The Big Book Fix
Warning: Once You Start Reading These Authors Featured at the Miami Book Fair International, You May Not Be Able to Stop

This is the worst kind of literary crack, a woman’s romantic fantasy, wrapped up in a fire-red flamenco skirt.

By Celeste Fraser Delgado

I should have started writing this column a long time ago, but first I thought I’d skim a few pages of Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Just a few pages, to see what the book is like. Then I decided I’d only finish the first chapter, and then maybe the second, and by then there really wasn’t time to write anything before dinner, so I might as well finish the third. It is nothing short of a miracle that I am writing this now, instead of spending the rest of the night reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s memoir of his career as a Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. I hope I finish fast.

Goldberg sucked me in by stacking his opening line with one of the oldest tricks in books: “On the morning of the fine spring day, full of sunshine, that ended with my arrest in Gaza, I woke up early from an uneven sleep.” And so goes the first chapter, building to the moment when Goldberg is placed in the custody of an unknown Palestinian security force, and then leaving his fate hanging in the balance while the author backtracks through all the years and events that brought him here. He spares no one in his intimate and incisive analysis of the conflict, not even himself. I have to keep telling myself over and over that I can’t keep reading right now. Not one chapter more. That’s it.

I’m a narrative junkie, and I haven’t stopped reading for the past two weeks. Or is it three weeks? I’ve lost track, as the doorbell keeps ringing and the UPS and FedEx guys keep dropping off more books by authors scheduled for the Miami Book Fair International that kicks off this week. 

First there was Sarah Bird’s fifth novel, The Flamenco Academy. Oh, no, I thought, after reading the first two chapters, ending with the sentence: “A long time ago she had been my best friend. Not so long ago she stole the only man I will ever love.” This is the worst kind of literary crack, a woman’s romantic fantasy, wrapped up in a fire-red flamenco skirt. I’m not going to indulge myself with 381 pages of this. But maybe I can finish Chapter 3 before it’s time to get up and then choke down Chapter 4 over breakfast. So what if the main character is pathetically obsessed by a pot-smoking gypsy guitar player. Aren’t we all? Will she win him? Will she lose him? Will she win him again?

When I finish, I feel dirty. To atone, I devour Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation in one sitting. This slim debut novel by a young Nigerian American tells the story of warfare in West Africa through the eyes of a boy soldier struggling to retain his humanity while forced to rape and kill. Written in English with West African syntax, Iweala’s prose invents a raw language to capture a nation’s descent into horror and slim glimmer of hope. The effect is as dazzling as it is daunting.

Now immersed in African tragedy, I cross the continent and take up Melissa Fay Greene’s nonfiction account of an Ethiopian woman who takes literally hundreds of her country’s millions of AIDS orphans into her home, There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Africa’s Children. I do not expect this to be a page-turner, but I’m hooked before I finish the first chapter, as Greene accompanies her heroine, Haregewoin Teferra, to relieve an ailing father of the child he is too sick to care for. As she does with all the orphans she describes, Greene paints a vibrant and sympathetic portrait of this little boy who lived on the street but “skipped as if he owned the world.” I can’t put the book down until I learn what becomes of him, his beloved caretaker and all the other children we meet.

The hours and days run together, but the books stand apart, each one a separate universe of heartbreak and triumph. There is British ex-pat Christopher Hitchens, staving off his malcontent with his contemporaries long enough to produce an elegantly turned little tome, Thomas Jefferson, Author of America. There is Edith Grossman, following up her acclaimed translation of the epic Don Quixote by breathing life into the grand verse of 16th and 17th century Spain with her selected translations in The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance. With The Scroll of Seduction, Nicaraguan novelist Gioconda Belli also travels back to the Golden Age with an engrossing fictionalized account that recasts the supposedly crazed Queen Juana de Castilla as a rebellious woman determined to fight for her independence.

That brings us to Arianna Huffington and her 11th book, On Becoming Fearless in Love, Work, and Life. The Greek-born biographer, political commentator and founding blogger of the Huffington Post calls this her most personal work to date, as she shares critical moments when she overcame fear in her family and professional life. She was moved to write this book, she tells me over the phone from her office in California, because “I have two teenage daughters who suddenly started expressing a lot of fears that I thought my generation had dealt with.”

But if the book is personal for Huffington, it is far from a mopey confessional. Instead Huffington organizes it very much like she does the Huffington Post, inserting her own experiences and opinions among a series of short essays by other women on their fears. “It’s important to realize that this is a collective story,” she explains. “It’s empowering for women when they see themselves in other people’s stories.”

So maybe I don’t have a problem after all. Now if I can just find Goldberg’s memoir somewhere in this pile, I think I can finish it by morning.

Huffington speaks at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 15 in the Chapman building.

Greene and Goldberg are to appear at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 18 in room 7128. Also on Saturday is Iweala at 10:30 a.m. in Batten/room 2106 and Belli and Grossman at 11 a.m. in room 1101. Sarah Bird is slated to read at 11 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 19 in the Centre Gallery. Also scheduled for Sunday is Hitchens at 12:30 p.m. in the Chapman building.

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