Cathy Park Hong
W. W. Norton & Company ($14.95)

by Dale Terasaki

When one thinks of the thematic territories explored by Asian American poets, it is reasonable to conjure up images of the common immigrant experience, unique family dynamics, or self-discovery amidst conflicting cultural pressures. Yet Cathy Park Hong proves that ethnic background is not simply a funnel that limits the scope of imagination. Rather, it is a lens through which the ever-shrinking world around the poet is clarified and magnified. In an interview with Poets & Writers, she aligns with this concept: “I’m not saying that my ethnic identity plays a scant role, but it's now more temperament rather than a subject matter.” Hong’s sophomore release, Dance Dance Revolution, employs an unapologetic linguistic energy and a grasp of recent Korean history to forge a story that is both lighthearted and worldly, both comically absurd and solemnly nostalgic.

The overarching narrative of the book takes place in 2016 in a city somewhat like Las Vegas, where tourists can enjoy material luxuries from all around the world at various themed hotels. The protagonist, referred to as “the historian,” arrives in this manufactured melting pot of cultures to interview her father’s ex-lover, known as “the guide.” But this book is perhaps most characterized by Hong’s invented language “Desert Creole” that is spoken by the guide and recorded as poems. In her first book, Translating Mo’um, Hong writes: “What are the objects that turn me on: words.” Desert Creole, then, embodies a form of hyper-indulgence as it draws from numerous languages: English, Spanish, Korean, and some form of Caribbean pidgin, to name a few. It is this complex, messy world that Dance Dance Revolution begins to dissect and expose to readers.

Ironically, the guide character is both assimilative and authoritative with language. In the past, she was considered the voice of a revolution:

. . . Dim call me voice o Kwangju
uprising’s danseur principal . . . but samsy, es funny,
I’s voice o Kwangju since dim multitudes who
Cryim fo acceptance shun mine presence . . .

. . . I’s lose me wig en passion o rally,
mine ball had nekked, mine oysta eyes
filla-up wit wadder, stommpim podium,
spout ricanery to rally crowd . . .

This powerful recollection of a political uprising suggests Hong’s conviction to keep the past alive through story. The reader focuses less on the language itself—which is rendered somewhat arbitrary by Hong—and more so on the image and “passion o rally.” Her nod to this event is dynamic. It is as though the historical incident is being projected into the future, where it can survive and teach a world that is growing but really shrinking due to globalization.

Despite the guide claiming “no relation / ta Hapanese dance game . . . ipso facto no dancing / eider in de revolution,” the title is a nod to the popular fitness video game in which players mimic the dance moves appearing on a screen. Is this simply a flippant attempt to attract a younger audience? On the contrary, it sets in motion various themes of mimicry and disobedience. Poems such as “The Lineage of Yes-Men,” “Cholla Village of No,” and “New Town” give a glimpse into the challenges of liberty. In the latter, we read, “Law / is the sin of choice.” Hong complies with very few grammatical “laws” and remains free to invent, to choose a new world that suits her imaginative project.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

Christopher McDougall
Knopf ($24.95)

by Scott F. Parker

The spur that starts Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run in motion is a pain that appears in his foot when he runs. McDougall’s search for a remedy leads him to the Tarahumara Indians of the Copper Canyon in Mexico, a legendary tribe whose members, even its elderly members, participate in ridiculously long races without suffering injury. In the course of his journeys, McDougall meets a number of interesting real-life characters, including the mysterious Caballo Blanco, an expat living with the Tarahumara, who introduces McDougall to the tribe. The narrative arc of the book involves McDougall and the “White Horse” organizing a race between select U.S. ultramarathoners and the Tarahumara. Alongside the narrative, McDougall presents startling evidence and reaches extraordinary conclusions about how much of our common sense about running is wrong.

Unfortunately, McDougall tries too hard to prove that the Tarahumara’s way of life is in all aspects better than the Western way. There’s an extra-textual reason that may vindicate him—the Tarahumara’s land is being encroached upon by roads built by the Mexican government in complicit assistance of drug cartels that McDougall and Caballo Blanco wish to thwart by calling positive attention to the Tarahumara—but the book suffers for it. McDougall forgoes his claims of objectivity when he moves from extolling Tarahumara-style running to pleading for Tarahumara-style living, saying that if we learn to live like the Tarahumara, not only will we enjoy running, be injury-free, and eliminate obesity, but we will also eliminate depression, heart disease, cancer, and crime. These hyperbolic claims risk undermining the real virtues of his book.

And these virtues are substantial. Too many running books encourage readers to awe over accomplished runners and only promote running insofar as the accomplished runners’ stories are inspirational. Born to Run does something different. It actively promotes running by underscoring its universality in two distinct but related ways. First of all, McDougall makes the joy of running palpable. The emphasis in his writing is not on training schedules or impressive times. Even when he’s writing about some of the best ultra-runners in the world, his focus remains on the intense and often rapturous subjective experiences running cultivates:

I got a shock of my own when I hit the river. I’d been concentrating so much on watching my footing in the dark and reviewing my mental checklist (bend those knees . . . bird steps . . . leave no trace) that when I started to wade through the knee-deep water, it suddenly hit me: I’d just run two miles and it felt like nothing. Better than nothing—I felt light and loose, even more springy and energized than I had before the start.

The second really brilliant thing about McDougall’s book is more complicated. One of the lessons that McDougall learns from the Tarahumara is that anyone can run long distances. The big picture story is this: Far back in our evolutionary past, one of the key attributes that allowed our species to excel was our ability to run; we evolved because we could run, and therefore we evolved to run. It follows that the average person should still be able to run long distances. The fact that the average person cannot do so without incurring injury forces us to ask why.

And so McDougall’s driving question: What makes the Tarahumara different? The answer is that the way the Tarahumara run is quite different from the way most Westerners run. The Tarahumara avoid injury because they’ve managed to stick to running the way humans evolved to run, and they’ve done this mostly by remaining low-tech. There’s a frightening correlation between the development of expensive, air-cushioning, arch-supporting shoes and running injuries. Born to Run is at its best when McDougall is investigating these sorts of concerns; McDougall writes these sections well and makes a rock-solid case for running as close as possible to how our ancestors ran.

