Juan Villoro
Translated by Kim Traube
George Braziller, Inc. ($15.95)

by Peter Grandbois

Juan Villoro has been a well respected and widely read writer in Latin America and Spain for many years, publishing five novels and eight short story collections along with numerous children’s books and a steady output of articles on sports and music for Mexico’s leading papers. Sadly, he has remained unknown in the U.S., at least until now. In large part due to winning the prestigious Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo, the independent publisher George Braziller, Inc. has agreed to publish two of his works beginning with Villoro’s hilarious and wildly absurd short story collection, The Guilty.

With famed serious writers like Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes, Mexican literature has not exactly been known for its humor, which is why Villoro’s work is so refreshing. That’s not to say Villoro doesn’t owe a debt to his literary forebears. Rulfo’s lyricism and Fuentes’ formal experimentation are on display in nearly every story in the collection. However, like any great writer, Villoro at once acknowledges his country’s literary history and extends it, moving into David Lynchian layers of unreality. Take for example the longest story in the collection, “Amigos Mexicanos,” where we follow a gluten-free American journalist named Katzenberg as he searches for an “authentic Mexican experience,” only to find it in a fictional kidnapping orchestrated by a scriptwriter looking to create a little publicity. Or take the story “Holding Pattern,” in which the main character spends his time waiting for a plane that may or may not ever arrive to take him to see his girlfriend. As he waits, he reads a book written by his girlfriend’s former lover, only to realize the book may be determining his reality.

Then there’s the disillusioned mariachi from “Mariachi,” a man whose life seems to be unraveling with each new success. “That night I dreamed I was driving a Ferrari, running over sombreros until they were nice and flat.” He yearns to escape the world of mariachis, but he is trapped by the very clichés that define that world. The climax occurs when he stars in a movie in which the special effects are noteworthy: “There was a scene where a biker came close to touching my penis and a colossal member appeared onscreen, impressively erect.” He seeks help from the movie’s producer only to find that everything in his career, including the meeting, has been carefully manipulated. In Villoro’s stories, sincerity is not possible. Everything is a manipulation. Each “reality” we think we inhabit is only another surface designed by a marketing team. As one character says in “Amigos Mexicanos”: “We live in a world of ghosts: copies of copies, everything is pirated.”

What makes this postmodern romp different from so many others is Villoro’s deadpan wit, captured in the eminently readable translation by Kim Traube: “It was the iguana’s fault. We stopped in the desert next to one of those men who spend their whole lives squatting, holding three iguanas by the tail. The man we called El Tomate, 'the Tomato,' inspected the merchandise as if he knew something about green animals.” Any translation is only as good as its translator, and this opening from “Mayan Dusk” beautifully conveys the humor living in the concise phrasing and matter-of-fact tone of Villoro’s prose.

The U.S. lags behind the rest of the world in publishing translations, and if this book is any indication of what we’re missing, it’s a real shame. Villoro made me believe in the power of postmodernism to reflect back the multiple surfaces of our own highly constructed and often fictional lives. To do so while making the reader laugh out loud is no small feat.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Mat Johnson
Spiegel & Grau ($26)

by Elizabeth Tannen

“Race doesn’t exist, but tribes are fucking real.” So declares Warren Duffy, the middle-aged, recently divorced comic-book artist who narrates Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, a novel as richly entertaining as it is smart. Warren, like the author, is mixed-race, born of an Irish father and African-American mother. Also, like the author, he appears mostly white. “I am a racial optical illusion,” Warren tells us. And: “I don’t like feeling white. It makes me feel robbed. Of my heritage. Of my true self. Of my mother.”

So powerfully has this tension driven Warren’s life that it’s led him to Wales, and marriage with a Welsh woman, because surrounding himself with whiteness has reinforced his blackness. When the novel opens, Warren has come home to Philadelphia, where he is grieving not only his failed marriage and comic book store back in Cardiff, but also his father—whose dilapidated Germantown mansion is now his.

Johnson has described this book in an interview as his “coming out as a mulatto,” and above all the novel’s arc chronicles Warren’s slow embrace of his mixed-race identity. He’s spent his life consumed by the fight for admission into the black tribe, of which his light skin marks him as an “asterisked” member. He rejects the concept of biracial, and the notion of a mulatto tribe; in the novel he states, “Mixed people are just a kind of black people anyway.”

Generous use of that antiquated word, mulatto, is one way in which Loving Day subverts our usual framework of discussion around race. Another is its celebration of tribalism itself—a value that is, essentially, un-American. We like to imagine ourselves immune from the needs to belong, to depend. We prefer post-racial mythologies in the same way we prefer post-historical ones: we use the past as ornament, not as identity.

At the center of Loving Day is a pair of love stories: between Warren and the newfound teenage daughter that surfaces soon after his homecoming, and between him and a love interest, Sun, whose physical resemblance to himself is so striking that he observes on sight she could be his twin, and who serves as his foil when it comes to views on race. He and Sun first encounter one another at a comic conference, but she resurfaces as a teacher at Melange, the utopian, militant mixed-race arts and educational center that holds together the novel’s characters and themes.

Johnson has a knack for pulling off the semi-surreal, and Loving Day does a deft straddle between the realistic and the bizarre. He also has a gift for comedy. Some readers might be turned off by Warren, immature and openly sex-crazed, irresponsible and often self-loathing. But others will be charmed by his relentless, self-deprecating humor and brutal, vivid sense of self—as complicated and contradictory as that self might be.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Heidi Julavits
Doubleday ($26.95)

by Lindsay Gail Gibson

“Often,” as Virginia Woolf observed in a 1929 essay, “nothing tangible remains of a woman’s day.” By nightfall, “the food that has been cooked is eaten”; eventually, even “the children that have been nursed have gone out into the world.” The Folded Clock, a new work by Heidi Julavits, echoes Woolf in its opening query: “Today I wondered What is the worth of a day?” Subtitled A Diary, this luminous piece of life-writing poses possible answers to that question in each of the entries that follow, creating a complex composite portrait of the consciousness that persists amid “soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed.”

