One of the better known "failed states" is Somalia, which has been at war with itself since the collapse of its ruinous military regime in 1991. The country gained notoriety during the disastrous attempt by the United States to intervene in the conflict, which was portrayed in the book Black Hawk Down, later adapted into an acclaimed film.

Failed or no, Somalia has produced Nuruddin Farah, whom many regard as the best African novelist writing today, an heir to Chinua Achebe and even V.S. Naipaul. Farah’s new novel Links provides an extraordinary glimpse into life in Somalia’s capital Mogadiscio, "the city of death."

Links describes the homecoming of the Somali-American Jeebleh, a former political prisoner seeking to settle scores with his jailer, the sadistic half brother of Jeebleh’s old friend, Bile. But Jeebleh is distracted by the recent kidnapping of two girls under Bile’s care. Despite himself, Jeebleh becomes mired in Mogadiscio’s culture of guns and mistrust.

Farah references Dante’s Inferno at several points, and the comparisons are apt. In Mogadiscio, AK-47s can be had for six dollars, armed youths shoot children for sport and much of the populace is maimed. Starving cows nibble on shoes, plastic bags, live grenades. Rumor has it that a funeral director is selling the corpses’ organs abroad. Yet somehow Jeebleh suspects that for Somalia the worst may be over.

Farah is an unflinching writer of admirable skill—erudite, analytical, with a talent for arresting analogies ("as happy as a yuppie throwing his first housewarming party"). The novel’s title refers in part to the country’s divisive clan loyalties. But with no functioning banks, no universities and unreliable utilities, it’s hard to fault the Somalis for trying to preserve the connections they can.

In any case, anyone wishing to understand this struggle between failed states and those rather more successful would do well to read, and heed, this timely and gripping book.

Kenneth Champeon writes from Thailand.

National leaders occasionally decide that some of their country’s citizens must die so that the nation may live. This is true whether the citizens are soldiers sent off to war, murderers hung from the gallows or dissidents shot in the street.

In June 1989, thousands of Chinese protestors gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to demand the reform or removal of their government. Drawing their slogans from Mao and their symbols from the Statue of Liberty, they nearly succeeded. But then the People’s Liberation Army arrived, murdering hundreds or perhaps thousands in the crowd.

The most famous image of the uprising showed a man facing down a tank. Who was this man? Who were the soldiers and leaders who wanted him dead, and why? A new novel, <B>Sons of Heaven</B> by Terrence Cheng, provides some answers, if only fictional ones. It tells three stories: that of the tank-defying dissident Xiao-Di; the rebellion-quashing soldier Lu; and China’s chain-smoking leader Deng Xao Ping. Xiao-Di and Lu are brothers, and Deng was once a dissident himself. Thus Cheng debunks the simplistic, good-versus-evil treatment the event often receives.

Xiao-Di studies at Cornell University, where he is given an addictive whiff of freedom and wealth, while Lu stays behind, bound by duty and country. Xiao-Di returns to China to find fear and poverty, but also a wariness of foreign influence. Deng is sympathetic toward the students but is justly skeptical of their ability to rule. Xiao-Di’s rabble-rousing endangers his family’s life; Lu’s obedience challenges filial bonds; and Deng’s decision haunts his dreams.

Because Terrence Cheng was born in Taiwan and is a long-term resident of New York, the reaction to the novel on both sides of the Pacific will probably follow the usual doctrinaire lines. Perhaps the <I>China People’s Daily</I> will label it subversive, while <I>The New York Times</I> will label it an indictment of totalitarianism. <B>Sons of Heaven</B> is neither, and that is its virtue. It is a story of three men doing what each thinks is right in the context of their personal and world history. As Marx once said, Man makes his history, but he does not make it out of whole cloth. Man makes democracy, but he does not make it overnight. <I>Kenneth Champeon is a writer living in Thailand.</I>

Writing about another culture is a great risk. What if you presume? Misrepresent? Of course, the risk is lessened if you represent the culture with the compassion and accuracy derived from deep knowledge. American Nicole Mones has worked and traveled in China for more than 20 years, and her knowledge of the country illuminates every page of A Cup of Light, her second novel.

