Literary Prizes: Montecore

Narrators Dept: Montecore features two narrators retelling one man’s story, a difficult if charismatic father to the first narrator who happens to be a novelist of the same name as Montecore ’s author, which doesn’t really seem to matter and an old, cherished, if likewise difficult, friend to the second, according to Globe And Mail. The ensuing pages, composed of e-mail exchanges and episodic reminiscences between the two narrators, Jonas-the-son and Kadir-the-friend, answer that question by retelling Abbas’s story, which involves a tragic, orphaned Tunisian childhood, youthful adventure and travel, and unexpected, life-changing romance with a Swedish flight attendant, his marriage to her and immigration to Sweden, their up-and-down family life, his indomitable ambitions to be a world-famous and influential photographer juxtaposed with his hardscrabble efforts to support his brood, his mysterious, sometimes dangerous, often unsatisfying return trips to Tunisia, and his eventual and less-than-exemplary ascent to stardom. His is an unspooling spiral of a life story that Jonas and Kadir not only witnessed but were both inspired and bruised by, only now, in the wake of Abbas’s latest absence, to be left to understand together and and yes, dear reader, you did just read a Tunisia reference in the previous sentence. And so never mind all the self-evidently good literary reasons you might have to pick up this book on description alone, and never mind the further incentive of learning that Khemiri has already won some impressive literary prizes: If you read this book, you can feel assured that you’re simultaneously learning, from a sophisticated aesthetic vantage, about an important dimension of the signal geopolitical event of the present moment. What more could you ask of contemporary literary fiction? Only that it’s enjoyable – not impressive – but enjoyable to read, for one. And maybe, also, just maybe, that all of the book’s pyrotechnic-gyroscopic acrobatics yield a matching set of revelatory, meaningful explorations of human experience. We meet the man in question, Abbas, in a prologue detailing his dazzling life at the top of Manhattan’s culture-making scene – Kofi Annan, Sting, Bono and Naomi Klein are all at this globetrotting celebrity-photographer’s 50th birthday party – that ends by asking: “How was this cosmic success reached by a paltry, parent-free boy?” As reported in the news.
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