Category Archives: fiction reviews

Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines by Mark Lyons reviewed by Jon Busch

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Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines cover art. The title text on a green road sign in front of a road under an orange skyBRIEF EULOGIES AT ROADSIDE SHRINES
by Mark Lyons
Wild River Books, 216 pages

reviewed by Jon Busch

“…they just stick him in the ground with no stone, no nothin’. That ain’t right I say to myself.”

This short passage from “He Sure Do Want to Fly”, one of the many superb pieces in Mark Lyons’ most recent short story collection, Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines, summarizes the intent of the work precisely. With the assurance and ease of a well-worn traveler, Mr. Lyons escorts the reader on a voyage through the lonely corners of North America, erecting descanos—roadside memorials—along the way. Each story, in its own manner, is an offering to the Gods of forgotten souls, or as the eponymous hero of the story, “Arnold’s Roadside Café” eloquently states, “The Great God of Roadkill.”

The collection pulses with a tragic calmness akin to the writings of Carver or Cheever. Beneath every scene and absurd occurrence lurks a temperate sadness. While the explored themes of isolation, loneliness and death are heavy, the electric tone of the prose persistently enthralls. Here is Lyons’ energy and command of voice revealed by Blue-J, the protagonist of “He Sure Do Want to Fly,” describing a The Rancho, a rehab facility:

The Rancho: final rest stop for invalids and crips, folks what stroke out or got the multiple sclerosis, suicides what gone wrong, guy pick up a bullet in his back in East LA, some waitin’ for the cancer to finish them off. Too sick to care for they selves, nobody around to help out, and takin’ they fine time dyin’. 

The melancholy spirit of the book at no point becomes tiring, whereas the same material dealt with by a lesser writer could easily have fallen prey to monotony and weariness. Lyons success is rooted in his ability not to dwell or boorishly pull at the reader’s heartstrings for cheap effect.

The strength of the first story, “Aaron’s Auto Salvage and Restoration,” quickly assures the reader that they are in the hands of a professional. The piece tells of an ex-snake-handling pastor, named Aaron, who after seeking medical attention for a venomous bite, is exiled from his congregation and takes a position as a night watchman at a junkyard. During his time at the junkyard, Aaron erects a massive cross from the hubcaps of mortal auto accidents. The story is near flawless in its design and execution—masterfully compressed in form, yet emotionally boundless.

The story that immediately follows, “Holy Rollers,” takes us into the heart of South Philadelphia, where the author displays his impressive ability to transform and maintain multiple voices. The plot concerns the pre- and post-Iraq war experiences of Nunzio—a South Philly everyman—as well as the role of pigeons in the war. Lyons presentation of Nunzio’s devastating wartime transformation and the horrors he observed are compelling and impressively researched.

Mark Lyons author photo

Mark Lyons

Another notable highlight of the collection is the story “Clive,” which also explores the tragedy of war. After returning from Vietnam, Jimmy is offered a job by Bernie—an old family acquaintance—as a night worker at his chicken coop. Jimmy quickly descends into mental instability and smashes a dozen or so baby chicks with a shovel. Jimmy then enters a hospital where he remains for weeks, afraid to step on the ground for fear of triggering a mine. The danger is “Everywhere: in the cornfields, on the path leading up to the chicken factory, down along the creek, the road. Where you’d least expect it,” writes Lyons. “Every time he puts his foot down, he was sure he’d hear a click of the metal firing device connecting the circuit.” Bernie attempts to bring Jimmy back into the world and acquires a metal detector for him to accommodate his war-born phobia.

Jimmy names the detector Clive after the soldier who swept for mines in his unit, who he “left in Vietnam.” The writing here is clear and evocative with a near exhaustive tension streaming between the lines. The story reads as a hybrid of Alice Munro and Salinger’s “Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

If there is anything to criticize about this collection it isn’t the stories themselves, but rather their arrangement and selection. The first half of the collection plays out like side B of Abbey Road, a continuous sprawl of united music, with each story bleeding into the next in euphonious perfection. But after “Day of the Dead,” Lyons seems to lose focus and veer off into exploration of a different terrain. It is only in the second half of the collection where we leave America and the realism of the previous stories. In “The Place of the Red-Footed Rooster in the Hierarchy of Sentient Beings,” (which appeared originally in Cleaver Magazine) we are transported to Japan, where Lyons makes a departure in tone and style, offering up a Hessian fable about a contest between two painters—one representing the people and the other representing aristocracy. Another story of the second half, “Tlaxacala Red,” also seems to diverge in style, lacking the characterization, closure, and emotional resonance of the other pieces.

Recognizing these minor shortcomings, the collection, all in all, is an incredible success. Mr. Lyons is one of Philadelphia’s most exciting fiction writers. The laconic prose, humble style, and clever use of devices and through lines make for pleasure-filled reading. His empathy for the downtrodden and curious appreciation for the untold story of isolated America is profound and beautifully rendered.

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.

ORPHANS by Hadrien Laroche reviewed by Jamie Fisher

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Orphans cover art. A black-and-white photograph of three children hanging dead from a treeORPHANS
by Hadrien Laroche
translated by Jan Steyn and Caite Dolan-Leach
Dalkey Archive Press, 130 pages

reviewed by Jamie Fisher

Orphans starts with an advisory warning from the translators. Orphan, they explain, has a slightly different meaning in French: orphelin describes not only a child who has lost her parents, but a child who has lost only one parent.

The explanation is necessary, but also somewhat inadequate. Looking back along our linguistic family tree, orphan shrinks and dilates to cover so much more. In Latin an orbus is “bereft”; in Old English ierfa, an “heir,” with close ties to “suffering” and “trouble”; in Old Church Slavonic, a rabu (think robot) is a “slave” or “servant.” When we work our way back to Proto-Indo-European, orbho means “bereft of father,” but also “deprived of free status.” Orphan begins to sound simultaneously like someone who has lost his parents and someone who is inescapably tied to them.

In Orphans, Hadrien Laroche explores all of these extended definitions. The narrator visits or discusses three orphelins: fatherless Hannah née Bloch; motherless Helianthe née Bouttetruie; and the self-orphaning Henri né Berg, who “disinherits” his living parents but finds himself unable to escape their influence. All three are tormented less by the absence of a parent than by the surviving parent’s insistent presence.

In a book that revolves around parentage, it seems appropriate to address questions of intellectual filiation. Laroche was the final doctoral student of Derrida, father of deconstruction, the man who declared, “We think only in signs.” Laroche’s narrator describes himself as interested in constructing systems of symbology. The three stories are mostly this—drafts for three worlds, lightly plotted.

Hannah, an old woman when we meet her, lost her father in the Holocaust and finds herself unable to escape her mother’s influence. She comes to a final estrangement with her mother over her widow’s vision of life, narrowed by death and predicated on a claustrophobic family loyalty that never quite allows her children to move beyond their father’s death. “Kamikaze mother!” Hannah rails to our narrator. “A mother who produces daughters who no longer have any reason to live, who lack life and are close to turning back towards death, such a mother is no good for society.”

Helianthe’s damnation comes down the paternal line. After she and her husband purchase a chalet, the renovations recommended by her architect-father begin to consume their lives. His design—“badly understood, badly drawn, and deliberately vicious”—begins to feel like a critique of God, slightly veiled. “By destroying with one hand what the other hand built,” Laroche writes, “he disrupted his own work.”

The collapsing house that Helianthe “inherits” from her father is also equated to her faltering body, suffering from a pathologically idiosyncratic “orphan disease.” The section concludes with Helianthe dramatically ripping up the plans her father had drawn for the chalet: “In front of a destroyed wall face, Helianthe née Bouttretruie whispered that she could never give life. She was only good for ‘passing on death.’”

Hadrien Laroche author photo

Hadrien Laroche

In Henri’s story, both parents demonstrate how our families cast us in roles, reenacting old cultural forms with a disappointingly mechanical ease. His father expects him to inherit the family business; his mother spends her days making elaborate family albums “constructed entirely from images of celebrities lifted from various magazines and newspapers”: “To the right of a snapshot of a pained-looking Georges Perec in skis at Villard-de-Lans, she had inscribed the name of her brother.” All of this enrages Henri, who decides to “disinherit” his family. When he destroys the automatic signature machine “enthroned” on his father’s desk, it is intended as a triumphant rebellion against his mechanical parents.

Laroche’s novel is not entirely a triptych. The fourth orphan, hidden in plain sight, is the narrator himself. He wanders from home to home, an oblique house-guest deciphering his hosts’ personal systems of symbology “in order to pass the time, without understanding why I did it.” As the narrator writes of Hannah, “The world of signs that she inhabited was coherent… Like everyone, she lived in a singular space, full of signs and symbols, which were blindingly obvious to whoever came along, and which she, however, had no need to know how to read.”

Passages suggest that he is, like Helianthe’s illness, a kind of “orphan disease”: “One day, out of the blue, the orphan disease takes shelter under a man or woman’s roof…, grafting itself onto the foreign body.” By the novel’s end, as the narrator paces alone in the forest, Laroche suggests that by grafting himself onto his hosts’ stories, he has achieved liberation from the confines of his own house, and the body it symbolizes: “In a certain sense, I was never at home. Now I knew myself to be definitively outside the house. So much the better.” As the last light of a window is “definitively” extinguished, “from my feet to my head, I felt a needle-like cold penetrate me deliciously, bracingly, decisively. Then, coming around the bend, beneath the moon, I saw that extraordinary rock face”—one of many plays on Laroche’s own surname, the rock.

For a novel in which the narrator exists mainly as a framing device for observing the lives of others, Orphans is remarkably uninterested in understanding other people. Laroche has created—if we can divest the word of certain prejudices—a very self-interested book. The novel brims with excited self-references that play on Laroche’s name; they can feel absurd, but also sweet, a riff on the reason many of us read—to recognize ourselves in someone else. By the end we haven’t gotten anywhere, but in Laroche’s hands, this doesn’t feel like defeat. His book ultimately amounts to a claim that fiction is a form of self-transcendence that brings you, triumphantly, back to yourself. As he has said in interviews, somewhat gnomically: “If there is a lesson in Orphans, it’s this: we all have to become sons, or daughters, we can’t escape that. Or the child of our own lives, though that’s not a given. Or rather, we can become the child of our own works; that’s possible.”

Much of Laroche’s work is predicated on his own individuality. The novel’s jacket tells us that Derrida considered Laroche “one of the most talented and original thinkers of his generation.” Laroche’s talent is easily identified, but his originality can be difficult to pick out. Even Laroche’s obsession with the possibility of originality feels borrowed from his teacher’s work. Derrida used a typewriter to distinguish between event (singularity) and machine (repetition); Laroche’s destruction of the automatic signature-machine feels more like an encore than a further development of Derrida’s themes. He’s very much his father’s child.

As a result, Orphans feels dispiritingly familiar, even dutiful—a graduate student’s citations of the dominant literature. Like a Dutch Golden Age painter, tucking memento mori skulls behind every fruit bowl, Laroche arranges all his post-modern appurtenances clearly. In a novel dominated by observation and collection, even minor characters seem to have obsessions designed to support Laroche’s thesis: tape-recording every phone conversation, or compiling boxfuls of strangers’ photographs. It would have been interesting to see how Henri could have disowned his mother if she enjoyed less conveniently symbolic hobbies—meat tenderizing, perhaps, or roller derby.

Some of the same qualities that may have made Laroche an excellent student undermine his fiction. He seldom resists the temptation to annotate his own work. After Henri destroys the automatic signature-machine—“the imprint of his father’s signature was separated in two, dismantled, pulverized” —Laroche adds helpfully, “He had even in a sense committed patricide.” Periodically he summarizes his conclusions: “Changes, inheritance decisions, modifications, blank slate, invention, rebirth, the literal destruction of ancestors: it can’t be any other way.”

Laroche’s symbolism is theoretically tidy, but in often vital combat with his joyful sensuality.
At his best he is a fascinating and original creature: a symbolist, but also a poet of viscera. Call it sensual symbolism. At its best, Laroche recalls Marianne Moore’s deservedly repeated line about poetry: “imagined gardens with real toads in them.”

He feels most assured when at his most specific and sensuous, particularly in “Hannah née Bloch.” Consider his symbolism involving hands, both abstract and delicately physical:

The mother often repeated that her family was like the fingers of a hand. The expression made sense in this particular circumstance: three children, mother and father, which makes five. One couldn’t separate the members of the family without dying… The meaning behind the adage repeated by this one-hundred-year-old woman was that no one could leave without killing the rest of the family, and in particular the mother, whose hands were after all quite beautiful, veined, and long-fingered. Or, equally worrying, one couldn’t leave the others without dying.

Here the consequences of his symbology feel naturally true, but less than fully obvious. And often his language is as alluring as it is off-putting; he isn’t afraid to equate “the severed finger” to “the separated and thus liberated child,” or to open the book with a vision of Hannah in the shower, sudsing her sunken navel.

A cooperation between symbolism and sensuality can be difficult to achieve. Laroche intends to shock us freshly with all the old brutalities of ancestry and inheritance, but he ends up supplementing his point with violence that feels ancillary to the narrative: out of nowhere he will describe the spontaneous erection of a hanged man, or the putrid fly-laced vinegar that Hannah uses as a facial cosmetic. It’s too much toad, with no garden to maintain it. Here and elsewhere, Laroche seems undisciplined, using repulsion as a substitute for the moral outrage he really wants to cultivate.

And he is, primarily, interested in outrage. I was astonished by an interview in which Laroche claimed, “my books are humorous. You can hear the laughter that accompanies every tragic moment!” It’s true that the novel can be funny but the dominant mode is indignation rather than uproariousness, often at his artistry’s expense.

Orphans is Laroche’s first published novel, and the first part of Laroche’s “Man Orphaned of His Humanity” trilogy to reach English speakers. (His biography of Jean Genet was translated earlier.) What will propel readers through the next two books is less likely to be Laroche’s familiar arguments than his sensuality—Orphans’s heady sentence-by-sentence beauty, skillfully rendered by translators Jan Steyn and Caite Dolan-Leach. He describes idleness as “an aristocracy of will,” sentimentality as “the endlessly beating heart growing fat inside each of us, this sticky schmaltz in glazed red.”

That’s a masterful line, capable of repelling even as it attracts. I thought again of Hannah née Bloch, whose mother saved her children by briefly scattering them— “to the house of a neighbor born to Catholic parents, to a cousin’s house on the other side of the river, or to the back of a shop of an aunt who sold spices on the Avenue Alsace-Lorraine: cinnamon, cumin, saffron, vanilla.” It’s the cinnamon that saves us, every time.

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].

BLOWIN’ IT by Wintfred Huskey reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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Blowin It cover art. A black-and-white photograph of a person standing in the doorway of a small building. Above it, a strip of red. Below it, a strip of blueBLOWIN’ IT
by Wintfred Huskey
The Head & The Hand Press, 355 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

Although the motif of the try-hard hipster wore thin over a decade ago, it’s still being trotted out in popular films, cartoons, articles, and so forth. The accusation of hipster-ness, which is distinct from being “hip,” at least where I live, is a serious one.

Hipsters are characterized by a blissful ignorance that borders on denial. (Peter Pan was probably the original hipster.) A hipster appropriates the costumes of other characters and blends them, creating a deliberate pastiche of playful yet ironic cultural references.

A hipster wears workingman’s boots and has hands softer than a lady’s kid gloves. The odds are good that he (or she) holds a white-collar job or the creative equivalent; the coffee shop is their daytime hub, and at night they hover around lumberjack-themed bars, drinking cheap American draft beers and talking loudly about other people’s art.

They are cultural locusts, wandering in an aimless cloud, wondering what on earth they will now do with their shiny new college degrees and Tumblr blogs and secret proclivity for trashy pop music.

This is the subject of Wintfred Huskey’s wicked debut novel Blowin’ It, which was released by The Head & The Hand Press in September 2014. Reading it, I experienced the itchy feeling that I’ve come to associate with accurate, truthful fiction.

Wintfred Huskey crouching in front of a shop

Wintfred Huskey

“I know people like this,” I thought to myself. This idea quickly transmuted to, “I am friends with people like this,” and then, to my great discomfort, “I am like this.” From the first chapter, my teeth were on edge with the simultaneous pleasure and revulsion of self-identification, starting with the special bike helmet worn by Duane Richardson:

His helmet was special too—if you were in on the joke. It was a gold punter’s helmet. Like the one worn by Jack Nicholson’s character in Easy Rider. It had taken an entire evening of online research to find one like it because nobody seemed to be manufacturing the old-time helmets (certainly not for the purposes of cranial safety). Perhaps you thought that was the kind of thing thrift stores always had, but they didn’t… So much work went into that homage and he smiled and admired himself every time he wore it.

Duane isn’t long for this world, and Blowin’ It follows an unlikely rabbit trail to the novel’s hero, Billy George, a dude with two names and no purpose in life. He’s stuck at a dead-end nonprofit, living in a cruddy loft with about five other people, smoking too much weed, and performing the horrible end-of-the-month calculations of the chronically broke young person. Of course he has a college degree, and of course he has no native intelligence.

If Blowin’ It stopped there, it would be a cruel farce. However, it is not, and to my delight and surprise, Billy embarks on an ill-advised road trip that weathers him from a feckless man-child to something approaching a full-formed individual. There are no deep lessons here, thankfully, just a good solid plot and a character that can take a beating—and take it he does, as he conveys a load of contraband and stolen museum art across the Southwest, losing one thing after another until, “Ultimately, the only thing to do was to sink down Florida like a smooth stone skipped into the sea and enjoy the motion of it all.”

So squirm, and enjoy it. Huskey’s written a perfect mirror, a coming of age story for the people we are—and the people we think we’re not.

Claire Rudy Foster author photo

Claire 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.

TOTEMPOLE by Sanford Friedman reviewed by Derek M. Brown

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Totempole cover art. Abstract artwork of plants underneath an expanse of blueTOTEMPOLE
by Sanford Friedman
NYRB, 419 pages

reviewed by Derek M. Brown

It is commonly held that the figure at the base of a totem pole is the least significant, but if we are to believe the young craftsman-cum-love interest of Sanford Freidman’s protagonist, Stephen Wolfe, this figure is the most vital, as it provides the final chapter to the structure’s story.

Originally published in 1965, Totempole was revered and reviled for its unbridled depiction of a bourgeoning homosexual at a time when such themes were limited to the context of a cautionary tale. Unless the protagonist arrived at a much deserved tragic end, such works were thought to encourage morally untenable behaviors and corrupt the reading public. This work, however, provided a beacon of hope for those who thought themselves condemned.

Totempole has resurfaced roughly every twenty years or so since its initial publication. Currently, under the NYRB imprint, contemporary audiences are introduced to an author whose uncompromising voice failed to adhere to the mores of his time—yielding a work that will continue to materialize, in all its verdurous splendor, irrespective of the climate in which it emerges. While perhaps no longer unprecedented, this cri de coeur will doubtless appeal to the sensibilities of a readership confounded by the censure of an unforgiving world, as its greatest asset is not its much-heralded ability to disquiet. Rather, it is its ability to offer hope. And perhaps now, in the twilight of a transition towards greater acceptance and equality, its pages will prove more accessible to a wider audience, allowing it to finally achieve the recognition it deserves as a work of stunning emotional integrity and profound psychological depth.

Much like the totem pole featured in the text, Friedman’s novel unfolds with chapters represented—with one exception—by a variety of animals. In “Horsie,” we are introduced to Stephen, aged 2, who is stirred one night by the scent of manure wafting from the Seaside Riding Academy directly opposite his family’s summer rental in Seaside, New Jersey. After failing to squeeze through the bars of his cradle, he removes his pajama bottoms and, identifying an odor he associates with the horses, begins searching excitedly within his crib for “horsie.” Discovering only his stuffed monkey, “Oscar,” he admits defeat and fondles himself to sleep while muttering “Horsie…Dadda…Stephen.”

The Wolfes belong to a class largely exempt from the impact of the Great Depression. At a time when shantytowns, or Hoovervilles, line the riverbanks of Manhattan, the Wolfes continue to enjoy summers in a resort community along the Jersey Shore and maintain hired help in their apartment on the Upper West Side. Clara, their servant—occasionally referred to as “the schwartze” by Stephen’s parents—is of the exhausted Magical Negro variety, commonly found in American film and fiction. Nevertheless, her generous portrayal—exaggerated colloquialisms notwithstanding—reflects the author’s attempt to consistently endow the persecuted with an abundance of redeeming qualities. Stephen’s mother, however, is a neurasthenic homemaker who does little homemaking and, instead, spends much of her time playing mah-jongg, while his father, a volatile presence and source of erotic fascination for Stephen, “works in New York.”

Sanford Friedman author photo

Sanford Friedman, 1989

Stephen’s final summer at Seaside culminates in the construction of a castle that, he hopes, will withstand the tide and serve as a monument to a recent shipwreck, in which hundreds of lives were lost. Stealing away the following morning to catch a glimpse of his efforts before returning to the city, he observes only vague traces of his fort. Seated in despair among the sodden ruins, he remains idle as the mounting tide surrounds him. Waist deep, he longs to be ravaged by the ocean as completely as his castle, until there is “nothing left of him but a little brittle fingernail lying on the sand.” Surrendering to the restless ebb and flow, his sense of loss is sublimated into reconciliation—recalling the many gifts the ocean has given him all these summers: shells and surf-sanded glass of varying shades, “sapphires from Vicks and Noxzema jars, emeralds, zircons and aquamarines from ale, beer, Coca-Cola bottles.” Whereas previously he regarded his marine collection as something sacred, refusing to part with a single treasure, his mother is delighted when he remarks that his collection will not be returning with him to the city this year.

From an early age, Stephen exhibits that uniquely Jewish neurosis perhaps most fully, and endearingly, captured by Woody Allen. For example, “Almost the first thing he ever did upon entering a stranger’s house was to inquire about its lightening rod.” His sexual awakening occurs at the age of nine during a summer spent at Camp Potawatomi for Boys in Northfield, Maine. It is while swimming himself to exhaustion that he endures a form of oxygen deprivation resulting in a paroxysm-inducing climax. Eventually, he is better able to reproduce the experience by entertaining thoughts of his father “without pajama bottoms.” It is also during this period that he is scorned by his first love, Hank—a counselor 10 years his senior, whom he assists in the construction of the totem pole. While his love is not unrequited, Hank has the propriety to discourage Stephen’s coquettish advances.

Friedman offers what should amount to shocking glimpses into the development of a profoundly conflicted homosexual, but this response is essentially neutralized by the heartbreaking vulnerability with which Stephen is rendered and we forgive him his faults as they continue to mount.

As his shame develops in proportion to his growing awareness of his sexuality, a once neglected incarnation of Oscar serves as a talisman, which he takes with him to college—where he majors in drama and attempts to date a member of the opposite sex—and eventually Korea, where he falls in love with a POW.

Totempole paperback. Two men standing in darknessIn surrendering to a love that resembles the exchange intimated by the ocean, Stephen relinquishes the guilt that left him feeling like the “disgusting and degenerate” monkeys he observed at the zoo as a child (until their perverse compulsions seemed to reflect his own and he could no longer endure the sight of them).

While Stephen’s sexuality is a primary theme in Friedman’s coming-of-age work, its appeal should not be limited to the community the protagonist belongs to. The lessons derived from this work are universal in their application and the foreground—opaque wars, economic collapse, racism, and persecution based on sexuality—will undoubtedly resonate with a contemporary audience.

In the novel’s closing chapter, strolling through a Korean market with his translator, Stephen encounters a witch seated cross-legged behind an assortment of jars containing rodents steeped in formaldehyde. His translator expresses disgust at the woman’s shameless attempt to exploit the ignorance of their people: “Lady no witch: business woman… Sell superstition.” Later, Stephen returns to the market and the woman’s stall, accompanied by Sun Bo—his lover. Extracting Oscar from his pocket, he deposits the now “extraneous” object on the counter—as though to imply the shame he once felt is now as inconsequential as the impotent charms and formulas that occupy her table. And much as the totem pole erected by Hank ends with a man, so too would it seem that the closing of this chapter results in the emergence of Stephen the man, utterly devoid of the self-limiting fears and insecurities that prevented him from finding true happiness.

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.   

PANIC IN A SUITCASE by Yelena Akhtiorskaya reviewed by Michelle Fost

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Panic in a Suitcase cover art. Large white text in front of a woman standing in front of the seaPANIC IN A SUITCASE
by Yelena Akhtiorskaya
Riverhead Books, 307 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

Late in Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase, a character recalls a classic tale “about the lady who goes to see the rabbi and complains that life is so terrible with her slob of a husband and the crying children in a tiny apartment with such neighbors you start to think it might be better to be homeless, and the rabbi advises the lady to get a goat…” In the version I remember, the rabbi continues recommending that the lady bring another animal, and then another, one at a time, into her very crowded house, until finally, when the family is suitably miserable, he recommends getting rid of all the animals. Back to where they started—the original crowded condition—suddenly feels luxuriously spacious, and the family can’t thank the rabbi enough.

I was surprised to see that Akhtiorskaya chooses to bring in an abbreviated telling of the story, introducing only one goat into the house rather than an entire menagerie, because so much of the fun of Panic in a Suitcase is its comedy of excess, her ingenuity for adding just one more thing than you expect, a zinger on top of a zinger. Think Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni and John Lurie exuberantly chanting, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream” in “Down by Law.” Think one more relative than you thought possible coming to stay at the family dacha.

Panic in a Suitcase tells the story of Pasha, a poet who lives in Odessa and his niece and extended family who live in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. This niece, Frida, idolizes her uncle, the “great Russian poet Pavel Robertovich Nasmertov, who wasn’t really Russian considering that he’d never lived in Russia proper but in Ukraine, only don’t dare call him Ukranian, and furthermore was Jewish, which in Russia qualified as a separate nationality if not species, though he wasn’t really Jewish, having converted to Orthodoxy…” and so on. The writing inflates and deflates, moving with great energy. The world itself appears sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than it actually is. Akhtiorskaya encapsulates in a single swift sentence the essence of this story: “It was as if the city were shrinking and Pasha expanding.”

Yelena Akhtiorskaya author photo

Yelena Akhtiorskaya

In the first half of Panic in a Suitcase, Pasha visits Brooklyn. In the second half, Frida visits Odessa. Regardless of where they are, there’s a lot of getting lost. Oars fall from rowboats and sink beyond reach. Subway routes are complicated. Hurricanes can make a day at the beach disorienting. Sneakers are left behind at the dacha. Frida recognizes the lesson she needs from the remembered tale: “Several times in one’s life, a good sobering was required, and that’s what this trip was—a blatant disappointment that would serve as an electric charge to zap the elements back into motion, realigning the facets of her life that had been allowed to slacken into disrepair and stagnation.”

Another classic tale came to mind after reading Panic in a Suitcase—the story of Gimpel the fool as he sets out one day to travel from Chelm to a distant village. En route, he decides to take a nap. To remember which way to walk when he awakes, he points his shoes toward his destination. But a stranger comes across Gimpel’s shoes, tries them on, puts them back—toes directed not to where Gimpel means to go but Chelmward. Gimpel walks into Chelm and is amazed by how this new village is so like his own, and he marvels at how all the people look just like his neighbors and know his name! In Panic in a Suitcase, there is a similar sense of an uncanny resemblance between the place of origin and the place of destination. Brighton Beach or Odessa: Where does the family feel more at home?

Akhtiorskaya will puncture Frida’s fantasy of an idealized existence in Odessa (all it takes is a gust of wind). Still, Akhtiorskaya lets us see how home is less defined—larger—than the Nasmertovs and we might have thought. Exile and the diaspora are not what they used to be.

Michelle Fost author photo

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

THE WOMAN WHO BORROWED MEMORIES by Tove Jansson reviewed by Jamie Fisher

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The Woman who Borrowed Memories cover art. A photograph of a woman laughing in a lake in front of an old brown houseTHE WOMAN WHO BORROWED MEMORIES
by Tove Jansson
translated by Tomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella
NYRB Classics, 283 pages

reviewed by Jamie Fisher

Early on in a story in the new collection of Tove Jansson’s work, The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, a man named Stein takes over a celebrated newspaper strip. “Tell me something,” an older cartoonist asks him. “Are you one of those people who are prevented from doing Great Art because they draw comic strips?”

“Not at all,” Stein assures him.

“Good for you,” the man replies. “They’re insufferable. They’re neither fish nor fowl and they can’t stop talking about it.”

Pity the poor comic-book artist. Particularly before the rise of the graphic novel, too many people—cartoonists themselves included—regarded comics as the territory of the dilettantish failure, a pen-and-paper update on those who can’t, teach. Even Peanuts mastermind Charles M. Schulz reportedly said, “If I were a better artist, I’d be a painter, and if I were a better writer, I’d write books — but I’m not, so I draw cartoons.”

Certainly the uproarious success of Jansson’s Moomin comics, buttressed by tidal waves of promotional tie-ins, could not have eased their creator’s reception as a polymath painter and writer in the more refined air of the art world. Her top-hatted hippoish cartoons seemed to indicate that her artistic sensibilities were insufficiently mature.

But like all the best authors who wrote for children, Jansson drew from an inkwell of very adult themes: loneliness, obsession, the difficulty and the necessity of living with others. The twenty-six stories gathered here, spanning five collections and twenty-six years in Jansson’s creative life, demonstrate that Jansson was preoccupied with the same set of concerns since her debut as an “adult” fiction writer—not too surprising, since Jansson was already middle-aged by the time her first collection The Listener was published.

An old blurb in the back of several Moomin collections told you that Jansson’s family “kept a pet monkey named Poppolino, whom they dressed in argyle sweaters.” Reading these stories, I often thought of that childhood pet: adult concerns are just children’s concerns, dolled up in tweed.

