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BLOOM IN REVERSE by Teresa Leo reviewed by Anna Strong

Posted on January 24, 2014 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016

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BLOOM IN REVERSE
by Teresa Leo
University of Pittsburgh Press (Pitt Poetry Series), 104 pages

reviewed by Anna Strong

From the dedication page, Teresa Leo’s Bloom in Reverse props itself against the fence between the living and the dead. Dedicated to the living but in memory of Leo’s friend Sarah, the poems carry the dual burden of trauma and memory. How do we process, how do we articulate trauma? If we’re at all like Teresa Leo, we recognize that in art, in poetry, we remember the the Sarah Hannahs of the world and bring them into a collective consciousness. She is not forgotten.

Donald Hall wrote an astounding collection of poems chronicling his wife’s cancer and death, Without. Bloom in Reverse reads much like that collection—in each poem, we feel the keenness of the “without,” the strain of recollection, the reconstruction of the smallest moments of friendship and intimacy in the clearest language accessible to the speaker. Many of the poems are two-line stanzas, heavily enjambed and riddled with fragments, clauses that build and build on each other only to be let go in a kind of sigh—we feel the struggle to hold onto whatever memories come to mind, only to realize that that’s all they are. The ending of “She Said: It’s Not that Things Bring Us to Tears, but Rather, There Are Tears in Things” struck me as the most poignant of these conclusions:

a crude eradication that paints me still,
that which I must not think about fully

or for too long — heat, stress, vapor, bone —
I understand, insistently,

this concept of tears;
I’m surrounded by things.

The collection also carries the guilt of moving on. In “Constant,” the speaker finds “the man she loves / in front of a computer // with his hand in his pants” and in “I Have Drinks with my Dead Friend’s Ex-Boyfriend,” the speaker suddenly finds herself falling for her dead friend’s ex boyfriend, who “drove an hour in the rain // on a cold winter night to a bar / in New England to help me remember you.” There is also the anger that comes with that feeling of being left behind — in “Your Rose Bush,” the speaker has “killed” her rose bush “not by accident:”

and so your rose bush is not —
not here to invoke or provoke

not her to dismember the mind,
no false hope, a bloom in reverse
just another way to say
I disremember you.

That poem is a knife in the gut to anyone who has ever felt that anger and guilt, the persistent why and how, the ache of not understanding “the signs.”

This collection is hard to read. It brings old hurts to the surface, no matter how long you’ve buried the memories of your own grief, but it reminds us that memory, in the end, is all we have. You can’t bring them back, but you can choose to remember. You can water the plants. You can look at photos. You can sit outside and listen for a name on the wind, look for any sign you want that they’re somewhere, if not here. You can go on living, which is the affirmation of the final poem of the collection, “Advice for a Dying Fern:”

there still may be fiddleheads,
rolled up shoots

sturdy as shepherd’s crooks,
primed as stringed instruments

unplayed, not yet unfurled
but ready,

the living ready to burst
through the dead.

Cleaver Magazine reviewer and assistant poetry editor Anna Strong is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and is originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Peregrine, and Poems for the Writing. Anna also helps teach Penn’s Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera. She is pursuing a master’s degree at Boston College.

The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William Helmreich and Baghdad: The City in Verse edited by Reuven Snir reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Posted on January 22, 2014 by thwackFebruary 7, 2019

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THE NEW YORK NOBODY KNOWS: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City
by William Helmreich
Princeton University Press, 449 pages

BAGHDAD: THE CITY IN VERSE
edited by Reuven Snir
Harvard University Press, 339 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Writers, this one included, have long struggled to capture in words the dynamic and multi-layered ways that cities change. Cities themselves are powerful change agents in the wider world, but they are defined and redefined constantly by the evolving tastes and desires of their residents (who themselves are always changing), technology, culture and religion, structural political and economic shifts, and the feedback loop of history and history-telling, characterized through myth, poetry, and mass media. Here’s how I try to make sense of it in Song of the City (Four Walls Eight Windows/Basic Books):

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Think of the city as a collection of swarming cells that change, adapt, grow, shrink, and grow simultaneously. Imagine hundreds or thousands or millions of cells, each living and dying not in parallel or even in sequence, but overlapping from one generation to the next. The whole place moves in several directions at once. Unless calamity hits, no city dies in a single instant. Despite what you read in the papers, no city, no neighborhood even, is ever miraculously reborn.

I want to say cities change because people, in all their contradictions, make them. But urban change can also be terribly unnerving, even terrifying, and sometimes violent. We might reject it outright, and fight it to the death. We might campaign to preserve a building that harkens to another time, or demand that a neighborhood remains “Italian” or “Puerto Rican” or “black.” And we might mourn for a city “that once was.”

Perhaps, in part, it’s the very conflict between change and constancy that makes cities such interesting and powerful places. Now, two very different but surprisingly related books published at the end of last year, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William Helmreich (Princeton University Press) and Baghdad: The City in Verse, edited by Reuven Snir (Harvard University Press), help us frame and reframe the discussion. Both Helmreich, a sociologist who has studied New York for four decades and Snir, a professor of Arabic literature at the University of Haifa, seem to agree about the organic nature of urban change. “A city is not a static unit,” writes Helmreich in the introduction to his book. “It’s a dynamic and constantly environment, adapting to the needs of its residents.” Citing the prominent sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod, who passed away a month ago, Snir writes in his excellent introductory essay, “Cities are ‘living processes’ rather than ‘products’ or ‘formalistic shells for living’,” an idea I mirrored in Song of the City, which is organized into parts: pulse, body, soul, and seed.

Both of these admirable new books are indeed necessarily open-ended explorations: Helmreich’s across space, Snir’s through time. Over four years beginning in 2008, New York native Hemreich walked 6,000 miles across nearly every block of New York’s five boroughs; Snir, whose parents were exiled from Baghdad to Israel in 1951, parceled through more than a century of poetry about Baghdad, translating and ultimately presenting 199 poems by some 123 poets.

The cities, too, are distinctly comparable. Baghdad was founded in an instant, in 762, by the Caliph al-Mansur, who called his city Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace. It was to be the first city in the Arab world that would eschew placelessness. Until then, according to Snir, the Bedouin notion of genealogy framed one’s Islamic self-conception far more than the idea of homeland. Within a century, having made “place and self mutually interdependent,” Baghdad became one of the largest cities in the world, and beyond that, writes Snir, in a manner that makes us think of New York as a symbol for America, “Baghdad has been the city of Islam and Arabism par excellence—the center of the Islamic empire and the Arab world, in reality and certainly metaphorically. Baghdad was at times a metaphor even for the entire East.”

It became an open and pluralistic and hedonistic city through the end of the first millennium, into the second. It was, as the poet Ibn al-Rumi writes in the 9^th century, “A city where I accompanied childhood and youthfulness;/ there I wore a new cloak of glory./When she appears in the imagination, I see her budding branches aflutter.” And then, in 1258, the city was destroyed by the Mongol Hulagu, a founder of the Persian dynasty Il-Khanid. This was all but the death of the place; Baghdad didn’t quite recover until the late 19^th century into the 20^th century, when it flourished as a tolerant, modern metropolis. The Baghdad of a century ago, in 1914, Snir points out, was majority Jewish, and filled otherwise with Arabs, Bedouins, Christians, Kurds, Persians, and Turks. At that very moment, melting pot New York was enjoying the heights of 20^th century immigration and the first great migration of African Americans to the more tolerant north.

Of course, Sadaam Hussein and the modern Hulagu, the United States, eventually put that to an end; and in a sense, the cities’ fates became intertwined, as the poet Adonis, whose work on Baghdad Snir has collected in this volume, notes in the poem Salute to Baghdad (2003),

Put your coffee aside and drink something else.
Listening to what the invaders are declaring:
“With the help of God,
We are conducting a preventative war,
Transporting the water of life
From the banks of the Hudson and Thames
To flow in the Tigris and Euphrates

Snir presents a great deal of poetry on Baghdad from the second half of the 20^th century and into the 21^st, a time marked at first by modernity and cultural blossoming and at last by utter destruction and despair. Writes the poet Bushra al-Bustani in A Sorrowful Melody, “The tanks of malice wander./My wound/Is turned away like an abandoned horse/Scorched by an Arabian sun,/Chewed by worms./Picasso paints another Guernica,/Painting Baghdad under the feet of boors./Freedom is a lute/Strummed by a nameless dwarf./Paintings in Baghdad’s museums/Are at the mercy of the wind.”

In the book’s afterword, the Iraqi writer Abdul Kader el-Janabi notes that with its history of destruction, “Baghdad is an easy metaphor for revival and eclipse.” Indeed, despite attempts to conjure more complex and dynamic narratives for their cities, both Helmreich’s and Snir’s books are infused with that traditional broad stroke urban metaphor, of life and vitality followed by decline and death and (hopefully) life again. The difference is the point of view. New York, in the dusk of the Michael Bloomberg era, is triumphant: safe, utterly vital, nearly entirely tolerant. New York today is New York par excellence. As the protagonist of his story, Helmreich, who grew up in upper Manhattan in the 1950s, carries this prejudice into his exploration, which tends to downplay the challenges to New York’s massive homelessness problem, for example, or ethnic tension. He has a right to, for certain. New York, which lost more than 800,000 people during Helmreich’s formative years, has soared in the last two decades. He is, I think, both proud and amazed. And though Baghdad is now and again one of the largest cities in the Middle East (its population is 7+ million; New York’s is 8.3 million), Snir’s narrative is prejudiced by his own family’s story of loss of a beloved homeland and the war on Iraq, which left vast sections of the city in ruins.

The best way I know to counter the power of this broad, and deeply ingrained, urban narrative is with writing—and in the case of poetry, imagery—that’s specific, and particular to time, place, and circumstance. In this regard, I was somewhat (but only somewhat) disappointed by Snir’s collection. There is much metaphorical writing across the eras—“In the sky/The poles bow,/searching for what deserves illumination,/But the streets are overcrowded/With void.” (Sinan Antoon, 1989)—and not nearly enough visceral reality. I wanted to be taken onto an overcrowded street of the ancient city, of the modern city, of the city post-war to smell and hear and taste it. For that reason, one of my favorites in the collection is An Elegy for al-Sindibad Cinema, by the late Sargon Boulus, published in 2008. The movie house, a fixture of the cosmopolitan city of the mid-20^th century, was bombed during the Iraq war. “Those evenings were destroyed…/Our white shirts, Baghdad summers…/How will we dream about traveling to any island?” he asks,

Al-Sindibad Cinema had been destroyed!
Heavy is the watered hair of the drowned person
Who returned to the party
After the lamps were turned off,
The chairs were piled up on the deserted beach,
And the Tigris’s waves were tied by chains.

Helmreich seems aware of this pitfall; his epic walk was meant to—and did—put him face-to-face with hundreds of New Yorkers on their own turf, to see them as individuals whose daily reality helps define the city of today, and who in turn are shaped by the city. And those New Yorkers are complex beings, as he writes, “a person’s identity can include, say, religion, community, race, language, and economic considerations all at once. Human beings are naturally free to pick and choose from these.”

In essence, he’s reporting out on the state of things. In Jamaica, Queens, he meets an immigrant from the small South American country of Guyana who has planted a garden. “It’s a small area,” writes Helmreich, “about four feet long and three feet wide, surrounded by a miniature white picket fence.”

“These flowers are beautiful,” I say by way of starting a conversation.

Small and wiry, with bright teeth framed in part by a neat mustache, he responds with a soft smile, “They are flowers from my country, Guyana, which I love. I planted them to remind me of home. This way, when I look outside I always remember the beautiful place I lived in before I came here.”

Foreign-born people now account for 40 percent of New Yorkers; with their American-born children, Helmreich points out, they are the city’s majority. He thus spends a great deal of time on ethnicity, devoting chapters on new immigrants, “the Future of Ethnic New York,” and on New York’s neighborhood-based communities, home to so much of the immigrant experience.

In the chapter, “Enjoying the City,” Helmreich finds himself in the northwest Bronx, at a concert of the Jamaican reggae singer Beres Hammond. Helmreich describes the scene, “people on their feet, dancing the entire time,” the make-up of the audience—99.9 percent West Indian, 65 percent women—“dressed about two steps above what you’d call casual.” This must have been a fascinating event as cultural tableau. The author might have described in detail food, dress, conversations, art, and even the neighborhood around the venue at CUNY Herbert Lehman College. But instead, Helmreich gives the reader a kind of quick analysis in language that feels too broad and too conjectural (and full of assumptions), hoping to categorize the scene rather than record it for its essence. “Each immigrant who comes to the United States,” he writes,

leaves behind ways of life that need to be adapted to fit in with their new circumstances. Yet they also wish to preserve their identity. Yes, they’re now in America and hearing American music, but also important is the music of the homeland, accompanied by lyrics that express yearning, memories, shared values, and forms of cultural expression—how the houses looked, how the foods tasted, and how the people lived and related to one another. And of course the lyrics speak of the challenges of making it in their new homes.

Helmreich goes on to reveal some of Hammond’s stage banter, but of course what the reader really wants is to read the lyrics that are about the struggle to live in two worlds, hear the conversations, and taste the food. The author has it all, we presume, in his notes, but this visceral, sensatory New York isn’t revealed here. Nor are buildings or streets described in any consistent way. This isn’t Joseph Mitchell; we can’t quite conjure Helmreich’s hidden New York.

Part of the issue here is that the author is too ambitious: he wants to give us the whole city, the city he’d lovingly discovered and rediscovered in his four year walk, but 468 square miles is too vast a territory for ethnography. And his sociologist’s instincts work against him: amidst the panorama, it’s extremely hard to categorize and label in ways that expand the reader’s interest and imagination. To try to make sense of complex things, he’s all too often forced to sweeping judgment and summary statements that feel inadequate. Calling some place a “bad neighborhood” or diverse people “gentrifiers” doesn’t help. Labels have a way of distancing us from the complicated reality.

Interestingly, the book improves vastly as it moves along. In the long chapter on gentrification, Helmreich is able to convincingly put analytic skills to work, and perhaps because the people he encountered in gentrifying neighborhoods are English speaking, the quotes from them are longer and more resonant. It also appears that the systems and values at work in these places feel more accessible to him, and therefore to the reader. But he is right focus so substantially on immigration and immigrant life. Nothing so much defines the process of urban change than the ways newcomers adapt, reject, assimilate, become inspired by the city they’re adopting, which is after all the collective product of the many millions of people who had come before.

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.

HERE COME THE WARM JETS by Alli Warren reviewed by Vanessa Martini

Posted on January 21, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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HERE COME THE WARM JETS
by Alli Warren
City Lights, 104 pages

reviewed by Vanessa Martini

Diving into Alli Warren’s Here Come the Warm Jets is at once exhilarating and slightly overwhelming. Warren pulls no punches with this collection. The reader is at once plunged into Warren’s intricate linguistic code, and she does not wait for or expect us to get used to her from the start. The only comparable experience I can call to mind is seeing a Shakespeare play: the language is difficult to follow at first, being at a slight remove from our everyday speech, but by the end of the first act—or the first several poems, in Warren’s case—this wall has dissolved, and we are left free to absorb as much wonderful language as possible.

The collection shares a title with Brian Eno’s 1974 album, and this gives an immediate clue to how much cultural cross-pollination Warren plays with. I am sure I have missed more than a few references, but Warren gleefully includes rappers, fashion labels, social networks, and frequently sexual slang, sometimes turning on a dime from more high-minded language: “You look out on the estuary/and it is gross/full of sentiment/did she suck it or did/you just bang her…” This rapid hop-skip between stylistic codes makes reading the poems collected in Jets a frequently exhilarating experience, sometimes almost addictive, as each poem only confirms Warren’s cracking skill with words, and it’s impossible not to want to see what she does next.

Alli Warren

Warren also references social media with the most ease I have seen yet in poetry, mostly due to her decision to absorb its language to make her comments, instead of retreating to an ivory tower to proclaim doom from above. The lines in “Whose Rules Relate Regardless of their Names” begin with verbs that will be familiar to any Facebook user: “Join the group Work, Awareness of Death, & Sexual Conference…Become a fan of boat-like gliding…Poke the quadriceps/Poke the wild nettle;” in “Some Greater Social Sharing” we read about “two eyes fixed/on one profile / doing the pre-/emptive poke.” Such language is at once immediately familiar to a certain subset of readers, but seeing it in this context—printed on the page, not glowing on a screen—adds a layer of dissonance to that familiarity and asks us to think again about Internet-born language that has filtered offscreen and into our daily vernacular.

Gender and sexuality also wind like a thread through Warren’s tapestry of poems. In “Can I Prevent My Wages from Being Garnished?” we read about “a charming young thing/with big breathy icons”; elsewhere, “I stick my tongue in/and then I stick/my finger, forearm & mouth in/I venture all around,” “all private parts/precede and mislead/their patrons,” and “Terence and Will their concern/for purity of pussy.” The tone of these instances tends towards the slightly clinical, or maybe the skeptical; there is no sentiment about sex here, no romanticizing, and Warren frequently pairs these occurrences with meditations on class and monetary transaction (another overarching concern throughout the collection) which, to a certain frame of mind, is a perfectly natural pairing.

Although these observations bubble up in the reading of Jets it takes completing the collection to really get a fuller sense of cohesion, and this is because Warren closes the text with “Personal Poem,” a seven-page, glorious conclusion that immediately recasts all the poems before it and practically demands the reader return to the beginning and start again, for doing so lends a completely different feel to all the poem that came before it. It is difficult for me to articulate exactly why this is so, but “Personal Poem” takes the sort of poem children are often assigned in elementary school—Write a personal poem, about yourself, name things you like and believe—and turns it into a sometimes blistering, sometimes heartrending manifesto that exposes what forms the slightly messier underpinnings beneath Warren’s precision-cut earlier poems. There is no pretense of a “speaker” here, we see Warren herself, far more vulnerable than at any other point before: “Cultivate crushes and houseplants but not too many,” “If you lack confidence in your poetry don’t compensate with clothes,” “Astrology is real….Mercury retrograde will end.”

Such statements, delivered with the purity of belief that comes from learning after struggle, effectively deliver what might be called the abstract of the collection, the simultaneous summation and teaser, that clarifies while also enticing. It is at once a fantastic poem in its own right and also a superb decision about placement: at the beginning of a collection this poem would feel too obvious, in the middle, from out of nowhere. But at the end it allows all the poems before it to shed a little of their skin, to expose the softer parts beneath that are suddenly made vulnerable in any re-read, and this is a collection that begs to be read again and again, because Warren’s skill is one that only grows more apparent the more time a reader spends submerged in her poems.

