translated by Bert Pribac and David Brooks with the assistance of Teja Pribac
Salt Publishing ($20.82)

by Martin Balgach

Revered in Slovenia as an essential modernist figure and a formative avant-garde poet, Srečko Kosovel died in 1926 at the young age of twenty-two. A prolific writer, it is said that Kosovel wrote over a thousand poems, although few of those poems were published during his lifetime. Often called the Slovenian Rimbaud, comparisons are also made to Rilke and Lorca, and Kosovel deserves a place among these men—as can be seen in The Golden Boat, the most comprehensive selection of Kosovel’s poetry available outside of the Slovenian language.

English language readers will find in these poems the firsthand accounts of a historically relevant European voice interwoven with the metaphysical sensibilities and tender poignancy of a young poet. Take, for example, “The Sun, Nada”:

The sun,
Nada, has set already,
as if hiding
from my eyes.
The sun
has sunk beyond the grove
and all is silent in the wood.
All? I don’t know!
It’s just that the shadows stare
mournfully,
the flowers breathe out their fragrance
in the dusk.
You can feel the tulips bleeding.
I could weep but I am not allowed.

Kosovel’s poems also show us the pessimism of a young European experiencing the turbulence of a new century, as in “This Horrible Time”:

This horrible, unsettling time
is flooding our search with disquietude—
in every direction, every direction,
breaking and killing our dreams.
Crime—Sacrament, the sacrament is a crime,
suffering attached to love,
the heart’s old temples plundered
as if they were damned.
From dead and abandoned dwellings
grey, desperate prayers are sailing—
European man, half-dead,
calling for salvation . . .

The Golden Boat also chronicles Slovenia’s vulnerable position at the geographical and political crossroads of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire. For many Slovenian writers, including Kosovel, literature was not only a form of artistic expression but also a way to preserve and define a threatened society. In this context, the struggle for a cultural identity becomes equal to the poet’s metaphysical concerns. In poems such as “Autumn Quiet,” Kosovel often oscillates between the expectations of cultural definition and his developing sense of self:

It is quiet as autumn inside me
and outside. Beautiful
as far as I can think.

A big job awaits me.
Isn’t that joyful?

I am not striving
for an honorary award
in the society of man,
just for
a world of beauty
and justice.

What is joy?
The wish to live.
The joy of life.
Who care for awards!

I am a step closer to life
in which I must make
my mark.

As we see in “Autumn Quiet,” cultural place and self-knowledge are interrelated; for Kosovel, they must be elucidated in tandem. Along with the informative postscripts found throughout these selections, we are given access to Kosovel’s highly attuned emotional and intellectual sensibilities as he defines his political, cultural, and spiritual existence.

Kosovel’s poems are intoxicatingly honest, and the skillfully cadenced translations that comprise The Golden Boat allow us the opportunity to experience the tender curiosities and melancholies of a poet who was not given much time to understand his place in the world. These lucid meditations show us Kosovel’s intense appreciation for the natural surroundings of his native Karst region. We also find in these poems the sincere longing for quietude, which is not to say utopia; utopia would be too forthright. Beyond the compelling emotional ferocity of the young poet, there is a vulnerable tone in these poems, and that tone conveys a young man’s yearning for peace, not bliss. The Golden Boat illuminates that difference.

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Dawn Lundy Martin
University of Georgia Press ($16.95)

by Haines Eason

a gathering of matter a matter of gathering, the debut collection from 2006 Cave Canem winner Dawn Lundy Martin, is an artful scar winding over broken bonds of trust—trust in father and family, trust in men and mankind. Starting from the recesses of memory marred by abuse, Martin’s speaker dredges a harrowing past and stages it as an ongoing condition of living in the present. Martin attempts to rid her speaker of a painful history while reformulating it via damnation of the perpetrator, a world permitting perpetrators, and even the child abused. At times confessional, and persistently lyrical, percussive, and thrumming, a gathering of matter shatters the at-large world of bodies while endeavoring to reconcile her speaker’s memories and present body.

The broken bones of these two objectives must knit if the collection is to succeed, and titles like “I/M/A/G/E” and “Completion Cleaved” (subsections of “Negrotizing in Five; or, How to Write a Black Poem”) gesture toward that end. At first look Martin does succeed. The collection is arguably a long poem of enraged bereavement, which in itself is no straightforward thing. Being an amalgamation of contradictory emotions—some that tear and some that bind—bereavement is both a process and result that the plenary person has literally survived.

But as readers, we are obligated to ask if the threshold verging the aforementioned struggle toward unity is believably crossed—we must ask if a chronicle of bereavement is sufficient for poetry. Closer scrutiny reveals a gathering of matter remains raggedly sundered, so much that it blurs the line between therapy and art. The poems’ timbre is at times too invested in its fever, and the poems are often too spinningly linguistic for the sake of the emotional matter. Furthermore, the collection suffers from a hasty conclusion—the reader is asked to believe conciliation between the book’s present speaker and past speaker has occurred.

