit.
Although it was published posthumously and is not considered to be his best novel, Camus’s The First Man is probably his most autobiographical, and is certainly the one most closely linked to his childhood in Algiers. (Camus was born in Oran, where he set his novels The Plague and The Stranger.)
Next to Camus,Yasmina Khadra is probably Algeria’s most famous writer, although most of his novels are set elsewhere (his best-known novel for American audiences is The Swallows of Kabul). The author, who was once a high-ranking military officer with the Algerian army, wrote his books under a (female) pseudonym in order to avoid political repercussions. (He’s now in exile, in France.) Mystery lovers on their way to Algeria will want to try Khadra’s Inspector Llob series; the first one is Morituri, but my favorite is Double Blank.
Loving Graham Greene, Gloria Emerson’s first novel, is both tragic and funny. Wealthy and eccentric Molly Benson, who has a passion for Graham Greene and his work, travels to Algeria in 1992 (the year after Greene’s death) with two friends in order to give money to writers there who are targets of the country’s fundamentalists. This is a tale of three innocents abroad, the sort of people who believe that their good works (and pure motives) will protect them from harm. One could easily imagine how much Greene himself would have enjoyed reading it.
Harbor, a wrenching first novel by journalist Lorraine Adams, is about a Muslim from Algeria who arrives illegally in America in the 1990s. Aziz Arkoun is a deserter from the Algerian army and becomes caught up in America’s domestic war on terror following 9/11. This is one of those novels that raises uncomfortable questions for readers: how do we know whom to trust; how can we best accommodate new immigrants who are fleeing for their lives but don’t qualify as “political refugees” under the law; which should prevail when individual rights come into conflict with what we’re told is our national interest; and who or what defines a “terrorist”?
Other novels set in Algeria include Brian Moore’s The Magician’s Wife, which takes place during the Napoleonic period, and Claire Messud’s The Last Life, which describes the experiences of one French family during the last days of French rule.
For a change of pace, take a look at Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat and its sequel, The Rabbi’s Cat 2, a pair of graphic novels set in the once flourishing Jewish community in Algeria. They’re about a cat who swallows a parrot, learns to talk, and develops a devouring (sorry!) interest in everything related to Judaism.
Morocco
Whenever there’s talk about literature and Morocco, or travel and Morocco, it’s pretty certain that Paul Bowles’s life and books will be mentioned early in the conversation, since he spent many years as an expatriate there and is closely identified (at least in American minds) with the country. (See the section “The Sahara: Sand Between Your Toes” for more about Bowles’s best-known book.) So try to get whatever you know about the country, and Bowles, out of your head for a while, and concentrate on these.
One of my favorite writers, Edith Wharton, visited the country in 1917 and wrote In Morocco about her time there. What took away from the delight of reading a previously unknown—to me—Wharton book was the anti-Semitism that creeps in a bit here and there throughout the text.
Tony Ardizzone’s Larabi’s Ox: Stories of Morocco is a series of interconnected stories about three Americans who arrive in the country for different reasons and find (or not) what they came for.
French Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun explores the post-colonial country in The Last Friend, the story of the relationship between Ali and Mamed, childhood best friends, now irrevocably separated. The translation by Linda Coverdale is superb, and the story illuminates both the nature of friendship and the state of the country. If you’re in the mood for a difficult and soul-destroying read, also try his This Blinding Absence of Light.
Other books with a Moroccan setting—or close connection—include Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Secret Son; See How Much I Love You by Luis Leante (which limns the deep connection between Spain and its colonies in the Western Sahara); The Serpent’s Daughter, one of Suzanne Arruda’s mysteries (set in 1920) and featuring her regular sleuth Jade del Cameron—this one about a trip to exotic Morocco to reconnect with her mother;Tahir Shah’s In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams; The Spy Wore Silk by Aline, Countess of Romanones; Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir; and Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky.
NORWAY: THE LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN
If you’ve already read Sigrid Undset’s great trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter (composed of The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross) and want to read more of this Nobel Prize- winning writer, you still have ahead of you her other masterpiece, The Master of Hestviken.The four books that make up this series include, in order, The Axe, The Snake Pit, In the Wilderness, and The Son Avenger. And Undset has still others you might also want to try, including Return to the Future, a diary of her escape from Norway after it was invaded by the German army during World War II.
After immersing yourself in medieval Norway, you may want to move right to the more-or-less present, and try these.
The other Norwegian classic writer (and Nobel winner) is Knut Hamsun. I’d begin with Hunger, but all his books make for good reading.
Karin Fossum writes dark psychological thrillers; if you’re a fan of her fellow Scandinavian Henning Mankell, Fossum is someone to check out. Her novels feature policeman Konrad Sejer, who’s introduced to American readers in Don’t Look Back.
If real noir is to your taste, don’t miss the thrillers written by the prize-winning and multitalented Jo (pronounced “Yo”) Nesbø; he is also a singer and songwriter for the Norwegian rock group Di Derre. Start with The Devil’s Star.
In Out Stealing Horses, award-winning writer Per Petterson’s style is spare and restrained, with a plot that emerges only gradually, and the deliberate pace of the language may force you to read more slowly than usual. From the evocative cover (of the hardback edition) to its exploration of death, grief, forgiveness, and love, this is a novel not to miss. So take a deep breath, settle back in a comfortable chair, and prepare yourself for a beautifully translated, transporting novel about a man reliving his life, especially one particular summer day more than fifty years before. It began when his best friend, Jon, came by with a plan to borrow a neighbor’s horses and ended with the realization that nothing would ever be the same, for him or, especially, for Jon, again. If you enjoy this, try Petterson’s other novels, including To Siberia and In the Wake.
Linn Ullman’s Before You Sleep is the story of the tumultuous Blom family; it’s set in both Norway and New York. (The author is the daughter of actress Liv Ullman and director Ingmar Bergman, which is an interesting
backstory in its own right.)
Morten Ramsland’s Doghead is the Norwegian version of the dysfunctional family novel (although the author’s actually Danish). It’s set over a period of three generations and is funny, outrageous, and moving—imagine a John Irving novel set in northern Europe.
For a lighter read, try Robert Barnard’s mystery The Cherry Blossom Corpse, set at a romance writers’ convention in Bergen. It’s one of the series featuring Perry Trethowan of Scotland Yard, and it’s rife with satire.
And Dick Francis, one of my favorite mystery writers, set Slay Ride in the world of Norway’s horseracing community.
Although Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place—a combination of mystery and love story—takes place only partially in Norway, it manages to bring the country to life for us.
Maybe one of the most enticing nonfiction books I’ve read about this Scandinavian country is Paul Watkins’s Fellowship of Ghosts: A Journey Through the Mountains of Norway—it just made me want to be there with him.
OCEANIA, OR MILES OF ISLES
Frankly, the first thing that comes to mind for me when I think about islands is the chapter in A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh in which Piglet is entirely surrounded by water. However, the isles I’m talking about here include, but aren’t necessarily limited to, the following South Sea Islands:Vanuatu, Kirabati, Fiji, Christmas, Pitcairn, Polynesia, Solomon, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and Easter Island.
Some are better known than others: For example, Pitcairn Island is probably familiar to most of us because of Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty, which tells in exciting detail the story of Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian. (In fact, Pitcairn is populated by descendants of the mutineers on HMS Bounty.) Another interesting look at the topic is The Bounty Mutiny by Edward Christian, which includes Bligh’s defense, records from the trial, and much more. But maybe the best book to read is the always reliable Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. (Mystery fans who want a whole other take on Fletcher Christian and the mutiny should definitely read Val McDermid’s The Grave Tattoo.)