On the battlefield of everyday existence, diaries represent a kind of mnemonic triage. Like the household designs of Charles and Ray Eames, which Julavits adores, The Folded Clock performs this function even as it meditates on its own form. The author of four novels and a founding editor of The Believer magazine, she describes herself in these headlong terms: “I edit and teach and at times desire to be a clothing designer or an artist . . . and I write everything except poetry and I am a mother and a social maniac and a misanthrope.”

Julavits’s latest work shores up her memories against life’s rough-and-tumble, detailing semesters at Columbia, summers in Maine, residencies abroad; her marriage to the writer Ben Marcus; her musings on art and aesthetics; the time-lapse photography of her children’s growth. More than a mere calendar of doings or an almanac of emotional squalls, however, this book is an attempt to pin down effervescence, a sketch of the self that has sprung up in the cracks of these roles, occupations, and dreams.

The Folded Clock reproduces the format of her childhood diaries, opening each entry with a deceptively simple “Today I.” As an adult, this formula lends itself to a tone of whimsical deadpan, a habit of presenting off-kilter occurrences as utterly humdrum: “Today I ordered ten toy stethoscopes from a party supply company”; “Today I went to a neighboring town to see the gallery opening of the woman inundated by motherhood”; “Today I started reading a book called How to Navigate Today.” Reminiscent of writers like Miranda July and Sheila Heti, this tone preserves only kissing distance between miraculous and mundane, casting the author as realist observer of a world not quite identical to our own.

For Julavits, “today” functions as a formal conceit, a vault from which, with a gymnast’s agility, she executes temporal and associative leaps. Billed as “an accounting of two years of my life,” The Folded Clock shuffles the deck of days: June abuts March, July follows October, May and January meet. The work that results prefers recurrence to resolution, and its nonlinear timeline may represent an attempt on the author’s part to slip the traces of plot—which she associates with novel-writing, and with which she has lately become disenchanted—in favor of a more episodic mode.

The published journal’s implicit promise is to catch personality ungroomed, before its morning toilette; to provide a warts-and-all portrait of the author in conversation with herself. The Folded Clock bears stronger resemblance to the pianist’s impromptu, a work whose painstaking composition mimics spontaneous, improvised play. Likewise, these entries engineer an intimacy more akin to two confidantes’ tête-à-têtes than a wiretap on another’s thoughts. It’s no accident, perhaps, that the making and maintaining of friends—those most quotidian seductions—play a major role in The Folded Clock: the author’s blend of anecdote, disclosure, and self-deprecation mimics the idiom of a deep but platonic bond.

Julavits is quick to interrogate her own motives for charming us, fretting that, in “trying to be charismatic . . . I probably didn’t tell the truthiest truths.” Perhaps not. By taking full advantage of the formal prerogatives at her disposal, however, she has produced an authenticity rarer and more startling than truth unadorned. Her diary returns at intervals to a male friend’s assertion that, when it comes to intimate partners, “Men want a relationship, but women expect a world.” Readers also require worlds of the books we devour, and The Folded Clock delivers one, fully formed.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Dan Beachy-Quick
Tupelo Press ($16.95)

by M. Lock Swingen

When the aesthetic climate of our age champions recursive internet memes and pop culture references, irreducibly knitted mash-ups and bottomless wells of meta-this and meta-that, the poetic corpus of Dan Beachy-Quick, in contrast, hungers refreshingly for source and origin. The poems of his latest book, gentlessness, sift through the modes of expression of the literary past in order to instantiate the poetic immutability of the lyric voice. In other words, Beachy-Quick does not merely trawl the literary past in order to reference his forebears; in gentlessness he summons the voices of the past in order to reanimate them in all their originary power.

In his pursuit of source and origin Beachy-Quick places himself somewhat cockeyed in the tradition of the High Modernist poets, such as T.S. Eliot, who revived expressions and forms of the past in order to reconcile an agonistic present. However, whereas Eliot wandered a wasted European landscape in a nostalgic effort to stitch together the detritus of Western civilization, Beachy-Quick can be seen to trail rather the poetic path of Ezra Pound. Pound likewise beckoned personas, voices, and forms of the literary past but with the intent of nourishing and progressing his own literary epoch. Where Pound gave the early 20th century the voices of 12th century French troubadour poets, for example, Beachy-Quick offers us the voices of Beowulf, Wordsworth, Bradstreet, and Pound himself.

Beachy-Quick moves from one literary period to another, resurrecting voices, melodies, tropes, and obsessions in sections whose titles map distinct literary periods: “a short treatise on the nature of the gods,” “heroisms,” “puritanisms,” “romanticisms,” and “modernisms.” In the first of these, Beachy-Quick recalls the powerful voices of Greek poets Homer and Virgil:

Write an ode and evict the gods, O gods
And goddesses, hear my voice and lean out
Just a little, and give my song light, so what
Is blank is seen, O lean over and give
My song melody, so what is seen
Won’t fall apart, O lean out, you gods

