Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen: Simple Recipes from My Many Mothers by Kim Thuy (Penguin Random House Canada)

“I depend on food to express as best I can my unconditional love.” novelist Kim Thuy says in her introduction to this cookbook. Although she herself is an accomplished cook who gave up a career as a lawyer to open a restaurant in Montreal, Thuy gives full credit to her mother and her “aunt-mothers” for the recipes that fill the pages of Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen. They are the women who taught her that food is love, “a tool for expressing our emotions.”

While most cookbooks introduce a particular cuisine and culture, Thuy’s introduces her family, beginning with her husband and two sons for whom she makes three separate meals every day between 3 and 8 o’clock, and then presenting her culinary lodestars, her mother and her five aunts.

Portraits of these stunning women introduce each section of the cookbook, beginning with The Fundamentals and ending with Desserts and Snacks. Their strong, beautiful faces and their brief introductory stories give this book an extraordinary dimension: the mother who “very easily gained a degree in aeronautical technology during our first years in Canada,” the aunt “who waited for her husband for ten years,” the aunt who kept her composure during a difficult divorce by silently conjugating French verbs, the rebellious aunt who found success in the United States, the aunt who lacks the ability to live alone but who has mastered “the art of conversation better than any of her sisters,” the aunt who is “the eternal beauty.” Thuy herself appears only at the very end, a dazzlingly radiant and “infinitely impatient” eater of desserts, with a self-description of ”Me, I tell stories.”

It’s difficult to take attention away from these women but the lessons they teach their readers are equal to that task. No detail is ignored nor previous knowledge assumed--cook rice noodles in cold water and turn off the heat as soon as the water boils; when cooking fish with turmeric, use “three times as much dill as fish;” serve heaping platters of vegetables, raw and cooked, with almost every meal; use a spray bottle filled with warm water to moisten and soften soften rice paper wrappers. And don’t forget the fish sauce, without which “most Vietnamese couldn’t cook, couldn’t EXIST,” or the fresh herbs that “leave a memory of their perfume long afterward…like a lover’s kiss.”

A bounty of soups, including one that’s made more rapidly than packaged instant ramen, one-dish meals of stir-fries and noodle bowls, vegetables that become the stars of any dining table, the hazardous and irresistible delights of fried food and the savory pleasures of grilled snacks, “slow-cooked” meals that rarely take more than an hour before they’re on the table; desserts that almost always feature fruit as the main ingredient--all of these are presented in tempting and uncomplicated recipes that range from summer food to hearty warming dishes for cold weather.

And of course there are the stories. In the middle of a war, while still living in Vietnam, Thuy’s father often made a dangerous four-hour drive to have coffee with his grandfather, coffee that was made from the beans eaten by foxes and excreted whole from their bellies. Thuy’s Saigon childhood was filled with the music of bells, announcing vendors who nestled scoops of ice cream within a small brioche--a gourmet’s version of an ice cream sandwich. She tells how her mother made dumplings in a refugee camp, rolling out the dough on the rusty metal cover of a water barrel and how in the camp her entire family once shared a bag filled with a cold and sweet soft drink, passing it from hand to hand so that each of the thirteen people had three tastes from the single straw inserted in the closed bag.

When Thuy’s first novel, Ru, received Canada’s Scotia Bank Giller Prize, the Giller jury praised her for “reinventing the immigrant story.” She quickly corrected them, saying she writes refugee literature. “Refugee and immigrant are different. A refugee is someone ejected from his or her past, who has no future…in a refugee camp you live outside of time.”

Her novels all convey that state of timelessness in its truest dizzying sense, a dream-like quality that gives her stories the opaque and distant feeling of  being “stateless, part of nothing.” Although Thuy’s fiction draws heavily upon her escape from Vietnam on a hardscrabble boat, her nights of sleeping in a cobbled-together shelter in a refugee camp, her time as a lawyer in Hanoi, her days as a restaurateur, and her mothering of an autistic child, she weaves her life into narratives that avoid sentiment or emotion, books that feel almost flattened in their straightforward and compressed plots. 