Tove Jansson author photo

Tove Jansson, 1967

Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County; Jansson had islands. These were physical islands, with a real vitality—the wind-tousled, goose-trampled outposts of Jansson’s late adulthood and early youth. Islands form a physical presence, but also supply an appealing metaphorical lexicon for Jansson’s recurring themes: the artist as a solitary individual, shaped by the elemental forces of nature and creativity and brought into uneasy concatenation with her fellow islands. Critics can frame this preoccupation, in a condescending minor key, as how to get along with others; regarded with fuller dignity, these are parables of socialization whose concerns date back at least to Rousseau, if not the Tower of Babel.

If Jansson’s progression from The Listener (1971) to her final stories in Messages (1997) is any indication, the author’s perspective has undergone some alteration over the decades (stories from both of those books and two others are collected here, in The Woman Who Borrowed Memories). The artist-protagonists of The Listener are solitary people, unsure of their relationship to others, who retreat from the world in order to perfect their art. To them, the choice seems to be entirely stark; solitude is a necessary precondition for creating “pure” art, and human warmth threatens as much as it comforts —cf. “Black-White,” a disappointingly predictable tribute to Edward Gorey, where an illustrator abandons his beloved wife to toil in darkness.

Jansson’s world is full of people ready to impose their suffering on you; her characters tend to be happiest on islands, and happiest as islands. “Traveling Light” proceeds from the extreme conceit of a man who leaves for a cruise, deciding that “from now on I was going to be a person who never took any interest in anyone.” He is in fact intensely interested in people, if afraid of crowds; he rattles with their sympathies like a tuning fork. When the narrator’s roommate begins spilling out his soul, “holding forth about his misunderstood childhood” :

Perhaps for the first time in my life, I effectively managed to shut off that dreadful compassion that has given both myself and those around me such fearful trouble. I use that word deliberately, fearful. Now perhaps you can understand why I started on my journey? Perhaps you have some idea of the depth of my fatigue, of my exhaustion and nausea in the face of this constant need to feel sorry for people?

By the time we reach the final pages of this book, Jansson has arrived at a position that feels more nuanced and generous. As she writes in Messages, “I think that solitude could be a wonderful thing if we’re sufficiently careful with it.”

Particularly in her early stories, Jansson can be a poet of procedure and obsession, chronicling the rituals of daily life as an artist and obsession as skillfully as Lydia Davis. When Jansson shows us the working rhythms of an artist, she describes “sunshine, which hour by hour moves through the room like a challenge, certifying afternoon on the rocking chair, then disappearing on the stove hood in red, like an accusation.” The mood and sentiment are handled masterfully here by the translator Tomas Teal. Although many stories in the collection are translated by Silvester Mazzarella, I favored Teal, who has, at times, a gift for the absolutely perfect single-word translation. (Both translators are uneasy with slang. This is especially problematic in the epistolary stories that dominate the last third of the collection, pointing out how difficult it can be to persuasively render a colloquial, complaining voice in translation.)

It doesn’t diminish Jansson’s work to compare, formally, her fiction and her comics. Both are animated by the same visual genius for physical comedy. When the protagonist of “Traveling Light” claims seasickness to escape a too-talkative roommate, his interlocutor opens the window: “a violent and extremely wet rush of ice-cold air took my breath away and blew the curtains horizontal while my glass fell to the floor. ‘Not bad,’ he said, much revived himself.” He tries again: “but the boat rolled, making me lose my balance so that I was flung violently against Mr. Connaugh. He grabbed me like a drowning man and leaned his great head on my shoulder. It was terrible. From many points of view.”

Like a comic strip, the book begins to feel like serial adventures of what amounts to the same character. Her protagonists are all artists: illustrators, photographers, sculptors, writers, dollhouse-whittlers. Their personalities, too, feel consistent. The Moomins were anxious and sweetly histrionic, in a way that will remind many American readers of Peanuts. Jansson’s characters are often Moomins without the fur. (Although the Moomins may have been Jansson with fur: as she writes elsewhere in the collection, “I think every canvas—nature morte, landscape, whatever—is, at its core, a self-portrait.”)

While the fantastical elements in these stories are sure to win Jansson comparisons with Gorey and Shirley Jackson, she doesn’t deal much in damnation or suspense; she believes too fully in her characters’ resilience to let them fall so definitively into doom. While her characters are often anxious, they are seldom despairing; as a woman writes of a difficult period in her youth, “I started brooding about silly things and getting all sad for no reason.” And as the titular character writes in “Letters from Klara,” “I don’t see any point in listing one’s obvious misfortunes.”

This resilience can make Jansson’s plots twist a little tamely; everyone will probably be fine. Look, even, at Jansson’s choice of words in the title story, “The Woman Who Borrowed Memories.” That’s borrowed, not stole. (She’s gonna give ‘em back real soon, honest!) The real dramatic tension here is a product of the collection as a whole: a narrative of Jansson’s sensibilities as they develop. Her language becomes more daring, even as her approach to solitude becomes more moderate. One character, measuring herself against the “deep bowl of the valley,” considers

A dramatic landscape, enormous and enclosed. What effect did it have on human beings? It was so utterly solitary. She stood still and listened, gradually becoming aware of how the silent was accentuated by never being absolute. Now and then a dog barked, a car passed on the road below the village, church bells rang a long way off. Points of comparison, she thought, like the way the ocean grows larger if there are islands breaking the horizon. We need contrast, she told herself.

She could just have easily said “contact.”

The description comes from “The Garden of Eden,” easily one of the richest stories here. The story, set among a self-described “colony” of foreigners in Spanish village, tucked away in the mountains, develops naturally from her concerns with travel and paradise, exceptionalism and membership in a wider community. While nearly all of Jansson’s stories involve two-character relationships or single-purpose plots, “Eden” is woven from many threads: the protagonist Viktoria’s relationship with her (absent and dying) friend Hilda, the increasingly violent feud between the ostracized Miss Smith and the rest of the colony, and Viktoria’s efforts to negotiate a healthy peace, informed by her background as a well-meaning professor mediating among her students. “You could accept the fact that you’re ordinary,” Viktoria suggests to the defiantly individual Miss Smith. “I always find that quite exciting enough.”

The story, while exceptional, isn’t flawless. Miss Smith’s confrontations, involving knife attacks, feel forced. And the detente Viktoria arranges between Miss Smith and her opera-mad neighbor Josephine can come across as childishly simple, the no-nonsense intervention of a Finnish Mary Poppins. “In all honesty,” Viktoria asks Miss Smith, “do you think it’s proper to go around threatening to kill people and making faces at their cleaning lady?… And as for you, Josephine O’Sullivan… Is opera really the one music you’ve got?” (“‘No,’ said Josephine angrily.”)

Of course, maybe it really is that simple; this is, after all, a writer who titled one of her adult novels Fair Play. Viktoria’s inspiration for the reconciliation comes after death of “the lost friend of her youth—Hilda, who never understood how easily she could have stopped being difficult.” The sensibility is very Jansson: profoundly optimistic and pessimistic in the same stroke. It’s all as easy as child’s play, and as difficult.

Monkeys in argyle. It never gets any better.

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].

SISTER GOLDEN HAIR by Darcey Steinke reviewed by Devon McReynolds

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Sister Golden Hair cover art. Large golden text over a red-and-blue sky above small housesSISTER GOLDEN HAIR
by Darcey Steinke
Tin House Books, 327 pages

reviewed by Devon McReynolds

The epigraph to Sister Golden Hair cites a line from the Modern Lovers’ 1970s era song, “Hospital”: “I’ll seek out the things that must’ve been magic to your little girl mind.” But in this story, instead of “magic,” we get cloying bits of superficial whimsy. While author Darcey Steinke weaves an amusing series of tragic characters into the story, Sister Golden Hair is sabotaged by vapid details, jarring, nonsensical metaphor, and a patchy, dull narrative.

Our narrator, 12-year-old Jesse, has moved with her family to a shoddy housing development in Roanoke, Virginia. Her father, a former preacher ex-communicated from the church for his far-out hippie leanings, has dragged his family up and down the Atlantic Seaboard in search of work. As he struggles to make sense of his morphing spirituality, Jesse struggles to make sense of her own morphing adolescence. She wobbles along the tightrope between girlhood and not-yet-a-womanhood: she languishes over her flat chest, dreads the arrival of her period, and is teased over her nerdy clothes –predictable dilemmas that have been told with more wit and insight from the likes of Judy Blume or Judd Apatow.

The fraught relationship between Jesse’s parents pushes her to seek guidance from others. In the first chapter, Jesse becomes infatuated with the neighbor, Sandy, a sexy single mother who slathers herself with a mixture of tanning oil and iodine and half-drunkenly tans in the front yard. Sandy provides Jesse with her first glimpse into an adult, sexualized world – a world that seems both glamorous and frightening. She should have been a more dynamic character. But instead, she’s been reduced to a stereotype: a leopard-print wearing MILF whose wantonness accounts for her ultimate misfortune.

After Sandy abruptly makes her exit in the story, we jump ahead to another character—Jesse’s classmate Jill, a fellow outcast. In Jill, Jesse finds a confidant—with her, she can share the more juvenile aspects of her imagination, like play-acting ancient burial practices, or pretending to be unicorns. But Jill is forced to grow up much faster than Jesse, and leaves her stuck behind in Childhood.

Often, Steinkne reaches for the absurd metaphor. In one instance, Jesse describes watching Jill perform chin-ups during gym class: “The narrow muscles of her neck stood out like hotdog meat.” Huh? The bad figurative language doesn’t stop there. The most mundane events in the book seem to be the ones embellished with the most tedious detail.

Darcey Steinke author photo

Darcey Steinke

After Jill’s departure, the story jumps ahead three years, and I had trouble buying the author’s assertion that little, if nothing, had changed for the now 15-year-old Jesse. It’s, uh, been awhile since I was 12 or 15 years old myself, but from what I recall, a lot can change in those three years. If Steinke aimed for this to be a classic coming-of-age-story, it was a sloppy move to replace these three years with a feeble summary of what had happened in the interim (which was: she gets her period; Patty Hearst was kidnapped).

Despite, or because of, these holes, the story moves quickly. By the last two chapters, the threat of schoolyard bullying has more or less dissipated, but it’s been replaced by more prevalent, and immediate, threats of emotional and sexual abuse. Jesse’s confrontations with these issues are the most well written parts of the book, and Steinke sprinkles Sister Golden Hair with a handful of darkly amusing moments.

After years of pining after the friendship of Sheila, the most popular girl in school, Jesse finally gets the chance to bask in the glow of her 15-year-old glamor. Sheila is an aspiring Playboy Bunny, and cajoles Jesse into joining her world of ludicrous beauty and diet regimens that ring absurdly prevalent today. They measure the space between their thighs (I didn’t know girls were obsessed with achieving an optimal thigh gap in 1976), embark on a “paleolithic diet,” and guzzle a concoction of lemon juice and cayenne pepper—today’s Beyonce-certified “master cleanse.” Still, stilted dialogue and vague characters mask any attempts at poignancy, or at the very least, some sort of resolution.

The tone of Sister Golden Hair is confused—is Jesse’s “journey” a somber one? Is it humorous? Tragic? Absurd? If the epigraph were any hint, it should be a reflective meditation on all of these feelings: the ones that constitute the dark, confusing, and yes, sometimes beautiful, “magic” of growing up.

Devon McReynolds author photoDevon McReynolds lives in Philadelphia and writes for the Emmy award-winning documentary series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment.” She holds a B.A. in History from UCLA. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and the Village Voice.

ANOTHER MAN’S CITY by Choe In-Ho reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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Another Man's City cover art. Gray geometric shapes against a white backgroundANOTHER MAN’S CITY
by Choe In-Ho
translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton
Dalkey Archive (Library of Korean Literature), 190 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

As I’m writing this, the rain is beginning. The spattering sounds of drops hitting the fat, broad maple leaves on the tree outside my window catch my ear like static. The rain turns on the rich, dirt smell of the ground and dampens the sound of passing traffic. My neighbor, who plays the piano for the Portland Opera, is practicing some Brahms and singing out the notes as he plays them.

This is my place. Do I think I belong here because my senses interpret it as “mine,” and I’m attached to the reality I identify as “mine,” or do I belong in any old place, whether I recognize my surroundings or not?

This impossible question is the crux of Choe In-Ho’s novel Another Man’s City. I walked into it expecting something bizarre, futuristic, and possibly a bit whimsical. But this is not The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Instead, I ended up in one of Philip K. Dick’s amphetamine dreams. “Every train station displays a timetable,” he writes,

For the public, it’s a kind of civic contract, it’s the way things work. Likewise, weren’t all K’s thoughts and actions following a sequence, a meticulous computerized program? Hadn’t K become a human train, an automaton, coming and going as programmed?

For K, the unmoored hero of Another Man’s City, the universe collapses on a Saturday, around 7 a.m. He wakes up, shakes off his hangover, and after a few bilious heaves, comes to terms with the strange, fleshy creature who sulks at him in the mirror. Last night went poorly; he came home drunk, couldn’t get an erection, and forgot to turn off his alarm clock. And another thing: “And then, for the first time in his fifteen years of married life, he had risen from his bed naked, his bedclothes having vanished like a magician’s dove. And finally his aftershave had disappeared, replaced with a brand he wouldn’t be caught dead with.” Curiouser and curiouser. K, it seems, has woken up on the wrong side of someone else’s bed, next to someone else’s wife. Even his dog fails to recognize him and sinks its puppyish fangs into his ankle. Can it get worse? Absolutely.

Bitter, bare, and oppressive in its tone, Another Man’s City is a claustrophobic story about a man going to pieces. Convinced that he has somehow been replaced by a clone of himself—or maybe he is the clone?—K whips himself into a paranoid lather. Is his wife really his wife? Is his wife the same woman as his best friend’s wife? His suspicion seems to center totally around women, their inherent untrustworthiness. He seems to think they’re interchangeable, and in fact one woman easily becomes the surrogate for another.

Choe In-Ho author photo

Choe In-Ho

On top of this, Choe, who converted to Catholicism in the 1980s, layers on a thick frosting of Catholic imagery. Original sin, cheating wives, and unpredictable lust bubble through the crust, adding a creepy logic to K’s unwieldy thinking. “He remembered passing his hand across the cheek of his mother just before she was encoffined—his wife had felt even colder. The frigidity of marble, of ice, of an inanimate object—that’s how his wife’s body had felt.”

Choe is one of South Korea’s most famous writers. Decorated with literary awards from a young age, he often wrote in a way that criticized Korea’s totalitarian regime, and his signature, surrealist style is credited for breathing new life into modern Korean fiction. 19 of his works were made into films, and his novels were serialized in the magazine Saemto for more than 34 years, a record in South Korean publishing. He was so famous that his book covers were adorned with his face—no author photo hidden on the back jacket flap. He pushes the envelope in every way, challenging us to change our minds about everything we know (or think we know) about ourselves.

In Another Man’s City, Choe’s fifth novel to be translated into English, we’re led by a master storyteller through the maze of our own minds. As K doubts his reality, the reader begins to doubt K. Who’s the crazy one here, I wondered. If K’s madness is so accessible, is mine, too? Is his paranoia the symptom of a mental illness, or is it the natural consequence of realizing that there are larger, darker forces at work, pulling the strings that underlie every aspect of human life?

These are big questions, and they push Another Man’s City beyond the genre parameters of science fiction. This is the novel that Choe In-Ho, who died in 2013 at 68, wished to be remembered by: according to the translators, “he finished the first draft in two months, writing as usual by hand, but with thumb and fingertip thimble guards, his fingernails and hair having been lost to chemotherapy and radiation treatments.” Reading, I imagine the author bending over his notebook, a man so pale that his extremities are nearly transparent, doing the work of transmitting his final story. I wonder if the rain distracted him; if, like K, he felt so much fear that he wanted to leap out of his skin.

Maybe, like K, he felt like an ant on a Mobius strip, “on an infinite journey, from inner to outer and back to inner, a journey without beginning or end,” with no goal in mind except making it through the next day. Or maybe he was like any of us, ill at ease in the world even as he claimed it for his own. Maybe there is no moral, no punch line. Maybe we can hear the single footfalls of the rain.

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 WILDS by Julia Elliott reviewed by Kim Steele

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The Wilds cover art. A woman sits in a black mask. Her hair transforms into a tree and her tail into a curvy shape with a bird at its topTHE WILDS
by Julia Elliott
Tin House Books, 372 pages

reviewed by Kim Steele

Finishing Julia’s Elliott’s debut short story collection The Wilds felt like leaving a strange town: I’m relieved to be back in a world where I understand the rules, but I can’t stop glancing in the rearview.

The universe Elliott has created in this book is fenced together by her unique and consistent voice. Every story, whether it be about a lovelorn robot, a town overrun with feral dogs, or a young girl filling the two hours before her scheduled whipping, is written in the same unflinching and intelligent manner. Elliott doesn’t hold back from the repugnant details of life, in fact, many of her stories obsess over them. Again and again her characters are acne-smeared: “Purple pimples glistened like drops of jelly on his cheeks,” “A massive zit festers in my nose like a parasite; I’ve spent the morning picking at it with a needle.” Again and again they are diseased or disappointing in some way: “But the sun has not been kind to you. It has left you blistered and spotted and scathed,” “[A] twentysomething human male, pudgy, hairless save for the frizz under his armpits, between his nipples, on his lower back, and in the pubic region. He had nine amalgam fillings in his teeth.”

Julia Elliott author photo

Julia Elliott

Elliott’s stories don’t literally occur in the same town. Some are rooted firmly in the South while others are much more vague about their whereabouts in time and location. In “LIMBs,” an elderly woman with dementia is attached to bionic legs and undergoes a treatment to rebuild her damaged neural structures. She slinks through her nursing home, suddenly able to remember all the days of her life. “Regeneration at Mukti” is equally ambiguous about its place in time. In this story a woman attends a spa retreat where, instead of typical massages and mud baths, she is pumped full of infections. Covered in a variety of blisters and sores she anxiously awaits the day she can slough off her scabs and discover the new, revived body beneath. It is unclear whether this is the near future or another universe entirely. The uncertainty doesn’t weaken Elliott’s stories; rather it pulls you close in. As you wander through like a dreamer, you’re forced to try to make sense of this new world.

With the exception of “The Love Machine” and “Organisms,” each of Elliott’s stories is told from an exclusively female perspective. The women in Elliott’s book lead diverse lives. Some are still girls, just entering puberty and navigating changing parental relationships and first loves. Most are middle-aged. They are teachers and scholars and mothers, some faithful to their husbands and lovers and some not.

The Wilds poster with the same woman from the cover

Elliott tours us through the landscape of fidelity and also beauty. Her characters often attempt to reconcile their own bodies with contemporary (and American) standards of beauty. They’re anxious about their non-conforming bodies. “Regeneration at Mukti” pokes fun at the ridiculous things women (and men!) do in order to maintain youth and beauty. “Caveman Diet” is similarly an exaggerated version of a weight-loss retreat, where our protagonist finds herself given a “cave name” (Vogmar) and eating with her hands at a table full of people barely dressed in caveman attire. This anxiety surfaces in other more subtle ways throughout the book. A woman on vacation with her elderly parents notes the many ways their bodies have warped with age. A young girl longs for a perm so that she won’t be “ugly for the rest of the summer.” These characters are made miserable by their inability to fit a standard that, as many of us know or will eventually learn, is unattainable to begin with. And while all this misery makes Elliott’s book sometimes difficult to read, it’s urgency means that putting it down is never an option.

Elliott has crafted a spooky and intelligent collection of stories that make for an engrossing and, at times, stressful read. Often, I wanted to hose her characters down. I wanted to brush their hair and dress them in clothes that still smell of laundry detergent. Instead, I held my nose and read on.

Kim Steele author photoKim Steele is a Midwesterner currently living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the flash fiction zine Oblong. You can follow her on twitter at KJ_Steele.

CONQUISTADOR OF THE USELESS by Joshua Isard reviewed by Jon Busch

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Conquistadors of the Useless cover art. Simple artwork of a shadowed shape pushing a carriage up a brown hillCONQUISTADOR OF THE USELESS
by Joshua Isard
Cinco Puntos Press, 249 pages

reviewed by Jon Busch

Joshua Isard’s Conquistador of the Useless is a novel of vertices, exploring the terrain of transitions, where cultural ethos and personal identity evolve in phase. It is this vague middle ground, the no-man’s-land between good ol’ days and dreary futures, where our protagonist Nathan Wavelsky traverses in apathetic strides. The use of this structure manifests in an insightful and poignant exploration of meaning and meaninglessness in contemporary life. What does it mean to live outside the narrative arc?

The novel opens with Nathan and his wife Lisa moving out of the city of Philadelphia and into the suburbs. The move marks a return to the land of his childhood and the end of his rebellious twenties. But Nathan isn’t home in either world. He is neither young nor old, urban nor suburban. The era of his young adulthood has concluded and the shifting cultural tide presents him with the uncomfortable truth that all of his once grandiose, youthful angst has accomplished nothing—the experiences which once felt unique and infused with importance were, in fact, no more than the standard benchmarks of growth that all young people pass.

Perhaps worse, the suburbs, he realizes, represents a kind of giving in. Observing the tame lives of his conservative neighbors only reinforces this view in his mind. The suburbs, he says, are “the place you spent your teenage years trying to leave. Lisa and I felt a little defeated looking at homes in our old school district.”

Still, Nathan capitulates. He observes his transformation, from grunge loving, city-dwelling slacker into suburban tree enthusiast. “I’m sitting on a folding chair I brought out to my own patio,” he says,

… Instead of a fence, my half-acre back yard has spruces along the property line, which means that I can’t see much into the adjacent yards, and my neighbors can’t see any more into mine. What I can see is the tops of some tall trees, including Tom and Kristy’s pin oak. That’s going to look incredible when autumn comes around.

The horizon, of course, is marred. Beyond the trees lie the predictable landmarks of suburban life. Lisa soon will broach the subject of children. Nathan will receive a promotion at his corporate job. It seems as if every facet of his life has been absorbed into the narrative of the suburban mundane. Nathan’s had hardly a second to adjust.

Joshua Isard author photo

Joshua Isard

In fact, he’s caught off guard. When his new neighbors stop by in a panic and ask if he and Lisa can babysit their fourteen-year-old daughter, Rayenne, Nathan’s failure to recognize himself as an adult leads to a social scandal. He develops a fondness for the girl and spends the time discussing music and books with her. After a flashback scene exploring Nathan’s nostalgia for his own teenage years when older kids provided him with mix tapes of cool music, he hands Rayenne a flash drive filled with some of his favorite tunes. The next week, Nathan invites Rayenne over and offers her a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. The girl’s ultra conservative parents are appalled when they find the book in her possession and even more distraught to hear that Nathan brought her into his home. Within days, Rayenne’s parents inform the entire neighborhood that he has given their daughter pornographic literature.

This chaos leads Nathan to accept an invitation from his bachelor friend Mark to climb Mt. Everest. With no prior experience, the absurdity of the situation is evident. Isard sets up all the pieces for epiphany. The parallels are all in place, with the climb up representing the past (city, youth, nineties culture, Lisa as girlfriend), the peak representing the time of transition, and the return down representing acceptance of the present and future (suburbia, adulthood, millennial culture, Lisa as mother).

At this point in the novel, it isn’t hard to feel frustrated with the courting of cliché. A journey into the mountains to find one’s self is all to frequent and familiar. By the time Nathan begins considering a trip to Nepal, his apathy and habit of name-dropping alternative 90s bands (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Husker Du) had also become tiring.

But here, Isard shifts, smothering my preemptive critique. While all arrows pointed to a spirit quest—one that would leave our grumpy narrator enlightened and free to be happy—instead Isard gives Nathan an authentic transformation. The ending of the novel saves and elevates what could have been an unsatisfying book. By providing him a means of escaping his own apathy and evolving out of the transitional fog into something like a whole human, Isard does the impossible for Nathan.

Without spoiling the ending, the following conversation between Nathan and a member of the climbing team prior to departing from the base camp of Everest reveals our narrator’s attitude about this venture:

…Do you mind if I ask why you’re here?

Same reason as everyone, I say, to climb the mountain.

No, that’s not what I mean. Why do you want to climb it?

That’s what my wife asks me. It’s hard to say, really, but I’m here more or less because it’s worthless.

What? he asks.

It’s not easy to explain, I say.

Would you mind trying?

I have, a few times, but it never seems to be clear. I guess it’s that I grew up with all my grade school teachers telling everyone that they could do incredible things with hard work. My parents were the same way. They’re still that way, actually, always telling me that I can do something important. They never told me that I might not want to do anything important.

This passage provides, for the first time, a cause of the Nathan’s apathy. He is not simply a whiny 90s emo-guy. His condition is far more interesting. He is a living protest of dissatisfaction, seeking the useless in a society where everything must serve a function. What makes this a thought-provoking insight is that Nathan’s quest for the useless is merely a thin linguistic façade concealing the logically equivalent truth that he is seeking the meaningless.

Isard’s debut novel, while initially frustrating, ultimately succeeds in exploring the maturation of the apathetic individual. Nathan’s evolution from ornery 90s cliché to absurdist hero is well worth the read. The authenticity of the author’s voice and lack of literary pretension also makes for an enjoyable experience.

Jon Busch author photoJon Busch lives in Manayunk, Philadelphia. He graduated in 2012 from Bloomsburg University with a B.A. in Philosophy. When he’s not proofreading pharmaceutical drug labeling for a living, he spends his time writing short stories, reading, and playing music.

Augustus by John Williams reviewed by Ana Schwartz

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Augustus cover art. A photograph of three statues of men in robesAUGUSTUS
by John Williams
NYRB Books, 305 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

“Notable Romans”

Those who studied Latin in high school or college might recognize the feeling with which Georg Lukacs introduces his Theory of the Novel. Although the book was published a century ago, it still holds valuable insight into the pleasures of reading. In the introductory sentences he describes those happy ages when the world and self were each visible with sharp distinction. Discrete they were, but also intimately familiar to each other. Lukacs’ framework is present in the first lists of Latin vocabulary; these collections of words alert contemporary readers to a world in which a word meant itself and at the same time more than itself. For example, ferro—iron—could denote the reliable metal; it could metonymically represent a sword made out of iron; and it could metaphorically represent any object of potentially harmful strength. These vocabulary lists imply a world in which such figures were useful, a world in which they could and would be deployed with practiced subtlety, perhaps in response to iron-willed violence.

Augustus is the recently reissued fourth novel by John Williams, whose earlier novels, Butcher’s Crossing and Stoner, have been very well received by 21st century critics. His story begins with a letter from Julius Caesar, father of the protagonist, to Atia, Augustus’ maternal guardian. In it, he encourages her to send the boy from Rome to Apollonia (a city in what’s now Sicily) for a change of scenery and for a better education. After listing these reasons, he rephrases his instruction as a command, and points out the rhetorical strategies of his own prose. The self-reflexivity of that early moment persists through many of the novel’s epistolary chapters. Together, these crisscrossing letters narrate the rise and reign of Caesar Augustus, known by his intimates as Octavius. The letters show the figurative delicacy of their shared world: every action and gesture oozes significance. On this basis alone, the novel is deeply gratifying to anyone who’s spent time imagining what it would have been like to live and act in such a literary community.

Statue of AugustusAugustus pieces together the life of one of classical Rome’s great Caesars. When he first appears he is a young man, and not much of one. In their memoirs and letters, his friends from youth describe him as slight and sickly. He has an ineffable intensity in his eyes. After his father is murdered, he strategizes his way into popular favor and wins the allegiance of the Roman forces and rules Rome alongside Marcus Antonius and Marcus Lepidus. Eventually, he takes his revenge on Marcus Antonius for the murder. The second half of the book narrates the intrigues of the next decades. Most of these stories revolve around Octavius’ daughter, Julia, his only child, and her relationships with the men who would plot to overthrow the emperor, though unsuccessfully. The letters can be difficult to follow because there are so many names and connections to keep straight. Yet the confusion gives a strong sense of family culture in ancient Rome. This is a world where a man can be criticized who “bears no name, and what virtues he may possess are merely his own.” Many of the letters exchanged in these pages connect family members, and the content of these letters usually drives the plot. But it’s the letters between poets and historians—the letters between friends and colleagues—that sustain the emotionally magnetic pull of this novel.

Even in clannish Ancient Rome, the erudite Augustus keeps a close circle of intellectuals—historians and poets. When they reflect on their city, their observations and comparisons with other cultures highlight Rome’s unique qualities. Athenodorus, a Greek philosopher, observes that to the citizens of Rome, men like him elicit a sort of puzzlement (at best) for their dedication to a life of abstraction. This isn’t exactly rudeness or coarseness on the part of the Romans so much as a greater interest in minutiae of everyday life. Nicolaus of Damascus, in a late letter to his philosopher friend Strabo of Amasia, describes an abandoned book project, “Conversations with Notable Romans.” It wouldn’t work, he explains, because Roman society depends so much on subtleties of the unsaid. “I almost believe,” Niclaus laments, “that the form has not been devised that will let me say what I need to say.”

John Williams at the University of Denver in the 1970s.

John Williams at the University of Denver in the 1970s.

