The Assistant, Bernard Malamud

Frank Alpine, the assistant at the grocery store, shows us how to waste a life and lose a job, and then in the following act, how to save a business, restore love and restart the cycle.

Sometimes in life, when faced with a crisis or extreme situations that make us suffer, one questions the meaning of what is happening, feels powerless against what one considers an unjust fate and resentful of the neighbor’s greener grass. However, life has many twists and turns and patience is recommended to deal with its hardships which, like everything else, will pass in time. China´s millenary wisdom understands as much and decrees the fact with the saying that advises to sit at your front door and wait to see the corpse of your enemy pass. This is a hard concept, distressing - but certainly not the lesser true for that – because it reveals our envy for other’s good fortunes and our wish for revenge, in most cases not by our own hand but by that of fate, the same hand that turns the enemy of those who know how to wait into a cadaver.

Feelings like these are common among shopkeepers who live comparing themselves to others in their vicinity and suffering on account of the success of his closest acquaintances. Such is the predicament of the Jew Morris Bober, owner of the grocery store who, as he gets older and embittered with life for the death of his son Ephraim and for his endless rotten luck, discovers himself not only envying the good fortunes of his fellow Julius Karp but even wishing him wrong: “For years the grocer had escaped resenting the man´s good luck, but lately he had caught himself wishing on him some small misfortune”. For Morris, however, life performs a turn and makes one thing change into another and still into other, leaving us wondering whether the body in the saying is that of our enemy or our own.

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

“Then he saw that the normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect, of body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known, he saw a long procession, deformed in body and warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh and some with illness of the spirit. He could feel a holy compassion for them all. They were the helpless instruments of blind chance”. This is the reflection which, endorsed by the book’s author on the protagonist, reflects the conceptual design that pervades the work and serves him to explain much of the human misery he confronts the main character with and perhaps, one might guess, also his own. If we think of humans as beings settled on four fundamental pillars, the body, represented by the physical or material aspects; the soul, by the spiritual, moral or mood disposition; the mind, by the rational or intellectual; and the heart, by the emotional or passional, then any defect in one of them will unbalance the owner of such flaw and make him limp and stumble through life as if a table with one leg shorter than the other three.

Philip, the lad whom the story follows from when, already having lost his father, loses his mother victim of a miscarriage, and up to his thirties, an age at which he makes the reflection which starts this review, is the vehicle that Somerset Maugham uses to show the hardships a human being with one of his pillars deficient or poorly compensated must deal with as he trudges through life. In fact, as was disposed by fate, misfortune, or for those who are believers, God's will, Philip was born with an ugly physical defect consisting of a club-foot, a deformity that causes his owner to limp, prevents the practice of sports and even dancing. Such calamities when aided by a loving mother, a supportive family upbringing and an empathic social environment, have good prospects for improvement and thus do not affect the vital balance. But this is not the case of Philip who, orphaned of father and mother in his early years, is taken up reluctantly by his uncle, a scrupulous Anglican vicar, imposing and petulant, and his wife, a sentiments-frigid woman submitted to the arbitrary and loveless indifference of her husband.

Tigers Are Better-Looking, Jean Rhys

The title of this book is so appealing that raises expectations and entices us to read it, especially if its author is the well known Jean Rhys - whose main work is the novel "Wide Sargasso Sea" - a writer of Caribbean roots, with half Creole blood and half English blood. His life story is linked to British colonialism in the nineteenth century, when Dominica, his country of birth, was still a British colony. With a Welsh for father and a Dominican mother, Rhys struggled to find her place in life against the discrimination encountered by those who are neither from here nor from there, a fact which is reflected acutely in the eight stories in this volume.

The first thing that strikes us in reading these stories is the ill-fated lives of the protagonists, almost all of them women, who are torn between the optimism of their youthful energies and the everyday tangible evidence of failure, which, being permanent, changes optimism into pessimism. Those who know the life of the author will see that all these stories, some more some less, describe episodes of her early life in native lands and then as a young girl in the land of the English colonizers, to where she emigrated. In fact Rhys lived in the British Antilles until about sixteen, traveling then to Europe where she tried to assimilate into London life without much success. Most of the stories revolve around her wretched experiences of this period.

Background to all accounts is the acute sense of social rejection Rhys suffered as a result of the ruthless contempt exercised on her by the fully bred English gent who used to brand her "a horrid creature of the colonies." This discriminatory treatment unleashes in the author a violent aversion to all things English, embodied in the city of London, which is tangible in the texts: "It was Eddie who first contaminated me with doubts about "the homeland", that is, England. He was always very quiet when others who had never seen it sang its praises and spoke with grand gesticulations of London." And then: "Don’t come to me with stories about London. There are many people in London with the heart like a stone." And even more categorical: "London always smells the same. It sucks, you think, but I'm glad to be back. And for a while you cheer up. Anything can happen just around the corner, you think. But long before you reach the corner you are already discouraged."

Papillon, Henri Charrière

If I had only one stroke to define Papillon, central character and at the same time author of this fascinating and entertaining autobiographical novel (in real life Papillon is the alias for Henri Charrière), I would definitely say that he is a person of an unwavering determination of purpose, which is to escape from the prison to which he has been sentenced for life. In fact, not a day passes in the thirteen years of captivity in which Papillon has not his mind set in contriving and getting ready for his next flight, always envisaging high risk plans, always bringing in the adventure those he considers his allies in suffering and always thinking that this will be the ultimate escape to freedom ... and revenge.

The year is 1931 and before a Paris court is brought Papillon, an urchin twenty-five years old, accused of killing an insignificant character of the Parisian underworld and police informer. Papillon asserts his innocence and the evidence against him is weak so he expects to be exonerated. However, he is face to face with the most ruthless public prosecutor imaginable who claims for himself the mission to avenge society of crime in the flesh of disreputable personages as Papillon, with no concern to whether he is guilty or not of the circumstantial accusation, especially if this is so grave that allows his putting away forever. Pradel is the man and in his first speech to the jury intimidates everyone with a threat to Papillon’s face, telling him: "Prisoner at the bar, just you keep quiet and above all don’t you attempt to defend yourself. I’ll send you down the drain alright."

Predictably Papillon gets life and is sent to serve his sentence in the infamous penal colonies of French Guiana on the northern coast of South America. The reminiscence of Victor Hugo's Inspector Javert is inescapable and along with Alfred Dreyfus, artfully accused by his colleagues in arms of treason to France on false charges and whose real and famous case is revisited in the book, give ground to our thinking that there was a long period in which the French courts used questionable methods for dispensing justice and brutally cruel sentences.