William Kloefkorn
University of Nebraska Press ($22)

by James Walkowiak

Following his acclaimed memoir This Death by Drowning, William Kloefkorn's Restoring the Burnt Child continues grappling with how 1940s middle America shaped its boys into men. A spirit of gamesmanship permeates the entire book, infusing the story with nostalgia and muted terror. The narrative, recounting Kloefkorn's pre-teen years, opens with a game of match-throwing that nearly burns down his house. Influenced by the rhetoric of the Second World War, Kloefkorn describes the incident as a tactical battlefield maneuver: "It required speed and concentration and purpose—and the God-given ability to strike a match at full throttle and drop it burning down the shirt of the fleeing victim."

The remainder of the book pivots back and forth from the playful to the disquieting—from snapshots of boyhood mischief to dreadful incantations of a bible-pounding minister who preaches "fireandbrimstone." Wherever Kloefkorn travels—barbershops, drugstores, movie houses—he soaks up language, building a lexical cache. He draws foremost from language inflected by the violence and prejudice of war as it filters down to him through ordinary conversation. Overhearing men at a local barbershop, for example, the boy digests the era's racist slurs: he hunts down barn swallows, calling them "Germans and Japs."

A few pages into the memoir, the speaker disrupts the narrative to celebrate the aural pleasure elicited by certain words. As a boy, he loves discovering "richochet," "trajectory," and "flak"—wartime words he admires in spite of the terror they orchestrate between other men. For Kloefkorn, the music of words takes precedence over meaning: "It has taken me a long time to realize the extent to which the story, any story, relies upon a melody." This aesthetic—an aspiration for music—will appeal to readers who know and admire Kloefkorn's poetry, but his privileging of music over meaning produces a problematic narrative. Passages refract similar-sounding voices. A circular time scheme reiterates fragments and shuffles dates and places from one paragraph to another. The narrative lacks a chronological frame of reference from which the reader can assemble all the disparate strands the author gives us.

Kloefkorn, however, intends to conflate events as he retells them; he defends his amorphous time scheme, saying, "Chronology has at best a habit of collapsing, of becoming quickly smaller, like the leaky bellows of the old red-and-black accordion as my grandfather squeezed it." When the narrative compresses linear time successfully, one remembered moment bears imprints of multiple life experiences. We see boys driving dump trucks, shooting birds, climbing boulders, listening to temperance women, and saving cash for radios, all happening simultaneously. This scheme allows Kloefkorn to showcase his lilting cadence and absurdist humor, though he does so at the expense of well-defined characters or the trajectory of an emotional arc. Still, on its own terms, Restoring the Burnt Child testifies to the music of youth which many men spend a lifetime seeking to regain.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond
Agustin Victor Casasola
Essay by Pete Hamill
Aperture ($50)

Mexico/New York
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans
Introduction by Roberto Tejada
Mexico Editorial RM / D.A.P. ($60)

by John Toren

Photojournalist? Photographer? Artist? Historians have found it difficult to place Agustin Victor Casasola comfortably within the pantheon of modern photography, due to the vast scope of his oeuvre, the violence of the times and places he covered in his work, and the unabashedly commercial nature of the agency he ran for over thirty years in Mexico City. Casasola is most widely known today for a few portraits he took of Zapata and Pancho Villa, the two populist heroes of the Mexican Revolution. He was also on hand when Porfirio Diaz, the departing dictator, set sail for Europe from the port of Vera Cruz. But scholars and archivists working in the center for photography that Casasola established late in his career have catalogued more than 400,000 images bearing his name. The difficulty of coming to any conclusions about the overall merit of such a corpus is compounded by the fact that many of Casasola's photos were, in fact, taken by other photographers.

In Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond, we are presented with a choice selection of images from the Casasola Agency, which cover the turbulent times of revolution but also expose the life of the city during its fascinating and awkward coming-of-age as a modern metropolis. There are photos at the race track, and photos of unruly Independence Day celebrations, showing streets jam-packed with men in enormous sombreros; we're taken into dance halls, sweatshops, and "modern" laboratories; and along the way we meet up with snake charmers, riveters, and student protesters. There are bullfighters and society musicians, prostitutes and clowns. The deaths of both Villa and Zapata are represented in gory detail, and Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and other notables make an occasional appearance; but many of the images chosen by the editors are generic, as if to highlight Casasola's efforts (following in the footsteps of great European photographers like Eugene Atget perhaps ) to document the life of the city.

As the visual record of a region and an age, the photos in the Casasola collection are nothing less than fascinating. We may have seen similar photos taken in North American cities at about the same time, yet here the costumes, the expressions, the flavor is entirely different. The question remains to be answered, whether Casasola's work actually rises above photojournalism, to reach that level of sober-minded profundity we associate with genuine works of art.

In an informative introductory essay Pete Hamill takes a stab at the question, and brings considerable weight to bear on the idea that Casasola was a sort of genius behind the camera. "His eye often recognized what Cartier-Bresson would later call 'the decisive moment': the way bodies fell after the fusillade, the primeval joy of charging cavalrymen. But he also captured the contrast between the horses of nineteenth-century wars and the railroad trains of the modern era. He caught the bold swagger of the soldadera along with the growing indifference to sudden death."

But a careful look at the photos doesn't convey quite the same impression. After all, anyone who takes 400,000 photos is going to catch "the decisive moment" every once in a while. And anyone who takes a picture of soldiers arriving somewhere by both horse and train is going to "capture" the contrast between the two modes of travel. The most obvious thing to note about many of the photos contained in this book is that they're posed. The war pictures aside, they seldom have the instantaneity of a fleeting event, large or small, that's been captured magically on film. Several images are of the type and quality that often wins photo-journalism awards today—the execution of six counterfeiters, for example, whose bodies can be seen crumbling through a cloud of smoke (which may be a doctored negative.) But more often they display the somewhat crude lighting and the dead-pan expressions of individuals who are lined up in front of a camera. Even the pictures of couples dancing at a nightclub show them, not gliding elegantly by, but frozen in place, their faces turned awkwardly toward the lens.