Williams, late professor of English at the University of Denver, is winking here, maybe less-than-subtly, at the medium in the reader’s hands. He might be thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin, an early twentieth-century contemporary of Georg Lukacs, and a formalist literary historian, who famously pointed out the genre’s polyglossia, its unique capacity to include several perspectives or voices in one text. Likewise, novels can absorb and integrate diversity of literary forms. In these letters, Williams includes theatrical dialogue, excerpts from official decrees and poems; at one point, the performance of a poem becomes a crucial element in the plot, preventing a character from leaving a party to attend an urgent political affair. Through the novel, Williams nrrates what Nicolaus tries to explain: the subtleties of communication among these important historical figures. The book easily might be subtitled “Letters of Notable Romans,” if not exactly “conversations”: Horace, Vergil, Ovid, Julius Caesar, even Cleopatra appear as writers in these pages. Through letters, the novel represents the subtleties of communication from the viewpoint of many people actively invested in close interpretation. To the description of one man’s life, each letter adds not only descriptive subtlety, but also, through their personal relationship to him, these letters help place the reader more immediately into the world of those Latin vocabulary lists; and even if these letter-writers don’t all love Augustus, they love Rome, the way a scholar loves his books or a poet

But after at least three centuries of developments in the novel form, the epistolary novel has become maybe too familiar. Think of Pamela, Dracula, or Franny and Zooey. More recently, think Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story or Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Williams’ short sections and chapters consolidate, almost too seamlessly, into a recognizable genre. It’s easy to forget that the characters themselves would not have recognized it as such, and, likewise, easy to forget that no one has any comprehensive understanding of Octavius Augustus, not even Octavius Augustus. In the penultimate letter of the novel, Augustus writes that his life is occluded in mystery, even to himself. How strange it is to depend on the histories and the poems for insight into one’s own life!

Admitting the limits of independent self-understanding might be the most honest confession of the letters. By contrast, the character who relentlessly reveals the most comprehensive self-awareness is Julia, his daughter. Throughout her writings, she sustains a tension between performance and sincerity that is extremely compelling. But from the start it generates a skepticism that never really fades. Her tone is consistently decorous and stylish, but she insists in the first letter that she is writing for no one. It is a habit, she explains. She then narrates the childhood education that cultivated such a habit; the story she tells is, on its own persuasive, but who would she be trying to persuade?

In this, she appears as a foil to Octavius, his inverse. As the occasion for all these memorials narratives, he is always present as a public figure. But his inner life is only once represented, and then, with serious uncertainty. When he admits the limits of memory, he makes himself more sympathetic, and rhetorically more likely to be trusted. On the other hand, Julia writes her diary entries from exile, mostly forgotten. From that distance, she demonstrates a keen understanding of Roman intrigue; she seems incapable of not performing, but her persuasive and elevated style, generates a persistent sense of skepticism and doubt. One is continually reading for a subtle second meaning in her diary entries. This is precisely the practice of reading that the letters have cultivated in the reader.

A portrait of AugustusTogether, Octavius and Julia are necessary to understand the world of Ancient Rome. As family, they represent the powerful engine of Roman society, and neither of them alone can narratively explain its culture. He wields power quietly and her letters illustrate how that power works. They do so not only in their content, but also in their discursive style. This is nowhere more vivid than in one of the final twists in the plot: Did Julia know about, perhaps even participate in the plot to overthrow Augustus that was organized by several of her former lovers? She certainly admits the motive. In one entry, she writes frankly about her resentment following his decision to marry her off to Tiberius Claudius Nero, an unlikeable fellow who, in the end, claims power after Augustus’ death. When Octavius informs Julia of his plans, she asks him whether all of his personal sacrifices for Roman cohesion have been worthwhile. “I must believe that it has,” he responds, “We both must believe that it has.” His unspoken and personal disbelief is both affirmed and obscured by the imperative to believe. The very same syntax reappears near the end of the book, in Julia’s last entry. In her last conversation with her father he asks her whether she was plotting against him, and she responds: “You must believe that I did not know.”

But if that relationship is the ultimate turn in the plot, it is also the most powerful illustration of the emotional life of these characters. In his final reflections, Octavius muses on this uncertainty to Niclaus of Damascus. He believes that she did know. Most interesting here, beyond Octavius’s certainty, is the reader’s pleasure in noting the subtleties of expression with which they communicate. They have ample ground to resent each other and the novel’s multiple narrators show that each would be justified in their hostility. Yet beyond the severe emotional demands that Roman politics have made on their personal lives, they preserve their love for each other through their elevated decorum and their ability to understand meaning that exists beyond speaking, beyond even the most skillful use of vocabulary words.

It’s tempting to claim that Williams’ novel recreates a past time and a bygone cultural perspective, a time when individuals with iron wills were sharply distinct, yet never totally estranged from their worlds. These individuals had the agency to make meaningful and heroic sacrifices on behalf of their communities. It’s a suspect claim, though, since, like Julia’s guilt, it would be impossible to know for certain. A pleasure of learning Latin is the exposure to a social landscape different from our own. In that world, language resonated with clarity and richness apparently lacking in contemporary usage. Williams’ novel sustains and is animated by that fantastic nostalgia of completeness, that is, until the last letters: Julia’s ultimate diary entry, Augustus’ musings to Niclaus of Damascus, and Niclaus’ narrative to Seneca, the Stoic philosopher. In these letters, Williams’s characters reflect with a profound skepticism about their world. It is a sense, not unfamiliar to the 21st century, that what one had wanted to say still remains unshared.

It is a sense, not unfamiliar to the 21st century, that what one had wanted to say never quite translates.

Ana Schwartz author photo

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

DUPLEX by Kathryn Davis reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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Duplex cover art. A painting of a boy rowing a white boat in stormy waterDUPLEX
by Kathryn Davis
Graywolf Press, 195 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

“It is not wise to break the rules until you know how to observe them,” said T.S. Eliot. Author Kathryn Davis has taken the aphorism to heart.In her latest novel, Duplex, a series of simple stories fit neatly into one another: she’s following the rules. Boy meets girl, boy sells his soul for fame. A woman takes a lover. A woman goes on a journey. And then she breaks them: using a pared-down voice and a lush palette of nightmarish images, she leads the reader through a futuristic suburb populated by robots, sorcerers, traveling photographers, and all kinds of ordinary-seeming people. It’s a pleasure to watch her break each rule, twisting the familiar fables and tropes into something shining and snarled, like a coil of steel wire left out as a trap for rabbits.

The components of the plot are in fact mercifully simple, as anything more elaborate would sink the novel. As it is, the story centers around two star-crossed children, Mary and Eddie, and their neighbors, Miss Vicks the schoolteacher, and a sorcerer with white and wandering fingers. A family of robots lives next door. Cars are rarities. After a car accident, Eddie disappears and returns altered; Duplex follows his ascension to fame, as well as Mary’s changing fortunes as she navigates marriage, motherhood, and loneliness with a highball in her hand. Overhead, silver satellites called scows observe the action, while down on earth, carnivorous fairies are sewed into a musical drum, since “they have no regard for human life.” The allusions to Ray Bradbury and Nathanael West are strong here, with Davis balancing the bizarre rituals of daily life in childhood with the larger picture of a scorched environment, a sky crossed with wires, and a sense that civilization is headed nowhere good, fast.

The language is dense and prone to repetition; often, Davis places two metaphors so close together in a paragraph that they clang against one another, making ripples that jar the reader for the next few pages. Sentences lead to unexpected conclusions, new thoughts, and sudden drops. Here is Davis describing the grounds of an abandoned estate:

The stringweed and creeper covered everything, leaving behind only the general shapes of things, disquieting like the sheeted furniture in Victorian novels, and what appeared to be paths often turned out to be trails made by animals or an aboveground system of drains, so if you weren’t careful you would sprain your ankle in a rabbit hole or pitch into a cistern and drown.

There is no respite in Duplex, and that’s part of its charm. It’s unrelentingly weird, and won’t appeal to everyone. Certainly, readers seem less interested in magical realism and psychedelic fairy tales than they used to be. Writers like Aimee Bender, Kate Bernheimer, Kellie Wells, and the like seem to have moved stage left, making way for genre fiction wearing enough literary makeup to be respectable. Am I wrong? I could be wrong, but I miss the weird, tightly stitched psychological fiction of 15 years ago, when characters ate peach-flavored vowels at a roadside stand or gave birth to babies with irons or pumpkins for heads. I am tired of zombies, relationships that fail after a single tense conversation, and talking animals. There’s Karen Russell, sure, but her fiction, though beautiful, often lacks the sickening sense of inevitability that Davis executes so well in Duplex.

Kathryn Davis author photo

Kathryn Davis

For Davis is happily still going. She traps you on the first page, and from there things only get stranger. There’s no way of predicting what will happen, and in fact the novel is so bizarre and beautiful that I’m having a hard time describing it now, just like a dream that passed but is impossible to shoehorn back into everyday language of weekend plans and bus schedules. “By now the sea had calmed down,” she writes, “the sky resting its palm soothingly across the face of the water. The first scow Marjorie had seen since leaving home appeared, moving very slowly and up so high she could barely tell what it was. Like a gleaming grain of rice, she thought—whereas no matter how far above the sea the scow’s operator managed to get, the sea would never look small to him.”

When was the last time you read a book that offered such a dramatic change of perspective? Or has broken the rules as delicately and carefully as a wishbone? One snap, and the whole world changes. Duplex is magic, from cover to cover.

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.

JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT by Antal Szerb reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT
by Antal Szerb
translated by Len Rix
New York Review Books, 296 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

I don’t mind observing that as a child I reveled in erotic games, secret afternoons and evenings of play at sex and death. The child’s world stretches infinitely and yet is all encompassing. The ceaseless hours end—usually forcibly, by parents—inevitably leaving a taste of unfulfilled desire.

Oh, to be so fully awake, so charged again.

Those earliest encounters with desire—yet unnamed, unformed—set on us, mark us, until, at some point the feelings fade. Not desire itself, but the skin’s memory of it fresh, smothered by age and responsibilities. But for some of us, perhaps because the experience is so acute, the process of forming relationships to others cements in those early rooms.

Then adulthood presses, like a train conductor telling you, in a foreign language you don’t understand, that you’re sitting in the wrong class. You shrug, he keeps demanding, and the seconds freeze in confusion until at last someone pushes you along. It is in this state that we find Mihály, the 30-something protagonist of Antal Szerb’s scintillating 1937 novel Journey By Moonlight, published this week—in the English translation by Len Rix—in the United States for the first time. Mihály has been pushed into bourgeois propriety, into a job in the family’s firm in Budapest, into a marriage with the beautiful and wealthy Erzsi, and here he is on his honeymoon in Venice. Dreamy, detached, Mihály is however determined to capitulate. The alternative, to live in dissolution overpowered and haunted by memory, is too much. He has to bear up.

But Erzsi has married Mihály precisely because he isn’t ordinary, because something haunts him—“Mihály had secrets even from himself.” In him, she thinks there is “something utterly alien to the conventions of bourgeois existence” that would carry her, too, “beyond the walls.” Only her timing is terrible; they are out of step: “Mihály was simply trying, through her, to become a conformist himself.”

Antal Szerb author photo

Antal Szerb

The problem is he can’t. His plan—“using her to become a regular bourgeois, only stealing out into the badlands, into the bushes, furtively and alone, until conformity no longer bored him and he was used to it”—is impossible, as perhaps Szerb, a Jew whose family had converted to Catholicism in order to conform, understood. (And indeed the Hungarian authorities, under pressure from the Nazis, would anyway ignore Szerb’s attempt at conformity. Despite his having been the president of the Hungarian Literary Academy and the author of The History of Hungarian Literature, he was removed from his university position for being a Jew and sent to a labor camp, where he was killed.)

And thus, a few days into their travels, events begin to dislodge his plan. Mihály’s old high school nemesis, the unsettling and manipulative János, appears while the couple eats gelato in a piazza in Ravenna. Apparently their mutual friend from childhood, Ervin, the most passionate of their group and a Jew converted to Catholicism, lives as a monk in an Italian monastery. Does Mihály want to help find him?

The confrontation with János forces Mihály to reveal for the first time to Erzsi the intense circumstance of his youth as it played out in the realm of the inseparable brother and sister Tamás and Éva Ulpinus, who had rejected all notions of the outside, practical world. Beguiled by the siblings’ androgyny, swept into their role playing games, skits, and wildly imagined scenes—“Day after day, Tamás and Éva strangled, poisoned, stabbed or boiled one another in oil”—in those formative days, Mihály longed to play the sacrificial victim. “It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up,” he tells Erzsi in their Ravenna hotel room.

“Why did you enjoy being the victim?” asked Erzsi.

“Hmmm…well, for erotic reasons, if you follow me… Éva loved to be the woman who cheats, betrays and murders men, Tamás and I loved to be the man she cheats, betrays, murders, or utterly humiliates…”

Erzsi, of course, wants to know if Mihály was in love with Éva, and if he still is. But Mihály’s incoherent answer is beside the point. What happened in the Ulpinus house was the planting of a seed that would undermine all desire for convention, for forward life. From then on he would never escape the need for the erotic, for self-negating death.

And so, in Italy, the seed would grow again. As soon as he tells the story of his coming of age to Erzsi, he can no longer shake the unsettling instinct to court the unknown. He tries to share it with her, and during a night of tingling, touching, apparently non-standard sex that Szerb describes with delicate acuity, and that fills Erzsi “with wonder,” Mihály is overcome with shame. Sex with Erzsi should be “responsible.” He can’t rectify the opposing instincts. He begins to plot to break away.

Mihály spends the rest of the marvelously dark and yet utterly matter of fact book seeking his inner truth. Szerb’s plot is absurdly novelistic—people appear and disappear with a kind of transparent thrill—but that only enhances the fun of the read. Mihály’s journey of self-discovery is all of ours, after all, and how exactly will he, or we, land?

The answer isn’t so obvious. The ungrounded Mihály flits and flies across the Italian landscape. János crashes in. Erzsi bends and torques. Éva lurks behind a hillock. Ervin, now Father Severinus, tries to steady the ship. Nostalgia, the dead, “the whole dreaded terrorist army of the past,” conspire. All the while Italy itself transforms from setting to antagonist (slowly, so that you hardly realize), from “grown-up” travel destination of the well heeled to menacing landscape of decomposition and death. Place has always played on Mihály’s soul, but now that he’s half broken it’s all the more powerful. In Rome, finally, Mihály sees signs and symbols everywhere. He meets an old friend, Waldheim, full of wisdom. “At the precise moment when I lose my balance, I am filled with a sudden ecstasy,” Waldheim says. Mihály meditates on the vision.

“I know rather more about this whole notion than you think,” he responds. The ecstasy, he’s well aware, is annihilating. Poor Mihály will have to make a choice.

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.

I CALLED HIM NECKTIE by Milena Michiko Flašar reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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I CALLED HIM NECKTIE
by Milena Michiko Flašar
translated by Sheila Dickie
New Vessel Press

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

A novel can fly across time and space or it can burrow, it can seek out, hide from itself, emerge somewhere else, on some other plane: a surprise. Certainly, other novels set in Tokyo, as is I Called Him Necktie, sprawl across the endless city as words scratch across the page. But this one, by the 34-year-old Milena Michiko Flašar, the Viennese novelist whose mother is Japanese, is a kind of airless tunnel—the closer you are to the exit the further you’ve actually gone, lost as if in meditation, digging.

Flašar’s protagonist is Taguchi Hiro, 20 years old and a hikikomori—an outcast who shuts himself in. Buried in silence, Hiro hasn’t left his room in two years. “My room was like a cave,” he says, a few days after venturing away, into public for the first time.

I had grown up here. I had essentially lost my innocence here. I mean, growing up signifies a loss. You think you are winning. Really you are losing yourself. I mourned the child I had once been, whom I heard in rare moments pummeling wildly in my heart. At thirteen it was too late. At fourteen. At fifteen. Puberty a battle, I lost myself by the end.

Like most parents of a child who can’t fit in, Hiro’s are caught without a plan. They can’t fish him out. They have no language for self loss, for seeping away. “What can you say when you’ve run out of words?” he wonders. They’re blind to the signs, anyway, and the culture, which refuses failure and cheats against openness, aids the dissonance. Three times a day they pass him a tray of food and little by little magazines pile up on his chair, taking his place at the dining table. The parents pretend to go on. Life accretes, as does Flašar’s taut but also airy prose seamlessly rendered into the English, from German, by Sheila Dickie.

Milena Michiko Flašar author photo

Milena Michiko Flašar

But now, on the park bench, Hiro spots someone else, another regular, a 58-year-old businessman named Ohara Tetsu, who shows up most work days in the morning, sits and smokes, eats his lunch from his bento box, and at six gets up and leaves. Tetsu pushes in on Hiro’s consciousness until, finally, they come to share the bench. The man is exiled too. Having lost his job, he can’t tell his wife. She still packs his lunch. He dresses, descends into the subway, and alights in the park. Once in a while, he gets drunk at a café.

It’s worth pausing here, for Flašar appears to be daring Japanese cliché, the twin cultural hang-ups of repression and shame particularly. “Mother and father were in agreement: Name and reputation must be preserved at all costs,” says Hiro. Tetsu, who can’t face his own failure, more so: every day he lives a lie, trapped by propriety. Haven’t we seen this before, over and over, in film and fiction?

Surely, yes. But this is Hiro and Tetsu, Tetsu and Hiro. Their lives fill the page. Flašar has given them blood; Flašar has allowed them to search and dream. “I want to learn how to look at things again,” says Hiro. Tetsu wants to take him to a jazz café. He wants him to taste his wife’s salmon, so carefully packed every day.

Together, they dig. They talk and the talk opens channels. They talk and the talk exposes skin. First Hiro then Tetsu becomes vulnerable. They both wish to defy stereotype; they know it’s trapped them; they know they have to face it in order to get away. Hiro’s childhood has been tragic. Friendships have come to violent end. “Don’t be ashamed to be a person with feelings,” says Tetsu. His marriage has been rocky. For the first time he peers back across decades to hear his wife’s words, forgiveness. “All at once I saw that you’re a rock, I’ll roll with you. On and on,” he hears her say. “We’re rolling together up a steep mountain path.”

Hearing this, Hiro offers his friend a deal. Together, they will clamber for light, they will fill each other’s emptiness. Flašar has given us a tale of miracles. We know what they are, but yet we don’t. We’re sitting amidst them, but we can’t see them, we can’t tell. Finally, Hiro compels himself forward. He’s almost there. It’s only then the city intervenes.

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.

HARLEQUIN’S MILLIONS by Bohumil Hrabal and WHO IS MARTHA? by Marjana Gaponenko reviewed by Michelle E. Crouch

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Harlequin's Millions cover art. In the middle of a black cover, an abstract sketch of a woman in a hat Who is Martha cover art. The text emerging out from behind blue leaves HARLEQUIN’S MILLIONS
by Bohumil Hrabal
translated by Stacey Knecht
Archipelago Books, 312 pages 

WHO IS MARTHA?
by Marjana Gaponenko
translated by Arabella Spencer
New Vessel Press, 216 pages

reviewed by Michelle E. Crouch

We had grown old, yet we were still the same as we’d been when the war ended, I had moved even further back, to the last century, which had risen for me from the dead. This retirement home with its Baroque halls and garden, this castle in which I lived, suddenly meant more to me than that golden brewery of mine, where I had spent my younger years. Here in this castle I lived every day in the mystery, in the strata of human destinies of people who had long since been buried…
—Bohumil Hrabal, Harlequin’s Millions

Levadski did not have much time left to forget. According to the diagnosis he should have felt dreadful…From the breast pocket of his pajamas, however, his heart announced an overwhelming joy at beautiful things, pleasure and desire, to see beauty like the light of God’s face. Beauty in spite of the revolting decay of the institution of his body, beauty in spite of ugliness and precisely because of it. Beauty.
—Marjana Gaponenko, Who is Martha?

The recently published novels Who is Martha? and Harlequin’s Millions each features an elderly Central European protagonist living out the end of life in rarefied surroundings, reflecting on disappeared worlds and searching for a true source of beauty. In each book old age becomes a kind of landscape: dim in the corners and mazelike at times, lapping back over itself, but punctuated with clarity and painfully lucid recollections. The protagonists navigate this terrain with variable steadiness, stumbling through local folklore and jarring hallucinations, but never entirely losing a sense of humor about the whole enterprise.

Harlequin’s Millions may be the more melancholy of the two books; it is certainly the denser. Hrabal’s distinctive prose style utilizes long, wandering sentences connected by ellipses, capturing the first-person narrator’s thoughts in a fluid, almost musical fashion. Each of the fifteen chapters is a single paragraph (fortunately the book designer of this edition opted for a small, square page, making the wall of text a little less daunting), narrated by an unnamed woman who lives with her husband Francin and his brother in a retirement home at what was once the magnificent estate of the aristocrat Count Špork. The plot doesn’t move forward so much as deepen; each chapter is like another one of the narrator’s rambles around the castle’s grounds, covering the same territory but discovering new details. She recounts not only her own history—her days as a local beauty, her attempt to run a perfume shop in Prague, the collectivization of the brewery that Francin managed—but that of the small Czech town where they lived.

The Czech Hrabal (1914-1997), much admired by Milan Kundera, isn’t well known in the English-speaking world. He published Harlequin’s Millions in 1981, near the end of his life. This first English translation of the book by Stacy Knecht was released in May. Of his many novels, the best known are Closely-Watched Trains (1965) and I Served the King of England (1971); some of his work could only be published by underground presses due to restrictive government policies in then Czechoslovakia, though he shied away from outright political dissent.

Bohumil Hrabal author photo

Bohumil Hrabal

The town “where time stood still,” as the narrator often calls the setting of Harlequin’s Millions, may resemble the writer’s own hometown of Nymburk, where his parents ran a brewery; Hrabal notes in an afterword that he incorporated the newspaper columns and memoirs of several local elders into the text. The narrator herself encounters three men with the same names and is spellbound by these “witnesses to old times,” whose memories stretch back further than her own. Yet their memories are in danger of being lost, too; the graveyard is dug up, and they mourn the loss of the stories behind the inhabitants’ nicknames in a litany of odd appellations: “This is the end of the golden old times, where have they taken those tombstones, where are Červenka the Parasol, Červenka the Perch, Červenka the Gimp, Červenka the Lousehead, Červenka the Periwig, Červenka the Greyhound, Červenka Busted, Červenka Koruna, Červenka the Cigar, Červenka Sweatbuckets, Červenka from Upstairs, Červenka Untergleichen?”

But if the book is love song to a town’s history and a vanished way of life, it does not remain restrained by or insensibly enamored with the past. When the narrator and Francin leave the retirement home and walk through town one day she realizes that “time certainly hadn’t stood still in this little town for the people I’d seen streaming back and forth across the square and down the streets and avenues, boarding the buses, that their time was now, that the only time that had stood still was the time that I was happy…”

The title Harlequin’s Millions refers to a piece of music that is constantly piped through the castle’s sound system. It’s both a maudlin tune (a “chintzy, chocolate-box melody” like something that would accompany a Chaplin film, the narrator tells us) and an anchor, a literal motif that grounds the narrative. In Who is Martha? birds have a similar role. The book’s protagonist Luka Levadski is a 96-year-old ornithologist, and birds find their way into his thoughts constantly, especially Martha, the last carrier pigeon, who died on the day of his birth in 1914. His earthly possessions include an unlikely dictionary that translates the language of ravens.

A Ukrainian author who writes in German, Gaponenko, born in 1981, has also published several volumes of poetry, not surprising given the visually rich language here:

The elevator came almost immediately, opening its golden chest. From all sides Levadski could see a small bald dandy staring back at him. This hotel is a ship, thought Levadski stepping into the elevator, a ship, and I am a black-headed gull on deck.

Although individual poems have appeared in English, Arabella Spencer’s translation of Who is Martha? is the first full-length work of Gaponenko to appear in English; her first novel, Annushka Blume (2010), and several volumes of poetry are available in German.

Levadski is a spry 96, a bit of a twinkling-eyed prankster figure. A European mutt, he was born in Galicia, raised in Vienna, and lives in Odessa as the book begins. He receives a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer and, rather than submit to treatment, buys a new suit and a walking stick filled with cognac and flies to Vienna to enjoy the chocolate cake and classical concerts of his youth, determined to live out his days in the extravagant Hotel Imperial until his savings or his life run out.

If time and memory are the inevitable concerns of a novel with such a protagonist, Ledvaski tries more emphatically to shrug them off, inhabiting his present forcefully, ordering Iberico ham in the hotel restaurant even as he doubts his ability to chew it, requesting rose-colored silk lining in his suit even as he’s keenly aware of his physical decay. Although the author spends several chapters detailing Ledvaski’s life story–attending classical concerts with his great aunts, fleeing to Chechnya with his widowed mother during World War II—the meat of the book takes place at the hotel, particularly in his relationship with his Palestinian butler, Habib, and a strangely competitive friendship with Mr. Witzturn, another man staying alone in the hotel, who claims to have a plastic nose. The two men treat their age as a kind of rivalry. (“A pretty boy, thinks Ledvaski, as smooth as an egg. How old can he be? Eighty, eighty-five at the most!”) The final part of the book is taken up with their last hurrah, a glimmering night on the town that verges into the surreal as Ledvaski slips in and out of bird-filled dreams.

Marjana Gaponenko author photo

Marjana Gaponenko

Who Is Martha? is faster paced than Harlequin’s Millions, the tone a bit more wry. Yet perhaps due to the characters’ closeness to the great unknowable-ness of death, both allow room for the possibility of the magical: the “witnesses to old times” might be ghosts; a young female “cosmonaut” who might just be Gaponenko herself appears at the bar and then vanishes into a cocktail glass. Both books end by dwelling on a similar question: What is it that has given shape to one’s life? What landmarks remain clear and illuminating as the rest fade away—the smell from a broken bottle of perfume, the memory of a young girl eating cake? Both books necessarily have a dual timeline—the plot duration (the days in the hotel and the castle), plus the entire life of the main character, and indeed the whole scope of history that has forged the present moment. We all have these dual timelines; we all live simultaneously in the past and the present. How to handle this balancing act on the page? Hrabal and Gaponenko solve this riddle in different ways. Hrabal chooses to immerse his characters ever deeper in the past, exploring and finding what others have forgotten, taking a Proustian luxury in memory, while Gaponenko fights against its reach, scrabbling with a youthful energy for those last few moments of the present, even as the images of the past begin to burn brighter while the real world dims.

Michelle Crouch author photo

Michelle E. Crouch, a co-founder of APIARY Magazine, has been published in Indiana Review,Treehouse Magazine, and The Rumpus. She currently lives in Raleigh, NC. Her website is mcrouch.com.

 

OUR LADY OF THE NILE by Scholastique Mukasonga reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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OUR LADY OF THE NILE
by Scholastique Mukasonga
Archipelago Books, 244 pages
translated from the French by Melanie Mauthner

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

This is how Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile ends, in 1979:

You remember what they used to tell us in catechism: God roams the world, all day long, but every evening He returns home to Rwanda. Well, while God was traveling, Death took his place, and when He returned, She slammed the door in his face. Death established her reign over Rwanda. She has a plan: she’s determined to see it through to the end.

She does, in fact. In 1994, ethnic hatred erupted into political terror and Hutu militants wiped out some 800,000 Tutsi people along their Hutu allies. This is the part of the history of Rwanda, a tiny East African nation squeezed between Burundi and Uganda, between colonialism and corruption, that we remember. For most of us the genocide was unfathomable and worse, a distant horror, another strange interruption of the Clinton years.

Here, in this slender, deceptively fast-paced novel, Mukasonga, who fled Rwanda before genocide, explores everything leading up to it: ethnic rivalry, resentment, hatred, the quota system that limited Tutsi participation in society and that was payback for centuries of Tutsi control, and the role of the Germans and Belgians and the Catholic church in creating the conditions that led to horror. Mukasonga’s three memoirs of the genocide, which claimed 27 members of her Tutsi family, and of the family’s forced exile before it, were published in France by Gallimard. This novel, studiously translated by Melanie Mauthner, a British writer and poet, won various French literary awards, including the Renaudot Prize, in 2012.

Scholastique Mukasonga author photo

Scholastique Mukasonga

Our Lady of the Nile is a product of profound understanding of Rwanda, knowledge and feeling, manifest in the collection of students at the lycée, in the tensions that quietly spill out across the school—quietly and then in a rush, as Mukasonga must know well. This is the reader’s prize. The prose has a dry objectivity to it, wry and weary, but also cheerful and warm. A few times, Mukasonga translates her country into poetry, for of course love and disappointment are at the heart of the endeavor. Listen: “For many months, rain becomes the Sovereign of Rwanda,”

a far greater ruler than the former King or the current President…Rain, the good omen of a fertile marriage. First rains, at the end of the dry season, making children dance as they turn their faces skyward to receive the fat drops for which they’ve longed. Shameless rain, revealing the budding curves of all young women beneath their drenched wraparounds. Violent, capricious, punctilious Mistress, pitter-pattering on every sheet-metal roof, on those sheltering in the banana groves or in the muddy neighborhoods of the capital. She who casts her net over the lake, and diminishes the volcanoes’ hugeness; she who reigns over the vast forests of the Congo, the very guts if Africa. Rain, endless Rain, unto the oceans that bore her.

Our Lady of the Nile is an elite Catholic high school for girls. Four stories, looming over a mountain lake at the supposed source of the Nile (“A steep path brings you to a heap of rocks where the rivulet spurts between two stones”), the building is more imposing than the capital in Kigali. It’s ruled over—in French and only French—by the white Mother Superior and her ministers, including the misogynist Father Hermenénégilde. The school, of course, was intentionally placed in the mountains so that the girls would be safe from threatening eyes. Mukasonga indeed takes pleasure in pointing out the trail of contradictions that lines the girls’ lives.

They’re not hard to come by. The Hutu, “the people of the hoe,” are the only true Rwandans, they say. Their moral and political authority derives from this humble origin (traditionally, the Tutsi were the people of the cattle, which gave them authority over the people of the hoe) and yet these are elite girls: they value skin whitening cream and fast cars (and the men who drive them). Their fathers, generals and top businessmen and politicians, pursue policies to further subjugate Tutsis, mimicking the similar policies invented by the hated Belgians. Supposedly top students, few of the girls care about their studies; they’re on the hunt for powerful husbands. Apparently loving Catholics and models of Christian behavior, and certainly not backward paganists—traditional religion always a looming threat—they are a catty bunch.

