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DICK OF THE DEAD

Rachel Loden
Ahsahta Press ($17.50)

by Janet McCann

Rachel Loden’s major preoccupation, Richard Nixon, dominates again in her electric collections of poems, Dick of the Dead. In this book, Nixon is the door through which pours all the tattered and tacky debris of the twentieth century—politics, art, sex, lies, videotape. He functions, however, as a negative icon. Rather than gathering he splinters; he introduces chaos rather than coherence. As sharers in his society we mirror him, too—we are accomplices, and cannot help recognizing our face in his.

Nixon and his era figured largely in Loden’s own history. She was a “red-diaper baby” reared in the protest movement, which gave her both a difficult childhood and an insider’s knowledge of current events. In an interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket 21, she explains, “My Richard Nixon is not simply Dr. Evil. He’s not (just) a literary contrivance or a way to score small political points. He’s more of a muse. Or a death’s head. Sometimes I think of him as a dancing-master, and we’re doing a kind of aberrant minuet.” Richard Milhous Nixon does indeed dance around in these bizarre, quirky poems; events from his life are threaded amidst current events, memories, bits of history. And this book introduces some new steps.

While Loden has penned previous Nixon-themed works, cleverly combining oddments of strange information in a kind of mad reportage, Dick of the Dead produces a new invasion of twentieth-century ghosts—ghosts from politics and art, ghosts of style, ghosts of belief. These spooks are more literary than previous ones. Wallace Stevens is the fattest ghost; others include Rainer Marie Rilke, Robert Desnos, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath. The poets slip in and out among other elements of the century, from Seinfeld to the Microsoft Corporation.

The book is divided into three sections, “In the Graveyard of the Fallen Monuments,” “The Winter Palace,” and “Another Blue Stretch in the Black Eye Galaxy.” The poem entitled “In the Graveyard of the Fallen Monuments” neatly sets the scene with its quiet beginning:

Sometimes I like to think about Leonid Brezhnev
whose white torso stands here dreaming

in the Graveyard of Fallen Monuments. Leonid,
I say, it’s Dick. Where are your goddam legs?

Seems like yesterday you broke out the Stoli
at your dacha, and we laughed about détente.

Many of the poems start with a bang, yanking the reader in by the hair. Who would stop reading a poem that began, “The disposal of the dead is exempt from VAT”? Or another that begins with a news quotation, “There is a huge backlog of animal patent applications,” followed by the poem’s first line, “Which explains all the barking and thrashing around in the gene pool”? Then there are the riffs. A Rilke fan will be both attracted and horrified by the beginning of “Autumn Daze”: “George, it’s about time. The summer was really gross.” Ditto for the Plath reader as she launches into “The Sylvia Plath Story”: “First, are you our sort of a villain? / Do you wear / Jodhpurs, a codpiece or a crown?”

Notes provide some background for popular-culture references that those born after Nixon’s day might not recognize. Fortunately the notes don’t over-explain the poems, and older readers may find that they are useful for confirming guesses.

How can someone write multiple books centering around a figure like Nixon and still continually be original and fresh? Nixon’s circles seem to be widening in these books; single elements in his life—like the death of Checkers—touch and reflect more and more areas. This book is especially unusual for the range of its styles. Some of the poems are burlesques; some use tight metrical forms; some explore the furthest reaches of free verse. There are poems that deliberately jangle, poems that sprawl crazily across the page, an occasional friendly one that curls up and scratches the back of your neck. They differ too in what they demand of the reader—a few are immediately clear, but most require rereading and yield new meanings with each approach.

Many readers are waiting to see where Rachel Loden’s poetry will take her next, but wherever it is, Richard Nixon will likely go with her.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

THE CLOUD CORPORATION

Timothy Donnelly
Wave Books ($16)

by Stephen Ross

Cloud seeding is a form of weather modification used to alter the type or amount of precipitation that falls from clouds. The procedure works by dispersing substances like silver iodide and dry ice in the sky, either by launching them in a rocket or dropping them from an airplane. Once deployed, these substances cause vapor to condense or solidify around them, possibly creating new weather. Numerous countries currently use seeding techniques to relieve droughts, to clean smoggy air, to prevent rain or snowfall (the Chinese government, for instance, took extensive measures to keep Beijing dry for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics), and even to dampen countercultural activities (the U.S. government allegedly seeded the skies over Woodstock, NY, in mid-August 1969).

