Ken Kalfus
Washington Square Press ($16)

by Christopher M. Worth

Ken Kalfus brings together in this collection a stunning variety of places, times and characters, weaving a rich and complex picture of the human soul in its most vulnerable predicament—being out of place. Kalfus's protagonists find themselves far from home, returning home, and divided between two homes in nearly equal measure, and the reader is deftly wrenched along with the characters' displacement.

An immensely broad range of settings for the stories gives the collection a sense of sweeping grandeur; they strike a fine balance between ecumenicism and internationalism, achieving a profound unity that most novels could only hope for. Kalfus leads us on tours of the present and past, to places near and far, and, most importantly, within.

Kalfus's language is striking without relying on cheap affectation or clever artifice. "The Republic of St. Mark, 1849" takes place in a Venice besieged by the invading Austrians and Croats and by deadly epidemic. Alessandro, the protagonist, recounts the last days of war and plague in the once-grand city even as he himself dies from cholera. So real is Alessandro's hopelessness that the reader, too, feels the weight of a doomed man in a once-glorious (but now dying) city.

Throughout the collection, the dialogue, too, is entirely convincing, and indeed one of Kalfus's most notable gifts. Though few of the stories rely heavily on dialogue, the voices of his characters are always crystalline, revealing nearly everything about themselves in a way that is just overt enough to be satisfying, but still fraught with enough common human insecurities to seem unerringly authentic.

Kalfus deftly creates characters that are real in the sense that they are more than archetypes—more than simply the manifestation of a particular emotion. They are likable, fairly ordinary people in most cases who find themselves in extraordinary situations. In "Day and Night You are the One," the protagonist is the victim of an odd "sleep disorder" which causes him to fall asleep in his apartment on one side of town and almost immediately awaken in his other apartment on the opposite side. His two lives progress quite nicely until elements of one life begin to bleed into the other.

The narrator of "No Grace on the Road" is an economist returned to the Thailand of his birth who, with his American wife, spends a harrowing night in the height of the monsoon in the humble home of a young couple with a very sick infant. They are unable to convince the couple that they are not doctors, that they have no medicine, and that they in all likelihood cannot help the child. Fighting for survival in the raging storm, Palin finds himself railing against the impossible backwardness of the country he has proudly identified with for his entire life.

Kalfus's style and execution are flawless. He takes the most disparate elements of the human psyche and the world around us and knits together a stunning tapestry of humanity out of place. The only drawback to this collection is, simply, that it eventually comes to an end.

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Manlio Argueta
Translated by Edward Waters Hood
Curbstone Press ($14.95)

by Susan Swartwout

The logistics of conducting a wartime love affair are seldom more orchestratable or romantic than "Your place, or mine?" Yet in this innovative, political novel, Manlio Argueta creates the poignancy and desperation of two lovers caught in El Salvador's deadly civil strife. In this world, much of their relationship must resign itself to the destructive hell of memory, like "the fly's egg in the fruit so that the larvae will be able to eat it up from the inside out."

Argueta was a member of El Salvador's most acclaimed group of writers, La Generacion Comprometida, from 1950 to 1956. His novels (including the widely-praised One Day of Life, which addresses social conditions in El Salvador through one day in the life of a middle-aged peasant woman) have enjoyed international success. Not surprisingly, however, Argueta is known in his own country primarily as a poet: this novel uses figurative language as beautifully as a poem would, despite the novel's darkest events that brand themselves on our collective memory—events as unforgettable as Salvador's desaparecidos, those who have disappeared.

The dialogue between dreams and desires, and parallels to the Red Riding Hood fairy tale, intertwine throughout the novel, accenting effect over chronology. As with any recursive writing, a chronology-junkie will flounder through this dense and intense book. Yet, throughout the novel's flow the reader is enveloped in the thoughts, lifetime, and losses of two war-crossed lovers. The experience is haunting.

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Alison Bechdel
Firebrand Books ($10.95)

by Pat Carlin

Everybody's favorite dykes are back, and better than ever. For years now the savvy cartoonist Alison Bechdel has been chronicling the lives of this lesbian community as they make their way through a world of stress, work, death, and taxes—in short, the world everybody has to deal with. And she somehow manages this complex cast of characters in strip-sized segments that appear weekly in alternative newspapers across the country. But as carefully crafted as each "episode" is, they read even better in the collections, of which Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For is the most recent.

