Michael Crummey
Other Press ($15.95)

by Marjorie Hakala

It’s common to say that a book paints a vivid picture, or to remark on the sound of its prose, but somewhat more rare to claim that a book has a distinctive smell. Galore is an exception, carrying a pervasive odor of fish and the sea that’s both distinctive and unforgettable.

The fourth book and third novel by Canadian author Michael Crummey, Galore is set on an isolated scrap of shoreline in Newfoundland, where villagers make a meager living from cod fishing. The story begins sometime in the very early 19th century when a whale is beached on the shore and the villagers, hacking up the corpse for meat and oil, find a man in its stomach.

Against all odds, he proves to be alive. Mute, albino, and emitting “an astonishing stink of dead fish” no matter how many times he is bathed, he is given the name Judah—a compromise between Judas and Jonah, because the illiterate villagers can’t agree which one was swallowed by a whale. He soon becomes the center of this winding saga of life in a place usually just called “the shore.”

The community where Judah arrives is split in two. Paradise Deep is a predominantly Protestant and English settlement, lorded over by its founder, King-Me Sellers, a merchant who controls the price of cod. The Gut, which lies on the other side of a windy and treacherous point, is mostly Catholic and Irish. Here, the novel focuses on the Devine family, led by a matriarch everyone calls Devine’s Widow. She may or may not have some supernatural capabilities; either way, her leadership of the family has effects that echo over the hundred-year span of this book.

Judah is the most original figure in the story, but the most important point-of-view character is the widow’s granddaughter, the sharp and slightly witchy Mary Tryphena. It’s from her perspective as a young girl that we see Judah emerging from the guts of the whale. In fact she appears earlier than that, in the first paragraph of the novel: “He ended his time on the shore in a makeshift asylum cell, shut away with the profligate stink of fish that clung to him all his days . . . He seemed more or less content there, gnawing at the walls with a nail. Mary Tryphena Devine brought him bread and dried capelin that he left to gather bluebottles and mold on the floor.” A second glance reveals this to be not the beginning of the story but the end, and it’s just the first example of the book’s chronological slipperiness. Things that have not yet happened are presented as foregone conclusions: we are only three pages in when we’re informed that Mary Tryphena and Judah will marry, and for readers who pay attention to front matter, a family tree at the beginning lays out six generations’ worth of marriages and births.

The past, too, intrudes itself on the story. Things that have already happened are glossed over only to appear as narrative surprises later on. There is a ghost in this novel who gets introduced two or three times before the reader learns he is dead. Between episodes in Mary Tryphena’s life, the narrative slips back in time to tell us about her grandmother’s feud with King-Me Sellers, and how her parents fell in love and married.

Late in the novel, an American doctor who has settled in Paradise Deep muses on the local term “now the once”: “It was the oddest expression he’d learned on the shore. Now the once. The present twined with the past to mean soon, a bit later, some unspecified point in the future. As if it was all the same finally, as if time was a single moment endlessly circling on itself.” It’s almost too on-the-nose, like an author’s note that alerts us to what he was thinking when he conceived of this story. Time passes in this book—and it grows more chronological as the story progresses and runs out of past it hasn’t told us about already—but change happens slowly in this remote outpost. It’s easy to believe, in this context, that time is just one moment turning around and around.

Despite this changelessness, the novel is filled with events. There are a great many marriages and births, but Crummey keeps things interesting with profoundly odd characters and a language as distinctive as Judah’s odor. The narrative voice here incorporates broken sentence fragments, colloquial curses, and dialogue without quotation marks into a sharp, idiosyncratic style. It’s well suited to describing harsh things, like the Newfoundland winter, or the summer when fishing is bad:

Most were in arrears from one failed season aboard another and King-me forced the most desperate to grant him a mortgage on their land estates as a surety. He’d already taken possession of half a dozen fishing rooms and seemed determined to own both harbors entire. The spring’s whale meat was long gone and some families were surviving on winkles and mussels dug up on the beaches or the same meal of herring served morning, noon and night until a body could barely keep the fish down. The summer not half over and already there was talk of winter and how many would starve without help from God.

