Tricia Rayburn
EgmontUSA ($17.99)

by Carrie Mercer

Justine Sands is always ready for adventure—fearless, even. It's one of the qualities her sister Vanessa loves about her. Then Justine turns up dead, drowned in a freak weather event, in “currents so strong, Triton himself, the Greek god of the sea that could turn the waves up and down with one blow into his conch shell, wouldn't have been able to hold his own.” A terrible accident, everyone says. But Vanessa is determined to find out what really happened. She knows something is off, even before she starts hearing her dead sister's voice inside her head.

Siren, Tricia Rayburn's first young adult novel, is a tricky proposition. A realistic story with just a smidgen of fantasy, Siren plays with the suspension of disbelief every reader enters into when she reads a work of fiction. Here, the main character struggles throughout with a suspension of her own disbelief in order to find the truth. So the question becomes, does Vanessa's struggle to understand her world in a different way ring true with the reader? The struggle is a perfect metaphor for coming of age, which is what makes it work so well (and why we see this device so often in YA novels).

Vanessa's investigation starts with Simon and Caleb Carmichael, a fixture of the girls’ summers. Caleb was with Justine just before she died, and now he's disappeared. So Vanessa teams up with Simon to find Caleb, a hunt that proves stranger and more dangerous than either of them expected, changing their easy-going friendship into something deeper. Rayburn is adept at conveying the conflicted emotions Vanessa experiences from this change, especially in the middle of her grief over the loss of Justine.

Like those “meddling kids” in Scooby-Doo, Vanessa and Simon start nosing around town asking people questions they don't want to answer, including a crazy old man who holds the key to part of the mystery. It's a compelling read, as Rayburn's pacing is spot-on, moving between the adventure of the mystery, the excitement of first love, and the grief over a death in the family. The plot thickens deliciously as Rayburn adds layers, expanding the mystery beyond Justine's death into several similar deaths, both recent and historical. She also complicates the mystery of Justine as Vanessa finds out that her sister, who she thought she knew so well, was keeping secrets from her.

One of the most satisfying aspects of Siren is its rich plotting: the story is unpredictable, with no sudden reveal at the end to tie all the pieces together. Instead, there are several points at which the reader's curiosity is satisfied, and even more than one climax; when Simon and Vanessa finally rescue Caleb after a harrowing chase and a battle of wills, we're only halfway through the book. Unfortunately, Rayburn's propulsive plotting only moves forward; the few scenes where she skips time and then tries to reveal what happened by looking back are confusing. Still, Siren is an enjoyable read that leaves us hoping there's more to come.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Josiah McElheny
University of Chicago Press ($25)

by W. C. Bamberger

A German expressionist writer and critic, and a well-known theorist of the use of glass in architecture, Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) authored mostly light-hearted, vaguely astral caprices that were favorites of Walter Benjamin and the Gestalt psychologist and writer Salomo Friedlaender, among others. His short vignette “The Light Club of Batavia,” originally published in German in 1912 and translated here for the first time, concerns a group of rich eccentrics who hatch a plan to create a dazzling, light-saturated underground environment—a spa for “bathing in light”—in an abandoned mine. There is as much digression as there is plot; the charm of Scheerbart’s writings (others of which detail politics on the moon and travels in a dirigible) is created by way of the novelty of invention and glittering beauty of the details, glimpsed in lines like “In my opinion, we all suffer from light addiction. It is the most modern of diseases.”

Sculptor and performance artist Josiah McElheny’s interest in the use of glass in sculpture led him to Scheerbart’s work, and he enlisted a number of collaborators in the creation of this chimerical book. In his introduction, McElheny sketches Scheerbart’s life and offers a synopsis of the work. This synopsis extrapolates a great deal from what is actually present, finding profundity in the slightest of the cast’s asides. But McElheny’s purpose isn’t simply to present the text as he found it—he wishes, rather, to use it as the hub of a series of extrapolations and ruminations, to explore how many facets can be found by turning Scheerbart’s text and ideas to various angles. The Light Club thus prints the original text, as well as a translation by Wilhelm Werthern; a poem by Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Mueller that thinks its way through the themes and scenes of the story without always referring to it; a reinvention of the story as a play by Andrea Geyer; a more modern-styled short story by McElheny, which treats Scheerbart’s text as a tale to be retold at a bar; blurred black and white photographs; and two further critical essays by George Hecht and Branden W. Joseph—all in less than 100 pages.

The book as a whole is similar in effect to some works by George Perec, or even Ron Padgett’s Among the Blacks—it presents pieces of text that act as shifting views, or as different “lights” shone on the same subject. If the reader wants conclusions, he or she has to draw them. Scheerbart’s wispy text is offered up in this heightened setting McElheny has created for it like a tiny diamond in a complex ring.

