Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller
University of Chicago Press ($13)

by Douglas Messerli

In her beautifully written apologia for Naples and the Campania region, author Shirley Hazzard begins her “dispatches” with a differentiation between traveling to a country, merely living in another country, and a stay of pilgrimage. The first, no matter how rich the experience may be for the traveler, is usually defined by a brief stay in a place, with little deep knowledge of, or appreciation for, its history or culture; tourists generally travel through a country without having the time or ability to take in its rich heritage. Certainly Hazzard and her husband Frances Steegmuller (a well known editor, translator, critic, and literary biographer) could be described as a couple living in another country—Hazzard’s father’s career as a diplomat forced the family to move several times in her early life, from Australia to Japan, Hong Kong, England, and New Zealand, before she ended up in New York City and, some time later, worked for the United Nations in Italy—but their experience is quite different from those individuals living in another place who continue to define their lives by their ultimate return to their homeland. For Hazzard, her journeys, particularly her move to Naples and Campania, are of another kind, what she calls “pilgrimage,” resulting in experiences that appear as “an elixir, a talisman: a spell cast by what has long and greatly been, over what briefly and simply is.” The difference, she argues, is that the pilgrim traveler becomes temporarily one with the place, “learning to match its moods with one’s own,” combining “human expectation” with “an exquisite blend of receptivity and detachment.”

Hazzard, accordingly, takes the reader through her Italy—the headland of Posillipo, Vesuvius and Pompeii, Capri, the Sorrentine penisula, and through the streets of Naples itself. She shows us its museums and treasures—the ancient villas of the Romans, the churches, the fisherman returning with their catches, and the Spaccanapoli, the sequence of streets (Via Benedetto Croce, Via San Biagio dei Librai and Via Vicaria Vecchia) that cut through the heart of the Naples’ historical center.

In a particularly riveting chapter, “In the Shadow of Vesuvius,” Hazzard describes not only the great volcano that buried Pompei and Herculaneum, but other eruptions and earthquakes since—detecting, in the continual destruction and rebuilding right up to the lip of the volcano, the Neapolitan sense of time and the inevitable. As the author repeats, “Naples requires time,” like the city itself with its ancient layers of reality; the experience of the city must be something encountered over long stretches if it is to reveal itself. In dazzlingly beautiful sentences, Hazzard indeed allows the reader to intellectually wander the city along with her, characterizing it as a “city of secrets and surprises”:

Persisting, you will soon discover the opera house, the spacious galleria, and the huge Castel Nuovo that dominates the port. Even so, the city eludes the search for its center. The truth is that there are many centers at Naples, each vital to its own city quarter. And Naples is rifest perhaps at its oldest point, the district of Spaccanapoli, where the city splits along its Greco-Roman decumanus.

Hazzard’s writing, accordingly, is an often brilliant travelogue in which the reader is made to recognize what he or she may have missed in the elusive city. But there is occasionally a sense in her homage to Neapolitan wonders that seems almost forced, as if she were somehow in league with the city’s tourist industry. Indeed, so in love with Naples is Hazzard that she only once mentions the notorious Camorra mob—an obvious danger for those living in the entire region—and she appears never to have experienced the heaps of garbage I encountered there in 2007, a perfect invitation to a blight of rats and disease. Although she and her husband describe riding through the city in taxis, neither seem to have witnessed the complete abandonment by the Neapolitan drivers of the rules of the road. While admitting that “Unlike Florence or Venice, Naples long allowed her great monuments to languish in disorder, “ she argues that they remain in their authentic context, and that “Private acts of faith and rescue have not been lacking in recent years.” Although she advises several times that visitors should never carry a purse or bag, she hardly hints at the violence that might occur if one were to ignore her suggestions.

The longest chapter in this book, however—a piece titled “The Incident at Naples,” penned by Steegmuller—describes just such an event. Carrying an empty bag, and forgetting for an instant to roll it up or put it in his pocket, Steegmuller, dangling it by the handles, is suddenly attacked by two young men on a motorcycle, and, in the usual pattern, is dragged along the street until it becomes loosened from his arm. In this case, the victim is quite seriously hurt, with severe lacerations to his nose, hands, and legs. But even in this one instance of described violence, Steegmuller finds the decaying hospitals to be filled with kindly doctors who, because of the nationalized health system, do not even bill him. Returning to the U.S., he misses the kindnesses of the Neapolitan doctors and the immediate actions of close Italian friends. The clean white clinics of New York seem less interested in him as a human being than did the decaying facilities of Naples, and he returns to Italy, after healing, to thank the several individuals who helped him get through the affair—one of whom tells the author that the robbers might have killed his son had he not removed the baby from its stroller at the moment of attack.