Vanessa Martini graduated from Bard College in 2012 with a degree in creative writing. She now works as a bookseller in San Francisco, where she eats a lot of avocados and walks everywhere. In the past she has interned for McSweeney’s Lucky Peach, where she milked a cow for an assignment, and for two sex writers, for whom she had to read 50 Shades of Grey.

MERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience by Eileen Cronin reviewed by Colleen Davis

Posted on January 17, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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MERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience
by Eileen Cronin
W.W. Norton, 336 pages

reviewed by Colleen Davis

When I read a memoir, I feel like I’m climbing into the kitchen of someone I’ve never met to see if their recipes for life trump mine. It’s amusing—and sometimes shocking—to discover the great variety of messes humans can create with similar ingredients. Lives get twisted and re-shaped by crazy family members, creative impulses, and random events. But some people get a truly strange variable thrown into their stew. Eileen Cronin, for example, was born without legs.

You might think that if you’ve spent your earthly time in prime physical condition, her story will not connect with yours. But that’s not how Cronin’s memoir, Mermaid, comes across. Sure the young Eileen is at a great disadvantage in her early years. She must “squiddle” from one place to another instead of walk. But once she’s old enough to get prosthetic legs, her challenges start to resemble those of typical teenagers.

In fact, it seems that the most complex feature of Cronin’s life is not her lack of legs. She has a much tougher time navigating the shifting emotional currents set off by members of her rambunctious family. Eileen has ten siblings to contend with as she evolves from child to adult. While the narrative makes it clear that these kids have deep bonds with each other, their behavior often bewilders Eileen who obviously has a different perspective on many of life’s great questions. A prominent scene in the book depicts a moment when Eileen’s leg flies off as a handsome dance partner twirls her in the air. The potential for this kind of ordeal is something she’s always got to look out for, so her path in life is truly unique.

Yet these moments just deal with the external Eileen. While the first half of the book hints at her inner confusion, they don’t fully expose it. The story’s middle chapters paint a picture of a fairly stable young woman who seems to be accepted by most people—including handsome, intelligent men. There is something about her easy transition into the arms of a college dean’s son that makes you wonder if life is really all that hard for Eileen. I mean there are plenty of two-legged teenage girls out there who never have such an easy time finding romance or social acceptance. Though she gets nervous about certain decisions, for some unexplained reason Eileen never seems overwrought until much later in the story when tragedy strikes a sibling.

This buoyancy of her tale made me wonder if Cronin was holding something back. Writing about family is always tricky business. Considering the sheer number of people who could object to her take on things (i.e., ten siblings, a mother who may have taken thalidomide, a squadron of Catholic school teachers who taught the Cronins, etc.), holding back is something she may have felt compelled to do. But her smooth evolution into a pretty girl with lots of opportunities makes you wonder what she did with her pain.

During my own adolescence, I had to deal with a physical disability that transformed my life in a purely negative way. Although I had all my limbs, I developed an extreme scoliosis that required plaster casts, a back brace, physical therapy, and endless doctoring. The person who became my high school best friend had an even more serious curvature requiring extensive surgery and long recuperation. These experiences left us steeped in self-loathing that took decades to shake off. We suffered in relationships, we lacked self-confidence, and too often we self-medicated to quell depression it took years to outgrow. As I read Cronin’s story I kept asking myself: How come Eileen never gets depressed? How come she doesn’t seem to hate herself for being so different? Did she have more resilience or character than we had? Or did the size and economic position of her family create some kind of firewall between herself and cruel social forces?

As a reader I was disappointed that the author didn’t provide answers to these questions—or at least give enough evidence on which to hazard a guess. The sheer number of Cronin’s siblings creates another narrative problem. It’s hard to keep each Cronin distinct as you read. Most memoirs don’t have this volume of characters and it’s tough to keep them vivid over a forty-year period of growth. The good news is that readers who hang in until the end will find some richer passages that make the problems of adult Eileen seem far more compelling than those of her post-college self.

The final chapters offer a more honest assessment of Cronin’s problems with alcohol, self-doubt, and trust. Chapters describing her foreign travels are also illuminating. They illustrate her personal courage as she moves unhindered across sketchy terrain. Ultimately, Cronin’s book shows how far you can go if you refuse to eat the crumbs the world offers and make life into a meal of your own.

Colleen Davis is a Pennsylvania writer and author of the website Between the Pond and the Woods, which provides information and a Facebook forum for dementia caregivers. She writes for the Penn Memory Center and is a script writer for the documentary series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment“, which airs on 6abc.

SCATTERED VERTEBRAE by Jerrold Yam reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

Posted on January 16, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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SCATTERED VERTEBRAE
by Jerrold Yam
Math Paper Press, 2013

reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

Jerrold Yam’s second poetry collection was titled with care: like the image of scattered vertebrae, these poems are at once beautiful, dark, and disturbing. Yam weaves family life, social expectation, religion, and tragedy together so ornately that at times one does not realize what they’re reading. This technique generally makes for compelling and delicate poetic image, but at times the disorientation feels less deliberate—Yam’s is a poetics that requires rereading, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It is a poetics of “pleated identity” (31), turning away from singular intent or simple subject matter, and its difficulty reflects the personal sense of unease that Yam confronts throughout: unlike some collections, here one can safely equate the speaker with Yam himself.

Yam’s verse is elaborate, complex by nature, for the poet dives into his own conflicted psyche in a ritual of Freudian digging. He dredges up childhood memory as well as painful scenes of the present day, from his disappointed mother’s mixed acknowledgement of him, to his stricken grandmother with curled body and “feet knotted / in wreaths and bouquets” (89). The book is writhing with sexuality, pulsing with imagery of “the unripe / egg of the female before sperm tongue their way through / its gelatinous down” (50): indeed, the poet seems to have a minor obsession with the womb, seeking, perhaps, his own origin story.

Jerrold Yam

The anatomical fascination that cohabitates with Yam’s social/familial relations begins to fail, however, when the author resorts to explicit sexual description—or worse, dramatized sexual description. His memories of locker-room explorations, a hand job rendered in the seat of an airplane, and so on appear out of nowhere, the sensitive hedging of previous poems yielding suddenly to such excessively wordy lines as “my / beating organ about to froth over its glistening cloak” (66). Perhaps Yam’s eagerness to write about ejaculation can be rationalized as part of the Freudian catharsis discussed above, but bodily attention seems far more effective in this collection when limited to scientific curiosity, rather than what might be misread as fond reminiscence of past orgasms; consider, for instance, the more poetic “I / survey this cinema of red, / feverishly waiting for a gene to / raise its flimsy translucent palms” (65) or “things stranded in the script of capillaries” (86). Lines like these may not smack of sexual courage (the “unbridled fire” [85] of which Yam seems to revere as a refusal to conform to societal expectations), but they do not compromise the lovely hauntedness of this poetry with distracting imagery as others do.

In Yam’s defense, his sexual orientation appears to be linked heavily to the family discord, and likely the hesitation about religion expressed by “twin criminals of [his] lungs / loaded like doubt in a church” (62), that he transcribes. Scattered Vertebrae is, at its core, a book of loaded poetry, driven by psychological, emotional, and physical desire, placing current events (the Sierre Coach Crash and other tragedies), a mother’s coldness, turbulent romance, and the church on the same sad but enchanting level. Though the imagery is at times heavy-handed or overwrought (“her limbs propped along the bedstead / like bags of dormant muscle” [100]), its intensity is quite often appropriate for Yam’s dark subject matter; if, as the poet asserts, “All that is beauty is also ruin” (95), he has certainly mastered the art of sorting through the rubble. He writes, “I don’t know / of sorry and thank you and I / love you — their foul simplicities” (48), and seems to prefer it that way, the book a genuine celebration of life’s perplexing lots.

Kenna O’Rourke is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The Pocket Guide, the Philos Adelphos Irrealis chapbook, and Penn’s Filament and 34th Street magazines. She is an editorial assistant for Jacket2, an enthusiastic employee of the Kelly Writers House, and an occasional blogger and jewelry-and-sewn-object-maker.

CARDBOARD PIANO by Rina Terry reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

Posted on January 13, 2014 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016

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CARDBOARD PIANO
by Rina Terry
Texture Press, 102 pages

reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

We tend to equate the word “prison” with concrete, metal and despair, ostensibly as means of change or as a tool of rehabilitation. In her new collection, Cardboard Piano, Rina Terry reveals multi-layered evidence of the transformative power of art versus stone. Anyone who is familiar with Stephen King’s prison stories, The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption (or at least with the movie adaptations thereof) expects to question the prison system and to explore the humanity of both the inmates and the guards. Terry’s words push the reader to consider the realities of an in-person search for and confrontation of that humanity, in all its potential glory and obloquy.

The opening salvo, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Inmates” offers a kaleidoscope through which we can feel the entire collection. Terry challenges our accepted notion of rehabilitative space as cyclical: “There is only one/direction. Single file/through metal detector.” Parole notwithstanding, the suggestion is that for most who enter, there is no hope, and what’s more, the system-keepers believe that as well. After all, “an inmate/is and inmate/is an inmate.” The guards do not see what Terry sees, the one man who holds on to his sense of self enough to iron his uniform, or the baptism trough as cleansing agent.

In “I’m Just Glad to Be Here” Terry explores gender politics within the system. She tells us that “Power . . . scratches its balls and zips up/as you step aside for him to pass.” If power is a man, how can women have any authority, and how can Terry, as chaplain, help the inmates to see her as an instrument of change? Indeed, the systemic power works against rehabilitative efforts. When we hear the inmates’ voices, the anger, though it exists, is sparse and muted, and is directed at the forces that landed them in prison, or the futility of existence within prison walls. “Power,” when it speaks, lashes out at the chaplain, and at the missionaries who volunteer. The problem, as highlighted in “Ebenezer Holiness Pentecostal Church Prison Chapel Volunteers” is that people who want to help, to reach the inmates’ hearts and transform them from within, threaten the existence of Power. The volunteers “spread(s) unwelcome/stunning light in a cesspit,” counteracting the “hopeless empty impossible” trinity that equals job security to the officers. Poems that speak in the officer’s voices, and in the voices of the administrators, use harder, plainer language, speak through expletives and ring with indifference..

Terry contrasts the vulgar, explicit vitriol of the guards with subtler, introspective language from the prisoners themselves. “Horse Trough Baptism” exposes the delicacy of hope, and the dangers involved in reaching for it. To agree to baptism, which in prison is a public affair, means agreeing to be exposed in wet, clinging prison garb, to an audience that includes potential rapists. In exchange, they receive “no perks, no parole points,” no tangible rewards. To do so offers the possibility of finding meaning beyond “steel bars and jangling keys/ you can’t touch.” They do it because they “want to believe something. . . because you just can’t bear not to.” The only incentive is hope.

Terry’s poems are filled with music, figuratively and literally. Over and over, we see music do what metal bars do not. “Wherever Two or More Are Gathered” fuses prayer, art and transformation. Set on Christmas Eve, the poem focuses on the chaplain and the only two inmates who show up for the service. They sing “Silent Night” by candlelight, and in the dark cold one inmate breaks into tears. “Such A Moment” explodes a rare and perfect convergence of art and spiritual upliftment, in which “there rose up such great joy/the air was moist with the tears/they could not dare to shed.” The titular poem, in which both the chaplain and an inmate lose themselves in the soundless music the inmate plays on his fake instrument, illuminates the healing nature of art.

The American prison system operates on the premise that rehabilitation is possible. The stone walls, while protecting “us” from “them,” are meant to eliminate or control negative characteristics and transform inmates into ex-criminals. Terry shows us that art can do what the system does not, and through her controlled use of language and imagery, proves the power of art to effect change.

Shinelle L. Espaillat writes, lives and teaches in Westchester County, NY. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at Temple University. Her work has appeared in Midway Journal.

SUPERLOOP by Nicole Callihan reviewed by Anna Strong

Posted on January 12, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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SUPERLOOP
by Nicole Callihan
Sock Monkey Press, 72 pages

Reviewed by Anna Strong

The startling beauty of Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop lies in the balance the poems strike between the specificity and universality of childhood memory. The strongest poems take us deep into a place of colorful, youthful imagination, full of the unexpected juxtapositions that only retrospection can bring. The poems retrieve those crystal-clear moments in childhood when we make our first brushes with what it means to be a grown-up—a death in the family, divorce, a new word, and ultimately, the realization that our parents are no more perfect than we are. Callihan constantly crushes and compresses those moments of innocence and experience together, as in the the title poem, where she writes “This is the way / the Tilt-a-Whirl ends / not with a smile / but with a nice ass whisper.”

Every poem in the collection is richly textured and intensely visual. The colors of our childhood homes, playgrounds, and titular (“SuperLoop” is the name of a favorite carnival ride) theme parks seem brighter than ever when seen through the lens of Callihan’s poems, an effect that comes from her ability to access childhood, whether in content or in voice. Callihan is able to combine a child’s imagination and focus on the minutiae with an adult’s sense of the scope of the universe, which makes for juxtaposition and associations only possible with this compression of time:

But now I am in yellow, an October flower girl

for my father’s new life. Now in red December,
our mother divorces another man,
but it is still August for us. We are out of seeds,

so we lay on the sidewalk, my brother
and I, and we play dead ‘til almost
dusk… (“Playing Dead”)

The balance of focus in the poems tips towards the simple, the tangible, the sensory, which makes the intensity of the moments of memory stand out all the clearer. The reader is never settled in the poem, our focus constantly shifts between the specific and minute and the “big” moments in a young person’s life. Those shifts are colored by a touch of surreality—just enough to be exciting and not so much as to take over the entire poem—which both smooths over and enhances the jumps in time and adds a certain instability to the memories the speaker relates. We remember events as we remember them, whether we remember them “correctly” or not is irrelevant. The surreality functions not so much as a poetic construct, but as an element of memory itself, equally powerful as the things that at least superficially seem “real”:

I walked back
to the house
which I remember
as paper
though I’m sure
it was brick or stone
or wood, and my mother

was crying because
the orthopedist
was screwing a nurse,
she said,
then explained
that screwing is when
grown-ups kiss. (“The Other Dead”)

The best poems in the collection follow this (admittedly, very-nearly formulaic) approach to childhood memory: looking back on the big, defining moments through the tiniest of lenses.
The poems manage not to blend into one another, however, because Callihan tempers the narrative poems with non-narrative, simple, sensory poems. The strength of these poems lies in the tremendous gaps Callihan leaves for the reader to fill in—we may insert ourselves into the more narrative poems because of a personal experience we share with the speaker, but the non-narrative poems leave wide-open space for us to join Callihan in the poem. The voice in the non-narrative poems is more adult in its sensibilities, and feels heavier and sadder, but loses none of the child’s wonder of the world, which we feel in the richness and sensory complexity in the language, coupled with the rhythm suggested by the short lines and enjambments:

plump and red
you beat perfect
tonight, heart
you have never been wrong
never wronged
sweet apple
go go (“October, night”)

Callihan’s collection leaves us wanting to go back to our childhood with an empty scrapbook and a snow-cone, to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl for the first time since our first kiss, to fill in the gaps in our memory not with the truth but with the imagination. There is grace and hope and extra whipped cream in the darkest places these poems are willing to go, and a fierceness in the memories lit only by neon carnival lights.

Anna Strong is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and is originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Peregrine, and Poems for the Writing. Anna also helps teach Penn’s Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera. She is pursuing a master’s degree at Boston.

LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR by Ramsey Beyer reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Posted on December 5, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR
by Ramsey Beyer
Zest Books, 272 pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

It’s a familiar notion, the sense of being a little fish in a big pond. This awareness may arrive at an early age for some, while running inexplicably late for others. But for eighteen-year-old Ramsey Beyer, a lover of lists, lakes, and bonfires, this epiphany arrives with a traditional right-of-passage: the start of college.

Ramsey Beyer – Photo by Michael Cantor

Beyer, now ten years beyond this awakening, chronicles her transition from Midwest high school senior to city-savvy first year art student in her debut memoir, Little Fish: A Memoir of a Different Kind of Year. Like many pre-undergrads, she precariously balances on the teeter-totter of change and consistency that comes with college acceptances, graduation, and the unstoppable arrival of the first autumn away from home. Beyer demonstrates maturity and insight when constructing a list of what her home environment lacks and what the prospect of life in a more populated setting might bring, highlighting both the positive and negative possibilities. After one final evening together with her “oldest and best friends,” the author even wonders while on the edge of slumber whether a part of her might actually like being Midwestern. But the thought is fleeting as she and her mother embark the next morning on a 600-mile journey from Paw Paw, Michigan to Baltimore, Maryland. The learning curve is steep, as any former collegiate will recall, and Beyer doesn’t shy away from noting even the smallest of challenges.

While the first few weeks present obstacles that range from completing two weekly six-hour classes to learning and debating the differences between direct and passive political action, Beyer successfully settles into the new pace of her life as “a little fish in a big pond for the first time ever.” We share in alternating monumental and miniscule moments, which she artistically weaves throughout her black and white narrative while painting a complete account of this yearlong rite of passage. Surrounded by a buffet of like-minded, artistic individuals, Beyer firmly grasps the identity of her twin golden braids, which she has worn daily since middle school, and flirts sporadically with the idea of loping them off in exchange for a shorter ’do. Her growth appears largely internal, as she celebrates small events like the challenge of peer critiques and the expansion of her new friend group. She is not immune to homesickness, however, and often ponders the wellness and whereabouts of her Michigan friends as she anticipates their correspondences.

Beyer is quietly rebellious and leads an enviably creative life sprinkled with solitary wanderings around Baltimore’s inner harbor, a growing presence in the city’s punk scene, and her first relationship. She is ever optimistic but immensely grounded, remaining rooted in her identity while still receptive to change.

Little Fish is sprinkled with lists, many of them copied from Beyer’s first zine—“a cut-and-paste independent magazine that is filled with whatever you want,” explains the author. Oftentimes Beyer’s lists are presented in tandem with graphics and highlight the contrasting norms of the past with changes occurring within the present. These creative catalogs read like poetry and cover a range of both serious and silly topics, from “recent best feelings ever” to a deeply honest look at personal downfalls.

Also included as textual components are Beyer’s journal entries, which detail her demanding schedule, desire to return to her friends back in Paw Paw, and humble appreciation for the luck that she has experienced in life thus far. It is clear that she appreciates her parents and brothers, whom we are introduced to at the commencement of her memoir through a pen-and-ink annotated photo album. “I’m so lucky to have such a good home life and such a good school life,” Beyer writes while flying back to school after a one-week autumnal recess. “I wish everyone did. It’s weird how the instant I step off the plane, I’ll be in a totally different universe/mind-set/routine.”