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Atiq Rahimi
translated by Polly McLean
Other Press ($16.95)

by Brooke Horvath

Afghanistan is the graveyard not only of empires but of countless Afghan war victims, tens of thousands of whom have died in the internecine struggle for power that commenced upon the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989. It is in the midst of such fratricidal conflict that Atiq Rahimi—an Afghan writer and filmmaker who fled Afghanistan in 1984 and now lives in Paris—has set his fourth novel,The Patience Stone, winner of the 2008 Prix Goncourt.

As the novel opens, an unnamed woman is tending her comatose husband, shot not by a rival faction but by one of his comrades during a squabble. Beyond the window, its curtains “patterned with migrating birds frozen mid-flight,” the fight goes on amid daily life “somewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere.” The woman, mother of two small girls, attends the intravenous feeding tube and prays, peeks out the window or runs errands, feeds her girls and talks to her unhearing husband. Day follows day, each filled with anxious tedium, horror, and haplessness: the old woman next door wanders the rubble muttering crazed nonsense after finding her son and husband beheaded; patrols pass, and gunfire briefly shatters the silence; soldiers climb through the window to threaten and insult, the woman lying that she is a prostitute to avoid being raped; one of the soldiers returns to pay her to lose his virginity. Meanwhile, the husband lies unmoving, unresponsive, all appeals to Allah unavailing, and the woman, between tasks, sits and reflects, awash in dreams, memories, and confessions.

It is the sharing of her secrets with her husband—the woman’s first opportunity to speak her mind to him despite ten years of marriage—that constitutes the soul of this novel. As her husband lies there—his mouth “half-open,” his expression “strangely mocking”—he becomes her “patience stone,” a magical stone to which, according to legend, one can “confess everything in your heart, everything you don’t dare tell anyone . . . until one fine day it explodes.” As the days pass, these revelations become increasingly intimate, uncensored, and confrontational:

She moves toward the man’s mouth. “I have never kissed you.” She kisses him. “The first time I went to kiss you on the lips, you pushed me away. I wanted it to be like in those Indian films. Perhaps you were scared—is that it?” she asks, looking amused. “Yes. You were scared because you didn’t know how to kiss a girl.” Her lips brush against the bushy beard. “Now I can do anything I want with you!”

Yet tenderness is never absent, for this woman understands that her husband, so brutal and domineering, has been himself a victim of a culture that has warped him, made him unfit for love. She speaks to him of his sexual clumsiness, his “empty presence,” his inability to share himself. She comes to see men’s violence as a form of cowardice, agreeing with something she recalls her aunt, the family’s black sheep, once saying: “those who don’t know how to make love, make war.” Near the novel’s close, she laughs dully and whispers, “when it’s hard to be a woman, it becomes hard to be a man, too!”

The woman’s story, told in bits and pieces, offers then a critique of Afghan sexual/social relations; Khaled Hosseini, author of the acclaimed bestseller The Kite Runner, praises The Patience Stone in his introduction to the book for “giving voice to those who, as the fable goes, suffer the most and cry out the least.” The irony, of course, is that the voiceless Afghan woman here has been given voice by a male novelist. Still, The Patience Stone remains a courageous book, for “there is nothing more taboo,” as the French-Iranian journalist Lila Azam Zanganeh puts it, “than talking about an Afghan woman’s body and her sexuality.”

Beyond sexual politics and social critique, and beyond the realistic if impressionistic sketches of a city wracked by indiscriminate bloodshed, what is of equal interest is the novel’s psychology of survival, the woman’s internal search for salvific truths to replace the deadening lies by which she has habitually lived. As Rahimi’s heroine reasons, “If all religion is to do with revelation, the revelation of a truth, then, mysang-e saboor [my patience stone], our story is a religion too!” In this respect, The Patience Stone may remind some readers of the Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jalloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light, which concerns the endurance of a man buried for more than twenty years in a lightless, vermin-ridden cell of a Moroccan prison. In both novels, the ability to endure turns on a refusal to abandon oneself coupled with a need to understand that self more fully.