Timothy Donnelly’s best poetry operates on a similar principle to that of cloud seeding. He will introduce a phrase, a song, a word, a government report—any metaphysical seed you like—where the mist of thought begins to coalesce around it, occluding it here, polishing it there. In time, the seed and the surrounding thought-cloud will undergo a state change and merge into something new, a “cross-fertilization of intelligence and cloud”. The poem that grows out of this encounter, like a seeded cloud, will carry inside it, at least figuratively, the taint of industrial, commercial, and cultural forces that went into its making, but it will also be a unique environmental phenomenon. The process feels something like

fluctuating on like a soft shifting mass, yielding
instantly to pressure and engulfing any object senseless

enough to have trusted in its surface, incorporating
whatever it can into the grand amalgam of itself
discovering itself and finding everything perfectly
indispensable and pointless . . .

Whereas governments send chemicals into the sky to increase crop fertility or to keep public events dry, Donnelly deploys a range of cultural matter—from Springsteen and Shelley to The 9/11 Commission Report and The Beverly Hillbillies—to spur the release of something rather more nebulous: “A silver line, a souvenir, a sieve of relation”.

While this cloud seeding analogy may seem a bit heavy-handed, something about reading and writing on Donnelly makes one want to overdo it, to partake of the head-clearing license he gives himself to run wild with analogy, metaphor, and the appropriated language of “non-poetic” disciplines (meteorology, in this case). While the debate around “organic” form in poetry long ago grew stale, the broad concept does speak to Donnelly’s methods of recycling or riffing on a set palette of subjects (elements) within a given form (system)—usually the vicissitudes of knowledge and selfhood within the three-line unrhymed stanza. Much like a weather pattern or a financial market, The Cloud Corporation, conceived as a book-length whole, operates on a cyclical logic of accumulation, solvency, and dissolution. But it also stands outside and reflects on these and the other systems on which it is conceptually modeled. It is a “grand amalgam” of biographical fact, emotional fancy, literary convention, and gently ironic reflection on the whole:

its foundation
made of clouds, an anchorage

in sinking down where to know
is to feel knowledge dissolving
into particles of pause, the many

stoppages and starts that shape
by sounding each possible maze

through a landscape of otherwise
perfectly nothing.

Donnelly’s great achievement is to generate, across dozens of poems, an insistent pathos relating to the systems (physiological, financial, natural) that govern our lives. He does this in part by literalizing the figurative language of everyday life—“the metaphors we live by,” especially that the mind is a landscape—and, alternately, by recasting the natural objects of the world in the figurative language of commerce, history, architecture, philosophy, religion, and poetry. This literal-figurative dialectic begins with the titular “Cloud Corporation,” a curious, incongruous coinage that, meditated on, gradually opens into a thousand possible meanings—“The clouds part revealing,” as Donnelly has it. With its focus on questions of collectivity, knowledge, and self, the book might easily have been titled The Intelligence Community(just the sort of horrifically banal phrase that Donnelly would take pleasure in recuperating). Another contender, had it not already been taken and had the book’s organizing conceit been earthy rather than cloudy, might have been Leaves of Grass.

At its best, Donnelly’s patois of the body, the heavens, and the marketplace wipes instrumentalized language clean of accumulated meaning, restoring flattened-out words and concepts to a state of prismatic three-dimensionality. In Donnelly’s usage, “corporation,” yoked to “cloud,” is allowed at least momentarily to stand free of the unpretty connotations it has acquired. In fact, the word must acquire new meaning, because the prospect of the weather itself becoming a corporate resource is simply too painful to consider. But then we realize that it already has:

The clouds part revealing an anatomy of clouds
viewed from the midst of human speculation, a business
project undertaken in a bid to acquire and retain

control of the formation and movement of clouds.

A “mature environmental aesthetic” (Buell, The Environmental Imagination), to borrow Lawrence Buell’s formulation, is at work in this book. If this aesthetic could speak, it would say: “Our selves, like our thoughts and our ethics, are nothing more than emergent properties of the things of this world. As a result, the degradation of the latter directly erodes the integrity of the former. Reflect on yourself reflecting on this.” On the subject of weather modification, Donnelly has some thoughts of his own:

It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s
full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism

than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture
provoke in an audience more positive, lasting
response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature.

