<B>A cult’s apocalyptic endgame</B> The most recent works by Nobel Prize-winning Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe have tended to be readable, thinly veiled autobiographies featuring his mentally challenged son, Hikari. But his massive new novel, <B>Somersault</B> as ambitious as it is ambiguous focuses on the Japanese fascination with quasi-Christian, apocalyptic cults.

Inspired by the Aum Shinrikyo cult that attacked a Tokyo subway with nerve gas, Oe’s fictional cult is led by two men named Patron and Guide. They believe that humanity is doomed, the world moribund, and repentance our only chance. The cult prepares to convert a nuclear power plant into a nuclear bomb to be used in expediting Armageddon. But Guide has second thoughts, so the leaders publicly recant. This is the somersault of the title.

For a decade the leaders go into exile or, as they put it, into "hell." But just as they contemplate a re-emergence, some of their former adherents kidnap and interrogate the ailing Guide, who dies in the process. Enter Kizu, an art teacher who is groomed to become the new Guide. Inspired by Kizu’s lover Ikuo, a group of young militants called the Fireflies join in the preparations for the "end time." Drawing on his experience with Hikari and with the Hiroshima victims, Oe has always been preoccupied with mayhem, distortion and death. But he has also sought transcendence through the imagination or its close cousin, religion. Perhaps the best-known living Japanese writer, Oe offers an invaluable vision of post-War Japan. Gone are sake, sushi, the Shinto shrine, haiku and Mt. Fuji. Instead we find beer-and-whisky, ham-and-eggs, future shock, repetition and the superstore.

Not a pleasant read, but a timely one. For should the curtain fall on humankind, perhaps our successors will find a few copies of <B>Somersault</B> among the ruins, better to understand our anxious last days.

It is not by chance that author NiccolËœ Ammaniti sets his third novel, a riveting tale of a boy’s coming of age, in the ironically named Acqua Traverse (literally translated as “water crossings”), for it is the summer of 1978, and the fictional southern Italian village is scorched by record-breaking heat and parched by drought. Here, where nine-year-old Michele Amitrano lives with his younger sister and their parents amid the four other households that make up the tiny community, lack of rain has caused the land to sear and hearts to wither. But all is not as drowsy and sunburnt as it seems in the daytime. Night brings the village adults to Michele’s house for cabal-like meetings while he sleeps, in turn awakening Michele to his father’s true nature.

Told convincingly in the first person by an adult Michele, I’m Not Scared is translated here by Jonathan Hunt from Ammaniti’s native Italian (the book has already become a runaway bestseller in Italy, where it was first published). With similarities to Stephen King’s The Body upon which the hit movie Stand By Me was based I’m Not Scared is as much a compelling study of one boy’s awakening to the literal horrors of real life as it is a parable of trust gained and lost, dreams realized and shattered. When Michele one day sets off with his sister and their four friends on a journey to explore an abandoned farmhouse on a nearby hill, little does he know that he will soon uncover a secret so horrible and unbelievable that it will change his world forever. In a scene that eerily echoes William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, the children claim the hill as their own in a base and gruesome way, foreshadowing that life in Acqua Traverse will never be the same.

Haunting passages and subtle snippets of Italian life make I’m Not Scared a highly effective look at how our ideas and perceptions as children are dictated by the “reality” our parents and other adults shape for us. When Michele discovers the world-shattering truth on the hill, he learns a hard lesson: that life is not always what it seems and that trust can be as easily lost as it is gained. Thomas A. Grasso lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

<B>Pico Iyer’s mystical journey</B> Given that Pico Iyer is best known for his idiosyncratic travel writing, it comes as no surprise that the best sections of his new novel, <B>Abandon</B>, are set in foreign locales such as Syria, Spain and Iran. <B>Abandon</B> shares some common themes with Iyer’s nonfiction writing, particularly the uneasiness that can occur when disparate cultures converge in a shared place. Unlike the travel books, though, the novel takes place in a landscape of the author’s imagination, albeit one that approximates our contemporary world.

<B>Abandon</B> begins like one of Graham Greene’s entertainments. John Macmillan, a graduate student in Damascus, pays a visit to a reclusive Islamic scholar, who asks him to deliver a small package to someone in California. Back in Santa Barbara, John tracks down Kristina Jensen, another scholar of Islam. When he goes to deliver the gift, however, he meets Kristina’s sister, Camilla. She is a mysterious, emotionally disturbed woman who will insinuate herself into John’s life in ways he never thought possible.

