![\"\"](\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/9780063257856-copy-2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nMy novel, River East, River West<\/a><\/em>, is in part a social portrait of restless and suffocated youth in Shanghai. I\u2019ve long been fascinated by the effect of place on adolescence, how a locale\u2019s social and environmental factors exerts an influence on how young people behave or misbehave, how landscape informs crevices of society young people burrow into or the barriers they break out from. In Shanghai, this meant FamilyMarts and dark KTV rooms where teens could drink and frolic, all-night cybercaf\u00e9s and gargantuan malls, city parks teeming with feral cats, residential housing towers dense as concrete forests where supervising adults were too often absent, busy making money in distant cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a reading list about young people growing up too fast, too hard, too weird, too tenderly because they live in places where the setting is a driving force for complicated youths. Let these books take you around the globe, from working class towns of volcanic northern Tenerife to squatter apartments in Beijing, from a desolate eastern French town corroded by alcohol to the rooftops and caf\u00e9s of Mexico City, from 1990s Burundi to the tundra of the Canadian arctic. In these stories of fevered hopes and bleak pessimism, absentee parents, epidemics of violence, the anonymity of buzzing metropolises, the wilderness remote towns, the suffocating provincialism, and racial and class tensions are all vivid setting traits to contribute to a kaleidoscopic collection of youth in flux\u2014spanning continents, but all authentic portraits of hyper-particular settings.<\/p>\n\n\n \u201cTo live somewhere,\u201d Faye writes, \u201cis to melt carnally into the topography of a place.\u201d In the musician\u2019s debut novel, we meet 10 year-old Gaby, a French-Rwandan boy living in 1990s Bujumbura, Burundi, in a bougainvillea-filled cul-de-sac of the Kinanira neighborhood. He attends the French school, steals and gorges on the neighbor\u2019s mangoes with his band of mostly mixed-race friends, picnics by the glittering lake with his family. Due to inflation, everyone in Bujumbura is a millionaire; democratic elections are on the horizon, neighborhood bars called cabarets brim with colorful opinions and artisanal liquor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gaby\u2019s innocent childhood cracks open when his Rwandan mother and French father split up\u2014on their last outing as a family, following a muddy forest trek and a visit to the palm oil factory where his father supervises a colonial enterprise, Gaby notes that the palm oil came to spoil the happiness of his childhood, mixing into the dissolution of his parents\u2019 marriage. In neighboring Rwanda, ethnic tensions are coming to a boiling point, and Gaby\u2019s visit to Kigali with his mother for an uncle\u2019s wedding is full of chilling precursors of the genocide to come. Soon, the unthinkable happens, and Gaby\u2019s once innocent band of boys\u2014who\u2019d smoked cigarettes at his 11th birthday party by a crocodile carcass, who\u2019d picked idle fights over small neighborhood squabbles\u2014are buying grenades off the black market and arming to guard the neighborhood as violence spills across the border. Years later, the cul-de-sac once teeming with great trees is now bare, barricaded with tall walled compounds and barbed wires. But the cabaret\u2014 the ubiquitous neighborhood bars where obscurity reigns and tongue are set loose, where the real country, this \u201csmall country where everyone knows everyone,\u201d\u2014still stands, and Gaby returns to see if he can still find memories of home and the ghosts who haunt him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This novel\u2019s original Spanish title is Panza de Burro, or \u201cdonkey\u2019s belly,\u201d a Canarian description of the low-lying cloud cover clinging to the volcanic landscape of northern Tenerife. The ten-year-old narrator and her best friend Idora live in a working class town where many of the adults\u2019 livelihoods are tied to the resort economy of the island\u2019s south. For the girls, the sea is a three hour walk away. They spend much of their languid, suffocating summer failing to get to it, settling instead for a made-believe \u201ccanal beach\u201d with concrete slabs and a trickle of water littered with ubiquitous pine needles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The town\u2019s roads are steep (\u201ca vertical neighborhood on a vertical mountain\u201d), the houses multicolored and half finished, the minimarket a distributor of junk food and mean gossip. The narrator resents the holiday residences her mother needs to clean, from which she feels separated by \u201ca barrier of clear clingfilm.\u201d The girls eat and purge and gorge on berries and pears that make them shit endlessly, they grind their bodies on everything, including each other, they roam in the heat and volcanic haze. The clouds are always low, hovering right above their heads, their oppression a pressure cooker, presaging the boiling point towards which the novel is gathering force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is summer in Logar province, and an America-raised teen called Marwand is visiting his family\u2019s village in rural eastern Afghanistan. This is a land of orchards and streams and mulberry trees, of curving roads leading to mazes of interconnected compounds, of courtyards covered with flower petals carried by the wind, of laborers and fields, of US army operations in the surrounding black mountains, \u201cso that those of us down in the river valleys only ever heard the softest hum of gunfire, the gentlest tremble of stone.