The Observer – The decade before America’s declaration of independence in 1776 saw more Americans visiting England than ever before. This engaging social history, written with a novelist’s eye for character and plot, tells their tale – one author Julie Flavell calls “a missing chapter in the social and cultural history of Americans abroad.” Read my review in The Observer.
In Laura Restrepo’s novel about Argentina’s Dirty War, the tragic is hidden amid ordinariness, like the secret prisons of the country’s military dictators. Read my review in The Washington Post.
Read “On the Migrant Trail,” my dispatch from the U.S.-Mexico border for The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. I spent a day in the desert with the Samaritans Patrol and took this photo of the border wall in Sasabe, Arizona.
“The Surrendered” opens with an image reminiscent of a war photograph. An 11-year old girl is riding on top of a train, cradling her two younger siblings against the cold with a stolen blanket as they flee south with other refugees at the start of the Korean War. The image is iconic, beautiful in its way and shot through with foreboding. Nested together, the orphans are “these last of their kind.” And soon, the girl, June, is the only one left.
The novel opens up like an album of atrocities, though the stills that are hard to look at alternate with more alluring ones, in a book that has perhaps as much sex as it does death. Its characters are so convincingly etched, its story carried forward with such a momentum of empathy, like the refugee train, that it is more felt than intellectually encountered. Its author, the Korean-American writer Chang-Rae Lee, recently told an interviewer that he wanted “to give a certain bodily experience to the reader. Because I don’t think I can explain war.”
In this he succeeds: his words provoke what Susan Sontag, in her dissection of war photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, called“the pleasure of flinching.”
Continue reading the review in The National.
It was an art critic who coined the term “magic realism,” to describe a new wave of painting in 1920s Germany. The work departed from the moody Expressionism of the day, emphasizing material reality even as it unlocked an elusive otherworldliness in the arrangement of everyday objects. Sometimes, though, the fantastic rubbed elbows with the real: in one painting, a fat general nonchalantly shares a table with headless men in tuxedos.
In literature as in art, the genre has been dominated by men. So critics devised the label “magical feminism” just for Isabel Allende’s multigenerational family chronicles featuring strong-willed women, usually entangled in steamy love affairs against a backdrop of war and political upheaval. These elements are all present in her new novel, “Island Beneath the Sea,” but its approach is traditional. Where, you wonder, are the headless men — or, in Allende’s case, headless women? Where is the magical realism?
Continue reading in the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
Read an excerpt from the book here.