Interviewed by Allan Vorda

Jordan Salama was born in the Bronx and raised in the New York City suburbs. His family hails from Latin America and the Middle East, providing Salama with a background of mixed Syrian, Jewish, Iraqi, and Argentinian culture. He received his BA in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, graduating in 2019. He is now an established nonfiction writer, journalist, and producer whose work appears regularly in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other publications. He also co-created The Lulus TV, which is a digital video series for children on YouTube with a companion channel, Los Lulus, for Spanish-language viewers.

Salama first traveled to Colombia for an internship after his freshman year at Princeton, which was when he became aware of the Magdalena River. For his junior paper he retraced the trade route of his Syrian-Jewish great-grandfather, who was a traveling salesman in the Andes, by exploring the mountain range from Argentina to Bolivia. During his journey down the Magdalena, Jordan learned much about the people he met and their stories. Some of these characters include: the Mohan, a mythical creature who guards the riches of the Magdalena; the hippopotamuses of Pablo Escobar; an eighty-nine-year-old jeweler who continues an ancient tradition of making silver jewelry known as filigree; and a fifty-year-old man who has dedicated his life to delivering books to children in the remote farmlands of the jungle on a burro. The culmination of these stories is Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena (Catapult, $26).

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Allan Vorda: You’re from Argentina, the home of the great Jorge Luis Borges. What was your exposure to literature growing up?

Jordan Salama: I wasn’t born in Argentina, I was born in New York, but having grandparents from Argentina and other relatives from all over the Middle East, I grew up around storytellers. I remember, as a kid, sitting beside older family members as they told me stories of our family migrations around the world, from Iraq to New York, Syria to Latin America and beyond. As a result, today I love reading literature that crosses cultures and features stories of these unique blends. Gabriel García Márquez, John Steinbeck, and Andre Aciman are a few of the writers whom I avidly read growing up and who still deeply influence me today.

AV: You covered Lionel Messi and the Argentina national soccer team during the 2016 Copa América tournament. How did you get this assignment at such a young age?

JS: This is one of my favorite stories to tell. In the summer of 2016, Argentina was to play the Copa América in the United States, and I wanted to go see as many games as I could (how could I pass up the opportunity to watch Messi, the best player in history!).

But the tickets and the travel were too expensive. I was a freshman in college at the time and had no journalism experience at all, so I applied for FIFA press credentials, and was shocked when I was accepted. Then I took those credentials to a local Spanish-language newspaper a few towns over from mine and told them, “I have this press pass and can enter all the games and press conferences, I’ll write about the tournament for free if you cover my travel to all these places.” And they said yes! That’s how I ended up in the basement of Soldier Field in Chicago one evening, after Argentina vs. Panama, and got to ask Messi (and Mascherano and others) some questions. Right next to me were commentators and crews from TyC Sports, the Argentine broadcaster I’d watched all throughout my childhood, and ESPN and FOX and others. It was incredible.

AV: What was the genesis of your journey to travel the entire thousand-mile length of the Magdalena River in Colombia?

JS: A coincidence, really. The same summer that I spent time with Messi and co. during the Copa América (which, for Argentina, ended in tragic defeat in the final), I had the opportunity to travel to Colombia for the first time. I spent three weeks there in August of 2016, working as an informal “intern” on a grant for an international wildlife conservation organization. I was based out of their office in Cali, but got to travel throughout the country. I visited communities in the rural northern wetlands, the Pacific coast, the jungle-clad Darien Gap. And I learned that Colombia was a tremendously diverse country (in both people and landscapes). It’s also very misunderstood by the world, known not mainly for its beauty, but for its conflict. Right away I knew I wanted to write about it in a longer form. So when it came time, a few years later, for me to choose a subject for my senior thesis in school, I remembered that many people in Colombia had mentioned the storied Magdalena River as a great way to understand a very misunderstood place. I decided to go back.

AV: You mention Ernesto “Che” Guevara as a “young man in his twenties who set off wide-eyed on an anxious journey that would give him a new lens with which to view the world.” As a nineteen-year-old Princeton freshman making a similar journey, did you feel any kinship with Che Guevara? Did your journey open a new lens for you as well?

JS: I’m not sure if “kinship” is the right word. Of course, Che Guevara is now a very charged figure. When I reference him in the book, I’m speaking more about his famous motorcycle journey through South America while he was still a medical student (studying in the same class as my grandfather, in fact, at the University of Buenos Aires). Reading his journals and watching the excellent film that was since made retracing his trip, I can’t help but see a person who, regardless of what you think of him now, was deeply impacted by the kinds of injustices he observed across the American continent. I think journeys like these have an important power to illuminate, to make connections between seemingly disparate people and cultures and places, and making those connections so that they might inspire change is one of the main purposes of this book and much of my work.

AV: The old woman in Ladrilleros said, “To understand the river is to understand the country.” Did you find this to be true and to what extent?