Donnelly’s writing often wanders into the realm of what Terry Gifford has called “post-pastoral”: “literature [that] has gone beyond the closed circuit of pastoral and anti-pastoral to achieve a vision of an integrated natural world that includes the human” (Gifford, Pastoral). Donnelly certainly aspires to chart, or at least imagine, an integration (incorporation) of this sort, even as he is also prepared to admit that in most cases it is direly lacking. Regardless of real world conditions, he has invented for himself, in serial poems like “The Cloud Corporation” and “Globus Hystericus,” a formally robust line generous enough to swallow the whole world. In this sense, his poetry stands among other contemporary work that sports with, revises, and upturns the conventions of nature writing in the broad daylight of post-industrial modernity. Such work uses the experimental strategies of modernism—collage, intertextuality, self-reflexive meditativeness in the Stevensian grain—to recover the ethical viability and aesthetic potency of otherwise worn out modes of nature writing like the pastoral. For recent works of a comparable post-pastoral richness and maturity to that of The Cloud Corporation, one thinks of Lisa Robertson’sXEclogue and The Weather, Peter Gizzi’s Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Jennifer Moxley’sThe Sense Record, and Joshua Corey’s Severance Songs. “My green retreat,” Donnelly writes, “has folded, drawn into itself without me / in it”. Later he sketches a harrowing anatomy of modern nostalgia:

Already the present starts plotting its recurrence
somewhere in the future, weaving what happens
in among our fabrics, launching its aroma, its music
imbuing itself into floorboards, plaster, nothing can
stop it, it can’t stop itself. You will never have access
to its entirety, and you have asked how to calculate

what resists calculation, how to control what refuses
to cooperate, but know full well a propensity to resist
and to refuse is the source of its power.

The Cloud Corporation is not eco-poetry (it might not even be nature poetry), but it nonetheless occasions and responds to the sorts of questions that most concern eco-poets. It does so with a political edge, but without limiting itself to a strict political instrumentality. It points one of the more promising ways into the future of environmental writing.

Much more could, and hopefully will, be said about this subject, but for now I would like to conclude by quoting the most beautiful passage in the book, from “Dream of a Poetry of Defense,” in a shameless bid to convince as many people as possible to buy stock in The Cloud Corporation:

As infrastructure to the most invisible
indestructible flower. And infinite. As infinite as pleasure
apprehended through excess. As cross-fertilization

of intelligence and cloud. And as light, and as energy.
As all related instruments indispensable to choruses.
As being differently indispensable. As being harmonious.

As far as “being harmonious” is concerned, Donnelly has done nothing less than “yoke evanescent wonder”.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

DREAMHOUSE KINGS SERIES

House of Dark Shadows | Watcher in the Woods | Gatekeepers | Timescape | Whirlwind | Frenzy

Robert Liparulo
Thomas Nelson ($9.99-14.99 each)

by Kelly Everding

      
 

Adding up to almost 2000 pages, the six books in Robert Liparulo’s Dreamhouse Kings series follow roughly a week’s worth of jam-packed danger and adventure for the King family, Mom (Gertrude or “G”), Dad (Edward), Alexander (Xander, 15), David (Dae, 12), and Victoria (Toria, 9). While their given names are after kings and queens, everyone’s names get shortened for that added sense of urgency and intimacy. Dad uproots his family from Pasadena, California, to a small town six hundred miles north called Pinedale to take a job as principal in the local high school. Needless to say the kids are not happy about this, but they don’t have a choice, and so throw themselves into house hunting for a new home. The house they choose (or that chooses them?) is a fixer-upper to say the least, and from the very start it plays odd tricks on their eyes and ears. The weirdness mounts when David discovers that the linen closet is a portal that transports its occupant to locker #119 at their new high school. And if that weren’t strange enough, Xander and David discover a corridor of twenty rooms in the house’s attic, hidden behind a secret door. Each room contains a bench and a few strange items that give a hint of what lies beyond the interior door. Xander learns their purpose the hard way as he finds himself transported to the distant past right in the middle of a gladiator fight in the Roman Colosseum.

       
 

