Category Archives: fiction reviews

GOOD ON PAPER, a novel by Rachel Cantor reviewed by Lillian Brown

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Good on Paper cover art. Dark blue text over a piece of notebook paper with distorted lines running across the page GOOD ON PAPER
by Rachel Cantor
Melville House, 320 pages

reviewed by Lillian Brown

From Rachel Cantor, the lauded author of the 2014 novel A Highly Unlikely Scenario, comes a novel of New Life, a journey of personal resurrection, Good on Paper. Much of the novel is a meditation on fidelity, in relationships and in translations, and it brings to the page some of the most interesting personalities and family dynamics so far this year in literature.

The characters and their relationships make this story of literary delight: Shira, the protagonist, a translator and single mother; Ahmad, her gay best friend and co-parent; Andi, her young and sharp daughter; Romei, the illustrious, Nobel prizing-winning poet, both on the phone and the page; Benny, the owner of the neighborhood bookstore People of the Book, publisher of the local literary magazine Gilgul, part-time love interest of Shira, and the very person to connect Shira and Romei. Good on Paper serves as a reminder of the power of connections, between both people and words.

A PhD dropout and SuperTemps veteran, Shira spends much of her time contemplating the impending Y2K (the novel is set in the late nineties) and the nature of love in its various forms, when she receives a mysterious telegram. The note is from the famous poet Romei, who requests that Shira translate his most recent work. She’s shocked, and even believes it’s a joke at first, courtesy of Benny, but quickly realizes the good fortune of the situation, and accepts the offer.

Romei’s new work is “Vita Nuova,” based on Dante’s poem of the same title, which it happens Shira has spent much of her life studying and translating. When Shira initially calls Romei to discuss the translation, he seems to care more about her opinion of the piece, whether or not she is “interested” in it, than the actual act of translation. Then as Shira begins to translate the piece from Italian to English, she notices strange similarities between Romei’s stories and her own writing, papers she wrote back when she was a student. She’s troubled, because these are not necessarily remarkable details, but some things are too strange to be coincidental. More mysteries unfold as she contemplates her missing mother, and the possible inability to translate Romei’s latest piece.

“Translation requires, and generates, a rare kind of intimacy. Like sex done right, I’ve always thought,” she says, suggesting the pun that is the title of this novel, a play on “good in bed.” Indeed, she observes,

The translator makes a holy commitment to understand, to listen with all possible intensity, to step backward, ever backward, through the labyrinth of an author’s ideas and devices, uncovering his decisions and triumphs, line by line, until she arrives, finally, at the moment of creation—and before, when words are merely phonemes and breath, and the author lies naked and drunk with his obsessions, visions, and agonizing aphasia.

Rachel Cantor author photo

Rachel Cantor

Good on Paper is the second major work of literature to be published this season on translation. Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, with its text in English and Italian both, also considers the art of translating and writing in another language. Likewise, Cantor’s novel isn’t just an insight into the world of translation as art, but also translation as science. A certain amount of respect and appreciation for the profession of translators develops as one reads Good on Paper, which is only achieved by an accurate depiction of a translator’s world.

Cantor’s research is evident both in the idiosyncrasies Shira exhibits while at work, and in the way that the character describes her own technique. “I use a Buber-Rosenzweig leitwort approach,” she says. “Not as fancy as it sounds. When Buber and Rosenzweig translated the Bible into German, they always translated the same word the same way. They didn’t look for ‘pleasant-sounding’ variations; they didn’t translation ‘according to context’.”

Shira goes on to describe reading Romei’s work as a reader first, and then as a translator, a combination many struggle to achieve, due in part to both a lack of patience and a general misunderstanding of the craft of translation. The descriptions are comprehensive but in no way boring or too detailed, as much of the skills needed for translation are displayed through example. Shira will briefly explain her translation style, before actively working on Romei’s piece, making the information accessible to anybody reading the novel. The short chapters keep readers consuming the novel in the fast-paced way it’s undoubtedly meant to be read.

The novel’s slightly cliché opening—a single mother living in the apartment of her gay best friend—is off-putting at first. Occasionally Shira’s metaphors are heavy-handed and it’s at times hard to bear the unsubtle meta-fiction relationship of her life and translations, but Good on Paper is very much more than its title. A bit of narrative “choppiness,” and a predilection for ludicrous situations, such as Romei discovering Shira in the first place, is made up for entirely with Cantor’s rich characters and compelling storylines. Amidst the search for New Life is a greater truth, which takes shape in the ultimate chapters of the book. This is a love story at heart: love of language, love of mystery, and—above all—love of one another.

Lillian Brown author photoLillian Brown is a recent graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and currently lives in New York. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Sonder Review, Driftwood Press, and Allegro Poetry. She also works with the arts and literary journal, The Missing Slate.

ALMOST EVERYTHING VERY FAST, a novel by Christopher Kloeble, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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Almost Everything Very Fast cover art. Small black outlines of people, trees, a house, and a sun against a yellow background with large green letteringALMOST EVERYTHING VERY FAST
by Christopher Kloeble
translated by Aaron Kerner
Graywolf Press, 306 pages

reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

Like the best coming-of-age stories, Christopher Kloeble’s Almost Everything Very Fast addresses universal concerns by asking personal questions. Nineteen-year-old Albert, raised in an orphanage, wants to know why he was given up by his anonymous mother and the father he knows: Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes, a grown man with a childlike mind. Albert has gotten nowhere by following the “Hansel and Gretel crumbs” he’s found in Fred’s attic: a photo of Fred with a red-haired woman, a few auburn hairs plucked from a comb. When Fred’s terminal illness imposes an urgent deadline, Albert visits him in Königsdorf one last time—but his “infinite questions” lead to still more questions: What is love? In what ways do family ties bind us? Is nurturing natural? Do parents cause their children more harm than good?

In Segendorf, Fred’s ancestral village, to love is to discard. For nearly 400 years, residents have been compelled to hurl their Most Beloved Possessions off the rocky bluff of the highest hill at the annual Sacrificial Festival. During one such celebration in 1912, incestuous (and murderous) twins Jasfe and Josfer Habom conceive a son, Julius, whose birth brings shame but also relief: the baby is not a “Klöble”—the local term for the “clumsy, stupid fellows” who “test a parent’s love.” Unknotted from their lineage—their mother died in childbirth and Josfer kills their disapproving father—they are scorned by hypocritical neighbors in a village where inbreeding is a cultural norm.

Their second child, Anni, orphans herself and her brother by burning down the family’s home with their beloved parents inside. Julius takes off with Wickenhäuser, the town mortician, who offers the boy as a companion to his war-widowed mother Else (Julius’s “first love”), to pay for freedom from filial responsibility. Back home, Anni wastes away until she marries Arkadiusz Driajes and gives birth to the Klöble-esque Fred, rekindling her brother’s covetous love. Meanwhile, Julius impregnates a woman he doesn’t love—the devoted Mina, who gives birth to Ludwig, who will one day marry Klondi, who loves the idea of motherhood but can’t stand the scent of her actual daughter, Marina.

These stories of entwined Bavarian villagers are fragmented, like memory, scattered throughout the book in numbered sections of thematically titled chapters organized by association. But whose mind is arranging these pieces? And what larger picture do they fit? While Albert pursues his origins, this is another puzzle for the reader to solve.

Christopher Kloeble author photo

Christopher Kloeble

Kloeble offers scant clues in the prologue, introducing a narrator who is 80 years old and under nurses’ care, promiscuous with his love and prolific with children, both hopeful and haunted. “I haven’t forgotten a thing,” he says. “I remember the beginning and the end, and all that lies between. I’ve seen a story become history and the other way around.” What’s past is apparently prologue—and, as this still mysterious storyteller implies, the fragments that follow relate to the orphan Albert’s roots, though they’re not related by him. Equally telling as these autobiographical details is a line justifying the book’s nonlinear narrative: “If only they knew what lies ahead of them! The poor things believe that their lives will spool out just the way they’ve imagined. Eventually, they’ll figure out that you can’t set a course for things.”

Kloeble, who is a scriptwriter as well as a novelist, won the 2008 Juergen Ponto-Stiftung prize for best German language debut for his first book, Amongst Loners. And what he attempts here, in his third, is admirable: a plot-twisting, page-turning, nine-part literary mystery spanning four generations and fit into just 306 pages, an economy he achieves by including documents and referencing folklore, fairy tales, and historical events to give the story breadth and depth. Recurring images—such as Else’s bright-white wedding dress, which Julius first offers to his sister Anni and then makes Mina wear like sexy lingerie, and which strangles his young granddaughter Marina to death when she falls from a tree while playing dress up—are like buoys marking underwater charges in a roiling sea of plot.

But while the plot is compelling, its relentless pace and narcissistic narrator (who, fifty pages in, we learn is Julius) create emotional distance; it’s like trying to care about people glimpsed from the window of a speeding train while your travel companion loudly tells his life story. Because Kloeble covers so much ground so quickly, he sometimes has to resort to awkward summaries to reorient the reader or explain characters’ behavior. In this passage, Julius answers the reader’s question about why he pines for his sister but doesn’t return home to her:

The longing for Anni was like an invisible thread coiled around my chest. Now and then it was as if she tugged on it, so that my heart throbbed and I was afraid I might forget her. Then I’d ask myself why I hadn’t tried to make contact with her by now, and I answered that it was impossible: there was no mail delivery to Segendorf, Wickenhäuser’s next excursion south was beyond the horizon, and I was much too young to travel on my own. Looking back, I think these were only excuses to salve a guilty conscience. The real reason was that I preferred Schweretsried to Segendorf. Even if I had to sacrifice the proximity of my sister.

Albert’s surrogate mother at the orphanage, Sister Alfonsa, gives chess lessons lost on Albert, who uses his “chess notebook” to imagine maternal reunions and list the reasons a “perilously stupid” mother might desert her child. As Albert closes in on his personal mystery, his anger is gradually transformed to empathy. But Albert’s coming-of- age story is entangled with Julius’s self-serving retrospection; an orphan’s point of view directs the reader’s gaze, presenting the elderly Else’s death, Anni’s refusal to indulge her brother’s incestuous desire, Klondi’s indifferent mothering, and Alfonsa’s independence as collective evidence of female abandonment. As disturbing as the casual cruelties the novel depicts—sexual coercion, bullying, rape—is its depiction of these female characters, who express themselves in primitive ways while the tiresome narrator pontificates. Anni starves herself and washes obsessively; Else speaks in grunted syllables; Klondi tries to record her story but can only produce a blank tape.

Near the end of the book, Julius recalls pig farmer Markus, an autodidact who reinvents himself as a Nazi figure obsessed with the racial integrity of the German nation. “I understood that I couldn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t be the way I’d been any longer,” says Markus. “Because almost everything goes by very fast. A love. Our lives. Simply all of it! There’s not a lot of time. Anyone who doesn’t comprehend that will get lost in hopes and memories and die without ever having lived. The books opened my eyes, I came to understand what I love you really meant: to accept myself. Because that’s the first step toward growth. You have to realize who you are.” The old man offers the story as if to justify his own past betrayals, but it’s flimsy scaffolding for Germany’s historical crimes.

Ultimately, Kloeble’s ambition is undermined by overwrought sentiment, which evokes Goethe’s questing young Werther, but is too pervasive to blame on Albert (or Kloeble’s translator, Aaron Kerner). Adolescent narcissism is a hallmark of Albert’s developmental stage—and in the best coming-of-age narratives, authentic depiction of this temporary, transitional state of mind contributes to the work’s success. But Kloeble’s book suffers in the hands of an adolescent old man, who aspires to profundity though he’s perplexingly shallow.

Elizabeth Mosier author photoElizabeth Mosier is a novelist and essayist. Her reviews have appeared most recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer and Cleaver. Her essay “Believers” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015, Read more at www.ElizabethMosier.com.

THE LAST WEYNFELDT, a novel by Martin Suter, reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

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The Last Weynfeldt cover art. Abstract art of a nude woman sitting on a yellow carpet in front of a fireplaceTHE LAST WEYNFELDT
by Martin Suter
translated by Steph Morris
New Vessel Press, 302 pages

reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

Martin Suter’s The Last Weynfeldt is an impressive work of intrigue and beauty. It sparks at the intersection of two very different people, Adrian Weynfeldt, mid-fifties, internationally renowned art expert, and Lorena, a shoplifting, small-time model who rips Adrian from his carefully crafted still life.

Adrian earns his living by putting a “fair” price on beauty, authenticity, and originality. Lorena, often an anonymous commodity as a model, is also a thief, a woman who never pays society’s agreed upon price. And it’s through these differences—along with a whole host of other artists, liars, grifters, and moochers—that Suter brings out the novel’s central conflict between authenticity and forgery, the mass-produced and the one-of-a-kind.

Of Lorena, Suter asks what does it do to a person to be dismissed as little more than copy or commodity:

In the streetcar to the exhibition center [Lorena] took a free newspaper from the dispenser and sat down cautiously on one of the hard seats.

Her picture was on the cover. Wrapped around the Ducelli in a provocative pose, with a seductive look for the camera. The caption read: “Superbike with ultra-transparent chassis and high-torque motor: the new Ducelli 7312.”

She read the article carefully; she wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the main text either. Not even as an accessory, not even as something which stopped you from getting a good look at the bike. It was as if she didn’t exist.

But just as Lorena longs to exist, to matter to someone, to matter to herself, Adrian is only too happy to remain locked up in the tradition-built cages of routine and old money.

Martin Suter author photo

Martin Suter

The Swiss Suter’s style in Steph Morris’s translation fits Adrian perfectly. Each chapter is a neat, easily digestible morsel, one you might imagine Adrian savoring while dining out with one of his various lunch clubs. And Suter’s prose is at once lush enough to relish and so confining as to make you want to elbow your way into a larger room, free from all the suffocating smoke of “polite society.”

For while these gilded cages may have been built by his predecessors, it’s Adrian who keeps the confining bars standing thick about himself—in his formal, sometimes (unintentionally) condescending manner of speech; in the oily (however well-meaning) way he tosses money around to avoid even the slightest whiff of conflict or discomfort; in the way he traps himself in the past by refusing to learn how to use a computer or carry a cellphone; in the way he confines himself to a life of complete dependency by never learning how to cook, clean, or even dress himself, turning instead to chefs, ancient housekeepers, and fussy, high-end tailors. Indeed,

Weynfeldt never went to an effort. He left that to Frau Hauser. She would prepare what she called “a morsel”—tiny canapés with salmon, foie gras, roast beef, viande des Grison, lobster garnished with homegrown oat- and lentil sprouts and radishes. For dessert there would be more morsels, this time sweet—éclairs, mille feuilles and the whole pâtisserie repertoire, all in dollhouse proportions.

That is, until Adrian, against his usual routine, ends up inviting the half-drunk Lorena back to his place for the night, only to wake up and find her teetering on his balcony, threatening to kill herself. If she had killed herself, perhaps that would’ve closed the book on Adrian’s story, giving him an excuse to sink ever deeper into his plush prison. But she doesn’t. And, as Lorena herself is quick to point out, since Adrian isn’t responsible for her death, he’s now responsible for her life.

She looked up at the gray sky. “The weather certainly wasn’t worth staying alive for.”

“Anything else?”

“What else then?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “There’s always something worth staying alive for.”

She stared at him intently. “Can you guarantee me that?”

“Guaranteed.”

But even as Adrian comes to know a new way of seeing the world through Lorena, he soon finds himself yanked out, onto a teetering edge by an act of forgery in a world that, as Adrian only then begins to realize, is itself filled with forgeries.

K.C. Mead Brewer author photo

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, Hobart, and elsewhere. As a reader, she loves everything weird—surrealism, sci-fi, horror, all the good stuff that shows change is not only possible, but inevitable. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.

HERE COME THE DOGS, a novel by Omar Musa, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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Here Come the Dogs cover art. White text over a raging orange fireHERE COME THE DOGS
by Omar Musa
The New Press, 330 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

You had to be there. Right? That’s how these things work—the magic of moments strung together, a shared lexicon, the bond of shared origins. Omar Musa’s brilliant first novel Here Come The Dogs unpicks the rough, multifaceted hip-hop culture of small-town Australia. Immediate and compelling, this one deserves a place on the shelf next to Trainspotting or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Both a snapshot of a specific time and place, and an examination of the broadness of humanity, Here Come The Dogs is filled with stinging insights, delivered in freestyle and lyric prose.

In hip-hop, context is everything. Those who know, know. Inside that world—word battles and swag weed—a man can be a prince if he spits good rhyme. Outside, it’s a different story. The guy dominating the mic last night is waiting to wash your car windows this morning. Who is underneath the shiny props and thick black tattoos?

Solomon, Jimmy, and Aleks—one Samoan, one Macedonian, and one unknown—waste time being cool in small ways. They’re half-assing it, diverting their hustle to greater things in the way that artists do. One has a part-time dishwashing gig, one plays the middle man for the local drug traders. Around them, the world is shrinking into a shape that doesn’t have space for three men like them. “Every fire dies, every story, every star, every town. Every nation? Childhoods are macadamed beneath asphalt and paint rolls, but just for other childhoods to exist. This, the nature of change, of modernity.” The friends struggle at the fringes to keep their fire alive.

It’s a shit life, and they know it, but at the same time, what’s the alternative? Their words make them powerful—turn them into a secret tribe. You had to be there, the rhymes assert. Who’s the outsider? Who doesn’t get it, now?

Omar Musa author photo

Omar Musa

The author, Omar Musa, plays with the same boundaries that vex his characters. Hip-hop’s power is in its ability to dignify struggle, and Musa gives his troublesome three every ounce of respect he can. Perspective is everything, and he puts things in perspective—no talking down, no transforming characters into symbols, no impersonations. Here Come The Dogs takes on race, class, baby’s mamas, dead-end jobs, respecting your parents or telling them to sod off, being the only black man in class, dropping out, tagging the tampon dispenser in the public bathroom, seeking the side door into something better.

This will all sound like familiar territory to hip-hop aficionados—the cadence of Musa’s language, his characters’ friendly-competitive banter—but Musa takes it deeper. The catalyst is a one-eyed racing greyhound named Mercury Fire. On a whim, Solomon buys the dog after its last race. Never mind that he’s crashing with his mother and has nowhere to keep the dog. Never mind feeding it, exercising it. He and his friends are figuring out what they can and can’t maintain. They’re deciding whether to leave Australia or stay; whether to heal the torn places in themselves or go on bleeding. Aleks contends with his wife’s post-partum depression. Jimmy, with his loneliness. Like the racing hound, they’re all losing their edge.

Like him,
I used to run and run,
from here to the stone gazebo
on the edge of the park
and back again, to keep lean …

A pointless struggle,
actors in a strange tragedy
where the winner never wins,
……..never gets its prey.

The language, alternately tender and sharp, goads the story along. Musa is quick to remind us that, although his characters and their suburban landscape may feel familiar, this isn’t an ordinary story. This isn’t what you expected—and neither is the author himself, a Malaysian-Australian rapper and poet with three albums and a TedTalk under his belt. The goodness of this novel is no accident. Each turn of phrase is measured, perfectly describing the cage bars that Solomon bends, a millimeter at a time.

Both foreign and familiar, Here Come the Dogs explores the fine distinctions between thug life, real life, hip-hop, rap, and the game of moving seamlessly between them.

Claire Rudy Foster author photoClaire Rudy Foster lives in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her critically recognized short fiction has appeared in various respected journals and she has been honored by several small presses, including a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.

A HAND REACHED DOWN TO GUIDE ME by David Gates reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

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A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me cover art. An upside-down photo of a telephone pole against a darkening blue skyA HAND REACHED DOWN TO GUIDE ME
by David Gates
Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages

reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

It’s December and you may be looking for a holiday read (with a bang).

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is a short story collection that offers a rare pleasure: the possibility of reading it cover to cover, leaping from one story to the next.

Some readers, including this one, may want to protest the gallery of rogue characters David Gates presents in this new collection perhaps enough to wonder who Gates hangs out with. I’m reminded of the scene from the film Ocean’s 11 when Julia Roberts’ character says to George Clooney, who plays Danny Ocean, “Your problem is you’ve met too many people like you.” Some of these characters’ habits and inclinations, reflections and bitter asides, are just this side of depraved (or perhaps for some people, the other side of depraved). Indeed, the people in Gates’ stories can wear a bit, with their biting sarcasm and world-weariness.

Yet there is no denying the sure hand behind these stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker and the Paris Review. Gates knows his characters so well that the descriptions and stories feel chiseled like sculpture. In the case of Lily, the protagonist of the story “A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens,” one is tempted to think Gates has compiled a fictitious Netflix account for her. Clearly he’s had the fortune or misfortune of knowing exactly the kind of families who send their children to Brearley, Dalton, and other New York City private schools. The kind of families who know people called Portia and who can be found “doing coke…in the bathroom at Portia’s wedding.” Lily lives in Brooklyn Heights, and casually mentions at one point sharing “a taxi back to Brooklyn with Portia’s married boyfriend” and then sharing some illicit affection, which sets off a torrent of emails from the boyfriend.

While much attention has been paid to Gates’ male protagonists, in this collection and other works, the author has a special affinity for sketching modern female characters. And Lily is perhaps a prototypical example. She is jaded, yes, and cynical and at a very tender age has already acquired enough vices to make the story nearly feel transgressive for the reader who is merely reading. While house-sitting for one of these tony New York-area families (in a suburban nowhere-place “where nothing ever happens,” as the title goes), she finds endless ways to deviate, and self-sabotage. And yet while Gates has been criticized for his somewhat misogynistic depiction of women, Lily is the embodiment of many modern women who are as self-centered as men can be, and who abuse alcohol and drugs, and treat sex like a bodily function rather than a guilty pleasure/obligation/sacred act to dance around.

David Gates author photo

David Gates

Gates, for his part, appears never to have believed for a second those feminists who suggested a world run by women would be one without war (it may or may not be true; but such a cloyingly patronizing attitude reduces women’s complexity.) And understandably so, given that the British newspaper, the Independent, has called Gates “a master of messy awfulness.” He’s perhaps best-known as the author of the 1991 novel Jernigan, which The New York Times called “astonishing” and which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He’s been compared to Samuel Beckett, which is appropriate since Gates has studied Beckett extensively, having written a dissertation on him. Gates, himself, in an interview with The Iowa Review, has cited inspirations as diverse as John Cheever to Raymond Carver to Ann Beattie (to whom he was married at one point).

His other works include the 1998 novel Preston Falls and the 1999 short story collection The Wonders of the Invisible World, both of which were nominated for National Book Critics Circle awards.

Readers have seen some of these awful characters before, and not just in Gates’ work. As writer Ross Simonini of The Believer has said, Gates’ stock characters are people who “in reality would be considered rude, intellectually arrogant and aggressively opinionated.” But readers like them! And not a lot here is old hat. That’s partially because Gates, in this new collection, seems to suggest all of us humans are flawed individuals who will paw our way toward our ultimate destinies, regardless of how virtuous or unvirtuous – or pedigreed (or degreed) for that matter – our lives may be. Given these characters and the deeply-read author behind them, one can easily imagine the message here is: ‘Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.’ Perhaps, with the added glee of sticking that message especially to accomplished, well-educated literary types and aging academics who throw out references to Milton and the composer Franz Liszt, of which the collection abounds. But perhaps there is some hope, some nuance, some novelty in knowing that the mighty fall, and the unmighty, too, in sometimes surprising ways.

Indeed, there is little that is conventional about his approach. Gates likes to flip the script, as they say, or manipulate our expectations. In the story “Desecrators,” we learn almost immediately that the main character, Cal, a journalist living in New York City, is cheating on his wife. In fact, the opening scenes show him saying goodbye to his daughter, Cammy (that dog!), renting a convertible at the Hertz concession and picking up his paramour, who’d told her boyfriend she had an out-of-town reporting gig.

As he arrives in front of her building, Cal looks Margaret over and says, “We like the nips.” She responds by grabbing “a handful of t-shirt on each side” and after pulling her shirt tighter, she says, “Externals.” A few lines later, we read, “’You’re completely evil,’” she said. ‘I want your cock in my mouth.’” Cal replies, “Here and now….or just on principle?” Well then! This not a short story that will give rise to a new franchise of “The Thin Man.”

But things are not as they appear. A few pages into the story, as Cal and Margaret are enjoying their weekend getaway at a secluded cabin, he calls home to talk to his school-age daughter. His wife answers, and when she passes the phone to their daughter, Cal says, “No problems, right? I know you can’t really talk.” Wait a minute. What’s going on here? A page later, Gates tells us that after Cal married Fran, he “quit the Ph.D. program and stopped playing music, like some Jane Austen lady who’d hooked a husband and no longer needed her accomplishments.” Then we find out Cal took a job as an editor of a weekly paper when Cammy was three years old, shortly before Fran had her “first rehab” stint. On first read, the mind reels at the word ‘rehab.” On second read, one notices the modifier ‘first.’ That’s one way to flip the script.

Cal is not by any means the only male protagonist in Gates’ stories or the only appealing one, but his women characters are the ones that stand out. This is clear from the first story in the collection, which is a fast-paced novella that clocks in at 90 pages. Here Gates gives us a decadent tour of a second marriage between two people who know what they are doing, and what they are doing is living gluttonous, hedonistic lives. The story is told from the perspective of a middling, part-time journalist who upon meeting an older, eccentric, misogynistic artist she’s covering for a story quickly decides to ditch her nice husband and embark on an affair. Needless to say, nearly everyone in the novella is a rogue, women included, of course. The result is writing that is wicked and witty. The novella might represent Gates at the heights of his storytelling capabilities, and is a perfect prelude to the rest of the collection.

Jeanne Bonner author photoJeanne Bonner is a freelance writer and editor, and a candidate for an M.F.A. in Fiction from Bennington College. A nonfiction essay she wrote called “I Come Bearing Gifts, Amore Mio,” was awarded Honorable Mention by Writer’s Digest as part of its annual writing contest this year. Another essay, on the importance of work, will be published in an anthology next year by the HerStories Project. Her poetry and nonfiction travel essays have appeared in Mothers Always Write and Afar.com, respectively. She lives in Atlanta, where until last year she was an NPR station reporter.

WAR, SO MUCH WAR by Mercè Rodoreda TRISTANO DIES by Antonio Tabucchi A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION by José Eduardo Agualusa THE THINGS WE DON’T DO by Andrés Neuman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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Cover art for the four books. For War, So Much War, white branches against a solid green background. For Tristano Dies, a painting of a person's face. For The Things We Don't Do, vertical orange and blue stripes against a white background. For A General Theory of Oblivion, a painting of a crowd.CONSEQUENCES: Four Books in Translation
reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

WAR, SO MUCH WAR
by Mercè Rodoreda, translation by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennant
Open Letter, 185 pages

TRISTANO DIES
by Antonio Tabucchi, translation by Elizabeth Harris
Archipelago, 192 pages

THE THINGS WE DON’T DO
by Andrés Neuman, translation by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
Open Letter, 190 pages

A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION
by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn
Archipelago, 246 pages

Once in a while a writer speaks to me as if we are in a kind of private ecstatic embrace. That is the kind of reader I am: thirsty for intimacy, for communion. In dialogue, I answer back as best I can.

I spent much of last year with Traveler of the Century (FSG, 2012), Andrés Neuman’s lost and found allegory of the nineteenth century, bildungsroman of modernity, eyes tearing with fraternity. Here was the brother (older and wiser) of Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press), a novel I had published the year before.

Now Neuman has nudged me into a new conversation, about constructing narrative, in a series of conceptual stories and experimental situations collected in The Things We Don’t Do, in the English translation by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. Neuman whispers as he writes about writing, the place of the writer in the reader’s field of vision, and holds out a hand as he wanders through the borderland of experience, writerly self-awareness, and invention. “We have become such hybrid authors that any day now we’ll make a purist revolution” (a counter-revolution probably more accurately), he writes, one of a series of “dodecalogues” of interpretation and observation that follow the stories in the new collection.

As Neuman plays with form, Caistor and Garcia, his English translators, demonstrate extraordinary range and interpretive capacity, and they must: translation as a theme runs through his work—the heroes of Traveler of the Century fall in love translating poetry. Neuman’s stories in fact speak in various tongues at once. In “Piotr Czerny’s Last Poem,” a secret poet loses his entire oeuvre in a fire. The fire—both destructive force and fuel of imagination—saves him amateur embarrassment and provides an “electric shock” of inspiration. In “Embrace,” with a scent of Poe, Neuman observes the consequences of guilt after a mugging that leaves one friend injured and the other unharmed.

In “Monologue of a Monster,” a three-paragraph allegory on precision, the killer of a child parses impulse, intent, and consequence. “You don’t decide to kill a child. At most,” he says,

you decide to clench your teeth or tense your muscles. To aim at the head or lower the barrel. To open your hand or squeeze your forefinger a little. No more than that. Afterward the consequences flood in at once.

Writer, word choice matters, elbows Neuman. Words have power and words have meaning. “Your curiosity is not the same as your decision. An impulse is not the same as a sentence. Anxiety is not the same as hatred. From not paying attention to these nuances, I did what I did.” (The delightfully playful Neuman has a killer chide writers about word choice, as if to laugh at the overseriousness of the literary enterprise.)

You, too, Reader, says Neuman, listen to the killer: we really don’t ever know the consequences of our actions, for ourselves, for others. Now this is serious:

For us to be responsible for our actions, it would be only fair to be asked for approval one by one. Reality ought to ask us: Do you accept making this movement? Very well, now do you agree that your movement causes this other one?

Andrés Neuman author photo

Andrés Neuman

These questions, from the mind of a cold-blooded killer, help us consider the much broader—and yet deeply personally penetrating—consequences of mass violence and war. Three other new works of fiction in translation—José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, Mercè Rodoreda’s War, So Much War, and Antonio Tabucchi’s Tristano Dies—plant Neuman’s seed in epic twentieth century battle fields.

President, terrorist, commander, do you accept making this movement?

With the Syrian crisis—truly the consequence of deliberate actions stretching back at least to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq—on everyone’s mind, it’s useful to think about the hand on the trigger. The consequences, as we see them spilling across our screens, as these three novels remind us, are unpredictable.

While penetrating darkness, evil, squalor, uncertainty, and disgust, these works, too, are formal literary experiments in narrative structure. Agualusa, Rodoreda, and Tabucchi each evoke wartime existential fragmentation and its interpersonal consequences (on mental health, on relationships) by punching through the traditional narrative wall.

Antonio Tabbuci author photo

Antonio Tabbuci

Tabucchi, author of some two dozen novels and books of translation before his death from cancer in 2012, splits the elderly, dying Tristano, the narrator of the novel, into three: the man himself with faltering memory; “Tristano,” an objectified third person hero; and a “writer,” called to the dying man’s bedside to record his soupy memories. In her translation of the book, which was originally published in 2004, in Italian, Elizabeth Harris affects this soupiness, a consequence of Tristano’s age and illness, but also the profound confusion of the post-war mind, “the ache of the headache sea, like a blowing bellows that you’re sitting on, swaying.” Tabucchi’s prose swoons like this, with a fatal, melancholic tone, consciousness puffing and draining, puffing and draining.

Tristano, like Neuman’s murderer, finds himself as a young man with a finger on the trigger. An Italian soldier in Athens, ally of Germany occupiers, he watches a young boy “bundled in an enormous military coat that dragged along the ground” pushing a bicycle across a square, defiantly whistling a resistance song. A German soldier loads his submachine gun and kills the boy and then a woman dressed in black, who has stepped into the square, releasing a scream of damnation. Tristano raises his “regulation musket” and kills the German. “And like magic,” recalls the dying man, “Plaka came to life, and men appeared out of nowhere, because some unforeseen stagehand like Tristano had decided it was time…”

…through death, life had resumed at an uncontrollable pace, because that’s how life is, and history’s what follows, you ever think of it that way, writer?…

Now a traitor, Tristano is saved by a woman named Daphne, who hides him. Daphne’s friends help him escape to the Peleponnese Mountains to join the partisan resistance. Later, after southern Italy is liberated September 8, 1943, he returns home. “He imagined his entire life, until it became memory.” As time goes by, in memory, Tristano and Daphne are lovers and Tristano a hero of the resistance.

