Susan Neville
MacMurray & Beck ($22)

by Nicole Hamer

Susan Neville's latest offering would like to be a serious meditation on manufacturing and meaning. However, somewhere in her journeys through the flat plains of Indiana, between the Veneer factories of Edinburgh, the Burley Tobacco auctions of Madison and the Industrial Goth night at the Melody Inn in Indianapolis, Neville allows nostalgia and grief to act as our tour guides in Fabrication. Deceptively heavy with mythic titles, such as "Byzantium," "S(t)imulation," and "How the Universe Is Made," Fabrication searches through the places where things are made in order to understand not the "meaning" suggested in the book's ambitious title, but the vanishing places and people inhabiting Neville's own nostalgic Indiana.

In this Indiana we find Dante, Chekhov, and Chopin mingling with muscular dogs, jovial factory workers, and grieving tobacco auctioneers—good local color, but only two chapters really live up to the promise of the book's title. These chapters provide the author's unique vision on manufacturing and meaning and work wonderfully: as in "Smoke," part exposition and part narrative fiction on the complex world of small tobacco farming, or the moving final paragraphs of "Carboys," a dedication to the youth who helped create modern technology. However, when the thoughtful work of these two chapters is complete, Neville slides back into the nostalgia that guides the remaining chapters of Fabrication, such as in "Perfect Circle," which seems symbolic of Neville's preoccupation with the past:

We'd walk into town and buy homemade donuts on Saturday morning at the donut shop and homemade caramels at the candy shop, and the children we'd someday have would ride their glittering bicycles through the golden angel dust that lined the street and we would know the names of the women who worked at the hardware store and the pharmacist with his bottles filled with blue-and yellow-tinctured water and we would always every minute of our lives be happy.

Neville can be an engaging writer, and Fabrication is most successful when she injects the intimate and nimble style that won her a Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. In the end, however, this almost meandering collection of essays remains regrettably underdeveloped and disappointing. What could have been a fascinating meditation on the grand meaning of man-made things is instead merely a travel book on found objects and the author's own nostalgic grief.

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edited by Edmund White
University of Wisconsin Press ($29.95)

by Thomas Fagan

Much has been written about the toll taken by AIDS on the artistic community. Especially in the early years of the epidemic, when the time between diagnosis and death was much shorter than it is today, it seemed that every day brought news of another poet, playwright or painter, many only in their 20s or 30s, struck down by the virus.

Most of us only heard about the deaths deemed newsworthy, but what about all the others? For every Keith Haring, there were countless as-yet unknown painters who became too ill to wrestle their visions onto canvas; for every Rock Hudson, thousands of aspiring actors were robbed of the chance to perfect their craft and share their gifts.

It's said that when an artist dies, the world suffers two great losses: the person and the work they did not live to do. Loss Within Loss seeks to shed some light on both. Published in cooperation with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, this is a unique and ground-breaking collection of essays by artists, written about their artist friends, mentors, colleagues, and in some cases, lovers.

While some of the subjects in Loss Within Loss—Derek Jarman, Paul Monette, James Merrill—were relatively well-known when they died and have had their lives and works written about, most were not. The great service provided by these essays is to rescue from obscurity and celebrate the lives and creations of a diverse group of artists, most of them unknown and all dead too soon.

Combining elements of biography, memoir, art history and cultural studies, the contributors to the anthology approach their subjects from a variety of angles. John Berendt's tribute to his friend, landscape architect Bruce Kelly, is a straight-forward assessment of his considerable body of work, culminating in a detailed appreciation of Kelly's last project, more famous than its creator: Strawberry Fields, the John Lennon memorial in New York's Central Park.

Others, like Sarah Schulman on the writer and publisher Stan Leventhal and Felice Picano on the novelist Robert Ferro, take a more sociological approach, illuminating their subjects' lives and artistic accomplishments as parts of the new gay bohemianism of the 1970s, which was both a social and artistic phenomenon, and placing them firmly at the center of its emerging queer literary scene.

Most of the essays in Loss Within Loss are more personal and anecdotal. Allan Gurganus's piece on James Merrill, chronicling the stages of their friendship, consists of the two times the novelist spoke publicly of the poet: the first in 1993 when he introduced Merrill reading his work at New York's 92nd Street YMHA; the second was Gurganus's eulogy at his friend and mentor's funeral a mere fourteen months later.