Perhaps one of the most poignant themes of Little Fish is the initial recognition of being a stranger in a once-familiar locale: for Beyer, this knowledge comes during the aforementioned trip home during a break from classes. During this time, Beyer checks off the majority of items from a to-do list and pens her thoughts on both the good and bizarre aspects of returning to Paw Paw. Being that this is her first experience living away from her life-long home, she experiences epiphanies of magnetic proportion, such as recognizing the presence of sexist and racist language utilized by those in her hometown and the varying levels of freedom that come from living in a city versus a rural setting.

Beyer checks in with the reader and lets us into her psyche through the constant presence of thought bubbles, which appear in a variety of social situations. She thinks for the everyman, whether by recalling her desire to eat one of the donuts in a somewhat outlandishly peculiar student art project or by asking her solitary questions regarding changes in her friend group as the academic year concludes.

We are left upon the conclusion of Little Fish with illustrations of the items left in Beyer’s shared apartment, an insightful list of what she hopes to learn in the next year, and well-placed anticipation for the next chapter. While the story closes with the completion of the young artist’s first year of college (and the potential modification of hair length), readers may continue devouring her present adventures online through comics, zines, and photographs at EverydayPants.com.

Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS by John Sibley Williams reviewed by Anna Strong

Posted on December 4, 2013 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016

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CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS
by John Sibley Williams
FutureCycle Press

reviewed by Anna Strong

Controlled Hallucinations is a collection of questions, interiors, and barriers—stepping into the world of these poems means being alone with your thoughts and the images and associations your brain creates only in its quietest moments. The title of the collection already suggests that these poems will occupy a space far removed from the outside world, but John Sibley Williams invites readers into this space with an introduction to the collection in the form of an untitled poem (following the dedication, which is to “the coming extinctions”). The introductory poem is a series of infinitive clauses (“To be the effect. / To be a thoughtful pause / and restrained response. / To the the passion of raking nails.”) which collectively define what can be expected from the ensuing poems.

Poet John Sibley Williams

Williams titles his poems only with Roman numerals and visually speaking, the poems do not set themselves apart from one another any more than their numerical differentiation—though they vary in length, the poems have short lines and stanza breaks obey only the internal rhetoric of the poem’s meaning, not an external metrical scheme. The absence of titles or great variation in the tenor of the poems makes the reader feel as though they are reading an extended interior meditation from a single speaker on what it means to think, to feel, and to know.

Many of the poems pose questions to this effect—especially the first three poems, which pointedly introduce this rhetoric of questioning—all of which ask both what it means to know and how it is that we language “knowing,” as in the short third poem, which contains the most beautifully compressed articulation of this idea:

without a single voice to complain
while strumming my fingers along the many
closed worlds of language
What is the sound of a shared idea?
What is the sound of your agreement? (III)

Williams primarily uses a first person speaker in these deeply interior poems, but even when he evacuates the speaker altogether there is still a sense of a sparse vacuum of thought. There is no sense of a world beyond the space of the poem, few competing voices beyond the speaker’s, few observations that seem to come from anywhere besides the consciousness of the speaker’s own thoughts. Silence and solitude blanket these poems as much as the white space around them on the page, and it is not long before the reader finds themself drawn deep into this world where thinking and feeling are the only language. Williams articulates this internalization with sound—in the (welcome) absence of rhyme and meter, alliterative and assonant sounds, and even simple repetition provide the links between lines:

The paper cut on my palm
runs parallel to my love line.
They taper off at the same spot,
under my thumb. (IX)

The sounds of the poems slow the reader down—instead of racing through the short lines, the reader wants to read closely for these subtle, savory moments of sonic connection.
Each poem opens and closes like a window and is gone the moment the reader moves onto the next poem—the fact that every poem resolves itself with closed punctuation (periods and question marks exclusively) sometimes leaves the reader wishing some would open out to the world beyond the poems, a kind of coming to the surface for air after a long, deep meditation, but the reader is also left with the feeling that they needed this time of retreat from the world of certainty.

Anna Strong is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and is originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Peregrine, and Poems for the Writing. Anna also helps teach Penn’s Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera. She is pursuing a master’s degree at Boston.

THE GRAVEYARD by Marek Hłasko reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Posted on December 3, 2013 by thwackFebruary 7, 2019

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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.

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.

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.

MY DIRTY DUMB EYES by Lisa Hanawalt reviewed by Margaret Galvan

Posted on December 2, 2013 by thwackMay 18, 2015

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MY DIRTY DUMB EYES
by Lisa Hanawalt
Drawn and Quarterly, 120 pages

Reviewed by Margaret Galvan

My Dirty Dumb Eyes, released last May, may be comic artist Lisa Hanawalt’s debut text with a major publisher, but it highlights her preexisting popularity. Indeed, Hanawalt’s text shows its chops through its diverse array of humorous comic vignettes often originally commissioned for well-known print and internet periodicals—from New York Magazine to The Hairpin. A few months prior to its release, one of these comics, “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” first printed in the pages of Lucky Peach—a magazine co-created by Momofuku-founder, David Chang—was nominated for a James Beard, the preeminent award in the culinary world.

In addition to “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” where Hanawalt creatively imagines bizarre skeletons in the closet out of the public personas of renown restauranteurs, she weighs in on the world of fashion and film in other comics. Her eyes certainly are not dumb—she can speak knowledgeably about a vast swath of culture in order to poke fun at it. But, dirty is an apt descriptor for much of her work where genitalia and evocations of sex predominate.

Even in a multi-page comics review of the New York Toy Fair, she admits her libidinal impulses by the seventh page, making the “uncomfortable observation [that her] attraction to certain toys feels kind of… sexual?” Following this observation, she contends that one toy is dildo-like and another cries semen-like tears. After voicing these thoughts, she moves into a more serious discussion of the role of toys in childhood nostalgia, yet, at the comic’s end, she illustrates herself in a wedding dress smooching the dildo-like toy. She refuses to leave the sexual behind or silent on the page.

Across her oeuvre, Hanawalt often depicts her sentient beings as animals, but her embrace of the animalistic does not build on the visceral, sexual energy, but departs from it. These very-human animals, rendered in Technicolor, sometimes discuss more poignant topics, regularly reaching existential impasses and unearthly conclusions. Following from an unresolved argument about driving style, the cat in “Control” unrealistically and successfully propels the car into the air by driving over a car, leaving the horse passenger in tears over the multi-car heap of twisted metal behind them. In “Moosefingers,” a horse questions her artistic decision to make idiomatic finger sculptures, wondering at the worth of the “pile of weird fingers” and tossing and turning in bed without resolution. On the next page following this conclusion, we see a photograph of some of these sculptures, suggesting that the horse’s artistic angst is Hanawalt’s own. In the comic as a whole, these tonally serious comics are interspersed among the lighter fare.

Hanawalt’s embrace of the vulgar alongside a more serious register aligns with the blithe irreverence that she calls upon for so much of her humor. Take an off-kilter observation and run with it for comedic effect, and that’s how you end up with the six pages of photorealistic animal faces donning surreal headgear that is “Fashion Week Animals in Hats” and “North American Wildlife and Hats.” These visual indices, which are so emblematic of her work, resonate with the feel of today’s Internet, where so many of these works first appeared. Her catalogues seem very reminiscent of our BuzzFeed culture of endless lists of humorous sound bytes. My Dirty Dumb Eyes may not be a cohesive narrative, but her comics are no less engrossing than an afternoon spent surfing through cat videos on YouTube.

Margaret Galvan is a PhD candidate in English and a film studies certificate candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is writing a dissertation entitled “Archiving the ’80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture” that traces a genealogy of queer theory in 1980s feminism through representations of sexuality in visual culture. Her academic writings, which explore the intersection of critical theory and visual representation of female bodies, can be found in publications like the Graphic Novels (Salem Press, 2012) reference work and in the forthcoming book, The Ages of The X-Men (McFarland, 2013). She teaches in the Gallatin Writing Program at New York University and works as an Instructional Technology Fellow at Brooklyn College. See margaretgalvan.org for further information.

A CONVERSATION WITH NATHANIEL POPKIN by Roberta Fallon

Posted on November 18, 2013 by thwackFebruary 7, 2019

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_Google_Art_Project

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.

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.

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 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.

PACHYDERME by Frederik Peeters reviewed by Brazos Price

Posted on November 11, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

Pachyderme

PACHYDERME
by Frederik Peeters
translated from the French by Edward Gauvin
Harry N. Abrams Press
SelfMadeHero imprint, 88 pages

Reviewed by Brazos Price

A cinematic opening: a woman’s heeled boot, a 1950’s traffic jam in bucolic Romandie, a downed elephant.

Carice Sorrel, a woman who “simply must get to the hospital,” to see her husband who has been in an accident, heads into the woods rather than wait for the elephant to be removed. In Pachyderme, by Frederik Peeters, this transition from the road – through the woods – and into the hospital, quickly feels like a trip into the subconscious. When Carice first sees the hospital, the reader sees her have something of an out of body experience.

Pachyderme-2

Ultimately, the image seems to suggest that she is replaying, reinterpreting, and reworking recent events while asleep or unconscious or insane or dead.

She wanders through the hospital and her memories. Moments of unreality are interspersed in the story and generally taken with aplomb by Carice, which further suggests that she is in a dreamlike state. This, coupled with frequent jump cuts in the narrative to places without context, adds to the overall unsteadiness of any direct interpretation of what is happening. The feel of the story is what seems to matter.

Take the decidedly Freudian stretch that finds Carice trailing her hands across a hospital wall , one that suddenly extrudes a nipple. Carice is surprised to find her hand there, and yet once she does, she begins to caress and stimulate the nipple. Flowers come out of the wall in great numbers, and form a vagina-like opening.

Carice walks inside and finds herself in a verdant grove, fecund with infant-like creatures that have appeared periodically up to this point. It comes across like a waking dream: unsettling, influenced from life, but lacking clear meaning or resolution.

Pachyderme-4

Carice cannot have children. This fact is implied earlier when she first meets the infants in the woods, but it is revealed to the reader definitively while Carice is having a conversation with a corpse in the morgue.

Pachyderme-5

This corpse may or may not be her future-self post-mortem. She is discussing her life, and her marriage, with her corpse. That certainly lends credence to a reading that Carice is going through some internal processing of her life up to the present.

It would be a shame, though, to read Peeters work just through that specific lens. There is much here that is ripe for exploration. Take the lowercase i in the lettering. Peeters uses lowercase i exclusively, as compared to all caps for nearly everything else (except the letter t). Does the lowercase i imply that the characters lack agency? Real egos? It is heavily implied that Carice had, for years in her marriage, suppressed her own desires. She confides as much to one of her young piano students, the same one who gives her an elephant necklace and appears occasionally just out of reach in the hospital.

Other aspects of the story feel less true. There is an ever-present feeling of Post WWII paranoia, primarily manifested and expressed by an ominous and strange stuttering secret policeman. The policeman is wearing a trench coat and can appear from nearly anywhere.

Pachyderme-6 He is after some documents, and enlists Carice’s help to retrieve them, or at a minimum to convince doctor Barrymore in the hospital to return them. This other character, the doctor, has his own depthand it almost rivals Carice’s, though he appears in fewer pages. He is an enigma, a dancing alcoholic seducer of women who seemingly likens his craft to performance. His is another path with which to read and analyze the comic.

So, Pachyderme is clearly about one woman coming to grips with her life. Or it is a Freudian look at the sublimation of desire. Or it is a treatise on post WWII paranoia. Or it is the exorcism of guilt. Really, though, what this comic is about is not important. Pachyderme is dense. It is cinematic. It sticks with you, it makes you think about it long after you’ve read/watched it. You may want to re-read it, to re-interpret it. Perhaps you will even dream on it.

Brazos-Price Brazos Price is from Austin, Texas where he served as an inaugural member of the Texas Library Association’s Maverick Graphic Novel Reading List. He has also reviewed comics for the librarian focused website No Flying, No Tights. He now works as a Librarian in Atlanta, Georgia.

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

Posted on November 4, 2013 by thwackFebruary 7, 2019

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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.”

Léger, “The City”, 1919

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

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)

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?”

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.

SIDEWALK DANCING by Letitia Moffitt reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Posted on November 1, 2013 by thwackFebruary 7, 2019

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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.

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.

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

Posted on October 17, 2013 by thwackFebruary 7, 2019

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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.

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.

WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS by Margaret Kaufman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Posted on October 15, 2013 by thwackApril 14, 2015

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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

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.

WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ By Jérémie Dres reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Posted on October 11, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ
by Jérémie Dres
SelfMadeHero, 199 pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Everyone has a story, a collection of historical inner workings and familial memories that makes us who we are. But not all desire or are able to physically retrace the steps of those who laid our ancestral foundation. In We Won’t See Auschwitz, author Jérémie Dres does precisely that: embarking on a pilgrimage to Poland in search of the “drop of cool water from a spring” that he likens to his Grandma Thérèse, Dres winds his way through the history of the country and retraces his grandmother’s steps while simultaneously forging his own.

The reader is dropped immediately into the action, rendezvousing with Dres in Warsaw’s historic Old Town as he searches for his grandmother’s original home on an unseasonably warm June afternoon. Together we search with him through the clouded eyes of the past for the buildings and neighborhoods his grandmother once recalled perfectly from memory, only to find that they either no longer exist or have been altered beyond recognition. Dres, eager to learn from those currently dwelling within the city walls, next meets two “young, Jewish, Polish, and hip” Varsovians who advise and answer his questions about the current sentiments of Poland toward Jews. He is amazed to find that there are still Jews in Poland, his own family having long since departed for France. Dres continues to meet both older and younger Polish residents, conducting a series of informational interviews and receiving in return detailed contemporary history lessons. The week becomes one where movement is somewhat determined by conversation, the destinations lingering on the horizon like doors begging to be opened. We tumble into this rabbit-hole expedition like Alice through the looking glass, as the present becomes a vehicle for gaining access to the past.

As is the case of any well-planned personal journey, though, Dres’s trip is full of both surprise and disappointment at the deviation of continuity between the past and present. Roadblocks are strewn throughout, ranging from unfamiliar Polish vernacular to the pestering presence of a dybbuk, a demon that “possesses people with any sort of tie to Yiddish culture,” that plagues Dres’s brother and travel companion Martin. We follow the brothers through Warsaw and into the country, silently peering over maps while invisibly crammed in the back of their compact European rental car on a journey to the decrepit Jewish cemetery in Żelechów. Dres is careful not to sugar-coat his fears, explaining in detail the plan he and his brother devise to tell people that they are “guys some Jewish billionaire’s hired to take pictures of his ancestral village” and chronicling his brother’s anxiety in the odd looks thrown to them from local citizens as they wander.

Lest the reader be weighed down underneath the somber conversations with government officials and trips through the crooked-toothed graves of deserted burial grounds, Dres is careful to include cultural highlights between the heaviest of chapters. We are with him on his first night at the Oki Doki Youth Hostel, where he opts for an early bedtime instead of chatting with others at the bar, and we share in his amused disappointment in a Polish meal. He is ever conscious of the reader, providing a perfect balance between solemnity, cheer, and historical background.

Dres chooses to illustrate his graphic memoir entirely in black and white drawings, complementing the collection of family photos found in the book’s appendix and allowing the reader to decipher the complete story in the barest possible way. In the absence of color, we are shown the texture and depth of scenery, specific facial details of those met by the brothers, and this allows us the opportunity to absorb the situation in a somber manner. From panel to panel, there are small differences to Dres’s drawings that illustrate well the true humanity he experiences—no two drawings are completely identical, just as no two moments perfectly mirror one another.

Dres looks at the scarred stories of his family as a guide, one that not only looks back into his unchangeable heritage but also pushes himself toward his own malleable future. “Perhaps this story will help put things back in order,” he writes upon the conclusion of his memoir. And while the “right order” of one’s life is indeterminable, Dres successfully reorganizes the abstract memories ingrained deep within himself while subconsciously weaving a tangible chapter into his own story.

Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

The Property by Rutu Modan reviewed by Amelia Moulis

Posted on October 10, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

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THE PROPERTY
by Rutu Modan
Drawn and Quarterly, 222 pages

reviewed by Amelia Moulis

A family secret. A tragic love affair. This could well be any book of the last millennia, and yet in Rutu Modan’s latest graphic novel, The Property, fresh life is given to these age-old tropes. After receiving the 2008 Eisner for her first foray into adult graphic novels with Exit Wounds, Modan’s second novel further cements her talent in exploiting the subtleties of the medium. Where Exit Wounds is a fast-paced and chaotic adventure, The Property follows similar themes in a calmer setting as a grandmother and granddaughter travel from Tel Aviv to Warsaw ostensibly to reclaim a property they lost in World War II.

From the outset, grandmother Regina is established as a quick-tempered, strong-minded and endlessly stubborn character in direct opposition to the temperament of her granddaughter, Mica, who is practical and level-headed.

As their personalities collide and the cracks of their relationship grow deeper, both characters find themselves steeped in a wealth of age-old grief. Mica finds herself driven by emotion, calling her new yet ‘untrustworthy’ Polish lover (deemed untrustworthy primarily due to his heritage) when her grandmother is unwell, and Regina becomes weakened by memories she cannot silence or defend. It is only once Mica and Regina connect with the climate of grief, and the legacy it entails, that they are truly able to connect with one another and reconcile the past.

Gracefully plotted and ripe with suspense, Modan’s gentle pace evokes the tragic eternal echoes of the Holocaust while exploring Warsaw as a real place where real people lived as opposed to the stale and dehumanized pitch presented to tourists: “Personally, I prefer Majdanek to Auschwitz” comments a schoolteacher taking his class to Poland. Modan alleviates the solemnity of the atmosphere with a subplot of skulduggery and the workings of precise wit and satire, for instance in the change of attitude of a class of school children on a Yad Vashem trip from the flight over to the flight back.

These moments of humour, and in fact the entire plot, unravel without the aid of a narrator. Modan relies on her ability to convey deep emotion through Tintin-esque linge claire in a matte color scheme, generating pain and suspense through the astute application of panelling and the most minute manipulation of a single line.

It is difficult to find fault in The Property, yet possibly Modan’s weakest moments arise from statements or reactions that seem melodramatic or over-sensationalized. But the dynamics of these moments often reveal themselves later in the piece and thus in retrospect serve to further underline the author’s careful observation of the idiosyncrasies of everyday life: halting conversations, miscommunications, faltering pauses, awkward poses and bizarre actions.

Her strict adherence to a realistic portrayal of human interaction is further enhanced by the trilingual communications – different tongues lettered in different fonts for intelligibility between specific characters – and the precision of body language. This precision is heightened by Modan’s use of actors to play out each scene before she drew the book.

