Chris Bohjalian. The Sandcastle Girls. © 2012
Bohjalian takes us back and forth between two narratives. In the first which takes place now, Laura
Petrosian decides to find out more about her Boston Brahmin grandmother and the
Armenian man she met in Aleppo and later married. The second takes us straight into the horrors
of the Armenian genocide. In 1915
Elizabeth Endicott and her father Silas travel to Aleppo as representatives of
The Friends of Armenia. They are
immediately faced with a square full of starving and almost naked women who with
almost no food or water have been marched across the desert from their villages
and towns at the eastern end of the Black Sea.
There was an excellent review of the book in the Washington Post -- the url is below. This is not the first thing I have read about
the Armenian Genocide, but Bohjalian, in fictionalizing his main characters,
brings it alive in a way that no documentary could. It’s on a par with the Nazi genocide, and I
have never understood how or why the Turks continue to deny it. January 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/chris-bohjalians-the-sandcastle-girls-relives-the-armenian-genocide/2012/07/16/gJQA1oLOpW_story.html
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Paul French. Midnight
in Peking, How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of
China. © 2012 When I pulled this off the library shelf, I
thought it was a novel. It reads like a
novel but is an account of a real murder in Peking in 1936. Pamela Werner, a young Englishwoman age 20,
was found by the Fox Tower early one morning, murdered and badly
mutilated. It was investigated by
Colonel Han of the Peking police and by a British detective sent in from
Tientsin. Time passed, the crime
remained unsolved and was consigned to the cold case files. Pamela’s adoptive father, a retired British
consular officer and a lifetime scholar of Chinese affairs and languages,
couldn’t accept the Consulate’s decision to close the case. He spent his own small fortune to hire
detectives to continue the investigation and he sent reports of his findings to
the Foreign Office. He did solve the
case, but no action was ever taken against the murderers. A small group led by a British dentist
resident in Peking would frequently lure young girls to attend what they
thought would be a party and then raped them.
Because the men were pillars of the foreign community the girls knew
they would never be believed if they reported what happened . It worked until they tried this on
Pamela. Along with a good story, the
reader gets a lot of description of Beijing back in the 1930s, including its
seamier side, the arrogance of consular officials and the ever growing threat
of the Japanese military. January 2015
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Alexander Soderberg. The Andalucian Friend. © 2012
Sophie Brinkmann, a nurse in a Stockholm hospital, takes care of Hector
Guzman while he is in the hospital with a broken leg he got in a hit and run
accident. After he gets out, he invites
her to lunch to thank her. They like
each other. She doesn’t know that one of
his businesses is shipping cocaine from Paraguay to Rotterdam and another is
blackmailing executives to get advance notice of things that will affect the
price of their firms’ stocks. However,
Gunilla
Strandberg , who heads a national police
investigative unit, does know what Hector is up to and tries to get Sophie to
report to her. She also puts her under
surveillance. Then there’s the German
gang that wants to takeover Hector’s cocaine business, and an old friend of
Sophie’s, Jens Vall, whose illicit shipment of automatic weapons to some crazy
Russian mobsters get stolen by the Germans because they think it’s Hector’s
cocaine shipment. It’s complicated and
the only ones who survive are Sophie and her 15 year old son, although he will
probably be in a wheelchair for life.
January 2015
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Tan Twan Eng. The Garden of Evening Mists. © 2012 As the novel opens, Judge Yun Ling Teoh is
reviewing her life experiences. She is
suffering from an aphasia, which may destroy her memory and her ability to
speak within a year and is writing things down to try to delay the
inevitable. This is a strange, cruel and
beautiful story with many facets touching Japanese, Chinese and Malaysian
culture told in three time periods, the 1980s when it opens, WW II when she was
interned by the Japanese invaders and the early 1950s when she apprenticed
herself to the Japanese Emperor’s former gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, at Yugiri,
his garden in the Cameron Highlands.
This was a joy for me to read, because it brought together the two
cultures with which I am most familiar and deepened my knowledge of both. Like everyone else who has at least seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, I was
familiar with the brutality of the Japanese on the railroad project in Burma,
and I have read many accounts of Japanese prison camps, but I was still
unprepared for what was done to the civilian population throughout Malaya. Judge Yun is the only survivor of the fictional
camp where she was interned and where her sister perished after years as a sex
slave. All of the prisoners except Yun
were exterminated to conceal the location of the camp, and Yun was released in
such a way that she did not know where it was.
Her sister had studied Japanese gardening and had planned to create one
in Kuala Lumpur. Yun apprenticed herself
to Aritomo, because she wanted to create a garden in her sister’s memory. Aritomo not only taught her gardening but
also Japanese archery, which is much more than just shooting arrows at a
target. Aritomo was also a famous
woodblock print artist and a master of tattooing or harimono. Yun and Aritiomo always remain master and
apprentice, but they also become lovers, and he persuades her to let him tattoo
her entire back. Aritomo also comes to
rely on Yun to handle visitors to the garden, including the British High Commissioner. Along the way we get some recollections from
a Kamikaze pilot who survived, and we meet up with the CTs (Communist
Terrorists) led by Chin Peng during the “Emergency.” When it’s all over, we still don’t know if
Aritomo was a Japanese agent and a participant in “Golden Lily,” a Japanese plan to conceal stolen
art treasures until they could be quietly recovered after the war. This was the rationale for exterminating the
prisoners. January 2015
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