In memory, Tristano abandons Daphne after lovemaking, promising to return. “Sometimes someone does something all the same and he doesn’t know why,” says the dying man, “…and then he spends the rest of his life with it gnawing away at his conscious.” He has a son, who may or may not be his, with a Spanish woman, Rosamundo, who he also calls Marilyn. He rejects the boy; he balls up in consequences.

 

Mercè Rodoreda author photo

Mercè Rodoreda

Adrià Guinart is about fourteen when he joins the fighting in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, in Rodoreda’s War, So Much War, originally published in Catalan in 1980 and now in English for the first time. Rodoreda’s life and work are tied up in that conflict. During the war, as a prominent republican intellectual, she was exiled to other parts of Europe and stopped writing. She came out with Time of the Doves, the most beloved Catalan novel, in 1960.

Open Letter has previously produced new English translations of Rodoreda’s Selected Stories and Death in Spring; these and War, So Much War have been translated by Martha Tennent, American-born resident of Barcelona, the setting for Time of the Doves. That novel’s denouement—the primal scream of war-tortured Natalia—is memorialized by a sculpture in the Plaça del Diamant, in the neighborhood of Gràcia.

Not far into the novel, Adrià’s regiment is told to withdraw. It isn’t ever clear, according to the narrative, which side he is on—only hints at religious belief may indicate that the boy is on the Fascist side. Ideology as a reason for the war is never apparent, possibly because Adrià, who tends his family’s carnation fields on the outskirts of Barcelona, is too young to have formulated political sentiment. “The locked houses,” he says of home, “the dead windows, the balconies with the shadows of hanging flowers, the cool nocturnal water of a fountain in a square, a stone bench at the entrance to a house: They were my companions.” He has joined the war because an older boy, Rossend, “the junkman’s son,” wouldn’t stop talking about it.

Like Tristano, Adrià encounters a woman, Eva, who becomes his Daphne, an impossible dream, an apparition (among the countless ghosts of the war landscape). Eva, who “had never liked people who loved her. To Love her was to shackle her, it didn’t allow her to move.” He finds her and loses her—each successive time loosening his grip on certain reality. This is the reader’s feeling. Rodoreda’s prose, in the soft whisper of the internal facing the external, is often hypnotic and here she is at her best, producing a feeling, not unlike the Provencal writer of the same era, Jean Giono, of silent ecstasy. “The night was glassy,” says Adrià,

littered with dead stars; the moon was high, bluer than the icy snow of the celestial cemetery. The grass was damp. The mountain—black silhouette against the black gleam of night—beckoned.

Adrià follows the sky; he steals eggs; he gets beaten, as if a spy; people find him: the jealous, suicidal Isabella, the man imprisoned in the castle, the old man without teeth, “uvula red as fire,” the woman carrying her dead son, the farmer beating the dog, the sadistic woman of the forest. War, So Much War laps at the reader, but without much plot-driven propulsive energy. And yet it hasn’t any of Time of the Dove’s almost catatonic passivity. Adrià, however, loses himself. “A great sadness like an iron hand clutched my heart,” he says near the end, unsure why he has been put through the war.

“Can anyone tell me why we are fighting?” asks a laborer Adrià encounters. This question vexes Adrià as he imagines returning to the carnation field as someone not himself. It badgers Tabucchi’s Tristano. Rodoreda cuts off her narrative at the end of the war, but Tabucchi has to face the product of the freedom Tristano had fought for: soulless modern commercial culture, what Tabucchi’s colleague Italo Calvino calls “the inferno of the living.” Tristano calls it “pippopippi, with the solemn goal of obliterating from the mind…any sign of meaning.”

Andrés Neuman’s stories take place in Argentina, where he is from, and Europe (he lives in Spain). In “Man Shot,” the man, Moyano, is blindfolded in front of an Argentinian firing squad, “the most logical thing to happen in Argentina.” Moyano hears the gunfire: “That ought to have been the last sound, but he heard something more.”

José Eduardo Agualusa author photo

José Eduardo Agualusa

Moyano’s survival is mirrored in a scene early in José Eduardo Agualusa’s 2013 novel A General Theory of Oblivion, released this month in the bright English translation by Daniel Hahn. Jeremias Carrasco, a Portuguese mercenary fighting on the colonialist’s side during the prolonged and particularly bloody 1970s Angolan War for Independence, has been caught by the communist-nationalist operator, Monte, who points out that Carrasco, ironically, means executioner. Monte turns away as a single soldier lackadaisically opens fire on Jeremias. He misses. Jeremias opens his eyes to read, in graffiti on the wall: “The struggle continues.”

As Agualusa hints, the Portuguese struggle for Angola, the most recent intensive colonization of an African republic by a European power, endures, at least in Portuguese literature and film. Agualusa’s book joins António Lobo Antunes’s magisterial The Splendor of Portugal (Dalkey Archive Press), and the 2012 film Tabu, by director Miguel Gomes. In all three cases, an elderly Portuguese woman carries the burden of colonization.

A General Theory of Oblivion’s elderly lady is a real person, Ludovica Fernandes Mano, who at the start of the Angolan war shut herself in her apartment, writing on her walls in charcoal, and stayed there for twenty-eight years. She died in 2010.

Agualusa was asked to turn Ludovica’s story into a screenplay for a film. This project fell through, but the book that he produced instead carries with it the intricacy of a thriller plot. Like the other writers here, Agualusa plays with the novel form, adapting Ludovica’s diaries and punctuating the narrative with fictional versions of her poetry.

Even the light seems strange to me.
Too much light.
Certain colors ought not to occur in a healthy sky.

Ludovica’s madness is the dark heart of the novel. She kills an intruder and buries him on the terrace, eats Che Guevara, the monkey she befriends and feeds, burns the books for heat, and writes on the walls because she’s burned all the paper. “Death circles around me, shows its teeth, snarls,” writes Ludovica. “I kneel down and offer it my bare throat.”

She is ground down, as Tristano and Adrià, but in the dust of her, and blindness, is some kind of incipient enduring humanity, brought out eventually by a Luandan street urchin who climbs scaffolding to break into the apartment. He is the first in decades to see Ludovica—and he saves her after a fall.

Ludovica’s self-imprisonment is a consequence, in part, of the spiral of war that leaps from resistance to colonialism to ideological confrontation—with Cubans supplementing Angolans fighters—dictatorship, corruption, and exploitation. The only hero, aside from the boy, Sabalu, who saves Ludovica, is a nurse, Madalena. “You and your friends fill your mouths with big words,” the woman says,

“Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution—and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don’t feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables and a good fish broth, at least once a week. I’m only interested in the kinds of revolution that start off by getting people to the table.”

Agualusa’s potent skill as a storyteller is in circling each of the characters as they adapt to war and instability. Everyone is victim. Everyone is aggressor. Everyone rots in a rat filled jail and everyone, eventually, finds their way to an upscale apartment block. During war and its aftermath, when all that was is demolished, people come together and split apart primordially. Return to rabid nature might be the immediate consequence of war. Humans adapt to the scars. In that moment, they make literature.

“I realize I have transformed the entire apartment into a huge book,” writes Ludovica in charcoal on the wall of her apartment as Luanda tears itself apart and reforms around her. “After burning the library, after I have died, all that remains will be my voice.”

Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

STUMBLING OUT THE STABLE by Sean Pravica reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

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Stumbling out of the Stable cover art. A wax figure sits with is hands on his neck against a black backgroundSTUMBLING OUT THE STABLE
by Sean Pravica
Pelekinesis Press, 436 pages

reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

In his short stories, Sean Pravica often prefers the magical real and the weird over realism. In his debut novel Stumbling Out the Stable, however, Pravica steps up to a more classic literary endeavor: to find (and not shy away from) meaning in the everyday. For Pravica’s characters in Stumbling, this “meaning” is found between the gods of order and chaos—not simply in their conflicts, but in the strange beauty of their creative harmony.

The novel crackles with the nervous energy of this crossroads between order and chaos, between the dream of freedom and the fear of aimlessness, between the desire for something new and the temptation to remain safe in practical routine. It is at this crossroads that Pravica introduces us to his leading men, the debt-riddled college student-philosopher-photographer Seamus and Seamus’ best friend, Jamie. “What if taking neither path was the best decision?” wonders Seamus,

“The more as well as the less traveled were both born from the same split decision. What if movement was nipped in the bud? Was that not It, content already, seams tied shut, wounds healed, stasis realized?”

The fog was clearing. Seamus knew it.

A young man who aspires to become a photojournalist hitchhiker after graduation (though he already bums rides everywhere he goes), Seamus is still adjusting to the possibilities now opening before him, a world of sense and senselessness, normalcy and absurdity. Pravica gives us this world in still life:

[Seamus] imagined all the daytime life he wanted to capture through his lens. He wanted contrasts, but he also just wanted visual oddities. He wanted the mundane world around him to sparkle with the gilded edges of Its illuminating energy. He wanted to show, through his pictures, what It was, and moreover, what It was not. He wanted his photography to break away the layers of daily failure he was becoming so accustomed to, each class more questionable than the last, each future day more distant, more uncertain, more unrealized.

The creeping chaos haunts Seamus even as it fuels the fearless, shameless Jamie. Together they try every drug they can get their hands on, get drunk on booze and their own philosophies, take lovers and lose lovers, suffer the peculiar deaths of friends once- and twice-removed, and generally search for significance in the everyday, for some mark of purposefulness and meaning amid all the seeming randomness.

In Seamus and Jamie’s escapades, I find myself chimed back to old love affairs with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, with stories of young, ridiculous men hungry to escape, to get a foothold somewhere, to be cool, to find love, to puzzle out all the mysteries of the world before they hit thirty. These tricksters are timeless. They fall down and pick themselves up again and again, their creative and adaptive powers seemingly endless. And though they may cause us to roll our eyes at their grandstanding and self-indulgence, it is impossible to deny their enduring charisma built of humor and hopefulness, the charisma of finding meaning in the everyday.

Sean Pravica author photo

Sean Pravica

Seamus and Jamie, together with their eclectic coworkers, spend their days at the Singing Pines Country Club working wedding receptions. Their regular day-in and day-out existence thus consists of the set-up and strike-down of someone else’s most special day, packed with the theater of first dances, bouquet tosses, and cake-cuttings—preprogrammed moments we all try so hard to imbue with extra, perhaps even artificial, meaning and significance. But in these champagne-filching busboys, we’re forced to see the truth of things laid bare. We’re forced to see what everyone would deem singular and special, even sacred, become just another part of someone’s day, just another napkin set on just another table for just another dinner.

And here again we find the ultimate driver of Seamus’ story: a desire for (and fear of) some greater meaning met by a buffer of carefully maintained irreverence. In Stumbling Out the Stable, Seamus is forced to struggle with this buffer, with the growing pains of becoming more than just a passenger in his own life.

“So,” Jamie says to Seamus,

“You’d be like a philosophizing, hitchhiking photographer? That’s what you want to do with your degree?” … Jamie smoked more and stared longer. Then, with a voice slowly rising in volume and enthusiasm, “That has to be the coolest thing I have ever heard of!”

Irreverence, it seems, holds meaning in its own right.

K.C. Mead Brewer author photo

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, Hobart, and elsewhere. As a reader, she loves everything weird—surrealism, sci-fi, horror, all the good stuff that shows change is not only possible, but inevitable. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.

FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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Fat City cover art. A man walks in front of city storefronts with large advertisementsFAT CITY
by Leonard Gardner
introduction by Denis Johnson
New York Review Books, 191 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

We steal. Writers do. A good writer is a magpie, searching other people’s sentences for something that glimmers. A good writer reads with a jeweler’s loupe. Close reading, and the willingness to borrow shamelessly from other people’s works, is what differentiates the casual writer from the serious writer. Very serious writers find other writers’ reading lists, and read them. And then those writers’ lists, their influences. And so on back. Read up the chain. Understanding what a writer reads, and how they read it, can give deep insight into the craft of storytelling. But getting inside means finding the book that matters most; the one that changed everything. Fat City by Leonard Gardner is one of these. It’s cited as a major influence by writers like Denis Johnson and Joan Didion. Ever heard of it? Me neither.

Like its main characters—two perpetually out-of-luck boxers—Fat City is the best book you’ve never read. It resists hype in a way that’s refreshing. In an age that lives for the reboot—J.K. Rowling’s return to YA fiction, Harper Lee’s lost manuscript, yet another volume of the Game of Thrones series—this slim, unpretentious novel comes from an era when fiction did not have to be flashy to be read and respected. The trim sentences create neat sketches of Stockton, California and the fly-by-nights who clutter its gyms, weekly hotels, lunchrooms, and dark bars.

Gardner’s restraint is reminiscent of John Steinbeck, whose novels Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat dignified the shallow, unhappy lives of the vagrants of Monterey, California. Published in 1969, Fat City makes no allusion to its period in history. There’s no mention of the massive social changes taking in America in the late 1960s. There’s no talk of brotherhood and equality, either. Gardner’s characters become equals when they enter the boxing ring; otherwise, they go aimlessly from tomato field to short-order station, passing time until they can get in shape for their next fight.

Leonard Gardner author photo

Leonard Gardner, 1969

Ernie Munger and Billy Tully, though at different points in their boxing careers—if you can call such disappointing feints a ‘career’—have one thing in common. They can fight. In fact, it may be the only thing they can do. Ernie, at 23, and Billy, newly 30, both possess the singlemindedness that enables some people to map the shores of undiscovered continents or build powerful cameras that explore the reaches of outer space. They can punch, and be punched, and while they’re in the ring, everything makes sense. Then, the world is the right size, and all they have to do is win. After a fight, “Tully was free of the sense of impending ordeal that had been with him for weeks. He felt whole, self-sufficient, felt his life had at last opened up and that now nothing stood between him and the future’s infinite possibilities. Already he was moving into that unknown and it was good, because it was his own life, untrammeled by any other.”

His problems are waiting for him, however. The problem isn’t with the fight; it’s the lack of fight. Filling the problematic time between matches takes each man further from the ring. Neither can seem to apply the same dogged determination in any other part of his life. Ernie and Billy make half-hearted jabs at being good husbands, fathers, employees. Of course, any investment in those other things will take them out of the ring—and any success in the ring will take them away from the rest of life. Their talent evaporates, leaving them sullen and disappointed.

Billy Tully’s half of Fat City is especially dark. While his early track record looked promising, he was momentarily flush, but things rapidly go against his favor.

Fat City cover art from the 1969 edition. A sign spells out the title in neon letters

Fat City, 1969 Cover

“He had not realized the ability and local fame he had then was all he was going to have … ,” writes Gardner. “After six months, he fought once more and was knocked out by a man of no importance at all. Then he began to wish for someone who could give him back that newly-wed wholeness and ease, but it was a feeling he could not find again, and he knew now that his mistake had been in thinking he could.”

He loses a job driving a truck, and another one at a box factory. He drinks too much. He finds women who drink like he does, and makes his money topping onions in the fields outside Stockton. He sleeps in doorways when his hotel rooms change their padlocks. He’s perpetually confused about how he’s fallen so far; how his life got this way. Ernie, at the beginning of his downward trajectory, has yet to taste this kind of bitterness, but it’s coming. We know it’s coming, from the moment he’s laced into his gloves. We feel sorry for him.

Fat City is a story that sticks tight. It’s Gardner’s only novel, made into a film by John Huston in 1972. Gardner went on to write for NYPD Blue, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review and Esquire. He is a former Guggenheim fellow, a native of Stockton, and one of the more gifted writers working today. Read what he reads. Steal from him. Steal it, every last punch.

Claire Rudy Foster author photoClaire Rudy Foster lives in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her critically recognized short fiction has appeared in various respected journals and she has been honored by several small presses, including a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.

KIDS IN THE WIND by Brad Wethern reviewed by Rachael Tague

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Kids in the Wind cover art. A stringless kite in the shape of a shark flies against a cloudy sky KIDS IN THE WIND
by Brad Wethern
Red Hen Press, 146 pages

reviewed by Rachael Tague

Randy Ray McKenzie received the nickname General Custer because Junior Malstrom always thought Randy was galloping Strawberry, the one-eyed horse, into disaster. And perhaps, on the day General Custer agreed to race the old horse against a junkyard Ford on a rarely used, viciously windy airstrip in the California seaport town of Fairhaven, he was indeed galloping into disaster—or at least over the edge of a sand dune.

The General moved to Fairhaven in the middle of second grade, which “is like playing 52 Pickup with all your people and things. When you try to collect them and put them back together, you can’t, because they are somebody else’s people now and somebody else’s things.” Fairhaven was different from the General’s grammar school back in Oregon where little John and Marnie “could kiss just like Hollywood stars at the end of a movie,” and Hugh Taylor did not get in trouble for yanking the new Egyptian student off his swing by the ankle. The Fairhaven school had nutrition and physical education instead of morning and afternoon recess, the first through third graders were all in the same classroom, and Lance, a boy from the “Jova Witness Church,” always left the room during the Pledge of Allegiance. According to author Brad Wethern, “The world of Fairhaven on the north spit of Humboldt Bay in the 1950’s is familiar to very few,” but by late elementary, the General was well acquainted with the peculiar town and its inhabitants.

Brad Wethern—actor, realtor, and comedic inspirational speaker—wrote his debut book, Kids in the Wind, based on his own experiences growing up in Oregon and in Fairhaven, California. With this knowledge in mind, readers must decide whether or not they will choose to believe the first line of the preface: “These stories are fiction, I think.” But, as Wethern says, “the history of childhood is written by the survivors,” and this man has chosen to write a fictional (maybe?) childhood “filled with fantasy, reality, kid ideas, humor, and moral codes that are far from fully formed.” His seven short stories follow General Custer as he makes friends, finds “puppy love,” comes of age, and survives childhood in the little town of Fairhaven.

In Fairhaven, the two-room school released kids from class a few hours before their parents left work, freeing the kids to design an illegal horse race, catch a nine-foot tiger shark and parade her through town, and build a cargo kite called the Flying Boxcar to launch at their bayside kite club.

Brad Wethern author photo

Brad Wethern

Kids in the Wind bursts with colorful characters. Literally. Kirk is blue. And no, he “didn’t catch no blues from no Dairy Queen refrigerator. He said he was born just like he was with blue skin all over, in a place call Blue Hollar.” In the story “The Flying Boxcar,” when the kids team up to save Kirk from his abusive stepdad by hoisting the small boy up into a cargo kite and drifting him over the bay, I remembered when my cousins and I tried to build a submarine out of an inflatable boat and a plastic crate or when we knocked down a sapling as tall as Grandma’s house just to see if we could. When the smallest girl in the General’s fishing group catches a nine-foot tiger shark, I remembered when I was the only one in the family to catch a catfish or when my cousin and I wrote a note to a groundhog, stuffed it down his hole, and were shocked the next day when he responded (with paw-print stamps my aunt bought from Wal-Mart).

Wethern’s stories fall just one beat short of reality, but I couldn’t help but believe them, and by the end of the book, I felt like I had walked alongside the General through all of his adventures. I think that’s the magic of childhood. We managed to survive it, but we long to go back and experience that freedom from responsibility, that urge to do something ridiculous without our grown-up senses telling us to calm down, be realistic. Childhood moments and friendships may be fleeting, but they create “a deep memory inside, undisturbed and fairy tale perfect.”

In “A Pledge of Allegiance,” the General explains the “embarrassing millstone around his regular guy persona.” Starting in second grade, he was always chosen to lead the American flag salute, first in class, then in special functions outside school, and finally for the last time at his high school graduation. At the end of the piece, he reflects on the morning after graduation: “it was like I had just transferred to the new school back in the second grade. Only now the new school was called the world. Everywhere I went my friends and familiar things seemed to be drifting away. They became somebody else’s people now and somebody else’s things.”

In his last words to the reader, Wethern flashes forward from the General’s elementary talent show to his college years when the General visits Fairhaven and recalls the words of his grade school girlfriend, Sherry Ferston: “Life and music. It’s always so good when it happens, isn’t it? That’s all we really need to know.” These bits of truth remind us that childhood is not to be forgotten, in fact, much of the wisdom we apply in adulthood is gained by our grade school experiences.

I adore the book of short essays (and later a play) written by Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, each sketch reliving moments from childhood that apply to adulthood or vice versa. Kids in the Wind feels like a narrative extension of Fulghum’s essays, so that by the end of the book, I found myself thinking, “All I really need to know I learned in Fairhaven.”

Rachael Tague author photoRachael Tague grew up in the Indianapolis area and is currently studying English and Creative Writing at Cedarville University. She is an editorial intern for Cleaver Magazine.

TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz reviewed by Rory McCluckie

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Talk cover art. A woman lies on sandTALK
by Linda Rosenkrantz
NYRB, 215 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

Whatever else it might be, Talk is the bearer of a remarkably terse and comprehensive title. Has there ever been a work that so accurately summarizes its contents in so short a space? In four letters, Linda Rosenkrantz encapsulated the interior of her 1968 literary experiment immaculately; this is a book of talk. All 215 pages are repositories of speech, unadorned by scenic description or third-person agency. What’s more, they’re pages of genuine talk, not a word of it imagined or fabricated. Over the summer of 1965, Rosenkrantz decided to capture the conversation of friends on tape, a process that eventually lead to her picking out three personalities, and presenting their interactions in the form of a “novel in dialogue.” Stephen Koch’s introduction fleshes out the context: “I had the tape recorder running all summer,” Rosenkrantz recalls,

even dragging the bulky monster to the beach. At first there were about twenty-five different characters and fifteen hundred pages of single-spaced transcript, which I took close to two years honing down to the three characters and two hundred fifty pages.

Quite the project, in other words. A little later in this same introduction, however, there’s another phrase that ultimately proves more striking. As Koch introduces the conceptual basis of the book, he posits that the guiding vision behind the work was one of exploring how daily existence might function when presented as an act of creation, thus acting as a literary experiment the results of which were hard to foresee. The framework, he offers, within which Talk should be viewed is crystallized into the following question: “Why not see if life really imitates art?”

This short inquiry resonates throughout the book and employing it as a lens through which to view the work is a useful way of thinking about both its accomplishments and its problems—two things that are entwined in an unsually involved way here. Starting with the obvious is a good way of beginning the disentanglement, and the most salient characteristic of the book is its presentation. Talk has, impressively, retained something of its essentially innovative core. The pages follow the dramatic format, punched with the names of speakers on the left hand side so that any reader picking up the book without foreknowledge of it would presume it to be a work for the stage. And yet, the lack of even theatrical instructions is conspicuous and adds to the sparse, stripped-down feel that emanates from the text. Rosenkrantz presents the three characters, Emily, Vincent, and Marsha, in mundane scenarios that range from sunbathing on the beach to preparing the evening’s meal, all the while exchanging thoughts and feelings with no authorial embellishment and in a way that is completely free of commentary from anywhere outside themselves. It’s quick, it’s insular, and it’s entirely unpredictable:

EMILY: What’s the matter, darling?
VINCENT: I’m so sad.
EMILY: Why?
VINCENT: Because that’s what being alive is.
EMILY: I know it, I’m sad all the fucking time, you have no idea.
VINCENT: I head something last week about what makes humans different from animals, some gorgeous basic thing, like that humans have memories, but it’s not that.
EMILY: What is it?
VINCENT: Something absolutely beautiful. Are you putting garlic powder in too? Wow, is that cheap. Why use fresh garlic then?
EMILY: Completely different tastes. They are, as one might say, complementary.
VINCENT: Marsha darling, I can’t bear it when you’re sad.
MARSHA: I’m not, I’ve just got a lot of work to do.
VINCENT: Who hasn’t? I began a new painting today.
MARSHA: Yes, and were you interrupted?
VINCENT: Yes, continually, by my memories. Do you want to get married, Emily?

The manner in which the diaologue flits around here, rapidly opening avenues of conversation before turning away from them just as swiftly, isn’t unusual for the work at all. There are no guarantees that subjects, once raised, will be followed past an initial line or two and there are occasions when these swift changes are downright brutal in their spontaneity. As a reader, it’s hard to remain neutral to this sort of thing and it’s this insistence on making us feel one thing or another that’s in rude health in Talk, even decades after its original publication.

This insistence turns out to be problematic for the book. After only a couple of chapters of such choppiness, and once their novelty has started to dim, the tangential interruptions very quickly begin to pall. Accumulating rapidly and falling more abruptly than they might in a more conventional work, they lack the descriptive preludes or explainations that would usually accompany them. Consequently, they very quickly become a regular reminder that the life in Talk is failing in its aforementioned attempt to imitate art. In effect, these interruptions are like chimes from a clock tower—we can sit beneath it for minutes at a time without paying attention to the fact that time is passing, but as soon as it sounds, we are reminded of the moments that have been lost. In a similar way, there are passages in Rosenkrantz’s book that come off as being at home in a literary work; they explore themes with patience, at length and with an interested, and interesting, tone. But because these sections are always eventually bombarded by this inattentive disturbance, the reader keeps being jolted from the rhythm of the conversation. Persisting begins to require a distractingly conscious engagement with what comes to feel like a clunking artificiality.

Which is curious, of course, because there’s nothing whatsoever in Talk that is artificial; this is bona fide conversation transcribed verbatim. So where does this fraudulent aura come from? Part of it is born of Rosenkrantz’s commitment to carrying through her project. She was so immaculately fastidious in her presentation of—and only of—her recorded exchanges that the result can feel ruthlessly clinical in its presentation of material that doesn’t always seem worth presenting in the first place. But that doesn’t quite get to the heart of the issue. To do so requires revisiting Koch’s initial question in order to effectively strike it from the record: Does life imitate art? No. Not here, at least. The part of life that is captured in Talk isn’t imitating anything and to seek its doing so is to miss the point: this isn’t artificial, but it is an artefact. What we’re doing when we read this book is eavesdropping on conversations that took place almost fifty years ago. The lack of an authorial presence leaves us free to interact, not with a novel or a literary creation of any other sort, but with a piece of history. This, primarily, is what the book amounts to—a chatty and irreverent slice of archived dialogue that illuminates the cultural atmosphere of the 1960s.

And, as such, it’s a fascinating document. The society in which Talk unfolds is one undergoing enormous changes; the pill has revolutionized the way sex is thought about and engaged in, the drug scene has expanded in an excitingly psychedelic direction, while the artistic milieu the protagonists are orbiting is a bustling source of gossip and parties. Emily, Vincent, and Marsha drop names from the worlds of literature and politics with a delicious regularity; the cultural zeitgeist in general is richly contextulaized in passages of the following sort:

EMILY: Let’s see, I love Fitzgerald—Gatsby is one of my favorite books, and Tender Is the Night; the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The Sun Also Rises, the poem Kaddish. I love Proust, Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Durrell, Robert Creeley, I like Rilke, I like Martin Buber, the idea of I and Thou, even though I don’t know much about it. I like Bob Dylan and I love the Beatles. I like Frank Sinatra. I have a couple of favorite songs in the word, I think one of them is “Speak Low” by Kurt Weill.

Emily and friends insist on analyzing themselves and the people around them. Everyone is seeing a therapist and there’s a lot of time spent answering questions about the significance of this event or that dream, the tendency becoming almost laughable in its occasional degeneration into self-obsession:

EMILY: Oh you and your art, you and your related images, you and your no one thing stands by itself; you, you, you.
VINCENT: Marsha’s coming back. Let’s close the door and show them we’re alone.
EMILY: Can we analyze a little about her and Tim Cullen?
VINCENT: Marsha No, can we be honest about ourselves?
EMILY: I want to tell you a story about my sister.
VINCENT: All right, but make it short?
EMILY: My sister’s a lot like me on certain levels.
VINCENT: Aw, let’s talk about ourselves.

These aspects of Talk jolt the reader; they force an awareness of the discrepancies—and similarities—between our own age and that of the book. Perhaps it’s most rewarding to think of Emily, Vincent, and Marsha as vessels for a time that has, by now, become a distant, storied, and almost mythological, completely beyond our reach. It’s the insight into this era, and the people who were living through it, that we should focus on here—much more than the stuttering way in which these same people might be contributing to a work of art.

Rory McCluckie author photoRory McCluckie is a freelance writer and editor from Manchester, England. A graduate of the University of Leeds, he currently resides in Montreal.

KILLING AUNTIE by Andrzej Bursa reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

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Killing Auntie cover art. Abstract art of a woman's foot severed at the ankleKILLING AUNTIE
by Andrzej Bursa
translated by Wiesiek Powaga
New Vessel Press, 107 pages

reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

Andrzej Bursa was born in Krakow on March 21, 1932, seven years before the German invasion of Poland. He died of congenital heart failure at age twenty-five on November 15, 1957, just after Poland began to overthrow its totalitarian system of Communist rule. Bursa lived in a time that shifted dramatically from extreme suppression to extreme expression, misinformation and propaganda to jazz and poetry. His literary career began on the heels of the post-war period of Polish literature noted for an emphasis on “Socialist Realism,” but was cut short at the emergence of an era of national sovereignty that prompted an explosion of avant-garde art, performance, literature, and music.

Bursa’s only novel, Killing Auntie, was not published during his lifetime. The novel takes place over the course of a week, during which a young man named Jurek whacks his aunt in the head with a hammer and then attempts to rid himself of her corpse, a more difficult task than he imagines. While it doesn’t ever do anything, or say anything, everything Jurek does is in reaction to the corpse. This is the black humor of the story, which could also be a foil to the atmosphere of 1950s Poland, a time that fluctuated from the enforcement of Soviet sponsored police terror, censorship, and economic strife to the reversal (or decrease) of such policies.

Even without knowing the novel’s political context, Killing Auntie may be understood and appreciated for its stark and unapologetic approach to the (frankly) absurd trajectory of adulthood. Jurek, orphaned, disaffected, and now living on his own, longs for real purpose: “Today for the first time I realized I had no purpose. I went out without a reason. These purposeless, lonely walks were murderous. I knew that.” Jurek’s story is not dark for the sake of darkness (although killing your aunt in cold blood is pretty dark), but to subvert the idea that we all grow up to make families, buy groceries, and pay bills because these are aspirations for a lifetime of happiness. Jurek does not kill his aunt because he hates her. He kills her to have a purpose.

Andrzej Bursa author photo

Andrzej Bursa

This rebellion against banality is at play in the novel’s structure, which features both a false start and a false ending. The novel opens at 4 o’clock of the day that Jurek has killed his aunt, but at the start of chapter two, Bursa describes Jurek waking up to his aunt preparing for her day. Chapter two isn’t a flashback; rather, the opening is a false start, a beginning that clashes with the information Bursa provides in the subsequent chapter. The false start makes the murder existentially necessary to Jurek. He can’t choose not to kill her because by the start of the novel, technically, she is already dead.

Again, Bursa is not concerned with the crime, but with the search for purpose that prompted it, a search that continues through the rest of the novel and is represented by his aunt’s indestructible corpse. Jurek worries that he might be caught, that someone will notice his aunt’s disappearance, but no one suspects a thing. The corpse, he soon realizes, is both an adversary and part of his new purpose. Jurek’s search comes into conflict once he meets Teresa, who becomes his lover and confidant. Although momentarily disgusted, she too helps him dispose the body. Despite all their plans of escape and love, Jurek finds the burden of the corpse more real and important: “Yet I realized with absolute clarity that the only real thing was the corpse, at once a millstone around my neck and my lifeline.”