The argument for running closer to our natural state is finding traction among runners. It’s an argument that will find sympathetic ears in Michael Pollan’s readership and other groups who see that who we’ve been has relevance for who are, and the longer we’ve lived a certain way the wiser we would be to trust there’s a reason for it.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

Tracy Daugherty
St. Martin’s Press ($35)

by Jacob M. Appel

When hiring short-story author Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) for the managing editorship of Location magazine in 1962, art critic Thomas Hess advised his new employee, “The only adequate criticism of a work of art is another work of art”—wisdom that became Barthelme’s own literary battle cry. So Barthelme would undoubtedly be pleased with his first full-scale biography, Hiding Man, a genuine literary masterpiece penned by his former student, Tracy Daugherty. The volume, which is both a narrative of the writer’s life and an effort to situate his work within a larger literary landscape, promises to do for the legacy of its underappreciated subject what Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic did for Herman Melville and what Thomas Beer’s A Study in American Letters did for Stephen Crane. One cannot read this book without recognizing that Barthelme was the dominant writer of his generation or that Daugherty will be one of the leading literary biographers of his own.

From the publication of his first story collection, 1964’s Come Back, Dr. Caligari, to his premature death from poorly treated throat cancer, Barthelme served as the iconic father of the literary movement now known as American postmodernism. In doing so, he relied heavily on his knowledge of avant-garde movements in other fields. His father was a leading modernist architect and he spent much of his youth in Houston’s “black” jazz clubs, listening to musical innovators such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelley. He reviewed movies for the Houston Post. Later, Barthelme served as director of Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, where he became an intimate of Elaine de Kooning. These nonliterary forces played a significant role in the development of Barthelme’s own work, but it requires a scholar heavily versed in music, painting, and cinema to recognize the specific contributions. Daugherty, who clearly loves these creative forms as dearly as his mentor did, is an excellent tour guide for this cross-form journey. His reflections upon Barthelme’s influences, from Hemingway’s prose to Antonioni’s films, are gems of cultural criticism in their own right. Read alongside this biography, challenging Barthelme works like The Dead Father and “See the Moon?” become readily accessible.

If his wide knowledge of the creative arts inflected Barthelme’s work, the other inescapable through line of his life was his love of women. His four marriages, and numerous intermittent romances with such luminaries as author-activist Grace Paley and power agent Lynn Nesbit, form a compelling fugue that drives Daugherty’s tale. The personalities of his wives—the “imperious and inapproachable” Marilyn Marrs, “earth mother” Helen Moore, “ethereal” and “scary-fairy” Birgit Englund-Peterson, and “Goody Two-shoes” Marion Knox—make for vivid storytelling. What is most striking, however, is the tension between Barthelme’s conservative Catholic upbringing and his embrace of the liberated social and sexual mores of New York City’s Greenwich Village. Daugherty does a masterful job of evincing these tensions and showing how they manifest themselves in such definitive Barthelme works as Snow White and “Me and Miss Mandible.” He also offers an insightful and even-handed assessment of the accusations of sexism leveled against the International PEN Congress in 1986, an event Barthelme helped to organize, and that ultimately led to his break with Paley.

Yet Daugherty’s work is as much concerned with his subject’s artistic legacy as it is with his complex and turbulent life. The most visible part of Barthelme’s influence upon today’s literary landscape is the relentless support he displayed toward a generation of aspiring writers—from Paley, who likely would never have published her second collection without Barthelme’s urging, to the young Thomas Pynchon, who penned Gravity’s Rainbow while living rent-free in the basement of Barthelme’s 11th Street walk-up. Less recognized is the degree to which Barthelme influenced the New Yorker, itself the dominant literary publication of its era. Epic stylistic battles between Barthelme and his more conservative editors, Roger Angell and William Shawn, helped to open that magazine’s doors to a generation of writers whose sensibilities extended beyond Joseph Mitchell’s verbal portraits and John Cheever’s suburban send-ups. (Barthelme won many of these skirmishes, although not his perennial struggle against the mandatory “serial comma” that defined Shawn’s editorship.) In fact, Barthelme proved so influential at the peak of his career that pranksters published stories under Barthelme’s name in several leading literary journals, including the Georgia Review, forcing the befuddled author to pen a rebuttal to the New York Review of Books, in which he denied responsibility for these pastiches.

One of the major features of Barthelme’s prose was the unabashed use of time-sensitive materials in his writing, a choice that Daugherty recognizes as risky:

If a sculptor places a metal pipe in the center of his piece and then it tarnishes over time, darkening, flaking, the new hue and texture will alter the entire structure, and will change the viewer’s response. The trick is to choose materials that will change in interesting ways, but this is difficult to predict.

This grounding in a specific cultural moment adds to the emotional power of Barthelme’s work, but it also may explain why his reputation has waned. It has become something of a convention among scholars of the American short story to compare Barthelme’s legacy with that of Raymond Carver (1938–1988), the blue-collar realist who also died in his prime. Daugherty makes a concession to this mania, noting “Don had been the most imitated short story writer in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raymond Carver could now [in the 1980s] claim that distinction.” At the same time, the biographer does not devote much time to this rather fruitless comparison—which, considering the decidedly different artistic projects embraced by these authors, is no more productive than comparing the legacies of Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath. Daugherty takes us beyond this hollow paradigm of postmodernism versus minimalist realism. Moreover, he appears to believe that Barthelme’s reputation will see a resurgence, as the time is ripe for what Lois Zamora has called a “critical repositioning” of the Barthelme corpus.

