Book Review

Henry Martin: An Active Ear

Selected Writings, Conversations, and Correspondences

Edited by Emanuele Guidi and Egidio Marzona, with text by Lisa Andreani, Jordan Carter, Luca Cerizza, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Emanuele Guidi, Henry Martin, and Elisabetta Rattalino
Spector Books ($45)

by Richard Kostelanetz

The remarkable African American art critic, curator, and translator Henry Martin, who died at the age of eighty in 2022, finally gets to be the subject of focus in Henry Martin: An Active Ear. Martin, a native of Philadelphia, was an expatriate author; after attending New York University in the mid-1960s, he traveled to Italy and stayed there, marrying visual artist Berty Skuber and settling with her in the mountainous South Tyrol, where other Americans were scarce.

Martin made his living by contributing articles to magazines and translating Italian texts into English. He was a literary man who came late to art writing; the greatest influence on his prose was another Henry, surnamed James, from whom Martin learned the art of composing extended sentences in long paragraphs. The primary source of his enthusiasm for visual art was Marcel Duchamp, whom he discovered as a teenager in 1950s Philadelphia:

Marcel Duchamp first entered my life when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, surely before I was sixteen when I was old enough to drive. He connects directly to the old red bus at the stop on the corner of the road where my family lived, then a transfer to the green municipal bus somewhere inside the city, and finally the trolly through Fairmount Park to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is a great fake Parthenon atop a great fake Acropolis that stares from a distance towards the center of the city and the statue of William Penn on the summit of City Hall.

Fortunately, one of Martin’s first jobs in Italy was helping the Milanese art historian Arturo Schwarz prepare The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Abrams, 1969). This immersion explains, perhaps, why the most profound essays in An Active Ear discuss aspects of Duchamp, who became Martin’s principal teacher in modernist aesthetics as well as a touchstone he returned to for decades; with the Italian painter Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023), Martin wrote Why Duchamp (McPherson & Co., 1985).

Nearly all the other people whose work is discussed in An Active Ear descend from Duchamp; about pre-20th-century visual art, of which Italy has so much that is excellent, Martin says little. He favors post-Duchamp artists such as Ray Johnson (1927-1995) and George Brecht (1926-2008), not only in discrete essays but in extended probing interviews. Often does Martin reveal that he knows his subjects personally, not to boast but to give his commentary an intimate authority. Only one of his many subjects is African American: Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016), who likewise resided for a time in Europe.

Emanuele Guidi has constructed An Active Ear to be an alternative kind of biography; in addition to Martin’s essays and conversations, Guidi includes correspondence between Martin and his favorite subjects as well as occasional informal photographs. Of the last, my favorites appear as endpapers, with Martin holding a white bird (perhaps a dove) on his outstretched hand on the front spread and raising his middle finger beside two white guys on the back spread.

What further makes this book a de facto biography are five appreciations written by people who aren’t artists and a remarkably elegant foreword by John-Daniel Martin, Berty and Henry’s son. The only ungainly thing about the book is its format: the sans serif type and small margins make the reading experience challenging.

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Art Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews

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Absent Here

Bret Shepard
University of Pittsburgh Press ($18)

by Jeff Alessandrelli

Bret Shepard’s second collection, Absent Here, could be called a “project” book, in that all its poems are centered on one topic—in this case Alaska, which here seems less a state than a state of mind. Tundra, darkness, Arctic, body, language, absence: certain words that repeat in the text feel less written than lived (and indeed, as the author bio on the back cover tells us, “Bret Shepard is from the North Slope of Alaska”). Lines from the serial poem “Here but Elsewhere” are emblematic:

The absence is enormous in the Arctic.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Some deaths create other ways to die.

Some losses you only understand once

your body and mind come back together
wherever it is beyond what we name.

Shepard’s approach in Absent Here is both reflexive and discursive. Early in the book, “On Ice” asserts:

Faces retain what the world gives back to us. We see it
in the mirror. Because it is already done, the mirror reflects

small ways we reduce. Like ice rolled over mistakes,
we grieve what we touch, the selves we try to change too late.