Or perhaps the more appropriate comparison is to Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights. Both women, after all, are telling stories to save their lives and in the process hope to save their one-man audience. “Look, it’s been three weeks now that you’ve been living with a bullet in your neck,” the woman tells her husband. “That’s totally unheard of! No one can believe it, no one! You don’t eat, you don’t drink, and yet you’re still here! It’s a miracle. A miracle for me, and thanks to me. Your breath hangs on the telling of my secrets. . . . Don’t worry, there is no end to my secrets.” The message ought to be clear: stories can save us. To paraphrase the American poet William Carlos Williams, people die miserably every day for lack of such stories.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

David Mitchell
Random House ($26)

by Ed Taylor

David Mitchell couldn’t be hotter. He surfs to the literary beach onThe Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet riding a tidal wave of acclaim and attention; at only forty-one, he is routinely compared by critics to giants such as Dickens, Tolstoy, and Pynchon. Mitchell seems a good soul in addition to a Promethean talent, based on a July 2010 profile in the New York Times Magazine. So a reader opens this handsome book featuring a woodblock cover illustration by revered 18th-century Japanese artist Hiroshige with, for better or worse, some expectations.

Is it “good”? Yes, unequivocably. Is it flawed? Yes, unequivocably. Does it raise distracting questions about itself outside of the world of its story? Yes.

Mitchell’s career-announcing book was The Cloud Atlas, a startling formal experiment with heart that managed to be about being human and also about the novel—a stylistic coup challenging and brilliantly playing with aesthetic conventions of both literature and art in productive, profound ways. The Thousand Autumns, by contrast, is a conventional historical novel, set in Nagasaki, Japan, from 1799 to 1817. Mitchell does indeed demonstrate Tolstoyan reach in creating a kind of Colonial Nagasaki akin to Colonial Williamsburg, a world so deeply imagined you can walk around in it.

The book’s axis is Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch East India Company clerk of intelligence and modesty and incorruptible morality, and his sailing to Dejima, an artificial island built off the coast of Nagasaki on which early European merchants were in essence quarantined so they could trade with Japan but not profane it by actually entering the country. (The island is currently being restored in Nagasaki to create an actual Colonial Nagasaki Historic Experience.) Only one trading ship a year was allowed by the Japanese to land, so service on Dejima was a test of will and the ability to triumph over cutthroat business dealings, disease, boredom, typhoons, earthquakes, and bad luck. Jacob takes this arduous five-year posting in order to make his fortune and return to the Netherlands to marry his true love Geertje, whose father disapproved of the well educated and morally upright but poor Jacob.

Jacob’s story is complex and wrenching, and related in the present tense; we are always (not just in Jacob’s sections) in the moment. And momentous things happen in this story—there is war (the clash of empires being a Big Theme here), and betrayal, and extensive cruelty, and, getting to one of the puzzling bits, a climactically sinister religious retreat. However, the author chooses to have much of the action in the story reported, via characters—at times related through “conversation” that reads more like exposition, a no-no taught in Novel Writing 101—and dialogue that others have pointed out is historically inaccurate. Regardless of historical inaccuracy (not necessarily a deal-breaker), more troublingly they often sound like characters in a book.

As a result the ornately wrought, careful observation is fully present for the reader, but feels at best like a neutral surface, and on occasion even disjunctive. There is deep emotion here, and life and death, and pain and joy and love, and the clash of cultures: all beautifully handled at the sentence level, but kept, perhaps too often, at the arms’ length distance of a museum’s objets.

While the writing is exquisite and the imagination Olympian, this is a novel that on occasion feels worked to within an inch of its life. This burnishing and stylistic self-awareness reach their apex near the book’s climax, in a narrative soliloquy in which a Japanese magistrate contemplates life as he faces his own death. “Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas, and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells.” What follows is a full page of intensely observed life that rhymes (a technique used nowhere else in the book—so the choice here raises questions). Is this brilliant, innovative style enriching an experience of the world, or self-conscious ornamentation that actually works against the content? (For what it’s worth: rhyme is grammatically difficult and uncommon in the Japanese language.)

Another conundrum is the previously mentioned sinister religious shrine, a mystery that slowly unfolds within what is essentially a story of yearning and unrequited love: Jacob falls for Orito, a disfigured Japanese midwife bravely studying, against all odds of both Japanese and European cultures, medicine. Orito is the link between West and East, and Jacob’s past and future, and between the parallel stories of Dejima and of Mount Shiranui Shrine, a mysterious mountain castle ruled by a powerful Lord Abbot and accessible to no one. Shiranui becomes increasingly gothic, as Orito the midwife is “traded” to the Abbot to pay family debts and taken by force to the mountain shrine, to what end no one knows.

The spooky cult of the shrine and its secret “12 Creeds” present a curious tonal shift from the close-grained quotidian life of Dejima and Nagasaki. Further complicating things is that as secrets are revealed, the Lord Abbot who sits like a spider at the center of the plot web begins to sound like Ming the Merciless in “Flash Gordon” movie serials of the 1930s. “Why do you mortal gnats suppose that your incredulity matters?” and “If you knew, Shiroyama, you horsefly, what you’ve done . . .” and “The creeds work, you human termite! Oil of souls works!” This “oil of souls” and how it is made is the mountain’s darkest secret, and this secret itself is also something, surprisingly, verging on melodrama.