Despite the reading group guide questions provided at the back of each book, these time-traveling excursions are not harmless educational jaunts, but rather gritty, life-threatening lessons in the war- and murder-prone activities of human history. Liparulo puts the pressure on the Kings with the kidnapping of Mom (who becomes lost in time) and the evil machinations of a sociopathic assassin named Taksidian, who wants to use the house to usher along the apocalypse. The family dynamic comes into play as we learn of betrayals and lies that got the Kings to this desperate situation, and conflicts arise. Dad’s desire to step back, do research, and hold up some appearance of normalcy directly clashes with Xander’s impulsive desire to run head-long into each room and search throughout time for Mom. David at first follows Xander’s lead as the stalwart little brother. But as the days pass, David’s character begins to shine through, not so much as a negotiator, but as an evolving person of steady strength and resolve who dives into danger even though he is scared, and who allows himself to feel compassion for the suffering victims of each violent moment of the past he witnesses, be it the harsh conditions of the Civil War, the relentless Nazi tanks of World War II, or the indiscriminate brutality of crazed Norse berserkers. With every wound and broken bone, David carries on to the bitter end, even with an almost certain prediction of his death at the nefarious hands of Taksidian hanging over his head. Xander and David push the boundaries of their roles as sons and saviors, rising to their destiny as gatekeepers for the house’s time portals. With Dad’s determination, Toria’s spunky nurturing, and the arrival of unexpected help from an aged relative and his caretaker, you can bet the Kings manage to come out on top.

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Click here to purchase Watcher in the Woods at your local independent bookstore
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Click here to purchase Gatekeepers at your local independent bookstore
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Click here to purchase Timescape at your local independent bookstore
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Click here to purchase Whirlwind at your local independent bookstore
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Click here to purchase Frenzy at your local independent bookstore
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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

HUMAN.4

Mike Lancaster
EgmontUSA ($16.99)

by Shawn Patrick Doyle

Human.4 is a clever book by a clever writer, but Mike Lancaster’s greatest asset is that he understands when cleverness goes too far. In his first YA book, Lancaster relies on familiar conceits, but even readers familiar with those conceits will find pleasure in his creative attempts to avoid cliché.

The novel begins as a typical fantasy story. Kyle Straker is a normal fifteen-year-old until he volunteers to be hypnotized at a local talent show. When he wakes, the entire town save for Kyle and his three fellow volunteers sits frozen in state of suspended animation. The four “survivors” split up to investigate: Kyle and his ex-girlfriend Lilly set off to explore the town while Mrs. O’Donnell, a local grocery clerk, tends to Mr. Peterson, the town mailman, who wakes muttering, “They are to us as we are to apes.”

Lancaster builds on this setup with a narrative frame that is more than window dressing. In a preface, he presents himself as a humble editor tasked with providing a transcription of three cassette tapes on which Kyle recorded his story. The editor intersperses footnotes into the transcription to Kyle’s cultural references, which initially provide comic relief: one explains “Teletubbies” as “a word of deep religious significance, referring to a collection of gods or goddesses almost exclusively worshipped by children.” However, when Mr. Peterson suggests that Kyle and his friends are being studied by higher beings, the scholarly footnotes appear more sinister.

While he’s not the first to present a novel as a transcription, Lancaster finds ways to make that structure serve his own purpose, and he never presses a conceit without cause. Perhaps the author’s craft is best revealed in the novel’s double ending. Kyle finds the hypnotist and appears close to finding answers, but the hypnotist suggests that he might simply snap his fingers and Kyle will wake up. The reader fears a hackneyed “‘it was all a dream” ending, and Lancaster teases readers by letting them see what that ending might look like: Kyle begins a new chapter where he tells how he woke from hypnosis, closing with a clichéd “we all lived happily ever after.” Yet that is followed with a chapter that opens: “Except that wasn’t what happened.” The false ending provides insight into Kyle’s motivations, and complicates his emotional state. Kyle’s processing of the event necessarily defines the arc of the novel.

For that reason, readers cannot get too frustrated with the fact that the actual ending feels like it could do more. Kyle comes to accept his new reality, but he glosses over the facts of his life in the new world he inhabits. The full reality of that new world contains complex emotional depths that Lancaster never sounds. Still, if not quite full-fledged invention, Human.4 is an enjoyable proof of an arresting concept.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

LOVE LIKE HATE

Linh Dinh
Seven Stories ($16.95)

by REDACTED

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Recently (as of Winter 2020) Rain Taxi has been made aware of anti-Semitic and anti-Black statements by the author whose book is discussed below. Because of these abominable public pieces, the original reviewer no longer wishes to have their name associated with the author in any way and it has been redacted. Rain Taxi fully denounces those statements and does not in any way encourage its readers to support racist authors at any turn, but we are leaving this piece public as a matter of transparency.]

Linh Dinh’s Love Like Hate is listed by the Library of Congress under the subject headings Vietnamese-AmericansVietnam, and Losers. These terms offer an insightful micro-synopsis of Linh Dinh’s novel, the first by the Vietnamese-American writer known for his paranoiac stories and poems. In Love Like Hate, Dinh presents us with a brutal, unsentimental portrait of modern Vietnam, with all its disillusionment and degradation.

