River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

husband, who chooses to live in the garage attic, where he can spy on his family, until the moment it appears someone might take his place. While Doctorow revisits the constricted space of Hawthorne’s story and the possibility of effacing one’s identity within the community. Doctorow favors first-person narration , characters enmeshed in a situation : an Episcopal priest in a failing church, buying back stolen items from street vendors; a convert to a religious community facing the problem of continuing it when its charismatic leader leaves; a suburban husband attempting to keep his marriage together, dealing with a homeless man who sits in his car in front of the house because he once lived there; a son’s account of his mother’s murderous con game; a son’s Oedipal revenge. Other stories are third-person limited: a man brought into a scheme to marry a woman so she can emigrate to the States; an abused girl named Jolene whose life bears little resemblance to the pop ballad. The best of Doctorow’s stories build on a somewhat flat, detailed declarative style; his characters and narrators reveal more than they know or should know at any given moment. His best stories make an impression that lasts even when wrapped up too neatly in the last lines. The weakest, including the title story, fail when the focusing mind itself is supposed to be of major interest. E. L. Doctorow works best when he constructs good plots for his characters to inhabit. Thankfully, most of the stories in this collection have engaging plots. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Amitav Ghosh. River of Smoke. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2011. isbn 9780374174231 Throughout his work, Amitav Ghosh writes with a global perspective, evident not only in the range of locations and variety of characters he depicts, but also in his insistence on connections that cross presumed boundaries. At the beginning of River of Smoke, the second volume in Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, Neel, the deported raja whose story begins in Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies , remarks of a hurricane that it is “looking for new possibilities, creating fresh beginnings, rewriting destinies and throwing together people who would never have met.” This passage is vintage Ghosh, aware simultaneously of the destructive and constructive forces that bind people and histories together. Throughout River of Smoke, characters’ paths cross, sometimes fleetingly and at other times in intricate and life-changing ways, as Ghosh probes the human frailty and fortitude of individuals caught up in the opium trade to China. This novel begins with Deeti, a central character in Sea of Poppies. Her shrine in Mauritius contains pictures of characters and events familiar to readers of Sea of Poppies, but Ghosh quickly shifts the scene to Canton and the small, sometimes convivial and sometimes claustrophobic Foreign Enclave that is home to opiumsmuggling merchants. While Paulette and Neel from Sea of Poppies appear frequently in River of Smoke, Ghosh introduces a wide cast of new characters , most compelling of whom is Seth Bahram Modi, a trader from Bombay who has built his fortune by selling opium in China. Bahram’s story is movingly complex, and Ghosh consistently maintains a humane, rather than polemical, interest in this man who is a privileged merchant accepted by his British peers but always aware of his colonial origins, and whose love for a Chinese woman must remain painfully secret from his extended Parsi family in Bombay. In Bahram, Ghosh brilliantly captures the struggles of an individual whose desires and interests are ultimately defeated by far-reaching historical, economic, and political events. River of Smoke is rich in historical detail and liberally sprinkled with Hindi, Bengali, and pidgin dialogue. It is told in a narrative style that wears its erudition and its political insights lightly. Paulette’s quest to find a mysterious camellia plant aptly captures a theme of the novel: that the era of global modernity is about connections , accidental discoveries, and an unregulated flow of information 62 | World Literature Today wltreviews Susan Fortes Waiting for Robert Capa Harper Perennial Set during the Spanish Civil War, this highly acclaimed novel tells the true love story between photojournalists Robert

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