First Fiction

Mirage

A Novel

Bandula Chandraratna

Black Sparrow Press:

224 pp., $24.95

Bandula CHANDRARATNA’S first novel -- the story of a poor, middle-aged hospital worker in a strict Muslim country -- was nearly short-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize when it was originally published in England in 1999. Although “Mirage” has something of an also-ran aura about it, it’s an eye-opening peek inside a closed society, where the inhabitants do their best to get by amid watchful religious mutawahs with their edicts and canes, an influx of migrants from neighboring kingdoms and the rich West, and ancient rituals of love, self and family that clash violently with the encroachment of a Pepsi Generation world.

Sayeed is in his early 40s, a hapless loner who has moved from a desert village to a sprawling shantytown on the outskirts of the big city. He lives in a hut that is vaguely habitable at best, a jarring contrast to the hospital where he works -- brightly lighted, antiseptic, full of Westerners and even women who talk. He’s a porter there, happily going about his mindless work and amazed at his wages -- probably starvation. He can often be found nibbling pita bread and pretending to read the newspaper, holding it upside down, to the general hilarity of his workmates. To him, Arabic text resembles nothing more than “beetles’ legs on white paper.”

When Sayeed endures a long bus journey home, he finds that his brother -- farming the family plot and surrounded by two wives and various kids -- has set up a marriage for him. The prospective spouse is Latifa, a beautiful young widow with a little girl.

Chandraratna handles this improbable turn of events with considerable skill and understatement, as we watch Sayeed rise, barely, to the occasion: borrowing money, building a toilet for the hut and generally stressing out. It’s enough to keep us distracted from the jaw-dropping surprise he has in store for us when Latifa moves in. But there’s something cursory and unfocused about “Mirage”; as much as we appreciate Sayeed’s gentle company, he seems ever on the verge of vanishing before our eyes.

*

I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere

Short Stories

Anna Gavalda

Translated from the French by Karen L. Marker

Riverhead: 208 pp., $13 paper

This breezy and rather slight collection of 12 extremely short stories about Paris and its surrounding banlieux has sold a whopping 700,000 copies in France. Its author, Anna Gavalda, drew comparisons to Francoise Sagan and Dorothy Parker and won a raft of literary prizes. C’est bizarre. It’s not that “I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere” is an entirely terrible story collection. It’s not. But for a country so devoted to the timeless values of slow food, it’s difficult to fathom why so much attention has been lavished upon these inoffensive literary equivalents of Happy Meals. For the most part, they bring to mind Jay McInerney with a bad hangover and a Dictaphone.

In “Courting Rituals of the Saint-Germain-des-Pres,” a first date is ruined by the man’s beeping cellphone. “This Man and This Woman” is a hackneyed sketch of a nouveau riche couple; he’s obsessed with the wiper blades on his car and his secretary’s breasts, while she, poor thing, feels terribly unloved. And “Clic Clac” tells of a guy buying a bunch of Ikea furniture for his new apartment and a bra for the office slut.

Gavalda’s stories are adolescent set pieces with a predictably nauseating cast -- insensitive yuppies, rich spoiled brats, clueless suburbanites, all of them ho-hum stereotypes or dour cartoons digging their own graves. Her prose is resolutely stenographic, even when, in her best efforts, an injured wild boar goes nuts inside a pristine Jaguar (“Junior”) or a country veterinarian exacts outrageous revenge upon her oafish sexual assailants (“Catgut”). But these wonderfully executed moments can’t erase the irritation of having to read every conversational pause as ellipsis points inside quotes. A typical exchange: “ ... “ “ ... “

In the end, you can’t help but entertain the uncharitable notion that maybe the French don’t hate us for McDonald’s and “Baywatch,” but rather for the likes of Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Jhumpa Lahiri and Don DeLillo.