In short, relatively few of the Casasola images elicit that subtle frisson we experience when a slice of time seems to echo with the mysterious import of all time—but as a tireless exploration of both the dramatic events and the incidental details of Mexican life on every social level, this book is a wonderland of engaging imagery.

The handsome volume Mexico/New York, offers a less robust but altogether more aesthetic vision of photography in Mexico. It reproduces a few of the images that appeared in a show held at the Palacio de Bellas Atres in Mexico City during the winter of 2003. That show, in turn, was a re-creation of a show held at the New York gallery of Julien Levy for two weeks in the spring of 1935. No one knows which photos were on view at that show, though the photographers involved were the Frenchman Cartier-Bresson, the Mexican Álvarez Bravo, and the American Walker Evans. Cartier-Bresson had been living in Mexico, and knew Álvarez Bravo well. All three were exploring photography as an expressive form at the time. The subtitle of the show at the Levy gallery carried the intriguing phrase "Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs."

The book itself is somewhat of an enigma, however. Reading the breathy preface by Mexican photographer Mercedes Iturbe, one would be hard-pressed to discern precisely why these works are appearing together. The book itself is printed on thick, luscious paper, but a number of the pages are blank; only thirty-five contain images. The typography is stunning, yet there are also glaring typos here and there. And the photos by Evans were taken in New York City, while the rest of the photos depict street scenes in Mexico. (The photos by Evans included in the original show had been taken in the American South.)

In Roberto Tejada's introduction he refers to "the borderline relation of these three photographers to surrealism," and we might add that they possess only a borderline relation to one another. Cartier-Bresson had not yet reached the point of total inclusiveness and nonchalance that would make him the greatest photographer of his time. The works of Álvarez Bravo and Evans share a more public face and a more classical form, though their chosen subjects lay half a continent apart.

It would be tempting to remove a few of these beautifully printed photos from their binding to hang on the wall, because considered one by one, the pictures are striking; in comparison to the Casasola works, they carry far greater formal strength and iconic presence. On the other hand, much of the incidental detail that invigorates Casasola's best images—the hats, the goats, the dust, the smiling revolutionaries—has vanished. The railroad tracks have lost their trains, and the store-front displays, with their manikins and eerie reflections, have become windows to the subconscious, rather than to the aspirations of a rising middle class.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Nathaniel Dorsky
Tuumba Press ($10)

by Christopher Luna

Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky's Devotional Cinema, which is based on a lecture he delivered to Princeton's March 2001 Conference on Religion and Cinema, is a beautiful celebration of cinema as a form of religion, a "metaphor…for our being." The author persuasively illuminates the formal elements that contribute to film's ability to address/reflect questions regarding our very existence. Dorsky first discovered "a concordance between film and our human metabolism" when, at the age of nine, he left a movie theater after spending more than six hours in the darkness to find that his perception had been irreversibly changed:

Quite suddenly, the normal things that were my usual reference points, everything that had been familiar to me in my hometown, all its archetypes and icons, became eerie and questionable. I felt alien and estranged…. Eventually I got home, and it even seemed odd that I was in my house. I was feeling this quite strongly and was trying my best to recover from the giant hole that had opened in the middle of my head.

Dorsky made a practice of observing the changes exhibited by himself and other audience members after films. As he "began to become more sensitive to these post-film experiences and the qualities in a film that might produce either health or ill health," Dorsky realized that this power arose from film's "ability to mirror and realign our metabolism."

An alchemy takes place when the form of a work "include[s] the expression of its own materiality," a transmutation that is evident in cave paintings, Egyptian sculpture, 12th-century French stained glass and stone engraving, and the music of Bach and Mozart. According to Dorsky, watching a film "has tremendous mystical implications; it can be, at its best, a way of approaching and manifesting the ineffable. This respect for the ineffable is an essential aspect of devotion." Cinema can achieve a "transcendental balance" in the successful union of "the internalized medieval and externalized Renaissance ways of seeing." The relationship between shots and cuts is also crucial to this balance. Dorsky sees a parallel between "our visual experience in daily life" and the intermittence of light and dark as film runs through a camera or projector at 24 frames per second. Though we do not experience the world as a "solid continuum," learning to accept the "poles of existence and nonexistence" ultimately "suffuses the 'solid' world with luminosity."

Devotional cinema captures the present moment (what Dorsky terms "nowness"), acknowledging the simultaneity of "absolute and relative time." Dorsky defines "devotion" as "the opening or the interruption that allows us to experience what is hidden, and to accept with our hearts our given situation." Just as devotion increases in relation to our openness and "willingness to touch the depths of our own being," film can facilitate revelation when it "expresses itself in a manner intrinsic to its own true nature." Ideally the cinema may even "serve as a corrective mirror that realigns our psyches and opens us up to appreciation and humility." This slim but eloquent book will touch the hearts of readers who approach film as an art form, one which has rarely exhibited the fullness of its vast potential as the one medium which incorporates all other disciplines.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Rosamond Purcell
The Quantuck Lane Press ($25)

by Michelle Mitchell-Foust

In Rosamond Purcell's Owls Head, the search for things is the thing. Archivist, collector, artist, and consumer, she searches for eye-catching detritus in the small town of Owls Head, Maine and negotiates the purchase of found objects with local scrapyard proprietor William Buckminster. Purcell then takes the things home and makes other things—simple. And yet Owls Head is not simple, as the things Purcell makes are not simple. Three memoirs are embedded in Purcell's Owls Head: that of a man, a place, and a woman refining her aesthetic.

Buckminster handles the task of keeping and giving away the mountains of things with the grace and patience of a benign ruler, even in the face of an aggressive faction of concerned citizens who wish he would clean up the place. Purcell says: "I saw him too as a kind of deity from a Down East pantheon of gods that included the Lobster God, the God of the Outer Shoals, and the hardscrabble Potato God." Throughout she sketches his prismatic character as iron worker, host, gossip, historian, collector, rebel, philosopher, husband, merchant whose methods are a mystery—and all in the context of the "almighty thingness of our all-American world." Purcell gives us his voice, too, as he revisits objects from Owls Head that have been translated in Purcell's studio:

B: I don't remember but I remember this, though—
R: —yeah—
—roller skate.
If you see anything you want back…
No, no.
Is it—what you told me—arbor vitae?
Lignum vitae.
Lignum vitae. Oh, it's stuck on there—
A very…heavy wood. Matter of fact it doesn't float. Maybe dragged
up by a scallop fisherman.
Why was it in the water to begin with if it doesn't float?
The ship probably sank.