In addition to these sections, gentlessness opens with “monadism: a proem” and also interludes with a long poem titled “overtakelessness.” In an interview with the Kenyon Review, Beachy-Quick extrapolates upon his close relationship with the literary past. “I feel just as keenly that the words I use contain . . . a history of uses—often by the poets and writers I most love—which carry forward in nearly occult ways in my own poems,” he explains. “Even more than an appropriation of works and lives, I suppose I think of the poem as a kind of conjuring and a kind of repair.” What distinguishes Beachy-Quick’s poetry from his more obliquely ironic contemporaries, whose allusions can sometimes verge on extraneous and murky, is that Beachy-Quick conjures the voices of the past in order to embody them completely. His poetry does not mime or reference the Romantics, for example; it possesses and conjures them. In the section “romanticism,” Beachy-Quick employs the sonnet form:

Gnats breed, mind broods, a cloud in the air
Breathes out one breath until the cloud is gone,
And the sun pours down heat in glaring hours
That prisms wings as thought prisons song.
The grass dreams other dreams than those the crickets
Conspire—dreams of being those taut lyre-strings
Pulled up to the sun despite the thicket’s
Maze; . . .

Here Beachy-Quick embodies the very poetic preoccupations and song of a Wordsworth or a Keats. In a time when writers avoid old school images like “a cloud in the air” or “lyre-strings,” Beachy-Quick’s revitalization of these Romantic tropes seems almost courageous.

In addition to Beachy-Quick’s resurrection tour through different literary epochs, the poet is also always concerned with the very material of language that recalls these voices and summonings. In an essay for the Boston Review, B.K. Fischer hones in on this aspect of Beachy-Quick’s prose and poetry. “Like so many of his peers,” Fischer writes, “Dan Beachy-Quick came of age in the heyday of post-structuralism in American universities. The lessons of Derrida infuse his work with a persistent awareness of language’s contradictions.” In gentlessness Beachy-Quick indeed returns again and again to one of the central tenants that poststructuralist theory imbued into his work and generation at large—that is, that language is never totally here nor totally elsewhere but somewhere always between. Beachy-Quick extrapolates on this central attribute of language and of his poetics in the aforementioned Kenyon Review piece: “Language asserts and betrays its own materiality, seems always more than and less than an object . . . Part of the nature of the material is its metaphoricity, its pointing at that which it isn’t, and in pointing, verging into what it’s not.” In the eponymous stanza of gentlessness, Beachy-Quick writes:

gentlessness is a word
to describe that
which must deny itself
to exist.

In spite of Beachy-Quick’s self-aware preoccupation with the contradictions and pitfalls of language, the poet abstains from reveling in the poststructuralist fixation on absence, instability of meaning, and the impossibility of origin or truth. On the contrary, Beachy-Quick’s poetic voice is urgent, generous, and, above all, unabashed in its singing for the presence of the literary past. “A fragment acts flagrant but is not,” he writes. Elsewhere, in the opening volley “monadism: a proem,” Beachy-Quick affirms:

sing me open to swerve error astray
*
but prayer makes a point inside
*
of infinite angels so sin learns
*
a song to sing o source asleep

Beachy-Quick’s poetry embodies what Emerson once reminded us—namely, that “every word was once a poem.” gentlessness searches for the source of language, that poem in every word, in a time when our aesthetic mainstream maintains a constant distancing from the wellspring of art.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

by Garry Craig Powell

David Joiner is a U.S. novelist currently living in Kanazawa, Japan, although he has spent more than a decade in Vietnam since he initially visited the country in 1994, when he was the first American to live in Bien Hoa city since the end of the war. His debut novel, Lotusland (Guernica Editions, $25), focuses on Nathan, a young American journalist living in Saigon. Nathan finds himself torn between love and duty, vocation and worldly success, when he simultaneously receives intriguing offers from Le, a poor but talented female lacquer painter, and Anthony, an old friend who wants him to help run a successful real estate business. With its complicated cast of characters and evocative settings, Lotusland is likely the most vivid novel set in post-colonial Southeast Asia that contemporary readers will encounter.

The following conversation with Joiner, whom I have known since we were in graduate school together at the University of Arizona in 1998, took place by electronic mail.

Garry Craig Powell: Although I know Lotusland quite well, having read a number of drafts of it, I don’t remember its precise inception. Could you tell us a bit about how you got the idea for the novel, and what aspects of it seized your attention?

David Joiner: I don’t know that a specific idea led to the inception of Lotusland, but I do remember wanting to fill a niche in U.S. literature about Vietnam. I wanted to set my novel in contemporary Vietnam, during the time that I was writing it, and have it turn the page on the war we fought there. I find it regrettable that America’s focus on Vietnam remains squarely on the war. Even though the war ended in 1975, virtually every U.S. novel, movie, and play that deals with Vietnam does so by resurrecting the war. In many ways that makes sense because the event had such a huge impact on the U.S.—and in fact on the world—and much of the literature that came out of the war has been incredible. But forty years on I feel like we should look for a different perspective on Vietnam.

GCP: That’s certainly one of the most refreshing things about the novel. Rereading the published version, it struck me that although there are two ostensibly very different plots in the book—and I think they are of equal importance, unlike the typical novel’s plot and subplot—both are thematically similar. In both Nathan’s romantic relationship with Le and his blurred friendship/business relationship with Anthony, the conflicts come about because there are serious issues of trust. Was that deliberate and planned?

DJ: Yes, it was. I think issues of trust mark all relationships, no matter where one lives. But in Vietnam, where it can be difficult for people to meet on equal levels—economically, socially, historically, culturally, etc.—I think these issues are especially salient. One needs to be rather careful there both in business relationships (as with Anthony) and romantic ones (as with Le and Huong). After all, legal protections in Vietnam hardly exist. Also, Vietnamese people in general distrust their government, the police, and others in positions of power. That distrust often filters through to everyday relationships, which play out dramatically in the novel.

