Two Years in the French West Indies by Lafcadio Hearn
Though the Anglo-Irish-Greek author and translator Lafcadio Hearn is best known for his work introducing the culture and literature of Japan to the West, enthusiastic traveler that he was, he also passed considerable time in the Caribbean, some of which is recounted in this lovely book. Despite occasional (though typical for the time) outdated musings about race, Two Years in the French West Indies contains exquisite descriptions of such locales as Georgteown, Guyana and of the dazzling ethnic diversity of Trinidad as they existed in the late 1880s. Focusing in the main on Martinique, Hearn pens, especially considering the time, very respectful accounts of Martinique’s spiritual and cultural life and seems enraptured by the physical beauty present in this part of the world.
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov
A book suffused with loss as it looks at the life of a beekeeper living in a nearly-abandoned village in eastern Ukraine during Russia’’s 2014 lunge for that part of the country (a precursor to its larger 2022 invasion), this novel brings home some idea of the human cost that Russian imperialism has exacted on the people of Ukraine.
The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace
A beautifully-written account of the of the struggles, the hopes, the anger, the pettiness, the sadness and the bravery of a cast of characters living in close quarters in an impoverished quarter of Trinidad’s Port of Spain, this 1979 novel is an expertly-crafted evocation of the reality and rich inner lives of its subjects.
Cairo: The City Victorious by Max Rodenbeck
An interesting 1998 effort by an Anglo-American journalist to encapsulate the dizzying urban multiverse that is Egypt’s massive capital city, this books has its weak points (various military leaders, rulers, and foreign eccentrics are mentioned in passing and then disappear, without making any particular impression up on the reader and the tone - about slavery, for instance - can seen off-puttingly flippant), but it improves as it goes on and is still an admirable attempt to fit a kaleidoscope of human experience into a digestible form.
Journal 1935–1944: The Fascist Years by Mihail Sebastian
A searing first-hand account of the collapse of Romania into hysterical totalitarianism by a young Jewish writer, these journals open with a vivid description of the extraordinary intellectual hothouse that was Bucharest before the war, even as ominous rumblings of virulent antisemitism spread through the very intelligentsia that Mihail Sebastian was part of. The curdling of the nation’s ailing political system into something truly dreadful is vividly and terrifyingly evoked, first in the so-called National Legionary State that saw the quasi-mystical fascist Iron Guard rule in uneasy cohabitation with right-wing General Ion Antonescu, and then under the reactionary and violently anti-semitic Antonescu alone after a failed coup attempt by the Guard which included a hideous anti-Jewish pogrom in Bucharest. Though the book could have perhaps used an editor to pare down some of the rather workman like recounting of some of the author’s romantic escapades and passages about the mechanics of writing, the journals are full of beautiful lyrical passages, such as Sebastian’s description of a football match just before the horrors of war descend:
It has been perhaps one of the last magnificent days of autumn. I went to a soccer match at the O..E.F. (Venus against CFR), not for the match but for the scenery, which I guessed in advance would be gleaming. I wasn't wrong. A weary, powdered, tender light-and far off a bright, steamy, silvery mist from which the city detached itself in an unreal way, as in a painted canvas or a mounted photograph. And how many colors! I didn't know there were so many red houses in Bucharest. From the stadium they look as if they are made of toy bricks. And the leafless trees jut out of the mist as from a damp exhalation of their own. Everything was very delicately drawn, but with an explosive wealth of color. The red grounds, the multicolored billboards, the still-green grass, the football shirts mingling black, white, and blue, the huge crowd: it was all quite dizzying. At the beginning of the second half, the referee blew his whistle for a minute's silence in memory, I think, of a foreign player who died recently. Suddenly there was a massive silence-a silence of some twenty thousand people. The noise of the city could just be heard in the distance.
Following Romania’s disastrous decision to join forces with Germany, Sebastian and his family live through conflict and displacement within Bucharest, as he tries to retain his sanity by reading Balzac during bombing raids. As the nightmare of fascism drew to a close (to be followed closely by the nightmare of Communist dictatorship), and only nine months before his own untimely death in a traffic accident, Sebastian penned memorable lines in an entry that may read very familiar to the citizens of newly-liberated Syria today: “And now, life begins. A kind of life, which has to be lived. The only thing for which I longed was freedom. Not a new definition of freedom—but freedom. After so many years of terror, we don’t need to have it explained to us what freedom is. We know what it is—and it cannot be replaced by any formula.”
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh
A wonderful, touching and deeply sad memoir by the Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh that, as any good work of literature does, restores subtlety and humanity to a group of people - in this case Palestinians - who are so frequently caricatured abroad.
The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha
A sprawling and nearly all-encompassing account that places abolition as a movement in its proper transnational context, this tome also illustrates how the abolitionist vision was a multiracial one with African-Americans ever at the forefront.
How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems by Serhiy Zhadan
This volume is an incandescent and affecting work - part exorcism of horrors witnessed, part rallying cry for a future yet to be won - by a great Ukrainian poet who, since Russia’s 2022 invasion, has also served in the 13th Khartiia Brigade, a combat brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine. The expert translation by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps allows Zhadan’s work to flow beautifully in English in a series of poems that are reminiscent of some of the best work of Mahmoud Darwish or Nâzım Hikmet in their fusing of the personal with the political.