I have no doubt, given my own personal experiences with Neapolitans, that he received such a genuinely personal response, and one applauds both Hazzard’s and Steegmuller’s praise of these interpersonal relationships that continue to exist throughout the region. Nonetheless, it often appears that the Naples and Campania of The Ancient Shore is a world more of the past and shadow than of the piercing glare of contemporary Southern Italian daylight.

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Werner Herzog
translated by Krishna Winston
Ecco ($24.99)

by Scott Bryan Wilson

“My life seems like a stranger’s house to me,” writes Werner Herzog late in Conquest of the Useless, less a straightforward diary of 1979-81, when he was working on Fitzcarraldo, than a series of “inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle.” The film tells the story of the title character (played by Herzog’s frequent collaborator Klaus Kinski), a man who dreams of opening an opera house in a remote corner of Peru; to avoid treacherous rapids and natives alike, Fitzcarraldo opts to drag all of his equipment, including an enormous steamship, over a mountain rather than sail around it. It’s classic Herzog—a relentless, obsessive dreamer refusing to bow down to the savagery of nature, the laws of physics, or common sense.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the story of making the film is as insane as its plot. Filming in the jungle, Herzog faces military coups, financial collapse, no contact with the outside world, terrible food, lice, quicksand, piranhas, numerous cast and crew deaths, poisonous snakes, tarantulas, self-amputations, and attacks by indigenous tribes. “The powers of heaven are powerless against the jungle,” he remarks. Sleep doesn’t come easy in the midst of all this, either—Herzog feels trapped in “labyrinths of weariness with no escape,” and notes that he doesn’t “know what real sleep is anymore; I just have brief, strenuous fainting spells.”

Other people are also problematic. Many of the natives that make up the majority of his crew and cast turn out to be drunks, thieves, and liars; his other associates include “the biggest crooks imaginable” as well as “the gangly young bookkeeper from the city, whose mere presence is death to any meaningful thoughts.” His actors aren’t much better, with the exception of Mick Jagger, whose part was written out after production was shut down (Herzog simply felt that he could not be replaced). The director was less kind towards American Jason Robards (who was originally slated to play Fitzcarraldo) and the Italian-German actor Mario Adorf, calling them “cowards, whose real problem stems from their appalling inner emptiness.” Adorf especially falls under the director’s harsh scrutiny; Herzog calls him “a whiner, a stupid star full of posturing who cannot stand it that the Indian extras are sometimes more important than he is, the famous actor. Furthermore, he is simply cowardly, sneaky, and dumb, high-decibel dumb.”

When Robards bolts for America, Herzog briefly considers playing the role of Fitzcarraldo himself, as his “project and the character have become identical”—that is, the quest of a madman. In the end he calls in his “best fiend” Klaus Kinski, who erupts into childish tantrums and tirades from the moment he arrives, including one on his first day during costuming, when someone touches his hair: “Not even my hairdresser is allowed to touch my hair, Kinski screamed.” Herzog admits in his journal that one of Kinski’s main problems is his “inadequate supply of human compassion and depth,” and some Indians, who have had enough of his outbursts, offer to kill him. Herzog convinces them that that won’t be necessary, otherwise the film would never be completed.

If you’ve seen any of the films which Herzog narrates or appears in, two things will stand out about him: his hypnotic voice, with its mellifluous German accent, and his inimitable syntax, word choice, and use of metaphor. In fact, it’s difficult to read Conquest of the Useless without hearing it in his slow, unmistakable speech patterns. Whether describing in great detail the unimaginative plot of a Spanish comic book called Texas 1800 or the infinite happenings in the jungle, he renders everything in the same beautiful, dry style. Often the subject matter can be pathetic or gruesome: “I saw a dog, the saddest of all; he was swaying on his feet, moving in a sort of hunched-over, squirming reptilian fashion. On his back and shoulders he had open ulcers, which he kept trying to bite, contorting his head and body.” Yet it can also be gracefully tender: “The people’s gestures are unfamiliar, gentle and lovely; they move their hands like orchestral conductors in time with a soft, shy melody that emanates cautiously from the depths of the forest, like wild creatures that emerge from the sheltering leaves now and then to go down to the rivers.”