The first poem, “Last Days,” surveys from a cold vantage the damage done a daughter by a father’s sexual abuse:

What is the relation between Figure A and Figure B?

That is what the father has become.

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

Who breathes in the room?

A girl on the bed, a daughter.

Only one then?

They won’t deliver him to her, her palms, little petals.

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

There are A and B, and some curtains drawn tight to lock the room.
There is the scent that I will remember for many years.

This is what happens before the figure disappears?

A row of unkempt stones they call heroes.

How is the pain endured?

A stem of grass imagined when it is not raining.
All those things called intentions. The private treasures one keeps safe.

From this point forward the speaker’s memories darkly coalesce. Out of this darkness sometimes spills a storming rage that buffets the bounds of diction, as in “Bone”:

Toward him. When sleep comes, it comes bare. Barely.
To balance there. It has been twenty years.
“What do you think about when you think about him?” Only,
toward him. Brush of him. Breath brush. Rum.
It was my first drink. Hairless arms and legs. Breath
of drink. Breath. Barely breast.

The collection is constructed from poems more resembling the latter than the former, in which we may hear Nathaniel Mackey as an influence. “Direct at blood-beat angled as to cease it,” from Martin’s “Sunday Lessons,” purely picks up the sparkling tones and textures Mackey perfected in Splay Anthem’s “Song of the Andoumboulou: 50,” for example. Consider this segment: “emollient feel for what / might not have been there. Head in the / clouds he'd have said of himself, / she'd / have said elsewhere, his to be above and / below, not know or say, hers to be / alibi, elegy otherwise known . . .” The matter of this Mackey passage is undoubtedly softer than Martin’s, and the lyric is less compressed or prone to slippage. Martin tends to extend or heighten the musicality with a plosive consonance that is jarring and metallic—as in “Breath / of drink. Breath. Barely breast.” Despite the differences, however, one notices the debt.

One might also make the oblique connection of Martin to Harryette Mullen, especially in consideration of the passage above from “Last Days.” The chance encounter with cooler language in that poem—and chance encounters with cooler language in a matter of gathering overall—makes it easy to link Martin to contemporaries who play languorously, as Mullen does. The slowness of “Last Days” might seem to link well with Mullen’s “Any Lit” or “Sleeping with the Dictionary.” But I believe Martin channels deeper currents in her slower movements: more surprising than Harryette Mullen, we may, as we turn from a Mackey moment, chance upon something in the mood of Virginia Woolf. From Martin’s “I/M/A/G/E”: “I / want to tell you about the splitting of a female body—how I squeezed into / it—fitting barely, of the texture of melancholy, of a sycophantic love, draw / a flicker for you, let you enter as if entering me.”

This is of course a leap, but what is interesting in this potential connection is how Woolf, in On Being Ill, describes a process of pain. She notes the body impinges in building measure upon the mind and is capable of driving one quite mad. A damaged body impedes the spirit’s search for the Essential:

All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours . . . The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife . . . until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes.

Further complicating the matter, Woolf believes, is one’s inability to give voice to this process:

[L]et a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. . . . He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

This description of a body impinging on the soul is of course apt for Martin’s narrator, whose scars are as fresh as sutures—they are integral to the frame and have become indistinguishable from it. Returning to “Bone”: when the subject of the father arises, the narrator admits to thinking of him “only”—despite the intervening years, the father looms (“It has been twenty years.”). In this instance the speaker is no longer a single self, and is broken over grief. Despite intervening years in which she could have muted her anger, she has frayed into a composite of herself now and herself as she believes she was in youth, with the abuser standing beside. Martin’s speaker breaks the past into so many pieces—the painful and pleasant memories, etc.—that the result is an irreconcilable dust which, come the concluding poems like “Instructions” and “Fire Island,” whisks off into some undisclosed vista, un-re-attainable, unresolved. “Instructions” gestures toward a fairy-tale motif: “Imagine her surrounded by toads and a pen.” Also mentioned: “A tea towel folded into halves,” which we might assume lies in someone’s lap, and which presents the idea of family and condolence after, perhaps, the great violence of the preceding poems. Following “Instructions” is “Fire Island,” which tries to drown the collection’s burden in the sea: “She unremembered here. A pounding, sucking force— / think about the water’s white rim.” Also from that poem: “plunging / colorless against expanse, devoid of scent, devoid of air. She is full.” But these conciliatory poems are circumvented by “Bleeding, an Autobiographical Tale,” which details “the stinked history of other inappropriate drills—being a girl.” The work to achieve solace in “Instructions” and “Fire Island” is erased; the balance is tipped against artfulness.

Paul Celan, upon receiving the Bremen Prize, took a moment to enumerate what remained in the midst of the loss he experienced:

. . . language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, “enriched” by it all.

Martin does not retreat with a bare language to a sanctified core, nor does her experience “go through its own lack of answers” (my italics), as it does not achieve an other-side as of yet. Indeed, she invokes a “ murderous” speech, but we still await “words for what was happening.” a gathering of matter chronicles its speaker’s ravages, but its conclusion does not provide a core or new language from which we may progress.

