Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming
Edited by Gardner Dozois
St. Martin's Press ($17.95)

Supermen: Tale of the Post-Human Future
Edited by Gardner Dozois
St. Martin's Press ($17.95)

by Ryder W. Miller

In the 1990s, Kim Stanley Robinson won many of the major science fiction awards for his Mars series (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) which chronicles the terraforming, or planet altering, of Mars. Despite Mars not being fully explored at the beginning of the series, the colonists start the process to create an atmosphere and oceans on the Red Planet. The series was shocking for anyone who hoped that we would do better by the next planet we inhabited.

Terraforming is not a new idea, and other authors have taken up the theme (such as Pamela Sargent in a series about terraforming Venus), but in detail and precision, Robinson described what many would like to do to our closest neighbor in space. Though forces arise to combat the terraformers in his series, the battle is lost and only remnants of the pristine Martian environment are saved. Robinson's series is thus a sobering reminder that if we think of ourselves as environmentalists, we would want to preserve Mars or at least treat it like a wilderness, rather than like the Frontiers of old which we have destroyed.

In Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming, editor Gardner Dozois anthologizes stories that have been written about terraforming other planets. As Dozois points out in his introduction the word terraforming was coined by Jack Williamson in the early 1940s, and Mars was also terraformed in Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars (1951), but the stories included here don't begin until 1955, with most of them written in the eighties and nineties. Dozois has assembled stories by many of the famous science fiction writers, but there are also works by the lesser-known writers of the more recent generations of story tellers.

Confronted with a barren, dangerous, and probably sterile solar system, many science fiction writers chose to terraform some of our celestial neighbors in order to tell their stories. Mercury is heated to high temperatures by the sun, Venus has been turned into a furnace by a runaway greenhouse effect, Mars is an ice box, and Jupiter and most of the other planets are gas giants. In the interest of saving lives and making the planets more hospitable, many storytellers in Worldmakers argue that we should change their environments to more suitable conditions. But there are also some stories, ironically Robinson's and Sargent's, with characters that object to the terraforming.

Dozois also points out that making these changes could be potentially dangerous, and in fact it is the danger which makes some of the philosophical stories exciting. But the stories show that even if we try to terraform the planets of the solar system, we may not necessarily be successful at doing so. "Ecopoesis" by Geoffrey Landis, one of the more memorable stories in Worldmakers, details how the planet Mars will become frozen again if the carbon dioxide escapes the atmosphere. Then there are the politics involved, and the human failings; as the worlds change, so do some of the characters—some even changing sex and identities.

In Supermen: Tales of a Post-Human Future, Dozois explores an alternative to terraforming: "pantropy," or the technological altering of human beings to adapt to new worlds, futures, or hostile environments. Though it is a struggle to apply the values of environmentalism to developments in space exploration, commercialization and militarization, Deep Ecologists should in theory applaud the pantropics. Unfortunately, this is not the collection of anti-terraforming stories one would hope; the anti-terraforming arguments are not developed with equal elaboration. The follow-up anthology could have better focused on pantropy by addressing the problems of terraforming rather than by dwelling on the strangeness of the future. Imaginary worlds are lost in the process.

What environmentalists can take from these stories is that there are worlds to save; environmental efforts seem even more necessary when Dozois likens our changing of the Earth to terraforming a new planet. The difference here is that we are not even able to protect the Earth from the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion, while the imaginary terraformers of fiction are making deliberate plans to alter worlds. These fascinating tales of our "post-human" future indeed have much to say about the present.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

Baudolino
Umberto Eco
Harcourt ($27)

Also Discussed in this Essay:

The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
Harvest Books ($15)

The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce
Umberto Eco
Harvard University Press ($15)

by Summer Block

Mundus Senescit: Umberto Eco recreates the Middle Ages

Umberto Eco's recent historical novel Baudolino opens with a sort of gibberish made up of Latin, German, Italian, and English, a gleeful combination of inside jokes, puns, and scholarly winks and nods. The tale, written on top of an earlier history that has been scratched off the parchment but occasionally peeks through, is a story in a story in a story on a story. If that sounds complicated—well, it is. Trickster Baudolino, an unreliable narrator by his own unreliable report, tells his long life story to Niketas, an historian whom Baudolino hopes will be able to give shape and meaning to an otherwise almost-random-series of events and decisions. From the very beginning, Eco is playing with myth, truth, history, and storytelling—and tackling a project far more lofty than Niketas'.

With the recent publication of Baudolino, Umberto Eco returns to writing fiction set in the Middle Ages—and creates an ultimate symbol for medieval thought and history, in its own time and in our own. Eco's concern for medieval philosophy, present in both his popular and scholarly works, is in fact a sort of nostalgia for a time now much maligned and misunderstood, a forgotten kingdom of intellect and imagination. Very much a realist, Eco never suggests we can—or should—return to a medieval mindset (Society for Creative Anachronism aside, no one who truly knows the Middle Ages could ever wish to live it over.) But in medieval thought he finds an elegant system, though one that was obsessed with its own eventual irrelevance and decay. In his essays, he expounds on the tension that exists between medieval and modern thought; in his novel The Name of the Rose, he heralds the emergence of the modern man; in his new Baudolino, the book itself is a symbol for medieval thought, its triumphs, its failures, and its eventual decline.

Baudolino starts realistically enough, with the adoption of the young peasant Baudolino by the emperor Frederick. Baudolino becomes a symbol of the new social mobility of the late Middle Ages, when urban centers and burgeoning nations created footholds for merchants and even peasants in the upper classes. Quick-witted and gifted with languages, Baudolino is sent to study in Paris, where he meets up with a group of friends (characters that are sadly never much developed). Baudolino falls in love twice, marries, takes part in battles and sieges, and generally leads a remarkable—but believable—life.

Our hero, however, is obsessed with the myth of Prester John, a legendary king and priest who rules a mythical empire in the east. Prester John's story begins to take on a life of its own when Baudolino shares the tale with his classmates, each of whom contributes to the kingdom whatever vision they hope to find there (for a Jewish scholar, it is the lost tribes of Israel; for a romantic poet, it is a cherished woman). Soon, they devise a letter in which Prester John describes to Frederick his fabulous kingdom, and its most fabulous treasure—the fabled Holy Grail. What begins as a political ploy spins out of hand, as copies of the letter—all altered slightly from the original—spread out. As the lie disseminates, history becomes entwined with myth. Baudolino and his friends soon set off to find this mythical land—a land they themselves invented—and find there precisely what they expected. The word becomes the world, and the last half of the book is as full of monsters and magic as any fantasy novel. Not surprisingly, Baudolino makes some bold assertions about language and reality, but none so bold as the very model of the book itself-as Baudolino's world fades into the sunset of dreams, so too does the whole medieval world, its philosophical models and ideas, even our perception of it, clouded by myth and time.

Mundus senescit: The medieval world anticipates its own decline

Just two years after the publication of The Name of the Rose, Eco laid out his own version of the medieval system in his slim volume The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, in which he makes a convincing argument for Joyce as a medieval man—or, more appropriately, a man in whom a basic medieval understanding warred with a modern sensibility. This battle between the medieval and the modern, of course, is as much a hallmark of Eco as of Joyce, and one doesn't have to think too far ahead to watch Eco carry out the same sort of drama he attributes to Joyce. In this essay, Eco devotes a section to "The Medieval Model," in which he presents a sort of "Middle Ages for dummies," a simplified, practical key to medieval thinking. Naturally, the section says as much about Eco as it does about either Joyce or medieval writers; in this section, we learn what to expect in Eco's historical fiction.

