Book Review

Shy

Max Porter
Graywolf Press ($25)

by Sam Downs

As the teenage protagonist of Max Porter’s latest novel sneaks out of his boarding school and into the night, he recalls an admissions official’s admonishment. “Is this you? The whole of you?” the administrator remarks, presumably brandishing a stiff finger to the eponymous Shy’s impressive juvenile record: “Failed 11+. Expelled from two schools. First caution in 1992 aged thirteen. First arrest aged fifteen.” By sixteen, he has “sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger” and, as consequence, been sent for amendment at the Last Chance home for “very disturbed young men.” Recognizable to those who have suffered under the yoke of misdirected adults in administrative positions, the educator’s ironic advice is that Shy ought not to let his past offenses define him—while emphasizing the very idea that they do.

A teenager in mid-nineties England dealing with issues the adults in his life are unable to define, Shy doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight. Not having wanted to attend the school in the first place, and not seeming to agree with descriptions of him as a “ghost,” mad, and a “Jekyll and Hyde,” he has nonetheless taken to heart the message of Last Chance—that is, it’s his, and he’d better not screw it up. On his midnight mission, Shy heads in the direction of a nearby pond carrying a backpack heavy with rocks.

As reviews have noted, Porter’s work often attempts to fill the silences that characterize male hardship. In Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Graywolf, 2016), a widower and his sons reckon with woe transfigured into a clever, protective crow; in The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber & Faber, 2021), the final fuses of a painter’s intellect ignite as he lays dying; and in 2019’s Booker Prize Long-Listed Lanny (Faber & Faber), the anthropomorphic socioenvironmental history of a village bears down on an uncannily talented young boy. All three novels are like fifteen-minute funerals: communal, convention-busting, and packing far more emotional weight than their brevity suggests. With its tender and big-hearted story, Shy marks another development in Porter’s singular, polyphonic style, distinguishing itself as his most urgent book yet.

The late aughts saw social and political discussions about men begin to reflect scholarship about the relationship between long-celebrated masculine tenets (hyper-independence, emotional invulnerability) and violent or otherwise antisocial behavior. If the laundry list is still being written, the major garments are worth airing out: worldwide, boys fight more frequently than girls at school; men commit virtually all sexual violence; and teenage boys are between two and four times as likely as their female peers to die by suicide—a statistic made darkly ironic by the American Right’s eagerness to foist liability for gun violence upon the mentally-ill, since the actual demographic uniting some 98% of mass shooters of gun violence is their maleness. Meanwhile, anti-intellectual opposition seems to have stalled the necessary turn from diagnosis to remedy, as can be seen in how useful terms like “toxic masculinity” and “mansplaining” have been hollowed of their original intent by offhand, uncritical usage.

A 2023 New Yorker article title emphasizes the extraordinary breadth of The Problem: “What’s the Matter with Men?” This could rightly serve as the slogan for Last Chance, but as well-meaning as the staff may be, their laser focus on obliquely diagnosing the boys’ troubles without providing sensible solutions leaves the likes of Shy unmoored. Faulting him for that would be like faulting a lost hiker whose guide had only shouted, “Don’t get lost!” As Porter portrays Shy’s vast, dynamic individuality in stark contrast to the reductive thinking that persists to this day, the conclusion settles in that neither Shy the book nor Shy the boy are so strange after all, however much they may defy our initial expectations. Who, after all, hasn’t spent a few youthful hours feeling lost, searching, considering escape? Who hasn’t thought, graspingly, “the night is huge and it hurts”?

Like Porter’s previous work, Shy offers a message about the human risk of minimizing the unknown by viewing it through the lens of the known. As Carmen Maria Machado states in her masterful memoir In the Dream House (Graywolf, 2019), “Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.” Perhaps the same can be said of putting language to something, or someone, for which you have too much language, and too much of it inexact.

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The Liar

Martin A. Hansen
Introduction by Morten Høi Jensen
Translated by Paul Larkin
New York Review Books ($16.95)

theliar

by Poul Houe

In his introduction to the newest English translation of The Liar, Morten Høi Jensen notes that Martin A. Hansen’s short novel, originally published in 1950, was “routinely ranked as one of the greatest Danish novels of the twentieth century,” and that “regrettably, it was also the last novel Hansen lived to publish” before “he died in 1955 from chronic kidney failure at the age of just forty-six.” To these factual epithets let me add a more subjective one: It is a book that will lead readers to marvel at how intricate storytelling and human life can be, and how subtly their intricacies can be linked.

The novel is composed of notes by Johannes Lye, a schoolteacher and parish clerk—and also, as his name suggests, the narrative’s Liar—who interacts with Nathan, an honest Biblical Nathanael. By the introduction’s account, Johannes is a torn character who “lives at a distance from other people and just as much from himself,” and who responds to life’s constant battle between conflicting forces by “telling tall tales and blurring truth and fiction” while not “getting too close to anyone, thereby failing to live.” Sort of a nihilist, he considers death a relief and homelessness his home.

Minor characters and the harsh environment play roles too: The ice breaking up around Sand Island compels Harry, Annemari’s new lover, to leave and Olaf, her son’s father, to return. Spring troubles are in the air and minds are mixed-up. Isolated from all but his dog Pigro and “forgotten by all he once knew,” Johannes, the itinerant incarnate, questions his own identity, his gift for tall tales, and the nature of humanity. Yet life’s secrets are “sometimes hidden until wonder is aroused.” Immune to fame and fortune, Johannes remains vain, he confesses to Nathan, while admitting that Harry’s secular religiosity is “stealing into him.” While Johannes is practicing the next day’s hymns in a cold and damp church, Pigro makes him sob “heavily . . . without shame.”