The novel’s resolves, post-Shiranui, elegiacally and autumnally and beautifully. Mitchell is brilliant, and the fictive world here generally lives and breathes in ways that lesser mortals can only envy. You can indeed enjoy a prodigious talent here—if you can, to adapt a Buddhist concept, read with a light touch.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($28)

by Tim Jacobs

For those who like their fiction burly and tough, and have an abiding fascination with the difficult (to use Yeats’s phrase), Jonathan Franzen isn’t your man—he eschews the difficult and has declaimed in an essay on William Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult,” that literary fiction needn’t be challenging to be resplendent art. His latest novel, Freedom, exemplifies this point of view, as it breaks no new ground in the area of narrative technique—the book, in fact, very much recalls its predecessor, The Corrections (FSG, 2001), which won the National Book Award for its well-written and accessible portrayal of the dysfunction of an American family.

Franzen’s fiction is best when it explores relationships. He is good at dramatizing the trivial, tricky, tender, and toxic aspects of our personal relationships and understands the complex ways we fall in and out of love with ourselves, others, pursuits. He skillfully articulates the intricate ways that relationships are held together like a Macgyver invention, with found twine and chewed Juicy Fruit. And he knows how to create compelling characters that feel like real people who suffer silently.

Freedom charts the rise and fall of a typical, middle class St. Paul, Minnesota, family, the Berglunds: Walter and Patty and their kids, Joey and Jessica. While the Berglunds have plenty of typical familial discord, little actually happens in the way of plot. Franzen, it seems, is a believer in the dictum that character is plot. It’s primarily the story of Walter and Patty’s courtship, marriage, infidelity (Patty’s), separation (six years), and eventual reconciliation after Walter’s post-marriage love, his executive assistant, Lalitha, is killed in a car accident—the dramatizing of which is farcical and syrupy. En route, plenty of neighbors fill in the background, as do the modest doings of the children.

While the novel is putatively about the Berglunds, this is singularly Patty’s story. Much of the narrative is delivered through an autobiographical manuscript that Patty writes—tediously in the third person about herself—at the supposed urging of her therapist, who never appears in the novel (neither does any mention of the therapeutic sessions, oddly enough, for someone who is supposedly depressed). After only twenty-six pages of perfunctory introductory material in which an array of largely unimportant characters are paraded, we are immediately forced into Patty’s turgid, self-indulgent autobiography, Mistakes were Made, for 161 dreary pages—and for another thirty pages for her “Conclusion” later on—that are nearly enough to put off the adventurous reader.

In the autobiography, we get Patty unplugged: we understand that she’s the misfit of her family because she’s an accomplished high school and college basketball player in an unathletic family; we learn that she is date-raped during high school; we follow her through her college years at the University of Minnesota; we get her jejune infatuation with Richard Katz, Walter’s college roomie (and, later, a famous rock star); and Walter Berglund’s infatuation with Patty, as well as the courtship, wedding, and blahblahblah of the Berglunds’ collective life. It’s pretty dry reading, of course, because Patty is no writer, and Franzen couldn’t dress up Patty’s prose because then it wouldn’t come off as Patty’s. Still, the voice of the autobiography and the unnamed third-person narrator’s voice in the novel proper are almost indistinguishable, which is a glaring stylistic flaw. But the main problem with the autobiography is that Franzen overrelies on it to deliver the bulk of the novel’s events and backstory. It’s unsubtle writing and a tired metafictional conceit that makes the novel feel as though it was composed in haste, which is disappointing considering the nine-year wait since The Corrections and that Franzen himself has remarked in interviews that he wrote Freedom in a year.

The rest of the novel is devoted largely to Walter’s machinations to protect the cerulean warbler, a songbird close to extinction, through modest federal political intrigue, lobbying, and a Virginia coalmine (it’s complicated); and Walter’s son Joey’s devious move to partner with a shadowy figure to supply used—that is, unserviceable—trucks and parts for the Iraq War effort, which makes Joey a fortune but causes him a good deal of guilt. He attempts to assuage his guilt with a large and morally ambiguous donation to his dad’s political cause. Pushing Wimsatt and Beardsley aside for a second, it’s at times interesting to try and divine what Franzen thinks himself about our self-interest via Freedom. The novel feels occasionally angry, and yet the easy and happy dénouement undermines any implicit critique it may be after.