"The medieval thinker," Eco begins, "cannot conceive, explain, or manage the world without inserting into the framework of an Order." True enough. It's easy today to imagine the Middle Ages as a time of great intellectual chaos, even stupidity. In fact, the Middle Ages was a time of great intellectual rigor and passion, born out of a need to bring order to the chaos unfolding in religion and politics, the ravages of disease and greed, the uncertainties of a changing world. When errors were made—and they often were—they were not the result of chaos, but the result of an excess of reason. When the order is primary, stubborn details that do not fit must be altered or disregarded. Yet this reason-before-reality system is not evidence of faulty thinking, only of different goals. Their reliance on systems, after all, was no less a liability than the modern thinker's, who cannot explain the whole for the tyranny of details.

All around was unrest and dissolution, but still there remained immense intellectual potential. The world was waiting to be remade. Classical thinkers, while still respected, were to be assimilated or ultimately discarded; after Christianity, all thought and experience was new again, waiting to be explained, classified, and ultimately redeemed.

In his essay, Eco contrasts medieval order with the disorder of modernity and post-modernity—a jumble of signs and references, a movement "from the ordered cosmos of scholasticism to the verbal image of an expanding universe." Still, within this ordered cosmos a wilderness is contained, a "grid of allusions." "The medieval mind," Eco goes on, "does not fear innovation, it conceals changes under the form of commentaries." This dialogue among texts, part of "an unlimited chain of relations between creatures and events," unfolds as "history telling itself to itself." This very idea of speaker and reference is at the heart of Baudolino, where the character tells his history—and, by extension, the story of the whole medieval period—to another, and the story is spread and changed even as the world it depicts diminishes and gradually passes away.

Eco cites here the common medieval wisdom, "Mundus senescit" (which he refers to in both The Name of the Rose and Baudolino as well). The Latin phrase sums up the basic medieval nostalgia, the preoccupation with age and decay; then, too, it describes the eventual decline of the medieval system under the pressures of modern thought. Eco uses it to invoke the way the very notion of the "Middle Ages" has declined in popular imagination, straying off into myths of King Arthur and dragons, the real substance and detail of everyday life increasingly difficult to imagine.

Mundus senescit: Eco charts the passing of the medieval era

Language, storytelling, detail, and order are all embedded in Eco's first medieval novel, The Name of the Rose. In this mystery story, a forward-thinking monk and his apprentice are called to an abbey—and its vast library—to solve a series of murders. Using signs, the monk William interprets the clues in the natural world, coming to conclusions in a thoroughly modern way. He maneuvers through the ordered library, itself a model of an ordered world, and masters it; finally, the ordered library is itself destroyed and its knowledge forever lost. Naturally, it is easy to see in this story an allegory for the dissolution of the medieval philosophical system and the rise to prominence of the scientific method and all it entails. Eco is quick to complicate the matter, however, by telling The Name of the Rose in a series of frames—William's apprentice, Adso, tells the story, which is supposedly found in manuscript form, an "Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth century." This self-conscious list of references naturally calls into doubt the veracity of the text and its translation; already the ordered intellectual world of the Middle Ages is on shaky ground.

Adso opens his story meditating on "the disaster of an aging world," its unruliness and vice. He remembers fondly his teacher, the monk William, a man who could "read the great book of nature," though perhaps also sensing that William is the sort of modern man of science, of detail, that is bringing down the order he mourns. The story progresses, all contained in the space of only a few days, in the small space of one abbey. Following these unities of place and time, The Name of the Rose is a small work, but one that contains hints of bigger things. The murder weapon—a poisoned book—is the first sign that The Name of the Rose is more than just a mystery novel. The book presages the work that Eco will produce in time. In fact, a list of monsters, found in an illuminated library text, alludes to precisely the same sort of monsters that appear in the flesh in the great, sprawling adventures of Baudolino, stories whose only unity is in their own telling.

The Name of the Rose is a relentlessly practical book. After all, there is a murder to solve, and that sort of directedness does not allow the wild game of allusions that leads Baudolino everywhere but to the point. Yet at the end there is a key, a way to unlock the mysteries of the library and tear down its rigid order. Adso stumbles on this clue almost by mistake, causing William to exclaim, "Why, of course . . . the discourse is presumed de dicto and not de re." Of words and not of things: this little line is the key to more than just the mystery. In Baudolino, Eco will create a vast system of allusions, lies, jokes, puns, myths—a world of words and not of things, a modern system of texts that defy any order.

Mundus senescit: The medieval world fades into obscurity

Enter Baudolino, Eco's return to fiction and the culmination of his nostalgia, his predictions, his games, and his lessons. Baudolino is full of everything—history, magic, philosophy, science, theology. There are debates about the nature of the vacuum, the nature of the Grail, the nature of the Trinity. It is as if Eco meant this book to be a compendium of everything medieval, every idea, every system, a real, wide world fading to memory and myth. In The Name of the Rose, the book did it; here, the book is it, the lesson, the device, the universe. (Medieval literature, too, is replete with frame stories, dream visions, and unreliable narrators.)

If The Name of the Rose is the Middle Ages that was, Baudolino is the Middle Ages that we see now, looking backwards, its details dissolving into myths and misconceptions and generalities. When Baudolino and his companions ride off to find a place they made up themselves, Eco refutes the very notion of the accurate and the real. Baudolino's lies become reality, while annihilating the very possibility of reality and order, annihilating the library of The Name of the Rose, annihilating itself. You can imagine the giddiness with which the wise semiotics professor employs language to simultaneously create and destroy, to usher in a modernity of information and communication and dissolve forever the stately calm of the medieval system.

While The Name of the Rose is small in scope, Baudolino is huge. It tackles every issue: war and peace, the creation and dissolution of cities, the creation and dissolution of kingdoms. These issues were at the forefront of the medieval consciousness as well; the birth of nations, the need to bring fractured and warring kin groups together for "national" interests, the rise of urban power centers and the university elite, the violent conflict between Church and state—all of these demanded a system of political and religious thought that could put order to chaos.

Authenticity is at the very heart of Baudolino, where much of the plot hinges on phony relics. Baudolino even carries a phony Grail, one he himself fabricated, and comes to guard it through years of wandering torment with the passion of a believer. In Eco's world, believing makes it so, whether it is a phony relic or a phony kingdom. "When you say something you've imagined, and others then say that's exactly how it is, you end up believing it yourself," Baudolino explains to Niketas. Baudolino uses his fabulous stories to deceive, to seduce, to entertain, and to encourage—and the listener has an eager ear, because he is waiting to be lied to. Often, Baudolino lies out of a sense of duty; of three phony relics, the supposed bodies of the Magi, he says it was "up to me to give those three bodies a new Bethlehem." And you believe him, because you can hear in his voice how much he wants to believe himself.

The mythical kingdom of Prester John may or may not be real, but real is no longer a category worth considering. Previously, in the medieval system, the world was organized and ranked, a great chain of being that accounted for all things. Baudolino represents a new world of half-truths and relativity, a world without organization or rank. At the end of his life, Baudolino is bound to his lies, committed to living out the truth he made. He lives in his own mad dreams and wills them into reality. Whether this is a punishment for lying or a gift for genius, one can't say.

Baudolino is certainly a novel of the head and not the heart. The characters are more allegorical than personal, the allusions and cleverness make it hard to feel a bond of affect with the characters. Yet Eco intended to make Baudolino not only an allegory for medievalism and its decline, but a lesson about truth and memory. Again and again, reading the novel, you want to ask, "How could that obviously phony letter fool them all?" But we are all fooled by narratives of our own devising, sometimes heroically, sometimes tragically. Eco, too, is a victim of his wildest dreams, for while he struggles to save medieval scholasticism from the dustbin of history, he takes another step toward fabulous obscurity.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

by Joel Turnipseed

Murray Bail is a patient writer, having published just four books of fiction at sixty, a mark almost to be aimed at for its deliberateness. Unfortunately, his fame here has taken an equal leisure. Twenty-seven years have passed since the publication of his most famous story, "The Drover's Wife," which has been widely-anthologized abroad and was included in his first Australian collection, Contemporary Portraits, also out in 1975. This lapse is lamentable, since Bail shines best in his short stories. Camouflage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20) combines the contents of that original selection with some newer stories for debut in America.