David Mamet has said that there is no such thing as character in drama—only action. Who wants what and how will they get it? In Love Like Hate, Mamet’s thesis becomes the unavoidable question of post-colonial Vietnam, as filtered through the tragicomic ambitions of café owner Kim Lan, her two husbands Sen and Hoang Long, her son Cun, and her designer-branded daughter Hoa. Kim Lan wants Hoa to marry a well-to-do Viêt Kiếu (a Vietnamese living abroad), and decides that Hoa will do this by learning the imperial tongue: English. Through the intrusion of an opinionated narrator, we are led to believe that Kim Lan’s situation is a kind of synecdoche of the Vietnamese obsession with occupying foreign cultures—first France (Kim Lan’s café, after all, is called Paris by Night), then the mega-culture itself, America. “Vietnam is a disaster, agreed,” Dinh writes, “but it is a socialized disaster, whereas America is—for many people, natives or not—a solitary nightmare.”

When the promise of American wealth creeps into his characters’ motivations, Dinh quickly points to the system’s moral bankruptcy and corrosive touch. After all: “America was a country of straight lines and geometric exactness where everything must be quantified: your breasts, your income, your batting average. Life must be constantly measured to show that profits and progress were being made.” And when Kim Lan and Cun (who “resembled a naked mole rat at birth and would go on to resemble a naked mole rat for the rest of his life”) visit a three-star hotel for the first time, they both think, “We’re inching up to international standards.” The modern Vietnam of Love Like Hate assumes that if their country had butter, cheese, and brand names, everything would be all right. Culture becomes a warp and woof of power relationships, in which no one can measure up to globalized ideas of success. “The humiliation of a minor country,” Dinh writes, “is that it is always at the mercy of a major one.”

This observation trickles down to the very relationships between parents and offspring. Kim Lan has grand hopes for her daughter: “She’ll buy and sell and make lots of money . . . she’ll take good care of me in my old age.” Hoa’s subsequent refusal of her mother’s Americanized life, however, leads to a tragic culmination of hate and revenge, whose only solution seems to be escape. But escape where? There is, in the end, “a deep yearning in the Vietnamese psyche to leave Vietnam at the first opportunity. Birds, bees, and salmon do it, but the average Vietnamese can only dream of crossing a border.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

CENTURIES OF JUNE

Keith Donohue
Crown Publishers ($24)

by Andrew Cleary

In the opening scene of Keith Donohue's novel Centuries of June, we see the bloody collision of the narrator’s head against the bathroom floor. "In that instant," Jack says, "the blood became a secondary concern to the hole in the back of my head." When Jack rises from the bathroom floor, his head wound already healing, he returns to his bedroom to find eight unfamiliar women in his bed, any of whom may have delivered the knock to his noggin. To help sort out this mystery, a man appears who may or may not be Jack's long-departed father, though he also bears a likeness to playwright Samuel Beckett.

With every clock in the house stopped at the same early-morning moment, Jack wanders through a bemused fog, struggling to remember how he came to his present predicament. In between stretches of clock checking, Jack repairs to the bathroom, where he is visited one-by-one by the women in his bed. Each of them, ravishing and ravaging, harbors an ancient grudge against Jack, who is unable, we are reminded more than once, to remember who each is or how she arrived in his bed.

To jog his memory, each woman takes her turn recounting her history, and here Donohue's novel exults in languorous sensuality. The recursive mystery of Jack's death recedes before the brazenness of each woman's story. Bawdy and erudite, their tales range deep into history and swirl with sorcery. Dolly, a pre-Columbian Tlingit girl, marries a shape-shifting bear; Alice, a housewife in colonial Salem, may indeed practice the witchcraft she is accused of. Each tale is united by a plot of a wronged woman and a delight in the textural beauty of language. Long Lane Long's story of 17th-century Bermudan colonists scatters "tho"s and "whene'er"s wherever it can, and Flo Worth's tale of the California Gold Rush glisters with varmints and jackanapes.

In an important sense, then, Centuries of June is a romp, and though Jack stumbles through it addled with incomprehension, the humor of its suspended animation echoes indeed Beckett's dark comedy; likewise, the fanciful tales, happy violence, and sensuous, twining language recall the gaiety of Tristram Shandy's endless diversions, and that earlier novel's happy, delaying struggle with death's specter. Unfortunately, Jack seems too slow to keep up with the tales and their allusions. In each interlude between tales he wanders through his house, wondering the same questions about what time it must be, where the cat may have gone, and why, once more, did he find himself brained and dying on the bathroom floor?

