The Dream of My Return, Horacio Castellanos Moya

The whole time I was reading this book (admittedly, not for very long because the book is very short) I kept thinking, "I love this book, but why???" Having finished it, I'm still not sure I can articulate what exactly I loved so much about it. 

Over Labor Day weekend, I was visiting friends in LA. They took me to the nice little Alias Books in Atwater Village, where I proceeded to scan the fiction section from A to about M (at which point we ran out of time and had to leave) looking for books from countries I hadn't read. I picked up two without knowing anything at all about them, including The Dream of My Return, which is to represent El Salvador.

It's a first-person narrative of a rather neurotic Salvadoran journalist living in Mexico City who is making plans to return to El Salvador as the civil war is on the verge of ending. Wild things that seem realistic and normal happen to him, he undergoes hypnotherapy, he overthinks everything. He's a cad, but relatable. I just liked him. And the book. It was just right. (It reminded me a bit of Bolaño, though I liked it better than the short fiction I've read by Bolaño (whose long fiction I adore). It made me want to go back to Mexico City!)

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, Louis Begley

Before I get into my review, can I tell you the most crazy thing I learned from this book? It's that Emile Zola was maybe murdered for his support of Dreyfus. I had no idea!! (I hope this doesn't qualify as a spoiler? Sorry!!!)

I read this for, and then thoroughly discussed it with, my reading-around-Proust book club, so I'm not inclined to say a whole lot about it now. Prior to starting Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, my knowledge of the affair came primarily from reading Proust and Benjamin, and this book provided context that my other sources lacked. This was a thoroughly readable, just-in-depth-enough history of the events leading up to Dreyfus' arrest, his trials, the circumstances of his imprisonment, and his eventual exoneration.

On a side note: through much of the book, Begley draws parallels between the circumstances surrounding the Dreyfus affair and the 21st Century "war on terror," some of which seem a bit forced. Knowing what we do nearly 8 years later, I found it rather sad to read his preface, written on the eve of President Obama's inauguration, which focused on the prisoners at Guantanamo and the hope for them under the new administration.

Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton

I feel pretty dumb about this now, but I didn't realize Alan Paton was white until I googled him some chapters into my reading of Cry, the Beloved Country. I had a longish list of South African books I was considering -- titles by J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Foreigner, and Athol Fugard (whom I had also assumed was black for quite some time) -- and I thought to myself, maybe I should not choose a book by a white author to represent South Africa. Then I found a copy of Cry, the Beloved Country at a thrift store, and I thought, "perfect!" Joke was on me! At the same time, I had in the back of my head some faint memory of critiques I'd heard of the book. I couldn't remember any specifics, but having read the book now I can imagine what they were. (A certain elevation of Christian morals, a dose of "white man's burden" thinking, and just a general disposition toward conciliation, mainly.)

It's hard to read this book, nearly 70 years after it was originally published, and not reflect on the fact that the apartheid state in South Africa only strengthened in the decades following its publication. The book is hopeful, and you would like to believe that people would behave and come to mutual understanding in the face of tragedy, the way they did in the book, but history tells us this was not so. At the same time, this was published in 1948, at a time when European colonialism was firmly in place throughout Africa, and gave voice to some of its ill effects, bringing these to an audience that may not have been attentive to them before. It's hard to imagine what the book meant in its time.