"Launch," perhaps would have been the better word, since the collection opens with the parabolic tale of "Seduction of My Sister." Here a young man comes to the grim realization of his fate—as hopeless middleman between things and their possessors. But how it comes: in a succession of wild losses, none of whose value he esteems until everything is broken or gone, including his sister. These things land in the hands of the new neighbor Gordon Gill, a kid who knows how to coax without asking:

From the beginning, I began to see, I was doing all the work. To Gordon I suggested we change positions. Operating in darkness near our back door I could do my bit with my eyes shut, whereas on his side light was absolutely essential, he pointed out. "Without proper light I've no idea what's coming my way." I'm at the receiving end, let's not forget, he actually said. Besides, he pointed out, we have each attained a degree of efficiency in our respective roles. "Isn't that right?" he said to her, alongside.

And so go, over the roof in ever-hilarious, ante-raising amplitude, the things of his family's life: Caruso 78s, coins, a birdcage, stuffed fox, tennis racquet and toaster. The transition from the insidiousness of class in child's play, enacted in an inspired rebellion against the ennui of youth's afternoons, to the story's magic conclusion is nothing short of masterful. In the end, the young narrator's congenital lack of expectation is rendered in a beautiful, ecstatic moment of recognition—a spark of longing. It is a hushed surprise of quiet wonder that shouldn't, and can't, be spoiled.

If "Seduction of My Sister" rummages the garage and attic in a sustained arc of loss, Bail's first novel, Homesickness, travels the world looking for tropes to send home as postcards, and finds them in abundance on four continents: a Collection of Pygmies; Ramanujan's red-phone theorems and Wiener's calligraphic Taylor's series; Traveler's Geneologies; Corrugated Iron; a bathtub with drains at both ends, straddling the equator; Lenin's gold fillings. The premise is clear from the outset: examine a nation's pretensions by sending its denizens abroad. And yet, Bail's museums and vagrants, for all their cleverness and exuberant inventiveness, most frequently trip over themselves in a cheap joke, as in Bail's nod to Lautréamont's surrealism in the Museum Of Handicrafts, in which the broken remains of Empire lie in state in Kenya, most peculiarly:

They passed two objects which had been combined: an early Singer sewing machine and an umbrella. To save space the umbrella had been opened, revealing its construction, and placed on the machine, but someone without thinking or to demonstrate the jabbering needle, had got it tangled and mutilated something terrible.

This is just one in a long series of jokes, many of which are genuine used-bookstore groaners, such as Bail's pun on the exhibits of an Ecuadorian leg museum: "Civilization and its contents." Still, he gets in some great ones—as when he calls airplane voices "that Esperanto of steadiness which rises at the end"—and they are frequent enough to sustain the journey.

As for the characters in Homesickness, I kept trying to remember whether a doctor was among them, they seemed so frail with life. Too frequently are they mere occasions for brilliant observations and opinions: brief essays with cocks and cigarettes, passports and cuckolding wives and a lawn half a continent away, waiting to be mowed. Like the vatted brains in Bail's museum of genius, I wondered about his travelers: "If I hooked them up to a speaker, would they scream?" Detail is frequently the begetter of place and character—and delirious detail abounds in Homesickness—but somehow all this fails to live up to the kind of facticity that a Balzac or, more fantastically, Melville would have shored up into reality.

Failure, probably, is the wrong judgment, because Bail does succeed in his analogical imaginings, at giving substance to his story. Unquestionably, he can pack a lot of life, its shock and recognition, into the off-hand. Take this gem from world-traveler Borelli's uncle, remarked when the two pay tribute at Richard Burton's London tomb: "It's immovable yet it's a monument to a great traveler. That's the paradox; one that you won't forget."

Paradox. It's hard to see what else the hurtling mess of Homesickness could lead to. Like the succession of museums and continents, we never stay long enough in any one consciousness, or place, to let one imagining take hold; instead, a quick succession of minor masterpieces. Here is Bail's description of Borelli's uncle: "He was sixty-four, with his own teeth, was skinny, as sharp angled (in knees, elbows and nose) as the letters L and K: unfolding, he snapped and crackled like a carpenter's rule."

Brilliant language and keen observations leading to—what exactly? The expected result: museum fry. It has been said of Bail that, "for him, realism in fiction fails to record the subtleties of reality." I don't know whether this counts as praise, since in this he is just one more inheritor of an old problem in the novel, one whose difficulty has only become more urgent as we have invited the intense consciousness of dreams (or, alternatively, the most skeptical of our philosophic doubts) into our most everyday art, a trouble earlier diagnosed by Mary McCarthy: "We know the real world exists, but we can no longer imagine it." One wishes that Bail's travelers had his patience, and moved at a pace that was pedestrian in the best sense: peripatetic, wandering, observant at the pace of two friends on a stroll. Instead, we end the novel as they do-disoriented and exhausted.

Oddly and by contrast, Bail succeeds wildly at capturing both the strangeness of the world and the vitality of its characters in the brief Borgesian elaborations of "Huebler," the most fun of the stories in Camouflage. Determined to help Douglas Huebler, a photographer, in his ambitious task of photographing the existence of everyone alive, the narrator offers help in identifying the first twenty-three, as defined by such recherché (and McSweeney's-anticipating) qualities as:

1. At least one person who always has the last word.

7. At least one person who thinks words are as concrete as objects.

17. At least one person whose existence was foreordained.

22. At least one person whose unique sexual capacities have no outlet.

If it seems unlikely that a short story should contain more real characters and more deeply-felt moments than an entire novel, consider this brilliant moment of Suggested Person Number 2, Rivera, who is "one person who would rather be almost anyone else," a moment during which the overbearing architect finally sees his son:

It was his face. He saw his faults duplicated, smoothly growing. It was what other people must have seen. They were conspicuous: obviously father, son. For Rivera it was an intrusion; he felt like suddenly hitting his son hard across the face. He wanted to; strange, weak man. He went sullen and fiddled with a spoon.

If he could sever, disassociate. That became his immediate, hopeless wish. To be someone-almost anyone-else. Then all the signs displayed in the young face opposite could not point to him.

All twenty-three of Bail's people approximate this quality of genius. The short tale of Karl Schultz—one who will outlive art—is a parable worthy of Kafka. Another of the lives pays silent tribute to Bernhard and Wittgenstein ("Concrete."). And finally, the Twenty-Third person, "for whom reality is richer than the artist's fantasies." Huebler?

There's an uneasiness about Huebler's undertaking that spans all of Bail's works: the means of Huebler's art. For a writer so intensely visual, Bail has an angry obsession with photography. The most loathsome of Homesickness' characters is the obliquely anagrammatic Kaddok, who wears his camera like a weapon, and who is so bumblingly inane he manages to trip over the equator while setting up a shot. Bail can be acidly observant when he is railing against Daguerre's heresy, as in this scene at the Tate: "Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism and Tourism are all related. I doubt now whether one can do without the other." In another scene Bail states, "Oh and Commercialism, never one to be left out: two multinationals, Kodak and the Kraft Corporation, had joined forces to sponsor a European food photographic competition, 'Say Cheese!"

Elsewhere, Bail states categorically, "Photography: Melancholia." The origin of this complaint can only be guessed: a deep inner anguish over f-stops and emulsions; the artist's revulsion at the banal machinery of vision and its reproductive processes—a kind of unrelenting paean to Walter Benjamin, sung for future graduate students.