Galore has an epigraph from Gabriel García Márquez, and it owes a significant debt to his magic realism. The supernatural elements in this novel can be spotty—one is never sure how realistic the world of the shore is meant to be, and old curses and rituals sometimes disappear for generations at a time before appearing again—but these, along with the figure of Judah, provide unifying threads for what could otherwise have been a story with no natural stopping or starting point. It’s a compelling, haunting portrait of hard lives in a hard place, and for American readers in particular, Crummey’s Newfoundland may prove the definitive version.

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Kevin Brockmeier
Pantheon ($24.95)

by Kelly Everding

Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination takes on a juggernaut of philosophical conundrums: the problem and purpose of suffering. In the world he creates, every person’s source of pain, from paper cuts to pancreatic cancer, suddenly begins to emit light. There is no fanfare to it—it just happens, and people are left with questions of provenance and etiquette and how to incorporate this new information into their reality. However, in true Brockmeier form, this fantastical occurrence is merely the backdrop to the stories of six complex characters who must assimilate the new paradigm into their already pain-ridden lives. These characters don’t know each other, but they are connected by their temporary ownership of a book, a journal of love notes. While light may illuminate their suffering for all to see—and it’s scary how quickly this miracle gets subsumed and commodified into the culture—it is the book that truly illuminates them.

A mixture of observations and insider jokes or stories, the journal is a transcription of daily love notes from husband to wife, diligently transcribed into seven volumes. Patricia Williford has her latest volume with her when she is mortally injured in a car accident with her husband, Jason, but before she dies (believing Jason is already dead), she gives this book to her hospital roommate, Carol Ann Page. From there the book changes hands six times on a circuitous route to its own destruction.

The Willifords’ journal is a strange time capsule, an extremely personal expression that somehow becomes a universal articulation of love, one that is seemingly eternal in its written form and therefore alien to this world. It is a sham, but a sweet, beautiful sham that seduces its readers with an unreal but somehow believable notion of perfect love, a love that none of the other characters have experienced. All of the entries begin the same way, with “I love . . .”:

I love how quietly you speak when you’re catching a cold. I love hearing you tell the cockatoo story to people who don’t know it yet. I love watching you step so carefully inside your footprints when it snows. I love the way you hunt for our names as the movie credits scroll by—“thirteen Jasons and not one Patricia.”

While one might easily expect a religious slant to the illumination of wounds, Brockmeier uses this trope to highlight an entirely different aspect of human nature: our deep attraction to pain. Carol Ann Page’s severed thumb tip starts off the litany of wounds, and the light emanating from it serves to highlight her fascination, “testing it a dozen times a day.” Jason Williford, Patricia’s husband and survivor of the car wreck, also grew intimate with his pain: “Whenever he felt it diminishing, a brief feeling of regret settled over him.” The pain is a way to escape the devastation of losing his wife. “The agony was nearly indistinguishable from bliss,” he says of provoking his wounds. Physical pain becomes inextricably mired in memory and nostalgia; any mercurial moments of happiness is a gateway to self pity. “The world was unreliable. The world could turn on a dime. It was a joy to be alive when it was a joy to be alive, and it was a terror to be alive when it wasn’t,” thinks Carol.

For Chuck Carter, the third owner of the book, “the strangeness of people went on and on and on.” Chuck is a young boy who suffers abuse at the hand of his father (or “pretend dad” as Chuck refers to him) and bullies at school, and he can see and empathize with the illuminating pain of objects. He steals the book because it is shining bright with pain, and he wants to “heal” it, however he fails miserably and decides to pass it on to Ryan Shifrin, a door-to-door evangelist passing out leaflets in the neighborhood. Shifrin invites religious speculation about the Illumination; fortunately he is not a fundamentalist, but his mission work has taken him all over the world and allowed him to experience incredible suffering and loss. “Was it possible for God to sin?” he wonders near the end of his life. Shifrin leaves the book in a hotel nightstand for Nina Poggione to find, an author on a book tour whose mouth sores make it excruciating for her to talk. Nina incorporates the find into her own work, a short story she reads entitled “A Fable for the Living” (which Brockmeier later published in the literary journal Electric Literature). The fated book finally winds up with a homeless man, Morse Putnam Strawbridge, who is “fascinated yet vexed by the book. . . . He did not understand how something so sweet, so earnest and candid, could also be so wayward and enigmatic.”