Meanwhile, the eternal moment of Jack's morning exerts a captivating pull that trivializes the mere mystery of his death. With each tale through the centuries, the moment is stretched to its limits with infectious brio. Jack comes up with his own modest solution to the mystery, but by then it's too late for him to join us in treasuring the insistent, spellbinding tales of his visitors.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

DANIEL

Henning Mankell
Translated by Steven T. Murray
The New Press ($26.95)

by Jens Tamang

A story about a white man who brings a black child back to 19th-century Sweden against his will, Henning Mankell’s ethically complex and disturbing novel Daniel has tremendous potential for offense. YetDaniel is a surprisingly delicate meditation on the failures of colonial power, providing a drastic departure from the desiccate Kurt Wallander mysteries for which Mankell became internationally renowned.

Originally published in Swedish in 2000, Daniel begins with a disparaging portrait of twenty-nine-year-old Hans Bengler, an extremely bizarre entomologist bent on discovering an unknown species of beetle. It quickly becomes clear that Bengler—a lonely, drunk, academic failure—isn’t really searching for a beetle, but unattainable dominance: “The world was full of insects which didn’t have names and had not been catalogued. Insects that were waiting for him.” For Bengler, the prospect of finding such a specimen leads him to fantasize about reversing his failure at school, restoring his family’s wealth, bringing his mother back to life, and curing his all-consuming impotency (figurative and otherwise).

When he finally finds his beetle, Bengler’s fantasies prove to be lofty, and in this state of disappointment Bengler adopts a “specimen” of a very different kind. He discovers Molo, a young orphaned boy of the San tribe. Ironically, Bengler—a certified observer of nature—cannot see the trauma registered in Molo’s body, the trauma of having witnessed the slaughtering of his family. Bengler names the boy “Daniel,” hubristically satisfied about having “liberated” him from the savage abuse of his former owner.

Mankell does well to foreground the novel with a portrait of Bengler as a white man whose masculinity is in crisis, a man seized by illusions of his own prowess. Throughout the course of the narrative Bengler comes to represent the failure of benevolence to act as a comprehensive solution to the multifaceted problems with which we come in contact. And Molo’s “liberation” provides an excellent example of Mankell’s ability to illustrate scenes with layers upon layers of ethical complexity.

In Daniel, those who mean to do well can do evil, those who mean to do evil can do well, and everyone is to blame but the child caught in the crosshairs of white supremacy and colonial arrogance. Such ethical complexity shrouds the novel in mystery and the effect is gripping. Coupled with the stark prose that evokes the style of Cormac McCarthy and harks back to Mankell’s roots in the detective genre, it’s definitely hard to put the book down.

Perhaps the most questionable aspect of the book is that, a third of the way through, the narrative switches away from Bengler’s point of view and begins to narrate from Molo’s perspective. Here Mankell navigates dangerous territory, having to face head on the temptation to exoticize the “purity” of Molo’s psychology. Mankell’s handling does, more than once, submit Molo’s narration as a stand in for a half-baked concept of spirituality, one that romanticizes the African body in ways that seem sappy and out of touch. Mankell’s depiction of Molo succeeds, however, when it presents a kind of childlike bewilderment with the arch poise of a masterful writer. When Molo first arrives in Lund, a housekeeper finds him urinating on a potted plant, and Mankell portrays the confusion that arises from the collision of the two worlds with humor, tenderness, and a kind of honesty that reaches a paradigmatic realm of human experience.

At the end of the day, Molo’s narration is not the greatest accomplishment of the entire novel. Rather, the novel is at its best when it succinctly depicts scenes with a blunt realism that still seems intimately woven into the fabric of colonial symbolism. In Daniel, the twin poles of Mankell’s native Sweden and his adopted region of southern Africa come together; when Bengler describes the “viscous mess” of an infected boil running down another Swedish character’s back, one cannot help but wonder if it is just that, or if the boil comes to stand for the infection of colonial power sweeping the globe in the 19th century.

There’s no question about the kind of politics Mankell espouses in Daniel. A radical leftist and a life-long opponent of Israeli politics, Mankell provides an important voice in the burgeoning canon of contemporary anti-colonial literature. Furthermore, the fact that a novel with such potential for problematic material can run through the wringer of critical race theory and come out largely unscathed makes it a must-read for anyone who desires to take a long, hard look at a particular racial dynamic and the bloody history that has stained it.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

FLASH: a novel

Jim Miller
AK Press ($13.95)

by Susan Solomon

Who are the Wobblies? If you know, if you care, then Jim Miller’s novel Flash may light a spark inside you, driving you deeper into the realm of hellish history heaven. And if you are not familiar with the Wobblies and the Industrial Workers of the World, be prepared for an exciting excursion into the early 1900s and some dark and essential knowledge of America’s brutal West Coast labor history movement.