Buckminster is the thin, serious figure balancing on the precarious mound that is Owls Head. At one point in the biography, Purcell superimposes a ghost image of British collector Dr. James Petiver (1658-1716) over Buckminster, imagining the collectors past and present standing side-by-side: two men "prepared to admire the minuteness of much of the naturalia of this place as well as to take the chaos of its artificialia in stride."

Interesting, too, is the relationship we see developing between subject and biographer in Owls Head. Purcell is a character in the life of her subject; in Buckminster's presence, she becomes the being who wants. She holds up whatever she's found—a horse harness that has grown roots, or a swollen 78 r.p.m. record that sounds like "A New Year's Eve broadcast from the ballroom in London might have sounded to the soldiers in the trenches in France in 1918"—and Buckminster gives the nod or not, keeping some items "high and dry," for his own use, though as Purcell knows, "it's not for models but for love and it's no fair asking to buy them." In searching for the objects of desire she grows to wonder, as she did in childhood, "how 'want' looks"—and tries "not to look like a ridiculous Victorian" when she is turned down.

Want looks a great deal like Owls Head to those who recognize the place as a "terrifying chaos" that wants organization. But mostly Owls Head is a town with a house and a scrapyard and a barn and a mammoth collection of wooden lobster buoys—a collector's paradise whose gravitational pull Purcell cannot resist. She borrows a quotation by architect Philip Johnson (an allusion to a house built by Buckminster's relative Buckminster Fuller) to describe Owls Head: "nothing to do with architecture and all to do with dreams." As she watches Buckminster stabilize the barn, she says, "The staircase to the second floor was free-standing now, with no step at the bottom or the top. The elements of the building stood around me like pieces of a set. 'Under the Big Top only two days count, today and tomorrow.'" Purcell's circus reference is interesting in light of the fact that the objects at Owls Head are testaments to history, yet what the archivist/author/photographer perceives is what happens to these objects down the road, as weather and "translation" work on them. She notes, "Sometimes the stages of an object's evolutionary sequence are in plain sight."

Purcell defines "translation" as "to transfer from one place/condition to another." In order for translation to result in something approaching the sublime, the reader must understand the vocabulary of the image as well as relinquish the conventional classifications for things. Purcell acknowledges that "systems of classifications are [also] inventions":

I exhume the frame of a typewriter, its vestigial hammers like the ribbings of an ancient echinoid. Where does the sea end? At what point does a manufactured object turn into an organism? Do objects drown? Do they ever possess a life—beyond batteries—that might be taken away? Is an object transmuted into another substance ever, like a fossil, turned from flesh and bone to stone? When does an inanimate object become worthy of a scientific name? I name the typewriter Underwoodensis corrupta, a close invertebrate cousin to an echinoid….this typewriter aspires to the same lofty class of object as the book-nest, it too comes from the place where metaphors are made.

Owls Head is a project of nested metaphors and the joy of renaming, and Purcell's writing isolates her artistic process and refines her aesthetic. She sees in the piles of Buckminster's barn a resemblance to artist Robert Wilson's "installation of the hollow elephant, the decrepit Bonapartist watchman, mechanical rats, and opera music." Regarding her studio art—what becomes of much of Owls Head naturalia—she distinguishes herself from surrealist/collector Joseph Cornell:

I understand all too well the impulse to Joseph Cornell-box the world. Beyond a tropism for weathered surfaces and idealized microcosms, I share little of Cornell's vocabulary of lyric opera singers, celestial charts, and marbled papers. I admire his work but am wary of the romantic yearnings the constructions—so attractive—provoke in me. In the end, many of these boxes fill me with regrets. I turn away toward a closer observation of the teeming and intermingling between organic and inorganic forms, of what happens between the ice and the inner tube, the sun and a glass plate negative, the rain and a roadmap.

Purcell sees intensely how organic and inorganic forms work together in the life of an object in the wild, and she knows profoundly, "as Owls Head is a place of tireless consumption, of active burial and renewal by mice, squirrels, bees, beetles, ants, and worms, phenomena such as strings of pearls are illusory, soon dissolved by the sun." She exchanges both worm and pearl for word, for Owls Head is a prose poem, too. Not much since Walt Whitman's Song of Myself have we seen such a catalogue of Americana. Whitman writes:

My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
Root of washed sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
Mixed tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
Trickling sap of maple, fiber of manly wheat, it shall be you!
Suns so generous it shall be you!
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
………………………………………………………………….
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
………………………………………………………………….
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

In Whitman's poem and in Purcell's memoir, America holds still for us, awaits our careful scrutiny, during which we realize that the place is always in motion. The difference between the two approaches is that, unlike Purcell, Whitman was writing America through its people—he writes the egotistical sublime that makes himself (the human) the body of America (organic to organic)—while Purcell writes America through its things, what man has made and time has remade. Purcell acknowledges the biology of the inanimate object, considers context and associates in forensic detail. She is unafraid of what scientists may refer to as "the evil weed of metaphor" and metaphor's cousin synecdoche, which may, in stretching circumstances, move meaning away from the thing itself, rather than closer toward it. She asks herself, concerning "the ideal Platonic object—was a single leg, for instance, still a chair?" And she writes:

We are in the trenches somewhere, all the time, as far as I can make out. However apocalyptic these war scenes, their density owes everything to Owls Head. As a typewriter may also be a fossil echinoid, so piano wire is the horizon off the French coast and a piece of stained lace a bloody stretch of road. One thing becomes another, the shafts of a bird feather a broken Romanesque arch, sewing threads tangled military scrap, and an ape hanging in a museum window becomes the victim of a lynching hanging from a tree.