It’s within this book, through the faces and the food of her mothers, that she reveals bright flashes of who she is and where she comes from. Not quite a memoir, not only a cookbook, these secrets from a kitchen are nourishing on a number of different levels. They remind North American readers that we all are descended from refugees, people whose differences have  made our countries vibrant and our food choices delicious.~Janet Brown

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador) Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador)

From the author of the bestselling book Breasts and Eggs comes Mieko Kawakami’s second novel to be translated into English. Heaven was originally published in Japanese in 2009 with the title of Hevun. The English version was translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

Heaven centers around two fourteen-year-old junior high school students. The time is 1991. The boy is nicknamed “Eyes” by his classmates as he has a lazy eye. He describes his condition as “what my right struggled to see was part of what my left eye saw. Because everything had its blurry double, nothing had any depth”. 

The girl, Kojima, also has a nickname. Her classmates call her “Hazmat”. Kojima was “short, with kind of dark skin. She never talked at school. Her shirt was always wrinkled, and her uniform looked old. The girls in her class picked on her for being poor and dirty. 

Both students are the victims of ijime or bullying. Japan’s Ministry of Education defines ijime as a “physical or psychological aggression on someone weaker, which is detrimental to them.” Ninomiya is the leader of the pack of bullies. He is one of the most popular students in the school. He is also one of the top students at the school. His right hand man is Momose. 

Kojima reaches out to Eyes by sending him notes. Eyes at first believe the notes were left by Ninomiya or one of his cohorts. Around the beginning of May, Eyes receives a note that says “I want to see you”. Eyes fears going to the spot as mentioned in the note but is afraid of not going even more. He has no doubt in his mind that if he shows up, Ninomiya and his pals will give him the beating of a lifetime. 

Imagine Eyes' surprise as there is no Ninomiya or any of his friends waiting for him. Instead, sitting there with her back to him was a girl in her school uniform. It was Kojima. She befriends Eyes because she thinks that they are of the same mind. She feels that being bullied makes them stronger as people. Kojima and Eyes become close, however their only common bond is that they let themselves be bullied and don’t do anything about it. 

In one of the worst bullying episodes Ninomiya and his friends stick a cut volleyball over Eyes’ head and start to play “human soccer”.  Eyes gets a total thrashing as he is continually kicked in the head. He is left beaten and bleeding in a deserted auditorium. After Ninomiya and his friends have their fun, they tell Eyes that he should clean up himself and leave the premises a half-hour later. Meanwhile, Kojima watches the entire incident but doesn’t report it. 

At the hospital, Eyes sees and confronts Momose about the bullying. Momose says that bullying Eyes has nothing to do with his lazy eye. In fact, if it wasn’t him, it would be someone else they would bully. He sums up his own philosophy by telling Eyes, “People do what they can get away with”. 

The book stays with you long after you have finished. It often makes you angry and also makes you feel helpless. The senseless violence bestowed on Eyes and Kojima is more than just a little disturbing. It borders on the edge of brutality. I believe Kawakami makes the ending a bit vague and leaves it up to the reader to imagine what the fate of Ninomiya, Momose, and Kojima is like.  

Ijime or bullying continues to be one of the major problems occurring in schools throughout Japan. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times a teenage suicide due to bullying is featured in the news for the education system to change. Teachers and schools continue to ignore the cries of students who are being bullied, often hiding and or changing the facts to protect the school’s reputation and to deny any responsibility for the act. Although I've never been bullied myself, I definitely want the schools, the teachers, and the Board of Education to do an even better job than they are doing now. ~Ernie Hoyt

69 Sixty-Nine by Ryu Murakami translated by Ralph M. McCarthy (Kodansha)

Long before Haruki Murakami came on to Japan’s literacy scene and gained international recognition, there was Ryu Murakami. He was born in Sasebo, Nagasaki on Japan’s southernmost main island of Kyushu. His best known works which have been translated into English include his first novel Almost Transparent Blue, Audition, Coin Locker Babies and In the Miso Soup.