Toward the end of the collection, in “Summer Camp,” a bull caribou falls dead, and by being “taken apart” it is simultaneously “also reduced to more.” From any angle, there’s a sadness to Shepard’s Alaska, an overhang of the past’s erasure against the present’s inevitability; the speaker is often looking back at what once was and is no longer. “Territories,” which contains the epigraph “Report paints grim picture about Alaska Native language fluency, but hope remains,” begins with the decree “I’m missing a language for what is lost,” followed by the repetition “Tundra. Tundra. Tundra. Tundra” and the lines “In difficulty, a grammar for the vastness // measured in millions of eye lengths.” In this white and desolate landscape, the speaker considers the weight of poorly made past decisions (“The village voted itself dry / again. What is paradise // but a final tally of choices / given to innocence, sin // given to sunless days”), and what isn’t seen—absence piled upon absence—matters just as much as what is.

“Territories” is also notable for the line “I don’t have a language that isn’t white,” a reference to the region’s tumults of snow that also hints at a racial component to Shepard’s picture of Alaska. The observation is well-deserved—after Hawaii, Alaska has the highest percentage of Indigenous residents among U.S. states—and Shepard is wise to foreground the particular absence of non-whiteness his own whiteness dictates. Still, Absent Here is not a confessional text in any standard conception of the word; its poems are imaginative, far flung, and oftentimes non-linear, and even moments that seem to relate the author’s personal experience exhibit a stark refusal to accept a solid version (or vision) of selfhood. Take the opening section of the collection’s final poem, “Here but Elsewhere”:

Language doesn’t make decisions. It keeps
guessing. When I was given my Inupiaq

name, Jenny Felder talked me into sounds

from the book listing each possible version
nearby. I still hear her. I would speak them

now if my mouth could shape the words.

In his well-known review of Kenneth Lonergan’s Oscar-winning 2016 film Manchester By the Sea, critic A. O. Scott notes that it is “less concerned with nostalgia than with the psychology of loss.” Absent Here is squarely interested in the same thing. Although the book is filled with ideas and images of Alaska that a non-resident might also initially recognize (darkness, isolation, snow, etc.), Absent Here steadfastly troubles any fixed picture of Alaska—as a project, as a state, Alaska (like the self) remains ongoing amidst its vast and immediate absences.

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Fragments of a Paradise

Jean Giono
Translated by Paul Eprile
Archipelago Books ($18)

by Alice-Catherine Carls

Long before dictating the eight chapters of Fragments of a Paradise, Jean Giono spent three years translating Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; during World War II, he pursued this nautical theme with an homage to its author, Pour saluer Melville (“To Greet Melville”), published in 1941. Later, almost five years into the Nazi occupation of France and having been under suspicion of pre-war pacifism and wartime collaborationism, Giono conceived a Moby Dick à la française, turning Ahab’s anger into a scientific expedition to the South Atlantic in a surreal blend of science and poetry. These circumstances call for reading Fragments of a Paradise as both a literary feat and a testament.

Critics have seen the novel as a divide in Giono’s work, a shift away from the tragedy of the world that defined his earlier works. In Fragments of a Paradise, the main topic is no longer man’s confrontation with nature but his enchantment with it. Depending on one’s education or social status, the gateway to enchantment can be a child’s innocence, a scientist’s reasoned understanding, or the delightedly fearful awe of past legends. Officer Larreguy, a graduate of the prestigious engineering school Centrale, has an awakening that relies on all three when on a visit home he notices an unusually large ox footprint that reminds him of the winged bulls guarding the gates of the city of Nineveh he had learned about during history classes.

This quixotic quest for Arcadia leads the ship’s captain to the most remote island on earth, Tristan da Cunha, after struggling through angry seas and skies with pre-industrial tools (the only radio on board remains unused, and the sailing vessel is a three-mast corvette). This unmooring process, says Giono at the end of the book, is the only way to fight the dulling of one’s senses from the pettiness and boredom of a routine in which the deadly tanks and airplanes of war have replaced nature’s wonders. Fighting “the most terrifying thing a man can imagine: to be inanimate,” the book concludes, “This is why all the men on the ship are hastening to find a soul within themselves.”

