BLINDNESS by Jose Saramago

I’m not sure which is worse—living through a pandemic where you could die or one in which everyone goes blind.  Well, almost everyone.  One character claims to be blind when she really isn’t.  She can only keep up this charade for so long, but in the meantime, she is useful to have around, particularly in an abandoned mental institution that will eventually house over 200 blind people.   Since no unaffected person will dare come into the building, these sightless people are basically on their own.  Food and cleaning products are delivered to their doorstep, but it is awfully hard to keep anything clean when everyone is blind.  The result is pure chaos.  Greedy, vicious new arrivals make the situation even worse.  I found the punctuation in the book—no quotation marks, run-on sentences, spotty identification of speakers—annoying, but I think the author had a purpose with the disorderly dialog, perhaps emphasizing the unavoidable confusion among so many blind people in an unfamiliar place.  It is sort of like Lord of the Flies with adult characters.  I found myself totally immersed in the horrific lives of the people in this well-imagined story and eager to find out what lay in store for them.  Their suffering is unfathomable, and yet their hope for a cure or treatment or a vaccine keeps them struggling to survive.  Most amazing and disturbing, though, is that even as more and more people become blind, the government still suggests the possibility that the rampant blindness is not a pandemic at all but just an unfortunate coincidence.

ON THE BEACH by Nevil Shute

Almost everyone in the world has died from radiation poisoning after a massive nuclear war.  Pockets of people still remain in the Southern Hemisphere, but the cloud of radiation is coming their direction.  This novel centers on a small town in southern Australia, where everyone is trying to live as normal a life as possible while knowing that they will die in a few months.  Dwight Towers is an American nuclear submarine captain, now in Melbourne, but still harboring magical thoughts about returning to his wife and children in Connecticut.  Peter Holmes, a local naval officer who has been furloughed for months, becomes Dwight’s liaison officer for two reconnaissance missions in the sub.  Peter introduces Dwight to Moira, with the intent that she will cheer him up and keep him company until the inevitable end comes.  Shute published this book in 1957, but it takes place 5 years in the future, prophetically in roughly the same timeframe as the Cuban missile crisis.  The characters in the book cope with their impending doom in myriad ways-- some in apparent denial, while others prefer to go out with a bang.  The dialog is severely dated, which keeps it from sounding authentic, but the author treats each of his characters with such loving care that their individual stories are triumphant and heart-breaking at the same time.  I had some obvious questions, such as why didn’t they build and stock underground fallout shelters, but somehow that possibility didn’t come up.  Also, I found the title to be a bit mystifying.  All that aside, I tend to forget the plots of books fairly quickly, but I have a feeling that this one will stick with me.

EAST IS EAST by T.C. Boyle

Hiro is a young seaman, half Japanese and half American, who dives overboard near the coast of a Georgia island.  A tony writer’s retreat on the island becomes his safe haven for a while, as Ruth Dershowitz surreptitiously shares her lunch with him, brings him clothes, and helps him hide from the authorities.  Ruth is not the same caliber of writer as some of her housemates, but she is the girlfriend of the owner’s son, Saxby.  This novel is primarily Ruth’s story, and T.C. Boyle does not disappoint.  We see Ruth’s rise and fall in the pecking order of the colony, as we follow Hiro’s struggle to survive in an environment that is basically an inhabited jungle.  Boyle never shies away from controversial topics, and here the theme of bigotry is what makes Hiro’s story so poignant.  He was bullied in Japan for being only half-Japanese, and in the U.S., he is branded as a “Nip” and hunted by the authorities like an animal, without having committed a serious crime.  He ricochets from one bad situation to another throughout the book, relying on his wits and his will to keep him one step ahead of the INS, represented by one man who is overly concerned about his reputation and another who is an incompetent fool.  Hiro is the hero, and Ruth is the damsel who tries to save him, even as she is repeatedly thwarted by her own mistakes and hubris.  The pace of this novel never lets up, especially while Hiro is on the run.  When he’s not, Ruth and Saxby dominate the storyline, and they are just as captivating.

FACELESS KILLERS by Henning Mankell

Someone has murdered an elderly Swedish farmer in a most grisly fashion, and his wife is hanging on by a thread after having had a noose tightened around her neck.  The only word she can utter is “foreign,” and now all the xenophobes will come out of the woodwork.  Soon Kurt Wallander, detective for the Ystad police, will have other crimes to solve, after an anonymous caller has made threats against asylum-seekers living in refugee camps.  As in most novels of this type, the detective’s personal life is a disaster.  His wife has left him, although he still hopes for a reconciliation; he has lost all contact with his daughter; and his father has dementia.  In other words, he has a lot on his plate, and opportunities for sleep constantly elude him.  Plus, he’s tracking down leads all over the place, first trying to establish a motive for the original murder and then following a number of other clues, none of which explain the wife’s use of the word “foreign.”  The very competent new chief prosecutor is an attractive young woman, and Wallander is frustrated to learn that she is married.  That doesn’t stop his dogged pursuit of her company nor of the other theories as to who committed the murder.  This book is a fast and pleasurable read, easy to follow, and I didn’t notice any awkward language in the translation.  Wallander is a flawed hero, eating and drinking too much for starters, but heroes don't have to be perfect to be heroes.

