Bill Callahan
Drag City ($10)

by Karl Krause

Sandwiched between a surrealistic dog and a bronze boxer on trap rock, Bill Callahan’s Letters to Emma Bowlcut mails seventy-two messages to a distant lover with humor and elegance. One half of an apparently two-sided correspondence, Letters also portrays a writer of a unique sensibility, wry and gentle at once.

The romantic scaffold of Letters teases the busybody in us enough to hone an appetite for some jangly, oblique prose. As a love affair, Letters is a lopsided disaster: Emma’s lover fills in only the slightest biographical details, and the few indications of any mutual correspondence (e.g., “I’m sorry to read about your skin disease”; “That’s a lot of activity you described”) are filled with a regular, risible vacancy that insists the book lives elsewhere.

The hacks with which Letters doles out its romantic tit-for-tat simplify the elements of infatuation to a negligible place, where the epistle writer’s acute ramblings take hold of the story. Amid a stock tale of attachment and alienation, there are moments of lovely adoration, as much for experience as for distant love: “after, when I am flayed out on the couch, is the only time I see the one star visible through the window so small and high.” In the end, Emma’s lover apparently disappears into a professional vortex, too consumed with his own health and preoccupations to carry on with love.

Callahan’s love poems are a scaffold for episodic punch lines: a blunt barrage of two- or three-liners that come out delightfully dull and undisguised. The letters tumble like words before a lull in conversation: insightful enough to linger, and internal enough to leave detached. If Letters does little in the way of narrative or characters, it does everything in achieving a voice of creative memory. Never important, the letters are sometimes comically dreamy (“When I got up I noticed several complete outfits of clothes in piles on my floor. As if a group of men had dropped them and gone out into the storm naked”), but almost always tonally flat.

Fans of Callahan’s music, recorded under both his own name and the band moniker Smog, will recognize this tone as an echo of the off-tune baritone and heavy lyrics that edit his audience to scale. Through fourteen albums, Callahan has perfected lyrical punctuations arresting enough to transport a listener from hummable ditty to philosophical musing. Always benefiting from some tension between melody and discord, he applies repetition and startling word choices to disrupt a traditional uniformity of meaning and songs, as in this verse from “From the Rivers to the Ocean”:

When you were blind,
You touch things for their shape
Have faith in wordless knowledge
Have faith in wordless knowledge

Not a song, of course, Letters abandons repetition almost entirely, but the startling word choices abound, and make for finely edged lines even without musical accompaniment. Callahan revives common song themes—birds, bodies in water—where the voice seems most at home, as when Emma’s lover wrestles with his ex, Robin: “She just wanted to race and would dart above and below me like a beam of light while I flabbily gasped and flabbily thrashed. Once, I placed my foot squarely on her chest and pushed. But I went nowhere. She wooshed back in the water’s slowness.” And everywhere is Callahan’s punch-line format, familiar in songs such as “Feather by Feather”—

When they make the movie of your life
They’re gonna have to ask you to do your own stunts
Because nobody nobody nobody
Can pull off the same shit as you
And still come out on top

—but the punches feel new in Letters, perhaps ending more certainly, without musical extension and tonal influence to open room for interpretation.

Though its voice is honed and recognizable, Letters in some ways creates a compelling foil for the rock. During the eight years in which Letters was composed and edited, Callahan’s music has grown to include more layered production and varieties of song. His distinct baritone, more and more, comes out somewhere in the middle, recessed in a textural instrumentation. Perhaps Letters offers an upfront place for that voice again—less dissolved by melody, though still beautifully wandering.

The book’s quick jabs suggest heavily edited notes on writing, and build to two surprising final letters that blend a novel continuity with the wry grace that makes Letters a pleasure. Here, Callahan lingers on scenes longer, surveying the medical hum and confusion of elderly housing, where beds look “like something that folds cars in a junkyard.” Soon after this scene, the book is finished, but it has introduced a prose stylist worthy of attention. Callahan apparently has only begun to knock out a narrative voice that will no doubt pummel the next time around.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Hans Fallada
translated by Michael Hofmann
Melville House ($16.95)

by Malcolm Forbes

A mysterious person is dropping mysterious postcards across the city. No case for the police, surely. But the city happens to be Berlin, the date 1940. This is no careless postman or serial litterer at work. The city’s custodians are the country’s rulers, and they have little patience for anything mysterious: mysterious matters are unorthodox and unknown, and that won’t do. The state has to know all in order to rule absolutely. Thus our postcard writer must be tracked down and stamped out.

Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone seems to be a tale we have heard before: the little man versus the totalitarian menace that enslaves him. But Otto Quangel isn’t Sophie Scholl. He is no educated dissident and has no White Rose-type resistance group to seek refuge among. He is a blunt, gruff factory foreman with his wife’s support, but chiefly he acts alone. While the White Rose group printed articulate leaflets that quoted Goethe and Schiller and were aimed at the German intelligentsia, Quangel’s postcards are badly written, riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, and are left rather than distributed—in lobbies and stairwells, addressed to whoever will stumble upon them. Despite the crude writing the message is all too clear, and if he’s caught he will be charged with treason and executed. He’s aware of the risk but he can’t sit tight. Doing nothing is tacitly complying—something he refuses to do.

Enter Inspector Escherich of the Gestapo, entrusted with tracking down “the postcard phantom,” or Hobgoblin, as he dubs him. This sobriquet is apt, for in Escherich’s eyes his quarry is so mysterious as to be otherworldly; what real person in his right mind would attempt to resist the strong arm of the law and iron fist of the state? Quangel thus intrigues him and arouses admiration in the reader. His mission is doomed from the outset, but that makes it appear all the more commendable. An earlier Fallada novel,Little Man, What Now? (1932), tells of one man’s struggle to stay afloat during the Great Depression;Every Man Dies Alone offers a similar tale of struggling, but on a grander scale and featuring, tragically, an unvanquishable foe. This Goliath can’t be slain, but that doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to spur on our diminutive hero.

Every Man Dies Alone is monumental for the modern reader, but of course, the book will have its detractors, critics less of its quality than of its content. In Britain and America, after all, two World Wars and one Cold War still sell. Saving Private Ryan spawned Band of Brothers. Schindler’s List captured Academy Awards and arguably paved the way for Life is Beautiful to do the same four years later. Spy novelists write period pieces with the Berlin Wall still standing, partly out of nostalgia, and partly because Soviet Russia is a more visible and therefore interesting enemy than amorphous al-Qaeda. That said, we may have reached our saturation point. The Germans in particular want to move on; most German writers and filmmakers have had to use these conflicts as a backdrop in order to get a stab at success in the English-speaking world. The truth is, we are still beguiled by the horrors of the 20th century. Two German films from recent times, Das Leben der Anderen and Der Untergang, could translate fluently into Anglo-American critical acclaim because the Stasi still scare us and Hitler’s downfall, more than anyone else’s, inspires patriotism rather than pity. It will be interesting to see if a new German film, Goethe, makes it onto an Oscar shortlist or even into a London cinema. Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, based on Bernhard Schlink’s book of the same name, also had Nazism as its subject matter, and if we felt uncomfortable wondering if we should have any sympathy for Kate Winslet’s character (is the notion of a “good Nazi” oxymoronic?), we knew we were witnessing another competent handling of this brutal and tragic era.

As for other detractors, it has to be the all-pervading bleakness that repels; many will shun the misadventures of Otto Quangel because his travails can only lead to tragedy. What’s the point in reading a book where good can’t trounce evil? Why root for a character if he has no hope at winning? But not every novel can have a cheery conclusion. We can take Tennyson’s line and twist it: “better to have resisted and lost than never to have resisted at all.” Fallada portrays Quangel as an anti-hero who almost knows his fate but won’t let that dent his bravery or sway him from his proposed course of action. In a marvellous head-to-head with Escherich, after being told he is no more than a gnat trying to take on an elephant, Quangel retaliates with, “I had to fight, and given the chance I would do it again.” Later, when he is in the dock, Judge Feisler (based on Roland Freisler, the head judge of the Volksgerichtshof—people’s court—who sentenced Sophie Scholl to death) screams at him, calling him ungrateful because under National Socialism he has been able to save money: “To oppose the commonweal that cared for you...You don’t know the meaning of gratitude.” Quangel has been biting the hand that feeds him, but for him it is a hand that also has the power to strangle him. Undaunted by Feisler’s hysterics, he mocks the Nazi fantasy of the Thousand-Year Reich. This has echoes of Sophie Scholl chiding the real Judge Freisler: “You know as well as we do that the war is lost. Why are you so cowardly that you won’t admit it?” Quangel is sentenced to death and is congratulated by his cellmate for opposing evil and for having “behaved decently till the end.” Indeed, his bravery continues right up to the last seconds of his life. When his back-up plan fails, he accepts his punishment silently and stoically.