The ship’s quest, however, remains unfinished. Michael Wood, in his pertinent introduction, lists critical interpretations but does not address whether Fragments of a Paradise should be considered a finished work. The open-ended status of the novel is in character with its focus on the dualities of life/death, good/evil, creation/destruction, and nature/civilization. Giono hinted at revisions, calling the eight chapters a “future poem”—perhaps emulating his friend C. F. Ramuz, who wrote “poetic novels.” On the other hand, Giono typically wrote quickly, and rarely made any corrections to his texts.

An armchair traveler who lived most of his life in a small town in southeastern France, Giono had an encyclopedic book knowledge of geography and foreign cultures. Interestingly, he does not list these disciplines among the expertises possessed by his fictional crew: “Zoology, Botany, Geology, Paleontology, Bacteriology, Hydrography, Oceanography, Meteorology, planetary Magnetism, atmospheric Electricity, and Gravity.” In the fourth and fifth chapters, the reader is served a heavy dose of what critics call “borrowed information” in the vein of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Joseph Conrad—or for that matter, Giono’s own readings of the complete works of 18th-century naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who was a founder of the theory of ecological succession, and Jules Dumont d’Urville’s multi-volume Voyage de la corvette l’Astrolabe, published serially from 1830-1833. Giono also drops clues about his knowledge of current sea exploration; expeditions to the island of Tristan da Cunha in the 1920s and ’30s made the island popular, and the sporadic discovery of Antarctic islands in the 1930s by French expeditions perhaps explains Giono’s captain’s choice of a reconnaissance area between the 66th parallel and the Tropic of Cancer.

The novel’s structure is supported by Giono’s use of both poetic and scientific language, with shifts between scientific prose, nautical jargon, rank-and-file sailors’ idioms, and dialogues replete with vieille France formulas of politeness. The first three chapters are pure poetry. The Franco-Basque crew sees a giant stingray and sperm whale through the eyes of medieval writers and in the language of John Milton, so they are unable to explain the sea creatures’ extraordinary feats of light, sound, and smells. These are explained more scientifically by the captain and the ship’s officers in the following two chapters, with a profusion of details to anchor them in verisimilitude. Poetry returns when Noël Guinard, the storekeeper, climbs to the top of Tristan da Cunha, fulfilling Giono’s idea of complete solitude and preparation for death. Poetic images are scattered through the chapters; technicolor visions of monsters and sunsets and a symbiosis between land, sea, and sky unmoor the mind as surely as the motion of wind and water. Paul Eprile’s conscientious and sophisticated translation must be commended for sparingly “paring down” the original text and preserving its stylistic richness.

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Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Patriot

Alexei Navalny
Translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel
Knopf ($35)

by Grace Utomo

For some, the difference between what if and what is is a single character. For others, it’s the gulf between silence and annihilation. Alexei Navalny, intrepid critic of Vladimir Putin and leader of Russia’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, chose the latter. Navalny’s memoir, Patriot, which blends traditional narrative, prison diaries, and social media posts, was released posthumously by his widow Yulia Navalnaya in October 2024 after the opposition leader was allegedly killed in one of Russia’s most brutal penal colonies. From surviving assassination by chemical agent in 2020, to 295 days of torture and solitary confinement during 2023-2024, Navalny remained steadfast in his dissent.

Although Navalny composed Patriot in spaces ranging from a tranquil asylum in Germany to a punishment cell above the Arctic Circle, the book’s tone is strikingly consistent. Its opening captures the author’s tongue-in cheek approach to both politics and memoir: “Dying really didn’t hurt. If I hadn’t been breathing my last, I would never have stretched out on the floor next to the plane’s toilet. As you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly clean.” Navalny describes his near-fatal poisoning—believed to have been ordered by Putin in response to Navalny’s carefully documenting Russian political corruption, as well as his two attempts to run for political office—with humor and irony without overplaying either.

As Patriot progresses, Navalny reveals that the memoir he’d begun writing to uncover the truth about his mysterious “illness” has morphed into something else: the saga of an unbreakable battle with the Kremlin. Navalny never doubts the truth will prevail, but his glasses are not rose-colored. He wrote to followers shortly before his death:

Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Whether “life” is defined either by the end of my life, or the length of the life of this regime.
The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. . . . Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.

