Mario Bellatin
Edited by Daniel Parra
Translated by Kolin Jordan
7Vientos ($19.95)

by Greg Baldino and Adrian Nelson

In the classic fuzzy logic problem, a boat undergoes a series of repairs, replacing each plank of wood one at a time until the entire boat is made of new wood. The question is asked if it is still the same boat, and if not, at what point during the repairs did it become a new one? Mario Bellatin's two novellas, collected in a flip-book edition with the original Spanish and a new English translation, address a similar question of loss and identity: How do we change in the face of loss?

The narrative in Flowers is divided into a series of linked vignettes, each named after a different flower. Haunting the stories is the drug thalidomide, an immunomodulatory drug once prescribed for morning sickness, which resulted in a generation of babies born with missing or deformed limbs. Among the recurring characters is a writer (never named, though implied at times to be an analogue of Bellatin) with a prosthetic leg decorated with jewels. Elsewhere in the wandering fragmented narrative are the troubled affairs of the “Autumn Lover,” a person who is attracted to elderly people (and dresses as one); the work of Dr. Olaf Zumfelde and his assistant Henriette Wolf, which seeks to compensate victims of the drug; the mosque that the author frequents and the dervishes therein; and the brief glimpses of others struggling to navigate a world where their sexuality, their religion, or their disability separates them in solitude. Each of these pieces of interrelated flash fiction is written in a precise and concrete style, dream diaries transcribed into police reports. This stylistic detachment allows the reader to view the players in this modular drama objectively, from all angles; there are no victims or heroes, only humans trying to live and understand their lives.

Mishima’s Illustrated Biography acts much like the second half of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, reflecting and magnifying the ideas and themes of the stories in Flowers. In no way an actual biography of the controversial Japanese author, the story begins after Mishima had committed ritual seppuku following his personal militia’s failed attempt to stage a military coup. The author—sans head—attends a university lecture on his own work, and then proceeds to carry on with his life in the company of his disciple, Masakatsu Morita. Substantially more surreal than Flowers, here the novella takes the idea of loss of limbs as metaphor to a parodic extreme, examining what happens to a life when the drive of the soul is entirely removed. The narrative works because Mishima was a real person who did indeed lose his head; it allows us to consider his life before literally losing his head without requiring an embellished backstory.

Setting aside the desire for linear narratives, the two stories open up to re-viewing the world through the eyes of those it discards or ignores, unfolding petal by petal for them. In Spanish, Bellatin's prose contains echoes of the surrealism of the other literary greats before him—Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo—but stands alone in some of the things it touches, particularly disability and sexuality. The English translation, though competent, does not quite capture the fullness of Bellatin’s natural voice. But readers not fluent in Spanish may still catch a glimpse of the world that Bellatin allows to play out: the dream-fragments that one remembers on waking, brought to the language of reason.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

The Beatles: All These Years, Vol. 1
Mark Lewisohn
Crown Archetype ($40)

by Britt Aamodt

There has never been another band like the Beatles. There have been other phenoms: Shakespeare, Mozart, Bob Dylan. But no one ever captured the buoyancy, irreverence, ambition, and group chemistry tied to a creative big bang the way the Beatles did. Not surprisingly, the public has a special relationship to the Fab Four. Perhaps that's because many still living remember when John, Paul, George, and Pete thumped the boards at the Cavern Club, or when a rejiggered Beatles—John, Paul, George, and Ringo—conquered America on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Mark Lewisohn must have an audaciousness to rival that of his legendary subjects. When the historian announced in 2003 that he was writing a Beatles biography, there must have been a collective groan. Another Beatles book? It makes you wonder how many Beatles books it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Surely, it's been filled many times over.

But here's the thing: Lewisohn's book, Tune In, is the tell-all book every Beatles fan has been waiting for. Detailed in the extreme yet extremely readable, Tune In is the first of a proposed trilogy collectively titled All These Years. The narrative begins with a genealogy of the Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey clans—mostly Irish, mostly poor—and their beginnings in Liverpool, which would have been struck off tourist itineraries of the day as a rough, industrial backwater.

Yet it was in this smoking seaside somewhere that four boys emerged under the cloud of war: Richard Starkey, 1940; John Lennon, 1940; Paul McCartney, 1942; George Harrison, 1943. Haley's Comet did not sear the heavens to announce their arrival; wise men bearing guitars and drums did not parachute into Liverpool. But somehow these boys from the back of beyond became the musical culmination of the 20th century. As Lewisohn points out, they were both cutting-edge groundbreakers and a commercial success.

So how did they do it? Lewisohn spends 803 pages (not counting the index) detailing the Beatles' formative years, a subject that has been covered before (in the same year even, in Larry Kane's When They Were Boys), but never quite so exhaustively or entertainingly. He also wants to set the record straight, as straight as anyone who wasn't there can. He explains in the introduction:

I've wanted a history of deep-level inquiry where the information is tested accurate, and free of airbrushing, embellishment and guesswork, written with an open mind and even hands, one that unfolds lives and events in context and without hindsight, the way they occurred, and sets the Beatles fully among their contemporaries—they never existed in isolation and were always part of musical scenes with friends and rivals, young turks together in clubs and nightclubs.

What unfolds is a cast of characters worthy of a great novel. First off, there was lusty, red-haired Julia Stanley, who was impulsive enough to marry merchant seaman Alf Lennon, bear a son, then carry on with her life and romances as if marriage and motherhood were no impediment to fun. (It helped that her husband was often gone.)

Enter Aunt Mimi, Julia's captivating, iron-fisted older sister. Mimi is often cast as the domineering woman in Lennon's early life, but she’s given a balanced treatment here. After all, as her nephew's guardian, she provided the stable, book-loving environment and middle-class upbringing Julia could not. (She was also the one who famously told Lennon he would never make a living with his guitar.)

One of the magical moments of Beatles lore is the first meeting of Lennon and McCartney at Woolton's church fete. It was June 1957, a year and one month after Paul McCartney lost his mother to cancer. He stood at the lip of the stage and listened in wonder to the lead singer of the Quarry Men as he blazed through the Del-Vikings’ "Come Go with Me," a song McCartney knew but didn't think anyone else did. If that were not enough, the Teddy Boy in the red and white shirt was ad-libbing the lyrics.

A mutual friend, Ivan Vaughan, introduced the two afterwards. The moment was ordinary but for McCartney playing Eddie Cochran’s "Twenty Flight Rock" on Lennon's guitar. Already displaying the musical prowess and versatility that would be instrumental to the Beatles' success, McCartney played his way into the Quarry Men. And it was McCartney who brought George Harrison to the group.

Harrison was the son of a homemaker and a bus driver, good solid people. Hearing "Heartbreak Hotel" in 1956 was his life-changing moment; he became the kid who would rather fantasize about guitars than pay attention in class. So it was a good thing the Beatles came along, and a better thing that they were booked into the Hamburg nightclubs, which offered steady work, beer, Preludin, and sex. Hamburg, where they played night after night for hours at a stretch, was the Beatles' finishing school. They arrived amateur musicians and left seasoned professionals.