Although a non-believer, Johannes believes in a kind of uncompromising youth that demands “purity and truth.” Part of his duplicity involves indulgence in “passionate certainties,” while also being “death’s great confidant,” “flung from deeply enriching, coruscating moments to dark meaninglessness and despair. Only to be flung back again.” Conversely, an older person is “blind to life’s greatest contradictions,” full of “small deceits and minor untruths,” yet of “good conscience because he has become blind to the fact he’s a liar.” Embracing the role of street performer, Johannes faces a congregation of doubters and believers to whom he is a stranger; as this community gathers, he senses himself as “nothing,” “a divided self,” “a double”—all the while trolling his “ghostly pale specters” to lure them into his traps. Feigning to serve the Divine, he instead helps The Devil bewitch the faithful.

Later, he truthfully tells Nathan that his performance was but one aspect of tackling old-world values—another being his controlled scheme of ambushing himself, either because he was less detached from his deceit than he thought, or because the faith he tried to deceive was not entirely outside him but rather a part of his makeup that he could only realize after seeking to undercut it. 

Going back and forth, Johannes needs Nathan’s help. Rarely is his duplicity more obvious than when he hesitantly decides to attend a ball with “many trolls, dwarves, elves, and fairies assembled.” Facing both the self-deprecating hostess Rigmor and her antagonist Annemari, he admits to being a liar, while later telling Annemari of his wish to elope with her. Realizing it’s a lost cause, he gives her a necklace as a “parting gift” instead, with this verbal kiss of death: “Hang it around your neck, Annemari.”

When Rigmor, who feels Johannes might alleviate her despair, suspects he was never “really serious” about love, she is puzzled by what became of the uplifting experience he once aroused in her. He now says it was a “cooked up . . . theory” about how to live life with a troubled heart, or “a fool’s folly,” suited “to cause wrack and ruin”; he further opines that “life is one huge battleground in which two powers are locked in eternal combat. No-man’s-land doesn’t exist.” Only by taking ownership of one’s life does it come to fruition, and since a fruitful life rests on nature, Johannes begs Rigmor join him outdoors to observe and reflect—and to share the experience of meaning and community they both hoped for, or at least a less troubling world than often imagined.

By “mid-April,” Pigro is no longer. Actually, his ‘departure’ was a year earlier, but like the rest of this narrative’s notes, the event was recorded “only very recently” to stress the Liar’s truth-telling. On their walk the day after Rigmor’s ball, Johannes discovers a “sacrificial stone” that puts his existential experiences in context. As an outsider, “words, events, and feelings have a liberating effect” upon him. Strangers don’t conquer or pass their legacy by default, for their part of human history and memory is but a speck against endless island time. As loneliness engulfs him “like some latter-day Job,” Johannes recalls the day he and Rigmor parted ways. Remembering her potentials while acknowledging his own failures, our Liar embraces his wounded self, ready to resign but also to move on: “And now we won’t speak of that anymore, Nathan.” 

Far from timeless, less so from timely, The Liar puts a late, rather than light, twist on the traditional Bildungsroman. Paul Larkin’s translation, though slightly overwrought and not always factually correct, reads well, making this new edition of a Danish classic a welcome publication overall.

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Emerald Wounds

Selected Poems

Joyce Mansour
Translated by Emilie Moorhouse
City Lights ($22.95)

emeraldwounds

by Allan Graubard

Erotic, subversive, sensual, vivacious, defiant, fragile, satirical, ironic, lyrical, eruptive, heretical, anguished, sexy, and buoyant are just some of the words that come to mind when considering the poetry of Joyce Mansour. Certainly there are other words that readers will conjure. Have I left out odorous and sweaty, given Mansour’s embrace of the body as a ground her poems take root in and burst from? And what about her body, the female body, in a world run by men? Add in the complexities of passion, love, marriage, family, and exile, and readers will find that Mansour creates a rich and spicy gumbo in these Selected Poems.

From her first book, 1953’s Cris/Screams, to her last, Trous Noirs/Black Holes, published in France in 1986, the year of her death, Mansour will delight those with her, or those willing to be touched by her, while scandalizing others for whom custom and behavior are sacrosanct. Throughout her body of work, Mansour’s titular “emerald wounds” blossom and ensnare, even as they live and die, because they sing—this is a world ripe with magic, the kind that exalts and transforms by the power of words.

Long associated with the Paris surrealist group, Mansour in this new translation lives with a currency that is as striking as it is needed, especially when women’s free expression of desire, sex, and autonomy still militate against the enduring pivots of misogyny, whether intimate or institutionalized. Indeed, the fifteen-year lapse between this, Emile Moorhouse’s effort, and a similarly configured translation of Mansour’s writings by Serge Gavronsky (Black Widow Press, 2008) has, it seems, done little to eviscerate men’s desire to control women, so embedded in the social fabric it is, with deadly consequence all too often.   

But a brief history.  Born in England in 1928 as Joyce Patricia Adès to a wealthy family of Jewish-Syrian descent, she is raised in Cairo; her language English. Later, with her second husband who speaks only French, she will change, adopting French as her Rosetta Stone. Her poems, as she describes them, originate as screams or cries, the aforementioned title to her first book. They rise through her as the traditional mourning wails of Egyptian women do, sibilant, yearning, and sharp. Do her poems then function as a form of “exorcism,” as Moorhouse notes, of the dual traumas Mansour suffered when young: the death of her mother when she was fifteen and the sudden death of her first husband six months after their honeymoon, both from cancer? Perhaps. But it does not end there. If exorcism is a therapeutic medium born from trauma, the metamorphic and liberating charge of Mansour’s poetry leads.