If the failure of character can be considered the chief fault of Homesickness, Bail's second novel opens with promise enough in compensation. Holden's Performance is the coming-of-age story of Holden Shadbolt and the city Adelaide. It says something about Bail, however, that it's uncertain which of these two develops more, or demands more sympathy. Holden endures a broad succession of manipulators, all preceded, following the death of his father, by two startling entrances into his life: a photographic memory and a would-be stepfather, the unscrupulous and storytelling Corporal Frank McBee.

Unfortunately, Holden soon turns out as unaffecting as Kaddok's Pentax. Still, we are treated to Bail's gift of Adelaide by his presence, from the early backstory of his father's work on its trams—

...encouraged by the puritanical streets, the brown trams always went forward in straight lines, scattering traffic and pedestrians like minor objections or side-issues, and somehow this suggested the overwhelming logic of plain thinking. There always seemed to be a tram opening up a clear path to the distant goal of Truth.

—to the city's post-tram disorder; the insatiable thirsts of McBee in his successes; and Holden, at book's end, standing watch over the peroxide paranoia of the State:

Standing on special running-boards... Shadbolt became a reincarnation of his father working his way along the outside of trams. His position though was more unpredictable. There were no regular stops. The aim was to escort the Head of Government in profile in a steady sliding motion, the way a coin is passed before a sceptical crowd, yet rapid enough to foil a sniper on a rooftop aiming to intersect his hairline sights.

Here and throughout, Bail shows gifts of description that stand equal to that of Bellow or Delillo, but not quite with the humanity of the former or the sustained pitch in tuning an idea to its story of the latter. In the end, Holden's Performance feels like one of the sexier sport cars being sold by McBee: you suspect something's going to go mysteriously wrong, no one will know how to fix it, and a thing of beauty will sit on the blocks awaiting a die-hard enthusiast with the patience to master it.

And then there is Eucalyptus—a forest of language in which readers can become joyfully lost. Bail's only necessary novel, Eucalyptus is a wonder. It relates the story of Ellen, and her life in an encyclopedic landscape of eucalypts carefully cultivated by her father Holland on his outback ranch. The plants are stubbornly singular, thriving in strange soil, cultivated by intelligence and passion—and thus Eucalyptus is also the story of stories. Bail's ability to weave story within story, metaphor within metaphor, is displayed here with a mastery hinted at in his previous novels, but they contained nothing like this:

What is frail falls away; stories that take root become like things, misshapen things with an illogical core, which pass through many hands without wearing out or falling to pieces, remaining in essence the same, adjusting here and there at the edges, nothing more, as families or forests reproduce ever changing appearances of themselves; the geology of fable. In Alexandria, eucalypts were grown in front of houses to ward off evil spirits, including fatal diseases.

Eucalyptus takes firm root in its premise: the man who can successfully name each species of E. on Holland's ranch can take possession of it through marriage to Ellen, who is herself more beautiful than any other woman in the outback. After many failures, a man of significant promise arrives, Mr. Cave. Whether he is a better suitor for Ellen or her father is a question from the start, however, as we guess from his first visit:

Mr. Cave shifted in his seat. "Mind you, (studying eucalypts has) given me a life of sorts." He began nodding. "Everything is a comparison," he said for no apparent reason. Ellen had been standing by the window. It was odd how two men repeatedly put down blocks of matter and left it at that. In tone and steadiness they were tarpaulined trucks with heavy loads, now and then changing down a gear, rather than light and sprightly birds, hopping from one bit of colour to another.

As Mr. Cave walks the paddocks with Holland, he takes no notice of Ellen. His platonic interest points up, in his ways as well as name, a paradox in life and stories: how should it be that our attentions to the straightforward, the logical, the catalogued taxonomies—ideal structures placed on the world to give it light—should so devastatingly leave dark shadows within us? As he steadfastly, but with an equally leisured confidence, marches with Ellen's father through the stark light of the paddocks, he is not stippled by even a leaf of doubt. And so we, as well as Ellen, begin to despair as Cave trots off his task: E. signata, E. maidenii, E. nubilis...

But Ellen stumbles upon another man, unannounced to her father, and her discovery of him is a puzzle to the very end, one which delights from its inception. He was lying in the bush, unshaven, disheveled, obviously worn—

Concerning the bodies of men, the visible areas: they have the scars. Men tend to accumulate them, almost as women wear jewelry. To carry a scar is to carry a story. The very suggestion can extend a person. Beneath every scar, then—a story, unfortunately.

The man, unnamed throughout, proceeds to weave his sad art—his stories—into the paddocks of eucalyptus and into Ellen's life. And this is the task of the nameless storyteller: to name each eucalypt without uttering its nomenclature, to tell its story directly in the language of our lives—not in the parallel figuring of Mr. Cave, whose Latinate naming is at best the seed for metaphor. Ellen's engagement with the stranger's stories, despite their crookedness, their oblique falsehoods seeding a straighter truth, culminates in a fugue of desperation whose glorious resolution is Bail's greatest accomplishment.

Camouflage closes with the title story, in which the forty-year-old piano tuner Eric Banerjee discovers in painting indiscernible patterns on a desert Aerodrome during World War II, an unexpected joy in abandonment to large forces: the burning presence of the unpainted hangar, the loudmouthed freedom of Americans, and the great undertow of fate sweeping against personal agency in time of war. In what may be the most straightforward and quiet of his stories, Bail creates a living doubt:

Any sign of life was at mid-distance; and all so quiet it was as if he was going deaf.

Not that he wanted disturbance, disruption, surprise and so on. A certain order was necessary in his line of work. These thoughts he kept to himself. Yet increasingly he felt a dissatisfaction, as though he had all along been avoiding something which was actually closer to the true surface of life.

The twenty pages of "Camouflage" feel riskier in what they leave behind than the hundreds of pages of novelistic gambles Bail packed into Homesickness and Holden's Performance, and they pay off more handsomely. I felt as aware in this story's aftermath of the up-and-down nature of Bail's work—now its vertiginous heights, then its uncertain plummets—as Banerjee felt when surveying his own humble art during the flight that ends his story, and Bail's collection:

Everything was clearer, yet not really. Plane's shadow: fleeting, religious. In the silence he was aware of his heart-beats, as if he hadn't noticed them before.

Now the earth in all its hardness and boulder unevenness came forward in a rush.

Briefly he wondered whether he—his life—could have turned out differently. Its many parts appeared to converge, in visibility later described as "near perfect".

In his insistent vision, his increasing power to turn the scattered encyclopedia of everyday mundanities into metaphor and story, Murray Bail's work at its best does seem to be a convergence: the shaping of a vision that is turning out "near perfect" fiction.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other
Etel Adnan
Post Apollo Press ($13)

from the warring factions
Ammiel Alcalay
Beyond Baroque Books ($12)

by Fanny Howe

October 2002, America. Standard Time began this week; as ever it marks the random nature of time. Early nights. Emptying trees. Tragic news from around the world. Questions around dinner tables. Children hunched over homework.

What are we going to do? Our sense of things is absolutely lonely. A planet in space, no up, no down. A little lighted dot in a bag of darkness. "A heuristics of fear," is what Hans Jonas called it. "Lucky it wasn't me" is a person's daily thought after reading the papers.

In a matter of weeks everyone will have forgotten all of the events of this month, and on back into the year before. But I am not sure that memory is the way to salvage belief because it, too, has the status of fiction now. Culture is kitsch—a few spicy dishes and a color code for dress-ware, Christmas cards from a grandmother who lives in another country.