The main story in this book is centered around the bugbear of home-ownership. Eternal housemates Lois, Sparrow, and Ginger have decided to buy the house they live in when their landlord puts it up for sale, and invite Sparrow's new boyfriend (I told you these lesbians were complex) to live with them. Meanwhile, Clarice, Toni, and their legally adopted son Raffi are also buying their first home. Jezanna, the owner of Madwimmen Bookstore, is bringing her widowed father to live with her, and the always politically outraged Mo is about to shack up with her new fling, women's studies professor Sydney. As the characters debate and fret over their various moves, Bechdel manages to integrate a real sense of the stress and politics of home-buying and moving. The final story in the book is a thirty-five-page short story called "Demographic Rift," which follows all the characters on moving day, which they manage to get through without killing each other (but barely).

As if all this weren't enough, there are plenty of subplots to keep things interesting. The fiercely independent Madwimmen Books has to fight for survival when the corporate Bounder's Book-N-Muzak moves in down the block, a situation certainly derived from real life. Marital stress versus new love provides plenty of contrast. And the presence of Stuart really throws a wrench in everybody's sexual politics. Bechdel is a gifted writer, able to poke fun at PC lesbian liberalism even as she stays true to these same values on a personal level. And she is surely a gifted artist, employing a simple, clean style that tells the story plainly while constantly invoking humor (one newspaper headline reads "Steinem says groping by boss okay if he's a democrat"). If you're already a fan of Bechdel's work, Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For shows her at her best; if you're not, this book should convince you to become one.

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Robert Christgau
Harvard University Press ($29.95)

by Brian Beatty

These days, everybody fancies himself a critic. The dangerous among the legion subscribe to the "rock & roll nigger" aesthetic—perhaps best personified by the late, oft-sainted Lester Bangs. Writing as if hunkered in the trenches alongside their subjects, fighting a culture war vs. a brutal, apathetic society, these would-be-if-they-could-be's want to believe their work means something. Others, who realize there's no converting the unwilling masses, usually turn into culpable academics—sometimes within classroom confines, sometimes just pretending (i.e., Greil Marcus). Their strategy is to thrust intellectualism upon pop music, perhaps to justify the adolescent endeavor of taking the subject seriously at all. These writers are often found attending university conferences, swapping Dylan and Zappa bootlegs in the public toilets.

Could tenacious fanzine ranters really democratize an imploding billion-dollar retail market in the name of art? Is Greil Marcus slumming among today's riot grrls in hopes of copping a feel, or is he a true fan? Eternal questions.

No doubt Village Voice music editor Robert Christgau's a fan—not to mention a tempered leftist and a joker. But besides these things, he's a consummate music critic: "I'm driven by a continuing quest for music that will serve some function or other in my life and yours—inspire, amuse, enlighten, calm, excite...know beauty and feel truth." While it may seem blasphemous to approach your art with such candor, it's an aesthetic question in the end.

In the voice of blackface minstrel Emmett Miller, the gender-fuck lust of alterna-diva P J Harvey, or the corporate sell-out of indie stalwarts Sonic Youth, Christgau searches out beauty and truth. What he discovers is up for argument. "What's easiest to describe about Miller's singing is what's weirdest about it—his signature yodel," Christgau writes. "No Swiss or African model suggests its sound, and his imitators Rodgers and Williams don't come close to duplicating it." Few critics would be so quick to dismiss country music legends Jimmie Rodgers or Hank Williams. But Christgau is a contrarian whose evaluations aren't rooted in absolutes, but in the music he's heard and thinks we should hear (or not) for ourselves.

Occaionally Christgau even changes his mind (which is the fun of flipping through his album guides for the '70s and '80s). The longer pieces collected here afford Christgau a better articulated perspective than his short-graded reviews: "I haven't heard [Sonic Youth] live since before Bad Moon Rising—early on I thought (correctly) that they sucked, after which they discouraged my attendance by calling for my assassination at gigs . . . All I know is that the CD version of Goo peals and clangs with the clearest recorded version to date of a guitar sound that has always been their reason for living and their excuse for telling the world about it."

