Returning to Carthage
by Ben Sharafski
Ben Sharafski’s Returning to Carthage is a slim volume consisting of six interlinked short stories. They all feature the same unnamed first-person narrator, a man born and raised in Israel, but now (like Sharafski himself) living and working in Australia.
We first meet the narrator in Love and Lies in Laos, as a young man on a solo trip to Thailand and its environs. This trek is meant to be a sort of final bachelor’s spree before his settling down with his girlfriend Cathy back in Sydney. It ends up messier than planned, as he embarks on an ill-advised holiday liaison with Noi, a local single mother desperate to leave the country. Perhaps none too surprisingly, in the second story, Two Lives Intersected, set a few years later, there is no mention of Cathy or Noi and, instead, our (anti?)hero is preparing to marry Naoko. The meeting between their respective Israeli and Japanese families prior to the wedding provides the context for a touching and insightful exploration of heritage, family secrets and friction between cultures.
In the remaining stories, the narrator, while remaining rather prone to womanising, comes across as a more mature individual. We see him becoming a father to a girl, then a boy, and we accompany him in his struggles with parenthood. In the final, longest piece in the book, Waiting, the narrator, now in his forties, flies to Israel, to care for his cancer-stricken mother in the last weeks of her life.
In these engaging stories, Sharafski uses his narrator as Everyman. Here is an imperfect individual with some questionable character traits, who nonetheless tries to be a decent husband, parent and son in a contemporary, urban setting. Sharafski doesn’t just go for “realism” – the main character’s ruminations, conveyed throughout through a first-person narrative, have a ring of “autofiction” to them. By this I do not necessarily mean that the stories are autobiographical (although, for all I know, they might be) but that have a factual style which combines the immediacy of memoir or reportage with a warm sense of humanity which, ironically, is often best conveyed through fiction. The narrative is peppered with “non-fiction” asides – about the 20th Century World Wars, coin-collecting, living in Israel, cancer treatment – which add to the sense of authenticity. This combination makes for compelling reading, reaching a climax in the heart-wrenching final story, a blow-by-blow account of the wait for the inevitable tragedy of death.
I thank
the author for providing an electronic copy of the book in exchange for an
honest review.
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