Purcell's Owls Head has a marvelous section of notes and photographs, but no index, much the way its namesake has no map. The digging is the pleasure. Another famous Maine resident, Stephen King, said in an interview that because we humans have so little time, we are lucky to get to know one or two places. Rosamond Purcell knows Owls Head, and as a result of this stunning book, we can too.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

The Dead Letter & The Figure Eight
Metta Fuller Victor
Duke University Press ($21.95)

That Affair Next Door & Lost Man's Lane
Anna Katherine Green
Duke University Press ($21.95)

by Kris Lawson

For readers who think that Lifetime movies and the muddled genre books that combine romance and serial killers are a product of our tawdry age, Duke University Press has reprinted four 19th-century sensationalist classics that are titillating, vulgar, and moralistic by turns, full of violent action and passion, and as shallow and materialistic as reality television. Such fiction, however, provided an arena for women eager to become writers, and the novels collected in these two volumes—which each contain a fine introduction by scholar Catherine Ross Nickerson—display how vital that opportunity was.

Metta Fuller Victor was the first American—male or female—to write a full-length procedural detective novel (the honor for creating the genre is usually bestowed upon Poe, but as Nickerson points out, "As the brevity of Poe's stories suggests, he first conceived the detective story, for all its structural sophistication, as a concentrated form"). Now-familiar elements of traditional detective novels are present in Victor's books: the crime that occurs immediately before or at the beginning of the story, clues mixed with red herrings, multiple suspects (including the narrator) who all have detailed motives, the investigation and unveiling of the criminal, and finally, retribution or justice. Victor combines these tropes with Gothic/horror elements: the dreaded family secret, the moldering mansion with mysterious locked doors and strange noises, women in long, trailing white nightgowns wandering the halls in "somnambulistic excursions." The author blends these ingredients into a crowd-pleasing sensationalist brew, but her concentration on solving the murders and detailing the steps of those investigations sets her books apart.

A straightforward mystery, The Dead Letter opens mid-story, the murder and initial investigation taking place in flashback. The narrator, Richard Redfield, is an impoverished prospective attorney studying with the kindly Mr. Argyll, who has promised him a job in his law firm. Redfield is in love with Eleanor Argyll, the oldest daughter, who is engaged to Henry Moreland. James Argyll, a ne'er-do-well nephew, also disapproves of Eleanor's engagement. Since Eleanor is a rich heiress and James has a gambling habit, Redfield suspects that James does not truly love her. On a dark and stormy night, Moreland leaves the train station but never arrives at the Argyll house; he is found stabbed to death the next morning on the path from the station. Both James and Redfield are suspects; also suspect are a mysterious woman who followed Moreland from the station and a sinister black-eyed stranger who stared at Moreland on the train. The "dead letter" holds a vital clue for Redfield's investigation, aided by Mr. Burton and his psychic daughter Lenore.

The Figure Eight is more Byzantine in plot. Dr. Meredith, recently returned from California with $60,000 in gold and a Cuban wife barely older than his daughter Lillian, is found dead with a glass of poisoned port next to him. He leaves a scrawled message containing a figure eight, which his family believes to be a clue to find the gold he had hidden somewhere on the Meredith estate. Joe Meredith, an orphaned nephew with a history of bad luck and troublemaking, is the narrator; desperately in love with Lillian, he is also the main suspect. Also suspect are Miss Miller, the upright governess; Arthur Miller, her brother who is looking for a rich heiress to wed; and Inez, Dr. Meredith's fiery young wife whose passion for Arthur is an open family secret. After the estate where the gold is hidden passes to a new owner, Joe and Miss Miller suspect each other of the murder and frequently run into each other as they search for the gold. Arthur excites Inez' jealousy by flirting with the rich heiress who now lives on the Meredith estate, and Don Miguel de Almeda appears, ostensibly to reunite with his cousin Inez, but also to fall in love with Lillian.

Victor's novels have many of the elements of sensationalist fiction. Her two narrators take on disguises and new identities; they experience hallucinations, dreams, even psychic revelations that spur them on or aid them in their investigations. Marriage is a treacherous state; love, especially passionate love, is suspect and those who profess it have sinister motives. However, her story structure, in which the crimes happen before or just as the books begin and are solved as the books progress, is a departure for the genre and more typical of detective stories, where procedure trumps character and controls the plot.

Anna Katherine Green, writing a few decades later in the post-Civil War era, took her inspiration from Victor as well as contemporaries such as Louisa May Alcott and other women writers, most of whom hid under ambiguous or male pseudonyms. Green herself influenced and inspired later women writers of genre fictions such as Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

That Affair Next Door introduces Amelia Butterworth, a wealthy maiden lady who matches wits with Mr. Gryce, a police detective, as they solve a murder together. Despite the sparks struck against Mr. Gryce's old-fashioned notions of women, Amelia's partnership with him is successful: she finds clues and matches them to motive and opportunity, while Gryce's solid investigative procedure keeps Amelia's flights of imagination grounded in reality. The Van Burnams, Amelia's neighbors, return home from a long trip only to find the dead body of a young woman crushed under their dining room display cabinet. When the victim is identified as Silas Van Burnam's estranged daughter-in-law, Amelia—having witnessed the strange midnight arrival of a young woman and her mysterious companion—uses her friendships, her maid's acting skills, and her own resources to find the clues that lead to the killer's capture.

Lost Man's Lane has more of a Gothic tone. The titular lane is in a small upstate village, where four tramps have disappeared. Amelia's best friend from school days has recently died and her children are still living in the family home, which happens to be at the far end of the lane. Urged by Mr. Gryce, Amelia drops in for a visit and to solve the mystery of the disappearing tramps. Shaken by revelations of her friend's unhappy marriage, attracted by the friendly neighbor Mr. Trohm, and kept awake by ominous noises from mysteriously locked rooms, Amelia does not enjoy her stay in the Gothic genre. With her humor and stubbornness, however, she manages to solve the mystery (again with Mr. Gryce's help) and bursts through a few Gothic conventions while she's at it.

Green's novels had a far-reaching influence on the mystery genre—any story with an unmarried older woman solving crimes owes a great debt to her. But Miss Butterworth, as appealing as she is, is only part of Green's formula. To have a woman, no matter how smart or wealthy, be seen as the equal to a male police detective—and moreover, to have that woman's skills actively sought by police detectives—was a major breakthrough. Amelia's greatest talent consists of spotting clues where others see only domestic details of no importance (a ripped dress, a broken hatpin, a misshapen ball of yarn) and linking them to motivation and character (her observations of human behavior, studied in great detail in her small circle of friends and relatives, applied widely to the human race as a whole). Those themes, along with the light humor sprinkled throughout Green's books, greatly contributed to the foundation of the "cozy" mystery, a bestseller in all its manifestations even today.