Grown Up All Wrong is Robert Christgau's high-fidelity reason for living inside the pop music aesthetic. This compendium of his profiles and features should be required reading for anyone attempting a career, or even a sideline hobby, in putting words to paper on the subject of popular music.

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INVISIBLE NEW YORK
The Hidden Infrastructure of the City
Stanley Greenberg
Johns Hopkins University Press ($29.95)

RAILROAD VOICES
Linda Niemann and Lina Bertucci
Stanford University Press ($35)

by C. K. Hubbuch

Invisible New York presents architectural photographer Stanley Greenberg's photographs of the city's service spaces—places unknown, if not unimaginable to most, and seen by almost no one. As far as 650 feet below the streets of New York are twenty-foot-diameter water tunnels, controlled by enormous valves in cavernous adjacent chambers. A Lunatic Asylum, dating from 1839, crumbles roofless on Roosevelt Island. On Hart Island, the Bronx, are Nike missile silos abandoned in 1961.

Greenberg—who, before becoming a full-time photographer worked as a civil servant in New York City—reveals an appreciation for the shabby splendor of such service places that could only belong to one so familiar with the inner workings of an organism as complex as this city. He knows that water doesn't reach millions of people without some very sophisticated and interesting mechanisms, just as surely as he knows that a modern city rises over the ruins of earlier eras.

His talent, though, is hardly limited to finding and exposing the invisible parts of the city. Greenberg is a skilled photographer who uses only available light and a four-by-five view camera, to elicit dramatic, almost gothic moods and near-perfect geometric compositions. His most interesting photographs are of the anchors of the city's masterful bridges. Beneath the Verrazano-Narrows is a harp of massive cables strung on steel eyebars in a concrete base. The bound cables of the Brooklyn Bridge crouch like giant springs just below the roadway, where they attach to anchors extending down another 90 feet. Deep inside the towers are vaulted chambers that once served as wine cellars for Manhattan restaurants. In an enlightening (if somewhat cranky) introduction, art historian and curator Thomas H. Garver observes how 20th-century cities have transformed public work sites from monuments to technology into bland, utilitarian spaces, while yesterday's grand "service places," as pictured in Greenberg's work, deteriorate unseen.

Only one photograph in the book shows a human form. This photo reveals the inside of a clock tower at 346 Broadway, where the movement of the clock lies inside a glass case between four translucent dial faces. Sunlight projects the numbers of one dial onto the glass, through which the gears of the movement are visible; further back, the light filters through the opposite dial. Amidst all this light is the ghost-like reflection of a man—perhaps Marvin Schneider, the city's clockmaster who spent ten years of his spare time restoring the clock to working order. Whoever he is, this reflection is a visual reminder of the ghosts of the laborers who once built and worked in these places.

In Railroad Voices writer Linda Niemann and photographer Lina Bertucci collaborate to produce an honest and intimate portrait of one of America's most vital infrastructures. While the trains remain omnipresent, snaking across the countryside and rumbling through lower-income neighborhoods, the people who work these service corridors are as invisible today as the service places of Greenberg's New York. Automation has dwindled the ranks of railroaders, with most freights now running a crew of only two. Describing an encounter between a train crew and a family on the California Zephyr, Niemann writes, "[they] know every train or engineman by name; they know about their families, keep up on their lives. The usual encounter between rail buff and railroader is not at all this way. The buff wants to know about the motors, the track, the radio frequency."

Trains themselves are largely absent in Bertucci's gritty photographs. These are intimate portraits of the hard-working railroaders—mostly men—working, resting, and waiting. As we learn in Niemann's spare vignettes and oral histories, peppered with the esoteric jargon of the trade, these people do a lot of waiting: waiting for signals from the shrinking ranks of dispatchers; waiting on often drunk and unruly passengers on Amtrak routes; waiting to go home after three-week stints on the rails.

If it seems odd that two women would produce a book on the male-dominated world of railroad life, consider that these two were among the first women to work on the rails.