Miller is a professor of American Labor Movements at San Diego City College, and his love for these topics is evident. Flash chronicles reporter Jack Wilson’s discovery of, and fascination with, an old wanted poster in a San Diego library’s archives. Who was Bobby Flash? The face and the “defiant half smile” on the poster haunt Wilson:

What drew me to him? Perhaps it was the vague stories about my “crazy commie great grandfather” that my mom would toss off when she was assailing my father’s side of the family. They had always resonated with me—just not in the way she had intended. And, perhaps it was just a flight of fancy, but I thought Flash looked a bit like my son Hank thrust back in time (minus the gold tooth). OK. Enough already. Maybe it was just the name, Flash.

Wilson soon becomes involved in a search for Bobby Flash, a revolutionary Wobbly and labor leader. The novel jumps time, detailing the ageless human struggle for justice at its best, while hammering home the lessons that continually need to be learned and relearned. Always the same story, it is at once hopeful and positive and timely, even as it forever plays out in reruns. “We’re all just humans and the divisions between us have all been created to serve the interests of those at the top who benefit from a divided working class.”

This book delves into personal relationships, misunderstandings, blood ties, and the age-old quest for love and finding one’s place in the world. As Wilson gets historically and psychologically involved with the enigmatic and well-named Bobby Flash, readers see similarities in the two men’s lives—in reflections and similarities, as well as screams and warnings from generation to generation. In addition, through Wilson, readers are taken on a trip through some more recent California history: “A Raiders game is like a Dead show with carne asada instead of veggie burritos, beer instead of acid, and, of course, bloodlust for football rather than psychedelic music.”

Flash tries so hard to be loved. It is earnest; it pleads in a way, to listen to its message. Besides just labor history, we get a taste of Whitman and Thoreau and their political leanings at the time. And yet, how does an author make readers believe and care? How does a writer move from telling a stacked bunch of facts to placing real characters into a spellbinding story? In the current American political environment, labor rights are in the forefront; a book like Flash could not be more on point. And yet there is a feeling of being lectured to that cannot be shaken.

For lovers of American history, California history in particular, this book could be a dream come true. While Flash may have less than perfect prose, it delivers a tell-all account of America’s brutal labor past for readers who are interested in a serious and crucial history lesson, and who can be forgiving of its form—historical facts valiantly in search of a novel.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
Purchase this book at your local independent bookstore.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

SANTA: A Novel of Mexico City

Federico Gamboa
Translated by John Charles Chasteen
The University of North Carolina Press ($22.95)

by Kristin Thiel

This book’s English translator, professor of history John Charles Chasteen, provides a brief but extremely useful introduction to the 110-year-old novel Santa, offering readers some depth only scholars might already have. Santa—which describes turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mexico through the life of the inexplicably named Santa, a country girl turned urban prostitute—reads like a television soap opera. It has outlandish content, flowery, enthusiastic language, and even a liberal usage of images trailing off into ellipses. Indeed, in the late 1970s, it became a telenovela.

“Cared for by our eternally affectionate mother earth, with wild birds for their friends, and with dreams as simple and pure as the violets that grow hidden along the banks of a river”, Santa still manages to get pregnant out of wedlock. Her heartbroken mother and angry, disgusted brothers throw her out. Having once been approached by a brothel madam, Santa travels to Mexico City to seek that woman out. While Santa suffers some internal conflict once settled into the brothel—“she cried a torrent of tears from varying origins . . . a secret mourning for her lost purity”—what can she do?

Blessed with a stunning physical beauty, Santa quickly becomes the highest earner. Over the course of this slim novel she moves in with a matador, who almost stabs her to death for her infidelity; she returns to the brothel, where she is swept away by another customer; and she is struck with cancer and plummets to the most frightening depths of Mexico City—her final madam has forearms that “could have belonged to an Egyptian mummy” and hands that “unfolded themselves like trained tarantulas to explore Santa’s hips, thighs, and breasts through her dress”. Finally, she finds bittersweet redemption through the love of a shabby, ugly, blind old man.