69 Sixty-Nine is his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel and was first published in the Japanese language in 1987. The English version was first published in 1993 and translated by Ralph M. McCarthy. McCarthy has also translated the works of another famous Japanese novelist, Osamu Dazai, namely Self Portraits and Blue Bamboo, both of which are collections of short stories. 

The story is narrated by thirty-two-year-old Kensuke Yazaki, currently a writer living in Tokyo. He is reliving his third and final year of high school when he was seventeen years old. The year was 1969. It was the year “student uprisings shut down Tokyo University. The Beatles put out The White Album, Yellow Submarine, and Abbey Road, The Rolling Stones released their greatest single, “Honkey Tonk Woman”, and people known as hippies wore their hair long and called for love and peace.”

Yazaki’s character was inspired by the life of Murakami himself. Murakami formed a band called Coelacanth and played drums. He and his friends barricaded the rooftop of their high school and was detained in his house for three months after the school incident. Yazaki would be the mastermind of all these exploits as well. 

Yazaki has two really good friends that share in his escapades. His closest friend is Tadashi Yamada who spoke with an ultra-dialect as he grew up in the country in a coal mining town. His nickname was Adama because he looks like a French singer named Adamo. Adama was usually the voice of reason. When Yazaki had one of his hair-brained ideas, it was usually Adama that made the ideas plausible and possible. 

Yazaki and Adama are joined by Manabu Iwase. This trio of disaffected youths are only looking to have a good time. They want to listen to rock music, talk about foreign films and protest America’s involvement in the Vietnam war. But what Yazaki and most seventeen-year-old adolescents want is to get laid!. 

They claim to be anti-establishment and want to mimic the revolutionary students of Tokyo and other big cities in their backwater town of Sasebo which houses a United States military base. Yazaki has big plans for his final year in high school. Him and his friends are organizing a school festival which they have titled “The Morning Erection Festival”. 

To put it mildly, Kensuke Yazaki is the Holden Caulfield of Japan. Murakami’s novel of growing up in the sixties, in 1969, as a seventeen-year-old high school student is reminiscent of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. However, Murakami’s Yazaki makes Holden Caulfield look like an angel. Yazaki’s antics and attitude are bigger than life, and although he has friends who will do almost anything for him, he is first and foremost, a selfish bastard who only thinks about himself and about getting into the pants of the girl of his dreams. 

You can’t help but be reminded of your own high school years as a seventeen-year-old when you think you know everything and don’t have a care in the world. It’s hard to fault Yazaki for his actions. Even I remember doing things that were stupid and dangerous (although I won’t admit to what they were). Everybody goes through growing pains and surviving high school is just one tiny aspect of that. If you made it into adulthood without any problems, then looking back on high school can be a pleasant exercise in nostalgia. ~Ernie Hoyt

Em by Kim Thuy, translated by Sheila Fischman (Seven Stories Press)

When “truth is fragmented is it still the truth?” How is it possible to  encompass all the different truths contained in a war? Kim Thuy takes the stories told to her by others, the histories she’s read, and her own childhood memories to reconstruct the war that turned her into a refugee by the time she was ten. But, she says, “Memory is a faculty of forgetfulness.” It cloaks brutal truths with the vagueness that lends itself to myths and fables. 

In concise chapters that are spread over only 148 pages, Thuy presents true facts of the Vietnam/American war as seen through characters who appear and swiftly vanish, people of tragedy and coincidence. The improbability of their stories softens the brutal reality of the truth. A Saigon woman who has been recruited as a guerrilla to kill a French planter falls in love with him, bears his child, and dies with him in their plantation that’s become a combat zone. Their daughter is taken to My Lai during a school holiday by a servant who came from there. The girl goes to sleep in a veil of privilege, wakes up to the sound of killing, and is rescued from a pit of corpses. Later the child she abandons is picked up by a street orphan. Years afterward these two children meet in another world, another life, and find a happy ending together. 