Perhaps not unlike any group of teenagers. But the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic divide colors everything. In the course of the school year 1978-79, which we observe here, it comes to colonize the girls’ minds. On day one, here is Gloriosa, big boned and virulent in support of the Hutu cause. “Two Tutsi for twenty pupils is the quota, and because of that I know some real Rwandan girls of the majority people, the people of the hoe, friends of mine, who didn’t get a place in high school. As my father likes to tell me, we’ll really have to get rid of these quotas one day, it’s a Belgian thing!”

The two objects of Gloriosa’s wrath are the Tutsi girls Veronica and Virginia. It’s Virginia speaking at the top of this review—presumably her perspective overlaps with Mukasonga’s. The year begins with cautious optimism, uneasy peace. Gloriosa hugs Veronica and Virginia—“the tighter you embrace those snakes, the more you suffocate them,” she says. Veronica is wary. In perhaps the most beguiling chapter of the book, Virginia seeks protection from ancient spirits. But what can stop the chaos to come?

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.

HOME LEAVE by Brittani Sonnenberg reviewed by Michelle Fost

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HOME LEAVE
by Brittani Sonnenberg
Grand Central Publishing, 259 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

Brittani Sonnenberg’s debut novel, Home Leave, unfolds as a lyrical meditation on loss, geographical place, expatriate experience, sibling rivalry, family, and growing up. Sonnenberg writes with clarity about the messiness of the expat Kriegstein family’s lives. To tell her story, Sonnenberg begins the opening section improbably from the point of view of the mother’s childhood home. Yes: we hear from a house. What I liked very much about the novel is that it continued in this way, rough and tumble in its narration, jumping from first person accounts in the voices of the family, third person voices, first person plural voices, and so on. Home Leave has the fitting feel of a kid landing somewhere without concern about fluency but a willingness to tell her story using the language that works.

Sonnenberg captures beautifully what it’s like to grow up as an American abroad, not as a tourist but not fully as a native either. There’s bougainvillea, there’s spitting on the streets, there’s dancing in the public square. There’s always loss and longing—whether it’s for a simple box of Honey Bunches of Oats, the exhaust mixed with the heat of Shanghai, or the familiar candies with pictures of penguins on the wrapper from passport control in Singapore.

Brittani Sonnenberg author photo

Brittani Sonnenberg

During summers the female members of the family go back to the States for home leave.   It’s Elise and her daughters Leah and Sophie’s chance to stay connected to America as home. For Leah, the older Kriegstein daughter, though, home turns out to be rooted less in a place than in her family. Her mother, father, and sister are her home. Moves from London to Atlanta to Shanghai are a kind of practice for separating from her family, growing up, becoming an adult. Later, Leah will choose Berlin, a city with a “schizophrenic struggle” that feels comfortable. It’s a city where she can let go of what she is missing.

There are many losses along the way for the Kriegsteins. Their greatest loss is the unexpected death of Sophie on a soccer field at the American school in Singapore. The novel asks, “Was Sophie’s death a foregone conclusion in any geography, a heart failure built into her system that would have struck her down on any continent?” It’s a no-fault death, brought on by a heart condition that had gone undetected.

Dead or alive, Sophie is a strong presence in the novel. In two memorably inventive scenes, the dead Sophie participates in family therapy sessions, written by Sonnenberg in the style of short stage plays. The loss of Sophie is not an isolated event; it’s more the cresting of a wave carrying a family’s losses. Loss of innocence, of trust, of childhood, of place—Sonnenberg calls up many difficult moments of growing up. She sketches in for us traumatic episodes from the family’s past: a great-great grandmother who stumbles on the scene of her own mother in bed with her fiancé; a young girl who tells her mother she is regularly being molested by her grandfather, and is then scolded rather than believed or helped.

If there is a choice of fight or flight, generations of this family choose flight. Sophie, when she resurfaces after death in this story, is a conciliatory presence. Grief gives her a voice. Later in life, the great-great grandmother wonders if, had she stayed in Germany and married her fiancé, all would have worked out fine after all. And an internalized voice in Elise first scolds: “You shouldn’t tell such tales, Elise.” Then, “You’re still dragging that around?…Well, get over it!” It is not that the bad things that happen here are okay, but there is a stance of resignation and acceptance, of mourning and grieving and then leaving one’s grief behind.

Michelle Fost author photo

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

CONVERSATIONS by César Aira reviewed by Ana Schwartz

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CONVERSATIONS
by César Aira
translated by Katherine Silver
New Directions, 88 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

The Little Estancias

Domestic Tourism
What’s the name for the genre of writing about a house? House tourism exists, but what about house-writing? It would be a good word to have on hand when reading Argentina: The Great Estancias, because whatever that genre is, this book is the exemplar. An estancia is a large estate originating in colonial settlement of Latin America and supported by agricultural industry, usually livestock. Despite regional variation across Latin America (and the use of different names, like hacienda), they generally consist of a large central house and several smaller edifices across acres upon thousands of acres of land. True to the title, the nation of Argentina is the primary subject of this book. Its history and culture are beautifully recorded in the photographs by Tomás de Elia and Cristina Cassinelli de Corral, alongside the descriptive text by César Aira.

César Aira author photo

César Aira

Yes, that César Aira. The same Aira whose Spanish language oeuvre—over 60 novels, plus essays and a few monographs—has been, since 2006, slowly appearing in English, thanks to the editors at New Directions Paperbacks. The latest, Conversations, in the English translation by Katherine Silver, was published earlier this year. At 80-120 pages, most of these books are shorter than the conventional novel. Their smallness practically invites smuggling and stowing them into the pockets of coats or backpacks or purses. They want to be shared, reread, and picked up again in new places. On the other hand, Argentina: The Great Estancias is a large, clothbound coffee table book, in the style of a museum catalogue. You might need access to a university library to look through it. If you wanted to buy a proper copy and show it off, you’d probably want a nice coffee table—and a nice living room. But once you open the book, you’ll want to get back up again, pack your bags and spend an entire upside-down year in the Southern Hemisphere, visiting each of the beautiful estates: from La Calavera, in the northern province of Salta; to Harberton in Tierra del Fuego, which boasts gated threshold made out of a whale’s jawbone.

Katherine Silver author photo

Katherine Silver

But what would you do when you got there? Just look around? What greater experience than visual delight might you reasonably expect? In one of his earlier novels, Aira describes this underlying strangeness of travel with directness and clarity. “What would they go there to do?” he asks. Regarding tourists considering the pampas, he adds, “I don’t think traveling is worth the trouble if you don’t bring your life along with you.” Likewise, even if the images of Argentinean culture inspire envy, Aira’s historically conscious text is more ambivalent. He returns frequently to the less-than celebratory origins of these estates: most are the ancestral homes of colonial European families that settled in Argentina during the past four centuries. Some, like Santa Catalina, date back to the late sixteenth century. Others, like the main house at Huetel, were built as recently as 1905. Aira doesn’t dwell for very long on these statistical details—he moves briskly from room to room, episode to historical episode, and he is forthright about what’s represented by the windows with iron grillwork at Rincón de López, which testify to the many wars with local Indians. The past was savage, even despite the beauty of de Elia and de Corral’s photographs. Maybe it is best to stay at home with the novels.

Global Literature
One could do worse. The novels are a thrilling, if often unbelievably weird, introduction to Argentinean history and culture, as well as people and places around the world. Settings and also plots vary rather fantastically. Many of the novels take place in contemporary Argentina, or the pampas of the southern cone. Some transpire elsewhere, in other historical periods—a conference in Mexico City, for example, or the bustling Panama City of the nineteenth century. The works show a commitment to pan-Latinidad, but just as frequently offers a wider international perspective: that of a German painter, for example, an English naturalist, or a Hollywood actor pretending to pretend to be a Ukrainian—!—goatherd. The decorative coffee table book describes the land through its history of territorial settlement, but the novels, which are more interested in human mobility, in the speed and transience brought by globalization.

Each novel cares about the past, but the trick is figuring out how to read the manifestations of history on the terms each novel sets for itself. On this, Varamo is exemplary. In this novel, translated by Chris Andrews in 2012, the literary-critic narrator speculates on how the great Panamanian national epic came into being. The made-up long poem, The Song of the Virgin Boy, was written in 1923 by an otherwise unremarkable, unliterary, yet honest and earnest government employee named Varamo. The narrator begins with an admission of perplexity: none of his familiar methods of literary criticism explain this text. The best account he can give is through describing the diverse population of early twentieth century Panama: The effect of the canal on the city of Colón is never explicitly described during the course of the novel, but implicitly omnipresent in the scenes of trade and transportation of commodities. Varamo has recently left his job after unintentionally getting involved in a counterfeiting incident. He decides to write a short, sort of practical book: a taxidermy manual. As he perambulates Panama City he solicits writing advice from his friends and neighbors, characters from around the world. It’s good advice, too: they tell him that “writing was very easy and could be done very quickly…write out the notes one after another, with some commentary in between. Try not to tidy them up too much; immediacy is the key to a good style.” Maybe the advice is too effective: instead of a how-to guide, the miracle of Panamanian literature is born that night.

Human mobility, and the creativity it variously engenders, recurs as a motif throughout these books: The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira shows the doctor on the run from a mysterious villain. Much of The Literary Conference takes place en route to a conference in Mexico. Shantytown focuses on a group of homeless families, migrant laborers, who are constantly on the move; even the doors of their temporary houses sometimes move too, unaccountably. Consider the technique of Johann Moritz Rugendas, the real-life landscape painter of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and a disciple of the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. His travels to Argentina take him through the Chilean Andes; its sublime peaks and the contrast with the equally impressive Argentinean pampas elicit some fine meditations on method: “Everything was human,” Rugendas observes, “the farthest wilderness was steeped with sociability.” But the calm projection of self into nature isn’t where genius originates. It also derives from the outside world’s violent attack on the human: in a hurried rush across the pampas during a thunderstorm, lightning strikes Rugendas and hideously transmogrifies him. This leads to his development of a style that Aira observes will eventually be called surrealism. More vitally, for Rugendas, it is a “physiognomy of nature.” Examples of Rugendas’ sketches, by the way, can be found at the Los Alamos estancia, in the Mendoza province.

Conversational Reading
Conversations is his most geopolitical work thus far. It is a short book that spans several continents; the real and the fabricated and the forgotten; the personal and the public.Katherine Silver, the translator, also brought English language readers The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira and The Literary Conference. She has translated fiction by fellow Argentinean Ernesto Mallo, the Mexican writer Daniel Sada, and Salvadorean writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, among many others.

The plot of Conversations seems pretty flimsy at first: an unnamed narrator lies in bed one night, and, as is his custom, reviews his day’s conversations. For him, the mnemonic act is also a creative. It has its own rules, which, executed successfully, yield a sense of productive satisfaction. The particular conversation of the novel had taken place on the phone between the narrator and his dear friend, also unnamed. They have both watched a made-for-TV movie, a romance. The narrator was troubled by an illogical detail—an expensive watch on the wrist of an otherwise very poor goatherd in the mountains of Ukraine. The two men review their memory of the film. The narrator speculates about the visibility of the watch. He turns first to the vast complexities of the modern-day film industry. His friend interprets the watch by showing how the first explanation was actually a part of the plot itself: didn’t he see that it was a movie about the making of a movie?

Generally, in the earlier novels, Aira is interested in what generates and sustains creativity, often in the form of writing. This is Aira’s first translated novel to imagine how a creative artifact is read. Here, Aira elevates the practice of reading to a form of creativity. For that work, friendship is essential, because any individual’s experience of a text—the observable details, and the memorable details—aren’t available to any one person, even a really smart, really observant loner who spends most of his time thinking. The friendship also gives a wider experience of reading methods. Like the narrator of Varamo, this narrator is a good historical materialist, who attends to the means of production; but his friend corrects against his narrow focus by showing its limitations, as well as the political implications of his myopia. Like the 2012 Ben Affleck film Argo about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the production within the plot masked an international covert operation, but it’s not so clearly admirable a mission as the extraction of captive hostages.

So if it is a novel about how to read, then it is also a novel about how to be friends, and how to talk about friendship. It’s hard to overstress this element of the book, since Aira himself overdoes it, gleefully. Earnest moralizing about the value of friendship? Lessons on the importance of being a good listener? How repulsive! When the narrator makes these statements, though, he’s aware that his self-importance seems extravagant. Irony and overstatement work in Aira’s favor by creating a bit of breathing room for the narrator to flesh out the qualities of his relationship as well as specific examples of how much and why he needs his friends “to tightly pack in the attractions by filling in the dead times that inevitably exist in a story told by a single person.” The entire novel unfolds during a lonely and sleepless night that is characteristic for this narrator; those who’ve ever experienced a time of insomnia can attest to the pervasive feeling of morbidity. The narrator claims to allow his friendships to take hold in his heart, as if lonesome nighttime brooding were a choice. Coincidentally, this is the only novel so far that does not feature significant travel or movement for the main character.

The method of reading enacted here is instructive to a global readership. Through relationships like this, Aira suggests a perspective on the world, not only a way to read his complex little fictions. In this story that perspective is especially evident: the main plot is practically nonexistent, but the plots-within-plots are so geopolitically attuned, requiring the keen viewers of the novel to know a great deal about international politics. So far Aira’s fiction has kept the explicit geopolitical conversations on a quieter volume, and subordinated to formal playfulness. In The Hare (reviewed in these pages a year ago), for example, the conversations set the groundwork for eventual narrative discovery. Clarke, an English naturalist of the nineteenth century, comes to Argentina to search for the legendary Legibrerian Hare. This novel is the longest of Aira’s translated fiction and it reads like an English novel—at the end, the plot’s many important characters realize that they are all, mostly, related. The final twist mimics and mocks its precedent in the nineteenth-century English family novel. But the ongoing conversation between Clarke and Carlos, and their meditations on how storytelling can bring people together, but also divide them. This is the real sustaining energy of the text.

The Morphological Cures of Prof. Aira
The books themselves often seem like the author’s friendly interlocutor. Some version of César or Aira appears in many of the fictions, often with a curious mutation. In the Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, for instance, a Dr. Aira peddles a mysterious, quasi-religious cure for a likewise mysterious ailment. In How I Became a Nun, a child César does not become a nun, but rather switches genders. In The Seamstress and the Wind, a reflective and erudite novelist named César Aira sits in a Paris café and writes: but the memory he shares about his life is, like the details of those other novels, equally surreal.

Unlike the protagonist of The Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, though, César Aira is, on the outside, at least, no disfigured monster. He looks like a laid back, still energetic middle-aged guy, with a literature professor’s skeptical earnestness—or maybe that last is just the clunky spectacles. This probably isn’t too far off the mark. Aira was born in 1956 in Coronel Pringles, in the province of Buenos Aires, but well beyond the capital, where he moved at eighteen. He has lived most of his life in Argentina, although earlier in his career, he made a living off of translating genre fiction. In addition to a coffee table book and several novels, he writes literary essays and he lectures on English, Spanish, and French literature. Through the essays and lectures, he’s defined and named the organizing principle of his style as like a “continuo,” a “continuum.” Elaborating on the formal qualities, he calls it a “fuga hacia adelante,” a “flight forward,” which also describes his interest in territory and the nature of global communities.

His commitment to forward flight aligns him, at least formally, with the Oulipo, a mostly French avant-garde movement of the late twentieth century, still practiced by writers like Jacques Roubaud. In his Great Fire of London trilogy, Roubaud explains that he just wrote sentence after sentence, branching off when necessary, but never erasing or going backward. Aira also acknowledges a debt to surrealism, or its putatively Latin American variant, magical realism. The hero of The Literary Conference, for example, is traveling to Mexico to attend a meeting where Carlos Fuentes will be the honored guest. But he’s not there to celebrate; he is there to steal. Alas, the best laid plans! The protagonist’s bad science, and the author’s slightly better science fiction ends up cloning a giant blue worm out of Fuentes’ necktie!

Thematically, though, Aira’s work shows subtle, but pervasive affinity with his contemporaries of the Crack Generation (where there was Macondo there is now McOndo); its most famous star, the Chilean expatriate Roberto Bolaño, wrote the introduction to The Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, announcing Aira to be “one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.” Bolaño’s stamp endures on the cover of almost every consequent translation. In the short essay, Bolaño quietly praises Aira’s attention to the poor when he calls him a nun in the “Discalced Carmelites of the Word.” Likening him to the mendicants who beg for their food, Bolaño describes both Aira’s commitment to writing as well as to tenderness and humility.

These qualities are most powerfully communicated in 2011’s Shantytown, a novel whose realism relative to the early novels is motivated by a belief stated clearly and powerfully by the smallest of characters, Adela, the tiny maid of the protagonists’ household: “In the old days,” she observes, “there were poor people and rich people because there was a world made up of the poor and the rich. Now that world has disappeared and the poor have been left without a world.” One of the difficulties in representing a world for the poor in the twenty-first century is that they are required to live such a transient lives. The very articulate, personable protagonists represent one experience of transience, a more privileged experience, certainly, but they also help make visible the existence of those whose world easily disappears.

But what effect can any one reader or spectator have on that world? Aira’s answer is complex. In the same novel, he makes an observation that nicely sums up individual experience from the perspective of historical determinism: “If you do something on an impulse, or because you feel like it, or just like that, without knowing why, it’s still you doing it, and you have a history that has led to that particular point in your life, so it’s not really a thoughtless act, far from it; you couldn’t given it any more though: you’ve been thinking it out ever since you were born.”

For Maxi, young middle-class protagonist of Shantytown, this means that the dissatisfactions of home life urge him towards reflexively, if not always reflectively, cultivating friendships with the oppressed laboring class. Their insight on the inequality in the world shows him his relative unimportance as an individual and maybe even diminishes his anxiety about personal vocation and fulfillment. He helps them, too; not much, but they appreciate it. Mostly they appreciate his ongoing and unexplained commitment. Aira does not turn earnest care for the poor into another self-congratulatory property of the well-off; he avoids describing the interior of the shantytowns. Unlike the empty and well-storied estancias, he will not enter the homes of these workers, although he will show their ongoing labor and struggle.

The Grandes Estancias
But if human actions, even the most spontaneous, are products of history, what about literary trends? What factors account for Aira’s recent popularity? Why are these little books so marketable? It doesn’t hurt to look at the obvious. As with the Fuentes fan and his Macuto Line, following the obvious yields valuable insight: Aira’s books are perfect for traveling. Not only because they’re portable, although that’s nice too. They’re swiftly-paced and provocative. They yield more on second readings, often describing in the strangeness of liminal, nomadic experience thoughtful, provocative riffs that are frequently more pleasurable than the storylines. If, for example, you finished How I Became a Nun on the first leg of a coast-to-coast flight, you might still be able to think about what in the world just happened; then you might snack on small pretzels before dozing off, and then read it again to make sure you didn’t dream it up. Depending on your reading speed, you might even watch a made-for-TV movie before descending. Your carry-on would be barely any heavier and if you wanted someone to talk about it with, its brevity would be one great recommendation.

Ease of mobility is such an important feature of contemporary life that it is easy to take it for granted. One thing The Great Estancias shows is the relatively novel quality of this. As soon as the Europeans arrived from across the oceans and sufficiently proved their intentions to stay, often by means of great violence and forced labor, they built enormous estates. The impressively solid, stable quality of those estates, at least for now, contrasts with the stony ruins of those who had lived there before. The Europeans wanted to not move again, but their desires led to a great deal of suffering and exploitation. And so in the novels, Aira focuses on the labor of building, settlement, and home-making. Those who have spent a lot of time transit, or those who move around frequently from city to city, even in the most privileged conditions, can relate to some degree to the estrangement from a solid home experience by, for example, the characters of Ghosts. There, Chilean laborers squat in the proleptically haunted condominium complex that they are also building. When tenants move in and they move on, they too will fade, spectrally, from memory. Although few of Aira’s English language readers will experience those circumstances, the longing for home has a powerful emotional resonance. Toasting to their old home at the New Year, they sigh: “Chilean wines are so dry! They said, sipping it, with a touch of nostalgia, which they reined in so as not to spoil the evening. They’re so dry, so dry! Paradoxically, that dryness filled their eyes with tears.”

Despite their size, the novels house many people and grand ideas. Like the estancias, each has a character or personality of its own; each tells a unique story about Argentina and the larger world. The translator Katherine Silver, following the metaphor of inhabitation, attributes Aira’s popularity to their noncommittal quality. Even if they’re frustrating, she observes, “you’re not going to have to stay there with him.” Perhaps she has in mind the new translation of Leopoldo Marechal’s 1948 classic, Adan Buenosayres, the Argentinean modernist epic, and a very long book. Unlike the Panamanian epic of Varamo, Song of the Virgin Boy, it is a novel, and has been dubbed the Ulysses of Buenos Aires. What would the Aira estancia look like? If there were to be a great epic of the Americas in the globalized twenty-first century—for those who are skeptical of Bolaño’s 2666’s claim to that title—maybe Aira will sit down one day and unexpectedly write it. It will probably take place in one large house. But more likely, he will continue writing short, strange sojourns; books that migrate into the mind and stay there, or that visit for one long party. One could hardly ask for a more fascinating get-together than the celebration Aira describes at Miraflores estancia in the Buenos Aires province: “In 1993, the Ramos Mejía family held a reunion lunch where they gathered together fifteen hundred of the forty-five hundred descendants of the couple that had traveled across the pampas in a wagon caravan to found Miraflores among the Indians.”

César Aira in a bathtub

Ana Scwartz author photo

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

AGOSTINO by Alberto Moravia and MR. BOARDWALK by Louis Greenstein reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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Mr. Boardwalk cover art. A photograph people walking along a boardwalk. Below, Agostino cover art. A painting of a man looking at a woman standing at the edge of a lake

AGOSTINO
by Alberto Moravia
translated by Michael F. Moore
NYRB Classics, 128 pages

MR. BOARDWALK
by Louis Greenstein
New Door Books, 316 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

MUSEUMS OF INNOCENCE
In September 1980, military officers took over the Turkish government. Soldiers arrested 500,000 people, executed some of them, and installed martial law. Ultimately, the coup ended years of political and economic instability, but most remarkably it led to Turkey’s integration into the global economy, and eventually its status as an emergent power. Gone were days of economic and cultural isolation—a shared national innocence that novelist Orhan Pamuk has so daringly and insistently memorialized in the novel Museum of Innocence (2008)—and before that in My Name is Red (2003) and the memoir Istanbul (2005). In these books he has rebuilt and recreated a deeply provincial, yet colorful and highly idiosyncratic world that otherwise was trapped in his head.

This same instinct seems to motivate the author Louis Greenstein, a playwright, whose first novel, Mr. Boardwalk, was published last month by New Door Books. Greenstein’s museum of innocence is Atlantic City in the decade before 1978, when the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel was converted into Resorts International, the city’s first casino.

Greenstein conjures this pre-gambling world of the fortune teller Madame Diane, Jimmy, the patriarch of a Roma family that runs a marionette theater, his wife “My Edna,” their drug dealing son Bobby, Norman and Betty, Holocaust survivors who own the Two for One Arcade, the fudge stand, the Steel Pier, even the smell of the place in full fury: “Grease and sugar wafting from the takeout stands. Cigar smoke. Roasted peanuts.”

The book’s narrator is a former boardwalk juggler, Jason “the Magnificent,” about seven years old when his parents open a pretzel bakery and stand in Atlantic City, in 1967. Each summer the family decamps from the Philadelphia suburbs to the boardwalk, a world of magic and wonder to the young boy, “the soul of America,” according to Jimmy. At age eight, Jason is performing for crowds in front of the bakery and the marionette theater, perfecting an act while binding himself emotionally to a place, that like 1960s and 1970s Istanbul, is frayed by “inflation, crime and shit.”

Greenstein, like Pamuk, extends the metaphor to a love relationship—in this case Jason’s first love, high school classmate, Sarah—that will inevitably crash. As Kemal, the protagonist of Museum of Innocence, loses his love in the wake of the military coup, Jason loses Sarah just as the age of the casino begins. Jason, like Kemal, is a naïf in the sense that nothing will interfere with his obsession for his love—not the least of all practical concerns. At 16, he’s planning on buying a house in Atlantic City for them to live in forever. Jason is rather stunningly oblivious, a character trait that is sometimes hard for the reader to bear.

Much of Mr. Boardwalk is indeed a fairly familiar coming of age story that follows Jason’s journey through middle school and high school as he experiments with drugs and friendship, endures personal tragedy, and tries to make sense of a growing obsession with Atlantic City that no one else seems to understand. Jason’s loss of innocence is ultimately anticlimactic; he gives up on the place, “expunging all signs of the Jersey shore from my professional resume” and his personal life, never telling his wife about the house he had bought, and still owns, for a life that never would be.

But perhaps the pain of loss of innocence is too much: one has to escape the source of the pain as well as that naïve self that still lingers, sore and dumbfounded. This is the reaction of Agostino, a 13 year old boy who is spending the summer with his widowed mother at a beach resort in Tuscany, and who is the protagonist of the eponymous novel by the late Italian writer Alberto Moravia. NYRB Classics has just brought out Agostino in a new translation by the accomplished Michael F. Moore.

Moravia writes with spare attention; the reader becomes enraptured in this sensual world just as Agostino himself begins to take notice of it. Each day, he rows his mother out from the beach so that she can sunbathe nude and they can swim together. “Occasionally she would open her eyes and say how good it felt to lie on her back with her eyes closed and feel the water rippling and flowing beneath her. Or she would ask Agostino to pass her the cigarette case,” Moravia writes,

or better yet to light a cigarette and pass it to her, which Agostino would do with tremulous, painstaking care. Then the mother would smoke in silence, and Agostino would remain hunched over, his back to her but his head twisted to the side, so as to catch the little puffs of blue smoke that indicated where her head was resting, her hair radiating out in the water.

A handsome young man, a suitor, punctures the idyll, stealing the mother from the boy; soon after, a group of coarse urchins, sons of fishermen and laborers, will rupture it. Agostino is sensitive, sheltered, urbane. One day, this sort of boy will have to venture forth unprotected. He’ll get beaten, he’ll become the object of derision and pathological aggression, twisting him in such a way that he will lose “his original identity without acquiring through his loss another.”

Moravia carries the reader through the process, as Agostino accidentally encounters Berto, whose father rents rowboats on the beach. Berto takes Agostino’s mother’s cigarettes, ridicules him for not knowing how to smoke, and burns him with one. They fight. Agostino is “not so much frightened as bewildered by the boy’s extraordinary brutality,” notes the author.

It seemed incredible that he, Agostino, who everyone had always liked, could now be hurt so deliberately and ruthlessly. Most of all he was bewildered and troubled by this ruthlessness, a new behavior whose monstrousness made it almost attractive.

The great, unnerving pleasure of this book is to feel this sublime shift take hold inside Agostino, to observe him contort to face the new reality, to sense his discomfort and desire rising as twins of coming manhood, as defense and vulnerability both at once. His mother’s living sexuality, which he is forced to note as the summer wears on, acts like the opposite of blindness. Loss of innocence is seeing, finally, the wreck of adulthood. Meanwhile, the group of boys is pitiless and cruel. They turn him against himself. “The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him,” says Moravia, “and he couldn’t imagine when it would end.”

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.

SPHERES OF DISTURBANCE by Amy Schutzer reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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Spheres of Influence cover art. Abstract drawing of a woman riding a large black pig

SPHERES OF DISTURBANCE
by Amy Schutzer
Arktoi Books, Red Hen Press, 280 pages

reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

When my mother-in-law was dying of ovarian cancer, I had no patience for fiction. That summer, I sat by her bedside, reading while she slept—Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying, sent to me by a friend who worked for the National Hospice Foundation. Though I’d always sought out stories to figure out how to live, in the face of her death, I urgently needed reality-based guidance.

This spring, I carried Amy Schutzer’s Spheres of Disturbance with me as I spent long days in the hospital, and later hospice, with my father. That a literary novel could help me sort through the painful experience of losing him says much about Schutzer’s skill—and more about her wisdom. Compassion informs every line of her story about Helen, whose breast cancer returns metastasized, and about the circle of people who are moved by her impending death.

Schutzer circumvents the expected (and dreaded) arc of a terminal illness story by shifting among nine different points of view. She advances in time through a single day and in depth through a web of interdependent characters: a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig named Charlotta; Charlotta’s handler, the poet Avery; Avery’s lover Sammy; Sammy’s mother Helen; Helen’s sister Rosie and co-conspirator Joe; and Joe’s sister Frances, wife Marjorie, and daughter Darla. These characters converge at Avery’s garage sale, where she offloads her friends’ long-stored (and finally unclaimed) baggage to clear space for Charlotta’s imminent litter. Like the kitchen table where Helen feels strongest—“most sure that the cancer would be sent packing back into remission, for how could she not be part of this life?”—the sale is a spiritual meeting place, gathering the friends who are her surrogate family and the few members of her original family who seek an 11th-hour reunion.

Amy Schutzer author photo

Amy Schutzer

If a pregnant pig’s point of view seems implausible, it’s Schutzer’s way of grounding a transcendent story about death in the messy, fleshy, sensory details of life. Her complicated, well-drawn characters find meaning in the mundane, whether they’re feminists farming inherited land to reap social change, a solitary poet trying “to make sense of the ordinary,” or a formerly straight-A teenager “stripping off” her school subjects and risking Cs to get “below, inside, outside, the other side of the subject at hand.” Through them, Schutzer shows how tangible things touch intangible truths. For example, when Marjorie reflects on her macramé art, made of knots she’s designed so she alone can untangle them, she is also lamenting that her daughter (newly unrecognizable as a teenage “behemoth”) is ultimately unknowable. Many small, brilliant scenes and insights like this one illuminate a larger picture of love and loss.