The writer Benjamin Taylor was friends from childhood with scenic designer and avant-garde puppeteer Robert Frank Anton, and movingly recalls their life-long relationship. Of Anton's death in 1984 at age 35 he writes, "Watching my adored friend as the darkness enveloped him, I did not imagine how many more I'd watch as they vanished in their turn. This subtraction of wit, grace, brains and beauty from our midst has now become unbearable to contemplate. How is it we haven't, in compassionate horror, pulled the earth up over us?"

There are, of course, many more names that could be mentioned here: choreographer Joah Lowe, architect Frank Isreal, composer Chris DeBlasio, filmmakers Howard Brookner and Warren Sonbert. This list, fragmentary as it is, only hints at the depth and breadth of what we have lost.

As the "Age of AIDS" enters its third decade and the disease itself has gone from "crisis" to "epidemic" to "pandemic," Loss Within Loss is a powerful warning against complacency. It stands as both a fitting tribute to the dead of the past and a challenge to the survivors in the future: to continue the tasks of bearing witness and remembrance, the heart-breaking and necessary work of the living.

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edited by David Emblidge
Da Capo ($16)

by Charisse Gendron

Monday through Friday from 1936 to 1962, in a widely syndicated newspaper column called My Day, Eleanor Roosevelt told four-million readers her thoughts about public affairs and domestic life. The title of the column refers to its spontaneous, diaristic tone—"After greeting my children, we went down in a body to welcome all the movie talent which had come to help out in the President's Birthday Balls"—a tone that allowed readers comfortable access to Roosevelt's imposing mind and bionic schedule. She wrote, no doubt, in the same spirit in which she and FDR served hotdogs to the visiting King and Queen of England.

Although naturally not confessional—those seeking the private Roosevelt are directed to Blanche Weisen Cook's acclaimed multi-volume biography—the columns are indeed intimate in that they reveal the evolving convictions of a person centrally involved in the political and social life of the country for three decades. Dedicated throughout her career to the sometimes contradictory ideals of justice and peace, Roosevelt occasionally changes her mind or takes unexpected positions. In 1939, still opposed to the war against Hitler, she writes: "Why can't we get around a table and face the fact that Germany and Italy have started this whole performance because it was the only way in which their people could exist? . . . It is wearisome to read of the balance of power. I would like to see somebody write about a balance of trade and of food for the world . . ."

When Germany invades Brussels, however, Roosevelt throws her support behind the war effort, broadcasting (with Dorothy Thompson, Clare Booth Luce, Pearl Buck, and Marianne Moore) a message of sympathy to the women in detention camps in Poland, encouraging housewives to save cooking fat for the production of glycerine, and, though a champion of workers, advising against coal strikes that would slow the production of weapons.

Accused by misogynists of didacticism—"As she ages, the feminine part of the Roosevelt presidency becomes wilder in her attempts to force American youths to follow the pattern of life she wants to dictate to them"—Roosevelt was a flexible and discriminating thinker. Nowhere is this more evident than during the communist scare in the post-war years, when she served under Truman as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly and chaired the Human Rights Commission.

"I think the thing that needs to be settled today," she writes in 1948, "is whether a statement that you believe in certain economic and political theories known as Communism implies that you also believe in the overthrow of your government by force." Roosevelt is one of the few who gets it: If you bully dissenters into waving the American flag, then you don't believe in democracy any more than they do. Considering the actor and activist Paul Robeson's views too radical to endorse, she nonetheless wonders wryly why people go to hear him if they find his words so intolerable. She also reminds readers that racial prejudice drove Robeson to the USSR, where "he was recognized as an educated man, as an artist and as an equal."

Roosevelt was revered by those who really counted, such as Humphrey Bogart, who asked her during a lunch at Romanoffs to autograph his copy of her book, This I Remember. But well-wishers could not protect her projects from the national reaction against liberalism led by a new Republican president and, more stridently, by the red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy. Roosevelt held McCarthy partly responsible when in 1953 the Eisenhower administration refused to subscribe to the Declaration of Human Rights, a document she and her United Nations colleagues had worked for seven years to produce.