In The Property, Rutu Modan examines memory and history: how actions reverberate through time and suffuse into later generations, how grief is assuaged or left to canker, and how peace can be sought in the manifold plexus of love. The Property is rich with subtle satirical nuance in contrast to moments of clarity depicted in beautiful detail. Rutu Modan’s latest work is a tribute to her breathtaking talent as a cartoonist.

–October 10, 2013

Amelia Moulis

Amelia Moulis is from Canberra, Australia, but was living in New York for the past year, fulfilling her Creative Writing major at Columbia University. She recently returned to Australia in order to graduate from Monash University in Melbourne, but spends her spare time planning her return to New York.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S by Jeanne Murray Walker Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

Posted on October 7, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S
by Jeanne Murray Walker
Center Street, 384 pages

Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

“I worry about Mother, mostly,” writes Jeanne Murray Walker in her memoir, The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s (Center Street), “but I also worry about myself, because I am beginning to get myself mixed up with her. What does it mean that, in company with her, I ‘live’ in the past so much?” This question shapes Walker’s story of caring for her mother Erna Kelley, who lost her memory and life to the disease. Seeking answers, Walker offers insight into how memory works and what remembering means.

As she flies between Philadelphia and her mother’s home in Dallas, the author’s own 1950s childhood in Lincoln, Nebraska, keeps flooding back. Her own life seems boxed up with her mother’s stories about driving her brothers and sisters to school in a Model A, teaching in a one-room school house, staffing the night shift alone as a hospital ER nurse—cargo that was once pulled by the “powerful locomotive” of her mother’s memory. As Erna becomes increasingly disoriented to time, place, and person, it’s as if her daughter has been uncoupled and left behind on the track, unable to move forward.

Readers who are part of what Walker reports as “more than twenty million adult children in America who take care of a parent who is drifting into dementia” will recognize this state of mind. Alzheimer’s, like grief, is unpredictable—not a steady march through discrete stages, but a zigzagging, back-and-forth passage through a series of checkpoint crises. Diagnosable only after death, its progress is approximated by questions that test how well distinct regions of the patient’s brain work together to perform tasks such as remembering a random list of words. More confusing, Walker observes in a series of “field notes,” is how the symptoms of Alzheimer’s highlight certain cognitive truths: memory isn’t a locked file drawer full of untouched records of our experience, but a dynamic depository where we reorganize and recast what’s there as we need to. Though our capacity to conceive of a past self allows us to recount a story with a past, present and future, we experience time as fluid, not as static segments on a time line. “Believing that, I began paying closer attention to what Mother said,” Walker writes, signaling her turning point and coping strategy. “I started accepting, as a matter of faith, that what she said could be made sense of as references not to the present but to the past….And what a relief, not to have to set Mother straight.”

Jeanne Murray Walker

Walker’s done her research, but “Knowing fancy terms for the regions of the brain doesn’t help me remember better,” she reflects, doubtful that she could pass an Alzheimer’s test. Citing common mnemonic devices—acrostics, rhymes, lists, adages, and the blocking and “call and response” dialogue actors use to learn their lines—she concludes that memory depends on emotion. In order to remember the words ball, dog, car, she must trigger the amygdala that makes her feel by telling herself a story. Even playing music involves more than muscle memory, she observes as her son Jack memorizes the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. The melody is “the ongoing musical story you can remember and hum every day of the week. The orchestra has a different musical story…(which) gives you something to hang your own story on.” This is the ancient, enduring reason for telling stories as a means to preserve our collective history.

“What on earth is happening to all my things?” her mother laments after a life’s worth of objects is pared down for her final move to an assisted living facility. Walker speaks for all of us who’ve endured a similarly exhausting emotional task of dealing with “the sheer uncompromising weight of physical objects, at the awful truth that the body breaks down” when she writes, “There are times when the human condition can get a person down.” But from this darkness, she casts light.

“Eventually, even I started to relent,” she writes. “On the clothing front, for example, I thought, why shouldn’t Mother wear what she wants? … Even as (her outfits) became wilder, more outlandish, I didn’t try to stop her. I was right to let go of that. It became practice for more letting go later. I began to think of letting go as a discipline.” Later, she throws away the long packing list she’s made for a teaching stint in London, carrying only essentials to the city where the dreaded phone call finds her upon her mother’s death.

Remembering the journey is a journey in itself. Though heartbreakingly personal, The Geography of Memory is both memoir and a record of our shared human pilgrimage, a sacramental journey through a lifetime of memories to take in “the touch and taste and smell of spiritual truth.”

–October 7, 2013

Elizabeth Mosier teaches creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. Her essay on archaeology and Alzheimer’s, “The Pit and the Page,” appears in Issue 47 of Creative Nonfiction.

HALF THE KINGDOM By Lore Segal reviewed by Michelle Fost

Posted on October 1, 2013 by thwackNovember 16, 2015

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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

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 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 FARAWAY NEARBY by Rebecca Solnit reviewed by Colleen Davis

Posted on September 25, 2013 by thwackFebruary 27, 2016

THE FARAWAY NEARBY
by Rebecca Solnit
Viking, 272 Pages

Reviewed by Colleen Davis

Once a month my Saturday morning yoga class swaps our beloved Iyengar teacher for a visiting Power yoga trainer from Manhattan. Captain Kate is not her real name, but that’s what I call the woman who drives us through 85 minutes of fast, challenging postures which are not all that different from our normal fare. What Kate changes is the pace of our effort and the time we spend holding each pose. Under her direction, my country classmates and I move at the speed she expects from students in her 105-degree New York studio. Our local practice site has no amped up heating system, but a class with Kate still leaves us drenched. This is her rigorous lead up to the final moment when we gratefully follow Kate’s instruction to “lower our head and bow our mind to the power of the heart.” After all the physical exertion we’ve just endured, this commandment becomes easier to follow and sweet to feel.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer who also understands a thing or two about the power of rigor. Her writing displays a masterful command of language, imagery, and arcane knowledge of the most fascinating sort. Reading her book, The Faraway Nearby, is like getting into the car at an old-fashioned funhouse where you find yourself crashing through surprise encounters with Frankenstein, cannibalism, and leprosy. These topics and many others are held up to the spooky circus mirrors she creates through magnificent arrangements of detail and tangled story threads.

Her panoramic embrace of ideas is part of what makes Solnit an author worth reading. She manages to weave a baccalaureate’s worth of information into thirteen chapters that are nominally about three painful subjects: a parent’s Alzheimer’s disease, a cancer scare, and a bad romantic break-up. These serious life events are refracted through the lens of her dense and unrelenting prose. The result is both beautiful and somehow disappointing.

Solnit furnishes many explanations of her mother’s failure to become a nurturing presence during the early decades of the author’s life. The writer’s catalogue of wounds begins with a description of parental narcissism that is both plausible and disconcerting. It’s not hard to see that Solnit escaped from childhood pain by submerging herself in the cauldron of learning. This long and lonely metamorphic process must have fostered the development of her admirable intellect and substantial literary skill.

Despite these gifts, and the fact that The Faraway Nearby includes several passages exploring the concept of empathy, the reader is left feeling that Solnit’s experience of empathy is an arm’s length affair. Even as she recounts some sweeter shared moments near the end of her mother’s life, you get the impression that Solnit couldn’t really open herself to the expansion of heart that accompanies true compassion.

Late in the book she grumbles about editors’ frequent demands to wring happy endings from the overflowing cup of human despair. This is a reasonable complaint that most writers grapple with on many occasions. But I could easily envision the editor of this book begging such a talented author to try — please, please try! — to stop and reflect on the subterranean emotions propelling her agile mind. One can only imagine how the ideas Solnit explores intellectually might glisten if viewed through a more evolved emotional prism.

As someone who has shared Solnit’s plight of playing the simultaneous roles of writer and dementia caregiver, I can attest to the conflicts posed by the situation. But if I’ve learned anything from this challenge, it’s that a curious person can dramatically expand their understanding of the human experience by approaching these tasks with compassion and humility. There’s no book in the world, no tale more compelling, no journey more educational than the one that begins when your head really bows to the power of the heart.

–September 25, 2013

Colleen Davis is a Pennsylvania writer and author of the website Between the Pond and the Woods, which provides information and a Facebook forum for dementia caregivers. She writes for the Penn Memory Center and is a script writer for the documentary series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment“, which airs on 6abc.

RELISH: MY LIFE IN THE KITCHEN By Lucy Knisley reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Posted on September 21, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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RELISH: MY LIFE IN THE KITCHEN
by Lucy Knisley
First Second Books, 173 pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Never crowd the mushrooms.

It’s a mantra recited time and time again in cookbooks, culinary shows, and even some Hollywood films. But without understanding what this actually means, as one’s interpretation will invariably differ from another’s, the only result is a disappointingly inconsistent sauté. In the absence of visual representation, one may interpret crowding as tight as a tin of sardines or as light as a bag of fluffy marshmallows.

Enter Lucy Knisley and her graphic memoir Relish: My Life In the Kitchen, a bright collection of stories and memories centered on food, her family, and her upbringing. Following Knisley from the countertops of her childhood apartment in downtown Manhattan to early mornings at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her homemade meals and grocery lists guide the reader through a childhood of bustling movement and taste exploration. Not one to shy away from the use of color, Knisley portrays hand-drawn interpretations of dishes long since consumed, as though they lay perfectly preserved in her mind.

A self-described puppeteer, ukulele player and food/travel writer, Knisley grew up in a world surrounded by a family of foodies: her mother, a former Dean & Deluca employee who formed her own farmer’s market stands in upstate New York, and her father, a refined eater who prefers to savor taste through dining out in search of the perfect meal. Her parents, who she likens to Zeus and Demeter, each independently accompany her on culinary journeys spanning the globe, plopping her everywhere from Japan to Canada —with every imaginable nourishment and delicacy waiting for us to optically feast. Like a time-traveling stowaway, we simultaneously indulge in Roman hot chocolate, roadside tamales with hot sauce and lime in San Miguel, and five apricot-jam croissants on the banks of a Venetian canal.

Wafting among the paneled stories like the sweet smell of those hot croissants lies the notion of food as a signal of place, specifically that of home. After a long trip with her father, the two embark back to Knisley’s home to find stacked enchiladas made by the author’s mother. This notion of repast as a portal to the familiar resurfaces again at the conclusion of Knisley’s undergraduate years, when she is struck with a bout of homesickness. “I wanted to discover New York like I’d done with Chicago,” she writes. “A new and old place at once, different from the perspective of adulthood.”

Perhaps in an attempt to jog the culinary childhood memory of the reader or just to share specific kitchen advice, Knisley has peppered recipes, tips, and guides at the end of each Relish chapter. She instructs in the voice of a master, one with humble expertise and patience that explains everything from how to make your own pickles and a cheese cheat sheet to the best way to roll your own sushi. Where words can only convey so much information, Knisley is there to provide the reader with an optical feast of color, texture, and just how a meal is supposed to look as it comes together. She allows her comedic voice to shine through, suggesting not to let butterflies anywhere near a butterflied leg of lamb and jovially recalling the juvenile misadventures she and a friend experienced in Mexico.

A regular renaissance woman, Knisley demonstrates with precision that she is an artist: both in the kitchen and on the page, her craft is polished, playful, and relatable to both young and seasoned readers. Whether read as a memoir about growing up, kitchen escapades, or tried and true recipes, Knisley’s Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is delicious.

Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

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

Posted on September 19, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

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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.

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.

ON GHOSTS by Elizabeth Robinson reviewed by Vanessa Martini

Posted on September 17, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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ON GHOSTS
by Elizabeth Robinson
Solid Objects, 64 pages

reviewed by Vanessa Martini

Elizabeth Robinson’s On Ghosts is, in her own words, “an essay” that seeks to understand the idea of haunting. As many teachers—perhaps just many of my teachers—like to say, to “essay” means to try, and what Robinson tries to do is to create a haunting so slowly and carefully that at first a reader does not notice. The structure of the text is simple: many small sections compound upon one another in an attempt to understand “the phenomenon of ghosts and haunting.” What seems at first to be an Explanatory Note quickly proves itself rather similar to many sections that follow; we readers are suddenly sucked in, like hikers who swear the day was clear until fog rose all around.

Though it’s hard to say whether this is Robinson’s fault or my own, the first few sections seem awkward, too wordy, at once overly precise and not clear enough. Robinson describes apparition as “Rough erasure, but not real agency, not ‘power’…It is palimpsest, implicit disclosure.” Perhaps these attempts at definition rely too much on words that are already weighted, already haunted by meaning. Perhaps this means her definition is more successful than it initially appears.

Wandering on through the text—as an aside, the book itself is a pleasure to hold and read, so small and neatly contained—the format of words on the page continuously changes, never letting us rest in one shape for very long. “The Soul” looks like what most would call real poetry, all left-justified and line-broken; “Definitely Documentary” is composed of several short sentence clusters, not even paragraphs. Through the reading a few recurring forms appear, like refrains in a song. Robinson gives us “Incidents” and “Photographs,” each numbered, each paired together in describing a haunting. The photographs are not actual pictures; instead they describe what is shown in the supposed picture. In this way Robinson makes us haunters, too, ghosting the pages with our own imagined images, forcing our perceptions onto a paper that, as Robinson says, “is a page, and words may irritate its surface, dog-ear and crease it, but they will never truly impact the surface, they will never escape their page.”

The success of these sections makes a few of Robinson’s choices seem less assured, less graceful. She regularly inserts quotes from other writers—Jack Spicer, Kazim Ali, Simone Weil—into the text, and while all relate to ghosts, and all are quite nice quotes on their own, they served mostly to distract my reading, to yank me out of the haunted headspace. Robinson also plays with font once or twice, including a very long James Longley passage in typical typewriter font, so lengthy and uniform the eyes simply glaze right over it to the unfortunately long italicized verses beneath it, not much better. When Robinson returns to more regular forms the writing itself takes precedence, and that writing is a pleasure to read.

The back half of On Ghosts is where the full effect of Robinson’s neat séance can be seen. “The Nature of Association” is perhaps the best section of the whole book; it describes the more mundane sort of haunting we experience when simple actions or objects recall people we know. Are our recollections of those people ghosts? They are not whole memories, just the idea of a personality, conjured up perhaps by “the smell of Pear Soap” or “putting lotion on after a shower.”

Robinson ends with a section called “Story,” paired with a photograph. The story recounts a simple sort of spooky tale; the photograph is, we are asked to imagine, the cover of a book in which this story was found. But for all the sparseness—in language, in content—and simplicity, the ending does not satisfy. The text is like a shaggy-dog joke, all beginning and middle with many discursive asides along the way, leading to a hollow echo of a punchline, a vacancy. But “On Ghosts” proves its point more, perhaps, after the book is closed. Recalling a person in the way Robinson so nicely describes then recalls the text. What started as a simple pleasant ghost becomes a double haunting. Initial frustration with so pointless an ending turns gradually into awe: Robinson has turned the text into a ghost itself, something not quite whole that insists upon recognition.

Vanessa Martini graduated from Bard College in 2012 with a degree in creative writing. She now works as a bookseller in San Francisco, where she eats a lot of avocados and walks everywhere. In the past she has interned for McSweeney’s Lucky Peach, where she milked a cow for an assignment, and for two sex writers, for whom she had to read 50 Shades of Grey.

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

Posted on September 16, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

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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.

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

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 SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS by Dave Newman reviewed by William Boyle

Posted on September 15, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS
by Dave Newman
White Gorilla Press, 166 pages

Reviewed by William Boyle

Dave Newman’s The Slaughterhouse Poems is a book about work and failure and desperation, about the ways we escape and survive and the things we do when we’re lost in the vastness of youth and sore afraid of the vastness of age. The speaker of these poems—which are all set in Western Pennsylvania between 1986 and 1989—is looking back on his days as a high school fuck-up who has just taken a part-time job at a slaughterhouse. A wide cast of characters surrounds him: slaughterhouse employees (one who is famous for juggling cow balls and ultimately gets fired for fucking a three hundred pound pig), buddies, girls he’s after, dive bar regulars, a 91-year-old bowling alley owner, too-young strippers, old men who sit on their porches with cans of Schaefer beer, and drug dealers. The book has five parts, each beginning with an italicized section from one of the poems in that part. This serves to unify the individual sections and to thread together themes that web their way through the entire book. The first italicized line, excerpted from “Jackson Pollock Could Have Saved Our Lives,” sets the tone: “We believe too much in the singularity / of our own terrible hearts.”

Early in the book, the speaker marvels at the nightmare of the slaughterhouse. He sees a man “take a knife to a squealing pig’s throat” and pauses to consider “dead cows the size of small cars” hanging from steel chains on the killing floor. His senses are assaulted. In “The Man with the Long Silver Blade,” he talks to a meat cutter who smells, from three feet away, strongly of whiskey. Later, when that same man touches him on the shoulder, the speaker smells “dead cigarettes” on his fingers. A sausage machine, gears wailing, spits ground meat into pig guts, and everything smells of “red peppers and vomit / fennel and black pepper, dried blood and bleach.” In “The Horroriest Horror Flick Ever,” the speaker recalls seeing “pigs / getting hammered across the face.” He continues: “I saw horror in the slaughterhouse: / grown men with knives and saws / lopping off various parts / of various animals.” One guy, laughing, asks if he’s ever eaten “cow cock” and then tosses “a bloody dick / like some horrible space worm / through the air so it landed / at my feet and shriveled.”

But the book is not all about what a horror show the slaughterhouse is. It’s about a kid fumbling around, trying to find his way in the world. “It was summer and I hated work / but all my scams lacked distance,” the speaker says in “Smash It Up.” The plans he makes with his friends “sounded like space travel,” and the whiskey they drank “barely hit / but still felt like possibility.” In “The Horroriest Horror Flick Ever,” again thinking about pigs getting thumped in the snout with a hammer, he tells us that “death is barely death when you’re a teenager,” and it’s a line that lights up the book’s preoccupations with the errors and terrors of being young and being dumb and living only in the awful presentness of the present.

In “Plumpy Threw Up,” about a wrestler trying to make weight, the speaker says: “You can only destroy your health so much / at 16 and a half / with exercise and diet / before better forms of destruction call.” Newman is so good at capturing that feeling of being a kid on the ropes caught between a future he doesn’t want and a dream he doesn’t quite know. The speaker continues: “Being young is a miracle: / you spend all day / in the dirt / with a shovel / and the world / refuses your grave.” Owen, the ancient owner of a bowling alley in town, stands in direct contrast to the book’s younger figures. If the speaker displays nostalgia for a time that’s gone, a certain kind of Americanness that’s disappeared, Owen longs for a time before that. “What kind of a shitty country are we living in that / bowling is too expensive?” he asks in “Owen, the Owner of the Bowling Alley, is 91 Years Old.” Owen’s brokenness and his willingness to accept the brokenness around him exemplifies the sort of hardened wisdom the speaker, telling us these stories as an older man, can appreciate. In “Owen, 91 Years Old and Worried, Heads Out,” Owen visits a young girl who used to work for him at the bowling alley and is now auditioning to be a stripper. He wants to help her. But, sitting in the strip club watching her, all he can do is give her money and hope that the creepy men in the club don’t try to steal it from her. And then he wonders if he’s ever been a creep. He concludes: “Being a creep was not so hard to.” It’s such a sad and wonderful realization for an old man at the end of his life to have. It feels like a beginning.

