100 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews This triangle resonates throughout the novel. But the geopolitical forces spawned by 9/11 drive the plot: “History is the third parent.” Accompanying Rohan on a journey to Peshawar , Jeo and Mikal surreptitiously enter Afghanistan, in “the crosshairs of history,” to help wounded civilians . Foredoomed by Kyra, sold by warlords to the Taliban, attacked by anti-Taliban villagers, Jeo dies, and Mikal is taken into US custody. Released after extensive torture, he mistakenly kills two US soldiers and undertakes a grueling journey home, where he impregnates the widowed Naheed. Returning to Afghanistan to aid a family who sheltered him there, he disappears from the novel after giving himself up to the Americans . At home, meanwhile, Mikal’s brother, Basie, married to Jeo’s sister , Yasmina, dies at the Christian school where they both teach, in a bloody hostage incident orchestrated by Kyra. But Yasmina, like Naheed, is pregnant, and the birth of their sons signals hope. Some aspects of this novel may distance readers. The achingly lyrical style that renders Rohan’s domain goes flat, graphic, almost Hollywoodish for fighting and torture scenes. Flashbacks and histories repeatedly interrupt the omniscient narrator’s present tense, so the novel can feel overmediated. And a reliance on coincidence seems programmatic. Nevertheless, Aslam credibly represents the internal and external forces engulfing Pakistan and Afghanistan as the American behemoth struggles to end jihad. The Blind Man’s Garden, finally, designates not only Rohan’s family but his beleaguered region and our global culture, wherein warring ideologies limit vision and perpetuate violence but which, properly tended, can yield beautiful fruit. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Natalka Babina. Down Among the Fishes. Camilla Stein, ed. Jim Dingley, tr. London. Glagoslav. 2013. isbn 9781782670766 Natalka Babina’s Down Among the Fishes has all the charm of a bad adventure novel. Any aspirations of literary merit fall by the wayside in its gleeful and unabashed pursuit of entertainment value. The novel’s heroine, Ala Babylyova, is living a relatively peaceful life in her Belarusian village when, suddenly, the mysterious death of her grandmother launches her into national and international conspiracies involving opposition politicians, thugs, buried treasure, and even time travel. Babina doesn’t waste too much time on her characters’ motivations or on the internal consistency of the world she creates. Instead, she packs the novel full of exciting subplots, cases of mistaken identity, and visits from ghosts. By the end, all the wild strands of Ala’s adventures do not neatly resolve into anything coherent , nor do they seem to be commenting on any of the genres they imitate. They exist, it seems, for no other reason than to keep the reader entertained. In this, Babina succeeds. And by the time the book is finished, its unrestrained gimmickry has kept the reader’s attention focused, for 350 pages, on a country and culture often forgotten in the farrago of eastern Europe. Belarus nestles among better-known neighbors Russia , Ukraine, and Poland, all of whose languages and influence cross into its territory. “On my right,” Ala, the narrator, tells us, “I can hear people shouting in Polish. . . . To my left people are speaking Russian.” All the while, Ala writes in Belarusian. Whatever its faults, Down Among the Fishes successfully evokes the liminality of its setting. Babina’s characters are all caught in the middle of this Babel, where speaking a particular language becomes a matter of etiquette and ethics as much as ethnicity. The local strongman speaks Russian to his connections in the capital but addresses villagers in Belarusian when he wants to buy their land, and Ala navigates her increasingly dangerous world with amazing linguistic and cultural nimbleness. Ala’s linguistic aplomb is a much more compelling talent than her fantastical physical endurance or her ability to time travel, and to the English-language reader it might seem almost superhuman. In fact, the realism in the background of Babina’s novel is consistently more interesting than the flashy fantasy of its plot. Ala’s very realistic personal history gives her character an unusual perspective and Ulrich Baer Beggar’s Chicken: Stories from Shanghai Earnshaw Books Humorous and candid, Ulrich Baer’s first book of...