In retrospect, the title My Day suggests not only the diurnalism of Roosevelt's columns, but also their encapsulation of the history of a generation. "I have come to the conclusion that the nation as a whole has a very short memory," she writes resignedly in 1951, going on to explain the roots of the current Korean crisis in the Allies' liberation of Korea from Japan and subsequent division of the country between the US and the USSR. In the same year she finds it necessary to reprise the purpose of New Deal legislation, which was not to turn Americans soft but to save farms when "the businessmen who had striven to find answers to the economic problems up to 1932 had not succeeded in keeping down a wave of foreclosures." Farmers and others whom the New Deal kept working "were not made dependent," she continues; "They were simply kept from revolution against our government."

For those of us who failed to learn about 20th-century American history in school, these columns, with invaluable headnotes by editor David Emblidge, offer an inspiring way to make up for lost time.

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J. Paul de River, M.D.
Edited with an introduction by Brian King
Bloat ($18.50)

by Jon Carlson

Sexual murder still can prove interesting these days (depending on the creativity of the perpetrator), but for the America that had recently emerged from World War II, the crime was considered shocking as well. So one might consider unusual the 1949 publication of The Sexual Criminal, which catalogued Dr. Paul de River's interviews with a wide assortment of sexual deviants from Los Angeles, who had resorted to the most frenzied sort of killing in order to satisfy their bloodlust. Now, a half century later, Brian King has edited a revised and expanded edition, which includes newspaper accounts pertaining to four of the murderers, and a revelatory introduction about the peculiar circumstances that surrounded the professional and personal life of de River.

As one reviews the material of de River and other contributors to the book, it becomes apparent that virtually every sexual act falls under the rubric of perversion, which the glossary defines as "the deviation of the sex impulse from its normal goal." Their introductory and supplementary materials alert us to the evil of "the sex degenerate," and it is the shrillness and certainty of these "experts" that bring present-day evangelists to mind. Even holy wedlock cannot escape the far reach of the law: "Criminals have no monopoly on sexual divergences. It is now accepted by most authorities that many happily married couples engage in mouth-genital, or ano-genital contacts: actions which are considered sex felonies by the laws of most states." However, for all the immoral or illegal sexual practices, nowhere do any of the writers deign to define which behaviors might fit the "normal goal" and thus be appropriate for discharging the sexual appetite of Los Angelenos.

Perversion is most compelling when accompanied by murder, and here de River gives us both aplenty in words and photos. His categories include the juvenile sadist, genteel sadist, lust murderer and others. With each of the accused, de River provides family and personal histories, along with the results of physical and psychiatric examinations. Most interesting are the final segments of the case history, which contain the questions de River poses to the subjects and their responses, followed by the doctor's analysis and conclusion.

By also including photos of disarticulated limbs, multiple stab wounds, etc., de River provides the reader with a smorgasbord of visual aids to flesh out the text and demonstrate vividly to what extent his subjects lost any sense of moderation in pursuit of their sexual needs. This is close-range, hands-on killing with knives, clubs, rope, arsenic—there is not one instance of a firearm used to cause death.

Not every so-called sexual perversion investigated by de River culminates in murder. For example, with regard to sadistic bestiality, de River relates the story of a male preteen who indulged in sexual intercourse with chickens and his pet collie. More absorbing by dint of greater elaboration is the account of a teenage farm girl and Sandy, the family dog (a male, part shepherd). Although the girl longed for stallions or colts, she found Sandy much to her liking, as evidenced by her response to one of Dr. de River's "clinical" questions: "How would you get the most satisfaction from the animal?" Answer: "By his licking my privates until I couldn't stand it."

The Sexual Criminal contains a strong undercurrent of irony thanks to Brian King's introduction, "The Strange Case of Doctor de River." King's extensive research uncovers many concerns about de River's vocation, including questions about his medical training, his conduct dealing with suspects during the Black Dahlia homicide investigation, and his conviction for illegally prescribing narcotics for his wife, who was suffering from spinal surgery. And despite the ostensibly medicolegal justification that underlies the doctor's case histories, the nature of questions he advances in conjunction with the photographs points to a more personal interest. As with anti-pornography crusaders, who must carefully vet all the hardcore material within reach before dispensing their outrage, de River's moral patina is deliciously undermined by his own insatiable voyeurism. As such, it gives this engaging volume an enhanced kick.