The latecomer to the group, Ringo Starr weaves in and out of the narrative, but his story, in many ways, is the most compelling. He was the only child of Elsie Starkey, abandoned by her husband and doing what she could to support a son who spent months in and out of hospitals. As the drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Starr ran into the Beatles often. They liked him. He liked them. But he didn't join the group until 1962, when he was brought in to replace Pete Best at the EMI recording sessions.

Brian Epstein, George Martin, Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid Kirchherr, and Klaus Voormann play significant roles in a history that shows that the Beatles' success was anything but inevitable. Still, once the pieces were in place—once the Nerk Twins were writing their own songs—they were on their way to becoming “the Toppermost of the Poppermost.”

Lewisohn pauses the story at the close of 1962, with the first single ("Love Me Do") in the British charts and fame knocking at the door. Sadly, readers will have to wait six years for the sequel, but if it is this dense and rich, it will be worth every second.

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W.G. Sebald
translated by Jo Catling
Random House ($26)

by E. J. Iannelli

A Place in the Country is the posthumous and inexplicably belated English translation of a series of related essays by W.G. Sebald on influential (from the author’s autobiographical perspective, at any rate) writers and artists such as Johann Peter Hebel, Eduard Mörike, Jan Peter Tripp and Robert Walser. It was first published as a collection in Sebald’s native German in 1998, three years before his death, with the title Logis in einem Landhaus—quite literally, Lodging in a Country House, a phrase it borrows from Walser’s short story, “Kleist in Thun.”

Any review of the book inevitably takes place in the shadow of the elegantly written, insightful introduction by the book’s excellent translator and editor, Jo Catling. In those two roles, Catling has a knowledge of these six essays that is perhaps as intimate and internalized as the author himself, and she begins at the most natural point of entry, by quoting the following passage from “Le promeneur solitaire,” Sebald’s piece on Walser:

Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time, the life of the Prussian writer Kleist with that of a Swiss author who claims to have worked as a clerk in a brewery in Thun, the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a window of the Herisau asylum, Walser’s long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile.

Readers familiar with Sebald’s sui generis hybridized prose, an inextricable entwining of historical fact and literary fiction (“faction”?) accompanied by enigmatic photographs and delivered in graceful, dreamlike concatenations of clauses that drift between end-of-days fatalism and pastoral reverie, will recognize in this description one of its most memorable qualities. Indeed, it’s hard to approach A Place in the Country without reading much of the commentary as Sebald on Sebald, such as the “detours and digressions of narrative” he identifies in the “linguistic montages” of Walser’s The Robber, or the “objects in which melancholy is crystallized” that he sees in the paintings of Jan Peter Tripp, or his admiration of Gottfried Keller’s “furnishing almost all his stories with a kind of treasure chest (or Schatzkästlein), in which . . . the most improbable relics coexist side by side,” with the latter naturally supplemented by loosely related, uncaptioned black-and-white photos to illustrate the idea.

But there’s more in these half-dozen essays than the reflexive. Sebald is after all a keen observer, and he spots interesting qualities in the work of these kindred creative spirits. He draws a droll comparison between Gogol and Walser as writers, maintaining that “Both of them gradually lost the ability to keep their eye on the center of the plot, losing themselves instead in the almost compulsive contemplation of strangely unreal creations appearing on the periphery of their vision, about whose previous and future fate we never learn even the slightest thing.” The “secret” of these incidental characters, he writes, “(like that of human existence as a whole) resides in their utter superfluity.” He also praises the sociopolitical prescience of a novel like Keller’s Martin Salander and, among other things, the author’s enlightened and sympathetic portrait of Jewish traders in Der Grüne Heinrich, which shows this group demonstrating “the epitome of true tolerance: the tolerance of the oppressed, barely endured minority toward those who control the vagaries of their fate.” That phrasing, incidentally, with its tone of suppressed outrage toward injustice and inhumanity, is another familiar Sebaldian trait that does not go missing altogether in these essays.

Equally satisfying are the broader generalizations distilled into an epigrammatic turn of phrase, like the idea put forward in “J’aurais voulu que ce lac eût été l’Océan—,” the pieces on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that neither this philosopher “nor those who came after him were ever able to resolve the inherent contradiction between [a] nostalgic utopia and the inexorable march of progress toward the brink of the abyss.” He seems on unusually shaky ground, however, when arguing that art, unlike photography, “depends on polyvalence, resonance, obfuscation, and illumination—in short, the transcending of that which, according to an ineluctable law, has necessarily to be the case.” One would think that Sebald of all people would know that photography—which certainly falls under the umbrella of art—is capable of employing these devices and more to achieve that very end.

It’s worth noting that all versions of A Place in the Country are not equal. The UK version published by Hamish Hamilton is lacking in one important respect, namely, the double-page color images interspersed throughout the text. In an ideal world, these should not be two opposite facing pages but a single folded page with an unbound edge that opens outward, effectively giving the reader a three-page spread (two of a full-sized image, one of text) at a single glance. The American version, overseen by Random House’s David Ebershoff, follows the much more sensible layout of the German original, allowing the reader to imbibe Sebald’s description of, say, Keller’s partially erased Ideal Landscape with Trees while viewing it at the same time.

Formatting discrepancies aside, A Place in the Country is a welcome addition to the near-exhaustive English body of Sebald’s work. The collection offers more than enough to savor, ponder, and revisit until the appearance of Silent Catastrophes, the Anglophone counterpart to the combined essays in Beschreibung des Unglücks and Unheimliche Heimat, rumored to be slated for 2015.

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James Robertson
Other Press ($15.95)

by Catherine Rockwood

James Robertson is a Scottish author specializing in carefully researched, big-concept novels that address what’s known, mostly within the UK, as the Question of Scotland. That being: what is to be done about a “country that is not fully a country, a nation that does not quite believe itself to be a nation”? His readership has been largely British until now, but the world is coming to him and his set of concerns this year, because the issue that provokes and confounds Robertson as an author—what is to be done about Scotland?—has captured global interest due to the recent referendum on his nation’s independence.

Unfortunately, Robertson’s latest and fifth novel The Professor of Truth, which seems pitched to a crossover market, is a dicey place for international readers to start their travels with this writer. If you’d like to do some advance thinking-via-fiction about how the referendum might go and what it might mean, pick up an early James Robertson novel like The Fanatic (2001) or Joseph Knight (2003). You’ll have to read some Scots, but you can do it: just dive in, and keep the free online Dictionary of the Scots Language at hand (www.dsl.ac.uk). The books are worth the effort, works of historical fiction that are deeply invested in making past events felt in the present tense, a thing which Robertson pulls off with subtlety.

Despite its failings, The Professor of Truth deserves some focused attention due to an entirely different strain of recent geopolitics. The book is a fictionalized, revisionist account of the aftermath of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which rained its awful freight directly into a small town in the Scottish Borders. Comparisons with the recent downing of MH-17 are inevitable, and the novel therefore stands as a sort of test case for writing about the moral, legal, and emotional consequences of the violent destruction of civilian aircraft.