The novel could have ended here. We could have taken Jurek’s realization as a choice to live with the consequences of one’s actions. But instead, Bursa keeps going for three more chapters that comprise what we now see as a false ending. Jurek takes the bus into a kind of mirror-world, in which he meets a character identified as “The Girl I Used to See,” who lives in “The Other Town.” After a night together in the woods, The Girl takes him to the zoo to see mating lynxes and then later they feed the animals part of his aunt’s corpse.

Then Jurek’s aunt returns from the sanatorium unconcerned that remnants of her own corpse litter the bathtub.

Given the absurdity of this chain of events, it’s hard to believe that Jurek finds redemption. Because Jurek doesn’t get caught and doesn’t get away with the crime either, we can’t assume Bursa’s ending indicates anything so banal as redemption. Rather, the false ending indicates the banality of the assumption that life should provide redemption. Jurek explains this best when he tells Teresa why he killed his aunt:

Teresa. Do you understand? Thousands of days, thousands of hours, during which nothing ever happens: the staple of my childhood and adolescence. Dreams that turn out to be just as empty. Or worse—they turn out to be a poison that kills any chance of healthy vegetation. Were we fed the stories of valiant kings, knights and other heroes—just to be vegetation? Why have I been condemned to vegetation? Who is to blame for it? Who?

Jurek, Bursa’s Hamlet, bemoans his dissatisfaction with this “o’er hanging firmament,” this “paragon of animals,” all while his aunt’s corpse (like the “perturbed spirit” of Hamlet’s father) nags him to do something—anything—not out of duty to avenge her murder, but to avenge his own failure to live with purpose.

Jacqueline Kharouf author photoJacqueline Kharouf has an MFA in creative writing, fiction, from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Harpoon Review, Matchbook Literary Magazine, Gingerbread House, The Examined Life Journal, Shout Out UK, South Dakota Review, Fiction Vortex, Otis Nebula, NANO Fiction, and Numéro Cinq Magazine. In 2011, she won third place in H.O.W. Journal’s Fiction contest, judged by Mary Gaitskill. Jacqueline blogs at jacquelinekharouf.wordpress.com; tweets @writejacqueline; and hopes you “like” her Facebook page “Jacqueline Kharouf, writer.”

THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL by Bohumil Hrabal reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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The Little Town Where Time Stood Still cover art. A man floating on his back in waterTHE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL
by Bohumil Hrabal
translated by James Naughton
NYRB Classics, 299 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Late summer might be the best season to read Bohumil Hrabal, for time reveals itself in the ripe air and everything bleeds with life. Hrabal, the Czech novelist of delirious syncopation, who died in 1997 falling from a fifth floor hospital window while trying to feed the birds, returns to childhood in these two novelas about the manager of a small-town brewery, his older brother, savage wife, and young son. Hrabal’s stepfather was the manager of a brewery; Maryška, the wife of Francin, the fictional brewery manager, narrates the first novela, Cutting It Short. Their son is the narrator of The Little Town Where Time Stood Still.

When Cutting It Short, which Hrabal published in 1976, opens, Maryška, is lighting the lamps, waiting for Francin to come in from the brewery. “I dread the day,” she says, “the mains will be brought to the brewery and all the brewery lamps, all the airy lamps in the stables, the lamps with the round mirrors, all those portly lamps with round wicks one day will cease to be lit, no one will prize their light, for all this ceremonial will be replaced by the light-switch resembling the water tap which replaced the wonderful pumps.” Maryška’s no sap to nostalgia (indeed, quite the opposite, a woman of voluminous hunger for free-flowing life, she loves to climb the brewery’s chimney and speed around town on her bike); she’s merely setting us up for a string of electric events that will forever disrupt life in the town where time stood still. Hrabal’s full-throated prose, brought to delirious and delicious English life by the late translator James McNaughton, has the capacity to go low and high all at once, to convey meaning glossed with viscera.

The first spark comes with an electrode machine Francin has bought in the city to stimulate good health. “Maryška,” he says, “…this cathode here massages the heart, imagine, a heart-enhancing sizzling phosphorescence.” The grounded Francin has bought the machine to soothe Maryška and also to sexually excite her. Maybe all the sizzle—the “purple violet beauty” of the light—will keep her attention from drifting to other men in the town. “And again Francin leaned over the case and into the bakelite holder he stuck a neon comb,”

this neon comb glowed like an advertising sign over some ladies’ accessories shop in Vienna or Paris, and Francin came close to me, planted that sizzling comb in my hair, I looked at myself in the mirror and I knew that there was nothing more I could wish for but to comb through my tresses with that comb…I began to quiver all over, I had to hug myself, Francin breathed out quietly, every time he couldn’t stop himself from plunging his whole face into those tresses of mine…

Bohumil Hrabal author photo

Bohumil Hrabal

With each successive chapter of Cutting It Short, Maryška’s hair gains in symbolic and pelliquery weight. Blowing in the wind above the brewery’s chimney it becomes a papal flag. “Across the river,” says Maryška, “there towered the big church, at the height of my face was the golden clock-face on the tower, and round the church in concentric circles stretched the streets and lanes and houses and buildings,” time transporting the little town. In the wind, nothing will stand still. The electrode machine is followed by radio, which shortens the distance between the source of the sound and the listener, from Vienna all the way to the town’s Hotel Na Knížecí. As if hit by lightening after hearing the radio, Maryška decides to cut her locks into a slender Josephine Baker, greeting the coming modern with a sense of her own autonomy and anonymity.

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, which continues the story, only as told by Maryška’s nameless dreamy son, blows Hrabal into the melancholic, the tragi-comic, the autumnal, which always must come. Hrabal presses this feeling into Francin and, most elaborately, into Francin’s brother Pepin, a peripatetic laborer who comes to stay for a fortnight and never leaves. Uncle Pepin goes to work on the malting floor, where he does the hardest work and entertains the other workers. But Pepin also drinks and whores and once in a while rebels against the constraints of his respectable brother. A naïf acting out his own authentic soul against domestic repression, Pepin just wants to have fun. But fun goes stale after war (which follows the invasion of the radio) and communism comes to be.

Francin loses the brewery; he and Pepin find a truck, restore it, and deliver fruit. But finally summer’s pungent bounty ends. “Uncle gazed on into the very heart of time as it was stopping,” says Hrabal, disguised as his fictional boyhood self. Death surpasses everything, except maybe literature, which goes on and on and on.

Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

THE WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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The Wake Portrait cover art. The outline of a man's face in green hair, with a beard that has the title words cut into it in whiteTHE WAKE
by Paul Kingsnorth
Graywolf Press, 365 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

As I write this, the white half of the world is up in arms about a lion, killed on the other side of the globe. Black protestors in Ferguson stand in lines, chanting the names of the dead. Videos are released of police officers assaulting, maiming, and shooting unarmed black citizens. The temperature soars to 165 degrees in Iran. This summer has been too hot, a climate sweating for change. It is the oldest story: the new idea comes, and grinds the good old world into dust. And another idea on top of that, invaders with new languages and new philosophies.

Not all new ideas are good; genocide is one of them. We’re still seeing the systemic elimination of natives from their own land, in the United States and elsewhere. Sacred tribal lands are sold to copper mining companies. Lakes where gods once rose to give prophecy, poisoned by industrial waste. The crushing disappointment of our modern losses is brought to life in The Wake, which takes place in England in 1066 A.D. Awakened to the impending disaster of the Norman Invasion, Buccmaster of Holland begins to have visions of the Old Gods, which call him to fight back against the invaders and restore England to her former glory. Wake means “watcher,” and like the Buccmaster, the reader is compelled to watch the persecution of native English people by the army of Guillaume le Batard.

If this seems dry, consider that the novel is written in an imaginary language, an invented cousin of Old English, that sticks in your head like amber honey. Reading 365 pages of this stuff is akin to taking psychedelics—Cormac McCarthy, in the Middle Ages, on acid. The language requires total immersion in the novel, and casts a spell that is totally engrossing:

my grandfather wolde sae men does not lysten to the wise for what the wise has to sae is not what they wants to hiere for what they wants to hiere is that their lifs is right as they is and that they is good folc and does not need to do naht.

Paul Kingsnorth author photo

Paul Kingsnorth

So read that. Out loud. Kingsnorth’s story is simple, which allows this language to take center stage. Kingsnorth’s reasoning was a defense of his subject: “The way we speak is specific to our time and place. Our assumptions, our politics, our worldview, our attitudes—all are implicit in our words, and what we do with them. To put 21st-century sentences into the mouths of eleventh century characters would be the equivalent of giving them iPads and cappuccinos: just wrong.”

It’s a high-stakes move for a writer, especially a first-time novelist. The result is an incredibly moving story that asks a great deal of the reader, and delivers the same enchantment I felt as a child, knee deep in Narnia and completely alive to the imaginary world in the pages between my hands. Only a few other writers have successfully pulled off the “invented language” trick, among them Cormac McCarthy, Keri Hulme, James Joyce, and Riddley Walker. Arguably, none of these are truly manufactured languages, in the sense of Klingon or Esperanto. But they create the same effect of linguistic saturation, drawing the reader into the world of the book.

After losing his home, family, and holdings, the Buccmaster gathers a small group of men from mixed backgrounds, takes his grandfather’s sword, and declares war on the French. It’s a fool’s errand, and knowing enough about British history, a failed one. But all the same, the rich telling of it makes us wish, maybe, for a different ending. We want Braveheart, we want Disney. We don’t get what we want, and neither do the English. The Wake is pitiless in its honesty.

But it’s not without humor. English speaking people haven’t changed much in a millennium; there are fart jokes, and sex jokes, and the shared happiness of summer parties. Although The Wake is bleak, and hopeless, there are some rays of sunshine, and they are sweet, and needed.

i had cnawan yfel was cuman when i seen this fugol glidan ofer

a great black fugol it was not of these lands it flown slow … its necc was long its eages afyr and on the end of its fethra was a mans fingors all this i seen clere this was a fugol of deofuls.

Kingsnorth is a brilliant translator of this difficult period in history. His words bring to life a time that is both lost and still living all around us. You, in your comfortable computer chair, whose land are you on? Do you know who you’ve replaced? Are you ready to hear what those people have to say?

Claire Rudy Foster author photoClaire Rudy Foster lives in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her critically recognized short fiction has appeared in various respected journals and she has been honored by several small presses, including a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.

THE TREE WITH NO NAME by Drago Jançar reviewed by Justin Goodman

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The Tree with No Name cover art. A tree drawn in red scribbles against a white backgroundTHE TREE WITH NO NAME
by Drago Jançar
translated by Michael Biggins
Dalkey Archive, 274 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

Contention over millennials’ degree of entitlement hasn’t been limited to the United States. As we learn from Slovenian writer Drago Jançar, in fact, the generation gap has an equally special significance in the former Soviet Bloc, where, according to translator Erica Johnson Debeljak, writing on the Dalkey Archive Press website, the “new generation…takes independence and freedom, the Slovenian language, and shopping malls to be their birthright.” Communism is outdated. That’s why The Tree With No Name is so timely. The issue is not simply post-birth pangs (Slovenia was established in 1991 with the USSR’s collapse). Rather Jançar asks, what is there for the old generation in a new world?

To Janez Lipnik, the archvist protagonist who’s preternaturally incapable of letting go of the past and which he belongs to, it’s all that’s left. “Wherever there is no past,” he thinks, “the world is fundamentally unreal.” The overarching dread of becoming a living artifact overcomes Lipnik after his wife, Marijana, points out a women’s bicycle that is pulled from “the poor river whose bad luck it was to run through the center of the city.” This has happened after Lipnik has started work on the diary of “The Great Lover,” as he dubs him, who “slept his way” through World War II; after he remembers his grade school teacher, Zala, had a bike just like it; after he discovers a secret about his wife’s past, which destroys their marriage. “After,” in the sense of Klee’s Angelus Novus: In the words of Walter Benjamin, “He is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.” The novel opens with chapters Eighty-six to Ninety-nine, going down to One (when the bike is found) and back up to Eighty-five, reduplicating the unhinged obsessions of the archivist to retrieve a lost world, the past, as it moves rapidly away.

Drago Jançar author photo

Drago Jançar

An editor could make a decent supercut of various awkward phrases in the prose, like “he broke my dreams,” which distract from the otherwise beautifully oppressive surreality. Despite these phrases, the weight of this “eternally repeating story” is consistent and evenly spread. How does the poor river have bad luck then? Because, as with Lipnik, and as with the reader, it runs though the center of a Post-communist history, constantly ebbing and receding.

The Tree With No Name is not Jançar’s first work translated work into English. In 2011, Dalkey brought out his 1978 historical gothic The Galley Slave, translated into English by Michael Biggins. In translation, The Galley Slave, a now Slovenian classic, comes across as too bitter, finely tempered as almost to be Po-Mo. The plot is waylaid for cultural reflection, though the reflection is as tautly written as you’d expect from a Gothic novel. But, to our benefit in a Tree With No Name, Biggins’ handling of Jançar has improved greatly. The translated prose is as fluid and driven as the oft mentioned river running through Lipnik’s, city.

For the American reader, there is a parallel in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. After all, both Jançar and Faulkner give breath and breadth to the loser’s side, whose history is unwritten, mostly unremembered. Hence Lipnik’s insistence that “everything is interconnected,” and his attempt to rebuild memories from coincidences, much like the characters of Absalom, Absalom. Like Faulkner, Jançar gives the past a visceral emotional power:

She doesn’t understand that he’s looked into the abyss and beyond wakefulness into dreams, and beyond dreams into the past, beyond his birth, and that he’s traveling back somewhere, constantly back. That every event, the whole sequence of events of the past few weeks was borne out of that glimpse of the bottom…

Down to the breathless pace and toehold punctuation, the ordering of abstractions into causalities, the reader begins to realize this is the Slovenian Faulkner. It would be unsurprising if Biggins had this passage from Absalom, Absalom in mind while translating:

That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less; and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.

And not simply Biggins, who likely had considered the similairites between the Faulknerian recollection-dream and the Jançarian history-dream conflation, but Jançar himself has commented on the influence of Faulkner on his work. These obsessions meet at the titular tree, through whose dreamy roots and branches runs the veins of a past constructed from fleeting perceptions (memories of the American and Slovenian Civil War, or The Great Lover’s diary). “The only problem,” As Lipnik puts it to his wife, “is that you can’t erase anything, but you still have to tie it together, don’t you see?”

The question is not why remember, but whose memories? In one of the lighter meta-fictional moments, Lipnik ‘says’ (a consequence of this form is that verbs tend to be perpetually tentative) to passers-by, “this is no archive, this is my personal history, my embryonic history.” We live with Athena in our head and her wisdom, despite his boss, the archive’s director’s, insistence that he “was not here to reconstruct stories,” is what we birth, and lose in the birthing. Or, in one of Jancar’s subtle Greek conceptualization, in this “labyrinth of history.” Since “everything is interconnected by slender threads, which can break. It’s no surprise that we have millennial becoming a pejorative. These threads, Ariadne’s klew, which leads the way out of the labryinth is entangled and unending. At the crossroads, Drago Jançar asks who gets to decide which one “is logically interconnected, so clearly connected.” As we’re reminded of Lipnik’s honeymoon with Marijana on the island of Dugi Otok, we’re equally reminded that he has grown old. As does everyone.

Justin Goodman author photoA recent graduate from Purchase College, Justin Goodman is working to establish a career and develop knowledge of the literary scene. His writing has been published in Submissions Magazine and Italics Mine.

Four Novels from Unnamed Press reviewed by Johnny Payne

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The cover art of four novels: The Paper Man, with a painting of a young boy. The Fine Art of Fucking Up, with black figurines of dances. Remember the Scorpion, red ink against a grey background. And Escape Room Baghdad with an arrow filled in with green stars. THE PAPER MAN
by Gallagher Lawson
Unnamed Press, 267 pages

REMEMBER THE SCORPION
by Isaac Goldemberg
translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Tittler
Unnamed Press, 133 pages

THE FINE ART OF FUCKING UP
by Cate Dicharry
Unnamed Press, 230 pages

ESCAPE FROM BAGHDAD
by Saad Z. Hossain
Unnamed Press, 304 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

The wryly-named Unnamed Press out of Los Angeles is living the self-appointed paradox of making a name for itself. Any independent press walks the line between sufficient eclecticism to draw in a swath of curious readers, and a strong enough identity to stand out from the pack. Unnamed Press has achieved this goal with a set of spanking new novel releases: Escape from Baghdad, Remember the Scorpion, The Paper Man, and The Fine Art of Fucking Up (possible best title of the year).

A decided taste rules the selections:

There is snappy dialogue. “He’s a sullen little shit, but his work’s pretty good;” “All of Lima smells like a woman in heat.” “I dream only in American.”

There is narrative pith. The first, brief paragraph of The Fine Art of Fucking Up reads,

I am sitting behind my desk watching the downpour when I catch the scent of bacon. Dunbar is in the building again, despite the restraining order.

Who isn’t going to proceed to the second paragraph on this gambit, to see what’s what?

Gallagher Lawson author photo

Gallagher Lawson

There is pungent social heft. The Paper Man lives up to his billing, literally made of paper, trying to gain entrance to a sinister peninsular city in a dystopian time. Escape from Baghdad follows Dagr and Kinza through the opposite motion, escape from the ongoing apocalypse of war. Remember the Scorpion accompanies Detective Weiss through a Lima of tremors, gambling and murder.

There is a prevalence of somber comedy, irascible, nervous, gritty, or cynical sojourners toughing it out with wit, at wits’ end.

In short, the four books I received all at once, made not for a chamber quartet, precise and sedate, but a syncopated four-hander, as they seem to quarrel among themselves for top dog status. Goldemberg, a consecrated Peruvian Jewish author, not as famous as his Nobel-winning generational counterpart, serves up a hard-boiled neo-pulp, less textured and penetrating than that of Mario Vargas Llosa’s mature work, but reminiscent of the latter’s youthful The City and the Dogs. At its weakest the pages could be a Raymond Chandler outtake. “He ended up in Chinatown, a few blocks from the Central Market.” At its most potent, this novel sketches critical moments in succinct prose. In the midst of an earthquake,

From San Cristóbal Hill . . .descended a cloud of dust that veiled the reddish brilliance of the sun, which, poised to be eclipsed, was suspended above the city sky. Flocks of birds took flight and collided with each other.

Isaac Goldemberg author photo

Isaac Goldemberg

A fine introduction by the notable scholar Saúl Sosnowski and an endnote by the translator, Jonathan Tittler, concisely bookend Goldemberg work for new readers and put his novel into helpful context. Hossain and Goldemberg, Dicharry’s main men, in different ways, are plain spoken; Lawson, low-key in style, yet creates an eerie atmosphere, layering discomfort with strange prose effects. The bus in which The Paper Man journeys almost runs over a beached, mangled mermaid.

The triple set of gills—crusted with sea foam and bursting from each side of her neck, told him this creature had not originated on land. Her skull—crushed, the bones piercing the skin of her face. One of her webbed hands held a rusty knife; the large fin that extended in place of legs had been severed down the middle and was filled with a canyon of dried blood.

I was willing to coast through some blank, overly plain passages for the reward of such sensory flashes, which wax fantastical yet remain anchored in precision. I found a misnomer in a blurbed reference to Kafka, whose influence is oversold on many back covers. That comparison has come to represent a mere rough approximation to the style of writers who offer a journey into hyper-reality. Magical realism doesn’t fit as a moniker either. Let’s just call The Paper Man an ordinary world that has no problem accommodating incursions of strange business.

Saad Z. Hossain author photo

Saad Z. Hossain

There is much to like in in Hossain’s peppery, tragicomic pilgrimage. The book is divided into thirty-six memorable, often clever, subtitles (“Blackboard Rage;” “Further Inside the Watchmaker”) and short, punchy chapters that deal three-card monte among points of view. This structure works, echoing the concussive content of men navigating a maze of erratic streets, down to their last shared nerve.

An exemplary chapter is “Death by Kibbeh,” a mere four pages in length. After winning a big poker hand, Tommy is required by the losers to spring them all to a meal on the street. There follows an extended, luxuriant description of the delights of kibbeh, followed by a sudden bomb blast and the theft of Tommy’s hummer by urban Arab guerrillas.

Now, (the vendor) mixed in salt, pepper, and a bit of lime juice into the mash, remixing the stuff with a fine wooden spoon. He took out an egg-shaped scoop and used his thumb to hollow out the center into a kind of meat donut. The stuffing balls went in there, and two quick pinches on either side completed the kibbeh, beautiful ovals with a single point end.

That is only a portion of the para-Proustian prose that expresses Tommy’s elation for his favorite quick meal.

Cate Dicharry author photo

Cate Dicharry

Dicharry’s dyspeptic protagonist gets the last word here, and she would like that. This novel doesn’t break the mold. Jane Smiley, Michael Chabon, and Francine Prose come to mind. But this art school confidential offers its own course of study. Wild-eyed Dunbar, the nemesis professor barred by a restraining order yet refusing to respect its terms, provides a foil and a pretext that keeps the action going. Less interesting is the narrator’s benevolent husband, whose interlocutor duties kept me unwillingly from the main action. But the catalogues of Dunbar’s misbehavior alone serve up a delicious blue plate of packed prose that draws us down into demented doings.

Dunbar’s oeuvre includes hatching ticks in the main gallery as a statement against the blood-sucking School of Visual Arts management and assigning his Performance Art II class to assemble a twelve-person Viking battleship—“my ketch, my schooner, my clinker-built knarr.

In this fervid foursome offered by Unnamed Press, we get a vibrant sample of robust, sometimes rowdy, and rigorous writing that deserves its place on a best-of list. The editors are doing something right, and looked poised to keep doing it.

Johnny Payne author photo

Johnny Payne is Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles.  His most recent book of poetry is Vassal.  Forthcoming is the poetry collection Heaven of Ashes, from Mouthfeel Press.

HAW by Sean Jackson reviewed by Michelle Fost

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Haw cover art. A black-and-white photograph of a man sitting on a curb, with the word "HOPE" graffitied in the backgroundHAW
by Sean Jackson
Harvard Square Editions, 181 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

Sean Jackson’s first novel, Haw, recently out from Harvard Square Editions, is an ecological nightmare narrative, the story of a world starved for clean water. When I first came across Jackson’s writing in his short story “How a Ghost Is Made” (in Issue 7 of Cleaver) I was impressed by Jackson’s snappy, lean prose style. In “How a Ghost Is Made,” Jackson portrays a woman who is in the process of pulling away from the husband who is cheating on her. We first encounter Shelly while she is out for a run. As Jackson describes: “She leans into the next turn, bursting up Spindale Street like they taught her at Oberlin: run till you can’t think straight, then back off one gear.” The anger in the story moves similarly—high throttle, then backing off just enough. Shelly runs in a lush setting and her anger as she moves towards her emotional leave taking gives the story a satisfying, raw, unbridled energy. Shelly’s external world—her surroundings on her run—appears full, but her internal world feels stripped down, impoverished, giving some power to her reaching out in memory (however feebly) toward her mother.

The world of Jackson’s Haw is starkly different from that of “How a Ghost Is Made.” In Haw we won’t encounter any sprinklers nourishing lawns or anything even close to what Shelly experiences when “she pops in her earbuds and descends along the bridge into a canopy-covered swath of nature so green it makes her sick.” Instead, in Haw Jackson gives us a remarkably desolate world of the future.

Sean Jackson author photo

Sean Jackson

More interesting than the social commentary embedded in this dystopian parable, and more convincing, is Jackson’s portrayal of a quiet but intense father-son relationship. The world the father and son, Lucas and Orel, navigate is a shell of East Coast America as we know it, but internally father and son are remarkably well off. Following the death of Orel’s mother, they’ve needed to count on each other, and in the story we see that they very much can.

In Haw, Jackson writes with restraint about a handful of good people navigating constricting, challenging circumstances. (He also writes of one character, Gail, who epitomizes amoral badness.) There are many nice moments in the book, such as a portrait of a neighbor, an elderly professor, who Orel notes seems to have a strong connection with Lucas. Their neighbor plays piano and when he does it “is as if the two men are communicating. The more Lucas weeps the more melancholy the music becomes.” There is some drama to Haw, but what I liked most about it was its quiet.

Michelle Fost author photoMichelle Fost is a writer living in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in The Painted Bride Quarterly and her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Phoenix Literary Section.

A HISTORY OF MONEY by Alan Pauls reviewed by Rory McCluckie

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A History of Money cover art. A sun with thin, colorful rays against a light blue backgroundA HISTORY OF MONEY
by Alan Pauls
translated by Ellie Robins
Melville House, 197 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

There has never been a time when the subject of money wasn’t fertile ground for a work of literature; whatever view you take on its role in our lives, it’s central to them. From the economic policies of governments to the spare change tossed into a busker’s guitar case, it’s difficult to imagine what life without it might look like. Not a bad subject, then, for a work that is set to catapult its author onto the international stage. Alan Pauls is an Argentinian novelist, essayist, and critic who has been writing fiction for years while holding various academic and editorial posts in Argentina and the United States. Indeed, he seems to be so active and prolific in his various roles that it’s perhaps surprising that Pauls’ 2007 novel, The Past, has, until now, been his only work to have received an English language translation. With A History of Money, he should have assured that such negligence comes to an end. This is a skillfully realized work, as accomplished in its execution as it is acute in its criticism.

The novel follows a nameless protagonist from childhood to middle age, through relationships both familial and amorous, and across decades in which money, in different ways, dominates the lives of everyone involved. Spiraling out from that most familiar of tropes—a dead body and a suitcase full of cash—the book very quickly becomes something intensely unfamiliar: a work of torrential stylistic abundance in which compassion and indignation find equally potent expression. It’s this style that is the dominant attribute of A History of Money, rendered impressively in a vibrant English by Ellie Robins. Pauls’ prose rolls onto the page with incessant vitality, as though going downhill and at great speed. Not only does this make for a dynamic reading experience, it’s also a manner of delivery that aptly complements the subject matter being explored. One only has to look towards present day Greece to see how quickly the effects of economic crises can unfold, and the Argentina of the novel—spanning four decades from 1966—seemed to often be spinning out of control.

The country had no less than five currencies during this period and the turbulence that accompanied such changes was immense. As a short note on the text points out, the fictional events in A History of Money take place “over decades of real tragedy” and that “extreme instability in all spheres” permeated the nation and its people. What Pauls’ style does so impressively is channel a hectic, free-wheeling spirit and sets it tumbling from page to page in a way that evokes the daily commotion of such an environment:

And just like that, in the few minutes it takes this legendary father to clean out a sheik in Monaco, or break the bank in Baden-Baden, or get locked up for claiming responsibility for the urine with which a tourist in his charge decides to leave his mark on the ruins of Pompeii, the peso has depreciated so vertiginously that the pockets of the jacket he wore especially for the occasion, which were tried and tested in the same basement the previous Friday, in front of the same redhead cashier who counts money with one hand while peeling the other’s cuticles with his teeth, can’t accommodate the heap of australs he receives in exchange for his dollars.

The novel abounds in sentences like this, which unfold with a rapid unpredictability, the termination of which leaves the exhilarated and breathless reader wondering what exactly just happened. It’s in this way that parts of A History of Money are felt before they’re understood, and thus possess something of the character of economic instability itself; the pace of events find an echo in the celerity of the prose, and this marriage of form and function contributes enormously to the book’s rich and stimulating tone.

Alan Pauls author photo

Alan Pauls

ntensifying this frenetic atmosphere is the author’s tendency to have his narrator jump around in time. The book’s title encourages the reader to expect an historical account of some sort, one encompassing origins and sequences of events that culminate in a particular outcome. Instead, Pauls delivers a lithe, deftly executed tale, peppered with temporal shifts that are impressively absorbed into a compelling, kinetic narrative. They come in all sizes, from the barely there to the enormous and they do so with a quick-fire consistency that not only heightens the novel’s sense of overarching chaos, but draws a thread of humanity through that chaos that accentuates the one against the other.

A particularly generous source of such movement is the protagonist’s relationships with his divorced parents, two figures that cast large shadows over the work. His father is a gambler and a man seemingly incapable of living anywhere except on the edges of financial security. His mother, meanwhile, is a socialite who has similar difficulties keeping hold of money, though her preferred method of squandering it is usually via questionable business deals and lousy property investments (one of which consumes money so ravenously it earns the moniker “the Beast”). As they both flirt with disaster after their own fashion, their roles in our anonymous hero’s life provide abiding theatres in which Pauls performs his chronological acrobatics. The following, for example, comes at a point at which the protagonist has received a sizeable and unexpected “living inheritance” from his stepfather:

Meanwhile, his mother, whether out of objection, or jealousy, or because her husband’s decision surprised her as much as it did him, takes every opportunity to let him know that she was responsible…She tells him this when he first receives the money, naturally, but she also carries on telling him after that, eternally, so that he can never forget: when he uses it to renovate the apartment he plans to share with his wife, and later on, after the separation, when he and his ex-wife sell the newly renovated apartment and he broken-heartedly spends all the money, blows it—him, too!—on a trip to Europe that couldn’t be more depressing, and even much much later when the little matter of the living inheritance has been totally forgotten, is off the agenda, and his mother and her husband separate after thirty-five years of marriage in the midst of calamitous financial and emotional bankruptcy, made mortal enemies by, among many other things, the way in which the construction of the Beast has eaten away at them over the almost fifteen years they’ve spent dealing with it.

At first sight, it’s easy to feel that such an agitated narrative style is too active for its own good and that these flashes through time amount to little more than stuttering distractions. As the pages pass, however, any such feeling is swept away by the novel’s engrossing, unrelenting pace; soon enough, it’s clear that the way Pauls inserts these great chronological jumps, along with the insights into the future lives of the characters that accompany them, effectively emphasizes both the unruly timbre of the period as well as the fragility of the people passing through it.

Most importantly, however, what this shifting about in time affects is a surprisingly moving final act. It’s surprising because A History of Money is not, for the most part, a novel that deals in heavily emotional scenes. Rather, it spends the majority of its time conducting a remarkably stylish investigation into the pernicious effects of money on individuals and society. But as the cascade of detail falls, and the characters move through the feverishly unsettled landscape, the events that provide such a grippingly fluctuating backdrop to the novel begin to recede, become muted and, as they do, reveal the havoc their raging has wreaked on the human beings that have lived through the storm:

There aren’t any other sons crossing the city at this hour to take money to their mothers. He promises himself that he won’t do it again, and the decision alone is a relief. But he knows how much he’ll miss the bright light that floods his mother’s face when she gets out of the elevator on each of those insane early mornings and comes towards him to open the door, holding herself very upright and smiling, as if she’d regained the only thing whose loss she’s ever truly cried for—much more, even than her fortune: the radiant beauty of youth.

While the characters have been hurtling through the hectic maelstrom of events, it suddenly becomes clear that time has been passing, carrying life along with it. It’s a revelation that arrives suddenly and with the force of important realizations, now blindingly obvious, made too late, and Pauls strikes just the right note with it; the vortex of barely comprehensible happenings, along with the flecks of criticism the novelist sporadically administers, abruptly subside and, as though we had just been taken into the eye of a storm, we are able to see the disarray from a calm and poignantly tranquil location. Currencies can vanish overnight and exchange rates can plummet on a whim—profit and loss rule all. The true cost of such events, however, is to be found in the lives of the people sentenced to live under such volatility. Appropriately enough for a novel that revels in the fragmentation of chronology, Pauls’ narrator summarizes this most enduring of messages at around the mid-way point: “There’s no doubt about it: money doesn’t change,” he observes, before concluding with a note of weary resignation: “Everything else does, though.” In this excellent novel, it’s this fundamental imbalance, rather than money itself, that lies at the heart of everything.

Rory McCluckie author photoRory McCluckie is a freelance writer and editor from Manchester, England. A graduate of the University of Leeds, he currently resides in Montreal.