Escherich’s Hobgoblin, the phantom postcard writer, is dispatched by a regime that won’t tolerate subversion in any form, making the book a triumph of the spirit rather than the body. Quangel’s cellmate tells him that we all die alone but our deaths aren’t in vain. “Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.” This could have been a saccharine moment in a maudlin finale, but Fallada doesn’t waver. His authorial control throughout the book is superb—critical but never judgemental, mirroring events rather than preaching against their wrongness—and it is a testament to his mastery that as readers we don’t feel we’ve been here before. Every Man Dies Alone shines new light on a dark chapter, and Quangel is an original, unspectacular hero fighting the only way he knows how. The only mystery that remains is who, if anyone, will make the film adaptation of this extraordinary book.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Jeff Parker
DZANC Books ($16.95)

by Charles Dodd White

Contemporary short stories of true weight have the ability to transform our view of the world we inhabit, as they can trigger a moment of clarity amid an increasing saturation of cultural noise. Jeff Parker's story collection, The Taste of Penny, succeeds brilliantly in this regard, exposing personal and political absurdities with a supple, serio-comic tone and wire taut dialogue.

Intent on demonstrating exactly how we make meaning of our lives, Parker's stories engage the reader at the gut level. They provoke an immediate identification with their characters' various modes of being, whether from a standpoint of cultural isolation, as in stories such as “False Cognate” and “The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady,” or from the more familiar contemporary vantage of personal loneliness, as in the cycle of “James Stories” and the surreal yet quietly poetic “Our Cause.”

Parker's power as an artist rests solidly on his ability to bring genuine tenderness to stories that could easily slide into semiotic chatter. This is most evident in the stories “False Cognate” and “The Boy and Colgnate,” which use the trope of language confusion as a locus for the characters' existential anxieties. Instead of erring on the side of intellectualizing the conceptual quality of his fiction, Parker retains a vital and strikingly human interest in the way people are tangibly affected by the breakdown of sincerity. For this reason, these stories are buoyed by an unapologetic and deeply complicated sentimental sensibility that never strays into the easy cynicism and banal cleverness a less mature writer might resort to as a convenient escape hatch. Parker is comfortable in standing behind his fiction, and this confidence informs the collection throughout.

Interestingly, the most obviously political story in the collection, “An Evening of Jenga,” is paradoxically the most apolitical because of his remarkable handling of tone. Involving a seemingly harmless game of tower building among a group of variegated expatriates, the buried resentment of the narrator arrives with dramatic and terrifying force, exposing the kind of disquieting violence in the American imagination that is indivisible from national policy in the post-9/11 world. In this story, Parker does not demure from portraying ugly paranoia from a disarmingly non-judgmental perspective. The congenial guidance of moralizing is absent, making it a blank-faced insight into how we live with profound hate of the Other.

Parker's first book, the novel Ovenman (Tin House, 2007), treated the experience of service industry subculture. In The Taste of Penny, he retains much of the humor and sharp prose of that effort, but expands his powers of compassion, humanizing the most brutal elements of a world that often blinds itself to its own brutality. The result is clear-eyed, necessary, and above all, sincere.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Buddhadeva Bose
translated by Arunava Sinha
Archipelago Books ($15)

by André Naffis-Sahely

You can profit by memories—you can even steal them—but you can't extirpate them. And yet, for what constitutes such a rich part of our consciousness, we can't help but want to be rid of them. “What's the value of memory?” asks one of the characters in My Kind of Girl, “None!” another retorts, “Eats into work, wastes time, makes you sad.” Unfortunately for the latter, he and his impromptu friends have nothing but time on their hands—and far worse ways to waste it.

In Buddhadeva Bose’s fine novel, a derailed cargo train strands a doctor, a writer, a contractor and a bureaucrat together for a single night. It's winter and the quartet trundle into the first-class waiting room at Tundla station. As the prologue unwinds, the men order coffee and stretch out; a tin of cigarettes is passed round. Time proves difficult to pass, and after a half hour of idle chatter, the mood in the waiting room turns a rather bleak shade of grey. At that point, two newlyweds, “lost—still—in their love for each other” peer into the room. Taken by surprise, the four men stare blank-faced at them, and the couple, unsurprisingly, leave.

They didn't look like first-class passengers,” said the doctor.
“No, not because of that,” said the book lover with the furrowed brows, speaking from his corner for the first time since he'd entered the waiting room. “Not because of that. They went back when they saw us.”
A faint smile appeared on the smooth face of the bureaucrat. “I see. Honeymoon. In love. Well, tonight at least, they won't be happy.”
“Not at all,” the reader of books replied carelessly. “They will find a cozy, private spot for themselves, they will enjoy it. They don't want anything else, they just want privacy.”

The writer, as we learn by the end of the book, is correct. He later finds the two lovers snuggling under a single blanket “behind a pile of packing cases” on the platform—self-satisfied in the luxury of their solitude. The volume concludes with that image, yet the newlyweds, like the pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales or the plague in The Decameron, are but a backdrop. Thus inspired each of the men proceeds to share the great love story of their lives—which in Bose's charming and chatty prose provides us with tales as entertaining as either of those of its predecessors.