•   •   •

Etel Adnan grew up as the child of a Syrian Muslim and a Greek Christian between Beirut and Damascus, and endured the Lebanese Civil War before emigrating to the United States. Her book, There, is an act of confrontation with the above unhappy view of our world now and its origins and results. That is, it examines the repetition of the same eruptions and emotions and questions. What is the effect of knowing on what I do? Why am I named what I am? Where is there when I am always here?

Her landscape, dry but surprising, could be somewhere in Southern California. Militarism haunts it, and creates an anxiety that is all shadow. But shadows are not the same as obstacles. And many dreads are malformed shadows of the actual, not the actual itself. This is the real problem that Adnan wants to solve in her writing—which shadow is formed by the real, and what is the real?

Adnan is also a serious painter, and some of the difficulties of art enter into her narrative. Is there any way to make form and substance the same without dividing them? Where is color, if not both behind and before the color beside it? How would you get from white to color and back to white again on one canvas without making them all the same? Only by relationship.

Absurdly absurd this absurdity. Shadows, old companions, speak their own immensity. Why should I desire to undo Nature's simplest law—how can I remove your shadow from your body, and what good would that do to the nations I care for?

Adnan asks questions that she (thankfully) doesn't dare to answer. They are about the female and the male, the you and the she and the I and the he, being divided although made of identical substances. In the Psalms there is a similar vacillation between subjects (I-he-you) that puts this book, including its drawn desert face, into the ancient realm of the absolutely uncertain.

For Adnan the mercurial nature of the pronoun does not prove that a person is an invention of culture and perspective, but instead shows that we each contain the evil and good deeds of all our ancestors—that they are us. You are a hater and a lover, a warrior and a woman. It is not a matter of relativity but of non-dualism. The enemy is embedded in the face of every approaching friend.

I hated you for so long in the inner territory that we inhabited together that you're now the negative print of my identity (no, not a shadow), the unwanted companion who becomes, o tragedy!, love's very substance.

. . .

from the warring factions by Ammiel Alcalay takes a different approach to the same landscape and archaeology. This approach could be called post-modern. Formally it proceeds from recent American poetics and seems free from neo-gnostic self-examination and doubt.

Alcalay grew up in Boston and now lives in New York. He is a poet, translator, critic, scholar, teacher, and journalist; his specialties are the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Levantine culture generally. He spent many years out of the country in ex-Yugoslavia and Jerusalem and has maintained intense friendships across the years and borders.

This book is an excellent example of the thinking that is emerging from a post-Cold War generation. It could be used as a manual for trying to understand the way popular, ancient, and literary languages are "sampled" by writers who desire a new transnational consciousness.

The first part of the book is broken into five sections, each one being a kind of homage to a forensic anthropologist named William Haglund, who investigated and trained others to investigate the corpses of people killed in massacres from Rwanda to Argentina. Alcalay imagines Haglund tracing evidence of what happened in the dust and on car wheels, saying he "could have been Virgil mapping out his descent through the circles of hell."

This investigative activity is what Alcalay is himself doing, by resuscitating anonymous voices and writings from a variety of cultural eruptions. The writings are not ironic or lyrical:

As part of their effort, statistical charts were prepared recording total daily shelling activity; daily numbers of persons killed; daily numbers of persons wounded; and combined reported shelling activity and casualties by day and by week. . .

But lyrical moments come in very short, spoken clips: "Or the frontier then, along with some angels falling."

The second part of the book is a long and rewarding interview with Benjamin Hollander. Despite Alcalay's realism, it is strangely optimistic. From his breadth of curiosity and generous sharing of what he knows, a kind of hope in the human ability to transcend history emerges. He combines anecdotes with opinions, observations with results.

As an American in Israeli society with a Sephardic consciousness and an awareness of the Palestinian perspective, I found myself in a unique position. I could pass for white and was privy to all kinds of racist behavior that people couldn't imagine I would object to. This experience was formative for me, and it re-inscribed things that I was certainly aware of growing up in the United States but which were only driven home for me by being in Israel/Palestine. And it was through the Mizrahi and Palestinian activists and artists that I befriended—through the work they produced and the movements they created—that I began to grasp the true sequence of cultural permission and transmission in the formation of knowledge as a collective endeavor, rather than the way we are usually taught such things proceed—through acts of singular perseverance or genius.

In the final part of the book, Alcalay (a proponent of communalism and full disclosure) tells us which writers he drew his sentences from, and explains the politics behind this method. One of the most articulate and fully developed accounts of literary sampling, it illuminates the first part of the book the way notes by Robert Smithson would unveil the spiral jetty or other of his earthworks.

From the warring factions is a book without questions, and substantively unlike Adnan's There for this very reason. It is a book that answers itself, and in this way it is a useful and complete book for our time—a kind of textbook which concludes with the statement: "By making words and languages reorient themselves across time and face each other under new conditions, my intention is to re-awaken the ancient force of poetry-as fact and testimony."

And Adnan's ruminative, beautiful book ends:

From the primeval waters we arose—you and I, from the beginning we went on a search and when the gardens grew we looked together for a shade, didn't we?

From the desire to live we arose and built nations, didn't we?

. . . then the trees stared at their own bareness and we didn't come to their aid, did we?

Click here to purchase from the warring factions at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003

by Alan DeNiro and Kelly Everding

Jonathan Carroll is a fabulist of the first order. In twelve novels, as well as in his short fiction, he has created a body of work filled with psychological complexity, lyrical sentences, and outright surrealism, yet one which still provides the reader with the most basic pleasures of page-turning narrative.

Carroll has lived in Vienna, Austria for nearly 30 years, and is something of a literary star in Europe, though audiences in America have been slow to catch on to his fiction. This is perhaps because of a tendency to gloss over what we can't pigeonhole, and Carroll's unique hybrid of the naturalistic and the fantastic is indeed hard to categorize. From his 1980 debut, The Land of Laughs, to his most recent book, White Apples (Tor, $24.95), Carroll's work never preaches (although morality is a major concern) and never feels unrealistic (even in the most bizarre of settings). His characters can be seriously funny or wickedly morbid, but they always are contoured by careful draftsmanship. Most importantly, his books are suffused with wonder—a trope he rescues from cliché by crafting it with a lucid, cogent prose—and animated by an awareness that the narrative impulse itself can still be a powerful way to construct, and illuminate, the unsettled lives of his characters. We caught up with Carroll at the World Fantasy Convention, held this year in Minneapolis, and were fortunate that his editor, Ellen Datlow, could join the discussion.

Rain Taxi: You have lived in Austria for twenty eight years. How does being an expatriate affect your work? Does the different landscape or European sensibility inform your writing?

Jonathan Carroll: I don't like the word expatriate because it sounds like ex-something. Whether you're an ex-American, or ex-Whatever, I think home is where you're most comfortable and I've been comfortable in Vienna so I've stayed there. The one thing that is different is whenever I come to America, I listen to people talk—that's something I never do in Austria. I speak German but I turn it off, so I live a lot in my head, which I think is the most affecting thing of all. Not that I'm thinking great thoughts, but that I spend more time alone, whether it's on a bus or whatever. That has a profound effect on my work.

Ellen Datlow: I've read Jonathan's novels from the start, and they feel very European to me. I'm not sure why, exactly. But it's a different feel. It's the way he writes about places that make them feel different.

JC: I think that's true. I think America's more up-front whereas Europe's more held back. Could I be more specific about that? No. But when I read European novels there's a sensibility of holding your cards back. Whereas in America it's like POW! Not that one is better or worse than the other. It's like a left-hand-hitter or right-hand-hitter. The European is—I don't like to use the word-but it's more reserved.

RT: In terms of your European audience, do they view you as an "American" novelist, and are their cultural connotations or baggage that go along with that?