JS: Colombia’s global reputation has greatly suffered because of its long-running armed conflict. When many people in the United States think about Colombia, they think of narco traffickers and guerrillas and paramilitaries. But traveling the Magdalena, I got a glimpse of a very different country, of everyday life—flying kites, fishing, playing soccer, singing—and its people, centering local voices. The river cuts a cross-section through the heart of Colombia, many nations within one nation, and gives a glimpse into the lives of the many kinds of people who live there. There are Indigenous Colombians and Afro-Colombians and Arab Colombians and more. In many ways, the fate of these communities has mirrored that of the river itself. As someone who didn’t know very much about Colombia prior to these journeys, the river was a great connecting thread through disparate peoples and cultures and a great vehicle for learning. I hope the same goes for my readers.

AV: You write about the FARC guerillas and “’La Violencia,’ “a vicious civil war fought in the countryside between liberals and conservatives, claimed more than two hundred thousand lives between 1948 and 1958.” Were you concerned for your safety even though a peace agreement had been signed a few years before you went to Colombia?

JS: People were definitely concerned for me, but I took steps before I left to ensure that everywhere I went I would be received by someone I trusted, who would then show me around. Once I was in Colombia, I hardly ever felt that I was in danger—erratic bus and boat drivers were the only exceptions! Sadly, violence is still pervasive in the Colombian countryside. But it rarely affects outsiders anymore.

AV: What were your impressions and thoughts of the statues of La Gaitana and its lost civilization?

JS: They were stunning vestiges of the past, immortalized in stone. They are a testament to Colombia’s rich pre-Hispanic heritage, as well as the country’s very important and populous present-day Indigenous groups (whose land and other human rights are threatened on a daily basis).

AV: It must have been a shock to hear that your guide to La Gaitana, Luis Manuel Salamanca, was murdered one year after your visit.

JS: I received the tragic news the day before I was to defend my senior thesis, the seed manuscript for this book, in front of a panel of professors. Right away I knew that the whole project had changed. We had only spent a few days together, but Salamanca left a deep impression on me. His case was yet another example of how nearly every day in Colombia another “social leader”—environmentalists, human rights defenders, cultural preservationists—is killed by armed groups vying for control of the resource-rich countryside. I was saddened and infuriated.

AV: A man named Salchi runs the boat from Girardot and says, “This river . . . there’s something special about it. It teaches you things, every day it teaches you. Every day the river changes. You can never say you know the Magdalena.” Did you find this to be true and in what ways did the river change and teach you?

JS: Of course, this is where the title of the book comes from. It works on many different levels. There are the physical changes to the river, mostly environmental degradation, which help narrate the course of recent Colombian history. There are changes in the sociopolitical context, mostly with regards to the conflict, which lasted for more than half a century. And then there are the micro-level changes, the personal changes, in the lives of the people I met all along the way. I like the idea that every book written about the same river is likely to be vastly different, because, as the adage goes, you can never step in the same river twice. And as for myself, well, this journey cemented the idea for me (a student at the time) that I wanted to become a nonfiction writer, to tell stories of the world, as a profession. That is a pretty big change.

AV: Alejandra Mayorca accompanied you on the six-hour chalupa boat ride from Barrancabermeja. You also noted that she was carrying a camping tent strapped to her backpack where you said: “This alone made me nervous.” Why?

JS: I was nervous that she thought the boat wouldn’t make it in six hours’ time! We were not planning to camp overnight. But this is a good example of what makes Alejandra someone I, and many readers, have come to deeply admire: she seems unfazed by what the world throws at her. She is strong-willed and takes life day by day. And she is an incredible, captivating storyteller.

AV: Boat captain Alvaro Gulloso says, “This river is dying.” Can anything be done to save it?

JS: In this book I met many people who are working to “save” the river and all of its riches, from endangered/endemic species to age-old traditions and cultures along its banks. In the end, it is these community/environmental leaders everywhere who push our world towards a more sustainable and inclusive future, but only so much can be done locally. As with any natural resource, macro-level change is needed too.

AV: Tell us about Simón Villanueva and his craft of filigree.

JS: Simón Villanueva was an incredible person; when I met him, he had spent seventy-seven of his eighty-nine years on his front stoop in a town called Mompox crafting silver and gold pendants in the ancient style of filigree. He doesn’t have many customers, so the jewels pile up in a glass cabinet beside him, but he keeps going. He “lives in love with his work,” as he put it. Filigree is thought to have originated in India or Mesopotamia, and has followed human migrations as old as time across the world. The art came to Latin America with the Spanish conquests, and in Mompox and a few other places, it has stuck.

It is just one of many examples of the Arab-Spanish blend that is pervasive in the Americas. Simón Villanueva sadly passed away in April 2020. I hope this book helps to honor his memory.

AV: The chapter titled “Biblioburro,” which details the story of Luis Soriano, is pretty amazing. I doubt there is anyone else like him in the world.

JS: Another amazing person, yes. I believe there are a few roving libraries in the world, but I haven’t heard of many others that use donkeys. I was lucky to spend a significant amount of time with Luis Soriano and his students, and I’ve come away extremely inspired by everything he does.

AV: Can you discuss the importance of storytelling, both for the natives and yourself, as you travelled along the Magdalena?