By the early 1950s she circulates among Cairo’s avant-garde where, oddly enough, French, a colonial appendage, is the literary tongue. Political change, though, forces their move to Paris where her first book, Cris/Screams, draws the praise of André Breton, who identifies Mansour as one of the three most significant poets to emerge after World War II. From then on Mansour participates in the activities of the surrealist group, publishing in their journals and collaborating with some of their major and allied artists: Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Hans Bellmer, Pierre Alechinsky, and others.   

Emerald Wounds, with its 100-plus poems across ten of Mansour’s books, gives readers generous access into her world, emotional, vulnerable, and (as Alfred Jarry would say) umorous. A detailed introduction sets the stage while pointing out that, despite the potency Mansour commands, she is more often overlooked in the larger literary landscape. As for these translations, they perform well enough, beyond some awkward phrasings and word choices.

The first poem in Cris/Screams startles. From the sensitive opening, perhaps referring to the death of and funeral for her young husband—“I lift you in my arms / For the last time”—the corpse in its coffin “moving in your narrow world”—comes this implacable image that not only avoids cheap sentiment but also heightens the emotional stakes. For this corpse has its “head removed from your slit throat.” A concluding riposte to it all resonates with the bitterness of aborted passion: “It is the beginning of eternity.”

When it comes to sex, a convulsionary paradise, Mansour is ever explicit; the theme enriches throughout her work, as in the final poem from Cris/Screams:

May my breasts provoke you
I want your rage.
I want to see your eyes thicken
Your cheeks turn white as they sink.
I want your shudders.
I want you to burst between my thighs
That my desires be satiated on the fertile soil
Of your shameless body.

In her second book, Déschirures/Shreds, from 1955, the poems gain broader social reach and read as if written today in response to the oppressive cabal of racism and class:

Cry little man
Your boat is for sale
Your wife is sold
And the fresh milk of your cow
Red with the blood of blacks
Makes your children piss
Their hate

And then just a few pages on, pivoting to the sexual shivers that inspire her, is one of her most poignant poems. It begins this way:

I want to sleep with you elbow to elbow
Hair entwined
Genitals enlaced
With your mouth as a pillow

And ends in raked diminuendo:

Consumed by the wild inertia of bliss
Splayed on your shadow
Pounded by your tongue
And to die between the rotted teeth of a rabbit
Contented.

The third section includes twelve prose pieces and poems that Mansour published in Bief: Jonction Surrealiste, a modest Parisian journal, from 1958-1960. Satire plays deftly with an opening salvo: a comedic critique of heterosexuality that deforms the traditional meaning of its title. “The Missal of the Missus (Good Nights)” evolves in three parts, each translating the rules and rituals of the Catholic mass into something else; something they would never otherwise have been used for. The subtext of the first part, “Advice for Running on Four Wheels,” reveals the poet’s body as a car cruising at night hot with desire, and what a woman can do during sex to ensure her lover’s satisfaction. The second part, “Cold Out? A Dress Is Essential,” refers to fabric spun from flayed “moorish” skin, “two tea towels” worth, and how to appear beautiful when wearing it. Savagery is just beside the point. The third section, “Lines Around a Circle,” is a pastiche of fashion magazine dictates where you must “Straighten the silhouette without crushing the organs.”

Included as well is Mansour’s take on gossipy female advice columns with some “Practical Advice While You Wait”; that is, for your man—when in a train station, a restaurant, a city hall, or at home. No matter being worried or jealous, the commandment is clear: The woman must stay “pretty, relaxed, sharp . . .” But don’t “wait in the streets” and always wait for the heart of the conflict steaming up “amongst the reddened leaves and the caramel fumes of your discriminations.”

Husband neglecting you? “Dowsing” has a cure: “Invite his mother to sleep in your room.” Want something more? Okay: “Piss in his soup when he lies down happily next to you.” And then, “Be gentle but skillful stuffing the fat goose / With octopus messages / And mandrake roots.” In the end, however, the wife needs what she doesn’t get from him:

Motionless like a mollusk flatulent with music
Clings to the telephone
And cries
In spite of myself my carrion fanatacizes over your ousted old cock
That sleeps

These poems give a sense of the breadth of Mansour’s writing, which can shift, implicitly or explicitly, from personal to social, cultural, and political contexts with ease, and from brief to magnetic longer poems in her later collections, such as “Endlessly Midnight,” “Pandemonium,” and, the finale, “Black Holes.” Although seduction and orgasm fuel her poems, there is a parallel motif of disgust and pain that illuminates a depth of embodiment and humanity. If we are wounded by the repressions and oppressions that stalk us, Mansour indeed turns those hurts into dark and precious jewels.

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The Big Myth

How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Bloomsbury ($35)

thebigmyth1

by George Longenecker

Dislike of government and antagonism towards science, labor unions, and social programs are neither coincidental nor unplanned, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway point out in their latest book, The Big Myth; these sentiments have been part of intentional public relations campaigns for over a century. In their follow-up to Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury, 2010), the authors, both historians of science, name this the philosophy of “market absolutism or market essentialism.” As they state from the outset, “This is the story of how American business manufactured a myth that has, for decades and to our detriment, held us in its grip. It is the true history of a false idea: the idea of ‘the magic of the marketplace.’”

Oreskes and Conway describe market fundamentalism as “the belief that free markets are the best means to run an economic system but also the belief that they are the only means that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms.” The introduction is illustrated with a 1950s ad from a consortium operating under the name “America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies”; the freedoms listed in the ad include a Holy Bible, a door key, a pencil, and a free ballot. At that time, private utilities lobbied against electric co-ops and served only more lucrative areas, keeping millions of rural Americans in the dark: “Rural customers wanted electricity as much as their urban counterparts—and many observers argued that they needed it more—but electric utilities had neglected them.”