Sometimes Herzog juxtaposes thought after thought, jamming them up against another as if to recall them later, with no care as to how they fit together: “The lookout point at Tres Cruces. Casting propellers. The business with the dolphins. Striking teachers locked themselves into the church ten days ago and are ringing the bells. At the market I ate a piece of grilled monkey—it looked like a naked child.” It’s his almost throwaway observations, though, the ones which aren’t linked with anything specific about the making of the film, which stand out as tiny pieces in the tapestry of Herzog’s experiences: “I saw a crippled young woman in shorts climbing into a tree with crutches”; “On the back of a motorcycle a pole was fastened horizontally with a dozen live chickens attached by their feet, and also a tied-up hog. Their heads were dragged in the dust kicked up by the rear tire”; “Very early in the morning the cripples bathe at the beach.” He even somehow manages to see a number of films while in the jungle: “Because of the strike there was a large rally today on the Plaza 28 de Julio, with speakers shouting and gesticulating the way Mussolini did in the thirties. I went to the movies and saw a film in which a madman wanted to exterminate the race of blacks, but three muscular athletes stopped him.”

Conquest of the Useless is a fascinating account of one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers, one who refuses to compromise in the least, and who puts himself through hell to get his films made. Herzog basically sums up the pursuit early in the account: “A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.”

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Eula Biss
Graywolf Press ($15)

by Scott F. Parker

No Man’s Land was a nickname for “the sparsely populated place between the city of Chicago and the city of Evanston, the place just north of the boundary that once designated Indian Territory, a place where the streets were unpaved and unlighted.” In Notes from No Man’s Land, Eula Biss uses those three words to describe what she sees in America as a whole. What interests Biss in this volume of essays are all the no man’s lands in our country—public schools in New York, the gentrified neighborhoods of so many cities, and the psychological spaces of black children who think black dolls are uglier than white ones—places where people are cut off from themselves.

We’re all familiar with those old doll studies, but few of us have confronted what they mean as head-on as Biss:

I do not know exactly how the word “nice” was used in 1939 but I do know what it means now to describe a neighborhood as “nice” or another part of town as “bad” and I know what “nice” hair is and I know what it means when my landlady tells me, as I’m applying for a lease, that she won’t need my bank account number because I look like a “nice” person.

Biss puts her complicity at the forefront of all her essays (in this case, she takes the apartment and internalizes the guilt). She’s as devastatingly honest with herself as she is with the rest of us, and she resists the easy finger-pointing solutions that seduce so many cultural analysts. In the essay “Back to Buxton,” Biss identifies her own self-misunderstanding in thinking that when she moved to Iowa City she had found her true home: “I am haunted by the possibility that I was happy when I arrived in Iowa at least in part because of my misconception that I had come to a place where the people were like me.” Later, following the essayistic impulse to move from the personal to the cultural, she reflects on the state of fitting-in at the University of Iowa, in light of a study which found that minority students reported feelings of frustration, alienation, and unhappiness:

I found myself wondering, as I read the report on diversity at the University of Iowa, whom this particular version of diversity was serving and whom it was intended to serve. For whose sake, I wondered, did the university want to increase the number of minority students from 9 percent to 10.9 percent? It did not seem to be for the sake of those students, for the sake of their education, or for the sake of their selves. I suspected that it was more for the sake of the institution, so that it could appear properly progressive.

Whether pointing out the self-serving hypocrisy of modern institutional agendas or rewriting Joan Didion’s famous “Goodbye to All That,” Biss’s steady gaze is invaluable to the contemporary essay. It is almost impossible to imagine that any of the books Notes from No Man’s Land beat out for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize could have been more deserving. Reading this book will force you to take a long, hard look at what’s going on in a no man’s land near you.

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Daniel Kehlmann
translated by Carol Brown Janeway
Pantheon ($21.95)

by Eric Iannelli

When Daniel Kehlmann—one of the few authors of the past decade for whom the label Wunderkind is apposite—was recently asked by the fawning host of the German literary discussion program Literaur im Foyer to single out his favorite compliment of all those he’s received, he said it came from an American friend who had once spoken with the late John Updike. As this friend was praising Kehlmann’s breakthrough work Measuring the World to Updike, the veteran author said it would be difficult for the young newcomer to meet readers’ and critics’ expectations when it came time to write his second novel. Kehlmann’s friend informed Updike that this was actually his sixth book, not his second. Updike paused and then replied, “He’s safe.”