Sensationalist novels were the first American fiction to reach bestseller status; Green's 1878 work The Leavenworth Case, in fact, was (as Nickerson tells us) the best-selling novel of that year. Combining in embryonic form the elements of what became distinct genres such as Western, mystery, romance and adventure fiction, sensationalist fiction in pulp books and in newspapers reflected the mass consumption tastes of America—a rapidly expanding, industrializing America with the dirt of slavery and oppression of women under its nails, a country discovering that introspective literature only led to introspective thought (a bad thing when there was so much land to steal from the Indians, so many immigrants to exploit, so many resources to snatch up and hoard). Like the newly manufactured religions of that era or the widely available cheap beer, sensationalist fiction could be consumed easily and required no thought.

Derided in its day just as genre fiction is today, sensationalist literature had one positive result: women could participate powerfully and meaningfully in a new medium. Granted, many women writers used male pseudonyms or ambiguous initials: Victor wrote as Seeley Regester; Louisa May Alcott was A. M. Barnard. But the sheer volume of and demand for sensational fiction gave women an opportunity to dive in and swim in those churning waters despite their murky taint and odor of hellfire. Perhaps the pseudonyms were also useful to hide behind when an author was not especially proud of her pot-boiled work.

In her novel Little Women, Alcott confessed how ashamed she was of her own excursions into sensationalist literature. Jo March, Alcott's avatar, is initially proud of her moneymaking ability and of seeing her work in print, but when a friend points out the shallowness of her writing, Jo realizes "she was beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman's character. She was living in bad society, and imaginary though it was, its influence affected her, for she was feeding heart and fancy on dangerous and unsubstantial food, and was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature by a premature acquaintance with the darker side of life, which comes soon enough to all of us."

Alcott's moral qualms may have prevented her from realizing that "acquaintance with the darker side of life" was a necessary feature if women were to participate fully in society—as faulty, shallow, and dangerous as it may occasionally be. For women such as Metta Fuller Victor and Anna Katherine Green, descending into the world of sensationalist fiction, in all its vulgarity and ugliness, provided them with the opportunity to create new genres, which today have more appeal and possibilities than they might have hoped.

Click here to purchase The Dead Letter & The Figure Eight at your local independent bookstore

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Amanda Stern
Soft Skull Press ($12)

by Stephanie Anderson

In her debut novel, New York writer Amanda Stern depicts the anguish of a doomed and dangerous relationship between a young man and woman—two people who consume each other with the same ferocity with which they consume drugs and alcohol.

The book begins with an elegant, haunting overture: "Three years before we said out loud alcoholic, my breath rode Rochester's snow as icicles. We scraped the car, our girl, big blue. He let me drive plastered behind a wheel. Not our house, we laughed how easy stealing was. His panic attacks in each ventricle. His mother ate him young as afterbirth. His singing—mournful, never about me." This epigraph, composed of paraphrased excerpts from subsequent chapters, serves as a preview of what's to come: the harrowing tale of a self-destructive relationship told in poetic and, at times, heart-wrenching prose.

The Long Haul details the whirlwind courtship and coupling of the unnamed female narrator and her addict boyfriend, a man simply referred to as the Alcoholic, in a series of short chapters in language peppered with the pop-culture credo of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll." Her decision not to name her characters creates a distance between the two of them and between the story and the reader—an unsettling but ultimately effective method. The characters never come alive as individuals, since Stern situates them only within the confines of their codependency—but their venomous relationship takes on a life of its own when coupled with her lush prose.

The book's unique structure also distinguishes it from other relationship-gone-sour fiction. Stern tells the story in a nonlinear fashion, winding through the past and present, often from one paragraph to the next. The circularity of the storytelling confuses at times, but the absence of a chronological line suits the meandering lifestyle and recollections of the narrator and the Alcoholic, as they flit from college to therapy to gig to rehab. Stern intersperses odd but beautiful stream-of-consciousness passages between some of the chapters. These sections remove us from the narrative and from the conventions of space and time altogether, but they provide clear insights into the mind of the narrator:

There's a burn on your back the shape of Florida but you won't tell me how you got it. … You have secrets I want to know.… I want to see through you, memorize your veins. I lick your eyelids when you cry, run my tongue over your lashes. The salt burns on your face but tastes sweet and sad on my tongue. I want to know why people are warning me about you.

And we need these insights. Stern avoids opportunities to give her characters greater depth by introducing important (and often nightmarish) episodes that never fully develop. She dedicates an entire chapter to the narrator's obsession with her psychotherapist, but we never get a clear sense of either her resolution or continued fixation. In a chapter titled "The End of the World," the narrator and the Alcoholic attend a party together, and she narrowly escapes being raped by another partygoer. The narrator flees, finds the Alcoholic, and then the chapter abruptly ends. The characters never mention the attack again, and we can only infer the ordeal's significance. In this way, Stern plumbs the depths of co-dependence and addiction, but diminishes other dramatic elements.

What Stern chooses to explore, however, she explores well, recounting with grace and precision the depression and downward spiral of the two main characters and their relationship. Instead of growing annoyed at their incapacity, we hope they find the strength to leave each other. Even though we know early on that the relationship will fail, Stern's capacity for storytelling keeps us riveted to see how the tale unfolds.

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Nathalie Sarraute
Translated by Maria Jolas
Dalkey Archive Press ($12.95)

by Stephen Schenkenberg

There's probably never been a more serious book about the giggles than Nathalie Sarraute's Do You Hear Them?, first published in 1972 and newly re-released in English. The sounds start off lovely enough: "Fresh laughter. Carefree laughter. Silvery laughter. Tiny bells. Tiny drops. Fountains. Gentle water-falls. Twittering of birds…" and "clear, limpid laughter… living water, springs, little brooks running through flowering meadows." But there are also "long peals of laughter like thin lashes that sting and coil up"; "idiotic titters"; and "sharp peals" that "permeate every recess."