The authors smartly refocus some themes from their previous book within their new framework; for example, they label climate change “a market failure, because markets, acting illegally, failed to provide what people need and created a problem that markets have proven unable to solve.” The National Electric Light Association (NELA) was founded in 1885 as the industry expanded, and by the 1930s, it lobbied not only against electric co-ops, but also against government projects such as the Hoover Dam. Its campaign, the authors explain, “was based on dubious and historically misleading assertions, misrepresentations, half-truths, and in some cases outright lies.” NELA claimed that “Government involvement in electricity generation or distribution would be inappropriate, socialistic, even tyrannical.”

Drawing from many primary sources, Oreskes and Conway show that by the 1920s, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) “already had a long history of working to prevent business regulation by state or federal governments and, above all, fighting unions.” NAM funded a massive campaign to convince Americans that big business’s interests were their interests.  They made a rhetorical shift from “private enterprise” to “free enterprise,” a term still used a century later. They named this campaign the “Fight for Freedom!” To reach a broader audience, NAM used a series of sixteen posters, with captions such as “The real threat to workers’ interests is taxation,” a theme that resonates in political outcomes today. Knowing that many workers would be unlikely to read commentary in The New York Times, they used comic strips like Uncle Abner Says to reach a mass audience. The authors contend that such propaganda had long-lasting effects on Americans’ beliefs:

NAM members didn’t just manufacture cars and carpets; they manufactured a myth. They would spend the ensuing decades bolstering its intellectual credentials and embedding it in the bedrock of American culture, to the point where myth would be mistaken for age-old truth.

Oreskes and Conway document that NELA, NAM, and the American Liberty League all claimed “that government ‘intervention’ in the marketplace was a radical departure from American history” and cite numerous examples to show that this claim was false. With canals, roads and railroads, governments supported infrastructure development, including New York State’s Erie Canal Corporation. Slavery was regulated and abolished by state and federal government intervention. Furthermore, they point out, NAM “also had to skate over its own history. NAM was created in the late nineteenth century to advocate for federal imposition of protective tariffs, and to encourage the U.S. government to build the Panama Canal.”

The chapter “A Questionable Gospel” details efforts to reconcile laissez-faire business practices with Christian arguments for social justice. For instance, Los Angeles Congregational minister James W. Fifield built “an influential conservative movement, known as Spiritual Mobilization, whose goal was to convert mainline Protestant leaders and their parishioners into market fundamentalists.” The authors likewise document the ongoing influence of business on religion: “captains of American industry had found a way to turn Protestant theology on its head, from embracing the poor to celebrating the rich.”

American antagonism towards science and government regulations has hindered action on global climate change, the authors maintain—an argument they developed thoroughly in their first book. “To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilianization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver.”

In concluding, Oreskes and Conway cite the Covid-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis. As they put it: “Overreliance on markets and underreliance on government have cost the American people dearly. And this has been the case during both Democratic and Republican administrations since Bill Clinton.” Government, they argue, is the solution to many of our biggest problems—and it always has been.  

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The Nightmare Man

J.H. Markert
Crooked Lane Books ($19.99)

nightmareman

by Ryan Tan

In J.H. Markert’s The Nightmare Man, a serial killer called The Scarecrow terrorizes the fictional town of Crooked Tree. He is so called because of his habit of posing as a scarecrow in his victims’ cornfields. When they approach to investigate, he runs away. This continues for the next two days, until he catches them as they approach. His modus operandi derives entirely from a horror novel written by the protagonist, Ben Bookman, a citizen of Crooked Tree. The lead police investigator, Detective Mills, suspects Ben of being The Scarecrow; his distrust of Ben is strengthened by the disappearance of Ben’s brother thirteen years ago, which Mills also investigated. It remains an unsolved case.

Engaging vignettes end each chapter; each one is narrated from the point-of-view of one character, giving us a glimpse into their life. Compared to the main story, the vignettes contain less dialogue and more exposition; without conversations to break up description, the writing flows more smoothly, and Markert’s talent for character building shines.

Markert also successfully imbues each character with a distinctive manner of speech. We become so familiar with each of the character’s voices that if their names were omitted from a conversation, we would still be able to identify them by their unique diction. One character who shines in dialogue is Ben’s nine-year-old daughter, Bri, who expresses innocence and astuteness at the same time. When she converses with another character, she defines herself against them, developing not only her own individuality, but also theirs. And since dialogue dominates The Nightmare Man, this refinement of their personalities occurs over and over, such that by the end of the novel, each character is fully fleshed out.

With powerful characterization surrounding a central mystery, The Nightmare Man is an entertaining read for horror and suspense fans.

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The Bomb

The Weapon That Changed the World

Didier Alcante and Laurent-Frédéric Bollée
Illustrated by Denis Rodier
Translated by Ivanka T. Hahenberger
Abrams ComicArts ($29.99)

bomb

by John Bradley

“In the beginning, there was nothing. But in this nothing . . . was everything!” So begins this graphic book on the development of the first atomic bombs. Not only is the Biblical opening a surprise, but the speaker here is the element uranium, who offers other such chilling comments in this well-researched (with a selected bibliography) and expansive (459 pages) volume, which concludes with the U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Although a history of the bomb might sound like an odd fit for a graphic book, the three authors—with Alcante and Bollée providing the research and writing and Rodier the artwork—make the medium seem ideal. The book feels like a storyboard for a film, given its use of varied locations (Africa, Norway, Japan, Germany, and the U.S.), a vast cast (short biographies of the central figures are included at the back of the book), and intrigue, complete with a scientist-spy. The authors must be commended for their extensive research into the development of the bomb, especially as regards the story of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, the first scientist to see the potential of splitting the atom—it was he who pushed the U.S. to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis did, though once the weapon neared completion, Szilard did everything he could to stop its use. He foresaw a nuclear arms race, as well as the moral stain of the U.S. being the first nation to rain such hell on cities filled with civilians. On many occasions in the book, Szilard and General Leslie Grove, in charge of the Manhattan Project, argue passionately. By foregrounding the story of Szilard, the authors weave into the narrative a moral dimension sometimes missing in historical accounts of the bomb that view it more as a scientific breakthrough.

