Category: Review

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

The title pretty much says it all in Anne Fortier’s “Juliet.” A beach read at best, Fortier’s attempt to reinvent Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers has moments of real intrigue, but the overall effect is spoiled, unfortunately, by her own over-complicated plot.

The main problem with the novel is the heroine, Julie Jacobs. Fortier sets her up to be a Cinderella type of under-appreciated chorus-girl-turned-star, but it’s hard to get past her awful personality, let alone enjoy her first-person narrative.

Julie Jacobs, she tells us, has spent her entire life stuck in the shadow of her beautiful, smarter, and more popular fraternal twin sister, Janice. The twins were born in Italy, orphaned in their early childhood, and raised by a well-meaning aunt. Counting on inheriting equal shares of said aunt’s considerable estate upon her death, Julie is shocked to hear that Janice has been given the entire estate, and that she has instead been left a ticket to Siena, Italy, and instructions to meet with her late mother’s bank manager, where some fabulous treasure supposedly awaits her.

After whining her way across the Atlantic, Julie, who has recently learned that her name was originally Giulietta Tolomei, bursts onto the scene in Siena. Naturally, she meets a sort of a fairy godmother along the way, who sees to it that she is outfitted in designer clothes and given a total makeover, then sent marching off to the bank to see what her mother has left her from beyond the grave.

In her mother’s vault, Julie discovers a silver crucifix, a large sheaf of old documents, and a battered copy of Romeo and Juliet. The oldest of the documents is the journal of Maestro Ambrogio, a painter in Siena who recorded his encounters with a pair of star-cross’d lovers, namely Giulietta Tolomei and Romeo Marescotti. Julie’s mother, it would seem, had been researching the history of Shakespeare’s play before her death, and had traced it successfully back to Siena in 1340, and its female lead just so happens to share the name of one of her daughters. The treasure, then, is determined to be a pair of priceless sapphires called Juliet’s Eyes, said to be set in the statue of Juliet built by her grave. The only problem is, of course, that nobody knows where Juliet’s grave is.

Meanwhile, of course, the real question remains, where is Julie’s Romeo? Julie herself spends a good deal of time analyzing this mystery, and while she suspects a certain dark stranger on a motorcycle, she is distracted by the brooding Alessandro, who, she suspects, is playing the role of Paris.

Fortunately for her audience, Fortier’s “original”, that is, Maestro Ambrogio’s supposed journal, which for about half of the book runs parallel to the modern plot, is exciting and unique, with enough of a connection to the Shakespeare play to make his plagiarism several centuries later seem plausible, without becoming predictable in the way Julie’s version does. This more entertaining section makes bearable the treasure hunt and search for Romeo, which regrettably become increasingly convoluted as the book progresses. Amusingly for the reader, Janice makes a return in the final act, once again stealing the insufferable Julie’s little-deserved thunder. Fast-paced at times, and at others painfully drawn-out, “Juliet” misses its mark.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Only an elegant novel can combine an overwhelming love and a horrifying genocide without becoming unbelievable, but Kim Echlin’s “The Disappeared” makes it look easy.

Anne Greves is a 16-year-old student living in 1979 Montreal when she meets Serey. Her mother deceased, she lives with her father, an engineer of prosthetic limbs, but they operate at a distance. This loneliness prompts Anne to begin a habit of frequenting nightclubs, escaping via the blues music she loves.

There she encounters Serey, a Cambodian musician five years her senior. The two date and form a bond that will come to defy societal norms and become the cornerstone of Anne’s life. Despite her father’s disapproval, Anne dates Serey, boldly living with him on weekends, and hanging around his band, whose name is aptly lifted from Sartre’s famous play “No Exit.”

Serey is himself trapped. He was already studying at a university in the safety of Canada when the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror began in Cambodia. Left with only a yellowing photo of his family and his father’s last telegram warning him not to come home, Serey is wracked by worry and survivor’s guilt. He falls in love with Anne as an exile and inevitably has to leave her when the Cambodian borders open.

