June 2022: Fiction from Shirley Hazzard, Portugal (Claudio Pineiro,) Pakistan (Ahmida Ahmad), and the U.S. (Hernan Diaz)

 Elliot's Reading June 2022: Shirley Hazzard, Claudio Pineiro, Ahmida Ahmad, and Hernan Diaz

You can see why the Argentine writer Claudia Pineiro has been compared with Hitchcock if you read her 2007 novel Elena Knows (Eng. tr. 2021 by Frances Riddle)  as the novel is on the surface a quest by a 50ish woman, Elena, whose daughter, Rita, has been found hanged from a belfry inside a church an apparent suicide but not apparent to Elena who is striving to discover who killed her daughter. Great, a mystery - but it doesn’t take long before we realize that the mystery itself is far less significant than the development of Elena’s character, notable in particular in that she is in an advanced stage of Parkinson’s and every motion, every step, for her is agony. Never, I think, has an illness been depicted so vividly in fiction from the POV of the suffering character, and by the end we have tremendous sympathy for Elena and for anyone else trying to make headway in his/her life with this affliction. That said - the mystery has to be resolved. I will not divulge anything here, but I would have to say that it feels as if CP set herself a challenge that she could not meet; I would guess that she did not foresee the conclusion when she started; rather, the suicide/homicide was like Hitchcock’s famous “Maguffin,” the prop that sets all in motion and is by the end largely irrelevant. The novel takes a strong stance, near the end, in the indictment of the ban on abortions and in support of a woman’s right to choice - good on that - though I have to say the politics feels squeezed in or tacked on and not sufficient in scope to explain the course of Rita’s last days. I doubt if any reader will be satisfied with the outcome of the narrative - though all readers will be moved and troubled by the depiction of a woman suffering in a mortal illness. 

The last section of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories (2020) consists of stories “uncollected” or unpublished to date; we have to assume that she had tired for the form and had moved on, successfully, to novel-length work; in fact, her 2nd collection, People in Glass Houses, reads much like a novel. Two of the stories among the unpublished probably shouldn’t be recognized as finished pieces; they seem to be stories she put aside or abandoned. A few of the uncollected, though, are of the highest caliber; I particularly liked Out of Itea, that quite simply and beautifully recounts a Grecian ferry crossing - delving into the personality and behavior of each passenger w/ particular attention to the young Norwegian couple that seems to attract comment and attention from all the others. Even at her weakest, SH is quick with a quip or odd turn of phrase, and all of the stories have a suitable conclusion, rather than drifting off to nowhere as do so many NYer stories in the present day. 

First, what’s right and admirable in Aamina Ahmad’s debut novel, The Return of Faraz Ali (2022): start off that AA writes in an intelligent third-person style, not the usual first-person often narcissistic style of recent auto-fiction of personal confession. Second, she’s nothing if not ambitious: She could have confined this novel to one narrative line and she’s got a good one at the center of her vision, an eponymous police officer in a provincial city in 1960s Pakistan is re-assigned to the capital, Lahore, and pretty much ordered to take care of the investigation of the murder of a teenage girl (prostitute, probably), that is, to make the crime go away. His attempt to please his superiors, while also taking seriously a horrendous crime, leads to many complications. Good! Third, she hasn’t confined her ambition to one plot line; rather, there are several, one concerning the Farraz’s search for his secret of his mysterious parentage, also a washed-up Pakistani film star tries to return to the limelight, also we get the back story of the Faraz’s immediate superior, re his escape from an Italian prison in Libya during or just after the WWII. Whew. Which leads to my frustration with this novel: despite AA’s sly homage to George Eliot, this is no Middlemarch, as it’s hard to carry this kind of narrative weight in the 21st century, or even the 20th for that matter. My patience ran thin. Second, AA goes to great length to capture and depict street life in Lahore, but in doing so she uses so many words and phrases from Urdu, some discernible others not, at least to me, that it almost becomes a joke. Good luck if you can read this book and look up all the unfamiliar terms. Third, With all that narrative weight, I had to struggle to keep everything in mind, even the names of the major characters - she falls short, I think, on simple depiction, and add that to the unfamiliar names, many of which start w/ the same letter!, and even + half-way through the novel I’m flipping back pages to see who might be who. Ultimately, there’s so much going on here that I lose    sight of - and interest in - the main plot line, as the novel, so impressive at times, for me began to die of its own weight. So I may not be the ideal reader here, but I couldn’t push much beyond the half-way point - but I’m sure this novel will interest many and I’m sure AA has started a brilliant career. 

Hernan Diaz’s 2022 novel, Trust, consists of 4 sections of roughly equal length (ca. 100-pp.), all of which, though this is not evident at first pass-through, concern the same family : a family of a huge investment firm in the early 20th century. The first section is a third-person account of the rise of the family and the mental illness suffered by the patriarch and by the spouse of the financial leader, whose decline into fear and paranoia is the heart of the story, in particular the crude and cruel supposed treatment she received at a “Magic Mountain”-like clinic in Europe. As others have noted, this section is in the style of say Wharton or even H. James - though not nearly as sharp and nuanced; it seems amateurish. The 2nd section tells of a similar clan, with similar issues of mental decline, though in this instance, first-person narrative, the declining wife receives tender and loving care; it’s also evident that this is a detailed sketch for a memoir (includes many passages such as “as details here”). OK - but I’m getting pretty bored by now! Third section (which I skimmed, sorry - reader’s privilege, this is not a “book review”) is told any a writers in late life - late 20th century - who was hired to ghost-write the novel, a re-write of the 2nd section. OK, but why? What’s happening here? It seems like a series of unreliable narrators (the 4th section is the notebook kept by the woman in the sanatarium, all fragments) - in the style of say Remains of the Day, in which the (various) narrator(s) reveal much about themselves inadvertently and in which we can see around the edges of each piece of writing. So, it’s a smart, clever book that entails intense reading and skepticism, but in the end, I’m sorry to say, that from the plot line was uninteresting, not enough to carry the wait of the various narrative stances - a work rich in irony and ambiguity but without a sharp enough payoff.