Niemann, who holds a Ph.D. in literature, left her university job in 1978 and has worked as a brakeman (railroad titles remain defiantly masculine) ever since. As her writing attests, she has worked doubly hard to establish herself in this world. Bertucci hired on as a switchman on the now-defunct Milwaukee Road in 1974. Only 19, Bertucci used her camera to return the gaze of her often distant, occasionally hostile, male coworkers. In the process she captured the personalities of the largely invisible laborers of the trade.

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Nelson George
Viking ($24.95)

by Peter Wardrip

Around 1992, Tommy Hilfiger came upon a chance meeting with the rapper Grand Puba in New York's JFK airport. Tommy, of course, is currently a leader in the youth apparel industry, but at the beginning of the decade he and his clothing line were still trying to find their place in an already crowded market. Tommy's brother, Andy, recognized Grand Puba and knew that the rapper spoke highly of their clothing. Andy introduced the two and because of this meeting, Grand Puba and his crew were given a gratis shopping spree in their showroom.

Nationally, Grand Puba may not have carried the popularity in 1992 that someone like Puff Daddy does today, but he was extremely popular in New York City. He had just broken off from the successful group Brand Nubian to attempt a solo career, and at the time his voice was ubiquitous on rap albums. When Grand Puba was seen wearing Hilfiger, the trend spread throughout the country on the shoulders of rap music and hip-hop culture.

Hip-hop's influence on American culture is extremely strong today. Bits of hip-hop are pervasive whether through rap songs in the top ten or Will Smith's starring in big-budget action movies. Novelist, cultural critic, and music critic Nelson George, author of the much lauded The Death of Rhythm and Blues, describes hip-hop's influence on American culture in his latest book, hiphopamerica. This cultural, critical, and historical text is approachable and smart.

Rapper Krs-One was one of the first people to articulate the difference between hip-hop, which is a culture, and rap music, which is simply a style of music within that culture. Other aspects of the culture traditionally involve deejaying, breakdancing, and graffiti. However, with the influence hip-hop has had on mainstream American culture, it becomes more difficult to exclude other aspects such as fashion, movies, videos, poetry, journalism, and politics. What began as a largely urban phenomenon has gone the way of just about every form of business: global.

"Hip-hop didn't start as a career move, but as a way of announcing one's existence to the world," writes George. Although reports differ about who started what is now known as rap music, it is agreed that giants like Afrika Bambataa and Grandmaster Flash created what would become rap music when they deejayed parties in the early to middle '70s. These auteurs would play only the beats (the breaks) from popular rock, soul, and disco records. At first, words were spoken over the beats to energize the dancers, but gradually the evolution of rhythmic poetry developed, putting the rapper at the center stage and sending the deejay to the background.

As the music began to grow in popularity, so did other facets of the culture. Run DMC were endorsed by Adidas and had a hit single with Aerosmith. The Two Live Crew's booty-shaking lyrics brought about a national debate about freedom of speech and public decency. Different parts of the country developed their own brands of hip-hop. With this diversity came the infamous East Coast/West Coast feud which brought about the deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.

Nelson George does not go through a chronological history of hip-hop. (For that I would recommend The New Beats by S. H. Fernando.) Instead his mosaic shows influences that develop positive and negative aspects of hip-hop culture. He is able to situate hip-hop in a social, political, and cultural context. Hip-hop does not stay put in an inner-city domain, which represents much of its aesthetic foundation, nor does it completely sell out to suburbia, its largest customer. The shiny mixture of the two is what makes it so marketable and popular. The adaptability and diversity of hip-hop culture allows it to praise nihilism and vitality, materialism and simplicity, guns and peace—all at the same time.

As an involved observer for the past 15 years or so, George writes about the culture with an unabashed love. He has been an insider, but is also able to be critical of the lesser portions. He criticizes the violence, materialism, and black stereotyping, as well as the increasing influence of the visual aspects. Although videos have brought about a new breed of African-American filmmakers, George writes, "video just changed the hip-hop environment enough so that more sucker MC's have hits, taking up space from worthier artists." Videos make neighborhoods, cars, hairstyles, dances, and clothes world famous.