Perhaps in later collections Martin will refine her considerable energy and build the converse of this ravaged past. She certainly matches, sometimes even bests, our contemporary greats in lyricism and shift of wit, and has an undeniable talent for concretizing physical manifestations of the macabre. Deeper still, she has a love of place and history that, given full room, will provide good root for a future beyond grieving. And fairly, there are few satisfying answers to the questions abuse and grief asks; to frame a new language from a private carnage is a daunting task. a gathering of matter a matter of gathering does not raise new landscapes from the charred pain at its core, but it heralds a talented and terrifying voice, and this is bounty enough for now.

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edited by Edita Page
translated by Inara Cedrins, Eric Dickens, Herbert Lomas, and Edita Page
Wolsak and Wynn ($25)

by Amy Groshek

It's easy to describe the seasonal changes one experiences when living in a circumpolar climate, but difficult to convey the impact of such changes on the psyche. One can describe the maritime chill and palpable darkness of an Alaska winter; far more difficult to explain the platitude of 2:00 p.m. streetlights, the freedom of interpretation implicit in a red traffic light hung over an intersection which, for six months of the year, is rutted ice. In The Baltic Quintet: Poems from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden, one finds this same intimate, self-conscious relationship with the natural world—and some sense of its elusive milieu.

“For twentieth-century Lithuanian poets,” writes the collection's editor, Edita Page, “nature has never been neutral, it has been their spiritual doppelgänger, their spiritual being, their conscience.” This seems to hold true not just for Lithuanians, but for every nationality in the anthology, though there are various applications for such content. In the hands of Finnish poet Saila Susiluoto, nature is a thing which overtakes, transforms, and alienates. In “Wolf Tale,” for example, a woman believes she has been transformed into a wolf, causing her husband to reject her:

I lay awake every night, she
whispers, and I pressed my hands on my ears to stop them
changing again.

A tongue-in-cheek conclusion, fortunately, is not lost on what might otherwise have become a mystical feminist treatise. “Have I got the ears,” the wife asks. “No,” replies the husband, “nor a head either.” Another such common-sense quip appears in Swede Lars Huldén's “Loving one's native soil.” His predominant whimsicality is reminiscent of Polish poets Wisława Szymborska and Tadeusz Różewicz:

Your native soil will kill you
without the slightest compunction.
Climb a tree and jump . . .

There is also the natural imagery of the esoteric or spiritual lyric, more familiar to North Americans, as exemplified by Estonian Doris Kareva: “Grazing land shades into dawn, / chill. Pulling my coat flaps across. / Will you come too?” Many such gestures appear in The Baltic Quintet, for the most part indistinguishable from their equivalents on this side of the ocean. If, in this anthology, depictions of nature know no national boundaries, neither do contemporary aesthetics.

But rather than dwell on images of nature, let's ask the set of questions which we hold, spoken or unspoken, for states which existed for five decades either under or in the shadow of Soviet occupation: what was it like to compose a poem, or a book of poems, as did Latvian Pēters Brūveris, only to see it censored and never published? What exactly has independence offered? How easy, or how difficult, has it been to move on? Three of the five nations featured in this anthology were part of the Soviet Union, and Finland was required, for decades, to maintain a precarious economic relationship with the USSR. So it seems strange that only two poets in twenty, both Estonian, are credited with poems which refer to a Soviet past.

The elder of these is Hasso Krull, and the sociological and political landscape he portrays in “A Trip to the Country of the Mari” is riveting. Mari is a Finnish language spoken by inhabitants of the Mari El Republic of the Russian Federation. Krull's journeys in post-Soviet Russia are recorded in spare lines, and politics holds a primary but unforced position:

war makes the people rich
said Andrei that evening

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

somewhere a pig was rooting
one star stopped above the narrow yard
I had tried to explain
that producing weapons makes you poor

Krull's sense of the land is innately politicized. Looking onto the banks of the Volga, the speaker's instinct is empathetic: “this land has so long / found it hard to be Russia.”

Near the end of the poem, Krull records an old woman leading two goats, perhaps alluding to Tadeusz Różewicz's “In the Midst of Life.” The speaker's companion yells “how much does a goat cost” to the woman, but the speaker has his own, very different, idea:

dear old woman
never sell one goat to anybody

teach them to eat
weapons and rockets

and bite painfully all
those that boss them and make them toil

If this poem is indeed a revision of Różewicz's, the revision is a somewhat ambivalent acquittal of anti-establishment violence, a dispassionate regression from the heroic effort of rehumanization Różewicz's poem depicts. Overall, Krull's appeal is an ethical one, his nature aestheticized only in the embodiment of humanity's oft-failed obligations. The rest of the collection is worth reading merely as a contextualization of his work.