In this land where ultraviolence often remains the last resort of those utterly jaded by more normative and stagnated forms of cultural diversion, The Sexual Criminal graphically reminds us that the "simple act of murder," fueled by a rabid sexual urge and carried out well and thoroughly, has always been the ne plus ultra of the true crime connoisseur.

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M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism
Edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor
Duke University Press ($22.95)

by Charles Alexander

M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a journal published from 1986-1996, was an oddly effective burst of energy located somewhere in New York between the quiet smugness of an overblown art market and an undeniable outsider-artist cultural drive for articulation. Mira Schor and Susan Bee, not quite ten years after the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (in which Bee was instrumentally involved) first appeared, needed a forum to discuss their work and lives and those of others who "felt left out by the hype of the 1980s art market boom and bewildered by the obduracy and obscurity of some theory language." The journal they made emerged as a discussion about the work they were creating and thinking about, about the pressures on that work, and about the wider context in which the work occurred. It was a world of talking about art. Just to make sure it was really talking, it included no images (until the final issue, which was all image). A studio and work-based journal of art with no pictures. Definitely something new, clearly something vital to the as-yet-unperceived spirit of the time.

Energy was its watchword. Beginning with controversy, it took on David Salle's appropriations of sexuality, conceptions of feminism and post-feminism, racism and sexism in the arts and beyond, and even that quality highly suspect among the oh-so-serious art critics, pleasure. As Johanna Drucker wrote,

We know, as women artists, the pleasure of production and production of pleasure—intimately, complicitly, complexly, in all the vicissitudes of subject/object relations and their interchangeable configurations of our psychic positioning.

Quite often, issues of M/E/A/N/I/N/G presented forums where several artists and critics contributed short, insightful, and personal comments on key issues. In "On Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie" the inclusions indicate the range of elocution and experience made articulate in M/E/A/N/I/N/G.

Suzanne Anker:

Within the cultural body lies another corpus, the unwritten textual authority determining the value of flesh . . . However, when singular definitions are reexamined and opened to include identity beyond biology, identity is revealed as constructed rather than determined. Only then is the meaning of women extended to include functions of motherhood as well as characteristics not connected with it.

Susan Bee:

It is assumed that if your womb is active your brain has suddenly shut off.

Bailey Doogan:

While the images of both Artist and Mother are overly romanticized and revered in our culture, the Artist is constructed as complex, sexually potent, and creative, the Mother as selfless, nonsexual, and nourishing . . . Maybe what I, as an artist, have given my daughter is a life revealed not hidden. [My daughter] is now a drummer in an all-female band in Portland, Oregon called TRAILER QUEEN. Their slogan is "Heavy as a Chevy." I continue to do my work.

One has a sense of artists living-life-thinking-theory-making-art, knowing that the world wants to divide all these activities, the artists not letting such division succeed.

Any forum for M/E/A/N/I/N/G other than the original issues seems absurd. The magazines were attractive though not slick, fancy, or expensively produced. They were blatantly plain, belying the glitzy extravagance of art that some media wanted (and still wants) to project. M/E/A/N/I/N/G was meaningful, not glamorous. It was of the studio world, not the gallery world, not the academy. But now it's 2001—what was 15 years ago avant-garde and outside is now debated and celebrated at Columbia, Yale, and the University of Virginia (all places where Johanna Drucker, who contributes the first introduction to this book that presents essays culled from the original journal, has held faculty positions). Something is gained, in production quality, promotional capability, and, I'm certain, in terms of how many readers the work finds. Yet something is irretrievably lost—a sense of urgency and of a living community of fellow travelers.

To recover something of this sense of urgency and closeness, I suggest starting with the forums in the book: "On Authenticity and Meaning," "Contemporary Views on Racism in the Arts," "Over Time: A Forum on the Art of Making," "On Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie," "Working Conditions: A Forum on Art and Everyday Life by Younger Artists," and "On Creativity and Community." Move from there to the "Artists' Musings" section, including Susan Bee's splendid arrangement of unedited quotations others have hurled at her.

"You painted this?"

"I like the way everything is painted but the area under the chair."

"The images are great."

"It's humanist and psychological."

"It's not narrative enough."

"Put $50 more paint on the canvas."

"Use bigger brushes."

"I like everything but the hair."