JS: The Magdalena is a river filled with stories in every way. It is marked by folktales and legends all along its banks. The Magdalena was deeply cherished by the great Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and features prominently (even, I would argue, as a character) in many of his works. And its history in many ways mirrors the history of those who live by its banks. I have always turned to storytelling in order to
understand my own life, so I was very moved to find so many people along the Magdalena who rely on storytelling to make sense of their own lived experiences and histories, too.

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Leslie Moore
Littoral Books ($18.95)

by Jefferson Navicky

For those artists drawn to both the visual arts and poetry, there must come a moment when one wonders, what format now? How is this particular idea calling to be expressed in the world of tangible expression? This dilemma animates the central dichotomy of Leslie Moore’s book of poetry and prints, What Rough Beasts.

As an epigraph to What Rough Beasts, Moore offers an excerpt from Maxine Kumin’s poem “Nurture”: “Think of the language we two, same and not-same, / might have constructed from sign, / scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel: // Laughter our first noun, and our long verb howl.” Moore creates her own version of this language, a synthesis of word and art, word and animal. The first poem in the book, “Dichotomy,” begins, “I don’t have a poem today, but I’ve got the first blush / of color on two relief prints.” And so Moore is off and running with her theme of poem vs. print, and the energy that arises from this frisson:

Instead of putting one balky word after the other,
I’m in my studio, sharpening tools, carving
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . anticipating the denouement
when loose strands come together and my birds resolve,
without a word.

In this example, words are “balky,” and the creative flow necessary to work on a poem is far away. The speaker has deferred writing a poem in favor of working on relief prints. There’s a touch of feistiness at this choice, almost as if the speaker imagines defending the choice to a group tapping their fingers in expectation of a poem. Presumably in the moment there was only print as poem and the obvious relief, at the end of this poem, that the “birds resolve, without a word.” Birds, in this example, are more elegant than words, as they often are. But anyone who may be thinking that a book of poetry about birds wouldn’t be politically charged and relevant will be happily mistaken.

A tip of the cap must be given to Littoral Books and their designer Lori Harley. Moore’s prints jump off the page in rich, full color plates. So often images are relegated to the middle of a book where a few color plates require a reader to return to them again and again throughout the reading of the book. Not so with What Rough Beasts. A reader can nearly feel the texture of the prints with their fingers.

In closing, we must return to the animating dichotomy of the book, which arises in another poem, “On Presenting to My Poetry Group the Barn Owl Linocut I Finished This Week Instead of Writing a Poem.” Once again, the print is a stolen pleasure against the obligation of the poem. The poet hopes that the group will “admire / the structure of the print” and she imbues the print with the language of a poem: “They may feel a rhythm / in spilling pine, sense meter / in wingbeat, catch their breath / at the tonality of moonglow.” The poem doesn’t reveal if the group felt these sensations, but readers certainly will. The poem and print cascade down the page as one’s eye jumps back and forth from poem to adjoining image. It’s a very pleasurable rhythm indeed. It’s almost like flying.

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Kelly Gray
Moon Tide Press ($15)

by Ralph Pennel

In every Yorgos Lanthimos film, the characters are always simultaneously in translation and untranslatable. Their bodies, their identities are in flux, but it is in their routines of just being that their beingness becomes differentiated, emergent. In the poetry collection Instructions for an Animal Body, Kelly Gray explores these same themes of illimitability in stasis, with each poem, each line, each turn of the page an exploration toward a better, broader understanding of how a self is constructed.

Instructions for an Animal Body is syllabus, it is conspectus, but it is inconclusive disquisition, too. At every turn, it is in process, on process, the process. From the very start we find the speaker of each poem dreaming and shapeshifting, excavating the actual and virtual realms. In the poem “The Fox as Form,” the speaker is donning a fox skin; in “The Fish as Healer,” the speaker can no longer tell where they end and a fish begins. In “The Places Inside Me,” they are “so fucking dead it makes [them] alive,” until the borders between self and other have also become part of the speaker’s emerging beingness.

In the poem “I-395,” Gray’s exploration of actuality and virtuality continues. The poem opens, as every creation myth does, by attempting to name the unnamable:

In the beginning, there was only you
and your knife. You start by carving out a landscape,

a place to hang your words. Chip by chip you design a desert floor
and then, the inverse dome of black sky.

Also like any good creation myth, the story is really about the “landscape” of the speaker’s self, the process of “carving” a being out of clay (or in this case, sand). The “you” is both other and self, “You, the original Storyteller,” who “drive[s] your truck across this world / that she has mistaken for yours.” The difference between translational and untranslatable bodies becomes clearer as this journey progresses.

By the time we reach the poem “Crack Me Electric” (a nod to the Greek figure of Electra), it is clear that the speaker is aware of the emerging, transformative self. We see this awareness right away in the first stanza:

In morning dark, my eyes open to the sound of frothing
sky beasts dragging their tic-bitten bellies
across rooftops and canyons, blast cracking their cloven
hooves against the forest canopy, all wet
snout and bellow.

