Customer Reviews

Mercy

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Mercy tells the story of a foreign correspondent's journey through Africa and beyond. It's a revealing portrait of the psyche of a journalist working in unfamiliar places. Much of the novel's charm comes in the interplay of an edgy, broken set of reporters who are always on the move, drawn to African wars because they echo their own internal conflicts in some way. At the heart of the book stands the relationship between the reporter, Anna, and her Kenyan maid. Mercy's a larger than life character who starts of as a hireling but quickly becomes a kind of savior. As Anna embraces Mercy's struggles she slowly starts to see the continent, and herself, in a fuller way.

This story grabs and pulls you in right from the very beginning.The author is gutsy enough to create a main character--Anna--who, at first, is not very loveable. There appears on the scene a heroine of sorts--Mercy-- who tries, with mixed success, to shake some sense into Anna. But Mercy has flaws of her own and thankfully, the story is far from predictable. The book gives you a fascinating look at the life of the journalists living in Africa; they risk their sanity, their loves and their very lives to "get the story." Lara Santoro's writing is beautifully crafted, yet powerfully real. There's an important "message" in this book about Africa and HIV-AIDS but there is no lecturing, and no quick fixes presented. Instead, it brings the overwhelming "big picture" down to the personal level; in doing so, it touches your heart. You won't soon forget this story.

First, I confess to being acquainted with the author and to having lived in Kenya for two years. I found the novel compelling and affecting. By understating emotions, not dragging out scenes, and individualizing the HIV crisis in Africa to two very believable women, Santoro has written a novel that was hard to put down and will stay with me for a long time. This was not a polemic about the failure of governments and of drug companies to do more, but a story in a powerful narrative voice that conveyed reality through the eyes of a very real and engaging narrator. I also appreciated that she conveyed the strength and joy of Kenyan women in face of the hand life deals them.

This is a gripping, gripping narrative that plunges the reader into the violent morass that is modern-day Africa and asks some very hard questions about how the rest of us can sit back and let it all happen. Santoro's narrator is a western journalist on the very brink of self-destruction, and her foil is an outsize (in every sense) housemaid who acts as her goad, her conscience and, ultimately, her salvation. Santoro's prose is spare and unsentimental, and the book crackles with energy and quiet moral outrage.

As far as I know, nobody up to now has quite managed to make compelling novelistic drama of Africa's multiple 21st-century woes -- starting with the AIDS pandemic, which is at the heart of this book. Santoro succeeds brilliantly.

Highly recommended.

Mercy is a moving, beautifully written novel set in present day
Africa. A tale of two women, the vibrant, colorful Mercy who is housekeeper to Anna, a foreign correspondent whose life seems meaningless beyond her work and her flawed relationships. It is a story of survival and courage in our time. Ms Santoro presents us with a harsh portrait of Africa in the raw but gives us hope for a brighter future borne in the strength of its people.

Like Anna, the protagonist of her novel, Lara Santoro is a journalist who has covered extensively the AIDS crisis in Africa. I imagine Santoro shares Anna's frustration at how little us Westerners care about the millions of people who die simply because they are too poor to purchase medicines. But with her novel, Santoro has done a remarkable service: given a face to the AIDS epidemic in Mercy, a housekeeper turner activist. Mercy, of course, is a fictitious character, but her plight is much too real. This is an unforgettable novel, which deals with serious issues in a heart-wrenching, but not preachy, way. Highly recommended.

I lived in Africa for many years -- the West Coast not the East -- and so was refreshed by Santobo's unromanticized view of a continent and its visitors. Bless her for not writing another novel in which Africa features as a device to glorify its non-African characters. As for the AFrican characters -- they are just people. Imagine that!

Some of us remember this: We are children, lying in the grass, staring at the sky, and wondering when our futures will begin. We had time. It spread out before us like that sky or the grass that held our lounging bodies. Time. We had our fill of it, its vast limitlessness. We saw infinity there, but it was not enough. We longed for our older days not knowing that our time there, in our longed-for futures, would become eclipsed by The List of a Countless Things to Do.

And what, then, would become of this sky into which we had pointed at stars, or found fantastic shapes among the clouds, and wondered about the possibility of a rainbow's pot of gold? The sky would continue to become what it had always been, a vehicle for weather and birds and dreams. It would remain there, always, as it is right now. But for us, the some of us children who had lain in the grass, speeding toward our tomorrows, the sky would narrow itself into that one more thing we just learn to accept, or, better, forget, on our journey of trying to remember the day we became blind.

In her first novel, Lara Santoro has set about the task of restoring our sight. No small feat. Santoro has chosen Africa, of course, a continent where we cannot forget the sky, and she pushes us out of our comfort zone and onto the path of remembrance and forgiveness. On this continent where 700 people a day die from HIV/AIDS--and often simply because they do not have access to what have become ubiquitous retro-viral drugs in the developed world--we come to terms with life as the many characters we meet have come to live it. Here, even the living are dying, or, as Yeats might proclaim, slouching toward their particular resurrections. For what is our human fall from grace without its promise of redemption?

Father Anselmo, as perhaps the conscience of this novel--and of our sense of Mercy/mercy--exhorts us all through his conversations with Anna, the journalist of our tale, we have only to open our eyes to see. Easier said than done, n'est-ce pas? As are our attempts at understanding the human trilogy of faith, hope and love. We are witness to character after character in this novel making, and often failing, in her attempts at grappling with just such an understanding. Santoro reminds us that love hurts (haven't you heard) and sometimes it really is not all that pretty. But, like a casino in Las Vegas for some, for those of us who wake up to discover we are not so blind there comes a reckoning that it is the only game in town worthy of our perpetual, if flawed, service.

"There are no simple explanations, they don't exist: the minutest crumb of human experience is an aggregate of at least a half a dozen elements," Anna tells us, her readers; and like her, we know that we have stumbled upon this thing called humility, something the Africans have learned well how to serve. It may be difficult for citizens of a democracy to understand that somewhere else, like under the vast African sky, for example, pharmaceuticals belong to the privileged. In the case of such rampant HIV/AIDS infection, it means that life belongs to the privileged as well. In Mercy, both the novel and the African character for whom the novel is named, we learn about bravery in the face of such privilege. Time after time--the essence akin to God according to Father Anselmo--we witness our "privileged" characters come back from the dead. Thanks to Santoro, one or two of them return with her eyes wide open to remind the rest of us there is this task called seeing to attend.

All of the other reviewers, who have awarded five stars to this novel, are clearly friends of the author. I hardly know where to begin to say where this novel has gone wrong: the disagreeable first-person narrator, who is also a foul-mouthed drunk; a totally unimagined Africa; trite language. There is scarcely a place where a reader can see or feel what the author is talking about. Graham Greene is clearly the model, but what a thin piece of gruel this is. The narrator, Anna, is supposed to be a journalist who has covered the world's hot spots. After reading this, one begins to understand why the rest of the world is so poorly represented in American newspapers and TV. The news types in this book are totally self-absorbed and unlikable. Their redemption at the end is hardly credible.