Notably absent from Navalny’s messages to supporters and prison diaries are details of what he endured during 295 days in solitary confinement—perhaps an indication of Navalny’s focus on the cause of Russian freedom and of his reluctance to proclaim himself a martyr.

Crucial to Patriot is Navalny’s sensitivity as a husband and father. Starvation and sleep deprivation should desensitize the most high-minded empath, but Navalny remains tender. Halfway through his imprisonment, he writes to his wife Yulia: “I hate glass. Because for six months now I’ve only seen you through glass. In the courtroom, through glass. During visits, through glass. . . I adore you, I miss you. Stay well and don’t get discouraged . . . As for the glass, sooner or later we’ll melt it with the heat of our hands.” This missive demonstrates Navalny’s resolution to lift others up, though a birthday message to his son Zakhar also reveals regret over the collateral suffering Navalny’s activism inflicts on his family:

    What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.
    But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.

Few of Patriot’s readers in the U.S. will risk imprisonment, torture, or assassination for our ideals, yet Navalny’s call to unmask lies and elevate truth invites global application. This trenchant memoir might prompt us to ask ourselves: What are we doing today to make the world a better place tomorrow?

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

High Solitude

Léon-Paul Fargue
Translated by Rainer J. Hanshe
Contra Mundum Press ($21.50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Picture dragging yourself from bed with mounting anxiety in a small and dingy (yet Parisian, so not all bad) flat to the windows overlooking a boulevard and adjacent alleyways abuzz with city life. Looking out at streets you once rambled as a youth in jubilant company, with literature and art coursing through the veins, you now feel dejected as you begin a series of notes on Parisian city life. The writing isn’t some tell-all exploitative tale concerning now-famous lives of those you once knew. Rather, it’s a series of inner visions relating the strife and turmoil, sometimes imagined, that can be found in abundance on the city’s streets. Your name is Léon-Paul Fargue, and your book is High Solitude.

Fargue’s idiosyncratic book resists easy classification. Are these tales autobiographical? Yes and no. Are they fiction? Sort of. Might they be essays cast in fictional glow? Perhaps, at least sometimes. Whatever it may be, the book certainly contributes to the literary lineage of the flâneur, that indelible Parisian lurker of corridors and street cafes: “How sad it was to walk on and encounter the utmost end without finding anything of what I had loved or hated! I was lost in a forest of strange noctilucas, in a helpless city that hovered like a hawk over the stampede. I recognized everything and I recognized nothing.”

The streets of Paris are a central theme, if not an outright character, in High Solitude; the descriptive detail and moody tenor of Fargue’s writing gives them an eerie glow. There’s also an edgy despair embroidering these scenes as outer and inner experience jostle against each other: “These endosmoses between the past and myself, these returns to experience, the gone-by, the ground-down, I am exhausted, I am overwhelmed, I am drunk with them.” As if trapped in a grim arcade, Fargue implores, “What can I do to avoid these hordes of myself that go up the avenues, stand in line at the stations, occupy café tables?” He doesn’t really have any answers, but on occasion proffers a learned observation or two: “Order offers mortals pillows. Disorder puts them on the road towards the possible.” These occasional morsels of guidance encourage readers along Fargue’s lonely peripatetic journey.

Lacking cohesive narrative attraction, High Solitude does stumble here and there, only to recover and doggedly continue. Such is life, it suggests—although Fargue’s anecdotes and reflections magnify aspects of it few discover on their own.

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Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

May Our Joy Endure

Kev Lambert
Translated by Donald Winkler
Biblioasis ($18.95)

by Marcie McCauley

The lifeless furred and feathered bodies and heavy Gothic font on the cover of Québécois writer Kev Lambert’s third novel, May Our Joy Endure, prepare readers for a tragic story, and we get one, of sorts. From its opening pages, the novel offers a trenchant social critique in a chaotic unspooling of words—Lambert’s prose is relentless as perspectives shift rapidly with scant stops for respite.

While the telling feels urgent, the novel’s construction is impeccable. The middle segment of the three-part narrative belongs to Céline Wachowski, a world-renowned architect and host of her own Netflix reality series, Old House, New House, just when her studio is breaking ground on a complex for the corporate behemoth “Webuy.” Titled “Time Passes”—a deft foreshadowing of Céline’s obsession with Proust—this center section is the most conventionally styled of the narrative; it is bookended by untitled segments written in more experimental prose. To top it all off, the novel’s final sentence echoes its title, creating a loop to snare the contents between them: an exacting design, not unlike the figure-eight-shaped blueprint Céline has created for Webuy.

