wahistorian's reviews
488 reviews

Asne Seierstad's account of the massacre of teens at a Labor party summer camp is gut-wrenching, but very timely, given the increasing number of mass shootings in the news. Seierstad's research reveals the background of the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, but also the political circumstances in Norway that may have contributed to his incomprehensible slaughter of 77 teens. Rejected by nearly every group he tried to connect to, Breivik became the self-appointed savior of "Norway for Norwegians," directing his rage at immigrant Muslims, many of whom are also profiled in the book. Seierstad's aim is to describe each person's search for their role in a community--"one of us"--and how those identities can crash into one another with explosive results. It's an issue that will continue to be worthing thinking about as immigrants move around the world.

A concise overview of the life and work of nineteenth-century British novelist Wilkie Collins, the author of two of my favorite gothic novels, 'The Woman in White' and 'The Moonstone.' The book is part of 'Ackroyd's Brief Lives' series and, in this case, the brevity is sometimes frustrating, where more context and description--on amateur theatre or copyright law or the movements for women's rights or anti-vivisection, for example--has obviously been excised. Still, Ackroyd's focus on Collins's working methods and unconventional lifestyle are fascinating, and I admire his decision not to psycho-analyze his subject.

Hamid's novel, while slim, is not an "easy" read because it asks us to confront our own prejudices about the immigrant experience in light of the events of 9/11 and the national security state in which we live. Raised in Lahore, Pakistan, the narrator Changez takes advantage of an Ivy League education to launch a high-powered career in finance, evaluating the fundamentals of corporations about to be swallowed by other corporations. He falls for a fellow student and his love for Erica begins to parallel his American experience; she seems to want him, but cannot commit because her heart is elsewhere. The events of 9/11 conspire with his ill-fated romance to throw his U.S. life in a new light.

Simply and elegantly narrated, Camus's 'The Stranger' tells the story of a French Algerian, Meursault, who murders an unnamed Arab on the beach in cold blood some hours after the man and some friends threatened him. Camus conceived of the tale as an everyday confrontation between a modern man and the absurdity of a society suffused with religion. In the courtroom Meursault's crime of seeming insufficiently bereft at his mother's death counts guarantees his death sentence by shocking the conscience of judges and jurors. But Kamel Daoud's 'The Meursault Investigation' (2013) returns the humanity to Meursault's victim and explores the murder in the context of French colonialism and Algerian resistance. Read in dialogue with Daoud's work, the verdict in 'The Stranger' seems less absurd and more inevitable, ordained by the 20th-century history of anti-colonialism.

'The Meursault Investigation' takes on the weighty task of re-telling the story at the heart of Albert Camus's 'The Stranger' from the perspective of the brother of the anonymous Arab victim, Harun, many years later. Musa's murder becomes the determining event in Harun's life, overshadowed as he is by both Meursault's famous book *and* his mother's boundless grief for her (better) lost son. Though Mother's relentless harassment of Harun does get a bit monotonous, it's important to a post-Algerian Indpendence plot development that brings Harun and Meursault closer in their actions and outlook. Ultimately if Camus's narrator escapes the absurdity of God's judgment by insisting on his exemption, Daoud's narrator cannot quite bring himself to deny the existence of a higher power. Read together these two books are rich with food for thought about religion, justice, government, and what humans owe to one another.

Don't miss this thought-provoking piece on Daoud and contemporary Algeria: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/magazine/stranger-still.html.