Lügen Auf Albanisch: Roman (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
I liked this book and the Albanian main character who is trying to figure out American life. Lula is the live-in caretaker for a high school student, a precarious job for her, since everyone she meets assumes that she is sleeping with his father, the man she calls Mister Stanley. The book describes how Lula tries to figure out how to succeed in America. Due to the exigencies of life in Albania, Lula is adept at lying. She finds that it solves many problems and seems to please Mister Stanley and his friend Don, an immigration lawyer. She is grateful for the comfortable home and easy job she has, but is lonely, especially after her best friend, another Albanian, becomes incommunicado. Almost every encounter that Lula has with Stanley and Don is challenging, fraught with the danger that she could lose their good will and then miss her chance to become a permanent resident of the country. But she handles most of these encounters with acumen and self-possession. Lula is a combination of naive newcomer and shrewdly insightful employee who succeeds in her limited role until three Albanian men force their way into her life and she starts yearning for greater freedom. It's not a deep story, but it's not shallow either. Lula is escaping from a miserable society, and by the end of the book, the reader will be rooting for Lula's success and happiness, though we know it will not come easily. Francine Prose's novel, My New American Life, has one of the worst covers I have ever seen on a book by a serious American writer. It is a picture of a rosy-cheeked girl in a marching band uniform playing a drum. She has a big smile on her face and wears a hat with a leather brim and an eagle on the crown.Nonetheless I read My New American Life in part because I admired Prose's Reading Like A Writer so much. I was pretty sure that her benighted publisher was hyperventilating when he slapped that cover on her book. Prose is just too discriminating and intelligent to be the culprit.This proved to be more or less the case, although My American Life isn't much of a novel. Rather, it is an airy, hopeful, pretty funny, wandering tale about a young Albanian girl trying to make her way toward a Green Card (Permanent Resident Status) by serving as a bored nanny in the New Jersey suburbs of New York.Lula, our heroine's name, is a kind, thoughtful, exceptionally smart person with nothing going for her except the motherwit she brought along from Albania. Albania, for those who don't know, was the most secretive, closed-off country in the world during the Cold War. Partly as a consequence, and partly as a consequence of being a country in the Balkans, Albanians are cynical, have lived worse than however they are living now, resilient, and generally convinced that within the next few seconds they'll figure out how to escape their latest jam.That's Lula. This is a story about her ducking the sex-slave trade, being beached in the Garden State, and falling in semi-love with a small time Albanian hood named Alvo. (He makes his great escape by being deported.)Lots of things happen, with increasing frequency as the book rolls towards its end. That makes for numerous comic scenes that don't credibly add up, especially when the various calamities turn into serendipities and most of the horrendous possibilities are blunted by Lula's dumb luck, grandmother's sayings, and the ongoing circus of America at large within itself, meaning there is an Italian mafia (Tony Soprano in Bay Ridge), a Russian mafia (in Brighton Beach), and an Albanian mafia (wherever it can squeeze in.)Prose excels in long stretches of lively dialogue and a general picture of Americans as sadder, slower, and more culturally impoverished than Albanians. She's good at father/son alienation, broken-down wives, and the materialistic mysteries of what passes for Christmas. Lula has to navigate all this; she doesn't always succeed; but she's spunky and not mean. (I was reminded of a teenage friend of my son addressing her father as, "You wretched little man," to his face; now that's mean; Lula would never do such a thing.)I have no idea why Prose decided to pack this book with Albanians other than their scheming remoteness and bizarre past, but why not? For two decades I was a diplomat. We never dealt with, worried about, or even discussed Albania. It was sealed-up. It might as well have been a moth hole in a woolen map--not there, absent. Well, that was a while ago, and now the Albanians are here with us, banging their drums.For more of my comments on contemporary fiction, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).
What do You think about Lügen Auf Albanisch: Roman (2012)?
There were a few cute or interesting moments, but overall I felt that it wasn't worth the read.
—veronica
Cute story better as an audio. Not a book club book except good for a younger book club
—redhead23
Not my favorite Francine Prose. Just kinda thin, I guess -- it was no Blue Angel.
—natasha38
thoroughly entertaining and engaging. overall, a good story too.
—opeoluwaakintayo