Me and Kaminski (Ich und Kaminksi, 2003), Kehlmann’s fourth novel, dates from a time before Kehlmann was “safe” in his success from Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt, 2005). It is recounted by the arrogant, self-serving art journalist Sebastian Zollner, who has been tasked with writing a biography of Manuel Kaminski, erstwhile protégé of the fictional Richard Rieming. Kaminski, once advanced by Picasso and Matisse, is now an aging, effete curmudgeon with a reputation as faded as his eyesight.

The title of the book alone is revealing: “me” precedes “Kaminski” because Zollner coldly views Kaminski as little more than a vehicle for his own career; deference, whether a matter of grammar or a polite formality, would simply never occur to him. One oft-cited passage in particular is indicative of Zollner’s character, not to mention the plot and Kehlmann’s prose style:

My book should not come out before [Kaminski’s] death and not too long afterward either, for a short time it would be at the center of all attention. I’d be invited to go on TV, I would talk about him and at the bottom of the screen it would show my name and biographer of Kaminski. This would get me a job with one of the big art magazines.

What Zollner lacks in likability—and his lack here is indeed profound—he makes up for in honesty. He pulls no punches about his self-interested scheming or the high esteem in which he holds himself. (Given room enough for exposition, one could also argue that this is little more than a brittle front for his own sense of fraudulence.) These qualities manifest themselves again and again in pivotal episodes such as when Zollner decides to shanghai Kaminski and parade him around a minor art exhibition: “The evening had been a real success, they’d all seen me with Kaminski, everything had gone well.” Yet this crude honesty seems at times gratuitous, nudging Zollner in the direction of caricature.

The heavy-handedness in Kehlmann’s portrayal of Zollner is in fact a larger failing of Me and Kaminski,with its ancillary satire of the schmoozing and pretentiousness of the art scene, and the bromidic parable that emerges once Zollner takes to the road with Kaminski in search of the latter’s long-lost (and, to the artist’s ambivalent surprise, still living) love. Kehlmann could have applied to his own work the lesson that he has allowed Kaminski to learn over his career—namely, easing up on the force of his own brushstrokes and the overt symbolism that strips the ending of some of its poignancy.

While not as nimble a feat as Measuring the World, the novel that sparked this sudden interest in Kehlmann’s back catalogue, or as ambitious as Kehlmann’s latest, Ruhm (Fame, 2009), Me and Kaminskiis nevertheless a fun, engrossing, worthwhile read. Its appeal is rooted in the author’s assured storytelling and generally deft characterization, particularly with regard to Kaminski himself, as well as incidental figures such as Miriam Kaminski, the artist’s stalwart daughter, and the looming presence of Hans Bahring, Zollner’s arch-rival.

For the English translation, Carol Brown Janeway, whose best-known work is perhaps Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, takes small liberties, occasionally combining Kehlmann’s shorter, more staccato sentences; more oddly, she has stripped the text of umlauts (Zollner should ideally be Zöllner) and prettified the few English exchanges in the original to sound more natural, which seems to misrepresent Zollner’s inordinate confidence in his own dubious abilities. Kehlmann’s indubitable abilities as an author, on the other hand, are manifest in Janeway’s unobtrusive translation.

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Scott Blackwood
New Issues Poetry and Prose ($26)

by Jaspar Lepak

Winner of the 2007 AWP Award Series in the Novel, Scott Blackwood’s first novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, tells the story of a small Texas town and the mystery of the lives that intersect there. While these lives are close to each other in geographic proximity, the town’s citizens are kept apart by private experiences of mystery, loss, desire, and responsibility. There is Dennis Lipsy, a lawyer whose clients “often wanted him to renegotiate their already-lived lives,” and Winnie Lipsy, his wife, a pediatric nurse who seeks reunion with the daughter she gave up nineteen years earlier for adoption. And there’s Odie Dodd, a retired government physician who is haunted by the memory of the Jonestown, Guyana mass suicide.

The novel opens unusually with the voice of the lyric “we,” which speaks collectively as the voice of the town. This voice takes the reader on a town tour, pointing out the tower where fourteen people were killed by a gunman, and where more than fourteen people since have jumped willingly to their deaths. As the pages of the novel turn, the narrative voice goes back and forth between the lyric “we” and a more personal third-person narrator, tracing the characters’ encounters with death, disappearance, theft, and abandonment as it marks the difficulty of human connection over the personal spaces created by loss and longing.

The tone of We Agreed to Meet Just Here is also heavy with the weight of violence. Terrible things happen to people in a town where terrible things are already carried in its collective memory. Ruth Dodd, the wife of Odie, epitomizes this; she expects to lose her husband any day to cancer but wakes one day to find instead that he has simply vanished. Likewise, Natalie Branch, the young and sensuous lifeguard, disappears one evening on her way home from a movie screening at the public pool.