Céline’s career began with residential structures in the ′90s, and as her portfolio swelled with celebrities’ homes and important buildings across the world’s capitals, her accomplishments as a woman in a male-dominated profession intensified her star-status. With due pride, she has brought the Webuy complex to her native Montréal, but an article in The New Yorker scrutinizes Céline’s commitment to “ethical architecture” and accusations about her surface and spiral. Caught in the firestorm of criticism, Céline laments that a “climate so injurious is only possible in Quebec where a plurality of discourses cannot possibly coexist,” recognizing it as “a vestigial heritage of the Yes or No referendum debates” in a “powerless and panicked” province.

Most importantly, however, the novel’s focus is on the frameworks that gain invisibility as structures take their true shapes in the world. Foundationally, readers can explore concepts like neoliberalism and gentrification; in the basement, injury and trauma lurk. Various windows reveal not only literary influences—James Baldwin and Nelly Arcan, Virginie Despentes and Virginia Woolf, and most significantly, Québécois author Marie-Claire Blais—but also intertextual relationships with Lambert’s previous books: Their first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed (Biblioasis, 2020), explores the thin line between love and hate as well, and their second, Querelle of Roberval (Biblioasis, 2022), dissects power structures in the context of queer sexuality and labor politics.

As May Our Joy Endure suspends its heroine from a hook so that readers can examine the shell of what remains, the authorial voice seems to conclude that we’ve all had a hand in stringing her up, and that any one of us could be similarly exposed and flayed: “we can be as hypocritical as those we constantly reproach for their own hypocrisies.” Like the best social novels, Lambert’s holds up the mirror: We are not simply witnesses to the story, we are participants.

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Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

What Good Is Heaven

Raye Hendrix
Texas Review Press ($21.95)

by Jennifer Saunders

A remarkable debut collection, Raye Hendrix’s What Good Is Heaven interrogates kindness and mercy while exploring love’s complicated gestures. In “Animal Instinct,” the speaker remembers finding a squirrel “fallen from its piney drey, eyes still sealed // with birth” while walking in the woods with her father and dog. She jerks the dog’s leash to prevent it from eating the squirrel; her father tells her to “leave it to die quickly— / let the dog have his merciful doggy way.” Instead, she brings it home to “a slow death over days / in the rust of a long-dead hamster’s cage.” The adult speaker wonders how “to know when kindness / means crush instead of heal.”

The animal world often provides Hendrix with fodder for such meditations. In “The Bats,” the father and daughter find baby bats frozen to death. The daughter reaches for them, but her father

says to leave them for the wildcats
             and the dogs that run the mountain

he asks me to be more like
             winter                     beautiful but hard

he says despite my softness
                                             everything must eat

The poem “Mercy” shows the inverse: kindness dressed as harm. Here, child and father find a near-dead raccoon, and this time he “gave me the rifle / said it was time I learned // mercy.” The father’s efforts to push the softness out of his daughter is not an unkindness but an attempt to armor her against the violence of the world.

Just as kindness and harm are intertwined in these natural scenes, so too do they interface in human relationships. As a Southern queer poet, Hendrix understands that people and places one loves can do harm. “Daughter” begins:

I was loved with a Bible
              a belt        I ate Ivory

soap          I was sent out
              to choose the switch

Perhaps even more tremulously, it ends:

He once told me         (made me
               swear to keep it secret

to never tell my sister)
              that he loved me the most

Thus is the recipient of the father’s greater love also the recipient of his greater harm. In “Bloodletting,” Hendrix writes directly about the relationship between care and harm:

if the Greeks can be believed
then opening a vein
is Hippocratic: violence
cloaked in an oath of care

Hendrix also interrogates their own complicated love of a Southern home that has not always loved them back. They depict their hometown of Pinson, Alabama as a place where roads are “pothole-pocked / and going nowhere,” “the people are proud // to be holdout Confederates,” and the corrupt Mayor is replaced by “another reclining in his chair.” “But there’s jasmine here,” Hendrix counters; “There’s light.”