John, an Oxford-educated Englishman, is in California to study the work of the Sufi poet, Rumi. He is obsessed with the secrets of these ancient works of poetry, and his obsession spills over into his new relationship with Camilla. She is secretive about her origins and about her present life, too, often appearing unannounced, then disappearing for weeks on end. John fills the time between their frustrating liaisons with work on his thesis, but his grasp on day-to-day reality starts to slip.

Rumors of a "Shiraz Manuscript," a long-lost Sufi work smuggled out of Iran during the Revolution, take John on a series of wild goose chases, first to the Persian exile community in Los Angeles, then to Spain and India. Not even sure that such a manuscript exists, John begins a search that starts to parallel his relationship with Camilla, who may not be what she seems. In the end it is Camilla herself who supplies him with a mysterious manuscript, but its origins are as suspect as her own. As the lovers travel to Iran in search of the truth, they discover things about themselves and each other, things that lay beneath the surface all along not unlike the deeper meaning found in the deceptive simplicity of Sufi verse.

The mystery that frames the love story in <B>Abandon</B> is far more intriguing than John and Camilla’s fanatical love affair, which borders at times on the ridiculous. The novel would be a stronger work if Iyer had trimmed a little of the New Age dialogue between these two neurotic lovers. But John and Camilla do manage to make the occasional acute, well-phrased observation, and revelations about Camilla that surface near the end are surprising. Iyer is an atmospheric writer, and the sheer beauty of some of his descriptive passages compensates for the more mundane moments in the narrative.

One of the arresting puzzles of the novel is the way Iyer plays with the word "abandon" which can take on many shades of meaning, both negative, in the physical sense of abandonment, and positive, in the spiritual or mystical sense. Many scenes in the book take place in abandoned spaces houses, mosques, the desert which lend an appropriate sense of unreality. In an end note, Iyer tells us he has never been to Iran, and has based his depiction on the writings of others. This fabrication is an intentional choice, because the place he is writing about is really the romantic Persia of literature, though seen through modern eyes. He has, of course, been to California (he lives there part of the year), but his portrayal of that landscape is no less mythic, shaped to suit the exigencies of his fiction.

There are a number of allusions in the book to Persian carpets, and those textile masterpieces seem an apt metaphor for Iyer’s book itself. We need to step back and look at the work as a whole to see what the pattern is trying to tell us. Abandon is about the clash between spiritual and secular cultures, about the misunderstandings and misinterpretations that can occur when our individual stories are put into a greater context, about centuries-old Islamic traditions and how they can be distorted all themes that have powerful relevance these days. <I>Robert Weibezahl has worked in the book publishing industry for 20 years as a writer and publicist. He lives in Los Angeles.</I>

A married and middle-aged male teacher whose life is going nowhere woos one of his young, female students, thereby fouling up his life all the more. Sound familiar? It should. Cautionary tales about adultery are a perennial favorite with writers and readers. And now that many writers are also professors, the temptation to dally with the cutie in your Comp-Lit class must be sublimated into yet another version of The Scarlet Letter, lest the institution of marriage crumble altogether. But The Guru of Love by Nepalese-American author Samrat Upadhyay offers a slight variation on the threadbare scarlet A, and the novel, despite its hackneyed premise, is utterly absorbing.

Ramchandra is the teacher; Malati the student; Goma the teacher’s wife. Malati, who already has a child by an AWOL father, hopes to pass the national exam, go to college and escape her squalor. Ramchandra seduces the young woman and confesses the transgression to his wife, who promptly leaves him. Yet and here’s the twist when Malati finds herself homeless, Goma makes the bizarre decision to take Malati into her home. Rumors fly; Goma’s parents wail; the kids rebel. “Something,” thinks Ramchandra, “had gone terribly wrong.” But Goma perseveres until, happily, the AWOL father returns.

Mirroring this moral chaos is the chaos of Nepal, the novel’s setting and one of the world’s poorest countries. Westerners tend to identify Nepal with trekking in the Himalayas, smoking dope in Katmandu and so on. Upadhyay’s novel should help change that. His Nepal is no Shangri-La. “I’m stuck in this miserable job, teaching you miserable students, clinging to my miserable salary,” moans Ramchandra. Nepal and India share a culture that includes a deep and abiding fatalism, which Upadhyay superbly conveys. The novel is not joyless, and its descriptions of Nepalese festivals and family life are colorful and inspiring. But no sooner has the party ended than somebody, somewhere, is weeping. And only love, however fleeting and confused, offers a respite. Kenneth Champeon is a writer based in Thailand. He formerly lived in India.