Another thread in the saga that is often missing in much of U.S. nuclear history is the secret testing done on civilians. One such individual was Ebb Cade, an African-American worker at the Oak Ridge facility. Driving to work one morning, on March 24, 1945, Cade accidentally drove off the road. When he woke, he found himself in a hospital with a host of injuries. “We’re going to take good care of you, Mr. Cade,” an anonymous doctor tells him. “You can trust us.” Later, this same doctor injects Cade with an unknown shot. The reader soon discovers that this “human product,” as the officials call Mr. Cade, was injected with plutonium, though he was never asked if he consented to be involved in an experiment to learn about the effect of plutonium on the human body, nor was he informed later. The officials casually discuss how Cade lost fifteen teeth due to the shot, but this is quickly rationalized—“He suffers from acute gum inflammation anyway”—before they offer the ultimate excuse: “But it was in the interest of science!” The book includes one other “human product” who is injected with plutonium, but there were many others. Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (Dial Press) broke this story for the first time in 1999, and Alcante and Dodier make effective use of Welsome’s research.

Not only is the text of The Bomb engaging—and translated so well by Ivanka T. Hahenberger it feels as if it was written in English—but the illustrations keep the eye engaged as well. Bollée, who has published dozens of graphic novels in his native France, provides the expected “BOOOM” and “SCHBAM!!,” but the artwork shows great variety and versatility in technique. At one point we see a nightmare had by Klaus Fuchs, who spied on the Manhattan Project for the Russians; the hallucinatory style of the art here deftly conveys the terror of Fuchs’s dream. The depictions of bodies in Hiroshima set aflame by the atomic bomb are also vividly disturbing—as they should be.

While a graphic book might not be the first choice of a reader who wants a detailed history of the creation of the atomic bomb, The Bomb would be a good place to start for those who want a stirring and factually accurate (except for the creation of a Japanese family in Hiroshima) account. And should anyone think that our atomic history no longer concerns us, consider the words of uranium that close the book: “And so, you think this is the end of my story? What if it’s only the beginning?”

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Motherfield

Julia Cimafiejeva
Translated by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib 
Deep Vellum ($18.95)

motherfield

by Jessica Johnson

The first collection available in English by Belarusian poet, translator, and editor Julia Cimafiejeva, Motherfield begins with approximately thirty pages of the author’s year-long protest diary, composed in English during a mass uprising around the 2020 presidential election in Belarus; authoritarian leader Alexandr Lukashenko, in power since 1994, retained it in elections the E.U. deemed illegitimate. Cimafiejeva’s poems, translated from Belarusian by the impressive team of Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib, follow the diary, concluding with a single poem composed in English.

The diary feels written for the gaze of readers outside the events, possibly as a record in case something happens to the author. For some American readers, it will hold flashes of recognition—particularly the difficult feelings that come from continuing literary life and experiencing respites of comfort and safety during a political crisis—as well as an abundance of chilling occurrences that don’t (yet) happen here (for example, widespread internet outages as a government tactic).

Offering historical, political, and personal context to the poems that follow it, the diary is an activist’s account, but it is also a poet’s account; some of its moves and images linger and react with the poems’ more distilled elements. Of the dubious polling station where she will cast her vote, Cimafiejeva writes, “Every election day in Lukashenka’s Belarus has turned into a demonstration of the cheap and vulgar aesthetics of his power.” Her description settles on a

teenage girl in a pseudo-folk costume with a wreath on her head . . . singing about her love for the Motherland, passionately clenching a microphone. Her Russian song checks off the golden wheat fields, the big blue lakes, and the slender white storks flying over our heads. She sings that we all live safely and peacefully in our beloved Belarus.

Here Cimafiejeva shows the propagandist’s Russian-language vision of the Motherland, one that the poems will meaningfully subvert to include ecological disaster, disconnection, and stifled expression. Cimafiejeva was born in 1981 in a region of Belarus that became part of the Chernobyl zone during her childhood. Her poetry develops, often through extended metaphor, a concept of bleak, devastated embodiment with disrupted relationships between past and future, land and people, people and language.

In the opening poem, “The Stone of Fear,” the speaker’s inheritance is “a trust fund / of fear” in the form of a stone. The stone is mute and without memory, “an eternally slow-growing / embryo.” To nurse it, its inheritors must “unlearn” how to breathe, “how to say what needs to be said.” In place of nurture and natural cycles of rebirth, Cimafiejeva finds intergenerational reproduction of something wrong.

While ecological devastation, absence of language, and reproductive bodies feature in the metaphors that drive many of these poems, references to Chernobyl also appear more literally. In “Rocking the Devil,” children swing their feet at a bus stop bench; it begins to rain and the girls stick out their tongues, but no one knows the raindrops are “disastrous,” that they’ve already permeated the scene’s vibrant flora. When the bus takes the girls away, the trees wave goodbye. Similarly, “1986” is written from the perspective of a “we” who had to leave houses, crops, and graves. Strangers dismantle their homes and what remains of their lives in the ancestral village; when they come back to visit, the land does not forgive them.