GCP: Another fascinating aspect of the novel is the complexity and ambivalence of the main characters. You aren’t afraid to show them as inconsistent. Le’s reticence and dishonesty causes Nathan a great deal of suffering, which makes us sympathise with him, yet he withholds his true intentions from Anthony too, and while he doesn’t downright lie to him, he certainly misleads him. And Anthony, in spite of his apparent generosity towards Nathan, has ulterior motives. So there’s an intricate pattern of deception or at least lack of frankness, which may be symptomatic of relationships in a developing country like Vietnam, where money corrupts everything. Am I on the right track here? You could take it a step further and say that material interests have made liars and cheats of people everywhere.

DJ: I wouldn’t go so far as to say that money corrupts everything, but it certainly is corrupting. One often hears stories of people getting in trouble for something, fairly or unfairly, but managing to evade punishment by paying off people in high places. And people there know the power of money just as they do anywhere, but it’s particularly insidious in Vietnam because no obvious model of upstanding behaviour really exists for people to follow. The government is corrupt at every level, and the police force essentially exists only to enrich itself. Why should society be any different from those who wield power and grow rich through no honest efforts of their own? And to get ahead in life, as Anthony and Huong have been able to do after marrying, one often has to do things that others might consider unethical. I wouldn’t say they are liars and cheats, nor would I characterize most Vietnamese as such. Most Vietnamese I know, in fact, are lovely. People do find themselves in unfamiliar and difficult circumstances sometimes, and poverty often suggests a reason why people do things they likely wouldn’t do if they were better off. Poverty in Vietnam is not uncommon, though it’s usually not of such a desperate kind like you find for example in India.

GCP: As a State-of-Vietnam novel, Lotusland is a rich and textured portrait of the country that reveals both the worst things about it—the corruption, the poverty, and the tawdriness—and the best: the beauty, not only of its landscape and art, but often glimpses of transcendent beauty in quite ordinary scenes, as well as the humanity of the people, their present sufferings and their brave attempts to overcome the trauma of “The American War.” I was particularly moved by the descriptions of the Agent Orange victims, and fascinated by the detailed depictions of traditional lacquer painting. Not many writers can plunge the reader so deeply and intensely into a foreign environment. How do you do that?

DJ: If it’s a State-of-Vietnam novel, then by necessity it’s one seen through the eyes of foreigners. That’s the perspective I know, and I can write from it authentically. As for plunging the reader into a foreign environment, I’m not sure how much I’ve actually done this with Lotusland. Setting is important to my aesthetic, though, and I’ve always been fascinated by, even moved by, both the natural and urban landscapes of Vietnam. It’s kind of a wabi-sabi ethic, where one finds beauty in the potential of things, in their imperfections. To me, no other country possesses the kind of beauty Vietnam is endowed with, and because that beauty, that aesthetic, really can’t be replicated in the West, I need to paint scenes with a certain type of brushstroke to ensconce readers in the place itself. Vietnam is also eminently observable. So much happens in the streets and sidewalks of the cities, especially, that the life lived there is a gift to anyone drawn to writing. One’s senses are overwhelmed at every moment, one feels enormously alive there, and I don’t know how that could be kept out of any writing about Vietnam. I have a tendency to write imagistically, and to using setting like drapery—not to obfuscate the reader’s vision, but to hang it as close as possible before their mind’s eye so they not only see it but feel surrounded by it. That’s the hope, anyway.

GCP: You succeed in your aim of “surrounding” the reader with the setting. I think you do that by using all your senses, not just visual images, but sounds, smells, tastes and sensations too. It’s a heightened reality, a more intense one than we normally experience. As in much of the best writing, in Conrad for instance, the setting becomes a character. It’s not merely backdrop: it plays a vital role in determining the fates of the human characters. I think you also immerse the reader in your lyrical prose. You must have an excellent ear for the music of English to be able to write so beautifully, so euphonically. Is that something you consciously developed?

DJ: I’m not sure . . . I think most writers of literary fiction possess a love of language, otherwise they wouldn’t write. If I’ve succeeded in developing an interesting voice, it probably has much to do with what I’ve read. I started Lotusland in the middle of an intensive re-reading of Yasunari Kawabata’s oeuvre. I remember using multicolored highlighters to mark up old copies of Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, to study and learn from them, and later typing out all of the former on my laptop. I was interested in how he did what he did in those novels—their indirectness, the power of silence, their pacing, the rhythms and deceptive simplicity of his prose (or the translation of his prose). In fact, the first scene of Lotusland is my homage to Snow Country. My novel, too, starts with a scene on a train, though his is more beautiful than mine, and more successful.

GCP: You’re very modest: allow me to disagree, although I’m with you on the brilliance of Kawabata. But let’s go back to setting. The novel is set mainly in Hanoi and Saigon, the two biggest cities in the country, in the early twenty-first century. Why did you choose to set it then and there? Since two of the main characters are Americans, why didn’t you set it during or right after the war?

DJ: First and foremost, I wanted to write about places in Vietnam that I knew well, and I know Saigon and Hanoi pretty well—I’ve spent nearly ten years in those two cities. Also, both cities have changed dramatically since I first encountered them twenty-one years ago, and I’m sure my subconscious found both places fertile ground. There are other reasons, too. I wanted to veer far from typical wartime portrayals of Saigon and Hanoi—both novelistic and journalistic—and I wanted to present Hanoi, especially, in a way that managed to express its beauty. Hanoi is richer than Saigon with respect to the arts, and Vietnam’s lacquer painting tradition was developed in the north. In terms of its temporal setting, Lotusland only works as a contemporary story, and so that choice was deliberate. I also wanted to share with readers how Agent Orange continues to affect people in Vietnam three generations since the war’s end. Agent Orange is frequently in the news in Vietnam, yet how many people in the West realize the extent to which it continues to ravage people’s lives? Finally, as I mentioned before, I didn’t want to write another Vietnam War story. I was more interested in finding a different narrative about Vietnam, in inviting readers to step outside of that well-trod literary landscape.

