Crucible
by John Sayles
Sayles hasn’t lost his gift for cinematic storytelling, even though his name now turns up more frequently on bookstore shelves than movie marquees. There’s no better proof than CRUCIBLE (Melville House, 490 pp., $32.99), his rambunctious panorama of the turbulent years when union organizers went head-to-head with Henry Ford and his “enforcer,” Harry Bennett. Spanning the years from the 1929 stock market crash to the end of World War II, the novel moves from the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the Amazon jungle, but its focus is always the immense River Rouge complex outside Detroit. More than a factory, it is, as Sayles puts it, “a beast that never sleeps.”
Feeding its appetites are workers like Kaz Pilsudski, the son of Polish immigrants, and Zeke Crowder, lured from the Deep South by the prospect of better wages. Other story lines are carried by Rosa Schimmel, recording secretary of the Young Communists, and Kerry Rogan, whose father moves the family to Brazil when “the Chief” decides he needs his own rubber supply. Diego Rivera makes a cameo appearance, installing his controversial industry murals, and there are nods to other famous (and infamous) names.
Although Henry Ford appears less often than you’d expect, even from offstage he casts a long shadow. Especially when, in resisting the demands of his workers, “the thing that’s been cooking for years” boils over in terrible violence.
A Very Cold Winter
by Fausta Cialente; translated by Julia Nelsen
World War II is a perennial venue for historical fiction, its immediate aftermath far less so. Which makes Cialente’s A VERY COLD WINTER (Transit Books, 296 pp., paperback, $18.95) all the more welcome. Set in the “vast, wounded city” of Milan a year after liberation, it features an ensemble cast squeezed into makeshift quarters amid the bombed-out ruins: Camilla, a single mother of three; her violinist nephew and his French wife; another nephew’s resistance-hero widow and her infant daughter; and an expatriate Italian who worked for the British in Cairo. All share a single toilet on the balcony and frigid “rooms” separated by flimsy barriers. Despite Camilla’s valiant efforts at diplomacy, tension — and some desperate escapism — is inevitable.
Amid “a fog that was unmistakably Milanese,” the members of Camilla’s improvised household struggle to find food, work and a sense of dignity. In one case, this leads to the possibility of a redeeming love, in another to a secretive venture that will end in tragedy. “How quickly the solidarity of war had faded — the only good thing those bitter years had brought to light.”
A Great Act of Love
by Heather Rose
“Nothing is achieved without sacrifice,” proclaims one of the characters in Rose’s A GREAT ACT OF LOVE (Summit, 480 pp., $29), adding, “sometimes the sacrifice is other people.” It’s a fitting observation for a novel that begins with a murder in 1836 London and proceeds through multiple acts of subterfuge on several continents.
How does the young Englishwoman calling herself Caroline Douglas come to be on a ship bound for the remote penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, accompanying cargo in which she has clandestinely invested a fortune? Where did she acquire her formidable education and her skills as an apothecary? Why, once she has reached this “place where discovery was unlikely,” does she pose as a widowed governess? And who is Quill, the 10-year-old claiming to be her nephew?
Moving between Caroline’s exploits and those of her father and aunt, the narrative unfurls enticing layers of explanation. Their stories, with roots in the French Revolution, will intertwine with those of a blacksmith in flight from Caribbean slavery and a British captain turned banker whose interests may diverge from those of his clients. For Caroline and Quill, one constant is vigilance. In their experience, the past is “a riptide” that could easily “drag them away.”
Berlin Shuffle
by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz; translated by Philip Boehm
Boschwitz was only 22 when he wrote BERLIN SHUFFLE (Metropolitan Books, 256 pp., $26.99) and only 27 when he died on a ship sunk by a U-boat in 1942. But it wasn’t until 2019 that this tragicomic novel of down-and-out Berliners was published in his native Germany. Now appearing in a lively English translation, it makes you wonder what a stellar career he might have had if his vagabond life hadn’t been cut so brutally short.
Boschwitz’s tale of the petty grifters and bottom-feeders who congregate at a seedy tavern provides an unflinchingly honest, yet deeply humane portrait of a society floundering in the wake of the 1929 economic crisis, not to mention the unhealed wounds of the Great War. Just inside the door of the Jolly Huntsman sits a bag lady who’s convinced her dead husband will somehow return from the army. Also in attendance are a wily professional beggar and his sidekick, a monosyllabic, food-obsessed ex-mental patient. And about to come into deadly conflict are a former tram conductor who hawks dirty pictures and a malicious blind match-seller who treats his wife like a seeing-eye dog — two people “whose joy in life is so minimal” that “the fear of losing it is easily pushed aside by their hate.”
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