The first of the four stories, “Mankhanlal's Sad Tale,” places us in the context of Calcutta's shifting class boundaries during the Second World War:

It was an amazing time. There were no people in Calcutta, you couldn't add another person to Calcutta, Calcutta bombed, thousands of people dying on the pavement. The two-paise stuff cost twelve annas; neither rice nor sugar, coal nor salt was to be found; all you could get was khaki, jobs, and a bounty of easy cash.

Mankhanlal, dim but well intentioned, comes from a family of Bengali Oblomovs, landowners whose wealth and status has slowly faded into debts and desuetude. His mother, obsessed with elevating her children's status through education, is adamant that her son graduates from college—a task to which Mankhanlal passively lends his consent, without, of course, bothering to “crack a single book.” Not satisfied with her son's B.A., Mankhanlal's mother wants to marry him off to her next-door neighbor's daughter, Malati, whose acquisition as a daughter-in-law will lend the family even greater prestige. Though they are impoverished intellectuals—Malati’s father is a college professor—they turn down the mother's offer in disdain, considering Mankhanlal and his family nothing but nouveau riche, tainted by boorish ways and calloused hands.

Notwithstanding this social affront, Mankhanlal's is a star on the rise. Education soon proves more a feather than a tool, and expanding on his father's fledgling furniture business, Mankhanlal, taking advantage of Calcutta's boom, is soon a millionaire. Things, on the other hand, turn out quite differently for the professor's family. Though Malati, now a graduate, finds employment in an office, she cannot keep the family afloat. Her father's pay is an arrears, and though there's plenty of work to be had in Calcutta, who needs private tuition when there's money to be made? The professor soon falls so far behind on his rent that his possessions are dragged out of the house while the family, helpless, huddles on the floor in a corner of the bedroom. Mankhanlal, who unlike his mother harbored no grudge against the family, pays off their debts. Not that Malati expresses gratitude—she insists she will pay him back and refuses to acknowledge his presence further. The story ends.

The only tale to end happily, in a way, is the third, “Dr. Abani's Marriage,” where a famous writer's sister-in-law falls in love with the doctor's friend, only to marry the former once she's gotten over her one-sided crush. My Kind of Girl, however, is more than a sliding panel of love stories; it is a social document, it is a period piece which depicts the country in a violent state of flux. Women's rights are largely absent, while racial and caste prejudices remain as fixed as ever, despite the increased mobility. The last tale, “The Writer's Monologue,” offers a few insights into the insecurity of rural (mostly eastern) Bengalis versus their “street smart” Calcutta cousins. Still, these faults are at least recognized—and portrayed in an appropriately realist if soft-hearted manner.

“Is the memory of happiness that has passed happy or sad?” asks the contractor. “Somewhere in between” the book seems to answer. Originally published in Bengali as Moner Mato Meye in 1951, My Kind of Girlis one of Bose's lesser-known efforts, but this translation, previously published by Random House in India last year, is another fine addition to Archipelago's growingly impressive list of world literature.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Thomas McGuane
Alfred A. Knopf ($26.95)

by Steve Street

"Into the shitcan with everything ironic for the fun of it,” thinks the anti-hero of Thomas McGuane’s 1973 novel Ninety-Two in the Shade, which was to American literature something like what Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band was to popular music six years earlier, in maybe something of the tone of “Paint It Black,” too. With its harsh absurdities of character and plot and the furious energy of prose like glorious laughter from a clown vaulting over a cliff, it was one of the books that made an entire generation of readers want to write.

What can be charming in an anti-hero is less so in a real literary hero, however. The first few chapters in McGuane’s latest novel, Driving on the Rim, threaten to offer belly laughter and nothing more, thus raising the specter of decline—whether of a great writer’s abilities, the culture at large, or the power of the written word itself. Fortunately, by the end of the book readers will find they have been compelled by a wit as devastating as ever and a prose that is precisely evocative of the unknowable human soul and the fierce beauty of the natural world.

McGuane’s spiritual concerns, too, are hard to miss now. His narrator’s mother, for starters, is such a staunch Pentacostalist that when she’s eventually committed for public manifestations of faith, she “pronounced it wonderful to see that Jesus was there too.” His father’s a World War II veteran and deserter who still lives mostly in those years, though he goes through the motions of his wife’s faith as the three of them struggle through a hardscrabble life most identifiable by a period when they travel en famille as itinerant rug-cleaners. A theme of oddballs and misfits runs through the novel, as it did in McGuane’s early work; but the first thing we learn about the narrator, Berl, is that his full given name is Irving Berlin, “author of ‘God Bless America’”—inviting us to read his story as connected to, if not symbolic of, this country at its moment in time.