That last phrase should be remembered, for it well represents the author's narrative treatment throughout this work. Considered a key member of the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, movement, Sarraute (1900-1999) spoke and wrote clearly about her strategies of narrative recess-permeation; in a forward to Tropisms, her first of 17 books, she described her authorial focus as those "inner moments" that "slip through us in the frontiers of consciousness in the form of indefinable, extremely rapid sensations."

Here those sensations are given life through sound. Do you hear them, the title asks? Do you hear those children giggling? The question comes from the children's father, who sits a floor below with an old friend, attempting to meditate on a recently acquired work of pre-Columbian art, a heavy, puma-like animal of rough stone that "would deserve to figure in a museum." The father is insulted, intellectually derailed, infuriated at these children of his—these "overfed babies" with access to the best cultural education but who "[turn] up their noses at art treasures" for the comfort of comics and television. Here's one remarkable passage, delivered with the dizzy poetics on which the whole novel floats:

Alone now, leaning toward each other, the two friends turn in every direction the stone set before them on the low table… the two misers tenderly stroke this precious chest, this casket in which there has been deposited, in which is locked up for safekeeping, preserved for all time, something that calms them, reassures them, ensures them security… Something permanent, immutable… An obstacle set on the path of time, a motionless center around which time, arrested, is revolving, forming circles… They hold on to that, seaweed, swaying grasses clinging to the cliff…

The most intriguing thing about Do You Hear Them? may be that Sarraute has taken one simple scene—a father's object fetishization, his children's in-character childishness, the resulting conflict—and fashioned something wonderfully strange and complex. Very little else happens in the novel except this single scene, played again and again from different angles and with different colorizations and through different voices, the author handling, flipping and turning the story like a Rubik's Cube. (This novel, intent on showing multiple sides in something of a single view, does in fact seem Cubist.)

Thus the reader is given revolving points of view, so that the book's anger and its sympathies are continually shifting among the characters. When the father marches upstairs, for instance, we are told that the children are "going to stop, cower in corners, scared to death, startled nymphs caught unawares by a satyr, little pigs dancing when all of a sudden, howling, his great teeth bared, in comes the big bad wolf." But through another lens these cowerers hold the power—"One single invisible ray emitted by them can turn this heavy stone into a hollow, flabby thing," and to counter the father's fuming stair-march we're given this startlingly poetic image: "they felt clinging to them the threads they make him secrete, that slaver with which he tries to envelop them, the slender lasso that he throws at them from behind… and they stiffened, they withdrew violently, they went upstairs, dragging him behind them, giving him hard knocks, his head bumping against the steps…"

Sarraute's elliptical prose can be exhausting and frustrating, but it will ultimately reward the reader who can keep time with the book's unusual rhythm and accept its plotlessness. The ideas and emotions the author casts a fog over—matters of taste, childhood fear, disdain for the next generation's future—remain surprisingly intact when the strange novel is over; the fog clears, and the reader sees more clearly the characters Sarraute has created. While the book includes some simple, declarative statements—"They hold art in contempt," says the father; "He holds a stopwatch on all our gestures," says one of the children—the reader senses that the richness of the book is in its faint, poetic, quickly passing passages, such as: "I believe that it's time… They rise… and inside him something breaks off and falls…"

The author's commitment to locating these "inner moments" feels, in the end, worth the labor of both writer and reader. The moments may have slipped through the consciousness of Sarraute's characters, but they have not slipped through hers, nor ours.

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Nuruddin Farah
Riverhead Books ($24.95)

by Scott Esposito

Nuruddin Farah's riveting new novel Links begins with its main character, Jeebleh, arriving at the airport in his ancestral Mogadiscio after building a life in America. Soon after he arrives, the question of why he returned arises, and it haunts him throughout the book; it is a fair question because Farah makes it clear that this is not a place for idle visitors. Mogadiscio is a country where death is ever present, a land where AK-47s cost $6 and street youths take potshots at their hapless elders for the fun of it. Whether by retreating to refuges or by fleeing the country, it is a place that people escape, not a place to which they return. The best Jeebleh can answer his interlocutor at the airport is that he has come to give his long-deceased mother a proper burial—yet like the American military he finds himself immediately inundated by politics and rivalries that threaten to swallow him like a vortex.

Upon arriving at Mogadiscio, Jeebleh is accosted by Af-Laawe, a shadowy man who claims to be an associate of his dear friend Bile. Jeebleh is mistrustful of Af-Laawe, but has little choice but to accept a ride in Af-Laawe's van, which doubles as a hearse that he uses to give the unending ranks of the newly deceased a proper Muslim burial. When their ride is interrupted by a murder and Af-Laawe hauls the body into his van-cum-hearse, Jeebleh is forced to ride in a separate vehicle. His new driver soon informs him that Af-Laawe is known as 'Marabou,' a bird that competes with vultures for carrion. Throughout the novel Farah uses such revelations to force Jeebleh (and the reader) to rethink his assumptions.

This first series of events sets the tone for the entire novel. Continually, Jeebleh is passed from person to person, all the while unsure if he is being manipulated or assisted, but helpless to do other than accept these ambiguous favors. Also typical of Jeebleh's travels through Mogadiscio is that he will hear two or three conflicting descriptions of any one acquaintance. It is up to him to determine who to trust, and often his life hangs in the balance.

Jeebleh's experiences are typical of what Farah calls "a nightmare of loyalties," the intricate web of interpersonal relationships that lies at the heart of Links. Just as Jeebleh is drawn into this nightmare, his fellow Somalis have also been drawn in, and these loyalties play a large part in perpetuating the violence that thrives throughout the book. Virtually everyone has blood on their hands, either directly or by association, and when it is time to go to war these loyalties ensure that no one is immune from the call of duty.

After his ride from the airport is finally over, Jeebleh checks into a dreary hotel and the next day meets with Bile, who helps run a sanctuary in war-torn Mogadiscio. Bile tells Jeebleh the story of his niece Raasta, a four-year-old child that Bile's fellow refugees believe is protected and has the power to keep their refuge safe. Raasta has been kidnapped, and many believe that Bile's war profiteering half-brother, Caloosha, is behind it. Jeebleh visits him the next day.