Is hip-hop better off than it was 20 years ago? Nelson George, I think, would argue that it is. He probably yearns at times to see pioneers like DJ Hollywood like he did back in 1981 and, like many of us at that time, to be mesmerized by the freshness of this new genre. We can all be nostalgic about the times when we could keep up with what was new in the music with five monthly releases instead of 50. George doesn't sour his book with nostalgia, but even he ponders, "what will come after hip-hop?" George posits that the next generation could reject hip-hop as the next wave of hipness comes by, but it doesn't seem likely; just a new form of the old. "The truth is that hip-hop—in its many guises—has reflected (and internationalized) our society's woes so evocatively that it has grown from minority expression to mainstream appreciation."

Enter Tommy Hilfiger again. Four years after his meeting at JFK with Grand Puba, he had adapted his clothing line to the youthful hip-hop market. He became buddies with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and black music impresario Quincy Jones, becoming a strong supporter of his Vibe magazine. In 1996, Tommy Hilfiger was the number one apparel company traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Anne Fadiman
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ($16)

by Deborah J. Safran

Over the last few years, there have been a plethora of "books about books" published—more specifically, "readers on reading." Each has its merits, but there are too many to read; after skimming a few of the titles, I decided that a true reader would rather "just read" than discuss others' attitudes towards the act of reading. Yet I stopped my self-declared moratorium on the topic after stumbling across Anne Fadiman's slim, new book, Ex Libris.

Ex Libris is more than just a book about reading. In these 18 essays, Fadiman examines the memories and personalities created through reading, the joy of books themselves, and more complex issues such as the constant changes in our vocabulary, the need (artificial or otherwise) for nonbiased speech, and the eternal search for the "original idea." As most avid readers can, she links certain books to the most intimate moments of her life ("I had read [War and Peace] at 18. I kept no diary that year, but I had no need of one to remind me that that was the year I lost my virginity. It was all too apparent from the comments I wrote in my Viking edition."). She believes that the marriage of her and her husband's libraries really and truly secured their commitment to each other. And reading her great-grandmother's copy of The Mirror of True Womanhood upon the birth of her first child connected the five generation of women in a unique and touching way.

For the "common reader," the books kept at home can tell more about a person than the contents of a medicine cabinet. We each have our own methods of organizing our libraries (by title, author, subject, date of publication, etc.), and while some believe that a book's physical self is "sacrosanct . . . its form inseparable from its content," for others, "a book's words [are] holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contain them [are] a mere vessel." Reading is the one act that is both intensely personal and public—our bookcases alone can tell a thousand secrets, and yet we display them proudly, instead of hiding them from our friends and neighbors—a concept I truly appreciate after reading this collection.

While I found all of the essays entertaining and engaging, the subtitle of Ex Libris—"Confessions of a Common Reader"—struck me as a bit odd. After reading "The Joy of Sesquipedalians," in which she disclosed her family's favorite pastime of trying to stump others with obscure literary references, my own upbringing seemed to pale by comparison. And I can't even imagine purchasing 19 pounds of books in one afternoon. Confessions as they may be, Fadiman seems to lean more towards the extraordinary than the common. I empathize, however, with her description of how books can bind the family together, and share her love for the English language, her quandary over the "his/her/them" issue, and her obsessive-compulsive proofreading. In Ex Libris, Fadiman captures the essence of reading for a true lover of books—one who views it not as a pastime, but as a passion.

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Half-Humans, Evil Twins, and Science Fiction
Mike Hertenstein
Cornerstone Press ($14.95)

by Rudi Dornemann

In The Double Vision of Star Trek: Half-Humans, Evil Twins and Science Fiction , Mike Hertenstein offers a Christian deconstruction of Star Trek. He establishes his Trek credentials early, opening his acknowledgements section with a humorous reference to the Vulcan mating season, and as he explores various contradictions and paradoxes in Star Trek , his command of the oeuvre is never in doubt. Nor is there any question where Hertenstein's argument will lead. We know that, as an editor of Cornerstone , a magazine published by the Jesus People U.S.A. organization, he will eventually bring things back to the domain of Christianity. What we don't know is exactly what route he'll take.

Hertenstein avoids the easy traps. He knows that since the series has undergone 30 years of collaboration between various producers, directors, writers, and casts, a single monolithic work cannot emerge. While creator Gene Roddenberry is a key figure in his analysis, Hertenstein resists reading him as an outright auteur. He does not lean too heavily on any one phase of the Trek franchise, but draws examples from all its various television and movie incarnations.