Schutzer writes beautifully. “Helen blinks and her lids are dark, her face puffy, but her skin is fragile, papery,” Sammy observes near the book’s (and her mother’s) end. “It is her mom, but her mom changing into something like a waterfall; unholdable.” The author’s artistry lies in such elegant observations, and also in her understanding that the story of a terminal illness isn’t only the story of the person who is sick.  Helen’s quickly approaching death sends ripples through all her relationships, provoking old fears and new questions, most of which are unspoken. Joe and Frances resurrect a disagreement about their father’s (accidental? deliberate?) death as they fight about superficial things. Sammy banishes Avery from her bed, sleeping in her childhood room at Helen’s to avoid discussing (or acknowledging) her mother’s decline. To deny the inevitability of death is to refuse the possibility of love, Schutzer seems to be saying, as Sammy observes Darla and her friend Ruth, two adolescent girls who’ve just shared a first kiss. “They think they have discovered something true and real,” Sammy reflects glumly. “But it is only breath, in and out, in and out, and with it the world continues, and without it, it doesn’t.”

For Avery, who fled communal life on The Farm (and her controlling former lover Durga) for a semi-solitary life as a poet, agency is everything. “Ask yourself,” she writes indirectly to Sammy, posing the political and deeply personal question at the heart of this novel in her back-pocket notebook, “does she get to let go/and fall?” Joe answers that question with action, carrying his father’s ghost with him as he carries Helen to help her fulfill her last wish, thereby putting her back in charge of her life.

By anchoring her story even as she transcends it, Schutzer underscores that death is a natural, present, and present-tense process, rather than a fear-clouded experience that takes place in some parallel universe. Spheres of Disturbance resonates with honesty and humanity—perhaps why I found it so helpful and comforting.

Elizabeth Mosier author photoElizabeth Mosier is the author of The Playgroup, part of the Gemma Open Door series to promote adult literacy, My Life as a Girl (Random House), and numerous short stories and essays. She has recently completed a new novel, Ghost Signs. Her website is www.ElizabethMosier.com.

 

THE GALAXY CLUB by Brendan Connell reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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The Galaxy Club cover art. A black-and-white photograph of a man and child

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THE GALAXY CLUB
by Brendan Connell
Chômu Press, 189 pages

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner 

In his novel, The Galaxy Club, Brendan Connell, who was born and raised in New Mexico, reinterprets the landscape of a small New Mexico town, insisting that the comfortable and familiar all of a sudden feel slightly foreign. Connell has published both short fiction and several novels, notably Metrophilias (Better Non Sequitur, 2010) and Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chomu Press, 2012), and in The Galaxy Club, he experiments with making the conventional unconventional. From the first page of The Galaxy Club, Connell plunges his reader into a world that feels like it should be familiar but is riddled with the mythical and supernatural. I kept thinking that I should know this small, dusty town Connell describes—after all, I currently live in a small, dusty town. But Connell’s small town isn’t conventional. In a sense, it can’t be: it’s the late 1960s or early 1970s and the place bristles with sex (or anticipation of it, anyway), drugs, and rock and roll. It’s also soaked in the supernatural, which seems to stem from Connell’s interpretation of the spiritual aura of New Mexico, where he still lives. In the first chapter, which is only a page, Connell tells the reader that the dead “can still smell the colors.” I knew then reading Connell would be an act of true literary disorientation.

Connell’s town is earthly and unearthly at the same time; the story itself is a meandering quest for the world’s end that becomes a search for buried gold along the way. The narrative rambles. Connell forces the reader to backtrack in order to piece things together—which I rather enjoyed doing, once I got used to the rhythm of the book. Early on, the reader meets Blue Boy and his Demon Taming Stick, a dynamic combination that slays dragons in a creek.  The massacre spurs the rest of the dragons to seek revenge. Blue Boy, the son of Ibbie and Theodore Montoya, is made of part of the sky, and he becomes an integral thread to the loose narrative. Blue Boy appears throughout the book all the way to the end. He becomes familiar to the reader, though he does not necessarily help the reader find his or her bearings.

Brendan Connell author photo

Brendan Connell

Blue Boy does whatever he pleases. He does not succumb to anything but his own desires, and he greets the reader with this attitude of self-assurance, something many of the other characters either lack or doubt. The first time the reader meets Blue Boy, he is killing the little dragons in the creek, and the dragons are asking him to stop. Blue Boy completely disregards the pleas from both Smooth Stone Dragon and Little River Dragon. “You’re an ugly fish and I’m going to bring you to Mom and Dad. Mom’s going to cook you for dinner tonight. She’s going to fry you up,” he says. And later: “I don’t care what you are. We’re going to eat you for dinner tonight.”

Near the end of the book, Blue Boy acknowledges that “they say [he] cause[s] trouble,” and that he seems content and confident; he has no fear of the Galaxy Club, the supernatural mafia that wants him killed. In fact, Blue Boy refers to them as “the Galaxy Clowns.” He knows who he is, and his confidence in his identity, even if an impulsive and sometimes troublesome identity, certainly is comforting to the reader amidst the haze of this small town and its numerous residents.

Connell’s story unfolds in alternating first person accounts told by the various characters. The same events, and their back-stories, appear in the various accounts so that the reader’s picture builds from multiple perspectives all at once. We’re faced with different pieces of information that eventually we realize are somehow all related. Some of the characters are real people, others residents of the spiritual world, others typically inanimate, such as Blue Boy’s Demon Taming Stick. The reader becomes fairly well acquainted with Blue Boy, Elmer, Ramona, Alfonso, and Ibbie and Theodore Montoya. The reader recognizes these recurring characters but only in the same way a visitor might recognize a few faces if he or she stays long enough but still does not really know the full story.

Of course, Connell does much more than provide a few familiar faces amidst this disorientation. He grounds his reader in his wandering would-be hero, Cleopatra, a first person narrator who also appears in other characters’ chapters. The Cleopatra chapters are scattered throughout the book in the same haphazard way that Cleopatra wanders around the town, ultimately finding a woman and hidden treasure and only maybe finding what he sets out to find—the world’s end.

Perhaps, what I appreciate most about Connell’s work is how he uses Cleopatra to create a narrative where the form reflects the content. While Cleopatra starts his journey as a hitch-hiker, accepting the ride offered to him, the reader, too, jumps into The Galaxy Club and can only read the perspectives that are offered up as they appear. Moreover, as Cleopatra winds through the community and sifts through the many personalities either directly or indirectly, the winding chapters leave the reader with the exact same task. The reader’s only real touchstones are Cleopatra and reaching the end of the book, and maybe truly reaching the end of the book is like Cleopatra actually finding the world’s end. After all, in the very last sentence of the book, Ramona Roybal, the woman Cleopatra has run off with, says “I just sat there and looked out the window until I heard him coming,” and that “him” is presumably Cleopatra. She’s waiting for Cleopatra. We’re waiting for Cleopatra, and if we wait long enough, then we might as well start the book all over again. The end of the book is just a brief pause in the search, and it is not even told by Cleopatra, who is as close to an anchor as we can get. If he hasn’t really told us that he is through searching, then how can we be sure we have really reached the conclusion of our own search (reaching the book’s end)?

But I’m not sure if I should like Cleopatra or if I can trust him. Not to mention that Cleopatra drinks a lot. He loves cough syrup, and so it makes it that much more complicated to trust him. His thoughts are not always as coherent as I want them to be, but I am nevertheless excited to reach one of his chapters. It should help me find my bearings except when it doesn’t. Cleopatra is the Queen of Egypt, but our Cleopatra is a man wandering around in the 1970s, who nonetheless thinks he is Queen of the Nile; for all the reader knows, his name really isn’t even Cleopatra.

However, as soon as he says, “…it made my lips go dry and I wanted to speak but there wasn’t anything to say. Or maybe there was everything to say and I had all the time in the world, but I didn’t think so. No, eternity would go by like a flash,” I knew ultimately I wouldn’t be able to avoid liking him, and I knew that, despite all of the mythical and fantastic elements, Connell’s work is much more than something meant to disorient me. I think that it should say: I think for all of the supernatural elements that Connell weaves into his narrative, the honesty of Cleopatra, in fact his base humanity, in his more lucid moments is what works for me most. There is Blue Boy, who is made of part of the sky, killing little dragons in the creek, but there is also Cleopatra trying to think of what to say and how to say it; that’s real regardless of the plane of reality.

Cleopatra, thinking about the next part of his journey, thinking about the rumor of the buried treasure, contemplates going back for Ramona: “Sure, I would be a fool to go back, but I had been a fool most of my life and didn’t see any reason to stop now. You have to dream a little if you want to live. Not just remember, but also dream.”

And he goes on to consider the way he has been living his life. He is about to steal a car, to go back for Ramona, to do everything that seems risky. In his raw honesty, albeit an honesty tainted with cough syrup, he muses, “If I had lived safe I’d have probably been some kind of high priest grown fat, some clean shaven man at a desk quietly watching time go by.”

Connell succeeds because, by the end of the book, he makes it clear that there is some inherent value to the journey and to the wait and the accompanying risks. It is the anticipation of the quest, what is next, and the risks that make individuals wade through the blurred personalities and realities and discover a raw honesty that stretches across time and across reality.

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.

INSEL by Mina Loy reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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Insel cover art. A blurry black-and white photograph of a woman's face

INSEL
by Mina Loy
Melville House, 176 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

You, dear reader, consummate seeker of literature in all forms, of voices in all languages, of song and fragment, of tome and flash, of ancient and modern: writers, books, are slipping through your fingers. It isn’t your fault. There’s too much to read. Every other minute, they say, a new genre is born. You can’t, certainly, keep up. The idea of it is absurd. Worse yet, there are other things to do besides reading. After all, it’s nice out, cherry blossoms are swirling in the wind, a vortex of pink feathers alighting the street corner.

Maybe the best thing to do is simplify, streamline the library. Return to the classics after all these years. Read all of Dickens. Run through the American pantheon. Default to Shakespeare, or Edgar Allan Poe.

No? No, of course not. Don’t be silly. There’s no reason to limit oneself. You have to keep trying. Sisyphus lives. His stack of books is growing. His tablet is pregnant with titles. But where will you start, Sisyphus, how will you choose?

The first sentence, of course. The first sentence is telling. It’s the hook, the draw, the hand that shoots the arrow…

Listen: The first I heard of Insel was the story of a madman, a more or less surrealist painter, who although he had nothing to eat, was hoping to sell a picture to buy a set of false teeth.

Mina Loy author photo

Mina Loy

That’s enough, isn’t it? A more or less beguiling opening, if you ask me, an ace in the quiver. But the writer—who? Mina Loy. No, not Myrna Loy, the starlet. Mina. The first I’d heard of her was when the review copy arrived from the publisher, Melville House, whose editors seem insistent on badgering poor Sisyphus. Mina Loy, compatriot of Dalí, Ernst, Man Ray, and Dada, was a poet, painter, designer, and with this book, Insel, a novelist. Loy was a supremely avant-garde thinker who perhaps never quite fit in: she was probably too smart, her mind to fantastic, her legs too peripatetic for the rest of the world. Lunar Baedeker, Loy’s best known work of poetry, lauded by Ezra Pound and others, never quite landed in the canon. A fragment of her moonscape:

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

Insel, which was only published in 1991, posthumously (Loy died in 1966), is Loy’s reckoning with intellectual and emotional loneliness brought on, in part, by a restless, cosmic genius. She never found comfort, not even among the Surrealists.

Critics may not have always interpreted the novel quite this way. The original version, which was published by Black Sparrow Press, is the story of the baffling, contentious friendship between the 50-ish narrator, Mrs. Jones, the Paris representative for Aaron, a New York art dealer, and Insel, a morphine-addicted 30 year-old German artist. Mrs. Jones is transparently Loy, who lived in Paris from 1933 to 1936 as the exclusive agent for Dalí, Giacometti, Gorky, de Chirico, and Magritte on behalf of her son-in-law Julien Levy, who had in 1931 opened a Manhattan gallery. The German artist Richard Oelze is the basis for Insel, who we imagine—by the title, by the force of the narrator’s obsession—is the subject of the book. But last year, the literary scholar Sarah Hayden discovered manuscript pages for an addendum to the text, the “Visitation of Insel,” a new ending, written in poetic scraps of language that puts the main part of the book in a slightly different light. The “Visitation,” which is published here for the first time, offers the reader a sense of Loy’s despair, the isolation of a creative person few could understand. Those people included her daughters Joella and Fabienne, who she portrays as Alda and Sophia in the novel. Having left Paris, and Insel, at the end of the original part of the novel, in the “Visitation,” Mrs. Jones has returned to New York, a bother to Alda and Sophia, who accuse her of mooching off the family business in service of her novel. One senses that they had given her the job of agent in order to get rid of her.

“Aaron,” [Alda] announced, “doesn’t see why he should give you that hundred dollars”—and with that heinous crow I seemed to call up from the depths of so many of my intimates—“Your book!” she sneered. “It’s an excuse [missing word] to get money out of us!”

“You’re no good—never have been any good—” This blank truth struck me with the finality of unconsciousness. It was from very far away in time & space I heard her aggravation hollow out a course for my second childhood.

You wanted the business—we gave you the business—You wanted an apartment—we gave you the apartment and you sell it for nothing & come over here!”

                “But Aaron told me to see it at that price—”

In her despair, Mrs. Jones collapses on the couch and conjures Insel. “Here was my drug addict; divested of those shreds of flesh, easily as an aria relayed across the Atlantic, a recognizable ‘invisibility’ come to visit me.”

At this point, looking back at the main text, the reader has to wonder if Mrs. Jones has been conjuring Insel all along, for she often describes him as “transparent,” “luminous from starvation,” “evaporated,” with an “especial clarity of light,” her own private angel armed with his cosmic rays—this is the milieu of futurist-surrealists, remember—for saving her.

All the while, the book’s plot—indeed, it exists with requisite tensions as a Parisian love story that cannot be—turns on Mrs. Jones trying to save Insel—from drugs, starvation, dissolution, and disinterest in his art. Loy, in her potent skill as a writer, has deflected her own pain onto him. Critically, when she has “healed”—cleaned his filthy suit and gotten him away from the prostitutes he pimps—and fed him—she loses interest. And he with her. When Mrs. Jones speaks like a “normal person”—an art dealer, who commodifies exactly what can’t be given value—he vanishes.

Loy, it seems, could not face the exigencies of regular life. She was above and beyond it—in fact a very lonely place. Do you think she’d mind if we welcomed her back into the terrestrial library?

Nathaniel PopkinCleaver 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.

ELSA by Tsipi Keller reviewed by Lynn Levin

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ELSA
by Tsipi Keller
Spuyten Duyvil,  187 pages

reviewed by Lynn Levin

As I began reading this short novel by Tsipi Keller, I found myself enjoying what I thought was going to be a leisurely experience with chick lit. Nothing too demanding, nothing to worrisome. Elsa, at the start, is as much about the jealousies of girl friendships as it is about the protagonist’s desire for some overdue sex and true romance. About a third of the way into the book, however, the narrative becomes increasingly disturbing as Keller skillfully pitches the fascinating but dislikable protagonist, thirty-nine-year-old Elsa, into a gradually darkening labyrinth of seduction and danger. I so wanted to reach into the story and shake Elsa. “Get out of there while you can!” In the meantime Gary, Elsa’s wealthy middle-aged date, whispers in her ear in a velvet voice, “You’re a fool…So trusting.”

Elsa is the third in Tsipi Keller’s trilogy of psychological novels. The first two were Jackpot and Retelling, which trace the fortunes of women. Elsa calls to mind some of Richard Burgin’s noir fiction. Both writers explore the world of nefarious, but initially engaging, operators who insinuate themselves into the lives of lonely strangers aiming to control or ruin them. Burgin’s characters usually escape their captors. Elsa does not escape Gary.

Tsipi Keller author photo

Tsipi Keller

Elsa Berg is an attractive, sophisticated, and very lonely New York tax attorney, who, while catty and sometimes sour, also regrets her personality defects. “Why can’t she be sweet and generous like some women she occasionally meets, women who are soft-spoken, patient, and tolerant? Why is she so easy to anger, to find fault, with jealousy and resentment always bubbling right below the surface?” One evening she and a girlfriend go to a bar where they happen upon the mysterious and handsome Gary, whom Elsa at first dismisses as too old. After a few weeks of calculated delay, Gary calls and takes her on their initial and only date, picking her up in his Ferrari and swooping her off to his luxurious brownstone. Keller takes her delicious time ramping up the sexual and psychological tension as she allows antagonist Gary to ply the eager but socially klutzy Elsa with booze, a love feast of lamb chops and mashed potatoes, and more liquor. Meanwhile, Elsa makes off-putting comments about a colleague’s crotch, then annoys and even insults Gary.

Elsa’s gaffes and unpredictability startle the reader—such behavior!—and leave Gary more than miffed. Then, again, the reader begins to get the notion that there is something very suspicious about Gary. And it is not just that he is condescending toward her. At one point he clamps his hands tightly around Elsa’s neck, claiming that his hands are cold and he must warm them. Yet once he releases Elsa and calls a truce, she’s all too ready to proceed with their evening. “And yes, she is willing. To make up and forget. Maybe like he said, she is too sensitive…” Keller deploys a close third-person point-of-view that exposes her protagonist’s bitchiness, weirdness, loneliness, neediness, and her tendency to rebuff when she should trust and trust when she should run. Elsa’s reactions made me wonder how often needy people dismiss warning signs in dates and partners.

Shockers abound as Gary leads Elsa into the kitchen, captures her in a spinning net, and leaves her trapped for hours. Eventually he cleans her up and cossets her in a white canopy bed. Thus Elsa allows herself to be pampered and humiliated until events run their fatal course.

Much more than a tale about a smart woman who makes foolish choices, Elsa is a fast-paced, tightly crafted, suspenseful, psychological crime novel that sidles up to the reader, then pounces.

Lynn Levin author photoLynn Levin’s newest books are the poetry collection Miss Plastique (Ragged Sky, 2013), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry, and Birds on the Kiswar Tree (2Leaf Press, 2014), a translation from the Spanish of a collection of poems by the Peruvian Andean poet Odi Gonzales. She is co-author of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press, 2013), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in education/academic books. Her poems, essays, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cleaver, The Hopkins Review, The Smart Set, Young Adult Review Network, and other places. She teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.

THE NO VARIATIONS: THE DIARY OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL by Luis Chitarroni reviewed by Ana Schwartz

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THE NO VARIATIONS: THE DIARY OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL
by Luis Chitarroni
translated by Darren Koolman 
Dalkey Archive Press, 256 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

Because we were late in arriving, because we were late in departing, because we didn’t care that we’d be late, and, above all, because those from whom we waited turned out to be ourselves, which is to say, the others, the ones we called, ‘the slow ones.’ – The No Variations

Readers can only hope to be included in that community, that “we,” for the community described so affectionately here makes this one of the most memorable passages from The No Variations, Luis Chitarroni’s dense and often disorienting new non-novel. The passage appears early in the text, while expectations of narrative continuity still hold purchase. Lateness, in fact, extends hope for a plot, and with its charisma buys patience against the frustrations of plots subsequent absence. Instead of plot, the novel offers personality. The expansiveness and potential inclusivity of this passage pleasurably inscribes the writer himself; yet the same sort of expansiveness can slide easily into solipsism, an overindulgent memoirish quality.

Luis Chitarroni author photo

Luis Chitarroni

The No Variations balances between anecdote and comprehensive narrative. The tension between the two appears as early as the subtitle, which includes two distinctive genres, the diary and the novel. Presumably about the process of finishing, or trying to finish a novel, the text lingers in the vicinity of narrative, very literally “about” a novel, but there is no plot proper to this text. The specter of a plot as the ideal end of these notes makes its absence in the text a frustrating element. Instead, Chitarroni offers vignettes of the protagonist, Nicasio Urlihrt, trying to revive a literary anthology with poems and prose by friends and colleagues. The compilation of these notes makes little sense, however, although it does collate little plots, some more realistic than others, and often narrating the obstacles of everyday life that make literary work so difficult: “There were whole days and nights,” Chitarroni continues, “During which we lost our way…during which we lost our purpose. We bummed around exchanging tales of days gone by, anecdotes, gossip.”

At times these fragments are satisfying and pleasurable. Furthermore, the text’s refusal to neatly organize the diffuse experience of living isn’t a particularly shocking or innovative technique. Instead, what makes the book so compelling is its identification with the protagonist’s sense of frustration of balancing writing and living. Occasionally he glamorizes the writer’s preoccupation with life, with a glow of pyrrhic consolation. He insists, in occasional bursts, that living is more important: “The writer doesn’t really want to write, he wants to be; and in order to truly be, he must face up to the difficult challenge of not writing at all—not even a single line—of not theorizing, of not lifting a finger.” The seduction of the first part of that assertion (that to be is better than to write about being) tends to overshadow the diarist’s assertion that not writing is also difficult. The protagonist goes on to claim that in order to strive to live rather than to write, he “became deaf” to the world around him, obliged himself to ignorance, rather than, presumably, be tempted by the desire to create or represent.

If, for Chitarroni, the distinction between writing life and living it is central, his text from the start sides with writing: it is, after all a diary, and life-writing is thus the ideally professed genre. One technique deployed by the diarist in evading responsibility for writing or failure to write, is to continually point to his use of a pseudonym. Nicasio Urlihrt’s adoption of a publishing name, “Hilaríon Curtis” allows him to claim, with measured if frustrating hilarity, that “although I’m not really a writer, I’ve had many things published in my name…The whys and wherefores of all this escape me, as they would anyone. But I’m not writing this to resolve them.” Perhaps to reconcile his disavowal with his profession, or to suggest a possible reconciliation, the narrator admits on the first page that Nicasio Urlihrt is an anagram for Hilaríon Curtis; it’s hardly difficult to notice then, that these are both anagrams for Luis Chitarroni. The alphabetical acrobatics suggest that the text perhaps really is an experience of real-life-writing, rather than just very close mimicry.

So if the adoption of not-quite-true, reassembled personalities is one way to write life while still living life, and to not let living become an obstacle toward the practice of writing, the prose also takes on the work of remixing and reassembling. Sometimes this happens locally: for example, two paragraphs after reminiscing about his clique’s self-designation as “the slow ones,” the narrator returns to the theme, but with a subtle and important shift in tense: “Because we’ll be late in arriving, because we are loath to depart, because we don’t care that we’ll be late.” The transformation from paste tense to anticipated future describes the present lovingly, the experience of a community loath to move forward. Together, these passages support the claim that yes, to live in the present is more valuable to write about it retrospectively from the future. In a less local register, Chitarroni returns to certain scenes across the course of the novel, and although they’re a little more difficult to identify, relying more heavily on the readers’ memory, the rewards and pleasures of noticing these passages are commensurately great. That pleasure balances the frustrations of searching for narrative, searching for cause and effect: instead, it’s differently pleasurable to identify a theme—several themes—and their variations.

The emotional effectiveness of these moments is in both this kind of recognition within the text and the hope of recognizing yourself in the characters. That double identification is essential in the genre of the “variation,” at least, as practiced by Chitarroni. It is a mode of life-writing that distills personal experience into the blocks of language that comprise it. As time passes, these elements—of a sentence, of a literary clique, or even of the name of an individual—rearrange themselves into new forms while preserving some trace of the original content. The moment of recognition involves the reader insofar as she is compelled to reach back into the elements of her own past, and begin to recognize these characters or these lines as shaping her lived experience beyond the pages of the book. In this way the claims of the text take on a life of their own, and the anticipated characters “will turn out to be ourselves.”

Ana Schwartz author photo

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

THE UNDERSTORY by Pamela Erens reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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THE UNDERSTORY
by Pamela Erens
Tin House Books 169 pages
(originally published by Ironweed Press in 2007)

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

I began Pamela Erens’ The Understory to find the main character, Jack Ronan Gorse, peering inside his coffee cup to reassure himself that he is indeed drinking black coffee. As someone who also only drinks black coffee, I identified with Gorse’s need to ensure the absence of cream and sugar. Of course, Gorse’s habit has an interesting origination; it developed after once finding sour milk in his coffee. This first introduction to Gorse is a telling  characterization of him; he is a man in love with his habits and his routines, yet at the same time, restricted by them, using them to repress his desires for love and companionship. Gorse even goes so far as to insist that he cannot tolerate the company of other people, yet he is drawn to Patrick, a stranger, who he allows to distract his thoughts and upset his routine.

Pamela Erens author photo

Pamela Erens

The quiet of a familiar apartment lined with familiar books. The quiet of the flora and fauna of Central Park and the quiet of a favorite booth in a favorite diner. The quiet of a bonsai room in a Buddhist monastery in Vermont. For Gorse, an ex-attorney, it is this quiet and solitary life among his books, his thoughts, and his routine that sustains him until he faces eviction, homelessness, and his own repressed desires. Gorse finds himself struggling to blend his routine and quiet existence with an imagined intimacy with Patrick, a man Gorse consistently forgets he hardly knows. It is in this tenuous relationship with Patrick, and a flashback to a childhood friendship with a boy named Henry, that Erens demonstrates her aptitude for capturing the essence of relationships that do not materialize or meet an individual’s expectations. Whatever Gorse so desperately wants from Patrick, he cannot get, so he obsesses over small details, even a shard of glass of Patrick’s shoe, or conversations that have yet to occur. Gorse retreats to the Ramble of Central Park and addresses his obsession indirectly, sometimes spying on others and other times simply considering the foliage.

Gorse insists that what resonates the most with him in Central Park are shrubs that grow close to the ground, “the understory, as botanists call it.” It is Gorse’s understory that Erens so compellingly gives her reader, not a backstory or glossy picture of the man everyone around him sees, although that is the picture that Patrick takes of Gorse and later gives to Gorse. The Understory is the story of the meditations and thoughts that might ordinarily be left unnoticed much like the ground-dwelling shrubs of Central Park.

Erens makes beautiful what is so painful: a man’s obsession with routine and his struggle to find a place for himself. In addition to fluid and moving writing, Erens’ form reflects her content so that the reader feels as Gorse does, comparing and contrasting his existence in New York City  to his time at a monastery in Vermont. The novel is organized by alternating chapters, Gorse’s life before entering the monastery and his life at the monastery, until a final chapter that brings the two experiences together. Appropriately, the chapters that describe Gorse’s life before entering the monastery are longer, winding pieces that describe Gorse’s own winding routines, while the chapters that occur at the monastery are shorter, more minimalistic, and more incisive in their reflections, perhaps to reflect the minimalistic feelings of a Buddhist monastery. The novel pushes between the lines of one man’s meditations on his existence and the mystery of his current situation.

Without much pretension, Erens also skillfully incorporates numerous literary and philosophical references. The detailed descriptions of Gorse’s routine combined with these references allow the reader to understand Jack Gorse and all his thoughts. In imagining what he will say to the judge to defend himself from eviction, Gorse muses:

Your Honor, Locke wrote that what gives a man a right to property is that he has mixed his labor with that property. Hegel added that when a man exercises his will upon a thing, he makes that thing a part of himself.”  And he continues, “Should only geniuses, only people who offer a verifiable brilliance to the world, be allowed a life among books? Thoreau said that it would please him to imagine a government that could tolerate the existence of a few men who wished to live aloof from it, ‘not meddling with it, nor embraced by it’.”

For Gorse, it is natural to imagine his solitary existence in the context of heavyweight philosophers.

However, Erens does not simply write a man’s meditation on his life. Erens demonstrates that routines, even meditations are temporal. At some point, the actions that reflect the true self must bubble up to the surface, shocking everyone involved. The ending is just that—a shock. A character I felt I knew so well does something neither he nor I can imagine, and it is at the novel’s conclusion that Erens makes clear the full extent of the damage of self-repression.

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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 WORLD’S SMALLEST BIBLE by Dennis Must and DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA by Joan Chase, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE WORLD’S SMALLEST BIBLE
by Dennis Must
Red Hen Press, 232 pages

DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA
by Joan Chase
NYRB Classics (new edition), 215 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

 

GROWING UP, MID-CENTURY

Childhood is a kind of endlessly swelling pregnancy; the womb stretches and through the amniotic fluid of rooms and voices, odors and faces, the adult world becomes slowly traceable yet still distant, incomprehensible. Once in a while it ruptures and the child is forced to “grow up fast.” Otherwise, it’s the child who must give birth to her adult self. 

But perhaps I’m oversimplifying: for every child, eventually, will have to negotiate the various thresholds to the adult world and will do so not in a linear progression, but rather in some sort of prolonged iterative process of seeking and receiving, receiving and seeking, a rain shower that comes and goes, once in a while revealing sun. And society has erected its own regiment of boundaries, some known, some unexpected; almost all of these require some kind of an appointment with sex or death.

Such are the haunting conditions in which we emerge as full grown members of our species that we come to realize, though often not until it’s too late, that the adults that shepherd us can also do us harm. At best, one escapes with only ache—the nagging heartfall of mortality—at worst, what? Suicide, despair?

This inquiry underlies two rather mesmerizing novels, Dennis Must’s The World’s Smallest Bible, just out from Red Hen Press, and Joan Chase’s 1983 During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, in a new edition from New York Review Classics. Both books portray children—Must’s Ethan and Jeremiah and Chase’s Celia, Jenny, Katie and Anne—in mid-20th century rural America, places only a couple hundred miles apart on the cusp of suburbanization and demographic change. And both are searching books about people trying figure out the puzzle of existence while being watched upon by the overbearing monsters of death and sex. With little plot in either novel, there is rather a heightened sensory experience—a debt the authors owe to Faulkner—a lush world to breathe in instead of merely to read about.

There is no innocent 1950s Middle America here, neither on the northeastern Ohio farm where Chase’s book is set nor in Hebron, Pennsylvania, where Jeremiah and Ethan grow up. Their father—Papa—is an alcoholic skirt chaser, who drives Mama to attempt suicide, their aunt a stripper at the Elks Club. The annual Hebron carnival is an invitation to visit the Bearded Lady and her associates. You might lose your virginity there, as Jeremiah does, but beware the clap!

