Fiction is the ultimate time/teleportation machine.
Last month I lived through WWI, the rise of Hitler, WWII and the rise of McCarthyism, all while living the complex life of Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize winning author and father of six politically and sexually multifarious children. The power of The Magician, Colm Tóibín’s novel/biography, is the way he makes us see and feel, not the historic figure, but the man and his struggles with closeted homosexuality, an obstreperous family, and a roiling world.
Or what about joining an aspiring black businessman in 1950-60’s Harlem, navigating the path between riots and the tugs of easy money from shady diversions. That’s Harlem Shuffle, from Colson Whitehead, author of prize-winning The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys.
But all that pales beside Cloud Cuckoo Land from Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See. Doerr weaves together the lives of a girl living in a 15th Century monastery and an elderly translator of classical Greek living in contemporary Idaho, with flashes of Korean POW camps, a terrorist bomber, and the Ottoman siege of Constantinople. Like the dazzling diamond at the heart of his last novel, he has a moldy, faded ancient codex of a Greek fairy tale to bring it all together.
What an exciting month!
~ George Cooper