The speaker has woken from the dream state, and this “awakening” is further illuminated later in the poem, when they claim, “This is how I learn that my internal etymology has shaped my / adaptations / from insect to monster.” Here the speaker acknowledges the articulating, emergent, differentiated being and how poetry/poetics are a necessary dialectical tool through which to sense this experience. They may, in fact, be the only tool.

Gray exhibits exploration, excavation, and adaptation throughout Instructions for an Animal Body, but it is perhaps never more apparent than in the poem “Home of Seamstress.” At this point in the text, near the end, the speaker has reached a state of transformation, because they are fully aware of their transformative, ever-constructing identity:

I am lungs of house, a glass-spanned wall hung chandelier of larynx and trachea . . .

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

I am mouth of house, tilted bookshelves, titles decorated with bird song. . . .

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

I am hollow of house, needlewoman, double crossed on floor, spilled eyes and fabric scraps . . .

The voice is declarative, effusive. Here, the “seamstress” threads together the disparate, each stitch an adaptation and an enumeration, an assemblage of territories and the practice of deterritorialization. As we bear witness to “home of seamstress” and “seamstress as home,” the untranslatable becomes translation.

Instructions for an Animal Body is itself an animal body; the seams, the cover, the binding that holds the pages together are a construct of an emergent identity. This would be a difficult task by any measure, and it is excellently executed by the author in this engaging, rich collection.

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Ariel Dorfman
OR Books ($16.99)

by John Kendall Hawkins

In his new novella, Ariel Dorfman draws the conclusion that despite everything the angels of mercy can do for us, the human condition seems doomed. The Compensation Bureau is a parable in which the universe needs tender care, like a garden of unearthly delights. Angelic creatures calling themselves Actuaries work the terrains on the Lazarus Project, keeping things in balance between light and dark forces: “Conceived in response to the shocking violence observed in humankind, the project identifies people who have wrongfully died at the hands of others, and attempts to make up for the cruelty and pain they faced in life and death.” That’s right, Earth is the problem child of the universe. We just can’t quit the violence. The unnamed narrator Actuary tells us, “I have been gradually worn down by so much malignancy.”

For Dorfman, exposure to such malignancy has been a mainstay of his life. Born in Argentina, the author spent some of his boyhood in the U.S. but left when his parents were threatened by the pressure of the McCarthy trials. They moved to Chile, where Dorfman grew up; he eventually befriended and advised Salvador Allende but felt forced to leave when Allende was driven out with the CIA’s assistance and replaced by the Pinochet regime. He then moved back to the U.S., where he continued his writing career.

Like his good friend the late Harold Pinter, Dorfman’s major concern in his work is the power and destructiveness of unbridled tyrannical and fascist forces that degrade popular politics and make representative democracies problematic, if not impossible, to achieve or maintain. Pinter hated imperialism, and with his Nobel Prize speech laid into U.S. hegemonic aggression, which he saw as catastrophic in its neo-fascist requirements. Dorfman, like Pinter, is a playwright, and his most famous work, Death and the Maiden, is a study in the roles developed between the “interrogator” and the victim during torture. Dorfman turns the tables, however, and the play becomes a kind of radical interpretation of human empathy.

It’s just such radical caring that carries the spirit of Dorfman’s parable of angels in The Compensation Bureau to the rescue. The Actuary has witnessed it all and at a conference reports to fellow Actuaries:

I saw children scorched in ritual fires. I saw women being stoned for the crime of love and I saw women being murdered because they refused to love the lords who had bought them. I saw men decapitated and men thrown from cliffs and men whose hearts were carved out and men who were blown to pieces and men impaled with their entrails bleeding into the soil and men and women and children and the old and the new and all ages in-between suffering.

On and on she goes, and the others have similar findings. But in Dorfman’s story the narrating Actuary falls in love with a victim of horrific violence named Alba Jannah. Jannah deeply moves the Actuary with her commitment to love at all costs despite the horror meted out to her. Our narrator discovers that Jannah’s modus vivendi is, “They can kill me but they cannot kill my love.” For a worn-down Actuary, this is tonic for the soul.

Listening “at some point in time, from some point in the Universe,” the Actuary hears the dying brutalized woman’s last thoughts, and barely believes what she hears:

Nothing ever really dies.
She thinks: they will cast me into the ocean and I will baffle them by becoming food for fish and swim into some child’s mouth and fuel her as she skips and learns and laughs.
She thinks: they will throw me into some ditch and I will escape their rage by welcoming the worms as they churn me into mud.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The garden, the garden, it does not abandon her in her hour of need.

Finally, it seems one of these creatures can love unconditionally, at least one of them knows amor fati.

The Compensation Bureau, like Dorfman’s other recent short novel, Cautivos (OR Books, 2020), is tangled up in blue, as the Bard from Duluth would put it. There seems no end to our torment of each other, and words seem often to amplify the problems we face together rather becoming the avenue down which we move toward our common enlightenment. The Compensation Bureau is no easy remedy for our blues, but it qualifies as a warning to look up and see the stars and know our place before it’s too late.