The Bukowski influence runs deep in Newman’s poetry but not in a way that’s derivative. In fact, Newman breathes new life into a form that, in lesser hands, could easily slide into self-indulgence. I’d forgotten what it felt like to read poetry with this sort of intensity, to burn through a collection in an hour and then flip back to the beginning and start again. It’s the same feeling I had when, buried in the stacks as a freshman in college, I read Mockingbird Wish Me Luck with a sort of drunken ferocity. The world closed around me. The book was the world.

Early in The Slaughterhouse Poems, the speaker dismisses the work of Jackson Pollock and tells us: “The representations I like best / are the representations that still resemble / people in crisis and the places they go / to save and/or destroy themselves.” And that’s what Newman gives us here: real characters in moments of crisis, fighting or giving in. In “A Line of Poetry” and “Stacey Never Promised Me a Rodeo Championship,” the speaker recalls his discovery that poems don’t have to be about flowers, that they can be about bad part-time jobs and factories, a discovery which opens everything up for him. I hope this book winds up in the stacks or a bookstore somewhere and that some hardcase kid, a kid who didn’t know you could write “directly and honestly and in detail,” finds it and takes it home and lets it build him. Newman is writing to help that kid.

–September 15, 2013

William Boyle is from Brooklyn, NY and lives in Oxford, MS. His writing has appeared in The Rumpus, L.A. Review of Books, Salon, Hobart, and other magazines and journals. His first novel, Gravesend, is forthcoming from Broken River Books.

THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer reviewed by Chris Ludovici

Posted on September 10, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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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 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 AVERSIVE CLAUSE by B.C. Edwards reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

Posted on August 29, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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THE AVERSIVE CLAUSE
by B.C. Edwards
Black Lawrence Press, 180 Pages

reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

B.C. Edwards’s short story collection, The Aversive Clause, alternates between gentle poignancy and visceral revelation, often within the same story. To read his work is to ride a manic roller coaster through a gritty Wonderland reboot. Like Alice, readers will shrink and grow, and know things they cannot un-know. Without being heavy-handed or didactic, Edwards explores and explodes the socio-political fabric of contemporary society and in so doing, pulls readers into the conversation.

Edwards’s style and thematic resonance are evocative of Ray Bradbury. In particular, “The Providence of Angels” echoes several stories from The Illustrated Man. The desperate masses begging for healing outside Ty and Mac’s door calls back to the emotional hunger of the men in “The Visitor.” The random man at the rails, searching for the Angels to give him an external impetus for goodness, echoes “The Man’s” Captain Hart in his quest for Christ to give him peace. Much like “Zero Hour,” the story ends with the coming of the supernatural beings, whom only a select few can see at first, and whose breakthrough to this world becomes finally, terribly real. It is far too easy to assume that the unseen forces operating behind a curtain must be acting for the greater good; Edwards’s story urges us as a society to question everything, and perhaps to do the work ourselves in order to reach the goals we claim to want.

The dystopian depictions throughout the collection read like a conspiracy theorist’s nightmares, effectively indicting and predicting some chilling contemporary ills: corporate conglomerates that squeeze out small businesses and eradicate unions, leaving the average worker to fend, poorly, for himself, desperate job seekers going to interviews that literally kill them, and quiet bio-genetic weapons that lead to the zombie apocalypse. Yet Edwards often has his characters respond to hopelessness with self-aware humor. In “Eugene and the News,” Eugene describes the famous beast that will eventually consume everyone as the color of “those awful khaki’s which you insist hide your hips . . . which they do not.” The job-seeker in “Spots” weaves a fantastic tale in an attempt to excuse his lateness, and for a while, both he and the interviewer participate in a farcical call-and-response storytelling, mimicking the implicit suspension of disbelief in which readers and writers engage.

The collection’s other thematic focus is endings: of relationships, lifestyles, and/or the world. Endings are hard. These stories do not make endings feel any easier; they feel caustic, apocalyptic. This is a truth that this collection illuminates: endings hurt, even when they are the end of something that was bitter and miserable anyway. Drugs and alcohol, numbing tools of the depressed, neither deaden the pain, really, nor stop the end from coming. You will still end up in a dark forest outside Moscow, drummed out of town by the upgraded version of yourself, or sitting, skull-busted and vomitous, on a moist couch in a strange house.

But in the spaces leading to the end, we see love so abundant it hurts. The protagonists, and Edwards, have a gift for seeing the imperfect beauty in their partners, and subsequently drowning, just for a moment, in a well of love. In “The Providence of Angels”, even as we see Ty’s growing fear of both Mac and the Angles, he tells us that “Mac’s smile is like butter and chocolate.” In “Doppelganger’s Local 525,” Grange morphs into the image of his wife when he loved her most: pregnant and messy haired. And even though the story tracks the disintegration of his ability to provide for himself and his child, a brief look of love in his son’s eyes makes everything—not okay, but bearable.

If there is a guiding mantra to the collection, it hearkens back to a line from Yeats’s Second Coming: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Things do fall apart for Edwards’s characters. The center, though, is human connection; it is love. While the characters cling to that, they have a chance. When they lose that, when that center does not hold, they are lost. Even the advent of the zombie apocalypse does not end love.

–August 29, 2013

Shinelle L. Espaillat writes, lives and teaches in Westchester County, NY. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at Temple University. Her work has appeared in Midway Journal.

CALLING DR LAURA By Nicole J Georges reviewed by Amelia Moulis

Posted on August 20, 2013 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016

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CALLING DR LAURA
By Nicole J Georges
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 260 pages

reviewed by Amelia Moulis

Nicole J Georges’ Calling Dr Laura, is an acerbic and intelligent addition to the graphic memoirs of 2013. It catalogues Georges’ troubled upbringing and her subsequent quest for love and stability in her relationships, and indeed her life at large. Georges enters this story through her first girlfriend, who takes Georges to a psychic, inadvertently uncovering a deep family secret: the psychic insists that Georges’ father – whom she was told died of colon cancer when she was a baby – is in fact alive. Although this is the ‘hook’ of the story, it is important to emphasize that this is actually not the driving force behind the storyline. It takes many years for Georges to share this information with anyone, let alone confront her mom about it. In the meantime, Georges meanders between cross-sections of her mom’s abusive relationships, the string of ‘father figures’ shaping her upbringing, Georges’ own inability to process stress and emotion, her struggle to establish a family, and the faulty dynamics of her lesbian relationships. But underneath this is the constant tension of when, or if, Georges can confront her mother about her sexuality and the circumstances of her father’s absence from her life.

It is both fascinating and frustrating that the book is only tangentially about Georges’ father and the fleeting Dr Laura – a radio talk show host who joins an orchestra of people unloading bad advice onto Georges. Partly due to these tangential undertones, the links between themes can often be vague. There remains the feeling that Georges’ tendency to ‘check out’ like a fainting goat in real life has translated onto the page, obscuring her capacity to connect herself more deeply to how she’s telling her story, and thus draw clearer connections for the reader. Another consideration here is that the episodes in this book began as shorter comic strips, possibly contributing to the undertone of disconnection. That said, themes of love and belonging are undeniably present. Each scene builds well upon the last to paint a landscape of Georges’ repressed character and warped notion of family, and the aforementioned vagueness can often become an intriguing coercion, driving the reader onto the next page. Certainly this makes Calling Dr Laura rewarding on subsequent reads.

Regardless of any struggles to connect different storylines, when Georges delves into memories of her childhood, the pages come alive. Georges is able to pare down the genre’s susceptibility to stories of self-absorption as she gazes unflinchingly at episodes of intense trauma. Georges truly utilizes the form’s potential here, drawing scenes from her childhood in fairly simplistic, stark black and white lines as opposed to the grey wash of contemporary scenes.

Georges’ lettering is also a visual spectacle whereby different techniques of writing provide aesthetic wonderment and further compliment the main ideas presented. She uses calligraphy on scrolls when introducing people or situations, childlike printing during flashbacks, aureate swirls for flowery speech, and textbook extracts to impart background information.

In many ways, Georges strays from the stereotypical mining of family history for conventional memoir material, and this is a commendable highlight of Calling Dr Laura. Georges sketches a portrait for the reader of a young woman who is attempting to gain footing in her own life after spending her youth on unsteady ground. It catalogues a move away from history and memory and into the creation of a new, independent future. It is left unclear as to whether or not Georges embraces this future, the lack of conclusion shrouding the end of the story in hopeful discontent, but nonetheless, the honesty and grace of Calling Dr Laura are an enchanting tribute to Georges’ skill as a graphic memoirist.

–September 1, 2013

Amelia Moulis

Amelia Moulis is from Canberra, Australia, but was living in New York for the past year, fulfilling her Creative Writing major at Columbia University. She recently returned to Australia in order to graduate from Monash University in Melbourne, but spends her spare time planning her return to New York.

HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Posted on August 18, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR
by Beth Kephart
Gotham Books, 254 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

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It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my warm little warren. Through the stone-laden campus, across the slippery streets of town, and onto the train that will take me into the city. I am in my final semester as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College and I still have not learned to buy shoes that fit my feet — I dig into the walk through West Philadelphia, burdening myself with blisters that will not heal until the first flowers have shed their petals to spring. Stumbling onto the porch of the old Victorian manor, I step into the most challenging, inspiring, and rewarding fourteen weeks I’ve yet experienced: I step into Beth Kephart’s Creative Non-Fiction class.

Flash forward one and a half years later and I am standing on the back steps of my first apartment, wearing shoes that (finally) fit and hooting jubilantly at the tiny brown box in front of me. I hug the cardboard to myself as though I could absorb the details of its journey osmotically and greet it with as much euphoria as though it were a friend returning from a far off journey. But I suppose that’s exactly what Beth Kephart’s Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir is: stories of both the familiar and strange, a chance to learn through another’s experiences, and an invitation to have our own unique adventures while meditating on the specialness of times we have already put to rest.

Handling the Truth is not a manual on how to write memoir. That would be like telling an over-eager high school student the secret to getting into the college of their dreams—there is no way other than to be honest and try. Kephart is a warm narrator, writing in an inviting tone that welcomes the reader to freely pose questions and make discoveries of their own through her detailed discussions on form and the importance of staying true to one’s own story line. As readers we are transported to Kephart’s class on the corner of 38^th & Walnut, welcomed to sample the contemplations of countless students she has advised within this wood paneled classroom. “Try this,” she seems to say when presenting an exercise of listening to music and writing about a conjured memory. “Maybe this will work,” she offers as she suggests photographing something intriguing, only to zoom in and write about a detail previously unnoticed.

Beth Kephart

Kephart speaks to the reader as though she were physically present, posting open-ended ideas of how to begin the act of writing memoir and concrete lessons on how to successfully approach the craft with the honesty and dedication it deserves. “Memoir is not a lecture, a lesson, a stew of information and facts,” she writes. “Memoirs illuminate and reveal, as opposed to justify and record. They connote and suggest but never insist.”

The reader is questioned, probed to find the meaningful in the mundane and the motive behind their own story. Perhaps the act of recalling memories through taste or smell will do the trick, or maybe a excavation into the deep dark crevices of messenger bag to determine the most meaningful item. These theories require the reader to be an active participant in their own experiences rather than simply a bystander. We as readers are asked to think and feel, and then to ruminate further on what makes us comfortable as well as discontent. We are pushed, not to our breaking point but rather to a heightened sense of personal awareness, one that is able to see and feel in a manner previously unattainable. We meet, with the help of Kephart, a new self.

Kephart presents an assortment of authors to the reader, much as a hostess shares a variety of delectable dishes, and the reader is asked to sample each before determining what it is we find inspiring. We are offered the ultimate movable feast, with the alternating memoirists Kephart cites serving as the structured courses meant to satiate our readerly palette:

Tastes are pathways, then. They lead us toward a story. But a meal—or a kitchen—can do even more than that for us…We eat, and we recall our past. We cook with others, and other stories percolate between the chopping and the stirring. We watch someone we love making a meal we hope we won’t forget, and something happens to us, connections are made.

As readers we devour words, sampling in search of satisfaction and finding bits of ourselves between the meaty morsels of this alphabet soup. From Geoffrey Wolff to Mary Karr to the wide eyed undergrads from around the country that have studied with Kephart, the reader is left upon concluding Handling the Truth with a comfortable fullness and a desire to create something of their own.

Before concluding with an annotated list of suggested reading, Kephart muses on one specific question her students often pose: “Aren’t you tired of memoir yet?” She assures us that no, she is not tired. That memoir itself is never vanquished so long as we continue having stories to tell. We are all teachers while still remaining students, holding the ability to maintain an openness to learn and a willingness to accept and encourage others to do the same.

And that is just what Beth Kephart does while taking us on this beautiful 254 page journey: she teaches while listening to the pages turn beneath the readers’ fingers, allowing us to find parts of our own stories between the margins, underneath the dog-ears, and deep within ourselves.

–August 19, 2013

Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

CARTOON COLLEGE by Josh Melrod and Tara Wray reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

Posted on August 15, 2013 by thwackApril 7, 2016

CARTOON COLLEGE (video documentary)
by Josh Melrod and Tara Wray
L. B. Thunderpony Home Entertainment, 76 minutes

reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

Within moments of its bare opening, I already liked Cartoon College. When I reached chapter three of the documentary—which dubbed comics “better than sandwiches”—I knew that I loved it.

Josh Melrod and Tara Wray keep the first shot simple: the camera shows a man’s back as he rummages through old drawings. We are not coddled by music meant to make us feel happy-go-lucky or sentimental. This meditative simplicity populates the entire film, allowing viewers what feels like a filmic rarity: the ability to listen to a human voice with only that voice for guidance.

Throughout Cartoon College, the camera acts as a casual friend rather than a self-conscious machine. It visits the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, along with all of its classroom discussions, brainstorming meetings, and honest confessionals—from both comics greats and students alike. Charles Burns admits to drawing pictures to ward off bullies just as a young MFA candidate discusses being dismissed by his hometown for his career choice. Lynda Barry reveals that she makes most of her money on Ebay while students ponder how comics might be able to provide them with a living.

This democratizing of artists—bringing them all in front of the same, simple camera, whether published, self-published, or not at all—makes Cartoon College accessible to everyone. You do not need to be immersed in this world to watch this film. Consider it a boot camp: the same name that students at the Center for Cartoon Studies use for their first year in the program. Newcomers to comics will learn a substantial amount about the industry and the grit needed to succeed in it—all in a swift seventy-six minutes. And comics veterans will hear from an impressive roster of artists, likely to swoon as famous faces pop up on screen. Like the quaint town of White River Junction itself, Cartoon College is homey—and yes, it is the kind of place where immensely talented individuals dub comics “better than sandwiches.”

If I had to change anything about Cartoon College, it might be its name. When I finished the documentary, it seemed I had watched a beautifully composed collage as much as I had watched a depiction of a contemporary college. One featured artist composed a memoir about the Latter Day Saints. A young woman committed herself to a series on the trials and tribulations of menstruation. We meet a character called “Muscle Duck.” In this subtle, character-driven style, Cartoon College undermines the misconception that all cartoonists are nerdy men. These are women, men, young people, older people, interesting people. These are individuals eager to share their stories with the world. And I can’t wait to read them.

–August 16, 2013

Cartoon College Clip No. One from Cartoon College Movie by Josh Melrod and Tara Wray on Vimeo.

Amy Victoria Blakemore is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, where she served for three years as a writing tutor. She earned honors for her senior thesis on contemporary iterations of Superman in comics and graphic literature, and she also was awarded an Academy of American Poetry Prize. Her work appears in the The Kenyon Review, [PANK], and The Susquehanna Review.

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

Posted on August 11, 2013 by thwackApril 14, 2015

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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

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.

SCRATCH PEGASUS by Stephen Kessler reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

Posted on August 11, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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SCRATCH PEGASUS
by Stephen Kessler
Swan Scythe Press, 88 pages

reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

Stephen Kessler’s agenda in the poetry of Scratch Pegasus would seem to be that of the artist in his poem “Hopper”: in an era where inscrutable conceptualism has become somewhat of a standard, Kessler is confident that his “representation / so square compared to his successors’ transgressions / looks now purely formal and coolly classical … in rooms full of murmuring tourists / relieved to see what they recognize”. It’s lamentable, then, that Kessler’s altruistic aspirations towards a communitarian poetics, a poetics of reachable clarity, are troubled by an unintentional (or so one hopes) exclusion of the modern reader.

True, the poet occasionally hits the mark with poignant imagery (“the barking park / where the city’s dogs / sniff each other’s butts / and tangled strips of toilet paper / fly like flags from lampposts”, “Gold light streams / through cold beer”, etc., obviousness that is not condescending but pleasantly relatable), but such imagery drowns in problematic particularities.

Kessler makes clear that he is in his later years, a state of being meant to inform his poetry, but he is heavy-handed in dating himself. While certain details, though culturally past their prime, may be innocent enough (as in “Driving a Stake Through the Heart of Beatnik Vampires”), the book far too frequently resorts to voyeuristic recollections of women past, reminiscences that recall the less-than-pleasant gender norms of an earlier time. Babs, Dotty, Cathy, Marina, Miss Masacas, and others are remembered for their breasts, their legs, the poet’s attraction, yet the dismayed reader finds no relief in Kessler’s poems of the present, either: the poet grins knowingly as a boy feels up his curvy lover, imagines teenage lovemaking after observing a pair of skateboarders, and time and again equates the sex act to devouring food (“Death by Tiramisu,” “In the Dark,”). It’s a misogyny disturbing not only for its disregard of feminism’s advances, both social and literary, but for its predictability; one wishes that Kessler’s renegade-against-opacity persona were a little more rebellious, a little less tame in its transparency.