Lia Frank is an American art appraiser sent to Beijing to generate an inventory of some ancient Chinese pottery slated for purchase. The stash turns out to be a gold mine, but not without the occasional forgery. Thus the age-old question arises: what is real? And if a pot can deceive, what about a person? Enter American Michael Doyle. His battle with cancer drove his wife away, and he has come to China to undertake the grim task of researching lead poisoning caused by exhaust fumes, as well as to forget his past. In contrast, Lia is in the business of remembering the minutiae of art history. Opposites attract. They meet, kiss, separate, reunite. But is it real? Meanwhile, the art deal proceeds. When the Japanese invaded China during World War II, fears arose that they would steal China’s prodigious art collection. As a result, the Chinese scattered much of the collection throughout the Middle Kingdom.

Lia’s stash is part of this diaspora, and thus a struggle ensues. The Chinese government wants the ancient pottery, but has neither the clout nor the cash to get it. To compensate, the government is known to execute art traffickers. If the stash makes it to Hong Kong, the deal is a success; if it doesn’t, axes may fall. To complicate things further, a Chinese airliner explodes in mid-air and rumors fly that the U.S. shot it down accidentally, of course.

Miraculously, Mones weaves these many threads into a seamless whole, using pure and brilliant prose. Both the story and the style in which it is told are hybrids of East and West, once thought to be as incompatible as oil and water. A Cup of Light bodes well indeed for rapprochement between two empires, two systems and even two lonely souls. Kenneth Champeon is a writer living in Thailand.

Bibi Chen, the wealthy entrepreneur philanthropist narrator of Amy Tan’s gorgeously written, satirical and deeply humane novel Saving Fish from Drowning, is dead—she’s not sure, but she believes she was murdered. Yet Bibi, the thoroughly Americanized child of a Shanghai aristocrat and his concubine, still follows along on the Asian tour she’d arranged for her liberal-minded friends, if only as an omniscient spirit. The trip goes on as scheduled; to do otherwise would mean forfeiture of a hefty down payment, as well as the chance, perhaps, to uplift the downtrodden stuck in those exotic, Shangri-la-like places like so many mud-tramping water buffalo.

From the beginning, things don’t go well. During the trip’s China leg, one of the group is caught urinating in a sacred place. The tourists flee to Burma, where they soon find themselves stuck with a local tribe waiting for the return of their Messiah and ruled by two little children named Loot and Bootie. The situation is ripe for satire: through bouts of malaria, the tourists stay glued to a television powered by a stationary bike attached to a car battery for news of their ordeal as it is broadcast over CNN. The cultivation of an antimalarial plant discovered as an offshoot of the tourists’ stay at No Name Place is quickly and savagely suppressed by the Burmese government. And their experiences inspire a reality TV show called "Junglemaniacs!"

But the wacky plot and characterizations are just a scaffolding for Tan’s explorations of cultures and histories so foreign to most Americans that they might as well have come out of a fairy tale. Through Bibi’s somewhat ironic voice, we’re plunged into the weirdness of life among myriad Asian ethnic groups as well as American slackers and quasi-celebrities; the poignant and sometimes dopey good-heartedness of aid organizations and the way Western culture is translated and transmogrified. As in her earlier novels, Tan’s intelligence, depth and reach make the reader marvel.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

At a key moment in this melancholy picaresque fable, the 90-year-old narrator announces: “Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.” And he has had plenty of consolation: when he lost count of the prostitutes he’d slept with at the age of 50, he had been with 516 of them. Never once did he make love without paying for it. Except, perhaps, the one time he was overwhelmed with the thighs of a laundry girl and launched a rear-guard attack that leads to one of the outbursts of absurd crude humor that enliven the story.

This slender book is really a novella. Curiously, it has the kind of temporal compression one would find in a shorter fictional form, and a mysterious expansiveness that makes the book feel 200 pages longer. This magical effect is due, in large part, to the meditations and obsessions of its central character, who remains nameless throughout. A rouŽ who comes from a line of men so well endowed they could “make donkeys smile,” he is reluctantly facing death with a series of stratagems designed to put off the inevitable.