In Milan Kundera’s new novel, Ignorance, two Czech ŽmigrŽs have been talked into returning to the country of their birth after having been away for 20 years. They will soon discover how much things have changed in their absence and learn that who they have become doesn’t matter much to their former countrymen.

The ŽmigrŽs, Irena and Josef, are both middle-aged and have lost spouses. They meet by chance in a Paris airport and promise to reunite in Prague. Irena, now involved with a man who is closer to her domineering mother than to her, remembers Josef from long ago as a potential lover, though he has long forgotten her.

How we choose to flee the past and forget it, before finally confronting its physical and emotional realities, is at the heart of Kundera’s book. The Czech ŽmigrŽ’s 10th novel returns him to his homeland. Having departed Czechoslovakia more than 25 years ago to live in France, the writer perhaps best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being adopted the French language to write his last three novels and two nonfiction works.

Kundera describes how Irena left Czechoslovakia many years ago with her husband to distance herself from a mother who flattened her. But when her husband dies and her children are grown, Irena comes back to her native land. Josef also left behind his family and possessions to emigrate, and only returns following the death of his wife. In some of this book’s best pages, Kundera explores the attachment between Josef and his deceased wife, and shows how he maintains a life with her.

Kundera poetically captures the disorientation and loss that ŽmigrŽs feel when returning to a city or country after such a long time away. His two ŽmigrŽs shockingly realize that to be accepted by old friends and family, they must amputate the last 20 years of their lives. Richard Carter has lived on three continents but presently calls North Texas home.

The history of literature confirms Plutarch, who wrote, You will find few of the wisest and most intelligent men buried in their own countries. A great many of the best writers have lived abroad. My bookshelves are a veritable shrine to homelessness: Hemingway, Nietzsche, Milosz, Naipaul, Vidal, Buck, Conrad, Wharton . . . and now Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a long-time resident of Paris. China, he says, gives him a headache.

Precious little of Gao’s oeuvre is available in English: a few plays and the monumental novel Soul Mountain, which documented the disastrous repercussions of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). His new and long-awaited novel One Man’s Bible relates in fictional form his own participation in the Revolution and his ultimate rejection of its goals.

The novel begins in Hong Kong. The year is 1996. Or is it 1984? Gao fears that his hotel room is being videotaped by his nemeses in Beijing. And as his lover forces him to recall life under Mao, the reader visits a real version of Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare.

Suspected counterrevolutionaries are denounced in a fashion reminiscent of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate, publicly flogged and humiliated, transported to reform-through-labor camps, monitored by seeming friends, thrown from windows to fabricate suicide. History is constantly revised for political expedience. To save his skin, Gao must conceal and even destroy his writings, and he must pretend to fawn over Marx and Lenin. Searched and questioned before departing China, Gao realizes that home is now elsewhere. Only reluctantly is Gao a political writer. Politics is merely an obstacle to living well. This includes the creation of art: before winning the Nobel, Gao supported himself largely as a painter. It also includes sexual indulgence. For Gao, as for Orwell, sex is the ultimate defiance of an increasingly regimented world. Indeed, the novel’s most compelling scenes involve two strangers sharing a night of love, trust, and abandon amid a climate of hate, suspicion and control.

One Man’s Bible is a profound and liberating testament to the human spirit, whatever as Gao might say with an ironic smile that may be. And while he admits that happiness may be unattainable, the pursuit of happiness is well, you know, inalienable.

Much Madness is divinest Sense/To a discerning Eye, wrote Emily Dickinson. Ha Jin, the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting, revisits this connection between insanity and sagacity in his new novel, The Crazed. The year is 1989. The country: China. Jian Wan is the protŽgŽ of Yang, an ailing professor of literature. Jian is also engaged to marry Yang’s ambitious daughter, Meimei, who expects Jian to follow in her father’s academic footsteps. But when Jian is charged with caring for Yang, he discerns divine career advice in the old man’s demented outbursts. Don’t become an academic like me, he moans. You should learn how to grow millet instead. Yang argues that intellectuals in China are mere stooges for the regnant Communist Party, glorified clerks doomed to enslave knowledge to ideology. As long as foreign influences are shunned and, George Bush is the number-one Current Counterrevolutionary, intellectual endeavor is absurd. Yang persuades Jian to abandon years of study, and Jian resolves to become an actual, rather than a glorified, clerk a knife rather than meat. Even though it was her father who led Jian astray, Meimei calls Jian a coward and gives him the slip.