If the diary operates in one register of documentary, the poems work in others, but several moments in the poems call back to the diary. “My First City, Zhlobin” portrays a steel-producing town as a body that nurtures ruin:

I fear your children, Zhlobin,
the steel-cast children
of Zhlobin
nursed by the factory’s
smoggy tits.

The speaker here, fed on the factory’s black milk, emits rust, whereas the body in Cimafiejeva’s diary observation “I feel safe inside the body of a crowd”—the body of people gathered in protest, sharing water and food and generally looking after each other—can be read as a counterpoint to the blighted bodies of the poems.

Also thought-provoking is the diary entry for October 17-18, when Cimafiejeva and her husband, a novelist, are at a literary festival launching their books. He draws a crowd, but she doesn’t. She writes, “My new poetry book was published a few days before the election. It was the worst time: no one is interested in a tiny poetry book when the main news is deaths, beatings, and detentions. But there is no other time.” This moment highlights the question of poetry’s connection to lived and recorded history, a question enacted again by the arrangement of the book itself.

That arrangement comes to a crescendo with “My European Poem,” which closes the book. It speaks to the possibility of being read by an international audience and being placed among writers working in less challenging political conditions. Of Belarusian history, Cimafiejeva writes,

When I tell it in English,
I want to pretend that I am you,
That I don’t have that painful experience
Of constant protesting and constant failing,
That nasty feeling of frustration and dismay.

In the end the speaker keeps a “beaten hope” that “builds its nest / On my roof and sings / In Belarusian.” This poem, unlike others, is dated: August 5, 2020, just before the election, before the crackdown, before the president remained, again, in power. The beginning is at the end, enacting the cyclical nature of the “beaten hope” the poem names.

Yet if Motherfield’s final poem relies on the protest diary for context, the poems that precede it—their images of wordlessness, thwarted regeneration, and ecological catastrophe—give the book its depth, and announce Julia Cimafiejeva as a poet that English language readers will want to follow in the future.

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Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Translated by David Colmer
New York Review Books ($18)

Wijnberg

by Thomas Moody

Walking on the beach he gets an idea
and immediately guesses its incorrectness
                                                —“Method”

Nachoem M. Wijnberg’s poetry possesses the disconcerting quality of being at once extraordinarily strange and very close to the feeling of life as it is actually lived. Wijnberg brings the world close to us (and it is a sweeping world he attends to: religious and philosophical investigations, encounters with historical figures, and domestic affairs of the most trivial nature) by being exact about the indecisiveness of the human will and by favoring the processes of our understanding of experience over the particulars of experience itself. Take “Letter to the Corinthians”:

Awareness of the world as well as ourselves
is as difficult for us as self-awareness for fish or foxes
although they in their behavior take their own existence
into account as we do the existence of the world.

These poems deal with the obstacles we face in “taking into account . . . the existence of the world”: the incompatibility of desires, the misapplication of attention, the strangeness of the other (particularly when the other is familiar), and the oddity of the revealed self. Here’s the opening to “Replying”:

Starting with what is the same for everyone

or can be (can everyone come over here),
looking at oneself and leaving out what reminds
one of oneself
to be able to say what can be said

without waiting until the same thing has been said in reply.

Understanding and loving, so that one of the two
can rest while the other watches.
Having the courage to say when no one is there:

how I wanted to live is incomprehensible to me
but maybe not to everyone.

Wijnberg is a professor of business studies at the University of Amsterdam; value systems, and our attempts to ascribe them coherently, are recurring themes throughout his poetry (“Continuing with what I do, recognizing what might be important enough to / justify putting everything I have into it — both of those are brave, aren’t they?”). Over the course of the twenty volumes collected here, from 1989’s The Simulation of Creation to 2022’s Naming Names, there is arguably little in the way of formal inventiveness—we are presented with songs, jokes, parables and ghazals—however, Wijnberg’s approach doesn’t require new forms to astonish; his singular voice makes existing forms seem new.

This is due partly to Wijnberg’s casual poetic register, which flattens any hierarchy of concepts and abolishes the mind’s value rankings of the quotidian and the profound. “Power and Knowledge and Justice,” a meditation on the existence of God, reduces the divine to a doorman “who does have power / over you but not much, and you can take a lot of it away by walking off and / standing somewhere else.” The poem opens:

Imagine there is someone far away who has almost no power but loves us—
our existence matters to him and he wants to know as much as possible about
each of us.
Or else he could have power but has set the condition that he only wants to
know that much if he doesn’t have to have power.
If you have had a lot of power, you can never give it back entirely, you still
know something about how it works.

Such cursory language unmoors us; it reproduces the disorientation we experience when thinking about such enigmatic concepts. Much of this is achieved through Wijnberg’s syntax, which employs a bewildering repetition of pronouns (especially “it”) with their exact referents often difficult to determine, as well as run-on sentences and other devices to produce complex layers of meaning. Take, for instance, the short poem “What an Actor the World Has Lost in You”:

An actor on another actor: he turned from left to right and stopped, at the
same time gesturing with his hand.
Being an actor was unbearably lonely if no one noticed him doing it, the chill
from its beauty went right through me.
Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that, a bad
actor can do it now and then, only a very good actor can do it all the time.
They are acting and they go on for too long or stop suddenly and you can see
they’re glad to be allowed to stop.

We are never entirely certain what any of the four “its” are. The poem seems to turn on the line “Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that,” but Wijnberg leaves us unsure as to which of the referents in the previous lines “that” refers to. This uncertainty destabilizes us as readers, but it replicates our understanding of the world as we experience it, and the accompanying feelings of surprise, confusion, and disorientation. To create such ambiguity through simplicity is Wijnberg’s greatest talent as a poet.

