Review by Lynda La Rocca
Favorite Books – December 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
I’ve always been fascinated by the way a seemingly inconsequential act can generate unimaginably far-reaching — and unforeseen — consequences.
In House of Sand and Fog, a clerical error sparks a crisis that engulfs the novel’s protagonists and culminates in a tragedy that, while almost preordained, is nevertheless profoundly shocking.
While I can’t say that I liked any of the characters in this riveting book, I have to admit that I sympathized with them. Author Andre Dubus III draws readers so deeply into his characters’ minds and souls that we end up seeing the world only through their eyes, accepting each disparate point of view so completely that otherwise heinous behavior becomes not only understandable, but almost justifiable. It’s an odd talent, one that Dubus puts to dazzling and disturbing use.
Kathy Nicolo, an unstable, 36-year-old house cleaner and former drug addict whose second husband recently deserted her, has managed to hold on to just one thing in her entire life — a cottage on Bisgrove Street in northern California, her late father’s only legacy. When she is mistakenly evicted and the county auctions her house to recover unpaid taxes (which are actually owed by a resident of a house on Biscove rather than Bisgrove Street), Kathy spirals into an abyss of destruction that eventually encompasses everyone in her path.
The buyer of Kathy’s house is Massoud Amir Behrani, a middle-aged former colonel in the Iranian air force who fled to America with his family when the Shah was overthrown. Once members of Iran’s elite, powerful ruling class, the Behranis have no social standing in America, yet they manage to keep up appearances within their clique of still-wealthy, but similarly dispossessed Iranian exiles by steadily depleting their once-considerable savings. Unable to find a job suited to his exalted past, Behrani works as a roadside trash collector by day and in a convenience store at night, jobs he carefully keeps secret from both his children and his Iranian neighbors. A newspaper notice for an auction of what turns out to be Kathy’s house leads Behrani to devise a plan to secure his family’s future in America: He will become a real estate speculator, purchasing the cottage at auction, quickly reselling it at a significant profit, then using the proceeds to buy additional properties.
This would be a fine scheme if not for Kathy’s furious determination to get her house back. And when Lester Burdon, the married sheriff’s officer who helps evict Kathy and then becomes her lover, is added to this already volatile mix, disaster ensues.
Alternating, first-person segments perfectly capture both Kathy’s cigarette-husky, world-weary voice, and the quaint, stilted speech of Behrani, a man who has been thrust into a society he neither respects nor understands.
When Behrani learns that he is expected to “correct” the clerical error by selling Kathy’s house back to the county, his bewilderment at America’s convoluted legal and economic systems gives way to rage.
“Three times I read the letter, and I begin a fourth time to read it when my hands tear the paper to pieces and I throw them at the trash basket…. Oh, this country, this terrible place; what manner of society is it when one cannot expect a business transaction to be completed once the papers have been signed and the money deposited? What do they think? No, it is clear they do not think; they are idiots; and they are weak; and they are stupid…. and may God damn them all to hell: a sale is a sale.”
I know just what he means.
WHEN THE PARENTS of Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager who has been called the “human face of the Holocaust,” gave their daughter a cloth-covered diary for her 13th birthday, they had no idea how that one small gift would affect the world.
From its pages sprang the classic, The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne’s passionate, gut-wrenching account of the 25 months she, her parents, sister, and four other acquaintances, spent hiding from the Nazis during World War II.
In her fine book, Anne Frank: the biography, Melissa Müller recounts how, after Anne and the other occupants of the “secret annex” were betrayed and sent to concentration camps, Miep Gies serendipitously discovered Anne’s diary and the sheets of paper on which Anne had been revising her original entries.
Gies, who was the primary protector of the annex inhabitants, saved the material, intending to return it to Anne at the war’s end. Respecting the teenager’s privacy, she didn’t read the entries. If she had, Gies says in the book’s epilogue, she would have had to destroy everything because the pages would have incriminated both Gies and the Franks’ other helpers in the eyes of the Nazis.
Using formerly unavailable documents and correspondence, along with interviews of friends and family members who survived Hitler’s genocide, Müller creates a finely nuanced portrait of Anne, her family, her background, and the Europe in which she lived and died. She fleshes out the girl who Anne herself revealed in her diary, portraying the teenager in an unsentimentalized, warts-and-all fashion. Along with speculation as to who may have betrayed the residents of the annex, Müller’s biography contains family photos and a genealogy of the families of both Anne’s beloved father Otto (the only annex inhabitant to survive the war) and her mother Edith, with whom Anne had a relationship best described as “tumultuous.”
THE MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE is one ripe, juicy peach of a book, so big, and lusty, and luscious and full of life that it’s impossible to put down.
Novelist Oscar Hijuelos portrays Latin life in New York City in the late 1940s and 1950s as seen through the eyes of the Mambo Kings, the great César Castillo and his brooding younger brother Nestor, Cuban musicians who take the city’s club scene by storm yet never quite make the big time.
When Nestor’s song, “Bellísima María de Mi Alma” (“Beautiful María of My Soul”), written in honor of his one true — and forever lost — love, catches the attention of fellow Cuban Desi Arnaz, the Mambo Kings reach the pinnacle of their fame: They appear on a segment of the I Love Lucy show, singing “Beautiful María of My Soul” at the Tropicana nightclub, backed by Ricky Ricardo and his orchestra.
This is an earthy, street-smart, yet introspective work that makes you laugh with joy while crying over the essential loneliness that is the human condition. It captures the spirit of an era, a community, a family, a man, and his passion for wine, women, song, and cigars (and lots of all of them). It’s no wonder that this book won a Pulitzer Prize; this is a work that’s truly magical.
Lynda La Rocca sometimes teaches in Leadville, and she lives and writes in Twin Lakes.