COUP DE FOUDRE by Ken Kalfus reviewed by Carolyn Daffron

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Coup de Foudre cover art. A photograph of a black door reflecting a hotel bed. COUP DE FOUDRE
A Novella and Stories
by Ken Kalfus
Bloomsbury Press, 277 pages

reviewed by Carolyn Daffron

Ken Kalfus is an audacious stylist, whose stories and novels often invoke the likes of Borges, Calvino, Golgol, and Saramago. His choice of subject matter can be equally fearless: cosmology, 9-11, and the grand sweep of Russian history, to name only a few. Coup de Foudre, the novella which forms the centerpiece of his most recent collection of short fiction, is a coruscating example of this gutsiness and high literary ambition.

Not that I enjoyed reading it, at least not the first time. Coup de Foudre tells the story of David Léon Landau, a character not-at-all-loosely based on French financier and former presidential hopeful Dominque Strauss-Kahn (known in France and now everywhere as “DSK”) who was accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in his New York hotel in 2011. Although criminal charges were dropped, the case led to a civil settlement, various other scandalous accusations and revelations, and the ruin of DSK’s career.

The novella is a first person account of the hotel assault and the events immediately surrounding it, written in the form of a letter to Mariama, the housekeeper-victim—a letter which Landau can never send to her or anyone without violating a civil gag order and subjecting himself to criminal prosecution. Landau’s story, which parallels DSK’s in almost every known particular, is a repellent one, and its narrator is about as monstrous and unappetizing—to say nothing of unreliable—as they come. Even while purportedly seeking “moral benefit” from “fully and exactingly” acknowledging his errors, the chief of which is that he forcefully fellated Mariama, he cannot help reminding her that his name “signified financial brilliance in the service of the public” and that a water treatment plant he financed in her home country may once have given her clean liquid to “sip thirstily and with pleasure…You may even have reflected at the time on the liquid’s animating power and plenitude…Some may have spilled from the sides of your mouth.” It is hard not to shudder at this.

Or to think of Nabokov and his Humbert Humbert. Mariama’s and Lolita’s predators are both wily, sardonic, self-pitying, and usually self-deluded narcissists. The two narrators write with a similar flowery style and attention to detail, sensuous and sickening, and both taunt us by conflating predation with love: “Oh, darling, ” Landau writes as he recalls the assault, “ I can summon to memory every ridge and contour of your tongue and palate.” Much as I would have rather not, I couldn’t help recalling how Humbert perverted Lolita’s very name by telling us how his tongue carried its three syllables along his palate, front to back.

Ken Kalfus author photo

Ken Kalfus

Ostensibly for the purpose of making sense of what happened—although he also spends plenty of time complaining, and enjoying his own skills as a raconteur—Landau takes us through his weekend. He recovers from a sex party in Washington; meets up with one of his long-time lovers, the older but highly skilled Claudette, whom he actually calls a “piece”; and seeks out various other possible partners. He gets credible evidence that he and his correspondence are being spied on by his political opponents. He negotiates with the American Secretary of the Treasury. All this while preparing to save the economy of Greece and possibly Europe at a Sunday meeting with Angela Merkel, whom he views as part of “all the forces that were arrayed against” him. It ‘s possible, he says, that when he emerged from the shower in that hotel room, naked and with a huge Viagra erection, he mistook the “full-bodied, round-eyed” Mariama for the German chancellor herself.

This observation, which had me on the brink of nervous laughter, immediately precedes a graphic, twisted account of the attack itself. And so it is with the novella as whole: the reader is swept along, horrified and entertained, and horrified to be entertained. The writing is masterful, especially considering that Kalfus manages to write so well while in the persona of a vain man who is trying and mostly failing to write well.

But is masterful writing enough, given the subject matter? When I read the blurb for Coup de Foudre, my heart sank. Why, of all the heads in all the world, does Kalfus have to go into the fictionalized head of DSK, who could have used his gifts to unite French socialists but chose instead to violate a helpless refugee working as a maid in his hotel room? At first I wondered whether Landau’s/DKS’s intimate story was something anyone, male or female, needed to suffer through; but after I had raced through Coup de Foudre the first time, stopping to admire the writer’s (if not the narrator’s) style and insight from time while simultaneously wincing and cringing, I came around. As Landau says, we must to try to understand. Learning what motivates evil acts may help us prevent some and heal the effects of others. Or it may not. But at least we will have tried, and writers who tackle such issues—for heuristic and not sensationalistic purposes, as Landau or Humbert might put it—should be commended and read. It seems especially important to try to make sense of troubling human behavior when the perpetrator can affect so many lives. We should learn all we can about how someone like Landau/DSK, decent and large-minded in public life, could be so reckless, and so evil, in private, and about how the various kinds of power and entitlement and greed—political, economic, sexual, psychological—bleed into one another. Kalfus’s novella makes a real contribution to this sobering debate.

On my second, more leisurely, better-armed reading, it was easier to appreciate the many comic touches in this novella, as when Landau loses the battle with crosstown traffic on the way to lunch with his daughter. Hailing a cab to go seven blocks, he says, was “almost chief among” his many “perverse, foolish actions that weekend.” (If so, it is a very distant second.) There follows a set piece, with clanking horns and shimmering heat and hallucinations of Merkel driving the car up ahead. The cabdriver says “Fucking Greeks,” and Landau concurs. But my favorite comic scene—which is also the one time we meet a woman with ideas about the larger world—has to be the interlude in a scarf shop, when Landau tries to seduce one of the salesgirls by having her model some high-end scarves and hinting that, if she accepts his invitation to go out for a drink with him, she can have the $410 scarf he has just bought with his “anodized titanium Black Card, an advertisement for sexual prowess if ever there was one.” Things seem to be going well until she realizes who he is. It turns out that she’s a grad student in international finance at NYU: she instantly forgets about the scarf and the drink in her excitement over the intricacies of macroeconomics and Merkel’s position on the Greek bailout. “She was a hard, bright young woman,” Landau says sadly, “and fully self-possessed, never a real prospect.” No scarf for her! (Landau ends up giving it to Claudette, who had been a bit vexed when he threw her to the floor that night, stunning and bruising her—an event he refers to as “her fall.”) As I suspect might happen with DSK in real life, a closer reading of Landau made me regard him with less fear and more contempt, which is a sort of progress, and makes at least some laughter possible.

The fifteen remaining stories in this collection vary widely in style, tone, theme, and subject matter, ranging from a very short humor piece—a list of increasingly absurd and burdensome instructions to future literary executors which, appropriately, ends the book—to “The Un-,” an almost 30-page story about aspiring writers. A straightforward realistic narrative, with wonderful interludes cataloguing the many ways you can go crazy being or wanting to be a writer, “The Un-” is full of convincing detail about writerly pitfalls and obsessions, but somehow manages to encourage ambition anyway.

The other stories include two fanciful tales which are among its most successful—although, given how eclectic this collection is, reasonable readers may differ about which stories work best. One of the fanciful stories, “Square Paul Painlevé,” about a young American in Paris, thwarted in love by a park bench that roots people to its seat, is a sweet distillation of hopeless romantic longing. In the other story, “The Moment They Were Waiting For,” a town falls under a curse where all its inhabitants know their exact time of death. With great economy and specificity, we are told how the situation plays out, from the townspeople’s being “enshrouded in perpetual mourning” down to the curse’s effects on retirement planning and life insurance.

Although there are stories in the collection with far grander concerns or backdrops—war in the Middle East, the wages of racism, astrophysics, irregularities in time, and the possibility of Earth’s being swallowed by a black hole—the two that stayed with me longest were about one man getting his eyes treated and another having his quarterly periodontal cleaning. In “Factitious Airs,” the narrator, a witty and minutely observant writer, takes us with him as his hygienist scrapes his gums and administers nitrous oxide. He knows that the gas will put him in a heightened state, and has a detailed agenda for how he will make use of it. Needless to say, things do not go according to plan, and the narrator returns to a world “which is no more comprehensible than it ever was.” But the journey is thrilling for the reader, and its aftereffects do make the narrator’s mouth “tingle with interdental awareness.” We’ve all been there.

“Laser,” the ophthalmology story, works seamlessly on several levels. It is a thoroughly believable account of a man’s dwindling eyesight and the treatments he accepts and declines. It also explores the relationship between doctor and patient, the limitations of the scientific method, and the nature of perception. The patient, who is a veteran science teacher, comes to understand that repetition and predictability, as much as field loss, can make the world seem as if one is looking through “a wall of slightly smudged glass.”

Another story, “Mercury,” stands out for me as a fine experiment. Ostensibly a first-person account of how the narrator loses his teaching job for delivering a scandalous note to another teacher, it becomes clear (the title should have been a hint!) that the real story is about the messenger, a second-grade misfit named Sammy, and his traumatizing journey down long corridors and into a classroom full of contemptuous fifth-graders. The story plays havoc with point of view, and we never do find out what that note said—though we can guess. But Sammy’s agonies are so well and compassionately depicted that “Mercury” works anyway.

If I have a complaint about the stories in this collection, it is its reductionist, retro treatment of women. One expects a certain amount of shapely legs, short skirts, nubile young things, retreating forms in provocative clothes, and so on in the title novella, but there are plenty more in the rest of the stories. Item: In “Professor Arecibio,” an astronomy professor on a train imagines the “intimate parts” of the woman opposite him, with her “above-the knee leather skirt.” Item: In “The Future,” another professor (social science this time) is almost run over by a woman. He becomes “transfixed” by her skirt: “by its brevity and by its twenty-first century pink vinyl sheen.” He is also taken by her legs and the “nearly pre-Cambrian” freshness of her face and, since she has decided she cannot drive in the city, he chucks an important meeting of an august commission and drives her to New Rochelle. Thoughts about past, present and future worlds figure into this somehow. Item: The young paralegal with whom the protagonist in “V. The Large Hadron Collider,” a judge, imagines an affair, wears “body-hugging blouses and above-the knee skirts.” On the day the story takes places, she is wearing a short dress whose hem rides up “a few inches farther” when she leans into his doorway. The judge, who is deciding a case about a particle collider, begins to have deep if incoherent thoughts about alternate universes where he could “frolic” with the paralegal and not get caught by his rich and powerful wife.

Okay, many of the protagonists, and perhaps the author, are leg men. Fair enough. But the larger point about this collection is the near-absence of women who are not objects of male desire, or in the story only as they relate to men. True, the writer is a man, and you write about what you know. Even so, I decided to apply Alison Bechdel’s movie test to this book. To pass the Bechdel test, a movie must: (1) have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3), about something other than a man.

I leafed through the collection and could only find two examples where females talked to each other at all, and both are on shaky ground. The two schoolgirls mentioned as part of the scenery in “The Future,” who “resolved not to return to school,” might count, but that would be a stretch because we never actually hear them speak. Or the second hygienist in “Factitious Airs,” who both speaks directly to the first one and actually has ideas about special relativity, would have saved the day except that she turns out to be the narrator’s nitrous-oxide induced hallucination. Of course, short stories are not movies; they are more interior, contain fewer characters, and are, well, short. But when a whole collection doesn’t get past Bechdel Step Two, it is worth taking stock before compiling the next one.

I would, however, add that Kalfus, like Updike and Cheever and probably most other great male fiction writers in English, create plenty of characters that either transcend gender, or teach all of us something new about it. This is an intelligent and very rewarding collection of short stories, with a brilliant flagship novella.

Carolyn Daffron author photoCarolyn Daffron is a lawyer, writer, editor, and policy analyst who lives in Philadelphia.  For the past several years, she has worked on the intersection of policy and technology.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST by Daniel Torday reviewed by Michelle Fost

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The Last Flight of Poxl West cover art. Artwork of a plane flying over LondonTHE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST
by Daniel Torday
St. Martin’s Press, 291 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

In Daniel Torday’s debut novel The Last Flight of Poxl West, two first-person tales wrap around each other. This intertwining is in itself fascinating, especially given that one of the strands is an account of a man who repeatedly pulls away from those he feels closest to, seemingly unable to sustain intimate connections.

Torday begins the novel in the voice of Eli Goldstein, a Boston-area teenager who bears witness to the literary rise and fall of his adopted uncle, Poxl West. Eli finds his Uncle Poxl’s success as a writer absolutely thrilling. These two have a special relationship—they greatly enjoy each other’s company, going together to cultural events such as operas and symphonies—and, best of all, afterwards going out to Cabot’s for ice-cream, conversation, and the sharing of early drafts of Uncle Poxl’s writing in progress.

Eli is Poxl’s first and probably most adoring audience for his book, Skylock: The Memoir of a Jewish RAF Bomber. Eli takes a lot of pleasure in following the book’s reception. After the memoir is reviewed in The New York Times, Eli imagines Poxl’s response to the review: “There are some criticisms in there, Eli, sure. Even The Great Gatsby isn’t a perfect book. But my book! Reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times!” Post publication, the kid is in for quite a disappointment over Poxl’s failures. Where is Poxl? Why must Eli craft an imagined conversation rather than have an actual, real life conversation with his Uncle Poxl about this book review? Why doesn’t Uncle Poxl send Eli and his parents the promised signed copies of his memoir? To what extent has he misrepresented himself in his memoir? And, most importantly, why does Poxl mysteriously vanish from Eli’s life?

The second voice of the novel is Poxl’s. Along with the story of Eli and his relationship with Poxl West, Torday also presents the full manuscript of Poxl’s memoir. On the surface, the memoir tells a heroic story of a Jewish boy who fights Nazis by enlisting in Britain’s Royal Air Force. Go a little deeper though, and we find the story of a Jewish man who understands his survival—however much a matter of chance—as related to his tendency to run away from anyone important to him whenever the relationship becomes emotionally painful or complicated. It’s as though Poxl attributes his survival to his decisions to flee.

Poxl’s literary acclaim is likened to that of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. Eli prefers Poxl’s stories. At a Boston literary reading and signing, a graduate student aggressively questions why Poxl has written his book: “I’d just say there’s a certain saturation point with a certain kind of story…. I just wonder what you can say that Primo Levi or Jerzy Kosinski or Elie Wiesel hasn’t already.” For Eli, Poxl’s life and writing position him beyond these other literary witnesses to the Holocaust. These other writers, as Eli sees it, hold little challenge to Poxl’s importance:

We’d been assigned Survival in Auschwitz, The Painted Bird, and Night at Hebrew school. I’d read Kosinski closest, and my uncle was no painted bird. He was a Jew who had killed Germans, who had sought the fight when others fled. He was the master of his own narrative.

Eli adds, “Poxl West was the only hero I needed.”

Daniel Torday author photo

Daniel Torday

But what kind of hero is Poxl? Like Kosinski, Poxl will be exposed for fabricating some of what he presents as his personal experience. And although Eli views Poxl as a fighter rather than a fleer, repeatedly in the memoir we learn of instances of Poxl running away.

Poxl inscribes Eli’s importance in his life into the acknowledgments page of his memoir: “And thanks to Elijah Goldstein, my first reader and constant listener. I’ve told these stories to you, and for you.” I was reminded, reading The Last Flight of Poxl West, of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Eli’s relationship to Poxl resembles Art’s with his father. These are stories that layer the act of witnessing: Eli and Art bear witness to witnesses.

In Maus II, Art talks to his therapist about how difficult his father was to be around. Art is struggling with his recent success as a graphic novelist. His career is flourishing but he’s depressed and suffering from a creative block. Art and the therapist have a remarkable conversation. They talk about how Art’s father, a Holocaust survivor, was always hyper-critical of him. Art could never do anything to meet his father’s high standards. Is Art feeling guilty now because in his success he is proving his father wrong? Has Art attributed his parents’ survival to his father’s ability to be more successful and capable than others?

Clearly a lot is at stake psychologically for Art in becoming a successful graphic artist. The therapist points out that “it wasn’t the BEST people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was RANDOM!” What’s more, the therapist points out that “the victims who died can never tell THEIR side of the story, so maybe it’s better not to have any more stories.” Art and the therapist talk a little more. We learn that Art usually feels better after these weekly sessions. He heads home, more able to return to his creative work.

I’m interested by the similarity here between Spiegelman’s Art and Torday’s Eli. Both these next generation witnesses experience challenging behavior of survivors close to them. In Torday’s novel, the tendency to flee—borne out of the association of flight with survival—has a great cost; the tendency doesn’t fully stop with the end of the war. Perhaps it is difficult for a survivor to believe that his actions alone didn’t cause his survival. Poxl keeps fleeing. Yet flight is in constant tension with what an important character in the memoir-within-the-novel calls a “muscle memory.”

Poxl West, as we learn, has not been a stranger to intimacy, love, connection. Torday brings the two strands of his novel together marvelously. Despite all odds, this survivor, with his tendency toward flight, loss, and cutting himself off from nurturing human connection also is pulled toward memory. For Poxl West and Eli, there remain traces of Poxl’s past attachments. Much was lost for Poxl in his experience of the Holocaust. In Torday’s telling, there’s a hopefulness that the knowledge of what was lost—including a capacity for love—and not simply the act of losing and disconnecting, gets passed down through the generations.

Daniel Torday’s flash fiction story “Air Conditioner” appears in Issue No. 2 of Cleaver. Read Michelle Fost’s review of his novella, The Sensualist from July 2013. 

Michelle Fost author photoMichelle Fost is a writer living in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in The Painted Bride Quarterly and her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Phoenix Literary Section.

THE SILVER SWAN by Elena Delbanco reviewed by Hannah Judd

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Silver Swan cover art. Close-up of a woman's face next to a close-up of the body of a violinTHE SILVER SWAN
by Elena Delbanco
Other Press, 240 pages

reviewed by Hannah Judd

Elena Delbanco’s father was Bernard Greenhouse, cellist in the Beaux Arts Trio, and in this first novel full of musicians her lived experience brings authority to her descriptions. Her focus is on a father, Alexander, a famous cellist but distant man, and his daughter, Mariana, also a cellist, poised to follow in his footsteps as a soloist but derailed by crippling stage fright and an unhappy love affair. The cello promised to her since childhood, her father’s, is unexpectedly not left to her in his will: the reader is left to grapple with, alongside Mariana, questions of where love, art, and family intersect. What does it mean when a cello, an object, is the center of a story? What myths do instruments carry; and why do we value the old ones so highly? What does it mean when a father loves his career more than his family? How do we recover from blows dealt from beyond the grave? How do we mitigate the expectations of families to pursue our own passions?

The cello that is the focal point of the novel is called the Silver Swan (because of a silver inlay), and it is fictional but compared to the Countess of Stanlein, the Piatagorsky, the Duport, and other ‘name-brand’ cellos of history. This is a quirk of many string instruments; there is a mythos built up in the lineage of famous players, the well-known makers, the year the instrument was built, the varnish, and the age of the wood that makes some stand out. These are the cellos that are played by the most famous soloists and often land in museums; Yo-Yo Ma plays a cello on loan from the Smithsonian, the Piatagorsky cello is currently on display at the Met.

Having a cello at the center of her story is an interesting choice because at some point all of Delbanco’s characters fall victim to their obsession with the instrument. Mariana’s father calls the cello his greatest love, and Mariana looks forward to playing it on special occasions. She eagerly anticipates inheriting it, to the point that she becomes irrational and destructive when that is not the case. Mariana’s mother, Pilar, figures in the story as a dour figure who is resentful of the fact that the cello takes attention away from her. Claude Roselle, Alexander’s star student, is so worshipful of the cello that when he fears it is damaged he begins to cry. The idea that an object could take precedence over a personal relationship is a realistic one, but it makes it difficult for the characters to appear sympathetic. The reader comes to expect every character to act selfishly on behalf of their stake in the cello in any skirmishes that take place.

Elena Delbanco author photo

Elena Delbanco

Delbanco is comfortable in the world of music: she writes beautifully about the sun’s light on the Silver Swan’s varnish, the concentration of practicing Bach, the beauty of the Berkshires by Tanglewood, the post-concert dinner parties attended by performers and Manhattan elite alike, and the schedule of the touring classical soloist. She truly shines in scenes where Mariana is a teacher, talking about the intricacies of interpreting music and understanding the cello. Mariana, a character who is by turns rash, impetuous, and confused, comes into her own when she teaches, and Delbanco’s dialogue is fascinating in those moments.

As lovely as her navigation of the musical world is, when the spotlight moves from the day-to-day of an artist to the motion of her narrative Delbanco falters. While she can describe the delicacy of a Bach Sarabande, her plot feels by contrast heavy-handed: we watch Mariana’s father and mother fight constantly, her mother accuses her of stealing her father away, her father is revealed to have a mistress and a secret child. Mariana seduces, she faints onstage, she steals a cello and flees across the globe, she burns down a house. The twists happen in slow motion, and are so overdrawn as to take on a soap-opera quality: they are disproportionate to the point of being unbelievable. This is hard to read through; one feels that the plot is forced and littered with intentional and distracting twists and turns instead of leaving the story to naturally develop.

The disappointing nature of Delbanco’s plot is redeemed by her gorgeous prose, which makes the novel imminently readable. She is skilled at creating a world of glamour and intrigue, and her dialogue is a beautiful mix of the witty and the thoughtful. She relishes details: the silver inlay on the Stradivarius at the center of the book, the way the light shines through a fifth avenue window, the dishes of food served at an elegant restaurant all come to life in Delbanco’s impressive first work, The Silver Swan.

Hannah Judd author photoHannah Judd is a rising junior at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is a music major and works as an associate editor at PennSound. She is a cellist who currently studies under the direction of Jeffrey Solow, and has played in the Bowdoin Music Festival, the Cello An American Experience two-week intensive, and Interlochen’s World Youth Symphony Orchestra. 

ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren reviewed by Justin Goodman

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Alexandrian Summer cover art. Abstract drawing of a horse against a yellow backgroundALEXANDRIAN SUMMER
by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren
translated by Yardenne Greenspan
New Vessel Press, 171 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

“The Irony of Nostalgia”

From our Modernist forebears came an emphasis on the power of memory (think Marcel Proust). Yet they forgot to mention its overbearing sibling, nostalgia. Overbearing not only because it tends to act as “a screen not intended to hide anything–a decoration meant only to please the eye,” but also because it obscures history. In effect, it fetishizes the past. It makes Alexandria the “strange, nostalgic European landscape” of Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s Alexandrian Summer (translated for the first time into English by Yardenne Greenspan). One would expect an aestheticizing impulse of, as André Aciman informs in his introduction, a man who “aged ten…left his home on the Rue Delta in Alexandra” and then saw the military overthrow of King Farouk “dissolve all remnants of multi-national life in Egypt.”

Alexandrian Summer is nigh a roman à clef, following the arc of the author’s life up to his fortuitous migration from this anti-Semitic cosmopolitan fantasy to Israel to join his brothers. Nonetheless, despite his intimacy with his history, Goren avoids any such pathos. All nostalgic bliss is converted to a mourner’s Kaddish. The novel’s characters are impulsive, obsessive, and repressed; its future is inevitably bleak. Goren confines the mythical, in “this mythical metropolis,” to the telling. “I just want to tell the story of one summer,” the narrator begins the story, “a Mediterranean summer, an Alexandrian summer.”

It’s the summer of 1951 when “a Jewish family [that] came from Cairo…came to Alexandria for a summer of joy.” The summer when the family’s eldest son, “David Hamdi-Ali tall as a toreador, blonde as a Nordic cavalier, elegant like Rudolpho Valentino,” attempts to woo and wed the Alexandrian Anabelle. To an extent, this marriage plot is the narrative locus. All eyes turn to Anabelle to determine if she will take the wealthy and talented jockey.

Yet, with the clarity and complexity of Austen, Goren’s centerpiece elaborates on its periphery. The apex of their romantic drama, for instance, reads like “two boxers…going on…with an almost mechanical inertia,” from ultimatum to ultimatum: She tries to shake him off by demanding that it’s “either me or racing.” David says he will “give it up, damn it.” “She stopped in her tracks. It couldn’t be.” And following ruminations of this nature he continues, “…after I finish this season.” And so on. Alexandrian Summer leads to these moments when the minutest answers rock the world. This is the genius of them. They’re also what corrupts everything that comes afterward. Decisions are earthquakes and the future is its aftershock.

Yitzhak Gormezano Goren author photo

Yitzhak Gormezano Goren

Perhaps a grim metaphor, but it is demanded of a novel in the shadow of destruction. One would have to go back to–the analogy must be emphasized–Austen’s Mansfield Park to find such bleakness, such fatedness, such a corrosive social world that can’t help but be dreamed of. Even including the “Victorian society…bind[ing] itself by the webs of convention,” gossipy grandmothers tut-tutting, pushing for marriage, and racisms that lets you “live like a carefree lord” if you were European, “or at least Jewish.” This lurking aspect of nationality creates a shadow of its own, shading all interactions. Often it is grim, light, and cheeky. At times the shading is too rough, as with the introduction of the jockey who eventually beats David, the Arabian Al-Tal’ooni, who is so consistently envisioned as a Mohammedian figure as to become a figurine. Sacrifice of character for polemics is rare, otherwise.

To call Alexandria “cosmopolitan to the bone,” as the narrator does, comes across as bitterly ironic then. The characters saying, they “love her so much, Alexandra,” almost acidic. It is impossible to deny the wistfulness though. A sense of simplicity lost drives the telling without the suggestion of Eden. Whereas nostalgic love would linger on that blissful eternity, Alexandrian Summer is a felix culpa. Why do they love Alexandria? Because “something is rotten, truly rotten.” It is a more noble, and more nuanced, love than can be found in most literature. The real romance of this novel is not person to person, but memory to storyteller. It is enough to note that the only person to explicitly die in the novel is Joseph Hamdi-Ali, who had rejected his history for another’s. Whether this was freedom or condemnation could not be said, since he could never erase his history. As a mark of Goren’s gentleness, Hamd-Ali’s wife “Emilie almost smiled with relief” at his peace.

The book opens with the native Alexandrian family’s youngest, Robby, as he scribbles down license plate numbers in his notebook to fill in his free time. “’What a cacophony,’ says one women. And, indeed, the aerial view of Alexandria is of ants “running around…as if there were purpose to all this frenzy.” Perhaps that is all one can do, fill in the free time of the past, through close study recreate some stained Shangri La. Nostalgia, as history reminds us in the anecdotes of its elderly, has the blessedness of a long life. What we have in Goren is an anti-nostalgia: it ends with “the rain splattered over the numbers, the water blurred the ink, blurred the shapes, erased everything.” What makes this summer one to recall, what makes most summer films forgettable, is its sense of eternity in ending. Eventually comes winter.

Justin Goodman author photoA recent graduate from Purchase College, Justin Goodman is working to establish a career and develop knowledge of the literary scene. His writing has been published in Submissions Magazine and Italics Mine.

I REFUSE by Per Petterson reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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I Refuse cover art. Two tiny human figures against an all-white expanse of bare trees and snow.I REFUSE
by Per Petterson
translated by Don Bartlett
Graywolf Press, 282 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

The fact is that part of you is always fifteen, and will always be that silly, stunted age, when you had all the answers and your heart was folded as neatly as a napkin. The age when you sampled cigarettes and realized how easy it would be to run away from home, for good. The age when the drink or the drug worked, for the first time, altering the way you saw yourself and the rest of the messy, stimulating world. The fact is that everyone is this way, forever fifteen. We age in place, with our bodies getting older around the skeletons of our memories, which are fixed as the spears of a crystal. The same is true of Per Petterson, who circles the same heavy themes over and over again, as though hoping to divine their meaning. I Refuse, his latest novel, revisits familiar territory: cruel adults, absent parents, the unspoken pact between friends, and an eyeless God hanging over the whole scene like a painted canopy.

Released over a month ago, I Refuse is already “selling like a train,” according to publisher Graywolf Press. There are other reviews, by more astute writers in higher places. These other essays compare Petterson’s work to his earlier novels; they reflect on the inherent grimness of being Norwegian. The element of time, so lovingly evoked in I Refuse, suffers a great deal of praise in these other reviews. Why? Petterson isn’t necessarily breaking new ground, in his own writing or in fiction in general. He’s deepening the trench he’s dug with his pen, and his labor is inspiring in its singlemindedness. And isn’t that how it should be, the same way Lou Reed cooked rock and roll down to three throaty chords? Simple. Humans are afraid to die. We examine the entrails of our pasts, hoping for a sign of where we went wrong. Was this part of our makeup, or an offense we committed without thinking twice? Petterson tweaks the tail of those fears. His characters find that, although the glare of youth has passed, the coals burning in them are red and fierce as ever. Will we ever be obscure? They seem to ask themselves. Were we ever anything?

Per Petterson author photo

Per Petterson

The premise is simple: two men, Tommy and Jim, once childhood friends, meet on a bridge on a grey, unpromising morning. One man is at the wheel of a Mercedes, headed to work at an office in the big city. The other, fishing from the rail, his hat greasy and battered. A moment of recognition, and the past unfolds like a deck of cards. Petterson deals the details slowly, giving the reader a chance to savor the connections. There’s an imminent sense of failure—we already know how this story ends, it’s the who and why that keep us turning pages:

We both knew why he limped and we had forgotten nothing, repressed nothing, but we weren’t supposed to talk about it, no, that was the trick, instead we would just look at each other with maybe a quick smile on our lips and share that knowledge, that memory, as though it was something that was ours together, his and mine, something intimate and violent, a secret, burning bond that held us together, a bond of blood.

The rejection of memory—or someone else’s version of the past—seeps through I Refuse. Petterson gives each character his or her own say in a way that enlarges the plot without causing much intrigue. There is little disagreement in Tommy and Jim’s accounts, which is mildly disappointing, but the winding sentences and beautiful, bleak images of the woods in childhood elevate the novel from clever to elegant. Many critics will tell you this one is worth reading; I say, yes. Like the past, like the shell shaped whorls of your finger pads, like the white stones in a new grave, it is worth examination.

Per Petterson’s short story collection Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, also from Graywolf Press, was reviewed earlier this month by Rory McCluckie.

Claire Rudy Foster author photoClaire Rudy Foster lives in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her critically recognized short fiction has appeared in various respected journals and she has been honored by several small presses, including a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.

TROMPE L’OEIL by Nancy Reisman reviewed by Michelle Fost

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tromp l'oeil cover art. A view of three children standing in the sea through a burnt white patterned wallpaperTROMPE L’OEIL
by Nancy Reisman
Tin House Books, 352 pages
reviewed by Michelle Fost

Does a good life play out like a well made film? Nancy Reisman has published two excellent books—a prize-winning collection of stories, House Fires (it won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction in 1999) and a novel, The First Desire. Now her second novel, just published by Tin House, Trompe L’Oeil, comes along and almost tricks the eye to thinking it is about a real family, or perhaps about what we can learn from a carefully curated assemblage of painters (descriptive response to their work is incorporated into the novel) including Edouard Vuillard, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and Georges de la Tour. Still, there is something more exciting at play in Trompe L’Oeil than the saga of the Murphy family or the discussion of visual art within the novel. This is a novel that finds beauty and resolution by testing how real life and literary art are like filmmaking.

Reisman can sound like Virginia Woolf, but her experimentation also places her in the company of contemporary film directors like Terence Malick and Richard Linklater. If she has written a love letter to cinema, it’s not a traditional or straightforward letter. I don’t think anyone in the Murphy family ever so much as steps a foot in a movie theater in the many decades that we follow them. We hear about great painters, but no filmmakers, no directors, no actors. Instead, we can understand the Murphy family itself as a stand-in for a film being made. Moments accumulate to form their story, and we read of these moments sequentially.

Trompe L’Oeil is a literary “Girlhood” to Richard Linklater’s quietly experimental film “Boyhood.” Both Reisman and Linklater—like Virginia Woolf—care about moments. Late in “Boyhood,” we witness this conversation between the just-arrived-at-university Mason Jr. (the boy at the center of the film) and a girl he’s just met, sitting on a rock in the middle of a vast, beautiful desert landscape:

Girl: You know how everyone’s always saying seize the moment? I don’t know, I’m kind of thinking it’s the other way around, you know, like the moment seizes us.