GCP: And yet, even though the war has long been over, one feels its shadowy presence throughout the book, sometimes in completely unexpected ways—for instance, in the apparent lack of bitterness the Vietnamese feel towards these men from a recently enemy country. What makes this interesting, for me, is wondering how genuine it is. To what extent have the Vietnamese really forgiven the Americans (and the French who preceded them) and to what extent are they forced to be agreeable, because they, the Americans, are richer, and may be able to offer them jobs and visas?

DJ: That’s a good question. I assume it’s genuine. Vietnamese, friends and strangers both, assure me that they have forgiven but not forgotten what the U.S. did in Vietnam, and aside from a few drunks I’ve run into in Hanoi, no one has made me feel uncomfortable for being an American or blamed me for what happened forty and fifty years ago. Further, young Vietnamese people often don’t show interest in the war. The war bores them, it’s something they’re forced to read about in school, to tune out when their parents and grandparents start talking about it, and it’s part of many state-run programs that offer no appeal to the young. I’ve met college-aged students in Vietnam who thought their country had fought against Australia rather than the U.S. And yes, I do think that people make a distinction between “America the War Machine” and “America the Land of Opportunity.” Getting to America is still viewed as a way to better one’s life. And, by association, to better family members’ lives. That’s the story of quite a few Vietnamese people who came to the U.S. after the war, and who continue to come. Everyone remembers the success stories, which are often endlessly circulated, and people tend to see themselves in those who’ve done well. The Vietnamese, if I may generalize, are some of the most hopeful and forward-looking people I’ve ever met.

GCP: Another thing that I find engaging is the complexity and unpredictability of the characters’ motivations. For instance, the young Vietnamese women who interact with Nathan and Anthony are all materialistic, but Anthony is just as crass in his own pursuit of wealth, and Le’s apparent manipulativeness turns out to be more complex than it appears, and is arguably balanced by her genuine devotion to her art. I also admired the way the various conflicts—over whether Nathan should dedicate himself to writing or simply accept the very comfortable lifestyle Anthony offers him, and whether he should keep his promises to his friend, to whom he owes money and a job, or be true to his heart and pursue Le—are tangled together. Although Nathan is in his late twenties, Lotusland is a sort of bildungsroman, isn’t it? Nathan is forced to work out for himself what is really important in life, perhaps a little belatedly—though maybe nowadays, since people mature later, the bildungsroman has to be about people in their late twenties or even older.

DJ: I think that’s right. In Lotusland, Nathan struggles to learn what’s most important in life, and unfortunately he makes mistakes, some of which hurt people along the way. But this is true of most foreigners I’ve met in Vietnam. The country offers many a chance to leave behind their own countries and the messes they’ve made of their lives there. Many people travel to Vietnam on a whim and decide to stay to reinvent themselves. Many foreigners I’ve met in Vietnam have only learned in their sixties and even their seventies what’s really important in life. Or some have known all along, but for various reasons they’ve been prevented from living how they want to, from being the kind of person they dream of being. As a writer, I find the idea of “reinventing oneself” interesting. It’s a theme that’s passed through the lives of many older Vietnamese people I know, too—leaving Vietnam for the U.S., for example, and reinventing themselves there; and maybe later returning to Vietnam and reinventing themselves yet again. One also sees it among U.S. vets who come back to Vietnam and settle there. They often have demons they must grapple with in both countries, but the ones in Vietnam are frequently gentler, more welcoming, and—to go back to something we spoke about before—more forgiving.

As for materialism in Vietnam, I don’t think it’s as deep-seated as it is in the U.S. or many other developed countries. At least not yet. Vietnam may become as materialistic over time. I have a number of Japanese friends in their sixties and seventies who tell me that they recognize post-WWII Japan in Vietnam’s fervor to rebuild the country.

GCP: So to some extent we can see the novel as an indictment of capitalism in developing countries, but it’s also about the rootlessness of many westerners: Neither Nathan nor Anthony really belongs in the States any more. Why is that? Have they simply been lured by the exotic to Asia—are they what Edward Said has pejoratively called “orientalists”—or is there more to them than that? Are they adventurers or just misfits?

DJ: There’s probably some or all of that in both characters. You find many expats unsure of their futures. For most, living in Vietnam is an adventure, and the quality of life there is often better than it is in the U.S.—unless you’re extremely wealthy and well-connected back home. The weather in the south of Vietnam is great, you don’t have to work all that hard, the food and coffee remain cheap and some of the world’s best, people are friendly, travel opportunities are plentiful, it’s easy to make friends, and the women are beautiful. A man, particularly, can live like a prince there—and be treated as an important personage. The lure to stay can be far stronger than the lure to return to one’s own country. And while Nathan and Anthony have both encountered this in Vietnam, Anthony is the one whose identity has formed around near-overnight success and wealth. And it changes him. Just like it changes so many of us. I don’t think that either of them are misfits, and I’m not interested in writing about misfits, anyway. I think both are quite earnest about their lives—about finding ways to become more happily rooted.

GCP: Much great fiction dwells on that theme. In Robert Musil’s opinion, the only question worth the attention of intelligent people is how to live happily, and naturally place and way of life play a part in that. Good fiction is always about a specific place and time, and yet Lotusland also manages to be universal. How is that achieved? What would you say to someone who told you that he or she wasn’t interested in Vietnam?