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Safia Elhillo
Make Me a World ($17.99)

by Carlos A. Pittella

Safia Elhillo’s Home Is Not a Country may be a young adult novel in verse, but it could just as well be shelved with poetry or fiction for older audiences. No label would change its triumph of addressing cultural identity and belonging while being relatable to those a similar age to Nima, the book’s 14-year-old narrator.

Self-conscious of her accent in English that she “cannot manage to make charming,” Nima also struggles with Arabic, which she and her best friend, Haitham, learn in Sunday school: “we mispronounce the language       how it wilts / on our american tongues.” Accented in both worlds, Nima feels she doesn’t fully belong to either. Through the eyes of Nima, Elhillo stares at the gaps of a personal and collective history, challenging silences. There is the silence of what Nima does not know but desperately wants to, and there is xenophobia and the silent witnesses that allow it, when Nima and her mom are denied boarding into a plane or when Nima is called a terrorist and suspended from school for fighting back against four bullies. Haitham seems at first to fit in better, but then becomes a victim of post-9/11 racist violence, driving Nima further into her quest for what’s missing from her life.

Formally, the text of this book speaks strongly to Nima’s uncertainty and sense of loss. Elhillo avoids capitalization (i, nima, haitham are always in lowercase) as well as punctuation (pauses are indicated by spaces and line breaks, as in open-field poetry). One glaring absence is Nima’s father, whom she never met. She only knows he died in their homeland and that his death is connected to why Nima is not called Yasmeen, the name she wishes she had:

my mother meant to name me       for her favorite flower
its sweetness       garlands made       for pretty girls
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

instead i got this name       & i don’t even know why
maybe named for some unknown dead relative
some dreary ghost

Feeling inadequate in her own name (which means grace), Nima summons Yasmeen, the ghost of her alternative Self. Nima is called many things, some affectionate, some not, and throughout the novel she weighs how fitting they seem as ways to name her Self. Haitham fondly calls her “nostalgia monster,” laughing, as Nima explains,

at the dream-brain that takes over mine when i hear
the old songs       & run my fingers
over the old photographs       i know the words
to the old films       & imagine myself gliding in
to join the dance (14)

For Nima, these cultural fragments reveal “a country i’ve never seen / outside a photograph // & i miss it too”—the country that both her and Haitham’s mothers left. Readers can assume the country to be Sudan (Elhillo is Sudanese-American); but because it goes unnamed, it stands for any of the places evoked by “the old songs” Nima loves: Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, and Sudan. Through a magical portal, she enters the old photographs with the help of Yasmeen—running the risk of becoming a ghost herself. Nima must then choose between either accepting who she is or erasing part of herself. Thus, the book becomes a story about agency and the choices that make us who we are.

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Pauline Baer de Perignon
Translated by Natasha Lehrer
New Vessel Press ($17.95)

by Linda Lappin

Despite belonging to an illustrious family of art connoisseurs and actors, Pauline Baer de Perignon felt she had never really tapped into her own artistic potential. A journalist, screen writer, and teacher of creative writing, she had never personally completed a book or found a writing project exciting enough to galvanize her energies. Then a casual remark by a cousin proved to be life-changing, leading her on a treasure hunt during which she made some startling discoveries about her family and recovered priceless heirlooms that everyone thought were lost forever. This search comes together in The Vanished Collection, a work of nonfiction which entwines a disquieting family memoir with a true tale of mystery and intrigue.

De Perignon’s great-grandfather was Jules Strauss, a celebrated Jewish art collector in Paris whose magnificent collection of Impressionist paintings had supposedly been auctioned off in 1932. That sad date marked the end of the family fortunes, but the author knew very little about her great-grandfather, certainly not why he had parted with the collection he had so passionately built. Her family had never talked about that chapter of their history—nor had they ever spoken much about their Jewish origins; de Perignon’s father had converted to Christianity at the beginning of the war, and she had been raised Catholic. Jules Strauss was a faraway figure she had never thought much about.

Then, out of the blue, her cousin Andrew, an art expert, suggested that their great-grandfather’s collection had not been auctioned in 1932, but was stolen by the Nazis. “Andrew’s words,” she writes, “sent my mind tumbling down a rabbit hole: I couldn’t tell if the effect was pleasant, bizarre, or anxiety-inducing. . . . The fragments of family history Andrew evoked were profoundly unsettling.”

Andrew provided her with a list of masterpieces by Sisley, Monet, Degas, and Renoir for which their grandmother had unsuccessfully filed claims from 1958-1974. Originally in the Strauss collection and then confiscated by Nazis, some of these works had been returned to France in the aftermath of the war, but not to their rightful owners. Some were still being held in storage in French museums. Others were elsewhere in Europe.

De Perignon soon became obsessed with investigating Jules’s life. She was puzzled by the reticence she initially ran up against: Why had no one in her family ever mentioned this story before? Jules and his wife had remained in Paris during the Occupation, while other family members and friends fled or were deported. When forced to move from their home, they were stripped of nearly everything they owned, including all objects of value. Their apartment at 60 Avenue Foch, requisitioned by the regime, became the headquarters of the SS’s black-market operations. But the Strausses were never deported. How had they managed to stay alive in occupied Paris?