Gabriel Garc’a M‡rquez assaults political correctness with the first line of the first page. “The year I turned ninety,” the narrator says, “I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Alert Oprah and Dr. Phil we are in Lolita territory here. The narrator contacts an old madam and makes a contract for the deflowering of a working girl of 15. That night he totters to the whorehouse, where he discovers his virgin, naked and asleep. Here begins a scene both lyrical and uncomfortable for North American readers the old man spends much of the night inspecting the body of the naked child. He looks at everything with an erotic sorrow that leaves him haunted and almost remorseful by dawn. Readers have waited 12 years for new fiction from the Nobel Laureate, and this autumnal effort is a miniature jewel. It will alternately make them laugh out loud, sigh with their own memories and cringe at its erotic transgressions. Garc’a M‡rquez, himself facing winter, is clearly planning to tango all the way. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in nonfiction for The Devil’s Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea is also the author, most recently, of the novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter.

Muslim women are much spoken of, seldom heard from, unless in the almost obligatory television scenes of bereaved Palestinian mothers or veiled Afghani daughters. Perhaps no other group is so misunderstood. But this is changing. Witness the timely Madras on Rainy Days, by Indian-American Muslim author Samina Ali.

Despite its title, the novel is set mostly in Hyderabad, an Indian bastion of Islam. Layla, an Indian-American woman, has come to India in order to marry Sameer. Unfortunately, Layla has already become pregnant by an American. Following a sloppy and incomplete abortion, she awaits the wrath of a community expecting wives to be “pure” before marriage.

Layla and Sameer represent two common types: the American nostalgic about an imaginary India, and the Indian bedazzled by an equally imaginary America. After her arrival in India, Layla becomes more religious, learning Arabic and reciting the Koran. But both eventually perceive the flaws in their philosophies: she realizes that religion is often a cause of violence, while Sameer discovers that prejudice exists in America as well.

For Ali, Islam appears to be in disarray. Sameer describes himself as “lapsed”; Layla’s father, rather than taking the permitted second wife, instead divorces his first. And then there is Layla herself, who has been changed irrevocably by her youth in America. Brought to the country by the sword, Islam in India is now threatened by a brazenly pro-Hindu government. Layla’s Muslim family is constantly vigilant, especially in the book’s closing scenes, when the Hindu festival of Ganpati falls in the Muslim month of Muhar’ram, during which the faithful stage processions involving self-flagellation. Obviously nothing good can from this convergence of fervent and mutually hateful mobs. Although like many contemporary American novelists Ali is given to long-windedness, she successfully pinpoints the critical issues facing her characters as they attempt to reconcile Islam with modernity. The book’s outcome suggests, however, that such a reconciliation is increasingly unlikely. Kenneth Champeon writes from Thailand.

V.S. Naipaul has gained fame as a literary prophet of the lost. His characters abandon their homelands; they are ragouts of caste, race and class; they embody post-colonial angst. While they always manage to muddle through, their lives never fully vindicate the chaos wrought by the globalization that began in earnest with Vasco de Gama.

Half a Life, his first novel in six years, is true to Naipaul form. It spans four continents; its characters are mulattos, half-castes, people of almost every imaginable mixture of lineages. Even Somerset Maugham, that archetype of the international author, makes a brief, stammering appearance.

The novel’s protagonist, Willie Chandran, is himself a hybrid. His father is an Indian Brahmin who, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s abhorrence of caste, marries an Indian "backward" and has two ill-fated children by her: Willie and his self-righteous sister, Sarojini. To escape his scorned family, Willie attends university in England. There he enters a culturally diverse but rather squalid bohemian scene and enjoys brief promise as a writer.

But the novelty of this identity soon fades. As Willie approaches the void of graduation from college, he falls in love with Ana, a woman of "mixed African background." Together, they move to her home in an unnamed Portuguese colony in Africa. Yet Willie remains unfulfilled. The colony’s collapse at the hands of indigenous guerillas mirrors the collapse of Willie’s illusions. Finally he must admit, "I have been hiding too long." Structurally, Half a Life is arguably two half-books: a writer’s bildungsroman and a document of colonial decay. The seam is not perfect: once we have developed a fondness for Willie (and especially for his shy, bungled forays into sex), the book abruptly puts the colony at center stage. Like its characters, the novel itself is a sum of discordant halves.