The boys are about ten and eight when their mother orders the younger Jeremiah back into the children’s bedroom. She’s had it sharing her bed with her son, just another reminder of the man who’s supposed to be there and isn’t. Ethan, she says, is in charge of the boy now. But Jeremiah is the more spirited child, aggressive and sexually charged. He declares his independence early, leaving Ethan to observe his mother’s descent into madness. Rose Mueller—Mama—has lost the attention of her husband; she’s confused by middle age, boredom, and her own uncertain sexuality. To get her husband’s attention, she starts acting and dressing like one of his floozies, a woman named Lee Ann Daugherty, splitting her personality, and all of a sudden destroying the world the boys thought they inhabited. Must delivers this shift with alacrity—it comes upon the reader as is does the children with a powerful, blindsiding force. “Papa made love to one and ridiculed the other,” says Ethan, who narrates Must’s story. “It’s as if I had opened my closet door and Mama stood there, figuratively naked, handing me a note she’d written.”

New book, Ethan. Throw the old one away.
Nothing is what you think it is or was.
I’m incapable of playing the role of yours and Jeremiah’s mama any longer. That woman died long ago. I don’t know who I am. I’m somebody who sleeps with your father and prepares your and his dinners. I wash and iron your clothes. I clean this house. But please don’t ask me anything else about who I am. I simply don’t know.
(italics in the original)

For all the she is caught between the traditional and the modern, Rose Mueller could easily be just another of Chase’s “Aunts,” the five daughters, all in their 30s and 40s, still in the orbit of their mother, the fierce and sometimes forgiving matriarch, Gram. The women—Aunts May, Libby, Rachel, Grace, and Elinor—were raised on the farm Gram had bought after receiving a surprise inheritance; Libby, the mother of Celia and Jenny, lives there with her husband, a butcher named Dan. The women had grown up, in the world of Ohio farm country, rich, with property and horses. Gram hadn’t—she was sent to work at eleven—a fact she, the “Queen of Persia,” lords over her soft daughters.

Celia and Jenny and their cousins Katie and Anne, the daughters of Grace, roam as a collective across the house and fields, chunks of which the indifferent Gram keeps selling off. The four of them—the collective “we” narrating the story—bounce among the territory their mothers, Gram, the silent prick Grandad, who knows only to keep tending the cows, and their own internal, searching world, laced with emergent desire, and awareness of themselves as women. “Our mothers wouldn’t allow us to talk to like Gram though they themselves did when they were mad enough,” they say. “When we were alone we did it for fun.”

It made us feel bold and powerful. In the same way we played strip poker; it was just something that came over us, the wanting to play, the knowing we were going to, only putting it off for a little, so we could feel the excitement working in us. We were breathing hard, trembling even, when Katie threw the crumpled deck among us. Jenny might say, “Maybe we shouldn’t.” But there was no stopping us.

Will they turn out more like the hard but utterly capable Gram or like one of their confused mothers—or, still possibly, their lustrous Aunt Elinor, a New York advertising executive and recent acolyte of Christian Science? As Anne then Celia become sexually active, the girls have to negotiate conflicting feelings of passion and the need for control. Should they run wild and risk pregnancy or settle down and risk boredom? Either way, they’re soon to find out that adulthood demands bewildering compromise that can so easily lead to despair.

As the girls collectively and individually try to figure all this out, Ethan, the narrator of The World’s Smallest Bible, keeps watching, measuring the distance between Papa and the next door neighbor, a dreamer named Stanley Cuzack, trying to figure out who will be. While Papa numbs the pain in town, Cuzack builds, first a found object sculpture garden then a massive luge course to “shoot the moon” then a perpetual motion machine he thinks will make him immortal. “Stanley sang too,” says Ethan,

But he crooned for immortality in the A&P encyclopedia. Papa warbled for dames. A male bird never sated, willing to die, nay drown, in the Big Run of Lust.

Stanley’s quest captivates Ethan and their friendship becomes the heart of this story. “Cuzack is dogging something more intoxicating than poontang is to you and Papa,” he tells Jeremiah. Once Cuzack gets the perpetual motion machine going, it “won’t ever stop. Ever. After Papa, Mama, even you and me are long gone.”

Jeremiah thought awhile, then like he was thinking out loud, said, “That’s what I want to be.”
“What?”
“What the Polack’s buildin’.”
He rolled over and pulled the comforters nearly over his head. “Somethin’ that’s ain’t ever gonna die.”

It’s mortality, all these children discover, that eats at the adults in their midst. On the farm, the girls must confront it: Aunt Grace, the mother of Katie and Anne, is dying of cancer. When glamorous Aunt Elinor, with her sharp clothes and colorful jewelry and determined good humor, comes for an extended stay, she’s there to cure her sister. After all, “Christian Science was a science of health, it was the power of God revealed and demonstrated. It would help all of us, as it had helped her; and it was going to cure Aunt Grace completely.”  Grace will become Elinor’s perpetual motion machine.

Of course, we, like our wisened narrators, know how all this will end. But the turmoil generated in the brew of sex and death that bubbles so ferociously inside each of us makes these two books such revealing mirrors, not only on middle America, circa 1955, but on our own lives today. More so, in the surprise tragic endings of both books, the writers seem to want to say the earlier and hotter our sexuality burns the harder it is later to face the inevitable compromise and despair.

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.

MORE THAN YOU KNOW by Melissa Malouf reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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MORE THAN YOU KNOW
by Melissa Malouf
Dalkey Archive Press, 240 pages

Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

Melissa Malouf’s More Than You Know intrigued and perplexed me right from its disorienting start. I’d barely landed on the first page when I fell down a rabbit role with narrator Alice Clark, chasing characters I hadn’t yet met: Hannah Jensen and her husband Bradley, always called Mr. Jensen; Barbara Delaney from Las Vegas; the “three dead young men,” Eric Langland, Richard Stone and Darrell Farnsworth, grad students in English and American Literature at UC Riverside. Unmoored (by early retirement) from teaching at a California community college, Alice doesn’t decide so much as she is compelled to travel cross country to Vermont to confront the Jensens and her role in her friends’ deaths. Through Las Vegas, Cheyenne, Omaha, and Peoria to the Jensens’ home in Chittenden, Vermont, Alice pursues a psychological mystery for which the only way forward is back. Her “mad undertaking” is a puzzle she puts together in real time with the reader, a year after her road trip—and decades after her loss. “Untimely deaths is a phrase one could use to make a tidy story of it,” she says. “If one had never met the Jensens.”

Melissa Malouf author photo

Author Melissa Malouf

But this story is anything but tidy. The novel’s odd, taunting title aptly describes not only the mystery at its heart, but also the instability of any story’s meaning through time. Like the old black and white photograph of the grad school friends that “tells [Alice] something different each time [she] looks at it,” interpreting Malouf’s story is a matter of choosing from a set of literary tropes that point in different directions. Is Alice, who sometimes slips into distancing 2nd-person voice, the fragmented protagonist of a trauma narrative, seeking integration? Is she like the hearth-centered females of 19th– and 20th-century domestic fiction, settling for home ownership while secretly pining for “priestly” Eric? The solitary scholar stand-in for the madwoman in the attic? A contemporary version of the Victorian innocent lured into the clutches of charming villains? An unwitting resident in a haunted house, its walls embodying regret and grief? A guest in an Agatha Christie country manor, presumed a suspect if not a victim? Shifting these signposts seems to be part of Malouf’s point. More Than You Know reinterprets the linguistic puzzle-making of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, and reproduces the frustrating and rewarding experience of learning to read: deciphering words in changing contexts, embracing and abandoning patterns as clues.

Alice is a literary code reader—so she’s alarmed by the lurid victim tales Hannah invents as the two women play the board game, “Clue.” And when Hannah shows up at her house one night claiming she’s been raped, Alice studies Mr. Jensen’s diary for evidence. But like Hannah’s husband, the diary is indecipherable: “There is no discursive writing inside, no revelations or reflections, no detailed memories, no stories per se,” she says. “There are only our names—Alice, Eric, Darrell, Richard, Hannah—in various couplings and combinations.” Later, when Eric’s body is found in the Chittenden Reservoir, his coat pockets stuffed with heavy volumes, Alice looks to the sunken books’ titles for explanation. For Alice, literary “weight” has figurative and literal significance.

Reading a literary novel set at a college is like any inner-circle game: the more familiar the references, the greater the pleasure. And though the mystery involving the charismatic, creepy Jensens keeps the reader turning pages, the novel’s somewhat hasty ending reminded me of “Clue,” in that the solution is never as satisfying as the search.

But there’s another, larger, question of identity that Malouf pursues here. Is Alice “always just Alice,” as Hannah (whose palindrome name is the same word read forward or backward) insists, and her potential pre-determined by her past? Or can she change her trajectory to revisit “the life [she is] not leading [that] sits on [her] shelves and in [her] cupboards, an unwound clock”?

“Here is a storybook tale,” Alice reflects in the first pages—and near the last moments—of her story, from a future that includes a friend (Barbara) and a child (Constance, her ward) she’s brought forward from the past. “One about a world where these things could have helped me to mend the gaps that kept me close to Eric but not close enough. It’s a busy little world, abuzz with patchings-up and re-assemblings and timely rescues. With tinkerings that don’t manage to stop either the clock or the sickle but do their noisy best to stave them off….I want to end up in such a place, to live out my days there, mending, not dreaming.”

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward,” the White Queen says to Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Indeed. For Melissa Malouf’s Alice Clark, remembering is also the act of rewriting her future.

Elizabeth Mosier author photoElizabeth Mosier is the author of The Playgroup (Gemma Open Door) and My Life As a Girl (Random House). She has recently completed a new novel, Ghost Signs.

DEPT. OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill reviewed by Michelle Fost

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DEPT. OF SPECULATION
by Jenny Offill
Alfred A. Knopf, 177 pages

Reviewed by Michelle Fost

Here’s an idea for a book party. Hold it in the Guggenheim. Set up an exhibit of all the pages of the book. Frame each page and display them in sequence, ending at the bottom of the ramp. Enlarge the pages 10X the size of the Borzoi Book edition pages, because the first line of the book is “Antelopes have 10X vision, you said” but also so that it’s possible for many viewers to be reading a single page. Hope for crowds. Leave the walls behind the framed pages white, to call attention to the writer’s use of white space as well as the visual appeal of the blocks of text in this accomplished second novel. See if anyone at the bottom of the ramp wonders if the experience of the novel is like what could happen if, say, Rothko had created a series of paintings to be viewed sequentially and that expressed an artist’s emotionally fraught love story. Or maybe if Terrence Malick created an exhibit of still photographs that told a similar story.

The passages that make up Jenny Offill’s 46 brief chapters in her new novel are visually and tonally striking. Still, the astonishing emotional pitch and compositional elegance of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation snuck up on me. Sure, block paragraph after block paragraph is beautifully crafted. The writing is always sharp, crisp, careful. But her chosen subject matter is risky in its seeming self-absorption. Struggling writers beware: you may not appreciate following the woes of a Brooklyn writer who seems to have a nice enough position teaching writing, a kind husband, a healthy daughter, good friends, a sister who looks out for her, an agent in the wings awaiting her new manuscript, and lots of time to do yoga. What’s she whinging about?

Jenny Offill author photo

Jenny Offill

That’s not to say that our protagonist doesn’t have her challenges. Her story is one of wanting first of all to become an “art monster,” then falling in love. The story line is then fairly simple. She gets married. She has a child. Her husband cheats on her with a much younger woman. Rage. Rage. Rage. Then, finally: a repairing of the marriage, while still being able to be an art monster. What makes this novel so satisfying?

For me, Jenny Offill has created something that feels only possible in language—it truly is a work of written art. She writes a consciousness into being. Here she builds character a little the way David Markson did in his wonderful novel, Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Our narrator calls out to Berryman and Rilke, and we begin to know what it’s like to see the world as she does. Sometimes I felt I was too close up to this consciousness—remember the Antelopes with their 10X vision of the novel’s first sentence. We seem to be looking through a microscope at the narrator’s thoughts. “Memories are microscopic,” the narrator tells us. She can be tender as well. Of her baby: “That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.” On falling in love: “I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.” Joan Didion said in a Paris Review interview that writing is a hostile act because the writer is pulling the reader into the writer’s dreams. As Didion puts it, “Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.” Offill tricks us; we’re there.

I’m glad I stayed. The narrator instructs us in point of view: “It’s important to note the POV switch here.” Offill uses point of view to a beautiful end. It’s not just technique; it’s story. Point of view perfectly communicates the narrator’s dissociation when her marriage is in crisis. Style and point of view, like a camera, reproduce the narrator’s shifts in mindset, perhaps the way the French doctor Hippolyte Baraduc in 1887 in the narrator’s telling “found that the same emotion would make the same kind of impression upon the photographic plate, but that different emotions produced different images. Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.”

Didion has written of seeing pictures that for her have a shimmer. “You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer,” she says. “You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet.” She writes of the pictures having a grammar. She says that with her novel Play It As It Lays, she wanted “to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all.” It’s my feeling that Didion, writing about her craft, cuts close to what Offill achieves. Even if the surface details—the biography in miniatures—make us restless and impatient with the privileged narrator who doesn’t grasp how good she has it and seems to have little interest about much that’s going on in the larger world around her, the story transcends its smallness with its truths. Not only is the book filled with white space, it also has an emotional core. I think Offill does more than create an enclosed world that is beautiful in the way of a snow globe. Through its artistry, the novel got me thinking about how and why a self closes off and opens up to the world.

Michelle Fost author photo

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

THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL by Elizabeth Cohen reviewed by Michelle Fost

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­THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL
by Elizabeth Cohen
Other Press, 256 pages

Reviewed by Michelle Fost

Like so many of the characters in Elizabeth Cohen’s fifteen incisive stories in The Hypothetical Girl, Emily in the title story is truly suffering. Her affliction is contemporary. Girl meets guy online, falls hard for him, and is rejected by him before their relationship ever has a chance to develop out in the real world. What happens when people connect online, on sites like Letsgethooked.com, Flirtypants.com, and Yummybaby.com? Many of the stories have a sad, humorous and twisted logic. Emily—who meets Nick on Matchmaker.com—walks right into the new anxiety. “I think I miss you,” she says to Nick. “Can one miss someone one has never met?” Nick’s answer (“You can, but it is ridiculous”) is devastating. In a way, it is a simple case of unrequited chat love. Nick does not see Emily as a real person, only as an online chat partner. Cohen captures his problematic point of view: “‘You are not an actual girl,’ he wrote. ‘You are hypothetical.’” Emily’s feelings for Nick, a guy locked away in the online universe, lead her to experience herself—not Nick!—as less and less real. She is overwhelmed by her feelings for a person who is real but not real; out in the world, she is fading away.

In another story, “Dog People,” the oddness of the web arrives in its absence. Clarissa and Harry meet while walking their dogs in the park. Clarissa chats on Facebook with a friend about this budding relationship. “Oh wow,” the friend writes. “A real-world man. You don’t hear much about that anymore.” In this story, though, the ending that takes place in the real world has the feel of online. The man disappears in a way that is surprisingly swift and complete, like the closing of a tab.

Elizabeth Cohen author photo

Elizabeth Cohen

Again and again, in this collection, Cohen maps out the strange terrain of her characters’ travels online. Her characters set out full of hope—intrepid and romantic explorers. Often, it doesn’t go well. “Blame it on the Internet,” says a therapist in “Limerence.” In this tale, a guy named Larry is suffering from something that feels huge but unnameable: “It was like a drug but it was not a drug.” He had connected with Louise online, but she stopped writing. Cohen writes, “There was no minute that went by when he did not want to check his cell phone or his e-mail inbox, or rake over the text messages in the Louise file.” Larry is finally helped when his therapist finds a name for what is wrong with him. The therapist says he has a disorder called Limerence, “an obsessive, unrequited love.” Larry’s problem sounds like something that could happen to anyone, online or offline. In this case, having a name to hang onto makes all the difference for Larry, and for a little while he runs around saying the word over and over again, taking pleasure in the sound of it, relieved by the validation of his suffering as real. Cohen writes with panache about the very particular afflictions of the web that arise when the division between real and not real becomes so murky.

The fifteen tales are humane, if dark. Cohen maintains an edgy humor while looking clear eyed at what often goes wrong when her characters take risks. I found myself thinking that Cohen’s accomplishment is related to an adventure remembered by the protagonist of one of the stories, Alana in “Life Underground.” Alana recalls a childhood family trip into a cave. The tour guide showed them glittering, beautiful stalactites and stalagmites. He also brought them into an unlit chamber in the cave, letting them experience “real darkness, actual darkness, rare in our world.” Cohen’s stories, written with sharp humor and intelligence, are attuned to both light and dark.

Michelle Fost author photo

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

THE DISMAL SCIENCE by Peter Mountford reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE
by Peter Mountford
Tin House Press, 275 Pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

It seems fitting that Peter Mountford’s novel, The Dismal Science, is being published just as certain global emergent markets—Brazil, Turkey, India, South Africa, and Indonesia, nicknamed by investors the “Fragile Five”—are failing. As the book opens, in 2005, at a World Bank conference in Washington, DC, Vincenzo D’Orsi, a Milan-born, 24 year veteran Bank economist, is leading a panel discussion on the state of global markets. The subtext of his introductory talk, in the woozy gestalt of Bank and IMF bureaucrats:

Politics had matured, capitalism was working. Stability had taken hold and the emerging markets were now actually emerging.

“It’s almost on autopilot,” says Vincenzo.

Vincenzo is speaking of himself, too. Professionally, he’s peaked, after a long climb through the bank’s politicized bureaucracy; fundamentally allergic to simplistic, ideologically fraught rhetoric, he’s grown bored of spouting the corporate line. He knows he could give the same speech next year and the year after that, endlessly collecting a bloated paycheck and playing speed chess with his best friend Walter, a Washington Post reporter, on the weekends.

But like those emerging markets today, Vincenzo is about to send himself over the edge. At 54, he is placeless, neither Italian nor American, and only vaguely accustomed to Washington (despite having run World Bank programs in Latin America for years, he struggles with Spanish). His wife Cristina is dead, the victim of a terrible accident, and his relationship with their 23 year old daughter Leonora is strained. Vincenzo loves Leonora more than anyone in the world, but their lives are diverging, leaving him essentially alone.

Having dramatically quit the Bank, Vincenzo is free; anything is possible. But he stares out at the world with overpowering ambivalence toward everything but his daughter and his daughter’s rat-faced boyfriend. Soon after leaving the Bank, he finds himself in a New York hotel room during an early winter storm, forced to consider his future.

What he’d never done was stop advancing himself, steadily, gradually, upward within the architecture of the Bank. Now he was supposed to put that energy toward some other thing. The great second act. Or was he onto his third act, now? Alas, it was probably the third act. The finale.

He needed a new fire, a fresh purpose to his days. Instead, he had a hissing heater by the window of his well-appointed hotel room. And he had those massive snowflakes, too, a hundred million delicate and crystalline lattices suspended peacefully between gusts, like a sea of glowing spirits floating aimlessly between waves—but then they’d all spin wildly away from the window as if gathering for a tsunami.

Vincenzo follows in a long line of melancholic and disillusioned middle aged male characters in existential crisis. In certain ways, there’s not much new here: “What he wanted was sad and predictable: a younger woman, not too much younger, but enough to be truly beautiful, with whom he could he could settle at his farm in Piedmont and pass his remaining years in peace, tending to the olive trees.”

But Mountford’s portrayal of Vincenzo is utterly vivid, overcoming, as good writers do, trope with particularity. Vincenzo breathes so completely, most fully when he’s grappling with his beloved Leonora (the father-daughter dynamic here is exquisite), that the reader is liable to imagine the testy, forlorn man is sitting on his lap. Pat him on his bald head, he needs comforting.

One can’t help but be reminded of the Italian actor Toni Servillo in this past fall’s La Grande Belleza. Servillo plays a onetime novelist and longtime playboy, who at 60 can no longer quite connect. Like Vincenzo, Sevillo’s Jep Gambardella lives in relative opulence, but to no effect. Even his oldest friends leave him cold. But Jep has something Vincenzo doesn’t: a city—his city, the eternal city—Rome. Jep turns to Rome as perhaps we all seek out a measure of the eternal to soften the inevitable decline. Vincenzo, on the other hand, seems to have nothing. He pretends to fall in love with a different city of high elevation, La Paz, but that’s really in an effort to get laid.

As he struggles with his own desire and indeed his daughter’s future, Vincenzo comes to resemble perhaps the most remarkable of literature’s melancholic men, Lampedusa’s Don Fabrizio, the Leopard. (It may be that Italian men have a lock on this role.) Both men struggle, it seems, with a world that goes on without them. Their reaction is rarely graceful, and often self-destructive; even the Leopard, the wisest of men, is the often the cause of his own suffering.

Yes, Don Fabrizio had certainly had his worries those last two months; they had come from all directions, like ants making for a dead lizard. Some had crawled from crevices of the political situation; some had been flung on him by other people’s passions; and some (these had the sharpest bite) had sprung up within himself, from his irrational reactions…

One might easily substitute Vincenzo here for Don Fabrizio. Vincenzo, who reacts viscerally to fundamentalism, breathes in disorder. His antidote, perhaps counterintuitively, has long been the hyperrationalism of economics. Now, after throwing away his job, his every move feels irrational. In the spiraling out, he confounds all those in his path, including himself. But is he, finally, living? If auto-pilot’s been turned off, and the driver has taken his hand off the steering wheel, where exactly is he going?

Vincenzo, deep in confusion, has no idea. Mountford is too honest to say otherwise. We each of us are only wherever it is that we are; one can’t be ambitious and utterly sanguine all at once—and anyway, only time can sort it out, if in fact that is what time does. “There would not be angels spreading their majestic wings at the conclusion,” he writes. “There had been only this—the space left between where he’d been and where he would emerge again.”

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 OLD PRIEST by Anthony Wallace reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE OLD PRIEST
by Anthony Wallace
University of Pittsburgh Press
2013 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, 170 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

“Let’s leave Limit,” says Anna to her husband Phil, the narrator of Anthony Wallace’s story “Snow behind the door.” Limit is a fictional New Jersey town near Atlantic City and a metaphor for the physical and emotional borders that confine Phil and the other protagonists in this searing, surprising collection. Phil and Anna want to escape—their neighborhood is in decline, the neighbor’s dog won’t stop barking—but at what cost? To what end? What’s keeping them?

What’s begging them past the border?

Phil and Anna could leave. She suggests they open a restaurant in an old industrial town in upstate New York that’s “just begging for this kind of thing.” But Phil’s grandmother Rose is dying; they can’t leave her, not yet, anyway. He needs her too—as he listens to her own stories that wend the line between escape and acceptance. Ruth’s stories—and the stories, places, and myths that hover over other characters in this collection—exert a kind of invisible, perhaps even imagined, influence over their lives. We imprison ourselves, Wallace seems to say, in memory and habit.

In “The City of Gold,” fiftysomething Charlie has dragged his nineteen year old girlfriend Amber, the narrator of the story, from Atlantic City to New Mexico, where he imagines he’ll get work in an Indian casino. (The casinos in this book, windowless places of escape, inevitably imprison the characters in dead end lives. Phil works at a casino called the Bastille, “the irony of that name long since lost.”) Since she was sixteen, Charlie has kept Amber under his total control; he has given her a “good life” in exchange for her freedom. While they’re waiting to see Charlie’s contact at the casino, Amber sees an opportunity to flee; as with two other stories in the collection, “Have you seen this girl?” and “The unexamined life,” escape comes in the form of a surprising sexual encounter.

Here is the narrator Christine stepping across a threshold in “Have you seen this girl?”:

Then a door opens and I’m out on the fire escape with Darcy, the sky in flames behind the blackened rooftops. The dog on its length of rope blinks, looks up at me, blinks again.

“Hey,” Darcy says, and brushes the velvet-covered back of her hand against my arm, the side of my face, the ends of my hair.

“Hey,” I say back. “Want to go someplace? A look, something, the architecture of her face.

“Sure,” Darcy says. “Where to?”

She takes her gloves off, one arm then the other.

“Let’s get lost,” I say. “Let’s just get so lost—”

Sex and drugs, indeed, infiltrate Wallace’s various borderlands; they serve as the means and form of escape, and, of course, entrapment. In the title story of the collection, “The Old Priest,” a 2013 Pushcart Prize winner suffused with existential Catholicism, an encounter traps the narrator in an endless paralyzing purgatory of sexual confusion and uncertainty. In some other imagined Catholic reality, the priest, behind the confession box, might relieve him the burden. But this priest, who knows the border territory all too well, and the narrator are locked in an unspoken battle of will and shame.

Wallace’s protagonists seem to alternate between paralysis and determination; his skill lies in meting out both kinds of characters—and in convincing the reader how closely they’re aligned, perhaps he might say two sides of the same coin.

Nathaniel Popkin author photo Cleaver 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 GRAVEYARD by Marek Hłasko reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE GRAVEYARD
by Marek Hłasko (1956)
in the first English translation by Norbert Guterman (1959)
release December 3, 2013
Melville House, 140 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin 

The moment of truth in this book of deceit is treated in a most unusual way: it isn’t treated at all. Or more precisely: it isn’t even needed. The consequences for Franciszek Kowalski, the protagonist of Marek Hłasko’s unforgettable 1956 novel The Graveyard, indeed for all of humanity, are damning enough.

Marek Hłasko author portrait

Portrait of Marek Hłasko (1934-1969) by Zbigniew Kresowaty

Slender Citizen Kowalski had fought bravely in the underground in 1945; after receiving a nearly fatal chest wound, his faith in international socialism had willed him to live. Now, at 48, the sober Kowalski is a proud Communist Party member and a factory manager in a Polish city. One night, he runs into a comrade he hasn’t seen in years. The old fighters set off to a bar to reminisce, and despite himself Kowalski gets drunk. On his way home early the next morning, Kowlalski inadvertently insults two young police officers, and without explanation they have him locked up for the night.

The earnest Kowalski can’t understand what’s happening. “Under arrest?” he asks. “What for?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No,” Franciszek said resolutely. He came close to the railing and put his hands on it. “I do not know. I remember that I somehow flew off the handle, but it seems to me that’s no good reason for keeping me locked up all night.”

“No good reason?” the sergeant drawled. “And what about the things you shouted? Don’t you remember what you shouted?”

The three of them stared at him, and Franciszek suddenly shriveled…“No,” Franciszek said after a while. He passed his hand over his forehead. “I don’t remember.”

Franciszek shrivels and you, reader, shiver. “It’s those words we’re interested in,” says the sergeant. Kowalski has entered level one of totalitarian hell. Outrage is followed by remorse, self-approbation, despair, and bewilderment. “Each one of us imagines he didn’t do anything,” a stranger tells Kowalski, in the drunk tank. “Each one of us somehow thinks he is innocent.”

Hłasko, who was forced to publish The Graveyard and other works while in exile (his books were banned by the Polish government), was masterful in revealing the levers of psychological manipulation at work in a totalitarian society. By the next day, Kowalski is convinced of his guilt. No longer worthy of his membership in the Party, he decides he must prostrate himself before his factory’s Party tribunal. This will be his moment of truth, a chance to cleanse himself and rebuild his standing. But what is this tribunal? An inane and arbitrary body, a farce.

Now stripped of his Party membership, Kowalski finds himself on the relentlessly gray, rain beaten streets of the city. “He raised his head and breathed in the air with all his strength,” says Hłasko;

there was a lump of steel in his lungs. He walked on, occasionally stumbling; he stared at the sky—it was better, easier this way. An insipid moon was drifting over the roofs; the darkness grew thicker and thicker, a clammy, impenetrable darkness which choked the sickly stars and he crowded city. A military patrol tramped by, the heels clattering. The moon suddenly dropped out of sight behind a dirty cloud; the soldiers walked ahead, staring apprehensively into the damp darkness.

Kowalski walks on—into the graveyard that was his faith in communism, his faith in humanity. He seeks out his comrades from the underground. They’ll vouch for him, he thinks, but one after the other has been destroyed by the “fear you’ve got to live with, constantly, without interruption, from morning until night.” Each one is more paranoid, more wary of the police, more afraid. Each one after the other has grown more distant from the idealistic days of the war.

Poor Franciszek buckles under the acute disillusionment; Hłasko makes his despair a metaphor for the emptiness of the regimes of the Soviet bloc. But his power as a writer lies in the precision and the particularity of a single man’s story as it unfolds in a single devastating moment. As a reader, this is the great reward, as it is with so much of the literature from Eastern Europe now being published—often for the first time in English—by Melville House, Archipelago, and New York Review Books: a beguiling glimpse at human beings drawn to the edge of existential possibility and then, so it seems, pushed some more.

Nathaniel Popkin author photo Cleaver 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.

A CONVERSATION WITH NATHANIEL POPKIN by Roberta Fallon

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Lion Leopard cover art. Family crest-like artwork of two lions holding flags against a golden background

A CONVERSATION WITH AUTHOR NATHANIEL POPKIN
by Roberta Fallon

Nathaniel Popkin’s new novel LION AND LEOPARD is set in early nineteenth Century Philadelphia, and features historical figures such as Charles Willson Peale, Raphaelle Peale, and the German painter John Lewis Krimmel. A historical incident sets the plot in motion—a mysterious death at a mill pond— and the novel’s descriptions are so earthy you can almost smell the cowpaths. Yet Popkin says Lion and Leopard is not historical fiction but rather a contemporary piece that deals with universal themes of originality, duplicity, family, friendship, power struggles and unexpected twists of fate. Indeed, the dialogue-rich writing uses slang that you might overhear on the streets today. And the issues are familiar. I sat down with Nathaniel earlier this month to ask him about the book.

[Editor’s note: You can preview a sample chapter of Lion and Leopard, “The Dig“, in Cleaver Issue No. 1.]

How did you get the idea for Lion and Leopard? It’s such a Philadelphia book, and such a Philadelphia art world story.

