6 minute read
THE MISSING WORD by Concita De Gregorio; trans. by Clarissa Botsford
between her and Cillian, she’s compelled to reevaluate the person she’s become during her marriage and must decide whether her time in Paris will prove life-altering or nothing but a brief, beautiful mirage. Though its plot sometimes proves predictable—the love triangle at the book’s center is its almost-exclusive focus, and it presents few unexpected turns (or character developments, at least on the men’s parts)—this is a smoothly written, enjoyable novel that gives due to the social and emotional complexities of middle age. Vincent is a lovable protagonist; the narrative is also interspersed with her diary entries and letters, creating a self-aware, three-dimensional character. Cross-Smith sensitively explores the many permutations of romantic and platonic love and the idea that, especially in Paris, one’s love may not be limited to a single other person.
Charming and lively, if somewhat predictable.
THE MISSING WORD
De Gregorio, Concita Trans. by Clarissa Botsford Europa Editions (112 pp.) $16.00 paper | July 5, 2022 978-1-60945-762-4
Inspired by a heartbreaking true story, De Gregorio’s remarkably restrained novel follows the events that ripple out in the aftermath of tragedy. The story is simple but mysterious. Shortly after Italian attorney Irina separates from her controlling Swiss husband, Mathias, he disappears with their twin 6-year-old daughters. Five days later, he kills himself, and the girls are nowhere to be found. The police are of little help, and Irina is left to try to assemble a new life for herself, always hoping the children will somehow be located. By the time the novel takes place, several years have passed, and Irina, though still grief-stricken, has fallen in love with gentle Spaniard cartoonist Luis and is surprised to find that suddenly “everything feels like a surprise and a gift.” De Gregorio constructs her brief but potent novel out of sharp fragments: There are letters from Irina to her beloved grandmother and to the marriage counselor who refused to speak to her after Mathias disappeared, Irina’s matter-of-fact recollections of the events leading up to the kidnapping, and lists of things that make Irina angry (the inefficiency of the police) or happy (humpback whales and “red wine, when it’s good”). There are also sections labeled “Me About You,” in which the narrator, a writer who has become close to Irina, lets loose her own emotions about the case and her feelings about how Irina has survived. It’s a story about that “missing word” of the title, a word lacking in most languages, a word for parents who have lost children, and the narrator affirms that “losing a child is the touchstone of grief, the gold standard of pain.” The daring of the novel is that Irina is not defined simply by that loss, as she might be in a lesser one: Her life is shaped by the disappearance of the children but not destroyed by it.
A quietly devastating but somehow hopeful tale.
THE SHEHNAI VIRTUOSO And Other Stories
Dhumketu Trans. by Jenny Bhatt Deep Vellum (336 pp.) $15.95 paper | July 26, 2022 978-1-646051-68-7
A curated collection of 26 stories from Dhumketu (1892-1965), a celebrated Gujarati writer who wrote more than 500 in his lifetime.
The book begins with “The Post Office,” Dhumketu’s most anthologized work, about an elderly man waiting for a letter from his daughter, who’d married and moved to her husband’s faraway town years earlier. The opening line sets the tone: “The
shutter
hazy dawn sky was glittering with the previous night’s stars— big and small—like happy memories shimmering in a person’s life.” The title story invokes the beauty of nature, with the shimmer of moonlight, and of music, with its sonorous joys and sorrows, and the way they can stir the soul; the rest follow suit in demonstrating the ways literature can do the same. While many of these stories portray the lives of ordinary folks, others feature leaders engaged in questions of politics and power. What unites them is their lush language and the author’s skill in addressing a myriad of subjects with hope and humility. Bhatt selected at least one significant story from each of the author’s 24 published volumes, setting out to demonstrate his stylistic and thematic range. She accomplishes her mission with grace; the stories are as varied as they are rich with description about everything from their characters’ inner struggles to their settings, whether a small lakeside village, the Himalayas, or an alternate reality where individualism is eradicated, as in the “The Rebirth of Poetry.” This story is a love letter to the power of art and the human spirit that feels like the engine of the whole book. Gujarati speakers represent a large portion of the Indian diaspora in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, and Bhatt’s translation is a significant contribution to an English-speaking audience’s appreciation of Indian literature.
These stories invite readers to rediscover the wonder in the quotidian.
SHUTTER
Emerson, Ramona Soho Crime (312 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 2, 2022 978-1-641-29333-4
Emerson’s striking debut follows a Navajo police photographer almost literally to hell and back. Rita Todacheene sees dead people. Since most of her attempts to talk to someone about her special power while she was growing up on the reservation ended in disaster, she’s tried to keep it to herself during her five years with the Albuquerque Police Department. Her precarious peace is shattered by the death of Erma Singleton, manager of a bar owned by Matias Romero, her common-law husband. Although lazy Detective Martin Garcia has ruled that Erma fell from a highway bridge, her body shattered by the truck that hit her on the roadway below, Erma insists that she was pushed from the bridge. “Help me get back to my baby,” she tells Rita, “or I’ll make your life a living hell.” Since Rita, a civilian employee, has few resources for an investigation, Erma opens a portal that unleashes scores of ghosts on her, all clamoring for justice or mercy or a few words with the loved ones they left behind. The nightmare that propels Rita forward, from snapping photos of Judge Harrison Winters and his wife and children and dog, all shot dead in what Garcia calls a murder-suicide, to revelations that link both these deaths and Erma’s to the drug business of the Sinaloa cartel, is interleaved with repeated flashbacks that show the misfit Rita’s early years on her Navajo reservation and in her Catholic grade school as she struggles to come to terms with a gift that feels more like a curse. The appeal of the case as a series kickoff is matched by the challenges Emerson will face in pulling off any sequels.
A whodunit upstaged at every point by the unforgettably febrile intensity of the heroine’s first-person narrative.
GIRLS WITHOUT TEARS
Finlay, T.L. Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $27.99 | Aug. 9, 2022 978-1-63910-080-4
A public relations manager with a rare malady is called back to the home she put behind her to help someone she never wants to see again.
Back in high school, Zack Flynn may have been Noa Romwell’s one and only, but
