An Afghan’s odyssey I In the Sea There are Crocodiles by Fabio GedaI

At the age of 10, Enaiatollah Akbari sets out with his mother from his village Nava, in Afghanistan. After a perilous journey, they arrive in Quetta, Pakistan. She makes him swear three things: Never to use drugs; never to use weapons; never to cheat or steal.
This advice is all he has when his mother leaves in the quiet of the night to return to her other children back in Nava.

With most of the odds against him, chances of Enaitollah’s survival in a new, hostile country are bleak. But he survives to tell his poignant tale. The story is told by Fabio Geda as a series of conversations with Enaitollah. These conversations between the author and the protagonist are spread through the narrative. Written in Italian, the book has been translated into English by Howard Curtis.

Abandoned in Quetta, Enait picks up odd manual jobs. Even when he is reduced to a mere street urchin, he misses his days at school and Buzul Bazi, a dice game played a bone taken from a sheep’s foot after it’s been boiled. He listens to the children playing during school recess, longing to join them but is forced to go out into a world where a simple request for water elicits a scathing reply: First tell who are you? Are you a Shia or a Muslim. By now Eniat has learnt his lessons as he shoots back, "First I am a Shia, then I am a Muslim. Or rather, first I am a Hazara, then Shia then a Muslim." Hazara, inhabitants of Ghazni province, are identified by their almond eyes and flatter noses. While some claim to be descendants of Genghis Khan’s army others claim to have come down from Koshans, the legendary builders of the Bamiyan Buddhas. "Some others say we’re saves and treat us like slaves," says Enaitollah. Fed up of being treated badly, he decides to go to Iran, where he had heard "things were much better". Here begins  Eniat’s association with people traffickers, cramped trucks and the constant fear of Telisia and Sang Safid, the immigrant detention centres. At the Iranian city of Isfahan, he picks up the job at a construction site, which is where most of the illegal migrants worked. But with the constant police raids and the sword of deportation hanging on his head, Eniat decides to move again; this time to Turkey. This journey is far more challenging than anything he had been through. From Salmas, the last city in Iran and
closest to the mountains, begins a 27-day trek across snow-capped mountains.

On arriving in Istanbul, it becomes clear that there was no work to be found there. A journey further ahead to Greece is imminent. Here ensues a voyage in a dinghy which ends in his landing at a Greek port town without any clothes. The journey to Mytilene and thereon to Rome is largely aided by kind-hearted people. Enaitollah’s tale is a real-life account not a fictionalised narrative. His journey, that spans from Nava to Turin, may bring to mind the century-old adventures of Kipling’s Kim. This is however a much more realistic account pared of all the romance of adventure and powered by the sole grit to survive. Enaitollah refuses to name most of the people and places. "Facts are important," he tells Fabio, "The story is important. It’s what happens to you that change your life, not where or who with." While debating if they should take the journey to Greece in a dinghy, a fellow Afghan mentions the threat of crocodiles in the sea. The only answer available at that time to the group of young boys in desperate search of a better life is that there are no crocodiles in the sea. A postscript to the novel notes that Eniat, who is now 22 years old, and has received asylum in Italy, has discovered that there really are crocodiles in the sea.

The circus of dreams I THE NIGHT CIRCUS by Erin Morgenstern I

In 1886 a circus arrives in London: Le Cirque des Rêves (the Circus of Dreams). A notice at its entrance announces "Opens at Nightfall, Closes at dawn". On the night of October 13, the gates of the circus are thrown open. One steps into a world of wonder. Everything in the circus follows a pattern of black and white colours. As people move from tent to tent, they admire the curiosities. From painfully slow-moving human statues to a giant clock that turns itself inside out, everything in this circus touches the point of bizarre. Nothing is out of step, everything is too perfect. As the clock strikes midnight, a giant bonfire is lit by 12 archers. As each of their barbs produces a different colour at the bonfire, two people in the circus realize the "game" had begun.
The "game" is a challenge between two magicians Hector Bowen and AH, who swore their students into a battle of magic. The rules of the game are not clear perhaps because there are no rules. The students Celia and Marco, are mere kids when their "preparation" for the challenge beings. While Marco spends cold, comfortless days in intense study, Celia is subject to painful exercise like her fingers being cut up so she can repair them "magically".  
The Night Circus is Erin Morgenstern’s first novel. Morgenstern, who lives in Massachusetts and is also multimedia artiste, describes all her work as "fairy tales in one way or another". Morgenstern’s peculiar brand of imagination works on details: frill and cut of dresses, smells that bring back memories, rain seeping slowly into clothes. The details present themselves through the magical world of the novel.  
The night circus is the stage where the challenge of wizards is played out. Celia is the illusionist in the circus and Marco is the owner’s assistant.  While, the bonfire lit by Marco powers the circus, Celia is the one who transports and "holds the circus together". The other members of the circus, including its owner Chandresh, have little clue about the real magic in action. The challenge involves a series of move with the two players adding their own magical tents to the circus and trying to gain control of it. Both Marco and Celia find themselves increasingly in awe of each other’s skills. By now the circus has tents like cloud maze, pool of tears, wishing tree, ice garden, desert world, to name a few. A steady group of fans known as rêveurs, follow the circus around. They dress in the trademark black and white of the circus but with a flourish of red. Meanwhile, the members of the circus don’t seem to age and begin to suspect something is wrong.
The admiration between Celia and Marco blooms into love soon, followed by the realization that the challenge would never end as long as both of them are alive.    
There is nothing ingenious about the story, given the rush of fantasy fiction in the last decade. While the magical challenge of Marco and Celia is played out in the world of muggles it is not clear how the two worlds interact.
This book would have been an ordinary work of fiction but for its stylized narrative. The story beings with the declaration: "The circus arrives without a warning." As you read the first chapter, you know Morgenstern is not in a hurry to tell her story. She lets the story breathe, slowly. Though, at 387 pages, it means a lot of breathing, but her prose has a lilt to it that accounts for more magic than all the charms in the book put together. She commits her blunders too, losing her rhythm to adjectives but pulls herself together.
Love between Marco and Celia is not something you see coming, given their detached rivalry. It does not sprout at the spur of the moment but evolves gradually, culminating to the point where both create breathtaking illusions for each other. A particularly interesting scene is the one where the two meet face to face as opponents for the first time. There are no pretences and secrets as the two wizards share details of how each controls the circus and what they are capable of. There is no love interest, but a
compulsion of having been unwillingly bound together by fate. While Celia stabs her hand with a dagger and heals it, Marco recreates a garden: What had been little more than a stack of rough stones moments before is now set and carved into ornate arches and pathways, covered in crawling vines and speckled with bright, tiny lanterns.
Contrived, yet compelling.