Krull's “Trip” is soft-spoken and apolitical when compared with the fiery allusions of Elo Viiding. Born in 1974, she is the youngest poet in The Baltic Quintet, but her work features mass graves, bodies thrown into bogs, and a family home “now the property of the state.” In one poem, she evokes Soviet-enforced quietism, asking, “do you want to live or dying / be submissively witnessed against.” “The law,” Viiding writes in “The Snow-Woman,”

has to be binding—on the ground
snow must fall.
Snow must fall on the ground on your father and mother,
on your sisters and brothers, your home—your body

Does Viiding's work read to Estonians as painfully necessary or sensationalist? Can the North American reader trust his or her own fascination with post-Soviet references? Regardless, the fusion of natural and human interests utilized by Viiding and Krull is noteworthy because, as we have been learning, our world does come with an ethical balance sheet—however esoteric—which neither governments, nor economies, nor the natural world escapes.

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John McNally
Jefferson Press ($22.95)

by Leah Raven

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia,” E. L. Doctorow once said. John McNally takes full advantage of this acceptability in his book of short stories Ghosts of Chicago. His characters, some purely fictional and others based on late, great Chicagoans such as John Belushi and Gene Siskel, are all moderately to severely unstable. Recurring motifs include men obsessed with women obsessed with other men (who are usually creepy and dysfunctional), mental instability, and drug dependency. Whether rendered in first, second, or third person narration, each of McNally’s voices is clear and evocative, as are the characters. In a few short pages, it becomes evident what haunts each character, even when they themselves aren’t entirely sure.

One of McNally’s most compelling tales is “The Goose,” in which a television show about a goose that thinks it is president of the United States becomes a man’s whole world. The story portrays Chicago television personality Frazier Thomas, but is narrated in the second person; usually limited to guide books and interactive fiction, this device allows the reader to experience how life might have been for a pop-culture figure whom many grew up watching. “The goose waits each morning for the arm that gives him body, the hand that fills his head. Then he waits for you, his trusty compatriot.” Thomas becomes paranoid that the goose is always watching him, and he grows increasingly ill at ease in front of the camera. The directive prose is distant, yet able to convey how sad and adrift Thomas may have felt. “Here you are, a fifty-something-year-old man, surrounded by puppets, and you think, This is my life, it’s not so bad.”

In the more lighthearted “Creature Features,” McNally becomes eight-year-old Timmy, who is obsessed with monsters. When his mother breaks the “horrifying news” that she is pregnant, Timmy doesn’t seem to mind. In reality, the announcement doesn’t even break into his consciousness:

The only things I cared about were monsters. Movie monsters, to be precise. I wouldn’t talk to anyone unless they had something to say about monsters. If the word monster didn’t come up within the first few seconds of a conversation, I quit listening. Monsters was the only acceptable topic—the only topic, in fact, worthy of my undivided attention.

This fact is explored humorously as the pregnancy progresses. Each time the baby is mentioned, Timmy acts oblivious. “What baby?” he replies offhandedly when told he will have to share a room, turning back to his monster magazine. McNally is wholly believable as a preoccupied prepubescent boy. Timmy’s thoughts are simple and curious and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge anything non-monster is very telling of his age. The night his sister is delivered, Timmy connects the birth to the creation of the Frankenstein monster. Only after making this analogy is he able to accept the new addition to his family, shouting out his window into a lightning storm, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

McNally’s seemingly mild-mannered yet unreliable protagonists prove intriguing as each deals with his or her own metaphorical monsters. Far more universal than its title might suggest, Ghosts of Chicago is a rollicking tour through the psyches of our modern world.

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Francine Prose
HarperCollins ($24.95)

by Joyce J. Townsend

Instead of unctuous stereotypic babble—the contrived kind that smacks so clearly of an adult author emulating a teen—Francine Prose’s latest book presents a classic young protagonist whose utterly believable point of view unfurls seamlessly. Destined to take its place among the great novels of adolescence, Goldengrove tells of the summer when thirteen-year-old Nico suddenly inherits the role of “One Remaining Child,” cast by mindless fate when her older sister Margaret abruptly dies, and distracted family members navigate the trampled labyrinth of grief.

Any death, particularly that of a young person, plunges survivors into despair; crucial assumptions and expectations—especially that one’s family will live happily ever after—crumble, toppling everything. Margaret’s parents are too shattered to reach beyond their own salvation to shore up their younger daughter’s. Stunned, in total shock, Nico is on her own, with no idea how, or why, to go forward without Margaret:

None of us knew. No one knew. That was what everyone kept saying. First we didn’t know what happened, then we didn’t know how it happened, and then we still couldn’t understand why, why Margaret, why our family, though it wasn’t like us to say, “Why us?” What did it mean to be like us? What did us mean without Margaret?