Mason Jr.: Yeah, I know, it’s constant, the moments, it’s just — it’s like it’s always right now, you know?

Here’s Reisman in Trompe L’Oeil: “The world as one knows it is only the world of a moment, isn’t it? Then there is another moment, another world.”

Nancy Reisman author photo

Nancy Reisman

To make “Boyhood,” Linklater regrouped every year over the course of twelve years with his cast and crew; the actors aged along with their characters during the filmmaking. Linklater lets his audience experience both weight and pleasure in witnessing time change not only his characters but also his actors. The film itself, because of the way it was made over time, reminds us of the sequential nature of cinema, one frame following another, like moments, minutes, hours, and twelve years.

In the course of the twelve years making “Boyhood,” one of the young actors, Linklater’s daughter Lorelei, at one point wanted out of the project. She asked her father if he couldn’t, possibly, just kill off her character. He said no, the death of the character would be too dramatic for the story to bear. By coincidence, this plot point—a young child’s unexpected, random death—is a central moment that informs everything that follows in Trompe L’Oeil. The death of this young character risks melodrama and trying the patience of readers. But where “Boyhood” with its twelve-years-in-front-of-the-camera cast is a story about continuity, Trompe L’Oeil, constructed of words, is all about disruption. When “Boyhood” comes to its close, it illuminates that it has been built of a sequence of present moments, none necessarily more important than another. Trompe L’Oeil will show us that a weighty moment in a family’s life can be balanced by what comes next.

Trompe L’Oeil introduces us to the Murphy family arriving at what should be a very sweet moment in their lives. The father, James, has just been promoted and the family goes off to Rome to celebrate with a family vacation. Little Molly tours a church with her mother and older sister. Soon afterwards, from the church steps, she sees her father and brother across the street. It might be her pleasure in seeing them wave that leads her to step into the street toward them—we can’t know why she does so. She’s struck by a white delivery truck and a little later dies in the hospital.

The death of the child becomes an image—like a film still or a photograph—the characters repeatedly return to and try to understand. What does Molly’s death mean to each of them, and at different moments in their lives? How will this death continue to alter what the story of this family becomes? It’s also as though a reel of film, the film including Molly, has gotten lost; past age four, there’s no footage of Molly for the filmmaker to work with.

When a parent buries a child, we feel the sadness of life not proceeding in the expected order. The desire for order is striking in Trompe L’Oeil, particularly as felt by Molly’s older sister, Katy. After graduating from college, Katy agrees to move in for the summer with her boyfriend. She is soon taken by surprise by the disorder and its effect on her: “Here inside lay the crusted dishes, here the dirty laundry, despite her efforts. Again disorder had replicated; again the day confirmed that her simplest desires—the clean space, a conch shell on a bare wood table—were irrelevant; she herself irrelevant.” Katy’s great sadness does not end there. The clean space, the bowl of apples, and the order that Katy longs for are, in fact, things that were known to her in her mother’s home. She spends more time in her mother’s home over the summer—one way of regaining equilibrium. The feeling of disorder, of their lives being somehow out of sequence, will be corrected late in the Murphy family story when the children will go to the funeral of a parent.

Sara, a sister born after the Rome trip—one of two girls born after Molly’s death—will grow up with an awareness of “a gap” in the family. Sara experiences Molly as fictional—a character in the family’s story, talked about, but not someone she has ever known as a living person. They have lived in different time periods. Sara’s experience during her own trip to Rome, then, is rather extraordinary. Looking at a Raphael portrait of a girl—La dama con liocorno—she has the sensation of how alive the figure is: “As if in fact you see each other.”

There isn’t really reciprocity in the relationship between Sara and Molly, but what Sara sees in the girl in the painting—and by extension, in Molly—is reflected back to her. When Sara looks at Raphael’s striking painting that so strongly affects her, I would guess that she understands that to create such a portrait, Raphael must have viewed a real person who was his model, someone who was as full of life then as Sara is right now, at this much later moment, while she registers the beauty of the picture. This recognition—a sense of the real life of a person not living in one’s own time—sets Sara free.

Michelle Fost author photoMichelle Fost is a writer living in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in The Painted Bride Quarterly and her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Phoenix Literary Section.

ENDING UP by Kingsley Amis reviewed by Jon Busch

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Ending Up cover art. An abstract sketch of a man throwing a dart at another man's back in a white room with pink and yellow balloons on the ceilingENDING UP
by Kingsley Amis
NYRB Classics, 136 pages

reviewed by Jon Busch

Originally published in 1974, Kingsley Amis’ short novel Ending Up is about five old-timers approaching death in England. It is a startlingly funny work, considering the grim subject.

I was initially apprehensive about this book, wary that my limited knowledge of English culture would hinder my ability to understand an English work of social satire, but happily this was not the case nor should it be a worry for any reader. Amis’ concerns in the book, while presented through British characters, are predominantly human in scope.

The bulk of the novel, with the exception of a few doctors’ visits, takes place at Tuppeny-Happenny Cottage, where the novel’s five protagonists share residence. The cottage, with its off-the-beaten-path culture, is a petri dish of incubating irritation resulting from the character’s declining physical power and loss of mental faculties.

While the plot is inherently tragic, Amis’ dry descriptions, annoying characters, and ridiculous ending argue for the book’s classification as comedy. Satirist Craig Brown, in the introduction, describes the book as irritation raised to the level of art. More succinct words have never been uttered. If there is an aim to this meandering tale of drunkenness, petty arguments, and “long wailing farts” it is to display without remorse the irritations of old age, incontinence and all.

The cast consists of individuals whose personalities are equal in flaw to their failing physicality. Leading the charge towards irritation incarnate is Bernard Bastable, a man whose general dislike towards everyone and everything results in days spent pulling hideous pranks and unsuccessful attempts to frame his roommate’s dog as a menace that should be euthanized. Amis’ insight into the cruelty of age captivates and adds intrigue throughout the text. As time scratches away Bernard’s desire, he grows distant from himself.

In the past, he had been a man of many interests. The athletic ones—fives, racquets, cricket—had gone when they had had to go and he did not want to read about them. Military tactics and strategy, the history of the Empire, anything concerned with India (the land of his birth and early childhood and of eight years’ service between the wars), pioneers in aviation, chess, the life of the Duke of Wellington, the works of George Meredith, all had gone too… So all he did was pass the time.

Luckily, or not, Bernard is surrounded by an ensemble cast of absurd ancients. Bernard’s sister, Adela, is an ugly woman without any friends who has “never been kissed passionately.” Derek “Shorty” Shortell is Bernard’s alcoholic partner who he hasn’t slept with in thirty years. George Zeyer, a retired professor suffering from hemiplegia and nominal aphasia, is the brother of Bernard’s former wife. And Marigold Pyke is a mildly senile woman who speaks in childish idioms such as “drinkle-pinkle,” “chummy-wummies,” and “kiddle-widdles.”

These are five irritated people with nothing better to do than irritate each other. Amis somehow manages to make one hundred plus pages of this hilarious and compelling. Shorty, for example, endures mortal decay with touchy stubbornness. “He felt a twinge at his anus,” writes Amis,

‘You are a sodding liar,’ he said to it. ‘Not an hour ago you were on about that was that for the day—what, you bother me again? Not you, and butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. All right, fuck you, I’ll go quietly. That bleeding wine. Thought Scotch was supposed to be binding.

Kingsley Amis author photo

Kingsley Amis

If he were to have chosen likable characters instead of the irascible lot of hand wringers and grouches that he did, the book would certainly fall out of comic classification and into the realm of witless tragedy. After all, if you look past the humorous antics and ubiquitous flatulence, you are left with five withering seniors plagued by strokes, cancer, senility, and alcoholism—each of them moving closer to death with the turn of the page.

But humor bandages most wounds and indeed, Amis’ laconic portrait of dimming life at Tuppenny-Hapenny Cottage is a near perfect satire, capturing with exaggeration the petty obsessions, feuds, and struggles that comprise geriatric life. While at times the apparent aimlessness of the plot can leave the reader questioning the point of it all (somewhere around the tenth “long wailing fart”), the final section of the book, in all its absurdity and cruelty, makes clear the author’s intentions and leaves the reader satisfied and in my particular case, laughing hard enough to forget all of time.

Jon Busch author photo

Jon Busch lives in Northwest Philadelphia. He spends his days working as the co-owner and content manager for Apollo Content. In the evenings, he can be found writing stories or playing music at open mic nights around the city. His fiction, book reviews, and interviews have been published or are forthcoming at Crack the Spine, Cleaver, Bird’s Thumb, Foliate Oak, Philadelphia Stories, Piker Press, and Baby Teeth Magazine. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

ASHES IN MY MOUTH, SAND IN MY SHOES by Per Petterson reviewed by Rory McCluckie

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Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes cover art. An abstract drawing of a house on a black lakeASHES IN MY MOUTH, SAND IN MY SHOES
by Per Petterson
translated by Don Bartlett

Graywolf Press, 118 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes is Per Petterson’s first book but one of his last to be translated into English. This isn’t surprising; Petterson’s 2005 worldwide breakthrough, Out Stealing Horses, triggered a certain catching-up period for translators. Gradually, we readers have been able to consume the bulk of his output but it’s only now that we can see for ourselves where it all started for the author. This means that readers are able to bring a context to this work that isn’t usually part of the chronological reading of contemporary fiction.

It makes for an interesting exercise. Published in 1987 when he was in his mid-thirties, Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes is a collection of stories that launched Petterson on a writing career that followed stints as a librarian, book store clerk, and translator. You could mine the man’s biography for years, however, and still not find anything more horrifically arresting than the event that took place on April 7, 1990. Early that morning, while travelling aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, Petterson’s mother, father, brother and niece perished along with 155 others when the ferry was set on fire. It would be a hard task to read his post-1990 work without some kind of reference to this tragic occurrence and, sure enough, much of that writing is delivered in a tone that feels like a reaction against this terrible misfortune. Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, however, came before this pivotal moment in Petterson’s life and thus naturally seems to pose a very simple but fascinating question; namely, does this early work suggest that, under different circumstances, Petterson would have been a different writer than he is today?

Per Petterson author photo

Per Petterson

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that it doesn’t seem he would have been that different at all. The reason is that this is an unusually prescient book. The first work of any writer is likely to contain ideas that are revisited and developed in later projects, but Petterson appears to have been set upon a certain group of themes from the outset. At the very least, his debut betrays an initial thrashing around for concepts that would later come to bear bountiful fruit for the novelist. This impression is one that arises easily from the book’s structure. Ashes is a collection of ten stories over 118 pages and, thus, has a brevity and pace that is absent from Petterson’s later work. Across these pages, he gives first airing to themes that have now become his common ground, and they’re explored through the experiences of Arvid Jansen—a recurring character in Petterson’s work.

Family, in particular, dominates proceedings. The book starts and ends with scenes of Arvid and his father, with the opening providing an immediate, enlightening example of one of the ways this subject provides fertile ground for Petterson:

Dad had a face that Arvid loved to watch, and at the same time made him nervous as it wasn’t just a face but also a rock in the forest with its furrows and hollows, at least if he squinted when he looked…Those that liked to comment on this kind of thing said that the two of them looked a lot like each other and that was perhaps what made Arvid most nervous, but when he glanced in the mirror he didn’t understand what they meant for Dad was blond, and all Arvid saw in the mirror was two round cheeks and plainly Dad did not have them.

But most of the time Dad was just Dad, someone that Arvid liked and dared to touch. Uncle Rolf said that Dad’s face had a determination that couldn’t determine where to go, but Uncle Rolf had always been a big mouth.

There’s a lot going on in this opening page. First, it’s interesting to note how quickly Petterson establishes the peculiar pitch of the familial relation. There’s undoubted affection in the way the members of the Jansen clan interact but there’s also uncertainty, as though they’re alive to the threat of being hurt by the very people they hold close. The way that Arvid “loved” and yet was also “nervous” over that first line economically strikes an uncomfortable balance that is maintained throughout the book and that is explored again and again in Petterson’s later works.

Second, Petterson immediately suggests a doubt about Arvid’s paternal origin. In what later turns out to be characteristic of the author, this isn’t explored in any detail. Rather, it’s an example of his occasional employment of Hemingway’s theory of omission. The brief reference to Arvid and his father is all that’s suggested to the reader but it betrays the enormous emotional and historical weight beneath the surface. Again, this is something that we see frequesntly in his later work. I Curse the River of Time, in particular, is memorable for the way some major incidents are never completely explicated but which the characters move around silently, like mournful planets orbiting a dismal sun.

And then there’s that wonderfully penetrating observation from Uncle Rolf: “a determination that couldn’t determine where to go.” This could be a description of a number of characters throughout Petterson’s work; a stifling inability to progress or to achieve something the characters themselves might not even know the dimensions of tortures a number of them across the writer’s corpus. Far from being some reaction against real events, it seems as though Petterson was drawn to this type of quiet desperation from the start.

The opening passage (and Ashes in general) reveals Petterson’s early ability to write from the child’s point of view, with the adult world poised on the horizon like a mysterious, unpredictable mountain. In fact, one of the most potent stories in this collection draws its force from the overlapping of youth and age. “Like a Tiger in a Cage” takes its name from the way Arvid suddenly sees the effect of time on the face of his mother. The result is visceral in its force:

She’d looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.

The shocking, revelatory nature of Arvid’s discovery feels terrifyingly genuine and laced with the trauma that can accompany a child’s first encounter with adult reality. The eight year-old protagonist has a similarly distressing experience when it comes to the subject of sex. He refuses to believe that human beings would engage in what he sees as behavior worthy of animals and provokes a rage-filled physical attack from one of his peers that leaves him prostrate on the road, in tears:

People fucked. Or else there wouldn’t be any babies. That’s the way it was. But he would never do it, wouldn’t want to or dare to or manage to, and he couldn’t care less whether he had children or not. But he felt strangely sad when he thought about the particular thing.

This kind of obstinate reaction somehow feels right, and so like Petterson because it chimes with what he wrote later. Through it, Arvid, though only a young boy, expresses a determination that establishes itself against reality and goes straight to the heart of what makes many of Petterson’s characters so melancholic and so ill-equipped for life.

Importantly, however, this is not an entirely morose book. Some critics have claimed that there is humor to be found in Petterson’s later works but such is the mood of those volumes, so steady and sad is the prose as it unfolds as though under grey, Nordic skies, that if it is there, its mirthful potential is completely drained of power. That’s not the case with Ashes. Partly as a result of the book’s pacey character, but equally due to a genuinely sunnier constitution, Petterson appears just a fraction more capable of cracking a smile within these stories. When, for example, Uncle Rolf is ingenious enough to come up with the idea of urinating out of the bedroom window instead of traipsing outdoors for relief, he does so (unintentionally) onto Arvid’s late grandmother’s rose bed. In later work, this sort of event would be shot through with a pathetic and bitter inflection; here, when Arvid’s father discovers the perpetrator midstream, Petterson is capitalizing on a potential for humor that he later came to ignore. In this first outing, the laughs have some kind of substance behind them; in later work, they’re hollow and lack conviction.

This is the only substantial difference between the Per Petterson of 1987 and the one who went on to write after the disaster of 1990. Indeed, there’s one particular episode in Ashes that seems to confirm it. It comes again from “Like a Tiger in a Cage,” this time when Arvid’s mother has gone for a nocturnal walk in the rain after another argument with her husband. While Arvid waits upstairs with his sister, they talk about how their mother always “walked up Trondhjemsveien, on the left- hand side, as far and as fast as she could,” and how, when she reached Grorud, “she crossed the road and came all the way back at the same insane tempo, smoking non-stop.” That night, however, is different from most in that his mother returns and then comes into his room to talk. Arvid seizes the opportunity:

“Mum?”
“Yes?”

“Why do you cross the road? I mean, why do you cross the road when you’re almost in Grorud and you’re on your way back?”

“Because I don’t want to walk with the cars heading in the same direction as me.”
“Why not?”
“Because is makes me feel they are all going away and I’m left standing there. You see?”

The explanation is fastidiously concise and yet it feels fundamental to Petterson’s writing. His characters don’t behave in their stubbornly inactive way out of a determined stand against anything, but because, by acting so, they escape the risk of something else that is much worse—being left behind. It’s an exchange that resounds throughout this small collection and one that extends its resonance deep into the author’s later work. More than that, it affirms that this authorial personality hasn’t simply been hewn from the ruins of one horrific event. Before life inflicted its terrible blow on Petterson himself, he was already imagining the pain of being alone—he’s been the same writer from the very start.

Rory McCluckie author photoRory McCluckie is a freelance writer and editor from Manchester, England. A graduate of the University of Leeds, he currently resides in Montreal.

THE SEA by Blai Bonet reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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The Sea cover art. Geometric art involving a dark blue shape at the bottom, vertical yellow bars on the right, and a red line with two slashes through it on the leftTHE SEA
by Blai Bonet
translated by and Maruxa Relano and Martha Tennent
Dalkey Archive Press, 178 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Manuel Tur, sixteen years old and confined to tubercular sanatorium, stares out his window at the forested plane. He fixes his gaze on the holm oaks and the olive trees. This is Majorca, the Catalan island, 1942. “To the west,” he says, at the opening of Blai Bonet’s 1958 novel The Sea (El Mar), in the new English version published by Dalkey Archive Press, “the sky is hazy, blue, tender, like an open switchblade above the sea.”

Bonet’s metaphoric language bristles with despair and danger. Tur, says another patient, Andreu Ramallo, “speaks as though bleeding to death.” The dying Justo Pastor has the “glassy, dirty gaze that animals have in the afternoon.” A razor blade in Tur’s hand (for the worst of reasons) has the look of a “train ticket that some invisible conductor has punched.”

The sea itself is the novel’s heavy, so vast and inviolate it’s invisible. Tur, the novel’s protagonist, mentions it at the opening (threatened by the switchblade sky) and then at the end, when the reader comes to understand its power. Nowhere and everywhere, coincidentally we find it even in the first names of the book’s two translators, Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent. In their luminous new translation, Maruxa and Martha have returned El Mar to the pantheon of twentieth century Catalan novels available to English readers. Bonet belongs there with Mercè Rodoreda and Josep Pla, like the painter Salvador Dalí so attuned to the dry heat, the crags and pines, the eternal, devastating light of Cataluña. (No book digs more violently into the Catalan earth than Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, translated by Tennent and published by Open Letter in 2009.) “We left the road and entered the parched fields strewn with clods of earth, and our feet hurt from the piercing stubbles,” says Manuel Tur.

The smell of wild olive trees, now close, filled us with anguish and silence and veiled cowardice. Treading on that red, sun-hardened earth was trying, because we were skirting walls that were covered with bramble and blooming asparagus that gave off a strong smell. A smell that was unfamiliar to us.

Blai Bonet author photo

Blai Bonet

Like The Time of the Doves, Rodoreda’s masterpiece, The Sea is framed by the horror of the Spanish Civil War. But quite unlike Barcelona, where Rodoreda’s novel is set, Majorca was significantly pro-fascist and conservative. Various factions of republican militias invaded the island in 1936, but they were turned away by pro-Franco fighters, falangists, and members of the Guardia Civil (Mussolini, in alliance with Franco, had Italian troops occupy Majorca until the end of the war). Manuel Tur’s father is a falangist and Manuel, at nine, and his buddy Pau Inglada, form a pretend militia inside a cave at the edge of their village. Pau, the “undecorated corporal,” wears a soda bottle cap pinned to his shirt as an artillery badge. Pau’s communist father is killed by the fascist milita. “To a nine-year-old boy, only crying and dying exist—pure and uncontestable—like a knife or a tree,” says Manuel Tur (the novel is comprised mostly of alternating first person accounts by Tur and Ramallo).

The dying indeed continues. The boys witness the fascist militia executing some republican prisoners in a cemetery; one of the executers is the father of their friend, the shepherd boy Julià Ballester. By correlation they blame the death of Pau Inglada’s father on Julià Ballester’s father, which leads to a harrowing fight between the boys.

“It was after witnessing that horror, all that shame, that the disease began to burn in me,” says Manuel Tur. The disease is physical—epilepsy and then, later, tuberculosis—and spiritual. The loss of innocence that begins with war-fed violence bleeds into the terror of adolescence. “Adolescence is the saddest, most deprived time in life because it is when one has the most intense expectations but no means of fulfilling them, consequently one is subject to serial disasters—large and small,” writes Josep Pla, in The Gray Notebooks (NYRB Classics, 2013).

Here the sea emerges, itself the knifeblade against the heart of Manuel Tur, at thirteen. In Alberto Moravia’s 1945 novel Agostino (NYRB Classics, 2014), the sea is where Agostino, a bourgeois boy on holiday with his mother, must face down the savagery and brutality of street-wizened local waifs to affirm the manhood he hadn’t yet realized was coming. Until the cruel moment, both Agostino and Manuel Tur are safe—Agostino in the bosom of his mother and Manuel in the deep cover of Catholicism, which clarifies his innocence as an eternal dream. But at the sea, where fate can turn with the shift of the wind, they must prove themselves (first, of course, by smoking cigarettes). And inevitably, in the terrible purgatory between childhood and adulthood, they’ll become confused when tougher kids break down and weep like children.

At the sea, Agostino is targeted by the other boys because he is soft and sheltered. Tur likewise is pelted with insults by the other boys, but this is because “between the previous summer sea and that afternoon’s, something had happened.” Manuel Tur has turned into a man. He responds to the boys’ laughter by diving into the sand as in a struggle to disavow his manhood and wipe himself clean.

As much as Bonet’s writing is saturated by the visceral world, Manuel Tur’s shame at loss of innocence and the spiritual disease that develops from guilt become the subject of the novel, amplified and distorted inside the feverish tubercular sanatorium. There, the acrid smoke of desire, of masturbation, of sordid thoughts, burns at the eyes of the poor, religious boy; Andreu Ramallo, slightly older and much more aggressive, fans the flames.

To protect himself, Manuel Tur invents his own stigmata, pain to numb himself from guilt and self-hatred. Ramallo, who has been sexually abused, needs to turn his own guilt on Tur, to force Manuel to destroy his innocence. He sends a nurse, Carmen Onaindia, into his room for the purpose of seduction. “Ramallo gave me his animal self,” says Manuel Tur. “I gave it to Carmen Onaindia and now I miss my mother terribly.” The rest of The Sea, a novel of existential struggle that delivers intensity of moral crisis on par with Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, is a battle between Manuel Tur and Andreu Ramallo for Manuel’s soul, between God and Satan, temptation and desire, between health and a terrifying illness that causes every patient at the sanatorium to hemorrhage blood in violent episodes that inevitably lead to sudden quiet and then death.

Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

GUYS LIKE ME by Dominique Fabre reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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Guys Like Me cover art. A green drawing of a man sitting and reading a yellow newspaper with a hole through the middleGUYS LIKE ME
by Dominique Fabre
translated by Howard Curtis
New Vessel Press, 144 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Sometime during Christmas week, 1997, my wife Rona and I and two of our friends were eating dinner in a small restaurant near St. Paul, in Paris. It must have been on rue Charlemagne, but though I can recall the table and the intimate ambiance, I don’t remember the name. We had finished eating, probably we were having our coffee, when the waiter advised us to forget about our experience. This isn’t the real Paris, he said, in the pointed French way. Of course, we understood, the center of Paris is full of tourists; and here we were only a few blocks from the Île de Saint-Louis, one of the fussiest parts of the city. The machinery of global capital, whose power has only heightened in the last two decades, has a way of obliterating the essence of place. Wealth, and all its concomitant pretensions, transforms the commotion of urban life into a commodity. But on the other hand, wasn’t this a rather under-nuanced notion? Authenticity is a slippery creature.

When he returned to collect our money, the waiter told us if we wanted to properly experience Paris, of working people and immigrants, we’d have to go to the 11th arrondissement, or the 20th. Go to Belleville, he instructed, this is the real Paris.

For the next six months, while attending Spéos Photographic Institute, in the 11th, and studying with an American photographer, Margery Clay, in her Belleville studio, I followed the advice. Bastille, rue de Lappe, Charonne, Voltaire, Parmentier, rue Oberkampf, the Belleville market, where I shot every week, the empty lots of the 12th below the Viaduct des Artes, the cold and artless streets around Couronnes: these gritty places seduced my feet and my camera lens and, exhilarated despite the endless gray of even the Parisian spring, I learned to see the city.

The work of the Parisian novelist Dominique Fabre has a similarly immersive effect by drawing the reader into the quotidian landscape of inner-ring suburbs along the Seine: Clichy, Nanterre, Asnières, Levallois, Gennevilliers, La Garenne-Colombes, and Courbevoie. Another waiter might have suggested we seek the essential Paris there, home of the aggrieved nativist right, Algerian and Morrocan immigrants whose presence tortures them, and Fabre’s middle-aged male protagonists who grew up there and can’t stand the change.

Dominique Fabre author photo

Dominique Fabre

Fabre has written a dozen novels, including the 2005 The Waitress Was New, which Archipelago Books brought out in English translation in 2008. New Vessel Press publisher Ross Ufberg attended a reading at Shakespeare and Company in Paris and decided to publish an English edition of Fabre’s next novel, Guys Like Me, in the translation by Howard Curtis. Both novels are narrated by middle-aged protagonists, once married, now single and lonely. “Sometimes you’re so alone you think you’re talking aloud even when you haven’t said a word,” says the unnamed narrator of Guys Like Me, who works in an unnamed office and lives in an apartment in Levallois. Once a week or so he talks to his son Benjamin, who’s finishing university studies, and every so often he meets up with his lifelong friend Marco to talk about Marco’s troubled son Antoine, who has been in and out of jail and rehab. Sometimes they reminisce and the landscape of the Hauts-de-Seine, which holds all their memories, talks back. He trolls Internet dating sites, “a kind of ocean” of loneliness. On Sundays, he walks along the Seine. He is vexed by the aggressive early spring trimming of the plane trees along the boulevards and the quay. But then, spring is coming, and soon the butchered branches will be filled with leaves.

On his way to Marco and his new wife Aïcha’s apartment for dinner, the narrator of Guys Like Me sits at a bench near the suburban bus junction at Porte de Champerret. He doesn’t want to arrive to early so he waits on the bench until the time dinner is called, 8:30. Then he gets up. “I walked quickly, pretending, the way all guys like me do, that I was a man in a hurry, a man who’d never begged for love or anything like that.” Fabre hoists the phrase “guys like me” as an incantation of group recognition, mutual empathy, and shared desire. The desire must be stifled, however, if it puts too much at risk.

“I’m only a barman, and when I forget that, the world around me seems like a bunch of different movies running at the same time,” says Pierre, the narrator of The Waitress Was New.

There are romance movies and sad movies, and if you pay attention most of their stories start to get all mixed together, till there’s no way you can go on telling them to yourself…then just when you’re ready to decide how they end, you have to serve two beers and wipe down the counter again, and empty the ashtrays and scrub out the coffee machine, and now and then leave the bar with butterflies in your stomach to go hear the results of a blood test or chest x-ray, and then it’s to hell with the film, and good riddance.

Oh, but you can’t stay angry, Pierre, can you? Fabre injects his two protagonists with an almost invisible hopefulness—and this is what makes them feel, despite the quiet languor, intensely luminous. Pierre’s boss, the owner of the restaurant where he tends the bar, has gone missing. If the restaurant closes, what is he to do? Things could certainly get worse, and yet the potential change reminds Pierre that he’s still alive. “There are no second acts. But I still believe there are, from time to time,” says the narrator of Guys Like Me. Early in the book, he meets a woman, Marie, on an online dating service. Slowly he becomes accustomed to her and they begin to date seriously. Could this be a second act? Unsure, and facing the terrifying possibility that Marie is terminally ill, he purchases a Vespa. He hasn’t had a scooter since high school.

Perhaps purchasing a scooter is evidence of a Parisian midlife crisis. But the narrator of Guys Like Me doesn’t use his new toy to run away to some virgin land. Rather, the Vespa takes him back through the landscape of his life, all there in the Hauts-de-Seine. “I hadn’t gone a long way, but somehow it had been full of adventures, I told myself,” he says. He begins to photograph key places from his youth. Days later, when Marie is out of the hospital, they go to the river via Porte Maillot. “The reflections on the water were dark, almost proud,”

it seemed to be watching us, it was as if we could count on it and it would never abandon us.

In the days following, he experiences a full awakening, the start of what must be a true “second act.” Writing in the New York Review of Books this month, Oliver Sacks describes his experience after undergoing embolization to kill tumors metastasizing in his liver. The procedure laid the eighty-one-year-old low. He felt sicker than ever. But in the afternoon of day ten of recovery, he transformed. His body finished getting rid of the dead tumors. He lost fifteen pounds in two days. “I suddenly found myself full of physical and creative energy and a euphoria almost akin to hypomania,” he writes.

Nietzsche, says Sacks, described the feeling perfectly in The Gay Science when he wrote of “a reawakened faith in a tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again.”

“I could ride for hours,” says the narrator of Guys Like Me.

Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

TESLA: A PORTRAIT WITH MASKS by Vladimir Pištalo translated by Bogdan Rakic and John Jeffries reviewed by Rory McCluckie

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Tesla: A Portrait with Masks cover art. White lines forming a circular maze on a red backgroundTESLA: A PORTRAIT WITH MASKS
by Vladimir Pištalo
translated by Bogdan Rakić and John Jeffries
Graywolf Press, 452 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

One of the most illuminating moments in Vladimir Pištalo’s biographical novel, Tesla: A Portrait with Masks, comes not when the protagonist is immersed in the electrical discoveries for which he became famous, but when he is translating poetry. Searching for an English equivalent to the Serbian phrase crammed in, he pauses his contemplations to offer an observation: “On the outside, Serbian looks like such a tiny language,” he opines to his collaborator and friend, Robert Underwood Johnson; “but it’s so roomy on the inside.” It’s a short remark but one that is loaded with significance. Tesla himself was an outsider. A Serbian in North America, a loner in high society, and a genius among men, he was set apart from others his entire life. This outsider, however, possessed an intense inner existence molded by the death of a brother, and a capacious affection for the human race that informed his life’s work. When he noted the duality inherent in the Serbian language, the inventor could just as well have been describing something fundamental about himself.

He could also have been commenting on this novel. This is the first book by Vladimir Pištalo to have been translated into English and is an entirely appropriate debut given both his scholarly interests and personal history. A Sarajevo-born academic who is currently Professor of Liberal Arts at Becker College in Massachusetts, Pištalo wrote a PhD dissertation on the concept of national identity among American Serbs in the twentieth century—a thesis for which Nikola Tesla himself could have been a case study. The similarities between the men are obvious, as is the interest the inventor must have held for the scholar. More than is usually the case, the writer knows intimately what he is imagining here.

Vladimir Pistalo author photo

Vladimir Pištalo

This first time English readers can enjoy Pištalo is made especially notable by the role the language itself plays in painting the portrait of Tesla. Bogdan Rakić and John Jeffries’ translation crackles with idiosyncrasy. They vault from word to word with a consistent air of eccentricity that seems to confirm Tesla’s linguistic observation while encouraging a jaunty, uneven tone from the outset. The text, in translation, gives off such a palpable sense of having been conceived in another tongue that this transparency of form cultivates a threat of being almost distractingly singular in delivery. What ensures that the novel never completely falls to this danger, however, is the way that the language complements the nature of the man it serves to reveal. Take this, from an early chapter, “An Aside on Flying:”

Sometimes I fly all the way to the stars, where it’s always morning and where people made of silver live. Sometimes I plunge through the blue void in between the lights of the universe or dive in the ocean depths among the glowing fish. In the middle of the night, I long to see the day, and I see it. Sometimes I see the day on my left and the night on my right. I am Alexander, the conqueror of apparitions.

