DISCOVERIES
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Kuraj
A Novel
Silvia Di Natale, translated from the Italian by Carol O’Sullivan and Martin Thom
Bloomsbury: 438 pp., $15.95 paper
ON the banks of the river Amudar’ya, where the steppes of Uzbekistan meet the steppes of Turkmenistan, Naja, whose mother died in childbirth, spends her first nine years of life. She sleeps in her aunt’s yurt with her cousins and grandparents, learns to ride when she is 2 and, when she’s old enough to talk, to recite the names of her ancestors back to Genghis Khan.
In 1942, her father, a Tunshan of Mongol and Turkish descent, joins the Germans to fight Stalin in the Caucasus and befriends a young German lieutenant. When Naja’s father is killed, she goes to live with the lieutenant and his family in Cologne. The only word she recalls of her Tunshan language is kuraj (tumbleweed).
The rest of her life is spent struggling with Western culture, from the binding clothes to the disembodied languages. She tries piecing together the story of her father and the German lieutenant and finally, at age 40, returns to the land where she was born. Oh, to travel to those faraway places, to know what it feels like to sleep in a warm yurt in winter surrounded by family and animals, to see the strangeness of European culture through Naja’s eyes -- you’d think it was your own childhood, left behind on the steppes, by the river Amudar’ya.
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The Dream Life
of Sukhanov
A Novel
Olga Grushin
Marian Wood/Putnam: 358 pp., $24.95
POOR Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov, well-fed, well-dressed, good-natured fool. He’s a social climber, a wealthy art critic, a married man, a father, proud of the life he’s built but mostly of his success in the new Moscow. Memories of childhood -- the gray, Communist kind (midnight knocks on the door, multifamily apartments, a father at work in a faraway city) -- well up at the most inconvenient times. His wife is tired of his self-centeredness; his children detest him; figures from his past (he was once a painter) appear to remind him of the soul he abandoned for a secure career.
“The Dream Life of Sukhanov” is full of dread. It is a novel of an insecure generation that has lost more than it has gained. A window opens and “out into the street spilled the zesty smell of roasted chicken ... the performer’s old-fashioned tenor sang caressingly of a solitary sail gliding through the blue mist of the sea. And suddenly Anatoly Pavlovich felt an odd, poignant tug at his heart, as if at that moment all these colors, smells, and sounds of a Moscow evening came together in just this way solely in order to re-create some long-forgotten combination.... “
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White Muslim
From L.A. to New York
... to Jihad?
Brendan Bernhard
Melville House: 150 pp., $12.95 paper
THE increase in conversions to Islam worldwide after Sept. 11 leads L.A. Weekly reporter Brendan Bernhard to wonder, not altogether rhetorically, whether the terrorist attacks were a publicity stunt: “It is clear,” he writes, “that one thing Islam wants is to establish itself in America on an equal footing with ... Judaism and Christianity.” He quotes a New York City imam: “The present culture is poisonous.... Islam is going to bring the normalcy of the situation back.”
This is the story of the conversion of Charles Vincent, a blond-haired, blue-eyed 29-year-old from Torrance. Like many, Vincent’s conversion was a protest; like many converts, he chose a radical path, rejecting the music he once loved, the clothing he once wore, his whole (often dissolute) pre-Sept. 11 life. Bernhard is impressed by how easy it is to convert, by the syndrome of “convertitis” (radical adherence to the new identity; rejection of the old) and by the number of Muslim missionaries eager to “Islamize America.”
“White Muslim” is a fine and fascinating book. It would be too bad and too easy to use it to fuel anti-Islam hysteria instead of as a key to understanding what draws men and women of other religions to Islam.