There are no answers really. In a sense, The Illumination could go on and on, from story to story, following trajectories of the pain that we inflict on ourselves and others, with no end in sight. “Everyone had his own portion of pain to carry. At first, when you were young, you imposed it on yourself. Then, when you were older, the world stepped in to impose it for you. You might be given a few years of rest between the pain you caused yourself and the pain the world made you suffer, but only a few, and only if you were lucky.” However grim this assessment is, made by the grieving Jason Williford, the philosophical paradox of pain may be likened to Wallace Stevens’s lines from “Sunday Morning”: “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires.” Pain is the condition of living in this flawed but beautiful world. In compassionate and candid prose, Brockmeier provides a lyrical entrée to these profound and complex questions of human existence.

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Anne Wiazemsky
Translated by Alison Anderson
Europa Editions ($15)

by Derek M. Jackson

Each story has its appropriate storyteller. When it came time to tell the story of Claire Mauriac, the task fell to her daughter, Anne Wiazemsky, and the result is My Berlin Child. Focusing on a turbulent, pivotal time in Claire's life, the book spans from 1944 to 1947, from the closing years of World War II to the birth of her first child in post-war Berlin.

Wiazemsky wastes no time in setting the stage. Immediately we are told Claire is an ambulance driver who has courageously served the French Red Cross for the past year and a half, and who just happens to be the daughter of award-winning author Francois Mauriac. By way of subtle implication, there is an element of tension established between Claire and her affluent, traditional Parisian family. She feels passionately that what she is doing is right, but her family feels otherwise. Early on, as Claire weighs a decision to continue her service after the war, Wiazemsky introduces narrative devices that will be appear again and again: Claire's diary entries and written correspondence.

This skillful blend of modes helps My Berlin Child develop into a rich, compelling story. Each narrative device serves as a different lens through which to view the unfolding drama (and there is drama, to be sure), and the alternation between them propels the story forward.

In the diary entries, Claire expresses what cannot be said outright to her parents, co-workers, and lovers. Each entry sheds light on the complexities of relationships and communication—on what is said versus what is felt or thought but left unsaid. Reflexive readers will find themselves pondering this issue, questioning themselves in their own lives. That a fictionalized World War II memoir can evoke this universal issue is certainly a feather in Wiazemsky's cap.

Claire's personal growth and development seems most evident in her letters to her parents, which she copies for posterity into her diary. Though always feeling the need to justify her choices, she becomes increasingly confident—more assertive and direct, less censorial—as she writes of the hazards of her chosen occupation and relates the trying events of her days and nights to her reserved, bourgeois family.

The present narrative, essentially Wiazemsky's voice in the matter, inserts what even Claire does not or cannot write herself in her diary. It illuminates her life as it is lived, what Wiazemsky dubs “a life in the present,” and documents Claire's search for a meaningful life, away from the comfort and complacency of her past Parisian existence.

Wiazemsky may be the titular “Berlin child,” but this is not the only reason the book is so successful. Add to the mix Wiazemsky's experience as a professional actress, responsible for understanding and interpreting the nuances of human behavior and the subtleties of the human psyche. In addition, she was married to prominent French filmmaker and intellectual Jean-Luc Godard, and experienced first-hand both the benefits and the trials of living in the shadow of notoriety. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, since 1988, Wiazemsky has written four award-winning novels.

It is not Wiazemsky's “credentials,” though, that make the book a success, but her approach to telling the story of My Berlin Child. What could have easily been presented in conventionally dry, chronological reportage, Wiazemsky brings to life by approaching her family history in an effectively nuanced, layered way. Not only a story written by the appropriate storyteller, My Berlin Child is a story appropriately told.

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Alexander MacLeod
Biblioasis ($16.95)

by Benjamin Woodard

The Canada found in Alexander MacLeod’s impressive debut story collection, Light Lifting, is full of anxiety and obsession: a land where man masters the ins and outs of minivan combustion engines, parents fixate on the origin of lice, and the powerless struggle to overcome childhood fears. Across seven wide-ranging tales, lives are saved, others are lost, and redemption, both physical and spiritual, is occasionally found. Nevertheless, the world harnessed by MacLeod is also one that bursts with wonder and nostalgia, and the author lets his subjects shine with both raw power and supple beauty throughout. Each story in Light Lifting is a true marvel—there are no fillers here—and with every passing page MacLeod firmly establishes himself as a bright new talent in literary fiction.