During the late 1970s, critics Josephine Hendin and Gore Vidal spearheaded a determined rejection of Barthelme and his aesthetic, which John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction (1978) went on to describe as “enfeebled.” The reviews of Barthelme’s final collection published during his lifetime, Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983), proved outright damning. Jonathan Penner’s Washington Post attack was all too representative. According to Penner, the volume “repels any understanding whatsoever” and “What this book says is that nothing can be said . . . . Life means nothing, art is false.” Yet Barthelme’s clever use of wordplay and lyrical rhythms, his emphasis on irony and humor, and his willingness to break rules for the sake of truth are the hallmarks of much of contemporary short fiction. Furthermore, his insistence that characters have rich internal lives, reflecting authentic patterns of psychological development, is as important a component of any twenty-first-century story as the vivid external panoramas drawn by the realists of the 1980s. Barthelme’s impact can be seen in the writings of such rising masters as Kevin Brockmeier, Dan Chaon, Roy Kesey, Karen Russell, and Wells Tower. Daugherty points out that, “Of the twenty-two pieces in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories published just before [Barthelme’s] Sixty Stories appeared [1981], all were ‘realistic’”—and most were defined by “minimalism.” In contrast, only a handful of the stories in this year’s O. Henry Prize collection could be described as pure realism, and none are even remotely minimalistic. This belies the widely accepted historical narrative in which Barthelme’s postmodernism fought a word-to-word battle royal against the minimalist realism of Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason, and lost. Rather, today’s best short fiction is a hybrid of the postmodernism of the 1970s, the realism of the 1980s, and the magical realism of figures like Robert Olen Butler that dominated the form during the 1990s.

Daugherty’s treatment of Barthelme’s career is comprehensive and definitive. (The only item missing from the work is any discussion of the 1986 attack on news anchor Dan Rather, which—in one of cultural journalism’s stranger salvos—Harper’s writer Paul Limbert Allman has accused Barthelme of orchestrating.) One turns the final page of Hiding Man convinced that Donald Barthelme was the most important and distinctive writer of his age. Daugherty makes a compelling case that he is also the most influential unread author in United States history. Undoubtedly, when Barthelme assumes his rightful place at the forefront of the American literary canon, Daugherty’s beautifully crafted tribute will be remembered as the original source of this much-needed and long-deserved rehabilitation.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

bell hooks
Routledge ($24.95)

by Jay Besemer

Prominent African American feminist educator and cultural critic bell hooks continues her important "teaching trilogy" with Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. This engaging and thought-provoking volume differs slightly from the previous two books in the series in that it consists of thirty-two mini-essays written from her rich dialogue with colleagues and students. Building on and refining themes from Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community, hooks continues to think and write critically about the practice of education—and the often hostile, violent nature of the academic environment.

The violence hooks observes is not always or only a physical violence; here, her work is concerned primarily with a pervasive ideological, spiritual, and emotional kind of violence against which all learners and educators must struggle. Yet Teaching Critical Thinking is a book permeated with love and hope, not fear. Like its two siblings, this volume combines ideas from thinkers usually assumed to be unrelated to one another. For example, liberation pedagogy theorist Paulo Freire and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh are two of hooks's own greatest teachers outside the classroom, and they are mentioned many times and in many contexts within the pages of Teaching Critical Thinking. As always in hooks's work, these fertile and occasionally surprising syntheses help readers jump-start their own ideas.

One prevalent theme throughout this book is the influence of corporate capitalism on the type and content of instruction in formal education. Here hooks focuses on the way corporate concerns shape higher education in particular, from student goals and motivations to the working environments and conditions of laborers at academic institutions. This discussion also helps clarify the importance of hooks's ideas beyond the college campuses on which students and educators struggle toward a nebulous and high-stakes future. When the unique human attribute of critical thinking—the ability to look beyond the surface of our life circumstances, our choices and actions, and the decisions of those we allow to take action on our behalf—is not developed, exercised, or even encouraged, the quality of our lives is adversely affected.

Writing personally about the impact of critical thinking outside of academic discourse, hooks shares how that practice works to enrich her life: "Seeking to know and understand fully gave me a way to create whole pictures in my mind's eye, pictures that were not simply formed through reaction to circumstances beyond my control." A page later, she adds,

There are many circumstances faced by ordinary folk that require them to examine reality beyond the surface, so that they can see the deep structure. These circumstances may lead them to ponder the question of who, what, where, when, how, and why and thereby start on the path of critical thought. When we accept that everyone has the ability to use the power of mind and integrate thinking and practice we acknowledge that critical thinking is a profoundly democratic way of knowing.

Framed in this way, critical thinking is not the abstract activity of some sort of privileged intellectual elite, and its application transcends the limits of the personal or national. Seeing and connecting both the "deep structure" and the broad view allows us to move more freely and more compassionately between the multiplicities of selves, cultures, and identities—between contexts, meanings, and languages—in a way that honors differences yet fosters unity.

A skill that enables people to ask themselves about the "who" and "why" of any situation is indeed democratic—and it is potentially deeply disruptive to the status quo. Yet in English and Humanities departments across the nation—departments in whose courses critical thinking skills are traditionally taught—we hear about business leaders decrying the lack of critical thinking and problem-solving skills in their employees. One need not be overly cynical to see that business leaders naturally prefer critical thinking that does not lead in a direction that irreconcilably contradicts the goals of global capitalism. But hooks has a much more holistic view of the place of engaged reflection in a global context. Acknowledging her own perspective as an educator, she writes, "We need education that addresses the world's diversity . . . . More than ever before, students and teachers need to fully understand differences of nationality, race, sex, class, and sexuality if we are to create ways of knowing that reinforce education as the practice of freedom."

The nature of education is changing. Students seek undergraduate and graduate degrees primarily as credentials for employment; at this moment, the overall joy of learning and the exploration of ideas seem to motivate students less than the need to appear attractive to potential employers. Although that need is certainly legitimate and has always molded higher education as an institution in the U.S. to some extent, many stakeholders in education—students, administrators, educators, student services staff, corporate-sector members of boards of regents and trustees—now seem to be wary of learning, encouraging, or supporting any ways of knowing that are not directly accountable to employers' interests.