All this pointed to yet another mystery. Where were the paintings now, and could anything still be salvaged? To find the answers, de Perignon quickly gained highly specialized research skills, and assisted by curators, art historians, and archivists, combed through museums across Europe to retrace the scattered pieces of Jules’s collection and to make new claims for their restitution. She also pestered her older relatives with questions, scrutinized Jules’s personal papers, and even consulted a medium who channeled his spirit.

The results were impressive: Not only did the author succeed in recovering two artworks for the family, but she uncovered forgotten angles to Jules Strauss’s contribution to the history of French art and reconnected to her Jewish heritage. In the process she discovered much about herself, noting that “the women in my family have always remained in the shadows, their qualities often ignored. But here, in this Paris suburb, in this archive where no relative of mine has ever been, and where no one was expecting me, and where I would never have imagined setting foot, I could finally be myself. . . . This was where I belonged.”

The restitution process was both painstaking and painful, but de Perignon’s efforts were rewarded with the return of a painting, “The Portrait of a Lady as Pomona” by Largillière. Previously in possession of a museum in Dresden, it now hangs in the author’s living room: “When the house is empty, the children at school, the cat purring on the couch, I pause in front of the portrait. We look knowingly at each other. Only I understand the journey she has taken, only she understands my quest.”

Having made that quest with her, readers must agree with an insight offered by “Jules” through the medium: “Truth is only possible when history is acknowledged.” In The Vanished Collection, de Perignon pierces through the silence of family and bureaucrats, unpeeling layer after layer of amnesia and deception to retrieve not just a painting, but a deeper portrait of her life.

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Gabriel Kruis
Archway Editions ($14.95)

by David Brazil

In meteorology, a virga is a streak of precipitation that appears to be attached to the undersurface of a cloud and usually evaporates before reaching the ground. Gabe Kruis’s debut book, which moves back and forth between the author’s home of New Mexico (where virgae are frequently seen), and the mineral fact of New York City, embodies this aspect of the book’s title. But this precipitation that melts before it hits the ground takes its name from the Latin virga, meaning rod or stick and evoking the enchanted wand of the magician, associated in the medieval era with the poet Virgil. Then there’s the adjective acid: The corrosive chemical is signaled by an epigraph from George Oppen, but the psychedelic cover image of neoclassical maidens decanting liquids suggests the idea of lysergic acid as well.

I spend this time on the title because it’s the first signal of one of this book’s most noteworthy qualities: its confidence. Choosing a recondite noun in ambiguous relationship with its multivalent adjective to generate a phrase that ends up being perfectly right is characteristic of much of what will follow. It’s the first poetic move of a book whose intention is, as Keats wrote, to load every rift with ore.

This confidence is neither arrogance nor bombast, but a sure-footedness that is evident in the overall architecture of the book, which is first intimated by the typography of the table of contents. Acid Virga is composed of three poems, each of whose names are set in bold type, but “Waterfall Effect” and “Regression” are both followed by subtitles which turn out to be specific movements of the poems in which they fall. The result is a book with a brief overture, “Say,” a monumental core poem, “Waterfall Effect,” and something like a falling action, “Regression.” The decision to arrange the book in this unique way is powerful and effective.

“Say,” the one-page intro poem, is a bit of a fake-out, since its diction (which recalls the chiming tunes of Andrew Joron) will not accompany us through the rest of the book. We enter the book proper with the epigraphs to “Waterfall Effect,” from German filmmaker Hito Steyerl and poet George Oppen. The very presence of these two names on the page sets up a dialectic—metropolitan art stardom against hermetic West Coast sincerity. It’s a tension we’ll follow through the movement of the poem, which cuts vertiginously between the southwest of the poet’s upbringing and the New York of his present.

The poem opens with the narrator rereading, and working through, a decade-old poem whose text enters that of the verse we are reading via quotation marks. It’s another mark of confidence that the poet risks incorporating old, frequently purple, passages with the clear understanding that there will be a contrast between this juvenilia and the contemporary work. And there is. Kruis’s poetry is marked not only by verve but by a vivid clarity of image which has few, if any, equals among his contemporaries. Alice Notley’s blurb draws attention to the verse of Schuyler, which is absolutely right; the phanopoeia pops, and any poet could learn from it.

One moment of weakness is the author’s decision to refer to people by initial letters in the poems (as in, “this sonata- / form dub-step trance / piece J composed”). It’s an attempt to deal with the question of the proper name in poetry, but readers can’t help but long to hear what Kruis’s fine ear would do with the prosody of actual names (as in O’Hara’s “Joe is restless and so am I,” or Berrigan’s “Dear Chris, hello”). This is a very minor quibble of curiosity, however, with what is by and large an astoundingly accomplished first book.