“Miracle Mile,” which chronicles two elite runners as they vie for a spot on the national track team, kicks the collection off with a muscular bang:

This was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. You remember that. It was a moment in history—not like Kennedy or the planes flying into the World Trade Center—not up to that level. This was something lower, more like Ben Johnson, back when his eyes were that thick, yellow colour and he tested positive in Seoul after breaking the world record in the hundred.

These lines are spoken by Mikey, the story’s narrator. In a comfortable, conversational voice, he lulls the reader into the trenches, offering up detailed portraits of an athlete’s life. The particularity of these facets—be they motel rooms, train tunnels, or rituals—is what makes “Miracle Mile” so incredibly engaging. From the start, MacLeod is committed to immersing his audience into the environments and mindsets of his characters. Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, he is able to accomplish this encapsulation without sacrificing fluidity. Not once does “Miracle Mile” drag. Instead, it unfolds with such skill and proficiency that one forgets on occasion that the story is a work of fiction, and that MacLeod didn’t conduct interviews with a series of men and women and transcribe their lives onto paper.

This sense of engagement is a thread that keeps Light Lifting consistently admirable. Whether describing sunburns (“Like grease coming through waxed paper”) or a mysterious neighborhood house that “seemed like one of those doomed store locations that can’t support any kind of business”, MacLeod maintains a firm grasp on his audience’s attention. Of course, on occasion these vivid details might be a bit too much—in “The Loop,” for example, a character mentions looking at shelves and walls of family photographs, and instead of leaving anything to the reader’s imagination, he lists the reasons they are “all pretty much the same”—but these quibbles are minor at best. More often than not, MacLeod is spot on in his craft and confident in his talent.

Though the “light lifting” mentioned in the collection’s title story is a reference to the daily toll that comes from laying brick for a living, it can also be used to describe the craft of short fiction. “Any kid can pick up a hundred pounds if they only have to do it one or two times,” a nameless narrator says. “But it’s the light lifting that does the real damage. Maybe it’s just thirty pounds and it starts off slow, but it stays with you all day and then it hangs around in your arms and your legs even after you leave.” Like this small load, a timeless short story should stick and hang like a phantom weight and be carried by the reader for weeks, months, even years. With Light Lifting, Alexander MacLeod has given us all a new set of figurative bricks to haul around in our memories.

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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Translated by Linda Coverdale
Penguin ($15)

by Brooke Horvath

Although Tahar Ben Jelloun left Morocco for France in 1971, his imagination continues to haunt its villages and conjure its dusty beauty. His most recent novels, The Last Friend and Leaving Tangier, have explored the life of the immigrant, but with A Palace in the Old Village, the sixty-five-year-old Ben Jelloun has turned from young Moroccans trying to find new lives elsewhere to the older character of Mohammed, who has retired after forty years on an assembly line in an automobile plant in Yvelines. Just west of Paris, and once home to Émile Zola and Maurice Ravel, Yvelines is now a tourist destination boasting one of France’s better golf courses. Mohammed gives no indication of knowing any of this, though; how could such things matter to him, whose world extends no further than his now-gone job, his children, Islam, and the Moroccan village he returns to visit each year?

Mohammed has always considered himself an indispensible employee and conscientious parent. Job and children gave purpose his days, but now the job is gone and the children, leaving one by one for lives of their own, now largely ignore him (similarly, Mohammed mostly ignores his wife, who has little to offer that he needs). Worse, les enfants are thoroughly Frenchified, lost to the enticements of the West and absolutely indifferent to Morocco, the land from which they never came. Morocco, however, comes to obsess their father as his emptying house and emptier days leave him adrift. Wondering whether life in France has been worth what he lost by leaving Morocco, Mohammed begins to dream of returning to his old village and building there a house seductive enough to woo his children back to him. Back home, Mohammed will also be able to free himself of the émigré’s timidity and the abrasiveness of French culture, something to which forty years’ residence have neither reconciled nor accustomed him.

