Discoveries

Remember Me

A Novel

Trezza Azzopardi

Grove Press: 272 pp., $23

“REMEMBER Me” is written from some other dimension of echoes and auras. “Sometimes talking’s like being behind glass,” thinks the narrator, a homeless woman named Winnie, “the words can be hard to fathom.” Her childhood shattered by war, she tries to piece it back together. She begins by remembering the ghosts that surrounded her bedridden mother (whom she calls Snow White). “Each day, a little more of my mother was stolen. In no time at all, her eyes went hard as jet; her hair, brittle as spun sugar.” Winnie grows up with birds that flutter inside her when she’s afraid -- as when she’s sent to live with a crotchety grandfather, then an aunt in the country outside London, where bombs are shooting stars. Author Trezza Azzopardi is rarely direct: Winnie goes through life with her head down, relying on instinct to meet her negligible needs. She remembers her adolescence, spent with Aunt Ena: “New things were piling up. I heard noises in the night, a man shouting, a single bang ... two sets of footsteps, light and heavy, crossing the yard. I heard the absence of a grating chain, and the nothingness that the wind leaves when it falls. But I didn’t see him go.” When 72-year-old Winnie is robbed of her only possessions, a plastic case and a wig, she reenters the world to find the thief. But Azzopardi never leaves the margins. Real life remains a parallel universe. Winnie circles and circles but never dives.

*

Uncle Rudolf

A Novel

Paul Bailey

St. Martin’s Press: 184 pp., $21.95

The past folds up like paper dolls. Snip here, snip there, characters create facsimiles of the children they once were. The grown rememberer in this novel also struggles to piece together his war-torn childhood. Andrew (Andrei) left his native Romania in 1937 at the age of 7. His father sent him to London to live with his flamboyant Uncle Rudolf, a world-famous tenor. Andrew learns about the worldly world from his uncle: ladies’ undergarments to lieder. He learns the habits of a gentleman -- for example, eating burnt toast will make your teeth white. His immediate family recedes into war and memory; his new family emerges, Uncle Rudolf, the cook, the chauffeur and the manservant. It is charming to watch Rudolf make an aristocrat of his nephew and see Andrew release his past. “I no longer fear waking to blood and snow and storks on chimney tops. I eat my burnt toast at breakfast.... Let the bleak dreams come again, if they must, for I can cope with them now.” Uncle Rudolf’s greatest gift is the glue that holds a boy’s otherwise fragmented past together.

*

Gods, Mongrels

and Demons

101 Brief But Essential Lives

Angus Calder

Bloomsbury: 416 pp., $24.95

Cheng HO (1371-1433), 7 feet tall and the fiercest of warriors, was the “most notable eunuch in history” and part of the retinue of Chu Ti, the fourth son of the first Ming emperor, Chu Yuan-chang. Cheng Ho commanded hundreds of “treasure ships” (read pirates) and more than 27,000 men. Egil of Iceland (810-890) was a famous “berserk” (meaning that he went into fearless blind rage in battle). Liudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko (1916-74) was a Soviet major fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front. Of the 30 million deaths that occurred on that front, 309, including 78 German snipers, were attributed to her. Ruth Handler (1917-2002) created the Barbie doll in 1959, named for her daughter, Barbara. Each of the 101 entries in Angus Calder’s “Gods, Mongrels and Demons” is worth his or her own movie/novel/epic poem. He is fascinated by eccentrics and unusual people who “act from some irresistible inner impulse” and who manage to avoid “normality,” not to mention a “career.” “Every child should be encouraged to deviate as far as possible from careerist norms,” he writes. “I hope that this book provides excellent examples for the young to follow (as well as several that they’d better not).”