Indeed, Kessler seems to overlook that which makes Hopper’s paintings so successful: while we recognize the subjects and are invested in their stories (or the stories we project upon them), there remains an element of mystery, ambiguity, subtle tone, that renders them universal, relatable in their unknowability. It’s a voyeurism with the shades half-drawn, a matter of human curiosity trumping point-blank representation. Kessler’s interest in the ephemeral beauty of an individual moment, the act of “trying to fix [an afternoon] / in time, hold[ing] its momentous weight” or “transfusing the ordinary night / with unrepeatable beauty, one-time-only”, is certainly a valid poetic aspiration, but is sabotaged by his insistence on spelling his message out for readers in a way that makes blaringly obvious the retrospective act of writing. In the section entitled “Some Teachers,” for instance, each teacher is summarized in the opening lines, a technique that veers towards rote gimmick: “He worked for us when I was a little kid”, “He was the toughest coach I ever had”, “He taught philosophy at UCLA”, and so on. Otherwise-compelling poems are diminished by neat take-aways in their final lines, as in “Wild Man” (“The hunt continues”) and “John C. Padilla” (“I owe him more than I can ever repay”). Kessler is so conscious of eschewing abstraction that he overexplains in an explicitness insulting to the reader’s ability to actually read, and glean meaning from, his poems.

It is only when Kessler returns to language as an object of interest rather than blunt semantic object that the reader is permitted to appreciate his craft. Redeeming lines like “verses rhymes with versus and they are against Everything” are refreshing and clever, but it’s as if Kessler is shy about letting them peek through their more obvious counterparts. When he becomes less tied to a cut-and-dried “observe and report” strategy and lends insight not into his own lasciviousness, but rather his relationship with poetry itself, Kessler is (perhaps paradoxically) much more accessible on the universal level. “But poetry was doing something to me”, he writes (in an ending line that does invite further thought): it is madness (“Relish your lost mind and embrace the mania, / … You are a poet”), selfishness (“He wrote for his creative writing students / more than a hundred letters of recommendation, / thereby neglecting to write a hundred poems”); an expression of humanity. It’s a shame that Kessler’s final two poems are among the only ones to evade overwriting—“Bird in the Chimney” finally permits observation to collect without qualification, symbolism that speaks for itself, while the titular “Scratch Pegasus” encourages a second reading in its whimsicality. One likes to think that Kessler’s next volume will include fewer wedding poems and seedy recollections and more of this such work; as of yet, it may be that the poet has made a dent in the campaign to contrast conceptualism, but it’s the sort of dent that one discovers days later in the fender of their shiny new car, nothing to be done but fume quietly to oneself.

–August 11, 2013

Kenna O’Rourke is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The Pocket Guide, the Philos Adelphos Irrealis chapbook, and Penn’s Filament and 34th Street magazines. She is an editorial assistant for Jacket2, an enthusiastic employee of the Kelly Writers House, and an occasional blogger (englitchlanguage.tumblr.com) and jewelry-and-sewn-object-maker (www.etsy.com/shop/superkenna).

SO LONG, SILVER SCREEN by Blutch reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Posted on August 8, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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SO LONG, SILVER SCREEN
by Blutch
Picturebox, 88 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Every film is a ghost story. When we go to the theater, we see flickering images of things in the eternal past yet present which persistently haunt us. This observation cannot be avoided reading the French cartoonist Blutch’s new graphic essay/novel So Long, Silver Screen. With this book, Blutch summons the ghosts from his own filmgoing past to consider the film form. Death pervades the book from the very first panel in which a woman writes, “Adieu Paul Newman.” When the woman tells her lover Newman is dead, he reacts in disbelief: “it can’t be—I think about him every day” as if, by being captured onscreen, stars are immortal.

Blutch has decided to try his hand at film criticism. The book is largely comprised of discussions and arguments between a man and woman about film. We get all of the enduring debates—theater or film, how are women treated in film, and many more. In the discussion of why film is better than theater, the unnamed woman says that “movies give us something plays don’t…faces…and to top it off, dead people’s faces, too.” The book reminds us constantly of how films capture moments which will soon be past. In one chapter, the woman says that “film is a butterfly net for catching little girls.” One of the most gorgeous segments of the book is about Burt Lancaster. In one of the most powerful panels of the work, we see Lancaster as a trapeze artist finishing his act. In the next, a girl reads from A High Wind In Jamaica that “poor little Jako…fell plump on the deck and broke his neck. That was the end of him.”

We are reminded that these seemingly immortal and strong men or icons on the screen will one day fall. Even the living figures whom Blutch invokes seem practically ghostly. In the last segment of the book we see Michel Piccoli, the iconic French actor who has managed to work with directors from Carax to Hitchcock and most recently with Nanni Moretti in We Have a Pope. The woman tells the man to “forget the movies” only to have Piccoli appear from the shadows, a ghost drawing focus. Piccoli is not a man but rather his own imposing image projected. The idea of film itself is becoming something of the past as we move away from actual film to digital projection, losing the palpable feeling of light moving through film stock to create shadows in motion. In So Long, Silver Screen, Blutch shows us not the people behind the screen but instead the ghosts made alive by the flickering light of the projector.

–August 8, 2013

Gabriel Chazan

Gabriel Chazan, a filmmaker and writer, is from Toronto, Canada. He is currently studying film history, filmmaking and poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. He writes on film at Home Movies: The Sarah Lawrence Film Journal.

RECALCULATING by Charles Bernstein reviewed by Mary Weston

Posted on August 6, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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RECALCULATING
by Charles Bernstein
University of Chicago Press, 208 pages

Reviewed by Mary Weston

Bringing to mind the now all-too familiar GPS phrase, Charles Bernstein’s latest collection of poetry, Recalculating, depicts a poet pulled in a number of different directions and impulses. As readers, we too at times feel this pull toward the many evocations and articulations present in Recalculating. Yet in many ways, direction—or lack thereof—becomes the thematic anchor which ultimately binds Bernstein’s latest work. Poems in this collection move deftly and swiftly from heady articulations of Bernstein’s poetics, to oftentimes humorous experiments in language and syntax, to poignant translations of works from Catullus to Baudelaire. Yet throughout the collection, the theme of “recalculation” takes on a more sobering nature, as interspersed between Bernstein’s didacticism and humor, grief and loss also begin to take shape in the work, each time creating a quiet swerve and evolution in the work’s “direction.” It’s this versatility and variety throughout the collection which makes Recalculating such a compelling read, as quiet sorrow becomes inextricably linked with both the playful and the cerebral, and which nuances the work as a whole.

In many ways, parts of Recalculating seem written for the well-read and well-versed. Poems such as “The Truth In Pudding”, “How Empty Is My Bread Pudding”, “Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links”, and others, outline a kind of conceptual poetics which follow (and purposefully invert) a poetic tradition. As Bernstein writes in “The Truth In Pudding”, “Poetry starts in the present but immediately takes you to its many pasts, through its many paths.” And indeed, “The Truth in Pudding” is a kind of warped amalgamation of a poetic tradition which Bernstein is both indebted to and which he knowingly upsets, using both actual quotations from the past (Poe’s “we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses,” for instance) and purposefully inverted paraphrases of familiar poetic and philosophical evocations (Keats’s “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” becomes “A thing of beauty is annoyed forever”; Rousseau’s “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains” becomes “Information is born free but everywhere in chains”). Poems like this one, alongside other playful pieces such as “I Will Not Write Imitative Poetry”, in which Bernstein repeats the phrase “I will not write imitative poetry” sixteen times, enact a kind of pointed and clever “truth” of the poem. This kind of truth in “pudding” reverberates throughout the collection as Bernstein effectively “opens” the possibility for meaning by presenting contradiction and repetition in each articulation of the “truth” within the poem, writing:

If reading poetry is not directed to the goal of deciphering a fixed, graspable meaning, but rather encourages performing and responding to overlapping meanings, then difficulty is transformed from obstacle to opening.

As difficulty becomes opening, then, the possibility for continuous meaning and interpretation propels the poem, giving it life.

Yet these kinds of hopeful declarations stand at odds with other statement in Recalculating. The collection begins, for instance, with a translation of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s “Autopsychographia”, its opening lines declaring, “Poets are fakers/ Whose faking is so real/ They even fake the pain/ They truly feel.” In beginning the collection in this manner, Bernstein’s translation belies an anxiety and sadness present within the collection. While though “obstacle” becomes “opening” in certain instances, in others we see meaning begin to break down as obstacles presented in language depict a frustration or difficulty conveying meaning. In the collection’s title poem, “Recalculating,” Bernstein recalls the omen of bad luck, the Albatross, in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” when he states, “Language is an albatross, a sullen cross, a site of loss.” As the site of loss, then, there is a negativity, or a gap, in language that begins to take hold in Recalculating. In the collection’s final poem, “Before You Go”, we see a literal representation of the break down in language as the poem’s repeated phrase, “before you go” becomes truncated in each iteration, inhibiting understanding toward the end of the poem.

Suspended deanimation, recalcitrant fright, before you g
Everything so goddamn slow, before you
Take me now, I’m feelin’ low, before yo
Just let me unhitch this tow, before y
One more stitch still to sew, before
Calculus hidden deep in snow, befor
Can’t hear, don’t say, befo

Ending the collection in this way, and throughout the many poems, we begin to see that, as Bernstein writes in “Unready, Unwilling, Unable”, “Poetry is not about what says but what it does.” Recalculating is Bernstein’s first full-length collection in seven years, and what it does is “direct” us and let us into a world in language which is at once poignant, playful, and complex.

Mary Weston is a native of Philadelphia who graduated from Bard College in 2012 with a degree in literature and a concentration in contemporary poetry and poetics. Currently, she works at a non-profit that deals with adult literacy issues in Philadelphia. In her free time, she can be found reading, writing, or exploring the city on her bicycle.

THE MEHLIS REPORT by Rabee Jaber reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Posted on August 5, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

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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 21^st 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 20^th 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

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.

DAVID LYNCH SWERVES by Martha P. Nochimson reviewed by Chris Ludovici

Posted on July 31, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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DAVID LYNCH SWERVES: UNCERTAINTY THROUGH LOST HIGHWAY TO INLAND EMPIRE
by Martha P. Nochimson
University of Texas Press, 295 pages

reviewed by Chris Ludovici

In David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty Through Lost Highway to Inland Empire, Martha P. Nochimson presents a radical interpretation of David Lynch’s last four movies. She rejects the popular critical interpretations of his work, in favor of her own theory: a complicated mix of eastern philosophy and quantum physics. It’s fascinating, challenging, frustrating, and only intermittently persuasive.

Her ideas are compelling, especially when she’s addressing Lynch’s philosophy. As a devoted believer in Hinduism and tantric meditation, Lynch creates movies with strong spiritual components. They are intense stories, and his characters are often emotionally troubled. Nochimson clearly and thoughtfully explains Lynch’s repeating themes of the dangers of life lived in the service of greed and ambition, and his commitment to spiritual peace over material satisfaction.

But it’s her more radical, scientific ideas that are troublesome. Quantum physics isn’t exactly simple, and frankly, I don’t have enough knowledge on that subject to understand anything beyond her most superficial points. But here’s the part that’s tricky: the book is unclear as to whether or not Lynch does, either.

When Nochimson uses quantum physics to clear up some seemingly inexplicable plot development in one of Lynch’s films, the explanation makes sense. But the logic is all hers. She doesn’t offer much in the way of proof that it was what Lynch had in mind. All we have are her assurances that her interpretations are what he had in mind all along. Lynch’s work is deeply rooted in the subconscious; he famously dislikes offering explanations of his own work. But he does freely admit that he’s often not sure what he’s doing until it’s finished. It is difficult to accept the idea that Lynch was always aware of the very logical, scientific principles of quantum physics, while simultaneously free associating.

The index contains segments of Nochimson’s interview with Lynch. She doesn’t include the entire interview because Lynch felt it was too intimate and asked her to leave some out. Perhaps in those missing segments Lynch talks at great length about his interest and research in the field of quantum physics. But it’s nowhere in the book; Lynch doesn’t mention anything to the effect that he is particularly knowledgeable on the subject. In fact, when Nochimson occasionally asks him if he’s familiar with certain terms or concepts he says he is not.

But does any of this even matter? If art unintentionally overlaps with another philosophy or perspective, does that make it less valid than if the overlap was intentional? It’s a sure bet David Lynch doesn’t think so–if he did, he’d bend over backward to explain to everyone exactly what he meant by every choice he ever made. Art exists to be experienced, thought about, and discussed. Once it’s out of the artist’s hands, it belongs to the world to do with what it will.

None of this is to say that David Lynch Swerves isn’t an interesting book, or that Nochimson’s ideas don’t make sense. It is, and they do. And it gave me a clue of how to think about Lost Highway without wanting to slam my head into a wall until I passed out. Which is great, because that movie’s been driving me nuts for sixteen fucking years now. Too bad Nochimson didn’t present these ideas as her own, instead of insisting they were Lynch’s.

–July 31, 2013

Chris 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 HARE by César Aira | reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Posted on July 24, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

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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 19^th 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

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.

RUST BELT RISING ALMANAC, Vol. 1 reviewed by Ariel Diliberto

Posted on July 23, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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RUST BELT RISING ALMANAC, Vol. 1
Various Authors
The Head & The Hand Press, 168 pages

reviewed by Ariel Diliberto

Rust Belt Rising Almanac presents a pastiche of short stories, poems, photographs and artwork. Collectively they form a fairly complete image of the post-industrial cities that comprise the toponymous “belt” (in the case of this publication, namely Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh). Collectively being the operative word. For individually, some of the stories are flashes in the (rusting) pan. However, together these ethereal dispatches evoke the negative space inside an abandoned factory building, and upon reaching page 168, readers can step back and see it for what it is.

So what is it? The triumph of Rust Belt is its ability to dispel the false narrative about America’s trajectory from industrial to post-industrial, in which the peak of our society was the peak of the industrial era, and it’s been downhill ever since. Put another way, the idea that when factories were pumping in the hearts of these cities, it was the “good old days,” and now that they’ve shut down or relocated, despair ensues. Rust Belt demonstrates that a) the “good old days” weren’t always all that good, as Kim Geralds illustrates in the opening poem “Trademarks”:

Hands mashed, two fingertips lost
Stamp fenders of galvanized steel, in
2.4 minutes, rushed down the line

And Sarah Grey elaborates upon in “Under This Cloud: Life and death in the shadow of a coal-fired power plant”: “your sign of home and life and prosperity is also a sign of death… the people you love, and indeed you yourself, have always been dependent on an industry that sees the lives of you and everyone who raised you as collateral damage.”

And b) things aren’t always so bad right now, depending on who you are. Many of the authors invoke the thrills of being a young person in these Rusties: riding bikes through abandoned streets at night, renting cheap art studios in former factories, gardening in urban soils, roadtripping. Fear not, other authors look beyond the rehabbed warehouses, to the open-air drug markets and prostitute drags just out of sight, and the people whose lives are trapped in them. In Liz Moore’s interviews with prostitutes working along Philadelphia’s Kensington Avenue, a woman named Tanya describes her failed attempt to enter normative pathways of society: “I was clean for five months. Those five months, when I was clean, I couldn’t get a job at all. I went so many places, so many places, like K-Mart, Pathmark. Anything you can think of, I went to…None of them are hiring.”

At first, I was dubious of the “almanac” epithet. An almanac is traditionally a collection of statistics and information upon which hobbyists or farmers base their decisions. But ultimately, I would say Rust Belt is an almanac: an arsenal of documentation about “what is,” that feeds the imaginative of “what could be” for America’s post-industrial cities.

Make no mistake, Rust Belt doesn’t seem to imply that the ideal version of “what could be” is accomplished by more small businesses and artists’ studios. Those edifices are the horizon the book constructs that we must look beyond.

Looking beyond is essential in an era of urban revitalization where the dominant paradigm is Richard Florida’s regrettable “creative class” approach—a theory that Florida himself admits provides little trickle-down benefit for cities’ lower-income inhabitants. I’m someone who hopes that these rusted old cities can someday thrive in ways other than merely serving as a concentration of “creative” capital.

In Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela’s piece “Trumbullplex,” the protagonist contemplates “how a city might be after people stopped using it the way it was built to be used.” I can only hope cities will someday be used to foster residents’ pursuit of a vocation as Alexander Barton defines it in “Cleveland is a Vocation”:“[the word’s] roots are the Latin words for ‘a call’ or ‘a summons.’ The underlying belief is that everyone, through their upbringing, passions, experiences, and education, is searching for an honest expression of how they see the world.” Everyone, including Tanya on Kensington Ave.

–July 23, 2013

Ariel Diliberto is Block Programs Coordinator at New Kensington Community Development Corporation. She is also a contributor to Hidden City Philadelphia and sits on the central committee of the Philly Socialists. Ariel received a B.A. in Urban Ecology from Vassar College in 2011. For more information, visit her website.

BARNABY VOL. 1 by Crockett Johnson | reviewed by Travis DuBose

Posted on July 19, 2013 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016

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BARNABY VOL. 1
by Crockett Johnson
introduction by Chris Ware; Art direction by Daniel Clowes
Fantagraphics, 336 pages

reviewed by Travis DuBose

In his foreword to its first collected volume, Chris Ware compares Barnaby, Crockett Johnson’s 1940s newspaper strip, to other early influential comics like Little Nemo, Krazy Kat and Peanuts. He goes on to say that Barnaby is “the last great comic strip,” a description that ends up being a little unfair to any first time readers of Barnaby: though there are moments of greatness in it, Volume One mostly points forward to the strip’s potential, rather than showcasing Johnson’s brilliance firsthand. This difficult start is consistent with the beginnings of other strips, even great ones: the ability to deliver a solid joke, every day, in three or four panels is mastered by very few and even fewer, if any, can do it consistently from the first strip. Barnaby, however, has one of the best rocky starts I’ve encountered in the medium, and its later greatness is well worth its early fumbles.

Crockett Johnson may not have the immediate name recognition of Charles Schulz or Bill Watterson, but his work is a mainstay of American childhoods: he authored Harold and the Purple Crayon and its sequels, and readers of the Harold books will recognize in Barnaby’s protagonist, five year old Barnaby Baxter, the prototype of Harold. Additionally, there are several Barnaby strips featuring a half moon seen out the window over Barnaby’s bed, the final, iconic image of the first Harold book. Harold readers will also recognize the art style: stark, bold lines over simple backgrounds that nonetheless show an impressive command of perspective and space.