JC: I'm sort of like a Push-Me-Pull-You to them. The painter Cy Twombly, who lives in Rome, once said, "In America you're allowed to live overseas for a year, but after that you're a snob." And so Americans look at me with a not-so-different kind of skepticism, which is, "Why are you over there for so long? What's wrong with us?" Nothing's wrong with you. Home is where you're most comfortable. I think everybody wants a strange and mysterious answer, but it's as simple as this: I like where I am.

RT: It's hard to generalize about a lot of different markets, but in Austria, how is American literature viewed and how do you fit into that?

JC: I don't. I was telling an editor just two days ago that—have you ever heard of Donna Leone? No? Well, Donna Leone is the most popular American writer in most of Europe. She lives in Venice and writes all these typical mysteries set in Venice. And she sells in the millions. Is she published in America?

ED: I've never heard of her. But that doesn't mean she isn't.

JC: And you read mysteries. So it's very strange. William Wharton, who wrote Birdy, is the most popular American writer in Poland. He sells in the millions.

ED: And you're very popular there too.

JC: Yeah.

ED: Do you have any idea why?

JC: No, and neither do they. But what is interesting to me more so than how they view authors is the different audience. For example in Poland-where I sell a lot of books-all of my readers are 20- to 30-year-old women. In France, my readers are all these snobby academics. In Germany, they're punks. Neil Gaiman is the same way. You can't fit your audience to the place where you are. It makes no sense, and actually it's quite delightful. You would know about that. You're watching the European scene. Why?

ED: I have no idea. I have an anthology called Alien Sex that has been selling like hot cakes in Italy for years. It sold here very well, but it's finally out of print, and in Italy they keep licensing it over and over again. What's going on here?

JC: And if you ask your publisher they say, we don't know—

ED: They have no idea! Well, it does have great illustrations.

JC: It's like this novel The Lovely Bones. Why is it so huge? I don't know and neither does Little, Brown.

ED: It's something in the air.

RT: Ellen, are there any special challenges to editing someone overseas?

ED: With email, no. This is first time in nine years that I've seen Jonathan. But as far as communication, no. I love email. I have a lot of foreign authors in short fiction, and my other novelist author is Paul McAuley, in England. Email has made it extremely easy.

RT: How about culturally?

ED: Not with Jonathan. Paul McAuley sometimes, but Jonathan's work is not esoterically Viennese. Maybe because he is an American, I don't know. But it's not a problem at all. Sometimes I'll want him to describe a little more of the setting-but that's about it.

RT: In a panel yesterday, you said your work has been described in Europe as "hyper fiction." What is meant by this term? And what does hyper fiction offer a reader that more conventional or realist fiction cannot?

JC: The guy who said that is a very famous journalist and essayist in Germany named Maxim Biller, and luckily Maxim likes my stuff. So he said, "You write hyper fiction," and I said, "What do you mean?" and he said, "Go look up the word hyper." And I said, "Come on, Maxim..." and he said, "No, you have to go look up the word hyper." So I looked up the word hyper, and one of the definitions is: a reality beyond three dimensions. And he said, "The interesting thing about your work is you allow things to happen that normally wouldn't, but in the universes you create, it's okay." Very often my work has been compared to Magritte, where eyeballs float and so on, but it's full of familiar things—just in unfamiliar positions, locations.

ED: And I think it's partly because his characters are so believable—anytime I read his novels I believe his characters are real, and I wish they existed. They are so grounded that whatever he does with them, and the magic that comes about, is part of that belief. It's not a problem.

JC: Have you read White Apples? There's a scene where Vincent Ettrich turns around and sees a rat, a 60-pound rat, and it's talking to him. He doesn't go, "Oh wow, there's a talking rat." He just gets scared. Which is what I think we would do. Whereas a horror writer would have it dripping in blood, and a fantasy writer would have him float through the door, my character just gets scared—because that's what a normal person would do. If I saw a big rat I'd get scared and if the rat talked to me, I'd get scared.

ED: I get scared with little rats.

JC: But when it talks to you, it's challenging all the reality that you know. But you know what? You've got to deal with it right now.

RT: Also, in most of your novels, in the opening chapters there aren't any overt fantastic elements. And so it kind of eases the reader...

JC: ...slowly into the water, exactly. Except for The Wooden Sea. In White Apples too, where three pages in he sees the tattoo on her neck.

ED: But that wasn't as shocking as the dog dying and coming back several times.

JC: Damn dog!

RT: Is that something conscious, this departure in the last two books?

JC: No. I always compare it to walking a frisky dog: you open the door and it goes! In White Apples, for example, I always wanted to open a book in bed, real sexy, but I thought first I have to take a stance. And here's where Ellen comes in. I opened the book with the paragraph that begins "Patience never wants Wonder to enter the house: because Wonder is a wretched guest." But I had it linked to the body of the story as a kind of statement. And Ellen said, No, you can't do that. You have to separate the two. Make your statement and then get into the story. And I thought about that, and I said, okay, let's do that.

RT: The creation and death myths you work with in White Apples build on human desires, strengths, and fallibilities rather than on religious conventions of angels and devils, heaven and hell. What is the impetus for this more secular mythology—for instance the idea of the afterlife as a mosaic?

JC: When I came to the mosaic, I knew I was onto something, and everything else sprang out of that. I found myself going back and changing certain things so that essentially the mosaic became like a hub with everything else radiating out. I wasn't sitting there trying to be philosophical. I just said that's the centerpiece of the story and everything comes out from there. Although some critics have said, "What is this new-age bullshit?" [To Ellen] You said that would happen. She said, Watch out, someone is going to come down on it and say you're the next I'm OK, You're OK. Which is okay. I'll take that. Whatever they say, it's valid.

RT: I found it very moving, and it worked-it sprang organically from the story. Everyone's lives are such an intricate pattern in and of themselves, and their patterns go into the bigger pattern.

JC: Also...did you ever see Blade Runner? One of my favorite lines in the movie is when Rutger Hauer is about to die, and he says to Harrison Ford, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." It's such a wonderful, tragic line, it's true. All of the stuff that you have accumulated, all this experience, all these loves, all this coffee, all these dogs...As soon as you die, it's just tossed? I can't imagine that it works like that. I think there's probably some repository of this stuff. And that made a kind of sense for me. You just take this thing that you arrange, and once you're finished arranging it and you die, someone puts it into the mosaic, and the mosaic is made up of ten zillion pieces. That made sense to me.

RT: In The Wooden Sea you use marbles in the same respect.

JC: Not unlike it. But I think one is a step from the other. Because in The Wooden Sea, he says you can throw the marbles up lots of times and come up with different combinations, but in White Apples, Coco says people can't stop moving their pieces around. The two ideas are rubbing up against each other.

RT: You also stand the idea of the vampire on its head in The Marriage of Sticks; the female protagonist discovers she is a sort of vampire whose selfish desires takes the place of blood-sucking. Do you see a desire for the fantastic, fable, myth or fairytale as a way to explain our human shortcomings or strengths?

JC: I think that the images are so old that the gods are telling us something. We trivialize the vampire by putting him in a cape and biting pretty women on the neck, but essentially if you look up the word, a vampire is someone who kills you by taking your life force. Not your blood, not your virginity. Now, in the context of The Marriage of Sticks, this woman—and I see it all time—people are sucking the life force out of others. A bad relationship, a bad job, whatever. And whether they're being sucked or doing the sucking, they go, What's wrong here? What's wrong is this process is going on, but if I call it, vampiric people think I'm talking about Bram Stoker. No, not at all. I'm talking about the way we interact with one another. If more than one in two marriages break up, I'm sure that a lot of that has to do with vampires. On one side or the other. That's what Marriage of Sticks is about, or what I was trying to do.