In a nutshell: hard to do well. Robertson’s novel is hugely influenced by the real-life truth-finding campaign conducted by the English doctor Jim Swire, who lost his 23-year-old daughter Flora in the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103. Swire has for many years been a vocal dissenter from the official legal verdict in the Lockerbie bombing, which rests, at present, with one party held guilty: the now-deceased Libyan citizen Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi. The Professor of Truth’s main character, Alan Tealing, is certainly based on Swire himself, though distancing efforts have been made. Tealing, for instance, is an English professor and not a doctor of medicine like Swire; Tealing loses his wife and young daughter in the plane crash, not a beloved adult child. But these are too-thin covers for a too-narrow authorial purpose.

Over the course of the novel, Tealing goes haring off to Australia in search of new evidence that could initiate a retrial for “Khalil Khazar,” a fictional version of Al-Megrahi. He is provoked to do so by a visit from Ted Nilsen, a terminally ill American intelligence agent who confirms Tealing’s suspicion that dubious international politicking led to the selection of Khazar as a scapegoat, and that the real bombers have not been caught. This set of characters, ideas, and events constitutes an attempt at translating the terms of Jim Swire’s Lockerbie truth-finding campaign into a fictional setting.

Robertson tries very hard to work all the levers that might lead us to accept his polemical plotline as an un-dogmatic work of imagination. The book’s presentation of Tealing as an isolated crusader for justice, operating in an environment of international espionage, conspiracy and paranoia, provides links with a range of famous texts and authors, and makes a case for Robertson’s novel as the hybrid descendent of works like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, Conrad’s Secret Agent, and the Scottish spy-fiction of John Buchan. All of the above are name-checked or alluded to in the course of the book. But the focused activism of the work baffles its wider novelistic ambition. Robertson manages throughout to keep track of all content relating to the confusions and permutations of the legal case against Khalil Khazar, but his control of the novel’s literary referents and sources is erratic in the extreme.

Taking one example among many: when Tealing, in Australia, questions his own motivations for chasing down the witness whose testimony sent Khalil Khazar to prison, and begins to wonder why he’s still grinding along at the Case and whether it’s worth going on at all, we get this:

. . . What is it, to face death? What does it mean? Is it a braver thing to do than to face life? Is there even a difference? If you are not afraid, then to be brave is nothing. To be afraid and go forward, to meet life or death shaking but to go anyway . . . that surely is the mark of bravery. To be a coward and yet still to act, that is the thing.

It’s Hamlet, or bits of Hamlet: a flattened prose version of “To be or not to be.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with Robertson making the reference because Tealing, like Hamlet, is an isolated, possibly deranged lone wolf pursuing impossible justice. The parallel is plausible. What’s wrong is Robertson’s apparent amnesia about the fact that Tealing is supposed to be an English professor, someone who would almost certainly display awareness about the Shakespearean source of his thoughts. The fact that he doesn’t causes the book to flounder.

Robertson ‘s version of Hamlet negates Tealing’s internal consistency and erases most of the original Shakespearean phrasings, retaining only an altered husk of their content. The result is something very close to plagiarism, a marker of self-doubt. In the case of The Professor of Truth, Robertson was right to doubt. The book is flawed; it is also, though the world has cause to wish otherwise, timely.

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Miyuki Miyabe
translated by Daniel Huddleston
Haikasoru/VIZ Media ($14.99)

by Douglas Luman

Although several of Miyuki Miyabe’s books have been translated into English, American readers may be most familiar with the 2007 translation of her fantasy novel Brave Story, her novelization of the Ico video game series narrative, or the 1999 novel All She Was Worth. A popular writer in Japan, Miyabe’s credentials in the mystery and historical fiction genres are unquestioned. It only follows that the latest translation from her oeuvre, Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo (originally published in Japan in 2000), is a meeting of many of Miyabe’s sensibilities. Heavily steeped in Japanese cultural tradition and folktale, the nine-story collection subtly asserts her skill as a storyteller. It exists at the crossroads of thriller and historical fiction, spanning a wide range of time during the Edo period of Japanese history, in which a rising mercantile class enjoyed success in tandem with the forces of urbanization sweeping Japan between the 17th and 19th centuries.

With this historical backdrop, Miyabe’s stories tell of the pattern that reflects the swelling wave of younger workers coming to cities to apprentice themselves to shops and craftsmen in order to begin to make a living, in most cases inheriting traditions that displace their personal histories. Of the nine protagonists, all but two are engaged in apprenticeships, the two exceptions being a kind of detective (“thief-taker”) and the wife of a successful stationery shop proprietor. All nine of the tales are closely related to some kind of mercantile outlet, providing an oblique commentary on the development and impact of contemporary economic forces. Most of the stories revolve around the beginning of each character’s tenure in their given roles, and Miyabe pursues questions of how the characters’ origins and pasts (personal “ghosts”) intersect with, affect, and inform their lives.

Advancing the form of the folktale, the collection succeeds in creating representative cultural symbols that signify more than the sum of their parts. Much like the “ghosts” that appear within, nothing is merely what it seems. Though each story takes on relatively the same form, Miyabe draws on a variety of narrative perspectives that range the gamut of storytelling voices, primarily choosing third-person or omniscient narrators whose minimal style endows the text with a strong, forward-moving pace. As the protagonist of “The Oni of the ‘Adachi’ House” claims about the workers at her husband’s stationery store, Miyabe’s characters are like “oars that row a business along, but under no circumstances take the helm . . . an oar just continues to steadily row.” There is little in the way of digression or distraction, making every word, choice, and character feel highly crafted and conscious. Often, the key to simplicity is a high degree of control over material, and Apparitions is a fine example of craft.

However, to say that the book is simply told is not to say that the narrative is without substance. Certainly, Miyabe’s prose exhibits the smooth and deliberate hand of classical storytelling but it is, overall, conscious, knowledgeable, and judicious in providing context and historical texture while avoiding moralism. The straightforward style is reminiscent of oral tradition; Miyabe’s original tales feel as if they are family heirlooms, yarns that the narrator has a clear purpose in telling. In the same way that Miyabe’s ghosts appear in certain forms or only to certain characters, the intentions or messages hidden therein are layered to support intense or casual reading tastes.

When Miyabe does flavor the text with literary style, it comes in the form of longer passages of description exploring the world around her characters, often establishing their psychological state. Landscapes are used fantastically as personas on their own. Miyabe complements her ability to establish physical geography with other passages that invoke the loneliness that plagues characters in their new lives—rivers are “leaden, gloomy, and stagnant,” for example, and other environmental features appear and recur as symbols when needed.

