What to Read

Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.

“Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is the result of intensive, immersive observation over the course of four years in the life of a Mumbai shantytown called Annawadi. Boo’s technique is as exhaustive as it is self-effacing. She conducts countless hours of interviews with her key “characters,” interviews that, to judge by the results, can be as searching as therapy sessions. She backs these up with documentary research and shoe leather reporting. To establish what actually happened during a crucial event — the self-immolation of a one-legged woman following a dispute with one of the book’s central families — she interviewed 168 people, many of them more than once. She never mentions herself.

It’s tempting to compare the resulting narrative, seamless and intimate, to a novel, but since the reading public appears to be allergic to fiction about people like the Annawadians — poor, foreign and dark-skinned — that would hardly do it justice. This is a scrupulously true story, and therefore comes to us with an added luster of authenticity. But unlike most reporting on the poor, foreign and dark-skinned, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” mightily resists the urge to treat any of the half-dozen principle characters as examples of their class. The whole point of the book, as Boo states in an interview with her editor included as an afterword, “is to portray these individuals in their complexity — allow them not to be Representative Poor Persons.”

Who are they? Most of them are members of two families, each led by an indefatigable but flawed matriarch saddled with a weak spouse. The Husains are Muslims, migrants from northern India, who have built some modest security for themselves in the trash-picking trade, largely through the sharp eyes and diligence of the oldest son, Abdul. The other clan is Hindu and led by the formidable Asha, a ruthless fixer who aims to make herself the “slumlord” of Annawadi via her connection to the Hindu nationalist political party, Shiv Sena (a sort of Hindu Tea Party). Supporting characters include the bright and curious Sunil, a boy of indeterminate age, who sells his scavengings to Abdul.

Abdul is the quintessential head-down striver, while his brother Mirchi — in whose education the family has sunk a lot of its resources — dreams of “wearing a starched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel” like the ones attached to the nearby international airport. For her part, Asha has raised a beautiful daughter, Manju, who promises to be the first female college graduate from Annawadi, though she’s too tender-hearted for her mother’s tastes and dreads being married off, as planned, to a boy from Asha’s home village. Still, Manju’s lucky compared to her spirited best friend, Meena, whose Dalit (untouchable) family beats her every time she presumes to question their orders or plans for her.

The Husains’ fate takes a turn for the worse when they decide to spend some of their new disposable income on a tile floor for their shack. (The “Beautiful Forevers” of the book’s title refers to a repeating ad for similar tiles, posted on the wall that screens off the slum from the airport road.) Their neighbor — the one-legged, man-crazy and quarrelsome Fatima — virulently objects to the noise, and the ensuing dispute ends with Fatima setting herself on fire after promising to “put you in a trap.” In the hospital, she accuses the Husains: first of burning her, and then of compelling her to burn herself. The case plunges the family into the nightmare world of Indian law enforcement and jurisprudence.

The charge is ridiculous, but this system, which for several years consumes much of the family’s time and nearly all of its money, is less a method of controlling crime and enacting justice than a vast bribe factory for the officials within it. Corruption and cronyism run and shape the world of Annawadi, from the thugs who extort protection money from rag pickers like Sunil to the nun who takes expired food donated to her orphanage and resells it to street merchants. In one of the book’s most eloquent ironies, Manju has to give up teaching the makeshift English classes she’s been offering to the local children because she’s too busy helping her mother administer an entirely fictional network of kindergartens funded by a Western nonprofit.

Boo mostly refrains from generalizing commentary; that’s part of what allows “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” to hug its subjects as closely as their monsoon-drenched hand-me-downs. But when she does choose to pull back a bit, it’s to comment on how magical thinking and conspiracy theory flourish in a world this arbitrary and unjust, a place that so glaringly lacks “a link between effort and result.” A string of deaths in Annawadi are attributed to a curse prosecuted by Fatima’s ghost, and above all, “powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked … Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously with one another for spoils.”

You can see why some of the people Boo writes about give up, but what’s more striking are the ones who don’t. Abdul in particular makes for an arresting figure, a man struggling to work out the pattern of a virtuous life in an immoral world. Little Sunil cases the city outside Annawadi with an eye to unexploited opportunities. Manju joins a civil defense network so she can study the manners of its middle-class members. By the time “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” winds to a close, it seems almost unbearable not to know whether any of them will succeed. We can’t. What happens next can’t be told because it’s still happening, right now.