We Agreed to Meet Just Here is not a story about redemption, and it is not a story about making peace and meaning out of terrible events. Instead, this lyrical portrait of mystery and longing functions like a piece of music—a sad piece of music that gives voice to a yearning that is both general and specific. The narrative voice alternates between the songs of soloists and the swell of the full choir. Blackwood constructs his movements like a conductor, artfully choosing scenes that echo each other, and in this way the novel’s sections play out the different sounds of the novel’s theme: “See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?”

As they make this music, the characters learn to admit the truth about their losses: that the path keeps moving forward. There is no standing still, and there is no going back—even if the mind can trick itself into one of these illusions for a period of time.

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William Saroyan
edited by William E. Justice
Heyday Books ($24.95)

by Ryder W. Miller

One of the most famous and prolific writers of the 20th Century, William Saroyan (1908-1981) left behind famous stories, novels, and dramas, but he also wanted to tell his own tale in artful ways. For him art was an escape from death, and this new Saroyan Reader may once again grant him another spate of immortality.

Occasionally profound, Saroyan was also very quotable. He could give readers reason to pause, especially with his endings, which elaborate rather than pull things together. One could not help but take the rest of the evening off after finishing The Human Comedy, which is sadly not included in the new Reader, although many of his first-person narratives and autobiographical materials are presented instead. In He Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease one will find 27 stories (including Saroyan’s transcendental debut “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” which brought him fame in 1934); the play The Time of Your Life (1939), for which he declined the Pulitzer Prize; and the short novelsTracy’s Tiger and My Name is Aram. Editor William E. Justice promises in his preface, “Anyone reading this book with new eyes will be amply rewarded.”

Writers and readers alike are bound to find Saroyan inspiring. Justice includes a lot of selections in which Saroyan wrote about the writing process itself, especially this fascinating stretch from the autobiographical The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills:

To write is not the same as to tell stories.

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

To be a writer is to be in the streets. The people in the streets are the book.

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

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn’t happiness. A happy boy or man is not apt to need to write. But was there ever a happy boy? Is there ever a happy man?

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

For the subject of the book is not so much myself, now and sometime ago, as it is the action of the human soul, to which there is no start or stop.

Saroyan, who is noted to have been influenced by Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and William Blake, was a poetic writer; his sentences, especially the ones with lists or strung together with “ands” “or” and “but,” have a rhythmic ring to them. Yet he also belongs in the creative nonfiction genre. Justice notes that Saroyan influenced Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Kenneth Patchen, and that the New Journalists owe him a large debt.

Saroyan decided to become a writer at an early age. He was born in Fresno, California, an Armenian settlement in the Central Valley of California. Saroyan wrote much about being Armenian, but he was too American to be very exotic, except for the unusual Armenian names of his characters. He was already famous by the end of World War II, which he became notorious for protesting against despite having been in the military service. He had a failed marriage and two children, and spent much of his later life in Paris. After his death, his ashes were divided between Fresno and Armenia.

This new Reader—a previous one from 1958 contains an introduction by William’s son Aram Saroyan—focuses on his later writings, but one book is not enough to get all one can from Saroyan. Justice succeeds, however, in getting you to want to read more from this successful writer. Saroyan was an ordinary guy who delivered telegrams, gambled, and had family stories to tell; he also commented about the social, political, and racial issues of his day. He Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease helps us remember his massive contribution to world literature by plumbing some of his darker places.

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John Langan
Prime Books ($24.95)

by Charlie Broderick

One of the most important factors of the horror story is atmosphere. For this reason one should wait to read John Langan’s Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters until the ripest moment of the day—dusk. Begin the ritual by locking the doors, checking under the bed, and starting a fire in the hearth. Settle into the couch, and take a deep breath. Hope that the makings of a storm are in the air, and, as suggested by Elizabeth Hand in the introduction, leave a light on.

Hand wastes no time in adding to the tone of the collection by evoking the spirit of all the horror greats, from Lovecraft to King. One expects the atmosphere to escalate after such a promising introduction, but unfortunately the opening of “On Suka Island” feels off pace; one can’t help feeling Langan is like a kid in a costume shop trying on outfits for Halloween. Werewolf? Vampire? Mummy? Readers spend the first six pages of this thirty-five page story waiting around while the characters trade inside jokes on which monster will finally win the author’s devotion—but they’ll spend the next twenty-nine pages glad he did. “On Suka Island” demonstrates Langan’s narrative control by unexpectedly mixing mummy lore with a shifting point of view narration.