Barnaby lives in a small town during World War II, and the strip often focuses on the war and its effects on American life: Barnaby’s father is an air raid warden, and an early story arc focuses on an attempt by criminals to hoard and resell coffee. Another story shows Barnaby attempting to grow a victory garden under the dueling tutelage of his father and his fairy godfather, who encourages Barnaby to “be practical” and grow mangoes. Though Barnaby is nominally the strip’s protagonist, the strip is stolen by his fairy godfather, J.J. O’Malley, a pink-winged huckster who claims his cigars are actually “fine Havana magic wands” that need to be perpetually borrowed from Barnaby’s father’s humidor. Mr. O’Malley, as Barnaby invariably calls him, is a self-aggrandizing confidence man, whose various schemes and scrapes fuel the best narrative arcs: “O’Malley joins the circus and sets a lion free;” “O’Malley writes his memoirs by stealing from other sources;” “O’Malley gets elected to Congress and chairs a committee investigating Santa Claus.” O’Malley is a walking shaggy dog story (something the strip winkingly acknowledges in its literal shaggy dog, the talking Gorgon, who turns out to have nothing to say), and, as the strip progresses, the laughs are increasingly mined not from O’Malley’s ridiculousness but the ridiculousness of how the world reacts to him. The last sustained storyline in this volume, O’Malley’s successful congressional run, is bleeding-sharp satire whose stabs at the American election process still sting.

The strip’s other narrative engine, however, exposes the problems, not of Barnaby, but of publishing its complete run two years’ worth of strips at a time: there are just too many recycled story lines and gags sparked by the disbelief of Barnaby’s parents in his fairy godfather. Johnson takes some of his best shots at middle class conformity when the Baxters take Barnaby to a psychologist specializing in the “problem of the imaginative child,” but subsequent attempts to disprove O’Malley’s existence become tiresome and repetitive, and it’s hard not to want to sweep Barnaby’s parents and their doubt off the page and get back to O’Malley’s latest self-centered (and self-deceiving) scheme.

This repetition, both in story lines and jokes, is, again, largely a problem of format rather than an issue with the work itself: when read daily over two years, O’Malley’s signature exclamation, “Cushlamochree!,” becomes an endearing punchline even if reused several times; when reading a year’s worth of comics in a few hours, the repetition begins to grate, and, no matter the impetus for the story or joke, the early pages of the book can be downright awkward in their execution: the jokes often fall flat and many narrative arcs go on for far too long or have payoffs that left me rolling my eyes. It’s not until nearly the end of this volume that the strip delivers its first great visual punchline, and though the comic brilliance of that one, wordless panel is well worth the wait, it’s hard to sit through over two hundred pages of scattered laughs, sustained only on Chris Ware’s assurance that the material is great.

I would like to say that a two or three volume condensed version would present the strip in a better light than the commitment to publish every frame of the entire run, but as I flipped through the index looking for material to cut, I began to sympathize with the editors: excise the arc about the scrap metal drive and the introduction to McSnoyd the invisible leprechaun, O’Malley’s perpetual rival, is lost; remove the overly long investigation into a haunted house and the timid freeloader Gus the Ghost is gone. Like most pieces of serialized comedy, Barnaby has to learn to walk before it can run, and its early stumbles can be unpleasant to watch. However, once the series hits its comedic stride, about half way through its second year, Barnaby doesn’t just walk or run: it flies on O’Malley’s pink and self-important wings.

Travis DuBose’s fiction has appeared in Apiary and Petrichor Machine, and he was the recent recipient of a Jan-Ai Scholarship Foundation award. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife.

NO APOCALYPSE by Monica Wendel reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

Posted on July 15, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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NO APOCALYPSE
by Monica Wendel
Georgetown Review Press, 70 pages

reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

Monica Wendel makes every pretense of proving the veracity of her title, No Apocalypse, in her debut collection: as if responding to the question “What are some topics of poetry?” the poet has organized her work in orderly divisions—Politics, Dreams, Animals and Cities, Money and Ghosts—lending an everything-under-control sensibility to the book on the surface level. Indeed, her treatment of what many would consider signs of apocalyptic societal devolution – Wikileaks, the Trayvon Martin case, etc – is surprisingly deadpan, as if, in declarative ending lines, Wendel is grimly calming a gloom-and-doom hysteric. As such, when trauma does make an entry, it is all the more traumatic for its surprise, as in the poem “September, Red Hook”; at first glance the poem is whimsical, a charming exchange between two children as they float a piece of stale bread downriver (“a raft for a mouse who’s getting tired of swimming”), and by the time the reader realizes that the poem is set in the aftermath of 9/11 (“‘Or maybe,’ I said, ‘it’s a landing raft for someone in the ashes who jumped’”), it is the final stanza and there’s no backing out. It’s a technique that surfaces frequently in the book, all a part of Wendel’s strategic façade of non-apocalypse.

Monica Wendel

But as the book progresses, apocalyptic breakdown becomes all too apparent: political references pop up in “Dreams,” surreal reality invades dreamspace; titles, suddenly, are utterly mismatched with the contents of their poems. Where current events may lack a quality of disaster, Wendel’s personal details compensate; glimpses of Wendel’s private life are, for the most part, surprisingly compelling, articulating the self-centered but relatable way each of us prioritizes and synthesizes the components of an unsettled world. It seems, at times, that Wendel considers aspects of her personal life as cause for (or complement to) real-world disaster, e.g., “Of course, I fell back asleep and in the afternoon / high winds knocked a billboard off the expressway”, or “I was up // to my forearms in dark blood before I woke up / and also, Kyle Brown dumped me”. Strangely, such juxtaposition tends to draw the reader closer, for as hesitant as we may be to admit it, we can relate to Wendel’s paranoia. We may not know Megan, or Leela “with her backpack full of drugs and her shirt unbuttoned”, or Dave Solidarity and his bike accident, but we understand being “nostalgic for that / makeshift family”, just as we know the very real fear of a dream about your brother in the hospital, more catastrophic and immediate than the distant news reports one would expect with apocalypse.

Wendel is a master of subverting context to lend new insight, an appropriate approach for an author that hints (albeit satirically) at the “beginning of a new world order”. In poems like “Library” and “An Aquarium,” for instance, innocent titles mask forbidden sex acts, yet the creativity of Wendel’s metaphors makes said acts not so much crude as strangely reflective, intellectual. Lines such as “arcing like a mouth through / the sky – which is now turning purple, / Batman-movie purple” are unexpected, pasted alongside “an anarchist / boy with his black hood up and black bandana over / his mouth”; one feels almost guilty at chuckling in the face of violence. It is here, more so than in Wendel’s direct references to revolution and new world orders, that the reader senses the possibility of hysteria, of disaster, as the poet’s cavalier treatment of trauma stutters and breaks.

Wendel’s morbid fascinations, strung as garlands of animal bodies and murder victims throughout, do, however, put the popular appeal of the book at risk, and would no doubt make for a depressing (not to mention predictable) body of work were it not for the poet’s suggestions that they, too, are not wholly breakdown-proof. Humor finds its way in with poems like “Sexual Assault Awareness Week,” in which Wendel suggests that men be given whistles to blow when they feel they might be about to rape someone. Hers is a dark humor, to be sure, but at least Wendel embraces her less-than-pleasant inclinations. “I know / I’m supposed to love rivers, but I don’t,” she writes, “I only love / great open expanses that throw up carcasses before us / as offerings or sacrifices”. With such admissions, the poet endears herself to us: we are also, secretly, attracted to suffering, violence, the imperfections of the human race. In rejecting the pastoral rivers of classical poetry, Wendel contradicts her neat subdivisions, and this – unlike, perhaps, zombie apocalypse movies or end-of-days premonitions – holds one’s attention.

–July 16, 2013

Kenna O’Rourke is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The Pocket Guide, the Philos Adelphos Irrealis chapbook, and Penn’s Filament and 34th Street magazines. She is an editorial assistant for Jacket2, an enthusiastic employee of the Kelly Writers House, and an occasional blogger (englitchlanguage.tumblr.com) and jewelry-and-sewn-object-maker (www.etsy.com/shop/superkenna).

THE SENSUALIST by Daniel Torday reviewed by Michelle Fost

Posted on July 15, 2013 by thwackOctober 21, 2014

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

THE OFFICE OF MERCY by Ariel Djanikian reviewed by John Carroll

Posted on July 5, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014

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THE OFFICE OF MERCY
by Ariel Djanikian
Viking, 304 pages

Reviewed by John Carroll

I had the good fortune of reading Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood,and the Prison of Belief immediately before picking up Ariel Djanikian’s debut novel, The Office of Mercy. While Wright’s nonfiction account of a minor religious movement is, on the surface, seemingly far removed from Djanikian’s novel about a futuristic American settlement, the two books share much more in common than anyone could initially believe.

In particular, Scientologists and the America-Five residents in The Office of Mercy are equally concerned with the ethics of their individual movements. But both groups have arrived at ethical standings far removed from what a contemporary American majority would define as acceptable. While Wright narrates numerous confessionals about physical and emotional abuse in the Church of Scientology, Djanikian introduces readers to the “sweeps” of America-Five: these carefully planned strikes eliminate Tribespeople who live “Outside” – that is, beyond the enclosed settlement of America-Five or similarly numbered settlements established after a globe-altering event known simply as “the Storm.”

ariel-djankian.-credit-to-j.-christina-decamp

Ariel Djanikian

We learn about America-Five and the titular Office of Mercy through inhabitant and office employee Natasha Wiley. Natasha is an Epsilon, a name that defines her generation of America-Five residents. Children aren’t born at America-Five, but developed and created there, and only when the settlement has enough capacity to welcome a new generation to the fold. Natasha, though, begins to question a fundamental issue to the sweeping of Tribespeople and the creation of children: namely, why are the many tribes outdoors killed instead of welcomed inside? And why is a new generation of children (called the Zetas) being created in the presence of routine death?

Natasha, naturally, begins to seek out answers and run into problems she wasn’t anticipating. I won’t spoil the story’s many twists and turns here, except to say that it’s briskly paced and captivating. But what elevates it beyond a story simply well-told – which itself is a good reason to recommend Djanikian’s novel – are the novel’s loaded politics. Like the best science fiction, the world building is clear and encompassing, but the parallels to our contemporary culture are equally bright.

While America-Five’s medicinal and technological advances can only exist in our imagination, the ongoing debates in the novel about “sweeps,” coupling and childbirth bring to mind similar debates about drone strikes, gay marriage and abortion. While America-Five is a startlingly advanced culture, its politics often feel all too real and familiar. Djanikian places us in a story that divorces us from partisanship, punditry and known authority figures. This allows the conversations to be, in a way, more direct than they ever could be in our current political climate. The issues are deep and thorny, but the conversations in the novel are clear and direct.

I should note, though, that Djanikian never lectures her reader in the unfolding of this knotty novel. It’s a credit to her and her world-building that the plain awfulness of America-Five’s sweeps become increasingly complicated over the course of its 304 pages. Natasha struggles with such issues early and often. Djanikian writes, in chapter three:

A muffled sob broke from Natasha’s chest into the hard mattress. Poor people. Poor creatures of Earth. It was terrible. A terrible design that would allow suffering to flourish, and make pain and dying essential gears in the machine of life. To imagine that a benevolent God had made such a world! (Because for centuries their ancestors had all thought so.) Once Natasha had asked Jeffrey about it, about religion, and according to Jeffrey, the pervasive belief in God actually revealed a great deal about Pre-Storm times. The religions of that era, Jeffrey had said, were almost always concessions that pointed directly to the violent nature of living itself; and concessions that exposed more than anything else the defeat that once had lived in every human heart. Their poor ancestors, much like the Tribes, had not wielded a power even remotely comparable to the power of the settlements to put an end to suffering and death. And so, Jeffrey had explained (he explained now, his voice soft and soporific in Natasha’s mind), their ancestors had done the next best thing, they had colored their doom with a sense of purpose. They gave to suffering the aura of the divine; they gave it a witness and a reward; and to death, they granted a nature inverse of truth – calling the end a beginning.

Indeed, Jeffrey and Arthur and the Alphas – all, to various degrees, Natasha’s superiors – are so engaging and persuasive because America-Five has engineered language to be on its side. While Djanikian’s science fiction world is fully shaped and real on the page, the truly important world-building comes in the explanations that the settlement has built to create, defend and continue their controversial way of living.

This very aspect of the novel – the wielding of language as one’s greatest weapon – is what immediately made me link Djanikian’s novel to Lawrence Wright’s nonfiction writing about Scientology. And it’s this obsession with language that allows The Office of Mercy to be something greater than a gripping thriller, and explains why every review I’ve read is quick to compare it to both Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and George Orwell’s 1984. This book is at once a crowd-pleaser despite its despair, and a paean to language that engrossed me above and beyond the thrills of Natasha’s adventures.

–July 5, 2013

John Carroll has published fiction in Philly Fiction 2 (Don Ron Books), Versal, Interrobang!? and The Battered Suitcase. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from American University in Washington, DC. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he was born and raised. He is a former staff member of the Kelly Writers House, as well as the former Arts and Culture Editor of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. He currently blogs at OhJohnCarroll.com, as well as maintaining the Poetry, By Google Voice web site.

WOMEN’S POETRY: POEMS AND ADVICE by Daisy Fried reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

Posted on June 28, 2013 by thwackMarch 17, 2014

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WOMEN’S POETRY: POEMS AND ADVICE
by Daisy Fried
University of Pittsburgh Press, 88 pages

Reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

Daisy Fried’s new collection, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, illuminates issues that are both specifically feminine (i.e. mother-daughter paradigms) and gender neutral (being American in a foreign land). Divided into four numbered sections, the poems explore the layers of complicated relationships and expose the emotions therein. Fried shows us how beauty forces us to notice it, even when we’d rather not. Through several reflexive lines that connect to other poems within the text, she speaks to the multi-layered nature of art.

The Advice Column Section gives Fried latitude to launch a sweet and snarky rant against those who place themselves outside and against the world of women and words. How absolutely accurate, and satisfactory, to hear that the only difference between a male poetess (she “applies the term poetess to men and women, good poetesses and bad”) and a female poetess is that a male poetess is free to overtly comment on another male poetess’ body, whereas no matter how far we’ve come, body image issues can remain a no-fly zone for female poetesses. Her advice to Mr. Martyr (“try champagne, oysters, and mopping the damn floor for a change) reminds us that nagging, either a poet or a poem, will not yield the desired results.

In “Torment”, Fried positions the problems of wealthy undergrads next to those of the poet (“I’m a writer, /not a teacher”) professor. The economy has introduced these neo-adults to a world in which they do not automatically succeed and that threatens their sense of entitlement, even as they continue to be entitled. For them, poor interviews mean a blow to self-esteem, the tension of angry parents and the need to dip into trust funds. For the “not-quite-40” pregnant poet, whose interviewer has asked whether or not her impending motherhood will allow her “to be a literary mama to [her] students,” this means continuing to search for a job she’s not even sure that she wants. Everyone in the space is in transition, or about to be, and every one of them is afraid.

Section II moves us from the professional to the personal. Here, Fried’s phrasing yields both fluid understanding and visceral imagery. In “Midnight Feeding,” she juxtaposes seemingly contrasting ideas, beginning with the innocence of her nearly-naked moonlight trek. The nurturing instinct in her determination to feed the babies—both human and animal—in her sphere, along with the image of feral archangels (or at least cats named for archangels), echo the terrible and divine grace of motherhood. We see the identity crises mother-writers often face as they struggle with body issues (wearing a baby monitor “like a Miss America sash”) and new boundaries: “There are too many stars in poems you have to get drunk to write.” Fried lays bare the complexities of post-baby relationships in “Econo Motel, Ocean City,” highlighting the ridiculous contortia of sex while baby sleeps: “The warped ceiling mirror makes us look like fat porno dwarfs.” The poem ends with the poignant revelation of her “Sad Armageddon of marriage.”

Fried explores mother-daughter connections in “This Need Not Be a Comment on Death.” She gives us a three-generation chain of mother-daughter links in which language forms barriers, not bonds. In the primal space of the birthing room, where we expect only physical pain, words weave an extra layer of discomfort. “Never a caress without a complaint” she says of her mother, who has delivered what feels like criticism even while providing what’s meant to be support, and who leaves after receiving what feels like a rejection, thereby missing her granddaughter’s birth. Fried refers to herself as “a plotline”, presumably in her own daughter’s story, reminding us that pieces may get lost in the telling.

“Shame and Go Home, 2004” examines the complexities of liberal Americanism in Rome. The narrator and her partner are commended for speaking “pretty grammatical English for Americans.” The inherent and unintentional condescension here echoes the prejudicial overtones of white Americans who are surprised to hear standard English from the racial Other, thus putting the narrator in an unexpected place of discomfort. Indeed, the narrator wrestles with injustice in several poems focusing on the expulsion of gypsies from Rome, viewed from multiple perspectives, causing readers to question our own ideologies from the position of the inner or upper class, as well as from the position of the Other-though-still-acceptable.

Though Fried titles her collection Women’s Poetry, both genders can and should explore her work. The target audience may be women, but there is much here for all readers.

–June 28, 2013

Shinelle L. Espaillat writes, lives and teaches in Westchester County, NY. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at Temple University. Her work has appeared in Midway Journal.

THE END by Anders Nilsen reviewed by Henry Steinberg

Posted on June 28, 2013 by thwackJune 15, 2015

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THE END
by Anders Nilsen
Fantagraphics Books, 80 pages

Reviewed by Henry Steinberg

The Humming Bird.
The Condor.
The Giant.
The Hands.

I hold your head in my hands and your heart in my heart and I look at you and I am floating above the bed alone and there’s nothing I can do at all because you’re gone.

These are the Nazca Lines. Located in the southern desert of Peru, these ancient geoglyphs dot the landscape, their purpose unknown, their mystery immense. Carved into the earth by the Nazca Peoples, the exact date of their creation is impossible to pin down, but researchers believe they were made between 400-650 BCE. When standing on top of the lines, within them, it is impossible to discern the shapes of the designs, though they are figurative and quite complex. One needs the great distance and height of the surrounding foothills to see and understand their intricacy.

In 2005, Anders Nilsen’s fiancé Cheryl Weaver died after a long battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That’s when Nilsen began writing and drawing in his journals – laying down in lines the solid grief that would become The End. His drawings are not of the Nazca Lines, but sometimes they look like them.

There is a glyphic and timeless quality about much of Nilsen’s artwork in this book. He does not draw pictures so much as he writes them. Aside from a few forays into the truly figurative, the majority of the work is drawn in icons, referring to but not representing real people. He has created ciphers for himself, and for her – in his state of abject grief it did not matter what they truly looked like. In his deliberate omission of detail there is a clarity that is brutally true to the experience of grieving a loved one, in this new world of sadness there is only man and woman, Anders and Cheryl.

There is a mythological quality about his work too, and perhaps that’s why it feels timeless. It’s Orpheus and Eurydice, except Nilsen never ventures after Cheryl into the land of the dead, only into his memories. But The End is not explicitly about myths, or history, or ideas, though it may evoke them. The End is not like Nilsen’s last completed work, Big Questions, a 600 page opus which was about all of those things. The End is 88 pages of the most crushingly raw, honest and affecting comics I have read in some time.