Positing education as the practice of freedom to balance against (or as an antidote to) the notion of education as credential-collecting, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom seeks to help engaged educators navigate the contradictions and challenges of the academy so as to fulfill our mandate to be of compassionate service to students—as whole people, not simply as someone's future employees. To be of service in this context, hooks suggests, we must recognize that we are whole people ourselves, and let our students see that, like them, we struggle and learn and love, we fail and grieve and continue to try. Readers who do not see themselves as educators or students will still find many nourishing and challenging ideas on these pages.

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Christian Boltanski and Catherine Grenier
translated by Marc Lowenthal
Museum of Fine Arts Boston ($35)

by Mason Riddle

When Christian Boltanski describes his 2004 interview sessions with art historian Catherine Grenier as “psychoanalysis” or “confessions,” the French conceptual artist is spot-on. Translated into a 200-plus-page Q & A memoir, The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski reads as part sober rumination and part look-at-me exposé covering all manner of topics, including the artist’s childhood, family, career, marriage, friendships, successes, failures, and ongoing cogitation on death. The roughly chronological, oral autobiography is divided into seventeen chapters with titles as straightforward as “Beautiful Photographs” and as evasive as “Tell the Truth?” According to Grenier, the weekly interviews “followed a strict guiding principle: to narrate his life as well as his work, and to avoid modifying or censoring anything that was said.”

The first chapter, “Childhood,” starts before Boltanski was born, and revealingly sets the stage for his later artistic explorations of childhood, memory, identity, absence, and death. We learn that the artist was the youngest of three boys born to a Jewish physician father and a Catholic writer-intellectual mother. Boltanski deftly constructs, often with humor, a portrait of an idiosyncratic family whose members never went outside alone, rarely bathed, and all slept in the same bedroom, even though they lived a bourgeois life in a large apartment in Paris. For instance, he says his father “was so detached from the world—no desires, no friends, nothing . . . I never knew him to have a friend, I never saw him go into a café. It just didn’t happen.”¹ During the war his mother feigned divorce and hid her husband under the floorboards—although the artist concedes his father must have come up for air occasionally, as he was conceived in 1944—and Boltanski comments frequently how the Shoah was like a shroud over his youth.

At age thirteen Boltanski decided to be an artist. He had made a little object from modeling clay that his brother Luc told him was beautiful, and that was that. His career of mixed-media installations, photographs, films, and performances had been launched by a lump of clay, even though he never went out alone until age eighteen, lived at home into his late twenties, and played with toy soldiers until he was thirty-five. He believes his “real work” began in 1969; by the mid-1980s Boltanski was an artist of international acclaim. Speaking of his career in the context of his family, Boltanski states, “I was really incredibly lucky to become an artist, because we lived in a general atmosphere of danger, a fear of life.” The Possible Life, in fact, riffs on the title of Boltanski’s first film, La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski, made in 1968.

In addition to getting a bead on his formative years, Boltanski provides a quirky, bird’s-eye view of the Parisian and New York art scenes; he also discusses his many projects and their raisons d’être, candidly speaking about his successes and failures with both gallery and museum exhibitions. We are informed that his work draws on experiences of communism, Nazism, and Christianity, as well as the terrors of war and evil, and that Boltanski sees himself firmly lodged in the twentieth century. “My forms change, but my preoccupations remain Existentialist, even if I was unaware of those ideas that the time. I’ve still read very little Camus . . . yet I belong to that current of thought.” He also labels himself an expressionist and is interested in investing his work with “emotion.” The book provides valuable insight about his perceived aesthetic relationship to such artists as Gilbert & George, Beuys, Warhol, Fellini, Giacometti, Duchamp, Félix González-Torres, and Pina Bausch.

It may provoke art aficionados to learn that Boltanski feels his truly creative period began when he exhibited at the 1972 Documenta and ended in 1994, even though he continued to create and exhibit art. He now considers himself an “artist of space” and claims the notion of space is central to his work. Boltanski also views himself at odds with much of the contemporary art world. In the chapter “Artistic Affinities” he comments,

One thing that really irritates me is that a large portion of art today doesn’t talk about life, but instead talks about art . . . today, art that’s concerned with reflecting on art just goes in circles; it’s like kicking yourself. Moreover, I loathe the whole “little play on words” thing. Turning quotations into conceptual jokes seems rather rude to the artists who get looked down on, and I don’t see the point to it.

The Possible Life is a meandering but fascinating memoir that at times doubles back on itself—but then, perhaps, that’s the beauty of an endless, uncensored interview. There are also numerous contradictions. For example, early on Boltanski reflects on his happy childhood saying, “My parents would take me to school and come to pick me up.” Just a few pages later he describes his childhood as “one with lots of freedom: for instance, I didn’t have to go to school. Deep down, I think they [parents] were delighted that I didn’t go.”

Marc Lowenthal’s translation reads well except for some questionable word choices, such as when Boltanski says, “for an artist to do something, he or she must be surrounded by a whole compost of people.” The only real flaw in the book is the relative dearth of images. Even those familiar with Boltanski’s oeuvre can become lost in the in-depth discussion of his various series of works; for the uninitiated, the lack of visual reference might be cause to stop reading. At the very least, a chronology and an index would have helped the reader trace certain works, themes, and exhibitions across the text.

These minor flaws aside, The Possible Life is an inspired book that prompts the reader to ponder one’s own childhood and mortality. Boltanski’s thoughts on these topics are often unexpectedly enlightening, but in the end, it is important to keep a bit of “distance”—a quality Boltanski believes is critical to his art. On the first page he states, “What I love about memories is the mix of clarity and confusion. But as everybody knows, early memories are almost always invented . . . I think very early memories always correspond to a feeling: they’re visions.” On the final page Boltanski admits, “I am an incredible liar. I think lying is a positive thing . . . . and since no one knows what the truth is, it isn’t very important.” So Christian, is it or isn’t it? The Possible Life may very well be impossible, but it is still a provocative read embedded in the real.

