My father was forty-five or forty-six when he had a heart attack. This trouble with his heart was surprising, since for all the years we had known him as children his trouble was his stomach and his indigestion, requiring bottles and bottles of a particular brand of medicinal stomach powder, which he never had the foresight to buy when he was all right, preferring instead during a crisis to send his children on the long walk to the local pharmacy for the powder.
A couple of years after this heart trouble, my father was put on half pay by the Trinidad Guardian, the newspaper for which he worked. I was in school in England when this happened, and I worried about the effect of this half pay on my family; things had been bad enough on my father’s full pay. But my father, now near the end of things, was possessed by a strange lightness of spirit. It was as though the heart illness, officially recognized by doctors and the newspaper, gave full expression and an extra validity to the unhappiness he had felt for years, with the Guardian, with my mother’s family, with his poverty, with prejudice and the British Empire and the unhappy state of India, and with many other things; and it was no longer necessary now for him to go over any of the points.
The first one plummeted into a supermarket parking lot that was then under construction. That was in 1996. Two years later, a couple on a date swore they saw a second body hit the same spot, though this has never been confirmed. Another few years, another dead person in another parking lot, this one across from the supermarket which had by then been completed. The area received a decade-long reprieve from the bodies after that, but nothing lasts forever. In 2012 residents found one on a leafy side street; then, in 2015, on an air-conditioning unit on top of an office building. And this past summer, the latest: It plunged headlong into a walled back garden, neatly cracking the pavement open and landing next to a sunbather who responded with an appropriate mixture of shock and horror. That is supposed to have been the nearest near-miss.
The bodies are not from London. They appear to have only the fact of their difference in common. They were foreign, they were poor, they were black or brown, and when they were alive they would have been correct to surmise it would be difficult to enter the United Kingdom by filling out the usual paperwork. So, they skipped the forms.
Rodrigo Márquez Tizano’s debut novel, “Jakarta,” is a journal of the plague years. Or, more accurately, of the post-plague years, although such eras here are one and the same. Set in a small, imaginary country in Latin America, the book is a kaleidoscopic take on love and loss and longing, written in a voice that is sharp and cynical yet somehow without despair.
“Long Bright River” — a book that has garnered much pre-publication buzz — nervously twists, turns and subverts readers’ expectations till its very last pages. Simultaneously, it also manages to grow into something else: a sweeping, elegiac novel about a blighted city.
This is one of those books that turns a discipline upside down – the cold war, state socialism, eastern Europe and 20th-century architecture all look different in the light of its findings. Based on multilingual research, it concentrates on how the development of several postcolonial cities – mainly, but not exclusively, Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City – were in large part the product of architects and planners from the USSR, Yugoslavia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. It sketches in a strange geography, where an architect couldn’t legally go from one end of Berlin to the other, but could travel across the world and reconstruct it.
The questions Burrell and Ropper raise are as intriguing as their answers. How do we distinguish between brain and mind? And which mind do we mean: our accumulation of experiences or the way we process them? It’s a complex and convoluted story but one made highly readable and hugely entertaining by this authoritative book.