Tirana memoria by Horacio Castellanos Moya

vignettes?brief oral histories that Fitzroy had collected before he left town. Throughout the story, Fitz roy attempts to reconnect with his retired office-manager father, a well heeled, country-club type, but uncommunicative enough to make it a frustrating endeavor. The dynam icsof a familysufferingfrom watch ing helplessly the deterioration of an accomplished, fifty-six-year-old woman with Alzheimer's is an almost unbearable agony. The title refers to walking in Buffalo through what the city is best known for: the cold and wind and snow ofwinter. "Three bundled pedestrians venture into the road, inches fromthegrille ofmy car.Stiff necked and scowling, teethgritted, they split the twinbars of thehead lights,one rightafter another. They trudge past with identical Buffalo lockjaw faces." This brilliant firstnovel sug gests that Greg Ames isawriterwho will be heard from formany years to come. Marvin ]. LaHood Amherst, New York Abbas Beydoun. Blood Test. Max Weiss, tr. Syracuse, New York. Syra cuse University Press.2008. 121 pages. $16.95. isbn978-0-8156-0912-4 Editor of the cultural supplement of theBeirutnewspaper As-Safir,Abbas Beydoun isalsowidely known in the Arab world as a leading poet with eleven collections of poetry. This is his firstnovel and the 2007 winner of theKing Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies Translation ofArabic LiteratureAward. It isan amazing piece ofwriting for a firstnovel. It retains a poetic language inmany instances and a poet's innate love for interiority and search for meaning. Its narrator is Abbas Beydoun a young Lebanese man who, at the sudden death of his father in a dis tant land in West Africa, isprompt ed to investigate all the traceshe left behind, and to collectmemories of him from relatives and friends who knew him in Lebanon and in such West African locales as Dakar, Casa blanca, and others where he had become wealthy. Although repeat edly discouraged in his pursuit by family members, the young man perseveres inan efforttoexplore his own history and identity. The result is thisnovel, which, without a traditional plot,manages to be a page-turner because of the vivid portrayal of a number ofmale and female Arab characters, whose lives intersectinrelationships of love and hatred, friendshipand jealousy, intrigueand insouciance as they try to build fortunes for themselves in Africa, some in theirsearch fordia monds, others in their extravagant riving, others in their quest for a happiness thatkeeps eluding them, and others in theirpursuit of sex. The novel is not divided into chapters, although there are irregu lar small space breaks between sec- E tions of it,and there is a big space = break between pages 62 and 63 in E themiddle of thenovel, as ifdivid- E ing itinto two parts. In the first part, E the young man narrating the nov- E el's events gets sexually involved E with Safia, thewoman with whom E his dead uncle had been likewise E involved inAfrica and who came E to Lebanon and was introduced as E his ostensible fiancee. In the second E part of the novel, the young man E continues the narration?his uncle, E Safia, and the circle of their friends E and relatives in Africa becoming E themselves the greater part of his E investigation. In the end, howev- E er, his investigation raises as many E questions as it answers. E Issa J.Boullata E Montreal E Horacio Castellanos Moya. Tirana = memoria. Barcelona. Tusquets. 2008. E 358 pages. 19. isbn 978-84-8383-089-5 1 It isno accident thatTiranamemoria 's E protagonist, Pericles, shares the E scrupulously honest Greek orator's E name. Horacio Castellanos Moya, E by far theunmatched master of the E "political/dictator/exile" novels of E his generation, has single-handedly E recovered that subgenre, given it E oxygen by divesting itof itshabitual E ideological correctness, and provid- E ed its moribund practice thehumor E and complexity it has needed, at least E since 1959 and afterVargas Llosa. E Like the masterful shorter novels E of Bolano and Aira, Tirana memoria E shows that to denounce sociopo- E litical injustices, a writer need not E belong to the "Stalinist left." With 1 Senselessness and The She-Devil in E the Mirror, his...

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