Throughout much of the novel, this comparison of life in France to life in Morocco holds center stage, and Mohammed seems a bit of a Saul Bellow character as, chapter by chapter, Ben Jelloun advances the plot just enough to provide Mohammed the opportunity to mull over some new cultural conundrum or disappointment. “LaFrance is a wonderful country,” Mohammed muses toward the end of his story, “because it takes good care of its sick. Here [in Morocco] you’re better off never setting foot in a hospital.” On the other hand, Mohammed recalls the thousands of elderly French left at home to die during the heat wave of 2003 while their children were off on vacation: “Why? I don’t understand! It was just because.” As may be inevitable for a novelist more or less at home in two cultures, each of which at times leaves him uneasy, Ben Jelloun can find fault in both. The French may have loosened family ties to the point of abandoning one another, but in Morocco the importance of those ties is not given voice: “I’ve never complimented my girls,” Mohammed confesses, “No, that we don’t do.”

When Mohammed finally returns to Morocco to build his “palace,” the realism that has governed the narrative transforms into the magical as Mohammed learns in what ways one can and cannot go home again. The house he builds—wired for unavailable electricity, fully plumbed in case running water ever finds its way to the village—is a fiasco. As Mohammed perseveres, hoping that if he builds it his children will come, what comes instead is some “black thing” circling the house at night, fissures in the walls, portentous dreams, and death. The house, Ben Jelloun writes, “was as big as Mohammed’s heart,” but it ultimately leaves him in tears.

These stories of filial indifference, of the fate of dreams deferred, are familiar. However, Linda Coverdale’s translation, as fine as any she has produced, makes them seem fresh and new. She ably conveys Ben Jelloun’s desire not only to speak to western readers about what we have in common with Mohammed (his affection for a nephew with Down Syndrome, his frustration with his car insurance) but also to reveal to us the extent to which Mohammed’s story—even if we are aging and awkward and fresh off the boat—is inevitably different from our own.

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Martín Kohan
Translated by Nick Caistor
Serpent’s Tail Books ($14.95)

by John Toren

Though set largely in the provincial town of Trelew, Patagonia, circa 1973, Seconds Out contains several plot lines woven around an event that took place in New York City a half-century earlier—the famous heavyweight bout between Jack Dempsey and the Argentine Luis Angel Firpo, popularly known as “the Wild Bull of the Pampas.” The story’s protagonists are journalists who’ve been assigned by their newspaper to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary by revisiting an event that took place in the year of the paper’s birth. Verani, a sportswriter, naturally chooses the Dempsey-Firpo fight. Ledesma, an arts writer, decides to focus on a concert tour given by the famous composer and conductor Richard Straus to Buenos Aires in that year.

There would not appear to be much of a connection between these two projects, but Ledesma and Verani enjoy chatting over a drink in the bar after work, and there are long stretches of dialogue during which one writer tries to educate the other about the importance of the event he’s working on. These passages are often interesting—we learn a few things about Straus and Mahler and boxing, and Freud makes an appearance—although as conversations they don’t entirely ring true. The book becomes more compelling when Verani, combing the archives, finds a brief article describing a suicide in a hotel in Buenos Aires on the night of the Dempsey-Firpo fight. He makes some inquiries at the newspaper where the story originally ran, and soon comes to find this long-forgotten event more intriguing than the fight itself.

Alongside these journalistic probes, author Martín Kohan attempts to flesh out the Dempsey-Firpo fight itself. In fact, the book has seventeen chapters, each one corresponding to one of the seventeen seconds it took Dempsey to return to the ring after having been knocked through the ropes by Firpo in the first round. We watch the fight evolve not only through the eyes of Dempsey, but also from the perspective of the photographer he lands on and the referee who, stunned by the turn of events, fails to begin the count that would have led to Dempsey’s defeat.

Kohan strives for some sort of Proustian interiority in these passages, but for the most part they merely repeat and underscore the obvious. For example: “It’s strange how, at certain periods, events seem to multiply. I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s a kind of concentration of events. In a certain more or less defined period of time lots and lots of things happen.”

Three quarters of the way through the book, we learn that the man who died in the hotel room was a member of Richard Straus’s touring orchestra, at which point the novel’s two main strands—music and boxing—finally come together. But Ledesma and Verani are long dead by the time their young assistant travels north to an old folks home in Buenos Aires to find out what really happened that night.