Beyond being a fun escapist soap opera, Santa was adapted into Mexico’s first film that included audio; indeed, as Chasteen informs us, “some young Mexican prostitutes in the 1930s told their life stories to social workers in terms that sounded much like Santa’s . . . in doing so, they often mentioned the 1932 film version.” A naturalist by profession, author Federico Gamboa kept a “detailed journal” with his observations of people and city places, as he might have with animals and their natural habitats.

Of course, this isn’t to say that Santa is some magically objective history. Other things Chasteen shares about Gamboa—that he was born a socialite and maintained his conservative, Catholic, and pro-authoritarian-rule beliefs throughout life—shows that Santa is not an underdog story told by underdogs. It’s by someone looking in, and down. Late in the novel, Gamboa’s narration—which shifts without warning from past-tense specifics following Santa’s life into present-tense omniscience—describes the “slumming” rich boys do with uncanny accuracy. The owner of a popular dive “truly feels sorry for them, but since he can do nothing about these characteristics of theirs, he has resolved to exploit them quietly and systematically”.

Regardless of any bias, Gamboa does display in Santa his skill at describing human detail—from the gentle glimpses of the blind man’s fumbling hands to the strange fact that in a crowd where someone is ill, someone else will become an amateur doctor and make things just a little worse. Ultimately, in its quiet moments, Santa is a soap opera a reader can’t forget immediately because its author never forgot it, never hung Santa out as one dimensional, as a mere triviality:

Without thinking about what she was doing, she entered the pastry shop next door to the hotel, where the employees were clean, pretty, and friendly, and wore light-colored aprons:
“What do you want, señora?”
What did she want? She wanted to be just like them, or at least, the way that she imagined them to be: decent girls who worked long hours, lived at home, and loved their faithful boyfriends . . . Blushing, she bought candy because she thought she should buy something, and nothing else occurred to her”.

A reader suspects that, like any good scientist, this author learned something from his own research, too.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
Purchase this book at your local independent bookstore.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

Jennifer Egan
Anchor Books ($14.95)

by Sharon Harrigan

“It is in ourselves that we should seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.” This epigraph, from In Search of Lost Time, is well chosen, because A Visit from the Goon Squad is Proustian in its ambitions—not just in its themes of capturing the essence of time, memory, and the slippery concept of self, but in its innovation of language and form.

Jennifer Egan set herself this challenge: To make each chapter self-sufficient and from a different point of view. The chapter written exclusively in PowerPoint is perhaps the most original, but there are also chapters in close third person, first person omniscient, and second person, plus flashbacks and flash forwards into both the present and into a future that hasn’t happened yet. Chapters that move forward in time, then back, then forward again, seamlessly, like a tape loop turned into a time loop. Near future dystopia, 1970s punk-rock nostalgia. A page full of footnotes. A celebrity magazine profile written from jail. Novel as concept album.

But Egan is not just a piano player showing off how many keys she can nail at the same time; the most technically innovative chapters are also the most moving. Furthermore, A Visit from the Goon Squad is witty, fresh, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Sasha wonders if her therapist is “one of those escaped cons who impersonate surgeons and wind up leaving their operating tools inside people’s skulls.” Bennie, Sasha’s boss, loves old songs for “the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness they induced.”

The tone varies widely, including broad satire; a quartet of chapters that form a mini coming-of-age novel-within-a-novel; and a tale of regret, told by Jocelyn after losing twenty years of her life to heroin. The satirical pieces are not the most moving parts of the book, but they are some of the funniest. Who can resist banter like this: “How was it that of all the names considered—Xanadou, Peek-a-boo, Renaldo, Cricket—they’d ended up choosing the single one that melded flawlessly with the innocuous Crandale namescape?”

A Visit from the Goon Squad could keep a squadron of graduate students busy deciphering its literary and cultural references, but it is also a fast, glittering read, littered with cocaine sniffed from a young woman’s naked bottom; a record producer speckling his coffee with gold flakes as an aphrodisiac and spraying mosquito repellent in his armpits; near-fatal mauling by lions on an African safari; a kleptomaniac former prostitute looking for a “fake boyfriend” to fool her father’s spies; an unnamed dictator coaxed to smile for the camera for the first time by a B-list actress who turns predatory; boiling oil accidentally dripping from party decor and marring the beauty of every “it” celebrity; and a former rock star turned has-been launching a “suicide tour” for the publicity. Both intellectual and rollicking, wicked fun, this collection of self-contained stories becomes a novel with the fireworks of a grand finale.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
Purchase this book at your local independent bookstore.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011