As Farah's narrative unfolds, the relationships between Jeebleh, Bile, Caloosha, Af-Laawe and several other characters are explained. Farah elaborates his characters through creative imagery, incidents, and heaps of dialog, and uses forthwith, consistent pacing. Like Jeebleh, the reader is in the dark as to each character's trustworthiness and past and must base evaluations on whatever evidence is at hand. As the pieces fall into place, Jeebleh and the reader must decide what the truth is. Through this incomplete knowledge, Farah conveys an idea of the ambiguity and conflicting relationships that are part and parcel of life in Somalia, and imparts the message that this "nightmare of loyalties" keeps the nation at war with itself.

Jeebleh's Western attitudes come into play as well. He disgraces his tribal elders by flatly refusing their demands for money to create battle wagons, an action which almost costs him his life; he also repeatedly flaunts aspects of Muslim law that he considers unreasonable, and fights valiantly to forge a meaningful compromise between his Western values and his Somali roots. Jeebleh's challenge is to wind his way through the thicket of relationships and links that surround him on all sides until he is able to discover why he has returned to Somalia and what he needs to do.

It is a difficult trip that Farah renders beautifully. The author's vivid images of everyday Mogadiscio create a dramatic mosaic, and this mosaic helps us understand Somalia as Farah sees it. Links is a slow book that relies more on revelation than plot, but like the rest of Farah's oeuvre, it is well worth the effort.

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Italo Svevo
Translated by J. G. Nichols
Hesperus Press ($12)

by Eric J. Iannelli

Italo Svevo began writing A Perfect Hoax, the story of an aging "man of letters" who achieves what he believes to be his long overdue recognition, in 1925—a time when the author himself was receiving belated critical acclaim for his two early novels as well as his recently published masterwork, The Confessions of Zeno, thanks to a helpful push from his English tutor, James Joyce. This overt basis in autobiography makes A Perfect Hoax fertile territory for idle literary theorists looking to bind the man more tightly to his work. It also provides Tim Parks, the eminent translator of Italian, with a topic for his brief foreword.

Svevo's novella engages the same theme on which he would establish his lasting reputation: the convoluted intricacies of self-deception. Here he proves that he can craft a thoughtful, entertaining narrative about the all-too-human propensity to construct a comfortable version of reality in 70 pages as expertly as he did in the several hundred pages of Zeno. It is this, not the Easter egg hunt of deliberate autobiographical links, which amply justifies Hesperus Press's decision to republish A Perfect Hoax in a new translation by J. G. Nichols.

The hoax of the title unfolds when Enrico Gaia, a spiteful travelling salesman with a fondness for practical jokes, plans to dupe his naïve acquaintance Mario Samigli. Ever since publishing a poorly received novel at his own expense four decades earlier, Samigli has been drowning in delusions of literary grandeur. He credits his unknown work for influencing the younger generation of writers. He even wonders if the leaders of the invading Austrian army will hang him as a subversive or reward his genius. Samigli further cultivates his false self-image by writing trite fables—as inert as "little mummies"—about the local sparrows.

Spurred by a mixture of resentment and hostility, Gaia convinces Samigli that a representative from a prestigious Viennese publisher has been spotted in town among the crowds celebrating the end of The Great War. This man, he says, is looking to publish a German edition of the long-forgotten novel. Naturally, Samigli puffs with pride and arrogance. Like the mischievous praise of Samigli's gout-afflicted brother, Giulio, Gaia's flattering lie dovetails with the soi-disant author's concept of how things are and ought to be. This kicks off a daisy chain of ruses and fabrications, all of which Gaia has engineered to shove Samigli out of his waking dream.

Were Svevo's characters less pathetic, they would be contemptuous. The kindest reading of the antihero still pegs him as an inept, pretentious fool. The faux publisher's representative is described as simply "uglier than Gaia," the primary prankster himself being a short, paunchy, rheumatic man with the "hoarse voice of a boozer" who "limped like Mephistopheles" on account of his arthritic legs. Not even the characters' meager achievements are exempt from criticism. One Man's Youth, Samigli's novel, "might have been considered dead if in this world things could die when they had never been alive."

The prose of Nichols's translation is more restrained than that of William Weaver's The Confessions of Zeno, but it's safe to say that this quality is not a side effect of translation; rather, it speaks to a difference in Svevo's choice of narrator and tone. Whereas Zeno is warmer, garrulous, more informal, A Perfect Hoax is told at a superior remove, partly resembling Samigli's fables. (Only once does the story slip into the first person with "I am sorry to say it, but . . . ") The narrator speaks disparagingly—and therefore honestly, we assume—of Samigli's book, slightly less so of Gaia's modest itinerant profession; yet he refers to the salesman's hoax as "a work of art" and the practical joker in general as "a kind of artist." Iago is cited as a particularly admirable example.

We run into an issue of semantics at this point, possibly an intentional one on Svevo's behalf. A practical joke is not synonymous with a hoax. A hoax is designed to swindle, to dupe, to benefit one party at the unwitting expense of another. A successful practical joke, however, hinges upon the assumed good humor (or, more accurately, forgiveness) and retroactive complicity of its butt. The failure to properly distinguish between the two terms in A Perfect Hoax is not the fault of Nichols's thesaurus; nor is it the double meaning of "burla" in the Italian title. Instead it alerts readers to the narrator's predisposition: even while relating a tale of one man's astounding self-deception, this supposedly disinterested individual is unaware of his own biases and emphatic slants on the story. Likewise, the reader who mocks Samigli, Gaia, and the narrator for their skewed realities fancies himself equally immune to self-deception. Consequently he is just as guilty as the objects of his ridicule.

Still, all this jaded headshaking over the follies of humanity does not wholly suit Svevo, for there is something of the optimist in him. He makes certain that Gaia's malicious machinations are compensated by Samigli's wrath and a final stroke of good fortune. Moral debts are paid off. Balance is restored. It is not an entirely realistic or credible ending, but it is a satisfying one because, for one reason or another, we like to believe that this is how stories should end. Svevo knew this, and it fascinated him. It's why he kept returning to this theme.