In the course of the book, there are a number of high points—an interesting bit on teleportation and the nature of the soul, and some intriguing discussion of Trek's multiculturalism and multi-speciesism in light of how the future society it portrays seems to owe so much more to the Western Europe than to any other terrestrial cultural heritage. Perhaps the book's finest moment is its penultimate chapter, a wide-ranging treatise on poetry, science, religion, the unknown and—most of all—wonder.

Hertenstein occasionally glosses over his subject matter a little too quickly, however, as with his treatment of religion on Deep Space Nine. While he's right to point out that one of that Trek series' major religious characters is a cardboard fundamentalist and another is a fuzzily drawn New Ager, some of DS9's numerous religion-themed storylines also offer instances of characters who act on strong religious convictions—and are portrayed not only respectfully, but even heroically. Considering some of these more positive portrayals of religion in Star Trek more closely probably wouldn't have changed the conclusion Hertenstein reaches, but it would have enriched his analysis along the way.

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Edited by Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs
MIT Press ($25)

by Anna Reckin

In January 1932, the Julien Levy Gallery presented the first exhibition of Surrealism in New York, assured ample publicity by the presence of Salvador Dalí, whose work was being shown in New York for the very first time. But Dalí was not Levy's only outstanding New York "first"; others included Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Frida Kahlo, and René Magritte; and Levy' s interests extended beyond Surrealism to the Neo-Romantics and Magic Realism, beyond paintings and sculpture to film and photography, and beyond "high art," to various kinds of popular art. He was one of the first to exhibit Walt Disney' s work in a commercial gallery, while also giving Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou its first U.S. showing. His taste in photography was catholic, finding common ground between Walker Evans's documentary work, Jean-Eugene-Auguste Atget's near-surreal records of Parisian buildings, the artifice of Lee Miller and Man Ray, and Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moments."

Supremely gifted facilitators are often not especially self-effacing. Fittingly, the largest illustrations in this book are nearly all of Levy himself: Levy and his first wife, Joella, hanging a Max Ernst (photographed by Lee Miller); Levy and his second wife, Muriel, playing simultaneous games of chess with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning; Levy's celebrated profile in a portrait by Jay Leyda. The dustjacket shows Levy in a "daguerrotype-object" by Cornell; the dramatic cropping makes his face appear to be bursting out of the frame, floating above a row of roughly sketched skirts and pants—a witty representation of the lower halves of his gallery visitors, perhaps, all dressed up for a cocktail opening. The only other full-page illustration is a portrait of Mina Loy. As Carolyn Burke describes, in a chapter devoted to Levy's "Loy-alism," she was muse, mother-in-law (mother of Levy's first wife), and agent.

Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery was produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at The Equitable Gallery, New York in Fall, 1998. It provides a scrapbook of the gallery from its beginnings in November, 1931, (with an "American Photography Retrospective" arranged with the help of Alfred Stieglitz) to its final closure in 1949. Alongside illustrations of some of the major works that passed through Levy's hands, the book shows catalog covers, plans for a wall the "shape of an artist's palette" featured in one of the gallery's sites, and other ephemera. It explains Levy's many innovations in gallery management and publicity, and looks at his contribution to the development of museums and galleries in the U.S. Visitors to the Julien Levy Gallery would find themselves surrounded by some of the most sensational art in New York, and this book is a celebration of that coming-together. After all, the contemporary gallery that Levy helped to create is more than a location; it's an occasion, a performance space, a place for a party.

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by David Auerbach

Under communist rule, Czech literature was a crippled entity: not only did authors have difficulty publishing their work outside of brief thaw periods, but precommunist Czech writers disappeared from view, as their works were often banned. When Czech literature did become more well-known in the last few decades, much of it was in direct response to communist rule, such as the works of Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky. But many Czech writers both past and present remain unknown to English readers. Based in Prague, Twisted Spoon Press has a dual purpose: not only to bring lost Czech literature to light, but also to translate it into English, giving it a wider audience both outside and within their native country.