As Nico struggles for balance, she notes: "Every empty second was an invitation to gaze into the abyss and think how sweet it would feel to jump." Avoiding everything connected with Margaret seems the only way to inch forward with the least amount of pain: “Aaron’s van was way high on the list of Margaret-related things. Everything else—music, films, the lake—slipped down a rung, like guests at a table shifting to make room for a late arrival.” But Aaron, Margaret’s boyfriend, becomes for Nico the only person she can bear to be around. Her parents don’t much care for him, so Nico meets Aaron the way Margaret used to: secretly. “I did what anyone my age would have done. I invented a barbecue with old friends . . . At first I was relieved that [my parents] trusted me, and then insulted that they still thought of me as a truthful child instead of a scheming, secretive teen.”

Initially there is nothing sexual or romantic about the relationship. Nico has had crushes before but “Aaron treated me like a person, unlike the boys in my school, to whom I was a window through which they kept looking for a hotter girl with bigger breasts.” She feels that she can be herself with Aaron, or at least the version of herself that most resembles Margaret. Aaron, for his part, wants Nico to wear Margaret’s clothes and her special scent, so he can do things with her that he used to do with Margaret. “Part of me thought it was creepy . . . And part of me truly loved it,” says Nico, but eventually the creepiness supersedes.

Once again, Francine Prose exposes a universal situation uniquely, this time the struggles of a family and their friends trying to survive the unacceptable. In inimitable fashion, she focuses on the path chosen by the surviving sister who learns, as survivor siblings must, how no one can ever fill the void left by the dead.

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Nahal Tajadod
translated by R. Bononno
The Overlook Press ($26.95)

by Rasoul Sorkhabi

This book is the first comprehensive and authoritative historical novel in English about the life and mind of Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic who is one of the most widely read poets in North America. Nahal Tajadod confesses that it took her several years to finish this book, during which her mother (a scholar of Persian literature who helped her to understand Rumi) died and Tajadod gave birth to her first child after ten years of trying. During those years, her husband would often inquire about her book on Rumi, and in reply Tajadod would quote from one of Rumi’s own poems: “For a certain time the book has been delayed.” One day, Tajadod writes, while breastfeeding her infant daughter, she opened Rumi’s book and found out that that particular poem continues like this: “Because it takes time for blood to become milk.” Its long gestation seems to have paid off, for Rumi: The Fire of Love is a delight to read.

Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh (now in Afghanistan), an ancient city in the Persian kingdom whose history is blended with the march of Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Islamic faiths. His father, Baha Valad, was a Sufi preacher (and indeed, Rumi’s first teacher). Shortly before the Mongols sacked and massacred Balkh, Rumi’s family migrated westward and finally settled in Konya (now in southwest Turkey), an important city in Anatolia then ruled by the Seljuk dynasty. Anatolia was once part of the Byzantine Empire, or Rum in Persian—hence the name “Rumi” for the poet known respectfully to the Persians as Moulana, “our master.” After Baha Valad died, Rumi, then age 24, studied under several teachers and spiritual masters, and ten years later, took over his father’s position as an eminent teacher and scholar in Konya. In 1244, Rumi happened to meet a wandering dervish named Shams (literally meaning sun) in Konya’s bazaar. It was Shams who awakened Rumi to esoteric knowledge, mystic love, and union with God. This was a new beginning for Rumi, who said: “I was dead, behold I became alive. I was a tear, behold I am laughter.”

Rumi treasured spiritual friendships and “dialogues” (a tradition known as sohbat in Sufism); Shams was his first brother in soul. After Shams left Konya in 1248 (or was killed by Rumi’s jealous students, as another theory goes), Rumi found another friend to speak with, Salah Zarkub (“goldsmith” by profession), between 1248 and 1258, and finally Hesam Chalabi, from 1258 until Rumi’s death in 1273. Rumi: The Fire of Love is thus divided into three parts: Shams, Salah, and Hesam. Although Rumi’s contact with Shams was relatively short-lived (less than four years), more than half of the book is devoted to the Shams period, not only because Tajadod has squeezed the first three decades of Rumi’s life into this part, but also because of the overwhelming impact of Shams on the last four decades of Rumi’s life. Rumi is well-known as the originator of whirling dervishes (a Sufi order which Rumi’s son Sultan Valad actually organized, not Rumi himself). But how did Rumi discover whirling dance as a spiritual practice? A 1998 documentary film, Rumi: Poet of the Heart, informs us that Rumi turned to whirling after Shams had left him and while Rumi was longing for his spiritual friend. But Tajadod’s research suggests that Shams actually taught Rumi the practice of whirling dance.

Tajadod portrays Rumi not merely as a Sufi master, but as an embodiment of ancient spiritual wisdom absorbed from Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Greek, Persian, and Indian traditions. The book ends with Rumi’s death on a Sunday in Konya (where his tomb has been a shrine for centuries); his funeral was attended by people of various faiths, ethnicities, and languages. Another significant aspect of the novel is that Tajadod knows Persian, Rumi’s language, and has thus used original sources to write this story. These sources include Rumi’s own works: Diwan shams (“Book of Poetry dedicated to Shams”), Masnawi ma’nawi (Rhymed couplets on spiritual matters), and Fihi ma fihi (Discourses), as well as the extant books of Shams’s Discourses (Maqalat shams), "The Book of Sultan Valad" (Valad namah), and a huge volume, Manaqeb al-arefin (“The Virtuous Acts of Mystics”), written by Rumi’s disciple Ahamd Aflaki after his master’s death.