While characters may exhibit the typical flatness that is a folktale trademark, Miyabe’s focus on the environment around them flavors their actions and motivations, providing a surprising and subtle dimension to a time-tested formulaic style. Additionally, the use of rich historical detail, as noted in the book’s introduction, inspires nostalgia from those who have seen the regions she invokes or, among those unfamiliar with the terrain, similar enough memories that lend the stories a factual air; readers will feel as if they have been to these places before, lending accessibility to the text that crosses cultural divide. The translation by Daniel Huddleston further opens the book to Western audiences, focusing on the tangible character aspects of the narratives rather than dwelling too much on the historical facts that pepper the text. It also maintains the terse, forward momentum that the short construction of Miyabe’s sentences provides. Some may find the prose somewhat dry, but the expert pace of the stories overcomes this.

Viz Media may be more widely known for the animated and visual properties that it brings stateside, but the launch of its Haikasoru publishing line in 2009 has resulted in importing several excellent books that bring contemporary prose from Japan overseas. Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo is another entry in the impressive collection that the imprint has assembled, including Miyabe’s own Batchelder Award-winning Brave Story. While somewhat a departure from previous releases, Miyabe’s Apparitions is a gateway to many of the other offerings offered by the publisher under the mantra of “Space opera. Dark fantasy. Hard Science.” It should have no trouble finding a crossover audience that will enjoy this title and become interested in Miyabe’s other books.

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by Alexander Dickow

On November 18, 1978, in a gated religious settlement in Guyana, 918 people were poisoned to death at the behest of the preacher Jim Jones. The notorious cyanide poisoning became known as the Jonestown Massacre. Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise (Harper, $25.99) tells the story of impending disaster at Jonestown from the perspective of Joyce and her daughter Trina. Joyce begins to doubt and resist Jones’ indoctrination, and inevitable difficulties arise for her and her daughter within the Jonestown community. Presiding over the community is the caged gorilla Adam, who accompanies Jones in his grotesque and theatrical sermon-performances. The reader enters D’Aguiar’s novel through Adam’s eyes.

Fred D’Aguiar, a novelist and poet of British-Guyanese origin, has already written a collection of poetry surrounding the Jonestown Massacre, Bill of Rights (1998), a finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize. But the event demanded renewed attention by way of narrative form. In Children of Paradise, D’Aguiar plunges the reader into the Guyanese landscape, whose lush, profuse life contrasts starkly with the oppressive, totalitarian atmosphere of fear and coercion in Jonestown.

As the following interview demonstrates, D’Aguiar continually returns to sites of collective trauma, exploring the possibilities of art to commemorate and understand History’s wounds. By giving histories to forgotten subjects—a slave in Feeding the Ghosts (1997), for instance—fiction restores a human face to men and women whose faces History and power have suppressed and erased. Even in journalism, D’Aguiar claims, the limits of mere facts make recourse to the imagination a vital part of writing. But the necessity of imagination is proportional to the writer’s responsibility in the face of History.

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Alexander Dickow: Some people do very formal interviews where they have a list of questions, but I thought we’d just sort of converse naturally. I do have a couple of questions that are at the top of the priority list, as it were. The first is, have you read Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man?

Fred D’Aguiar: No!

AD: Oh, it’s a wonderful book, it’s very strange and a lot of English Department-types over the years have hated it, so it’s a controversial novel in some ways. It has people telling stories throughout, and they keep getting bogged down in epistemological questions about how much truth there is to the story—until the Cosmopolitan, a character, comes along and says, “I’m going to tell you a fiction,” and they can no longer get bogged down in these epistemological questions. So my take on this novel, and it’s only one of many interpretations, is that one of the saving graces of fiction is that it is detached from the real, and thus enables us to talk about moral issues, since we don’t have the epistemological questions anymore. So this leads me to my second question, which is: where is Jonestown as far as your research is concerned, and as far the writing process is concerned?

FDA: Right, well, typical translator, you cut to the chase! Thanks Alexander—that is, it’s good to be doing this and to talk about the book on a serious level, and that’s a serious comparison to start with, because the Melville of Benito Cereno is the one I know, and of course Moby-Dick, but in Benito Cereno he raises similar questions about credulity as asserted by a factual occurrence and its report.

So Jonestown. As you know, history has always trumped story, even though story is part of the spelling of the word history, because people set so much store by facts, and I totally understand why they do. I view facts as always coming to an end at some point, if you follow one to its logical conclusion. Reading journalism, I always come to a point where I feel this desire for the facts to give way to invention. It’s always that for me. It may be the habit of writing poetry, reading poetry, where you’re always invited to take a small sliver of fact and build on it a kind of edifice. It’s a little bit of an iceberg, where the stuff that’s on the surface and factually given to you requires a conjectural building that’s submerged and out of sight, but you’d better be aware of it because it’s huge. And I feel that about fiction, I feel the fiction part is the submerged bit . . . the bit where you begin to think and flesh out the lives that have fallen, once you’ve got the numbers right and who did the slaying and so forth, there’s this huge chasm of wanting to know about the lives, the impulses, what got them ticking before it was suddenly curtailed.

That, I think, is asking a bigger question beyond what the facts, a question that has to do with invention and imagination, and how they’re embedded in memory and recall. And this is true for holocaust studies, for slave narratives . . . I’ve always said, “Hey, remember the dismembered.” But because their names have been elided, they were hurriedly disposed of, mass graves and so forth, you know that you have to walk back in there with such care. You don’t have the usual journalistic tools, and it’s a scary responsibility—this idea that suddenly memory isn’t simply making things up, it literally is a re-member-ance and a reassembly of souls lost—it’s as big as that and I’m not scared to say that, I’m not embarrassed to make that claim for fiction.

AD: That covers a lot of ground, and I think we’ll come back to that question in other ways later on. Let’s talk now about your narrative choice to make the preacher a very unambiguous evil character. One option in a narrative like this is to see through the eyes of someone who’s taken with such a character, but instead we have Joyce, who has a certain amount of distance and mistrust and a critical sense where other members of the commune clearly don’t have the same skepticism. Did you consider portraying this preacher character through the perspective of someone who found the preacher seductive, and decided not to for one reason or another?

FDA: Yep. That’s a good question about time and the measurement of time in fiction. But it’s odd to think of when Jonestown began. It appeared to start when Jones was in Indiana in his late teens. He stood on street corners and preached to anybody who would listen, and he had the Bible as his text; he was really inspirational, and he leaned on the Pentecostal tradition of invention steeped in breath and utterance: if you can speak well and get someone’s attention and hold it, if you can control how you breathe in and breathe out, then utterance becomes ideology and it ensnares the listener. I thought, Jeez, if that’s the beginning, Jones’s early beginnings, that’s gonna take a thousand pages of fiction because from Indiana he goes to California, from California (after a number of years) he goes to Guyana, and I knew I couldn’t write a big book like that, linear, I’m not cut out for a 1000-page book, and I’m tired (laughs).

