IRISH WILLOWBy Chris ArthurThe Davies Group: 234...

IRISH WILLOW

By Chris Arthur

The Davies Group: 234 pp., $19.95

For all their crafted loveliness, essays start and end in a single point of view. Call it solitude. Call it elitism. The play of language and meaning is literature’s highest form of artifice. It is also the scene of some of the deepest dredging a consciousness can reveal. And watch, the author’s childhood is always a large part of the subject matter, in this case a middle-class Ulster Protestant childhood. It is well that the author begins and ends with what he knows. Essays demand such precision: the balance between the note of authority in the author’s voice and the hint of randomness is crucial.

On the neat, structural surface, “Irish Willow” is a collection of essays on patterns and meaning and reasons for doing things and different ways of living, what Chris Arthur calls “series of fallings through.”

In a bad essay, a reader senses the desperate grasping for metaphor; in a good essay, there is the feeling of wandering and meeting a conclusion, a lack of effort because meaning is everywhere, if we only tune ourselves perfectly.

Most of these essays achieve that artlessness, and the writing in all of them is unusual. The story behind the pattern of “Blue Willow” china, the source of the old Norse word for “book” and the burdens of religion in Northern Ireland are bonus insights in a well-proportioned collection of memories.

We are indeed, as Arthur hoped, plunged “without warning into unexpected pools and oceans.”

*

MY FORBIDDEN FACE: Growing Up Under the Taliban, A Young Woman’s Story

By Latifa

Talk/Miramax: 210 pp., $21.95

Like the “Diary of Anne Frank,” “Zlata’s Diary” and “A Chorus of Stones,” “My Forbidden Face” is the story of war told by a child caught in the middle of growing up. Latifa (a pseudonym) is 16 when the Taliban take power in Kabul, where she and her family live.

She has already seen more than a decade of war. Her mother, a doctor who cannot practice under the Taliban, has already sunk deep into a depression of isolation, tortured motherhood and suffocating repression. Her sister, a journalist, escapes to Pakistan, then to America. One brother stays soft and kind; the other is hardened beyond recognition after his own childhood is guillotined by brutal civil war and a stay in prison.

Latifa’s future dissolves before her eyes when the Taliban take power. She must wear a burka; she cannot pursue her education, much less a career; and she cannot even seek medical help in her own country when she gets pleurisy, because doctors cannot treat women. Her mother is besieged by midnight cries for help from women who have been raped or beaten in the streets.

Latifa starts a clandestine school for younger children, boys and girls. “They want to rob us of life,” she writes of the Taliban. Last May, Elle magazine flew Latifa and her parents to Paris so that she could tell her story. A fatwa was decreed against them, and they were unable to return until the Taliban were ousted. This is her story, told with a young girl’s unflinching faith in the future.

*

AQUARIUMS OF PYONGYANG

Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

By Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot

Translated from the Korean by Yair Reiner

Basic Books: 238 pp., $24

“Aquariums of Pyongyang” is the first book to appear in the West describing firsthand the hard-labor concentration camps in North Korea, where 150,000 to 200,000 people are imprisoned. When Kang Chol-hwan was 10, in 1978, he and his family were sent to a camp to be “reeducated.” His grandparents were wealthy North Korean Communists living in Japan, who returned with their children to North Korea because Chol-hwan’s grandmother was especially committed to its communist future.

Instead, she was brought, after her husband’s mysterious disappearance, to Yodok, North Korea’s largest camp. This is where Chol-hwan and his sister, father, grandmother and uncle spent 10 years (other family members were “excused” for various reasons). Chol-hwan learned to hunt rats to supplement starvation rations of corn and acorn paste. He saw hangings and beatings (including women beaten for becoming pregnant).

When his family was released in 1987, Kang found himself in danger of being arrested again for listening to “banned radio.” In 1992, he escaped to South Korea via China, one of few who managed to escape before the famine in North Korea reached its peak. He is now a journalist in Seoul. “All during my childhood,” Kang writes, “Kim Il Sung [North Korea’s leader] had been like a god to me. A few years in the camp cured me of my faith.”