¹ Ironically, in spite of Boltanski’s father’s solitary behavior, as a youth he had been friends with the Dadaists Theódore Frankel and André Breton. Later, his father and Breton had both studied medicine but lost track of each other during the war. When Boltanski began to paint as a teenager, his father wrote to Breton asking him to visit his son. Breton’s response to Boltanski’s paintings? “I advise you not to become a painter. It’s a very difficult trade, and a rotten milieu. You seem like a nice young man, you should do something else.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

translated by Sybil Perez
Melville House Publishing ($14.95)

by Mark Terrill

Much has been written about the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño since his death from liver failure at age fifty in July 2003, mostly about his last two novels, The Savage Detectives and the posthumously published 2666. Some of this writing has been of a denigrating nature, devoted to debunking the “Bolañomania” that has been created in the wake of his death. Granted, fuel for the mythmakers was provided by the many autobiographical aspects of The Savage Detectives, in which Roberto Bolaño and Mario Santiago, who together started the Infrarealist movement in Mexico in the 1970s, appear as Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the “Visceral Realist” movement. Their symbiotic relationship and itinerant search for the poetic grail conjured up images of a modern-day Rimbaud/Verlaine or Kerouac/Cassady correlation, paving the way for the spin doctors.

But despite the various myths, legends, rumors, and facts, one should bear in mind that it wasn’t Bolaño who created the hype emphasizing the romantic myth of the rebellious, vagabond, drug-taking poet but rather the publishers and champions of his otherwise difficult to market oeuvre. The fact that Bolaño, an autodidact and obsessive reader and lover of books, spent the last years of his life as a loving father living a quiet life in a small town on the Spanish coast is not the sort of thing that makes tantalizing book jacket copy. But for those readers of Bolaño who are looking for the roots and sources of his hugely amorphous and fantastically spun tales, laden with references to obscure writers and poets (real and fictional) that weave their way through the fractured history and cultural detritus of the twentieth century and beyond, it gradually becomes apparent that it was not Bolaño’s gregarious and wayward youth but rather his voracious reading and insatiable appetite for the written word that provided the material for his work.

Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview collects four interviews conducted between 1999 and 2003, the last just shortly before his death. Bolaño speaks frankly and candidly with his various interviewers, revealing his vastly erudite intelligence and knowledge as well as his skewed humor. When asked by Mónica Maristain (who interviewed Bolaño for the Mexican edition of Playboy in what was to be truly the last interview), “Have you ever shed one tear about the widespread criticism you’ve drawn from your enemies?” Bolaño’s answer was:

Lots and lots. Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks along the edge of the sea, which is by the way less than 30 meters from my house, and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm.

Continuously throughout these interviews, Bolaño makes reference to countless writers and poets, from the ancient Greeks to Cervantes, from Melville to Whitman, from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Dickinson, from Jacques Vaché to Kafka, from Philip K. Dick to Wittgenstein, all the way up to James Ellroy and beyond. He also references a whole host of Spanish and Latin American writers and poets, most of whose names would remain obscure to the uninitiated reader if not for an excellent editorial feature of this collection of interviews. On each page where Bolaño or his interviewer mentions a writer or poet, their names are printed in bold type in the main text, and a brief biographical summary and list of published works, both in original and translation, appear in the extra-wide margins. This makes The Last Interview an incredibly valuable sourcebook for those interested in tracking down all the various influences that are such an important part of Bolaño’s oeuvre.

Thus we learn the importance for Bolaño of such writers and poets as Julio Cortázar, Nicanor Parra, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Carlos Onetti, and many others. In an interview with Héctor Soto and Matías Bravo for the Chilean magazine Capital, Bolaño talked about inspiration and the importance or reading versus that of actual experience:

HS/MB: Writers are always asked for their inspiration and today will not be an exception. Some are inspired more from life, while others more from literature.

RB: In what concerns me, both.

HS/MB: Notwithstanding that, you are an extremely literary writer—to put it one way.

RB: Well, if I had to choose one of two things, and God pray that I never have to choose, I would choose literature. If I were offered a great library or an Inter-Rail ticket to Vladivostok, I would keep the library, without the slightest doubt. Besides, with the library, my trip would be much longer.

HS/MB: Like Borges, you have lived through your reading.

RB: In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book. A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity.

A continuous theme that runs through Bolaño’s work is that of the writer in repressive regimes, the dialectic between creativity and totalitarianism. Another recurring motif is revolution, which he talks about in his conversation with Héctor Soto and Matías Bravo:

HS/MB: Your books are distinct approximations of a particular world, a world of writers and rather marginal people who are in between being obsessives and losers. Your stories and novels also center around the same situations or the same characters.

RB: Also around the same arguments.

HS/MB: Exactly. Your characters are crusaders for revolutionizing art and changing the world, which is the project of your generation.

RB: Revolutionizing art and changing life were the objects of Rimbaud’s project. And reinventing love. At heart, to make life a work of art.

HS/MB: But you are a part of the world that you describe, and you look affectionately toward it.

RB: Perhaps I’ve been attempting to forgive myself.

HS/MB: You’re not an apologist for the project or rhapsodic about it, but you’re not a gravedigger, or a critic.

RB: I’m a survivor. I feel enormous affection toward this project, notwithstanding its excesses, immoderations, and deviations. The project is hopelessly romantic, essentially revolutionary, and it has seen the failure of many groups and generations of artists. Though, even now, our conception of art in the West is indebted to this vision.

Bolaño and his interviewers also discuss the endangered nature of this revolutionary project, as well as the high price of commitment to its ideals:

HS/MB: If there is a concept that has been devalued in this era, it is that of revolution.

RB: The truth for me—and I want to be very sincere—is that the idea of revolution had already been devalued by the time I was twenty years old. At that age, I was a Trotskyite and what I saw in the Soviet Union was a counterrevolution. I never felt I had the support of the movement of history. To the contrary, I felt quite crushed. I think that’s noticeable in the characters in The Savage Detectives.

HB/MS: At some point in your life, we imagined that you were animated by great revolutionary ardor.

RB: You imagined it correctly. I was against everything. Against New York and Moscow, against London and Havana, against Paris and Beijing. I even felt scared by the solitude entailed in radicalism.