This strange, close-to-hallucinatory passage captures something of the novel’s timbre as a whole. To say that Nikola Tesla was a singular individual is uncontroversial. Quite apart from his extraordinary scientific achievements, his behavior around his fellows, as well as the path his life traced made him, in the eyes of many, the realization of the proverbial mad scientist. By writing his novel in this manner, Pištalo, with the help of his translators, consistently fans the flame of individuality that is mirrored within the individual at the center of the book. Beyond mirroring, the way the man’s story is told illuminates the picture of the man himself.

Occasionally, as in the above passage, Pištalo breaks from the predominant third person narrative point of view. While contributing to the book’s atypical character, these shifts can disrupt the rhythm. One such instance comes when the author has led us to the eve of an important, if apocryphal, event in Tesla’s life with a brisk exchange of dialogue and then proceeds: “at this point of the story, I have to gently but firmly take the reader by the arm, as we are about to step into legend.” The turn is ungainly, abrupt, and wholly unnecessary. Much later, Pištalo writes,

In fear, Robert gazed at luminous distances, gossamers, and fairy tales in Tesla’s eyes. In addition to Tesla’s irresistible charm, Robert also sensed a halo of eccentricity and solitude enveloping his friend and felt sorry for him.

There is no doubt that the reader has been worried about Tesla as well.

The slim but intrusive last line falls with an unwelcome heft upon the page. The effect of these shifts in perspective is akin to flinging pebbles at a windshield; their size and impact aren’t enough to shatter the narrative’s glass entirely but they nevertheless fall with a noticeable, enduring force. Certainly reminders of the book’s placement between history and imagination, they unfortunately leave behind thin cracks of discontinuity that distract from the question of such placement at all.

The novel has no such trouble with the portrayal of Nikola Tesla himself. Pištalo treats his protagonist with sympathy throughout, overlaying a sense of destiny with the tumultuous events and colorful personalities that contributed to the man’s life. It’s a compassionate depiction, and one that suggests that the inventor’s greatness lay not only in his scientific achievements—that is, not only what is plainly obvious from the outside—but in his depth of humanity. Even more impressively, it furnishes this depth with a complexity that augments the character in a troubled, realistic way. Pištalo’s Tesla is enormously sympathetic with the human race in general and simultaneously uncomfortable with personal intimacy. As Stevan Prostran, the son of one of Tesla’s oldest friends surmises, the inventor “preferred mankind to people,” and Pištalo agrees with this, littering the novel with public episodes and private reflections that bear it out.

To see this in sharpest relief, look no further than the juxtaposition of Tesla with his mentor and rival Thomas Edison—an individual whom the author conversely paints as completely lacking in the compassionate, empathetic capacities his Serbian understudy could not ignore. While Tesla, for example, “felt very sorry for the elderly. And the little children. Everything that lives,” Edison, “was in a state of competition with every man, woman, and child alive.”

Similarly, while the American is borne along by the hidden determination to “never spare anyone from what he had to endure,” even a morose, complaining Tesla observes that “all my life I’ve been working to serve mankind.” It makes for a distinctly unflattering study of the old master, while emphasizing the immensely endearing characteristics of his apprentice.

Most endearing of all, however, is the way that Pištalo charts Tesla’s trajectory over the final act of his life. As the initial intensity of the electrical age starts to fade and Tesla’s great days begin to recede, the novel’s crackling style begins to resonate in a more poignant manner. Nothing in the delivery itself changes exactly, but it’s as though, through the lens of old age and memory, Tesla’s life becomes illuminated in a kinder, more loving light than before:

A lonely pianist played in the enormous lobby. Followed by the Buddhist smile of the headwaiter, Tesla quietly left the hotel in which he had spent twenty years. Each new phase of his life was a new expulsion from the Garden of Eden. A clear stream gurgled across the keyboard while he pushed the Astoria’s revolving doors, for the last time, after two decades. He murmured, “We’re life’s apprentices forever!”

He looked at objects as if he could not remember what they were. He blankly gazed into other people’s windows and other people’s lives with an innocent smile, which approaching old age, made him look suspicious. Like a moth, he fed on light. The whole world appeared like a lit-up shop window, which our frozen loner now observed from the outside.

Whether it’s the length of time the reader has, by this point, spent with the author’s idiom, or simply the natural tenderness one feels for a humane figure in decline, the inventor’s final years fall in gentle, moving waves, made all the more affecting by the fact that he is, in some way, still outside. The man who knew better than anyone how different things are from within remained unable to let anyone from without enter his own, roomy interior; it’s to Pištalo’s credit that we feel we see as much of that interior as we do.

Rory McCluckie author photoRory McCluckie is a freelance writer and editor from Manchester, England. A graduate of the University of Leeds, he currently resides in Montreal.

SINGLE, CAREFREE, MELLOW by Katherine Heiny reviewed by Michelle Fost

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Single Carefree Mellow cover art. Painting of a woman in a red swimsuit underwaterSINGLE, CAREFREE, MELLOW
by Katherine Heiny
Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

In Katherine Heiny’s very funny debut collection of stories, Single, Carefree, Mellow, women seek out a little more love, a little more sex, a little more passion. They have affairs with teachers, bosses, married men, and neighbors. Who can blame them? The comedy of their attachments made me think of the experiments of Konrad Lorenz, the ethologist who showed us how fuzzy little goslings, seeing a man instead of a mother goose after hatching, would naturally treat the man as their mother. These women and their men—as hilarious in their pairings as the goslings trailing behind a grown man, and they have no idea! Such innocents!

Take Sasha in the opening story, “The Dive Bar,” of Heiny’s collection. She’s rattled by a phone call from the wife of her lover. The wife, Anne, whose name Sasha does not recognize, invites Sasha to meet for a drink. “And to paraphrase Dr. Seuss,” Heiny writes, “Sasha does not know quite what to say. Should she meet her for drinks? Now what should she do? Well, what would you do if your married lover’s wife asked you?”

Sasha’s moral compass leads her to walk briskly down a large portion of the island of Manhattan in order to consult with her roommate Monique about what to do. Sasha and Monique agree that they will walk on Broadway, one starting at 106th, the other at 36th, until they meet, and then they will go into the nearest bar to think together about Sasha’s problem. Sasha’s problem has a certain gravity, but they can’t seem to help themselves from making a game of it. And then, of course, they break the rules of their game, choosing a bar that appeals to them more than the Taco Tico they land in front of.

Katherine Heiny author photo

Katherine Heiny

There’s a comic geography to these stories. Heiny’s characters go to great lengths to connect with others—literally walking dozens of blocks or, as Sasha and Monique also do, showing up for singles grocery nights or singles volunteer events where they do things like refurbish apartments. At one of these events, the volunteers fixing up a brownstone are busy looking each other over, so that Sasha “almost feels a little sorry for the needy family who is going to move in, picturing the very low standard to which their new home will be refurbished.”

In “Blue Heron Bridge,” Nina and her lover David have sex in his car, but they also go running together. As for Nina, “She liked going over the bridge best, where there was a slight breeze and she and David always each touched one foot on the far side and then reversed direction, like runners in a relay race.” In “Andorra,” Sadie who lives in Washington visits her lover Marcus in Chicago when his wife is away on a business trip. But Marcus and his wife are in counselling and he’s made a “promise never to speak to Sadie again, to banish her to the Ulan Bator of his heart, while in reality Sadie remained as central as Starbucks.”

Some of the humor in Single, Carefree, Mellow arrives in the form of an unbidden guest, like the lover’s wife on the other end of the phone, or the large family that accompanies Nelda, the housekeeper in “Andorra,” whenever she comes to work. Heiny’s women tend not to say No when people want in to their hearts or homes. The high-school age Magellan asks to stay with her brother and sister-in-law because she is tired of answering her parents’ questions about why her boyfriend broke up with her. In “Blue Heron Bridge” a neighbor asks Nina if she wouldn’t mind taking in a minister whose parish has flooded. The minister, Reverend McWilliams, easily integrates himself into the life of the family. He enjoys himself. He takes part in their games of Hearts (loser washes dishes) and is happy to babysit for the little girls. He’s a perfectly pleasant houseguest, but when Nina gives it a little thought, “she would have preferred an exchange student from rural Scotland.”

The women in Single, Carefree, Mellow really do have choice when it comes to their attachments, even though they don’t see it this way. They mistake their friends, boyfriends, and husbands for houseguests of the heart. They have chosen partners who are really quite likeable, funny, understand their sense of humor, are perfectly good matches, but they still find themselves wanting, if not exactly a Scottish exchange student then someone else, someone other.

In the case of Maya, who features in three of the eleven stories collected here (and in an additional story, “After Dinner,” published in Issue 2 of Cleaver Magazine), there’s a glimmer of awakening self-awareness, as when she’s ready to break it off with her boss: “Maya went into Gildas-Joseph’s office the next morning to tell him that she couldn’t see him anymore and then they had sex on his desk. (This was something Maya had noticed about herself, a sort of inner contrariness; she drank the most on nights she went to the bar vowing to have only club soda.)” In fact, when Gildas-Joseph moves out of town, Maya’s husband, Rhodes, is able to comfort her.

When Maya’s dog is dying (in the title story) Maya comes very close to breaking up with Rhodes. It’s as though for Maya to be able to begin to feel her grief over the loss of her dog, she needs to compound her loss. In “That Dance You Do,” a boy after his birthday party cries because the party is over—an early experience of loss, a test run. Describing the mother’s relationship with her son, though, Heiny writes, “You wonder if he realizes that right now, at this instant, you love him more than ever, that you could not love him any more than you do.” That’s a relatively rare state of emotional equilibrium for Heiny’s characters, grownups growing up, amusing as goslings. These are generous, warm-hearted stories that tend to chart an over-abundance of love, rather than too little. Most of the very funny stories in Single, Carefree, Mellow involve a compounding of love and happiness, desire and camaraderie.

Michelle Fost author photoMichelle Fost is a writer living in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in The Painted Bride Quarterly and her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Phoenix Literary Section.

THE GUILD OF SAINT COOPER by Shya Scanlon reviewed by Justin Goodman

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The Guild of Saint Cooper cover art. A shadow of the Seattle Space Needle upside down at the top of the page, against an otherwise gray backgroundTHE GUILD OF SAINT COOPER
by Shya Scanlon
Dzanc Books, 413 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

“Spasms of the diaphragm,” the twentieth century theorist Walter Benjamin remarks, “generally offer better chances for thought than spasms of the soul.” And who hasn’t been convinced, softened to a position, by comedy? This is the principle behind Shya Scanlon’s newest novel, The Guild of Saint Cooper, which returns to the self-conscious comedy, and literary meditation, of his first novel, Forecast (2012).

It’s unsurprising that Scanlon has circled back towards laughter after his 2013 novel Border Run—geographically too, from Seattle to Arizona to Seattle—since it is clear he prefers to induce spasms of the diaphragm. But a novel of so much laughter can betray itself. Watching mildly funny Youtube videos with friends in an uproar invites a similar feeling. It’s a dare not to laugh, a dare not to take the laughter sincerely, and thus create an irreparable distance.

The Guild of Saint Cooper begins in waiting, and being “tired of waiting.” Blake Williams, narrator and, in Scanlon’s meta-structure, author of Forecast, has returned to his mother’s house to wait for their emergency radio to “roar to life and announce the collapse of the Ross Ice Shelf…trigger a tsunami…and Seattle would cease to exist.” His mother waits for her cancer to claim her, and he waits for his writer’s block to claim him. It is a liminal period, yet it progresses smoothly, and much like Forecast it stands between the oracle and the satirist.

As such, it is a post-apocalyptic landscape before the apocalypse, one where Muckleshoot Indians “reclaimed the channel as part of the tribe’s Usual & Accustomed Area” and members of his former drug dealing gang, The Source, instruct Williams to “live in the fucking moment” before knocking him out and stealing his bike. “Usual & Accustomed Area” could be a playground euphemism and the Source a pun on artistic inspiration.

“Maybe the Source was right. Maybe it was all just storytelling,” writes Scanlon. The deflationary humor doesn’t stop at the world, however. After repeating Forecast’s premise aloud, Russell Jonskin, leader of the novel’s titular guild, admits, “Okay, the metaphor is a little thin, but the message is devious.” With this, Scanlon mocks his own novel and his vision of literature. Blake Williams, significantly, is visionary Romantic poet William Blake’s name backwards. Shortly after, Jonskin hires Blake to rewrite Seattle’s history.Only six of thirty-nine chapters in, and already conceptually overwrought, The Guild of Saint Cooper is a serious joke that can’t wait to tell itself.

While Marxist in spirit, Scanlon’s novel is also infected with pop culture. Jonskin reveals that he wants Dale Cooper, from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, to star in the new history of Seattle. “Can you come up with someone more interesting? ” Williams challenges challenges Jonskin. Perhaps. But it is as much a joke about the arbitrariness of written history as it is a way for Cooper to become a representative of the urge to “destabilize and to comfort, ” to make one “skeptical of the quotidian façade, ” and quoting Cooper, to make the novel “both wonderful and strange. ” Cooper’s “suitability was nearly irrelevant, anyway, ” admits Williams.

Shya Scanlon author photo

Shya Scanlon

This cynicism is hard to disagree with. A recurring secondary character, Sargent George Washington, who appears quoting Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West,” reveals this major flaw in The Guild of Saint Cooper: A farrago of references tumble together, never cohering enough to prove they are not “nearly irrelevant.” As with the threat of a tsunami in Seattle, massive concepts don’t fit well in small spaces.

Initially reluctant to “fictionalize the world” for Jonskin, Blake Williams eventually admits, “It was this tenuous and naïve relationship between the real, material world and the stories he wanted to tell that interested me.” This rationale produces, in another slant meta-fictional gesture, the story of “one man but which told the story of Seattle as a whole. Of more than Seattle—of a humanitarian crisis.” That is, the story of Blake Williams’ childhood retold with the fictional Dale Cooper added. All that’s left is the history that is written, and Scanlon shows this seamlessly, convincingly.

By supplanting history with an intricate fantasy of aliens and corporate conspiracies to house them—as Michael Chabon says, fiction aims for in “Trickster in a Suit of Lights,”—Scanlon works to “scramble the conventions, to undo history…and to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining.” Only, he loses himself too much. The consequences of his self-consciousness are great. In all the slapstick and absurdity, he lacks the precision of writers like Ben Lerner who are similarly reflective on literary form and concerned with reader experience. The lights on Scanlon’s suit are too bright. As one of the many flat characters pithily declares, “illumination can lead to blindness.”

“The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real,” Scanlon writes, quoting Wallace Stevens.” There is no idea more profoundly argued against in The Guild of Saint Cooper than this one. Even Williams is proven wrong that “fantasy could never approach” what “brought the reader closer to his predicament, to his life.”

History is the fantasy of one’s life. As Stevens’ writes in the poem, “The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,/…And of ourselves and of our origins” is precisely the song of the writer. Even beyond our origins into the uncertainty of our ends which, like a wave, we wait to come for us. But, with Scanlon, the waiting is never silent, and never very serious, unable to avoid intellection’s mirror. If only Scanlon avoided its “mimic motion/made constant cry…/that was not ours.” Maybe then we could understand the reason for so much laughter, and make it ours.

Justin Goodman author photoA recent graduate from Purchase College, Justin Goodman is working to establish a career and develop knowledge of the literary scene. His writing has been published in Submissions Magazine and Italics Mine.

OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS by Claire Fuller reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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Our Endless Numbered Days cover art. A drawing of a woman holding branches with leaves in a field of other branches.OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS
by Claire Fuller
Tin House Books, 388 pages

reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

Claire Fuller’s mesmerizing novel begins with a black-and-white photograph from 1976: the once-upon-a-time that her narrator, 17-year-old Peggy Hillcoat, is trying nine years later to recall.

The picture opens a window into a living room in Highgate, London, where a group of so-called “Retreaters,” among them Peggy’s father James, meet to discuss their defense against environmental and economic catastrophe. In the photo, eight-year-old Peggy’s image is blurred; she’s being led from the room by her disapproving mother Ute, while James clenches his fists and Oliver Hannington, his sinister-seeming friend, smiles “as though he wanted posterity to know he wasn’t really interested in the group’s plans for self-sufficiency and stockpiling.”

But memory is partly projection; for Peggy, the photo is like a magic mirror, reflecting what she knows unconsciously but can’t yet claim. Her sudden, strange behavior after looking at it—using scissors to cut around her father’s face, then slicing off her bra and tucking his image beneath her breast—is the reader’s first clue that the “bloody Armageddon” she’s trying to recover is an entirely different disaster from the kind these survivalists predict.

As the story opens, the “forest girl” has been rescued and reunited with her piano prodigy mother and an 8-year-old brother she’s never met, after nearly a decade of (barely) surviving with her father in the woods. Washed and fed and disoriented in this civilized setting, she takes a seat at the piano and places her fingers where her father once laid his, on the “neat white row of keys, like polished teeth.” When Ute mentions the long-ago time when she went to Germany on a concert tour and Peggy “was away” with James, Peggy sharply corrects her.

“I was taken,” she says in the passive voice of a fairy tale, the voice that speaks for the damsel who’s never the agent in her own narrative.

Other elements of traditional fairy tales resonate throughout this odd, remarkable story about a father and daughter living beyond what he convinces her is the post-apocalyptic Great Divide: the archetypal journey into the woods; the “bug-out” cottage in an enchanted forest; the cunning, predatory wolf; the maiden imprisoned in the tower; the savior prince lured by her song; the nicknames James tries out on Peggy—Sleeping Beauty, Little Blue Riding Hood (for the blue balaclava packed in her bug-out bag)—before he chooses “Punzel,” short for Rapunzel.

Claire Fuller author photo

Claire Fuller

James prepares Punzel for the trip with military drills and moral lessons delivered in storybook form. “Long ago, in a land called Hampshire,” he tells her, “there was a family who lived together in die Hütte. They survived off the land and no one ever told them what to do.” He claims, on Oliver’s authority, that the woods are full of berries and mushrooms, the river stocked with fish, and the warm cottage equipped with a piano he promises to teach her to play. What happens to Peggy and her father when the story behind the picture turns out not to be true?

Punzel’s first-person narration is at times strangely—strategically—vague, both reflecting her developing self-awareness and mimicking a mode of literature derived from oral narratives. Idiosyncratic details fall away with each telling to reveal essential themes: in “Rapunzel,” the ward is banished by her guardian when she lets a lover in. Allusions to the Grimms’ version of the old French tale support Fuller’s original, psychologically authentic story of a daughter growing up and breaking free of her father’s spell.

“What’s the point of sitting in a classroom when the sun’s shining and there are plenty of things to teach you at home?” James asks Punzel after Ute leaves, pressing her to skip school. Days turn to weeks as together they create a garden utopia in their backyard. James teaches Punzel to trap and cook squirrels and rabbits, to distinguish between poisonous and edible mushrooms, and to start a fire with flint and steel. Far from empowering Punzel, though, these talents ensnare her in his quest. “We didn’t give a thought to what we were doing to the garden,” she reflects. “We only considered our next meal—how to find it, how to kill it, how to cook it. And although I would have preferred Sugar Puffs with milk in front of the telly, I joined in the adventure without question.”

Punzel’s impending puberty is the unspoken crisis that finally compels their retreat from home to die Hütte, from civilization to stark survival for nine grinding years. In the woods, Punzel plays her father’s soundless homemade piano, singing the notes to her mother’s signature concert piece. When, as the story goes, she conjures a mysterious savior named Reuben, her passivity is put to lie as events unfold. The novel’s shocking, satisfying ending points to the persistence of the domestic plot in fairy tales, even as it’s flipped. The artful way Fuller keeps—and fractures—fairy tale tradition reveals the truth between image and reality, between the story we read and the one we come to understand.

Elizabeth Mosier author photoElizabeth Mosier is a novelist and essayist. Her reviews have appeared most recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer and Cleaver. Read more at www.ElizabethMosier.com.

PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE by Atticus Lish reviewed by Jamie Fisher

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Preparation for the Next Life cover art. A bright light emanates from a small boxPREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE
by Atticus Lish
Tyrant, 417 pages

reviewed by Jamie Fisher

If civilization ended tomorrow and had to be reconstructed based on Preparation for the Next Life, our descendants could get reasonably far with Atticus Lish’s instruction manual. They could learn, for instance, how correctional officers respond to an incident in the yard. Or how to eat a hot dog:

The guy whose house it was’s woman brought out a tray of hotdogs and set it on the coffee table, which was behind them. The plumber turned around and said thank you, hon. There’s relish, she said. She sat down on the couch, which was behind the coffee table, and spooned relish on a hotdog and bit into it with her hand cupped under it and chewed.

In Preparation for the Next Life, Lish fixates on certain details. Notice how insistent he is on the geography of the living room, seemingly at the expense of almost everything else besides the hot dog. No one says much in this well-appointed room and not much happens—here or anywhere. The nearest metaphor for the novel may be a heavily upholstered room in which no one talks, really, about anything. The plot, such that it is, feels light. The structure is non-existent. Still, Lish wants to make the room look busy. So we have lazy boys, kitchenettes, sofa-beds; bodegas, E-Verify, the military-penal complex. At the end, gripped by the anxiety of moving, he decides the best way to leave the room would be to set it on fire.

On its surface, the book relates the fraught romance between Iraq War veteran Skinner and the Chinese immigrant Zou Lei. Both characters feel both tough and fragile: hard-bitten travelers at the mercy of others. We first meet Zou Lei in a motel, sharing “a room with half a dozen other women from Fookien and a liter of orange soda.” Skinner, recently relieved of duty, is hitchhiking his way to New York. Eventually their paths cross, in the way that aimless paths do. They agonize over money, marriage, mental illness, the possibility of deportation. Still, despite these background pressures, which get lip service every dozen pages or so, the novel is almost entirely without incident.

Lish’s style recalls, in its declarative simplicity, the novels of Kent Haruf, that Great Plain author of the Great Plains. “A blond came in,” Lish writes, “but she came in with two guys. They all had briefcases. Her voice carried. She said, You have to capitalize on that. They changed the channels on the flat-screen. Someone clapping. Someone pouring orange juice. The golf report. Skinner picked up his bags and went back outside.” (At some point Lish acknowledges that some sentence variation is in order. He confines it to this paragraph: “For Jimmy, the detectives were called. Distinguished-looking men, they came in suits and porkpie hats.”)

Atticus Lish author photo

Atticus Lish

A quarter of the way in, we meet Jimmy, a released felon who happens to be the son of Skinner’s landlady. It is necessary to meet Jimmy because Jimmy is the plot. He is the late-coming incarnation of evil, keen on raping and pillaging and borrowing Skinner’s girlie magazines. Without even asking! This section of the novel (excerpted in The Paris Review) is shockingly good. Lish relaxes into abrupt liveliness and a folksy humor that feels kind rather than condescending, noticing “a velvet picture of Elvis looking handsome above the couch his mother sat on.” Or, describing a daughter’s failed attempts to watch out for her mother: “She was her mother’s friend, but not her best one.” For twenty-odd pages, you know and feel for everyone. Then Lish pans out again into the Great Plains, and every character becomes a stranger.

But in general, Preparation feels more like a found document than a novel. Swaths of dialogue are what Lish calls “overheards:” borrowed “from people who didn’t know I was listening to them.” Lish likes to parrot and record, but seldom interprets; he is the kind of writer who never writes “she laughed” when he can write “hahahahaha.” It’s difficult to determine how much of Lish’s compulsion to furnish is deliberate. Certainly it recalls Bret Easton Ellis’s stream-of-consumer-consciousness prose in American Psycho, but to what end? Is he mimicking the intermittent significance of life? Unwilling to edit? Rebelling against his famously snip-happy father, Gordon Lish?

In the publicity storm accompanying Lish’s debut—Best of 2014, said The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair and BuzzFeed— he was widely praised as a master of dialect. Still, while Lish has an ear for dialogue, he never quite demonstrates Haruf’s knack for it. He knows how people speak—that an Irish father, for example, will say trown instead of thrown— but doesn’t really know what they should say. People are given to cryptic statements, trembling with significance: “You cannot ask for the things of this life,” Zou Lei’s mother says.

At times this seems to be part of a systematic philosophy, illustrating how seldom we understand each other. Lish’s flood of dialects, mainly talking past each other, is mirrored by his sections on the profusion of languages and dialects in China.“It was like hearing someone talk through a prism,” Mandarin-speaking Zou Lei thinks, listening to her coworkers glide along in Cantonese.

But on the whole, the author’s mimicry begins to seem symptomatic of a larger problem: Lish’s ability to record, but not to communicate. There’s a telling scene, in the opening pages, when Zou Lei and her fellow immigrants practice English from watching the television in their motel room: “Unbelievable, they said. This Tuesday on Fox. A grim day in Iraq.” Entire characters and conversations exist only to demonstrate that Lish knows how they might sound. Most of the novel never quite manages to transcend this feeling of puppetry.

Zou Lei and Skinner, too, feel like less like people than channels, tuned in to the Definitive American Experience. Obeying a modern update on Chekhov’s dictum, Lish knows that if there’s a soldier with post-traumatic stress in Act I, he must pull the trigger by the finale. At one point, Zou Lei crosses a freeway: “it felt like the rest of America, the vast concrete speedway echoing and echoing.” How can she say? At this point she’s only been in the tristate area.

When people are not busy having Realizations about America, they give Speeches about America. Or Lish does, in unlikely indirect quotation that feels like a conspiracy theorist’s elevator-speech about his pet ideations. Often this combines with updates on thematically relevant current events. So we end up with scenes like these, among the kingpins of a prison drug operation:

The Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal had just come out on CNN. They said you’ve declared war on the State of Indiana, we’ve declared war on the United States. This organization is bigger than the United Stares… This is a structure. We’re like Al Qaeda. They give us life, double life, life without. The state has our commanders in max segregation units, no human contact, twenty-four hours a day, and they’re still calling shots as far as politics, operations, whatever the case might be. Who goes in the hat. The state takes everything they can and we’re still going on like magic.

There is a strange, civic optimism to Lish’s idea that political discussion figures readily in everyday life. But there is also a lonely, unvarying pessimism in Lish’s execution—how often these discussions take place in soliloquy rather than dialogue, and how frequently these soliloquies sound like Lish.

His insights are, to be sure, often astute. Lish draws broad parallels between prison and the military, post-PTSD dislocation and the immigrant experience. But mainly Lish’s earnest philosophizing metaphors fall flat, inexpertly observed. Skinner, watching basketball, thinks to himself, “The players ran back and forth like herds of deer in a hunting program, like civilians in a hamlet. They fled across the court and then they stopped and smelled the air. They never knew who was going to hit them with the ball.” Really? The pro basketball players have no idea where the ball is? And why are they sniffing so often, and with such convenient poignancy? Reading Lish, it’s hard not to think of a dictum from that other great editor, Pound: no metaphors that do not permit inspection.

And few of Lish’s metaphors do. He sprints for pages without figurative language, then introduces it again, in little bursts that are probably intended to give you the giddy Technicolor feeling of entering Oz, but more often feel like jogging on a Möbius loop: weird attempts at metaphor that seem to indicate the pointlessness of metaphor, when everything is so patently already what it is. “When she was alone, her mind turned inside-out like an envelope.” Well, yes. If the envelope is turned inside-out. And a dark tunnel is never just a black hole. It’s “a black hole of nothing.”

For a book that strains to seem simply written, it’s telling how often moments of lyrical significance are signaled with a glut of words, mostly doing each other’s work. It’s as if, after so much deprivation, Lish binges. Sometimes literally. Chasing after Zou Lei, Skinner feels that “his blood was thickening, caramel icing like sugar in a hot pan and turning to acid.” Important descriptions are fat with adjectives; scenes meant to be particularly resonant are broken into long paragraphs. You can feel them coming on like movie music. Zou Lei never touches Skinner’s scar—not if she has the chance to “lay her palm on the dented puckered slick bumpy knotted flesh,” or grab “his hard clammy white bare foot with her discolored calloused hands.”

There is excess here, and irrelevance. Still, it’s interesting to note what Lish finds consistently worth mentioning. Retardation, for example, always interests. Picturing a corpse, Skinner considers that “the eyes looked like those of a brain-damaged zombie or retarded person.” Elsewhere, Jimmy watches “the onrush of the Chinese. Their scuffing, heedless, lobotomized walking, as if retarded, as if forced to ingest pesticide as children.” Regardless of your concern for political correctness, Lish’s use of retardation as a go-to code for creepy or unsettling certainly amounts to an imaginative poverty.

Another recurring pattern: Zou Lei, fresh from exercising. Lish is always sure to mention when Zou Lei’s shirt is heavy with sweat, or when her thighs are “tight from running.” Tight becomes her leitmotif. Zou Lei finds ways to end up pornographically compromised that defy logic. Here she is after washing her feet in a mosque: “She sat one knee bent, her tanned face and bare calves burnished and dark, the sweat on her forehead gleaming and the crotch of her tight denim leggings wet… Her dried sweat had left licks of salt on her temples, down her bare thighs.” Bare? She’s wearing jeans.

Although Skinner never glistens, Lish has a clear reverence for fitness, reflected in the physicality of both characters. He reads muscle magazines and doubles down at the gym, has a tattoo reading, in Chinese, something like No Pain No Gain; she lunges and runs, implausibly, during her lunch breaks at a low-wage kitchen job. Although the book’s title is drawn from a sign at the mosque where Zou Lei oozes, the idea of physical preparation for an unpredictable life to come dominates the novel. In a hasty epilogue, Zou Lei, the sole survivor of Lish’s attempts to clean house, undergoes a Zelig-like migration to the Southwest. (“She looked older,” Lish informs us solemnly, “had gained weight in the bones of her jaws and the muscles of her temples.”) There she quickly acquires Spanish and, despite being “piss-poor,” acquires an iPod and pumps iron in the perfect gym, one with “a fleet of treadmills and a mirrored cathedral of Olympic weights.” In a convenient soliloquy to poor dead Skinner, she explains that she can afford all this because—despite being budget-conscious in the rest of the book—she has decided to spend all of his money at once. As the book concludes, she literally shoulders her load: “From beneath her hat brim, she surveyed the weight. It was a lot for her… She put her shoulders under the bar, said a prayer to him and prepared to lift.”

So how to explain the phenomenal success of a middling book? Part of it is that old canard, wishful thinking that hopes experience can be alchemized directly into writing. Lish has dropped out of Harvard, served in the Marine Corps, lived in China; he has the taut jawline, forehead crease, and bald, concerned face of World-Weary Truth. Heck, he’s the son of Gordon Lish, the editor whose impeccable good taste won him the title Captain Fiction. Surely, at least by some trick of Lamarckian genetics, Atticus would have inherited his father’s sensibilities. So, I might imagine, the thinking goes.

If well executed, the book could have been a fable about the rise and fall of great powers: the American veteran, damaged by his own lust for war, returns home and does himself in, while the resourceful Chinese immigrant, infinitely adaptable, moves on.

In fact, it’s maddening to think about all the novel could have been, and what all the infatuated criticism in the world can’t make it. At its best, Lish’s language has a strangeness that feels both hallucinogenic and absolutely correct: “His face was lopsided, the result of ingesting pesticide as a child, which gave him the knowing look of someone who wasn’t going to be fooled again.” This is a terrain Denis Johnson has mined with much success, as psychedelic as it is forgiving. When he doesn’t play it plain and straight, Lish exaggerates pleasantly. “Jimmy grew up wearing a plaid shirt,” he writes, “standing brooding silent with his mouth shut, the trace of a mustache over his lip, waiting for Patrick to say, Let me have the spanner.” It’s a lovely way to convey adolescent impatience, evocative but self-aware.