Driving on the Rim’s moment is indeed current: over the course of its story the events of 9/11 occur, though Berl happens to be out of the country, and they occasion quite some somber reflection from him, if little overt connection to subsequent plot events. In the present plane of the narrative, much of the central action centers on the administration of a health center and the possibility of malpractice. The young Berl, with the help of a neighbor who steps in as moral guide and hunting mentor, becomes a doctor, originally for that most red-blooded of American aspirations—money—while engaging with women in a way that’s less single-minded: the young Berl seems a bit more like Tom Jones than current, insightful, or even sensitive.

But soon Berl’s motives and worries expand and deepen, even as his memories and daily events amble along at the ruminative pace of a small Western town. Even the most mundane of objects there is rendered with the precise, enlivening detail of someone who knows them inside and out and appreciates their true value, things like “a twenty-gauge Winchester shotgun with brass tacks in the stock like an Indian gun” and “a white Shakespeare Wonderod and a Martin Blue Chip reel.” Of course, the only real wonder is that McGuane, author of the essays about everything from tying flies to Isaak Walton collected in The Longest Silence, interrupts any actual fishing that Berl starts to do with unscheduled patient visits or other plot events. But McGuane’s keen eye and command of the exact names of everything—trees, grasses, wildlife, Montana land formations, the type of German tanks that traumatized Berl’s father (Königstiger), even a snowplow “spewing a great falling wing . . . on the roadside”—is beyond a writer’s mastery of technique. “I seized on everything,” Berl says in the emotionally charged aftermath of a murder/suicide that congeals into the core of his spiritual crisis as well as a central plot device, “wishing I might always be able to seize on everything.”

McGuane does the same in every sentence. He never drops a stitch—even literally, when Berl treats a moderate cut in a boy’s foot from a piece of broken glass: “I gripped the suture needle with a needle driver—actually an ordinary hemostat . . . and began quickly stitching, making certain the needle penetrated below the base of the wound before rotating it out, reaching through to pull up the loops and tying the square knot.” On this book’s publication, its author told a New York Times reporter he believes a novel’s main aim should be to entertain, and with plot turns like a switchback mountain road, and several small towns’ worth of quirky, delightfully observed characters, Driving does just that, if occasionally with the breathless grin of a Vaudeville hoofer in the second show of the night. McGuane can be as irreverent and bawdy as any lifelong teenager—“Saint Theresa can make Christ sound like a nine-battery Chinese vibrator,” Berl reflects—but what he broods on increasingly, through plot strands that dangle and cross like a loosely held loop of prayer beads, is sin: “In the words of my late mother, I understood I would have to be shriven.”

So the haul both he and his creator are in for is the long one. “Literature is the ditch I’m going to die in,” McGuane told that reporter, but he’s not dead yet, and Driving on the Rim has as many allusions as quips—to Seneca, Pablo Casals, Patsy Cline, ZZ Top, John Donne, Socrates, Harry Truman, Michael Jordan, and others—all the range you’d expect from a recently appointed member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters who was once known as Captain Berzerko. But the sparks he sends out now are from a steady stroke. Even minor characters are evoked with something of the same quality Berl expresses about breathlessly watching a she-wolf hiding its six pups: “surprise that a wolf doesn’t look like anything else on earth.”

Between the entertainment, the artistic mastery, and the frank spiritual quest, the total effect of Driving on the Rim is uplift. “Prolonged bad weather aroused distaste for one’s fellows, but life had taught me that the quality of light could enlarge the heart,” Berl says. So can this book. Even if it doesn’t make you want to write, it’ll make you want to travel West, read more McGuane, or simply keep on living.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Daniël Robberechts
translated by Paul Vincent
Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95)

by Laird Hunt

That’s how his Avignon is. A collection of streets that proceed at the speed of a pedestrian in a hurry, of boulevards that glide past at the speed of a bus; a town that revolves like a turntable with the increasing or decreasing speed of an arriving or departing train. . .

The 20th-century Flemish writer Daniël Robberechts knew what he was doing when he used the participial “arriving” in the title of this fascinating work: not only is his young protagonist constantly alighting in and around the southern French city without ever seeming to have actually arrived there—just as he is constantly attempting to make meaningful contact with the shifting objects of his youthful heart’s desiring—but the narrative built around this relentlessly indefinite state of affairs is equally, energetically tentative. So, if Arriving in Avignon is very far indeed from resembling run of the mill coming of age tales, it splendidly describes and embodies the quicksilver terrain between life recalled and life recounted.