This narrative is as improbable and magical as the frothiest of Shakespeare’s plays. It has to be. Interwoven with the fantastic is the history of the coolies who tapped the sap of rubber trees, exiles from China and India who labored beside their Vietnamese counterparts and died from the workload; the testimony of a man who took part in the My Lai massacre, saying “I was told to kill anything that moved,” the moment that an American plane holding Vietnamese orphans exploded on the runway, killing 78 babies, with the 178 surviving children put on the next plane in Operation Babylift. It tells how the actress Tippi Hedren launched manicure training classes for newly arrived women from Vietnam, creating a global industry in which Vietnamese control half of the market, making a living while breathing in toxic fumes. 

One chapter gives a glossary of French words that became part of the Vietnamese language, while the most commonly used Vietnamese word that entered French was con gai, that meant both girl and prostitute. Another tells how a homogeneous country became diverse, through the children who were never known by the foreign soldiers who impregnated their mothers. 

“Naked, the earth was no longer a dance floor for sun and leaves,” Thuy says before describing the rainbow of toxins, not just orange but green, pink, purple, and blue herbicides that descended in deadly clouds and ricocheted backward so “the sprayers were also the sprayed.” She describes pho in delicious detail and then tells how hungry street children waited to drain the leavings from bowls of it after customers had walked away. She enumerates the official numbers of dead and wounded American and Vietnamese soldiers, while asking “why no list included the numbers of orphans, of widows, of aborted dreams, of broken hearts.”

“I tried to interweave the threads, but they escaped, and remain unanchored, impermanent, and free,” Thuy says as she nears the end of her novel. What she has made from that elusive fabric has the force and agony of PIcasso’s Guernica, wrapped in the deceptive sweetness of a fairy tale.~Janet Brown

Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara (Soho Press)

When Aki and her parents get off the train in Chicago, a city they’ve never seen before, they’re greeted with the news that Rose, the family’s oldest daughter,  won’t be there to meet them. On the day before, Rose died. It’s suicide, the police tell them. She leaped into the path of an approaching subway train. 

Newly released from the California internment camp of Manzanar, the Ito family is overwhelmed with culture shock as well as grief. Rose had been the family leader, beautiful, smart, and confident. She was the one who became active in the JACL, the Japanese American Citizens League, after the Itos had been sent to Manzanar and she was one of the first to be released from internment. She had found a job in Chicago and a place for her family to live as soon as they were allowed to follow her. Now she’s dead, leaving her younger sister to take her place.

Aki refuses to believe that Rose killed herself. As soon as her family settles into their new apartment, she begins to track down the people who had known her sister, the ones who might help to explain the circumstances around her death. In her search, she discovers dark depths to the recently established Japanese population and urban corruption that appears to be untouchable.

Clark and Division is a gripping mystery, a rite of passage story, and a journey into past history that’s illuminating and shocking. Naomi Hirahara is a journalist as well as an Edgar Award-winning novelist and the research she’s done for her latest book is deep and revealing, disclosing facts that have been ignored.

Even before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor sent Japanese Americans to internment camps, the discrimination against them was crippling. Those who had been born in Japan, the Issei, were unable to buy or lease land in Los Angeles. White women, as well as American-born Nisei women, who married Issei men were stripped of their U.S. citizenship. After war had been declared on Japan, Executive Order 9066 in 1942 demanded the removal of all Japanese residents, “alien and non-alien,” from California, Washington, Oregon, and parts of Arizona, where the city of Phoenix was split in half to facilitate the emptying  of Japanese neighborhoods. Japanese, Issei or Nisei, who had been educated in Japan were sent to Department of Justice detention centers. All others went to one of the ten internment camps where blocks of barracks held families, with separate Children’s Villages constructed for orphans. 