If there is a common thread among Twisted Spoon's books, it is a decided antirationalism; the press aims to bring the surrealist side of Czech writing to an English readership. As publisher Howard Sidenberg says, "What Twisted Spoon is trying to do is to present these works from the prewar period in order to provide a hitherto unknown element of the European avant-garde during those fertile interwar years." Among these prewar reissues are new translations of Kafka's work in editions that restore the books as they were originally printed in this Prague native's lifetime. The press also has a strong list of contemporary authors whose work places them in this cutting-edge tradition.

Twisted Spoon's very first publication remains one of their most extreme: Lukás Tomin's The Doll. Tomin leaves his characters half-drawn for much of the book, forcing the reader to puzzle out the connections and distinctions between them. His drastic switches of style abandon cumulative effect for a series of instants, sometimes with heavily compressed plotting or circular passages of dialogue. A dream of a monk's life is described: "Through cold gothic corridors. Cloistered prayers. Move in silence. Angel walk. Shaved head. Faith the problem. Doubts. Dark night of the soul." The novel seeks to jolt with its odd narrative rhythms, making it a rare contemporary update of the surrealist novels of Breton and Pinget. Tomin grew up in a dissident family under one of the harshest periods of communist rule, and wrote The Doll in his second language, English, as an émigré in Paris. He steadfastly refuses to ground his prose in a comfortable fictional environment, just as he refused to ground it in the comfort of his native language.

While Tomin is more aggressively experimental than most precommunist Czech authors, he inherits their themes. Two "lost" books of Czechoslovakia, Paul Leppin's Severin's Journey Into the Dark and Otokar Brezina's Hidden History, outline a decadent romanticism. Dating from 1914, Leppin's novel plainly describes a libertine's aimless affairs and wanderings, focusing on the repetition of Severin's life and melding his decadent outlook with Kafkaesque detachment. Borrowing from Kleist as much as from Sacher-Masoch, Leppin passes over the more voyeuristic aspects of eroticism to examine the mechanistic drive of Severin. The book is surprisingly restrained, and the tight prose prevents Severin's miseries from becoming too histrionic.

Approaching the irrational passions of life with a manic rush, Brezina brings a happier outlook to the primevality that Leppin describes. In the essays contained in Hidden History, written in the first decades of the century, his words erupt almost without sense. Brezina forsakes rational structures of thought, instead creating towers of language that often exhibit powerfully abstract imagery. In death, for example, Brezina finds "a love of man for man which would seem lethal in our time—where the hearts of the brethren, distant, beat in solitude—will bring about a singing union of the spirit." Like Leppin and Tomin, he has little patience for convention, either in writing or in life, but his vision lacks all cynicism and nihilism; he realizes in words some of the purest possibilities of the subconscious.

Bohumil Hrabal's Total Fears is a nexus of Twisted Spoon's concerns: written late in life by a man who lived through both wars, it gives a firsthand impression of the impact Czech history has had on a single author. Hrabal, best known for Closely Watched Trains, here alludes to the nullifying effect of the political situation, which seems to have driven him out of the world and into his mind. Taking the form of unsent letters to a female acquaintance, the chapters are free-flowing streams describing Hrabal's travels in his old age, in which he encounters the spirits of dead writers who seem more real than the modern world around him. Particularly forthright and chilling is the first section, "The Magic Flute," a compulsively written travelogue ridden with pain, exhaustion, and unsettling calm: "Bohumil Hrabal, you've victoried yourself away, you've reached the peak of emptiness, as my Lao Tzu taught me, I've reached the peak of emptiness and everything hurts." As an invitation to Hrabal's memory, the book is tantalizingly frank and approachable. Hrabal's casual language discloses his obsession with communication, the desire to speak to his reader as his beloved authors have spoken to him.

If the press's surrealist impulse is buried in Hrabal, it is still detectable, as in the harrowing "Meshuge Stunde," which describes a frenzy among cats as Soviet planes fly overhead. This antirationalist strain seems to have fully permeated Czech literature; as Sidenberg says, "Czech surrealism draws on many themes that are endemic to Czech art in general: a deep sense of irony, absurdity, fantasy." Hrabal, Leppin, Brezina, and Tomin all represent different stages in the development of this aesthetic. As Twisted Spoon excavates parallel developments to more commonly known movements, they preserve what the title of Brezina's book describes: a hidden history.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 1999 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1999