Review Copy |

One of my favorite covers ever. The effect of a watercolor or ink brush painting on the textured, matte dust jacket is gorgeous.

The best travel advice I’ve ever received is: befriend the locals. Or rather, convince the locals to befriend you. Whether it’s a small town in Maine or a village in Afghanistan (preferably when there’s not a war going on), no one knows a place like the people who live there.

I won’t be visiting Afghanistan any time soon – and sadly, I’m left to wonder if the Afghanistan it describes still exists – but be that as it may The Honey Thief is a great way to learn more about the nation and the Hazara people who make up roughly 22% of its population. The book is a collaboration between Najaf Mazari & Robert Hillman. Mazari is a native Afghani who left his home country in 2001 and now lives in Australia with his family. He is the author of the memoir The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif . Robert Hillman is the prize-winning Australian author of the autobiographyThe Boy in the Green Suit. So both these men have some authorial experience behind them. I call them collaborators rather than co-authors based on their own description of the process by which this book was written -

Najaf talks; Robert fashions what he says into the sentences that become the stories. When Robert has completed a chapter or a story, Najaf reads it and offers suggestions. The question Najaf asks himself as he’s reading is this: “If these words were now translated into Dari, would my family in Afghanistan nod their heads and say, ‘This is our country. This is true’?”

The result is an engaging little book of short stories and recipes told to us by a friendly and charismatic narrator. It’s the narrative voice, Najaf Mazari’s voice I expect, that sells The Honey Thief. His storytelling contains the perfect blend of honesty, exaggeration & nostalgia – capturing the charming informality of the oral tradition.

And the idea of including traditional recipes is pure genius. These are written in the same style as the rest of the book and contain instructions like: “Fresh yoghurt. This must be proper yoghurt, not that foolish yoghurt that is sometimes sold with bananas in it and strawberries and sugar”. It’s as if you’re standing in the kitchen next to Mazari while he prepares dinner. It’s a wonderful change from the ubiquitous discussion points meant to target the members of book clubs.

The recipes are a bonus feature that comes at the end though. The Honey Thief starts by telling us about the Hazara people.

A tribe is a world. I have described myself to people who are not of my tribe in this way and that, and usually I satisfy the person I’m talking to, and also satisfy myself, up to a point. I say ‘ I am a pacifist,’ and so place myself in a very large tribe of people who share at least one belief with me. Or I say, ‘I am a businessman,’ and the banker I am addressing knows that I can be relied on to keep an accurate account of what I buy and sell; that I make sensible decisions with my money. I say, ‘I am a Muslim,’ and the Muslim listening to me will make a dozen assumptions about the life I lead, most of them correct. When I meet a Hazara, I don’t say, ‘Nice to meet you, I am Hazara.’ There is no need. We will greet each other in a different way to the way we greet people who are not of our tribe. We will be both excited and shy at one time. Excited because we are brothers, shy because without even knowing my name, the man I am talking to can see deep into my heart…

From there you’ll go n to read an eclectic mix of histories, folktales, family stories and (of course) the recipes. The Honey Thief really has a little bit of everything. I particularly liked the stories set in the recent past (1970’s & 80’s). In many ways these are the most brutal, but that’s because they seem the most connected to current events. Many of them follow the life of Abbas Behishti – who is a young boy dealing with the loss of his beloved grandfather when we meet him in the titular story. As a grown man he makes a journey on motorcycle across a landscape stripped bare by war with the Soviets. The stark juxtaposition of a man whose way of life seems to have changed very little since his apprenticeship as a child to a beekeeper and the mujaheddin soldiers with machine guns he encounters as he travels across the country is startling… as much to him as to us. The inclusion of these slices of a “modern” Afghanistan rounds out the book and turns it into something of a mini compendium on the Hazara people.

Even with the introduction of modern warfare, this is still one of the more light-hearted accounts of Afghani life I’ve read to date. Alternating between fables and stories makes them resonate and creates context. Add the traditional recipes and it becomes an immersive experience. Underlying it all is the deep love of an expatriate for the home he’s left behind. The Honey Thief is a chance to learn about a place and it’s people from someone who knows it best.

Publisher: Viking, New York (2013)
ISBN: 978 0 670 02648 7

Of all his novels and short stories, it is For Whom the Bell Tolls that showcases Ernest Hemingway’s signature brand of maudlin, alcohol-soaked sentimentality. Yet it remains a great novel. The closing paragraphs, as Robert Jordan says goodbye to his María, are among the most heartbreaking ever written. Yes, I believe it would have been better if Hemingway had just written their conversation in Spanish instead of inflicting all those English thees and thous on readers. Yes, there is something weird about his choice of the nickname Rabbit. But the bleakness conjured by the words “We will not be going to Madrid…” has remained with me, as I imagine it has with others.

