HOT NEW AND OLD BOOKS
Novel Pursuits, June 2000
by Pilar Webster

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A Café on the Nile
Bull, Bartle (1998)

The year is 1935 and the city of Cairo anticipates Mussolini's impending invasion of Ethiopia. The cosmopolitan Cataract Café, owned by wealthy Goan dwarf, Olivio Fonseca Alavedo, becomes a hub of camaraderie and intrigue for a wide assortment of characters, among them an English safari hunter, his estranged wife, her lover, an Italian safari hunter, his estranged wife, her lover, an Italian Air Force Officer, a German soldier of fortune, and wealthy American twin sisters in search of adventure.

As the Italian campaign gets underway, the action shifts to the highlands of East Africa with dramatic consequences for all the characters.

A Café on the Nile is an adventure story with romantic elements that ensure it a wide appeal. But this is no mere "potboiler." Bartle Bull, a member of the Royal Geographic Society and Explorers' Club, brings solid historical and geographic scholarship to this work. Bull's breathtaking description of the African locales reveals intimate knowledge of the area.

The End of the Affair
Greene, Graham (1951)

Recently made into a film this 1951 novel is set in wartime London. Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, and Sarah Miles, the wife of a prominent civil servant, engage in a passionate love affair. Following an air raid, Sarah inexplicably breaks off the relationship leaving Maurice embittered. As time goes on, Maurice comes to believe that his love has turned to hate. A jealous obsession drives him to the extreme step of retaining a private investigator to discover whether Sarah has taken a new lover. The results of the investigation give this story the mystical and religious twist which Greene, a convert to Catholicism, often brought to his works.

The Aguero Sisters
Garcia, Cristina

Cristina Garcia, a Cuban-American author, spins a tale of two sisters separated in their childhood, and of two Cubas - Castro's island, and the exile community in Miami.

Reina Aguero, sensual and irresistible to men, has lived in Cuba all her life. A Castro partisan, she is a master electrician in the nationalized conomy. Her sister Constancia has spent her adult years in New York and Miami and has absorbed the North American entrepreneurial spirit. Flawlessly manicured and efficient, Constancia owns her own cosmetics company.

Eventually the desire to uncover a dark family secret drives Reina to re-unite with Constancia in Florida. The novel explores the sisters' differences in culture, temperament, and family allegiance.

Christina Garcia, who won considerable acclaim with her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, is an exponent of the 'magical realism' style prevalent among Latin American authors. She describes "magical realism" as "taking reality to its furthest possible extreme - and then some." Aguero Sisters is a compelling portrait of family conflicts and loyalties.

Plainsong
Haruf, Kent (2000)

In style and setting, Plainsong is as far removed as could be from the lush, rococo world of the Aguero Sisters. Yet both novels deal with family relationships.

The setting is the small rural town of Holt, Colorado. The main characters all come from fractured homes. Tom Guthrie, a high school teacher, assumes sole responsibility for his two small sons after his wife deserts the family. Victoria Roubideaux, a pregnant teenager finds herself alone after her divorced mother forces her to leave home. Two elderly bachelor brothers, Raymond and Harold McPherson, farm the family homestead, apparently content in their isolation from the outside world. Maggie Jones, an attractive schoolteacher who cares for her senile father, extends a helping hand to Guthrie and Victoria.

Gradually these disparate characters come together to form a "family" based on sympathy and affection.

Haruf's novel derives its title from the "unisonous vocal music used in the Christian Church from the earliest times; any simple and unadorned melody." In a consciously understated tone Haruf tells this tender story of ordinary events in the lives of plain people