Books

BY MICHAEL J. BANDLER

Check out our picks of this month’s page-turners.

Windy City: A Novel of Politics Scott Simon
(Random House, $25)

As NPR correspondent Scott Simon’s big-hearted bear-hug of a novel opens, the gluttonous 300-pound mayor of Chicago lies dead, face-down in the remains of his nightly prosciutto-and-artichoke pizza—heavy on the cheese.

Naturally, the solution to the crime forms only part of the story; as stated, it’s “a novel of politics.” Simon takes a page from Tip O’Neill’s famous adage that “all politics is local,” recounting maneuvering among city aldermen to select a replacement who’ll hold the fort until the next scheduled mayoral election.

The book’s hero is Sundaran Roopini, an understated first-generation Indian immigrant, widower and father of two teenage girls. Roopini finds himself swept into the multicultural mélange that is the Chicago populace, covering all bases—ceremonial, culinary and, yes, political. The installation of a traffic signal at a busy intersection? The removal of a dead tree? A proper environment for an autistic child? Graft? Fraud? Sting operations?

It’s all part of the mix. What Simon seems to be saying, as Roopini roams among the ethnicities, is that aldermen—like all of us—are simply human. That sentiment—embracing roots and family, eccentricities and failings, and dappled with the sights, sounds and grit of the Windy City—makes this an energizing and loving contemporary urban fable.

The View from the Seventh Layer Kevin Brockmeier
(Pantheon Books, $22)

This thirtysomething author of short fiction and children’s stories must have some compelling wee hours. Th e imagination and vision he injects into his stories place him in the company of such writers as Nathan Englander and Aimee Bender. In this book of stories, a mute raises parakeets who learn to imitate sounds of his breathing, footsteps and alarm clock, producing a symphony that becomes the man’s legacy. A lonely woman, living on a sunny island, regrets things she wrote in her high school classmates’ yearbooks and awaits some otherworldly force to transport her out of the somber existence she’s come to know. A college philosophy instructor fears that Aquinas’ and Nietzsche’s decline in their later years somehow resonates in his own personal life.

A choose-your-own-adventure story brings adults into a child’s world. That’s only some of the stuff of Brockmeier’s world, waiting for readers poised and yearning to escape.

The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur Daoud Hari
(Random House, $23)

There are times when a thing of beauty lifts itself from within the most horrific circumstances—and so it is with this new memoir. Th e author, a Darfurian native who learned English from British and American classic literature, was not exempt from the violence and devastation that has swept his region. Yet, after witnessing the catastrophe first-hand, he was able to apply his education and language skills to become a highly valued guide to foreign correspondents and aid workers who shuttled back and forth across the border with Chad. Peeking tentatively through these annals of misfortune and death is an uncommon glimpse of the preciousness of life. Frequently addressing the reader directly (“There are many parts that I think will surprise you and make you very happy that you came with me,” he writes at the outset), he brings us, inexorably, together as one.