DJ: I don’t think that life in Vietnam is so foreign that people anywhere couldn’t relate to what happens in Lotusland. People could learn much about the country by reading my novel—or at least about the way one person sees Vietnam, as an American. If someone told me they weren’t interested in Vietnam, then they’re not likely to be interested in any place other than where they are. I do think Lotusland develops certain universal themes—love is one, finding one’s place in the world is another, learning to do what is morally right is one more. I’m not sure how that’s achieved in literature. But I think that writers as well as readers should have a wide range of experiences, and be curious about them afterwards, and care about them deeply, in order to deal with such themes successfully. Sometimes, though, I think it’s a crapshoot. What writer can say with certainty that his or her novel will be viewed as universal?

GCP: You’re right, you can never be sure. I’m not sure it’s a crapshoot, though. That implies luck and I think it has more to do with skill. Isn’t it a matter of writing so convincingly about characters from a specific time and place that no matter where you’re from, you feel you know them and can learn from them? And to take that point further, do you worry that readers won’t find your characters likeable or will be unable to identify with them? All of the main ones have serious flaws. Even Nathan is not only less than transparent with his friend Anthony, but also, in spite of some misgivings, accepts an “arrangement” with Le whereby in return for his help in getting her a visa, she becomes his girlfriend, which may strike some as sordid. Why didn’t you make him purer and nobler?

DJ: Characters need flaws to be interesting, to seem more human, and for readers to feel they can connect to them. I was interested in developing Nathan’s character in such a way that readers would root for him, while probably rooting against Anthony and even Le. And then I wanted to turn things on their head near the end to show that Nathan was flawed too, and that Anthony, for all his faults, was understandable. People are complicated—their intentions, good or bad, are often not well understood—and I wanted to show that. Hopefully on the final pages we see the characters on the threshold of becoming better people, of becoming less selfish, of figuring out their relationships and also their dreams. Nathan and Anthony are recognizably American, as American as any characters in fiction, and I never really worried that readers wouldn’t identify with them. I didn’t make Nathan purer and nobler because that doesn’t particularly interest me in fiction, and I don’t think he would come across as believable that way. But he’s also not terribly sordid. He tries to be pure and noble.

GCP: And what about the female characters? Some readers, familiar with the stereotypes about Asian women, may be surprised by how strong and aggressive they are. Would you agree?

DJ: Absolutely. Vietnamese society is changing at lightning speed, and stereotypes like these are subject to change, if they were ever even all that true. Of course Vietnam is still a Confucian—that is, male-dominated—society, but one sees Vietnamese women everywhere who are stronger in mind and body than their male counterparts.

GCP: Your next novel, Burning Green Sun, is also set in Vietnam. Would you tell us what it’s about and why the country fascinates you so much? Do you see yourself following in the footsteps of writers like Graham Greene and Marguerite Duras, or even ones from the colonial era like George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, and Somerset Maugham? Are you writing about “The White Man’s Burden,” and is that still relevant?

DJ: It’s a near-total rewrite of the first novel I ever wrote. It’s set in the early 1990s in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam and in Phnom Penh and the northern stretches of the Mekong River in northeast Cambodia. The characters are mostly river researchers—a French hydrographer; two American cetologists; a Cambodian ichthyologist; an American drifter who has left the U.S. for good, married a local Delta woman, and taught himself about life in the Mekong Delta; and an American traveller. Both countries fascinate me. In the case of the Mekong River in Vietnam and Cambodia, the natural settings are mesmerizing. I’m also fascinated by, and admire, how people live in such seemingly wild and untameable environments. There’s a kind of genius in how people have learned to make lives for themselves on the river, and there’s often a sense of seeing the world as it used to be hundreds of years ago. A great whirlwind of change is passing through the cities of Vietnam and Cambodia, but in the countryside there’s a feeling of ancientness, of an ancient slowness, of something we’ve long lost sight of and fail to appreciate now.

And no, I don’t see myself consciously following in the footsteps of the great writers you named. It may be useful to do so—to keep the bar raised as high as possible while writing—but I never thought like that. It would be crazy for me to. As for your question about “The White Man’s Burden,” I’ll let others decide if I’m writing about that, or if such a thing is still relevant, but personally I’ve never considered it. Perhaps I should have, but I simply wanted to set an authentic story in contemporary Vietnam that might lead readers on a different path than the one that inevitably arrives at another war story. Perhaps that is a white man’s burden after all.

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Vladimir Sharov
Translated by Oliver Ready
Dedalus Europe ($19.99)

by Lori Feathers

Short of acquiring fame, our earthly lives are destined for oblivion. For a time after we die we live on, so to speak, in the memories of friends and family who survive us. But when they too die, any real understanding of the life that we lived or the person that we were is gone. Alyosha, the narrator of Vladimir Sharov’s Before and During, seeks to rescue the dead from obscurity.

Set in Moscow in the mid-1960s, Before and During feels like two conjoined novellas, so apparent is the shift in style and direction between its two parts. The first takes place before Alyosha is admitted to a psychiatric hospital to be treated for his sporadic blackouts, the second during his residency at the hospital. In the novel’s opening pages Alyosha begins writing a Memorial Book in reaction to his own memory loss—although he can’t remember episodes of his own life he is seized with the duty to record the lives of others, to memorialize the lives of the dead as a way of resurrecting them.

In the hospital Alyosha resumes work on the Memorial Book, but now attends exclusively to the memories of the hospital’s elderly patients, many of them former high-ranking Soviet officials who use the site as a retirement home. Here Alyosha becomes convinced that his project has messianic importance—God has abandoned mankind and will return only if he faithfully records his fellow patients’ memories. Without their inclusion in his Memorial Book, man’s greatest error—his retreat from God—will be repeated endlessly.

