Paul Murray's The Bee Sting Buzzes Incessantly with Sorrow

Paul Murray's novel "The Bee Sting" hones in on the Barnes family in rural Ireland. Dad, Dickie runs the family's floundering car dealership, daughter Cass is finishing her senior year of high school in a downward drunken spiral, precocious younger brother PJ spouts trivial scientific facts, and mom is the queen bee and town beauty Imelda. These facts are only a mere foundation of this disturbing and comical fictitious family. The family flits around each other while being more drawn outside their own hive. Each character is given a full blown examination. All four are intoxicating in their own way, wrought with their own poor decisions making and obsessions. Murray's skillful depictions give the reader a keen sense of their afflictions. While engrossing, the reader becomes ensnared and beholden to all the drama brewing towards its tempest, payback karma. Along for the ride, we learn Dickie's and Imelda's back stories which raise their tormented heads. "The past hung in the present like smoke in the air, like vapor trails, fading out slowly." Dickie grew up in a wealthy family with a much beloved younger brother Frank.  Dickie's days at Trinity come back to haunt him. His malleability makes you want to shake your head (or his) in frustration. He spends his time and resources with his handyman, a survivalist at war with the world building a bunker. Imelda grew up in poverty, the only girl in a household of brutish men. Imelda was rescued from her hellish household by an elderly spinster with mystical powers. She was betrothed to Frank before her marriage to Dickie. Cass' consuming fixation on her frenemy Eileen is pathetic and self-destructive. Lastly, innocent PJ is left untended to fend for himself. He misguidedly thinks he's found salvation in a friend online.  As distressing and convoluted as this portends, there's plenty to cheer in the darkly humorous observations that illuminate the insanity of life in all its mutations. Dickie realized "You couldn't protect the people you loved - that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering." Overall I found the novel a trial of endurance. The buzzing plot is festooned in a malaise of lugubriousness that deviates into a myriad of mazes that churn incessantly.  Reading Murray's encumbered novel was a "a kind of Purgatory, a weird, interstitial space between one world and the next, filled with peripheral figures from the past, the kind of marginal acquaintances that turn up in dreams."

SOLITO-A Memoir Javier Zamora's Harrowing Migration at Age 9

Javier Zamora's memoir SOLITO is an especially disturbing and affecting account of his illegal migration from his native El Salvador to the US to join his parents. His father fled when Javier was one and his mother when he was five. Javier remained in El Salvador with his grandparents and aunts until his parents had managed to save up money to send for him. Javier's story is a child's migrant story. Narrated by Javier in the voice of his 9 year old self, the terrifying ordeal lasting three weeks when his whereabouts were unknown is illuminated in a patina of trust and innocence that belies the perils encountered. The honest recollections illicit stark details and his intent to remain steadfast. However, this memoir is deeply troubling knowing Javier was an unaccompanied minor; a child unable to tie his own shoes. The desire for a better life by reaching the US is incessant which fosters a system which leaves juveniles at the mercy of adults. And, a system that preys on people taking gross advantage of millions.  Miraculously, Javier received caring parental protection from two strangers who refused to abandon him, comforted him and saw his needs were met as they made their dangerous migration under the vicarious lead of "coyotes."  Javier's beloved grandfather entrusted him to a man from their village who ended up leaving the group after a week along with the belongings of someone else. Still, Javier hoped and prayed for his safe arrival in laUSA. The  ever-changing group traveled by bus, trucks, boats and mostly by foot over scorching desert terrain. Javier describes his fear of running and hiding to avoid capture.  Though twice captured and detained, Javier's self-appointed guardians made sure they remained "together as a family".  The trip by boat was terrifying and nauseating. Yet, Javier was delighted by the sight of jumping fish and the moon's reflection on the waves. Much of the time was spent shut inside, waiting for instruction and there was little to note but boredom, cramped quarters and little to do.  But throughout, Javier's young voice and budding poetic soul radiates with beauty. "I love looking for the big white moon. Seeing it change. The moon has been up there watching me since the dawn I saw good-bye to my family. It reminds me of all of them. They said there wouldn't be a moon, but they're wrong. Like a slice of watermelon bitten to the rind, it showed up over the mountains to our right. I like its gray light before the sun paints the dawn, our clothing changing from black to gray to blue like we're chameleons."