Park Hill Community Bookstore suggests translations, kids’ book

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Park Hill Community Bookstore recommends two terrific translations and a children’s book with stunning illustrations.

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From the publisher: Victor is depressed: his lover has dumped him, his short stories are too short, and the light has gone off in his dingy apartment. His only companion is Misha, the penguin he rescued from Kiev’s Zoo, when it couldn’t feed the animals anymore. Misha is the silent witness to Victor’s despair, and joins in his celebration — fish and vodka — when Victor’s luck seems to turn: He is commissioned to write obituaries. The weird thing is that the editor wants him to select subjects who are still alive, the movers and the shakers of the new, post-Communist society.

From Sheryl Hartmann, volunteer: I read about the author, Andrei Kurkov, in the New York Times and was especially interested because he’s a highly-praised Ukrainian author and public intellectual and I was eager to get a deeper sense of Ukrainian life outside of what’s in the newspapers right now. The penguin, Misha, acts like a penguin and is never made to seem human. There is murder and intrigue that takes place “off-screen” so the novel is not violent or gory. Victor, the main character, gradually begins to suspect that the obituaries he is writing pertain to people who are alive now but who the “state” is probably going to kill at some future date. The novel is short, about 250 pages, and if you like satire, surrealism, and books that present moral dilemmas, I highly recommend it. There’s a sequel — “Penguin Lost” — published in 2005 that I plan to read in the near future.

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From the publisher: Yochanan Rivlin, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Haifa University, is determined to understand two conflicts that have become central to his life: the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, which he feels will help him better understand the Arab mind and, more personally, his son’s divorce. His is a double search for truth, each involving a different bride — Samaher, his newly-wed Arab research assistant from a village in the Galilee, and Galya, who deserted his son in Jerusalem with no explanation. Against his wife’s better judgment, Rivlin tries obsessively to get to the core of both problems, crossing boundaries at once personal and political — man and wife, father and son, teacher and pupil, Jew and Arab.

With equal measures of energy, humor, anxiety, and poetry, Yehoshua portrays a life sometimes improbable, often dark, and infinitely rich. “The Liberated Bride” is a feat of masterly storytelling from one of the world’s great novelists.

From Sheryl Hartmann, volunteer: This is a long book — close to 700 pages and it took me about 100 pages to become so absorbed that I couldn’t wait to get back to it. ( Yehoshua wrote “A Woman in Jerusalem”, which I also loved.) I’ve done quite a bit of reading and studying about the history of the establishment of Israel starting from around 1890 through to what’s happening today. From what I can tell, I think this book fairly presents the social and daily life events of Arabs and Jews during the 1990s. There’s an interesting thread regarding Professor Rivlin’s field of study — the Algerian War of the 1950s and the ideas of “Orientalism” as defined by Edward Said in the 1970s. When I finished reading I decided that the book was optimistic and filled with cultural insights around the themes of love, identity, and social expectations.

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From the publisher: In 1936, eighth grader MacNolia Cox became the first African American to win the Akron, Ohio, spelling bee. And with that win, she was asked to compete at the prestigious National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC, where she and a girl from New Jersey were the first African Americans invited since its founding. She left her home state a celebrity — right up there with Ohio’s own Joe Louis and Jesse Owens — with a military band and a crowd of thousands to see her off at the station.

But celebration turned to chill when the train crossed the state line into Maryland, where segregation was the law of the land. Prejudice and discrimination ruled — on the train, in the hotel, and, sadly, at the spelling bee itself. With a brief epilogue recounting MacNolia’s further history, “How Do You Spell Unfair?” — aimed at readers from 7 to 10 years —is the story of her groundbreaking achievement magnificently told by award-winning creators and frequent picture-book collaborators Carole Boston Weatherford and Frank Morrison.

From Linda Baie, volunteer coordinator: If you want to read a short picture book that lays out the history of racism after the Civil War, read this book. Although Black people were freed, Jim Crow laws set in place in southern states kept them segregated and left out of many, many things. This particular story of MacNolia Cox’s journey and the Scripps National Spelling Bee makes one’s heart hurt. It starts with her journey but continues on until finally, in the early 1960’s, local spelling bees opened to African Americans.

Weatherford tells of MacNolia, who went to the National Bee and was well supported by her community, yet she had to stay with a Black doctor because the hotel that housed the white contestants didn’t allow Blacks. They also couldn’t use the elevator at the banquet but climbed the stairs and were seated at a separate table. And there is more. Can you spell O-U-T-R-A-G-E-D? I wrote that because on each page, Weatherford ends with a word that encapsulates the content of that page in a question, as I did. It’s a clever way to knit the theme. Frank Morrison’s paintings fill every page with gorgeous illustrations of the action described. There is an epilogue and a selected bibliography at the back.

Type of Story: Review

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