In “Pinson” and in What Good Is Heaven as a whole, the litany of details accumulates with force. Noticing and holding them itself seems to offer a proof of love—who but a lover could write “the algae // a million emeralds sunk just beyond / the shore”—but Hendrix gestures at their own love through these observations as well. Some of the softness the father in these poems had hoped to temper remains, and Hendrix’s readers are the lucky beneficiaries of its survival.

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Near-Earth Object

John Shoptaw
Unbound Edition Press ($25)

by Lee Rossi

Poetry can be personal, but as T. S. Eliot famously insisted, it can also be impersonal. Can it ever be both at once? In his latest collection, Near-Earth Object, John Shoptaw mixes disparate elements—formal and informal, autobiographical and traditional, and, yes, personal and impersonal—creating a work that takes various paths to express the existential crisis of our time: the effects of climate change.

From the outset, Shoptaw offers a guided tour of various disasters and disaster zones: the asteroid Chicxulub, clear-cut forests, the North Pacific Gyre, climate refugees, desertification in the Sahel. It’s not pretty. “Dry Song,” which beautifully reworks some of the basic motifs of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” reveals the terrifying reality of salmon unable to reach (or leave) their spawning beds because streams are running dry:

But the drought has pierced to the mountain route
and shown me rock under the shrunken mantle
and sand it fed to the river mouths, barring
salmon on their redds from salmon in the sea.

“Back Here” takes the tack of using the patois of “Swampeast” (southeast Missouri), Shoptaw’s boyhood home. “We believe in everything life has given us,” the speaker says—the few good things, the many disappointments. “We believe in you,” he tells the prodigal poet, but goes on to say, “Honestly, we don’t know what to believe. / We don’t believe you do either.” Finally, though, the speaker admits: “We know. The earth is dying. We get that. / . . . / Naturally, we’ll do what we can. / Only please don’t ask us / to change our climate for yours.”

Employing skewed formalisms in many of the poems, Shoptaw emphasizes that resilience and creation are as much a part of our behavioral repertoire as violence and despoliation. He craftily leans into the little-used “Poulter’s Measure” (a popular Renaissance meter) for an antic anecdote about the fried chicken of his youth. The poem begins with memories of a visit to a boyhood chum:

We play with our trucks out back in the dirt, where plump
red hens peck for bugs but keep clear of the hackberry stump.

Then checkers on linoleum in the kitchen
where Chuck’s mom in a red housedress turns: Cornflake fried chicken?

The music is charming, but there are deeper currents. Comparing himself to his friend, the speaker notes:

I grew on the wrong side of the rails but the right
side of the river in Missouri, Chuck on the wrong side

of both.

Shoptaw also likes large canvases; the final sequence in the book, “Whoa!,” revisits the myth of Phaeton in light of the environmental woe already upon us. Throughout the work’s twelve parts, Shoptaw offers many of the traditional pleasures of the long narrative poem, among them learned lists (flowers, decaying glaciers, unrepentant polluters), elaborate similes, and inflated rhetoric. Shoptaw’s list of “wide-waking annuals and perennials,” for example, is as specific and delightful as Milton’s famed list of flowers in “Lycidas” without dispelling the somber and elegiac tone of the whole:

snowdrops, crocuses, daisies and daylilies,
rice in flower and maize in silk,
woozy jasmine and heady grapevines . . .

Of course, all these pleasures are in service to a larger design. As our modern-day Phaeton (here cleverly named “Ray”) courses recklessly, he disturbs the jet stream and sends untimely cold snaps on New England and New York, causing disaster around the globe:

Coulters
and ponderosas, yellowed and browned, engraved
with trilobite grooves by pine-bark beetles
wintering northward, had turned from trees
into tinder.

Notice how Shoptaw’s four-beat lines evoke but don’t slavishly imitate Old English accentual verse, the alliteration deployed almost casually to reinforce the drive of the narrative.

Ray, it might be noted, is clueless, but at least he has the excuse of youth and inexperience. Not so “the fossil lordlings / . . . out / sledding with their kids in Central Park”; “Where’s the heat?” they want to know, their cluelessness a testament to their motivated ignorance. Since this is a mock epic, retribution is called for, so in Shoptaw’s telling, Earth herself fires a lightning bolt at Mister High and Mighty, ejecting him from “his plump white boy’s life.”