In her lengthy and well-written introduction, Marcela Valdes writes about the gigantic project that eventually became 2666, discussing Bolaño’s meticulous way of working and his obsessive attention to detail. Evidently he worked for many, many years, gathering information, corresponding with other writers and journalists, gradually accumulating the mountains of information that he would eventually rework into the multifaceted 900-page narrative about the so-called “femicides” of hundreds of women in Juarez in northern Mexico in the 1990s. In Bolaño’s acceptance speech for the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1998, he said that in one way or another, everything he wrote was “a letter of love or goodbye” to the young people who gave their lives in the “dirty wars” of Latin America. As Valdes says in her introduction, “His ambitions for 2666 were greater: to write a postmortem for the dead of the past, the present, and the future.”

The work that went into the writing of this vast and convoluted postmortem resembled in its nature the work of a detective, which put Bolaño in the center of his element. When asked by Mónica Maristain what he would have liked to be had he not been a writer, Bolaño answered:

I should like to have been a homicide detective much better than being a writer. I am absolutely sure of that. A string of homicides. I’d have been someone who could come back to the scene of the crime alone, by night, and not be afraid of ghosts. Perhaps then I might really have become crazy. But that could easily be resolved with a bullet to the mouth.

Bolaño managed to steer clear of insanity and suicide (although he was apparently close to both at one time or another), but was not able to escape the clutches of his fatal liver disease. And although a liver transplant which might have saved his life was suggested by his doctor, Bolaño repeatedly postponed the operation in order to finish 2666, a further sign of his extreme commitment to his art.

The hype and “Bolañomania” notwithstanding, it is this very commitment to art and the revolutionary project that seems to hold so many dangers; whether one is on a reckless poetic quest through Mexico and Europe or sitting in a library surrounded by books, the creation of art or revolution is not without its inherent risks. As Marcia Valdes says in her introduction, “Being a writer in this world is as dangerous as being a detective, walking through a graveyard, looking at ghosts.”

The dust kicked up by Bolaño’s critics and champions has yet to settle, but his place in the literary canon is already secured. Like Julio Cortázar, Gilbert Sorrentino, José Saramago, W. G. Sebald, and other writers, Bolaño has radically challenged our notion of the novel and upended many literary conventions, opening up the way for the generations to follow. Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview provides many valuable insights into the mind of this truly revolutionary writer.

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Walter H. Beale
University of Pittsburgh Press ($24.95)

by W. C. Bamberger

For centuries men have asked whether language has a direct relation (that is, a symmetrical relation) with reality, or whether it is entirely arbitrary and so of no real help in working our way toward real truths and to a better society. Walter H. Beale asks these questions once again and further shows us how these questions lead to even larger ones, such as that of whether there are any stable realities “out there” for us to know. Whether we believe there is an actual reality with which language engages or things constructed from language exist only as conventions, the implications lead beyond simple questions of naming into existential matters, and even to the realms of government, religion, and law.

Learning from Language is in part a survey of how these questions have been addressed, from Plato and Cicero to the rigidly logical thinkers of the medieval period, up to deconstructionism. Beale has a mastery of the entire history of his subject and offers connections that few of us might have made on our own. In discussing the somehow surprising fact that Augustine held with the asymmetry position, he points out that “the rather desolate landscape of a human society without much confidence in either reason or language is one that Augustine shares with some of the most notorious asymmetrists of the modern age, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.”

Beale rightfully asserts that modern linguistic thinkers generally hold with asymmetry, but he himself chooses to look at the valuable aspects of each position rather than simply hold to one or the other. In the final pages, Beale makes a convincing case for an understanding of language as displaying elements of both symmetry and asymmetry, existing in a state of constant dialectical adjustment: “Specific attributions of symmetry are often mistaken, but the intuition of symmetry is never wholly wrong. The corollary of course is that, while intuitions are never wholly mistaken, specific attributions are rather often wrong.”

Beale’s analyses of ideas—even ones as slippery as the above—are for the most part sharp and interesting. Unfortunately, the clarity of his logic and even his voice are largely lost in the confusion created by the book attempting to be a historical survey, an informational primer, a contribution to the philosophy of language, and more—a progression of jarring transitions and dissonant forms. In some instances ideas are set off like study blocks, with Beale’s discussion following it in a discrete section. Chapters end with “suggested reading” lists. There are charts and diagrams that do little to make the explications clearer and seem fated to become PowerPoint slides.

A professor of English (at the University of North Carolina), Beale asserts more than once that the ideas he looks at here will be valuable to upper-level English teachers, and these seem to be this book’s intended audience. But in the parts where Beale seems to forget that he is supposed to be writing a textbook, it is all too obvious that he clips his wings in order to stay at this arbitrary height.

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Julie Bertagna
Walker ($16.95 each)

by Kelly Everding

The recent climate summit in Copenhagen last December gathered the world’s leaders to address the impending calamity our planet faces, yet they couldn’t reach any real agreement on how to address the deleterious effects of our industrial progress. Global warming will not slow down and wait for bickering nations to catch up, and there is a real pressure to act now before we cannot reverse the damage that has already been done—or that is yet to happen. Julie Bertagna imagines a worst-case scenario in her young-adult books Exodus and Zenith, which follow the survivalist adventures of a ragtag group of people from all walks of life after most inhabited land has been swallowed up by the rising oceans. Her story is a wake-up call to perhaps the one growing group of activists that can maybe make a difference—the world’s young people.

Exodus follows the story of Mara in this not-too-distant possible future of Earth. The year is 2099; she, her family, and fellow villagers live on a tip of land called Wing in the Atlantic Ocean, the last bit of land (as far as they know) not engulfed by the ever-rising ocean water. The few breaks in the constant deluge of storms give them little time to repair damage done and meet collectively to discuss their dire situation, although few want to face the facts. Their memory of the past is vague, with little idea how they ended up this way—100 years can wipe out the advancements of the biggest civilizations, leaving tiny encampments of people living as farmers without any technology, except for what’s washed up on the shores of Wing. Mara escapes into one vestige of the pre-diluvian world, a cyberwizz: a globe-shaped computer fueled by solar power that connects her to the Weave, a vestige of the virtual world of the internet, “an electronic gravesite.” With her halo glasses and cyberwand, she can surf the dumping ground of knowledge left behind by the old society. While zooming around in the Weave, she meets another traveler, a fox who tells her he is from New Mungo in the New World, a city of impossibly high towers built upon an old drowned city in Eurosea. If Mara can trust the fox, and if the villagers of Wing can trust Mara, she may have found a way to escape their fate.