By Lester’s own admission, “Da Vinci’s Ghost” is fairly speculative. What we know of the master’s inner (and external) life comes largely from his notebooks, around 30,000 manuscript pages containing many sketches and observations, but also constituting, in large part, the most impossibly ambitious to-do list of all time. Da Vinci embarked upon a comprehensive study of human anatomy (among several dozen other disciplines) in the late 1400s, and part of that project consisted of obsessive comparative measurements of various parts of the body. The text accompanying the Vitruvian Man mostly lists his findings for the “ideal” body, including such stipulations as “from the hairline to the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of the height of a man,” and so on.

The transcendent meaning of the drawing is implicit (and perhaps occasionally imagined). Lester eloquently proposes the Vitruvian Man “as a study of human proportion; as an overview of the human anatomy; as an exploration of an architectural idea; as an illustration of an ancient text, updated for modern times; as a vision of empire; as a cosmography of the lesser world; as a celebration of the power of art; as a metaphysical proposition.” “Da Vinci’s Ghost” teases out the threads of these ideas from the centuries of Western culture that preceded the moment when Leonardo set pen to paper. The result is a short but dense book that dips into mysticism, military engineering, the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, the theory of sacred geometry, Medieval medical education, the construction of Gothic cathedrals, and more. Although Leonardo may not have acknowledged them, according to Lester, all of these cultural forces and legacies came to bear on the creation of the Vitruvian Man.

He gets his name, by the way, from Vitruvius, a Roman engineer and the author of a text titled “Ten Books on Architecture.” Vitruvius maintained that the proportions of a building should be derived from and based on the proportions of a “well-shaped” man. Such buildings in turn make up the body of an empire, in a classical version of the Medieval and Renaissance conception of universe as a multilayered reiteration of a single divine pattern. The idea that “the human body was a scaled-down version of the world and the cosmos as a whole” is, as Lester notes, “an age-old philosophical conceit,” but with the Vitruvian Man it appears before us as the most beautiful and triumphant expression of the school of thought known as humanism.

Like last year’s “Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” by Stephen Greenblatt, “Da Vinci’s Ghost” celebrates the emergence of humanism in 15th-century Italy. Both books are predisposed to the popular narrative in which the Renaissance is depicted as a revolution against Medieval thinking rather than an evolution from it, and this is regrettable, but Lester is a lot less guilty of it than Greenblatt.

Lester draws into his story such figures as the 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Under the influence of what are now thought to be severe migraines, Hildegard saw visions, including the recurring image of a human figure in the middle of a “wheel of marvelous appearance,” with its head touching the top of the circle and its feet touching the bottom. This, Lester suspects, shows the influence of Vitruvius’ book (preserved in monasteries like the one Hildegard presided over), which maintained that the ideal human form, when placed in such a circle, would fit perfectly, with its navel at the center. A similar symmetry can be found by placing the same figure within a square.

For Hildegard and Medieval thinkers, the body at the center of this geometry was Christ, the intersection of the human and the divine. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, however, is decidedly human, if magnificently so, with square and circle superimposed. “The figure,” Lester writes, “captures a hinge moment in the history of ideas: the intoxicating, ephemeral moment when art, science and philosophy all seemed to be merging, and when it seemed possible that, with their help, the individual human mind might actually be able to comprehend and depict the nature of … everything.”

Leonardo, that consummate polymath, has become yet another symbol of this humanist aspiration, while illustrating, at times, its downside: “He set himself to learn many things,” wrote Georgio Vasari, his 16th-century biographer, “only to abandon them almost immediately.” (Still, for all his frustrations, he did pretty well for himself in the end.) We can’t know what the master was thinking when he drew the Vitruvian Man, but Lester, who is forced by the thinness of the historical record to guess at many things, seems least speculative of all when he looks into the Man’s intensely concentrated features and sees a resemblance to his creator. Reaching for the edges of the cosmos, seeming to fly and stand firmly planted on the ground at the same time, he’s a creature whose limitations are their own form of glory.