But you see there's a perfect example. People who either don't know my work or dismiss it will say, Oh, that's a vampire novel. Because it's easy to say that. But it's not a vampire novel. It uses that element. It plugs that into the equation.

ED: I've never heard anyone call you a vampire writer.

JC: I've heard it a lot; I've been dismissed as that. And that's okay, but to me, that's a simplistic way out of things. I think The Marriage of Sticks is the most disliked book I've written.

ED: I thought you were too mean to her.

JC: But she's a decent person. As we're all decent people. But she's a fucking vampire. As we all are. And that's what's so shocking. If she was a bitch, it would be easy to dismiss her. But if she's Ellen, and I say to Ellen, go into that baseball stadium and see all the people you've wronged in your life, it would be horrendous.

RT: What's shocking is that she seems like a very normal, likeable woman, and then she discovers this about herself and realizes, I've been doing this to these people. Many of your characters are imperfect, but they are also eccentric and distinct in their tastes, the secret language they share with each other, and their perspective on the world. How do you go about discovering your characters—where do they come from?

JC: From myself, people I know, dream people... People always say that I'm a snob because I write about glorious, glamorous people. But basically I live in Europe, and the people who I know are editors and artists and filmmakers. I simply write about what I know. Of course, I take a little liberty... In Sleeping in Flames, the film director who gets killed has never forgiven me—the guy that I based the character on. He said, "Why did you kill me?" I said, "It's a book. It's a story." He said, "I know but that was me." So there you go. I always think of it as a mixed salad. You take your own imagination, that's some tomatoes, and you take the people that you know, people that you loved, the people that you hated, and you mix it together. And then the salad dressing that goes on it is your final say. I'm going to put a vinaigrette on top of it and that's what it is. All writers who say they don't use their life experience are liars. Even if they're writing books about penguins, they're using their life experience. I read an interview with John Irving, and he said, No, no I just use my imagination. Nonsense. He's cheating.

What it always boils down to, you write about what bites you. And in this context, I like these people. And yes they're flawed, and yes they're selfish, and yes they're neurotic messes, but who isn't? What's redeeming about them is that they try to get it together, because they realize this stuff is important. That you and me...that something has got to be saved here. And that's one of the things in my books that people both like and dislike. I take real, normal people and put them in these extraordinary situations, working out normal problems. Crazy stuff, but in the crazy stuff they're trying to work out grounded stuff. And that makes people very uncomfortable. It's like you and I are together, and we can't work out our relationship, and then suddenly God says, "Hey you two," and we both go, "Hey, we'd better work this out, because God just interfered."

RT: In your first novel, The Land of Laughs, the hero hunts down his favorite children's story writer with surprising results. In this book you mention many children's books—has children's literature influenced your own work?

JC: I never read children's books. I didn't start reading til I was fifteen. I was a kind of an anti-reader. I purposely did not read because I grew up in this family of achievers, and my way of creating an identity was being a non-achiever. The story I've told a thousand times: The first book I read was because my brother gave me a dollar—it was Of Mice of Men—and when I finished it he said, "Did you like it?" I said, "Yeah, it was really good." He said, "Do you want to read another?" I said, "NO," and I didn't read another book until I was fifteen. People asked me if I ever read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I say, NO.

Actually, the time I started reading children's books was when my kid was small, and I would read Goodnight Moon and Curious George. But that's entirely different. You're an adult reading to a kid. I was always very impatient with the kids books that I read. I thought most of it was condescending, including Roald Dahl. People always say Roald Dahl has biting, nasty stuff. The only children's literature that I didn't find condescending was Grimm's Fairytales, because they tell it like it is. The story starts with mom getting her head cut off, and it gets worse. I always liked that. In fact, in Sleeping in Flames, I used one of the Grimm tales-Rumpelstilskin. But no, it had a small effect on me because I didn't read.

RT: Your fictitious children's author, Marshall France, wrote surreal books, one of which was also titled, like your own, The Land of Laughs. Would you ever consider writing any of the works of Marshall France?

JC: People have asked me that, but no I wouldn't. Because the excerpts that I put in the books were hors d'oerves. It's for you to make the meal. I know that if I wrote any of the Marshall France books, I would fail you. And I'm a coward.

ED: You couldn't possibly live up to the expectations.

RT: At times you integrate poetry into your novels—you've quoted John Ashbery and Charles Simic, for example—and in a session yesterday you mentioned John Berryman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Is poetry important to you and does it trigger some kind of response in your fiction?

JC: Yes. Almost always before I start writing for the day I read some poetry. Because I think that it's like working out. Really good poetry, and I'm not talking about classic poetry, but poetry that appeals to you—I read a lot of Polish poets because they're brilliant, like Szymborksa—is real tight. Like I said yesterday, writers are either putter-inners or taker-outers, and I'm a taker-outer. I want my sentences to be short and sweet and hopefully loaded. And that's what poetry does. So I always read poetry before I write, because I like it and because it teaches me how to write the kind of writing that I want. Every once in a while I put in a poem of my own, like in White Apples. Whether it's good or not, it's certainly inspired by the people that I've read.

RT: Do you like poetry because of the encapsulation, the compression, where the language gets more—

JC: Hashish. You boil it down to its absolute essence. That's why it's stronger and more affecting. The ultimate is haiku. You read a poem and bang! it blows you out of the room. With novels, you write three-hundred-pages and maybe you'll get blown out of the room, but it takes a lot more time. That Basho poem, you know, my house burned down, now I can better see the moon-holy cow! Guys have written seven-hundred-pages trying to say the same thing.

RT: Emily Dickinson wrote that she liked poetry that takes off the top of your head.

JC: That's right. That's it.

RT: What other American poets do you like?

JC: I love Thomas Lux. I love Simic. Sometimes Rexroth and sometimes Diane Levertov, Diane Wakoski. Diane Wakoski was my teacher when I was in graduate school, and she taught me—she's probably one of the best teachers that I ever had—she taught me that you could put poetry in prose and do it right. I took her in graduate school and it really helped me. The greatest compliment to me is when people say your stuff is poetic. I try to make it poetic!

RT: Your novels are poetic in the sense that there are these little fireworks and dissonances that create something sonorous.

JC: Too often, writers either write well or they story-tell well. Very rarely are they working toward the middle, and a lot of the time the guys who write well are considered hands-off, literary writers. I think that they are forgiven a lot. They may have beautiful language or metaphors, but when I read, I want both. I want to read a good book, and that's one of the reasons why I don't read genre fiction, because most of these guys can't write well. They can story-tell well, but they can't write well, and I just get bored. To sit on a page with furiously beautiful language: that entertains you for a while, but after a while, it's like, come on! And if the guy tells a good story only and the characters are like film sets that have a stick behind them, and if you take it away they'll collapse—no, I want both. I want both in what I read. And I'm trying to do it in what I write.

ED: I think in short science fiction, short genre fiction, there is both. I can't judge as many science fiction novels or horror novels.

JC: But a lot of the time in genre, whether it be fantasy, science fiction, mystery, or whatever, these people are opting for the story—and fine! Obviously they have an audience. God bless. But Agatha Christie, for example, is a terrible writer, she's as wooden as they come. Raymond Chandler is a wonderful writer who tells a wonderful story. You can take a page of Chandler and teach it to a creative writing class. You know, irony, pacing, and stuff. That's what makes him more apt to be remembered than Agatha Christie, even though she sold eight zillion copies.

RT: I take it you're not so interested in some of the Austrian writers who are not great storytellers but are brilliant technicians—Thomas Bernhard, Handke...