From the musings, browse as you will, and read the two introductions last since they only function to contextualize the journal. There may be some of you or even one person, upon reading, who might go out and begin a journal yourself, something smart and outrageous and straightforward and willing to challenge all of the art world's precious concepts about itself and about art and life. If you do, this book will have proved more than an invigorating read; it will have become essential. As co-editor Mira Schor writes,

Writing has created a community for me of unknown and sometimes known readers. M/E/A/N/I/N/G was born of a community of two, Susan Bee and myself. This intimacy suited me well because I find working with larger groups personally difficult and operationally tortuous. Yet now a group of friends, strangers, and institutions are collected in a card catalogue of subscribers in a red box in my studio. It holds an abstract network of people, as insubstantial as a spider's web, yet providing connection to the outside world.

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Sophocles
Translated by Anne Carson
Oxford University Press ($10.95)

by Justin Maxwell

When looking at a canonical play that's been translated again, both the translator and the reasons for the translation warrant more attention than usual. Oxford University Press's Greek Tragedy in New Translations series operates from the standpoint that with contemporary poets as translators, the plays will have a more aesthetically charged life for modern readers. The series seems custom made to have Anne Carson translate an installment of it. An accomplished poet and classicist, she has brought Greek texts into English as part of her own writing, giving them a rebirth in the contemporary world.

Carson's interpretation of Electra conveys the uniqueness, the vibrancy, and the tradition that must have been there for the original audience. The characters speak in a style which simultaneously juxtaposes the metrical and the colloquial: "But I wonder. You know / I wonder— / suppose he had some part / in sending her these cold unlucky dreams." With such frequently shifting metrics, the play can feel a bit awkward when scanned, but this awkwardness would instantly disappear in the mouth of any decent actor. More importantly, the changing meter is a wonderful and successful way of revealing the psychic tumult that keeps Electra on the edges of madness and violence. She doggedly maintains a climate of vengeance even though she is completely aware that it results in her perpetual suffering: "they plan / unless you cease from this mourning / to send you where you will not see the sun again. / You'll be singing your songs / alive / in a room / in the ground. / Think about that." Carson calls Sophocles' play a musical "anti-dialogue" that succeeds in showing an internal, emotional struggle from within the heart of theatrical-poetic language.

Electra is necessarily a play dominated by language, the natural result of a theater with almost no set, props, or stage directions. On such an aural stage Electra's screams become a language-event for those who witness them, and they are strongly manifested in this translation. Carson keeps the screams in Greek, perceiving them as being something primal; as she says in her foreword, they are "a language of lament that is like listening to an X-ray. Electra's cries are just bones of sound." Carson rightly argues that these manifestations of emotive noise are an essential part of the character and the play. In previous translations these cries have been rendered weakly (e.g., "alas" or "woe is me") or simply cut, silencing a human pain that can, as Carson demonstrates, easily reach across more than a dozen centuries.

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Renate Dorrestein
translation by Hester Velmans
Viking ($23.95)

by Deborah J. Safran

According to the back jacket copy, Renate Dorrestein is one of Holland's best-loved novelists. If her writing reads as smoothly in its native Dutch as it does in this English translation, it's easy to see why—her words are liquid and flowing, and they make A Heart of Stone horrifically entrancing.

Twenty-five years have passed and Ellen van Bemis is still haunted by a tragedy that befell her family and left her and her brother Carlos orphans. Now pregnant with her first child, her thoughts turn to her mother; she desperately wishes to understand what really happened and put those ghosts to rest. When she notices while flipping through the paper one day that her childhood home is up for sale, temptation proves too great: she decides that this is the perfect place to sort out her past.

It all started just before her twelfth birthday, when her parents announced the impending arrival of their fifth child. Ellen sensed there wasn't enough room for another child in the over-flowing house. Given the opportunity to name the unborn baby, she settled upon Ida "because it was the ugliest name I could think of, Ida rhymed with spider, and if you twisted the letters around and added a few more, you got diarrhea. How she'd be tormented, later, at school!"

And tormented she was, beyond what Ellen could have imagined. What follows is the slow, delicate process of unraveling how her parents and three of her siblings met their end before the unfortunate Ida even reached her first birthday.

The writing weaves seamlessly between the past and present, with a word or phrase from one story leading us into another and back again. The novel is almost doughy in its progression; it teases the reader with brief revelations, only to pull back on itself. The chapters are titled with photo captions, as if Ellen were sitting with the family album resting on her swollen belly, mentally traveling from vignette to vignette. A "Daddy's little girl," his words continue to echo inside her head: "The third child is the cement" and "Loyalty . . . [is] not always easy. You have to learn to choose." Through these repeated phrases, she finally understands what happened and why she survives it.