The character who takes the reader on this wrenching journey and gives the book its title, Jun Do, is not an orphan despite having grown up in an orphanage in the provincial town of Chongjin. His mother — a beautiful singer who, like all beautiful women, we are told, got “shipped off to Pyongyang” — is simply gone, leaving his father, the Orphan Master, a devastated and none-to-compassionate man. The orphans, like the beautiful women, are little more than a commodity (if a far less valuable one), and are sold off to work at hazardous factory jobs. The resourceful Jun Do survives this Dickensian situation and lands in the army. First, he learns to fight in the pitch-dark tunnels under the border with South Korea. Then he becomes part of a seagoing team of military kidnappers who specialize in abducting foreigners with desirable talents from beaches and piers.

In the course of the novel’s first half, Jun Do will go from unwanted urchin to ad hoc envoy by way of a surveillance station concealed on a fishing boat. He even finds himself in Texas for a few days, acting as translator for a government minister (who’s actually a driver pretending to be the minister). But wherever he is, Jun Do’s fate is precarious. At any moment, anybody’s life can take a catastrophic turn. If your shipmate defects, the rest of the crew gets sent to prison camps. If your boat gets boarded by a bunch of frisky American soldiers and they make off with your obligatory photograph of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il as a souvenir, you get sent to a prison camp. If you fail in the daft diplomatic mission to which you have been detailed, you get sent to a prison camp. If you manage to avoid the prison camps long enough to grow old, the regime will supposedly send you to a retirement village on a famously beautiful beach, but when Jun Do’s ship cruises past the area one day, its white sands are ominously empty.

You can probably guess where Jun Do ends up, and then, roughly in the novel’s middle, the book switches from a straightforward, third-person narrative to a braid of very different voices. There’s a variation on the jingoistic broadcasts every North Korean citizen is forced to listen to from dawn to dusk and the first-person recollections of a nameless interrogator trying to crack a particularly tough case. The interrogator’s subject has brazenly impersonated a celebrated national hero (and possible rival of the Dear Leader) to the extent of moving in with the man’s wife, North Korea’s most beloved movie star.

The impostor is Jun Do — and he isn’t. “For us,” a seasoned operator tells Jun Do before his transformation, “the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” Since the Dear Leader chooses to behave as if the impostor really is Commander Ga, then, for the time being, that’s who he is. The novel itself becomes a maze of false fronts and hidden truths — the very stuff of survival in a society based on deprivation, arbitrary cruelty and lies.

“There is a talk that every father has with his son,” explains the interrogator, “in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family … We must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands.” If I ever have to denounce you or you have to denounce me, the man is saying, remember that it’s not the real you or me who does this.

The forlorn hope that love can persist in such circumstances is belied by the interrogator’s own parents, who fear him and never speak an unguarded word in his presence. He becomes fascinated with “Commander Ga,” who seems to have found genuine love with the actress. Meanwhile, the loudspeaker voice carries on, spinning yet another version of the novel’s events, full of all the preposterous propaganda of a dictatorship built around a cult of personality. Is it even possible to possess an identity — let alone to know intimacy — in such a world, where everyone is desperately pretending to be what everyone else knows they are not? A world where, with the slightest misstep, the people you love can be swallowed up by the gulag, disappearing forever? The first time Jun Do sees an American telephone book he’s dumbstruck at the realization that “you could look up anyone and seek them out.”

Although “The Orphan Master’s Son” spins itself into a web of uncertainties, the novel never scatters, meanders or lapses into arty opacity. Johnson makes a story about the instability of stories into an impressively coherent and arresting narrative. The main character, whoever he is, moves ever closer to true selfhood, which is, for him, the equivalent of doom; yet it’s a joyful doom, as strange as that may sound. From peripheral sources, it’s clear that Johnson spent years on the research for this novel — which extended to a trip to North Korea itself — and this shows in the fine texture of his observation. But the real marvel of “The Orphan Master’s Son” is its imaginative depth and breadth, something that absolutely can’t be faked. Which may be why there are no real novelists in North Korea.