Like this story’s weatherworn protagonist, Nick, readers may find themselves wanting to avoid the sea, but they will not want to avoid the collection’s second story, “Mr. Gaunt.” Here Langan takes his established tone and mummy theme even further by sharing the story of Henry, a man who finds a tape his dead father recorded for him which explains his family’s terrible secret. Langan artfully maintains the intense atmosphere captured from “On Suka Island,” beginning with the line, “It was not until five weeks after his father’s funeral that Henry Farange was able to remove the plastic milk crate containing the old man’s final effects from the garage.” Langan’s ability to speak directly to his readers is so apparent that they feel as if they are experiencing the story right alongside Henry.

In the third story, “Tutorial,” Langan abandons mummies for something much more frightening—editors. Langan may overestimate how interested readers are in the writing process, but he does not abandon his craft or attention to detail. This quirky story makes us work through long yet somehow funny sentences, such as, “He would have elaborated on the tutor’s white button-down shirt, the black plastic wristwatch tournniquetting his left wrist; all in all, James reckoned he could have spent a good page or two of single-spaced, ten point type on this man, whose name he thought was Sean but wasn’t sure.” It’s deftly written, although the little laugh that results may erode the spooky atmosphere Langan has worked so hard to establish in the previous stories.

Readers will forgive Langan for the indulgent joke a few pages into “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against The Pack In The Kingdom Of The Purple Flowers.” Langan picks up the pace as we are introduced to Jackie, a very pregnant protagonist, evading a pack of beasts amidst what could likely be Armageddon. In what seems to be the author’s version of a Werewolf story, pop culture comic book references abound; the experimental structure of the story also creates the feeling that “Episode Seven” is a comic book without the pictures. The sometimes bolded, sometimes italicized text suggests visual margins for the story, as do the names of colors which are italicized and set at the beginnings of paragraphs.

Langan’s unique artistic vision is carried out further in “Laocoon, Or The Singularity,” the final story of the collection. Readers will sense that the sometimes up and sometimes down protagonist, Dennis, is going to take them along for a ride on his emotional roller coaster to hell when the lonely art professor becomes obsessed with a discarded statue he finds behind his apartment and his life is forever changed. It’s no short read, at eighty-one pages, but it definitely gives rise to that Twilight Zone feeling Langan has captured throughout the collection.

After spending time with Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, readers may find it hard to sleep at night. Perhaps to account for this, Langan offers a section of story notes that give insight to the author’s inspirations and intentions, and offer suggestions about authors and topics for further reading. At the very least, these notes can provide a good excuse to keep the light on a bit longer.

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Mark Budman
Counterpoint Press ($24)

by Bob Sommer

Mark Budman’s My Life at First Try straddles the space between the short story cycle tradition of writers like Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway, and the novel, with its essential unities of character and plot. Budman’s unique test of whether the short story can sustain a novel is to shorten it further into vignettes or flash fictions, most of which run less than a thousand words. Each vignette begins with a repetend (a refrain that varies with each repetition) that records the year and the narrator’s age: “It’s 1954. I am four”; “It’s 1976. I am twenty-six”; and so on. Budman smartly launches each story with these cues, forcing us to consider what grade we were in, who was president, what songs were on the radio.

This semi-autobiographical novel traces the life of a Siberian-born emigrant to the United States, with the story divided between his youth in Siberia and Russia during the Cold War and his adult life in America, from the Reagan years through the recession that followed 9/11 (the last one, not this one). Major events like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Afghan War (theirs, not ours) appear as images in a background tapestry, but narrator Alex turns his vision mostly on himself—his sibling rivalries, his emerging sexuality, his confrontations with bullies. Solipsism is a theme of the book, but through Alex’s narrow worldview, Budman portrays the banal and sometimes dark life of ordinary citizens in a police state, where anti-Semitism is institutionalized and party politics an essential part of school and work.

Equally, America’s insatiable appetites and nationalized arrogance appear in marked contrast to the life Alex left behind. Alex goes to an all-you-can-eat buffet (“All you can eat—a concept unheard of back in the old country and probably anywhere else in the world.”); votes (“an ass or an elephant”?); asks his neighbor to quiet a barking dog only to find that the neighbor never speaks to him again; advances his career; discovers his ability to write (and his own incipient arrogance); and pursues his second cousin Annie, whose picture he’d seen as a child and instantly loved.