As the need for cheap labor became acute, by 1943 “loyal” Japanese were released to take jobs vacated by the men who had gone off to war. Even then they weren’t allowed to return home. They were banned from the Western Military Zone and were sent to midwestern and eastern cities that needed laborers and that had a scant Japanese population. This resettlement was overseen by the War Relocation Authority which aided the new arrivals with housing, employment, and education, while demanding that the Japanese congregate in public only in groups of no more than three.  In private, they were crammed into subdivided rooms in apartments and small studios, with often as many as six people in a single room.

Although World War Two ended in September, 1945, the last internment camp wasn’t closed until seven months later. The scars left behind by the internment are widely overlooked and the facts about the enforced creation of Japanese communities in cities like Chicago have been buried for the past eighty years.  At the same time that Naomi Hirahara has Aki uncover the truth behind her sister’s death, she skillfully reveals hidden corners of American history, with a back-of-the-book list of resources for readers to use in their own research. Let’s hope for Aki’s appearance in books yet to come that will disclose buried history while unfolding more of her own compelling story.~Janet Brown

The Japanese Lover by Rani Manicka (Hodder & Stoughton)

Rani Manicka is a Malaysian writer of Indian descent. The Japanese Lover is her third novel which was first published in 2009. It is once again set in Malaysia but begins on the island of Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka. 

The story opens with a young writer visiting Marimuthu Mami at her home in Kuala Lumpur. Marimuthu Mami is currently ninety-two years old. The visiting author is interested in hearing Marimuthu’s life story. What the writer is most interested in was Marimuthu Mami’s experience during the Japanese Occupation of Malaya. 

But Marimuthu Mami doesn’t want to remember the past. “Speak about the past, here in her daughter’s home? After she had finally mastered the art of forgetting things”. Her children would be surprised to know how much she does remember,  “how deeply rooted it was in her chest. She remembered all of it, every precious detail. They thought the past was dead because she never talked about it.” 

And so begins the epic story of Marimuthu Mami. She was born in a small town in North Ceylon in 1916. Her mother had already given birth to five sons. She was the family’s first daughter. A priest was present when she was born and as soon as she was out of her mother’s womb, he noted the exact time and cast her horoscope. He told the father “The child is destined to marry a man of truly immense wealth. But the marriage will be a disaster”. 

She was named Parvathi and at the tender age of sixteen, her marriage to a wealthy forty-two-year-old widow living in Malaya was arranged. Before leaving for her new home and new life, Parvathi went to a temple to pray with her mother. What her mother didn’t know was that Parvathi “had not been praying for a good husband and family but for the greatest love in the world, for one who would unthinkingly put his hand into fire for her. 

When Parvathi met her soon-to-be husband, he was very displeased. Her father had sent the man a picture of a different girl. Kasu Marimuthu, her husband’s name, said he would be sending Parvathi back to her father the following day. 

The next day, Kasu Marimuthu is asked a favor by one of his servants. A large woman named Maya. She says to him “I understand that you are unable to show the shape of your heart to your wife, but it is not right to leave the shape of your foot on hers.” 

Maya is not just a servant, she is a healer, a shaman. Someone who seems to have more power and understanding of the world than any rich tycoon or temple priest. Her words have the effect on Kasu Marimuthu that he does not send Parvathi home and lets her stay for a few more days. Days turn into months, months turn into years, and he has children with Parvathi. Maya also becomes Parvathi’s biggest influence and confidante. Maya seems to be a fountain of wisdom but never condescends to anyone. 

It isn’t until more than half-way through the book where the Japanese invade Malaya and Hattori-san comes into Parvathi’s life. By this time, her husband had passed away due to an illness. The Japanese have requisitioned her house and In order to save her daughter forms sexual slavery, Parvathi willingly becomes Hattori-san’s comfort woman, a woman used to satisfy the sexual desires of the Imperial Japanese Army. The more time Parvathi spends with Hattori-san, the love she prayed for seems to be within her grasp. 

