1. SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2012 67
David Dabydeen
Pak’s Britannica
Lynne Macedo, ed.
University of the West Indies Press
A celebrated Caribbean writer and
professor, Dabydeen has tackled issues
ranging from slavery to Shakespeare,
always with an unapologetic eye to
the marginalization of black culture.
A collection of essays and interviews,
Pak’s Britannia is the first book devoted
exclusively to Dabydeen’s academic work.
Roser Caminals
The Street of the Three Beds
University Press of the South
A rich heir seeks to understand the
disappearance of his seamstress mistress.
Set in late-nineteenth-century Barcelona,
The Street of the Three Beds explores the
connections between the city’s prosperous
elite and its seedy underside. Originally
written in Catalan, it is now also available
in Spanish and English.
Nota Bene
Teddy must give way to the perverse
speculation and advice of his crooked
superior, Inspector Malangi. When
paired with the advice on marriage
that Alice receives from her supe-
rior, Sister Hina Alvi, the couple falls,
powerless, into a trap of distrust.
As if trying to work a thankless
job and balance an unstable marriage
to a Muslim man she hardly knows
were not difficult enough, Alice finds
herself suddenly engulfed in acts of
divine intervention at the Sacred
Heart. It is through the juxtaposition
of human baseness and seemingly
miraculous events that Hanif weaves
his tale, thus exploring the bounds of
humanity at both ends, in depravity
and in divinity.
With a profession of love at
gunpoint, a man severing his own
thumb, and a laborious stillbirth,
this novel is not for the faint of
heart. The action of the novel steam-
rolls through to the end, thus keep-
ing readers engaged through the last
page, even if the novel does seem to
end a bit abruptly. Once the action
of the novel is concluded, Hanif
includes a letter from Alice’s father
that calls into question the nature of
Alice as a person, a nurse, and a wife.
Much like E. M. Forster’s A Pas-
sage to India, Hanif ends the novel
with more ambiguity over the very
questions he begins with—namely,
what roles truth and order have in
current Pakistani life and whether or
not Catholic and Muslim relations
can find common ground. Although
the novel does not conclude as neatly
as Hanif’s first novel, A Case of Explod-
ing Mangoes, it is just as well writ-
ten. What’s more, the characters who
comprise Our Lady of Alice Bhatti offer
more dimension than their predeces-
sors in A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
Mohammed Hanif’s second novel
proves to be a deep, gritty, and excit-
ing addition to his literary career.
Melanie Wattenbarger
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Adam Johnson. The Orphan
Master’s Son. New York. Ran-
dom House. 2012. isbn 978-
0812992793
The Orphan Master’s Son follows Jun
Do, a man searching for identity
while succumbing to the impulsive
and oppressive whims of the North
Korean government. I already need
to remind myself: this is a review of
Adam Johnson’s modern Orwellian
epic, not a highlight reel relaying the
orchestrated horrors of Kim Jong Il’s
living symphony. I wonder if John-
son had a similar struggle.
Although the novel’s protago-
nist, Jun Do, displays model citizen-
ship, he finds himself a victim of
the government’s calculated whims,
including his frequent transfer
among the county’s worst jobs—tun-
nel soldier, kidnapper, naval spy—
before being sent to Prison 33, a
prison modeled after North Korea’s
present-day concentration camps.
What follows is a complex prem-
ise that introduces a nameless state
interrogator who oscillates between
his own story of struggle with his
aging parents’ fear disguised as patri-
otism and the biography of Jun Do,
who, in an oddly logical attempt to
control his own identity, assumes
the identity of Commander Ga, the
nation’s most respected and highest-
ranking war hero, in order to defy
Kim Jong Il on behalf of the national
actress, Sun Moon.
Of course, the story is peppered
with hilariously absurd messages from

2. 68 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
reviews
the state’s propaganda loudspeakers
blaring their version of Jun Do’s story
(presumably the state’s altered version
of the biography written by the name-
less state interrogator) as the select-
ed winner of the Best North Korean
Story. In the narrative, Johnson speaks
to his largest theme, the supremacy
of national interests and propaganda
over the individual: “Stories are factual.
If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso
by the state, everyone had better start
calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d
be wise to start practicing the piano.
For us, the story is more important
than the person.”
Although the first half of the
book serves as a sort of prologue to
the more interesting Jun Do / Com-
mander Ga storyline, and nearly this
much of the book is required before
the story begins layering rich, sat-
isfying implications and picking up
any steam, it all ends at a dead sprint
as Jun Do sacrifices the only identity
he ever had for the sake of the only
woman he ever loved.
At times, the sadistic governmen-
tal whims, Kim Jong Il’s character (even
though Johnson said he toned him
down to make him more believable),
and the content of propaganda mes-
sages border on the farcical, but the sto-
ry’s ability to elicit empathy makes the
individual’s struggle for identity against
an oppressive North Korea powerfully
human and authentic.
As an aside, we certainly can’t
ignore that Kim Jong Il is alive and
well in The Orphan Master’s Son. John-
son expressed concern that Kim’s
December 2011 death would demys-
tify the legend (much the way Saddam
Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi’s
deaths did for them) before Orphan’s
January 2012 release. But, he said,
the secrecy surrounding Kim’s death
only served to magnify the reality Kim
had so meticulously manufactured.
John Tyler Allen
New York
Etgar Keret. Suddenly, a Knock
on the Door. Miriam Shlesinger,
Sondra Silverston, and Nathan
Englander, tr. New York. Farrar,
Straus & Giroux. 2012. isbn 978-
0374533335
Some stories are hard to get out of
your head, and Etgar Keret writes
such stories. His latest collection
brims with tales filled with sorrowful
poignancy and sympathetic isolation.
His telltale flare for the magical and
the absurd is present here in such
works as “Lieland,” in which a habitual
liar enters a world populated by the
characters from his and others’ lies,
and “Unzipping,” in which a curious
woman discovers a zipper under her
lover’s tongue and finds a completely
different man underneath when she
pulls it (see WLT, Nov. 2008, 19).
But many of his characters in this
work are average Joes who simply play
out a few moments of their mundane
lives for us yet succeed at revealing
more about our own lives than if they
had gone on a great adventure. One
such tale is “Healthy Start,” in which
Miron, a lonely man who eats his
breakfast at the same café each morn-
ing, starts inviting strangers to his
table and pretending to be whomever
they presume him to be. As expected,
this new habit ends in disaster when
Miron meets with an angry man and
pretends to be the lover of the man’s
wife. Yet, as Miron is lying on the
ground covered in blood after the
man beats him up, he feels alive, per-
haps for the first time. Keret shows
us that we need the painful, horrible
moments of life to provide the fertile
ground for awakening.
Keret is more than your average
storyteller—he is an acerbic social
critic, with an imagination like fire.
His insight burns all, but this destruc-
tion is precisely what paves the way
for new growth. His identity as an
Israeli writer is everywhere apparent,
and he often uses his penetrating eyes
to critique the politics of his region.
“Pick a Color” is, for me, the full-
est embodiment of Keret’s poignan-
cy, imagination, and cultural criti-
cism. In this story, violence befalls