When Mara and the survivors of her village make it to New Mungo, they are confronted with the harsh realities brought on by a destroyed planet with dwindling resources. The “haves” live richly in the gleaming towers oblivious to the “have-nots” struggling to persevere in haphazard boat camps outside the gates of the city. As Mara ventures further into this alien world outside of her now-idyllic Wing, she sees the worst of humankind, but there are small pockets of hope. Groups of people have carved out livelihoods in the shadows of the towers: the nearly feral sea urchins, children who have lost their ability to speak but whose survival skills keep them one step ahead of the New Mungo sea police, and the Treenesters, who, as their name implies, live in the branches of ancient trees that somehow survive in the shadows of New Mungo. With the help of these groups she infiltrates New Mungo to save her kidnapped friends and escape the uncharitable and oblivious people of the city. Once again Mara leads more survivors to an uncertain future toward a possibility of salvation in the shape of new land.

As Mara makes sense of what her cyberwizz reveals and the information in forgotten piles of books in the library of the old city below New Mungo, she pieces together what happened to her world. Even though the urchins, Treenesters, and, in Zenith, the sea-hardy "gypseas" of the floating city (hundreds of boats tied together with makeshift bridges) and the treacherous cave-dwellers of Ilira have renounced most technology (since little of it works, and most of it is foreign to them) and knowledge of the past, Mara realizes that knowing what got them where they are is crucial to their survival. But it is a hard sell, because the earth has forsaken these people. The gypseas curse with the word, “urth!” as they forget and reject the world of their “Landcestors.” Fear, distrust, and greed for any sort of comfort win out over careful thought and consideration about the future. It’s every person for him or herself. But despite missteps and great tragedy, Mara prevails as she leads her people toward a new future that she discovered in a book, Greenland, whose mountains, she theorizes, would rise above the waters buoyed by the melting glaciers. And her desire to survive draws strength from the people who believe in her and the people she loves, especially her love for Fox, who turns out to be a boy her age who she must leave behind in New Mungo. “I don’t know if there’s any happiness left in the world, thinks Mara. But there’s love. Maybe it’s strong enough to bridge an ocean.”

Both Exodus and its sequel Zenith are page-turners, filled with relentless adventure, hard decisions, and great sorrow. Bertagna keeps her characters moving, never allowing them to rest, even to the bittersweet end of the story. It is easy to fall for these well-written inhabitants of a doomed planet, sympathize with setbacks and losses, and cheer the very few successes they have in the ever-increasing struggle to find a place to live, to find some acceptance. Ultimately, the communities of people who band together and help each other are the ones who have the richer experience and connection to a world that tried its best to shrug them off. And Mara’s determination to understand the past helps them to forge a future—an uncertain future with no guarantees, but a future nonetheless. This entertaining but fierce story will hopefully serve as a cautionary tale to young readers and encourage them to take seriously the ever-increasing predicament of global climate change.

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Emine Sevgi Özdamar
translated by Martin Chalmers
Serpent’s Tail ($15.95)

by Jeff Bursey

At once tiresome and tiring, Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn has occasional stirrings of life, humor, and interest that keep one hoping things will improve. The unnamed narrator is a young Turkish teenager whom we follow from age sixteen to twenty-five, beginning in the turbulent late 1960s. She starts off as a worker in West Germany, where she is introduced to socialism and sexual desire. As the novel continues, she desires sex more and more, has an abortion, and reads Jack London, Engels, Gorky, and Brecht, while addressing everyone from a newfound Marxist point of view.

It could be that this character is a stand-in for the state of Turkish affairs at this time in history, yet it’s hard to believe that is Özdamar’s goal. Rather, we watch as the unnamed narrator moves through a few stages of life, shy at first, making friends in her new women's hostel while working in a factory, open to poetic thoughts, interested in the theater as an actress, repeating words and ideas over and over, and giving motivations to objects and occurrences:

Angel had a soft voice and spoke very slowly. So we also began to speak more slowly. I saw my slowed-down arm and hand movements as if in a slow-motion film, my feet rose slowly, came down on the street again, the snow fell slowly, our hair floated slowly, the cigarette ends moved slowly in front of our feet, the dry grass between the disused tracks . . . moved slowly . . . . Even the clock in the hostel lounge ticked more slowly and made the evening long. The evening sat down slowly on the chairs against the walls.

In this set of projections, suitable for a sheltered teenager, and one of many found throughout the novel, we see that for the narrator, all life is imbued with her own feelings. This technique doesn’t create a character so much as assemble an egoist.

After men come on the scene, the narrator shows some development. As the world widens, her legs open more often, which makes for dull reading if it’s not part of something larger. What the narrator does, in the area of sex, is itch to lose her “diamond,” then say yes to any man who finds her attractive (and all men do). She does this at some risk, it would seem, to her own person, such as having her back burned by a cigarette when alone with four men.

With nothing in the narrator to scorn or admire, we may legitimately ask what we’re to take from this novel that is of literary interest. The plot is simple, but not rendered in a way that makes it memorable. Attempts at characterization fail, and what results are occasional blurry puppets bearing male or female names. Once the action returns to Turkey, the civil unrest there in the late 1960s and early 1970s consume the narrative. The last fifty or so pages present a one-sided perspective of certain aspects of Turkish history, as in this passage:

The trade unions organized more strikes, the workers occupied factories, bombs exploded at the generals’ doors. For days people in Istanbul ate sharks, and as they put the fish in their mouths, they heard the bombs exploding, left the fish on the plate, and ran to the window or into the street. As a result many fish ended up in the bin, at night I saw cats everywhere, which gathered around the rubbish bins and ate the sharks. The people were banned from the streets. The military banned all films and plays in which topics like theft and kidnapping occurred. They banned trade unions and meetings. If more than three people went into a house together, they were suspect. The police arrested and tortured. The cries were not heard, the walls behind which the torture took place were thick, but weeping mothers and fathers could be heard from many houses. The police searched houses for left-wing books, one of the policemen told the paper: “I’ve injured my back from carrying all the communist books.”