The famous epigraph that gives the book it’s title, taken from John Donne’s XVII Meditation can be attributed to Hemingway’s cynicism or prescience depending on your feelings about the man. It ends with his hero, who valiantly aligned himself against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, lying beneath a tree and waiting to die. We know the Fascists, Franco’s Nationalists, ultimately win – and in doing so unlatch the gate for the coming of the second World War. “No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

Juan José Saer has set his novel, Scars, in a completely different time and place. “La Zona” is Saer’s personal Yoknapawtapha. It includes the city of Santa Fé, Argentina, c. the late c. 1960′s. The books is divided into four parts. How Saer names his parts is unusual – he uses it to compress the timeline. Part one is February, March, April, May, June; part two is March, April, May; part three is April, May and part four is simply May. The common factor of all four narratives is a violent murder which takes place in May (the description of which is the last narrative in the book). Luis Fiore kills his wife, La Gringa, by shooting her in the face with a shotgun. Twice.

The final part of Scars tells the story of the murder from the murderer’s perspective. The preceding three parts only touch on that event. Or rather, the event touches on the lives of the three men who each act as first person narrators for a section of the book. It opens with Ángel Leto, who is a young journalist given access to Fiore by the judge on the case. But of the 90 pages that make up Leto’s story only 7 pages and a few scattered sentences talk about Fiore or the murder. The rest is taken up by/with Leto’s libido as he goes about his day-to-day business. All his interactions are underlaced with an uncomfortable sexual tension.

The parts/chapters which follow are told from the perspective of an attorney and former friend of Fiore who has given himself over entirely to the game of Baccarat – spending all his money, mortgaging his house and taking the wages of his young housekeeper in order to continue gambling; and by the judge who presides over Fiore’s case – a man in a deep depression who sees the world through the narrow tunnel of his daily routine and perceives his fellow human beings as gorillas. Lust, addiction, despair and rage – these are the drives each man’s life seems to be reduced to. One at a time we, the readers, are trapped in an individual narrator’s head… along with his particular demon. Each of these men are connected, tenuously perhaps, by the murder. And each is isolated, living self-absorbed lives in which everyone around them is a supporting character.

Scars is an early novel – by a writer who is considered by many to be one of Argentina’s most important and influential authors. As such it has it’s strengths and weaknesses. The writing feels intentionally claustrophobic. Steve Dolph has done a wonderful translation – somehow balancing the author’s obsession with the repetition and minutiae of his characters’ lives (a detailed explanation of the game of craps, for example), with incredibly subtle moments of true poignancy. The Hemingwayesque styled conversations, particularly, are powerful because the prose is so stripped down. Saer doesn’t even bother with quotation marks.

They’ve told me you live off gambling, said el Negro.

Just the opposite, I said.

Then I asked him to tell me about Fiore. He said that he had gone hunting in Colastine Norte with his wife and their girl. In the truck from the mill. That on the way back they stopped at a bar. There was an argument, and when they were leaving he shot her, twice. I asked if the argument had been violent. He said he didn’t really know. He said that he had used the shotgun.

That could actually help, I said.

They’re going to give him twenty years, at least, said el Negro.

He’ll be comfortable in prison, I said. Much more than on the outside. It’s always more comfortable in prison, in a way.

El Negro stared at me. The skin on his face was thick and taut. Two cords curved from the base of his nose, dropped to the corners of his mouth, and died at his jawline.

I never thought I would find you like this, said el Negro.

Come on, Negrito, I said. We go back. Tell me what you can, because I’m not asking out of curiosity.

Scars ends with a postscript; the Latin words “NAM OPORTET HAERESES ESSE”. This translates to “There must be heresies” which is actually only a partial quotation of 1 Corinthians 11:19. The full line reads: “For there must be heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you”. The word heresies is sometimes translated as heretics, or as divergent sects. The translator Heather Cleary wrote a wonderful article on Saer for the website the Quarterly Conversation entitled The Geometry of Dissent – in which she translates HAERESES to mean heresies or divergent sects. Saer’s plays with points of view and perceptions, allowing the story of the murder to unfold slowly as the book progresses until, at the very end, we are allowed inside Fiore’s head (though clear answers still aren’t given). This makes sense, though to be honest I don’t see much divergence in the facts of the case among the narrators. Another interpretation that seems equally legitimate is “heretics”. That these four men, each sunk in a particular vice, likeable but by no means good, are in a way the heretics. That their miseries, obsessions, addictions are all necessary to better see (and appreciate) a life better lived. Because, going back to Hemingway, the only way to make someone understand that no man is an island is to show him that he, in fact, is. That we are all trapped alone in our heads*, wrapped up in our own lives and egos. Grace is the opportunity to step outside of ourselves and be “involved in mankind”. Juan José Saer seems to have understood that… though his characters may not.

*have you ever read a Hemingway character who wasn’t trapped in his head??

Publisher: Open Letter Books, Rochester (2011)
ISBN: 978 1 934824 22 1