Robberechts employs the third person to describe a young man who was or was not himself as he pays repeated almost visits to Avignon, a modest, handsome city most famous today for its jazz festival and a song about one of its bridges. He also frequently adopts the stance of an upfront, unreliable narrator—probably he thought or said or wondered something, but he can’t be sure; what he is describing happened years before and who can keep track of all the things that happened (not to mention are happening) in one’s head. Other times, Robberechts (or his narrative doppelgänger) steps in, using the first-person, precisely to set the record straight: “And now he can clarify: What I was longing for at the time, consciously but hopelessly, was an encounter with a Réa or a Hansi. . .” These moments of narrative intervention, which discuss events in the past tense, are all the more striking because the main body of the text—the young man’s encounter with Avignon and its inhabitants—is told in the present tense.

If all this sounds like the terrain of fiction, fiction of a jaunty, post-war experimental stripe, that’s because it is. It’s also not. Arriving in Avignon,first published in Flemish in 1970, is novel, memoir, guidebook, journal, bildungsroman, travelogue, and prose poem combined. Which is to say that Robberechts was Sebaldian before W. G. Sebald had published any of the boundary-blurring prose works that made him so famous. Still, given that comparisons to Sebald have become so common as to be almost meaningless, it might be more useful to evoke Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris, that 19th-century collection of vaguely autobiographical prose sketches that circle around their central theme, or Dumitru Tsepeneag’s more recent Vain Art of the Fugue. Still, Arriving in Avignon is its own strange and gorgeously sprightly thing. Here’s hoping that as many readers as possible will discover it.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($26)

by Yevgeniya Traps

In Nemesis, his thirty-first book, Philip Roth returns to the well-trod ground of the Weequahic section of Newark, the setting of his first published work and the childhood home of some of Roth’s best-known protagonists—and of Roth himself. And, because the novel’s key figure, phys. ed. teacher and summertime playground director Bucky Cantor, is, unlike his Newarkian predecessors, “largely a humorless person,” the book, especially in the first of its three sections, reads like a paean to Weequahic, a kind of paradise that will be, in the course of the novel, irrevocably lost.

The novel’s title officially refers to the polio epidemic that strikes Newark in the summer of 1944. As war rages in Europe and the Pacific, the specter of paralyzing illness looms over the city’s playgrounds, threatening the “beautiful Jewish children” who are the pride and joy of their community. But the title also evokes Paradise Lost, hinting at Satan or “adversary,” at the destruction of Eden. Nemesis is not, by any means, a work of the same scope as Milton’s epic poem, but it is perhaps the strongest of Roth’s recent short novels. (These works—Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling—have been grouped, in the list of “Books by Philip Roth,” under the heading, “Nemeses: Short Novels,” suggesting that Roth’s project in recent years has been the delineation of the enemies that threaten the fragile bliss of human happiness.)

But whereas Paradise Lost suggests that man is expelled from Eden through sin and willful transgression, Nemesis insists on “chance, and…the tyranny of contingency.” Even more frightening is its suggestion that man is undone not by his worst instincts but by his finest qualities. Bucky, brought up by his tough but loving grandfather and a kindly grandmother—his mother having died in childbirth and his father, a small-time gambler and embezzler, playing no part in the boy’s life—is, above all, fundamentally decent, neither brilliant nor self-reflecting but utterly devoted to doing the right thing. Kept from enlisting in the army by his poor eyesight, Bucky devotes himself wholeheartedly to bringing out the best in his young playground charges, but soon finds those in his care succumbing to polio. Questioning the God that could permit the senseless destruction of children, the God that could permit the death of the mother he has never known, Bucky flees from damaged Newark, taking up his fiancée’s invitation to join her at a Poconos summer camp. But his escape is freighted with the sense of exile, and when the vagaries of chance collide with Bucky’s sense of responsibility, tragedy becomes inevitable.

Nemesis is a profoundly sad book, though it is not, in a departure for Roth, an angry one. Bucky, not given to introspection, sees his future and his sense of self undone by circumstances he cannot understand. And though his life offers no possibility of returning to paradise, Roth allows, in the book’s beautiful closing moment, his tragic hero a final note of redemptive grace, an elegy of sorts to a lost paradise.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Robert Walser
translated by Susan Bernofsky
New Directions ($24.95)

by Brent Cunningham

If someone lent you a time machine and asked you to go back a hundred years, make contact with an obscure writer, and provide them with instructions for how to become the perfect literary cult figure for the early 21st century, your best course of action (after, perhaps, expressing surprise that the person owned a time machine, as well as a degree of measured outrage at their disappointing idea for how to use it) would be to go to Switzerland, find a certain Robert Walser, and pretty much let him be himself.