Increasing this uncertainty is the way the logic of many of these poems progress. Wijnberg’s associations often have no obvious point of contrast or connection; his declarative sentences are always slightly askew and his statements are just shy of making sense—close enough to be intelligible, far away enough to be obscure: “A poem must be about something; otherwise no one can say / if the poem is superfluous if it is about him. // What can he say, what is in his heart: a poem if one is bigger than the other, / disappointed if it is not a good poem.” His poems register the large impact of small differences.

They also make innovative use of those things we normally associate with poetic effect. Wijnberg’s rare similes are paradoxical in nature: “like wanting to fight / far above your weight, / but not against someone else”; “More reason to assume / someone is the Messiah / when he arrives / like someone politely leaving / at the earliest possible moment.” He also has an obvious talent for aphorism—“Where words mean something, Ghalib’s are law”; “No one knows what desire is until Ghalib says something about it. / He reads the history of the world and when he is finished, he says what is / missing”—though he rarely utilizes it, perhaps because this kind of rhetoric tends to take the reader out of the poem, or make us realize we are in a poem, devolving the feeling of lived experience into literature about it.

Perhaps it is fitting that one of Wijnberg’s most convincing and effective modes is that of the parable. Take “Laziness and Patience,” which echoes the Biblical story of the prodigal son:

The three sons of the father who says that when he dies,
The entire inheritance will go to the laziest son.

A judge has to find out which of the sons is the laziest.

The first son says: I go quiet when I think someone loves me.

That’s not bad, especially the haste, like someone
who has come to tell someone they don’t love them.

The second son says: my father has worked hard his whole life
to say that the inheritance goes to the laziest son

and that it’s up to a judge to find out which son 
is laziest. If it was more I know what I’d do,

says the third son to the woman he spends the inheritance with
in just one night. The woman tells the judge.

The judge asks the son: how did you know that she was the woman
who would tell me about it?  

Auden wrote that anyone who attempts to interpret a parable only ends up revealing themselves, but Wijnberg’s poetry compels us to try by asking us to find our bearings in disorientation. Here as elsewhere we might conclude that Modernity, with its pitch of distraction, its savagery masked in convenience, and its slogan- and corporate argot-riddled double-speak, forces us into constantly making sense of the world through the nonsensical. Confusion is our natural state, Wijnberg’s poetry confirms, and where we find meaning.

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The End of Reality

How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto

Jonathan Taplin
PublicAffairs ($30)

the end of reality

by Doug MacLeod

Jonathan Taplin takes on two roles—cynic and hardcore realist—in his newest book, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto. Taplin sees the United States as going down a dangerous road of what he calls “techno-determinism,” which he argues has been sold to a naïve public by four anarcho-libertarian technocrats. These four men—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—promise projects that will “deliver us a bright future”: Web3, cryptocurrency, human life on Mars, and transhumanism.  Taplin’s billionaire subjects propose that what is best for the world is not only the creation of new worlds and digitized economies but also the merging of technology and human life, disregarding the moral, political, and economic dangers that have already developed due to our avarice and incessant need for immortality.

Taplin expertly picks apart each of these self-appointed saviors and their Frankenstein’s monsters of modern technocracy—while also, for a lack of a better analogy, slapping readers across the face like Cher does to Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck: “Snap out of it!”  While partisan in his prose, he retains a relatively objective tone by displaying facts without overt judgement—and by taking the history of propaganda as his context.  Taplin acknowledges that the bamboozle has been going on since the days of Hitler and Goebbels, so he directs his disdain forward, at what he sees as its modern legacies: Trumpism, neoliberalism, the politico-media complex, and businessmen who exploit democracy’s gaps for personal gain.  If the American public seems to follow these charlatans blindly, Taplin explains, it is because of an ideology of individualism and its barriers to collective understanding.  Knowing this, writes Taplin, “all four Technocrats have constructed their companies in a way that stymies the ordinary feedback hoops that help leaders course correct.” Ultimately, he argues, the American experiment is disintegrating to a propaganda machine created by dictators in politics and technology—much like the Weimar Republic did in the early 1930s, but with a modern inflection: Technological advancements, the new face of power grabs, are designed to cause chaos to the point of disorientation and surrender.   

How can Americans escape the hyper-unreal morass engineered by Big Tech to ensure unwavering loyalty to a transhuman enterprise?  Taplin states that Americans need to resist rather than submit, and create a new age of realism devoted to a regenerative economy that place importance on cooperation, participation, responsibility, and innovation.  Reality is right in front of us, Taplin urges, and it is filled with poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, xenophobia, misogyny, white supremacy, food insecurity, violence, and other problems that flashy, profit-focused inventions can’t fix: “Technocrats have no solutions to real problems; in fact they exacerbate them by draining money for ill-conceived space ventures or fomenting discord that gets in the way of solutions.”

As a coda, proof of Taplin’s statement recently materialized with the tragic death of five people who spent $250,000 apiece to see the Titanic’s steel skeleton; their vessel was supposed to have been “unsinkable,” yet cost-saving shortcuts in its design spelled doom.  Taplin may be a cynic, but his argument in The End of Reality is valid and sobering.   

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American Midnight

The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

Adam Hochschild
Mariner Books ($29.99)

by Robert Zaller

Adam Hochschild, the author of the acclaimed study King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), has made a career out of unearthing the ghosts of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.  He might simply have made a single volume of that singularly bloody period, which saw the Western world’s hegemony collapse in two great wars and climaxed in the greatest atrocity in history and the most powerful weapon ever developed—a weapon that would soon prove capable of endangering human life on the planet.  But that story, in its broad outlines, is already familiar; in his work Hochschild has aimed instead to tell it indirectly and episodically—to do what a sequence of novels might do, but using the tools of a historian.