So readers may ask: what is the point of it all? The quotidian doings of any family become tedious quickly; there must be some larger obtainable point for this exhaustive engagement with the Berglunds and their rock star chum. Unfortunately, the title doesn’t provide much of a clue: “freedom” doesn’t get enough attention for the reader to take it up meaningfully, though the word/concept is deployed explicitly about a dozen times or so. Are we being asked to consider what it means and how we obtain it in our “everything is permitted” era? Are we being enjoined to consider our own freedom via the freedom the characters have to screw up endlessly and yet make whole their lives again? Possibly.

Franzen’s work can be classified as American social realism; he writes large novels that satirize contemporary America, replete with all the recognizable markers and issues of our time. The problem is that their engagement with the cultural issues—here, the Iraq War, the Bush-Cheney administration, special interest groups, the environment, materialism, catty neighbors, relationships—is superficial and stale. There is, of course, real artistic value in dramatizing our silliness and ignorance at a slight remove, but the trotting out of our cultural ills quickly becomes a litany of familiarity.

Franzen’s pal David Foster Wallace once remarked in an interview that “ (what’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price?” This is the missing element in Franzen’s angry social satire. In Freedom we get the familiar discussions of houses, renovations, Volvos, generational anger, politics, war, and the geist of cultural emptiness. But to dramatize the ways that, as Wallace described, we can as human beings push our nostrils above our cretinous little concerns—that we don’t hear much of in Freedom.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Alta Ifland
Ninebark Press ($16)

by Matthew Thrasher

Is Alta Ifland a real person, and if so, does she know real people? Her recent collection of short stories, Elegy for a Fabulous World, doesn’t provide any easy answers. Half memoir, half fantasy, the collection sprawls across two continents and a lifetime, tracing a cast of characters who are barely alive and objects that are barely inanimate. There’s milk that transforms into Miruku, a Japanese man named for the substance; near-sentient office buildings in Los Angeles; and the mystifying Adelaide Bauer, who launches into orbit upon breaking her decades-long silence. Instead of a family tree, Ifland has constructed a ghoulish arboretum of nowhere men and women—people who languish in an incomprehensible void, somewhere between Ukraine and the United States.

Of course, conventional biography is hardly one of her interests; as Ifland tells us on her website, she was “born in a lapse of time, my hand clinging to a dandelion, my feet gripping a vine leaf, my nose on my back, an eye on my ankle.” Yet for every story about being born in a chronological black hole, there is one about a tumultuous cross-cultural marriage (“The Wedding”); for every tale about a boy whose esophagus buds a sapling (“Harry and the Tree in His Lung”), there is another about an ill-fated love triangle between academics (“The Girl, the Professor, and the Wife”). It’s hard to believe, then, that Ifland is not trying to communicate some sort of meaningful experience, one that happened to an actual person in an actual time and space.

The catch is that these brief transmissions of human emotion occur only when you least expect them—in the most unreal stories. Ifland’s American foster parents and Eastern European aunts and uncles are real, but they don’t cry like it, talk like it, or live like it. Rather, they gurgle cryptically on the page, rarely moving beyond the farcical and never conveying the kind of emotional knock-out punch that such trope figures of transcultural memoirs are intended to deliver. In the end, readers turn to figures such as Harry, whose bizarre tree-in-the-lung-predicament generates a rare pathos that eludes Ifland’s more traditional, biographical prose.

Joyriding through Ifland’s world of nonsensical ephemera is no simple task, but it might be worth it just to get in on the joke. In “Random Bus,” Ifland is at her most perplexing, but she is also at her most irreverent. Less a story than a rumor, the narrative unfurls as a furtive exchange between no one and anyone—two nameless heroes who swap the great question of the memoir (do you remember?) for that of the elegy (do you know?). The premise is simple, riffing off the question “have you heard of the random bus?”—a delightfully erratic vehicle that wafts its way through an anonymous urban landscape. Chances are you haven’t.

Moments like these are not only surprisingly emotive; they are tongue-in-cheek responses to the collection’s starker moments as well. “My Life as an Orphan,” for instance, recounts the brutal experience of blending into the Styrofoam melting pot of American consumer culture. This requires much more than just a transfusion of hearts and minds; it mandates a whole cosmetic as well—a cultural facelift that remodels the “scowling mug” of the East European orphan into the neurotic smile of the nuclear family member and the fast food employee.

Such ostensibly familiar stories are legible only in conjunction with their off-the-wall counterparts. By the collection’s end, we no longer care who Alta Ifland is, but we do care about the questions she raises. After all, how can anyone remap a foreign face if they can’t map their own bus routes?

