In Times of Fading Light

Antonio Garrido The Corpse Reader Thomas Bunstead, tr. Amazon Crossing Tragedy hits thirteenth-century scholarinvestigator Ci Song, who is dishonored and forced to give up his studies to work as a gravedigger. Antonio Garrido’s character, inspired by Song Ci, the founding father of forensic science, has a passion for truth in the face of deep-rooted allegiances, and his dexterity in examining grisly deaths becomes even more complex with the arrival of an enthralling woman. Inger Frimansson The Cat Did Not Die Laura A. Wideburg, tr. Pleasure Boat Studio In her latest contribution to the growing “Scandinavian noir” genre, Inger Frimansson details the psychological fallout of a mildmannered schoolteacher who commits and must conceal a gruesome crime. The protagonist finds herself ever more tangled in an inescapable web of guilt and desperation, despite the seemingly bright yet false reality that surrounds her. Nota Bene salon-generated tan, he is mistaken for both a gypsy and Boris. Later, Sanja and his job now lost, Toni hopes “to assume my old face . . . and ride into a new film,” but finally wishes to “exit that game.” For he understands at last that Boris, his alter ego, never falsified his existence: “a remnant of something real, he came from down south and knocked me off my chair and out of my world—a world I thought was mine.” Indeed, Toni perceives the world as “globally mediatized,” its distorted realities randomly granting maskers some time on the stage. Yugoslavia’s recent wars thus prove “our contribution to global media. . . . The world took note of us.” Once Western reporters exit Iraq, the missing Boris (later discovered working for British television in Baghdad) becomes a cause célèbre, forcing Toni to face his aunt on a popular television show: “the final showdown between me and Milka, on the TV battlefield, like an epic folk song.” His mother and aunt at war over inheritance issues, Toni sees how “a local conflict escalates.” This split between urbanite-manqué Toni and proud bumpkin Milka, both Dalmatian , highlights the greater divisions the novel explores: subaltern/bourgeois -bohemian; “civilized”/“tribal”; Croat/Serb; West/East; local/global. Depicting a generation raised in “strange Eastern European systems” who “placed too much hope in rock ’n’ roll,” this provocative satire explores both modern Croatia and its discontents and also, like Mother Courage, the human lust for power and money that still spawns war and suffering. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Eugen Ruge. In Times of Fading Light. Anthea Bell, tr. Minneapolis. Graywolf. 2013. isbn 9781555976439 Whatever “light” the utopian vision of communism brought people, it fades under the grinding duress of “real socialism” as it is lived in this Buddenbrooks-like saga of a family’s decline in and beyond the GDR between 1952 and 2001. We start with Wilhelm, an old idealist preparing to celebrate his ninetieth birthday in 1989, who had stood next to Karl Liebknecht at the founding of the German Communist Party in 1919, and his wife, Charlotte, both top bureaucrats in the East German regime. Charlotte’s son, Kurt, served time in a gulag and was then exiled in Slava, where he marries the native Irina. Khrushchev’s reforms allow them to go to East Germany in 1956. Somewhat in reparation, the party lets him pursue a doctorate in history and produce “approved” histories of the German labor movement. September–October 2013 • 63 64 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Their son, Alexander, likewise takes up history, but soon disillusioned with party dogma he gets involved in theater, eventually in West Germany. This discredits his father, whom he accuses of having “lived a lie,” but the father contends, all too familiarly, that he had always striven for “real democratic socialism.” Alexander is diagnosed with untreatable lymphoma, plausibly the result of growing up in an environment that is as toxic inwardly as it is outwardly. His own son, Markus, essentially ends up an aimless dropout. In 1995 we get a nicely ironic insight into the benefits of unification: Markus’s mother, long divorced from Alexander, has married an East German pastor and local political leader who is now a member of parliament and hence can afford his wife a new Audi (while

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