Tajadod, who was born in Tehran and has lived in France over the past three decades, holds a Ph D in oriental literature and is a scholar at the French National Research Center. Her husband, the acclaimed French screenwriter Jean Claude Carrière, is currently working on a film version of the novel; one can only hope that the film is as vivid and accurate as the book.

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Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25)

by Jill Stegman

Told through the eyes of a middle-aged spinster named Glory Boughton, Marilynne Robinson’s Home is a challenging story played out in a Midwestern kitchen, involving heavy doses of theological discourse. However, while the scenes all take place in the kitchen and area surrounding the Boughton residence in Iowa, Home is anything but a domestic drama. As in real family life, all the tension lies beneath the surface, where expectations and stubborn refusal to change can lead to despair.

Robinson introduced the characters of the Boughton family in her previous novel, Gilead, which focused on the elderly Reverend Ames and his reminiscences told to his young son. Meditative in tone, Gilead charts the history of the town and Ames’s position in it. The characters of the Boughton family lurk in the background, introduced, but not completely realized.

In Home, the story of the tangled family of Ames’s best friend and fellow reverend, Robert Boughton, emerges from the tangential threads of Gilead. Filled with despondency over a failed love affair, Glory Boughton has come home to Gilead to care for her ailing father. The tedium of her life is alleviated by the appearance of her brother, Jack, who returns after a twenty-year absence, ostensibly to assist the family and make amends to his father. After a somewhat abrupt departure from home following the birth of his illegitimate child, Jack has been incommunicado all this time, not even appearing for his mother’s funeral.

Robinson’s characters represent archetypes; Jack and Robert Boughton, for example, play out the universal Oedipal conflict between returning prodigal son and demanding father. This is a common theme in literature, but Robinson succeeds in digging beneath the surface to reveal the historical reasons why different generations can fail to connect. Events are played out in the early 1960s, when segregation was the status quo and most Americans were intolerant of anything that challenged authority. Reverend Boughton’s frequent recitations of Christian tracts and the religious underpinning of the family are awesome in their depth and cerebral intensity, yet ultimately hypocritical. Although his theology is grounded in the enlightened thinking of Transcendentalists and their abolitionist beliefs, Boughton observes the beating of civil rights demonstrators with indifference. He even argues with Jack that civil disobedience is wrong. Jack seems mesmerized by the events, and we later learn why he might have so much emotional investment.

While the obvious protagonist may be Jack, it is ultimately Glory who emerges from the sidelines, providing the emotional resonance that allows us to comprehend this sad story; her faith and love prevent the tone from becoming overly morbid. Glory observes the interactions between her father and brother without judging either. She sees the tragedy unfolding, but can do nothing to stop it. Although she weeps throughout the book, she does not appear pathetic; as Robinson simply writes, “She wept easily. This did not mean that she felt things more deeply than others did. It did not mean that she was fragile or sentimental or ready to bring that sodden leverage to bear on the slights that came with being the baby of the family.”

Glory is as complex as her father and brother, making her the perfect observer of the events that unfold. She simply applies the principles of her upbringing to the task: “Glory’s view of things had an authority for them precisely because it was naïve.” Glory also serves brilliantly as a lens on this world because she suffers from rampant male arrogance and sexism: “She seemed always to have known that, to their father’s mind, the world’s great work was the business of men . . . They were the stewards of ultimate things. Women were creatures of second rank, however pious, however beloved, however honored.” Like women before her, Glory puts her personal disappointment aside for the sake of her father and brother. Still, Robinson makes evident the depths of her hurt at not being regarded as importantly as her male kin: “None of this had mattered much through all the years of her studies and teaching, but now, in the middle of any night, it was part of the loneliness she felt, as if the sense that everything could have been otherwise were a palpable darkness.”

It would seem that the novel is headed toward a grim conclusion: both father and son want the other to change, and when it does not happen, it leads to the end of the relationship. It is up to Glory to make sense of the shambles. As her father becomes frailer, Glory must also witness Jack’s withdrawal and final exit from home. Realizing that she will probably never see Jack again, she understands that she will most likely remain in Gilead for the rest of her life, accepting a largely unfulfilled existence. However, Glory does not despair; she sees herself as a conduit through which the positive characteristics of the Boughton clan will pass, promising Jack that she will keep the Boughton home intact for the rest of the family. Finally, it is Glory who patiently looks for optimism in the next generation when, after meeting Jack’s biracial son, she imagines him returning to a changed Gilead as an adult and thinks, “He cannot know that my whole life has come down to this moment.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

José Eduardo Agualusa
translated by Daniel Hahn
Arcadia Books (£11.99)

by Jeff Bursey

José Eduardo Agualusa’s previous novel, The Book of Chameleons, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007, featured a small cast of Angolans who purchased false histories to give themselves distance from their roles in Angola’s civil war (1975–2002), while the narrator, formerly a man, had come back to life as a gecko. Forgery, resurrection, and history were Agualusa’s concerns; he devised a lyrical voice for the gecko that drew the reader into an engagement with what decades of strife had created. In My Father’s Wives a missing father is used as a base from which to explore Angolan and personal identity. Here, Agualusa has deepened and expanded his concerns. The result is a novel that is profound and enriching.