Naipaul’s fascination with themes of fragmentation is no accident. An Indian born in Trinidad, he was educated at Oxford and has traveled widely in Africa, the Islamic world and India itself. In Willie Chandran, as in many of Naipaul’s protagonists, we see much of Naipaul himself.

Naipaul is one of the first truly international writers, and with over 20 books to his name, one of the most prolific. With Half a Life, he proves that he remains among the best.

Kenneth Champeon, a writer, has lived in India and now lives in Thailand.

A murdered corpse speaks from the bottom of a well, recounting to us the circumstances of its death, the life-work it has had to forfeit and its passionate hope of vengeance. This opening address from My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk’s novel of art and love, religious conflict and conspiracy, must have been unsettling to its Turkish readers, spoken across the void of time from the year 999 of the Muslim Hegira (that’s 1591 to us).

Now translated from the Turkish for American readers, the corpse-voice, and all the many voices which follow it, are doubly disconcerting, for the things they speak of are so strange, so literally foreign. The author casts us headlong into a world where the Sultan of the powerful Ottoman Empire spends his fantastical wealth largely on the creation of beautifully illuminated books, the labor of many artists, each contributing his highly specialized talent. The corpse at the bottom of the well had been the Sultan’s master gilder.

With Pamuk’s arabesque of narrative voices guiding us non-human ones as well, including dog, tree and gold coin we wander the labyrinth of Istanbul and sit in its coffeehouses, listening to the Sultan’s artists who moonlight as storytellers. Absolutely obligatory is the drinking of coffee, the taste and salutary qualities of which have never been as gleefully celebrated as in this novel. At every turn, we are shown that timeless art belongs to the rush and pulse of unruly time.

If there is a hero in the novel which enjoyed the largest print run in Turkish publishing history it is not a principal person, but rather an artistic principle, a potential synthesis between Eastern and Western ways of representing the world. But the wedding between East and West, real or imagined, is never a comfortable one. When the tree speaks, it speaks darkly of two cultures at odds with each other, and we must bear in mind that it is not an actual tree, but a beautiful illustration in a book. I don’t want to be a tree, says the tree, scorning the realism of Western landscape painting. I want to be its meaning. If Pamuk’s novel could speak, it might express the very same wish about the lives it tells.

Michael Alec Rose teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

In his last novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie gave us a modern rendering of the Orpheus story set in the jet-setting world of pop music. A bit less kaleidoscopic, but no less hyperbolic, Rushdie’s challenging new novel again relies heavily on mythology. Its title, Fury, refers in part to the calamity-slinging Furies of Greek myth. But it also draws on the word’s modern meaning of rage, and though ostensibly a comedy, this is an unabashedly rage-filled book.

Rushdie’s main target here is New York City, and by extension the U.S. — or at least the decadence and pretension that he thinks are piloting America’s globe-dominating culture at the beginning of the 21st century. "The city boiled with money," he writes on the first page. "Rents and property values had never been higher, and in the garment industry it was widely held that fashion had never been so fashionable. New restaurants opened every hour. Stores, dealerships, galleries struggled to satisfy the skyrocketing demand for ever more recherche produce: limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized Humvees."

Into this land of excess drops Malik Solanka, a Bombay-born, British-educated historian who has fled to New York after almost murdering his sleeping wife and child with a kitchen knife in a trance-like state of, yes, fury. Solanka, who is a millionaire thanks to the international marketing success of a puppet he created, is holing up in an overpriced sublet on the Upper West Side. Given to sudden lapses of memory and reports of some purportedly strange public behavior on his part, Solanka wonders if he might be the serial killer slaying some of the city’s most high-profile debutantes with slabs of concrete. While that mystery plays out, the plot unfolds like a surreal nightmare (or myth). Solanka’s destiny becomes entangled with two unusual women: Mila Milo, a Serbian emigre, and Neela Mahendra, an ethnic Indian from a South Seas island nation. In the end, Solanka, with the rash abandon of a mythological hero, trades embattled New York for a real war zone, as he pursues Neela and a last chance at love.