While the satire of both cultures is often sharply rendered, the comedy sometimes strains under its own weight. Alex lives in Rienville, New York (i.e., French for nothing), works for HAL Corporation (as in the infamous computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey), and rents a “U-Schlep” truck to move his daughter to Boston (brand names appear elsewhere, so why not here?). Alex is more a vehicle for reflecting the absurdities of contemporary life than a fully developed character. While he has definable traits, like his latent anger and his humor, which we hear about from other characters more than we actually see in his interaction with them, he doesn’t so much develop as a character as simply age in the environs he inhabits, and in this respect the book falls short as a novel.

Alex’s life story is contained in the vignettes of his experiences, but it’s not more than the sum of them, which may render a truth about the human condition today—and it may be much to Budman’s purpose that this is how we should see it. The affinity of flash fiction to the frenetic age of TV soundbites, Web bounce rates, bumper-sticker politics, and Twitter is obvious, but it may be just a new name for an old idea. Chekhov’s early short (very short) stories come to mind, not only for their rapid development and sudden conflicts in the briefest of encounters, but also because they rely more on caricature than character development. Budman’s comic distance from his characters prevents us from fully embracing them. Alex tells us he loves his wife, his family, his parents, but they remain distant, like the non-appearing adults in Peanuts.

Still, there is much to admire here. Budman, who also edits the flash fiction journal Vestal Review, makes good use of the form to offer many refreshing strokes of imagery, as in his description of Russian female names: “every name ends so softly, like the petal of a flower.” And he pares away at essential truths about human relations: “My friend Albert never asks me, ‘How are you?’ He answers my questions about his health, his kids, his house, his job, his finances, his girlfriend, his opinions, but he never asks about me.” The passage is rich in irony since Alex can be an annoying and self-centered companion.

Finding an answerable form for the novel in the digital age may be the next frontier in fiction. The demands of the Web-browsing/airport-terminal/Kindle/nightstand reader, the one whose attention easily jitters away, probably account for much of flash fiction’s popularity. Budman offers his own take on such readers at his Website: “Mark also writes flash fiction, so he knows how to express himself concisely, before the reader gets bored.” [http://markbudman.net/biography.html] But writing to stave off a reader’s inevitable boredom may be a little condescending to readers who turn to the novel for something more.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

Diane Glancy
Excelsior Editions / SUNY Press ($14.95)

by Emy Farley

First came the colonizers, then came the priests. With each new wave of settlers to the New World arrived both opportunity and destruction; both harm and hope stepped ashore. The men who journeyed from Europe to North America believed they were doing God’s work by claiming this new land, by saving the souls of the barbarians they’d found in camps and huts, worshipping Nature, by readying the path for a glorious new empire. The priests brought food, clothing, and Everlasting Life to Native Americans, but along with this salvation came deceit, disease, death, and separation.

Diane Glancy seeks to flesh out this complicated relationship between the saviors and the saved in her latest work of historical fiction, The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha. In this slim yet fulfilling novel, Glancy tells a story of a young Mohawk girl, Kateri Tekakwitha, after the arrival of smallpox to her camp. Her parents and brother die in the 17th-century outbreak, leaving Kateri orphaned, badly scarred, and nearly blind. She is isolated, lonely, and in need of a guiding hand. When the Jesuit priests arrive, she quickly embraces their message and follows them in pursuit of Christianity. Torn between the legacies of her mother’s Christianity and her father’s traditional Mohawk beliefs, Kateri makes the decision to convert and leaves for the Jesuit mission to begin her new life as a Christian.

The Reason for Crows is structured in short, journal-like entries written by Kateri and the Jesuit priests. Glancy’s skillful renderings question not only the “rightness” or “wrongness” of faith, but also the true motives of the priests who brought Christianity to the New World. Did they truly come to save the “savages” they found? Or did they come to scavenge off the sins of others? “I was to smooth the way for colonization,” laments one priest. Instead, he finds himself frustrated by overwhelming failure.

Once she arrives at the Jesuit mission, Kateri studies Christianity intensely, and eventually begins a journey of self-mortification in an effort to assuage the sins of her tribe. Though the priests call her Katherine, she still refers to herself as Kateri, and openly practices many of the traditional Mohawk rituals she grew up performing; “the priests tolerated some of our old ways.” Kateri still does her beading, still toils in ceremonial planting while singing the song of the digging sticks and burning tobacco so the smoke “takes our words to God.”

