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Summer reading picks

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Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks gets picks for summer reading from The World’s book critic, Christopher Merrill.
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LISA MULLINS: We’re gonna check in now with The World’s literature critic, Chris Merrill. It is summer of course, so we’ve asked him for some good beach reads. Or for those of us in parts of the country that are totally water logged, good rainy day reads. Chris Merrill never fails to connect us with good books from all over the globe. So, where to now?

CHRIS MERRILL: Well Lisa, we’re going to Iran, we’re going to Tasmania, and we’re going to Italy. And I hope that I can keep you entertained for the rest of the summer.

LISA MULLINS: Well, the love story that comes from Iran is pretty interesting. This is a new novel from the Iranian writer, Shahriar Mandanipour, and it’s called Censoring an Iranian Love Story, that’s the name of it. And the main character in this novel happens to be?

CHRIS MERRILL: The novelist himself, and he’s trying to tell a love story. He says that he has reached the age of 50 and he is tired of writing biter, dark stories about his life in Iran, so what he’s gonna do is, to tell the love story of Dara and Sara. But it turns out that it’s pretty hard to tell a love story in Iran because there are censorship issues, the fact that men and women can’t get together in public, or even in private. The police are always on the verge of arresting those who are crossing the morality lines. So the novel becomes his effort to try to tell a love story.

LISA MULLINS: And the writer has an interesting device that he uses here. I mean, he’s basically saying, hmm, I wonder if I can actually get this one by the censors, or this one by the censors.

CHRIS MERRILL: Well, [LAUGHS], part of the fun of the novel is that here’s the censor. He goes to see him, and his first novel comes out and, he says, “Well, you’ve gotta take out these 12, these 13 sentences.” But he says, “Oh, we’ve saved two breasts and three thighs at the end of the negotiations with the censor.” It’s back and forth with this guy, what’s gonna be allowed, and what’s not gonna be allowed. And then what he does is he crosses it out, but you can read through it and it’s pretty, it’s a lot of fun to see the story that he’s trying to tell, the story that’s getting crossed out, and the real back-stories. And the back-story gives us a picture of Iran that’s the picture that we can’t get through the Twitter, or through the, what few cell phone images come through over the protest of the last several weeks. In fact, this is what Iran looks like from the inside.

LISA MULLINS: Chris, take us next to Tasmania, 19th century Tasmania for historical novel that’s called Wanting, by Richard Flanagan.

CHRIS MERRILL: Well, here we have a wonderful story, again, and its way about desire. About Sir John Franklin, the famous polar explorer that goes to Tasmania as a governor in the middle of the 19th century. And his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, who has this idea of raising an aboriginal child in English way. Well, it doesn’t work out so well, and it doesn’t work out so well for her husband in other ways too, and that brings her close to Charles Dickens, because Franklin, who was a polar explorer, ends up as a polar explorer, and there’s a story going around that when his ship crashed, when they got locked up in the ice, his men resorted to cannibalism. And that’s a terrible story for Lady Jane Franklin, so what does she do? She enlists Charles Dickens to save her husband’s reputation. Well, all hell breaks loose when this comes together, and before you know it, we’re not just talking about desire in Tasmania, but we’re talking about the desire of the most famous 19th century novelist of all, Charles Dickens. What’s he gonna do with the rest of his life?

LISA MULLINS: Alright, this one’s called Wanting, the novel that’s blurring the line between reality and fiction. Third novel that you recommend is a good beach read, from Italy, Been Here a Thousand Years.

CHRIS MERRILL: This is a novel, Lisa, by Mariolina Venezia. This is the novel for all of us who don’t have the money to go to Italy this summer. If you wanna get a 150 years of Italian history through the funniest stories about this family, the Falcone family, in a hill town in Southern Italy, well here’s the way to do it, because crazy things are happening to them from generation to generation. And you get to see a picture of Italy from the consolidation of the State through the First World War, to the roaring excesses of the 1980′s, all told in very short stories. It’s a wonderful exercise in story telling.

LISA MULLINS: What’s your favorite little story in it, before we let you go?

CHRIS MERRILL: Well, the funniest story is right at the beginning where you have, a very rich and powerful landlord who falls in love with one of his farm hands. And when they finally get together, she delivers one beautiful, healthy girl after another, six in all, and he’s just desperate for a son to come. And, when he finally gets the son, well, things don’t go quite the way he expects them to.

LISA MULLINS: Alright, again, this is Been Here a Thousand Years, by Mariolina Venezia. And the other books, Wanting by Richard Flanagan, and Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour. Chris Merrill directs the international writing program at the University of Iowa. Thank you for the summer picks, we’ll look forward to talking to you about more, as the summer goes on.

CHRIS MERRILL: Good reading to you, Lisa.

CHRIS MERRILL: And you can find out more about these three books at theworld.org

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