Alida Becker was an editor at the Book Review for 30 years. She was the first winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for excellence in reviewing.
The Oceans of CrueltyBy Douglas J. Penick
It's believed to be one of the oldest story collections in existence, recorded in Hindi a thousand years ago, but with haunting origins that are even more ancient. As Douglas J. Penick remarks in the introduction to his retelling of THE OCEANS OF CRUELTY: Twenty-Five Tales of a Corpse Spirit (New York Review Books, 176 pp., paperback, $17.95), it reminds us of "human propensities whose lasting power we may prefer to ignore." Imagine "One Thousand and One Nights" as told not by a young woman but by a vetala, a demon whose "whisper is like the crackling sound of a burning house."
Tricked by a devilish yogi, King Vikramāditya is condemned to repeat a gruesome rescue, cutting down a corpse that's hanging from a tree and carrying it on his back, "like a cape of cold mist," as it relates a series of fables. At the end of each, the king must respond to a significant question -- with the answer sending them back to the same tree to resume the same sequence of actions. Only at the end of this cycle will it be possible for either of them to be freed.
As the stories swirl around and echo one another, the virtuous king can't help instinctively responding to the demon's words, assessing the motives of scheming aristocrats, rival suitors and ambitious merchants, not to mention the caprices of rakshasas (shape-shifting fiends), gandharvas (celestial musicians) and apsaras (heavenly nymphs). One tale hinges on awkward revelations from a green parrot and a black mynah about their love-stricken owners; in another, a wife's act of devotion results in a grisly form of resurrection. Throughout, Penick explains, the king's life "is imprisoned in tales from the past, tales of deception from times that are no more."
Yorùbá Boy RunningBy Biyi Bándélé
The sinister aspect of history at the heart of Biyi Bándélé's YORÙBÁ BOY RUNNING (Harper, 288 pp., $26.99) is the slave trade, whose malign influence continues into the present as the "spiritual scions" of the novel's corrupt tribal leaders "continue to sell their people to the highest bidder." The book opens in 1821 with a vivid portrait of a prosperous town in a declining African empire that's about to be ravaged by warriors in search of human plunder. Ajai, the Yoruba boy of the title, is only one of the many lively characters in this early section, which has the aura of ancestral myth -- a potent mix, as Wole Soyinka puts it in his introduction, "of the anecdotal, archival and inquisitional."
Bándélé, a Nigerian filmmaker and playwright who died in 2022, uses the second half of the novel, mainly set 60 years later, to depict the similarities and dissonances of the following era, when British colonialism holds sway. Ajai now occupies center stage as Samuel Ajai Crowther, a real-life linguist, missionary and abolitionist whose liberation from slavery took him from a school in Sierra Leone to a religious college in London and even a meeting with Queen Victoria. He returned to his homeland as the first African bishop of the Anglican Church, only to be nudged, "ever so gently" but resolutely, from his place in the hierarchy.
The Trial of Anna ThalbergBy Eduardo Sangarcía
The woman at the center of Eduardo Sangarcía's THE TRIAL OF ANNA THALBERG (Restless Books, 154 pp., $22) is beset by 16th-century German religious fanatics determined to hold her accountable for even the smallest infraction cited by her resentful neighbors. Her sin? Being red-haired, beautiful and -- perhaps most damning -- an outsider, born and raised in another village. When she's hauled out of her modest hut and denounced as a witch, only her husband and an elderly local priest come to her defense.
In Elizabeth Bryer's translation of Sangarcía's original Spanish, Anna's ordeal is narrated like a fever dream, pitting the hideous realities of her incarceration against the paranoid fantasies of her accusers. Tortured to "extract a truth that was not true," she offers an innocently implacable resistance that infuriates the cleric who's been tasked with gaining her confession.
The Ogre's DaughterBy Catherine Bardon
One cruel aspect of Anna's nightmare is the requirement, eagerly conveyed by the church's lackeys, that her impoverished husband pay the expenses for his wife's trial and even her possible execution. It's the sort of move the villain in Catherine Bardon's THE OGRE'S DAUGHTER (Europa, 384 pp., $28) would have applauded. Translated from the French by Tina Kover, it's a fictionalized account of the life of Flor de Oro Trujillo, eldest daughter of the notoriously brutal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who was assassinated in 1961.
Married nine times (starting at age 17 to the future international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa), Flor could be the designer-clad star of an extremely soapy telenovela. "A sacrificial lamb on the altar of her father's ego," she is unable to escape his emotional, financial and political manipulation. Battling "anorexia, alcoholism, exhaustion," unable to have children and routinely disappointed in love, she roams through interwar Paris and Nazi Germany, pre-Castro Havana and early-1960s Montreal, with futile returns to her native country. In a sadly fitting finale, 62-year-old Flor dies of cancer in a Manhattan hospital ... on Valentine's Day.