Unlike Manicka’s first novel, The Rice Mother, the atrocities committed by the Japanese army are overlooked and Maya is overused as a proponent for New Age ideology. However, these are minor negative points in this story about love, passion, deceit, and acceptance. ~Ernie Hoyt

In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Ann Goldstein (Vintage Books)

Native speakers of English are crippled by the belief that learning another language is a matter of choice, something to “take.” French, Spanish, sometimes German--one of these is chosen in high school, flirted with in college, “picked up” in the way one might get a bad cold, and rapidly forgotten. Dimly students understand that fluency will only come with total immersion but few realize how disorienting that process will be. It is, Jhumpa Lahiri explains, a matter of risk and discipline, an abandonment of one culture for another, a kind of baptism that holds the threat of drowning.

Lahiri had two languages as a child, the Bengali that was spoken at home and the English that she needed for the world outside, once she had turned four. Her parents resisted English, clinging to the language of their native culture. Lahiri became a double exile in a linguistic quandary. Her imperfect Bengali failed to connect her to a place she had never lived in and her perfect English failed to give her a place of belonging in either her birthplace (London) or her country of residence (the U.S.). It was a precarious place for a child to stand in and Lahiri found her refuge in reading and writing English words. “I belonged only to my words…to no country, no specific culture.” “Writing,” she says, “makes me feel present on earth.”

Then she falls in love with Italian, a language that seems to have chosen her rather than the other way around. Dizzied by the notion of choice, she takes lessons that will allow her to speak. She chooses to read only books written in Italian. She moves to Rome and becomes “a word hunter,” with her vocabulary notebook slowly measuring her progress. But this isn’t enough. To feel present in Italy, Lahiri begins to write in Italian. 

At first this is like “writing with my left hand,” she admits, an activity “so arduous it seems sadistic.” For the first time in her life, she has found a language that gives her the “freedom to be imperfect,” but as a writer, she refuses to take comfort in that freedom. She begins to show her Italian writing to those who will correct and guide her, Slowly she turns away from her “dominant language,” the one in which she had won a Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential medal conferred upon her by Barack Obama. She abandons English to the point that when she wrote this book, it was originally published as In altre parole. When it appeared as In Other Words, Lahiri insisted that it would be published in both Italian and English, with the translation done by someone other than herself. She knew that as a writer who had an expert command of English, she would be compelled to improve what she had written in Italian. Instead her translator kept the raw and unpolished thoughts that Italian had conveyed upon Lahiri, with the Italian text on one page and the English translation facing it.

The translated sentences are like ungainly pieces of furniture. They aren’t smooth--in fact they come in fragments, carrying splinters. They lack grace and are often clunky. They hold immeasurable courage, written by a woman who has stepped away from her literary fame, embraced imperfection and found a different way to be alive. . “I remain, in Italian, an ignorant writer,” Lahiri says, but she’s one that’s discovered the art of metamorphosis, a transformation that can be terrifying but is an act of rebellion and release. Through another language, Lahiri has left exile and chosen a new form, one that she exercises with freedom and generosity.~Janet Brown

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (Flamingo)

Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, two years after he became a French citizen. His novel Soul Mountain, first published as Lingshan in Taiwan in 1990, was partly inspired by his own experiences of traveling to rural China after mistakenly being diagnosed as having lung cancer. It was first published in English in 2000 in Australia and translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee. 

There are two main characters who are only referred to as the pronouns “You” and “I”. It’s difficult to distinguish if these characters are one and the same. The reader may wonder if “You” means the person reading the story or if it's a manifestation of an imaginary self to hold conversations with.  

“You” finds himself in a small mountain town in the South. “You” is not exactly sure why he is even here. He explains that it was my pure chance that another person on a train sitting opposite of “You” mentioned that he was going to a place called Lingshan. The man explains that ling means “spirit” or “soul” and shan means “mountain”. 

“You’d been to a lot of places, visited lots of famous mountains, but had never heard of this place”. “You” becomes intrigued with this place that’s located at the source of the You River, another place “You” has never heard of. “You” asks what’s there, “Scenery? Temples? Historic Sites?” only to be told that it’s all virgin wilderness. 