There are many novels about which it can be said that to get the idea, you really have to read the book.Seconds Out falls into a different category. It’s as intricately plotted as a fugue built on a twelve-tone row. Unfortunately, considered page by page, very little of it comes alive.

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Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Literary Press ($14.95)

by Amy Henry

Facing extreme poverty and unemployment in Austria in the late 1800s, the optimistic Ondrej Vinich is certain that a better future lies in America, so he takes his wife on the harrowing journey across the ocean. Their first son is born immediately after their arrival in 1899, a milestone they consider an augury of good things to come. However, a heartbreaking tragedy occurs, leaving Ondrej and Jozef alone as Slavic immigrants in an unfriendly setting. The only solution Ondrej can find is to return with his infant son to Austria, putting the tragedy behind them. A valuable rifle is the only possession he brings home, a fact that prefigures the role of guns, violence, and death in their future.

As a sheepherder and lumberjack, Ondrej raises Jozef in the outdoors, with only tales of heroes and history for company. These stories prepare the youth for only the noble sides of war, leading him on “a journey to the edge of the culture and land in which I had been raised . . . with the imagined valor of heroic battles, and the thought that death would be a thing I doled out to others who dared resist.”

Jozef soon gains a brother, a distant family relation who comes to live with them. Zlee is enigmatic and powerful: “he became the center to which all things weakened or antagonistic were either drawn or from which they fled.” As the two grow up together, their bond as brothers tightens and they end up joining the military to defend Austria-Hungary in World War I. Because of their father’s training, they are selected for intensive sniper training, and are soon known for their deadly success. As the days of war continue, the two learn to trust each other, defy the military brass set on intimidating them, and face an unceasing line of Italian soldiers bent on defeating their homeland.

Although his sentences can be clunky, author Andrew Krivak brings to his novel a lyrical touch about the tragedy of war: “They say the earth is a soldier’s mother when the shells begin to fall, and she is, at first, your instinct not to run, but to dig and hold and hug as much of that earth as you possibly can, down, down, down into the dirt . . . like a child clinging with his entire body to comfort after a nightmare.” That the soldier is symbolically digging himself into a grave for comfort speaks of the ambivalence and confusion amid a deadly firefight.

Despite the war raging in the background, Krivak manages to make the story more than political, raising questions about the nature of death and murder: how was it that two farm boys became deadly snipers, devoid of emotion or conscience? He also plays on the traditional technique of foreshadowing, toying with the reader’s expectations. These little twists and feints increase the tension as the novel progresses, creating a parallel between the confused soldier and the reader—at times, neither knows exactly where they stand. And Krivak paints vivid visual depictions with unusual metaphors: in one case, he refers to the grey-coated German soldiers in their tight formations as doves in a unified flock. These unpredictable nuances create an engrossing narrative that goes beyond a war novel into a character study of loss and redemption.

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Ananda Devi
Translated by Jean Anderson
Host Publications ($29.99)

by Kris Lawson

Although it “speaks of sideroads, of secret encounters, of nights spent dying in surrender to your dreams, the better to live again through other impulses and other surrenders,” the tango in Ananda Devi’s novel takes place firmly in Delhi. Subhadra and an unnamed woman narrator are the dancers; their vivid imaginings are the turns and twists in the dance.

Indian Tango is full of flesh and moisture, reincarnation and metamorphosis. The narrator has burrowed into a dream world where the difference between real and imagined becomes negligible. She gorges herself upon the world around her and regurgitates it later as fantasies, forcing them to fruition in order to unlock her writer’s block.

Subhadra becomes the focus of the narrator’s fantasies. A housewife who has buried her personality under the weight of family responsibilities, she refers to herself as “a robot, prepared for every emergency.” Yet she feels on the edge of some great discovery of self-knowledge, some metamorphosis. Her family senses the approaching change as well, and begins to force Subhadra into what they think she should become: a post-menopausal woman, safely de-sexed and de-gendered; what is left is now to be given to the gods. Subhadra’s mother-in-law puts increasing pressure on Subhadra to accompany her on pilgrimage, the only active life an old woman in their culture can acceptably experience.

One day Subhadra hears a neighbor playing tango music and finds it acting upon her, forcing her to a new comprehension of her changing self. She has had little time for imagination but now she finds the sensation of moist flesh intruding into every mundane moment: washing her body, kneading chapatti dough, sweating at night. She finds herself drifting to a shop window to gaze at a sitar, which she played before her family arranged her marriage.