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Alfred Chester
Black Sparrow Book ($16.95)

by Mark Terrill

Originally published by Simon and Schuster in 1967, and reissued by Carroll and Graf in 1986, Alfred Chester's The Exquisite Corpse has twice gone out of print and lapsed into literary limbo, its very unavailability helping elevate it to the cult status by which it is known today. Previously championed by Allen Hibbard under the "Widely Unavailable" rubric in Rain Taxi Review of Books (Volume 4, Number 3), Hibbard closed his piece by saying "We should all stomp on bleachers, go on hunger strikes, or lay down on railway tracks until it is brought back into print." These extreme measures are happily no longer needed, for The Exquisite Corpse has at last been resurrected, in a new edition which contains an illuminating afterword by Diana Athill, adapted from her book, Stet: A Memoir.

Prior to writing The Exquisite Corpse, Chester was an accomplished writer with a reputation as a sharp-tongued critic in New York; he wrote fearlessly and pointedly about Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, Edward Albee, Mary McCarthy, John Rechy, William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, and Vladimir Nabokov, in such renowned publications as Commentary, The New York Review of Books, and Partisan Review. A collection of short stories, Here Be Dragons, was followed by a novel, Jamie Is My Heart's Desire, and then by another collection of stories, Behold Goliath; these books, along with work by Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote, can be said to have pioneered the way for modern gay fiction. Chester's early stories earned him comparisons with Faulkner, Steinbeck, Jean Stafford, and Saul Bellow. Among his cohorts and colleagues in New York were Susan Sontag, Irene Fornes, Simon Perchik and Dennis Selby. Several of the stories in Behold Goliath were reworked or recycled as material for the surreal patchwork quilt that eventually became The Exquisite Corpse.

In 1963, Chester met Paul Bowles, who was in New York to write the music for a Tennessee Williams play on Broadway, and at Bowles's suggestion, Chester decided to leave New York and move to Tangier, Morocco. Fed up with life in New York and the confines of critical writing, Chester was determined to break away and write another novel. The three years Chester spent in Morocco were perhaps the best and most fulfilling of his life. He smoked kif, experimented with other drugs, took full advantage of Tangier's open attitude towards sexuality, and fell in love with a Moroccan fisherman named Driss, to whom The Exquisite Corpse was dedicated and who was also the main character in one of Chester's last substantial works, "The Foot." Yet Chester's increasing paranoia and struggles with his own sexual identity culminated in a vortex of madness, in which Susan Sontag and Paul Bowles figured as imaginary antagonists; eventually Chester's erratic and antisocial behavior led to his being asked to leave the country by the Moroccan authorities.

It was in Tangier that Chester wrote The Exquisite Corpse, gathering together his various talents to produce what many consider to be a masterpiece of modern writing. Chester's influences ranged widely, from Truman Capote to Pirandello, from Paul Bowles to Gurdjieff, from E. M. Forster to Jean Genet. Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and Gurdjieff's theory of multiple "I's" were both in accordance with Chester's own personal dilemma of identity. But stylistically, Chester was all on his own. Imagine a combination of the canny camp and tongue-in-cheek absurdity of Jane Bowles, the lewd surrealism and cheeky perversions of William Burroughs, the forward-toppling condensed chapters and poetic imagery of Richard Brautigan, a touch of Marquis de Sade and Ed Dorn's epic poem, "Gunslinger," and you're just beginning to get close to what's in store in this remarkable tale.

Chester's characters continuously change names, gender and identity, and the plots and subplots morph back in forth in time and space with all the diamond-cutting authority of a dream. Ira Cohen, a friend of Chester's in Tangier, described the novel as "a homo masterpiece born in the Bronx, made hairless by X-ray treatments, lovers with burnt marshmallow faces, a changeling born of lesbian frankfurter love taken away by angels with frosted toilet glass wings, broken telephone booths in the middle of the forest." At the hands of a lesser artist, The Exquisite Corpse probably would have wound up on the cutting room floor. But by way of Chester's masterful prose style and incredible wit—along with his keen sense of pacing and trans-cinematic imagination—this is a compelling roller coaster of a book, resembling at times a long poem more than anything else. As John Ashbery affirmed in his blurb, "Chester has used the materials of a novel to make something like a poem—a hybrid thing, but a thing still very much worth doing, as the poisoned eloquence of his writing proves on almost every page."

At the bottom of this palimpsest of shifting identity and gender is Chester's own ongoing dialectic between the self and the other, between identity and desire. For Chester, desire is the self, manifesting itself in one continuous irresolvable quest, identity being something you don or discard like a mask. The personal identity crisis as a point of departure for creating art was not Chester's own invention, nor was it something he employed as part of the fashionable existential self-doubt of the time, as evidenced by his eventual psychological breakdown in Morocco. Chester's crisis was legitimate, and he used it to explore the parameters of his own psyche, creating an enduring work of art in the process. As Michael Feingold wrote in The Village Voice, "Chester carried in himself two of the great polar elements on which most 20th-century art is based: He was an intelligent homosexual—that is, a man perpetually conscious of life as a series of roles or poses to be taken on; and he was a madman—a visionary." Speaking of his own position in the nexus of expatriate writers in Tangier at the time, Chester liked to claim that Bowles was of the past, Burroughs of the present, and he himself of the future. The Exquisite Corpse goes a long way to substantiate this claim, having opened the doors (along with Burroughs) for postmodernism, long before postmodernism became the cultural catchword that it is today.

Unfortunately, the future didn't last long for Chester. After being thrown out of Morocco, he briefly returned to New York, then began a peripatetic odyssey across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, finally settling in Jerusalem—where he died of a drug overdose in 1971, just short of his 43rd birthday, a tragic victim of his own demons and desires. Out of print and nearly forgotten at the time of his death, Chester would probably have been doomed to total obscurity if not for the scope and strength of The Exquisite Corpse. Black Sparrow has also published Head of a Sad Angel: Stories 1953-1966 as well as Looking for Genet: Literary Essays and Reviews, both edited by his long-time friend and literary executor Edward Field. With the reappearance of The Exquisite Corpse, Chester's place in contemporary letters should be as stalwart and enduring as a granite tombstone, marking the grave of one very exquisite corpse indeed.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004