The New York Times has called Preparation “perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade.” Well, perhaps. If it’s a love story, it might be a love story to Lish, his characters mirrors allowing him to bask in his own light. In Jimmy, and occasionally in Zou Lei, there’s a glow that seems to come from a deeper place. These are rare moments, and they could be flashes in the pan. Still, they make you hope.

Lish’s book is like the dream of a good novel. Let’s hope it’s preparation for his next.

Jamie Fisher author photo

Jamie Fisher is a freelance writer, Chinese-English translator, and budding manuscript conservationist working out of Philadelphia.  She graduated recently from the University of Pennsylvania, where her majors were Linguistics and East Asian Languages & Civilizations. She can be reached at [email protected].

THE BOATMAKER by John Benditt reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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The Boatmaker cover art. A black-and-white drawing of a man on a boat reaching up to the sunTHE BOATMAKER
by John Benditt
Tin House Books, 451 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

The intersection of poetry and prose is a rough sea, with deep, sometimes misleading currents. Some writers adapt poetry easily to fiction. Lyrical language works by adding texture to the plot; in some cases, it is the plot, as in flash fiction or more experimental forms. However, it doesn’t compensate for shallow storytelling. John Benditt’s novel The Boatmaker suffers from just this imbalance of plot and language, and the book founders from scene to scene, never quite finding its depth.

This isn’t a reflection of the author’s abilities; Benditt has credentials out the wazoo, including a stint as editor-in-chief at Technology Review: MIT’s Magazine of Innovation. He also was awarded the John Russell Hayes Poetry Prize. The shift to fiction seems natural for such a talented writer, but the adaptation doesn’t come easily and makes The Boatmaker a long, dull slog through all-too-predictable terrain. Alcoholic geniuses, bad guys, run-of-the-mill anti-Semites, women tormented by their emotions: it’s all too familiar, and Benditt adds little new or surprising to these threadbare tropes.

At its core The Boatmaker is an epic tale. The nameless main character awakens from a fever dream possessed by a desire to build a boat and sail to the mainland from his tiny island. An intemperate drinker, the boatmaker wanders in and out of sobriety, crossing paths with beggars, thieves, a priest, and workers of all stripes. These encounters unfortunately feel increasingly contrived; imagine Nathaniel Hawthorne stranded in Finland and you’ll have a good idea of how this unfolds. The story is a thin yarn, decorated by language that is too delicate and prettily wrought for the weight it bears:

Light trickles from small windows high on the walls, at the level of the street outside. The floor is bedrock. Cut into it are four bays. In each bay sits a huge piece of machinery, as tall as two men and much longer. A serpentine of rollers of different sizes leads the eye from one end of the machine to the other. Over everything is the smell of oil and ink and the melancholy of machinery stopped in the middle of its task.

John Benditt author photo

John Benditt

What’s really frustrating is how well these same craft elements work in a more compressed form when descriptive language feeds the necessary immediacy and fierce structure of the short story. So it’s telling that The Boatmaker started as a short story; Benditt originally planned to write a collection of interrelated short pieces. However, he felt encouraged to try something bigger, and knitted those vignettes into something that has the length of a novel but not its architecture.

A man in a boat on a personal quest—there are plenty of stories like this. Epics, even. However, the key distinction between Benditt’s novel and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is the scope of the work. The Old Man and the Sea was a novella, not a novel. Its power is in its succinctness. Under that simple-seeming language is a structure that could take a mine blast. Benditt’s novel is stretched thin, and all its best qualities are diluted in the long form. It takes ten pages for the main character to smoke a cigarette. Rather than keep things moving along—hitting all the plot points that sounded so enticing on the jacket—Benditt draws out the story, adding so many landscape details, back story, and decorative sentences that the novel’s main events get bogged down.

This stretching out give the impression that The Boatmaker is a little more style than heart.

Claire Rudy Foster author photoClaire Rudy Foster lives in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her critically recognized short fiction has appeared in various respected journals and she has been honored by several small presses, including a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.

FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS by Luke B. Goebel reviewed by Jacob White

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Fourteen Stories, None of Them are YoursFOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS
by Luke B. Goebel
FC2, 167 pages

reviewed by Jacob White

The pleasure of reading Luke Goebel’s little big first novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, comes less, it seems, from the pages themselves than from the palpable life-lust ripping past them, sloughing them off. The release of this energy is of course exactly a function of the novel form, yet the feat feels entirely new here, or newly realized. This monologue is running for its life, splitting the novel’s formal seams with intrusions to qualify retrospective distance or the shifting narrative present, the parentheses and brackets gaping wider and wider to reveal the fevered flesh beneath. In the narrator’s racing panic, we feel the pages tattering loose from his arms before finally snapping behind him with the wind into the crazy nothing. “Books are over,” the book concludes, and rarely indeed has a book been so humbled by the thing it contains. Life moves through these pages, and our joy—our elation—is seeing the pages struggle, and fail, to keep up.

I suppose each of Fourteen Stories’ chapters revolves around a particular story or anecdote, but in each the particulars get stirred loose in the turbulence and we’re left largely with the wind-shunt of its passing. But the situation more or less is this: Our narrator is undone by the death of an older brother, the loss of a girlfriend, humiliation by a mentor, and a peyote ceremony that, he says, “took me off the planet but I’m still on the planet.” The world is no longer a recognizable thing, nor is the self, so he acquires an RV, into whose aft all of this furniture goes sloshing:

Say I am a lost dog with my lost dog, only I am not a dog, and my dog is my dog, and I am a man upon the planet who is a family member of all families, but no one wants me, exactly, though I put on a great show of being an acceptable human. Plus my cock is far beyond average and I have a lot of firepower to give. Who wants to be human in these families, anyhow? I’m here. Baby. In California, I am saying, not in the RV Park you will read about in a few minutes. Ah scamp!

Luke B Goebel author photo

Luke B. Goebel

Beyond average his RV may be, but it’s out-measured still by his humiliations. The firepower here lies not in bluster but in the self-myth capable of carrying it off. Even as this myth is stomped at every turn—by death, break-ups, a literary father who has whipped him into a hot mess—its magical powers again and again restore him to a world that can fit his wanting, erecting around his losses and failures the Monument Valley of a hero’s passage; and while at times the narrator bends his vision to fit this world, via explicit fictionalizing, or what we hope is explicit fictionalizing, as in “Apache” and a few other cantors into windmill territory, at other times it’s the world that bends itself to fit the vision—as in the deliverance of an eagle feather, the article of faith that in a way sets the entire novel aloft.

We laugh at this dude’s earnest over-the-top bloody chest-baring—he seems to think in all-caps—yet we’re also moved by it, as we are by Quixote’s, because it’s too self-aware to be delusional. It feels, particularly in its duration, heroic in its faith—in its dogged belief in a largeness of self that, even as this belief is undercut and smashed by nearly every experience in a world whose job it is to make us feel smaller and smaller, persists nevertheless. The bluster’s buoyancy is an urgent one, but as a boat it’s a humble one, and in the end like everyone else’s:

Listen, listen, dammit, should you want to know the truth. I feel lousy as hell about chasing girls and talking the way I talk. You want to know the truth? As one man to whoever, I feel compelled, urged, to show off. Talking about roses and girls. These lunatic stories. Give me a break. What a joke. Pussy heaven. Ha. The world won’t want to hear this shit out of me, but the truth is I feel lousy. Those dogs howling in their kennels. The whole world aching to come back to life from the life we are all in up to up to our eyeballs. Everyone splintered over this and that word because they can’t change a light bulb in terms of getting a new joke together. I feel bad to God, when the truth is said, God’s honest truth: I want to be there for the world and for the people I love and for the people I don’t even love. All this talk about gishy is just, for me anyhow, just talk—unless I can find someone to spend some time with and then you know . . . make things better

Here is the howl of one of Rumi’s love dogs, whose sadness is itself the secret cup, whose whining is the ecstatic connection—a dog that none of us knows the name of but should give our life to be.

Fourteen Stories’ ecstatic narration could be mistaken at first as intoxication, soft spew—or, worse, some kind of arrested-adolescence pseudo-quirk lit. Yet Goebel’s is exactly the kind of talk that is not available to the dope-head, drunkard, or the scenester; there is too much charge in the non-sequiturs, too much gut desire in the engine room, and something clear-eyed and unblinking at the helm. Nor is Fourteen Stories, I think, meant to evince some kind of craziness or melodramatic imbalance—even if it does feel ghosted-through with the crazy soliloquies of Padgett Powell, Barry Hannah, and Harry Crews, whose racket-making imitators we hear all around us, revving and spinning, going nowhere. There is bluster and self-pity here, whooping and “half-fake tears,” but by being upfront about the bullshit of his own drama, the speaker manages at the same time to embody the drama, buying into it himself to the extent that the bullshit becomes real, because it was real, or is at least made so real in the telling that the feelings attached to it take on momentary validity and force. This sounds like method acting, but even that is too strategic a term for the way Goebel happens on the page:

The candles at the table, I used to stare at them and the light and feel myself going out of myself into the room like light itself. Like the candle was my name. I could feel the light in me, I am saying, going out of the room.

That is Denis Johnson and in no way derivative of Denis Johnson. And even as the correlation between Fourteen Stories and Jesus’ Son feels strong—particularly when we hit Goebel’s final chapter, “Chores,” which finds the narrator somewhat sobered of himself, a little tired of his antics and antic voice, and humbled to meeting the world on its own terms—even then the comparison feels meaningless, since originality has nothing to do with authenticity. This is an old story, finally, and the narrator arrives to the place all the old stories arrive. Like Candide after his journey, he is ready to tend his garden: “But it doesn’t matter now after my brother has died and I have to wash his truck and do some chores. Don’t kid yourself. I’m licking wounds—but still kicking.” Humiliations beget humility, and humility is the real firepower.

Goebel seems in Fourteen Stories to have broken this horse just enough to show us something of what real wildness is in fiction, which can’t stand the saddle of fiction, not for long. Everyone’s trying to speak their wild these days, and we tire of these honking voices, the evasive quirk, the lyrical feints, the mumble-mutter—the field’s crowded, enervating strain for originality. Yet we feel no such strain in Goebel’s work, in whose own strained attempt to actually make a book—one seemingly inscribed with fevered care on the back of a receipt on a sweaty knee while driving a motor-home at a mythical eighty-miles-an-hour across the desert with the windows open and sucking and snatching at anything loose and floating—we experience, in this panicked provisioning, the passing thrill of being a tiny human heart beating its way toward the immensity of the American landscape, knowing all the while that we will lose, have lost already, yet happy enough, bright and blue-eyed and ready for another beating.

We should give our life to be it.

Jacob White author photoJacob White is the author of the story collection Being Dead in South Carolina (Leapfrog, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill, Shenandoah, Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Hobart Online, and elsewhere. He currently teaches writing at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.

LEAVETAKING by Peter Weiss reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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Leavetaking cover art. A man's profile outlined in white against a blue backgroundLEAVETAKING
by Peter Weiss
translated by Christopher Levenson
with an introduction by Sven Birkerts
Melville House Publishing, 125 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

The late years of adolescence are the torch on the sugar of the artist’s will to create. Forgive the metaphor; I won’t extend it. But as I was reading Peter Weiss’ novella-slash-memoir Leavetaking, I couldn’t help but think of my father, cracking into a crème brûlée with the backside of a spoon. I do not recall the restaurant, the rest of the meal, or the occasion, but I can remember clearly the strong, decided crack of the spoon against the caramelized crust and my father’s white shirt cuffs and the satisfied look on his face as the dessert shattered, fragments piercing like shrapnel the smooth, sweet cream. My father has always done things with precision; I know him as someone who deliberates, and is a model of patience although he does not enjoy waiting. When he left home, it was time. We knew our exits just as we acknowledged the brief silence between courses, the arrival of a new dish on its small, white plate.

Leavetaking is about the last, painful years prior to a young artist’s decisive break from his family home. Peter longs to break through the thick, sweet layer of amber glass his parents have built around him. Mother and father, once gods, have dwindled into petty beings, “full of sympathy and compassion. They had given us all that they had to give, they had given us food and clothing and a civilized home, they had given us their security and their orderliness and they could not understand why we did not thank them for it.” A gentrified Jew raised in middle-class comfort in Berlin between the two World Wars, young Peter aches for something bizarre and avant-garde. He makes paintings that are totally abstract and express a world he can only touch with his feelings. At 17 he is cramped in his nicely tailored suit. His parents do not understand his drive to create; the tension between then rises as it becomes increasingly apparent that Peter will never be able to conform. They have unwittingly raised a freak—an artist—a black sheep. Around them, Germany is starting to break apart; soon, they’ll be surrounded by broken glass, a shattered world.

Peter Weiss author photo

Peter Weiss

Peter Weiss is best known in America for his play Marat/Sade. He is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s great artistic polymaths, unrestricted by form or genre. Leavetaking emphasizes his sensitivity to color, light, and composition. Each scene is beautifully arranged, with nods to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, as time descends like a drip of cold honey. 

I stood in the first-floor vestibule looking first through one of the red, then through one of the blue panes of the glass door into the garden, so making the bushes, the pear tree, the gravel path, the lawn, and the summer house appear first in a fiery glow and then in subdued, submarine tones. At the time of this viewing my basic nature had already been formed, and only when the observing, controlling part of me wearies and my consciousness loses its hold do impulses arise in me out of my earliest life, and it is in half sleep, in dreams, in periods of depression that I re-experience the helplessness, the feeling of having been handed over and the blind rebellion of the time when strange hands tamed, kneaded, and did violence to my being.

That’s two Proustian sentences, and again I hear my father’s voice, asking if we’re meant to get lost in all this, and why does it matter? I suppose that the point is to dabble, as the narrator dabbles in his identity.

There are no paragraphs here, and the sentences are a raveling thread, connecting memories into a single seamless story. Peter’s successes are small, almost petty, but hard-won. The tiny, shabby apartment; the gallery show that nobody attends; a letter from Herman Hesse, his hero; tiny bites of independence. Meanwhile, things are worse for Jews in Germany in these decades. The changes motivate Peter to look beyond himself, through the tall doors of his parents’ house, and see “the vision of these steps that had led me from my birth onward to this place … I saw the dark pattern of their track.”

From childhood to an unsteady few steps into adulthood, Leavetaking is a beautiful, carefully crafted novella that perfectly captures both the sickening anxiety of being a child, as well as its joys and sunny afternoons. For such a daring artist, Weiss’ story is surprisingly conventional at its core. We wish for escape, always; and when it comes, we’re eager to breathe a new wing under Peter’s wings, as “the forces of my flying forward screamed and sang in incantatory chorus. I was on my way to look for a life of my own.”

Claire Rudy Foster author photoClaire Rudy Foster lives in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her critically recognized short fiction has appeared in various respected journals and she has been honored by several small presses, including a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.

TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST by Deirdre Madden reviewed by Annika Neklason

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Time Present and Time Past cover art. A photograph of a grass field under stormy grey cloudsTIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST
by Deirdre Madden
Europa Editions, 161 pages

reviewed by Annika Neklason

I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to meet my family for the first time. What it would be like to look at them as strangers, to know nothing more about them than what I could see in their faces and their clothing and the way they moved to introduce themselves.

It seems like an impossible task, separating the people from the years I’ve spent growing up with them and the years I’ll spend growing old with them. Maybe more than anything else, family is a matter of shared time. Of photo albums full of baby pictures and accumulated Christmas and birthday presents and long, fidgety car trips to half-remembered vacation spots. Family is this weight of shared history, both experienced and inherited, and of shared futures that are always looming over every exchange of goodnights, or goodbyes.

Irish author Deirdre Madden’s ninth novel, Time Present and Time Past, is suffused with that deep connectedness of family across time. As in several of her previous works, including her Orange Prize-shortlisted “One by One in the Darkness,” in this latest book Madden explores both the ties that bind together people and those that reach back through the years to link past to present, what is to what was. Although the story centers on only a brief stretch in the life of Fintan Buckley, a legal adviser in his late forties living outside Dublin with his wife and three children in 2006, Madden constructs a web of memory and expectation, of worry and hope and regret, that feels weighted with unwritten years. The narrative pulses with lives already in the midst of being lived: not just Fintan’s, but those of his entire extended family, from his seven-year-old daughter to his elderly mother.

Fintan himself feels the gravity of those lives, and that time, acutely. He cannot escape seeing in the Dublin of his present the shadows of the past and suggestions of the future, and becomes increasingly preoccupied by early color photography and the dissonance of a world that looks real and familiar, but has been irrevocably lost in the intervening years. As he watches a second hand sweep round and round a clock face in his office, he is horrified to feel “time racing on, racing like a palpitating heart, so that he feels his life will be over before he has had a chance to live it, certainly before he has had a chance to understand it. Sometimes he feels he can almost hear time rushing past him; it is like a kind of unholy wind. He wakes, he works, he sleeps, and then another day is gone and then another week.”

Deirdre Madden author photo

Deirdre Madden

Though this anxiety stems in large part from strange lapses of consciousness Fintan experiences, during which he finds himself unable to distinguish words, or narrowly fixated on the minute details of his surroundings, or caught up in sudden rushes of memory, it could just as easily be his middle age that untether him from the present. These episodes are ultimately underwhelming, a minor and shallowly explored facet of a much larger and more fully realized story. It is not the strangeness but rather the normality of the piece that makes it remarkable, its ability to convey the rhythms of everyday life and the way in which time and memory work within them. The most moving moments of reflection come not when Fintan is caught up in a disorienting sensory experience, but instead when he asks his wife and children to linger in silence around the dining room table for a minute at the end of a meal or when, walking by the water, he meditates on his love for his young daughter, Lucy:

He will bring Lucy here so that she too can throw crusts to the birds. He will take her to the playground in the Green; he will point out squirrels in the trees; he will lay down memories for her to enjoy in the years ahead, like fine wines maturing in a cellar. But when he tries to visualise Lucy as an adult, as the woman who will savour these memories, he cannot do it. All he can see is a pearly mist: something like ectoplasm.

With elegant, understated prose, Madden pieces these quiet moments together to create an intimate and complex portrait of the Buckley family and each of its members. Like Fintan, several of his relatives have difficulty living entirely in the present; his aunt and sister each struggle to move on from personal tragedies, even as his two college-aged sons prepare for independence and adulthood. This temporal restlessness flows in a subterranean space beneath the surface action of the novel, directly glimpsed only briefly but tangibly shaping every shared meal, every exchange, every solitary scene.

The story’s 2006 setting is itself weighted with both the Troubles Ireland experienced in the late twentieth century and the global financial crisis that would begin only a year later. But these larger concerns rarely intrude into the domestic sphere that forms the heart of the novel. Instead they act as an unobtrusive backdrop to Fintan’s childhood memories and anxieties for the future, and heighten the story’s sense of fragile equilibrium—the sense that the moment it captures is ephemeral, caught in a stream of time that cannot be slowed, or stopped, or even preserved.

Like the old photographs that fascinate Fintan, “Time Present and Time Past” portrays a world at once familiar and impossibly distant. Madden deftly captures the complexities of time and memory in her moving portrait of a family, imbuing the mundane routine of Fintan’s life with a love that feels deep, timeless, and universal. It’s a story that will make you want to take out a photo album for the first time in years, or to call your mother just to hear her voice; a story that will leave you with a sense of mourning once you’ve closed the book and found yourself at once cut off from a place and a group of people that feel bigger than the pages that contain them.

Annika Neklason author photoAnnika Neklason grew up in Santa Cruz, California. She currently resides in Philadelphia, where she is pursuing a degree in English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Bassini Writing Apprentice for Cleaver Magazine.

WE’LL GO TO CONEY ISLAND by Barbara Scheiber reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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We'l Go to Coney Island cover art. A black-and-white photograph of a man and woman standing on a boat looking at a harborWE’LL GO TO CONEY ISLAND
by Barbara Scheiber
Sowilo Press, 246 pages

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

With all the recent speculation about octogenarians releasing novels, it’s exhilarating (and encouraging to writers everywhere), to read this sweeping first novel by Barbara Scheiber, published just last year when the author was 92.

We’ll Go to Coney Island, which was 30 years in the writing, tells a semi-autobiographical story about one family across generations, with a mother’s secret as the thread that connects everyone. The story is a set of relationships, conflicts, and memories as time passes. Scheiber was formerly a radio producer for NBC, and in 1975, she was involved in drafting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.

The book’s cover is a Walker Evans photograph of the backs of a man and woman at Coney Island. Evans took the photograph, which captures the scene Scheiber describes on the page one, in 1928. The Metropolitan Museum of Art featured it as a signature poster for a retrospective of the photographer’s work in 2000.

There is double-meaning to the photograph’s use as the cover illustration for We’ll Go to Coney Island: the man in the image is Scheiber’s father, Harry A. Gair, and the woman is Harriet, his lover and later Barbara’s stepmother.

Scheiber came across the photograph in the New York Review of Books about ten years ago after she had already been working on We’ll Go to Coney Island for a decade.

Barbara’s fictionalized Harry is Aaron, the loose thread that unravels her story. In 1916, on the eve of Aaron’s wedding to Minna, the threads are just starting to become tangled. In fact, Minna holds the story together as much as Aaron pulls it apart.

Scheiber’s fictional family includes Aaron and Minna Gershon, their children, Rachel and Daniel, and grandchildren, and Aaron and Minna’s new spouses. The shadow of Aaron’s lovers drifts across that family dynamic. Sometimes, his lovers are not shadows but new characters, just as real as everyone else. When Aaron is dying in the hospital, the reader meets his latest lover and finds that the story might unravel just a little bit more.

The book’s subtitle is A Novel in Stories. I like interconnected short stories as a form, and Scheiber does an excellent job using it to her advantage. Families are full of dysfunction, memory, and tradition, and quite often, feelings, memories, and traditions cycle back across generations. Scheiber lets the reader keep moving forward through time, but not without returning the reader to 1916 every other chapter when Minna and Aaron first meet and fall in love.

Barbara Scheiber author photo

Barbara Scheiber

Scheiber uses the form to tell two parallel narratives—past and present—that taken separately are rather linear. Once she puts them together, the linearity is distorted. This creates emotional resonance: the past and its formative memories does not yield or relinquish its hold on the present; it continues to resurface, even when Minna, suffering from Alzheimer’s, is left in the barren room of a nursing home. But what does Minna remember in that moment? Unexpectedly, she asks the woman if she would like any eggplant. Aaron loved Minna’s eggplant.

The last chapter takes the reader back to 1916 on the eve of Minna and Aaron’s wedding, when the relationship that will allow this story to unfold in the first place is about to become official. The past has the final word. Without the past and that moment, the reader would have little interest in the person Aaron takes to Coney Island.

Aaron was a teenager in one of the Jewish settlement houses in New York, and Minna, originally from Bucharest, falls in love with him, much to her father and stepmother’s dismay. I want to say that Aaron is in love with Minna, too, but the weight of that love is hard to discern. Aaron seems to fall in love with everyone around him so that they, in turn, will fall in love with him. His many women indicate that Aaron loves to be loved, but this is not unique. Arguably, all of the other characters feel that way, too: they love to be loved by Aaron. Perhaps most notably, his daughter, Rachel, and his first wife, Minna, want something from him that he can never give. Rachel outgrows this behavior on some level, but Minna does not, even with a second husband.

The chapters that take the reader back to 1916 are told from Minna’s perspective, and in these chapters that take the reader backwards in time, Scheiber reveals the origins of the complex relationship between Aaron and Minna. About halfway through the book, Scheiber takes the reader to a crowded room in the settlement house, where she reveals Aaron’s love of words and their power, and how “often when [Minna is] with [Aaron], he disappear[s] into his ideas, as if his mind [is] a room she [can’t] enter. [That night at the settlement house], he had brought her in.” Moreover, after Minna feels like she is part of Aaron’s world of words and ideas, she resolves to use her own strength to help Aaron achieve his goal of going to law school. Scheiber writes, “[Aaron has] a golden tongue. [Minna] could help him be what was in him to be.” Minna loves Aaron and wants to demonstrate her love by helping him achieve his goal, but helping him become an attorney does not make Aaron belong to Minna anymore than he belongs to any of his other women.

Scheiber always returns her reader to Minna’s perspective as a young girl in 1916. This way she becomes the thread that connects all of the chapters. Here, Scheiber writes fluid and quick-moving sentences, which makes the many years that Scheiber describes quite literally adhere to the adage, “time flies.”

Approaching the decision to marry Aaron, Minna sees him with another woman, Dora. She has to turn away Meyer Shub, the permitted choice of her father. She doesn’t love him. And yet, she’s just seen Aaron with Dora. Should she turn him down too? She cannot, for “whatever choice she made would be a lie. Whatever she did, she would keep the truth a secret.” For the rest of her life, throughout the arc of generations of her family, Minna tries to keep the truth a secret. And just what is that secret—that Minna started her marriage to Aaron with only a fraction of him. She never had all of him, so when they are divorced, it is only a reminder of that truth she had tried to hide. Of course, it’s the secret, and the way that Minna keeps it, that pushes the reader along.

Even as Minna begins to suffer from Alzheimer’s, turning her into what the nursing home facility calls a “forgetter,” she tries to keep the truth a secret. After Aaron dies, Minna insists that the old will that leaves her fifty percent of his estate is still valid.

Minna likely knows that the old will is no good, that Aaron left her no money. However, she desperately wants to refuse that truth, to bury it inside of herself, so that she can keep fighting—not for Aaron but for Aaron to love her in a way that confirms her own claim to him, her own love for him. Until her children tell her that Aaron wrote another will (and even then she still clings to hope that she can get some of Aaron’s money), Minna believes that she can still at least have part of Aaron. By way of his money, she can have part of him, lay her claim to him, redo parts of her house and always be reminded that it was Aaron’s money. In that way, Minna could feel like Aaron did something for her to let her know he loved her.

And then there is Charlotte, Aaron’s second wife, based on the woman in the Walker Evans photograph. Charlotte desperately wants to have a family and be a mother. On outings with Aaron, and his and Minna’s children Rachel and Daniel, Charlotte imagines that they are a family. But Rachel will never let her have that fantasy. Charlotte becomes upset when Rachel tells a store cashier that Charlotte is not the kids’ mother.

Charlotte suffers multiple miscarriages—she can’t have children. Later, when Rachel confides in her about her own pregnancy, Charlotte suggests letting her and Aaron raise the baby as their own. Rachel refuses. Like most of the characters, Charlotte, after a family with Aaron, doesn’t get what she wants. The rest of Aaron’s family never gets Aaron.

But what about Aaron’s son, Daniel, the boy whose brings Aaron home in the morning only to be greeted by Minna’s accusing eyes and words? It is Daniel who finally realizes his mother’s much-repeated dream to become a doctor. This is satisfying: someone has finally listened to Minna. Perhaps the characters only think they never really get what they want. Satisfaction can certainly be indirect.

Near the end of the book, Rachel visits Minna in the Alzheimer’s facility. She compares a photograph of her great-grandmother to her mother, and she recognizes “there was something in each of them, a force that ran in the blood—a powerful fusion of practicality and passion for living.” This practicality and passion encourages Minna to try to keep the truth about Aaron a secret. Rachel, caught among powerful conflicts of loyalty to her mother, father, and Charlotte, realizes the same practicality and passion must have influenced her ultimately to find “the will to break patterns of secrecy that thwarted her all her life, almost defeated her.”

Ashlee Paxton-Turner author photo

Ashlee Paxton-Turner is a native of Williamsburg, Virginia and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an English major with a concentration in creative writing. A former Teach For America corps member, who taught high school mathematics teacher in rural North Carolina, Ashlee is now a law student at Duke University.

THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER by Alexander Pushkin reviewed by Derek M. Brown

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The Captain's Daughter cover art. Artwork of orange horses running through flower fields under a blue skyTHE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER
by Alexander Pushkin
translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
NYRB, 170 pages

reviewed by Derek M. Brown

Writing in the February 5 edition of The New York Review of Books (“A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine”), financier and philanthropist George Soros says that the U.S. and European Union economic sanctions against Russia, put in place in lieu of going to war over Russian aggression in Ukraine, “have worked much faster and inflicted much more damage on the Russian economy than anybody could have expected.” This economic warfare, he says, in arguing for significant economic aid to Ukraine, has not only severely disabled the Russian economy, but as in real war, has inflicted significant damage on Europe, “helping to turn the threat of deflation in the eurozone into a reality.”

In making this argument, it appears Soros had been reading New York Review Books’ new edition of the Alexander Pushkin Russian classic, The Captain’s Daughter. Those who are “ignorant of [his] people or else hard-hearted men who care not a straw about either their own lives or the lives of others,” warns Pushkin, endeavor to plot against Russia.

Often considered Russia’s greatest poet and the progenitor of modern Russian literature, Pushkin’s penchant for fairytale-like serendipity leads the reader toward lessons once derived from morality tales—such as the necessity that a young man “fall in love and receive his parents’ blessing.” These narrative cadences, in which conflict is seamlessly resolved and events unaccountably fall into place, arrive like predictable, yet immensely satisfying closing phrases to musical passages.

Originally published in 1836, The Captain’s Daughter is a fictionalized account of a historical rebellion against the administration of Catherine II. The novel first appeared in English as Marie: A Story of Russian Love. In this edition, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler defy the sentiments of Robert Frost, who once declared that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” In this edition, all the richness, humor, and poetry for which Pushkin is celebrated, is lovingly preserved. The Chandlers’ translation will undoubtedly carry mass appeal for a modern readership.

Alexander Pushkin author photo

Alexander Pushkin

In The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s protagonist, Pyotr Andreyich Grinyov, the son of a lieutenant colonel, is “enrolled as a sergeant in the Semyonov regiment while still in [his] mother’s womb,” that he may be placed in a regiment befitting someone of his class and rank upon the completion of his studies, which he undertakes while “on leave.” Expecting to serve in the Guards, which he equates with “freedom and the joys of life in Petersburg,” his temperamental father is determined to have him “serve in the real army,” where he will “toil and sweat and smell gunpowder.”

Under the care of his father’s huntsman, Savelich, he is taken to a remote village, where he falls in love with his captain’s daughter. Soon, chaste pursuits in an idyllic setting, replete with snow-covered steppes, are interrupted by the intervention of a brigand, Pugachov, who has assumed the name and identity of the late emperor, Peter III. Intent upon overthrowing the imperial family and demolishing the nobility, Pugachov appeals to the disenfranchised and radicalizes them much as criminal organizations and terrorist groups do today. Although Pyotr’s fortress is eventually sacked, he is spared by this imposter, whom he unwittingly saved from freezing after giving him a hare-skin coat during a violent snowstorm preceding the emergence of his rebellion.

The acts of violence perpetrated by the rebel forces in this text will no doubt strike a chord with those following the upheaval that continues to proliferate in the same part of the globe. Indeed, the same fanaticism that persists and possessed Pugachov’s forces is characterized by the rebel leader’s favorite song, once beloved by peasants and Cossacks alike:

All praise to you, young son of a peasant
That you thieve truly and that you speak true words.
And your reward, young lad, young son of a peasant,
Is a tall mansion in the open fields;
Your reward is two poles and a crossbeam.

This celebration of the gallows is one of the more mordant exhibitions of Pushkin’s sense of humor, which is otherwise typified by subtlety and impeccable comedic timing, as evidenced by a note Pyotr’s father has written and which accompanies him to Orenburg, where he is stationed. Encountering his general, for whom the letter is written, he offers to clarify expressions that escape the German’s understanding as he reads the letter aloud. Among the requests his father makes is that the boy be held “with hedgehog gloves.” Turning to Pyotr to elucidate, the general is told it means “to treat someone gently, not to be too severe with them, to give them free rein.” The following line begins with the request that the general “not give him too free a rein.” “Zeze hedgehog gloves does not mean vot you say…”

While Pushkin fills the story with humor and lands at a predictably improbable ending, it’s also tempting to wonder if Pushkin is suggesting that his protagonist’s moral integrity is accountable for his success and eventual happiness. Pyotr is uncompromising in his resolve and, though he is willing to fall on his sword and defy seemingly impossible odds, he is firm in his conviction that “the best and most enduring changes are those that come about as a result of an improvement in morals, without any violent upheavals.” Perhaps everyone involved in the Ukraine crisis should take heed. Soros’s call for significant economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine would doubtless prove far more effective and enduring than the pattern of violence that continues to this day.