JC: I know Handke, and he and I have fought forever because I said the best thing he ever did was Wings of Desire, the film with Wim Wenders. There's a story there! I think he's going to win the Nobel Prize, but look at the guys who are remembered, but Cervantes wrote brilliantly and he told a story. Take Salieri. Salieri was the most famous composer of his time and Mozart was a little pipsqueak, but Salieri was in fashion and these guys are in fashion. So the ones who are remembered are the ones who can do both. They can paint wonderfully and they can move you. And moving is usually a thing of story, I think. You're not moved by language. It's cold. I hate to stoop to Dickens, but Dickens could write well and he was a hell of a storyteller. You go back to Dickens. Are you going to go back to Martin Walser? I don't think so. He's a fabulous writer, but you come away from the thing, you have to put gloves on it's so cold.

RT: Is your process different when you write shorter fiction, the stories in The Panic Hand for example?

ED: At least one of those stories became part of a novel.

JC: Yes. Marquez says there are long loves and short loves. I always think of the short story as short love.

ED: The Moose, the Moose... what?

JC: The Moose Church. "The Moose Church" turned into the beginning of Outside the Dog Museum. It's like a sprint versus a marathon. I like to write short stories, but I'm not very good at it.

ED: That's not true.

JC: I do it more to have fun, because I'm usually writing a novel. I studied with Peter Taylor at the University of Virginia. Peter was horrified by what I was doing. If you know his stuff, it's very conservative and Southern: Miss Daisy on the porch sort of thing. I was doing the same thing in my short stories that I was doing in my novels, but it was tighter. To this day when I'm writing a novel I'll say, Fuck that, put it down, and write a short story. And then I go back refreshed to the novel, because I had an affair.

RT: Here in America, you've worked with many different publishers and imprints, which means that your books are often shelved in different places. For example, Sleeping in Flames (Vintage) will be in the literature section, while The Wooden Sea and White Apples (Tor), will be placed in the science fiction section. While your writing gains strength from its very inability to be classified, does this compartmentalization of modern American publishing and bookselling bother you?

JC: What's interesting in this context is that the last two books, published by a genre publisher (Tor), are getting all this literary play. Whereas when I was published with Viking and Doubleday, they were putting them on the fantasy shelf. So it's actually reversed. It's both Tor's marketing and people saying, Okay, we'll drop our conceptions of what Carroll's doing and just read the book for what it is. Which is what I've been asking for all my life. When I was in college, I edited the literary magazine, and on the editorial page, everyone had their student number. Editor, 507671. Art Editor, 302240. That's what I've been asking for all along. Just read the fucking book. Don't put a spaceship on the cover; don't put fangs. In a sense, I just wish it was a white cover that said "White Apples" on it, because you know what—you'll probably be surprised that it's not what you think it is. But Tor has done the best job, overall, of doing that.

ED: And getting both audiences. Tor has worked really hard to market it in both directions, and get more readership.

JC: For example, White Apples has been covered in The Nation. The Nation, me? But I mean, big, a page, we love this book. Also Time Out, which is hip, and they don't usually cover science fiction and fantasy. Tor is being successful in dragging the literary crowd kicking and screaming to something which is going to surprise them if they just give it a chance.

ED: I'm always hoping that the bookstores will put them in both places. Jonathan should be in mainstream, science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery...all over the place. The best bookstores will do that.

JC: But the best bookstores don't buy seven copies.

RT: When you read publicly in Europe, what kind of relationship do you have with audiences whose first language might not be English?

JC: Most of the time you don't read in Europe. It takes up too much time in the sense that you read, and then they read the translation—I mean it's like a four-hour reading. I do it sometimes in Germany, and I've done it in France. But for example, when I go to Poland they just do question-and-answer for an hour and a half. They pelt you with questions. I think they would rather do that than a reading because it's more intimate. They can answer the question that's been bothering them rather than hear a section of a book they've already read.

RT: Your work has been translated into many different languages...

JC: The translations can go either way. I was talking to a woman today, a Japanese woman, who said my translations into Japanese are perfect, because she reads me in both. Whereas in German, I've heard that some are good and some are sloppy. Here's a funny translation story. In The Land of Laughs, there's a dog named Petals, a bull terrier. And I thought that was funny, because bull terriers look like pigs, so I named it something the opposite, which was Petals. In German, the translator said it doesn't work because the word for petals in German is "blätter?" and it's not funny. So I said, why don't you call him Mushroom, because in German mushroom is "pilz." In the translation, however, they made a mistake, and his name is "pelz," which means "fur." So they say, "Come here, Fur..." What are you going to do? When I saw it, I just started to laugh. What's the point? And that's in a language that I understand, so you can imagine what it's like in Serbo-Croatian! I had another funny experience recently. When I was in Poland, we were having dinner with a whole bunch of people, and they made a mistake of giving me a Polish copy of White Apples. The first chapter is called "Chocolate-Covered God," but in Polish they translated it into something like "Red and Green Painting." Something completely off—"Purple Porpoise." I said, what do you mean "Purple Porpoise"? And the translator is sitting over there, and he starts to blanche. And he says, well, in Polish the word for chocolate is this and the word for god is that and you can't put them together, so you have to—and I said, let's continue our dinner, let's drop the subject, I don't want to know. Leave it alone. Don't tell, don't ask.

RT: Speaking of Petals, why do dogs figure so prominently in your works, particularly as figures of pathos? They seem to be bridge characters, conduits for fabulism...

JC: ...the letters from there to here. People always ask, what's this dog thing? And I always say, dogs are like minor angels. They love you purely. They forgive you purely. They're happy to see you. You can wake a dog up at three in the morning and say, Hey let's play ball, and they'll say, OKAY! My wife won't do that. My son won't do that. My friends won't do that. Three o'clock in the morning—let's go get pizza! OKAY! We overlook these extraordinary qualities even though we wish they would manifest themselves in people. I always have bull terriers because they're funny and they're ugly. That's what I love about them. They look like little pigs walking around. They kind of sober you up and straighten you out when you're blue or you're angry. You look at this little pal sitting under your feet saying, Hey! Let's go out! And you say, Okay, let's go out. They remind you of reality. All I've done is ratcheted that up a little, so you have magical dogs. I like the idea that we're constantly surrounded by things that are angelic and supernatural—but we put them in this convenient, sort of degraded place because that's easier for us.

RT: Biologists have been looking at dogs, at those qualities as evolutionary traits. The wolves that happened to come closest to the campfire got hooked in—

JC: Right. It reminds me of James Michener's book The Source—there's a wonderful section about the first dog ever to be friendly with man—or that scene in Dances With Wolves where the wolf circles him for days, then takes the food out of his hands. I think there is a wonderful symbiosis between dogs and men, unless you're a monster and mistreat them. You serve each other's needs. I know my dog is a good friend of mine.

RT: One last question. If you could interview yourself, what sort of questions would you ask? In other words, what do people never ask that you think should be addressed in regards to your work?

JC: The only question that nobody ever asks is: What breaks your heart? I think that should be asked of all "artists." What breaks your heart. My answer to that would be something that happened to me recently. I was walking down the street in Vienna, and I saw this incredibly beautiful woman wearing a beige raincoat, and there was this huge dog with muddy paws that jumped up on her, and she was just laughing. And it absolutely broke my heart, because typically you would see her screaming and how dare you and get that animal off me. But she was so cool, and it was so funny and so human, and it was so perfect—that breaks my heart. When you see those moments you realize the potential of both life and your own life. It can be perfect in an imperfect way. Her coat was ruined and the dog was a pain in the ass, but for that moment, it was perfect, and it's not Pamela Anderson walking down the street—it's THIS woman who is much more human in the most fallible of situations taking it absolutely the right way. If that ever happens to me in whatever form I hope I can react with a laugh instead of a howl. So, what breaks your heart?

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2002/2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002/2003