The narrator, Sidónio, is a novelist accompanying his wife, Karen Boswall, a documentary filmmaker specializing in African women’s issues, as they visit various people and countries. Alongside this activity is the story Sidónio invents of Laurentina, also a documentary maker, in search of her real parents: a woman named Alima, and the acclaimed musician Faustino Manso. In the company of her lover, Mandume, Laurentina leaves Portugal for Angola, where she meets half-siblings; she tours South Africa, Namibia, and Mozambique looking up her father’s lovers. What begins in confusion becomes more tangled with each page. Some incidents that occur in the Sidónio-Boswall chapters show up transformed in the Laurentina story. On both levels there is a constant emphasis on the importance of race, Angolan history, and storytelling—in this case, literature and music—for major and minor characters.

The many literary figures referred to in My Father’s Wives, part of the world of letters that Agualusa belongs to, cohere as a verisimilitudinous prop, but the writings of Mia Couto, Ana Paula Tavares, Rui Knopfli, and others are quoted or referred to by characters on both levels, inviting the reader to ask: what is false here, and what is true? In a work where Laurentina’s quest for parents is the prime motivation on the story level, and where Boswall seeks the facts, or poetic truth (although most documentarians make films charged with subjectivity), in a context where identity is fragile, fleeting, and exchangeable, the presence of real African poets, as well as the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuścínski (who wrote about the Angolan civil war in his 1976 book Another Day of Life), unite to make us wary of what we hold in our hands. It’s a contradiction that helps prevent complacency in the reader. Some novels are welcoming; this one urges us to interrogate its genesis and content.

Agualusa is keenly interested in the question of race, especially when twinned with nationality. Mandume, born in Portugal, rejects his Angolan heritage thanks to the example of his father, whose two brothers were killed in Luanda. Laurentina regards herself as “a good Portuguese woman” who feels “a little bit Indian,” and who visits Angola to “find out whether there’s anything in me that’s African.” Her half brother Bartolomeu grew up in Angola and has strong views on how people regard Africans. Talking to one of Faustino’s lovers, Seretha du Toit, he states:

And how were all the big fortunes made in the United States of America? In Brazil? The whites killed the Indians, robbed and skinned them, and now their grandchildren are respectable people. All the whites in Australia descend from thieves and prostitutes. If that happened in those countries, why wouldn’t it happen in ours? . . .

To a lot of Europeans the only good black man is a poor black man. They don’t accept that a black man can be rich. First they attack us [Angola] for having allied ourselves with the socialist bloc. Now they attack us for being good capitalists . . .

Du Toit’s reply devastates him: “Accepting that you can’t criticize someone because that someone is black, that’s called paternalism. Paternalism is the elegant racism of cowards.” A way to sidestep the race question, or replace it with something else, is offered in the form of Miss Kiu-Kiu, “daughter of a Chinese man and black woman, who married an Arab and had five children. One of the daughters married an Indian, the others mulattos, etc., in an example of multiculturalism . . . ” One minor character’s wife, a mestiça, gets “herself classified as white” after apartheid gets going, reverting to mestiça once it’s more advantageous. Evidently, labels based on color are misleading. “Race” is insufficiently nuanced to explain or capture such complex situations, and, according to the novel’s sensibilities, it provides an illusory identity; while it’s nothing to bank on, race must be struggled with every day.

Agualusa’s third crucial theme is Angolan history. The civil war, its legacy, vendettas, and cruelties ensnare everyone. Many characters have led mysterious or grim lives, and once openly warring countries are still pitted against each other, sometimes within the same skin. “On some days [Brand Malan] wakes up Angolan. On others, white South African. On others still he wakes up Angolan and white South African and Boer, all at the same time, and then, right, then it’s best to keep your distance.” When on duty, the Angolan border guards drink and like to play draughts, in contrast to the professionalism of the Namibian guards. Mandume learns he has one remaining uncle whom his father never mentioned because they were on opposite sides in the war. The damage done to children is ever present; it’s not precisely history because the battles are not yet over.