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Kang Kyǒng-ae
translated by Samuel Perry
The Feminist Press ($16.95)

by Sun Yung Shin

From Wǒnso Pond is a novel that tears the veil off a society struggling to transition from a traditional, agricultural way of life to a modern industrial economy. Kang Kyǒng-ae delivers a portrait of the ordinary individuals whose lives are torn apart in the machinery of this transition, which in many ways continues in contemporary South Korea. Here she patiently describes one character’s moment-by-moment attempt to earn a living as a day laborer:

The best workers managed to stack up fifteen or sixteen [bricks]. They put a piece of burlap over their backs, then cut off another strip of burlap, attached it to the ends of the wire, and strapped the bricks onto themselves before standing up . . . And when he looked down at his hands, he saw that they were scraped and bleeding . . . Only then did he notice, to his horror, that each brick had tiny little spines that were stabbing him.

Kang Kyǒng-ae was writing and publishing in the 1930s and ’40s, a time when Japan held a repressive and brutal colonial rule over the Korean peninsula. This novel, her second, gives the reader the daily lives of her characters—their external challenges and the resulting internal turmoil. The novel is structured chronologically and chapters switch perspectives between a handful of main characters, each representing various elements of Korean civilian society: Sǒnbi, a hard-working orphaned girl from the country who must work for a middle-class family who exploits her, and who eventually moves to the city and begins work at a large spinning mill as part of an all-female indentured labor force; Ch’ǒtchae, a young man from the same village whose name ironically means “first,” who goes to the city to become a day laborer; and Sinch’ǒl, a college student who is involved with the bourgeois daughter of S ǒnbi’s employee, and who eventually becomes a “fallen intellectual” and joins the labor movement at the cost of losing his family, his position in society, and his opportunity to have a wife and family.

Government officials and politicians are noticeably absent from the narrative. Kang avoids authorial judgments of politics and policies, letting her characters’ inner thoughts show the dilemmas that result from the abuses of power and the inequities of the distribution of the means of production:

Ch’ǒtchae had lost tenant rights to his fields. The magistrate said that the township office was supposed to help all the farmers enjoy a better life . . . Does that mean I’m no longer one of the farmers? he wondered. I mean, Tǒkho is mayor of the township, and yet isn’t he the one who took away my land? And all because I broke some so-called law by smashing a wagon . . . the law . . . the law . . . Hell, I’ll probably be breaking the law if I don’t do what the magistrate said today either. . . . The law . . . The more Ch’ǒtchae thought about it, the more his doubts about it seemed to creep under his skin. . . . Ch’ǒtchae still tried hard to abide by this ‘sacred and unbreakable thing called the law, but for some reason as the days went by, he’d become increasingly caught up in it.

Kang was born in 1906, one year after Japan made Korea a protectorate, followed by official annexation in 1910. She died six years before the official beginning of the Korean War. Her novel was serialized in 120 episodes in the Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily) newspaper, still in operation today, and wasn’t published in book form until 1949 in North Korea, and it wasn’t available in South Korea until much later. The Tonga ilbo was a paper sympathetic to opposition movements and supported the kinds of narratives offered by Kang and others that exposed the human costs of rapid industrialization. Here Kang describes Sǒnbi’s first lesson at the Taedong Spinning Mill:

The noise coming from the generator and the rotating waku was so ear-splitting that it was almost impossible to concentrate on the factory floor. . . .
From here at station No. 500 the line still stretched into the distance, with hundreds more stations. Her face flushing in the heat, Sǒnbi watched as the thread tips were drawn up and out of the cauldron. Kannan’s hands were already bright pink, scalded by the boiling water. Her fingers were white and swollen.

The novel’s main arc brings us through the characters’ trials and tribulations—each trying to survive in the new economy and each coming to class-consciousness, which brings the warmth of solidarity and the strength of purpose, but at great cost and little hope for actual political or economic gains. We see the risks and actions taken by these ordinary people in order to expose the mistreatment and lies at the Taedong Spinning Mill. The men help from the outside by passing information, and on the inside, the women are at constant risk of being raped and are subject to interrogation, intimidation, continual economic exploitation. There is also the ever-present risk of illness and death because of the extremely dangerous working conditions. One of the great strengths of Kang’s novel is the sensitive way she portrays the emotional lives and friendships of the women caught up in these impossible circumstances.

If Kang could have lived to see the realities of not just the Korean peninsula, still divided today, but the entirety of human civilization and its widening gulfs between the wealthy and the poor, she would, I hope, conclude that her literature is as important as ever. Human trafficking for sex and labor, including the trafficking of children, is at an all-time human high and is estimated at 27 million persons worldwide¹, despite our species’ progress in knowledge, technology, and procedural democracy. According to the U.S. State Department, in the U.S. alone “some 18,000 to 20,000 people are trafficked every year.”² Novels such as From Wǒnso Pond give details and dimensions to the suffering endured by millions of exploited workers and indentured persons around the world, still working in conditions no better (and often worse) than those depicted in Kang’s story.