Like a novelist, Hochschild works with protagonists, but the consequential figures of history who lead his narratives are more than storytellers of particular events—to the author, it is the legacy of each that ultimately shapes them.  Leopold II is remembered for Belgium’s brutal colonization of the Congo, an imperial venture that set the pattern for Europe’s exploitation of Africa in the latter nineteenth century, including the precedent for German genocide in today’s Namibia.  His “ghost” is thus not merely what was done by him and in his name, but also what persisted until the collapse of Europe’s African empires fifty years after his death, which haunt the continent to this day.

The same spectral image defines Hochschild’s The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (Viking, 1994), which presents the Soviet dictator as an object of memory, defining the decades since his death for his nation as perhaps no other world personality has—a ghost now revived ominously in the figure of Vladimir Putin.  But dictators are an easy target, even if, as in The Unquiet Ghost, Hochschild is after a more multidimensional portrait.  In his most recent book, American Midnight, he fixes on the half-forgotten episode of a century ago colloquially known as the Red Scare, which he presents as a nadir of our history that has shaped it ever since. 

The Red Scare began with America’s entry into World War I, just as Russia’s ability to maintain a second front against Imperial Germany was in doubt.  Nominally neutral, the U.S. under President Woodrow Wilson had made extensive loans to the Western Allies, Britain, and France, which were unlikely to be repaid in the event of Allied defeat.  As Hochschild points out, this was a decisive factor in Wilson’s request for a declaration of war in April 1917—although, as he also notes, the enthusiasm for war in Congress mirrored that of the general population, for which war had partly the character of a great adventure and partly that of a natural extension of the position America had assumed as a Pacific imperial power at the turn of the century, as well as the world’s captain of industry. 

At the same time, Hochschild touches on the reluctance of many in the country to abandon George Washington’s long-held counsel to avoid foreign entanglements, and Wilson’s own boast, in his reelection campaign only months before, that he had kept the U.S. out of Europe’s war.  Some of the opposition to war, he notes, was ethnically based in the country’s large German population, and some in the only independent party of the Left, the Socialists. 

From the beginning, Wilson cast the war as a crusade, in his words, to make the world safe for democracy, even while privately admitting that it would mean “autocracy at home”—a marshaling of manpower and resources such as the country had never seen, and consequently a repression of dissent.  Wilson’s sloganeering would be, as Hochschild observes, a capstone for the idea of American exceptionalism that had developed in the nineteenth century and would define it in the twentieth and beyond.  In this, Wilson would shape American ideology profoundly, the personal tragedy of his failure to bring the U.S. into his postwar League of Nations notwithstanding.

To what extent Wilson expressed a hopeful idealism, and to what extent he was the partly cynical captive of his own rhetoric, is a subject that historians will long debate, and by foregrounding it Hochschild not only makes him the protagonist of this story but also places the legacy of our twenty-eighth president in a sharper light. As the war proceeded, Wilson’s rationale for it became broader and more grandiose.  It would be, he claimed, not only for the advancement of democracy but for the ultimate peace of the world.

Hochschild leaves us in no doubt of his conclusions about the cost of the war for American democracy, quoting the distinguished historian David Brion Davis: “The years from 1917 to 1921 are probably unmatched in American history for popular hysteria, xenophobia, and paranoid suspicion.” By June 1917, Congress had passed the Espionage Act, the broadest and most draconian restraint of free speech, activity, and assembly in the history of the country, and still in force today.  The government’s chief targets were home-grown socialists, whose leader, Eugene Debs, received almost a million votes in the presidential election of 1920 while imprisoned under the Espionage Act, while its largest union, the International Workers of the World (IWW), was crushed by mass arrests culminating in the largest civilian criminal trial ever held in the U.S.

The war itself, of course, had many consequential results, which Hochschild details.  The government assumed virtual control of the economy, enriching giant corporations while putting antitrust regulations to sleep.  The military draft upended millions of lives and cost 116,000 of them.  But the chief focus of Hochschild’s story is less about the vast redistribution of national wealth or the cost of battle, and more about what he regards as its ultimate price: the suppression of native dissent.  The Great War would prove not merely a pause in American democracy, but, despite the enfranchisement of women at the end of it, an enduring degradation.  The country would not again know a worker’s movement such as the IWW, or a political party as progressively committed as that led by Debs.  American public discourse, in Hochschild’s view, has been hobbled by this ever since.

Hochschild makes his points through a series of vivid portraits of antiwar radicals silenced or thrust into prison or exile—Alexander Berkman, W.E.B. DuBois, Marie Equi, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Hayward, Kate Richards O’Hare, and John Reed—as well as a lone voice of dissent within the Wilson administration itself, Louis F. Post.  Against these figures, he depicts those who abetted the war in their efforts to curtail the Left and civil liberties in general.  The best-remembered among them would be J. Edgar Hoover, then at the outset of his career but already a powerful force, but together, as Hochschild demonstrates, their work would help to make Wilson’s second administration one of the darkest and most lawless periods in American history.

As for Wilson, his desire to justify the war and his vision of America’s world leadership led him to promote the League of Nations that his fellow countrymen would soon reject.  The result was a paralyzing stroke that left Wilson himself the mere spectator of the last eighteen months of his presidency, and the witness of the vindictive Treaty of Versailles that virtually guaranteed the far greater war that followed it twenty years later.  Beyond that, Hochschild’s account of America’s long-ago “midnight” has much to tell us about the politics we have inherited in our own day.

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