And then I thought, what is the real penalty of Jonestown? For me the real test for Jones was when he landed in Guyana, with his preacher ability polished and intact. He was free to either set up a real, ideal commune and say “let freedom reign” as it were, or go really, really . . . like Heart of Darkness’s Kurtz: “the horror, the horror.” Heart of Darkness is a shadow text in my book, I’m kind of giving it away by saying that, but I was really interested in Kurtz. Conrad’s is a weird novel, too, because someone tells you a story within which the principal narrator functions by taking over the telling of the tale, and the person who introduces it is no longer the person responsible for telling the story. The classic structure, that the further upriver you go, the more you go into the subconscious, and the more civilization falls away fitted with the beginnings of Freudian thinking. Conrad didn’t get it quite right in that he had black people become stick figures, as Achebe rightly pointed out, but what was great about the book was that it correctly portrayed the subconscious, the fearless throwing up of the hands with that “the horror,” said twice, once for shock and the second time for insight gained through unspeakable pain. Civilization was no longer going able to remain intact; things truly fell apart (as Yeats would later chant). That disintegration became a formal, narrative question for Conrad. I thought, what would it have been like for Jones to land in the middle of paradise, with all his authority, and then behave without ever being instructed by his wise jungle environment, this beautiful Edenic place, the lungs of the globe as the Amazon is known—Jones simply put up a barbed-wire fence around his total institution, and that’s how he ruled. I felt that moment of arrival in Guyana’s interior was the point of most interest for me, when Jones began to unravel. He had this kind of “the horror, the horror” moment in a sustained way, as if his time in the jungle were elastic, made so by his drugged mind and dulled affect and unpredictable temperament.

I wanted to start the book in the middle of the action (en media res!) and move toward some backstory to show that at some point important people with common sense paid attention to him, and he betrayed that common sense and trust. Joyce, for example, who loved him at some point, had some kind of implied sexual relationship with him, was at the center of his confidential circle, and then was expelled from it and then re-invited back in, roughed up a little bit, and so we know that something went terribly wrong with this guy that would make somebody the reader trusts in the story to no longer believe in Jones. For me the jumping off point was right in the middle of what Seamus Heaney called “the pool of the moment,” where you kind of dive right into the deep end of things as your starting point. You’re not going to wade in from the shore and walk gradually. I think, there’s a notion from Philip Larkin, the British poet, which I’ve repeated to students, about there being two types of poems: the first is the kind you begin gradually, as if you’d arrived at the airport and checked in, and boarded the airplane, fastened your seatbelt, and so the plane takes off and builds to the height that you want the poem to get to—typical narrative. The second kind of poem is where you open the title or first line at 35,000 feet. I realized I really like the 35,000 feet poem; I’m not into the gradual seduction of linear narrative anymore, I think it simplifies the lateral and quantum complexity of thinking, the way in which we work emotionally, intuitively and so forth.

So I began to feel that I should import that complexity into a narrative form, the novel, where the line’s at the margin, and you’re forced to read like that, but actually what you’re thinking and feeling is lateral, quantum, intuitive. I like novels and stories that do that: Wilson Harris (Palace of the Peacock), B.S. Johnson (House Mother Normal), the Virginia Woolf of To the Lighthouse, for instance.

For me, the main thing with Jones (introduced by dropping him in the jungle, not giving him a linear build-up from start to finish that would make his character credible), was to begin with the incredible aspect of his character, because what would follow next would be even more devastating than his psychological disintegration. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. Even though you saw him being outlandish, it still didn’t make sense that he would take out a whole community. So the in-depth approach to his psychological state became a writing imperative for me. Readers already have all the facts of the story, but I still try and surprise them. I love novels that tell you on page one that everybody in this story’s going to be dead by page 500. Once you know that, the question for the reader becomes, what else is there to be discovered? In the novels I like reading, the “what else” is addressing Being, Consciousness—they’re more than slightly existentialist, but they include Freud, and some materialist obsessions as well, and as you know, we can’t go back after Marx and Freud. The novel since Freud has been by and large concerned with an interior landscape that takes on the world of politics but inhales it, interiorizes it, as a way of refracting it back to society. It’s in part an homage to Joyce’s corruption of that mirror and lamp binary, with the mirror as highly polished (which Joyce said wasn’t highly polished, Joyce said his mirror was cracked and dirty). Joyce admits a kind of interiority—“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” in that opening passage was looking into a mirror, shaving, and that was meant to be how we should read his novel as he walks through his day in Ulysses.

AD: In relation to the Heart of Darkness connection, I think where that comes through the strongest is in the moments with Ryan in the forest, which seems to be an underside to the novel we only catch glimpses of as the story progresses. I didn’t think of Heart of Darkness at the time, but now that you mention it, it’s clear. I did wonder about another reference that you might comment on, and that is to Les Enfants du paradis, the 1945 film by Marcel Carné. Is that an accident?

FDA: Nothing is an accident in fiction! As you know, the novel is a hoover, a vacuum clearer which pulls everything into it. Children of Paradise, and I’ve said this elsewhere, is my second most favorite movie in the world ever. I’ve seen it every year like one would watch It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol towards the end of the year.

One reason I like the Carné is that it does something that fiction, novels, and films haven’t done much since. In a lot of art, the evasive tactics are visible—what do you do with an imagination that’s apparently fenced in by a totalitarian regime, as was the Occupation of France by the Nazis? Secondly, all the things he does with the play and the theater. They say that all the world’s a stage, and it’s impressive for him to be so Shakespearean in his questions, but using film to do that kept the link between stage, audience and location in a way that insisted on the links between art and life. He was forcing us to think about plays, about actors walking the boards, about the audience. The richness of it, the language, the wit, the doubling and the texturing of the movie, with little tiny handkerchiefs and flowers as motifs and so language driven! It remains to this day one of the most complex cinematic palettes I’ve seen. It gives me chills every time I watch it. I’m still surprised by something in the corner—oh, there goes that acrobat, I saw him earlier. I think it’s one of those things that speaks to all the genres, too—it seems to be cross-genre, multi-genre in a weird kind of way, because of all the self-referentiality, the theater, seeing shadows of what was clearly a set being constructed, hearing some of the tricks about how they got perspective in there and depth of field . . . oh man! When I go back to it, it’s a template for me for all kinds of things that have happened in cinema before and since, and then the limitation of what the cinema has become in our day, in terms of the big things that are made. We’ve lost ground in terms of the art form growing alongside a growing and sophisticated audience. Instead, there has been a dumbing down.

For my novel, I made sure I didn’t put the article in there: it’s not THE Children of Paradise. I wanted people to think of paradise in terms of real children, and then of paradise denied, because the childhood that we may associate with those young bodies is denied. So that was my thing, but the film is always in my head.

AD: I’m also a Carné fan, so I was completely plugged in to what you were saying, but what I thought of was the totalitarian feel of this commune. It’s a little allegory of a totalitarian regime, with all the abuses of power. And I thought that felt like a connection to the film, which is supposed to be an allegory of France under the Occupation. It seems to me also that this is a novel about the consolatory power of fiction. It doesn’t provide any tidy answers, but it asks whether fiction can recuperate these lost lives in a way that’s effective in some way.

FDA: Absolutely.

AD: Could you comment a little bit on that, and how you arrived at your particular ending as well? I felt that the ending was very finely crafted, I was quite impressed.