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kochai\u2019s novel unfolds against this backdrop of \u201cTs\u201d and \u201cpsychopathic white boys\u201d and \u201crobots in the sky\u201d in 2005 Afghanistan, but the militarized elements make way for the centerpieces of familial lore, sumptuous feasts, and rowdy shenanigans as the children adventure around this landscape, searching for the escaped and much pestered family dog Budabash. In between, the cousins and friends succumb to mystery illnesses, crash weddings by hiding in burqas, and tell each other countless nesting doll-like stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By turns surrealist, absurdist, and deeply heartbreaking, the novel portrays a social landscape of intimate ties and bullet-ridden memories\u2013including a tragedy that marks an eternal wound on the family\u2019s beating heart. This secret is unveiled as layers of tales-within-tales rich with oral tradition are peeled back, culminating to a reveal so poetic and striking that it makes for a landmark chapter in contemporary American literature for its linguistic statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To the delight of his cult followers (of which I am proudly one), Bola\u00f1o\u2019s metaverse of poets coming-of-age in Mexico City appear in this early novel in his oeuvre as familiar echoes, doppelgangers, and kaleidoscopic fragments. Here, we loosely follow Jan and Remo, variants or alter egos of Arturo and Ulises of The Savage Detectives<\/em>, perhaps, as they roam through 1980s Mexico City, surviving on milk and avocados, dwelling in rooftop tenement rooms, taking part time jobs at newspapers, writing rabid fan letters to writers they admire. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reading the book can feel like tracing a map of the city: Bola\u00f1o writes of \u201cthe ghosts that appear behind trees and on cracked sidewalks in the old neighborhoods of Mexico City,\u201d \u201cthe dens of San Juan de Letr\u00e1n, the neighborhoods around Garibaldi where we sold Virgin of Guadalupe lamps on the installment plan, the chop shops of Peralvillo, the dusty rooms of Romero Rubio, the shady photography studios of Avenida Misterios, the hole-in-the-wall eateries behind Tepeyac that we reached by motorcycle as the sun was beginning to rise over the neighborhood\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The literary youth in the novel drift in and out of the periphery of workshops, talks, magazines, interviews, they harbor crushes and zip around by motorcycle, they hunt for dusty science fiction tomes in foreign language libraries, they question the dark sides of the \u201cartsy parties\u201d taking over the city, they hallucinate of basilica as monsters, they love with unbridled idealism. The book is capped off by the standalone \u201cMexican Manifesto,\u201d one of Bola\u00f1o\u2019s most brilliant short stories (in my humble opinion), which centers entirely on the ecosystem of lust and exploitation inside a Mexico City bathhouse, and is in itself a masterclass in using place as a driving engine in fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1970s, Nunavut, a small town of twelve hundred (human) souls in the Canadian high Arctic. It is a world of freeze and thaw, of sea ice and spring release ripe with smells of the life entrapped, fierce winds and 24-hour sunlight (\u201cThe sun is shining brightly overhead. The sun always brings life and mischief, serenity and visions. It\u2019s two o\u2019clock in the morning and I\u2019ve shrugged off my curfew\u201d). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Interspersed with poems and illustrations, this debut novel by Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq juxtaposes the narrator\u2019s sensorial connection with her social and natural environment and ordinary teen preoccupations with the dark underbelly of sexual and substance abuse the town\u2019s children witness and experience. There are butane highs, homes shaking with country music and parties best avoided, the creak of a door opening onto a dark room, unwanted touching, entering, rape. Nearby is the Arctic Ocean, and when it\u2019s frozen over our narrator takes walks on the water. Her adolescent years follow rhythms of cold and thaws, of ever-present darkness and ever-present light; she goes to residential school, is kicked out, she takes up a job at the local grocery store. She grows breasts and kisses the butcher, she harbors crushes on Best Boy, but those are not who enter her in violation. She tells of classes she abhors and creatures she rides in spiritual communion. There are famines, storms, bodies growing within a body and born into the Northern Lights as the narrator navigates pregnancy. Tagaq, a Nunavut native, offers a tale imbued with both the most harrowing darkness and the most poetic ode to the destructive and magical forces in the human soul and the natural world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Dunhuang gets out of jail, serving a stint for selling fake IDs, he is greeted by a classic Beijing sandstorm. The sky is \u201ca blur of yellow dust behind which the sun glowed,\u201d a \u201csandpaper sky.\u201d This effect of dull sepia suffuses the novel\u2019s landscape of city hustling, where livelihoods are often on the brink, but does nothing to diminish the novel\u2019s frantic energy. Dunhuang has nowhere to sleep, so we follow him along Beijing\u2019s Ring Roads and various fake good markets\u2014Book City, Electronics City, the university gates where counterfeit masters and doctorates are for sale. He takes up with Xiaorong, a young woman selling fake DVDs with a penchant for arthouse films, and finds shelter for some time. When her boyfriend returns, Dunhuang takes the porno films she\u2019s unwilling to sell and makes enough of a slim profit to rent first a bunk, then a concrete shack with a scholar tree in a dirt yard as his personal urinal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Small-Country-Gael-Faye-BookDragon.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nBurundi: Small Country<\/a><\/em> by Ga\u00ebl Faye, translated by Sarah Ardizzone<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Spain: Dogs of Summer<\/a><\/em> by Andrea Abreu, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Afghanistan: 99 Nights in Logar<\/a> <\/em>by Jamil Jan Kochai<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Mexico: The Spirit of Science Fiction<\/a><\/em> by Roberto Bola\u00f1o, translated by Natasha Wimmer<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Canada: Split Tooth<\/a><\/em> by Tanya Tagaq<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
China: Running Through Beijing<\/a> by Xu Zechen, translated by Eric Abrahamsen<\/h4>\n\n\n\n