As Jian plummets into apostasy, pro-democracy demonstrators are massing in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Jian joins them, but his motives are less than pure: He wants to show Meimei that he is not a coward. It’s personal interests, he concludes, that motivate the individual and therefore generate the dynamics of history. But we all know what comes next. The People’s Liberation Army arrives, butchering the demonstrators and horrifying the world. Surprisingly, the actual death toll is still unclear. According to Ha Jin, the BBC reported 5,000 deaths; official China, not surprisingly, reported zero. Jian escapes with his life, but without his illusions. And he sets out for Hong Kong, then a British protectorate. Like many books by Chinese dissidents, The Crazed occasionally reads like anti-Communist propaganda, and its pro-Western subtext will certainly promote its success with Western audiences. The dying professor offers lengthy orations in praise of Canada and the United States, and Ha Jin himself, a professor of English at Boston University, praised America as a land of generosity and abundance in his National Book Award acceptance speech. In some ways The Crazed is one long thank-you note to Ha Jin’s new home, and a Dear John letter to the China he left behind. As a work of art, The Crazed is hard to fault. Ha Jin, who writes in English, has perfected a prose that is accomplished without being ostentatious. His characters are credible precisely because they are as benevolent as they are flawed and confused. And though the novel’s events proceed in a natural and captivating way, the author still finds room for meditations on Genesis, The Divine Comedy, Bertolt Brecht, the questionable value of suffering, the sublimity of carnal pleasures and China’s empleomania: a mania for holding public office. American literature is dominated by sprinters (as opposed to milers) and professors (as opposed to writers). But Ha Jin’s new novel proves him a laudable exception to this rule. May his madness, such as it is, continue to make such admirable sense.

Kenneth Champeon is a writer based in Thailand.

Within Bombay’s Towers of Silence, the Parsis expose their dead to hungry vultures a practice as environmentally friendly as it is macabre. Ethnic Persians who had migrated to India, the Parsis have traditionally led Bombay’s commercial class. And though they have become an endangered species due to stagnating birth rates and miscegenation, their Zoroastrianism has largely removed them from the constant squabbling of Bombay’s Hindus and Muslims, which a decade ago erupted into carnage and fire.

Behind the riots was the Shiv Sena, a Hindu supremacist band of thugs, whose agenda includes abolishing Valentine’s Day, razing mosques and, according to writer Rohinton Mistry, subjecting innocent letters and postcards to incineration if the address reads Bombay instead of Mumbai. Such is the cultural and political backdrop of Mistry’s commanding new novel, Family Matters, his follow-up to the acclaimed A Fine Balance. A Bombay native, Mistry capably evokes a city that would explode were it not for the Indians’ heroic tolerance and patience. I am a born-and-bred Bombayvala, writes Mistry. That automatically inoculates me against attacks of outrage. Nariman is an old Parsi widower cared for by his children Jal and Coomy. But Coomy soon connives to move Nariman into the house of Roxana, his daughter by another marriage. Roxana’s husband Yezad resents the new addition, and he takes to illegal gambling to subsidize Nariman’s care. Mistry deftly shows how necessity compels Indians to embrace corruption, India’s scourge. Even Yezad’s son starts taking bribes in his capacity as a Homework Monitor.

Nariman becomes demented and incontinent; Yezad’s boss, Mr. Kapur, abandons his dream of becoming a muckraking politician; Jal and Coomy enlist the help of a semi-competent handyman to refurbish their flat this in a Murphy’s Law country where anything that can go wrong usually does.

Any novel set in Bombay must be as vast as the city. Mistry’s knowledge of its customs, locales and languages is encyclopedic, his cast of characters panoramic, and his portrayal of Indian attitudes spot on. Indians perceive the use of toilet paper as unhygienic; they often converse in trite proverbs, and their attitude toward the West is decidedly conflicted. So is their attitude toward India, a great country and a hopeless one.

Indians writing in English are producing some of today’s most inspiring and original fiction. And with Family Matters, Mistry’s name may soon take its place alongside those of a Rushdie or a Roy. Kenneth Champeon is a writer living in Thailand. He lived and worked in Bombay for six months.