As experienced time travelers may one day confirm, it is difficult for us non-travelers to appreciate just how out of sync Walser was with his own era, as opposed to how comfortable and appropriate he seems in ours. Back then, eccentricity in a writer’s style didn’t count for half of what it counts for today (“eccentricity“ is now the raison d’etre of whole publishing projects), and an indeterminate approach to irony and sincerity was nowhere near the fashion it has recently become. Similarly, at the high water mark of heroic modernism it was surely not a compliment to be called, as W. B. Sebald later called Walser, the “clairvoyant of the small.” But while Walser might have been nearly forgotten during and immediately after his own time, by the 1970s his reputation began to grow appreciably, both in his native Switzerland and outside it, greatly helpedin America by the likes of Susan Sontag. Now, in the last ten years, the Walserian revival in the U.S. has started to kick into an even higher gear.

Much of the recent attention is due to the strength of Susan Bernofsky’s new translations. Walser has been quite lucky in that regard, since the earlier Christopher Middleton translations were also great, but Bernofsky has the torch and is sprinting with it, having recently brought out the first English translations of two of Walser’s published novels, The Tanners (2009), and The Assistant (2007), both on New Directions. With four novels and a goodly number of short stories now in translation and in print (although there are apparently hundreds still untranslated), Bernofsky and New Directions have turned to some of the more obscure works of this formerly very obscure writer. Microscripts, released earlier this year, is a selection of short sketches and treatments very much in Walser’s usual sinewy and suspiciously polite style, written by “your colossally humble servant” who nevertheless demands that we, without fail, be satisfied with him. As becomes abundantly clear in these short works, no one does the direct address with as much faux-or-possibly-not-faux earnestness as Walser, just as no one throws in as many digressive and seemingly superfluous qualifying phrases while still managing to keep the vast quivering bundle of strings from unraveling. The ultimate effect of both these techniques is to foreground not only the emotional vacillation and mannered remoteness of Walser’s narrators, but the vacillation and remoteness of grammar and language in general—a very contemporary effect indeed.

Adding significantly to the curiosity-factor, these twenty-five pieces were originally written in an almost microscopic script that densely filled the corners of envelopes, the backs of postcards and business cards, and the margins of hotel stationary. Since much of that writing was literally too small to read, Bernofsky is in fact translating something that has already been pieced together and to a degree “translated” by Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte when they resized it to fit human eyes. (It can only be hoped that the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, which already boasts a number of exhibits in the field of the extra-small, is hard at work on a new Walser wing.)

Physically speaking, Microscripts is beautiful and extremely well done. There are gorgeous color reproductions of each piece in its original mundane setting, and the German is kindly made available in the back of the book. Bernofsky provides a focused introduction and—worth the price of admission, as they say—a translation of an essay by Walter Benjamin that once again illustrates why the name Walter Benjamin is spoken on college campuses like a mantra. One of Benjamin’s most memorable observations about Walser runs as follows: “Everything seems to be on the verge of disaster; a torrent of words pours from him in which the only point of every sentence is to make the reader forget the previous one.” In that single insight, Benjamin gets at much of Walser’s appeal: the fascinating tension between each sentence and its predecessor or even, in many cases, between the tail end of a sentence and its own beginning. One effect of such a tension is to slow the reader down considerably, forcing them to read at a pace normally reserved for poetry and/or legal briefs. Despite a lovely vocabulary and a zest for descriptions of the natural world, there isn’t much “flow” in Walser—only a sort of ongoing and perennial struggle to change direction, as if pure vacillation, taken to enough of an extreme, might be able to transcend the limits of expression.

It must be said that Microscripts is, almost certainly, not the best place to begin reading Walser. Despite its many gems, this is a book for the Walser completist, or else for that even smaller subgroup, Those-Who-Are-Especially-Interested-In-The-History-Of-Tiny-Writing. Any of the three novels available in English, or one of the available collections of Walser’s dazzling if almost plotless short stories, would likely be better starting points. The reason has as much to do, again, with the curiosity that is Walser’s style: without the contextual setting provided by even his most threadbare narratives, some pieces can come across as chocolately and baroque. Reading the shorter bits it’s possible to miss the overarching humor and mockery in Walser, and especially the degree to which that mockery is itself an outgrowth of existential misery and solitude. True, Walser’s humor often has obscure targets, so that it is persistently unclear if he is mocking himself, his narrator, or—hold on to your hats—we readers. But after spending time in other Walserian works, you at least learn to detect that the intent is generally humorous, and often in the most quotidian of places. For instance, see if you can find the hilarity in the following sentence, one that ends one of the pieces in this book and will now end this review: “This is certainly a peculiar story, and in any case it has never before appeared in print.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Pier Paolo Pasolini

edited by Jack Hirschman
City Lights Books ($16.95)

by Mark Gustafson

Like many people, I first encountered Pier Paolo Pasolini through his film The Decameron. It was a memorable meeting. To a wide audience, Pasolini is known as a controversial filmmaker, but he was a “creative dynamo,” justifiably famous in Italy as a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. His communist viewpoint is what a reader notices first—he was a thoughtful provocateur, an ideologue, and a moralist—but he did not always hew to the party line. His unorthodoxy kept getting him into trouble, as did his frank homosexuality. At the age of 53, in 1975, he was murdered.