Glancy utilizes the image of the crow throughout, on the first page describing the bird as a scavenger. “Black birds gathered waiting for our death. I felt the birds peck my face.” Just a page later, the crow becomes an image of holiness: “He sent his son, Jesus, to become a crow on the cross.” And throughout the rest of the book, the priests are repeatedly identified as the crows, their words becoming “their cawings.” Thus, the crows go from scavenger to savior, from menace to monk.

Many readers may find this image uncomfortable, even blasphemous, but Glancy’s skillful manipulation of the comparison is thought provoking. “What if they knew they could approach God on their own?” asks Father Chauchetiere. Tired of reaping the rewards of failure, the priests take to scavenging for success.

The Reason for Crows, though short, is a complex and deceptively heavy novel. Glancy uses striking imagery in overlapping and contradicting ways to ask engaging and still-relevant questions of her reader. No two people who have witnessed the same event will tell the exact same story, and Glancy handles the different perspectives, tones, and experiences of each narrator very carefully, constructing a version of history that is believable and intelligent. While certainly not the first book to address colonial religious oppression and its long-reaching consequences—Louise Erdrich’s artful Tracks comes readily to mind—The Reason for Crows is a compelling, engaging, and well-written addition to the genre.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

Claire Keegan
Grove/Atlantic ($13)

by Salvatore Ruggiero

A pervasive melancholy rips through the hearts and minds of the characters in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields. In sharp, sparing prose, the Irish author’s new collection of stories analyzes the faults and flaws of fathers and daughters, writers and brides, farmers and pastors—all of whom are stuck in their own worlds of loneliness. With a cold but knowledgeable eye, Keegan explores an Ireland yearning for impossible desires and the sacrifices we all make to get what we think we want.

To solidify this sense of solitude, Keegan chooses to make most of her characters anonymous—she uses their professions as their identities, gives no personality or physical descriptions, and thus creates an allegorical and existential aura to these stories. The farmer, the daughter, or a character’s surname seems to suffice here. However, in “The Parting Gift,” the narration is second person, present tense: “When sunlight reaches the foot of the dressing table, you get up and look through the suitcase again,” the story starts. This perspective jars the reader’s perspective; we must recognize that the “you” of this story is not a mirrored version of ourselves but rather a girl flying to New York, leaving her family behind—a family that includes a father who sexually molested her and a brother who proudly states he’s going to leave the family farm and find a new life, but can’t admit that none of that will ever happen. The choice to narrate from this perspective creates a disorientation that permits the reader and the protagonist to sit side by side and understand one another more concretely.

In the eponymous story of this collection, we receive a portrait of a wedding day that’s not ruined by the fact that the best man, while drunk and dancing with the bride, breaks her pearl necklace. Rather, it is the memories of the love affair the priest who officiated the wedding once had with said bride. Instead of being allowed to let go of inhibitions like everyone else at the ceremony—one woman steals a serviette as the priest watches, admitting to her kleptomaniac obsession over these items; the best man admires his penis size while zipping up in the men’s room—the priest is stuck saying grace over dinner and dessert, a prayer which he says without enthusiasm, without care:

Lately, when he has prayed, his prayers have not been answered. Where is God? he has asked. Not, what is God? He does not mind not knowing God. His faith has not faltered—that’s what’s strange—but he wishes God would show himself. All he wants is a sign. Some nights he gets down on his knees when the housekeeper is gone and the curtains are pulled tight across the windows and prays to God to show him how to be a priest.

The narrator is relentless here, making the priest merely a priest; there are no other signifiers to this man. And yet he doesn’t know how to be the man he’s supposed to be, convey the character those around him think he should. Moments like these—where the narrators uncover some character flaw, a tender moment, or a raw description—truly make this collection heartbreaking. Characters cannot admit to one another, or even to themselves, the truth about their behavior or innate desires. Their painful existences are then augmented by this reticence and inability to express yearnings and feelings, a theme that Keegan also explored in her first collection Antarctica (Grove Press, 2002) and its standout story “Close to the Water’s Edge.”

Keegan’s style of telling a story is almost suffocating: each sentence, in its simplicity, leaves us gasping for something more and intrigues by disgust, pity, or plain curiosity. Our own epiphanies about these characters are uncovered when there’s an empty moment to ruminate upon the solitude—mental and physical—these men and women are experiencing. No flowery language or purple prose buffers the pain and problems; the psychological horrors of these characters are not only held by themselves but by the readers as well. Likewise there are no showy plot devices or experimental trials; everything seems natural and necessary. In that, Walk the Blue Fields is a silent, grounded, and gritty collection.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009