HOUSE OF WOMENBy Lynn FreedLittle, Brown: 212...

HOUSE OF WOMEN

By Lynn Freed

Little, Brown: 212 pp., $23.95

Somewhere in Africa, a girl has been raised by her mother, an ex-opera singer, in a walled compound, visited infrequently by the girl’s father, a wealthy playboy who never lived with his wife and child, though he loved them both. The mother is beautiful, wretched and fueled by hatred, by some accounts a madwoman. When her daughter is 17, envisioning nothing but life on the verandah with her mother, her father’s cousin kidnaps her, marries her and takes her to live on a remote island in a palace on the cliffs. The girl learns that her father lost her in a bet with his cousin when she was only 6. Since then, the cousin has been waiting to collect. She alternates, in her captivity, between succumbing to him and fighting him--and longing to return to her mother, though he will not let her. Lynn Freed’s “House of Women” is a gauzy novel with loose particulars flapping in the breeze that blows through these rarified lives. The mother-daughter relationship is rich and complex, and certainly the strongest in the novel, but it has the feel of a medieval tale. It verges on parable; the characters seem at times like ornate chess pieces, nothing more.

*

THE CAPRICES

Stories

By Sabina Murray

Mariner Books: 160 pp., $13

Sabina Murray’s stories about colonialism and war glitter with juxtapositions: the white shirt on the dark Indian man at dinner in the colonialist’s club in India; the Italian and the Irishman, two soldiers walking out of the jungle in New Guinea, arguing about Joe DiMaggio; the lazy midafternoon on a village street emptied by war; the strange normalcy of the old woman’s flowered shift and the abnormality of a child’s life in a war-torn city. Murray’s stories are set in the Philippines, India, New Guinea and Sumatra in the 1920s through 1950s. Headless victims make a ghostly appearance in many of the stories, set in steamy landscapes or dusty villages with brackish water. “The dripping water punctuated the day’s waning with its steady beat. On the mainland, the trees rose up like a purple wall, muted and unreal.” She writes of the relationships between soldiers. The decay of colonialism, its steady drip like the melting of an icicle, is Murray’s true theme: “Your time has passed,” says a young Indonesian to an old Dutch settler. “You have profited in another’s country, which is equivalent to theft, and I would rather see you leave, but could easily kill you and feel justified.”

*

SELKIRK’S ISLAND

The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe

By Diana Souhami

Harcourt: 246 pp., $24

Lest you harbor the illusion that Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” sprang purely from the author’s imagination, here is the true story of Defoe’s inspiration, Alexander Selkirk, who was marooned for four years and four months, 1704 to 1709, on an island off the coast of Chile now called Robinson Crusoe Island.

He was 23, and by all accounts a violent-tempered but resourceful young Scotsman when he signed on in Kinsale, Ireland, under the sleazy, greedy and equally ill-tempered Capt. William Dampier on the ship Cinque Ports for a voyage of piracy to unload French and Spanish galleons and to find gold in South America. He wanted freedom from his parents and their small town; what he got, after Dampier left him on the island for attempting to start a mutiny, was a prison surrounded by a 10,000-mile moat. A prison that turned out to be a paradise. Selkirk raised goats, built a hut, survived without alcohol or tobacco on lobsters that grew to 3 feet long, herbs and plums and beautiful sunsets. His 2,280,000 minutes on the 12-mile-long, 34- mile-wide island, a Biosphere Reserve since 1966, turned out to be the best of his life. The rest was drinking and brawling and running away from the law.

The first account of his life, written by one of the men who saved him in 1709, Woodes Rogers, painted a pearly picture of Selkirk as a man who read psalms every day and found God on the island. Defoe’s version, published in 1719, in which Crusoe lives for 28 year on the island, is somewhere in between. Diana Souhami relies on Selkirk’s scant journals, petitions of two women claiming to be his wife and accounts of the crew of the Cinque Ports, as well as seafaring histories from the period. She also spent three months on the island, which gave her its true flavor and the same love for the place that made Selkirk regret his return to England. Selkirk did not understand, she writes, “that the true experience of being marooned was elusive, monumental, that it was in his eyes perhaps, but not his words. That the Island had cast him in on himself to the point where no time had passed, except for the silence between breaking waves.”