The Rent Collector by Camron Wright

In the past year, I have read various novels about countries, cultures and life experiences that were immensely different than anything that I knew about. This included the fate of orphan children who were shipped throughout the United States, the plight of Mexican immigrants in this country, the difficulties that the Jews and France experienced during World War II, the bizarre life of living in North Korea, the American-Indians living in this country during the 17th century. This novel presented still another perspective of which I was unfamiliar and did not fully appreciate. That is living on a gigantic garbage dump in modern day Cambodia where a person might live with his family in a shack with a tarp as a doorway and no electricity. On top of that, the families would eek out a bare subsistence by picking through the smoldering garbage piles to find any items that they could sell for a small amount of money to buy food which was mostly rice, so their families could survive until the next day. While the details of the story were fiction, the characters in the book were real and there were actual photographs of them at the end of the book.

Yet the novel was much more than a revelation of how some people might live today in Cambodia or the historical and political circumstances behind this travesty. Camron Wright has told a story that reflects the potential humanity that can exist in any life circumstances. He focuses on the tradition for literature to convey meaning, love and hope throughout the ages in a multitude of cultures.

One of the main characters in the book is the story teller of this novel, Sang Ly. We meet her as a married woman with a small sick child who was trying to survive in this horrendous environment. The other main character is Sopeap Sin or the rent collector, a seemingly mean old woman who collects the rent from these poor people who live in the immediate area surrounding this gigantic garbage dump. We learned that she has a poignant and complicated history. Among the many facets of her background is that she has great knowledge of literature. She accepts Sang Ly’s invitation to teach her to read and the plot takes off from there. On one hand, this is a simple beautiful story and yet on the other hand, it is as complicated as the hidden meaning of great literature and the secrets of our dreams deep in our hearts.

A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena By Anthony Marra

Despite universal raves about this book, I found it, at best, a very well written depressing book about a piece of Russian history I know very little about and still am not very motivated to study further. It does however capture the inhumanity that existed in the late 20th and early 21st Century and in this case focuses this damning searchlight on the Russian Government and a subset of its people. Such disregard for people who are of a different origin obviously is not exclusive with the ethnic group involved in this book. Sadly, we see similar antagonistic behavior in the United States if you scan today’s headlines although not acted out on the widespread scale that we found in the pages of this novel.

The centerpiece of this book is a small village in Chechnya. History tells us that the Russian Federation invaded this country in the 1990s to prevent it from leaving the Soviet Union. We follow a handful of characters throughout this book. One is eight-year-old Havaa who flees with a neighbor after the “Feds” killed her father and burnt her home down. The neighbor is a doctor who asks the surgeon of a nearby hospital to take the girl in if he will work helping out at the hospital. Fleeing refugees seem to be the most common patients at this hospital and they appear to either die or have amputations of their limbs from injuries, frequently with dental floss for suturing, since the hospital is chronically short on supplies. The new doctor is also short on medical skills but is a good artist. So he draws portraits of the deceased patients, which get hung in the local town as more or less death notices and memorials to them.

While the tone of this review may seem flippant, that was not the mood of the book. The author clearly tries to convey the caring that the people had for each other. Refugees roaming from one city to another were given rooms to stay overnight by local residents although they could only pay a symbolic pittance. On the other hand we are given graphic descriptions of how a person can be tortured by the government and how someone could ultimately become an informer who turns in just about all his friends. We also learn what a father might do when he learns that his son is such an informer.

The time span of this book is relatively short but it is greatly expanded by the author’s use of flashbacks. Mr. Marra has a way with words and metaphors that is captivating but the characters are somewhat in the shadows. One of the tests I give myself to see if a book has made a distinct impression on me is to see if in my mind I could cast a movie with known actors and actresses. In this case they didn’t stand out enough for me to do it.