Kang ends her novel, ultimately a tragedy, with this plea: “People have fought for hundreds and thousands of years in an effort to solve [these human problems]. But still no one has come up with a solution! And if that’s the case, just which human beings will actually solve these problems in the future? Just who?”

¹ http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-human-trafficking
² http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17897131

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Roberto Bolaño
translated by Natasha Wimmer
New Directions ($16)

by Joshua Willey

It’s a relief to know there are still enough people reading fiction to support trends such as the Roberto Bolaño craze of the past few years. The great Viscerealist, may he rest in peace, took the English-language literary scene by storm first with small volumes such as By Night in Chile, then with the landmark volumes The Savage Detectives and2666. Now New Directions, always a patron saint of masters on the verge of obscurity, is fleshing out translations of the bulk of his catalog. Regardless of whether or not you’ve tackled the major works, the fifty-six short chapters which compose Antwerp are crucial to an understanding of the Latin sensation, while at the same time finding the writer working in a mode unique not only in his corpus but in contemporary fiction in general.

It’s debatable whether or not Antwerp is actually a novel, but if we admit it to the category, it is Bolaño’s first, marking a crucial turning point in his career from poetry to prose. As his lasting importance is undoubtedly as a novelist, Antwerp serves not only as an example of early style but as a sort of road map. Bolaño was thematically consistent and the central concerns of 2666’s 912 pages are here in 96. Though Bolaño claimed that he should have been a homicide detective, his descriptive precision and sense of aesthetic drama betray the faculties of a filmmaker.

The poet Bolaño is still close to the surface here. He’s years of desk time away from the narrative lucidity and focus of 2666. He actually appears willfully unconcerned with narrative, as least in the traditional sense. Rather, we have the juxtaposition of images that are so powerful they manage to create their own interstitial logic. The noir archetype is strong in Antwerp, but it’s a noir tinged with an irrationality you’d never find in Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, let alone in Jules Dassin or Billy Wilder (though you might find it in Bolaño peers such as Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami). Waiters walk along a deserted beach, uncanny scenes unfold deep in the woods, people get on and off highways, go in and out of rooms.

Bolaño said Antwerp was the only novel he felt proud to have written. Was he joking? If not, why did he wait over a decade to release it? One obvious answer: nobody would have published it. Antwerp is a bit like a celebrity gossip magazine. Nobody would care about these pained paragraphs if Bolaño had never taken up subjects like Mexico City in 1968 or the Juárez murders. But sometimes the works that seem most minor, most flawed, can reveal a writer’s message just as compellingly as a masterpiece.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Daniel Kehlmann
translated by Carol Brown Janeway
Pantheon Books ($24)

by Salvatore Ruggiero

Daniel Kehlmann’s new work, Fame, may be one of the few examples of a collection of stories that when brought together actually constitute a novel. The nine tales and their respective characters only become stronger and more lucid when seen through the alternate lenses Fame has within. Kehlmann’s book is an exercise in writing without a core, where there is no easily perceptible overarching protagonist that threads the entire narrative together. It is also an exercise in congealment, but one where the adhesive is the reader’s perception.

In the first episode, “Voices,” after many protestations from his wife and child who claim that he’s unreachable, Ebling finally decides to get a mobile phone. Immediately though, he starts receiving phone calls for a man named Ralf. The callers all have different voices, young and old, male and female. And Ebling can’t figure out why he’s receiving someone else’s messages. It only becomes worse when a woman begins to threaten him with ending “their relationship” unless they meet for dinner. In the vein of a Paul Auster novel, Ebling might take on this Ralf personality as he agrees to this meeting; but he then chooses not to show. Yet like an Auster novel, Ebling is aware of his actions due to these mistaken phone calls and the concept of doubling. The narrator states that as Ebling was watching soccer with his son, “he felt an electrical prickling, it was as if he had a doppelgänger, his representative in a parallel universe, who was entering an expensive restaurant at this very moment to meet a tall, beautiful woman who hung on his words, who laughed when he said something witty.”