FDA: Thanks for mentioning the craft element, because out of that perspiration and labor I hoped to orchestrate certain effects to do exactly with that idea of trauma. And it comes from trauma theory too; if you revisit a site that’s been vandalized, what is the purpose to walk over where bodies were laid low? Why breathe life into them once more as an historical and fictive undertaking long after the event? What’s the point? In the end of the novel, there’s a point where as narrator I hold a charge and responsibility of the story, and Trina comes along and takes it out of my hand. Because at that point, the history of her outcome is so clear in our heads with everything that came before that there’s an inevitable end that I would have had to walk into, which is the queuing in front of the vat in the story, and taking the cyanide, Kool-Aid, and valium mix. I didn’t want to go there, and I was very glad to have a child say, “my interior life, which is mine, not my mother’s, not Jones’s, is not going to capitulate to this inevitable history.” And if I don’t, what use is it to a reader removed from that event by thirty-five years? It’s not so much about those who died and the kind of slippage and the surrealism of avoiding that, nor is it written solely to suggest possibilities that were curtailed for everyone who fell, it’s about my place as remembering the occurrence of the event and returning years later to a history that matters because I’m invested in the Guyanese and American landscapes.

One question I ask is, what’s the point of History as instruction for the present? So it’s a bit more than Faulkner’s “the past is never past,” it’s about its ever-present quality sure, but also about its insistence as being a site for instruction—not cure—provocation more than cure. You’re provoked into thought; there’s no guarantee you’ll get something out of it, you’ll feel something, but once you feel, there is an intelligence informing that emotional stirring that hopefully will take you to some place on behalf of those who didn’t have a chance to go there, that will help that history, and not make it passive, but something that absolutely influences anyone who’s prepared to engage with it in ways that are a little bit hurtful, risky, dangerous, but enriching, absolutely enriching as narrative, enriching as an emotional cluster of things to do with ideas that you want to bury in detail and not have up front, allow them to surface in the reader’s body, once you plant them there in the emotional reality.

My concern was that I had so many thoughts about what happens to time if you reimagine it, if you translate from an historical event to an emotional reality, as a lot of fiction is trying to do—how do you enshrine in those details the ideas you take and pirate from that historical moment to reconstruct as an emotional construct? There’s a risk involved, but imagination is a fantastical, limbic, chthonic tool that enables repeated returns to dangerous places. I’ve talked to young people hearing about slavery who are black; they can’t believe that this is a part of their history, they get enraged, and it’s just like grief, it’s exactly like grief! The holocaust studies and the trauma theories I’ve followed to do with Nazi camps, it’s exactly the same weight. You look back with astonishment and hurt; all the stages of grief are built in. “It mustn’t happen again” is usually one of the lessons, “How do I stop it, how do I make sure everyone knows?” And if the historian is working, the geologist is working with landscape and so forth, what is the fiction writer going to do but build a landscape for those who didn’t have their names registered? Because in Oakland, CA, there’s a mass grave for about two-thirds of Jonestown, people are laid to rest there, many of the kids are in double coffins because they were not claimed, not identified. What an erasure! And it’s chilling, it’s horrific, it makes the idea of writing fiction really compelling; if you go there, you better have a good reason for going back into trauma, and you’d better make sure your art is up to scratch. So by the time I got to the end the responsibility was huge for me, it was hurtful for me. I’d done so much historical research, listened to so many tapes of Jones; if I heard another tape I was going to break, because I couldn’t believe his continuous indoctrination of them and how crude it was, and how unrelenting and how much it resembled a total institution.

Erving Goffman wrote a book called Asylums, which talks about how they take you and drop you in a space, and it’s so totally enrapturing for you that when they release you, you’re remade in the image of the institution, and it resembles prisons, it resembles concentration camps, what they try to do, and they give you a uniform, feed you when they say, make your diet small, tell you you’re small, you know, they reconstruct you, and then what they try to take away from you is this humanity that you’ve got to really fight to keep alive, to remember something—there’s a book I’m reading right now by Otto Dov Kulka called Memory and Imagination about what it was like leaving the concentration camp Birkenau at age eight. It’s hard to read, really painful. He called it Memory and Imagination, he didn’t say History. He was really pushing History away for a reason, and that reason appeared to be that he was relying on a reconstruction of it in his own terms, and wanted to enshrine in there an emotional integrity that belonged to him. Not to deny the historical truth of it, but to say, “When I reconstruct it, it means this to me, and it’s my whole nervous system extracted and laid bare in language.” It’s a wonderful book and it reminded me of slave narratives, thinking about slavery, and the recuperation of a loss, and then the individual body, giving it value once more, not as a piece thrown away, but as an individual, hard to quantify, you can’t get their dimensions by walking around them, because they have a depth that you can never quite sound out once you credit them with a story. And that’s also from being a poet. I began as a poet so I’m always thinking, “Corrupt the narrative, circle, go downwards, don’t go forwards too much!” Because I do think that’s how the truths are, they’re soundings. Heaney called it soundings when you throw out something as surveyors do and it goes, waiting, and surprised by the long wait and so thinking, oh my goodness, that thrown thing has not landed as yet, nothing’s come back, can’t be! You’re on psychological terrain in that gesture of the flung thing that never lands on solid ground, that keeps going, that’s the kind of depth the novel plumbs.

I also need to say a bit more about Wilson Harris, born 1921. Wilson Harris is a Guyanese writer and a surveyor who went into the interior of Guyana as a young man surveying in his early 1920s, and was committed to writing mythical realist type things. When he tried to measure the rivers and the trees and what surrounded him in Guyana’s interior, the Amazonian interior, it destroyed all of his notions of linear narrative, because when he took five steps and sounded a river out, it would say forty feet. Five more steps, he would hit a rock escarpment, that took it down to eighty or 120 feet, but it was such a sudden drop and such a dramatic difference from the last sounding, he was thinking, what does that rock strata look like? And for him it was like a mountain upended, he was trying to find ways to talk about it because it was so dramatic. And then he talks also about walking into weather from sunshine into rain in a few steps and vice versa, that the forest would have this little shower going on just over there, shhhhh, and he’d watch it thinking, it’s raining, right there. And you’d walk right into it and see the way in which the weather was already being remade to once again move along a few feet—you get a real sense of it as an ecosystem by watching it, walking into rain, walking out of it, being wet by mist, dried by the sun, immersed in it all. I think he just felt the realist sentence could no longer serve his imagination, because his geographical reality had made exterior something he intuitively suspected as a writer: it wasn’t going to be a linear progression, hitting the margins and making sure you carry on that walk; it would have to be lateral, and it would have to be quantum.

AD: One of the ways the novel functions is this tension between the Guyanese landscape on the one hand, which is sort of everywhere, and then the narrative movement on the other. So in your terms, the landscape is working downward, as it were, and the narrative moves forward?