I was reading Gary Nash’s First City, which deals with characters in early Philadelphia, including Krimmel and George Lippard. I became interested in both. Both die tragically at the height of their careers. I also read Anneliese Harding’s biography, John Lewis Krimmel. Krimmel was thirty-two when he died. In his paintings he captured the street as it is, all types of people. No American had ever done that before, and I felt a connection to him. In 1821, he’s elected president of the Society of American Artists and then he gets a commission to paint a major historical painting on William Penn; his career is taking off, and on July 15, 1821 he dies, drowns. I knew I wanted to turn it this into fiction.

What are your other influences?

Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, a novel that opens with a drowned painter. It’s a first person narrative about a lost art world. My influences tend to be literary, not historic. A wide range of other books, including Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, influenced this one.

Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale walking up stairs

Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale I), Charles Willson Peale,, 1795
Philadelphia Museum of Art

How did you put the story together? 

I didn’t quite understand the connection between Peale and Krimmel’s death until I went to Adam Levine, the keeper of the city’s water history, and he helped me figure out where Krimmel drowned. It was literarily just up the lane from Peale’s farmhouse Belfield, which still exists. So I saw the proximity. Then, in reading Peale’s journal, where he details all kinds of things from farm inventories to conflicts with his children, I discovered the pages of Peale’s journal for the dates around Krimmel’s death were missing. No mention of the death of a rising star, who he certainly knew. I found that interesting, mysterious, intriguing.

Tell us about your process. 

I started working in 2007. I bought anthologies on all the people who would become my characters and literally surrounded myself with prints of the paintings. Then I asked an artist friend to look at the work of these painters and help me discern their personalities.

The Peale family is particularly interesting, and they’re all a little nuts, especially the father, Charles, but the son Raphaelle, the still life painter, he’s a basket case.

Raphaelle Peale was a very unusual man for the time. His work, although in still life, is really about himself. Those bruised apples: that’s him. They are full of his damaged soul. Charles Willson Peale was a mad man who throughout his life struggled to keep his passions in check. Rembrandt Peale was, on the other hand, very serious and almost purely dogmatic.

Still Life with Steak painting by Peale

Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Steak, c.1917
Munson Williams Proctor Museum of Art

Your novel has a lot of dialogue, and the use of slang seems more akin to our time than to the 1800s.

In my novel, dialogue is action. Zadie Smith is dialogue-y; Roberto Bolano, too. I like contemporary fiction. Lion and Leopard was never intended to be an historical novel. It was meant to be contemporary. Its ideas about fiction are contemporary.

You are an accomplished non-fiction writer. Why a novel?

I’ve written two other novels, but they are still unpublished for one reason and another. My love is literature and I thought I ought to be able to write fiction. (I have also published some flash fiction.) I could have written this book as history or even as a quest to solve a mystery, but the tragedy of the story resonated to me as fiction. 

How did you become a writer? Were you an English major? 

I was a philosophy major. I’ve never taken a writing class—no creative writing, no journalism. I’m self-taught. As a writer, I’ve always been an outsider. The first thing I published was Song of the City, a book of literary non-fiction. That book pulled me into becoming a writer as a full time career.

Were your other novels set in the past like Lion and Leopard?

No, they were contemporary, partly set in Philadelphia. One was about a Wharton professor who meets a woman through notes left on a SEPTA regional rail train.

Lion and Leopard is full of artists and writers. Any writers or artists in your family?

I grew up in Bucks County along the Delaware. My family is from Trenton. My dad is a dentist—probably one of the great artisans of teeth. My mother has worked the front of his office for years. My father’s family was filled with lefty intellectuals. My mom’s father was a self-taught capitalist and entrepreneur. His bookshelves were filled with biographies of Ford, Carnegie, etc. My sister has been a journalist, in TV news. She was once a practicing artist, but has dropped it. My family has always been creative.

Do you make art, in addition to writing?

In 1988 I went to Speos, in Paris, to study photography. The school was founded by one of Cartier Bresson’s printers Pierre-Yves Mahé in 1984. There, I learned it all—how to use the dark room, everything. This was just as they were bringing in the first computers to the school to teach digital. My time at Speos gave me an opportunity to roam around the city and practice street photography, something I’ve been doing ever since—it’s what formed that connection in my mind to John Lewis Krimmel. There is a photography section on my website with three photo essays and a fourth coming soon.

Have you exhibited your photos?

I’ve shown in a gallery across from Christ Church on 2nd Street in Philadelphia, and I showed in Paris while I was in school.

Do you consider yourself a local writer?

So many writers are the product of place. They respond to and write from a perspective of place. I suppose I’m no different. So call me a Philadelphia writer, but not a “local writer”—that seems to me a term that’s used to label anyone not cool enough to live in New York.

What are you working on now?

Mr. Mosaic, a novel. I’m taking notes now, and hope to start writing in January—a book that ought not take five or six years to write. It’s about an architect who becomes obsessed with a vacant lot, which becomes his undoing.

Nathaniel Popkin in front of the sea

Nathaniel Popkin author photo Cleaver 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.

Roberta Fallon author photoRoberta Fallon is the co-founder of theartblog.org. She has written about art for Philadelphia Weekly, Artnet, Art Review, Art on Paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Art and Auction, and has taught and been a visiting critic at Tyler School of Art, St. Joseph’s University and Cranbrook Academy of Art.

GILGI, ONE OF US By Irmgard Keun reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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Gigli cover art. A white profile of a woman's face against a plum background

GILGI, ONE OF US
By Irmgard Keun (1931) in the first English translation by Geoff Wilkes
Melville House, 210 pages 

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

You push through the small, enclosed, almost claustrophobic rooms at the head of “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, like an exile from a provincial village, and there you are face to face with Léger’s masterwork The City. Now free of the repressive ties of the parochial, you’re not there yet. The City—the city—looms, an inscrutable machine. “At once spacious in its lateral spread and aggressively frontal, it offers the eye no reasonable focus and the body no comfortable place to stand,” says the show’s curator, Anna Vallye, in the deeply informed essay, “The Painter on the Boulevard,” in the exhibition catalog. “To approach is to hazard.”

The City by Fernand Leggier

But Léger’s painting is no warning. Rather it’s a syncopation of the moment when Modernity wrote itself across physical and temporal space in the form of the bristling, color-flashing, mesmerizing, hard-edged, dangerously inhumane and astoundingly infinite city. Past The City, the show opens up into a vast gallery, where, almost a century on from 1919, when Léger finished the eight foot tall painting, you are carried away by the arms of levers, the spin of wheels—faster, faster—the spectacle of man inventing his world (and made to feel both God-like and mouse-like by it). In the gallery, you may feel, despite what you know about the intervening century, the power and joy and energy of the city as it breaks apart the hard heavy stone of the traditional world and carries you willingly forward, with no need, so it seems, to look back.

Léger’s point, says Vallye—so admirably achieved by the exhibition—was not just to represent the city on canvas but to make something that itself would be equal to the tenacious force of the unfurling metropolis. Undeniably the city infects the work, which in turn—like so much other modern art and literature, music and film—pressed back onto the streets and boulevards of the city.

Irmgard Keun author photo

Irmgard Keun

One of those works, a slender 1931 German novel called Gilgi, One of Us, Irmgard Keun’s first, has just been translated into English for the first time, by Geoff Wilkes of the University of Queensland in Australia, and will be published November 12 by Melville House Publishing. Indeed, for this reader, Gilgi arrives as an equal kind of modernist wonder: the assertive voice of a young woman singularly determined to grab on. “My times! The only ones I can live in,” says Gilgi, a 21 year old typist at a hosiery concern in Cologne, who is teaching herself to translate Spanish, French, and English so that she can travel and work where she wants. “The times before, the times after—don’t interest me at all. The times now are important to me, they belong to me–.” The city—the world—would be hers.

The knife blade of modernity would slash history—would expose its injustice. The theorist Walter Benjamin, writing about the same time as Keun, put it thus: “The dreaming collective knows no history.”

Not insignificantly, Vallye, the Léger curator, chose a passage from Benjamin’s The Arcades Project to set the urban scene.  “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective,” notes Benjamin, “…an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that—in the space between the building fronts—lives, experiences, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls with their “Post No Bills” are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the café terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household.”

This broad shouldered, crass, class inflected, pedestrian cityscape is Gilgi’s home, even as, in Cologne, it sometimes feels like a second city version. As the book opens, Gilgi, at 20 and still living with her mostly silent parents, endures—for the good of her will—a cold shower. She exercises, dresses smartly (of course), and running a little late, hops a streetcar to work. “Dingadingding—they get off, they get on. They ride the streetcar. Ride and ride. Eight-hour day, typewriter, steno pad, salary cut, end of the month—always the same thing, always the same thing.”

But adorable Gilgi sees herself apart from the collective. “They’re gray and tired and lifeless. And if they’re not lifeless, they’re waiting for a miracle. Gilgi isn’t lifeless, and she doesn’t believe in miracles. She only believes in what she creates and what she earns. She isn’t satisfied, but she’s pleased. She’s earning money.”

Gilgi - eine von uns (1931)

Gilgi – eine von uns (1931)

Punctual, hardworking, and organized, she’s moving forward. But significantly, this isn’t 1919. In 1931, the year the book comes out, the German economy is in recession and in so many ways the promise of modernity is in doubt. And on the street: “Nazi guys beating up Communists—Communists beating up Nazis.” Keun felt what was coming. There is despair, nationalism, doubt and even more, hints at the way, starting the very next year, German society would be exploited by Hitler. Gilgi would be banned and Keun would go into exile in Holland.

Gilgi, as the translator Wilkes points out in an essay at the back of the book, is a so-called New Woman of the Weimar Republic, capable of earning, living independently, and choosing her path. She reads newspapers and listens to jazz; she is honest with herself, careful never to dream excessively. Dutiful enough, she comes and goes as she pleases. This isn’t the only kind of New Woman here, however. Gilgi’s friend the flamboyant Olga works when she needs and otherwise travels. She has flings with men, but is careful to never get to close. Olga guards her independence.

After work, for extra cash, Gilgi takes dictation from a former military officer who is writing his memoir. She keeps a tiny room where she goes at night to practice translation. Aware of her good looks, energy, and attractiveness—a sensibility reinforced through Keun’s use of the interrogative semi-second person, as if Gilgi’s rational subconscious is doing the talking and then turning its head to talk to the reader—Gilgi is sexuality liberated: the great fear of modernity. Though young, she easily sees through men.  She rebuffs the ugly ones and lures along the ones who can help. “The main thing is that you know how to fob them off tactfully,” says Gilgi, “without starting some great drama of outraged honor.”

But in the infinite city, of course, anything can happen. Yes, something is coming to disrupt Gilgi’s tight little world. “Do people ever suspect how completely they can be influenced!!!!” wonders her subconscious a bit later on. One night Olga introduces her to Martin, a bohemian writer who is house-sitting for a well-to-do friend. Gilgi—so cold, so controlled—falls in love. “Since that night,” writes Keun, “something in Gilgi has been broken beyond repair.—Oh, liking someone is good—loving someone—is good too. But being in love, really being in love: an extremely painful condition.”

Martin, who finds German work ethic moralism absurd and inhumane, knocks Gilgi off-kilter, leaving her ultimately “defenseless, completely exposed…at the mercy of everyone and everything.” But Gilgi, happily, is never quite a victim. This makes Gilgi strikingly different from novels like Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 Sister Carrie, about the excess and moral bankruptcy of urban life. Gilgi isn’t at all a moral screed—it’s too wise—about men, politics, aging, and justice. As Gilgi struggles, she begins for the first time to unwind her deeply held belief in personal responsibility. Finally, she begins to see herself as more than a single one-dimensional entity, but rather as a person of sometimes divergent layers, a different person at different times to different people—a thoroughly modern woman, that is. “There are two layers in me,” she begins hesitantly to feel,

And the upper one, it dictates—everyday words, everyday actions—little girl, little machine girl, little clockwork girl—the lower layer underneath it—always wanting, always searching, always longing and darkness and not knowing—not knowing where to—not knowing where from. A thinking without words, a knowing behind the words—a wakefulness in sleep—behind laughing, a weeping — — — the uncut umbilical cord—a tie to the dark world. And the gray world and the bright world, you’re familiar with them and you know about them—and you didn’t want to acknowledge the dark world and you’re still trying to lie it out of existence. But it’s there—for every woman—every man. And one person says sorrow and one person says pain and one person says crime—filth—or God—no word cuts right through to the core.

No, Gilgi, there is hardly any comfort in the modern city. It will throw you. It will demand you to ask, and ask again, “What—am—I—really?”

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.

SIDEWALK DANCING by Letitia Moffitt reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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Sidewalk Dancing cover art. Two long shadows against a concrete floor

SIDEWALK DANCING
by Letitia Moffitt
Atticus Books, 158 pages
Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

A sidewalk dance is the step or two that strangers on a sidewalk make together in an effort to get out of each other’s way. Sometimes, says Letitia Moffitt, they

naturallly move in tandem, like dancers, until they collide. Sometimes they stay that way, perpetually in each other’s path, never moving past each other.

This suspended state of existence—one imagines cells tumbling around a petri dish—infects Moffitt’s novel Sidewalk Dancing (Atticus Books), the story of Grace Chao, a Chinese immigrant to San Francisco, and George McGee, a peripatetic and dogmatic city planner, who intercepts Grace at the diner where she waits tables, and pulls her half knowing into a life of mutual abeyance. The couple moves to Hawaii, where George designs an impossible house, fails to convince his colleagues of the importance of the latest planning ideas, and loses in a bid for city council of the town of Windward Oahu. They have a child, Miranda, who narrates some of the chapters of the book.

The three McGees each struggle with identity. George has run from his unassuming Pennsylvania origins; over and over again he seeks the other to awaken his soul and lend meaning to his life. In Grace, apparently inscrutable, he sees another equally out of kilter. Grace is an artist, who can’t abide the impractical, an immigrant who isn’t sure why she desires to be American, if she does. They carry Miranda along in their fraught dance so long that as an adult she is wary of the search for an ethnic identity: it can’t seem to lead anywhere good.

Moffitt has a straight, dry, insightful prose style especially suited to Grace’s silent suffering as an outsider, never able to connect or feel at home, even in Hawaii. “I sometimes felt,” says Miranda of her mother, “that she was in perpetual retreat, withdrawing into something like the tunnel of a snail’s shell, an endless vacuum tube spiraling inwards, and away from the opening to the world, compressing into the claustrophobic space inside her head.”

While Grace, who is brittle but also tough (far more resilient than her husband), detaches, George fumbles and falters. All of a sudden,

He was not a young man who astonished and impressed people when he told them of the places he’d been and the things he knew. He was a middle-aged man whose lifelong experiences had been rendered into idiosyncrasies—mostly harmless, at worst a nuisance.

The portrait of these two figures in the setting of 1970s and 1980s Hawaii is the book’s clear strength. Moffitt understands their insistent, nagging contradictions; she hears their silence, especially as it strangely rains down on their daughter. And indeed, the perspective is welcome. It’s just this—the layers of silent suffering, shame, confusion—that Moffitt knows she has to explore if she’s going to turn this particular version of the immigrant experience into literature that matters. She seems aware of her special view; Grace wonders why Miranda, apparently an aspiring writer, can’t turn their family story into something like Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Miranda counters that she isn’t interested in that sort of maudlin fiction. “I know everybody read Tan,” Grace responds in turn. “And see the movie. She writes more like real life, like a true story. Those other writers, they may be trying too much to be writing literary. Too strange, too hard to read. Nobody understand them.”

Sidewalk Dancing isn’t hard to read. Moffitt’s prose is polished, but of course it happily lacks the necessary clarity of commercial fiction. And yet, about two-thirds through, as the story’s focus shifts to Miranda herself, the prose becomes “like real life” and ultimately banal. Somehow the tightness that bound the first two-thirds of the book—prose that had obviously been worked hard and clean—got lost in an effort to bring the story to the present, perhaps because Miranda herself is too close to Moffitt. By the end, the reader finds himself disinterested in Miranda, longing for Grace’s compelling, frustrating passiveness that he feels must somehow be wise.

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.

BLINDING: THE LEFT WING by Mircea Cărtărescu reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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Blinding cover art. Abstract colorful artwork in the middle of an olive background

BLINDING: THE LEFT WING
by Mircea Cărtărescu, in the English translation by Sean Cotter,
Archipelago Books, 464 pages

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

It starts in adolescence. The questions come to you while lying in bed (certainly now with a growing awareness of your sexuality), the walls of your room expanding into endless grainy darkness, as if the room itself could encompass the entire world: why am I here, why is there anything at all?

The questions may haunt you at age 13 or 15 or 17, but by adulthood they tend to feel banal. Unanswerable, impossible, if taken seriously debilitating, they are in a word blinding, and so you tend to avert your gaze. But suppose you can’t, suppose the inviolable white light only draws you closer, to madness possibly, to paint or write or drink or pray (to what God, tell me?) almost certainly. And so perhaps you scribble, the pages of your notebooks filling with furious script, like eons of sediment piling into sad mute mountains no one else will ever excavate or carve or climb.

Unless, perhaps, you are a writer of the caliber of Mircea Cărtărescu, the celebrated Romanian author of the 1996 book Blinding: The West Wing. Cărtărescu is a poet, essayist, and novelist of unsurpassing imaginative vision and startling bravery. He has won several Romanian literary prizes, but beyond Romania and France, where a few of his novels have been translated, and Holland, where he has taught, Cărtărescu, a child of the post-War communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, is rather unknown. His only other novel to be out in an English edition is the 1993 Nostalgia, published here in 2005 by New Directions.

Blinding, which was brilliantly translated into the English by Sean Cotter for Archipelago Books, is a strange, beseeching, glimmering book that’s part meditation, part meta-fiction, part exploration of the relationship between a man and his deeply flawed city. The Bucharest in Blinding, says the book’s narrator Mircea, “filled my window, pouring inside and reaching into my body and my mind so deeply that even as a young man I imagined that I was a mélange of flesh, stone, cephalo-spinal fluid, I-beams and urine, supported by vertebra and concrete posts, animated by statues and obsessions, and digested through intestines and steam pipes, which made me and the city a single being.”

And like the Prague of Michal Ajvaz and the Buenos Aires of Borges, in Cărtărescu’s hand the rooms, gazes, corners, lamps, current events, political officials, ruins, hallways, and basements of Bucharest become portals to hidden, dreamlike, distorted, and yet visceral worlds. Reader, beware: one might veer into them at any second.

The point of these journeys, be they to underground vaults or high into elevator shafts left standing after wartime bombing or even to the time sequence of another city—New Orleans—is to challenge the veracity of our individual senses. We are, in other words, he says, blinded by the incessant propaganda of our own prosaic lives. But there is hope: even “in this opaque world, dense, murderous as pillow that someone holds over your face, kneeling mercilessly on your chest to stop your writhing,” says Cărtărescu, “revelation is possible.”

He goes on: “What every person had intuited at some point in their lives somehow, suddenly became clear: that reality is just a particular case of unreality, that we all are, however concrete we may feel, only the fiction of some other world, a world that creates and encompasses us.”  In that world, we—every being and kind of being, every feces and every sperm, larvae, neuron, and whisper—are all part of single throbbing unit of life.

The heart of the book is this search for enlightenment, with hints of the Norwegian writer Karl O. Knausgaard’s discovery of angels in A Time for Everything and shades of Hinduism and barbarity. Is this a true spiritual journey or, as Mircea wonders, “nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling?” This meta-conversation about the purpose and intent of the work—alive throughout—is like a strap handle on a streetcar, to steady the reader as the story sways.

And what of the story? Having gone through electric shock therapy for facial paralysis at 16 and hospitalization for another, unspecified, illness as a young boy, Mircea is about thirty in the mid-1980s, when the book takes place. Seemingly alone but for a drunk named Herman he’s taken into his small apartment, Mircea seeks the meaning of his existence, most profoundly, in the empathetic narrative of his mother Maria’s coming of age, from peasant village to encounters with Bucharest nightlife to the night of the bombing, by Allied forces, of her neighborhood in the last year of World War II. Maria is adventuresome, self-possessed, and in love with cinema. Post-War Bucharest, the “Romanian miracle” of early communism, feeds the life of her quickly transforming city. But progressivism turns into the despotism, doubletalk, and political strangulation of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s bloody regime: a different kind of blinding.

Through all of it—the quick paced, straightforward, sexually charged narrative of Maria’s passage to womanhood, her marrying Mircea’s father Costel, Mircea’s boyhood from one house to the next with visits to Maria’s father in the country, the detours to other worlds rife as they are with insect imagery and madness, the strap handles of meta-fiction—Cărtărescu’s prose, so magically transformed into English by Cotter, speaks to the reader with a lush and fruitful honesty. Time and again, he produces imagery you, the reader, are sure you’ve held in the quiet of your own subconscious, mirrored in Maria and Mircea’s own search for memories and images of their pasts. Here is a crowded subway station filled with “a subterranean humanity rising like a menacing water,” a blind man walking “as though he was resisting someone who pushed him from behind,” a tram approaching, “red, rocking on its rails, like a tired beetle,” Mircea walking the night city, “the mysterious and beloved city spread under the Persian carpet of the constellations.”

In all, Blinding wants to prove that being is both less and more than we take it to be. It’s less, because of course, none of us is really separate from the massive opera of life, more because reality is also unreality, reality is memory, human existence is cumulative, iterative, self-creating. “The me of today,” writes Cărtărescu, “englobes the me of yesterday who encompasses the one from the day before yesterday and so on and so on, until I am only an immense line of Russian dolls buried one in the next, each one pregnant with its predecessor, but still being born from it, emanating from it like a halo until the middle is darker and the surfaces more diaphanous, and the glassy surface of my body in this exact moment already reflects the tame light of the one that I will be in an hour, since my astral body is nothing else but the clairvoyant light from the future.”

Again and again, Blinding seeks this greater, more profound, more meditative path, which in this imaginative realm is never banal and always lush, even amidst the gray streets of the ugly city. That doesn’t mean the book is easy to read. The other worlds are harsh and strange and sometimes ridiculous. A giant, blue winged butterfly appears and reappears, a harbinger or a monster or a god. You might tire of Mircea’s endless melancholy or, if you’re like me, part flesh and stone of my city, but also weary of its utter, blinding hegemony, Cărtărescu will speak to you, an astonishing voice from another world.

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.

WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS by Margaret Kaufman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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Where Somebody Waits cover art. A photograph looking up at a Ferris wheel against a gray sky

WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS
by Margaret Kaufman
PaulDryBooks, 201 pages

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Critics never thought much of Ettore Scola’s 1987 film La Famiglia. Vincent Camby, writing in the New York Times, said that it has “the manner of a film that was conceived as an idea…The characters and events were thought up later.”

But the idea, to capture time as it drifts through a single family in the space of a single apartment, is so powerfully melancholic that I’ll sit and ache through the film any time. Even despite the soft filter gauze of the mid-1980s.

That same ache ventures forth from Margaret Kaufman’s debut novel Where Somebody Waits, out this month from Paul Dry Books. The tidy paperback, with its glancing, storyteller’s prose, covers about 60 years and four generations of the Davidson family, Jews in a small Arkansas town. While La Famiglia centers on the scholarly, even-handed Carlo—it opens with the infant Carlo in his grandfather’s arms on the day of his Christening and ends at a party for his eightieth birthday—Where Somebody Waits places its focus on Ruby, a fiery beauty from a poor downriver hamlet who seizes the opportunity to marry the gentle shopkeeper Bubba Davidson. “If he was so solicitous now, when they barely knew one another, what would it be like when they were lovers?” Ruby wonders of Bubba, whose real name is Nathan, on their first date. “Was it possible she would sleep with a Jew?”

The Davidsons are an archetype Jewish family of the south, whose story of dual identity and assimilation has been rarely told in film or literature, one major exception being Tony Kuschner’s play Caroline, Or Change. Bubba owns a clothing shop on the town’s main street; his brother is a doctor, who treats black and white alike. The family is vaguely more liberal than most of the town’s whites. Bubba, Ruby notices right away, says “colored” instead of “nigger.” But while the Davidsons don’t hide their identity, they are caught, as Kaufman writes, “in a frenzied limbo between worlds we didn’t quite inhabit.” Bubba, eager for business, donates fans to the church revival going on in town at the book’s opening with his store name on one side and a picture of Jesus Christ on the other.

Early in the book it appears that this duality, and negotiated compromise, will be the territory of Where Somebody Waits. It struck my interest: there have been shoe and furniture and dry goods stores all over the south with the Popkin name on it, distant relatives who disembarked in New Orleans instead of New York, who I imagine eat, as the Davidsons do, fried catfish and collard greens and cornbread.

But Kaufman’s book finds its emotional center in a different negotiation, Ruby’s own, between passion and stability, the urgent fire of the moment and the long simmer of a life well-lived. Ruby and Bubba’s immediately explosive love tempers. A year goes by and Ruby isn’t pregnant. “Lying on their bed, smelling his cigar, listening to the radio, feeling the evening creep into the house, purple and blue over the rose of Sharon outside their bedroom window, Ruby was surprised by sadness.” Ruby, who is so compellingly drawn out by Kaufman, hungers for a child, but she’s also reconnected with an old lover John Clay, who had been off at war.

Must she give up one for another? In La Famiglia, Carlo, too, is faced with a similar choice, between the steady Beatrice and her sister Adriana; the choice of Beatrice haunts him—and yet all the same it doesn’t. Life simply goes on.

“Anybody who tells you you can’t love but one man at a time, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” says Ruby much later in life. It took her decades to come to understand.

In Carlo’s lifetime in La Famiglia, Canby notes, “Italy has survived World War I, the rise of Mussolini, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the fall of Mussolini, Nazi occupation, Allied liberation, the sinking of the Andrea Doria and the marriage of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe.” Likewise in Where Somebody Waits, as Ruby fights and gives into passion, and tries to hold the demon whiskey and her uptight sister-in-law at bay, the US experiences World War II, desegregation, Viet Nam, terrorism at the 1972 Olympics, the counter culture, and AIDS.

Kaufman’s skill is threading all this through a humble, almost whisper narrative about a certain southern family writ across a short—or is it long?—period of time. As all time, Ruby’s era aches with our own need and our own enduring search for grace, aware as we are of our limited time to be alive.

–October 15, 2013

Nathaniel Popkin author photo

Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver fiction review editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of three books, including the 2013 novel Lion and Leopard. He is co-editor of the Hidden City Daily and senior writer of “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” an Emmy award-winning documentary series. His essays and book reviews appear in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, The Kenyon Review, The Millions, and Fanzine.

HALF THE KINGDOM By Lore Segal reviewed by Michelle Fost

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Half the Kingdom cover art. White text against a green background, reflected and inverted by the middle of the cover

HALF THE KINGDOM
by Lore Segal
Melville House, 176 pages

Reviewed by Michelle Fost

Late in life, after health issues led my grandparents to move to a retirement community called Stonegates, my grandfather referred to their neighbors as his fellow inmates. I am still puzzling over Lore Segal’s new novel, Half the Kingdom, but I think she beautifully casts some theatrical lighting on the full inner lives and personal histories of the inmates.

It’s as though Segal lifts a lid on what she might call, here, the Crazy Box of stories inside her aging characters. The lives of Joe Bernstine, Lucy Friedgold, Samson Gorewitz, Ida Farkasz, and a few others intersect in the emergency room and on the seventh floor of the Senior Center of the Cedars of Lebanon hospital. The open lid won’t reveal enough: part of the story here is that though Joe, Lucy, Samson, Ida, and their peers clearly hold a wealth of stories inside them, it is painfully difficult for them to deliver their stories to the outside world.  What they wish to communicate too often is trapped and locked up inside them.

In the case of Lucy, she is completely distracted by the fact that an old editor friend has failed to respond to or even acknowledge a story she submitted to him months ago. She’s sent him “Rumplestiltskin in Emergency,” a story related to the death of her husband. I really felt for Lucy; her irritation at her old friend who leaves her very personal story languishing is understandable. And Segal comes up with a remarkably satisfying solution for Lucy. Armed with a cell phone as part of her work, Lucy will systematically call all those listed in her old, paper address book, and read them her most recent short story. Will Lucy ever feel properly, fully understood? Here, Segal is very funny: “Katherine says she is burning to hear Lucy’s story. Lucy reads Katherine ‘Sadie in Heaven.’ Katherine’s detailed, specific, accurate, high praise is what Lucy has been waiting her life long to hear, does not believe, and experiences as an act of hostility.” Lucy is brilliant at converting being heard back into the feeling of not being heard.

Lore Segal author photo

Lore Segal

There is a lot of suffering in Half the Kingdom. One of the most frightening instances is that of Samson, who spends a night on a sandy beach, the waves lapping his cold body. He is paralyzed and unable to get the attention of anyone who might help him. Francis Rhinelander feels terrorized by the music he imagines hearing everywhere and can’t get away from. This music, it turns out, is of course not in his imagination: he is excruciatingly sensitive to Muzak.

Very powerful for me was the case of Ida Farkasz, who suffers complete amnesia when we first encounter her in the ER, but has a miraculous recovery of memories. She flees to the Dominican Republic, a place she lived for some time after escaping the Holocaust and before coming to America. But we learn that Ida will receive a letter from her daughter: “If you want to see Poldi you need to invite her, and soon.  You know she isn’t well, Mama, and the rest are all gone, Papa, Onkel Kari, your sister Berta. What they did or didn’t do is two wars, an emigration, and a Holocaust ago!” The opposite of too little memory is too much memory.

