The Age of Orphans by Laleh KhadiviThe Siege by Ismail Kadare

Canadian writer Helen Hum phreys deals in her lovely prose experiment, The Frozen Thames,with a kind of creation: the way that water turns to ice in winter?in forty win ters to be exact, forty winters over the course of seven centuries. Over and over again the Thames freezes, birds freezeand fallfromtheair,and Londoners face the cold and dan ger and pleasure of river ice. Boat men lament the loss of free-flowing water, the poor sometimes freeze in midcrossing, lovers embrace there, plague victims suffer there, royalty celebrates thismystery of physics and chemistry.As Humphreys has a lady-in-waiting soliloquize to the thirty-two-year-old Queen Elizabeth I in themid-iooos, "The ice is new to us. The old ways of behaving don't seem to apply here. It is as though, in thevery factthattheriver froze,anything elsemight suddenly become possible as well." Reading this inventive littlevolume, with a bit of a shiver, you know what it must have been like forAdam and Eve to see ice forthe firsttime. TheAge ofOrphans byLalehKhadivi (Bloomsbury,2009) The Siege by IsmailKadare (Canongate, 2009) Firstaired on NPRApril 7, 2009 Two newly published works of fic tion take us deep into the lives of warriors from the other side of the Mediterranean. Laleh Khadivi's The Age ofOrphans tells the story of a young Kurdish boy forced to join the Iranian army, and The Siege,byMan Booker Prize-winner Ismail Kadare, gives us the tale of amedieval siege by a Turkish army of a Christian citadel inKadare's native Albania. It's not every day thatwe find a novel that takes us into thehearts and minds of the Kurds, whose national fable has them descended from thewreckage of Noah's ark. In The Age ofOrphans, Laleh Kha divi's first novel,we meet one young Kurdish boy, Reza Khourdi, as he comes to be called. He's orphaned in the early 1920swhen his fatheris killed inbattlewith theShah's army, and he's taken captive by the Ira nian military and educated in army schools. As Reza, a good soldier, rises in the ranks,we get to see a lot of thepeople around him, his fellow soldiers, Iranian officers, the woman fromTehran he makes his wife, his seven-year-old daughter, even farm ers and women in urban brothels. Alas, theprose about everyone else in the novel gives us more sense of life than thewriting about the central figure, good soldier Reza. He remains a cipher, really,which makes the novel ultimately rather empty and leaves a reader some what disappointed. When you pick up Ismail Kadare's The Siege, the novel by the Albanian master novelist, you notice the immediate electricityin its pages, emanating from thewriter's deep understanding of characters who lived, as thebook would have it,fivehundred years ago. The Siege itselfhas a long history. Published inAlbanian in 1970, then translated intoFrench and published inParis in 1994, and now translated into Eng lishbyDavid Bellos, IsmailKadare's novel was a long time coming to our bookstores, but it'swell worth the wait. War-weary Tursun Pasha, the Ottoman Turk commander-in chief, leads his 40,000-plus army of soldiers against a Christian citadel sequestered in the Albanian Alps in a campaign on which his future depends. The war-sawy Quarter master General, who knows what soldiers need and commanders often can't supply. Saddedin the army poet, who hopes tomake an epic about thebattle but ends up terribly scarred. Celebi, the chronicler, in his first war, whose task is to record theglory of theTurkish army's vic tory. Here's a war novel formilitary buffs and pacifists alike. It tells of war's truths, miseries, futilities, and glories and takes all this to a higher level of understanding about East againstWest, Islam against Christi anity, truthversus illusion on both sides of theparapets. Washington, D.C. Alan Cheuse is the author of four novels, three collections of short fiction, and a memoir, Fait Out of Heaven. His most recent publication is a book of travel essays, Trance after Breakfast, which is excerpted in this month's Notebook section (see page 7). Cheuse serves as book commentator for NPR's evening

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