Edited by Jack Hirschman, whose eclectic résumé as a poet and activist makes him an apt choice, this new Pasolini anthology balances poems and prose, the latter limited to literary reviews, essays, and interviews. Ten translators are represented, including the editor himself (and, a bit inexplicably, the erudite singer/songwriter Jonathan Richman). While this variety doesn’t hurt the prose so much, it does affect the poetry; the poems’ various forms and relatively consistent themes are obvious, but with several translators Pasolini’s language and tone are more difficult to gauge.

The primary approach of the poems is autobiographical, even confessional—Pasolini writes with touching vulnerability of his youth, his mother, and his sex life, as well as the more universal themes of loneliness, aging, anger, disappointment, and fear. At the same time, concerns with poverty, revolution, and the class struggle are pervasive. “The Coran Testament” ends with a declaration: “Long live the courage and the sorrow / and the innocence of the poor!” A decade later he writes: “Almost forty years old / I find myself in a rage. . . / I’ll never have peace, ever” (“The Rage”). A long poem, “Monologue on the Jews” closes as follows:

Maybe life will begin

when the angels of resignation
—the poor at heart, the meek, the vulnerable,
the wretches, the Jews, the Blacks,

the young, the inmates, the virgins,
the peasants, the people lost
in the innocence of the barbarity,

all those who live dedicated
in humiliating otherness—
will commit violence.

Then life will begin!

Although Pasolini’s “otherness” as a homosexual is just one of several reasons for his deep identification with and sympathy for those on the margins, a few poems aren’t political, or nostalgic, or despairing. In “One of Many Epilogues,” he writes to a lover: “I’m insatiable about our life / because something unique in the world can never be exhausted.” “The Presence” is an appreciation of the soprano Maria Callas.

Pasolini expands many of the same ideas in prose, where his voice seems more mature. (The earliest poem here is from 1941; the prose selections, for some reason, start in the 1960s.) The geographical reach of the prose also is greater. At first, Pasolini enthuses over the younger generation, long hair, the New Left, and the SNCC (in “Civil War”). But he becomes disenchanted as he sees the potential for real change vanish; in the course of “The Hippies’ Speech,” the youth movement is co-opted, absorbed into the bourgeois mainstream.

He clearly admired Ezra Pound, and in two pieces makes an effort to let that founder of modernism, despite his embrace of Mussolini and his anti-Semitic rants, off the hook. Yet elsewhere he is highly sensitive to the reverberations and reappearances of fascism that continued long after its official death in Italy in 1943.

Prose also gives Pasolini room to stretch his intellectual muscles. Semiotics and philosophical speculation are regularly intertwined with political thought. As a literary critic with a distinctive voice, he reviews Marianne Moore, Mary McCarthy, Italo Calvino, Constantine Cavafis, and Osip Mandelstam, along with writers—Campana, Fortini, Buttita—not so well known outside of Italy. Occasional asides, like “Neruda is a bad poet,” seem intended to provoke. He pronounces Charles Olson “a disappointment,” a mere epigone of Pound. His declaration that Apollinaire, Machado, and Cavafis are the three greatest poets of the 20th century is more fodder for argument. A review of Dacia Maraini’s My Women becomes a general discussion of feminism, chauvinism, and what’s happening to women and to men, for both can be victims. “Real problems always begin after rights are given,” he reminds us.

“The less [sic] rights one has, the greater the freedom. The real slavery of the Black Americans started the day they got their Civil Rights. Tolerance is the worst repression.” Paradoxical and prophetic, Pasolini here sounds a little like Noam Chomsky, and his socio-political concerns (including racism, immigration, poverty) have only become more pressing. He felt the burden of his knowledge and awareness, as his final interview makes clear. Speaking truth to power always involves sacrifice. Faced with strong criticism from all sides, he acknowledges his “solitary struggle.” Yet his idealism was unchanged. “My nostalgia is for those poor and real people who struggled to defeat the landlord without becoming that landlord.”

Without a doubt, Pasolini deserves more attention. Hearing his cogent and self-aware voice (“I’m raving here, I realize”) in this book—which one only wishes were longer and more comprehensive—one can’t help but wonder what he would have made of Silvio Berlusconi, the European Union, the uprising in Egypt, and any number of other things. He wanted to keep us alert. “We’re all in danger,” he said, a few hours before he met his death. And we still are.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011