Lore Segal shares a little of Ida Farkasz’s life story—Segal escaped the Holocaust, spent time in the Dominican Republic, and then moved to the United States. Her autobiographical novel, Other People’s Houses, beautifully recounts a good deal of that story. Segal was among the children who escaped on the Kindertransport to England. I remember reading the obituary of Segal’s mother in The New York Times. Her mother died at age 100 in September 2005. The writer of the obit describes: “For many years, Mrs. Groszmann and Ms. Segal lived in different apartments in the same building on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Each day at 7 a.m., the daughter would take the elevator down to have breakfast with her mother, who until three years ago rose at dawn to squeeze grapefruit juice for the two of them.” I was struck at the time by the lovely, easy intimacy of such a routine of this mother and daughter. Many of the characters in Half the Kingdom crave this kind of connection. Some of them have it, like the group of old friends and family who Joe Bernstine assembles to work with him on his Compendium of End-of-World Scenarios, like Lucy who has her friend’s ear, but they don’t always see what’s right in front of them.

Michelle Fost author photo

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

Two Cities, Two Outsiders, Two Novels reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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The Story of a New Name cover art. A black-and-white photograph of two people hugging. Below, Eli, Ely cover art. A black-and-white photograph of a woman standing against a wall

THE STORY OF A NEW NAME
by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein
Europa Editions, 471 pages

ELI, ELY
by Ezekiel Tyrus
Hardhead Press, 283 pages

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Two Cities, Two Outsiders, Two Novels

My thirteen-year-old daughter Lena got a hold of my review copy of Elena Ferrante’s new novel The Story of a New Name and the pencil stuck inside it for jotting notes in the margins. “Your journey starts now! Ready….go!” she wrote at the beginning of chapter 59 (of 125). On page 251, and then every so often to the end of the book, she wrote, “Pit Stop,” and drew icons for a bed, a cup of coffee, and the bathroom. At the start of chapter 75, she sketched stick figures of people lined up, as if along the edge of a marathon route. “Yay! You can do it! Come on!” she wrote, in a speech balloon above their heads.

I didn’t need this sort of encouragement to get through the book, a striking, deeply felt, and fully imagined psychological portrait of two young women raised in a poor, particularly parochial Naples neighborhood in the early 1960s. But Lena was on to something. The book is powered and the narrative sustained by the single, galloping, almost breathless force of the narrator’s voice, in expert translation from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. The reader, to be sure, may feel he too is racing along, eager to escape the cruelty and dumb brutality of the gray, filthy place as much as Elena Greco, the narrator, and her closest friend, Lila Cerullo.

Here they are seventeen years old at the precipice, about to enter a party at the house of Elena’s erudite teacher Professor Galiani, on Corso Vittorio Emanuele in Naples’ relatively cosmopolitan center, far away from their neighborhood with its “tangled skein” of madness and betrayal. On the other side of the door: a world of infinite possibility.

We smoothed our skirts, I pulled down the slip that tended to rise up my legs, Lila straightened her hair with her fingertips. Both of us, evidently, were afraid of escaping ourselves, of erasing in a moment of distraction the mask of self-possession we had given ourselves. I pressed the bell. We waited, no one came to the door. I looked at Lila, I pressed the button again, longer. Quick footsteps, the door opened. A dark young man appeared, small in stature, with a handsome face and a lively gaze. He appeared to be around twenty. I said nervously that I was a student of Professor Galiani, and without even letting me finish, he laughed, exclaimed, “Elena?”

It’s an apt question, for in the neighborhood she is known as Lenú, short for Lenuccia. By calling herself Elena, she has declared a new identity—one she will earn through self-exile and self-creation. Elena will soon leave Naples to attend a university in Pisa and later she’ll find herself in Milan, the hopeful author of The Story of a New Name.

We are to presume that this book, Ferrante’s eighth and the second of her “Neapolitan novels,” is a work of autobiographical fiction. That may or may not be true. Little is known of the author aside from her birthplace of Naples; she herself may be a fiction.

Like Elena Greco, the narrator of Ely, Eli, Eli Trocchi, has given himself a new name and new identity, changed after moving from Florida to San Francisco. But this book about a struggling writer who just lost his job and his girlfriend by San Francisco provocateur Ezekiel Tyrus, feels like it’s fallen right out of the author’s personal diary.

Eli is a kind of misfit, an outsider who swaddles his discomfort in drugs, alcohol, tattoos, and anti-social behavior. He frequently exposes himself and gets in fights. Like Elena, he also writes—tragic, self-deprecating stories about abuse and sex. “I’m the long-suffering, oft-tortured writer! I’m the employment-challenged, money-nothing artist! I’m the tattooed San Francisco performance-artist-slash-storyteller!” Eli quotes himself. “I’m the hard-drinking, body-abusing macho man, and why, why, among the hipsters, the punk rockers, the San Francisco bohemians, the bar denizens, can I not find a place to belong?”

“Write clear and hard about what hurts,” says Ernest Hemingway. Eli aspires to meet Papa’s expectations. The problem is he takes the advice all too literally: the narrative—far more reliant on telling than showing—indeed hits too hard. Complexity, contradiction, even pathology—even drunkenness—are all kind of lost to the need to write clear, to take the pain on directly. Eli—Ezekiel—might be better off with Malcolm Lowry.

While Eli, Ely is a brave and honest—and ultimately a big hearted book—it can’t live up to literature’s need to transform real experience into something else more sublime.

“I am part of the universal terror,” says Elena Greco, “at this moment I’m the infinitesimal particle through which the fear of everything becomes conscious of itself; I.” That very “I” is what’s so convincingly at stake, and then doubted, in the closely observed co-dependency of Elena and Lila. Does Elena lose herself in forging a new identity? Does she steal from the needy, manipulative Lila? Does Elena’s aspiration even matter?

Does yours or mine? A great work of fiction—and surely The Story of a New Name is one—gives us a touchstone for our own tiny selves.

Nathaniel Popkin author photo

Cleaver fiction review editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of three books, including the 2013 novel Lion and Leopard. He is co-editor of the Hidden City Daily and senior writer of “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” an Emmy award-winning documentary series. His essays and book reviews appear in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, The Kenyon Review, The Millions, and Fanzine.

IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KABBALIST by Ruchama King Feuerman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KABBALIST
by Ruchama King Feuerman
NYRBLit (e-book only), 203 pages

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

As I was crossing the street just outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem one evening this summer, I noticed a Palestinian boy, about 15 years old, flying a kite on the corner. It was about seven and the sun had disappeared already. The light was pink. The sky in the distance was a cloudless blue, but it seemed, at dusk, to have the texture of felt. An orthodox Jewish mother, wearing a headscarf and long skirt, came across to the traffic island, where the boy in capris and a t-shirt stood watching his kite fly over the honeycomb colored wall of the old city. The woman pushed a stroller, inside of which sat a nicely dressed boy of two. He was interested in the kite.

A child flies a kite in Jerusalem The older boy immediately noticed the little boy’s gaze; he gestured to him and the mother let him out of the stroller. She smiled with delight as the Palestinian boy held out the kite handle and the two boys held on together, the older one keeping a casual eye on the kite, tugging and guiding, the younger one concentrating hard on the string.

The kite was a momentary gift—a child’s toy, after all—in a place that so rarely seems to allow any give.

Ruchama King Feuerman proffers a similar kind of gift—or two of them rather—in her second novel, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist, which will be published September 17 by the New York Review of Book’s new e-book only press NYRB Lit. (The press’s publishing strategy is to eventually publish print editions of books that sell well in the electronic edition. I printed a PDF copy of the book.)  The book tells the intersecting stories of Isaac Markowitz, an orthodox Jew who moved to Jerusalem from New York as a forty year old, and Mustafa, a janitor at the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim Holy site in the Old City above the Western Wall that includes the monumental Al-Aqsa Mosque. Both men are nominally believers and both suffer from a physical ailment: Markowitz from terrible psoriasis and Mustafa (whose last name is never given) from a birth defect that left his head permanently turned, facing over his right shoulder.

The pained men’s lives cross when Mustafa discovers Isaac, with his long beard and black coat and hat, walking through the Arab Quarter. He wonders what a religious Jew would be doing there. “Aren’t you frightened?” he asks. The uneducated Mustafa is guileless, but so is Isaac.

“Should I be?” he responds.

Isaac praises Mustafa for doing God’s work by keeping the site—holy to Jews who believe it was the place where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and to Muslims as site of Mohammed’s rise to Paradise—“clean and wonderful.” So whose site is it? Jews claim a history on the “Temple Mount” dating to the first Temple period of King David. Muslims claim the place was made holy only by Mohammed; they deny a Jewish presence there.

This is the heart of the issue, of course. Whose holiness matters? Whose claim on the land is longer, more lasting, more vital? Whose God is best? These most vexing of questions, which trap otherwise smart and even liberal-minded people in boxes they can’t seem to get themselves out of, emerge from this one spot in this one city.

But what if, Feuerman wonders, a Muslim would offer irrefutable evidence of the Jewish presence on the mount? And what if a religious Jew would open his heart to save the life (and soul, presumably) of the Muslim? Could the boxes be broken?

What if the answers lie right beneath our feet?

Feuerman asks these most delectable questions in the form of a fable (the form, it seems, dictated by the place and the subject), infected, like the novels of Meir Shalev, with a kind of Jewish mystical magical realism. She is a wonderfully empathetic and perceptive writer sensitive to the psychology of people particularly who choose to move to Israel. “I’d be riding on the bus or walking along Jaffa Road, and I’d feel the most amazing sensation,” says Isaac. “That I was fulfilling my destiny—not only my personal destiny, but God’s plan for the Jewish People. It’s an extraordinary feeling.”

She delivers a nuanced portrait too of Mustafa, with his bent neck, according to his own mother some kind of curse from God; and she is equally clear eyed about religious fanatics on both sides. But it’s the operators, those who “live out these problems, in the real world,” “while all of you hide behind your Torah books,” she interestingly scorns most.

When Mustafa discovers a piece of pottery—a pomegranate carving that had been the head of a cane or staff used for religious activities during the First or Second Temple periods—he gives it to Isaac. A gift, like the handle of the kite. This one, however, is deeply subversive, for it’s “proof to the ones who say our temple didn’t exist.” Mustafa immediately regrets his gift and the rest of the fable follows the characters as they try look over the edges of the boxes that trap them, recoil, and press ahead to the most dangerous ledge, right to the very end.

Feuerman is masterful in directing plot and manages, under very challenging circumstances, to avoid turning her characters, which include the orthodox Rebbe Yehuda, the Kabbalist, into cartoons. And she is careful to try, somewhat unsuccessfully, to give equal treatment to Jews and Muslims. Among the imbalances, even in this carefully calibrated book, Feuerman fails to deliver a sympathetic Muslim analog to the kind and open-minded Rebbe.

But as a novel about people trapped by religion and history, it too is trapped by the form of the fable. The characters, though well-conceived, can’t evolve past the limits of the book’s architecture, which makes the story feel like it isn’t quite fully imagined. The cost is the power of the ultimate tragedy; what ought to feel terribly melancholic is delivered with a wink and a nod.

–September 16, 2013

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Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver fiction review editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of three books, including the 2013 novel Lion and Leopard. He is co-editor of the Hidden City Daily and senior writer of “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” an Emmy award-winning documentary series. His essays and book reviews appear in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, The Kenyon Review, The Millions, and Fanzine.

THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer reviewed by Chris Ludovici

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THE INTERESTINGS
by Meg Wolitzer
Riverhead Hardcover, 480 pages

Reviewed by Chris Ludovici

Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is a beast of a book. At four hundred eighty pages, and covering forty years of half a dozen lives, its ambition is both broad and admirable. It is compelling when it offers a sustained, ground-level view through one of her character’s eyes, which comprises the bulk of the book. But its ambitions also exceed Wolitzer’s strengths; the book suffers from odd pacing, random shifts in perspective, and haphazard leaps in time. When considered as a whole, the pieces don’t fit together in an organic, satisfying way.

The Interestings has an ensemble cast, but its lead is Jules Jacobson, who in the summer of 1974 finds herself inducted into the cool kid inner circle at Spirit in the Woods, a New England summer camp for privileged children. Jules, a plain middle class girl from Long Island who just lost her father to cancer, is attending the camp on scholarship and is immediately smitten with her new artistic friends and their upper-class Manhattan lives. There is the beautiful, open-hearted Ash; her moody, enigmatic brother Goodman; sensitive musician Jonah; emotional dancer Cathy; and the brilliant animator Ethan. The book follows these six people from childhood to middle age, as they come to terms with their various successes and failures.

As children, Jules and Ethan have a brief romantic relationship, one that ends at her insistence. The two remain friends, even after Ethan becomes involved with, and eventually marries, Jules’ closest friend Ash. When Ethan creates a cartoon that makes him a billionaire, Jules struggles with the jealousy as she trudges along in a much more economically and career compromised life. This is the most engaging plotline of the book and the real spine of the story.

Along the way, The Interestings makes many astute observations about how difficult it can be to maintain friendships in the face of family drama, distance, and class. Unfortunately, many of those observations are revealed in unsatisfying ways. The book makes odd leaps in both time and perspective. The first chapter is from Jules’s perspective and takes place in 1974 at the summer camp. The next chapter, however, takes place in 2009, and is, inexplicably, about the people who ran the camp. Chapter three, while still taking place in ‘09, jumps back to the now adult Jules. In chapter four we go back to 1981 and are still with Jules; at chapter five we’re back in 1974, again with Jules.

While the narrative straightens out a little after that, Wolitzer never really gets a handle on the structure of her story. It ricochets backward and forward in time and between four of the six friends, but without any sense of pacing or placement. We might spend a hundred pages with Jules, then twenty pages with Jonah, another seventy with Jules, then Ash, back to Jules, Ash again, then Jonah, Jules, and finally Ethan. There’s no real rhythm or timing to the perspective shifts, which, along with the time shifts, feel awkward and poorly thought-out.

Similarly, Ethan’s brilliant TV show, Figland, is too fussy and abstract to actually resonate. It feels made up, like somebody’s idea of a great idea, rather than a great idea itself. The show is clearly meant to be analogous to The Simpsons, and brilliant, cynical Ethan to its creator Matt Groening, but that comparison does Figland no favors. Part of what makes “The Simpsons” such a resounding and important show is the simplicity of the concept. In trying to come up with a brilliant animated show, Wolitzer imagines something far out and kooky and not very compelling at all. By the same token, Ethan often comes off less as a funny neurotic genius and more like somebody’s fantasy of one. His dialogue, especially when he jokes, is often hacky and self-conscious.

Wolitzer clearly wanted to write an enormous story, one that pitted everyday people against larger than life characters, outsized dreams, and accomplishments against economic hardships and everyday realities. But she’s only good at the intimate stuff, and the epic parts ring hollow. There are other plots too (The Interestings overflows with plot), involving sexual assault, child abuse, family secrets, money, September 11th, autism, AIDs, and on and on. Forty years is a long time, and a lot can and does happen. They’re mostly handled in the same lopsided fashion. The end result is a book that finds itself that murky zone of stories that shoot for epic greatness, but fall just short of its lofty goals landing in merely good.

–September 10, 2013

Chris Ludovici author photoChris Ludovici has published articles in The Princeton Packet and online at Cinedelphia. His fiction has appeared in several literary magazines, and in 2009 he won the Judith Stark awards in fiction and drama. He has completed three novels, two on his own and one with his wife Desi whom he lives with along with their son Sam and too many cats in Drexel Hill.

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P. by Adelle Waldman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P.
by Adelle Waldman
Henry Holt, 242 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Suburban Mid-Atlantic childhood. Check.

Journalist. Check.

Book reviewer. Check.

Writing book review to keep from working on more substantial essay. Check.

First novel coming out. Check.

Writes on urbanism. Check.

Closest friend Peter. Check.

Name Nathaniel P. Check.

That Nathaniel P? Like the fictional protagonist of Adelle Waldman’s debut novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., I’m happiest reading and writing; I’m ambitious enough (though the doppelganger has a large advance for his novel, something I’ve not yet received); and I can’t see myself doing anything else. The arrival of the book has made for good jokes, of course. My friend Cristina wrote me the other day to say she had received the book (she ordered it and read it as soon as I told her about it). “I have your love affairs with me,” she wrote with a wink and smile.

But the Nathaniel in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. isn’t really anything like me. I don’t go by Nate, for one—ever since my little league coach called me “Nate the Rusty Gate” (I couldn’t hit)—and my Peter would never admonish someone for using coarse toilet paper. “Just feel it. Can you believe that this—the world’s most diaphanous sandpaper—is what our Nate uses to wipe his ass? Talk about self-loathing,” says Nate’s friend, an American Studies professor who lives in Maine. (In fact the opposite, the real Peter, a professor of American history, can’t understand why anyone would use excessively soft and cushioned toilet paper—it’s your ass we’re talking about, I mean come on! he is likely to say.)

Moreover, Nate is a kind of jerk (and that can’t be me, right?), with only vague intellectual interests and almost no passion.

A loveable jerk? Well, that probably depends on how you take to Waldman’s dissection of Nate’s flawed personality, particularly his underdeveloped capacity to connect emotionally with women: much of the book covers Nate’s somewhat lifeless relationship with aspiring writer Hannah.

As several previous reviewers have noted, Waldman is indeed adept at seeing women through the eyes of a 30 year old man, particularly one who finds all the pleasure in the hunt and almost none in the act of sustaining love. Here is Nate eying up his previous girlfriend Elisa, an editorial assistant at a New Yorker-like magazine:

Her demeanor was smooth and preoccupied, even slightly sullen, and she spoke at times with an unnerving, almost anhedonic lack of affect. She often seemed bored. This edge of perpetual dissatisfaction made it all the more thrilling for Nate when he cajoled her into laughter and good humor: to impress her, one felt—he felt—was really something.

As Nate floats along this way Waldman reveals her keen ability to interpret disjuncture in relationships—particularly within the cloistered demographic of white, over-educated 25-35 year old writers and editors clambering around Brooklyn—and weigh out the unsaid, the painful silence that so often pierces intimate conversation.

For a book that aims to be a summer must-read, Waldman deliberately flaunts the rules of the bestseller: there is no plot, no inciting action, no lofty desire, no set back per se, just the straight line heartbeat of a small man who likes to get laid. This is perhaps what I like most about the book: it attempts no resolution. Nate doesn’t change or grow; he discovers, after all, no moral clarity (he perhaps loses a bit, refreshing). This has somewhat been my aim, too, with the forthcoming novel Lion and Leopard.

But the book also lacks pathology; there is zero undercurrent, nothing that bristles. Moreover, because ultimately so little is at stake, hardly anything comes of the love affairs of Nathaniel P.

Some of this is attributable to the narrow setting. Waldman is most certainly part of the Brooklyn literary scene that’s manifest this last decade and a half and she clearly knows it well. Her husband, Evan Hughes, is the author of the 2011 Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life, which was also published by Holt. Nathaniel P. is deeply absorbed in that unrelentingly aspirational and most certainly claustrophobic world (“the whole publishing industry lives in Brooklyn”), where a book contract is the ultimate reward for living, everyone is constantly assessing and labeling each other, half-baked liberal theories much beloved by magazines underlie every conversation, and no one ever seems to escape except to live in one or two still uncleansed neighborhoods (yet always with an eye on Park Slope).

The narrowness in this case is only a problem because it constricts the emotional range of the book. Waldman, a journalist, is clear-eyed and dead pan in her description of the people and places of literary Brooklyn and that tone infects Nate’s life. He evidently lacks imagination for living (and he knows it). But unless they are drunks or social deviants, writers make lousy protagonists. After all, we don’t actually do much but observe, read, and think—and struggle with our own craft (and obsess over exposure). It’s an unusually internal life—hard to render en vive on the page.

As I read about my doppelganger, a young man with my name who sits at a desk all day as I do hoping to turn words into magic—as much for the self-fulfillment of the whole endeavor as to entertain and delight the reader—it was fun to imagine how very, very little separates our lives. The circle that contains this Nathaniel P and that one is pretty narrow indeed. (Though God knows, I was curious about those affairs: I’ve been married for 18 years.) And yet, I also kept wondering why Nate, who left Philadelphia, where I live, for the much wider world of New York never seems to engage in the almost infinite richesse of the Big Onion. I wished to tell him to go out and walk, walk endlessly, and find himself elsewhere. Better yet, alter ego, why not use that six figure advance and go see the world?

–August 11, 2014

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Cleaver fiction review editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of three books, including the 2013 novel Lion and Leopard. He is co-editor of the Hidden City Daily and senior writer of “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” an Emmy award-winning documentary series. His essays and book reviews appear in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, The Kenyon Review, The Millions, and Fanzine.

THE MEHLIS REPORT by Rabee Jaber reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE MEHLIS REPORT
by Rabee Jaber
translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
New Directions Paperbacks, 202 pages

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

At night, I dream the city; I dream Baldwin’s—and Capote’s—alluring New York at mid-century; I dream Pamuk’s melancholic Istanbul of the same period; I dream Antunes’s desperate 1990s Lisbon and Nasr’s suffocating Tunis and Bolaño’s heretical 1970s Mexico City; I dream Zadie Smith’s London and Mercé Rodoreda’s Barcelona; I dream my own Philadelphia, which sometimes isn’t Philadelphia at all (it may be Brooklyn or Montreal).

Now, I dream Rabee Jaber’s early 21st century Beirut; I dream the enduring disquiet, I dream the hidden springs, I dream the memories (of terraces filled with mulberry trees, of abandoned villas), the loss, the fear, the cranes that rattle the sky. “How many cities are hidden in the belly of this one city?” writes Jaber,

At rare times, you see all these cities together. At night, when you push the window open, outward, and hear the wooden shutters bang against the wall, and then retreat into darkness, your heart jumps.

The Mehlis Report, in English translation by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is Jaber’s first to be offered to the American reader. At 42 years old, he’s produced some 16 books and has been awarded the 2012 International Arabic Fiction Prize. He also edits the culture page of a major Lebanon daily.

It’s clear in The Mehlis Report that Jaber is as wise and empathetic as he is prolific. His 2005 Beirut is bristling in the summer heat. The specter of civil war looms. People who can are leaving. There are explosions, there are deaths. There is also manic construction—steel and glass rising in place of the ruins of the 20th century streetscape. And the city awaits the report by the UN appointed investigator Detlev Mehlis on the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Will the real truth come out?

Beirut in these pages is a place holding its breath, and woozy. Jaber’s protagonist is Saman Yarid, the 40 year old head of his family’s legacy architecture firm. A brooding character not unlike Pamuk’s Kemal in Museum of Innocence, Yarid wanders his city, allowing history and memory to wash over him. But unlike Kemal, who became obsessed by his young lover Füsun, nothing in Yarid’s life seems to stoke his heart. At middle age, he is in abeyance, filled with “impenetrable feelings. All this uneasiness. These ups and downs.” Where is he going? Unmarried, he floats among girlfriends. He hardly works (though demand for architects is clearly soaring).

And he really ought to leave Beirut. “Why is he clinging to these streets,” Jaber wonders, “why is he holding onto this city? What’s keeping him here? Salty humid air rustles through the palm trees.” Is Yarid’s love of Beirut irrational?

Perhaps, but Jaber posits an answer to his own question: the city holds the secrets of the dead. About two-thirds into the book, the point of view, which in Arabic fashion has been shifting subtly throughout the text, decisively moves from Yarid to his dead sister Josephine. It’s in this shift that The Mehlis Report, so smartly constructed, transforms from beautiful to exquisite, from the crisis of a man at middle age to the dream of an impossible world.

–August 5, 2013

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Cleaver fiction review editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of three books, including the 2013 novel Lion and Leopard. He is co-editor of the Hidden City Daily and senior writer of “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” an Emmy award-winning documentary series. His essays and book reviews appear in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, The Kenyon Review, The Millions, and Fanzine.

THE HARE by César Aira | reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE HARE
by César Aira
New Directions Paperbacks, 218 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

The writer César Aira has a charming trait (at least in the English language translations of his books published by New Directions): at the end of his novels, he inscribes the date he completed the work, at least so we are supposed to believe. For both The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, published in Katherine Silver’s English translation by New Directions last year, and The Hare, which New Directions brings out tomorrow translated by Nick Caistor, were apparently finished the same day, September 6, 1996.

Could this really be? Aira, the author of some 70 works of fiction and essay, is after all one of the most prolific writers in the world. It is conceivable he completed the two books on the same day. Or has Aira, a master of meta-fiction, found yet another way to invite the reader to contemplate the nature of reality, the possibility of storytelling, and the absurdities of perception? “Between one story and another,” he writes in The Hare, “even one that was really told and another that remained virtual, hidden and unborn in an indolent fantasy, there was not a gap but a continuum.”

That continuum undergirds all possibility, all human experience, Aira wants to say, even in situations of profound disjuncture. In The Hare, an English naturalist finds himself in a landscape he can’t quite fathom, among native people he finds inscrutable, amidst an Indian war he can’t interpret that appears based on entirely unbelievable myths and interpretations of reality. Yet the naturalist, Clarke, a somnolent and melancholic protagonist much like Aira’s other middle aged male protagonists (a continuum of strangely naïve men), seems to believe everything: truth, after all, is as flat as the pampas.

Clarke is ostensibly out to discover a legendary flying hare that can jump in one motion between two horizons. Wonderfully, all the metaphor doesn’t get in the way of Aira’s clipped plot, which though full of funny asides about the writing process, draws the equally naïve reader in and pulls him along. Clarke bandies about among different Indian kingdoms and meanwhile the truth seems closer—or further away—every moment of the journey.

That the ultimate truth of Clarke and his co-adventurers is laughably absurd is part of the fun here. But is it enough to make this book endure in the imagination? The folks at New Directions think so—they say The Hare is the best of the eight Aira novels they’ve published. But I’m not sure this is so. I’ve read five of the eight; among them, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter in Chris Andrews’ translation, about another European seeking out a transcendent truth in the pure wilderness of Argentina, stands out above all the others, for it rises beyond melancholy, beyond the intellect, beyond even imagination to a most unforgettable sublime. The painter is Johann Mortiz Rugendas, a 19th century master of landscape and genre advised by Alexander von Humboldt. Rugendas is out on horseback with an acolyte (a storyline also mirrored in The Hare), when he is struck by lightning. “It was pure action,” writes Aira, “a wild concatenation of events.”

There is something in those events and those that follow, which Aira describes with painterly care and also wisdom—“Rugendas witnessed the spectacle of his body shining”—that puts the reader directly, with stunning immediacy, inside the character’s life being torn and twisted. This is what, in The Hare, Aira calls art, “that which does not demand understanding.”

The author signed An Episode November 24, 1995. If that is so, and The Hare was finished nine and half months later, we can see it as a worthy analog, a book of meanings to go along with a work of art the reader will never forget.

–July 24, 2013

Nathaniel Popkin author photo

Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver fiction review editor Nathaniel Popkin’s latest book is the novel Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press, for sale November 12). He is also the author of Song of the City (Four Walls Eight Windows/Basic Books) and The Possible City (Camino Books). He is co-editor of the Hidden City Daily and senior writer and script editor of the Emmy-winning documentary series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment.” He writes the “Bookmarked” column for Art Attack/Philly.com.

THE SENSUALIST by Daniel Torday reviewed by Michelle Fost

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THE SENSUALIST
by Daniel Torday
Nouvella Books, 177 pages

Reviewed by Michelle Fost

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am at once very connected to and disconnected from Germany, and I’ve been exploring this feeling in a novel I’m working on. My grandparents were German Jewish refugees, sailing from Hamburg, Germany, to Ellis Island in 1934. We talked very little, my grandparents and their grandchildren, about their lives in Germany before they left. If their lives were an apartment building, it was as though we always entered on the third floor, and were welcome to walk around anywhere from the third floor and up but never below. We didn’t notice anything unusual. Obviously, there are good reasons for not talking about what was left behind by German Jews who escaped the holocaust. But there is also tremendous loss in disowning all of it. Sam Gerson, the narrator of Daniel Torday’s novella The Sensualist, has a similar relationship to his grandfather and his past. His grandfather rarely talks about his background as a Jewish Hungarian refugee, and Sam has not been especially curious. But Torday gets across the surprising strength and importance of the experience of the past generation—as invisible as this experience may seem—to Sam. Sam’s story really resonated for me.

The Sensualist tells the story of Sam and his friendship with a recent Russian Jewish immigrant, Dmitri Abramovitch Zilber. The two bond after being mistreated by a gym teacher. Sam becomes smitten with Dmitri’s sister. There are a number of fights with another boy, Jeremy, who also involves himself with the sister. We know from the novel’s opening sentence that it’s not going to end well for Jeremy. We know that somehow he’s going to get beaten up badly by Dmitri and his friends. To Torday’s credit, there’s a lot of suspense in anticipating this attack. I found it interesting that the attack takes place offstage—we learn about it through Dmitri’s recounting for Sam over the telephone what happened. There are many violent skirmishes throughout the book, but this last leaves Jeremy with a broken jaw wired shut and other serious injuries. Throughout his friendship with Sam, Dmitri insists on the importance of being able to feel and act on his emotions, like a Dostoyevsky character. This insistence is part of what lands him in juvenile detention, but it is also what attracts Sam to Dmitri. There’s violence, but there’s also sharing the story of what happened with a person who will understand. In The Sensualist, Torday makes a case for both conflict and connection being necessary for feeling alive.

Sam and Dmitri’s friendship changes Sam. It changes the way he sees his grandfather, and the way he sees himself. When Sam drives his grandfather to the train after a family Seder, Sam’s grandfather remarks on the big walls being built along the highway. Sam says they are “bullshit soundproofing.” Sam has noticed that these sound barriers are going up in the sections of highway behind the homes of the wealthy. Years later, Sam returns to visit Dmitri. Their lives have diverged. Sam is a college student in Maine; Dmitri has just been released from juvenile detention. Sam notices that Dmitri’s basement is quieter than he remembered it. Driving along the Beltway, he sees that the sound barriers are now everywhere. The feeling I was left with at the end of Torday’s spare, lyrical novella was that the Russian Jewish immigrants may well be on their way to becoming as assimilated as Sam and his family, but it was the noise that came with Dmitri and his friends that helped Sam better understand his grandfather and himself.

–July 15, 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.