Dealing with death is the process of gaining perspective on life.

The End is a kaleidoscope of perspectives as experienced through a singular vision. There is nothing for the reader to hold onto: you will get dizzy, you will stumble and fall into Nilsen’s grief and you will experience it with him – that’s one of the reasons why this book is so effective. While a dead lover and one man’s grief could easily be an emotional gimmick, our inability to hold onto a coherent narrative turns this tale into something much more intimate and immediate.

The majority of the “story” in The End moves at a steady rhythm, underscoring the banality, the crushingly quotidian nature and moment-to-moment quality of dealing with life after death. These sections of the book are figured as a dialogue between Anders and Cheryl, or rather his memory of her. “What do you remember about me now?” she asks him. There is no story in The End, only moments captured in images. All of this is punctuated by the pale blue scrawl of Nilsen’s handwriting – ghostly – written as though he weren’t even there.

To read The End is to read the experience of incommensurability – perspective is impossible because when it comes to pain and loss and suffering there is no such thing, at least, not at first. Like the Nazca Lines, the lines of Nilsen’s pain are strange and alien yet altogether strikingly, unsettlingly precise in their renderings. Standing on the foothills at the edge of Nilsen’s loss, we are given the privileged position of both seeing and feeling the experience of another person’s grief. Though at the time it may be messy, Nilsen’s line etches the exact feeling of the pain death brings with it. Nilsen is not carving lines into the earth as much as he is into his own flesh. It is not all hopeless, it is not endless – The End does end, for Nilsen and for all of us.

–June 28, 2013

Henry Steinberg grew up in Philadelphia and recently graduated from the university of Pennsylvania where he studied English and Creative Writing. He is also a letterpress printer and bookbinder, and loves all things ink and paper.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DANIEL J. ISENGART by Filip Noterdaeme reviewed by Michelle Fost

Posted on June 27, 2013 by thwackOctober 21, 2014

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DANIEL J. ISENGART
by Filip Noterdaeme
Outpost19, 351 pages

Reviewed by Michelle Fost

Because Gertrude Stein wished readers would pay more attention to the ambitious but largely unread work she considered her masterpiece, The Making of Americans, she had a tendency to knock her very popular Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Years ago, as a young fiction writer working on a master’s thesis on The Making of Americans, I sometimes identified with Stein. Here she is, in that book, wondering if her work will be read:
Bear it in your mind my reader, but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such a creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be to me always my receiver,—but anyhow reader, bear it in your mind—will there be for me ever any such a creature… listen while I tell you all about us, and wait while I hasten slowly forwards, and love, please, this history of this decent family’s progress.

I was impressed by her direct expression of a longing to be read, and the lonely seriousness of her project.

Like Stein, I championed her neglected work and cared less for the Autobiography. Filip Noterdaeme’s new work, The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart, came with an invitation to have another look at Stein’s Autobiography. I was struck by how good Stein’s writing is—witty, perceptive, nicely phrased.

Filip Noterdaeme has gleefully appropriated, recast, and remade Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In this version, we follow a Stein and Toklas-like couple, Daniel and Filip, as they establish themselves in New York. Daniel is a chef and a cabaret singer, and Filip is an adjunct teacher, sometime lecturer in museums, and art establishment outsider and provocateur. He’s often very funny, if frivolously so. They are both outsiders to the New World, Daniel from Germany, and Filip from Belgium.

At times, Daniel and Filip’s concerns feel excruciatingly trivial. Yet Daniel and Filip are also very entertaining, as when Filip arranges the books in their apartment:
When the paint was dry Filip Noterdaeme decided to shelve all the books facing the other way, that is with the bookends in the back. He found that they were much more pleasing to look at this way. But how do you find a book, our friends said. You don’t find a book, Filip Noterdaeme said, the book finds you.

I was okay with this Autobiography finding me. What’s more, I enjoyed the many very nice collisions with Stein that had me appreciating both Autobiographies. During an all Elvis cabaret performance, someone in the audience is excessively eager for Daniel to sing “Heartbreak Hotel.” He accommodates, but his version takes the familiar words and translates them into German. As he says, “I was making the most known american song foreign for them so they could once again hear it as if for the first time.” It’s his version of Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

I really liked Noterdaeme’s description of a period of his life: “All his creations for the museum were based upon his years of working for art museums and the many hours he had been watching and thinking about the homeless and it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning, all falling into place and creating miraculous things.” This seemed to describe The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart, a kaleidoscopic turn of Stein’s work into something new but strongly related. I was then rewarded by finding Stein’s description in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas of her early days in Paris as “like a kaleidoscope slowly turning.”

How do we read The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart? Is it a conceptual art piece, a work that stands on its own, or a simple mash up of Gertrude Stein’s popular and famous work? Is it slight or is it profound? Did I mention that The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart is full of gossip and New York art scene names? (Brace yourselves, fans of Marina Abramovic.)

Stein wrote about how nothing is new in literature, and words like rose lose meaning through regular use. After centuries of appearing in poems, a rose no longer corresponded to the flower in the world. Stein’s idea of repetition was to restore meaning. Repetition was very important to Stein. Noterdaeme, by repeating the form in his Autobiography from her Autobiography, has renewed the work. In both cases, what looks like an amusement has some depth. Here is Daniel looking at Filip, simultaneously on the cusp of success and failure: “When I saw Filip Noterdaeme, the director of the Homeless Museum of Art, an as yet insufficiently known institution of which he is the founder, stand outside in the cold for two hours in a cheap rented tuxedo and holding up a signpost pointing towards the Museum of Modern Art, I must confess I began to cry.” Drawing on the originality, intelligence, and humor of Gertrude Stein, Noterdaeme has created a spirited portrait of two men who are at once insiders and outsiders at a particular moment in the New York art scene.

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

THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner reviewed by Chris Ludovici

Posted on June 25, 2013 by thwackMay 20, 2014

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THE FLAMETHROWERS
by Rachel Kushner
Scribner, 400 pages

Reviewed by Chris Ludovici

Early in Rachel Kushner’s occasionally frustrating but fascinating book The Flamethrowers, the protagonist sleeps with a man she’s only just met. She naively believes that her encounter with the attractive, nameless stranger is going to lead to something more meaningful, and she is more than a little disappointed to find him gone when she wakes the next morning. He leaves a mark on her, though, both by taking her virginity and also by giving her the only name we will know her by, Reno, after the city she was born and raised in. It’s a fitting name for the heroine of this novel, which is, principally, about starting over, on both an individual as well as national level.

All the characters in The Flamethrowers are interested in reinvention; they ache to transcend their compromised human past into a more perfect, harmonious present and future. Fresh out of college with a degree in film, Reno arrives in New York, ready to live. She’s a born gear head, she loves motorcycles and speed, and she’d like to do something with her camera, but all she’s got is some grainy film she’s shot of her neighborhood. Reno is a woman in search of direction and purpose. She doesn’t so much know what she wants, as she knows what she doesn’t want: to stay at home and end up a switchboard operator liker her mother.

At least, she doesn’t know what she wants besides her boyfriend Sandro, a fortysomething Italian artist and the heir to the Moto Valera motorcycle company. Sandro is running away, too, from the weight and obligation of his family’s company and its legacy of fascism and exploitation. Together the two of them navigate the avant garde art world, where everyone is either desperate to become the next big thing or is a jaded professional, too cool to care about the very thing they’d until recently worked so hard to achieve. In art, like everything else, people are looking to change themselves, to become something new and better, the thing they always truly were.

After breaking the women’s land speed record in a Valera car, Reno, along with a reluctant Sandro, agrees to go to Italy and participate in a publicity event for the company. Once there, she finds herself in the middle of a revolution. Rampant poverty and exploitation have led to mass demonstrations and rioting, much of it directed at the Valera Corporation. Reno sees a country engaged in reinvention on a national scale, waging a war for workers rights against Sandro’s own company. She is brought face-to-face with the politics, both social and personal, that fuel Sandro. As she’s drawn further into the Valero family drama, Reno finds herself caught up in a life-and-death conflict between the workers who are struggling to transform Italy into a more equitable country and the old world aristocracy, who refuse to go along with the change.

There isn’t a whole lot of plot in The Flamethrowers. It’s a series of scenes, with Reno in or around the center. She’s an appealing contradiction of a character: fully realized, yet, at the same time passive, and a sort of cypher. We learn very little about her, and she has very little agency. She mostly follows the lead of others, often her older glamorous boyfriend. Many of the vignettes involve her listening to other people talk or just observing the world around her. But she’s sharp, and her thoughts are fascinating. Reno is a fully formed portrait of a woman in her early twenties– that is, a person still struggling with who she is and who she wants to be. She looks to others to give her clues of how people behave, and she yearns to find a place for herself among them.

Occasionally the book digresses from Reno’s journey to look into the lives of some of its other characters, most notably Sandro’s father as he grew from a child growing up in Egypt to a wealthy Italian titan of industry. These chapters are interesting, and give Kushner an opportunity to explore her themes of reinvention and the mixture of the personal and political from other perspectives than Reno’s. But these digressions lack the urgency and emotional investment of the Reno chapters. One of the dangers of presenting such a well-realized, intriguing character at the center of your book is that the supporting cast can seem inconsequential by comparison.

The Flamethrowers has much to say and many moving parts. It doesn’t always fit together smoothly, and the ending feels unsatisfying—although probably deliberately so. But those quibbles aside, it’s a dense engaging read whose moments of insight and brilliance far outshine its occasional missteps.

–June 25, 2013

christopher-ludovici Chris 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.

TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE by Ulli Lust reviewed by Tahneer Oksman

Posted on June 21, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

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TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
by Ulli Lust
translated by Kim Thomson
Fantagraphics Books, 460 pages

Reviewed by Tahneer Oksman

Note: Lust’s memoir was edited and translated into English by comics visionary Kim Thompson, who passed away earlier this week. This book, along with countless others, is a tribute to his legacy. –T.O.

Why weren’t more women dharma bums, taking trips across the country like the Kerouac’s and Cassady’s and Snyder’s of On the Road and beyond? Why weren’t more of them trekking up desolation mountains, sleeping in boxcars, bumming cigarettes and hash and old paperbacks and swigs of wine from strangers?*

Ulli Lust’s thick graphic memoir, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, though set in the early 1980’s, decades after most of the beats had already burned out, and continents away – taking place in Austria and Italy – offers a potential answer, in the form of Lust’s own resounding howl. The book features snapshots in the life of a girl, a newly self-affiliated punk raised just over the western side of the Iron Curtain. At almost seventeen, she sets off on foot for Italy with just the clothes on her back and aspirations to “accumulate as much experience as possible, to meet as many people as possible – from the bum to the millionaire, normal people and crazy ones….” And she does. Except, as it turns out, people, or at least the men she encounters, from the artist to the Buddhist, from the junkie to the politician, are a lot more alike than not. And they are a lot less interested in helping her along in her journey, in fostering any kind of a meeting of the minds, of experience as acquaintance, intimacy, or knowledge, than in objectifying her, in using her to fulfill their sexual cravings. As it turns out, to them, she is, and perhaps can only be, an object of lust, nothing more, nothing less.

We never learn whether Ulli’s experience is representative of other travelling, rebellious punk women, striving against all odds to leave their stifling home lives behind for a world of uncertainty and adventure (which really turns out to be, largely, a world of danger). The other central female character in the memoir is Edi, another youngster with a much more stultifying and destructive appetite for experience. Edi’s response to the powerlessness of being a perpetual object of desire is quite the opposite: unlike Ulli, she seeks out her sexual escapades, luxuriating in the sense that men want her, that she can, at least one way and if only for a short time, control them.

The girls’ friendship is based on a shared desire to run away and try new things –prostitution, the opera, heroine, panhandling, sleeping under the stars… And the beauty of this graphic memoir is in the way, image by image and line by line, it captures that yearning and its momentary fulfillments in the shapes of breathtaking, carefully drawn landscapes, or drawings that depict Ulli’s surreal fantasies, like her body floating happily over the Spanish stairs. These flashes contrast with the much more frequent and overwhelming desolation and gloom that confronts the two women – the sense of powerlessness and disappointment that can emerge only out of the most hopeful and naïve youthful aspirations. Both women are eventually beaten down by the journey; their friendship dissolves in a series of betrayals. What remains of this experience? Lust seems to be asking. What can you do with fragments of memory, still sharp and detailed, from a journey that so changed you but almost broke you?

The thick, two-colored memoir is framed with pieces from Lust’s real-life archive – journal entries, a couple of photographs, an unmailed letter. What is so astonishing about this work is the way that the comics, composed decades after the adventures they portray, so closely match that youthful exuberance and obstinance as reflected in the documents taken from that moment in time. A fragment from one of her early journals (from 1981, when she was thirteen) reads:

What kind of a person am I?

Am I even actually a person?

I can never quite reach any kind of conclusion, sometimes I’m melancholic, sometimes I behave like a total fool, like a nut, and then suddenly I’m full of energy and threatening to explode. Just like now. My whole body is itching, it’s awful.

The images throughout the text vibrate with those same clamorous emotions – we feel Ulli’s anger as she fights her aggressors, her excitement as she walks into a Clash concert, her desperation as she hungers for a bite to eat. But even as Lust reveals the contours of Ulli’s interior world through expressive, often horrifying images, what makes this memoir so stunning is the way Lust simultaneously holds back from offering too much information. Even as we learn what Ulli is feeling, from moment to moment, we don’t know what this journey will inevitably mean for her, how it will ultimately change her. Like any seventeen year old setting off into the wide unknown, we don’t know how the story will end.

*Of course, there were lots of women who took part in the so-called Beat generation, by engaging in those and other activities, and Brenda Knight, for example, has anthologized many of their writings in her book, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (1996). Joyce Johnson, author of Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir (1999), was one of them.

–June 21, 2013

Tahneer Oksman recently completed her Ph.D. in English Literature at the Graduate Center at CUNY. Her articles on women’s visual culture have been published or are forthcoming in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Studies in Comics, and several upcoming anthologies. She has taught at NYU-Gallatin, Brooklyn College, and Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript on Jewish women’s identity in contemporary graphic memoirs. In the fall of 2013, she will be joining the faculty at Marymount Manhattan College as Assistant Professor of Writing and Director of the Writing Seminar Program.

THE TRANSLATOR by Nina Schuyler reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Posted on June 21, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

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THE TRANSLATOR
by Nina Schuyler
Pegasus Books, 352 pages

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

I noticed, earlier this week, that my friend Cristina Vezzaro had been posting on Facebook in Dutch. This shouldn’t have surprised me. Still, I wondered, “Have you added a new language?”

“I took Nederlands while in Geneva 20 years ago. I am just trying to refresh what I knew and learn it better,” she replied.

Vezzaro, after all, is a literary translator, who translates novels from the original German and French to Italian; but Cristina was born multi-lingual, in a part of Italy near Germany and Switzerland, and she acquires languages as some do shoes or kitchen appliances. I’ve witnessed her almost immediate acquisition of American English, slang and all.

Hanne Schubert, the protagonist of Nina Schuyler’s quietly perceptive new novel The Translator, is one such character, an expert translator of several languages with a special expertise in Japanese. Like Vezzaro, she is primordially multi-lingual. Schubert, whose childhood and education took her all over the world and who eventually settled with Japanese husband, an ambitious chemist, in San Francisco, is at home almost everywhere—and yet nowhere.

Now a widow, the intensely (and rather moralistically) disciplined Schubert is working on the most important translation commission of her career, a novel by the top Japanese author Kobayashi. With the translation, Kobayashi will grab hold of the American market and Schubert herself will become a star. She might even become a successful writer in her own right.

Writers, quite unfortunately, are condemned to think this way about every next thing they do. Translators, who live in the shadows, have it even worse: as much as they might desire a connection to readers, their work is imagined to be invisible. In the publishing industry, this means poor pay and rarely seeing their name in publicity or on the book cover. Having grown tired of this, this year Vezzaro, who is based in Torino, started a new website Authors and Translators, meant to draw attention to the interdependency of writers and translators and the critical role translators play in the literary enterprise. (I wrote about it recently here.)

Translators, indeed, are caught between conflicting urges for mastery and subjugation, and this tension underlies Schubert’s journey in The Translator. Using her own deep knowledge of Japanese and asserting her own judgment about the author Kobayashi’s main character Jiro, a classical musician who sends his dying, mentally unstable wife away, Schubert closes in on finishing the translation. She is convinced she understands Jiro intimately, even better than Kobayashi.

The Kobayashi writes: Jiro wa isoide uchi e kaeri, toko ni tsuku. He hurries home and goes to bed. He is not fleeing or running away from anything. Jiro is not shirking responsibilities. He is weary from an eventful day. She translates it: He heads home and goes to bed.

But then she stumbles. He weeps uncontrollably.

Hanne looks up as if a stranger has just entered the room. Even in the darkest moments of caring for his wife, as her condition deteriorated, Jiro displayed the fine qualities of composure and restraint. It’s out of character and it isn’t at all believable. After a long string of dismal months, he finally and most deservedly had an extraordinary day. Why cry now?

…

She translates:

He weeps uncontrollably, feeling a serenity he didn’t know he was missing.

This conceit is her crime. It makes the book a kind of cautionary tale for translators who feel themselves creative agents. They are, of course, and Schuyler provides worthy insight into the process. “Translation is an art, she’s said countless times, requiring all the skill of a writer and then some, because the story, written in one language, one as different as Japanese, must be made meaningful in another language.”

Translation is indeed an almost irresistible literary metaphor. Schuyler plunders it effectively, and most of the time subtly enough to underlie, and not overwhelm, her story, which centers on Schubert’s search for a connection to her long-distant daughter Brigitte—a mother’s desire to apologize to a daughter she couldn’t ever understand.

After a beautifully described accident that leaves Schubert able only to speak in Japanese, she comes to realize her problem with translating Kobayashi, who angrily rejects her manuscript, is the same with connecting with Brigitte: her own biases are getting in the way. Schubert, a woman of 53, must forget what she thinks she knows and listen more intently, trusting others to speak authentically for themselves.

–June 21 2013

Nathaniel Popkin is a journalist, author, editor, film writer, historian, professor, and critic. Since 2002, with the publication of his first book, Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape (Four Walls Eight Windows-Basic Books), he has been a distinctive urbanist voice in the conversation about Philadelphia’s past, present, and future and a careful observer of cities in the context of American life. According to Tom Sugrue, historian of the University of Pennsylvania, Popkin is “a visionary with two feet on the ground, a poet who finds verse in the everyday.” Lion and Leopard, Popkin’s novel of historical fiction about the romantic movement that shook the foundations of the American art establishment in the early 19th century, will be published by the Head and the Hand Press in Fall 2013.

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