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Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985
Edited by Andrew Nette
and Iain McIntyre
PM Press ($29.95)

by Paul Buhle

About a half century ago, my grand aspiration was to become a Science Fiction writer. It wasn’t a bad idea. The half-dozen or more SF or SF/Fantasy magazines on the newsstands published hundreds of stories each month, and the paperback market was similarly booming. Some of the 35-cent paperbacks tackled serious subjects, like the commercialization of culture; the more avant-garde writers offered literary polemics against racism and war. And although I couldn’t see it, the revolution had only begun. PM Press’s recent anthology Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985 covers the field’s early years with wonderfully sweeping essays and studies of some of the most illuminating authors and editors of the field in transformation.

From a radical point of view, the “Futurion Club” of Manhattan, formed during the Popular Front years of the later 1930s, offered a beginning. Comprised of mostly Jewish writers, it included Isaac Asimov (the only genre writer, along with Rod Serling, to have a whole magazine eventually named after him), but also figures like Donald Wohlheim, destined to become more influential as editors of SF magazines and of their own paperback imprint series, and Judith Merrill, the feminist writer who anticipated so much to come.

One of the astounding and revealing documents in Dangerous Visions and New Worlds is a reprint of two facing pages of writers for and against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. This literal face-off is useful because it stands for so much more. The audience for magazines and books, until at least 1960, was considered either juvenile or juvenile in mind, a similar assumption to that made about comic art and similarly maddening to more mature creators and fans. Bug Eyed Monster traditions had been nibbled at the edges by writers who managed to suggest that encounters with aliens might be a lot more complicated, or that civilization after a widely anticipated nuclear war might not rebuild by the same rules, or that the State—even the U.S. State—might be dangerous for individual liberty. That last point cut across Left and Right, reaching a rapidly expanding fan base and offering promise to a relative youngster like Philip K. Dick, an anti-authoritarian who could seemingly be Left and Right at the same time.

But another issue had more potency for the Science Fiction of the 1960s and after: Sex. One much-remembered writer, Jose Farmer, had a global impact on SF authors with his daring plots and suggestive details. Meanwhile, the judicial repeal of censorship laws offered cash galore for the small-scale producer as well as for the more daring movie corporations. One of the most intriguing essays in Dangerous Visions and New Worlds reveals the creation of soft-core lines of SF books with circulations in the tens and hundreds of thousands. This was a boon to enterprising authors who could grind out lascivious wordage at record speed, including prolific gay authors such as Larry Townsend. Older readers who shunned sexual material expressed shock at even muted effects on the mainstream writers and magazines. Those older readers counted for less and less as the counterculture advanced, however.

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds is unique in presenting an extended discussion, through several topical essays and extended comments in many others, of race, gender, sexuality, and ecological subjects in these works. The role of Harlan Ellison, editor of the totemic 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions and its successors, was surely crucial as he opened doors and made things possible. So did the only major figure of this volume still living and writing today, Black and gay author Samuel R. Delaney. Also mentioned for her contributions is the late Ursula Le Guin, whose feminist and antiwar breakthroughs made her internationally famous, and not only to SF readers. Similarly, Octavia Butler, whose untimely death at 62 deprived readers and the field of a Black, feminist writer who had already made large waves, is noted for her anticipation of Afro-Futurism.

But there is much, much more here. Consider the curious life and role of Alice Sheldon, married to a CIA chief but in her own mind an unrealized lesbian with a powerful imagination. She wrote as “James Tiptree, Jr” for more than thirty years and began to win awards in the 1970s for stories that mixed sex, drugs, and space exploration. Sometimes in her fiction, thanks to scientific advancements, men become entirely unnecessary—a far cry from the Space Westerns of yesteryear or Star Wars et al.

Considered also in the anthology is the changing shape of prose. Fans of the fantastic who welcomed a break from the old staidness of form drew back from literary experimentalism in the genre, which first began in the UK through the magazine New Worlds. Plots could disappear into prosy explorations of what language might do in untrammeled worlds. Old time editors complained, this time with a certain validity, that the result was fascinating, but perhaps not actually Science Fiction. Mainstream writers like Joanna Russ, a feminist notable, seemed at times closer to James Joyce than to Ursula Le Guin.

The SF field at large was transformed again a few years later by blockbuster films, as if nothing could compete with the themes of the big screen. The pulps had by that time long since dwindled, anticipating the near-total collapse to come. Dangerous Visions and New Worlds happily stays away from post-1985 developments but gives us ample hints of the better energies and directions of the field’s evolutions and a clear vision of where it came from in closely viewed literary terms.

There are many more treats to be found in this volume. The essays in this collection may lead readers to consider African American author Joseph Denis Jackson’s forgotten 1967 “insurrectionist” novel, The Black Commandos, or Hank Lopez, the leading Latino spirit in SF. Likewise, readers might be drawn to reconsider household names, such as leftwing feminist poet and novelist Marge Piercy and her 1976 classic Woman on the Edge of Time.

Le Guin and the best of the others elaborated the simple truth that as things go on changing drastically, present-day organized society appears in no way ready to understand them, but if they can be seen to take place on a different planet and/or in the future, they might be understood more usefully. Basic human understandings of everything from gender to economics need to change, to be seen differently, or society will surely perish.