Sharov’s characters, loyal to their Russian literary heritage, struggle with theology—they long for God’s comfort and despair when they disappoint him. But at the same time they deny a role for God in Russia’s future. They recognize that godless communism has rent a hole in society’s emotional wellbeing and yet, except for Alyosha, they do not recognize a place for God in fulfilling Russia’s destiny to lead the world into a brighter future.

Sharov’s novel confronts big, philosophical questions and frames them in an interesting context, but the book stalls under the weight of its ambitions. Too much, both stylistically and narratively, is attempted, creating a disjointed and chaotic impression at times. The juxtaposition of the French writer and socialite Germaine de Staël with Alyosha—her fantastical, long life and disregard for death versus his preoccupation with death—should amplify Alyosha’s philosophical journey; instead, her story distracts in the great number of pages devoted to it and Sharov’s stylistic shift to magical realism.

Nevertheless, Before and During justifies Sharov’s place as one of contemporary Russia’s most significant literary voices, and Oliver Ready is most deserving as the winner of the 2015 Read Russia Prize for his remarkable English translation of it. The novel’s theme that a life is nothing more than others’ memories of it may feel bleak, but memories, as witness to our past, also offer hope: that humanity can avoid repeating history’s mistakes, that we can free ourselves from committing the same unpardonable crimes against our fellow man.

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Sarah Blake
Wesleyan ($24.95)

by Will Randick

It’s hard to get away from Kanye West—he finds a way to put his hand in so many different forms of art. Kanye has a large influence on today’s music and fashion, but what about poetry? In Sarah Blake’s Mr. West, the subject is viewed from an angle that is both personal and public.

Blake’s book should not be mistaken for a biography of West, as the poems in the collection have far more reach than one person. Motherhood, religion, language, and the body are all central themes in these poems. Kanye’s deceased mother Donda is discussed with empathy by the speaker, who in many of the poems is a mother to be, looking to Donda for tips on motherhood.

There are a few moments where Kanye seems like a forced punchline to a poem, but the poems are at their best when the rap icon finds his way into the poems naturally. When there is a strong connection between the speaker and West, the poetry gleams as brightly as “Kanye’s Glow in the Dark tour. / It reminds me of my son’s bones, glowing white / in ultrasounds, in a more wretched darkness.” Blake’s themes of birth and race are subtly reflected in these lines.

Some of the best lines in the book are spoken by Kanye, as Blake recontextualizes West’s words to fit into her poems. In a poem titled “I No Longer Have to Look Up Dates Like Your Birthday, June 8, 1977,” Blake recounts West’s thirtieth birthday inside a Louis Vuitton store. The speaker describes who is present at the party and how the cakes spell the subject’s name wrong, but the moment with the greatest wonder is Mr. West’s: “I’m in my 20s as we speak right now, but at midnight, I’ll be 30. I’m / already 30 in Japan and London and everywhere else.” These lines seem to speak to the never-ending self awareness that Kanye possesses, as well as to the self-mythologizing he has created, that we all collectively create.

Mr. West is at its most interesting when the speaker takes that larger than life self-mythologizing to a quiet moment of personal secrecy. Some of Blake’s lines feel whispered: “I’m afraid I will be a horrible mother because / I am a horrible woman.” This candor is touching amidst the book’s background of Rick Ross interviews, YouTube comments, and gold teeth.

Kanye is shown sympathy in the poems, but the speaker also embodies how hard it is to empathize with a celebrity one can barely see as a person. In “Jesus Walks,” named after Kanye’s early hit single, Blake’s speaker admits that there is so much distance between West and the rest of the world: “Kanye, if only I could write a poem for you and not about you.” It is difficult to relate to someone who is placed under the largest microscope, but Blake’s speaker seems far more concerned with the small microscopes put on domestic life. Her moments are a quiet contrast to the noise that surrounds West.

We all have our own versions of Kanye. My parents know him as the obnoxious rapper who interrupts award shows; I see him as the innovative voice of self-belief. Sarah Blake understands Kanye West as both a human and a concept, “half cannon, half ballet. / Half canonical, half prey.” West is to be taken seriously, and so is the poet writing about him.

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Inger Wold Lund
Ugly Duckling Presse ($9)

by Tova Gannana

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, hear more, to feel more.”
—Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

Inger Wold Lund, a Norwegian living in Berlin, wrote Leaving Leaving Behind Behind in English. A book of poems in the form of a day-book or a day-book written to read as poetry, it offers a duality, a doubleness of language. Take the first poem/entry:

At home. Some weeks ago.

The branches I cut and brought inside grew roots.
The roots were a light shade of pink, like my own
skin. I sucked a finger to see if it would take on the
same nuance.

Of course, it’s possible that none of what is written in Leaving Leaving Behind Behind by Lund is true in the sense that these events actually happened. In “Some months ago. In My apartment,” dust is taking over the rooms; to avoid it, the people drink coffee in the shower and take interviews on the toilet, invoking an eerie naturalness. This theme comes to play also in “Half a year ago. At a store”:

The lady in the store told me the marks on the pumpkin
I had chosen had appeared during a hailstorm earlier
in the fall. Then she asked if I remembered the storm.
I said no.

Is this mere forgetfulness, or is Lund here rejecting the wreckage of the natural world? Or even the explanation of the woman regarding the natural world? There is often more in Lund’s language than we initially recognize:

Last Summer. At the border between two countries.

It was hot. The police wore white hats. In white leather
belts they carried guns. The guns were attached to
their belts with white cords, curled up like the cords
of old telephones. I thought of whom I would like to
kill if given the chance. Of people on my phone list:
One. Maybe two.

