The Right of Thirst

I'm going to catch up on the last three books I've read one of these days, but while it's still fresh in my mind, I want to write about The Right of Thirst, which I just finished and loved. This is a beautifully written novel about a middle aged man (Charles), discombobulated after the death of his wife, who wants to do something meaningful in his life, so he sets off to do earthquake relief in an unnamed country (Afghanistan?).

"... my eagerness made me realize that I truly had come for a reason, that the simple freedom of experience was not what I sought. I needed something else, something clear and redeeming and larger than myself, whatever it might be..."

Written in the first person, it's a very personal, interior story, but Charles and the other characters are all beautifully realized. Charles is so thoughtful, he so much wants to do good, but of course things don't work out quite as planned. He finds that the country is caught up in a civil war of sorts and that feeding starving people affected by the quake is not a priority.

"...all the questions of hierarchy and honor, the eagerness to spend precisely what they could least afford on conflict and war, to remake the struggle as one between men when it should have been one between hunger and food, between legs and stones -- suddenly it infuriated me."

And later, as he is getting ready to leave and return home, his mission unfulfilled:

"I saw it clearly. I was guilty of the commonest of American failings, a modestly successful man, and no more, and there was so much I could not grasp, and did not understand, and I was old enough to know that I never would. If that was the best I could manage, I thought, it wasn't good enough, because surely there was more.
Surely mine was not the only story to be told."

There is so much more to this novel than I could possibly recount here, including his relationships with other people, past and present. It resonated strongly with me through universal themes ... the desire for a meaningful life, guilt about not giving enough or doing enough for your loved ones, confusion about how to find the right balance, recognition of the simple things that give one's life meaning. Huyler's writing is spare but evocative and compelling. It's one of the best books I've ever read.