Derek Brown author photoDerek M. Brown is an English major at Columbia University. He is also a singer/songwriter and performs regularly throughout New York City.   

BOMBYONDER by Reb Livingston reviewed by Brent Terry

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Bombyonder cover art. A large pill half blue and half purple standing covering the yellow sunBOMBYONDER
by Reb Livingston
Bitter Cherry Books, 346 pages

reviewed by Brent Terry

Welcome to the crater. Keep your head down, your eyes open, and try not to lose your lunch…or your mind. Your guide on this journey is one of literature’s most unreliable narrators: a murderous, narcissistic, yet oddly appealing young woman on a quest through the bombed-out wreckage of her own psyche, in search of a past she can hang her hat on, a future that tells the truth, the real nature of her bomb-maker father’s legacy, and a little birdy that might make everything turn out okay.

Reb Livingston’s literary forbears are legion. In this compellingly daft, lyrical, and mind-expanding novel we find traces of Sophocles, Lewis Carrol, Vonnegut, the Nabokov of Pale Fire, Hunter S. Thompson, Gertrude Stein, and Shelley—both of them—all run through the cerebral cortex of Tim Burton, put in a pill and swallowed whole by Livingston, the effect of which is an acid-trip of a novel that requires every bit of guile and courage a reader can muster. Livingston is best known as a poet, (with two critically acclaimed books and a Best American Poetry appearance to her credit) and her poetic sensibilities guide this book: not magical realism, but hyper-realism smashed to bits and reassembled, reanimated, and turned loose among the unsuspecting villagers.

Reb Livingston author photo

Reb Livingston

Whether physical or allegorical, the world of Bombyonder, Livingston’s first novel, is much like this one—maybe it is this one—a world of constant and ever more complicated war, a state the father of our unnamed narrator/protagonist seeks to exploit to establish his “legacy.” His desire for immortality leads him to create the “kind bomb,” a pill which undoes, scrambles, and recreates the memory of whoever might swallow it. The weapon’s first victim? Our heroine, convinced by her father to to swallow the pill just before she slits his throat, twinned actions which set the madness in motion. Livingston depicts the state of unreality this weapon would surely cause in horrifying and devastatingly funny ways. As the weapon does its work, neither the character nor the reader can know what is real, what is fabricated, or what is made from cobbled together bits of the daughter’s own subconscious. All she knows is that she must venture into the crater—actual? Subconscious? Who knows—left behind by the bomb, following clues that might lead her back to herself.

She does not want to go alone, but very bad things come to those she enlists to help her. She needs a prince, but princes are undesirable or in short supply. Then, in one of the book’s many delicious ironies the bomb seems to offer up a solution:

But I was in no mood to marry. I needed connection to a prince who wouldn’t try to fuck me.

I needed a brother.

Rauan looked just like me except his hair was the texture of a dog’s and the shade of a cat’s. His eyes shined like fruit plucked from a wolf’s jaw. His jaw squared and slacked while his breath wafted like Father’s, if Father had worked in a coal mine. Rauan’s overall aroma was closer to Mother’s, but mushier and dragon-doused, like he was older by centuries. We were practically twins.

Nobody remembered him. Nobody wanted him. Except me.

My Iron Kin lived again.

A helpful bit of advice to the reader: try to treat this difficult book as one would a poem. Let it wash over you, submerge you in its bizarre and dangerous charms, and carry you away. Sit back, hang on tight and gape at this safari of Ums and assbeasts, denim-clad golems, troops of spirit-guides and Tiresia, (Tiresiases?) seeming always, even as they lead our narrator—and us—deeper into the crater of Bombyonder, to lead back to the murdered father and his inescapable legacy. Geeks bearing gifts, indeed!

Imagine Carroll’s Mad Hatter going down his own rabbit hole, emerging in a world exponentially weirder and more dangerous than the tea party he left behind, a world of detritus and damage, of: “[A] ferret riding an elk with multiple stab wounds. A blue dog barking “white cat.” A dying fox gasping “Oh my Pompeii.” A lanky reaper-type. A cow wearing zebra print. Another lizard wearing a feather boa. A monkey selling laundry soap. A graffiti-covered snail. And on and on.

This world is exhausting and more than a bit disgusting, and in the hands of a lesser writer it would be boring, too. But Livingston, in torrents of delicious language, sends a protagonist as unsympathetic as imaginable on a journey of discovery that forces us to sympathize, empathize, and in the end, recognize ourselves in her. The beauty of Bombyonder is how it begins with a character and a setting almost completely foreign, and in the course of its madly fractured narrative brings us to a deep—and deeply disturbing—understanding of the narrator and her world. We start with a narrator who repels us, but Livingston does not let us look away. We are frog-marched into a world that horrifies us, but she does not let us escape. We find ourselves, almost against our will, cheering for our narrator to succeed. We find ourselves liking and identifying with her. Holy Hannah, we cry, the narrator is me!

We begin to understand this terrible truth when the narrator says, “Vomit it up all you can, but that awful something is already absorbed, already a part of the body, the landscape, the equation. It’s science, it’s art, it’s the truth you never attempted to learn but somehow you absorbed the concept and thank God you did otherwise you wouldn’t be able to breathe down here because this guy is burning up all the air.” 

And thus, the demented, destroyed and damned (and damned funny) world that is Bombyonder begins to look very much like the world we live in every day, our own memories suddenly as untrustworthy as any revisited by our protagonist. Which brings us to the author’s final literary forebear. Bombyonder obsesses over memory every bit as much as Proust’s a la Recherché du Temps Perdu, but in a peripatetic, right-in-the-middle-of-the-damn-apocalypse kind of way, Proust’s madeleine replaced by a vomited-up dead bird, memory contemplated not in calm repose, but in frantic descent into a crater of one’s own making.

Brent Terry author photoWyoming/Colorado native Brent Terry has published poems, stories, essays and reviews in many magazines and journals. He is the author of two collections of poetry: the chapbook yesnomaybe (Main Street Rag, 2002) and the full-length Wicked, Excellently (Custom Words, 2007). Terry received an MFA from Bennington in 2001. In 2111 he was awarded a fellowship from the Connecticut Arts and Tourism Board. A former neighborhood poet laureate in Minneapolis, Terry now lives in Willimantic, CT, where he scandalizes the local deer population with the brazen skimpiness of his running attire and teaches at Eastern Connecticut State University, but still yearns to rescue a border collie and light out for the Rockies.

LEARNING CYRILLIC by David Albahari reviewed by Jon Busch

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Learning Cyrillic cover at. Slanted black text on a white backgroundLEARNING CYRILLIC
by David Albahari
translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Dalkey Archive, 189 pages

reviewed by Jon Busch

Printed on the cover of renowned Serbian author David Albahari’s most recent short fiction collection, Learning Cyrillic (his seventh book to be translated into English), is an excerpt from a review, “A Kafka for our times…” As I read the twenty plus stories in the collection, this short passage stuck with me. I was taken aback and distracted by how little resemblance to Kafka I found. Unlike Kafka, who never breaks role and keeps the fourth wall strong, Albahari entertains a great allowance of postmodern play—with frequent narrative breaks and ruminations on meaning and text. With the exception of, “The Basilica in Lyon,” about two-thirds into the collection, there is slight trace of Kafka. And even in this piece, the resemblance is superficial and lies solely in the use of a labyrinth setting.

Albahari and Kafka, while an interesting comparison to note—given the author’s geographic proximities and proclivity for parable—seem to hold little in common, apart from a partiality towards general weirdness. Unlike Kafka’s bleak meanderings of an isolated protagonist, trapped inside an indecipherable system—Albahari’s stories often feature two or more people conversing. The conversations take place in typical circumstances—eating dinner, drinking coffee, etc. Albahari’s characters attempt to wade through the chaos of time and meaning together. Even if the hopelessness of Kafka is at times present, the overwhelming loneliness is not.

The majority of Alabhari’s stories concern language/interpretation, time, and love. These topics are roughly partitioned into the confines of a three-part structure, although the themes and tones freely bleed between the artificial and at times arbitrary boundary.

The stories of Part I explore the comfort of meaning and our human need for narratives in understanding the world. Alabhari does not confront these topics head on as much as he orbits around them, inviting a dance. He makes the reader work. In his more successful pieces the reader is left with a certainty that “I am missing something,” and it is fun to go back and interpret. In his less successful pieces, the reader is left with an abrupt ending and frustration.

David Albahari author photo

David Albahari

But when Albahari succeeds, he does so in great fashion. The first three stories in the collection are meticulous and intriguing. Each of them explores how people interpret contexts differently and how communication is rooted in the shared interpretations of contexts. If you are sensing a little bit of later day Wittgenstein here, it’s no accident. Albahari constantly returns to Wittgenstein themes: Is there a Truth or only a variety of interpretative narratives? Can we ever be sure that another person is interpreting as we are? Is meaning ever truly shared? He wrestles with solipsistic fears, as Wittgenstein’s interlocutor in Philosophical Investigations. Here, a man and wife in conversation in Albahari’s “Lolita, Lolita” talk across the divide:

I remembered a sentence from a friend’s letter. “Interpretations of dreams,” I said, “are boring. They only matter as images.” “Nonsense,” said my wife. “Images are empty space that has been painted in: interpretations are the connective tissue, the glue. Without them the images burst like soap bubbles. Dreams are lost my dear,” she said, scooping mayonnaise from the jar with her knife, “but interpretations remain.”

Albhari’s interest in these themes is not strictly philosophical. He aims to emote as well. It is clear he finds a great sadness in the secular world’s preference for structural narratives. In “Fireflies” he gives us a young girl, Eva, who spends youthful summer nights in reverie, contemplating fireflies’ glow. Later in life she receives the scientific narrative—the biological explanation of the fact. After this happens, not much changes. The sky does not fall and buildings do not crumble. But the world of our character has changed. There is less magic in her life.

After the first three pieces, Albahari transitions to a more classic narrative style. In “Shadows,” he writes about an author who has a devastating encounter with the son of an ex-lover, as he passes through town on a book tour. Throughout the entire collection we see Albahari move back and forth in this way—from dialogue driven philosophical musings in the vein of Delillo to Chekovian slice-of-life tales that at times incorporate genre techniques, such as suspense and twist endings.

In Part II, Albahari shifts away from his meditations on interpretation and explores the nature of time, with emphasis on how different cultures can embody different times, and what happens when two different time-embodying cultures interact. In the eponymous story, “Learning Cyrillic,” our protagonist is a Serbian immigrant who lives in Canada (as Albahari himself does). He teaches Cyrillic to Canadian children at a catholic church, where he keeps bumping into and eventually builds a relationship with a Native American of the ‘Blackfeet’ tribe. Throughout the story, the Serbian, the priest, and the Native American, bounce off each other, each confused and intrigued by the other’s foreign beliefs and historical narratives.

The theme of time is continued in “Stamps,” a tale about a stamp collecting father’s wish for his tech-savvy son to continue the hobby and his dismay when his son does not. The father can’t keep up with the times: “…the world had changed and that he hadn’t caught on soon enough, or that somewhere in himself, even if he had noticed the change, he had done nothing to embrace it.”

We also encounter mediations on time in “Hitler in Chicago,” “The Basilica in Lyon,” “Tito in Zurich,” and others.

Albahari transitions again in the third set of stories, this time into the realm of love. At the same time he moves away from the classic narrative form and intensifies his postmodern approach. With constant breaks from the physicality of setting, Albahari migrates into analysis of language and solipsistic neuroses, which he often explores through two people’s shared anxiety. In “A Story With No Way Out,” a man has included himself and his wife in a story he’s written. “You mean to say you don’t know how to get us out of this story?” says the wife,

“Can’t we go out the way we came in?” “If I knew the way,” I say, “I wouldn’t merely go back, I would begin again.” “So,” says my wife, “we’ll be stuck here forever.” “Yes,” I say. “You could at least have written a nice sentence,” my wife says. “I like being in a nice sentence. Nice and long.”

This is despairing and smart and funny, but at the end of the day the stories that stuck most were narrative driven. The shorter more philosophical stories lacked the characterization necessary to generate empathy. These were fun puzzles to dissect, but after a few of them the effort became tiring and the abrupt endings unsatisfying. While, at first, the short length of these stories—two-to-three pages—was compelling, the form eventually grew tiresome; it had the effect of disrupting this reader’s pace. The short length also hindered any lasting connection or investment in the characters.

It would be unfair not to note that for me, postmodern fiction, relying too heavily on cleverness and tricks, frequently lacks the emotional resonance that the narrative form can deliver. With that said, and recognizing the irony, I admit that my favorite pieces of this collection (the first three) are some of the most quintessentially postmodern of the bunch. Regardless of all criticism, Albahari’s successful stories and ambition alone, make for worthwhile reading.

Jon Busch author photoJon Busch lives in Northwest Philadelphia. He spends his days working as the co-owner and content manager for Apollo Content. In the evenings, he can be found writing stories or playing music at open mic nights around the city. His fiction, book reviews, and interviews have been published or are forthcoming at Crack the Spine, Cleaver, Bird’s Thumb, Foliate Oak, Philadelphia Stories, Piker Press, and Baby Teeth Magazine. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

THE SCAPEGOAT by Sophia Nikolaidou reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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The Scapegoat cover art. Geometric artwork of a columned building beneath a hint of sunTHE SCAPEGOAT
by Sophia Nikolaidou
translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich
Melville House Publishing, 237 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

As I begin to write this on January 20, 2015, the news from Buenos Aires isn’t good. Albert Nisman, the federal prosecutor assigned to finally uncover the truth about the 1994 bombing of the Argentina Israelite Mutual Association, a Jewish community center, was found dead in his apartment. Nisman was about to reveal a high-level government conspiracy to cover up Iran’s role in the bombing, which killed 85 people. Argentina has long struggled with corruption and politicization of its government institutions, making it almost impossible for the nation to confront its demons—from sheltering Nazis to the 1970s/1980s rounding up and killing of leftists, communists, intellectuals, and Jews who became known as the desaparecidos opposed to the ruling right wing Junto. The powerful are usually protected.

Nisman was to provide evidence that Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirschner made a deal with Iranian leaders in 2013 to absolve Iran of blame in the bombing (Nisman had accused Iran and Hezbollah of funding and carrying it out), in exchange for cheap Iranian oil, which the country desperately needed. According to the New York Times, a gun was found on the floor next to Nisman’s body, suggesting suicide. But many observers think he was murdered, or forced to kill himself. The day before he died, Nisman said, apparently, “I might get out of this dead.”

“I’m angry and sad because I know we will never know the truth,” said a woman interviewed by the Times standing outside the crime scene.

Listen to her resignation—we will never know the truth—the despairing wheeze of a society suffocated by double-dealing, corruption, and cover-up. It isn’t anything new in Argentina—or half the world. Americans, certainly, are angry and sad after closed-door grand juries in St. Louis and New York City ruled to protect the interests of police over citizens.

In Greece, the perennial crisis of confidence in political institutions has worsened since the economic crash of 2008, leaving young people particularly disenfranchised and disillusioned (“New Party Capitalizes on Greeks’ Loss of Faith in Their Leaders,” says the Times on January 21st). The writer Sophia Nikolaidou confronts the disillusionment in The Scapegoat, a neatly kaleidoscopic stirring of a novel, her first to be translated into English. Nikolaidou, in Karen Emmerich’s swift translation, connects the present anxiety to the 1948 murder of the American journalist George Polk (the namesake of the prestigious Polk Awards), who had been investigating Greece’s corrupt right-wing government during the nation’s Civil War. Fearing the loss of U.S. aid, the Greek government pinned the murder on Grigoris Staktopoulos, a journalist and one-time communist. Evidence was thin to non-existent and, as in the Nisman case in Argentina, hardly anyone felt they would ever learn the truth.

Sophia Nikolaidou author photo

Sophia Nikolaidou

Nikolaidou approaches the Polk case by drawing it as a shadow cast over present-day Thessaloniki, where the murder took place. In alternating sections, the past unfolds across the present, resonating in the lives of the book’s unlikely protagonist, graduating high school senior Minas Georgiou, and his parents, grandmother, teacher, and friends. Minas is bored with school, stifled by Thessaloniki, Greece’s northern second city, Salonika of the Ottoman empire. “I’ll just rot here,” he says. “My whole life spent in a tiny speck on the map. Nine hundred steps along the sidewalk of Tsimiski Avenue. I counted.”

Minas has decided he doesn’t want to go to university. He’s a top student, and from an intellectual family; his mother Teta and grandmother Evthalia have conditioned him for the legal faculty; his father Tasos is a consummate, truth-seeking journalist, editor of the city’s leading left-leaning newspaper. And now Minas refuses to study for the college entrance exams. “There’s just no way you can memorize all the nationalist uprisings in southeastern Europe in chronological order and the casualty count for each one and still have the brain of a normal person, Jesus,” he says.

Panicked, Teta asks Minas’s history and language arts teacher, Marinos Soukiouroglou—“Souk”—to intervene. Souk is a black-suited iconoclast who believes in critical thinking over rote memorization, hated and loved by students. Souk grudgingly intervenes—he judges Teta the worst kind of helicopter parent—by giving Minas a project: figure out what happened with the Polk case. Interview people, go back over the evidence, and come up with a plausible theory of who killed Polk (fictionalized as Jack Talas) and why the murder was pinned on Staktopoulos (fictionalized as Magnolis Gris).

With this, author Nikolaidou alternates between 1948 and 2010, using past despair and frustration with official cynicism to mirror the present. The mirroring takes tangible form amongst the characters and within the plot; grandmother Evthalia is mirrored by Minas’s friend Evelina; Evthalia’s unrequited love for Evelina’s grandfather Dinopoulos, who as a young lawyer served as Gris’s defense attorney, is mirrored in Minas and Evelina’s potential affair. Minas Georgiou is simply mirrored by Magnolis Gris.

Dinopoulos took the case knowing it would be impossible to clear Gris’s name; instead he made a deal to keep him from being executed. “Anyone who investigates the Gris affair needs to understand one thing: no one made any decisions without agonizing over them first,” says Dinopoulos.

But everyone felt that the country’s future was at stake. The greatest good for the greatest number, that’s the basic rule of governance. You weigh the options and settle on the least of all evils.

Translator Karen Emmerich photo

Translator Karen Emmerich

As a young reporter, Minas’s father, Tasos, reopened the Gris case. There was a chance he would solve it, until his mentor at the paper warned him to disavow the evidence, let it go. The next year, Tasos was made editor; he’d compromised on principal in order to have the opportunity to shape the paper’s reporting on other, more contemporary, more pressing issues. His decision mirrored Dinopoulos’s: the greatest good for the greatest number. By making the deal for cheap oil with the Iranians, Kerchner, the Argentinian President, must have been thinking the same thing.

The mirroring thus has a thematic use: in Greece, the past never relents. It’s also a useful plot device. The interconnections between periods make for an intricate story that’s novelistic, but also emotionally resonate. In the just released How to be both (Pantheon), the Scottish novelist Ali Smith uses a similar device to make the life of a contemporary teenager, Georgia (whose mother, like Minas’s father, is relentlessly political and often blindly dogmatic), echo the life of a Renaissance painter. The touching of past and present in both new novels produces a kind of magic sensation in the reader—a quiet reminder of common human ambition, desire, and despair. It’s also a reminder that we only ever view the past through the frame of the present.

Nikolaidou’s elaborate web produces a kind of symphony on truth, compromise, determination, and ideology, amplified by her choice of narrative form. The Scapegoat is told by alternating first person narrators, past and present. The thrill of this form is that the reader gets to hear directly from the characters. With a case of intrigue, like Gris’s, this is almost necessary. With more than one version of the story, the reader can decide.

Photo of George Polk

George Polk c. 1943

But the format, certainly inspired by Roberto Bolaño’s successful Savage Detectives, is tricky. Though the narrative voice is fresh—unfiltered by a third person author—it’s also distant, often narrating past events—telling rather than showing. Living and dead people have equal footing, which requires a leap of faith by the reader (and anyway, who collected all these transcripts?). It often isn’t clear if the character is meant to be writing his story or talking to the reader—or a reporter or, in this case, to young Minas. Sometimes the form won’t work because of complications of plot. Nikolaidou is forced at times to employ the omnibus “Through Other Eyes” as an unnamed narrator whose point of view is unrevealed. Who are these other eyes? the reader wants to know.

And yet despite this dissonance (or perhaps due to it—the reader gets to see the writer molding the book, making choices, even confusing ones), The Scapegoat turns out to be an utterly compelling meditation on the nature of political truth, compromise, and justice and at the same time an evocative reflection on family dynamics and generational change. The symphony of voices, no matter slightly uneven, swells in the reader’s imagination.

In assigning him the Gris affair, the insistent Souk wants Minas to perform an impossible act: assert blame, or at least a clear theory on what happened. “Well, will you attempt to offer an interpretation of the events?” he demands during the boy’s presentation of his findings. “Or will you limit yourself to safe, painless description?” Minas gathers his composure and lists the complicated set of possibilities, the complex geo-political arithmetic that led to the murder. “Minas had come to realize that justice is an abstract concept…riddled with qualifications, asterisks, interpretations, clashes of opinion,” says the unnamed “Through Others Eyes.”

Does Nikolaidou believe this? Is this her answer to the despair of present day Athens, or Buenos Aires? A great novel is never so clear. Justice wasn’t ever served in the case of George Polk. The pain of cover-up and expediency only dulls; it never goes away.

Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

THE DOOR by Magda Szabó reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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The Door author photo. Simple drawing of the empty corner of a white room where the floor and two walls meetTHE DOOR
by Magda Szabó
translated by Len Rix
introduction by Ali Smith
New York Review Books, 262 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

Popular aphorism: the Eskimo people have more than 50 words for snow. They have, embedded in their language, almost a hundred distinctive terms for each type of snow, every kind of snow that can possibly exist or has ever existed. Every delineation within the semantic category “snow” is honored by its specific traits and virtues. The types cannot coexist, though they may drift into one another.

Another popular aphorism: love is patient, love is kind. Love being as common as snowflakes to us, as individual and as piercing. We should have a thousand names for love; it seems unnatural to group them all under one generic title. One four-letter word.

Some types of love cannot be corralled, as narrator Magda finds in the legendary Hungarian novelist Magda Szabó’s novel The Door, originally published in 1987 and now out in a new English translation by Len Rix. These other kinds of love are elemental—the way the Greek heroes were, in their mythological stature—and too terrible to share the flimsy mantel “love” with puppy-dog eyes and Valentine cards.

The person in whom Magda discovers this other kind of love is Emerence Szeredas. Magda and her husband, both writers in a time when it was politically difficult to be an artist in Hungary, hire Emerence to keep house for them. Emerence is known as a hard worker, despite being in her 70s. She cares for many families in the neighborhood, not out of necessity, it seems, but from a sense of pride. “I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty linen,” she says. After checking Magda’s references, she begins working for the couple, and her relationship with Magda begins to take shape.

The small scale of The Door is intimate and satisfying. Rather than tackle the larger issues head-on, Szabó allows them to niggle into the fabric of the story. World War II is over, still fresh in the characters’ memories. The smell of death on the battlefield is evoked by the mauled corpse of a cat. Empty cattle cars. The “disappeared” Jewish families, and the Hungarians who were able to help them escape. All these things, as well as the advent of space travel, television, and new kinds of music, create a landscape for Emerence to stride across in her daily, unchanging ritual of labor. Every waking moment is for sweeping, laundry, cooking, cleaning, and other domestic labor. She does not sleep, but reclines on a small “lover’s couch” in one corner of her kitchen. Her front door is permanently locked.

She stood for certainty—in summer the first ripening cherry, in autumn the thud of falling chestnuts, the golden roast pumpkin of winter, and, in spring, the first bud on the hedgerow. Emerence was pure and incorruptible, the better self that each and every one of us aspired to be. With her permanently veiled forehead and her face that was tranquil as a lake, she asked nothing from anyone and depended on no-one. She shouldered everyone’s burden without ever speaking of her own, and when she did finally need my help, I went off to play my part in a TV show and left her, in the squalor of advanced illness, for others to witness the single moment of degradation in her life.

Magda Szabó author photo

Magda Szabó

Emerence is unnatural in her naturalness, surreal in her realness. She is a monster of purity, and she wages holy war in Magda’s life. Her expectations are too high; “she was like Jehovah: she punished for generations.” As Magda’s career starts to coalesce—the Communist regime is in full force, and the right bureaucrats are finally interested in her writing—the tide turns in the women’s relationship.

Magda, so accustomed to relying on Emerence, is called to return Emerence’s love. However, Magda is only human. She justifies her every failure to reciprocate. It’s a class issue; Magda tells herself that Emerence is a peasant, a beast of burden, a bad Christian. But her own threadbare intellectualism can’t overlook the trope they’re both participating in. Magda’s knowledge of the world does not elevate her bourgeois concepts of right and wrong; Emerence’s ideals do not free her from her servitude. In the end, both of them are locked into their respective classes. Love may bridge the gap between the two women, but it doesn’t mend their differences. In the end, the two sides are diametrically opposed, even in the moment when the need for reconciliation is greatest.

Magda’s fascination with Emerence subtly influences her, illuminating her many failings. In the domestic world Emerence creates for the two women, everything that makes Magda splendid is in fact cheap and worthless. Magda’s knowledge of Greek mythology, European languages, and her many novels butter no parsnips for Emerence. Likewise, Emerence does not translate into Magda’s world. She is crude, in her way—a conversation piece for Magda and her academic friends.

The tension between Magda and her housekeeper is fascinating, and sometimes sickening as well. From the first sentence, we already know that Magda has failed, and that, like Judas, her sin against the person who loves her most purely has damned her. The novel, which is presented as a memoir, is a chronicle of her self-condemnation. Emerence, safely ensconced in the past, is a dangerous memory to play with, but Szabó does her characters justice even as she reveals her narrator’s weaknesses. Emerence is, after all, too good to be good forever:

She was like someone standing in strong sunlight on a mountain top, looking back down the valley from which she had emerged and trembling with the memory still in her bones of the length and nature of the road she had travelled, the glaciers and forded rivers, the weariness and danger, and conscious of how far she still had to go. There was also compassion in that face, a feeling of pity for all the poor people below, who knew only that the peaks were rosy in twilight, but not the real meaning of the road itself.

The Door is highly decorated, by several significant awards—but what’s the point of those? The story celebrates love, the kind that is too perfectly made to exist on Earth. The kind we crave, and will never deserve, that slips through our fingers even as we cry out that we were wrong. Popular aphorism: love means never having to say you’re sorry. The love shared by Magda and Emerence cuts like a knife, and in the end, the only thing Magda can say is, I was wrong. Her redemption, of course, is up to the reader.

Claire Rudy Foster author photoClaire Rudy Foster lives in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her critically recognized short fiction has appeared in various respected journals and she has been honored by several small presses, including a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.

HOW YOU WERE BORN by Kate Cayley reviewed by Michelle Fost

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How You Were Born cover art. A black-and-white photograph of two children standing in a doowayHOW YOU WERE BORN
by Kate Cayley
Pedlar Press, 152 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

Years ago, I was lucky enough to take a fiction writing class at Penn with the late, great cultural critic John Leonard. I was reminded recently—while reading Kate Cayley’s remarkable short story collection How You Were Born—of a story he told our class. A year earlier he met with his friend Elie Wiesel for lunch and coffee at a diner on the upper West side, and Wiesel appeared distraught. His wife was pregnant, and Wiesel felt miserable about the idea of having a child. He didn’t see how he could possibly bring a child into a world where the Holocaust is possible. A year later, shortly before our class, they met again. This time Leonard found Wiesel already there, at the same table, but his demeanor was completely changed. He stood up and greeted Leonard warmly. There wasn’t a trace of distress in his manner. When Leonard sat down, Wiesel handed him a huge photo album to look through, sharing what seemed like hundreds of photographs of the new baby.

How You Were Born is an archive of anxiety. In the story “Young Hennerly,” Robert Browne gets out of being drafted to Vietnam by being a student of American folklore. His work involves interviewing older people from around the country and collecting their stories. He’s heard many times variations of the story Annie Reardon tells him. As a girl she was warned to stay away from the men in the trees, and especially the dangerous man who lives under a great rock. That man is so hungry, the story goes, that if he sees you he might eat you! Something about Annie Reardon’s telling spooks Robert Browne. When he drives past a huge rock and a man materializes out of nowhere at the side of his car and looking for a lift, it’s clear that our inner worlds hold fears that can’t be escaped as easily as the draft.

There is plenty of danger and darkness in How You Were Born. The narrator of “Blind Poet” might be providing a blueprint for many of the stories when she says, “A stranger arrives, pounds on the door, or shows up at the foot of your bed; you ask them in, even if they are soaked with rain, battered by wind, and dangerous, even if they are worse than dangerous.”

Kate Cayley author photo

Kate Cayley

My favorite story in the collection is “Acrobat.” Here Cayley introduces eleven-year-old Zoë, who has plenty of reasons to feel sorry for herself. Her family has recently moved, she’s bored, and she’s stuck sharing a bed with her bed-wetting younger sister. But Zoë is curious about a workshop and Circus Festival taking place in her local park. When she attends, she has a transformative experience. A man with a dragon tattoo who runs the workshop chooses her for a demonstration. When he hoists her into the air, the feeling of weightlessness and freedom amazes her. Later, when she returns to the park for the Festival, the dragon man doesn’t recognize her. But this rejection doesn’t have quite the sting it might have: during the performance, Zoë again feels lifted by the beauty of the acrobatics. In this story, it’s as though Cayley is showing us that desiring connection is not as dangerous as it might seem; Zoë’s feeling of uplift isn’t dependent on being seen by the dragon man.

The center of gravity of How You Were Born is the decision to have a child. Molly and Robin, in the stories that frame the collection, make this decision—but they approach it quite differently. Molly is ready, at ease, desiring: “She wants this more than I can imagine wanting anything.” Robin is not similarly at ease. As she describes, “I’m superstitious—it seems too easy, leaving me feeling we have pushed our luck. As we board the plane, I worry that the catch is coming.”

One catch that neither Robin nor Molly could have predicted is that Jake, biological father to Robin and Molly’s daughter, dies. In the first story of the collection, Robin, Molly, and now ten-year-old Emma, drive to visit Jake’s mother. “What should Emma call her?” Robin asks. They don’t have the vocabulary to describe the relationship of their daughter to their friend’s mother, but by the end of the story a connection becomes literally visible. All the women see Jake in Emma. The narrator of another story voices a feeling common to many of Cayley’s characters: “We are so tenuously linked that nothing holds us.” Molly doesn’t think Emma needs a name for Jake’s mother. Still, the visit to Jake’s mother suggests the possibility of expanding rather than constricting our ideas about how we are connected with other people.

In the end the book is Robin’s. The stories put flesh on the bones of her anxieties, superstition, and dread. It’s as though the stories express the many forms of fear she feels ahead of becoming a mother. Cayley shows us, in How You Were Born, that the impulse to collect and then work through anxiety imaginatively is important and powerful. The final story, “How You Were Born,” provides the perfect ending to the collection. This story goes back in time to allow Robin to give an intimate account of the important trip out to visit Jake, to conceive baby Emma. There’s still plenty of anxiety in the voice. But it’s as though an archive has been completed and by documenting these different forms of our collective fears we can contain them, and let them go.

Michelle Fost author photo