Leaving Leaving Behind Behind could be written for a lover, or for a former self. In this way, Lund leaves space in her poems for the reader to enter, and the book grows in our mind, continuing to take its place in an ever-present “after.”

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Sarah Einstein
University of Georgia Press ($24.95)

by Renée E. D’Aoust

Chosen by John Phillip Santos as the winner of this year’s AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction, Sarah Einstein’s Mot, A Memoir is a breathtakingly beautiful read. In this unique story of friendship, Einstein drives from her home in West Virginia to Texas to spend a week at a KOA “kampground” with her homeless friend Mot. The week will be an upgrade for Mot, who lives out of his car, but the KOA cabin will heighten his considerable anxieties (for example, Mot’s voices tell the pair where they can and cannot eat). Still, a week spent in a sanitized camping ground is also a much-needed break for Einstein, from her job and from her husband Scotti. While Scotti shares Einstein’s commitment to social justice, he’s taken his dedication too far, allowing a desperate woman named Rita to overwhelm his marriage.

Einstein is a kind, compassionate friend, whose understanding stretches convention. Mot doesn’t seem to need her in the same way she needs him, though we assume he does. Einstein reports that

A week of magical thinking has reshaped me into someone who finds augury in the black smoke.
Mot’s mental illness infuses everything with meaning. I’ve spent a week immersed in the unreal. It takes work to pull myself back into the world of simple cause and effect.

By living on the road, and on the edges of society, Mot uses perpetual movement to keep his inner voices in check. His story as a vet is desperately sad, but he is not a pathetic man.

The finely crafted narrative backdrop to Einstein’s and Mot’s friendship is Einstein’s marriage to Scotti. Scotti helps Rita, who is emotionally abusive, and Einstein helps Mot, who ultimately disappears (as he warned would happen). The marriage is a quartet of dysfunction. It’s clear this arrangement no longer works, if it ever did.

Einstein’s story of individuation propels the narrative forward. Having burned out helping others, she now acknowledges that she has subsumed herself through her almost obsessive need to be of service. Her dedication is worthy, but it makes it impossible for her to be a whole person.

Einstein makes another trip to see Mot—this time to a KOA east of Oklahoma City. Mot’s car breaks down, so Einstein brings him home with her to West Virginia, offering yet more help. Einstein is the kind of friend we would all do well to emulate. Mot’s car is left behind like road kill, but not Mot. On the drive home, Einstein reflects:

Two days of nothing to do but converse have left me without a single untold story or crackpot theory left to fill the silence. Mot, too, has grown quiet, although whether he is out of material or fretting over what to do is impossible to know. It’s Sunday. He turns the radio to NPR so we can let Garrison Keillor and Michael Feldman do the talking for us.
Mot says that he often goes months without anyone to talk to and that during those times the people on NPR are as close as he comes to having friends.

Sarah Einstein is a brave, compassionate writer, and in Mot, A Memoir, she honors a beautiful, honest friendship.

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Sandra Marchetti
Sundress Publications ($14)

by Heidi Czerwiec

The “confluence” of this debut collection of poems may refer to several things: how these poems blend the style of Elizabeth Bishop’s piercing observations to the dense dexterity of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ musical language; the ecstatic merging of words with ineffable experience; and the passionate union of the lovers featured here, an aspect that makes Sandra Marchetti’s poems transcend mere imitation.

Arranged in three sections, the collection opens with the delicious language of “Never-Ending Birds,” where Marchetti aspires to meanings beyond language by using parts of speech in unexpected ways:

Soft bulbs of morpho blue,
tight light pruned to a circuit,
the swallows feather and vector the wind.

I plume to watch, freshed in the ground;
they ring the trees as their own
sweet planets.

From here, the poems of the first section introduce the lovers as well as recurring images of transitory elements: flowers, birds, eggs, icy surfaces, deciduous trees, weather, and the play of light. The poems progress by accretion of image and sound, accumulating appositive phrases and ambiguously placed modifiers so that meanings are amplified exponentially, as in these stanzas of “Storm Dialogue”:

Storms turn on their stomachs and gain on us.
Cloud decks smoke the windows. Beating cold.

Rain comes in shifts and pisses. Moving west
is the gesture; the skies shave the city gray.

The second section begins with “The East Highlands,” a poem about breaking new ground, and while many of Marchetti’s motifs recur here, the play of light on surfaces takes on added urgency in this section. Words like “glaze,” “slick,” “glint,” “lumen” or “luminescence,” “flash,” and “gleam” persist, teasingly offering insight, as in “Saints”:

They say
a glass with water
is the very hardest thing

to paint, the light
reflecting, a globe suspended
in wet wonder.

But this “wonder” may be glimpsed equally in the shine of the Northern Lights or in the post-coital slick of a lover’s body.

The third part begins curiously with a poem titled “The Waters of Separation,” where “we wait riven.” In many of the poems of this section, “Everywhere is sharp edges / even outside rooms”; images of what’s cut away, split, or pruned back abound. In “Orange Bouquet,” Marchetti describes cleaning a cauliflower:

Without a knife, each flower
clicks clean from the stem

as you said it would,
in a backward crack,

a snap of the head.

But it’s this pruning of the self that allows the possibility of union:

By night
my body disconnects,

from joints I wash toward confluence,
dissolved in a room of night

and this leads to the epiphany of “Pastoral”: “This is why I go out, / I think; it is something to recover from.” While the poet yearns for imaginative transcendence, she is equally drawn to the physical world. Firmly in the Metaphysical tradition, Confluence reminds us that the sensory and the spiritual are one.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015