This is a really engaging piece of social drama that takes us deep into the life of a marginalised and abused teenaged girl. Most of the book appears as profoundly real as any dramatic fiction I’ve been privileged to read. Sadly, I know the story is an accurate reflection on too many young lives. Natalie comes from a theoretically ‘middle-class’ home, in a middle-class street, in a normal enough town, yet her young life is for the main part anything but comfortable.

    Natalie is a bright girl who is blighted by having a physically abusive father, and an emotional detached mother. She is the constant scapegoat for every wrong, for every misfortune, for every failure in her family, while being personally deprived of all but the necessities for life. No wonder then, that she ends up on the streets and as the victim of further abuses. Thankfully the author stood clear of introducing sexual abuse as well. Perhaps that on top of everything else wouldn’t have only detracted from credibility. The main thrust of the story is that Natalie is let down by the care system as much as by those close to her. That is a woefully familiar story, as cash strapped social programmes fail in almost every corner of the world.

     The story is very well written from a technical point of view, and very well crafted as a story. This appears to be this author’s first real leap into fiction writing, from a non-fiction writing background. I hope there is far more of her penetrating fiction to come. This is the sort of book that encourages all right-minded people to be generous towards those that are struggling; especially the young, routinely down on their luck and short of consistent support. Natalies exist in every towns’ shadows, marginalised by systems that just about support the luckiest, but which seem only to make the lives of the emotionally and physically deprived comparatively and inexcusably more intolerable.

     I recommend this book to all those with less than solidly frozen hearts, as a reminder that most street kids, usually driven by desperation to petty crime, or worse, don’t volunteer for their roles; even when that sometimes appears to be the case. This is powerful writing that, as others have said, makes this book hard to put down.

AMAZON LINK

Poisson d'Or / Fisch aus Gold I thought, was a rags to riches story, but it turned out to be a more grim illegal immigrant version of Forest Gump. In this book the protagonist Laïla tells her life story as a 1st person narrative: From when she was kidnapped as a young child in Morocco, snatched away from her parents permanently. All the way up to when she's around 20, when -- I won't spoil it, let's just say things end on a positive note!

The title refers to a poem about a golden fish that should watch out for predators, it's a metaphor for Laïla who has to deal with quite a lot of predatory people - sadly. So it's neither as funny as Forest Gump nor mixed with historic moments. But this book also tells the life story of an innocent person, with the occasional tear-jerker moment. Fortunately it's not too sad or depressive.

The book is well-written and easy to read, and keeps the reader interested most of the time. The blurb of this book seemed a bit pretentious "This book is about blah blah, the most political Le Clézio has written". But after finishing it I must admit that it made me think about things, which is good I suppose. A good 4+ out of 5 score! PS. The writer's fan club has a useful list of available translations.

Dixiane Hallaj is a particular good writer of social/historically placed, politically pointed, drama, both in her creative fiction and as in this case in the writing of Biography augmented with fictional reality. In fact, most biographies contain some invented content, and/or augmented interpretation. There are going to be gaps to fill in any knowledge that reports anything deeper than the bare historic/factual bones.
Hallaj writes, very-broadly speaking, women’s literature, in that central female figures and through them family, are her bread and butter. That shouldn’t deter any but the most misogynistic of male readers. There is plenty of the gritty content and adventure to balance the childcare and dressmaking. This is a lot on female, and male, sensitivities, but certainly very little sentimental. Lola had as psychologically tough a life as most male heroes, and survived an extraordinarily mixed bunch of husbands and other male figures. I may have lost count, but she had certainly buried at least two husbands and saw off another by the time she was thirty. Well, to be accurate, the exes were never conventionally buried.
Hallaj has preserved for history a very informative piece of family/social history. She literally saved important social history from a death bed. This is the history of a very ordinary daughter of gentry, turned extraordinary by the turmoil that swirled through and around her life. Lola saw plenty of the poverties and hardships as well as at least spells of grandeur living. We learn a very great deal about the life experiences of people in Latin America and further afield, between the end of the 19th century and the start of the Great Depression. We leave Lola’s life when she was still hardly middle-aged, by which time she had as much life experience as a half dozen others might achieve in half a dozen centuries. Hallaj has blended biography and real life fiction to create a wonderful memory of her grandmother from her mother’s own words.
The writing is of a very high quality, the script is captivating, and we learn as much about Lola’s times as we would from the very best of historical documentary. What is more, Hallaj seems to be able to paint incredibly detailed pictures without ever seeming to use more than the fewest of words to do so.

http://www.amazon.com/Its-Just-Lola-Dixiane-Hallaj-ebook/dp/B008SUUV7G

Despite its title, No Longer Human is really about the pain of being human (duh). It's about depression. Alienation. Life spiralling out of control.

Okay, so Yozo, the protagonist, is afraid of humans. He doesn't understand why exactly people act like they do, but in order to fit in, he tries acting as human as possible. This poses an extra problem because now, on top of his fear of humans, he's also afraid lest people find out that he's a "fake," that everything he does is nothing but false affectation.

Now, I think that way of seeing things is interesting because isn't it normal for people to assume different "masks" when they interact with different individuals? It's to be expected that people act differently with, say, their boss than they do around their friends; it doesn't mean that they're being insencere.

Or perhaps that's precisely the point? Just because something is perceived as "normal," it doesn't mean that it comes easily and naturally for everyone. When you're incapable of doing what everybody else is doing, like Yozo, you might end up concluding that there's something wrong with you, that it's your own lack of humanity that is to blame. Yozo thinks like that, and maybe it just proves just how kind he is. (And why those women fall in love with him, even though all he seems to do is leeching them for money, sex and affection.) I imagine that people who are truly inhumane--psychopaths, let us say--wouldn't suspect that there's something wrong with them.