On his journey “You” encounters a woman, only referred to as “She”. They become travel companions and as they become closer, “You” entertains “She” by telling her stories that he just makes up as they journey towards the mountain. 

We are then introduced to “I” who was diagnosed with lung cancer. While “You” goes in search of Lingshan, “I” is mistakenly diagnosed with lung cancer. At first, “I” was resigned to his fate as his father suffered the same outcome. However, once the error was discovered, “I” felt “Death was playing a joke on me but now that I’ve escaped the demon wall, I am secretly rejoicing”. 

“I” is an academic and after being misdiagnosed he decided to take a break from city life. “I” felt he “should have left those contaminated surroundings long ago and returned to nature to look for this authentic life”. It is “I”’s journey that makes up the autobiographical part of the story as “I” travels to the Sichuan province that walks along the Yangtze river to the coast. During his travels, “I” will meet minor ethnic groups such as the Qiang, Miao, and the Yi who are also known by the name Lolo. 

To be honest, I found Xingjian style of writing difficult to follow as it is hard to know who exactly are the protagonists. The blending of folklore, travel essay, history and anthropology are mixed into one smorgasbord of a story that seems to have no definitive plot and wanders all over the place. Is this part of the narrative or is it another story that “You” or “I” is making up? If existential psycho-babble is your thing, you might enjoy this. If not, it’s going to be a very difficult read. ~Ernie Hoyt

Escape from Baghdad! by Saad Z. Hossain (Unnamed Press)

Saad Z. Hossain is a Bangladeshi author who writes in English and lives in Dakka, Bangladesh. Escape from Baghdad is his first novel and was published in 2015 by Unnamed Press in the United States. Judging the book from its cover and its title, you may be led to believe it is a military adventure set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq and you would be partially right. It is much more than just a war-time novel. 

Set during the occupation of Iraq when it was ruled by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the transitional government set up after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and headed by the United States Government, the story focuses on two regular guys who were from Baghdad. 

Dagr and Kinza have lost everything to the war. They survive by their wits and dealing in black market goods. Dagr was a former university professor who taught economics while Kinza was and still is a streetsmart hoodlum. Their latest piece of contraband isn’t something but someone. They have with them Captain Hamid, a man known as the star torturer for Saddam Hussein’s recently toppled Ba’athist regime. 

Captain Hamid has promised them a hoard of wealth if they can smuggle him to the city of Mosul. With the help of an American marine named Private Hoffman, they agree to help him escape the authorities. But it isn’t only the Americans who want Captain Hamid, and getting out of Baghdad is not going to be an easy task. 

As the three were trying to escape the confines of Baghdad, Kinza had also killed a man who happened to be the younger brother of an imam named Hassan Salemi. A devout Shi’a muslim whose “obsession for vengeance had overtaken his mind”. 

While Kinza, Dagr, Hamid are being pursued by Salemi and his men, the trio had made a deal with another group of men to help them pursue a possible serial killer at large. A man presumed to be a member of the Druze. They have also come into the possession of an ancient watch that also belonged to the Druze but doesn’t seem to tell the time but which may hold the secret to eternal life. 

Who are the Druze? The Chrstian had their Knights Templars. The Catholic Church had the Illuminati, and even the Jewish faith had their Kabbalists. In the glossary provided at the end of the book, Hossain informs the reader that the Druze were a “secretive ancient sect of mystic within Islam who follow a number of esoteric beliefs that are known only to their sworn elders”. 

Hossain has created one of the most interesting and intriguing stories that blends the adventure and thrill of a Tom Clancy novel, the dark humor and absurdity of war a la Catch-22 and throws in a good measure of science-fiction and fantasy. It is a fast-paced and action-packed smorgasbord that will keep you riveted to your seat as you wonder if the three protagonists will reach their goal of leaving Baghdad and do they find the secret to immortality? ~Ernie Hoyt