Moreover, the second episode, “In Danger,” starts with a novelist exclaiming: “A novel without a protagonist! Do you get it? A structure, the connections, a narrative arc, but no main character, no hero advancing throughout.” And herein lies the central conceit. The speaker is Leo Richter, “the author of intricate short stories full of complicated mirror effects and unpredictable shifts and swerves that were flourishes of empty virtuosity.” He feels that he can get away with such a novel concept for a novel because “this was now the age of the image, of the sounds of rhythms and a mystical dissolution into the eternal present—a religious ideal become reality through the power of technology.” There is an optimism here that seems not to have pervaded contemporary literary culture. Metanarrative has always been a part of the prose tradition, from Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, but in Fame, there is something that makes the meta-aspects of the novel feel fresh, as if just discovered.

The rest of the stories bounce off each other, using characters and tales hinted at in other chapters. The phone calls that have been mistakenly going to Ebling finally catch up with the intended receiver, the famous actor named Ralf, who now feels as if someone has stolen his life. A blogger writes an overly long post in order to discuss how he wants to be in a Leo Richter novel. A character in a Leo Richter novel prepares herself for death only to be disallowed such a termination. A self-help author who everyone seems to be reading decides that he wants to retract everything he’s ever written by committing suicide.

Fame appears to have a laissez-faire attitude as it allows its plots and characters to move where they want to move, yet the reader is constantly reminded of the author’s presence, that things can be changed on the author’s whim. Everything is at the mercy of the creator. And yet even the creator succumbs to his own feelings and, more frighteningly, to technology:

How strange that technology has brought us into a world where there are no fixed places anymore. You speak out of nowhere, you can be anywhere, and because nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true. If no one can prove to me where I am, if I myself am not absolutely certain, where is the court that can adjudicate these things?

What do we do when there is no solid ground, when we can’t define the world around us? Such ponderings make this book quite a leap from Kehlmann’s previous novel, Me and Kaminski, which feels lighthearted by comparison. Both are works that search for authorial presence and authorial definition. They seek a subject, but the subject is always evasive.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Joshua Mohr
Two Dollar Radio ($16)

by Adam Hall

At the start of Joshua Mohr’s newest novel, a young woman named Mired (pronounced “Mee-red,” though her emotional state suggests otherwise) is planted in a dental chair getting all of her broken teeth replaced. The first of Termite Parade’s three rotating narrators, Mired likens herself in the novel’s first line to the bastard child of Dostyevsky, Sylvia Plath, and Eeyore, which perfectly maps the ley lines of the author’s ambitions—namely, Dostyevsky’s moral self-flagellation, Plath’s desperate longing, and Eeyore’s cartoonish nihilistic depression. What Mohr supplies this orgy is a thoroughly modern spin on all three that explodes with pyrotechnic prose.

First, the teeth: one second, Derek, Mired’s boyfriend, is carrying an intoxicated Mired up the stairs to their apartment; the next, Mired lies bruised and bloodied at the foot of the stairwell. In his quest for redemption for what he sees as an unforgivable crime, Derek and a broken GPS head to Reno, only to fall prey to a band of loquacious softball players’ vindictive bladders in a passage that calls to mind the absurdity of Kafka and the humor of A Confederacy of Dunces. Mired, meanwhile, abandoned by Derek mid-operation at the dentist, inventories her “Mount Rushmore of Male Failures” while her injuries heal; as she catalogues all the exes who have failed her, she decides to call the one ex that didn’t. And Derek’s twin brother, Frank, the third narrator, an ambitious would-be auteur who yearns to expose humanity as a mob of veiled animals, debates whether or not to tell Mired his brother’s damning secret$mdash;that Derek dropped her on purpose$mdash;and how best to use the revelation for his art.

While the narrators share Mohr’s penchant for dazzling turns of phrase, they are also allowed their own distinct voices: Mired’s despondent ruminations come across as elegiac and resigned; Derek’s chapters burn with a self-pitying rage that threatens to consume him (the titular parade of termites eating Derek’s heart from the inside are his metaphor for the all-pervasive shame); the coldly detached Frank frequently breaks the fourth wall, addressing the reader and christening himself a self-styled “Reliable Eyewitness.” Mohr’s triumvirate of protagonists pine for external validation, some sign that with time they can eventually find the right path. But even youth holds no solace, as Mired bitterly relates: “And the fact that I was relatively young didn’t matter, didn’t hatch the tiniest respite. Why would being young matter if I’d proven time and again too dense to learn from my mistakes?”

Termite Parade flaunts the big burning heart on Mohr’s sleeve, wildly tossing it about to light the way in a relentless search for answers to the unanswerable: How do you forgive the unforgivable? Can you ever really forgive yourself for such a sin? And most importantly, what’s the difference between actual redemption and self-delusion? In the scope of Mohr’s unrestrained vision, Derek and Mired find the only redemption worth attaining is brutal, uncompromising, and never guaranteed.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010