Once again, Agualusa has breathed novelistic life into history. A wry humor keeps My Father’s Wives from being ponderous, its themes are treated with sharpness and intelligence, and the multiple narrators keep the diverse plots moving forward. The characters embody the bewilderment, contradictions, rootlessness, and sense of loss that come from a generation that survived, though didn’t escape, the ravages of civil war.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Deb Olin Unferth
McSweeney’s ($22)

by Stephanie Hlywak

At the heart of Deb Olin Unferth’s astonishing, unsettling first novel is the idea and intention of vacation: what do we escape from? Where do we go? And at what point do we transition from being happy that we’re away to wanting to return back home? “A vacation,” Unferth writes, “is simply, you know, to vacate.” The characters who inhabit her sparse and melancholic landscape have indeed vacated, but they are not vacant: cast in a poignant, deceptively minimalist style, they are fully formed emotional beings craving reassurance they are not alone in the world. Their journeys—a man seeking the object of his wife’s fantasies, a daughter searching for the father she never knew existed, a refugee returning home to family, a dolphin “un-trainer” releasing dolphins back into the ocean—shape their characters.

Beautifully structured, with paragraphs like alternating verses in a folk song duet and a multi-perspective narrative—nine voices in all, including that of a “Sexy woman in bikini”—Vacation centers around Myers, a man with a misshapen head, who, suspecting his wife has strayed, begins stalking her, only to discover she is following another man, Gray, a stranger to her but an old acquaintance of Meyers’s from college. Meyers follows Gray from New York City to Syracuse to Nicaragua, orbiting around him without ever making contact, seeking without ever finding. Gray, meanwhile, suffering from a massive brain tumor that impairs his judgment, is in Panama, unable to find his way home. This wonderful synchronicity—two men with head problems and domestic trouble—is emblematic of the deft reciprocity that unites these characters, who otherwise move through Unferth’s spectral landscape alone and disembodied.

In a 2007 interview, Unferth stated that she had to write this novel or she would die. This imperative to act—even in ways that are not necessarily rational, as if propelled by a force greater than oneself—is reflected in the characters that populate Vacation: they, too, have to keep moving forward, even if in the end it hastens, as opposed to guards them from, their own demise.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Roberto Bolaño
translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions ($23.98)

by Luke Sykora

Since the author’s untimely death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño has risen to a level of international prominence. Nazi Literature in the Americas is one of his most innovative works, as it charts the lives of 33 writers from the Western Hemisphere, all of whom are completely invented. As Bolaño’s deadpan satire carves its way through the imagined lives of these extremist authors, we’re introduced to a surprisingly varied body of creative work: monumental avant-garde experiments, bizarre Nazi science fiction efforts, embarrassingly sentimental lyrics, and the unabashed soccer hooliganism of the Fabulous Schiaffino Boys.

Bolaño’s subjects are for the most part absurdly minor literary figures, producing their poems and novels with little awareness of their almost total irrelevance to the larger literary society around them. Oddly, the effects such extreme political commitments have on these authors’ works are curious at best—their politics sometimes hover in the background and at other times emerge in completely inscrutable ways. As an example, consider Franz Zwickau’s poem “Concentration Camp,” described as “a humorous and at times touching story of Zwickau’s life as a child, between the ages of five and ten, in a middle-class neighborhood in Caracas.” In many cases these Nazi authors are near buffoons, textbook studies in the banality of evil.

Historical figures—both artists and politicians—regularly make cameos in the lives of Bolaño’s imagined authors. Jim O’Bannon, a beat poet and football player from Georgia, apparently unaware of the movement’s sexual politics, attacks Allen Ginsberg after Ginsberg and another man make advances toward him. Rory Long, a disillusioned disciple of Charles Olson, vomits for three hours after reading The Maximus Poems. Meanwhile, the lives of the South American poets are often deeply intertwined with the repressive dictatorships of Perón and Pinochet.

It’s a testament to Bolaño’s skillful prose and vivid characters that his parade of microbiographies stays fresh throughout. But is his dark, potentially inflammatory comedy aiming for anything beyond well-wrought farce? In the final biography, that of artist and murderer Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, we’re at least given a hint. The story is narrated by a Bolaño who, much like the autobiographical Bolaño (though not necessarily the historical Bolaño, as a recent piece by the New York Times suggests), was briefly incarcerated in a Chilean prison following Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Bolaño is hired to track Ramirez Hoffman and eventually comes across him in a dingy bar in Spain. As it becomes clear to Bolaño that the man who hired him intends to kill Ramirez Hoffman, he half-heartedly attempts to intervene on behalf of the poet/murderer: “He can’t hurt anyone now, I said. But I didn’t really believe it. Of course he could. We all could.”

Bolaño’s reaction to the presumed revenge killing ends here. He’s too smart to overreach himself and try to resolve any nagging questions we might have about the role of politics in art or to indulge in any heroic fantasies about the writer’s role in history. If anything, Bolaño seems to be saying, political heroics can get a writer into deep trouble, sometimes yielding results much more dangerous than bad art. Beyond this suggestion, Bolaño sidesteps any overtures toward a grand moral lesson. In fact, by entering the story as a character in a fiction of his own making, Bolaño turns the dilemma on its head: it is no longer a question of how art can “influence” the real world, but how the real world can be drawn into the imagination—and how the imagination can process, rearrange, lampoon, and sometimes defuse the residue left behind by very real upheaval and displacement.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009