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Lena Andersson
translated by Sarah Death
Other Press ($16.99)

by Julian Anderson

In her fiction, Swedish journalist Lena Andersson repeatedly takes on difficult love. Her first novel, Willful Disregard, (translated by Sarah Death, Other Press, 2016) charted the travails of Ester Nilsson, intellectual and poet, in the throes of sudden, irrational passion. As Esther obsessively analyzes every interaction with the man she adores, the reader grows increasingly uncomfortable, seeing clearly what Ester cannot: that she should stop hoping for any reciprocity. Ester’s next, also ill-conceived passion was then documented in Acts of Infidelity (translated by Saskia Vogel, Other Press, 2019), a novel equally unrelenting and intense. Now, with Son of Svea: A Tale of the People’s Home, Andersson uses her powers of analysis to dissect a more systemic love gone wrong: a middle-aged Swede’s disenchantment with his country as it shifts away from the ideals of Social Democracy.

Born the same year that the Social Democratic Party came to power, Ragnar Johansson has grown up in what he and many might consider a golden age for Sweden. The government’s vision of a middle way between capitalism and socialism, a welfare state known as “folkhemet,” or “the people’s home,” succeeded in lifting the country out of poverty and achieving a smoothly run, state-managed system that provided all citizens with fair and equitable access to housing, education, healthcare, child-care, and more. The system placed a premium on honesty, utility, group effort, mass production, and egalitarianism.

All these are values firmly aligned with Ragnar Johansson’s own personal belief system. The novel begins with his adult daughter Elsa putting him forward for an academic study of folkhemet. When he is rejected as “too ordinary,” he feels pleasantly triumphant; to be a cog in a wheel that runs smoothly for the benefit of all has been his life’s goal. Yet his victory is hollow: He is already aware of being marginalized and irrelevant to the new Sweden developing around him, one that is increasingly international and individualistic in its orientation.

A highly rational man who has had a career teaching woodworking at a high school, Ragnar has always felt at one with his country, admiring its polished bureaucracy as much as his own well-made wooden drawers. As his harmony with the party and its tenets is examined, though, a tone of wistfulness emerges. We learn how Ragnar’s own acceptance of egalitarianism has negated personal ambition, and in this we feel some of the shadows that darken the narrative.

As the Social Democrats’ power erodes, we see Ragnar also confronting changes among his fellow citizens’ viewpoints. There is a breakdown, it seems to him, in the collective spirit, an unnecessary admiration of other cultures, a new, unhelpful sensitivity to the individual. With each interaction that runs counter to his rational view of Swedish social good, he experiences a disorientation and sense of betrayal. These encounters and shifts are subtle, and the dramatic stakes of the novel can seem low. Ragnar is surprised to discover that colleagues, for instance, do not share his sense that immigrants must be distributed throughout the country to avoid their culture penetrating and disturbing Sweden’s status quo. He is shocked to learn that this rational solution might be viewed as xenophobic. Similarly, he is baffled when parents at his daughter Elsa’s ski club reject his mathematically calculated schedule of fair reimbursement for car-rides, preferring their own private, un-systematized transactions.

In depicting Ragnar’s rigid, collective mindset, Andersson succeeds in striking a fine balance between sympathy and satire. While she has clearly organized the novel so that Ragnar and his family can stand in for the “People’s Home” mindset, she never loses her investment in them as real people. Ragnar may be a totem, but we still feel his hopes and sorrows. Andersson depicts his youthful reunion with his girlfriend, for instance, with a charming emphasis on the practical: “It was raining steadily in Stockholm that weekend, but he did not take an umbrella with him as he rushed off to her one-room flat with its cupboard kitchen. All his clothes were left to dry on the radiator for the remainder of the day.”

Cleverly, the generations of the Johansson family represent the very different evolutions of Sweden’s recent history. Ragnar’s mother Svea embodies the old, rural ways governed by frugality; her name itself is the traditional name for Sweden, evoking nineteenth-century flag-waving. Andersson playfully juxtaposes, for instance, Svea’s self-sufficient fruit canning against Ragnar’s preference for the country’s modern, mechanized food production and its factory bread. Ragnar’s children, Erik and Elsa, represent the new, post-folkhemet Sweden, which he disparages. He feels they take for granted the material comforts that the country offers them and follow paths that are trivial and of little value to society.

The novel’s most dramatic section involves Ragnar’s conflict with Elsa. Having supported and promoted her early talent for skiing, he is outraged when he witnesses her own commitment gradually supplanted by an interest in movies and books. Ragnar disparages this as wasteful and bourgeois. As time passes and Elsa steers toward intellectual triumphs, Ragnar comes unmoored. The people who have supported and bought in the smooth-running system that defines Ragnar, have become, Andersson suggests, sadly irrelevant.

Political satire usually works on a more dramatic canvas, and a critical post-mortem of something as close to utopia as “folkhemet” presents a tricky premise, but Son of Svea succeeds through its clarity, precision, sympathy, and charm. Examining Ragnar as he grapples with his beloved country that is slipping away, Andersson’s intellectual acuity drives this quiet narrative with both humor and heartbreak.

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