The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

corrupt director, the latter portion of the text examines Moses’s desperate attempt to secure meaning as his sense of wonder evaporates. From the briefest encounter with a mortician who openly speaks with cadavers to a brothel owner named after a Fiat 500, Mabanckou’s characters pulsate with life. Each page unveils a new face, an additional quirk, or the unfortunate and abrupt end to an established figure. This frequent strategy is rarely overbearing; the impact of each personality is carefully woven into the greater whole of Moses. Despite a momentary , physical presence, no one face is ever glossed over superficially. Black Moses travels in close tandem with its historical context, drawing particular attention to a scientific revolution in its early stages before transitioning into a harsh, ethnic cleansing in the latter . Mabanckou takes care in crafting the extermination of the marginalized while criticizing the hypocrisy of the oppressing class, most notably the mayor of PointeNoire . Moses’s own fluctuation echoes what the novel describes on a national stage as he attempts to harbor hope while doused with depravity and violence. Mabanckou’s recognition of life’s harshness , especially in how it relates to an orphan struck by fantasy, fortunately does not compromise the persistence of optimism . Rather, it fuels his narrative and memorializes Black Moses as a masterpiece ; not only does the piece harken to the works of Dickens and Twain, but it also builds on those legacies in a timeless way. Daniel Bokemper Oklahoma City Arundhati Roy. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. New York. Knopf. 2017. 449 pages. Many reviews of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness have discussed its engagement with the larger political history of India’s last two decades and its representation of the Kashmir conflict. Adopting a slightly different tack, I focus on the novel’s concern with presence and absence in history. Ustad Kulsoom Bi, a hijra (eunuch), gets excited by the brief mention of court eunuchs in a show about late Mughal history at New Delhi’s historic Red Fort: “The moment passed in a heartbeat . But it did not matter. What mattered was that it existed. To be present in history, as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it. . . . A chuckle . . . could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.” Contrast this with the opening coda that describes the disappearance of sparrows and vultures from urban Indian spaces. The causes for the disappearance of the sparrows remain unspecified, but their absence leaves an aural void that the noisy “homecoming” of crows and bats cannot fill. The vultures die of “diclofenac poisoning” after feeding on the carcasses of cattle pumped with the chemical. Best European Fiction 2018 Ed. Alex Andriesse Dalkey Archive As the name suggests, Best European Fiction 2018 contains a multitude of incredible authors, some established and some just beginning to make a name for themselves. With work from over twenty-five different countries ranging from Luxembourg to Slovenia and content that varies just as much, there is a story here for every kind of reader. Marta Batalha The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao Trans. Eric M. B. Becker Oneworld As a woman living in Brazil in the 1940s, Euridice Gusmao is expected to be a loving wife and mother. In marrying a traditional man, Euridice sacrifices her ambitions and passions for her parents’ sake, until the day that her runaway sister returns. With sharp humor and pointed prose, Marta Batalha’s novel rebels against the patriarchal forces of her home country. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 71 Diclofenac turns cattle into “better dairy machines” but works “like nerve-gas on . . . vultures.” The narrator says: “Not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds. There was so much to look forward to.” In the epic march of discourses of development, the vultures lose their foothold in the wall of the future. Contiguously, in the first quarter of the novel, the narrator focuses on people massed at the edges of the Jantar Mantar— a Mughal-era observatory in Delhi also doubling as a space for political protest. A majority are fixated by “the newest show in town”: the media spectacle...