What are we to make of subjective history that doesn’t have the virtue of being set down with style, or with special insight? There’s little differentiation in tone from people eating sharks to cats eating sharks, so that neither is more significant than the other. The breathless sentences—a feature throughout, signaled by comma placement—are meant to lure us into the narrator’s state of mind, but there is no depth there. Of the unrest that filled Turkey at this time, Özdamar presents only the surface. We’re meant to accept as a given that this or that oppressive measure is brutal, but when these measures are presented without any distinctiveness or liveliness, what comes across is one long, uniform wave that never shatters against a headland or wipes out a shore.

It should be noted that in parts of the earlier sections, Özdamar does write well. If she had worked harder on the rest, and not stuffed The Bridge of the Golden Horn with sequences equivalent to "then we did this, then we did that" as well as filler, this novel would have been much richer.

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Jonathan Goldstein
Riverhead ($15)

by Jesse Tangen-Mills

Call it the second coming: the Bible is back. From Slate editor David Plotz’s blogs on the topic, to the success of Marilynne Robinson’s religious novels, the books some believe to be written by God are being rewritten by everybody else. But literary fascination with the Bible is nothing new. Most nineteenth-century writers, religious or not, reverently read the King James Version, particularly the Book of Psalms; as recently as 2007, critic James Wood has labeled these verses among the greatest works of poetry in the English language. Regardless of its hot or not status, Jonathan Goldstein joins the holy hullabaloo by focusing on what the good book most lacks: humor.

More than a modernization, Goldstein’s stories satirize and estrange, and yet remain clearly recognizable as the stories we all know, or thought we did. In fact, to the religious zealot some of these tales may seem obstinate. Joseph is jealous of his son Jesus. Adam is an idiot. Moses is a grimacing pedant. David is a jokester. Samson wants to be an angel because they can “kick ass in the name of peace.” Though these tales josh, however, they also examine with utmost honesty. The many heart-drawn details—such as David recognizing the birth of Absalom as “one of the few occasions in which [he] believed his heart had not stabbed his back,” or Cain’s final realization that after his punishment he no longer desires anything, and in a case of poetic justice has become like Abel—convert plain sardonicism into something less didactic and more profound.

“King David,” the longest story in the collection, likewise begins with mockery but leads to real emotion. Goldstein portrays David as a kid who wants to be funny at any cost; when he takes down Goliath it comes as the result of a joke —“laugh-out-loud funny.” As absurd as this might sound, it is convincing. Hoping to please everyone, David resembles in many ways a comedian courting an audience. In part of the David story, David is married to Saul´s daughter, Michal, a woman he can’t make laugh, who finds him bothersome rather than charismatic, which in turn leads to his tumultuous affair with Bathsheba and Absalom’s tragic patriarchal revolt. David concludes: “God, because he has always loved and supported me, will take me up to Heaven where I will sit around for thousands and thousands of years. Then a million years. And will keep going. Then one day I will go before God and beg him to kill me . . . . And I will say, ‘With all due respect, I don’t think you get it. I’m sick of all this. I’m full. I’ve had enough.’”

Certainly we have left the cushy realm of parody. In fact, Goldstein’s humor and hyperbole often reveal new ways of understanding that can be jarring. For example, Noah’s divinity comes with an old-school work ethic as well as abusive behavior toward his sons, who help him in his daily toil as a contractor. Strikingly similar to the God that chooses him as his earthly servant, Noah calls his sons “good-for-nothing[s],” and feels as confident in his decisions as God might. His sons, however, are not so sure of his plan. When it begins to rain, as Noah and his sons wait on the ark with two of every kind, Ham hears the condemned human race “banging at the outside walls . . . Then there were more hands. Pounding. Punching. Scratching.” He asks his father if they can empty some of the animal cages to let people in, but Noah once again scolds him and calls him a dummy for disobeying God. The sons of Noah generally are left out of the flood story or converted into symbols of do-and-don’t piety, but in Goldstein’s hands they are as human as perhaps they were to the Bible’s first audience.

“Samson and Delilah,” a story still shedding its hippie interpretation of forbidden love, in Goldstein’s hands reads more like a Hulk comic book. An enamored Samson practices confessing his love by wrapping his arms around a tree trunk until it snaps. He tries to impress Delilah by performing feats of strength in the market. His father, “an intellectual who referred to himself as a ‘man of peace,’” disapproves of Samson’s belligerent muscle-flexing, which leaves Samson dreaming of killing Philistines despite his honest intentions to be a pacifist. In the end, Samson is duped by his wife, and God tells him, “You have spent your life making an ass of yourself . . . but you have done so in a most interesting way.” Despite Delilah’s hatred of him, Samson’s last wish is to feel her touch again.

Over the past few years, Goldstein has been reading his biblical fragments on NPR´s This American Life, as well as on his own CBC radio show WireTap, which generated the buzz that sent this collection to print. If you have already heard Goldstein on the radio, you will have trouble not hearing his pregnant pauses and omnisciently playful tone when reading this book.

Just as the text it is based on, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible! takes place in a small world where everyone is either related or neighbors, so much that they are bound to each other. The greatest difference between the original and Goldstein’s zany interpretations are the laughs, as David categorizes them: “laughter at your own expense, laughter at the expense of others, laughter at the human predicament, and laugher at small animals falling off tables.” Life in the Bible, often hardscrabble or tragically cut short, hardly provokes a smile, let alone a laugh. That’s exactly why many of these humorous protagonists come to sobering moments of anagnorisis, as when Joseph thinks just before the birth of Jesus, “For the first time in a long time, it felt like things were going to be okay.” The book’s real punch line seems to be that the Bible can still pack a punch, even for the weak of faith.

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