Khalil is a Cairo-based journalist who reports on the Middle East for a variety of Western publications. While it’s impressive that he has published “Liberation Square” before the one-year anniversary of the uprising, it’s not unusual. Reporters routinely crank out quickie books on major news events, and these tend to be rushed and lumpy creations, nearly as ephemeral as the newspaper stories on which they’re based. What’s remarkable about “Liberation Square” is how good it is, how well written, how perfectly calibrated in its amounts of background, commentary and prognostication — and above all how thrilling it is to read.

“Liberation Square” is also far from impartial, though I doubt there are many readers who will fault it for that. As a longtime Cairene, Khalil is able to quickly and vividly sketch the mindset of his countrymen as, a mere year ago, they faced the demoralizing prospect of Mubarak’s son, Gamal, continuing his father’s nepotistic, kleptocratic style of governance into the foreseeable future. He knows the jokes they told and the shame they felt — as a nation of famously “clever, resourceful and resilient” people, inheritors of an ancient and storied civilization — at being dominated by a pack of bullies, liars and incompetents.

In describing the increasingly intolerable conditions in Egypt, Khalil picks out a few cultural and political milestones and symbols that capture this malaise and festering disgust. The buddy comedy movie, “Cultural Film,” about a group of friends desperately trying to find a place to watch a softcore video, portrayed the bottled-up sexual frustration of a generation of educated young men who had no hope of ever finding decent jobs, moving out of their parents’ homes and getting married. A bestselling novel, “The Yacoubian Building” (later made into a film), uses “a grand old building in downtown Cairo” to illustrate how the rigid Egyptian class system arbitrarily yet mercilessly dictates the residents’ fates.

And then there’s the Internet, whose role in the uprising was, Khalil confirms, pivotal. Two important figures were Khaled Saieed, a 28-year-old Alexandrian computer buff, who was beaten to death in a foyer by police officers for reasons unknown. A relative used a cellphone to secretly snap a photo of Saieed’s battered corpse, and this, along with the victim’s fresh-faced, quintessentially middle-class passport photo, “exploded onto the Egyptian Internet,” inspiring a We Are All Khaled Saieed page on Facebook. “The huge thing with Khaled Saieed wasn’t his picture after he got killed,” a blogger told Khalil. “It was his picture before he got killed. A little innocent-looking guy who looks just like your son, your cousin, your nephew. That’s what galvanized people.”

Another galvanizer was Asmaa Mahfouz, a 26-year-old veiled woman who took to YouTube to harangue the populace into attending the Jan. 25, 2011, protest in Tahrir Square, provoked by the flagrantly rigged elections of the previous year and the electrifying example of the Tunisian revolution. “Mahfouz directs more of her anger at her fellow Egyptian civilians than at the government and the police,” Khalil writes, “taunting viewers to prove their manhood” by showing up at the square. Aimed as it was at the Egyptians’ “prized self-perceptions of what it meant to be a man” and providing more traditional women with an activist role model, this and other Mahfouz videos constituted “a remarkable moment of viral political marketing,” Khalil writes. Her impact, he asserts, was enormous.

The last half of “Liberation Square” forms a suspenseful, day-by-day narrative of the weeks between that first protest, on Jan. 25, and Mubarak’s resignation on Feb. 11. Khalil was on the streets much of the time and has interviewed dozens of participants about the unfolding drama as the demonstrators sought to take bridges and public spaces from the police, figured out how to communicate when the government cut Internet and cellphone service, fended off attacks from hired Mubarak supporters on camel- and horseback, welcomed the military and then wondered why it didn’t do more to defend them, listened to and rejected the self-justifying statements of Mubarak and other officials, and gradually realized that there was no going back and that the country was theirs at last.

Khalil is responsible enough to outline the ways that “figuring out what comes next will be much more difficult” than jettisoning Mubarak. The new Egypt must cope with a press so accustomed to toadying to the government or private owners that it doesn’t know how to think for itself, and with old-school elites doing everything they can to make sure they’re not held accountable for their misdeeds. Will the army, which is currently running the government, surrender that power willingly? How can decades of corruption and cronyism be replaced by a more “meritocratic” society, a reform that Khalil regards as “the single most important change going forward”? Although “Liberation Square” does offer a satisfying resolution in the form of Mubarak’s ouster, it’s a resolution for the book,  certainly not for Egypt itself. There, the protests continue.