FDA: Yep, there’s this idea that landscape is not a passive backdrop, it isn’t like you’re on a set where they’ve constructed the frame in front of which the actor is projected to you. That’s the most common view of landscape as passively set up. When it’s active, it becomes a character in the novel. This is especially true of the Ryan sections, which are exactly the ones you mentioned. One confession I must make: there are poems in there that I included and simply removed the line breaks; three or four instances where a kind of density breaks out, and it makes you slow down a little bit, and that’s because I took out the line breaks and hit the margin, because I thought, I can’t leave this out, it’s a poem, it can’t go in, it’s gotta be a line of prose—don’t tell anyone, Fred! (laughter)

AD: Those were probably my favorite parts, where suddenly the verbal intensity was ratcheted up a notch!

FDA: And that’s when I thought the landscape would take my prose and wring it a little bit, put it through something that would alter its specific gravity. I wanted to say, “Look, look at the landscape influencing how consciousness unfolds, or is displayed. Look at the dark that Ryan talks about, that he says will pick him up and drop him down, what does he mean by that? But you decide, reader.” In other words, he really is that landscape and conducting it through his body, and his senses. Those moments I kind of jumped up and down when I got them as poetry, and then realized, don’t take them out because poetry doesn’t work—Henry James said for every poem you put in you lose a reader, or something like that—if you want to kill your audience, write a poem, or tell them a dream. So I thought I’ve got to put in a dream, because he said it can’t work, got to have some poetry in there. But then I relented and thought, you know what? I won’t declare it up front to the reader, I’ll let the reader kind of slip into it without realizing.

AD: Right, well, and Adam of course is the perfect incarnation of this sort of strange agency that Ryan’s surroundings take on for him. Is there anything in particular you’ve wanted to talk about?

FDA: I want to say something about the spirit—about, if you don’t go to the usual sites, places where spirituality is being looked after, let’s say the Bible, as a primary text for Jones as a young man, if Jones doesn’t use it properly as he did not in the latter stages of his life, is there a secular way of re-invoking that spirit of instruction and the growing of conscience? I’m interested in imaginative ways of saying that I acknowledge that in each of us there’s some spiritual hunger that needs to be answered in various ways. And the Blacks and the poor Whites who followed Jones were trying to address that question, and he told them an answer which he betrayed. Now, if you’re writing a novel where the Bible, the most you can take out of it is a little quote from Corinthians and if that’s your only concession to the Bible and if Paul’s thesis is guiding you, because you know it a little bit, what do you say if it’s a secular vision that you’re trying to reconstruct, and talk about catastrophe and trauma? Leaning a little bit on the Bible, but not a lot, where the imagination is a place you’re going to, and that’s a contemplative act, and the cathedral is a different kind of cathedral. I got interested in that as a big secular question, once I’d set the Bible to one side, having already set up passages in there.

AD: I wondered about that, actually. I thought at first this is just going to be sort of a screed against religion, but that’s not at all what it’s about. There’s absolutely no ambiguity that the preacher guy has perverted this beyond all recognition.

FDA: Right, exactly, it wasn’t the Book’s fault, it was the messenger. He had done something bad with the message. But that still left a hunger to be filled, not so much in the dead, because they had paid a terrible price for trusting him so much; it would be for the living, in a secular space. What would that question be about the spirit and about that spiritual hunger, which is clearly in our bodies, based on the quest, repeated quest for truth(s) or some kind, various kinds? That’s why we see these failed repetitions with the Branch Davidians and so on, the small independent spaces where people think they can create an ideal on earth and address that spiritual hunger, as a daily routine. And it’s like taking Proust and infusing it with—it’s all spiritualism, it’s not mundane details, when you put all the details together, they create a ferment, which is an account for your day, which then becomes, through materiality, an account for an interior thing that’s hard to pin down.

The book has a spiritual center to it, and hopefully it will point the way back to the declaration of faith, hope, and love that fronts the book. I’m hoping that when they get to the end of the book, the last word is “love,” literally, and I had to craft that, to get to that, I had to play with/in the language some, in order to point readers back to the epigraph and forwards to the end. And also, show the lamp (no mirrors cracked or otherwise alas) in the middle of this place, that’s been ignored by Jones. That there is a shining beacon still going strong, and it’s got a half-life of maybe 6000 years is my hope for a good novel, but what do I know.

AD: The Captain seems to me to be the figure for that sort of enlightened spiritualism that doesn’t sacrifice critical thinking in the novel.

FDA: Exactly. He takes Joyce for a walk in the woods and behind that waterfall, and he asks her to listen to and into the forest. In that scene he’s trying to tune Joyce in and to a kind of geographical reality of their actual surroundings as another approach to spirituality, because she’s gone through this terrible baptism with Jones that has left her a little cynical and largely stunned by him. So for her to be once again reawakened to a sensuous life, and in that sensuality leading to a kind of knowledge and a reengagement with the spirit, the Captain would be her guide. And Adam of course would similarly embody the jungle, hinting at a kind of starting all over again, a different view of Eden if only Jones were to pay attention. So there’s a lot of riffing on things with symbolic value to a culture of reading and I shine (sort of) little torches to various edifices of our thinking and refinement and sophistication of humanist (with a sprinkle of historical materialist) thought. I didn’t want to go into it too much in the novel because those ideas are tried and tested and self-explanatory. Once you (as a reader) going into Adam’s name and you riff on his name, it takes you back to the first cause, problematic innocence versus experience and stories about beginnings, probable endings and so on.

AD: It didn’t need to be heavy-handed; Adam is enough, the name is enough.

FDA: There you go! Yep, that’s the thing with writing too, it’s all by implication that you kind of create felt alternates to ideology, but if you were to walk with ideology any more declarative than that, it tends to corrupt the narrative. That’s the funny thing about ideology (everything is and isn’t laden with it): you can almost say look, I had to shake away all the research, and all kind of alienating arguments before I could write the book. But, and then you hope that with the embodiment of characters and so forth, and their own vocabulary, that once again the ideology will surface, but with a new life-force, and a kind of breadth and freshness that those people will give it. Otherwise it becomes an argument. I think Yeats said, “Out of a quarrel with others we create propaganda; out of a quarrel with ourselves, we create poetry.” That binary isn’t exactly true—it’s more of a commitment to the self by an avid awareness of both, it’s actually the outward thing in society made inwardly contemplative; it isn’t that you have one thing out there and one thing in here, and one is propaganda and one is poetry. When you’re looking out, there is a coalition of the public and the private, and that’s what I’m interested in. What if the way you’re committed to society is so deep it’s actually a social contract, even when it’s private when you start off, even though you’re on your own seated at your desk with multiple drafts? You’re seeing communities, you’ve got terrible stories from history pasted on your wall, Germany in the Second World War, the Atlantic slave trade . . . Those are things I look to as instruction because I’m living just after those times, and watching how they’re instructing our present, watching our present make mistakes, the same mistakes, the same amnesia, almost willful, and thinking, “Come on, why can’t those crucibles (lived, urgent, and eradicating millions) be endlessly instructive?” It’s not instructive because there aren’t enough stories about it. The more stories we have about it—for each generation, in all kinds of genres—the more likely we are to get those lessons to be ever present.