OSCAR AND LUCINDA by Peter Carey

At first I thought this book was just about gambling—obsession with gambling, gambling in secret, guilt over gambling, and passing judgment on gambling.  However, about halfway through the book, the plot becomes focused on one wager between the title characters.  Oscar develops a gambling system that enables him to attend Oxford and then sail from England to Australia in the mid-1800s.  This journey is especially taxing, as he is terrified of open water.  Lucinda, living in Sydney and purchasing a glassworks with her inheritance, goes to England to find a husband.  She fails in that endeavor and meets Oscar on her return voyage.  She is more of a compulsive gambler, with plenty of resources, but her gender hampers her ability to nourish her obsession.  The problem with this novel is that the pace is agonizingly slow.  The book finally becomes somewhat interesting, though, when Oscar embarks on an ill-advised expedition that has consequences neither he nor Lucinda, nor the reader, for that matter, could have imagined.  One thing that annoyed me about this novel is that it is so wordy that I at times overlooked important events that were buried in a lot of descriptive language, and I had to retrace to find what I had missed.  Also, the narration is actually first person, with Oscar’s great-grandson as the narrator, and each time the word “I” popped up, I had to remind myself who that was, as the vast majority of the book has nothing to do with Oscar’s progeny.

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN by Betty Smith

I certainly hope this book is semi-autobiographical, because it has no plot.  It’s the story of Francie Nolan’s childhood in the early 20^th century.  Her father drinks too much, and her mother works hard to make up for her husband’s inability to put food on the table.  In her father’s defense, he does contribute to the family finances sporadically, and Francie adores him.  He likewise dotes on her, whereas Francie’s mother loves Francie’s brother more than Francie.  The author makes this point multiple times, and it grated on me.  I felt that Francie had a bit of a chip on her shoulder because of her mother’s preference for her son over her daughter, but Francie still manages to keep a sunny outlook, no matter what, and loves her brother dearly.  In other words, Francie is an almost perfect child and sees the silver lining in every hardship.  Neither of Francie's parents made it past grade school, and Francie’s mother is determined to make sure that her children escape poverty through education.  Both children read the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays incessantly, as these are the only books the family possesses.  Francie views poverty through rose-colored glasses, and I suppose this viewpoint is better than for her to be wallowing in self-pity.  She and her brother certainly look back on their childhood with fond memories, but I guess it’s normal to remember the good times and repress the bad.  Whenever something really ugly happens in this book, someone comes to the rescue, and suffering seems to be short-lived.  Consequently, I felt that the story lacked depth.  I enjoyed it for what it is—mostly G rated.  That’s not to say there’s not a dash of heartbreak here and there, including death, romantic betrayal, and even a sexual predator, but Francie always bounces back, stronger and wiser.

THE FRIEND by Sigrid Nunez

The friend in the title could be a Great Dane named Apollo, or it could be the narrator’s writer friend—a man who has recently committed suicide.  The dog belonged to the writer until the writer’s death, and now our female narrator, a self-proclaimed cat person, reluctantly takes ownership of Apollo, despite the fact that the lease on her tiny apartment prohibits dogs.  She and Apollo bond over their shared grief, and they become virtually inseparable, initially because Apollo becomes destructive on the one occasion where the narrator leaves him alone for too long.  Call me crazy, but I loved the image of the 180-lb dog lying in bed with her on his own pillow.  The narrator also shares with the reader quite a few fascinating opinions about writers, including what they write and why they write.  She herself teaches writing and has abandoned writing a book about human trafficking.  The narrator peppers her musings on writing with a fair amount of cynicism regarding fiction today, especially when quoting her deceased friend.  She offers a scathing criticism of James Patterson’s claim that anyone can write a bestseller and his selling of videos that promise the viewer the ability to do just that, as if he didn’t already have an obscene amount of money.  This book is funny at times, but mostly it is incredibly touching, and I had to remind myself constantly that it was fiction and not a memoir.  One chapter threw me for a loop until I realized that it was basically a detour into magical thinking, ending in sort of a guilt trip.  At least, that’s how I interpreted it.   This is so much more than a dog book, and yet it addresses so beautifully why we accept the constant violence against humans, in movies and in real life, but cannot bear the mistreatment of animals.