What Shoptaw offers readers, then, is not an answer but a fantasy of reprisal, one with no more impact on social policy than the tagging of a freeway overpass has. Perhaps that’s what most writers do—scrawl texts in hopes it might shock us into saving ourselves from tragedy. Few, however, do it with the force and elegance of Shoptaw.

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Poetry Reviews

A Prague Flâneur

Vítězslav Nezval
Translated by Jed Slast
Twisted Spoon Press ($19)

by Allan Graubard

For those who enjoy strolling around a city they know well or don’t, which they live in or visit; who have no particular destination in mind; who wander at different times, drawn by places and people they encounter and which, for intimate reasons, captivate them, will find an ally in A Prague Flâneur. Its author, Vítězslav Nezval, founded the Czech Surrealist Group and was one of the leading poets and writers of the avant garde. A Prague Flâneur is Nezval’s paean to the city, his city, then on the brink of disaster: The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia was complete by March 1939, soon after the publication of the book.

The flâneur, of course, comes to us from mid-19th century France. In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire depicts the figure as a stroller who observes in poignant detail what he encounters in and around a city but who keeps his distance, preferring to represent the experience in solitude, visually or with words. Some eight decades later, Nezval reveals the legacy of the term anew. Inspired by Prague’s polyglot architecture, mechanized systems, distractions, crowds, and those rare spaces (streets, parks, playgrounds) that can transform the normal urban chaos we expect, enjoy, or endure, Nezval orchestrates the city’s analog—the book.

Nezval’s writing style mirrors the kind of critical-poetic journalism with which surrealists captured the currents of cities—particularly their marvelous, disorienting, delirious, or dreamlike aspects. A Prague Flâneur is replete with historical descriptions of this or that street, building, restaurant, or café, and how they played in Nezval’s life— from his days as a poor, hungry university student to his rise as a literary figure—as well as brief sketches of writers and artists important to him. As he describes it, Prague takes on a multiform, resonant charge, socially proscribed but personally invented.

After Nezval, others continued to revive the legacy of the flâneur as they conceived it. A decade on after World War II, the Situationists’ dérive (their drift through the city) provoked theoretical remarks on a new context: psychogeography, a term they coined and which, as things go, now appears as a sub-discipline of geography. Heightening the stakes for Nezval, though, are two pivotal events that bring an often-feverish poise to his writing: the immanence of World War II and the fate of the Surrealist Group.

The former stems from the September 30, 1938 signing of the Munich Agreement, by which England and France ceded to Nazi Germany the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia—a Hail Mary to delay the onset of war that Nezval knew would fail; the only question was when. Anxiety percolates through the book, sharpening its tempered edge. The planes that fly above Prague presage the battle to come. The country arms only to fall months later, betrayed by its allies.

The latter involves Nezval’s split with the Surrealist Group, the repercussions of which followed him and now cannot help but appear as subtext to the book’s exuberant, elegiac tone. The cause of the split was partly political: Nezval supported the USSR, despite the terror Stalin unleashed on his opponents. The majority in the group criticized Stalin’s hunger for victims, which included leading Russian poets and artists, Communist revolutionaries, and uncounted allies or bystanders. Most were put on trial, given sentences, exiled to the Gulag, or executed. There was no possibility of rapprochement.

Nezval’s recognition that only the USSR could mount a force equal to that of Nazi Germany and wage war against it to victory was true enough in retrospect. The other members of the group—whom, oddly, Nezval never names—re-organized and continued on. Perhaps for emotional balance, Nezval recounts his friendship with André Breton and Paul Éluard: the mutual esteem they held for each other, several experiences they shared in Prague, and something of their rich collaborations. A somewhat specious critique of psychic automatism follows, which allows Nezval to clarify how he would write from then on (faced with the immanence of war, cultivating the absence of intention was not something he prized). Be that as it may, when Nezval leaves his apartment, he enters a realm that he creates: the city as his avatar, with chance their conductor.