The ending, though slightly predictable, doesn't tie things up in a neat little bow. It's good to leave some issues unresolved, of course, but it seems strange that Ellen never ponders the whereabouts of her surviving brother. Adopted at age four, Carlos van Bemis is no more alive to Ellen than Kes, Billie, or Ida. And why are we introduced to Ellen's ex-husband, Thijis, at all? Their divorce offers no insight to her mental anguish; his existence only provides the opportunity for Ellen to tell why she became a pathologist (a profession which seems only too appropriate). These issues are minor, however, and do not detract from the beauty of the story. And beautiful it is—it's amazing how such an ugly tale can be so well told.

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Bonnie Burnard
Henry Holt ($25)

by Kiersten Marek

Bonnie Burnard's first novel is a good book, just as the characters are good people, who live in good houses. The Chambers clan seems better than most, able to handle the death of their mother by cancer without undue havoc, able to accept their father's remarriage and the birth of a new sibling. But as the novel progresses, its very goodness can begin to be a hindrance; it keeps the reader at a safe distance from these good people.

With heavy exposition, the narrative of A Good House often feels more like a well-versed family history than a novel. I say this with sincere respect, since it is a feat to chronicle over 50 years of family life. But telling a family's history is complicated. Whoever is doing the telling is bound to have his or her own blind spots, moments of the story they prefer not to delve into. Burnard's novel seems to do a similar dance of avoidance. The narrative steps back from its characters at critical moments, leaving them like unfinished sketches—unrealized and easily misunderstood. Consequently, the book left me with lots of questions similar to questions I have about people in my own extended family, questions which are not to be asked or answered, lest they threaten to destabilize or debunk. Why, for example, does Daphne refuse to marry Murray? She sleeps with him, bears his children, but in two of the few fully played-out scenes of the novel, she refuses his proposals. The only reason offered by the novel is Daphne's observation that Murray prefers love from a distance. This may be so, but it doesn't show how Daphne prefers love, and why, for the sake of her daughters if not herself, she does not seek a little institutional security.

Where the book lacks in its willingness to depict its often compelling characters more fully, it makes up for in some well-rendered scenes. Daphne falling and breaking her jaw in a neighborhood circus is riveting. Similarly, Burnard gives a connoisseur's attention to the lovemaking between many of the book's couples. She also spares nothing in portraying Daphne in confrontation with her ailing father, Bill. In the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease, Bill serves as a figure of tragicomic relief toward the end of the book, speaking, like a Court Jester, his most vile and base opinions. Of the father of Daphne's affairs resulting in her two daughters, Bill tells his daughter ruthlessly: "He took what he wanted, and you too stupid and ugly to deny him," to which Daphne replies in true Masterpiece Theater form, "You bastard. You God damned bastard."

As with any good house, this novel is filled with little charms, too. Burnard has a gift for carefully nuanced summations, with lines like "She turned on the tap and laid some Colgate along the bristles of her toothbrush." She also demonstrates an impressive understanding of life experience, and can summarize a person's 20-year-emotional career in one swift dash of the pen: "He'd had the words ready for a while, from the time his guilt had finally, and almost without his notice, transmogrified into the lesser sin of profound regret." And her metaphors, while not showy, are wonderfully rich, as in, "She watched him like you might watch an animal grooming himself in the dark of night."

Despite the mystery of Daphne's choice not to marry, in the end the story returns to her. Curiously, Burnard closes the novel with the marriage of Daphne's oldest daughter to an up-and-coming academic (like all good neo-Victorians, she knows that happy stories end with a wedding). Some of the final details about Daphne in this marriage chapter will keep readers pondering. Burnard tells of how Daphne raised her daughters on stories that only contained "the best words, the weird, strange, yummy words," but these stories always had the same revealing moral: "Be careful, children. You are all alone. Be very good or else."

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Ross King
Walker & Company ($26)

by Kris Lawson

Fans of The Name of the Rose will enjoy Ex-Libris, an unconventional bookish mystery. Books inform and consume the characters, who struggle to survive in the bleak England of post-Cromwell and the ravaged Europe of the Thirty Years War. From collections of dangerous books, the possession of which is enough to send the unlucky reader to prison or death, to covert book auctions in seedy wharfside London, Ex-Libris moves quickly as it weaves together two plots, linked by the search for a mysterious manuscript.

