DISCOVERIES

CAPE BRETON ROAD by D.R. MacDonald; Harcourt: 304 pp., $23

We are drawn to books for reasons worth examining. Some are entirely personal (for example, a fondness for witches), others more common (the desire to read what everyone else is reading). All reasons are good; none is bad. In this season of high indulgence, the three books presented here were chosen simply because this reader will consume anything on the far north, possession and witches or India. Any reader who finds himself at the cash register in a bookstore clutching a novel about 17th-century cartographers and feeling guilty will understand this. Something else is going on.

Cape Breton Island sits on the northern tip of Nova Scotia on the way to Newfoundland. There is still a bit of Gaelic spoken here and some French. The countryside is harsh and beautiful, one of those tragic coastlines that no lighthouse could ever guard sufficiently. You do not see many novels set here. Innis is 20 when he is deported from Boston back to Canada (he left when he was 2) after stealing one too many cars. He stays with his Uncle Starr, a womanizer who is not entirely thrilled to have a 20-year-old in his house. Innis spends a lot of time in the woods alone, checking the pot plants that he hopes will be his ticket off the island. He falls in love with one of his uncle’s girlfriends, and the testosterone starts flying. D.R. MacDonald gets distracted by the young man’s longing, which makes for novel-length foreplay (even more frustrating in fiction). It is as if the book needs to be weeded of all the personality, so that the landscape and its effect on young Innis can be savored. It’s in there, and it is this book’s lovely raison d’e^tre, but you have to suck it out like marrow from the bone.

SISTER INDIA by Peggy Payne; Riverhead: 288 pp., $24.95

“From every direction, more crowds poured onto the wide street--this confusing, overwhelming uproar--the shiny reds of rickshaw seats, everything so soaked in color.” If the challenge of literature is to describe and translate experience, surely India poses the greatest challenge. This novel is set in Varanasi in Northern India, not far from the Nepalese border, on the great River Ganges. Here, there is a guest house, the Saraswati, run by a mysterious woman, Madame Natraja, in another life American, who now weighs 400 pounds. She scrutinizes guests and sits on the roof of her guest house, watching the river. In Varanasi, all life and death takes place in the open: the washing, the bathing, the blessing and the dying. When the novel opens, a fresh set of guests has arrived just as a fresh round of violence between the Hindus and the Muslims breaks out. A curfew is established by the authorities, and the violence escalates. Natraja has a complicated interest in her cook, Ramesh, a Hindu man with a family of his own. During the violence, she becomes increasingly concerned that he will be targeted by the Muslims. The source of her obsessive fear is the incident that drove her from her home in North Carolina to India. It is the novel’s thread of Ariadne, leading back to the memory that is the wellspring for the story. In many novels, this device leads back in a character’s memory to sexual abuse or incest. In others, particularly those with a connection to the southern United States, this thread leads back to a traumatic racist experience. The love of Natraja’s life was a young black boy. The two were just 13 when their love was brought to a violent end. The juxtaposition of North Carolina and the Ganges is slightly jarring. The two threads meet somewhere deep within the psyche of the main character. Like wires crossing, they send sparks that set fires in the lives of all who cross Natraja’s path.

THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS READER Edited by Frances Hill; Da Capo Press: 448 pp., $18 paper

Which sticks must be laid, and in what pattern, on the political and cultural and social bonfire in order to start a blaze like the Salem witch trials or the McCarthy hearings or, as Frances Hill points out in her introduction, the McMartin Pre-School case in California, in which seven people were acquitted of Satanic child sex abuse? Between June 10 and Sept. 22, 1692, 19 people were hanged for witchcraft, and one was pressed to death. The Salem witch trials had their sociopath, the Rev. Samuel Parris, in whose family the first signs of witchcraft were discovered. Parris had two Caribbean Indian slaves, Tituba and John Indian, and in one explanation for the outbreak of possessions, they are blamed. This book contains excerpts from such texts as the 1608 “A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft” and the first book on witchcraft, written in 1486, “Malleus Maleficarum” (Witch Hammer). Excerpts from Parris’ sermons and letters and various court documents, as well as excerpts from historians’ explanations (from Cotton Mather to Elaine Breslaw’s 1996 book on Tituba), provide at least a taste of every ingredient in this American episode.