Rushdie is an important writer on the world stage, with his books translated into 37 languages. While Fury may not be the best introduction to his work, it displays a good sampling of the bedazzling erudition, clever word play and philosophical meanderings with which this singular writer has managed both to enchant and to antagonize so many readers around the globe.

Robert Weibezahl is a Los Angeles-based writer.

If any country continues to clothe itself in the cloak of its history, it is Spain. Gloriously proud of their short-lived arc as a world power following Spain’s conquest of the New World, Spaniards are at the same time defensive of the aristocratic excesses of their blue-blooded imperials. Out of this dichotomy, Arturo PŽrez-Reverte has fashioned a hero as fine and tempered as the blade of Toledo steel he has mastered Captain Diego Alatriste, swordsman for hire.

PŽrez-Reverte’s reputation as a writer who seamlessly blends intellectual stimulation with breathless action was richly burnished with his last novel, The Queen of the South. In Captain Alatriste, which is the first of a series written years ago and now being released in English, the author visits an era when the glitter of New World gold masks a terrible truth Imperial Spain is corrupt and dying. Dukes and counts jockey for a playboy king’s favor, common Spaniards live on centavos and the Grand Inquisition still casts its fanatic shadow over them all. Woven through the book is a sense of desperation, of time slipping away as Spain squanders her fortune and her soldiers.

Amid the intrigue and betrayal, Diego Alatriste clings to the triple truths that govern a Spanish caballero’s life: honor, courage and friendship. Wounded during the Thirty Years’ War, Alatriste hires out his blade and raises the son of a dead comrade. Accepting a contract to waylay two English travelers, Alatriste’s refusal to butcher a courageous man sends ripples through the Spanish court, the Inquisition and the English monarchy. Suspenseful and literate, Captain Alatriste is a novel to be savored, and Alatriste himself is a man to be admired, but from a distance, lest the steel in his blade and his soul prove too high a standard. He is not just a hero he is all that Spain aspired to be, and, for too brief a time, might have been. Jorge Antonio Renaud writes from Texas.

<b>East meets West in Sijie’s new novel</b> The eighth-century poet Li Po could well have been describing the plot of Dai Sijie’s latest novel, <b>Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch</b>, when he wrote, <i>Hard is the journey / So many turnings / And now where am I?</i> Chinese author Sijie, whose <i>Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress</i> was an international bestseller, now introduces readers to Mr. Muo, a middle-aged apprentice in psychoanalysis. Returning to his native China after studying in Paris, Muo’s thoughts are filled with Freud and longing for his love, Volcano of the Old Moon, who has been imprisoned by the Communist government. To free her, Muo has been forced into the role of procurer for the decadent Judge Di, who has demanded the use of a virgin in exchange for her release. One would think that, in a country of 1.3 billion people, one virgin shouldn’t be difficult to locate. However, in Sijie’s dexterous hands, Muo’s mission takes on seriocomic turns melding Don Quixote, Sisyphus, Kafka and Hermann Hesse. The parallel with Hesse is especially strong, not only due to the inevitable self-discovery that accompanies Muo’s quest, but also because of the underpinnings of modern psychoanalysis (where Sijie turns to Freud and Lacan, Hesse substituted Jung). Fans of such novels as <i>Demian</i> and <i>Knulp</i> will find this book richly resonant. The couch of the title, as one might guess, is the device our semi-psychotherapist uses not only as a way to finance his mission, but as a devious stratagem to seek out virgins in his various environs. In exchange for a little cash, Muo proves quite the gifted dream interpreter, occasionally (and quite unintentionally) to his detriment.

Sijie, who has lived in France since 1984, excels at painting this miniature of a complex, idealistic man facing a complicated ordeal, and in so doing, both informs and inspires. <i>Thane Tierney is a record executive in Los Angeles.</i>