The first plot concerns the hero, a mild-mannered and nearly blind bookseller who discovers untapped reserves of persistence and bravery whilst aiding a mysterious noblewoman who lives in the midst of a decaying mansion filled with more books than furniture. The second follows three refugees fleeing the downfall of the Holy Roman Empire, smuggling crates of forbidden books from the Lutheran armies. Guarding the books are the obsessive librarian whose vocation is for cataloging; his lover who enjoys flouting convention by reading forbidden books; and the secret agent who doubles as secret book buyer for Emperor Rudolf, whose passion for magical and alchemical knowledge exceeds his military acumen.

Both stories converge with the search for the mysterious manuscript, The Labyrinth of the World, so rare that it has become legendary. Alchemy and secret societies, ciphers and invisible inks, mazes and secret passageways: Ex-Libris becomes conventional only in its plethora of plot devices—there's even a chase scene with boats racing down the Thames. Where King excels is in his historic scope: he demonstrates with heartbreaking regularity how censors as well as natural forces—here figured as waterways that facilitate murders, drown books and the sailors who smuggle them, and destroy the libraries they are meant to protect—can wipe out books in a matter of seconds, leaving only hints from other books to prove they ever existed.

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Alvin Lu
Four Walls Eight Windows ($22)

by Peter Ritter

As a typhoon closes around the island of Taipei, hungry ghosts intermingle with the living, causing mischief and stealing souls with impunity. Meanwhile, a shape-shifting killer called K grips the island's already-fevered imagination. Is K real, or, like the comic-book stories of suicide and haunting that seem to be coming to life, a figment of mass delusion caused by the storm? Such is the mystery of Alvin Lu's luscious but perplexing debut novel, The Hell Screens, a noirish ghost story with too many ghosts and too little story.

Lu is a film critic and teacher, and his interest in cinematic technique and the subjectivity of the senses is much in evidence here. The novel's narrator, an amateur Chinese-American scholar of the supernatural, sees the spirit world through a contact lens, which, when soaked in tea, blurs and distorts his vision. His associate, a rotund amateur videographer who may or may not be the reincarnated spirit of a dissident film director, roams the halls of a haunted apartment building trying to capture the image of a female ghost. Throughout, glimpses of Taipei's glistening, crowded streets flash on the page like whispers on celluloid. "I saw myself no longer in contemporary Taipei, but in the ghost city on which it based itself, in its imagination, if cities dream down to the naming of streets. In some dark lit colonial gotham, the bodies of poets and spies floated, shot and dumped, through gutters and down rivers, while young women, smitten and deceived by the notion of romantic love, waited in hovels for their idealistic young men to return." Filtered through the novel's distorted lens, the city's subconscious landscape, formed by myth and populated by nightmares, becomes manifest.

Like its setting, the plot of The Hell Screens flows according to the discordant logic of a dream. Characters, both living and otherwise, flit through the narrative, guided by voices from beyond through the labyrinthine metropolis. Adding to the confusion, they metamorphose at random, becoming apparitions from manga one moment and flesh-and-blood people the next. A girl with a flower tattoo, for instance, appears variably as one of K's victims, an enigmatic medium, and the ghost of a suicide. Even the narrator becomes suspect; he may, in fact, be a figment of K's imagination. Lu drops clues throughout, including snippets of Buddhist philosophy about the illusory nature of the material world, which suggest that the novel's puzzles are, at heart, unsolvable. As in Kafka's stories—which, as the killer's name implies, seem to have inspired Lu—paranoia is the narrative catalyst. When nothing is as it appears, anything is possible.

Yet for all the richness of Lu's atmospherics, there is an absence at the center of The Hell Screens, as though the novel itself were nothing more than the feverish projections of an unquiet mind. Kafka's parables were, at least, grounded by their stylistic parody and subversive spirit; Lu's fantasia, bound by nothing, eventually drifts into a cul-de-sac of portentous signs, metaphysical musing, and overripe prose. Trying to follow the author on this head-trip, we're left feeling like Theseus lost in the labyrinth, with nary a narrative bread crumb to guide the way.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001