Real life behind headlines in Uganda, Paris ghettos and other global hot spots

Bring me the news from far away — the kind you can't find in any newspaper.

That's what we sometimes ask of fiction. And in the three fine debuts below, we get it.

"Brief Encounters with Che Guevara"
by Ben Fountain
Ecco, 229 pp., $24.95

Short-story collections don't come much better than this.

In these eight tales, author Ben Fountain draws on the time he's spent in Haiti, and on his own considerable imagination, to get under the skin of trouble spots around the world.

"Brief Encounters with Che Guevara" offers pointed prose, nimble revelation, some stunning description of flora and fauna, and a rueful generosity toward a string of well-intentioned bumblers who get in over their heads.

Among those bumblers are an American golf pro, career on the wane, who stumbles upon an unexpected opportunity in Myanmar; a Duke University ornithologist who makes a startling discovery while being held captive by Colombian rebels; a Green Beret's wife who doesn't know how to handle it when her husband returns from his tour of duty in Haiti converted to voodooism; and an aid worker in Sierra Leone whose search for project-funds propels her into diamond smuggling.

The details of the stories set in Haiti and those set in Colombia, Myanmar and Sierra Leone (countries Fountain has never visited) are, remarkably, equally persuasive. Fountain clearly feels compelled to delve into as much of the world as he can, whether via observation, research or invention. Much of what he sees is bleak — and bleakly comical. But just as much is fiercely challenging, even ennobling.

"Are you a good man?" one of his flawed heroes is asked. "A brave man? A man of conviction?"

Maybe — maybe not.

But even if this particular blunderer turns out to be good, brave and full of conviction, that doesn't mean things are going to work out for him or those around him.

While most of the book recalls the best work of the young Paul Theroux, the closing tale has more in common with the meticulously patterned magic of Steven Millhauser's fiction.

"Fantasy for Eleven Fingers," about an 11-fingered piano prodigy, trades contemporary political unrest for 19th-century classical-music intrigue. Its surface details are exquisite, yet its underlying realities are as wrenching as anything else in the book. The story makes you feel there are whole other directions that Fountain could pursue — and very little that he couldn't pull off.

"Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe"
by Doreen Baingana
Harlem Moon/Broadway, 184 pp., $10.95

The prose of this debut writer from Uganda is just as fine, and her powers of observation equally sharp. First published by University of Massachusetts Press, this novel-in-stories has found its way, happily, into a paperback imprint with wider distribution.

"Tropical Fish" is set against the backdrop of "the Amin days and each coup thereafter."

That would be Idi Amin, Uganda's brutal 1970s dictator, who made headlines around the world for his arbitrary laws and his expulsion of his country's Indian population. What Doreen Baingana brilliantly evokes here is the experience of growing up in the wake of his regime, in Uganda's former colonial capital of Entebbe.

The book focuses alternately on Christine Mugisha and her older sisters Patti, a born-again Christian, and Rosa, who puts her faith in the pleasures of the flesh. Christine herself follows a more middle path, both by inclination and aptitude (her attempt to use a Georgette Heyer romance as a template for a date with an 18-year-old boy "tall as a windmill" proves hilariously inept).

Christine's family, like the Uganda of the 1970s and '80s, is in decline. Her father, a senior bank accountant, succumbs to alcoholism early on. His widow and daughters struggle along on the margins of privilege, the girls attending a boarding school that itself has seen better days.

With a simple turn of phrase, Baingana can suggest subliminal parental messages ("Don't exist so loudly") or a teenager's disdain of her schoolteachers ("God's experiment at unique human shapes"). She brings home, too, how colonial borders imposed on a tribal patchwork can result in a tri-lingual household: Christine's parents' village language is different from the housemaid's, which is different from the girls' schoolroom English.

Baingana is just as good on the cultural shock Christine experiences — both when she lives for a time in Los Angeles, and when she returns to Uganda eight years later.

The hard stuff is here: AIDS losses, the humiliation of living in a country run by thugs. But by book's end, after losses have been weathered and some political stability achieved, things start looking up.

"Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow"
by Faïza Guène, translated by Sarah Adams
Harcourt, 179 pp., $13

This Algerian-French writer's debut novel is set in Paris.

Ah, Paris! you might say — more familiar ground, to many American readers, than Uganda or Myanmar or rebel-held territory in Colombia.

Not quite. This is the Paris of low-income high-rises, housing a restless immigrant population on the perimeter of the city. And it is rendered with tough defiance by Faïza Guène, who was just 17 when she sold her book to a French publisher (she is now 20).

Narrator Doria is 15 years old, rudely articulate, painfully suspended between two cultures. Her dad has ditched the family and moved back to Morocco. Her illiterate mom is a motel chambermaid. Her high-school principal is "stupid," as is her social worker. France is "this crappy country."

"The only ones interested in us," she sneers, "are the parasite journalists with their nasty reports on violence in the suburbs."

Yet "Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow" isn't simply a rant. Doria, for a start, harbors no illusions of what her prospects as a traditional Muslim girl would be.

"Our generation's lucky," she says, "because you get to choose who you're going to love for the rest of your life. Or the rest of the year. Depends on the couple."

She's also well aware that one reason her dad left was that his wife couldn't give him the son he wanted. So where does that leave her?

With her hardworking mother's example of "real dignity — the kind of thing you don't learn at school." And with her own native wit, which pushes hard at all the odds that are stacked against her.

In Sarah Adams' energetically slangy translation, "Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow" is a brash and bracing read (the title is a play on "kif-kif," Arab-French street argot for "same old, same old," and "kiffer," a verb meaning "to be really crazy about something"). Its heroine may get down at times — "I just can't seem to see myself in the future" — but her angry verve and street smarts seem likely to see her through.

They also let readers glimpse a side of Paris — and, by extension, France and its neighbors — that you won't find in any tourist guide.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com. He has been the Seattle Times book critic since 1998, and has also published four novels.