Unlike Subhadra, the narrator feels that her “flow has dried up.” The narrator’s fantasy life has reached a point where every sight that enters her vision, every thought that crosses her mind, is milked and caressed into a forced bloom that never quite satisfies her. In order to force a change in her own stagnant life, she begins to stalk Subhadra, to dance a duel with her as she engineers their meetings in front of the shop window. “I know that I need her to set us free, both of us, so we can perfect what remains incomplete within us . . . . to turn the writer into a human being and the extinct woman into a burning core.”

Devi enjoys playing with the language and imagery of the dance and the hunt. Indian Tango leaves the reader with a torrent of poetic imagery, visions that convey Subhadra’s new self and the results of the duel between the two women.

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Roya Movafegh
Full Court Press ($15)

by Kristin Thiel

This is not your grandmother’s memoir—it’s your contemporary’s, and it’s cloaked in fiction and fable. Author Roya Movafegh does not claim The People with No Camel as nonfiction, but it appears to be much more than simply “based on a true story.” As with her narrator, Movafegh was born in Austria, moved with her family to her parents’ native Iran in 1976, and left again a mere five years later due to religious persecution. Both the real and the fictional families are Bahá’í, a people who have long been discriminated against in Iran and who faced government-sponsored persecution and execution after the Islamic Revolution. This novel is the story of a young family—two parents and their five- and ten-year-old children—risking their lives to flee their country and seek asylum elsewhere.

Movafegh’s writing largely works to demonstrate how a child’s experiences are recounted by that exact person grown into an adult. Some of the most purely childlike views come in the description of the young narrator’s observations. Kids intensely observe their peers, as does this narrator: “The same children whose excited cries had carried us into their village reappeared and ran alongside us again in the dusty roads. I watched; they ran, shouted, and waved.” Most readers will relate to the sinking confusion and embarrassment that the narrator feels in the passage below:

I thought nothing of my endless drawings of men tied to posts, crying as bullets exploded out of firing squads. During one of my great-uncle’s visit[s] to my grandparents, I had proudly shown one of those drawings to him, awaiting praise and recognition for my skills and choice of colors.
“Look at what our children are drawing,” he said, his distaste undeniable.
I looked. What was wrong with what I’d drawn? I looked. Then I saw. Then wished that I hadn’t drawn it.

Sometimes the narrator seems oddly mature beyond her years: early on she explains “We were leaving behind good-byes unsaid, for we had only learned about our moment of escape the previous afternoon,” and recounts how an airport security guard “searched my body, much like one would search for valuables on a fresh corpse, and I in turn searched for a sign that would tell me that she had once been a girl like me.” Most ten year olds who are living among strife cannot imagine the concept of “good-byes unsaid” or the notion that a hardened adult had once been a child; this particular ten-year-old has seen ugliness, without doubt, but she hasn’t participated in it or processed it.

What serves The People with No Camel better is Movafegh’s anecdotes from the escape. There is the moment in the middle of the desert when the narrator not only sees but tastes her new surroundings: “Cloaked in desert colors, I peeked at my father. He no longer resembled himself. ‘You’re blonde,’ I informed him and immediately regretted allowing more graininess to enter my mouth”. The family’s guide along their escape route comes up with a strange and inspiring spontaneous solution to mislead guards at a checkpoint. And there are Hot Wheels, Snow White purses, Streisand, and humor: “Had it not been barren and gated, I would have liked to live in a no-man’s land”.

The distinctly second part of the book, its own standalone story, is where The People with No Camelseems to veer into complete fiction—the protagonist is now a grown woman and portrayed in third person, and she is running from a mystical creature who craves her ears, trying to save a forest of talking trees, and drinking magic potions. Her fantastical quest for freedom is as palpable as the real-world girl’s in the book’s first part, and it is also less so, because the setting is inherently alien. Indeed, stories that fall within the fantastical rubric— fables, magical realism, surrealism— have long been useful at conveying the strange horror and fortune of real-world wars and explorations and individual dramas.