A Prague Flâneur lives up to its title in a fraught historical moment through which Nezval sought a way to live without sidelining in his writing the inspiration Prague gave him and that he now gives the reader: walking through it, loving and fighting in it, playing out his days and nights with a keen sense of what makes it all unique, even funny (a satirical escapade with an escaped crab its capstone).

This translation, finely done by Jed Slast, is of the rare, unexpurgated first edition with photographs by Nezval, which hit the streets in the fall of 1938, coincident with the signing of the Munich Agreement. Given the consequences of that agreement and the Nazi conquest soon to come, Nezval had the book pulled from its bookstores so that he could delete passages that might compromise him with Nazi authorities, including his celebration of Stalin and his cutting portrait of Hitler as a young agitator of the lumpenproletariat in seedy Berlin beerhalls. An appendix carries that content and the edits Nezval made.

Characteristically, Nezval ends the book with a brief paragraph that recalls the narrative’s through line. It has a solitary atemporal quality—not yet mythic, but almost so. Place it as the first paragraph in the book and it works just as well. Is it an ending or a beginning? For Nezval, it could be both:

Oh Prague, I turn you in my fingers like an amethyst. But no. I just walk, and I see in the magical mirror of dusty crystal that is Prague the animated expression of someone who is fated to find himself and to wander, to find himself through wandering.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Clean

Alia Trabucco Zerán
Translated by Sophie Hughes
Riverhead Books ($29)

by Dimitris Passas

It all begins with a laconic advertisement in the newspaper: “Housemaid wanted, presentable, full time.” Thus, Estela Garcia, a young woman from a rural community populated by a largely underprivileged population in the southern Chilean island of Chiloe, comes to the big city of Santiago to become the housemaid of an upper-crust household. Estela’s employers (only referred to by her as señor and señora) and their young daughter Julia, are the sole actors in this claustrophobic environment of class discrimination, cultural distinctions, and the struggle to endure a dreary life in which monotony quenches any form of meaning and distorts one’s sense of time and reality.

In her second novel, Alia Trabucco Zerán revisits themes that dominated her first work, The Remainder, which dealt with the residues left in Chilean society by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. In Clean, the strictly domestic setting expels everything that takes place outside the house where Estela works as a cleaner, servant, and nanny. Trabucco Zerán offers as a backdrop Chile’s Estallido Social—the riots that erupted in the winter of 2019 after the sudden increase in the metro fare—yet the totality of her tale unfolds inside the house where Estela works.

The story starts with Estela being arrested for suspicion of foul play in Julia’s death. Sitting behind one-way glass, Estela narrates directly to silent interrogators, determined to tell her own story. She often interjects comments directed to all those who may hear her—which of course includes us, the readers—urging them to keep notes of seemingly trivial details that are destined to play a major role in the story to come. As she says: “you have to skirt around the edge before getting to the heart of the story.”

Clean is not a typical domestic suspense novel, however; its prose blends the humdrum of Estela’s quotidian existence with her breakout insights and shrewd observations regarding universal, diachronic questions. As our narrator says, “This is a long story, my friends, . . . It’s a story born of a centuries-old tiredness and questions that presume too much.” Estela knows that she will never become a part of society’s upper echelons. Her wealthy employers’ thinly veiled hostility and distrust render her an outsider, bound to remain a stranger as long as she stays in the job. But she never leaves, and she voices the reason in the most austere and accurate of ways: “I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals . . . each one an attempt to gain mastery over time.”

One of the most striking elements of Clean is the way Trabucco Zerán sketches the contours of her youngest character. Julia is headstrong and inflexible, and her reactions to various emotional stimuli suggest that perhaps she should be visiting a specialist. However, her doctor father rejects this idea and keeps her as close as possible to teach her only what he deems necessary. As Estela’s crystalline narration illuminates the hidden dysfunctions and corrupt relationship dynamics in the family, it becomes evident that Julia’s detached parents and unloving upbringing have traumatized her from a very early age.

Sophie Hughes, who also translated The Remainder, again delivers Trabucco Zerán’s prose into English with skill and precision. While its distinctive mood may alienate genre-oriented readers, Clean is a slim but sparkling novel that will grab the attention of those who value literature that speaks truth to power.

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Fiction Reviews