Click here to purchase Children of Paradise at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Terence Hawkins
C&R Press ($19)

by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Terence Hawkins, the author of The Rage of Achilles, tackles everything from race to privacy rights in his newest book, American Neolithic. Set in a dystopian New York, American Neolithic follows Blingbling, a secretly literate Neanderthal, and Raleigh, Blingbling’s lawyer. In Hawkins’s world, Homeland Security controls the government and Americans are subjected to oppressive monitoring. With this as backdrop, Raleigh takes on the case of Blingbling, a member of a popular rap group who has been accused of killing a member of a rival gang. As Raleigh learns Blingbling’s identity and fights to keep his client’s secret, Blingbling fears for his life and for the surviving band of Neanderthals.

With their vastly different voices and backgrounds, Blingbling and Raleigh are a huge part of why American Neolithic is so good. While Blingbling’s poetic writing style resembles that of a “Neanderthal Prometheus,” Raleigh’s narrative has all the bravado, heart, and wit of Sam Spade. When things go wrong, Raleigh doesn’t get anxious, he finds solutions. He’s used to “represent[ing] the guilty—if not as charged, then generally of something much worse.” Despite Raleigh’s sharp tongue, he has a soft soul. He’s the sort of character who is deeply affected when he is “hugged by a happy child.” In a lovely passage halfway through the book, Raleigh meets a Neanderthal child and says:

[The child’s] sudden gratitude had affected me more than I would have expected. I’d managed to lead my life without any significant emotional entanglements . . . I’d been separate from the beginning . . .
The funny thing is that the smaller world I’d been so eager to escape kept me from ever becoming fully a part of the larger.

Like Raleigh, Blingbling is a memorable character. Although he can only speak in grunts, he writes like a scholar. The Neanderthal’s facility with words makes his imprisonment that much more tragic. Blingbling believes, “I had hoped to be the Neanderthal Prometheus. Instead, I am Ahab, dead already . . . ” Blingbling is fascinated with the power of language, and how the written word can preserve a species. In one of the many touching moments in the books, Blingbling remembers the day he found a Speak and Spell in a dumpster. Blingbling “nearly soil[s]” himself with joy when he realizes what the toy can do. It’s a moving scene that highlights the self-awareness of the character. Similarities between Blingbling’s story and the experiences of various oppressed “others” in America are obvious. Still Blingbling isn’t just a symbol; he’s a multi-layered, sensitively wrought character, and readers will root for him.

Terence Hawkins’s American Neolithic is a special novel; thematically rich, it also provides all the pleasures of a hard-boiled thriller. The unique premise and lovingly crafted characters will stay with you long after you’ve closed the book.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Rodrigo de Souza Leão
Translated by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler
And Other Stories ($15.95)

by Douglas Messerli

Brazilian writer Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs Are Blue is like no other book in the world. That is not to say it is entirely original; its many literary and social references, including the author’s own re-summarization of the commonplaces (if you can describe them as such) of living in a lunatic asylum, harken to other great works in this subgenre. Although the author may not have read Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or seen Anatole Litvak’s 1948 film The Snake Pit, these works, at moments, have a kinship with Souza Leão’s exuberant depiction of his life in hell.

Then again, this young author—who died at the age of 43, just as this book was published—may have known both of those works. For a man who spent so many years locked away in an asylum, his mind and body interminably altered by drugs, Souza Leão calls upon a huge body of international film, poetry, music, television, and popular events. Indeed, two major poets of the 19th century, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, regularly visit him in his cage in the little room to which he has been consigned in the favela-adjacent institution; with him are not only numerous other mad men and women, but criminals, and the elderly who have nowhere else to go. Although beautiful plants and trees surround his building, all day long his fellow prisoners cry out, bang their heads against the wall, and listen to loud television, while at night the endless music and screams of the slums washes over his troubled dreams:

Night came and along with it came the worst thing of all: the soundtrack. Our asylum was next to a favela. Rio funk played all night long and all day too. Go Lacraia, go Lacraia, go Lacraia! Go Serginho, go Serginho. Sleeping with that rubbish playing . . . blaring!

Our hero’s entire world turns different colors depending upon which drug has just been injected into his veins: Benzetacil, Haldol (blue, like the color of his stuffed dog at home), and numerous other concoctions that force the patients to hallucinate and vegetate through what they have left of their lives. Part of the problem, the author lucidly argues, is that clinics mix up their types of patients, trying to medicate them as if they were all suffering from the same problems.

It’s little wonder that in such an interruptive world, Souza Leão has created a work that is not only raw in its vocabulary, filled with descriptions of and events that refer to bodily functions—spit, vomit, urine, shit, etc.—but linguistically lurches from association to association, radically moving from passages of description to narrative events past and present, and from the external to the internal in mid-sentence. “Real” visits from his mother and father are confused with his magical camaraderie with Rimbaud and his more casual friendship with Baudelaire. A discussion of electroshock therapy quickly grows into a serious consideration of why women are not allowed to cohabit with men; this in turn brings up the subject of sex, which the narrator associates with his own loneliness and ultimate sense of nothingness. The lunatics’ performances on a karaoke machine are quickly interrupted by the appearance of agents searching for the killer of the clinic’s former locked-away criminal, Fearsome Madman, who previously killed many people but was afraid of the narrator because he sounded like his father. Some associations function as a sort of psychological undercurrent, while others seem to come out of nowhere. Readers who seek coherence and an authorially controlled narrative will certainly be frustrated in reading All Dogs Are Blue. Stylists will find the work rough going, and logicians will quickly abandon it with despair.

Yet this short fiction, in its subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle repetitions of names, events, slang, and cultural experiences, in the end makes sense in a way that those whom we might describe as sane might never perceive:

Finally they gave me some glasses. But with the glasses I could only look inside people.

And there are moments when Souza Leão and his narrator philosophize in a manner that reaches near profundity:

Violence is so fascinating, and our lives, so normal. I’m talking about a specific kind of violence. Everything can be violent. Even God.

Clearly the narrator of this sometimes maddening work is mad throughout, but he recognizes that in that madness he can at least say what he wants. And in his recognition of his own madness, our hero recognizes his own condition in a way that few us do. He is aware not only that someday he will die, but just how he might die:

I take Haldol to be under no illusions that I’ll die mad one day, somewhere dirty, without any food. It’s the way every madman ends.

Rimbaud falls in love with him, contracts AIDS, and even asks the narrator to marry him, but Souza Leão’s persona doesn’t lose sight of his own reality: the fact that he, himself, is not gay. In the end, both Rimbaud and Baudelaire disappear, only to be replaced by other hallucinations of a vast supportive society of peace-loving Todogs, who, despite the narrator’s imprisonment, grow to include millions of members, altering the reality of the planet. Aren’t all such dreamers described as mad? Even if one’s dream and the whole of one’s past ends up in the rubbish like the narrator’s blue dog, it can always be restored through the imagination, no matter how troubled and sick it has become.

All Dogs Are Blue is no book for literary purists, but is a great read for anyone who can embrace the human spirit.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014