While The People with No Camel succeeds in creating a hybrid text that offers a take on historical reality, it feels less successful than it could have been. Movafegh is a multimedia artist, and readers may wish that she’d pushed this story further, through the incorporation of visual art, technology, or maybe simply a more outrageous genre pairing. Still, it is a vivid reminder that children who live through totalitarian regimes can’t shake the echoes of their upbringing.

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

Moacyr Scliar
Translated by David William Foster
Texas Tech University Press ($24.95)

by Douglas Messerli

Often described as the major Jewish author of Brazil, Moacyr Scliar, who grew up in the south of the country in Porto Alegre, died this year on February 27, soon after this translation of his earliest fiction, The War in Bom Fim, appeared in English.

Originally published in 1972, the work seems, at first, to be a magical realist tale of the mostly Jewish immigrant community of Bom Fim during World War II in the 1940s. In that context, it at times resembles a mix between Sholom Aleichem and Neil Simon, as the story weaves in and out of descriptions of the poor Jewish citizens and their lives, involving two young boys, their father Samuel, his loveable and somewhat resistant mare Malke Tube, their fearless mother Shendl, and magical events that define this Yiddish-speaking society, including the omnipresence of Chagall and his “floating violinists,” whom the narrator transports to the streets of Porto Alegre along with the possibility of Kafka living nearby. On the other side of this somewhat nostalgic vision exists the games of the young brothers, Joel and Nathan, as they and their neighborhood friends imaginatively fight a war against the Nazis, who have invaded a nearby beach. With Joel as their leader, Nathan as a flying savior, and every child and beast at their side, the city of Porto Alegre is amazingly saved again and again, even when, at the end of the war, Hitler attempts to hide out in a nearby mansion.

This part of the story, which takes up a larger portion of the book, presents a wonderfully and innocently benign picture of the dying Jewish community. Unfortunately, as the boys grow up and the older parents begin to leave the neighborhood, things gradually turn grimmer, finally collapsing into a series of absolute horrors that demonstrate that despite their symbolic battles with hatred, this community is affected as well by anti-Semitism and the abandonment of social and religious values.

From the earliest pages of the book, moreover, there are clues that not everything in Bom Fim is right. The local dog, Melâmpio, hates Jews, and barks on winter nights to point the way to their house for Stukas and Messerschmitts. The author’s insistence of mentioning—every time he describes the large tree-lined Redenção Park in the middle of town—the benches of waiting pederasts seems almost homophobic; ultimately, one of the children, Alberto, is described as letting "himself be buggered." Rosa, a young girl, is raped in the park and leaves home. With the end of the war, new shops and high-rise apartments come to Bom Fim, making it more and more difficult for Samuel to sell his meager wares from his cart.

But these are only the rumblings of far more terrifying events that bring down the curtain on Scliar’s seemingly rhapsodic recollections. The younger, frailer brother, Nathan, suddenly dies. Joel’s mother goes insane and is locked away in an institution. His father, Samuel, is grotesquely trapped under his beloved mare, and must disembowel the beast to escape. Joel himself leaves Bom Fim as he becomes increasingly assimilated into a non-Jewish world, and ends up selling jewelry. One by one the poor homes of Bom Fim are torn down and replaced by newer and larger structures.

Near to where old Samuel now lives is a German bartender, who, trying to keep a low profile, endures the occasional tirades of Samuel and other Jewish customers. For his birthday, however, his two reprehensible sons capture Samuel, hoping to show him off to their father, and threatening to burn him as in the Nazi death camps. The terrified old man attempts to run off, but falls, hitting his head, and dies. To hide the crime, the sons cut up the body into pieces at the very moment that their mulatto mother returns home from a night of sexual pleasures, and, witnessing the pieces of meat before them, is insistent that they continue with what she perceives to be a barbecue. Inviting several other friends, she, her friends, and the speechless, now sickened brothers, sit down to a cannibal feast.

In another part of the city, Joel attempts to entice a wealthy young girl to have sex. Ultimately, realizing that any relationship with her will be impossible, he steals a car and, with a strong sense of nostalgia and self-pity, determines to visit his father to talk in Yiddish with him about the old times. So ends Scliar’s memorial to his Jewish past, none of which now appears to be salvageable or to represent any possible salvation. Joel’s realization that “the war is over” may also signify his inability to perceive that another war—a war to win back his heritage and meaning—has just begun.

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