But it is too late for Anne to turn back. She lives a life of apparent normalcy. She attends university, later becoming a professor of languages herself, but in truth she is hollowed out. She feels Serey’s absence, the danger of life in so unstable a country as post-genocidal Cambodia and her many unreturned letters and phone calls acutely. As a way of bringing herself closer to him, Anne studies the Khmer language, perfecting it. She rents his old apartment, unintentionally wallowing in memories of their past. Eleven years have passed when, watching the news, she believes she finally sees Serey, standing in the crowd at a memorial service. Without hesitation, she buys her plane ticket.

Upon her arrival in Phnom Penh, Anne gruelingly spends her nights searching nightclub after nightclub, until, at last, she and Serey are reunited. Unfortunately, their love cannot outweigh the residue of horror left to the recovering country. Anne’s narration of her time in Cambodia contains equal parts horror and history. Despite the atrocities, she maintains her unflinching love for Serey and manages to convey to he audience the beauty of the people, the culture, struggling to repair the irreversible damage done.

Anne and Serey fall into the familiar rhythm of quotidian existence, but something is off. After the stillborn birth of their daughter, Anne begins to suspect Serey of becoming detached. And when he disappears, Anne would do anything to get him back.

Echlin evokes something of Marguerite Duras’s style in “The Disappeared,” besides the similarity of a romantic relationship between a Western girl and an older Asian lover. Anne narrates from a future without Serey, turning the story into an extended love letter, addressing him throughout as “you,” pouring her grief and her longing for him into their story, her lasting tribute to their love. The eloquence of Echlin’s writing and the real, raw feelings of her narrator makes “The Disappeared” a truly moving read.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Helen Simonson’s first novel, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” captures with perfect aplomb the struggle between reverence for the tried and true and the indefatigable powers of change. Major Ernest Pettigrew (a 68-year-old resident of Edgecombe St. Mary, Sussex) is forced to face this challenge head-on, shaking things up just when he thought that his life had settled into the quiet rhythm of old age.

Major Pettigrew has just received word that his brother has passed away, news which is both personally saddening and a forceful reminder of his own mortality. He is physically rattled by his grief when he happens across the recently widowed Mrs. Ali. Despite the Major’s qualms about sharing his family’s business with a stranger, he finds himself talking to Mrs. Ali, a local shopkeeper and one of the only Muslim women in town. The two discuss their late spouses and their love of Kipling, forming an immediate bond of friendship which quickly develops into something more.

The Major is generally dissatisfied with the direction in which his town—and on a more macrocosmic level, the world—is moving. He is a man of principles, and to see them shattered by the local townspeople’s greed his contemporaries’ disrespect for the traditions he continues to live by and his shallow son Roger’s social climbing is a trial even for Major Pettigrew’s stiff upper lip. Mrs. Ali is a woman of immense tact and understanding, which the Major appreciates, but the townsfolk begin to whisper nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the Pettigrew family is in the midst of a serious debate over a pair of rare Churchill guns, passed down to the Major and his late brother by their father. The Major is adamant about maintaining the guns as part of the family’s legacy, but the younger generation is equally invested in selling them for a profit. Caught between tradition and the wishes of the rest of the family, the Major realizes that his son has fallen far short of his well-meant, but somewhat antiquated, expectations, and that his own motivations in wanting the gun might be somewhat questionable as well.

Everything comes to an unpleasant head when the town golf club, white members only, of course, decides to show their cultural acceptance by hosting a woefully tacky and inevitably offensive “Mughal Empire”-themed event. The Major turns heads when he invites Mrs. Ali, for whom he is steadily developing serious romantic inclinations. Things go horribly awry on all counts, and the remainder of the book deals with the fallout from the ill-fated dinner party.

“Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” is thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end. Simonson’s smart prose gives her work the feel of a novel of manners to make Jane Austen proud. The Major himself is a perfect construction of tact, intractability and wonderfully sarcastic dry humor. The blossoming romance between the major and Mrs. Ali is artfully done without becoming crude or unbelievable. Simonson’s commentary on societal changes and the challenges of small town thinking is apt, making “Major Pettigrew” a force to be reckoned with.